Brainpickings revisits the 1990 commencement address of Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson

Brainpickings continues to be my favorite blog for disseminating and dissecting important creative ideas. Here is one of today’s posts in its entirety (make sure to follow the spiderwebbing trails of links in the article):

May 20, 1990: Advice on Life and Creative Integrity from Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson

by Maria Popova

“The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.”

‘Tis the season for glorious life advice dispensed by cap-and-gown-clad elders to cap-and-gown-clad youngsters, emanating a halo effect of timeless wisdom the rest of us can absorb any day, at any stage of life. On May 20, 1990, Bill Watterson, creator of the beloved Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, took the podium at Kenyon College — the same stage David Foster Wallace would occupy 18 years later to deliver one of history’s most memorable commencement addresses — and gave the graduating class in a gift of equally remarkable insight and impact.

Watterson begins the speech by articulating the same sentiment at the heart of the most unforgettable commencement addresses: the notion that not-knowing is not only a part of the journey, but an integral part:

I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I’m walking to the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don’t have my schedule memorized, and I’m not sure which classes I’m taking, or where exactly I’m supposed to be going.
As I walk up the steps to the postoffice, I realize I don’t have my box key, and in fact, I can’t remember what my box number is. I’m certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can’t get them. I get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path, racking my brains and asking myself, “How many more years until I graduate? …Wait, didn’t I graduate already?? How old AM I?” Then I wake up.

Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life: that is, not knowing where you’re going or what you’re doing.

Like Chuck Close (“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”), Isabel Allende (“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”), E. B. White (“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”), and Tchaikovsky (“A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.”), Watterson speaks to the importance of work ethic and grit — but, like Freud, he places playfulness at the epicenter of creativity:

It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

[…]

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you’ll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you’ll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you’ll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

[…]

A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

Watterson stresses the importance of refueling the drained creative tank not by indulging in mindless entertainment but by nourishing stimulation — because, after all, “garbage in, garbage out”:

We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery — it recharges by running.

On the importance of defining your own success and holding on to your sense of purpose:

You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of “just getting by” absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people’s expectations rather than issues.

Recounting his early days of weathering the rejection storm, Watterson illustrates the soul-crushing effect of doing intellectually and creatively vacant money-work rather than work true to your calling:

For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job.

A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-1/2 million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it. … It was a rude shock to see just how empty and robotic life can be when you don’t care about what you’re doing, and the only reason you’re there is to pay the bills.

In fact, the central message of Watterson’s speech is that the myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — something cultural icons like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell knew well. At the end of the day, what counts is not prestige or money but pure joy in the work:

I tell you all this because it’s worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It’s a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you’ll probably take a few.

I still haven’t drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.

Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn’t in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.

But as his comic strip became wildly successful and he was tossed into the $12-billion-a-year cartoon merchandising business, Watterson found himself “spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing” and saw the gruesome other side of the same coin:

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.

The so-called “opportunity” I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I’d need.

But of course even then, long before the proclaimed “new age of fulfillment, in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning,” Watterson knew that what was being offered to him was a robbery rather than a gift. In reflecting on the experience, he revisits the question of work ethic, this time in light of defining your own success:

You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don’t discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.

He stresses the vital difference between “having an enviable career” and “being a happy person,” admonishing about the “hedonic treadmill” of achievement:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

He concludes by echoing Rilke:

Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.

Complement with more soul-stirring wisdom from Debbie Millman, Neil Gaiman, Greil Marcus, David Foster Wallace, Jacqueline Novogratz, Ellen DeGeneres, Aaron Sorkin, Barack Obama, Ray Bradbury, J. K. Rowling, Steve Jobs, Robert Krulwich, Meryl Streep, and Jeff Bezos.

Thanks, @monicapillai

Sticks and a stone, some tape, and water…..

30 year old kiln with stone age repairs……

Talk about solving problems with band aides! Here’s a close up of that magnificent repair job. Please notice the chunk of rock lodged between the bottom and middle plugs. Short of another stick this was the only immediate way I could keep the plug from jiggling loose and providing a poor connection. I need to order a whole new set of plugs and sockets, but that will have to wait until after the sales. If its running like this I don’t want to do anything to upset the balance, although I may replace the indicator light that burned out on the bottom circuit.

A ‘repair’ job any electrician would be horrified at. Who uses stones in electrical work these days? Maybe I’m just out of step with the times….

