What you want is for music to love you back. That's why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it.

Metamorphosis has always been the greatest symbol of change for poets and artists. Imagine that you could be a caterpillar one moment and a butterfly the next.

Ladies and Gentlemen, there are two types of metamorphosis: complete? as with butterflies and incomplete? as with roaches...

Transmogrification-that's the right word. It's been on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't quite catch it. It's a cumbersome word. It rolls through your mouth and then staccatos onto the floor in chunks of unnecessary syllables, like echoes of a thought already gone. It is a transformation, a metamorphosis that occurred not because I'd changed but because the rest of the world had.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . ." When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

Butterflies are beautiful, but the process of emerging from the chrysalis and spreading your wings can hurt like fucking hell. But still, you will survive the transformation (over and over again) and you will fly. Remember this when it hurts the most. This is the metamorphosis, the going down to liquid, and the rising again. It's no joke ? but damn, it's one hell of a journey.

Why do we appreciate the metamorphosis of the butterfly more than the beauty of ageing?