Flight

“Flight” is about the essential nature of invention. There is a certain process that drives the most powerful creative endeavors. The ancient Hermeticists spoke of this process. Furthermore, they claimed it was tied to the nature of existence itself. Consequently, creative endeavor is an activity tied to the existence of life itself. What’s more, all life is, in some sense, the emergence of the new from the pursuit of completion. That’s what creativity is.

In Hermetic terms, the interplay of the male and female principles drives this process. This occurs on the level of biology, psychology, philosophy, politics, even, one could say, on the level of quantum physics. Consciousness and the shared unconscious experience generates the substrate. I decided to call this piece “Flight.” It portrays man’s invention of the airplane as an example of this process.

I had a conversation with a colleague not long ago. He mentioned that one of the Wright brothers succeeded in the face of repeated failure because the woman he desired gave up on him. As a result, that motivated him to succeed, no matter what. Consequently, this drove him to extreme effort and accomplishment. While I have not verified this story, it is a plausible one. Because of the universal process of completion taking place in the context of the human species, gravity, which once bound by man to a radius of about a hundred miles in his life, was now simply the thing that kept the plane from drifting into outer space, as he enjoys his flight from New York to Moscow.

Some Notes on this Piece

Recently, I’ve decided to include a guitar track in my pieces. In “Flight,” the guitar symbolizes the idea of flight that becomes a tangible reality as the piano track transitions from the slow, plodding thinking to the dynamic emergence of the factual projection underneath.