Typos and creative degradation

Welcome to the ArtsBound Newsletter. Every Tuesday, I share three thoughts or insights meant to help performing arts students and young professionals flourish in their life and career. Today, 1) typos, 2) natural degradation in the creative process, and 3) the two states of creative energy. 

- 7-minute read -

(NOTE: I started ArtsBound because I believe the world would be a better place with more people living their true calling. If you know a student or young professional who is searching for their niche in the performing arts world, consider forwarding this email to them. If this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive my newsletter every Tuesday. It's free, and I’ll never share or sell your data.)

1. Typos.

Last week, I wrote about allowing for time of nonproductivity as a way to recharge our creative energy. The topic was quite literal for the kind of week I had had, and the idea for that newsletter had not come to me until the Monday before. I wrote it in a hurry Tuesday morning and sent it off before proofreading. To my dismay, it had quite a few typos in the section about body surfing. 

First, I’d like to apologize. I know typos make reading difficult. My goal is always to deliver an easy read that might spark some inspiration as you go about your Tuesday, so I’m sorry there were so many hiccups in the writing. 

With the apology for last week’s onslaught of finger-faults out of the way, I thought I’d share why, in general, one or two typos (or other small imperfections) is something I work to accept as a part of my creative output.

When I was a young professional, a theatre director introduced me to the Navajo concept of the spirit hole. When I looked into the concept online, I found this article that refers to it as the spirit line, but the idea is the same.

The Navajo believe that when a weaver creates a decorative rug, a part of their spirit is trapped in the rug. To let the weaver’s spirit escape again from their creation, they weave a line from the interior pattern of the rug all the way to its edge (check out the article for pictures).

The result is an intentional imperfection that also aligns with the Navajo belief that only God is perfect; the flaw in the rug is a guard against psychological inflation.

I was told of the spirit hole concept while serving on the creative team for a collegiate musical theatre production. I had pointed out that a set piece - created by students who weren’t otherwise involved in the production - was a mismatch with something in the script. The director, who was generally quite particular about his work, just smiled and said, “I know. That will be our spirit hole.”

In order to create, we must allow ourselves to become (to some degree) ‘possessed’ by our artistic vision. But, if we also want to maintain a healthy personal life, there must be a time at which we liberate ourselves from the demands of the creative pursuit and inhabit the rest of our life. 

As I wrote last week, my period of nonproductivity - indirectly resulting in those typos - allowed me to maintain some balance in my life. And as had I hoped, it also allowed for the time and space to plant the seeds for new creative content... the morning after sending last week’s newsletter, I woke with the concept for this week’s (and next week’s!) springing up in my thoughts.

2. Creative degradation.

The issue of typos, ‘creative possession’, and spirit holes brings up the need for an artist to be able to accept a degree of creative degradation in their creative output if they are ever to bring their creative visions to life. This topic actually came up in a podcast episode I heard last week that I’ll discuss more in the next item.

In college, I had a music theory and composition professor who lectured once on this topic. He raised the issue of how many conversions a piece of music must go through between the composer’s first bit of inspiration and way listeners would eventually experience the piece. In the Western classical music tradition, it looks something like this:

• A composer’s initial aural notions and impressions are converted into notes and sounds able to be produced by the performer(s).

• Those notes are written down, along with directions about how loud to play, with what articulation, phrasing, etc. There is a great deal of nuance experienced by the composer that is lost in this process.

• The written score is interpreted by the performer(s). They infuse new nuance into the interpretation. 

• The piece of music is performed. This is a physical rendering of the performer’s interpretation, which is affected by the performer’s technical skill, alertness, point of focus, emotional state, energy level, and state of their instrument at the time of the performance.

• The piece of music is heard by a listener. This is affected by the acoustics of the space in which the music is being performed, the state of the instrument being played, and the listener’s sense of hearing, alertness, point of focus, etc.

• What is heard by the listener is then, finally, experienced. The listener’s experience may be impacted by any number of things, including their familiarity with the piece (or music in general); whether they know the composer personally; their emotional disposition; their taste for the style of music being performed; their personal feelings (or lack thereof) about the performer, what the performer is wearing, the performer’s hair style; and so on, and so on…

This string of conversions is especially relevant to the performing arts, but after reading all that, you might see how even the process of something like painting or writing a novel goes through a number of conversions that may cause the final experience of the beholder to be quite different from the initial flash of inspiration experienced by the creator.

We might accept creative “degradation” as a built-in way to liberate our spirit from our creative products, but I believe it serves an even higher function and is therefore a misnomer. As artists we must remember that the Divine Spark of inspiration that brings us together with our creative ideas resides not only in us, but in every person along the string of conversion as well. Therefore, everyone along the way co-participates in the creative process, integrating themselves into the art in order to reconstitute whatever might have “disintegrated” out of the original vision of the work.

If you buy all that, then you see that every human being is creative, art always exists as a function of relationship, and every artistic experience had by an individual is, at some level, inherently and uniquely whole and complete.

3. The two states of creative energy.

Longtime readers may have noted that my thinking draws a good bit of influence from Jungian psychology (a.k.a. depth psychology and archetypal psychology). Lately, I’ve been rocking out with a podcast called This Jungian Life. The podcast episode I reference above is from this show and covers the topic of creativity.

Jungian thought often looks to mythology and fairy tales as a way of better understanding the way we think and relate with our world. In this episode, the hosts look at the Greek gods Dionysus and Hephaestus in order to examine the two states of creative energy in the human experience.

Dionysus is the god of wine, pleasure, festivity, and resurrection. He is an ambivalent character in mythology, evoking images of both ecstasy and madness (think of the creative figures of Van Gogh and Beethoven). In the context of this discussion, Dionysis is meant to represent the Divine inspiration that visits us with a creative idea and the creative ecstasy that may subsequently ‘possess’ us as we get swept up in our own experience of beauty.

I remember once I was working to notate a piece for choir that was based on an improvisation I had been working with for some time. So that the singers’ parts weren’t too complicated, I was sitting down to play the improvisation, putting myself wholly into the music in an attempt to capture its richest core and codify it in the score. Feeling as though I had found what I was looking for and not wanting to lose it, I stood up to write down the parts, still feeling the music in my body. 

But I didn’t write down a single note.

Instead, I ended up dancing ecstatically around the room. I can still recall the uplifting feeling I had in my chest. Focusing on the minutiae of the parts was impossible for me in that moment. 

That’s Dionysus.

Hephaestus is the blacksmith of the gods. He was the husband of Aphrodite, but she cheated on him because he had a physical deformity. There is nothing sexy or ecstatic about Hephaestus. But, he was a highly skilled and disciplined craftsman who worked faithfully in his forge to create items of great beauty and power.

Going back to my experience with writing that piece for choir, I did eventually get those parts written (weeks later!). It took a great deal of planning, focus, and diligence. 

That’s Hephaestus.

As artists, we need both of these energies if we are to bring something into reality (Hephaestus) that is truly unique and inspired by who we are at our spiritual core (Dionysus). The good news is, we can work to cultivate and develop both types of energy, and fold them into our regular routines.

That’s all for now. Next week, we’ll explore a bit more of what it means to be ‘possessed’ by your personal creative spirit and some other ideas centered on another meaning of the word possession.

See you next week!

Lee

PS - I started ArtsBound because I believe the world would be a better place with more people living their true calling. If you know a student or young professional who is searching for their niche in the performing arts world, consider forwarding this email to them. If this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive my newsletter every Tuesday. It's free, and I’ll never share or sell your data.