Creative Talk Therapy

I like this pic of David Lynch because I think he is pretty masterful at compartmentalizing. You wonder how he can reconcile often creepy subject matter with the real world.

There is an unlimited number of "departments" available to you when you embark on some kind of project where the objectives are not fully clear, and connection points have to be made as you go along. (If you work from ideas this is always the case). 

In many ways, being a creative person requires compartments or "departments" as Marcel Duchamp has said. It was what allowed him to move from being a traditional French painter to being a Dadaist making readymade urinals, or Gerhard Richter moving from painting family portraits to squeegee paintings and conceptual sculpture. Artists should feel at home and go anywhere they want there.

Perchance to Experiment

You have to be willing to enter the doors on the periphery of creativity, even though there might not be anything behind them. This is the essence of experimentation. If one is too compartmentalized, you're always staying in the same "room", although sometimes you want to close all the doors and stay in one room, and I have done that more in my visual art than in music when I work with specific color assignments for example. In music, I let myself be all over the place, simply because I leave all the doors open. The only reason you would want to leave all the doors closed is if there is a deadline. Deadlines are a nice constraint to impose to force a result but always having them probably suffocates good ideas. I recall an interview with Todd Rundgren in which he was asked about his production of the XTC album Skylarking. He imposed constraints in the beginning by figuring out what all the tempos were, titles, and so on. But the primary songwriter, Andy Partridge didn't have any such constraints, and it was taking a long time to make the album. But if you are an XTC fan, that could be your most favorite record. The point is, that even if you have constraints or you don't have constraints, the results could be successful. In the end, it's safe to assume that both styles were necessary, and if you interviewed each of them, they would be talking about the creative process in a different way, and both would be valid. But Rundgren was using the deadline constraint, inimical to experimentation. Ideally, one could experiment with imposing constraints more on a daily basis, e.g. finishing a track by 12 noon. Sometimes when I'm laying tracks, I will not bother to do more than one take, as I feel that if I keep moving and not looping back, that what is potentially ahead of me might be more interesting than perfecting the past. What typically happens in production mode, is that there are certain standards that have to be adhered to. One can only do so much with a track that is full of noise, or a track that is not in the groove.

Talk Therapy

Usually I'll understand something completely in retrospect. And the more I talk or write about it the more it becomes clear to me what the thinking process was (I dictated this as a first draft). When I say 'thinking process' I'm talking about the thinking process that happened subliminally and was not analytical. Improvisation is a good example of this (in speaking or in playing music): You simply cannot analyze as you are improvising, or, ideally, you want to stop yourself from doing that. In music, when I'm improvising the only thing I have to make a concerted effort to do is to listen to what's going on around what I'm doing and react accordingly. Therefore, the hands-on process of making art is a kind of improvisation in which you have to remind yourself to be more mindful of the things on the periphery that can change the course of the work, as one would think of things as they speak. 

One of the tasks of the creative person is to describe their connection points between the compartments and departments. This means that they must be able to explain their creative process, either in retrospect or in prospect. The Internet has almost made it necessary for a more descriptive process because we have access to so many more ways to shape ideas through their communication. This is difficult at first because we have to translate our thinking processes into words and/or images. Since work can’t always speak for itself, you have to speak in defense of it. I can usually tell you why I did something because I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I live with the work. 

David Lynch apparently connects all his creative processes with transcendental meditation. It is his way of packaging all the compartments into one unified structure. Things can't always be universally understood on a universal level, but they can be universal only on a personal level as well-- like children that are home-schooled who can rapidly change from one subject to another, and it all seems universal. This is actually a more natural way of working because the brain is always making connection points spontaneously. We don’t have to start one and then start another. We can allow them to overlap freely and organically. This is the reason that creative processes require explanation, as the universal at the personal level doesn’t always translate to the universal Universal. What is self-evident to me probably will not seem self-evident to you, and vice versa. It may seem like you made something up but you didn’t really make it up--you just forgot what it was initially. This is like the French idiom l'esprit de l'escalier where you thought of something you should have said when you got to the bottom of the staircase. It's a matter of training yourself to have faith in spontaneity more.

I think the best innovators know how to mindfully compartmentalize, and have access to many departments that are free and open to each other. This is one of the reasons I have always admired Lynch because he inhabits an open space and is not locked into one room. And talking about them is a way to make those metaphors more real and more effective in creative work.