Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
A post I did a couple of weeks ago, about my view that creativity is a relationship (and thus inherently subjective, in the sense that each person will contribute something different), prompted an interesting discussion with a friend that centered around the question of whether there is actually such a thing as bad writing, art, or music.
My initial response was that the answer had to be no. The most we can say with confidence is that there is "writing, art, and music I don't happen to like." What comprises that list will differ for everyone, so there's no such thing as "objectively bad" creativity. I had an experience a few days ago of exactly this; I had picked up a copy of French composer Olivier Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise, considered by many to be his finest work, and I found it to be so discordant it was virtually unlistenable. I would never jump from there to saying "it's bad"; it's merely not something I enjoyed.
But my friend's question went further than that. Setting aside simple matters of taste and preference, are there works that just about everyone can agree are bad? What about considerations of execution -- skill and craftsmanship -- such that we can look at a work and say, "Okay, that's poorly done?" The problem is, even that may not be so easy. Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may recall that a few months ago, I did a piece on a fellow named Paul Jordan who decided to poke some fun at the art establishment by producing paintings that were made to be deliberately bad, and found that they were taken seriously -- and received glowing reviews from major art critics, and multiple offers for being featured in solo art exhibits.
It's wryly amusing that there's actually a Museum of Bad Art, in Dedham, Massachusetts, devoted to artistic works that are (in their words) "too bad to be ignored." I have to wonder what the artists whose works are featured there think of their inclusion. Maybe it's like a scientist winning the IgNobel Prize; perhaps, as writer Brendan Behan famously said, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and it's better to be known for doing something dramatically awful than it is simply to be ignored.
What's curious, though, is that the people running the Museum of Bad Art themselves seem to have a hard time explaining the criteria they use to determine whether a piece qualifies. Marie Jackson, the Museum's Director of Aesthetic Interpretation, said, "Nine out of ten pieces don't get in because they're not bad enough. What an artist considers to be bad doesn't always meet our low standards." Kitsch doesn't qualify, nor does anything that is judged to have been a deliberate attempt to produce bad art. (One has to wonder what they'd have done with Paul Jordan's paintings.) MOBA curator Michael Frank explained, "We collect things made in earnest, where people attempted to make art and something went wrong, either in the execution or in the original premise."
But what does it mean that "something went wrong"? Simple lack of skill isn't enough; according to honorary curator Ollie Hallowell, it has to have an "Oh my God" aspect to it. But even that suggests something curious. The fact that MOBA only accepts art that's "so bad it's good" implies there's a category below that, of art that is "simply bad."
Imagine being an artist, and having your work rejected from the Museum of Bad Art on the basis of not being good enough. It recalls Dorothy Parker's quip about a book she was reviewing: "This book was not just plain terrible. This was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it."
Bone-Juggling Dog in Hula Skirt by Mari Newman, one of the pieces that did make it into the Museum's permanent collection
So we're back to there being an inherently subjective aspect to all this. There's clearly a difference between someone who lacks skill -- someone attempting to play the piano who makes mistake after mistake, for example -- and someone who has technical competency on the instrument but who doesn't play expressively. Likewise, having basic technical writing skill (using grammar and punctuation correctly, for example) doesn't guarantee good storytelling. But beyond simple considerations of mechanics, how do you even begin to determine objectively the quality of a particular work? Could bad storytelling, for example, be couched in perfect grammar? If so, what makes it bad? I thought the Twilight books were positively dreadful, but if you thought reading them was a life-altering experience, I'm not nearly arrogant enough to tell you that you're wrong.
What's bad, apparently, is as subjective as what's good. Exactly as we should expect. So this is a further illustration that you should simply enjoy what you enjoy, and continue to create fearlessly. Marie Jackson of MOBA says that her Museum shouldn't be looked at as simple ridicule, but an impetus for us creative types to continue to put ourselves out there. "I think it's a great encouragement to people... who want to create [and] are held back by fear," Jackson said. "When they see these pieces, they realize there's nothing to be afraid of—just go for it."
Maybe. I don't know. If I were an artist, I'd have to work to wrap my brain around being included in the Museum of Bad Art. As a writer, I certainly don't enjoy feedback like I got from a "friend" a long time ago about the first three chapters of a novel I was working on: "This is somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck." (The chapters eventually got worked into my novel The Hand of the Hunter -- if you read it, I can only hope you won't agree with her.) But I have to be realistic about the fact that my writing won't resonate with everyone.
After all, that's the nature of creativity. You win, you lose. Some things work and others don't, or (more commonly) work for some consumers and not for others.
Even if there's no real objective standard for creative quality, to that point I agree with Marie Jackson: the critical thing is not to get caught up in whether or not you're "good enough," but to keep creating.
Ernest Hemingway famously said, "There isn’t any symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."
Thus frustrating the absolute hell out of literature teachers everywhere.
To me, though, the interesting point here isn't the bit about puncturing your tenth grade English teacher's balloon, it's the last part: "What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know." Because that's true of all creative endeavors, isn't it? When creativity succeeds, it's a dialogue, not a monologue. We each bring to that dialogue our unique personalities and backgrounds and biases and individuality, and what we each take from it will be just as varied.
