I’m getting better at drumming. It’s hard to exactly place what this means or quantify it, it’s a sort of “I know it when I see it” thing. I feel better on the drums, my body moves better, and I have a better sense of how to shape those movements. This has provoked some interesting insights in myself, about embodiment, understanding yourself, and how matter and spirit twist each other.
You really just don’t know what it is to really love something, to really be insanely passionate about and moved by it, until you fucking suck at it. I think this applies to pretty much anything, I think you can find it anywhere. You can suck at enjoying food, you can suck at travelling, you can suck at watching movies, you can suck at playing squash. I don’t think its about there being an obvious way to measure “performance” in that field, I think its more about how, when we do things we are passionate about, we end up using it as a way to understand ourselves. We understand ourselves through others, through networks of media artefacts and personalities and self expression, no understanding appears ex nihilo. People say comparison is the thief of joy but guess what, that’s also basically the only way of knowing what joy is. You find yourself going through the classic loops of knowing and unknowing, as soon as you think you’ve got it all figured out, you’ll just as quickly realize you know absolutely nothing. This happens as readily when you’re trying to keep the houseplants alive as it does when you’re trying to get takes off about Henry the VIIIth outside of a bar. It’s not about the activity, it’s about the desire that it encodes.
I’ve learned that the things I enjoy the most are things that can contain that sine wave of affirming self expression, and destabilizing failure to enunciate. It’s rare you get to have something that so closely traces your own life and interests as an artistic passion like drumming, I can look at the way I play drums and say, that reflects who I am and what I like. Right now I just want to sound like Lille Gruber on the first 6 songs of Disposal of the Dead // Dharmata. I used find myself getting really irritated at my inability to sound like the artists I idolized, and frustrated and not sure what the point of my playing was. There was a year long period where I had conceded that despite my best efforts, I would simply never sound like my favourite drummers, and that was my own personal heartbreak. That’s different now. Not to jump the gun, but I think that is in part the point of this entire article, these wars waged in private are never over, even if you think you’ve waved the white flag. I remember having a moment where I was really frustrated about where my playing was at, and having a sudden moment of clarity where I realized “thats because this is worth doing”. That seems like an absurdly obvious realization, but for me it was a really sort of liberating thought. I’m so annoyed and frustrated with the way my body moves on the drum kit because I care really deeply about this shit, and in life you absolutely must orient yourself towards what you care about, what you’re ready to be upset about. If anything, that needling sense of discomfort is what you should look for sometimes, as a sort of north star, as in “I can do this if I keep trying”. Drumming in itself is not hard, it is the feelings that patina that experience that are difficult, that I want to avoid. Playing the drums has the unique upside that, unlike some other things that are Good For You™, it’s really fun, I enjoy the sensory experience of hitting those things.
This brings me to the entire notion of embodiment, which I guess is kinda like my bastardized version of the body keeps score. Everything is spinal catastrophism really. The real core of this article, other than earnest hopefulness about what we are capable of, what a body is capable of, is this: Getting better at something you’re deeply passionate about is necessarily going to be an exhumation of yourself. This is psychological, physiological and philosophical, you’re going to have to dig through yourself to figure out how to align yourself with this tool, this machine, more strongly.
I’m an avoidant person, when I feel pain or discomfort I turn the faucet off. I’m a “path-of-least-resistance” guy, which for a long time I tried to dress up as a sort of cool, ironic detachment, and believe me, that worked out just great! Without stretching an interminable article into an even longer confessional, I just can’t live like that anymore. I no longer have any inclination for living that way, and to change that you have to pull up a lot of roots. Drumming is an interesting case study in this for me, I had sort of given up on the playing that I’ve always been obsessed with (siri play The Bone Sculpture by Putridity), and had made all these sorts of workarounds, and found myself uninspired by the things I was doing on the kit. I was forever bumping into this ceiling of technique that I knew I had to sit down and figure out, but I would tell myself “well my pedals aren’t good enough” or “my seat isn’t balanced right” or “you can’t go that fast on an e-kit”, knowing that these were all lies only for my ears.
Technology, in its most general sense, should be made to get things out of your way. It should make you more able to do what you already wanted to do, ideally without adding too many additional tasks to accomplish that original thing. In this respect, my dog-chewed green slides have been the best piece of drum related technology I’ve adopted in the past 4 years. They feel nice to wear on the pedals, and don’t slip too much, and something about really going on a tear while wearing those neon green things makes the gears at the basement of my frontal cortex really spin. I spent a few afternoons sitting at the drums just bouncing both legs, and feeling the way the muscles twitch, and really trying to understand what made them go in the way I wanted. I did that a lot, and also just started playing extremely basic rudiments to a metronome, at a humiliatingly slow pace. Now, like 2 months later, I feel the best about my drumming I’ve ever felt. I think I could play a Death Fortress or Devourment song one day. I had to really spend some time reflecting on what I was doing, and what my body was when I played the drums, questions like, why am I moving my arm like that? Why do I place my elbow there, why do I shy away from this type of pattern? Your body is this weird lair of secrets and truths your mind has squirreled away, but if you take a moment to let it just vibrate, you can find some really rewarding things in there. I’m very grateful to have had this chance to really lean in and think about who I am, and recognize that the way you do things is how you care about them. The things you want to do are eminently doable, but they might ask you to change yourself, and that to really stabilize yourself you have to sit with something more than just “what do I like and dislike?”. More than anything else these days I want to feel aligned, I want to feel like all of the different planes of myself are moving in the same direction, and to do that you have to reel some things in, and give other things more leash, and you have to look for knowledge in new places. This isn’t to say I’m a completely new person or that I’m done learning the drums, but rather is a good reminder of what matters in life, and that not all development is about accretion, sometimes its about stripping things away as well.
“Invent self destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pg 160)