I don't have an answer for the question below. Perhaps it is that sometimes we do want to know and other times we don't. Sometimes we want to believe a beautiful melody just arrives. Other times we want to know what went into the construction of it.
I have been feeling my throat area as fragile, exposed. Today I realized my spine runs up the back of it. I have a line of bones. Perhaps focusing on the bones at the back will allow me to feel softer in the front. I'll see myself as a s'more back to front without the top - graham cracker bones, chocolate air and space, and melted marshmallow in front. I'll experiment with that. Also, I am beginning to understand that my arms are attached in front of my spine. They are not pinned back. I am not pinned down to some imaginary air or wall. I'm in play with what surrounds, in and out.
Annie Dillard asks -
Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: “You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?” The young photographer said, “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.”
A cabdriver sang his songs to me, in New York. Some we sang together. He had turned the meter off; he drove around midtown, singing. One long song he sang twice; it was the only dull one. I said, You already sang that one; let’s sing something else. And he said, “You don’t know how long it took me to get that one together.”
How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?-Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life