I ran into an interesting example of that last week when I was listening to the radio, and heard a song that was new to me -- Joywave's "Tongues." I was immediately grabbed by the mesmerizing, electro-pop riff that introduces the song (and reappears several times during its run), but the lyrics were what fascinated me most.
They seem to exist at that strange intersection between "evocative" and "fever dream." They're downright peculiar in places:
Pick me up, dust me off Give me breath and let me cough Drag me back, collect my thoughts I've come back to the land I'd lost
The palms are down, I'm welcomed back to town Sometimes I feel like they don't understand me I hear their mouths making foreign sounds Sometimes I think they're all just speaking in tongues
Despite their oddness, the lyrics immediately resonated with me. Pretty much all my life, I've been baffled by the behavior of my fellow humans. When I'm in conversations, even with people I know well and feel friendly toward, most of the time I not only never know what they're going to say next, I don't really get why they have the emotional reactions they do. I often feel like I'm witnessing something I don't really understand on any deep level, and even afterward I can't really parse what happened and why.
I've described myself as feeling like a changeling -- someone who was replaced as a child by a being from another species, and has grown up irredeemably separate from the people around him. And "Tongues" seemed to capture that sense of being a stranger in a strange land pitch-perfectly.
My emotional reaction was so powerful that I thought it'd be interesting to see what others came up with from listening to it. The first place I went was the music video, which took an entirely different tack -- this one about how society makes us hide who we actually are. [Nota bene: the video is cool but mildly NSFW, as it shows more human skin than might be appropriate in certain circumstances. Be forewarned.]
Then I did a search to see if I could find out how the songwriters themselves described it, and I found a piece lead singer Daniel Armbruster did with Medium about the origins of the song. Here's what Armbruster had to say:
There are a few things happening in the lyrics of “Tongues”, but a large chunk of it explores a disconnect with one’s peers. Back when I was DJing in Rochester, I would see the same well-meaning individuals night after night talking about how they were moving to a bigger city, writing a novel, starting a band, etc, etc. All of these things were great in theory, but no one ever did them. They never left the bar so far as I could tell. It really weighed on me after awhile and I’d just have to let it go in one ear and out the other. In a way I felt like I needed to push myself harder to compensate for my peers’ lack of effort. After the song came out, I had a person approach me one night in Rochester and tell me that the song had really resonated with them. I was thrilled until they elaborated and said that they had been traveling on another continent recently and couldn’t understand the local dialect. Hopefully that’s not what you take away from the song.
So there's yet a third and a fourth interpretation of what "Tongues" means.
As a writer, I share Armbruster's frustration that sometimes readers (or listeners) don't take away from a creative work what we intended. But that's part of the game, isn't it? Because creativity implies a relationship between producer and consumer, the producer can't (and shouldn't try to) control where it goes. Readers, listeners, and observers are one-half of the creative relationship, and their uniqueness is inevitably going to shape what they pull out of the experience. And, of course, this is why sometimes that relationship simply fails to form. I love the music of Stravinsky, while it leaves my wife completely cold -- she thinks it's pointless cacophony. A lot of people are moved to tears by Mozart, but I find much of his music inspires me to say nothing more than "it's nice, I guess." My friend Andrew Butters, who is so much like me we've been described as sharing a brain, found my favorite book (Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum) a colossal bore, and forced himself to finish it only out a sense of loyalty. Conversely, his favorite book, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, got no more than a tepid, "It wasn't a bad read" from me.
But that's what we should expect, you know? How monotonous would the world be if we all had the same opinions about creative works?
It's part of why I have zero patience for genre snobs and self-appointed tastemakers. If some piece of creative work inspires you, or evokes emotions in you, it's done its job, and no one has the slightest right to tell you that you're wrong for feeling that way. Honestly, I'm delighted if Mozart grabs you by the heart and swings you around; that's what music is supposed to do. Just because I'm more likely to have that experience listening to Firebird than Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong; all it means is that human creativity is complex, intricate, and endlessly intriguing.
So don't take it all that seriously if someone tells you what a poem, lyric, or piece of art or music means, even if that person is a college professor. Enjoy what you enjoy, and bring your own creativity to the relationship. It may be that Ernest Hemingway didn't mean The Old Man and the Sea to be anything more than a depiction of an incident involving a fisherman, a boy, a fish, and some sharks; but that doesn't mean you can't bring more to the reading, and pull more out of it, yourself.
And isn't that what makes the creative experience magical?
In the 1992 Winter Olympics, there was an eighteen-year-old French figure skater named Laëtitia Hubert. She was a wonderful skater, even by the stratospheric standards of the Olympics; she'd earned a silver medal at the French National Championships that year. But 1992 was a year of hyperfocus, especially on the women's figure skating -- when there were such famous (and/or infamous) names as Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding, Kristi Yamaguchi, Midori Ito, and Surya Bonaly competing.
What I remember best, though, is what happened to Laëtitia Hubert. She went into the Short Program as a virtual unknown to just about everyone watching -- and skated a near-perfect program, rocketing her up to fifth place overall. From her reaction afterward it seemed like she was more shocked at her fantastic performance than anyone. It was one of those situations we've all had, where the stars align and everything goes way more brilliantly than expected -- only this was with the world watching, at one of the most publicized events of an already emotionally-fraught Winter Olympics.
