The Moth, The Flame and The Eureka

Why we move toward the things that undo us—and why we must.

Pulled in again by an old force.

I realize now I was afraid to reawaken it—and why.

Sometimes, you can love something so much it threatens to obliterate you. But the paradox is that it is a willful obliteration.

It cracks off the parts of you that have become fixed. Shedding these skins hurts, but once cast aside, you feel things anew.

When I started my journey back to music, I was answering the call of a dim flicker. I felt it as a distant signal, moving towards it—vaguely—because I couldn’t fix its coordinates.

I felt lost in its pursuit, as if I were going somewhere but didn’t know where. The question kept surfacing: should I be going there at all? The weight of it lay in knowing that if I truly surrendered to its gravity, it threatened to tear down things I had spent so long building.

The choice was clear: remain in a safe part of myself, knowing I was consciously letting go of something vital, or move towards it and risk the stability—in and out—I had built.

It transpires, though, that I am a moth to a flame. It’s an ill-fitting metaphor because no part of me wants to be extinguished. But certain lights call you irresistibly, even though you don’t know their nature. And then, when things open up, you let go of reason, prudence, and practicality—you surrender to this new force of gravity, unmoored as you are.

These musings may be more private than usual, even if, even to myself, I can only articulate them in abstractions.

For most of us, the arts are a companion—something that lives inside us but that we are forever scratching at. We keep it as central as we can while negotiating existence, bureaucracy, work, bills, bloody subscriptions, loved ones, and the wondrous “interferences” that, in the end, compose our lives—coffee breaks, off milk, broken dishwashers, great loves, fractured relationships, demonic letterboxes, heaving inboxes, cursed notifications…

And yet, there are moments when you get a glimpse of the thing itself.

Recently, the loneliness and torment I felt at the start of this project finally vaporized. Rather than having to discipline myself to get to the studio or schedule songwriting time, I feel constantly pulled in by its force field. Only now, a year and three months into this adventure, am I starting to glimpse its core again.

This week, I found myself writing madly again, like I once did. God knows how long it lasts, but I wept while writing a song at 11 p.m. on Tuesday. I was so deep inside its emotion—indistinguishable from it—that I couldn’t quite believe I was writing it. I am still fumbling my way toward what I am looking for, but that night, I felt completely inside it—inside the still-alien world where harmony, rhythm, melody, and word meet.

It felt as though something had awakened within me, and I was inside its awakening.

This is proving enormously disruptive—to life, to work, even to promoting my own project. It made me chuckle this week—to remember that I am a reformed hopeless promoter, not someone innately versed in it.

A friend spammed me with a Tolstoyan essay on everything I should be doing to promote my work effectively.

“You need to have clear streaming goals!” the messages barked at me.

“One song a month will flood the algorithm and cause audience fatigue!”

As I read, I realized these things are anathema to me.

I am releasing one song a month not to conform to some algorithmic checklist or an unwritten decree from a Silicon Valley oligarch.

I am doing it because that is the project—that’s the art project.

If it’s too much for someone, well—that’s the glory of the unsubscribe button!

Don’t get me wrong: promoting our work is part of the journey. And I appreciated my friend’s suggestions—mostly because they clarified why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Right now, I want to talk about why I make things, not how to release them.

The world seems obsessed with the how, and not enough with the why.

But the one thing I know is this: I have been looking for this space for a very long time. And it is not a return to something.

I have been looking for what I have just glimpsed my entire life.

It is too early to say more—I just had to write about it now because I have no mind to write about anything else.

Even writing about it doesn’t make sense. As Frank Zappa said, talking about music is like fishing for architecture.

I don’t know what comes next.

All I really know is that I have been looking for this for years, and now that I am—tentatively—within it, I will give myself the gift of being within it.

Maybe that is the Eureka of the moth before it hits the flame.

Maybe that is what life is—even if I’m still stuck with the damn moth metaphor!

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From these abstractions, some takeaways:

Art is, at its core, a communion with something both within us and beyond us. It breaks down the boundary between ourselves and something we usually only glimpse.

This is why the world of “content” will never replace a work of art. In a true work of art, something simultaneously dies and is reborn in us—the artwork is the trace left behind from this transformation: something frozen, made permanent.

Reaching these moments of flow is hard. But here’s the thing—if you keep moving toward it, you get closer.

The greats—the artists we look up to, love, and admire—found a way to live, at least partially, inside it.

I believe some version of this exists in all of us. That is our own unique potential.

We sabotage it when we get trapped in comparison. So, please—climb out of that trap.

You have to keep moving, keep fighting through all the ways we get stuck.

Have the courage to move toward it, even if today it feels like nothing more than a dim flicker.

There is a reason it calls you.

Your job today is just to get a little closer.

To fight, if necessary, to keep it in sight—even though, at times, you’ll lose it along the way.

But keeping faith in it is what keeps you moving toward it.

And moving toward it is everything.

And enough.

Something, after all, is waiting for you there.