My kiln, as you can see, is a patchwork of miscellaneous repairs. But as of right now its limping along, thanks to the timely rescue of two sticks and a stone and a piece of tape! To prepare for my upcoming sales I need a working kiln, and the pursuit of this has caused me a number of sleepless nights this past week. My fingers remain crossed that some sticks, a stone, and a piece of tape will continue to save my bacon! For a few more weeks, at least…..

Sam McNerney had this to say:

“In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, two friends, Vladimir and Estragon, endlessly wait by a tree in the moonlight for the arrival of someone they both claim to know but neither would recognize – someone named Godot. While they wait, they talk about the Gospels, suicide, the past and the future. They exchange shoes and hats. They contemplate leaving. Most of all, they try to make sense of the situation. But doing so – trying to understand and control their circumstances – leads to anxiety. It is the attempt to make sense of the absurd that spells their demise.

(….)

The problem, paradoxically, is just that: we’re searching. Consider a paper by the psychologist Iris Mauss and three colleagues. They discovered over the course of two experiments that participants who sought happiness were less happy than participants in a control group. The idea is the more we value something, the more likely we will be disappointed, even when we obtain what we’re searching for. By analogy, imagine an academically minded student who considers anything lower than perfection a disappointment. Despite above average marks, he will believe himself a failure. The lesson here is not to lower expectations but to not emphasize only one variable. When we fail to do that we get caught in a Zeno’s paradox of sorts – no matter how hard we try, we’ll never arrive at our destination.”

Part of my anxiety has been looking at my kiln as a means to an end. Its a tool for finishing pottery, and those pots are the inventory I need to pull off my sales. Having a working kiln becomes important for that end, and an inoperable kiln makes the timing right now potentially disastrous for my sales.

But then, it seems, I am treating the kiln entirely as the servant of those goals, and the timing does become more important than other values and the results working out become incredibly pressure packed. For instance, my glazes right now have been thrown into confusion with a new source of Iron oxide, and I’m not getting the results I expected or, frankly, was counting on.

The lesson must be that I am running into trouble by not seeing the wider picture. The kiln is part of a process, but not simply a means to ends. If that process is an end in itself, if I enjoy making pots for the sake of making pots, for the sake of creativity and discovery, then the kiln not working may have interrupted the cycle, but being broken doesn’t also mean that my pottery making is broken. Delayed, perhaps, but not broken. And the results of my glazes being new to me is a reminder of the power and importance of serendipity. There are things about the new ways these glazes are looking that are so different and so interesting in their own right that I now understand I will be spending months if not years exploring them. And how exciting is that!

So, in the end it comes down to my own attitude about the little hiccups that life sends my way. I get disappointed when my expectations are not met, when the default attitude towards the lemony things in life gives me only sour fruit. But that’s up to me to interpret differently. Things only become obstacles when they intrude between means and ends. Ends become easily frustrated when they are not ends in themselves. David Foster Wallace said it nicely in his commencement speech from 2005:

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Peace all!

Happy potting or otherwise creating!

Make beauty real!

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My timely and much needed lesson in aspirations…..

So, as you may have gathered from the previous post I have been fending off a bout of hysteria that the lesser of my main two selling opportunities of the year was about to seriously tank due to a kiln breakdown and probable emotional meltdown. Just maybe I will be lucky enough to avoid the calamity of either of those dire consequences. The kiln has been ‘fixed’, if temporary solutions and band-aids can be said to solve problems, and the kiln is firing either the last or second to last bisque as we speak. Until I have a chance to really fix things I am being forced to operate on a reduced level, firing only three of the four rings that I normally operate with. We’ll see how that goes, if this firing today gets pulled off and the subsequent glaze firings reach temp safely…..

In the meantime I have had a lot of soul searching and self evaluation to contemplate as I waited for help from my electrician friends and the further improbable miracle of a cure from the gods. One of the lessons I seem to need to absorb is that my typical crushing anxiety in preparing for these sales is usually overblown and almost always self defeating. I usually get so worked up in trying to do every conceivable item on my check list, far more than I need to, that I spend more time chasing frivolous pursuits and following giddy ambitions than battening down the hatches and weathering the storm in simplicity and security. With my head in the clouds of wishful thinking and untethered inspiration I sometimes lack the grounding necessary to just hunker down. I spend far more effort and resources on exotic vanity exercises than on humble bread and butter sustenance. Why else would I have cranked out nearly 200 new mugs when I may only sell half that in the best case scenario? Why else would I overproduce pots that have a history of selling far slower than the inventory I already have in stock?

