Dear Heron Dancers,  

Creative people are sponges for information, constantly in search of the new image, new perspective, new information that can change their work. I think I’ve offered this quote in a previous Pause for Beauty or on the Heron Dance Facebook page.

I once asked advertising legend Carl Ally what makes the creative person tick. Ally responded, "The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he (or she) never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen."
     — Roger von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head

Gary Snyder once told an interviewer (I think in the book The Real Work, Interviews and Talks. 1964-1979) that the problem with most poetry is that most poets are unwilling to study the tradition out of which their craft evolved. Most who consider themselves poets don’t really want to go to the trouble of studying the history of their poetry: studying, for instance, ancient Chinese poetry or haiku. Their work, he says, lacks depth because it lacks effort and humility.

About half the paintings pinned to the walls in my studio are by other artists, and almost all are wild, uninhibited paintings that offer a rough approximation of a subject. They are paintings more about what the artists felt about their subjects than what the subject actually looks like. They offer insight into something deeper. I put them there to remind myself to relax when I paint, to not worry so much about an accurate representation. In a way, those paintings give me permission to pursue my own independent inclinations and vision.  

In his memoir, Chronicles I, Bob Dylan describes coming to the conclusion that he wanted to write his own material, rather than sing songs written by others, “I could see that the type of songs I was leaning towards singing didn’t exist…” For inspiration, he looked to songs that had a wild freedom about them, songs that didn’t follow any rules. In particular, he studied “Pirate Jenny,” a song by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Dylan compared the song to Picasso’s painting Guernica.

This is a wild song. Big medicine in the lyrics. Heavy action spread out. Each phrase comes at you from a ten-foot drop, scuttles across the road and then another one comes like a punch on the chin. . . . It leaves you breathless.
     Later I found myself taking the song apart, trying to find out what made it tick, why it was so effective. Everything was fastened to the wall with a heavy bracket, but you couldn’t see what the sum total of all the parts were, not unless you stood way back and waited until the end. . . . I took the song apart and unzipped it.
     — Bob Dylan, Chronicles I (Nina Simone offers a particularly
     powerful performance of the song on YouTube. Visit here.)

Dylan goes on to describe the next songs he studied as he prepared to write his own material — songs by bluesman Robert Johnson — the man who, according to legend, traded his soul to the devil at the crossroads in return for the ability to play the guitar as only a supernatural being could.  

In Martin Scorsese’s documentary of Dylan’s life, No Direction Home, acquaintances from Dylan’s late teens describe an incident where Dylan helped himself to several albums that had caught his imagination when his friends were out of town — albums that he inhaled and that changed his music. Some of the lyrics in his latest album, Modern Times, bear a striking resemblance to those of a little known Civil War reporter and poet,  Henry Timrod.

These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,
Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,
A round of precious hours.
Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked,
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,
To justify a life of sensuous rest,
A question dear as home or heaven was asked,
And without language answered. I was blest!
      — Henry Timrod, “A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night,” from
      Poems (1860)

. . . and at times
A strange far look would come into his eyes,
As if he saw a vision in the skies.
      — Henry Timrod, “A Vision of Poesy,” from Poems (1860)

The moon gives light and it shines by night
Well, I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O’er the road we’re bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down
      — Bob Dylan, “When the Deal Goes Down,” from Modern Times (2006)

Modern Times contains at least ten instances of lines or phrases taken from various Timrod poems. Dylan, when he first lived in New York City during the early 1960s (he was born in 1941), made a point of going to the library and reading every newspaper published in the ten years 1855 to 1865. In his memoir, he wrote:

The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.

Reading that, I was reminded of the Carl Ally quote offered at the beginning of this Pause for Beauty. I’m reading a memoir now by sculptor Henry Moore, and it is the same thing—he studied and pondered the work of artists through history—including work he didn’t like, work that bore no resemblance to his own, such as Chinese calligraphy. (To read more on Henry Moore’s study of art, visit my blog here.) When you look at work by Picasso and Matisse side by side, you can see how they fed off each other, reflected off each other, just as they both studied cave paintings and African sculpture.

In celebration of the Creative Journey,

Roderick W. MacIver

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Several times a week, Rod posts a book or interview excerpt on the creative process on his Pause for Beauty Blog. Recent examples include quotes from Picasso, MC Richards, Henry Moore, Henry Miller and Bob Dylan.

You can now receive these creativity quotes emailed to you automatically each day through this Blog site:

http://pauseforbeauty.blogspot.com/2010/03/notes-on-conflict-and-imperfection-in.html

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Hello Rod.

This is SUCH a beautiful piece on the hero’s and artist’s journey.  Thank you so much for putting all these quotes and thoughts together.  I have been studying ontological coaching for a number of years and work with folks who are stuck in “careers” that are probably found in the waste land, not in the hero’s journey.  SO this is much food for thought regarding our life’s journey, if it is going to be at all meaningful and with purpose and passion!

Again, thank you for your words AND your art!  A fond reader and viewer of your work, in Colorado, but born and raised in New England (Pittsfield, MA).

Leslie