Schertzer Arts

She noticed that more people were wearing masks that day. It had been a few days since she had been out. There was a line outside the new Food Emporium she hadn’t noticed, being surprised when the automatic door hadn’t opened for her, and she was directed to the end of it, where people were spaced at about six to ten feet apart.

Her scarf kept falling away from her face, no matter how well she thought she stuffed back into her coat collar, which was a relief, because it made her feel as though she was smothering, and the heat from her breath was stifling.

It was a lot better than the pandemic horror movies, where sudden depopulations sent civilization reeling into utter anarchy. This was merely a cold with teeth. Yes, it killed more people than it should, and put large numbers of people in the hospital, but it wasn’t science fiction.

Granted, it was scary enough just as it was, and Sarah knew she was of a “vulnerable age,” though she felt as strong as she ever was, and could run a mile in under ten minutes.

There was one movie she remembered from when she was a kid. A virus, instead of making people sick, made the healthier and happier, made them more inspired and loving.

However, the fallout was that fewer people were smoking tobacco, purchasing alcoholic beverages, prescription medications and expensive entertainments of all sorts. And fewer people worried about their investments, things like retirement, and so they quit their jobs so they could spend more time with others.

Of course, because of those things, it was a virus that threatened the financial environment, so it had to be cured as well. And when it was, people went back to their old sorry selves, just like old times.

Social distancing when you live in a two hundred square foot apartment was certainly not the kind of life he would intentionally design, not something he would recommend. It’s bad enough he only had the distance of two or three steps back and forth from his desk to the bathroom, but he also didn’t have his stove hooked up to the gas, and his refrigerator was a two-foot by two-foot cube — just enough for some leftover take-out and a six pack of beer.

Not that there was usually any take-out or beer left, and he was tired of microwaving the stuff anyway.

With all the bars closed he really didn’t have a life. He hated social media. He was tired of every single video game imaginable, felt nauseated each time he went into the App Store on his phone. So he tried reading some of the books he promised himself he’d finish eventually.

Wasn’t Infinite Jest like the pinnacle of late twentieth century novels?Gravity’s Rainbow? These were things his professors had raved about. A page or two and he’d fall asleep. He needed to move around more. He was beginning to feel like a piece of furniture left in storage.

What he really wanted was to see people, but there was nobody around. After what happened with Amy, a rift had grown between him and all of his old college friends. Not anything really dramatic, just a simple, fuck it, who needs it.

There were about three bartenders and five wait staff at his favorite hole-in-the-wall whom he felt closest to now, that is, besides the other jerks he worked with coding educational software. Yeah, right — tell me another. It was merely a way of selling a mishmash of snake oil psychobabble to supposedly increase one’s charisma and leadership qualities.

He’d go for walks, but there was nobody. Plenty of people scattered here and there, but none he’d imagine talking to, and they all swerved around him as he passed. Except for some bratty kid on a skateboard who almost took him off his feet.

No, it was best to stay inside, wash his one pair of socks, underwear and a teeshirt in the bathroom sink and hang them over the shower rod.

He stared at the wall, held his old beat-up guitar, and wiggled his fingers around the fretboard while his pick plunked the dull tones from deadened rusty strings.

Each sounding made the wall seem more brittle, liquid, or perhaps translucent, as his eyes fuzzed and he could imagine seeing through it into the building next door, and through that into another, and so forth, so many rectangular spaces one after another, he could imagine, going on indefinitely.

And the spaces would move back and forth as his fingers moved, and other dull tones were made, dancing in his head like a wind chime.

But there were no people.

He has had the cough for several weeks, and now he was only beginning to feel guilty about it.

Marion was driving the car, and he, Clyde, was checking the stats on his blog post. There was nothing so far, though there very rarely was.

After working from home for about a week and a half, he had returned to the office, and now he was feeling guilty about it. At the time, he was sure there was no way that it was the virus, just some strand of the multi-headed beast of corona type viruses that cause colds of all sorts. His having a low-grade fever and cough, after a few days of sore throat, was just a coincidence.

They were headed to the beach, Jacob Riss, specifically, sort of a out-of-the-way place out east of Marine park, where Marion and the kids would go some summers past. It was a good family place, mostly inhabited by locals. It was a nice early spring day, though colder than the previous one, and they had planned to just go for a walk along the surf, take in the air. It was a place to go without much fear of catching or spreading the thing everyone was talking about.

