The Value of the Unfinished
By Twistie
This is how many of us view unfinished works. We cringe when we think of the quilt squares that never got sewn together, the embroidery that we lost interest in halfway through, the bit of knitting that never seemed to go anywhere, and the piece of furniture that we abandoned because it just didn’t look like it was going to come out comfortable.
So we hide them away in corners. Sometimes we believe that we will finish them, other times we just aren’t quite sure how to get rid of them, along with all the bits and pieces we picked up thinking we could use them in our crafts, but never found the right project.
Mr. Twistie is, as I believe I’ve mentioned several times before, a musician. He’s also a composer. He has a huge file of songs he’s abandoned over the years in a filing cabinet. They weren’t getting anywhere, he couldn’t make them say what he wanted them to say, the tune and the lyrics never quite gelled together, his songwriting partner hated them, the issue became moot, two phrases and a snippet of a tune never quite turned into anything more… the reasons they languish in his cabinet are myriad.
And yet, every once in a while, he starts going through that cabinet and pulling out bits of unfinished songs and suddenly magic happens.
A phrase here and a stanza there suddenly make sense together. The lyrics from this and the tune from that bring new life to one another. A long lost point gets made, and a new song is born from the ashes of half a dozen old ones that just didn’t make the grade.
Sometimes it really is a good idea to hang onto all those half-finished potential disasters. Sometimes when you look at them again later on alongside some other unlikely stuff, art is born.
