I think I want to manipulate your emotions

This is top-of-my-head, a first draft of a thought that’s been knocking around in my mind for a long time. I don’t guarantee cohesion. I just find it interesting, and think you might, too.

When I write, I usually want to either persuade the reader to my point of view, or I want the reader to come along with me for a story that evokes emotion. This post is about the latter; stories where I want to evoke emotions in you.

Essays like the one about my grandmother’s cobalt blue fairy lamps, or about finding a new Karen Carpenter song on the B-side of a 45 record at a country antique barn, or about my loneliness from being unable to give my mother love, are pieces that I hope will evoke some sympathetic feeling in you. No, not “sympathy” as in “I hope they’ll feel bad for me and coo over me,” but sympathetic as in sympathetic emotional vibrations. Like the way a string on a violin will reverberate in a harmonic tone simply from having the string next to it plucked to send vibrations into the air.

I want you to feel with me. Sometimes I want you to feel exactly what I feel (not always possible, not always a good goal). Mainly, I want the reader to feel with me as I try to put into words emotions and the faces of emotions and experiences that are profound to me. Many other people say they find these emotions, or the experience of having them, as profound as I do. I seem to have a talent for describing these things in ways that make people say, “I’ve always thought or felt this, but I didn’t think anyone else did,” or “I didn’t know it could be described.”

This gives me immense pleasure. For a moment, I feel much less lonely, and I think the person reading me feels less lonely, too. I hope that’s true.

Music crops up in my pieces more frequently over time. You’ve noticed that I will often construct an essay around a song. I don’t know how most readers experience this, or whether they experience it in a way that’s close to how I do. It is not to everyone’s taste, and it’s easy to imagine that some readers will find it gimmicky or off-putting. If that’s the case, I get it. We don’t all respond to the same things.

But this is what I’m trying to do, or hoping to do. Music is, for me, the most profound artistic experience of all the media, physical and ephemeral. Music is a direct connection to my emotional core; it bypasses words and other sensations. Just one chord change can bring me to ecstasy or despair in a literal instant. One small phrase in a piece can make ripples of gooseflesh travel up and down my body. Sometimes, it does feel like being seized, taken.

Like for most people, there is a catalog of popular songs in my head. Mine runs from a bit of Big Band from the 40s through to the core of my internal “repertoire” that’s pop music from the 60s to the 80s. These songs, many of them overplayed, many of them tied to the now-kitschy production aesthetics of their era, are nevertheless anchored to my heart.

As a child of the late 70s and early 80s, I watched the birth of the music video on MTV. The form of the music video grabbed me young and never let go. Some of the early music videos from the first half of the 80s-Michael Jackson and Madonna, with Madonna keeping this up through the 90s-were beautiful three-minute stories. Mini pieces of cinema, gorgeous narrative set pieces, wrapped up in the space of a radio-friendly song.

I think the music video can be, and sometimes was, a higher art form than we credit. Perhaps we will in the future.

These essays I write around a song are my attempt to create something like what the best of these music videos did.

I’m contemplating doing more of them. From time to time I’ve thought about collecting them in a book.

Like all writers, I do wonder how readers experience them. I understand that some of you aren’t into that format; my bittersweet pieces may be too maudlin for you. I really do get it.

But for those of you who like this style, how do you experience them? Is your experience as a reader in any way close to how I’ve described my goal?