The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
~ Hunter S. Thompson
A friend of mine sent me this link, and I hope he doesn’t mind me posting it. I get a real kick out of reading biographies about people we now see as artistic geniuses because they deflate a rather shallow myth, genius as the divine blessing, and replace it with a much more nuanced myth, genius as both gift and curse, at war with everything including itself, in constant doubt. When someone gets on a real roll, of course, he has to play it up. “I was just sitting there one day, and it clicked! It just clicked, man! And I knew what I had to do!” I call bullshit. Are there those moments? Of course. But they’ll come and go many times in everyone’s life. If we knew how exactly a genius capitalizes on these moments, or if he could somehow explain it, we’d all be astounding each other. But those astonishments are rare. Because genius likes to destroy itself and doubt itself, and at times, it’s just plain lazy. This example… it’s completely unpolished. There’s stumbling over words, beat switch-overs that don’t quite match up most of the time, and there’s some slightly dry subject matter. But I listened to the whole rambling mess, and there were moments where… (more…)
I was on a camping trip a few years back with some friends. One of them painted in her spare time. We were looking at this tree in front of us, and she was telling me that painting a tree like that would frustrate her because there would always be at least one branch that looked out of place. Being in one of my more philosophical moods, I thought aloud, “You know, that might be the path to genius – that one branch that you just can’t get right.” Here’s my reasoning… That branch that’s out of place is out of place because of something very unique to the painter. Her brain somehow sees it differently, and the harder she tries to take herself out of the scene and represent what’s actually there, the more apparent her affect is. It’s sort of like the Observer Effect in physics. I think some of the best art is created when someone notices that Observer Effect and, instead of trying to escape it, tries to really understand it, to embrace it. They turn the apparent flaw into a unique ability. No one else can describe the scene or paint that picture quite like they can. And certainly, in my own experience, my favorite bits of writing or musical composition have always resulted after a long period of trying to improve upon a flaw, where I finally give up trying to fix it, and in a moment of defiance I just do what comes naturally. So, for those of you out there who are stuck in a rut in terms of trying to improve your art, ask yourselves if it’s really a rut. It’s great to push the boundaries, but if something is being incredibly resistant to being pushed, maybe it deserves a closer look. Or, to quote one of my favorite philosophers:
The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.
