(music link: LINK)

Can I Come With?

Artist's Statement

Stories are reflections.  They are reflections of our pasts, our beliefs, our lives.  Stories can teach us lessons or prove points. This Music Mosaic illustrates the story of playing with the how people emotionally view relationships.  The girl in the story longs for her husband to stay with her.  She wants him to not leave, to stop putting work and the world and those secular things before her.  Because even though he is not doing anything unreasonably wrong (he is not cheating on her or abusing her, in fact he is going off to a job to provide for her), he is still not showing as much love towards his marriage as he is towards something that the world holds at high esteem: his job and his income.  It has gotten to the point in their relationship that the man’s view of his relationship with his wife has become nothing more than that of a man and his dog.  He knows she will be waiting and forgiving, and without meaning to, he has turned her into no more than a canine companion.  Values and emotions are soft, and the world demands us to be hard.

            One element of the most recent reading for this class that really stood out to me is the mention of how stories or values or religions are not held in very high regard anymore because of how they have come to be perceived.  They are soft; we must be hard.  We are afraid to speak up for what we stand for and think that if it can not be proven, then it holds no place in our world. 

            However, while the world puts emphasis on the hardness of the world, there are still those things that would fight against it.  Some would argue that we are asked to be strong, and love is the strongest force we have.  There are even modern stories that illustrate this fact.  Take Ron and Hermione from the Harry Potter series: while the world may argue that emotions are weak, they prove that with their love they can accomplish great things.  Their relationship, unlike the one in the pictures, is double sided.  They both need each other, but neither is a waiting dog.  They feed off of each other and are better people because of it.  Unlike the view from the passage, their love and values do not make them soft, but strong.