The creative relationship

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?

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The Jerdanowitch method

Art lovers, ever heard of the Disumbrationist Movement?

Begun in 1924 by painter Pavel Jerdanowitch, it shares some features with Primitivism, in that there is little effort to make the image realistic.  Depictions are brash and bold, with dramatic lines and use of primary colors, but flat, with no particular attention given to perspective and depth.  Instead, the focus is on emotion.  Here's one example, Jerdanowitch's Aspiration:

Aspiration was selected in early 1926 for reproduction in the prestigious journal Chicago Art World, and Lena McCauley, of the Chicago Evening Post, said it was a "delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Art and Negro minstrelsy with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality."

And perhaps the most famous -- although I was unable to find a color image of it -- Exaltation:

Exaltation won a spot at the Exhibition of the Independents at the New York City Waldorf-Astoria, and the French art magazine Revue du Vrai et du Beau contacted Jerdanowitch to ask for permission to reproduce it, along with a request for an interview, more biographical information, and an essay describing his own interpretation of the painting.

Pretty impressive, considering how competitive the world of fine art can be.

Okay, now let's do this again, shall we?

In 1924, a novelist named Paul Jordan-Smith got good and pissed off because his wife, the talented artist Sarah Bixby Smith, kept getting bad reviews and rejections from shows and museums.  Jordan-Smith had never painted before, but grabbed a canvas and some paints and brushes, and slapped together a painting that looked like it had been done either by a four-year-old or a very talented chimp.  He signed it "Pavel Jerdanowitch" -- a Russianized version of Paul Jordan -- and took a brooding photograph of himself to accompany the submission:

Jordan-Smith as himself (left), and as Pavel Jerdanowitch (right)

He said that his new school of art was called "Disumbrationism" -- which means, more or less, "removing the shadows" -- and submitted it to a show.

To his amazement and amusement, it got in, winning high praise, and he found himself with multiple requests for more.  He was happy to oblige.  Other works included a piece called Illumination, which is a bunch of eyes and lightning bolts (this one was accompanied by the text, "It is midnight and the drunken man stumbles home, anticipating a storm from his indignant wife; he sees her eyes and the lightning of her wrath; it is conscience at work") and a piece called Adoration that depicts, I kid you not, a woman bowing before an idol shaped like an enormous erect penis.

All of Jordan-Smith's works were slapdash (to put it mildly); none took longer than an hour to create.  He kept thinking that at some point the critics would wise up and realize they were being taken for a ride.

It never happened.  He kept getting rave reviews and demands for more.  Eventually, he tired of the hoax, and in August of 1927, made a full confession, which appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

But even after that, Jerdanowitch refused to die.  Some of the critics -- perhaps out of an embarrassed attempt to save face -- maintained that Jordan-Smith's paintings did have artistic merit, even if the painter himself had set out to ridicule art snobbery in general.  In 1931, Boston's Robert C. Vose Gallery staged an exhibition of Jordan-Smith's work, including a new work called Gination:

About this one, Jerdanowitch/Jordan-Smith wrote:

It depicts the appalling effects of alcohol on Hollywood women of the studios. It is a moral picture.  Note the look of corruption on the lady's skin.  Everything is unbalanced.  While good gin might not have just that effect, boulevard gin brings it about in short time.  The picture is painted in bold strokes and with a sure hand.  I believe it is the most powerful of my works.

While I think the whole Disumbrationism hoax is fall-out-of-your-chair funny, I also think it points out something more important; art snobs really do need to get off their damn high horses.  What someone thinks is good art (or music or writing or any other creation) is a deeply personal thing.  It's not that I have any issue with a specific critic saying "Here's what I like/dislike, and here's why;" what I object to is that they append -- sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly -- "... and if you disagree with me, you're wrong."

I have zero tolerance for taste-makers and others cut from that same cloth (such as genre snobs, people who say shit like, "Romance books are virtually all poorly-written trash" or "Science fiction is for geeky teenagers and adults who never progressed beyond that stage" -- both statements which, I hasten to point out, I actually saw in print).  Who the hell set you up to be the arbiter of worth?  As a novelist, I've had to steel myself to accept the fact that not everyone will like what I write, such as the person who said about my novel Sephirot, "This is a sophomoric attempt to blend fantastical fiction with poorly-understood philosophy."

Yeah, that stung at first, but -- okay.  You didn't like it.  I probably don't like some of the books you adore. 

It's why these things are called "opinions."

So I think of Disumbrationism as bursting the bubble not of artists, but of people who appoint themselves as the Gatekeepers of Taste.

Although it is a little ironic that Paul Jordan-Smith lived until 1971, and is more famous for his hoax paintings than he is for any of his novels.

Life's tough for creative types, and the critics and snobs make it tougher -- often without contributing anything of value themselves.  To me, the important thing is that we continue to express ourselves through our art, music, and writing.  We should work to improve our skills, of course; our ability to convey what we intended will improve if we have better facility with the medium we're working in.

