Illustration:
Tatyana Apraksina
Convergent, 2011
Oil on canvas

"Made to Like Butter" is another of my many songs dedicated to my brother Wes, a multi-instrumentalist whose musical directions are as diverse as the number of instruments at his command. I wrote the song in anticipation of his summer birthday while reflecting on how the gift of music exceeds any pragmatic measure, simply existing to amplify our exploration of life, like how butter brings out deeper tastes.

Music seems closer to the half-absurd seriousness of a certain kind of innocent play that's ready to seek perfection endlessly, unreasonably — closer to that than to whatever finite forms of calculation become familiar to us over time. Music's touchstone brings us closer to the majesty of creation and Creator, helping us to step beyond our day-to-day concerns while contemplating their actual substance with greater objectivity and imagination.

While giving profoundly of himself in his vocations as a teacher, husband and parent, this song's hero also retains a childlike sense of wonder and persistence in craft for its own sake. In some cases, the most direct beneficiaries of this craft are the birds around his home, where in his free time on part of a given day he might sit alone in self-guided study of classical piano or guitar. In other cases, he might be found out enjoying musically centered relationships — playing banjo in a bluegrass band, or providing piano accompaniment for a cellist neighbor, or playing jazz standards, his own original songs, or Beatles tunes for all kinds of audiences. This song's hero is a person unbroken by civilization while growing in graciousness and humility on his own inclusive, strategic terms.

Wes's early childhood memories, from a time before my birth, include spending ample time on his own in nature, including gathering flowers in a meadow near the home where we grew up. In an essay where he recounts this, he recalls being a participant, alone and with others, in the well-known rituals involving daisies and buttercups that have been part of so many children's traditional anthropological fabric since who knows when, even as he scarcely grasped the identity of the "she" in "she loves me, she loves me not," or why testing for "liking butter" might be a matter of any general interest.

Life longs for us to discern our own "she" and "butter," along with their proper proportions in our callings. As Promised Lands are grazed and shaken by truth and competing ideologies, a legitimate sense of ethics can ground us in a peaceful gratification that answers urgent needs of being and community. Music can embody and instruct in such a salutary taste for modulation, for a moderation predicated on wholehearted substance. Meanwhile, we retain chins inclined to testify to our predilection for the good, like litmuses for our happiest hopes, earthbound yet sublime.

I might wish that this song's current performance were less ragged, yet the spirit of pushing to meet a birthday schedule on its eve might somehow compensate. May at least some of the purpose come across.