Knowledge and Creativity

I think the only people who are still capable of saying something are either those who have not been conditioned by education and its notions, or those very few who went through with it and escaped it. If it is creativity and life you desire, you have to dump that baggage at the crossroads and go with what you wanted to say all along.

Education and knowledge have nothing to do with creativity. It took me a long time to realize this. You have to know why you want the answers and what you want to do with them before you cram them down your throat. Being skilled is one thing, being educated is another, and being creative is another. It seems to me that education promises a lot, but delivers little in substance. No wonder most people who invest themselves in education at the expense of all the else end up jaded by it and deal in education for the rest of their lives.

The creative people, the ones actually doing the work, are never to be found within educational and academic circles. Their effect, and especially the influence of the people within it, is so stultifying to the spirit that one must cut all ties with them if one hopes to fly free. The fallacious notion that appears to me to be behind every theoretical analysis of anything (and indeed one must hold this notion to some degree to be true because otherwise the foundation of the whole endeavor collapses) is that something, no matter what it may be or how great, can be understood as the sum of its parts. This raises, for me, two questions: In the first place, why the desire or need to understand it? And second, what effect does one hope this understanding will bring? There is understanding to be had, but this understanding is partial at best, and dubiously related to the actual thing in itself, unless the thing one investigates was made explicitly to be understood through deconstruction, like a puzzle.

What one learns through analysis has more to do with being able to do analysis and less with what one uses the process for. That is to be expected with any kind of standardized method of theoretical understanding. What you learn then becomes a way to deconstruct and understand a particular thing, a method of perception. The scope of this understanding, although useful if used judiciously and with awareness, is very limited. By applying the method, you learn how to apply the method. It becomes more or less and end in itself, unless you are willing to see beyond it. You might know of a way to explain how something works, but you do not know why it does, and without the why you also do not truly know the how, just a how-to. That is because all systems of analysis and theoretical understanding must come necessarily after the fact, and conform to the fact for as long as they can until the new fact, the new art, literature, scientific discovery etc. demand a change in the method of explanation.

A person who goes to university to learn how to become a creative individual, in any field, is sorely deluded. Analysis and theoretical understanding cannot help anyone one bit toward that end. They can only help one "create" work that rises from applying this theoretical understanding and analysis to their craft. In other words, exactly backwards from the way it actually works, from theory to practice, instead of practice to theory. This results in work that has little or nothing to do with creativity, individuality and self-expression and everything to do with clever ways to use theory and knowledge. This, for me, constitutes the fallacy of all educational institutions, a fallacy that is so widespread that almost everyone who is associated with one or wishes to attend one takes as de facto. It is implied within the brochures, through their use of words and so on; "Come to us and we'll tell you all the methods and all the things you need to know to make a great (insert here)".

The problem I see with this is that the more it is propagated, through old institutions and new ones alike and through the majority of the academic world, the more the understanding of what it truly means and takes to be creative is being lost. Pupils imitate their teachers and assume their way of thinking, and pass it on. The industries that deal with creative people conform more and more to this new 'standard' of creative work. People, especially in the States, who want to be musicians or writers or filmmakers are increasingly brainwashed into accepting this sort of propaganda from institutions who in the end exist to make a profit. Most art schools in the US for example are very very expensive, especially music schools. But you know, it's "the place to be" if you wanna "make it". Well about 20%-25% make it with a degree, and out of those about 1%-3% go on to what their institutions promised as a career. Why? Because information is cheap nowadays. You've got institutions churning out thousands of skilled everythings, every year. Thousands of people who have the knowledge and the skills, and are competing for the same kind of work. So the demand for excellence, creativity, individuality and genuine art is on the rise. But 99% of the people who have the skills and the knowledge and can explain to you all of Bach's fugues or write a hundred-thousand word essay on Proust are completely ill-prepared for this demand to be outstanding, to be the originator of truly distinguished creative work. The 1% who figured out that their imagination is their most valuable asset are those who have a shot at being studied and analyzed by the academia later on. These people are visionaries, because they know that, in the words of Keith Jarrett, music does not come from music.

So to come back to my first point, theoretical analysis is very essential and useful in the beginning because it brings together all this vast amount of creative work and filters it through a standard method of deconstruction. It becomes a way of navigating this world of art, or music or literature or whatever it is. But it also has the effect of numbing the senses, of blurring the fine distinctions that are so important and worst of all it can make you think (it certainly made me think) that you really understand something. The only thing you really can come to understand (and therefore apply) is the method. To really understand (which is not exactly the right word for it) that which the method deals with, you have to dump the method altogether or be bound and short-sighted by its limitations. It's just a means to an end, and pretty soon it's not the right means for those who are bursting with creative desire and the spirit of adventure.