But keep in mind what the brilliant French Impressionist Edgar Degas said: "Art critic!  Is that a profession?  When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands, I think, what a shame!  Should we even accept that they talk about our work?"

His contemporary, Paul Cézanne, put it more succinctly: "Don't be an art critic.  Paint.  There lies salvation."

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The creative relationship

When I was in freshman lit -- a lot of years ago -- we were assigned to read and analyze Robert Frost's classic poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Mostly what I remember about the discussion that ensued was the professor telling us that when an interviewer asked Frost himself what the poem meant, Frost replied that it wasn't intended to be allegorical, or symbolic of anything; it was simply a recounting of a scene, a weary traveler pausing for a moment to appreciate the beauty of a snowy woodland.

"Of course," the professor went on, cheerfully confident, "we know that a poet of Frost's stature wouldn't produce anything that simplistic -- so let's see what symbolism we can find in his poem!"

I recall being kind of appalled, mostly at the professor's hubris in thinking that his own opinions about meaning overrode what the poet himself intended.  Since then, though, I've begun to wonder.  I still think the professor was a bit of a cocky bastard, don't get me wrong; but I've come to realize that creativity implies a relationship -- it's not as simple as writer (or artist or composer) creating, and reader (or observer or listener) consuming.

This topic comes up because a couple of days ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a video by Aldous Harding, a brilliant singer/songwriter from New Zealand, performing her song "The Barrel."

The song is weird, mesmerizing, strangely beautiful, and the video is somewhere in that gray area at the intersection of "evocative" and "fever dream."  The lyrics are downright bizarre in places:

The wave of love is a transient hut
The water's the shell and we are the nut
But I saw a hand arch out of the barrel

Look at all the peaches
How do you celebrate
I can't appearance out of nowhere

What does it mean?  Harding herself wants to leave that, at least in part, up to the listener.  In an interview with NPR, she said, “I realized that the video was a well-intended opinion of mine to just keep it loose.  I feel we’re expected to be able to explain ourselves...  But I don’t necessarily have that in me the way you might think."

It's wryly funny, especially in light of the long-ago pronouncements of my freshman lit professor, that a lot of people are weighing in on the song and interpreting it in a variety of mutually-exclusive ways.  One writer said that it's about female empowerment and escaping from abusive relationships.  Another suggests that it describes how "the scariest thing is looking in the mirror and not recognising what you see staring back at you."  A review in The Guardian lists other interpretations that have been suggested:

Depending on whose interpretation you plumped for, the video was either a homage to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal 1973 film The Holy Mountain, a nod to the national dress of Wales (where [Harding's album] Designer was partly recorded and where Harding currently resides), analogous to the faintly disturbing vision of pregnancy found in Sylvia Plath’s 1960 poem "Metaphors," inspired by postmodernist poet Susan Howe’s book Singularities, which surveys the 17th-century First Nation wars in New England, [or] somehow related to menstruation.

Watch it... and see what you think.

Like my lit professor, what gets me about a lot of these interpretations is how certain they sound.  My own reaction was that the lyrics fall into the realm of "nearly making sense," and that part of why they're fascinating -- and why I've watched the video several times -- is that there's a real art to using language that way, neither being too overt about what you mean nor devolving into complete nonsense.

Creativity, I think, implies a relationship between producer and consumer, and because of that, the producer can't always control where it goes.  Readers, listeners, and observers bring to that activity their own backgrounds, opinions, and knowledge, and that is going to shape what they pull out of the creative 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."

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 Robert Frost didn't mean "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to be anything more than a depiction of a scene; but that doesn't mean you can't bring more to the reading, and pull more out of the reading, yourself.

And isn't that what makes the creative experience magical?

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The advancement of technology has opened up ethical questions we've never had to face before, and one of the most difficult is how to handle our sudden ability to edit the genome.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a system for doing what amounts to cut-and-paste editing of DNA, and since its discovery by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the technique has been refined and given pinpoint precision.  (Charpentier and Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their role in developing CRISPR.)

Of course, it generates a host of questions that can be summed up by Ian Malcolm's quote in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."  If it became possible, should CRISPR be used to treat devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia?  Most people, I think, would say yes.  But what about disorders that are mere inconveniences -- like nearsightedness?  What about cosmetic traits like hair and eye color?

What about intelligence, behavior, personality?

None of that has been accomplished yet, but it bears keeping in mind that ten years ago, the whole CRISPR gene-editing protocol would have seemed like fringe-y science fiction.  We need to figure this stuff out now -- before it becomes reality.

This is the subject of bioethicist Henry Greely's new book, CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.  It considers the thorny questions surrounding not just what we can do, or what we might one day be able to do, but what we should do.

And given how fast science fiction has become reality, it's a book everyone should read... soon.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]