creativity

Why is creativity this fleeting moment book-ended by robotic, motion-dependent banality? Can I put much stake in the structure, the mechanics of creativity? I cannot help but think of those scenes from "32 Short Films about Glenn Gould" where the artist is either taking medication for his pain or is soaking his arms up to his elbows in cold water. One cannot discount the destructive capacity of human activity in mashing the ivories with precision, power, and utter determination. The desire to transcend the physics of music production at moments like these make one forget one's body.

Until the moment ends.

Then the pain comes back, perhaps first as a numb fingertip. The tendons, like so many living piano wires, contract and extend at such rapid pace to render sensible and virtuosic the fingers of the player that one forgets that they're sheathed under the flesh and under much duress. This body in pain reminds the player that they're merely vehicles for an idea, that of music. And music, being a parapet of high-culture, requires the enslavement of the body to its ideal. But maybe we should take a quick step back. Let's recognize that not all cultural elements require such a privation of human comfort to exist. Yet this displacement does occur, even in the smallest. The only difference between reconstructing Bach on a piano for an audience is that it takes much greater a toll upon the body than say hitting bongos rhythmically, high on some plant, until the wee hours of the night. There, the trance-inducing rhythm never escapes those of the body's potential rhythm. Perhaps that "native" ritual tells us something about the subliminal space of its faith that's contrapuntal to the fugue-state of other expressions or explorations of faith.

So let us not forget that there's a physical component to the coincidence of cultural activity and a body in its servitude. But what have we come to at this point?

Time.

Time is a component of all of this. And it is so in a way that is almost tautologically bound or totalizing in its descriptive potential. Time has an important element to it. It's being conquered by symbol use. Because words and ideas are these haunted tools for thinking and engaging with the world. They're something other than us in our use of them. That's because they're invested with a history. It's easy to say that they don't have to be. Yet, there's something impossible to avoid in the notion that while one can continually affirm that they have freedom to re-brand the meaning of words, but to do it alone risks a sort of social suicide, one marked by a solitary individual speaking gibberish. If one is to be successful in this re-branding one must get buy-in from others. One must sustain a marketplace of meaning from which to derive meaning-value and render the re-branded word into social currency, one that can be coined for social cohesion, rhetorical visioning, and practical use. That takes time.