This, of course, catapulted Hubert into competition with the Big Names. She went into the Long Program up against skaters of world-wide fame. And there, unlike the pure joy she showed during the Short Program, you could see the anxiety in her face even before she stated.
She completely fell apart. She had four disastrous falls, and various other stumbles and missteps. It is the one and only time I've ever seen the camera cut away from an athlete mid-performance -- as if even the media couldn't bear to watch. She dropped to, and ended at, fifteenth place overall.
It was simply awful to watch. I've always hated seeing people fail at something; witnessing embarrassing situations is almost physically painful to me. I don't really follow the Olympics (or sports in general), but over thirty years later, I still remember that night. (To be fair to Hubert -- and to end the story on a happy note -- she went on to have a successful career as a competitive skater, earning medals at several national and international events, and in fact in 1997 achieved a gold medal at the Trophée Lalique competition, bumping Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski into second place.)
I always think of Laëtitia Hubert whenever I think of the phenomenon of "choking under pressure." It's a response that has been studied extensively by psychologists. In fact, way back in 1908 a pair of psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, noted the peculiar relationship between pressure and performance in what is now called the Yerkes-Dodson curve; performance improves with increasing pressure (what Yerkes and Dodson called "mental and physiological arousal"), but only up to a point. Too much pressure, and performance tanks. There have been a number of reasons suggested for this effect, one of which is that it's related to the level of a group of chemicals in the blood called glucocorticoids. The level of glucocorticoids in a person's blood has been shown to be positively correlated with long-term memory formation -- but just as with Yerkes-Dodson, only up to a point. When the levels get too high, memory formation and retention crumbles. And glucocorticoid production has been found to rise in situations that have four characteristics -- those that are novel, unpredictable, contain social or emotional risks, and/or are largely outside of our capacity to control outcomes.
Which sounds like a pretty good description of the Olympics to me.
What's still mysterious about the Yerkes-Dodson curve, and the phenomenon of choking under pressure in general, is how it evolved. How can a sudden drop in performance when the stress increases be selected for? Seems like the more stressful and risky the situation, the better you should do. You'd think the individuals who did choke when things got dangerous would be weeded out by (for example) hungry lions.
But what is curious -- and what brings the topic up today -- is that a study inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that humans aren't the only ones who choke under pressure.
So do monkeys.
In a clever set of experiments led by Adam Smoulder of Carnegie Mellon University, researchers found that giving monkeys a scaled set of rewards for completing tasks showed a positive correlation between reward level and performance, until they got to the point where success at a difficult task resulted in a huge payoff. And just like with humans, at that point, the monkeys' performance fell apart.
The authors describe the experiments as follows:
Monkeys initiated trials by placing their hand so that a cursor (red circle) fell within the start target (pale blue circle). The reach target then appeared (gray circle with orange shape) at one of two (Monkeys N and F) or eight (Monkey E) potential locations (dashed circles), where the inscribed shape’s form (Monkey N) or color (Monkeys F and E) indicated the potential reward available for a successful reach. After a short, variable delay period, the start target vanished, cueing the animal to reach the peripheral target. The animals had to quickly move the cursor into the reach target and hold for 400 ms before receiving the cued reward.
And when the color (or shape) cueing the level of the reward got to the highest level -- something that only occurred in five percent of the trials, so not only was the jackpot valuable, it was rare -- the monkeys' ability to succeed dropped through the floor. What is most curious about this is that the effect didn't go away with practice; even the monkeys who had spent a lot of time mastering the skill still did poorly when the stakes were highest.
So the choking-under-pressure phenomenon isn't limited to humans, indicating it has a long evolutionary history. This also suggests that it's not due to overthinking, something that I've heard as an explanation -- that our tendency to intellectualize gets in the way. That always seemed to make some sense to me, given my experience with musical performance and stage fright. My capacity for screwing up on stage always seemed to be (1) unrelated to how much I'd practiced a piece of music once I'd passed a certain level of familiarity with it, and (2) directly connected to my own awareness of how nervous I was. I did eventually get over the worst of my stage fright, mostly from just doing it again and again without spontaneously bursting into flame. But I definitely still have moments when I think, "Oh, no, we're gonna play 'Reel St. Antoine' next and it's really hard and I'm gonna fuck it up AAAAUUUGGGH," and sure enough, that's when I would fuck it up. Those moments when I somehow prevented my brain from going into overthink-mode, and just enjoyed the music, were far more likely to go well, regardless of the difficulty of the piece.
One of my more nerve-wracking performances -- a duet with the amazing fiddler Deb Rifkin on a dizzyingly fast medley of Balkan dance tunes, in front of an audience of other musicians, including some big names (like the incomparable Bruce Molsky). I have to add that (1) I didn't choke, and (2) Bruce, who may be famous but is also an awfully nice guy, came up afterward and told us how great we sounded. I still haven't quite recovered from the high of that moment.
As an aside, a suggestion by a friend -- to take a shot of scotch before performing -- did not work. Alcohol doesn't make me less nervous, it just makes me sloppier. I have heard about professional musicians taking beta blockers before performing, but that's always seemed to me to be a little dicey, given that the mechanism by which beta blockers decrease anxiety is unknown, as is their long-term effects. Also, I've heard more than one musician describe the playing of a performer on beta blockers as "soulless," as if the reduction in stress also takes away some of the intensity of emotional content we try to express in our playing.