These are the questions I am being asked right now, and I can see that the partial answer is that I simply do what I enjoy doing, and on one level there can be nothing wrong with that. Making close to 200 mugs in a short time was exhilarating, especially as it gave me the opportunity to flex some experimental muscles in working out the kinks of my new favorite style of handles. But as with any choice or decision we make it often comes down to a balance between desire and other measures of appropriateness. Desire may not always square up with expedience (which can sometimes be important), practicality (which seems only ignored at a cost), and even the effects on one’s health. Its like eating cake for dinner when you know that butter, sugar, and refined flour won’t offer proper long term nutritional value, that too much will give you indigestion, and that all that sweetness is rotting your teeth. Its like buying another carton of ciggies after the doctor has warned you of the imminent risk of lung cancer….. Sometimes we simply can’t stop ourselves. And things which might be okay in moderation become dangerous when they blossom into a way of life. The issue, it seems, is knowing where to draw the line.

And so it also becomes a question for me that there are two distinct demands on my life that may not always be compatible. As an artist I am absolutely free to pursue what things interest me. 200 mugs? Why not 400! I can do as I want, make what appeals to me, and my curiosity is only strengthened, my talents and techniques only fine-tuned and honed. But as a business person, someone who has to make a living at this shtick, it is a different question of what gets made. And there are only so many slices of the pie of my efforts and resources to go around. I need to make mugs because they are always good sellers, and at the moment my stock is particularly low. But making 400 mugs for a sale where I might sell 100 would mean that I didn’t have the chance to make as many bowls or plates or cups or jars. 200 isn’t that crazy. Right….?

And so I can see that I sometimes get myself into trouble cramming for a deadline. I like what I like, but I also like to be over-prepared. Its the philosophy that more of a good thing is always better. Even though it might not be the wisest course of action, and even though it inevitably results in anxiety and sleepless nights. Its that last slice of cake I can’t set down, that keeps me up at night, that causes me to raid the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning. The temptation is too great. I don’t have a proper handle on my restraint…..

So maybe I need to recalibrate. Maybe this is a wake-up call to my rampant excesses of delusion and cloud chasing. Maybe its the refutation of simple solutions. Its the lesson of the ‘Golden rule’, ultimately. Even ‘good things’ have their limits. Caution is often a good thing, but you can be too cautious and freeze up by not taking chances. Practicality is often a worthy consideration, but it often comes at the cost of one’s imagination. Dreaming and hope and wishful aspirations are vital to a human life, but taken too far or out of reasonable context and they implode on one’s life.

In a sense, perhaps it is like a person’s diet. An unvaried and unrelieved consumption of even things that are necessary for survival can kill you. We require a breadth. We need variety and challenges. Simplicity and satisfying basic cravings only gets us so far. Comfort is a double edged sword of seductive temptation and worthy aspiration. Its never as simple as it sometimes appears to me…..

And perhaps because I don’t have a firm grasp on the business side of my art I get too easily carried away by extraneous things or blow minor details out of proportion. In ignorance I hammer out the natural complexity of the problems facing me into simple inadequate solutions. And its no wonder I find myself at this impasse….

If the worst comes to pass and my kiln is inoperable over the next several weeks I still have pots I can put out for the sale. I can scrounge pots from my cupboards at home and the coffee shop in town. There are other solutions to cranking 400 pots through a dinky little electric kiln in two and a half weeks. It won’t be the best, but it should be ‘good enough’.

I always seem to aim for beyond the best and come up so far short of that that it really makes no sense to get so carried away. What do they say? “Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst”? It would be a miracle to sell even half the pots I have waiting for the kiln. So why would I prepare for the best possible outcome that there is absolutely no evidence supporting? I could get lucky, and being lucky is often a matter of being in position to take advantage of opportunities, but I can’t pretend that getting ‘lucky’ is the only thing I need to account for…..

So what should I be aiming for? What should my expectations for these upcoming sales be? What do I need from my pottery selling venture for me to be happy?

Let me take Scott Cooper’s words from a post he wrote following the holiday sale last Winter. He’s waaay smarter than me, and I often count on him to get me out of a jam. Here’s what he had to say last December:

“Obviously, the money is important….. At the very least, I need the pots to pay for themselves. There’s an astonishing amount of infrastructure and related commitments and compromises required to make them; even at its most streamlined and efficient, it’s an expensive endeavor, and I am rarely all that streamlined or efficient.

