More on Exhaustion and the Creative Process...

A (long) while ago, I wrote this entry about exhaustion and the creative process.

Today, I stumbled on another take on the idea by Brian Eno. This site excerpted it from an interview Eno did in 1977 for a publication called "Melody Maker." Eno was sharing a conversation he'd had with his friend, the painter Peter Schmidt:

"I describe[d] an experience I had in Scotland recently where I climbed a very steep hill at twilight - absentmindedly not paying much attention to where I was going - and came to a halt, breathless and exhausted, on a small plateau near the summit. For the first time I looked to see where I was.

The plateau was covered with dead ferns, which glowed a brilliant fiery orange in the dusk. I was tired enough not to try to reduce the experience to words and concepts, so I just stood open-mouthed for some minutes.

This was an instance of exhaustion as an aid to perception - presumably the conscious mind resigns this continual obsession with classification and the attendant reassurance at times like this, and so the quality of the experience is unfiltered."

Any state that allows an escape from the relentless inner workings my own mind is of interest to me - total exhaustion was not something I had considered!

Why I Love The Internet

Sometimes Music..., originally uploaded by Poundstone.

From: Stephen Lamb
To: jpoundstone
Date: Apr 6, 2007 6:21 PM
Subject: Jeffrey Overstreet / Bill Frisell

Jessica,

I found your website after reading Jeffrey Overstreet's book where he
quotes you about music healing "a million little broken things you didn't even know needed attention." I wanted to tell you that I love that quote and agree with it 100%.

I work in the music industry in Nashville, and this week I got to do some work for a concert Bill Frisell played with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra's String Quartet. After the concert last night, I told him about your quote, and he loved it. He said he wanted to see the quote and drawing, so I just sent him the link to it on Flickr.

Here's my blog post where I wrote about it after reading that chapter in Jeffrey's book: http://www.jslweb.com/blog/?p=112.

Thanks,
Stephen Lamb
www.jslweb.com

I met a girl, Sarah, at a party; she told me about the thesis she was working on. A few days later, I came across a newly-published book of photography that dealt with the same rather obscure subject. I tried a number of ways to find Sarah's e-mail address online to write to her about the book. Not finding it, I figured I’d get in touch with the host of the party to get her address.

The very next day I decided to go to a coffee shop near my office, one I hadn’t been to in years. I took a window seat. And from my seat, I saw Sarah walk by. I was too stunned to say anything through the open window in front of me. I thought, well, on the astronomically low chance that she walks back by, I’ll say her name. And, wouldn’t you know it, half an hour later, she did walk back by, and I did say her name, and she came inside and I told her about the book.

To add the final implausibility to the story – the one that your fiction-writing teacher would say you couldn’t put in there even if it was real because it was just too cute – she mentioned that, in addition to her thesis, she was also working on a documentary. “On what?” I asked. “Chance meetings,” she replied.

1) If I hadn’t talked to Sarah at the party, I would not have noticed the book that related to her thesis. 2) If I hadn’t agreed to try help a photographer get featured in a national magazine, I never would have seen the magazine that the book was featured in. 3) If I hadn’t decided to go to that particular café at that particular time of day, and if I hadn’t chosen a window seat, I never would have seen her. 4) If she hadn’t taken the exact same path to get back to her car, I would never have seen her the second time. 5) If she had never found out about the book…well who knows? Maybe it will turn out to be crucial to her work, maybe not.

It’s exciting to think of encounters with people as scattering seeds. You can’t know what people do with information you give them; you can’t know what you’ll do with information they give you. It’s strange and wonderful to think that one (seemingly) random encounter with a person can change – maybe not everything – but a lot. For both of you. And slight changes in direction can eventually get a person on a whole new path.