Be that as it may, it's hard to imagine that a monkey's choking under pressure is due to the same kind of overthinking we tend to do. They're smart animals, no question about it, but I've never thought of them as having the capacity for intellectualizing a situation we have (for better or worse). So unless I'm wrong about that, and there's more self-reflection going on inside the monkey brain than I realize, there's something else going on here.
So that's our bit of curious psychological research of the day. Monkeys also choke under pressure. Now, it'd be nice to find a way to manage it that doesn't involve taking a mood-altering medication. For me, it took years of exposure therapy to manage my stage fright, and I still have bouts of it sometimes even so. It may be an evolutionarily-derived response that has a long history, and presumably some sort of beneficial function, but it certainly can be unpleasant at times.
When educational budgets are cut -- which they are, every year -- inevitably what is hit the hardest are programs for the arts, music, theater, and other electives.
This is ridiculous, and I say that as someone who spent thirty-two years teaching science, a so-called "core" subject. And I don't mean to criticize the importance of having a good "core" education; we all need to be able to read and write, do mathematics, understand the history of humanity, and have a basic and broad grasp of scientific principles.
But that's not the be-all-end-all of education, or at least it shouldn't be. I mean, consider not what gets you a job, what allows you to do mundane chores like balancing your checkbook, but what actually brings joy to your life. What are your hobbies, things you spend your spare time doing, things you'd spend much more time doing if you had the leisure? My guess is very few of us fill our free time doing chemistry experiments, even admitted science nerds like me. No, we paint, sculpt, garden, play an instrument, sing in the choir, play or watch sports (or both), cook elaborate meals, write stories. And while those do take a basic 3-Rs education -- I wouldn't be much of a fiction writer if I had a lousy vocabulary or didn't know how to write grammatically -- for many of us, our real fascinations were discovered in the classes that go under throwaway names like "electives" and "specials" and "optional courses."
So cutting these subjects is, for many students, taking away the one thing about school that makes it tolerable, and robbing them of the opportunity to find hidden talents and undiscovered passions that will bring them joy for a lifetime.
But a study has shown that it's more than that. Research by Katherine Sledge Moore and Pinar Gupse Oguz of Arcadia University, and Jim Meyer of Elmhurst College, has found that music education correlates strongly with the development of flexible intelligence -- and that those gains translate across disciplines.
In "Superior Fluid Cognition in Trained Musicians," published in the journal Psychology of Music, the researchers found that the degree of experience a person has in playing music (or singing), the higher they score on a variety of metrics -- episodic memory, working memory, attention, executive function, and processing speed.
It's hardly surprising when you think about it. As the researchers put it, fluid intelligence skills "are highlighted in musical training," which involves "quickly comprehending a complex symbolic system, multitasking, reasoning, and more." I can say from personal experience that performing music -- not just playing it at home for your own entertainment -- takes those skills up an additional notch. I was a performing musician for years, playing flute in a Celtic dance band called Crooked Sixpence. Being up on stage requires that you think on your feet, and often make lightning-fast alterations to what you're doing. As an example, most of what my band played were medleys of three or four tunes, and we almost never planned ahead how many times we were going to play any one of them (nor who'd be playing melody and who'd be playing harmony). Our fiddler, who was more-or-less in charge of the band, just gave me a wiggle of the eyebrow if she wanted me to take a solo, and said "hep!" if we were switching tunes. Sometimes the inevitable happened -- the fiddler and I both jumped to harmony at the same time, or something -- but almost always, one of us recognized it in under two seconds and slipped right back into playing melody. Despite the complexity of what we did, the times we had a real crash-and-burn on stage were very few and far between.
So this study is spot-on. And its conclusions are further evidence that we should be expanding arts and electives programs, not cutting them.
Not, honestly, that I expect it will have an effect. Sorry to end on a pessimistic note, but the educational establishment has a long track record of completely ignoring research on developmental psychology in favor of "we've always done it this way." The most egregious example is our determination to start foreign language instruction in seventh or eighth grade, when we've known for years that our brain's plasticity with respect to learning new languages peaks around age three or four, and declines steadily thereafter.
Or, as one of my students put it, "So we start teaching kids languages at the point they start to suck at it."
A close second is that researchers have been saying for years -- with piles of evidence to support them -- that children need recess or some other unstructured play time in order to improve overall behavior and attitudes about being in school. Not only that, but recess time correlates with better scores on tests, so like music, it's an investment that pays off across the board. Nevertheless, schools across the country have been gradually reducing unstructured leisure time, in some places to twenty minutes or less per week, in favor of devoting more time to preparing for standardized tests.
Now there's a way to make kids look forward to going to school in the morning.
I'd like to think that this research will influence educational establishments and (especially) budgetary decisions, but I'm not holding my breath. Any change on that count is likely to be very slow to come. But still, every piece of evidence counts. And anything we can do to foster the development of fluid intelligence, positive attitudes, and confidence in children is movement in the right direction.
All my life, I've been pulled by two opposing forces.