The real means are not external, they lie within oneself and, after they have been carefully cultivated they can only be supported by external factors such as knowledge and theory. There are infinite skills one can acquire - the key is to weed through all the "should's" and "have-to's" and only go for those that are absolutely essential to one's creative journey and keep working on them for the rest of one's life, because that's where the true value lies. Everything else is not necessarily superfluous, it's just secondary.

Letting Go?

[...] All I can say is that there is nothing to let go of. It is the illusion that there is something, a "self", a "you" that you believe you are holding on to. So long as you define "you" strictly by your knowledge of your past, your thoughts about the future and your self-awareness in the present moment, you cannot let go. Because the ego cannot let go of itself.

Self-consciousness is the barrier between what is construed as "self" and "other". Self-consciousness, the ego, "yourself" is the dividing line and the root of all fear. The ego is defined by what it separates itself from. The ego is defined by other, and as long as there is the perception of "other", there must be a "self". Fear then, is the resistance of "other".

Fear is what happens when you operate under the illusion of being separate from that which is happening to you. It is only the ego that is afraid. To resist the ego by means of the ego is futile at best and delusional at worst. The ego itself, or the self-consciousness in the present moment, or the sensation of "I" as something that experiences life, instead of being the experience is Resistance. The way it resists is by putting barriers between you and everything else, separating consciousness from Life and blocking experience and action.

When you see all of it is You, and that there is no "other", there is nothing more to fear. There are no barriers, no fears, no effort beyond the "self", beyond the ego.

What you are afraid of is what will set you free. It is the only means of liberation from "self" that has worked for me. It is only through facing fear that you truly come to see that there is no fear, there is no "self", and "you" are not what you think.

When you do what you fear, what goes beyond "yourself", you recognize there is no distinction between "self" and "other" -it was only your thoughts that told you so- and you become liberated from the illusion of control. The intellect cannot serve anything apart from the ego. Only through direct action can this be accomplished. As long as you act through the prism of a "self", whether you are trying to "let go" or not, it makes no difference because for a "self" to be there must be "other" and those two must be different. As long as you remain "yourself" there is the illusion of having to 'let go', which is just another form of Resistance.

There is nothing there to let go of.
There is nobody holding on to anything.

Ray Bradbury's words of wisdom pt.2

“It is easy to doubt yourself, because you look around at a
community of notions held by other writers, other intellectuals,
and they make you blush with guilt. Writing is supposed to be
difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.”

“But, you see, my stories have led me through my life. They
shout, I follow. They run up and bite me on the leg—I respond by
writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I
finish, the idea lets go, and runs off.”

“That is the kind of life I've had. Drunk, and in charge of a
bicycle, as an Irish police report once put it. Drunk with life, that
is, and not knowing where off to next. But you're on your way
before dawn. And the trip? Exactly one half terror, exactly one
half exhilaration.”

“By the time many people are fourteen or fifteen, they have been divested
of their loves, their ancient and intuitive tastes, one by one, until
when they reach maturity there is no fun left, no zest, no gusto,
no flavor. Others have criticized, and they have criticized themselves,
into embarrassment. When the circus pulls in at five of a
dark cold summer morn, and the calliope sounds, they do not rise
and run, they turn in their sleep, and life passes by.”

“My ideas drove me to it, you see.
The more I did, the more I wanted to do. You grow ravenous.
You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep
at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you
in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”

Steve Lacy's words of wisdom

“When I was coming up in New York in the '50s I was always into the radical players but at the same time I was contemporary with some of the younger accepted players.I was really mainly concerned to work with the radical people but at the same time I couldn't ignore the non-radical elements. But for me playing with the accepted people never worked out. Simply because they knew all the patterns and I didn't. And I knew what it took to learn them but I just didn't have the stomach for it. I didn't have the appetite. Why should I want to learn all those trite patterns? You know, when Bud Powell made them, fifteen years earlier, they weren't patterns. But when somebody analysed them and put them into a system it became a school and many players joined it. But by the time I came to it, I saw through it - the thrill was gone. Jazz got so that it wasn't improvised any more. When you reach what was called 'hard bop' there was no mystery any more. It was like - mechanical - some kind of gymnastics. The patterns are well known and everybody is playing them. It reached a point where I, and many other people, got sick and tired of the 'beat' and the '4 bars' - everybody got tired of the systematic playing, and we just said 'Fuck it'.”

“I think the question of appetite is very important. Some people are of a progressive bent and some are not. And you can't ask either of them to change. Some people are interested in carrying on an old tradition and they can find their kicks in shifting round patterns and they are not in any rush to find new stuff. They can rummage around the old stuff all their lives. People become obsessed with not just maintaining a tradition but with perfecting it. Some people search for the perfect arrangement of the old patterns and that is progress for them. Other people want to beat down the walls and find some new territory.”