The Liminal Spaces pt 2: The Hidden Architecture

Part 1: Get Creative: The Liminal State

Most people understand writing as a function of the conscious mind. You have an intention, you sit down and express it best you can.

However, the actual writing process is far more convoluted than that, and there are many "off-label" uses for the lesser understood parts of consciousness, where writing is involved. Nowhere is this more true than with the long-form creative process, which is more like a marathon than a sprint, and more like a surrealist "drift" than even a marathon.

Indeed, many of these byways, alleys and side-paths lead us through a meandering labyrinth, and we may even care to engage the physical process of one foot before the other.

Ambiguity is the labyrinth’s central nature. It is always unstable, changing its personality and ours as we change perspective. ... Like a psychic nuclear reactor, the labyrinth generates creative emotional and psychic processes in whatever guise it appears. It is continually breeding new versions of itself that demand we revisit our categories and redefine what the symbol means to us in our time. ... the experience of the labyrinth is not only ancient, it is hardwired into the brain structure of the earliest humans, biologically indistinguishable from us, who first recognized its ineffable potency.
In pre-literate antiquity, the labyrinth design and its cousins, the spiral and the meander, were symbols that occurred worldwide in rock art and weaving patterns, on pottery, and was scrawled as ancient graffiti on a wall in Pompeii. From the Near East to New Grange in Ireland, and from the American Southwest to Siberia, the labyrinth pattern is one of the oldest symbols in the history of mankind and one of the most universal.
--Dancing at the Edge of Death, Jodi Lorimer.

Much that has been written about "drifting" might be equally applied to writing, and vice versa.

One of psychogeography's principle means was the dérive. Long a favorite practice of the dadaists, who organized a variety of expeditions, and the surrealists, for whom the geographical form of automatism was an instructive pleasure, the dérive, or drift, was defined by the situationists as the 'technique of locomotion without a goal', in which 'one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there'. The dérive acted as something of a model for the 'playful creation' of all human relationships.
Unlike surrealist automatism, the dérive was not a matter of surrendering to the dictates of an unconscious mind or irrational force. Indeed, the situationists' criticisms of surrealism concluded that 'the unconscious imagination is poor, that automatic writing is monotonous, that the whole genre of ostentatious surrealist "weirdness" has ceased to be very surprising'. Nor was everything subordinated to the sovereignty of choice: to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed. It was very much a matter of using an environment for one's own ends, seeking not only the marvelous beloved by surrealism but bringing an inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world. 

--The Situationist International in a postmodern age by Sadie Plant

I've found this to be nowhere so true as in a city such as Boston, where the streets themselves seem to serve as a spatial metaphor for the creative process -- not a circle cut into 4 quadrants, as in the classical plan, but rather an organic structure built from original Indian walking paths, grown, cut-down, re-structured and -purposes over the years. Get lost in the city, letting your mind get lost as well, and you just might find the solution to that scene you've been struggling with for a week.

But maybe even this will not do. Some problems will not dissolve by way of drifting, and the only means I've found left at that point is to fall asleep.

I've often joked that the best parts of my novels are written when I'm asleep. Like many jokes, this isn't entirely untrue. How often do you suddenly happen upon inspiration, or unexpected connections, as you drift off? If you manage to wake yourself, you might scribble notes that can later take a form, or merely serve to perplex you. "The slashes on her hands, the angel's trumpets, a flower," the note reads. What did you mean by that? The transcription process is not the writing process.

As I've shared in many interviews about my novels, this isn't as absurd or uncommon as you may think. However, the common wisdom that inspiration has been born from dreams is, if my experience is any indicator, a misunderstanding. It is not the dream state that is so fertile, as the threshold of sleep, those liminal lands that offer up many connections and solutions, if we can only drag their glamour from those depths and connect them with more substantial matter.

Of course, not all such fragments are captured. And fewer still take to the soil they're given.

There is probably a hidden architecture behind most texts, of what never made it to the page. Like an actor holding a prop none of us can see on screen, I'd like to believe these "hidden architectures" still inform the corpus.

I have developed a number of fairly simple practices to help capture more of this gossamer stuff, and I'll share what I can with you, though as is often said, "your mileage may vary."

...To Be Continued...

All It Takes Is The Right Story. Mythos Media

A Group of One's Own: Full Circle

Much of this comes from rough drafts that inspired a piece in The Immanence of Myth. This is an important post re: the intent and future of this site so please read on...

Art is a medium of personal and cultural revolution. 

How do myths of progress and individuality effect our perspective of art and creativity? Though we regarded it from a macro- level in PrettySuicide Machine, I would like to turn our attention back to the micro- level: specifically the myths that we have of artistic progress, which we can then fold back into some of the larger issues of progress within Western, which is to say, industrialized and capitalist, culture. It is impossible that the myths that structure the place of art within the world should not similarly structure our views of value and commodity, or perhaps it could be flipped around and remain the same.