One of them is the chaos-brain I described in yesterday's post, which I seem to have been born with. The other is a ferocious attempt to counteract that tendency by controlling the absolute hell out of my surroundings. I know a lot of this came from the way I was raised; throughout my childhood, nothing I ever did was good enough, and any compliments came along with an appended list (notarized and in triplicate) of all the things I should have done differently and/or could have done better.
The result is that I do a great deal of overcompensation. I became fanatically neat, because organizing my physical space was a way of coping with the fact that my brain is like a car with bald tires and no brakes. My classroom was so organized and clean you could just about eat off the floor (and keep in mind that it was a biology lab). As a teacher, I strove to make use of every moment we had, and faulted myself whenever things didn't go well or there was an eventuality I hadn't planned for.
I didn't expect perfection from my students, but I did from myself. And, in some parts of my life, it served me well enough.
The problem is, that approach doesn't work when you apply it to the arts.
I'm not even talking about the "learning curve" issue, here. Even when I've attained some level of proficiency, I still expect nothing less than perfection, excoriating myself for every scene in a story that didn't come out the way I wanted, every slightly lopsided piece of pottery, every missed note when I play music.
In theory, I'm one hundred percent in agreement with the quote from Ludwig van Beethoven -- "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable." Or, more accurately, I believe that for everyone else. It's much harder to treat myself so forgivingly.
The result has been an overwhelming case of impostor syndrome, coupled with fear of criticism -- which will, in my warped way of looking at things, only confirm what I've thought about myself all along. I'm at least working on getting my writing out there under the public eye, despite the inherent risks of poor sales and/or bad reviews, but it's been harder in other aspects of my creative life. I'm still at the stage where I had to have my arm twisted (hard) to induce me to join as a flutist in a contradance band, and it's damn near impossible to get me to play the piano in front of anyone else (including my wife). But I'm harshest about my own skill when it comes to my artistic work, which is pottery. I keep very little of what I make, and most of what I do keep are the pieces that are simple and purely functional -- bowls and mugs and the like. The vast majority of the sculptures and other, more unusual, pieces I make end up given that dreadful label of "not good enough" and are smashed against the concrete wall of the back of our house.
All along, I had the attitude -- again, directly consonant with my upbringing -- that this is how you improve, that constant self-criticism should act as some kind of impetus to getting better, to ridding your work of those dreaded mistakes, to attaining that fabled ability to create something with which others could not find fault.
It's only been recently that I've realized that this approach is completely antithetical to creativity.
I got to thinking about this after watching an online pottery workshop with the wonderful New Hampshire potter Nick Sevigney, whose pieces are weird and whimsical and unexpected. A lot of his pottery has a steampunk feeling, a sense of having been put together from a random assemblage of parts. It was a revelation to watch him piece together cut slabs of clay, not caring if the result was a little uneven or had a rough edge. In fact, he embraces those seeming imperfections, turning them "from a bug into a feature."
So I decided to see if I could do a few pieces that riffed off of his approach.
I'm most comfortable on the potter's wheel, so I started out throwing three medium-sized white stoneware bowls. I've gotten pretty good at getting that smooth curve and rounded profile, with a perfectly circular rim, that is what most of us shoot for when creating a bowl.
Usually, that's where I'd stop. If it passed my critical assessment -- not lopsided, decent weight, evenly thick walls, nice smooth surface -- I'd keep it. Otherwise, into the scrap bucket it'd go. But here... that was only the first step.
One of the techniques Nick does is taking a piece, cutting chunks out of it, adding texture to the chunk, then reattaching it. You'd think that because you're putting the piece back where it had been, it'd fit perfectly; but the problem is that adding texture (usually using stamps or rollers) stretches and flattens the clay, so inevitably it ends up larger than the hole it came from. Nick just forces it to fit, warping the piece's profile -- and instead of worrying about that, he often adds some circular marks that make it look like the piece was inexpertly riveted or screwed back on.
He leans into the unevenness hard. And the result is something magical, like a relic you might find in a demolished nineteenth century mad scientist's laboratory, something stitched together and broken and reassembled upside down and backwards.
So I took my three smooth, undamaged stoneware bowls and gave it a try.
One of the results
The hardest part -- unsurprising, perhaps, given my personality -- was making the first cut. Even knowing that if I didn't like the result, I have more clay and could always make another plain, boring, but "perfect" bowl, I sat there for some time, knife in hand, as if the Pottery Gods would smite me if I touched that sleek, classic profile. Slicing and pressing and marring and deforming it felt like deliberately choosing to ruin something "nice."
But maybe "nice" isn't what we should be shooting for, as creatives.
Maybe the goal should be somewhere out there beyond "nice." The point, I realized, is not to retread the safe, secure footsteps I've always taken, but to take a deep breath and launch off into the shadowlands.
So I cut a big chunk from the side of the bowl, got out my texturing stamps and rollers, and set to work.
I was half expecting to give up after a few attempts and throw the whole thing into the scrap bucket, but I didn't. I found I actually kind of liked the result, as different as it is from what I usually make. And what surprised me even more was that once I got into it, it was...
... fun.