The cough started after that night out with his work buddies, after the five martinis they bought him, which he consumed easily, since they were so soothing on his sore throat he thought nothing of at the time. The next day he could barely talk – his voice was several octaves lower, and a bit of a croak. And he had begun coughing “in anger,” as his colleagues in London might say.

He was told to stay home the next day, which was a Friday, and he coughed all the way through the next Friday, and into the following week, though he showed up again at the office on that Tuesday. He coughed a couple of days, though much less, but everyone was told to work remotely the following days.

Until further notice. The memo said.

He was barely coughing at all now, and they were heading to the beach, he and Marion, and the guy being interviewed on NPR said something about a 20% improvement in air quality due to the virus.

He was only beginning to feel guilty about how he may have unwittingly spread the virus to people on his floor at work, just by going in on those two days. Though it was more likely they would have gotten it before he knew it was anything, when it was on its way up, rather than down. Still, he felt like a contributor, an early ally of this thing causing so much havoc, terrorizing everyone.

With fewer cars on the road, a general slow down of commerce, of all sorts of busy-ness, and who else knows why, there was a 20% improvement in air quality, but where?

Fewer exhaust pipes coughing carbon into the air. Perhaps a slowdown at power plants, and all kinds of production, and the birds now feeling the relief. They were pulling into the parking lot. There were gulls flying in elliptical circuits over the highway, as if in some military or magical rite. A Buddhist ritual of the feathered people, celebrating the change in the atmosphere.

Marion suggested that this was perhaps the way the planet took care of itself, all the other species that are being decimated. Nature does that, you know. It’ll tell us things like that, roll the dice and shuffle the deck. It will say, hey you, you need to create a different fucking economy. Or else I’ll fuck with you like this, stick it in your face.

The gulls seemed to like this nonsensical whirling around. It was time to get out of the car and go for a walk.

Cindy wanted to pick up groceries at the local C-Town, but Anne raised a fury, saying she wanted to limit their shopping visits to once a week, that way take less of a chance of either one of them being exposed. Cindy desperately wanted to get out, but was also hankering after her bok choy and pork dish that she recently discovered on some online compendium of recipes. She fumed inwardly at this restriction that her partner imposed, but kept her mouth shut, knowing it was probably for the best, and sat staring at a blank spot on the wall between a lamp and photo of them from last year’s ski trip. The crunch came to her mind, the mouthy sensations and the way they resounded in her head, blended with the flavors of the bok choy and pork, the garlic, ginger and soy wafting through her, and the way it brought pleasure to her entire body.

Pleasures were duller these days, hollowed, from too many hours of screen time, both working and leisure, the same stories marinated with deceptively similar details of the movies and series they’d been watching each evening. There were too many days sitting across from each other, overhearing each others’ work talk of various conference calls and the like, and those worst moments when they were both on the phone. The irritation of it all. They barely wanted to be together.

She stared so long it almost felt as though her head was screwed into the wall. It was quiet. There was a distant hum of a motor maybe a block or two away. She felt the warmth of her hand on her thigh, the cool of the chair seat. There was after wave after wave of frustration, of deep disappointment. And in between a glittering something that would begin to sing.

It wasn’t really a tangerine – that’s what they used to call it, what his mom used to get when he was a kid, but a different variety, clementine, bred to have fewer pits. It sat in his hand, and he rolled it up to his fingertips where he held it for observation, the dappled orange skin, the dull sheen, brownish and discolored scars, and wondered was the virus there, had someone coughed or sneezed and touched its surface while it sat on the shelf at the grocer, leaving traces of mucus or saliva. And if so, he would, in holding and pealing, spread it to the fruit he put in his mouth.

Funny thing life, always trying to obliterate itself, through need or the various motivations for war, or some parasitic venture to reproduce and keep itself alive, while unknowingly destroying the very thing it depended on.

No one individual of the virus was an actual individual, but in its entirety, spread over the world, like so many similar life forms that live a life like a cloud, not one with feet and arms and a head, not leaves and roots, not even like a fog, but invisible like a mountain air coming off the slopes with some sort of volcanic toxin. But this creature was instead made up of uniform mechanical toy-like objects that screw themselves into cells to reproduce their RNA.

It was smooth in his hand, rough but smooth, and such a happy color, orange, like dawn, a color of joy. He pealed off the skin without washing it and plied a section away from the rest, felt its flesh, not unlike his own in some ways, and placed it into his mouth. The juice ran back along his tongue, the sweet tang, the pleasure of it.