    Let's consider: it is a common conception that breakthroughs in science, philosophy and the arts have all come about through critical analysis of an established corpus of previous works, and that the process is a gradual one. This is a myth cemented in the natural methodology of teaching art history, or history in general: we assume a gradual progress from one point to the next through time, carrying up to the present day. Perhaps the rate of progress accelerates or slows down, whether through the convergence or divergence of trade routes, the friction and choke points of information of culture in the formation of cities, or the growth of an arts culture in a certain location, (not unlike a bacterial culture) and so on. But we imagine that we can safely assume that this Hegelian myth of gradual synthesis is a sound one. “In all ways we have Progressed, and this progression is towards some end,” so says the teleological myth. Let's proceed with it, but also consider the possibility that, like all myths, it is also misleading.

    It also follows that wherever we have a prevailing myth of “the artist,” rather than a tradition of artisans and skilled tradesman that attempt to do nothing beyond furthering and perfecting traditional methods, the real breakthroughs occur in the hands of rare individuals who change the playing field in varying degrees. Through figures such as Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, or Ornette Coleman, blues and jazz were transformed into bebop and free jazz. They all had varying experience in the traditions that came before, but all of their contributions are measured in the uniqueness of their own voice, and how the addition of that voice forever changed the tune afterward. An artist is often somewhere between a medium and a curator, picking which elements in the screaming cacophony around us to focus on, to enlarge or elaborate upon, or to rail against. What was Hunter Thompson's mode? What's yours? The emphasis on the role of artist in this process, which really involves everyone engaged within a particular social domain, is clearly something valued in Western culture, even if it is also feared by the conservative elements of that culture. (If a conservative perspective is one that seeks to be backwards facing, emphasizing and idealizing the importance of tradition rather than revolution.)

    We simply don't find the same emphasis on an artist as a unique individual, at least as the rule, in traditional tribal cultures of South America, or in many Asian cultures before Western values began to take hold. (Through it does crop up in various forms of guru worship, which is probably a variation on a similar theme.)

TED Talks Are Lying To You

From Salon:

What was really sick-making, though, was Florida’s easy assumption that creativity was a thing our society valued. Our correspondent had been hearing this all his life, since his childhood in the creativity-worshipping 1970s. He had even believed it once, in the way other generations had believed in the beneficence of government or the blessings of Providence. And yet his creative friends, when considered as a group, were obviously on their way down, not up. The institutions that made their lives possible — chiefly newspapers, magazines, universities and record labels — were then entering a period of disastrous decline. The creative world as he knew it was not flowering, but dying.
When he considered his creative friends as individuals, the literature of creativity began to seem even worse — more like a straight-up insult. Our writer-to-be was old enough to know that, for all its reverential talk about the rebel and the box breaker, society had no interest in new ideas at all unless they reinforced favorite theories or could be monetized in some obvious way. The method of every triumphant intellectual movement had been to quash dissent and cordon off truly inventive voices. This was simply how debate was conducted. Authors rejoiced at the discrediting of their rivals (as poor Jonah Lehrer would find in 2012). Academic professions excluded those who didn’t toe the party line. Leftist cliques excommunicated one another. Liberals ignored any suggestion that didn’t encourage or vindicate their move to the center. Conservatives seemed to be at war with the very idea of human intelligence. And business thinkers were the worst of all, with their perennial conviction that criticism of any kind would lead straight to slumps and stock market crashes.
*
Or so our literal-minded correspondent thought back in 2002. Later on, after much trial and error, he would understand that there really had been something deeply insightful about Richard Florida’s book. This was the idea that creativity was the attribute of a class — which class Florida identified not only with intellectuals and artists but also with a broad swath of the professional-managerial stratum. It would take years for our stumbling innovator to realize this. And then, he finally got it all at once. The reason these many optimistic books seemed to have so little to do with the downward-spiraling lives of actual creative workers is that they weren’t really about those people in the first place.No. The literature of creativity was something completely different. Everything he had noticed so far was a clue: the banality, the familiar examples, the failure to appreciate what was actually happening to creative people in the present time. This was not science, despite the technological gloss applied by writers like Jonah Lehrer. It was a literature of superstition, in which everything always worked out and the good guys always triumphed and the right inventions always came along in the nick of time. In Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” (2010), the creative epiphany itself becomes a kind of heroic character, helping out clueless humanity wherever necessary:
Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.
And what was the true object of this superstitious stuff? A final clue came from “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” (1996), in which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that, far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” Innovation, that is, exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

The Story of a Transmedia Revolution: (Part 2) The Story Wars

The Rise and Fall of a Story-Showing Empire

By Peter Usagi

The Transmedia Revolution has begun!
Which side will you join?
An empire of greedy corporate media cartels?
Or an ancient and mysterious order of storytellers...
Image via Panicposters

After years of study, I've come to realize that contemporary storytelling—books, film, television (and to a significant extent, even live theater)—are a completely passive medium.  They are narratives that lack interaction and any kind of participation from their audience.  These mass-produced mediums of entertainment are more appropriately labeled "story-showing,” then storytelling.