I've never been much good at "having fun." In general, I give new meaning to the phrase "tightly wound." Letting loose and simply being silly is way outside my wheelhouse. (I know I shortchanged my boys as a dad when they were little simply by my seeming inability to play.) But I've come to realize that the spirit of playfulness is absolutely critical to creativity. I don't mean that every creative endeavor should be funny or whimsical; but that sense of pushing the boundaries, of letting the horse have its head and seeing where you end up, is at the heart of what it means to be creative.
I was recently chatting with another author about times when inspiration in writing will surprise you, coming at you seemingly out of nowhere. When it happens, the feeling is honestly like the ideas are originating outside of my own brain. There are two examples of this that come to mind immediately, cases where characters to whom I'd never intended to give a big role basically said, "Nuh-uh, you're not sidelining me. I'm important, and here's why." (If you're curious, the two are Jennie Trahan in my novella "Convection," and most strikingly, Marig Kastella in The Chains of Orion, who kind of took over the last third of the book, and became one of my favorite characters I've ever written.) When that happens, it means I've loosened my death-grip on the story, and given my creativity space to breathe.
And it always is a hallmark of things going really right with the writing process.
So I guess the point of all this is to encourage you to stretch your boundaries in your own creative work. I won't say "lose your fears" -- that's hopeless advice -- but try something new despite them. (Either something new within your chosen creative medium, or something entirely new.) Be willing to throw your creative life out of round, to press it into new and unexpected configurations, to turn in a new direction and see where you end up. There's good stuff to be found there outside of the narrow, constricted, breathless little boundaries of what we've always been told is "the right way to do things." Take a risk. Then take another one. The goal of creativity is not to play it safe.
As French author and Nobel laureate André Gide put it, "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore."
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I got a curious response to my post a couple of days ago, about magical and/or supernatural explanations not actually being explanations at all, but a way to stop thinking.
Here's the email:
Dear Mr. Skepto,
You sound pretty worried that you don't have an explanation for everything. People aren't always explainable! They do things because they do them. That's it. Some people believe weird stuff and some people like the explanations from science. Just like some people like the Beatles and some people like Beethoven. It's silly to wear yourself out trying to figure why.
Do you worry about why your loved ones love you? Maybe it's some chemical thing in their brain, right? Do you tell your wife that's what love means? Maybe it's a gene or something that's why I think flowers are pretty. If so, the explanation is uglier than the flowers are. I'd rather look at the flowers.
All your scientific explanations do is turn all the good things in life into a chemistry class. I think they're worth more than calling them brain chemicals. I'll take religion over science any day. At least it leaves us with our souls.
Think about it.
L. D.
Well, L. D., thanks for the response. I find your views interesting -- mostly because they're just about as opposite to the way I see the world as they could be.
But you probably already knew that.
There is a reason why musical tastes exist. We're nowhere near the point in brain research where we could discern the explanation; but an explanation does exist for why Shostakovich's Prelude & Fugue in E-flat Minor gives me goosebumps (especially in this recording, played by the composer himself!), while Brahms's symphonies might send someone else into raptures but do nothing for me whatsoever. Nothing just "is because it is."
And I can't fathom how knowing the explanation devalues your appreciation of the thing itself. Me, I would love to know what's happening in my brain when I hear a piece of music I enjoy. We're beginning to get some perspective on this, starting with a 2011 study that found that the neurological response to hearing a piece of music we love is similar to the brain's response to sex.
Cool, yes? I think that's awesome. How would knowing that make me appreciate music less?
Or sex either?
I find flowers even more beautiful knowing that their shapes and colors evolved to attract pollinators, and understanding a bit about the chemistry of photosynthesis.
Understanding light refraction doesn't make me shrug my shoulders at a rainbow. And even love -- which L. D. evidently thinks lies entirely in the mystical realm -- is made no less by my knowledge that its underpinning has to do with brain chemistry. It's like that old song with the verse:
Tell me why the stars do shine And tell me why the ivy twines And tell me why the sky is blue, And I will say why I love you.
A more scientific type added a verse, to wit:
Nuclear fusion is why the stars do shine. Thigmotropism is why the ivy twines. Rayleigh scattering is why the sky's so blue, And testicular hormones are why I love you.
Which I think is not only hilarious, it's a good deal more realistic than attributing it all to souls and people "doing things because they do them."
In short: science itself is beautiful. Understanding how the world works should do nothing but increase our sense of wonder. If scientific inquiry isn't accompanied by a sense of "Wow, this is amazing!", you're doing it wrong. I'll end with a quote from Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who in his 1988 book What Do You Care What Other People Think? had the following to say:
I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty… There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
One of the most brilliant and startlingly original composers who ever lived was Ludwig van Beethoven.
He was capable of deep, stirring pathos, like the second movement of the Piano Sonata #8 ("Pathetique"), which I swear could make a stone cry.
Then there's the wild, joyous gallop of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony:
And if you haven't seen it, a must-watch is this Spanish flash mob performing the "Ode to Joy" from the Ninth Symphony. When the voices come in, it makes me sob every damn time.
*brief pause to stop blubbering*
What blows me away about the Ninth Symphony -- beyond its staggering beauty -- is that when Beethoven wrote it, he was almost completely deaf. The story goes that at the first performance, he conducted the orchestra -- and when it was over, the first violinist rose to gently turn around the great composer to see that the entire audience was on their feet, applauding wildly, many of them in tears.
