Changes of State

One of my favorite lines about creativity is by Walter Murch: "It is frequently at the edges of things that we learn most about the middle: ice and steam can reveal more about the nature of water than water alone ever could."

As I've collected aphorisms over the past 30 years (Dynaxioms), some of them have become lyrics or have generated rhythms for possible pieces of music without words. It is a change of state, like water to vapor.

I like the idea that language can be repurposed from one form to another: Sometimes a lyric will generate a rhythm on which the piece can be composed, then subsequently will be swapped with other lyrics to replace the original. Something is both lost and found in translation, on which the process repeats.

Here is a possible diagram of the process:

Extracting lyrics or poetry from prose (or in this case aphorisms) inherits their meaning--even when the original words have been replaced. In this way, writing has threads of other writing within it. The corollary in the visual arts is taking photographs of paintings which can stand alone as separate works of art. Hans Namuth's photographs of Jackson Pollock are intimately connected to the idea of the drip painting--it's a "thread". In the Google image result on Namuth, the first images are of Pollock throwing paint on the canvas--the stereotype of Pollock, for better or worse, corroborated by Google's indexing algorithm.

If you follow the flow, there is always something to draw from and never a drought of ideas. If you acted on an idea in some way there is always some way to use it.