Different ways make use of the available interrelations of things and their complexities:

“Not only does birdsong have its own relationships of counterpoint but it can find these relationships in the song of other species, and it may even imitate these other songs as if it were a question of occupying a maximum of frequencies. The spider’s web contains ‘very subtle portrait of the fly,’ which serves as its counterpoint. On the death of a mollusk, the shell that serves as its house becomes the counterpoint of the hermit crab that turns it into its own habitat, thanks to its tail, which is not for swimming but is prehensile, enabling it to capture the empty shell. The tick is organically constructed in such a way that it finds its counterpoint in any mammal whatever that passes below its branch, as oak leaves arranged in the form of tiles find their counterpoint in the raindrops that stream over them. This is not a teleological conception but a melodic one in which we no longer know what is art and what is nature (‘natural technique’). There is counterpoint whenever a melody arises as a ‘motif’ within another melody, as in the marriage of bumblebee and snapdragon. These relationships of counterpoint join planes together, form compounds of sensations and blocs, and determine becomings.”

— Deleuze from What is Philosophy

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star. –Marcel Proust

I’ve been watching Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy with my family for the umpteenth time, it seems. There are parts of the dialog we often repeat, or wait for on the edge of the sofa. My favorite is Gimli’s famous line, while weighing the benefits of going to war against the armies of Sauron, “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” a piece of dark irony that often leaves me in stitches. My younger son, Declan, even plays sections of the music on his violin, when he’s taking breaks from his lesson practice. The musical themes repeat, cycling around as various themes arise, and especially with the appearance of particular characters. There is a theme for the hobbits, a theme for the bold adventurers and warriors, and so on. This is a fairly common practice in film making across the board, for instance that famously dark melody that always accompanies Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies. And even writers will adopt particular rhythmic and tonal patterns in their writing, depending on the characters speaking, or the types of events that are unfolding. And repetition of these patterns is one of the pieces of the craft that give the work a sense of a whole.

The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call these repetitions of themes, personalities and events types of Refrain, a term they borrowed from musicology, and have found apt use for it ubiquitously throughout human endeavors, as well as in the both living and non-living natural worlds.

Our own most intimate refrains are our personalities, or the smaller patterns that make up our personalities. In their view these chunks of ourselves, or what we and others know of our selves, are like little melodies, and variations of melodies, that continually repeat themselves in a way that form a structure that is recognizable to ourselves and others.

These patterns change as we are faced with new challenges, or with epiphanies and inspirations, and so new variations are spun all the time, allowing us to adapt and grow toward new sets of ideals or desires. Except in rare cases, there is generally a firm sense of continuity to these changes, so the overall personality stays intact.

Obviously, the more fluid and prone to variations these refrains are, the more open to new patterns of ideas, and the more capable they will be to generate new ideas, i.e. to think outside of the box, which in essence, is to explore territories outside of one’s familiar territory.

The following practices will help engender such fluidity and flexibility, and may even provide the required leverage to create ruptures in habits that keep us attempting to solve problems in the same ways.

Reading challenging books

We are often most comfortable reading things constructed with familiar word patterns, ideas that are similar enough to our own ideas that they are easy to digest, and simple syntax that doesn’t twist our heads up in knots. However, some of the best writing is much more complex, and largely because of the distance it can take us as readers. This distance is the expansion of ideas we need to learn how to represent internally (understand), and those that we generate residually in the process, as you make associations with what we already know, and what we have been experiencing. The latter will, of course, be most invaluable to you as an innovator.

I remember reading that Steve Jobs was obsessed with the poet William Blake, and I don’t doubt that the strange worlds he encountered in Blake’s writing helped him envision his own worlds some of which we are living in today.

I have also emphasized in the past how writers like John Ashbery will literally force you to encounter meaning and use your brain differently. The very best and challenging writers always do. Try on some James Joyce or Gertrude Stein if your up to it, or perhaps some of our more contemporaries, such as Thomas Pynchon or Zadie Smith.

Writing and speaking differently

To further engage with strange and complex works, one can borrow from them and experiment with forming sentences utilizing vocabulary and syntax one is not accustomed to. Practice using new analogies, purposely wrought, run-on sentences, multiple parentheticals. Learn to hear your thoughts in a new voice, one you don’t readily recognize as your own. Imagine what it must be like to be the person who speaks that way. If you are male, write in what you imagine your voice would be if you were female. Borrow from the vernacular you are unfamiliar with using. Write your sentences backwards to see if they still make sense, or make another kind of sense. Remove every other word, and then swap them with other words. See what you can learn about thinking by doing these types of experiments. And of course, learning a new language is the ultimate way of experiencing this kind of shift.

