Musings on 'The Maker'

Where did people go to watch short, clever, animated movies before YouTube came along? I'm sure creative people have been making them for decades, but really--who had opportunity to watch them? How many works of genius went unnoticed? Works like this?
  Beautiful. Clever. Funny. Even a little profound.

 I've been accused of perhaps reading too much into things at times. As Sigmund Freud supposedly said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar--not (as I might say) a rumination of deep, powerful spiritual truths, wherein the ashes represent our all-too brief life, and the rising smoke is our daily offering to heaven, and the label is--well, you get the idea.

I think the makers of "The Maker" mainly wanted to tell a poignant story about a pair of weird, stitched up rabbits in need of some orthodontia. But even so, the story gives us an insight into the paradox of creation.

These rabbits, if you watch, are made of clay and fabric and glass eyes. And yet, there is something more in them, too. There is music. And music, in my way of thinking, is perhaps one of the most powerful and true symbols of spirit, of soul, that I can think of. Nothing can make us smile or cry so readily as a song. Nothing can better help us remember a time gone by or a day that, sadly, never came.

And it mirrors the paradox of our own creation. Science tells us what we're made of--the organs and cells and chemicals we're built from. Science tells us we are indeed marvels of evolutionary engineering. And yet, most of us believe there is something more to us than that--more than clay animated by electricity and chance. There is music in us.

"The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being," Genesis tells us. It gets to the heart of creation, how we are both science and spirit. When I run and bother to think about how it is that I'm running, it's pretty astounding how muscles and sinews and bones and brain impulses operate with such mechanical efficiency to keep me on my feet and moving forward. And yet I believe it's that God-given breath in me, that music, that truly sets me in motion.

The end of The Maker is a little beautiful, a little heartbreaking. And our lives often are, too. So it is with music. But I will never wish the song to be silenced.