Beethoven died in 1827 at the age of only 56 years, after decades of chronic ill health. It's long been a question amongst music historians what ailment claimed his hearing, and finally his life; we know from his journals that he was plagued with stomach problems as well. But was his hearing loss connected to his other health issues?
The researchers analyzed two authenticated locks of Beethoven's hair that had been preserved in a museum, and found something astonishing -- the two samples contained 258 and 380 micrograms of lead per gram of hair.
For reference, the average person has about four micrograms of lead per gram of hair.
While not absolutely conclusive -- the researchers are showing caution about making assumptions regarding possible sources of contamination -- this seems like pretty strong evidence. Lead poisoning is known to cause stomach and intestinal problems and also neurological damage, so it could account both for his digestive issues and his hearing loss (as well as his early death). As far as where the lead could have come from, the researchers speculate it might have been from his known fondness for wine. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, lead acetate was added as a sweetener and de-clouding agent to cheap wine; corks were often soaked in solutions of lead salts before being used to stopper bottles. Additionally, pewter wine vessels were common in Germany during the nineteenth century -- and pewter contains lead.
Whatever the source of the lead, it seems like the great composer's illness, deafness, and untimely demise might finally have an explanation. Sad that such a genius suffered so greatly, but you have to wonder how much his pain and grief inspired the heart-wrenching beauty of his music. No one would wish that suffering on anyone, but if it had to happen, at least Beethoven was able to distill it into something that still strikes our souls to this day.
"This man created some of the most beautiful music humanity was able to produce," said Nader Rifai, of Harvard Medical School, who co-authored the study. "It was so incredibly tragic that he couldn’t hear this majestic music that he created."
But how fortunate for us all that we still can do so, almost two hundred years after his death.
I've wondered for years why certain pieces of music elicit such a powerful emotional response.
Partly that's because I react powerfully myself, and kind of always have. I vividly remember being about fifteen years old and being moved to tears the first time I heard Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis:
Well, "moved to tears" is kind of an understatement. "Sobbing" or "bawling" would be closer to the mark.
Then, there's the first time I heard the moment when the sedate, tranquil "Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus" in J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor suddenly launches into the wild, triumphant trumpets and chorus "Cum Sancto Spiritu":
This one elicited a different response, although just as intense. I was lying on my sofa with headphones on, and when that transition happened I felt like I had been bodily lifted into the air. These experiences were what prompted me to weave both of these pieces of music -- and a number of others -- into the narrative of my novel The Chains of Orion, as experienced by the character of the kind-hearted, music-loving robot Quine. One of my coolest experiences as a writer was being told by a reader that he'd been so intrigued to find out why I'd chosen the pieces I'd used as a framework for Quine's story that every time another one was mentioned, he'd sit and listen to it -- and doing this had really enriched his experience of reading the book.
So music can generate some powerful emotions, but what's curious to me is how differently people can react. I also recall a less-pleasant incident when as a teenager I got into a riproaring argument with my mom (who was one of those people who simply couldn't bear someone having a different opinion than her) over whether Mason Williams's brilliant guitar piece Classical Gas was melancholy or not. I find the minor key riffs -- especially after the bright major-key brass passage in the middle -- to be deeply wistful, nostalgic, just this side of sad. My mom's argument was basically "it's happy because it's fast," which to this day I don't understand. (Although if I were to have the same conversation today, I'd be much quicker to let it go and say "okay, your opinion is your own." Maybe my mom wasn't the only one who couldn't stand being contradicted.)
While it's still a mystery why some pieces of music can affect certain people viscerally and leave others completely cold, a paper that came out last week in the journal iScience has taken at least the first step toward cataloguing how those experiences are perceived. A team led by Tatsuya Daikoku of the University of Tokyo used the impressions of over five hundred listeners to different chord changes to see if there was any commonality in the sensations those created.
And there was. The authors write:
The relationship between bodily sensations and emotions can be elucidated from the perspective of the brain’s predictive processing. Predictive processing operates on the principle that our brain constantly anticipates and predicts sensory inputs based on prior experiences. When there’s a mismatch between the predicted and actual sensory input, a prediction error is generated. Interoception, which refers to the brain’s perception of internal bodily states, plays a pivotal role in this context. The brain generates emotions by minimizing prediction errors between the anticipatory signals derived from its internal model and the sensory signals through exteroceptive and interoceptive sensations. Within the framework of music, when our musical predictions are not met, it can lead to a visceral, interoceptive response. For instance, if we anticipate a musical chord progression based on our prior experiences and the music deviates from this expectation, it can generate a prediction error. This error might manifest as a sudden change in heartbeat or a rush of emotions associated with surprise, both of which are interoceptive responses.
This certainly describes my mental levitation during Bach's Mass in B Minor.
I wonder, though, how much of that sense of unmet anticipation is dependent upon the musical tradition we've grown up with. I get together with two musician friends every couple of weeks to play Balkan music -- a tradition not only with chord progressions that can sound strange to Western European ears, but with time signatures heavily favoring odd numbers. (One piece we play has the time signature -- I kid you not -- 25/16.) So for example, would the progressions in this lovely and haunting tune sound unsurprising -- and therefore less poignant -- to someone who grew up in rural Macedonia?