I’d like them to return enough profit that I’m not constantly second-guessing my choice to devote more than half my working life to them. While I’ve accepted that my labor pays well below the hourly minimum wage, and likely always will, writing off those hundreds of hours each year as a donation to some nebulous cause won’t work. For all the intangibles… it still matters to me that the world values what I’m doing in economic terms, too.

But on a hypothetical list of Reasons Why I Make Pots, making money isn’t in the top three, and it might not even crack the top five. It’s one motivation among many, but certainly not the most important one. So why then, at the end of a sale, should I base the labels of “good” or “bad”, “success” or “failure” on just that one factor?

(….)

[I]t doesn’t really matter all that much how the numbers for this sale compare to last spring, or last year, or any year. It’s certainly not the only thing that matters.

People matter. Relationships matter. Making a small but personal “dent in the universe” matters. Quality and beauty; the satisfaction of a job well done; trying to constantly refine my ideas and improve my skills — those things matter. And, most of all, knowing that I put everything I had into this cycle of work matters. My intent was sincere, my heart full and my efforts genuine. Everything that happens after that is beyond my control.”

That sounds good and reasonable to me….. What do you all think?

Peace all!

Happy Potting!

Make beauty real!

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The gods are cruel…..

Its times like these that I could get me some old fashioned religion. I mean ‘old’ as in some version of what the ancients believed in, just hooked up to modern appliances.

Most electrical things are beyond my comprehension. I know its all science and technology, things that can be understood, not some absolute unknowable mystery. But sometimes it seems pretty inscrutable to me. And its times like these that I remember that I’m not so smart after all. There are minds that are perfectly at home in the spiderweb of scientific intricacies, and then there are minds like mine, ones that are at home in the nebulous garden of wonder and amazement……

So, with three weeks left until my Summer pottery sale I had the bright idea to swap out my kiln’s elements. No big deal. I’ve done it several times now. Many years ago I had to learn bits and pieces of kiln repair, the mantra being that everything goes somewhere specific, and that when you replace things you do it in exactly the way it had been before. That I can do. But don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me what it means for this to go here and that to go there, or what those parts actually do. I suppose I have some vague ideas. I know the names of things like fuses, fuse holders, relays, switches, but just because you can recognize a name and perhaps point to a part, it doesn’t necessarily give you a measure of control over your fate. No. Your success instead hinges on the workings of unseen forces, of powers and agendas that are beyond your control. The gods have weighed in, and we are helpless before them…..

Three weeks to go, and one last bisque kiln to run, and then something like 350 pots to potentially fire….. Of course I don’t need all of them. I have enough of most things already on my shelves. But I was genuinely excited about some of my newer pots. And I do have a few forms, like mugs and plates, that are far below the desired inventory levels. And then there is also one special order that needs to get pushed through….

“Oh great and benevolent Hephaestus, grant me the wisdom to solve the puzzle of my faltering kiln. Lend me your skill in connecting everything back correctly. Bestow upon me the might of thine hammer that I may smite the nasty kinks from its wires…”

And then there’s the weather…..

Go greenware or go….

I suppose I am still a potter, after all….

With the Spring/Summer pottery sales coming up shortly (A month? YIKES!!), I have been working like mad in the studio. Mad that I’m only now catching up, that is…. I think I took a bit too much down time after the Winter, and my to-do list involved getting my inventory of mugs back in the safe zone (my current on hand stock of mugs is at an all time low), and testing out some old favorite forms, some with new twists, and others that are unfamiliar and more exploratory.

And so, I give you “Greenware”:

Having fun with my “new” style of handles!

Tumblers, teabowls, and bowls

Potters always eventually understand patience. Taking the slow time it requires for pots to set up, and then the further activity of forming and applying handles, or cutting feet means that if you didn’t know patience before, this will teach it to you!

Different sized cruets, with air holes for pouring and some with handles

Vive la différence!

A little bit of inspiration never goes amiss! Some three corner, footed bowls ala Tom Jaszczak (among others) and big servers ala Ron Meyers!

Seeing what my pitchers look like with these “new” handles….

Possibly too close for comfort…, I needed to whip up some examples for my “Copying the Masters” class on Monday nights this term. A fun project, but I don’t suppose there’s much future in my ‘interpretations’ of Nick Joerling’s forms….

Peace all!

Happy Potting!

Make beauty real!

