Clearer thinking doesn’t always come from new information. Sometimes it comes from closer attention to what’s already present: the places where our clarity is false, where our sense of safety is maintained by avoidance rather than contact, where stability is actually a kind of stuckness.

I. Triangulation as a default mode of consciousness

Apparently we aren’t meant to live in the moment, every moment. 

On autopilot, we are often comparing our current experience to and in fact experiencing it through our expectations of what it should be.

Rene Girard noted that the desire of a subject for an object is mediated by a third: a rival, a model, or a cultural template for what should be desired in the first place.

Murray Bowen separately notes that a dyadic pair will frequently recruit a third to mitigate the intensity of real intimacy. A child becomes a project, an old flame suddenly comes to mind, a new goal becomes obsessive. 

The lure of these triangles is that they are stable. They may pulse with push-pulls of energy, but as long as the:

• subject, goal, and obstacle
• subject, object, and expectation
• subject, object, and addiction
• subject, subject, and scapegoat

—are contained in one system, the terror of choice, intimacy, commitment, and unmediated experience are avoided. Leaving the triangle—choosing a person, or choosing now—is an ego death. What Gareth Hill called a watery initiation.

No surprise then that love triangles are such a pervasive trope in literature and other narrative arts. Love triangle plots hook into structures we are already actively using.

My favorite ur-example of a love triangle is Stephen Sondheim’s Passion: a macabre inversion of Beauty and the Beast and a spiritual parable in which love is not a prize, but a destructive force.

In the famous letter scene, Giorgio is coerced by Fosca—a manipulative, terminally ill woman he does not love—into writing a letter that could ruin his career and his existing relationship. What she insists he write however is deeply insightful. Sondheim scores this scene with clinical tension: time signatures and keys press against each other, mirroring Giorgio’s resistance to a truth arriving through coercion, from the wrong person, at the wrong time, at a cost.

The structure of Passion (claustrophobic one-act) and genre (a drama, not a fairytale) refuse to comfort the audience, who often abhor this piece. Perhaps because they are comparing it to Les Misérables or a night spent quietly at home.

Ahem.

II. Artifice as a vehicle for presence

In Act II of Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt, Marietta asks her friend Fritz, an actor, to sing something “not too happy, not too sad.” What follows is perhaps the most gorgeous baritone aria in the opera canon: Tanzlied des Pierrot.

The aria is diegetic—i.e., Fritz isn’t singing because that’s the aesthetic conceit of opera; he’s singing because someone in the drama has actually asked him to sing. In the scene, Fritz is dressed as Pierrot, the sad clown who by the early 20th century had become a well-known Everyman symbol for the avant-garde. The costume and orchestration signal that this person and moment mean more than they appear. And then the song itself is so unguarded, so emotionally direct, that it stops feeling contained by the scene.

This big moment in the opera comes close to a fourth wall break—not because Fritz addresses the audience (though in some productions he does), but because the layered artifice becomes so visible that it stops functioning as a barrier. The frame announces itself as a frame, and in doing so, opens a door. We’re no longer safely outside the aesthetic bubble. We’re implicated.

Later we learn that this entire scene is occurring inside a dream, dreamed by a character not even onstage. Yet the moment feels more emotionally real than anything around it. Who, by the way, is singing? The dream-character, the Pierrot archetype, Fritz, and the actual performer before us. All four, simultaneously.

The other great aria in Die tote Stadt, oddly, works the same way. In Act I, Marietta is handed a lute and proceeds to sing “an old song” that suddenly occurs to her—Marietta’s Lied. It too is diegetic, a performance within the drama. And it too breaks free of its frame, in part because it is preternaturally gorgeous. The apparatus of artifice calls attention to itself and becomes a gateway. The audience is often waiting for this moment, floating above the story and also deeply immersed in it, their attention already heightened, ready to receive on multiple levels at once.

The artifice, the layers, the awareness of those layers—are all part of the experience, and the pleasure, in a way that makes it more real.

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Almost never in real life do any of us stand before many others, on a stage where we command full attention, emanating pure sound, with deep somatic engagement with our breath, with transparent emotions while we convey the extremity and particularity of human experience. 

Yet that hyper-constructed, artificial experience also feels deeply present and real—for an opera singer, it can be addictive. Singers performing Tanzlied des Pierrot, or any opera aria, must commit to some reality of what it means for them, specifically.

What I’ve noticed personally singing this piece is that full commitment to the moment means that all those layers of masks, layers of reality, conscious choices and organic discovery stay present.

When we commit to being fully in the moment, we don’t lose our mediations, protections, and complexities. We feel them.

Dissolving the ego retains it as structure, as a place we can visit, from farther away. Our longings and dreams continue, but without attachment. This is the message that makes Tanzlied des Pierrot not too happy, but not too sad. Bittersweet, but untempered. Rich, intense, vital, surprising.

Ego annihilation does not lead to purity or simplicity. It allows for depth and movement.

III. Coherence without cohesion

William Finn, a generation after Sondheim, learned none of Sondheim’s lessons about restraint. Where Sondheim achieves depth through surgical precision, Finn leans into overflow.

His exceptional song cycle Elegies is garrulous, explosive, tender, and discontinuous. In the song “Venice” from Elegies, even verb tenses fracture. A continued remembered past (“he’d say”) gets interrupted and contradicted by specific memories (“that then was the night”), present ruminations, revisions mid-thought, and counterfactual fantasies. The music follows each hairpin curve. When I sing this piece with a new accompanist, we often need a quick conversation to discuss what on earth is even happening.

The constant surprise of singing Elegies—and attending a performance—is that the songs are incohesive yet deeply coherent. The digressions, contradictions, expletives, and ironies serve a deeper structure. Within and across pieces, the cycle enacts what it feels like to grieve: to revisit pain, incorporate old information into new frames, honor what was and what might have been, and keep moving.

The difference between coherence and cohesion is spelled out in style manuals, which correctly warn that cohesive writing can feel coherent even when it isn’t. When one idea flows smoothly into the next, the sequence starts to seem accurate, even when the ideas contradict each other or reality itself.

Stating lies consistently and cohesively is a known technique of authoritarian regimes. Over time, the preposterous narrative, through repetition and surface smoothness, starts to feel true.

This is also a vulnerability of AI tools. Based on how LLMs function, they can’t help but to smooth things out—sanding off the bumpy edges of weird sentences, failing to fact-check.

Over the past several years, I’ve become more attuned to when clients’ ideas are cohesive but not coherent, a critique many are not used to hearing.

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This blogpost has been deliberately messy, allowing disjunct thoughts to jostle side by side. Each one is a different opportunity to think more clearly by noticing how we are already thinking:

• Are we experiencing reality directly or evaluating how well it fits a template or preference?
• Are we resistant to a playfulness that could lead us towards a deeper truth?
• Can we commit to the current moment, and see what happens?
• Do we see the cracks in our own thinking, writing, even grammar as an avenue towards deeper discovery?

It’s fun to bend words to make them do more, mean more.* Different languages bend words differently. In German, it’s perfectly grammatical to say Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen, es träumt sich zurück—my longing, my obsession, it dreams itself back. In English, that phrase is only coherent, not cohesive… a reminder that language itself is just another template.

Music is the universal human language for shifting the meaning of verbal communication from prosaic words to expressive soundscapes. It aligns with how our emotions work, and stimulates them. It exposes that more is always being communicated than what is being said.

If we’re willing to submit to its ambiguity, difficulty, and intensity, music is a pretty good teacher.

Life is too.

* Per Kendrick Lamar, “It’s levels to it you and I know.”