We Are The Music Makers, And We Are The Dreamers Of The Dreams

"Snozberries? Who ever heard of a snozberry?"
"We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of the dreams"

This is probably the only instance of a line from a film that I have consistently remembered through my life. It is from the great Willy Wonka, a film that also was part of the reason for one of the great moves in my life, out to Portland. While visiting Portland I saw this at the Bagdad Theatre with home crafted beer and pizza on a flawless April day. I felt that Portland was a place of music makers and dreamers of dreams, and Michigan (my home at the time) was a place of toilers and doers.

This dichotomy is exactly what the words are about, in the face of doubt and suspicion Willy Wonka responds with the core of his character, that because something isn't, it does not mean that it can't be. The words are actually from an ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy which makes the point more clearly with each ensuing line.

I have been meaning to write a post based on this line over the last few weeks as it has reappeared to me over and over again. While walking in bright sunshine in the shadow of a volcano, while playing croquet on an English lawn, while walking maniacally under the shadow of enormous boulders. Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living, but I think this is not true. I think for most people their character is such that acting from reflex, doing what is expected, doing your work and loving your family is indeed a worthwhile life. In truth, without such people nothing would ever get done, famine would ensue, buildings would collapse. These are the watchers of sit-coms, the ones who listen to pop music, the ones who sneer at thinking.

Those who do not need to examine their lives are in the majority, and seem to dominate life. The unthinking hordes who can hold George Bush up as the most and least popular president in history as a result of madmen committing mass-murder rather than anything he did. I remember my teenage years as a grey, oppressive time in which dull and serious people tried to force the necessary information into me so that I could become productive. The methods they used were fear and a lack of alternatives. Listen to the first third of Pink Floyd's The Wall to get the basic idea.

In this sort of situation the statement that "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams" is an enormous comfort. The most important word of the phrase is "We." Gene Wilder plays it perfectly in the film, a tiny little whispered message to all the children with dreams and the knowledge of magic that they are not alone. In fact, there is a great chain throughout history that you can feel a part of from Homer to Tim Burton. There have been thousands of great geniuses, and millions of lesser lights, throughout every culture in all times. All these people have been told to cut out their strange ideas, to do something productive, to stop wasting their lives.

This is essentially a childish way of being. The emphasis is on exploring, finding out, inventing, playing. The antithesis of being a dreamer is to settle down and start acting your age. But the whole origin of humanity as a unique species is down to the extension of childhood, neoteny. I am indeed quite childish, a typical teenager with my angst and my anger, my dreams and my fairytales, my railing against the oppression that others think is nothing. I think that's just the way I am, a bright, middle-aged child.

I am a part of a special group, without whom life would be a drab and pointless activity. Without those who understand what I am talking about, whose essential nature is to think what might be rather than what is, to create something new, and that a thought or dream isn't just a dream, humanity would be just beasts digging in the dirt. While I am not a particularly special part of this group, no star or leading light, I am indisputably a member of this group. This gives me great comfort when being stared at with horror and incomprehension because I am mad (and at those times I am probably mad.) When I rant about the emotion that pours from a song to someone who's just not into that sort of music I can feel part of a long history. When I feel my skin crawl with the need to do, to experience, to feel, it is a comfort to know I am not alone. When I feel the tears come to my eyes at something deeply sad, but still marvel in the pure beauty of the sadness, I can know that I am not the only one who has felt such things.

It is not better to be part of this group, just different. But I know for sure that I am one of the music makers, one of the dreamers of the dream.