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Teaching ‘Looseness’: The genetic variations of organic art

“The greatest hindrance to knowledge is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is, therefore, a prerequisite for authentic awareness…” Abraham Joshua Heschel

As an artist who also teaches students the art and skills of making pots I sometimes face a challenge in explaining the allure of imperfection. I think it is easy in our culture to have certain expectations for what ‘beauty’ is supposed to look like. Quite often we accept the symmetrical and uniform, the ‘classic’ proportions, as our standard of the beautiful. Its the default measurement. And this happens in everyday life where slender fashion models and toothy movie stars are thrust on our cultural awareness in a powerful marketing campaign for the ‘Ken and Barbie’ ideals of perfection.

But that’s hardly ever real life. And learning to make art means starting from a place that is miles away from those ideals. They can’t be the only standards we aspire to, or (as beginners and novices) we will drive ourselves crazy with failure. And there is so much more to enjoy about the nuance of the world than the simpleminded obvious standards of the fashion runways. We are never really challenged by those ideals. Most of us can agree that they’ve got it. “Easy on the eyes” means easy on the brain. The real trick is to learn to look beyond the Brad Pitts and Jennifer Anistons and see what else is also beautiful. As artists especially, it is our task often to find those hidden moments and serendipitous details that are off the beaten path and against the grain of our cultural norms….

So getting students to appreciate, much less embrace, the wobbly idiosyncrasy of an alternate take on beauty can sometimes be an effort. Our culture often likes to present its ideals as supreme and unchallenged. The ‘correct version’. And stepping outside the comfort zone can be controversial. Not just in accepting the ‘less than perfect’, the slightly off center, the out of round, the wobbly, the odd, the awkward, the unusual, the unexpected, the surprising, the counterintuitive, the defiance of ideals, the rejection of society’s norm, but it can also be a hurdle to get them to understand how to nurture this ‘imperfection’. And, as this is often defined more by what it is not, by an absence of perfection, this can be tricky. How can we purposely aim for things that are not of a certain standard? Isn’t the idea of a standard precisely that it gives us something to aim for? Getting students to accept alternate and idiosyncratic standards is sometimes as challenging as getting them to believe that the world is not flat, and you won’t fall of the edge if you sail far enough.

And so, the biggest impediment is often that students are hooked into making their work with specific well toned ideals in mind. Six-pack abs and slender calves. Until we learn otherwise we are believers in our institutional standards. Its the end goal of the billboard worthy result that often draws students onward. And unhitching them from this way of proceeding is the part that seems to make the least sense to their understanding of how the world works. Doesn’t success mean aiming for these cultural norms?

Serendipity and letting go are as far from an attitude towards the important things in life as is imaginable. The more we care about things the more we are urged to grip them tighter. If you truly care, you will cling and hold on, and judge every outcome by how well we measured up to that ideal. The more we care, the more success seems to be determined by the specific act of measuring up……

But that only gets us as far as we are can aim. The tightness of our vision constricts our potential, limits our possibility, and squeezes the variation and discrepancy from what we do. Perhaps it sometimes even squeezes the ‘life’ from what we are making…… In the worst case scenarios working only within clearly circumscribed standards is stifling and works against creativity. It crushes variation with intolerance. And the fear of distortion is almost a moral threat. But the alternatives are not between ‘anything goes’, a complete lack of standards, and ‘only this goes’.

Letting go of the finished result, or simply allowing certain things to come to pass, isn’t giving up on our right to judge the results. We can simply defer. Its just saying that where we got is not always as important as how we got there. Its an ethic that sometimes holds the means, the process, as at least as important as the ends, the results. Its saying that certain elements are important, but not that they are necessarily included in exactly this way, in precisely these proportions, or specifically to this extent. The process can be the means of discovery. “Yes I will turn left here, use this tool at this point in roughly this way, but I don’t know where it will get me.”

If we only tread the path we know will get us to proven results, then our powers of discovery are clearly circumscribed. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Its simply not the only way. It doesn’t lead to the only version of the beautiful. We simply can’t know all the possible variations of beauty beforehand. And so we attempt to explore them by putting ourselves in positions where they may be uncovered. We allow for serendipity and surprise. Its by giving ourselves the openness of options that we move beyond the already and precisely known. And the vision of perfection can be rightly seen for what it is: But one of many possible things to aim for…..

Think of it like this: We are engaged in creating. And we have a recipe. We will be using these ingredients, sometimes more of one, less of another, and sometimes we will leave some out and add altogether new things. In a way it will be like we are building people. Almost everyone gets two arms, but there is no rule about how long or how thick the arms are supposed to be. And everyone gets a nose, but there is no rule about how wide or how pinched the noses will be. There is no specific ideal for noses, thought there may be versions we decide are ‘too long’, and others that are ‘too short’, and often those will make sense only in proportion to the other features. A ten foot nose might actually look small on a mile high giant. In a way, using art to discover new and interesting things about the world is like an experiment with a Mr Potato Head doll.

