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.
No comments:
Post a Comment