Play with your internal sensory representations

When we think, we are not only thinking in language, but are processing internal images, sounds and generating feelings in response to them. If I hear the word dog, an image immediately comes to mind, either of a particular dog, or a composite of multiple dogs I have come in contact with. If I am thinking about what to eat, I reproduce flavors I’ve stored in my memory, and may even imagine what they may be like if I added some other ingredient. The same thing happens when I begin thinking of something like how I might build a bookshelf for a particular part of a room. I internally sample multiple design patterns, and choose from what I think are the best models and combine them in my imagination. We all do this.

Once you are aware of these sensory constructs you can tool around with them in a similar way to how you can with language. Where are the images in your visual field? What happens if you move them somewhere else? What happens if you change the color, change it from 2 dimensions to 3, make it larger or smaller? What if you change the voice to someone else’s voice? Move it around as well? Move the feelings you are having in response to different parts of your body.

Practitioners of Neuro-linguistic Programming call these practices, submodality processes – being subset details of the various sensory modalities: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. They believe that you can actually modify complete belief systems if they are done with enough precision and repetition. The same processes can also help to produce trance states that can take you out of your ordinary way of thinking and into other states where different things are possible.

Engaging with the plastic arts and music

Of course the masters of internal images are the folks who work them into paint and other materials, even into electronic media. The key here is not to look at a painting of a tree, and think tree, but to meditate on the way the materials have come to form the image, or even imagine what it was like to be the painter painting the tree, how it differs from the image in her mind’s eye, or how the internal imagine may have evolved as it was informed by the working with the material. Ask yourself how these images are different from things you encounter in the world. How is the crack in the sidewalk different from a similar abstract representation in a gallery or museum? Imagine things in nature, or haphazardly strewn around the world, as having a designer or artist. The combinations of processes, both inanimate and animate, such as the grass sprouting through and cracking the sidewalk, can be looked at as a specific instance of mind. What is it like to be that mind, simultaneously live and nonliving?

Do the same with music. How is the noise on the street, or the sounds of birdcall and leaves in the wind, like or unlike some music you’ve heard? Who is the composer? Perhaps it is you? What instruments are you playing?

Pretend

This goes without saying. Who are you? Are you sure? Try being someone else for a change. Try imagining what it would be like to listen to your favorite music if you were a dog. What would it be like to be someone who loves you, or doesn’t know you, but observes you from across the street while you are speaking to a friend? Try it and see. Fully embody it. Go in deep. You might find that person has a whole different set of ideas that might benefit you.

Let’s imagine that real innovation comes at the cost of the individual. Or it at least involves a temporary destruction of what most defines the individual: the individual ego, or what we ordinarily call identity.

Let me explain.

First of all, word of warning: if you are not interested in, or at least curious about, the challenges involved in being an innovator, please do not continue reading. At best, what remains will bore you to tears. At worst, it will make you feel crappy.

And let’s say, for argument sake, that an individual is a self who has assumed a role, and that role is specific to the context in which that self finds itself. In other words, we are brought into this world, are socialized into accepting particular beliefs, sets of values, languages, and other conventional modes of behavior. Before we even begin to have the tools to ask ourselves what it is we might want, we have a multitude of rules we need to begin to follow, assumptions we need to begin to hold, and so forth. We need to know that we defecate in one particular place rather than another, and that some things are okay to eat, while others are not, and with good reason. Hence, the individual.

The individual is a fictional persona – the gloved hand, not the hand itself. Perhaps there is never a hand without a glove, and no one glove that it wears for every context, but many. We all know how become different people in different contexts, how our friends bring out a different person than our boss does, and how our spouses and lovers, perhaps our most intimate friends, may bring out a most vulnerable, perhaps most true likeness to whom we feel we really are.

But even that self, the most intimate and credible of all selves or collections of selves, is in part a construct of our language and the social conventions we integrated, most unconsciously, throughout our entire lives.

These roles we occupy, mostly unaware, are no more real than the characters of a Harry Potter  story, or Madame Bovary. Yet we take them for real, even create a sense of consistency that blinds us to the fact that we are these many things, not one, and this blur around them we generate in order to do so, we make into an imaginary skin that holds the whole thing together.