People often wonder why there isn’t anything "new" in Hollywood.  Why is it that every movie, TV show, and most popular literature, tastes like reheated "leftovers" disguised with some kind of mystery sauce?  It’s because after a century of industrialization, we've become indoctrinated as a species of “story consumers.”

We’ve been raised to passively swallow the shallow narratives presented to us in our extended childhoods; schizophrenic mythologies filled with stories that have no depth, meaning, or purpose--other than to entertain (or perhaps more sinisterly, distract).

All of our modern entertainment (all of our stories) are almost entirely mono-active.

Our “entertainment industry” is simply a convenient medium for a 24/7 multimedia stream of consumer subconsciousness—peppered every fifteen minutes with commercials, product placement, and other forms of materialist propaganda.  Even traditional literature has become a victim to this malaise.  

The Lost Art of Storytelling

Parents who "tell” stories to their children, usually aren't really “telling” them.  They’re reading them word for word from a book; an example of modern mono-active story-watching.  Unless the child occasionally takes control of the narrative, thus making it interactive (I.E. "No, Red Riding Hood had a cell phone, and she called the cops on that mean nasty wolf!") the true immersive, and transitive aspects of storytelling are neutered, or even entirely absent in our modern fictions.

Is modern media a "big bad wolf" that
devours creativity and imagination?
Image via Wikipedia

If you put your book down, and “tell” a story to your audience (instead of read it), something about your story will always change, each and every time you tell it.  Unless, of course (as you’ll find in live theater), you have your lines memorized.

This is because even when you tell the same story (with the identical characters and plot),  you’ll always be a different person each time you tell it, and so will your audience (even if they’re the same people):

If you told a story to a group of recent college grads (while they were partying around a campfire in the middle of the wilderness) the crazy things you did to get into your career field…would that story be identical to the one you told to a classroom of second graders, the day after you lost your job?

If this is the case, does "storytelling" in its interactive sense, still exist in today's society?  Perhaps...

Thanks to new combinations of divergent media platforms, a new kind of storytelling is on the rise.  One that recognizes the importance of engaging an increasingly distracted and impatient audience: transmedia.

Modernism to Postmodernism to Postmortemism

By P. Emerson Williams


We cultural types do love to declare death wherever we cast our jaded blood-shot eyes. When our imaginations are exhausted, hard-ons for the latest arising only with greater efforts require new extremes of fetishism. A point comes when completed work crowds out attention. Art, empire, economy, politics look to us to be sated with days and ready to give in to sweet oblivion.

Lady Gaga killed sex, says the once much discussed Camille Paglia, who quotes her subject who declaims “Music is a lie”, “Art is a lie”, “Gaga is a lie”. The death of the novel is an idea so oft repeated that one can envision members of the literary establishment daring each other to intone the phrase three times in front of a mirror in expectation of the candyman to appear. And closer to home for us here, the right honourable psychonaut James L. Kent writing for Acceler8or the new transhumanist vehicle established by R. U. Sirius says we've come to rest after years of the deceler8ing of music as a living mode of expression. Nice opening shot.

Every style of traditional, ethnic, and world music has been incorporated into the modern pop uber-genre. There are no more Afro beats, throat singers, Middle Eastern microtonal scales, Buddhist Ohms, Irish sea shanties, American folk songs, Navajo ancestral chants, and so on, that haven’t already been chewed up, digested, and shat out by modern pop composers.

Forcing sound snippets into a twelve-tone, four on the floor format is for sure a denigration of these traditions, but it's a very colonial Western POV that would consider that this raiding of sampled sounds a cancelling out of entire traditions of music and culture. I recall a thread in an occult social site that began from a post that stated basically that Eastern philosophies were being killed by Western adoption through Western seekers not understanding the finer points or getting entire belief systems wrong. Well, I have news – taking a photo of a person does not trap their soul in the camera and Americans weaving Tibetan buddhism into candy-coated self help material doesn't make all the monks in exile disappear from the universe.

Maybe he's right. Perhaps the hum that is plaguing many towns across the globe with no detectable source is just the musicological equivalent of the smell of dead plague victims piling up.

Arthur Krystal is a voice in the Death of the Novel chorus for some time. In an interview in Harper's magazine he expands his theme:

Leaving film aside, since it’s a relatively recent art, the arts as we know them have run their course. You can argue this until your face is blue, but it won’t change the historical fact. Time and technology wait for no artist, and unfortunately history has seen fit to alter our sense of time by the invention of new technologies.

Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.
Philip Roth has devoted his life to creating novels, but he’s pessimistic about their future.
“The book can’t compete with the screen,” Roth tells Tina Brown in this video, and even the Kindle won’t change that.
“It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen," Roth says. "It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.”

The power of theta waves

I've said for years that near-sleep is an essential part of my creative process. God only knows how many hours I've spent drifting into sleep after being able to think up what to do next with a story, or a song, only to have it revealed to me all at once while drifting down and away. At that point you're left with the option of shaking yourself awake, and jotting it down before it is gone, or slipping off, and awaking with only the faint feeling that you lost something. Does it work that way for any of you?

Last night it was this paragraph, nearly full-formed. I woke up, hammered it out in less than a minute (since I already had it all in my mind), and then spent another hour or two trying to fall back asleep. Something else drifted up during the second attempt to go down, but I let it pass.

"Cutting to that heart directly and cleanly defining what myth is and is not will not suffice. The function of myth, even possibly its identity, changes based on the granularity of inquiry. In other words, a particular myth, received by an individual, may not serve the same function as that myth's effect upon a society. Myths are also "mirrors of the soul," which can only reveal to us what we already have in ourselves: so what is a message of love and compassion to one can be a distorting call to hatred and bigotry for another. This inquiry is further obfuscated by the fact that culture itself can only be understood by the myths it produces. Concurrently, it is increasingly difficult to speak meaningfully of "myth" without recognizing the function which runs through all contexts, all "level of granularity": myth is the meaning in representation. Words, sentences, and pictures are, on their own, no more a "myth" than the notes written on a staff are music, however all of these are the embodiment, that is, the representation, of experience. Concealed within that representation is all of the meaning that can be drawn from chaos. Myth is, in the final summation, truly a mirror image of our inner beings, for better or worse. We did not create our flesh or bone, nor did we choose the circumstances we were born into. The myths we create, on the other hand, are truly and completely human. Perhaps, at the same time, they are the closest we have to divinity, demonstrating our ability to build worlds from the clay we are given, to infuse it with our own meaning, and to chose what the very nature of the universe will be in our tale."

This from the growing passages of the Immanence of Myth.

Looking forward

I see a bit of a situation brewing on the horizon if this coming summer and autumn doesn't rectify it on it's own. I've been feeling it the past couple weeks, and it has been profoundly effecting me emotionally, (just ask C), but it wasn't until I was writing to a friend tonight that it dawned on me what this thing actually was.

In the past, my work has always been based on my life experience. As I get (ever-so-slightly) more mature in my work, it becomes more and more of an influence. Nevertheless, it is there, and without life experience to draw on- to cannibalize- I have nothing worth saying that can't just be hammered out casually like this blog-post, and then just as casually forgotten. I want to contribute more than that. As much as I'd like to see my book sales grow, there's almost no payment better than the few who contact me saying that I've changed their lives in some profound way. People I've never met, may never meet- changed. That's why I write, it's why I produce albums, or make visual art. For that, or even better, the people that I come to know through that work, or collaboration on future projects. To do this the work must be grounded in experience. Inspired from elsewhere, sure. But that ground, that honesty, has to be there.

After about four or five years where, on the whole, the output has been considerably higher than the input. I have "assets" to draw on for the projects I have planned up through the summer, but I really see myself hitting that bottom full on if I don't have more and varied experiences. Hours a day working in front of a computer, a couple hours of light socializing, making dinner, working, and going to sleep do not inform an artistic career. Contrary to popular opinion, that experience needn't be poverty, heartache, and despair, (I've had more than my share of all of those- it really isn't interesting material to draw from. Honest.) But it does have to come from outside the realm of expectation, a series of mental or emotional arrests, which complacent existence doesn't provide. If it doesn't hurt, it has to reach beyond itself, yearn, struggle, consume. My first book was inspired by an adolescent trip to an asylum, and several years obsession with psychedelics, the esoteric, and the occult. The second drew on a host of experiences which completely shattered everything I had thought to be my world, a re-inspired fascination with mythology, being in a band, living on the road. What can happen when you cling on to things too much, and what it can be like when you truly transcend fear and hope. It was a mental excursion into a hypothetical future, an alternate dimension, in every way different and yet at the same time very similar to our own present.

Now what do I have to draw on? What's the next story?

I guess I'm going to have to wait to find out, because these are the kinds of initiations you can't sign up for. Life gives them, or she doesn't. You can make yourself open to it, or not- but if it wants in, it'll damn well bust the door down if you don't open it up politely. And if it doesn't come, no amount of begging or posturing is going to give you that transformative experience that you need. But I've never been any good at waiting.