Writing about my art can be uncomfortable because it necessitates a confrontation with my own motivations and concerns, both conscious and unconscious. Why do I make what I make? For quite a number of reasons, certainly. But there are obsessions and compulsions recurrent in both my work and life and I want to try to tease out some of the threads that might connect them. Recurrent obsessions include the drive to listen to and think about music, the naked male body, language-bound theory that relates to the desire for communication and connection, and symbols (like keys and locks) of hidden meaning and revelation. What binds my subject matter together?

One verb in the previous paragraph, desire, once written and staring back at me from the computer screen, has a particularly strong pull. Desire: To strongly wish for or want something. It splits the world into an essential dualism, a polarity between the subject (me) and everything else. You, They, It  - the objects of desire. It’s a seductive dualism. But why music, why nakedness, why symbols of keys and locks? To tease out language about myself, it might be helpful to think about both my desires and also what desire is in itself. 

If Freud is to be believed, we are born desiring and unable to do anything about it. In this sense we are helpless. If the infant’s hunger is not satisfied by an other person, the infant starves. Freud wrote about the fury of the child, unable to satisfy its own cravings: the child is furious and desperate to control the sources of satisfaction. This creates what Freud calls a state of “original helplessness” which, after being experienced in infancy, is re-staged in puberty and through adulthood.

By definition, helplessness necessitates a reliance on others. According to psychoanalyst Adam Philips, it is in this original and re-staged helpless that we find the source of the moral and the social. Take the moral first: Will we allow ourselves our desires? Or will we minimize them, moralize or suppress them, in part because the feelings of helplessness that attend desire are so unpleasant? And what about the social: Will others be willing participants in satisfying us? How will we treat these objects of desire if they do satisfy us? How will we act if they won’t?

In the course of my daily life, while I am certainly helpless in the face of certain desires, there are other abiding ones that I can and do satisfy on my own, one of which is a persistent craving for listening to classical music. But where does that desire come from?

Perhaps science can help me. Biomusicologists have observed that listening to, reading, and playing instrumental music each recruit different areas of the brain. Listening to scales is processed in much the same way our brains process single words. Playing scales, on the other hand, activates the same premotor cortex that is recruited when we write. Both playing and listening to complete musical phrases is processed in a way that’s similar to how we process thoughtful speech. In her paper Hominid Brain Evolution and the Origins of Music, neuroanthropologist Dean Falk writes that listening to complex music activates spatial and visual stimuli in both hemispheres of the brain and, taking things a step further, she writes that listening to music while simultaneously reading it in a score recruits areas of the brain that we use to grasp the symbolism of language.

We, and the structures of our brains, have evolved to “grasp” for meaning. We are reaching out for something.

The infant, even before speech, has a voice. Screams and furious tantrums allow her to cry out when she’s hungry. As listeners, just like many other animals, humans have evolved to attend with particular subtlety to the voices of their own species. Of course this is useful. On the road to satisfaction, one might want to voice a need, to blurt an interruption, to exclaim assent, to vocalize dissent, squeal with joy, hum in encouragement, coo, confide, defend and so on. It would be helpful if one were heard.

“The piano is not a percussive instrument.” Well, in a way, it is, but this favorite line of Hungarian-British classical pianist and conductor András Schiff has a point to it. The piano needn’t be primarily percussive in its musicality for one reason: it can “sing” and 19th-century composers meant for it to do just that. (I’m thinking primarily of Beethoven here, a specific object of my desire, or a surrogate for it, or maybe a model for it. But that’s for another day.) The pianist and the nearby or faraway listener experience the singing keyboard, neurologically, at the intersection of speaking-singing-listening—and with a drive toward comprehending. Music has a “voice” in a more-than-poetic sense.

Falk and her colleagues write that the brain of a subject simply imagining (not actually listening to) a work of classical music experiences activation in the hypothalamus and amygdala. These are two limbic structures that participate in deep processing of emotions and visceral reactions.

Do you speak to yourself? In your mind? Is that the voice of your subjectivity actively creating itself(hood) in this moment? Or is it simply a memory of words you’ve heard before, a memory attended to by your subjectivity, just as it would attend to melody if you were asked to “remember” a piece of music? Do these words not affect you—even if only spoken to yourself in your mind? Perhaps a memory of your desiring feelings attach themselves to the grasped for meaning of musical phrases and are restaged in your mind, affecting multiple meaningful regions of your brai?

The primary caregiver, normatively “mother”, of object relations has a voice of her own. This adult voice evolved, in a sense out of the helpless infant she used to be. Before speech, she vocalized and demonstrated her desires, indicating to others that they might satisfy her.. Later, she was helpless in the face of her more mature desires, including sexual ones. She either sought out satisfaction or she put up defenses and told herself the lie that she was not helpless against the insistence of her desire but could find recourse in religion or disavowal or distraction. Did her early developmental experiences prime her unconscious mind for experiencing this helplessness-in-the-face-of-desire as an acute pain? Was it as an infant that her unconscious mind learned about desire, did it tell her that this was something that needed to be done away with or minimized and ignored or resolved through fury and satisfaction as soon as possible? 

It is difficult to sit with a feeling of helplessness. This is one of the main points made by Adam Phillips in his lecturetitledFreud’s Helplessness. Perhaps this hypothetical mother was unable to face her desires or thought it possible to desire something other than what she naturally desired. Perhaps her futile recourse was to raise this desire to a higher plane, find a more acceptable object and outlet. Perhaps it was through this sublimation thatshe found a less-good but quite powerful release in music.

What about desires that are particularly and persistently unwanted? Any analyst will tell you that if they are suppressed they need to go somewhere else. For a gay subjectivity like myself, who came out very late in life relative to my milieu, it seems reasonable to assume that I engaged in intense suppression and repression. Perhaps my attraction to classical music has roots as a tool of this repression—as a kind of supplement for more fundamental desires that I was helpless to control. But maybe music also operates as a skeleton key that allows me to re-access and therefore re-stage desire in a less fearful, more rapt and fulfilling way.

The mother, as an infant, cried out helplessly, demanding satisfaction. The pianist, say it’s Beth Levin, gently reaches out to touch the keys, activating the singing voice of the keyboard-and-strings with her fingers.

Or perhaps it’s less gentle. She’s playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, first movement, first bars. They are quite forceful. Strong agonized chords declare precisely what she (and Beethoven) crave. Then quieter notes sing out. The musical voice has subtle shades of rhetorical energy and tone of voice. This second phrase has more than a touch of longing in it.

Is the pianist performing desire? Is she intentionally prolonging helplessness? Is there a pleasure in that? In making my work, in listening to this music, in obsessing over the biographies of composers, the philosophers’ uses for this music… and I performing desire? Prolonging my helplessness? Experiencing a kind of bittersweet pleasure that’s also a balm?

Levin must be listening to herself as she plays. Perhaps the piano sounds like an other’s voice and she is experiencing requited desire In the form of longed-for outpouring of passion. Or maybe it sounds to her more like a one-sided amplification of her own inner voice.

The infant cries out and there is an other there to hear them and speak back.

A singing voice answers, probably in cooing motherese, with its pronounced melodic variation and musical rhythms.

Or it doesn’t. Perhaps there’s no voice and no answer.

The adult cries out, either out loud or inwardly, in desire.

The lover’s voice answers.

Or it doesn't.