CROSSED WIRES

[Jason Murray]

Crossed Wires"We spend our lives trying to get our facial muscles to match our interior states.We try to get our voice-the tone, the timbre, the pitch, the phrasing-to match our emotional state inside, the quality we want to project.The two are never naturally in synch.We spend our lives listening to ourselves, watching ourselves, seeing how we are reflected, how we are responded to by others, and then we fine tune ourselves in order to project accurately what is is we think we are.It is possible that for some people their faces-their muscles, their smiles, their frowns, the twitch of a lip, a raised eyebrow-have absolutely no relationship to the feelings hoping to be projected from inside.As if the puppet had all the strings attached in the wrong places, and no matter how much the puppet master emoted, the wrong things kept happening.We spend years learning how the wires are connected.We must eventually learn, by rote, that pulling on this particular string, as odd as it seems, will connote happiness, and this string, which our guts tell us denotes fear and anger, will, to the contrary, signal to the outside world a sense of well-being.I often sing with all my might, and I find that all I've accomplished is to convey a sense of energy being expended and a desperate need to communicate something.Often, no one is able to figure out exactly what it is I'm trying to communicate.I myself often feel that I've touched something deep as my voice rises into a sudden, painful, sharp edge, and I assume and hope that the exact same feelings are reconstructed inside the minds and hearts of the listeners, but it isn't always true.The audience often only watches in puzzlement as I produce a series of nonsensical, confusing, conflicting sounds that somehow they know denote intense emotional states, but they don't know which ones they are.Just like all our facial expressions, my strings are attached in the wrong places."- David Byrne(this is one of my favorite things EVER)- JM