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You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that art has to have a useful purpose. That's a side argument.
What I *am* saying is that, in art, the "end" is usually less important than the "means."
You'd have to have the idea in the first place...
Aaaaaaaand here we reach the crux of it.
You seem to have a bicameral, compartmentalized view of art—that it starts with an idea, which comes from Out There Somewhere, leaping into the artist's mind more or less fully-formed; and then comes the physical labor of translating that idea into reality.
What I'm telling you is that it generally doesn't happen that way. I'm saying that ideas come through the work itself. The physical reality of the work and the mental landscape of "ideas" cannot be separated.
Here's how it works.
A sculptor has her hands wet in the clay, fucking around, pushing and pulling as it pleases her with no particular product in mind. Interesting shapes happen, and she helps them to happen. An image grows clearer in her mind even as it grows clearer in the clay.
A composer lets his hands wander idly over the keyboard, trying different combinatons of chords, just to see what will happen. Some days, hours pass and he plays nothing worth remembering. Today he plays a phrase from an old folk song, then plays melodic variations on it—inverts it, re-harmonizes it, extends it, mashes it around for a while. Then he puts down the lid on his piano and goes into the kitchen to fix dinner. He hasn't written anything down. An hour later, while he's chopping carrots, he finds himself humming one of the variations.
A writer wakes early every morning to write in her journal. That's her bargain with herself—three pages, longhand, every morning, with no expectations and no goal. One morning she looks back at what she's just written and sees four words strung together in a way that rings her chimes. That'd make a good title, she thinks, and she draws a circle around the phrase, and she keeps writing. And for six months, or six years, nothing much appears to happen. She continues to show up every morning and write her three pages. And one day, she goes back through her journals and gleans a phrase here, a line there, an event here—and she has the seeds of a novel. Not a whole novel, fully-conceived, but a notion that will grow as she tells it. Her characters will do things that she does not anticipate: her plot will go in unknown directions. She will keep writing and sort it out later. She will keep writing.
That's how it works.
My beef with the idea of inspiration—the reason that I think it is such a pernicious and destructive myth—is that it keeps people from doing art. "I can't write songs / paint / write poetry," goes the refrain. "I don't have anything to say. I don't have any ideas. If only I had inspiration, then I'd..."
And so they don't start. Which means they never finish.
I've heard artists say that you have to draw a hundred terrible pictures before you draw a good one. And that is true. What's different about the hundredth picture is not that suddenly the Light From Heaven comes puring down into your head and out the end of your pencil: what's different is that all your experience, all your observation, all your errors—all your work—comes to a head in your 100th picture. Which is marginally better than your 99th, and not as good as your 101st. But the myth of "inspiration" keeps people from drawing their first picture, let alone their 99th.
It's an awful, poisonous mental construct. It arises from the laziness of the novice (who wants the results without the effort), but also from the fear of failure—and so it can cripple even people who have done the work, miring them deep in writer's block or artistic stagnation. It takes courage to stare it down, to accept the responsibility for everything you create—that you create—for good or bad, to stop giving the credit or the blame to the Breath Of God, or the Muse, or the 5D Ideasmiths Of Memespace.
It's a high hurdle to get over, so deeply culturally ingrained is this notion—but it's got to be done, if you want to be steady, productive, and sane—working in harmony with the creative process. And once you're over it, you wonder why anybody ever buys into it: Why conceive of yourself as being at the mercy of terrible forces that you cannot control?
Why would you wish to imagine yourself as so powerless? Why would you wish to imagine yourself as dependent on the whims of some outside force? Why would you prefer that to being an independent, autonomous operator? |
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