The creative approach of looseness is like an operation in genetics in this way. What we end up making might or might not all have a nose, two arms, two legs, feet, a belly and a head, but how those ingredients play out is a matter for discovery. And while mostly all the same ingredients are there no two iterations are exactly the same. Sometimes two examples will be related in no clear way and at other times there will be ‘family resemblances’. Sometimes we will see that although different things won’t match up precisely they still belong together and share a kinship. The taxonomy can be loosely organized, thematic. Its the difference between making clones, where exact ingredients are repeated exactly, and organic births where new editions are brought into this world as unique members of a tribe, or sometimes strange and new mutations that head off into entirely uncharted territories.

Did that make sense?

Peace all!

Make beauty real!

Make it however it makes sense for you to do it!

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Juggling serendipity or white knuckling pegs into holes

Master potter/artist and notorious deep thinker Chris Staley has this to say:

I had to think about what he meant by ‘presentational’ as opposed to ‘representational’, but its a great distinction. And I really wasn’t sure at first what he was trying to identify when he talked about the Thanksgiving table. But now that I understand it better I think this also is a fine analogy.

The distinction he is making is most obvious in the difference between goal oriented activity and process oriented activity. Its the difference that plays out in having a plot to follow and letting the characters find their own way. ‘Presenting’ is the view of the way forward, from the front end of the process: This is how we proceed. Its setting the table, setting things in motion. Its what arrows we’ve got in which quivers, and which ducks are lined up in what rows. ‘Representing’ is the view from the end backwards, looking back: This is where we got. Its the state of affairs that results from the process, and it tells the story of what went on. Its the view of which arrows hit which targets, and where the ducks ended up once they were turned loose.

‘Presenting’ is the means for an end. ‘Representing’ is the end which those means achieved. Re-presenting is a second look at the process, this time from a bit further along than where we began. Each is a directional view on what happens and why. Its a way of looking at the process and looking at the results. But within the creative activity itself we need to decide how much we are aiming, and how important the path is. We need to decide whether the outcome is premeditated or investigative. Our approach can be either ‘loose’ or ‘tight’, flexible or rigid, or a combination of the two to one degree or another….

In tightness we see that the process is subservient to the ideal of this or that particular formal outcome. The process is only aiming at something fairly specific. Its terminal. How we get there is less important than that we get there. If our process suddenly lead to results that were not expected or outside the range of what we were aiming for, then the process would need to be overhauled. Just as in industrial mechanical manufacture. Its the end results that count, and if we could get there some other way, then that’s entirely acceptable. Efficiency can be more valuable than using a particular tool or way of doing things. The goal is all that matters. That the pegs all go in the right holes. The finished pot/product is only allowed to be within a certain range of permissible outcomes. The success of the process is measured by the tolerance for its conclusion….

In looseness we see much different priorities. We see that the process drives the results, and the finished product is subservient to the way it was made. The process merely sets the stage, but what happens on the stage is significantly unpredictable. We can ‘aim’ at a species of looseness, or broad character, but the particulars themselves unfold organically from the seeds that were planted. We can grow an oak tree, but not have in mind specifically the tree that it will become, how many branches and exactly what it will look like. That can only be loosely predicted….. The gesture is intentional in the sense that it intends this process and not others. The process isn’t aiming at specific outcomes as much as it is attempting to reveal the possibility within that range of the permissible. ‘Oakness’, for instance. It is more interested in presenting options than in representing a specific state. Its more interested in the species of possibilities than the individual conformity. Its the free movement allowed by a wide open door rather than the constricting necessity of the eye of a needle.

The key to looseness is finding what’s on the other side, and we can stumble through the door, traipse along, dance a jig, walk backwards, or twist and turn. The interest is in how doing it differently leads to new places revealed. Its a strategy of serendipity. Tightness may not necessarily care how the needle is threaded, but it knows exactly what the results of threading are. Its the strategy of planning.

Because this is an issue of the control exerted by the creator its almost a Theological Question: Does our work allow for the ‘free will’ of our creations, that they unfold under their own power, by ‘accident’, and unpremeditated happenstance, or are their characters rigidly determined and the inevitable consequence of our first causes?

Did that confuse everyone?

Peace all!

Make beauty real!

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