Response

I have done little reading or anything else this week… I always feel a little uncomfortable when you respond to things I’ve said involving Proust, because he’s often implicated in the various supplements, interpretations and tangents I’ve hung on to him before he got to you. I think intensity of thought and experience was more central to him than time – true intensity only came about in solitude. That said, time does interest me, as does a goal of perfection. I realize that live performance is all about moment and experience, that a live performance is not supposed to stand as a monument – it is moving rather than static, and it makes sense to say that in an experience like that is, in a sense, lived rather than examined ‘perfection’ seems like a less relevant concept. Still… (and I’ll digress before saying what I was about to say, with aside about perfection, and our blog which is conceived of as a conversation, where I write down ideas I would usually never write down in such a half-baked form, where amidst all sorts of nonsense come things that are headed in the right direction but still wrong because of the formulation, because they seeds of ideas and unprocessed observations that haven’t really been checked or analyzed. This blog is a rejection of perfection for the sake of exchange. If we each waited until we had something polished and convincing to send, we wouldn’t get nearly as much insight into each other’s thought development as I think and hope we will this way. The downside is that I do already often feel embarrassed about what I’ve written, am writing or even am about to write – I’ll have to stop talking about that though… and just come back to stuff like my comment on Plato which I feel have to be lifted out of the half-idiot state they’re now in)… I think in talking about time and improvisation, you are also party touching on the difference between craft and inspiration – which is not to say that there is no craft in live performance and in improvisation, quite the contrary, but when people praise immediacy, movement and unreflected creation in art, there usually is some lingering background thought of the divine breath entering the body, of some sacred space being tapped and our highest selves being released. I think of renaissance debates on the relative merits of ‘nature’, meaning talent, and ‘art’ or artifice, meaning work and carefully acquired skill. I think of surrealist automatic writing, and Breton being ashamed of his initial desire to correct or polish lines in ‘magnetic fields’, which sort of went against the point of the experiment, and I think of Jack Kerouac claiming that he taped countless sheets of paper together so that while writing ‘On the Road’ in a mad continuous fit he wouldn’t have to pause to change sheets in the typewriter (did he claim to have written it in a day or something like that?). This is linked in too many people’s minds far too often to things like altered states, drugs and so forth, and sometimes a belief that brilliance is all in the unconscious and can express itself without thought. Of course there is such a thing as talent, of course over-analyzing what you are writing often ruins it, makes it contrived and unnatural, and of course when you are in the middle of creating something worthwhile often, though not always, you do feel almost like you are on things, what you are working on starts taking form and you don’t feel that it is entirely of your own doing, it can seem necessary, natural – but still, I have an almost protestant devotion to the idea of craft, of work, of revision. I think this is in part because I put too much stock in romantic notions of genius when I was very young, and not believing that there was such a thing as craft in writing kept me from actively learning it when it would have come quickest and easiest – and when I didn’t have other responsibilities to distract me from it. In performance the hard work of the craft comes through repetition – drilling into yourself gestures, ideas and structures that you can always fall back on, and also cultivating a certain style and rhythm of thought. Repetition, like revision is a circling back, revisiting, and each revisiting leads to refinement towards impossible and unreachable perfection – which is a necessary thought even if its realization is an absurd thought, as undesirable as it is impossible. Though mystical inspiration would seem to be more closely linked to speed or the moment and humble craft to taking time and proceeding with care – an ideal of perfection is linked to them both and never attained by either. I’m not going to talk about perfection just yet – it will involve another equally long tangent and there is something else I planned to write about…

But now that I’ve already composed something so long, I don’t think I’m going to start writing about Sade just now as I planned to. I’ll do that tomorrow and then maybe perfection or Plato on the weekend.

improvisation vs. permanence

I've not really read much this week, as I'm trying to finish a paper instead, and I haven't finished the paper either, so I don't have much to say on that front. But I thought I should make a few brief remarks before the week catches me in its whirlwind.

It seems the theme connecting Proust to your discussion of Socrates here are the circumstances for creation, and their relation to conversation. One point of comparison that leaped to mind was improvisation in theatre, which requires spontaneity and also a group, much like conversation. And like a Socratic dialogue, it also needs strict rules in order to function. Unlike a Socratic dialogue, fruitful improvisation relies on a back-and-forth between all the players, rather than having one dominant player who directs all the proceedings. Improv takes off when no one person assumes control over the creation, so that all participants surrender themselves to the possibility that things will spin off in a direction they didn't anticipate, while all assume responsibility for making that direction as interesting as possible. One of the things that's always fascinated me about improvisation is that it seems to me to be creativity in its purest form. Giving people time to think things through might give greater polish to what they come out with, but it also allows for tremendous self-censorship. What the great gurus of improvisation, like Keith Johnstone, train in their performers is the graceful art of letting go of that intellection and self-censorship so that gifted improvisers can surprise even themselves with what comes out of their mouths, but they have a strong enough instinct for cooperative storytelling that even the unexpected contributes productively to the story being told.

One reason I think improvisation brings people closer to the act of creation than most things is that it removes the element of thought. That might sound odd. But I think too much reflection can be a great hindrance to creativity. From the ancients to today, people talk about inspiration, about the muses, about spirits entering and moving them, and so on. There's a sense that true creativity is a gift that comes from without rather than a talent one extracts from within. Being a great artist isn't simply a matter of being talented, but also being open to that inspiration. What I envy in improvisers is their innocent capacity to be open to that inspiration. To use a word that's sadly fallen from common English usage, they're unsoulclogged.

That said, I do think that getting ideas straight does involve a lot of thought on one's own time. Rumination can be as much hindrance as help, and I think the history of philosophy bears all too much of the evidence of how abstract thinking can lead us astray. But I find, for instance, that the Oxford tutorial system relies very heavily on the cut-and-thrust of quick-witted debate, which can often be a helpful way of mooting ideas, but I far too often wish people could give me a day before I get back to them. I'm no Socrates.

On the side of taking your time is the dream of perfection. My brother, who's quite a chess wizard, plays a lot of correspondence chess, partly for lack of good opponents nearby, and partly because he finds the form fascinating. In tournament chess, you'll have less than a couple of hours to complete all your moves. In correspondence chess, you can take a week or two over each move. The result is that the best chess players could presumably play much closer to a perfect game by correspondence than they could in tournament. In a similar vein, Glenn Gould gave up giving concerts after a while and devoted himself to studio recording in the hope of capturing a performance that was closer to perfection than any live performance.

Part of the beauty of improvisation, to my mind, is that it rejects the idea of perfection altogether. What they're giving us isn't a spontaneous idea that could be improved through greater refinement. What makes what they give us worthwhile in the first place is its spontaneity. You find this mentality much more frequently in eastern traditions, I think. The sand mandala, for instance, is destroyed as soon as it's completed. I suppose that's in keeping with a spiritual tradition that takes "this, too, shall pass" as one of its fundamental tenets. I wonder to what extent our obsession with permanence and perfection and our resistance to spontaneity is related to our culture's monotheism?