In any case, that was beyond the scope of the study, but it would be an interesting next step to include volunteers from cultures with very different musical traditions.
So I think I'll wrap this up. Maybe put on some music. Stravinsky's Firebird never fails to pick me up by the tail and whirl me around a bit. On the other hand, for an emotional rollercoaster, there's nothing like Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, which takes us from the joyful gallop of the first movement directly into the wrenching pathos of the second. Or maybe I'll opt for the eerie atmosphere of Debussy's piano piece The Drowned Cathedral.
My grandmother was born in Wind Ridge, Pennsylvania, a little village in the Allegheny hill country in the southwestern corner of the state. It's a beautiful region, whose first European settlers came in the eighteenth century from Scotland and Northern Ireland, with some later influxes from Germany and eastern Europe.
It's also got more than its fair share of poverty. The soil is rocky and poor, and farming was never really going to work for more than the barest subsistence. Until the coal boom of the 1880s, and then the discovery of natural gas there in the 1920s, a lot of people -- my grandmother's family included -- did little more than scrape by. Despite her hardscrabble roots, and far more than their fair share of troubles, my grandma was always proud of the people she'd come from. I remember spending many hours as a child listening to her stories of growing up there, and how proud she was of her Scottish ancestry.
One constant thread for her, and one I've inherited, was music. She knew scores of old ballads, which I now know were carried across the Atlantic Ocean from Scotland and Northern England by my grandmother's ancestors and others like them -- "Annie Laurie," "Ye Banks and Braes," "Barbara Allen," "The Four Marys," and "Lord Randall" amongst them, all songs I still love not only for their nostalgia but because they're honestly beautiful. A study by British historian and musicologist Cecil Sharp found that many songs and tunes that still persist both in the Appalachians and in the Scottish lowlands have actually changed less in their western versions; put another way, the Appalachian musical tradition preserves virtually unchanged the musical culture from its English and Scottish roots three centuries ago.
As fascinating as this is (and however important for my own personal family history), this is far from the most astonishing example of persistence in musical tradition despite distance, time, and hardship. In fact, the reason this comes up is an article last week in Smithsonian Magazine that was sent to me by a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a song still sung in Sierra Leone that was preserved close to perfectly in the Gullah Geechee culture of the Sea Islands in Georgia.
Here are the bare bones of the story -- but you really should read the entire account at the link above, because it's amazing.
In 1933, a Black linguist and anthropologist named Lorenzo Dow Turner was studying the Gullah language of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. Gullah is a creole -- a language formed by the mixture of other languages, sometimes beginning so that people of different languages could communicate with each other for purposes of trade, but eventually solidifying into a true complex language with its own syntax, morphology, and lexicon. In the case of Gullah, its roots come from various West African languages and English, but due to the remoteness (and difficulty of travel) of the region where it's spoken, it's had a couple of hundred years to go its own way.
Anyhow, Turner was doing a linguistic analysis of Gullah, and came across a native speaker who knew a song she said had been passed down to her by her grandmother and great-grandmother. It wasn't in Gullah; only a few words were clearly from that language. The woman herself didn't know what the lyrics meant, only that she was singing it as her great-grandmother had.
Well, a Sierra Leonean student of Turner's recognized the lyrics as being in the Mende language -- spoken by about a third of the citizens of modern Sierra Leone, and which is related to other West African languages such as Mandinka, Bambara, and Susu. It wasn't until much, much later that Yale University anthropologist Joseph Opala came across Turner's account, and together with ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and Sierra Leonean linguist Tazieff Koroma set out to see if they could find the song's roots...
... and they found, in the remote village of Senehun Ngola, Sierra Leone, a woman who sang an almost identical version of the song.
Here are the lyrics in Mende:
A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei tambee A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei ka Haa so wolingoh sia kpande wilei Haa so wolingoh, ndohoh lii, nde kee Haa so wolingoh sia kuhama ndee yia
And the English translation:
Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace. Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be very much at peace. Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a firing gun. Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, oh elders, oh heads of the family. Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a distant drumbeat.
I don't know about you, but my reaction was... wow.
That not only a song, but a song that powerful, was preserved for over two hundred years on both sides of the Atlantic is truly extraordinary. And in the Sea Islands, without even knowing what the words meant. Gullah and Mende have some shared vocabulary, but not nearly enough that they're mutually intelligible -- making the song's persistence in coastal Georgia even more astonishing. And you have to wonder if that little village in Sierra Leone is the place from which the Gullah singer's ancestors were kidnapped and transported by the horrific Atlantic slave trade.
Music is one of the things that is common to the human experience, and the songs of a people are part of their cultural memory. I'll never cease being grateful to my my grandma for instilling in me early the love of music, and for her teaching me the songs she'd grown up with. It's a tie to my ancestors a long way back. Our cultural roots are as much a part of our lineage as our DNA -- something British singer Rose Betts celebrates in her lovely song "Irish Eyes," which you should all put on your playlists:
It's essential that we sing -- new songs and old, the ones written yesterday and the songs of the ancestors first sung centuries ago. The music is the important thing, whatever it is.