What more, some of the social conventions we have accommodated, have tattooed into the fabric of who we take as ourselves at our very core, are assumptions regarding the production and consumption of goods and services in our community, everything from the economics of paying for our sins, to how we go about seeking retribution or payment for the work we are hired for.

A person who innovates is a person who, conscious or not, will break from the default construct, and form fictional selves that are, at least at the outset, perhaps a bit absurd, irrational, in the context one has come into being within. That person has found new reasons for doing things, and to some degree, a different reason for living. She has found a line of flight.

 

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.

—Wallace Stevens from The Man with the Blue Guitar

 To be continued…

 

I think it was the author John Gardner who said, and I paraphrase, that there is no motivation too low for art. He went on to say that if your motivation was to make money, and that you wrote a romance novel, and you just happened to have a great mind, you would end up writing a great novel in spite of yourself.

This is in perfect contradiction to my prior post’s insinuation that true innovation (assuming “great” also means “different” in some way) cannot be forced by typical motivations, that one’s motives need to be completely atypical, and hence, innovative in themselves.

Where these two notions may find confluence is in what may make a “great mind,” however, since that seems to be requisite to even Gardner’s position.

So how does one develop such a thing as a “great mind,” as if it can be done, purposely, or in order to generate great and innovative ideas?

And do we even want a great mind? After all, so many great minds ended up in dire straights, or were just underappreciated. We would likely not want to end up with Alan Turing’s or Nikola Tesla’s luck. Van Gogh cut off his ear and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Giordano Bruno, who speculated that there were many suns and planets back when the church stood by the notion that we were the center of the universe, was burned at the stake.

Perhaps it’s better to steal their fire, call what we do “innovation” because we worship them even though we tend also to despise and treat the real innovators like garbage, perhaps because they make us feel irrelevant and inconsequential.

On the other hand, it may be far greater to seek out the strange in ourselves and others, to honor it, protect it, and to continue on ahead, regardless of what other people may be thinking.

Richard Bandler, one of the co-creators of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), once said something about how after NASA had gotten rid of all their lunatics, and hired sane business-minded people, they could no longer get anything done.

And he said his job was to create more lunatics because those are the people who really end up doing things worth doing.

Maybe he’s right. Look around you. Is this what you aspire to?

I don’t know, but perhaps having a great mind is similar to being a lunatic, in Bandler’s view.

But what kind of great mind? Tesla gave us alternating current, and a few other amazing things. Einstein gave us relativity and nuclear energy.

I prefer Gertrude Stein, who gave us a new way of thinking about the way we think, in language, a way of understanding its habits and limitations.

I may also prefer Marcel Duchamp, who helped turn the art world upside down, and when you turn something like art, that quintessential practice of representation, upside down, everything follows.

We are not your enemies
Who want to give ourselves vast strange domains
Where mystery flowers into any hands that long for it
Where there are new fires colors never seen
A thousand fantasies difficult to make sense out of
They must be made real
All we want is to explore kindness the enormous country
where everything is silent
And there is time which somebody can banish or
welcome home
Pity for us who fight always on the frontiers
Of the illimitable and the future
Pity our mistakes pity our sins

– Guillaume Apollinaire (trans. James Wright)

 

We at times should ask ourselves what we mean by innovation and change. To truly innovate means to create new motivations for our actions. The pursuit of money and noteriety are the least imaginative, least individual, and innovative reasons for doing things.

It is also not very novel to seek better solutions for the same problems. Innovation requires us to create new problems, to dream up obstructions where none are seen. And not for money. Longing for money is simply a mask for fear and the desire for domination.

That said, true innovation can attract money, but the desire to do something novel in order to create better products and solutions, to enhance one’s bottom line, is not true innovation. It is merely tinkering, inventive though it may be.

We can see where some of today’s billionaires may have started out as innovators, though they have tended to end up as something quite different.

The innnovator is never the one who is rewarded. You must become something quite different first. That’s up to you.

One’s whole raison d’etre needs to be different from everyone else’s. One must speak another, unique and truly individual, language, that few will even begin to understand. It is lonely, and it is rare that it will reap vast rewards, or at least not visible rewards (there will be rewards, however, I promise you).

You should try it. Become one of the pool of lunatics that in the long run will really make a difference, though not everyone will have gotten credit for doing so. You will know, and that’s what matters.