Thursday, November 16

something out of nothing

dr. steven covey asserts that all things are created spiritually before they become real and tangible. this makes sense. things need thinking about. planning might be for sissies, but sometimes it works.

the link in the title there is to a video which inspired the main point of this post. with no training in percussion or piano, our norwegian fellow still managed to create a rather fascinating display of musical expression. how much planning did that take? any? or was it all more afterthought work? i don't know much about video editing so i can't really say.

but it made me think.

I wrote in this essay,
If "to reread and to revise both mean to ‘re-see’ a text," then to read and to write must have something to do with seeing that text for the first time, watching it take shape under our pen or cursor, feeling its purpose shift and settle through draft after draft.
creative processes are so amazingly inexplicable. where do those ideas come from? how did that inspiration crawl into my brain? how did anyone think to add this thing and that thing and make something cool out of it? and why? and was it hard?

music is hard. i loved my violin lessons because they pulled all my concentration and feeling out through my ears. thank you, ms. marie brown.

writing is hard. sit down. cram your fat expansive ideas into curly little lines and neat little paragraphs. i love my notebooks because their emptiness demands so much of me.

a lot of the stuff we see gets left behind. cutting room floor. exed out backstory. even for those sissies who plan things out, they have to edit. prune. carve. if you try and see too much it's all just black, solid.

the ultimate creator, perhaps he had to edit too. i'd like to see the cutting room floor in the back room of the universe. the practice pieces. the rough sketches. the leftover bits of clay.

when i was little dad let us play in the sawdust and scraps of wood from his carpentry projects. mum got the finished cabinet doors, the new shelves. i still think the raw, unsanded, funny-shaped bits were way more fun than kitchen cabinets.

No comments: