Chris King is a writer and musician living in St. Louis, a city born at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Chris has a thing for confluences, both literal and metaphoric — thus the theme of his blog, Confluence City. This fascination with confluences is something we have in common, as you’d probably guess by looking at my work, which at its most basic level is a confluence of word + image.
I don’t know Chris, have never met him. He just emailed me out of the blue a couple hours ago to introduce himself and to say that we share an affinity for Robert Walser. Another confluence. And an influence.
He and I also share a trait of writing things down in notebooks and any scrap of paper at hand, which, as professional musician, he used to do in between gigs in notebooks he dubbed “gigbooks”. In The Chatter of the Soul, he elaborates:
As long as I can remember, I have been writing down fetching things people say. My personal hell would be me clutching my pants pockets for eternity and finding no pen or paper, while fascinating folks are saying unforgettable things that all of us are bound to forget, if someone doesn’t write them down, now. In my crowds, that was always me.
…On my own time and dime, I rather like to drink carefully-made beer and wine, and fellowship with friends with amply-stocked minds and souls. When this was a rock and roll road show, we were forever traveling between gigs. The notebooks I kept in those days were known (in the beginning, officially, complete with roman-numeraled dog-latin names) as “gig books.”… And when [these days] I take the time to type up my notes after a night out, I still think of them as gigbook poems.
Gigbook poems are not for everyone. Often I have been told, “I guess you had to be there.” But I think they capture the chatter of the soul. They strike me like little luminescent winks of actual people enacting their lives, in the middle of it and making it all up as they go along.
Yes! There is often gold in the most seemingly trivial of overheard utterances, which have long formed one of the sources of the texts I develop in my work (see #4 on the About the Work page of my site). I think Chris, as a “real” writer and journalist (and judging by his comment above), is probably more reportorial and factual than I am, or, to put it a better way, more inclined toward narrative; I’m usually pulling paragraphs apart and looking for different ways to scramble meaning. My version of his gigbooks are the Snarkbooks, which are not so much “the chatter of the soul”, but just the chatter, period.
There’s a feeling in this kind of activity though, a feeling of being in the zone, of appreciating what’s happening in the moment, that I think we’ve both tuned into in our own ways. John Cage summed this feeling up beautifully in the closing paragraph of his 1957 lecture, “Experimental Music“:
And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
Purposeful purposelessness is the best description I’ve ever heard for the function of an artist in society. And I love how Cage repeatedly in his writings throughout his life stressed the (curiosity) value of observing or creating situations and seeing what happens (getting “one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way”), as opposed to trying to impose a structure. I’ve always hated the phrase, “bringing order out of chaos”, as if the “ordered” system was inherently good and the “chaotic” system something to be avoided at all costs. If meaning is synonymous, or at least dependent upon, information, then a chaotic system, which has more potential, more possible outcomes, than an arbitrarily ordered system, must therefore be more “meaning-full“. Allowing an event to take place, to happen, does not mean, however, that it will always be 100% chaotic, and it’s much more interesting when a confluence of dynamic systems produces both chaotic and ordered eddies of information. How the “ordered” and the “chaotic” systems are arranged is, of course, a (by)product of uncertainty, so the beast feeds itself and the cycle continuously renews, like the water in a river you can never step in twice.
Yes, I’ve gone off on a tangent, and by now you’ve likely drowned in this river of metaphor, but isn’t a tangent but a confluence if you’re traveling in the opposite direction? Run the film of the tangent backwards, and you have a confluence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan (p. 204), relates this anecdote about Apelles of Kos, a renowned ancient Greek painter from the 4th century BC:
Sextus Empiricus retold the story of Apelles the Painter, who, while doing a portrait of a horse, was attempting to depict the foam from the horse’s mouth. After trying very hard and making a mess, he gave up and, in irritation, took the sponge he used for cleaning his brush and threw it at the picture. Where the sponge hit, it left a perfect representation of the foam.
A beautiful case study in support of Taleb’s advice to “maximize the serendipity around you,” something I am always trying to tap into both in the visualization process (painting, drawing, making stains) and in the conceptualization process (making words, stringing words along, weaving and unweaving narrative threads).
Thanks Michael for sending me the book — it’s very interesting and, as you suspected, right up my alley.
A nice composite image of John Cage cooking, from the excellent blog of the greatly named J. Henry Chunko:
Mr. Chunko links to this post about a recording of John Cage: Empty Words Part IV (1973-78). But I especially like the Lichtensteiger.de blog that he turned me on to, which has several pages of John Cage material. The recorded Cage readings that strike me in this hearing as unexpected cousins of Kurtz’s monologues in Apocalypse Now, two characters I’ve never connected before.
NY Times review of a show at the Whitney of German artist Rudolf Stingel that sounds really great:
Mr. Stingel is also heir to the uses of chance and silence, or in his case emptiness, encouraged by the composer John Cage. This is perhaps clearest in an expanse of cream-colored wall-to-wall carpet that spent six months on the floor of Mr. Stingel’s studio accumulating footprints and splatters, flecks and stains of black paint. Covering an immense wall at the Whitney, it initially resembles a huge swath of ancient parchment. When you recognize it as carpet, the thick familiar texture and the random, delicacy of the marks can create an unusual spatial push-pull. Focus on the marks, and they float in a creamy space. Focus on the carpet, and you may feel that you are doing the floating, looking down on it from above.
…The implication is that artists in particular should do as little as possible. The sign of a successful artwork is its ability to derive the greatest effect from the least means. Another lesson to be extracted from this elegant show is the oxymoronic nature of the notion of “empty beauty” that has been bruited about extensively in the last decade. This show suggests that if art is empty, it is not beautiful and vice versa. If something is beautiful in any sustained way, it contains, at the least, an idea about beauty and usually much more. It is the result of something being worked on and worked out. Beauty is the state of operating at stunning efficiency, a triumph that can’t be empty. Mr. Stingel’s work makes this perfectly clear.
“Rudolf Stingel” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Oct. 14, 2007.
K.C. Cole has a good article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Why editors must dare to be dumb, about how science editors tend to be uncomfortable with advanced science topics they do not understand. What it boils down to, in Cole’s opinion, is a fundamental discomfort with uncertainty and senselessness:
In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don’t want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.
In a way, you can’t really blame either scientists or editors for backing off. Stumbling around in the dark can be dangerous. “By its very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of ignorance,” is how one cosmologist put it. “Many who have visited it have been cut and bloodied by the experience.”
…
So what is it about science that makes them [editors] uneasy? Surely it is more than the obvious fact that it’s hard to understand things that aren’t (yet) understood. In science it can be just as hard to understand what is understood. Relativity and quantum mechanics have been around for nearly a century, yet they remain confusing in some sense even to those who understand these theories well. We know they’re correct because they’ve been tested so thoroughly in so many ways. But they still don’t make sense.
On the other hand, why should they? Humans evolved to procreate, eat, and avoid getting eaten. The fact that we have learned to understand what atoms are all about or what the universe was doing back to a nanosecond after its birth is literally unbelievable. But the universe doesn’t care what we can or cannot believe. It doesn’t speak our language, so there’s no reason it should “make sense.”
That’s why science depends on evidence.
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Science is also innately uncertain. What makes science strong is that these uncertainties are out there in the open, spelled out and quantified.
Embrace uncertainty, in science, in art and in life. As the Talking Heads sang, stop making sense.
From Jon Carroll’s column in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, wherein Jon describes a recent road trip he took with his wife and what they listened to:
Listening: We took our iPod along for the ride. We loaded it with 700 of our favorite songs, we selected the “random” option, and we let fate choose our music, Diana Krall followed by Mavis Staples followed by Waylon Jennings. We also downloaded some non-music: Adam Gopnik at the Commonwealth Club, David Sedaris at Carnegie Hall and, because we knew we’d never read it any other way, “The Brothers Karamazov.”
“The B.K.” is a very long book — Dostoevsky never uses one adverb when three will do — and is interspersed with long speeches about the existence of God and the meaning of consciousness. My mind tended to wander in the soft hum of the highway, so sometimes I was confused as to who was speaking to whom. The book is about the activities of about 10 people in the same Russian town, so there aren’t a lot of signposts for the inattentive listener. Still, I was liking it.
“Isn’t it interesting,” I said to Tracy, “how experimental this seems for a 19th century novel? Notice how everyone talks about Dimitri, but we never actually see him.”
It was not until Pennsylvania that we realized that we had neglected to turn off the “random” feature of the iPod, so we were getting chapters in arbitrary order, the plot entirely in the mischievous hands of fate.
We loved the part at the beginning, where everybody died.
Happy 100th Bloomsday! The 100th anniversary of Leopold Bloom’s wandering Dublin day chronicled in James Joyce’s Ulysses – June 16, 1904.
If you’re in the neighborhood, you might want to check out ReJoyce Dublin 2004, though if you’re fortunate enough to be in Dublin, you probably can’t escape the old man today.
Here is a passage from Ulysses, picked at random (p. 685):
Did he attribute this homonymity to information or coincidence or intuition?
Coincidence.
Did he depict the scene verbally for his guest to see?
He preferred himself to see another’s face and listen to another’s words by which potential narration was realised and kinetic temperament relieved. . . .
Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other frequently engaged his mind?
What to do with our wives.
indieWIRE has a good story and interview with Jorgen Leth about his new film with Lars von Trier, “The Five Obstructions.” Some excerpts:
Danish directors Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier have created the ultimate exercise in sado-masochistic filmmaking. And guess who’s the sadist? In “The Five Obstructions,” Lars von Trier subjects his predecessor Leth to a series of five filmmaking trials, each based on the remaking of Leth’s 1967 short film “The Perfect Human” according to different “obstructions.” Reminiscent of von Trier’s Dogme rules, the regulations include, among others, that every shot should be 12 frames in length, that one version had to be filmed in the most miserable place in the world, and one version had to be animated.
…
Leth also proves himself a worthy opponent to his young rival — always using von Trier’s mischievous limitations as springboards for creative solutions. (As von Trier whines, “The trouble is you’re so clever that whatever I say inspires you.”) In fact, all of Leth’s altered “Perfect Humans” are gems of innovative filmmaking. By the end of “The Five Obstructions,” it’s not easy to discern between obstructer and obstructed, victor and vanquished.
…
iW: You’re also a poet and I was wondering how you relate your poetry to your filmmaking, because poetry doesn’t seem to have any limits. And yet you say that limitations help to create art?
Leth: For me, poetry has a strong link to my filmmaking. My films learn from my poetry. In poetry, you’re free. You start in the corner and you don’t know where it leads you. I have no message, I have nothing I want to tell, I just start and I see where it leads, and it’s a big surprise and relief if it’s good. That’s the ideal state for filmmaking. I like the idea of chance coming into filmmaking, in shooting, in editing, and I do make space in my rules of game for chance. William Burroughs, Andy Warhol and John Cage are major influences for my work. Godard is the only cineastic influence.
Read the stories John Cage tells in Indeterminacy. Go on, you’ll enjoy them. And the Smithsonian Folkways recording accompanied by David Tudor is great great great:
The idea behind Indeterminacy was, like many Cagean ideas, essentially simple and audaciously original. Cage read 90 stories, his speed determined by the story’s length. In another room, beyond earshot of Cage, David Tudor, pianist and veteran Cage collaborator, performed miscellaneous selections from Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and played pre-recorded tape from Cage’s Fontana Mix. The resulting collaboration is an astounding piece of “music,” and a fine introduction to the innovations of John Cage.
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 - 12:50am |
John Cage + Jurisichism + art + chance/random + music |
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