Your bridge to cross

As I watch folk listening to my music at the coffee shop I notice some of them getting that far away look on their faces. They seem connected to the music, but also they seem to have gone somewhere within themselves as they listen. And I wonder, where? It’s the same thing I wonder when people read my short stories. Just where within those reader’s minds do those stories take them?
     My expression of the arts, musical and literary, is all about emotional communication. I’ve added a categorizing adjective there, emotional. It is about me sharing my emotions, those things I feel inside. At the keyboard, I don’t play covers or perform written music. To do so would be communicating the emotions of other performers or composers. Often those songs already have words embedded in them. Someone else’s words. Someone else’s experience. Someone else’s emotional experience in this world.
    I want the communication between myself and my listeners/readers to be personal, just between them and me, not some threesome with an unknown, non-present, other.
​    For my listeners, those intent on listening rather than just relegating my music into the background, I sense they may be feeling within themselves some of the emotions I had in creating the melodies, harmonies and rhythms. And even more, perhaps they’re feeling some of what I’m feeling on the other side of the keyboard as I play, listener and musician in a shared present and presence together.
    But there’s another dimension. Those emotions can nudge our minds to journey to some other time and place where we felt the same way.
    Recently, one of my listeners to a song I call Rain said it reminded her of being out in the falling snow. She had taken my mood state from walking in the rain embedded in the music and allowed it to take her to when she had been walking in a snow storm. Our two separate minds walked across the same emotional bridge created by the sounds of the keyboard to different experiences of moving through nature.
    During my four decades as a psychologist I learned the name of that bridge. It is the Affect Bridge (affect is the term psychotherapists use for an emotional response or a mood state). The affect bridge is a useful tool for helping folk understand why they were experiencing more intense emotions in response to situations than what might be expected. This tool is particularly helpful for folk experiencing strong reactions to triggers as a result of having experienced trauma in their past.
    In psychotherapy it works this way: in identifying a current emotional state in response to a present circumstance we ask the question when else did you feel this same way? In doing so, the client and the psychologist walk across the bridge of that emotion connecting the present and past circumstances. The unresolved emotion of the past experience had flowed into the present circumstance causing the subjective experience of it to surge. If that surge is unpleasant or disorienting, understanding where it originates helps to manage it.
    Making conscious connection to what we are feeling while listening to music, reading fiction, or looking at graphic arts renders a richer, more meaningful and personal experience because it serves as an entry point to that bridge.
    The amazing thing about this is that when it happens you suddenly don’t feel so alone. That artist (musical, graphic arts or literary) has told you that they may very well also feel something that you do. The artist has honed their skills and made public their art to communicate that feeling. In doing so, and having you be conscious and reflective, they are not so alone with the feeling and neither are you. There is something spiritual about this, something deeply human.
    This is not a one way street. Consider me at the coffee shop as I look up from the keyboard. The distanced look on a listener’s face, or the smile, or the body movement with the rhythm, all of it telling me that the emotion I am creating is getting through. I can see it rebounding back to me.
    I have had parallel experiences in sharing my short stories. Readers often reply with a past personal experience that the story had brought to mind. Typically these experiences were emotionally significant for them. The feeling they had in reading the story became a bridge for that emotional memory to cross back into conscious awareness.
    At first I was offended by this. Silly me. I just wanted the reader to be impressed by my story, to say how realistic and impactful it was. Now, in accepting that my story became an affect bridge for the reader, I realize that a greater success has been achieved.
    Even though I communicate the emotional experience within me (through a jazz riff or a plot twist) the end goal is not that my listener/reader knows me better as a result, but they know themselves better. We will both benefit from the solace of companionship in that shared emotional experience but ultimately there is a greater good possible for my art, be it musical or literary. That good is to lead the listener/reader to greater self-awareness, celebration or exploration of past experiences, and a harmony of past and present.
    This raises our experience of art above that of entertainment. Entertainment seeks us to be amused or distracted from who we are. We can come to crave its relief from the work of living and acting with integrity and insight. As such, entertainment is addictive.
    But art nudges us to a greater depth. Art leads us to know ourselves and the world around us better.
    There is an old truism about art: I know it when I see it. Perhaps we can re-work that a bit … I know it’s art when it helps me see me in a deeper, more insightful way.