Poets, Musicians, and God's Other Fools

Warning:  Random stereotyping commences here

Pandora is a wonderful thing for a variety of reasons.  One of my favorite things about it is that it helps me find new artists to enjoy.  Last night it spun me to the Avett Brothers, and today I've been listening to their Four Thieves Gone album and reading.  One song on it, "Pretend Love," got me started thinking about the way that musicians and poets love.

You'd think we'd be the same in love, but really I don't think we are.  We both craft words, we both go around looking at the world in a bit of a haze, but we're cousins, not brother-kin.  Poets have a tendency to fall hard and deep, attaching to a single person in particular.  Poets look at the object of our love and see in them the entire world.  Look at Petrarch and Laura.  300 freakin' sonnets in which he completely deified her.  While I prefer Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 for realism and sentiment, it still follows the pattern.  Love for the poet is to be stricken with the emotion and to fall at the feet  of the beloved for as long as they will allow it. 

Most musicians of my acquaintance have been something more in the nature of surface skimmers, more in love with the idea of love or its multitudinous sensations than with any one individual in particular.  They tend to be less willing to stay with any one person, more in need of their precious "freedom,"  and this seems to involve a capacity for falling "in love" over and over again, something most poets don't much do.  I suppose it's the difference between ravens and hummingbirds, those which mate for life and those which dart from pretty flower to pretty flower with a show of bright plumage.

Should you ever put a poet and a musician together?  Hell no.  A poet and a musician together would tear up the bed and burn down the house with their passion, produce reams of memorable material in the inspiration from it, forget to buy groceries and pay the bills, but they would eventually move on to have fights that make the Trojan War look like a polite misunderstanding, make mutual friends pick sides and hate each other, and end with recrimination and something bitter left in the soul that comes out in pieces of public work that turn into potshots taken at each other in song and in print.  They are things that are like, but not really the same, like animals of the same genus but not the same species.

I wonder how scientists, engineers, lawyers, law enforcement -- the sane, in other words -- I wonder how they approach romance when they don't have that creative hell boiling inside them riding them and trying to turn every moment into something else.  Do they know their own souls better, more truly, or are they just as confused as the poets and the musicians?  God, I hope not.  I hope somebody somewhere is quiet and sure.  I'm counting on it, counting on somebody being iron to ground my random lighting.  It would be so grossly unfair to think we're all hopeless messes.