Commentary

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I play best on the guitar when I stop thinking. My right hand picks, my left runs up and down the fretboard, and fingers find the notes without any conscious control. Who knows where my mind goes, but it has wandered off, and I become the music. The philosopher Iris Murdoch coined the term “unselfing” for losing oneself in art or nature this way. “In that moment everything is altered,” she writes in The Sovereignty of Good. “The anxious self with its hurt vanity has disappeared.” Wonder allows her momentarily to shed the ego, see a world beyond herself with a feeling akin to love, and clear her mind of “selfish care.” Beauty in all its manifestations is “a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dreamlife of the consciousness.” I also experience unselfing when I write which I know sounds odd because writing seems like a self-absorbed process, but at the keyboard I almost always reach a point where the illusory self flickers and disappears and the words arrive from somewhere far away. Staring at sentences my mind goes into a zone in which nothing matters but the shifting of words as if they are things appearing before my eyes. Hours evaporate. At times words come in a rush and at other times in a trickle, and too often they stop coming altogether, and, hung up, I linger in forever, fingers above the keyboard hovering at the luminous edge of discovery, but at all stages the full cup of coffee beside me goes cold, and I am unselfed.

—THE