Growing up in suburban Rochester, NY, I had a couple of very good English teachers at Irondequoit High School in the mid-seventies. Donna Byers and Marianne Letro turned me on to a handful of great authors, especially Kurt Vonnegut. I worked my way through all of Vonnegut's work which had been written and published by that time.
When novels were discussed in English class, the teacher invariably asked the class for the meaning of a particular work of literature. She wasn't asking for your interpretation of the artwork, or how the artwork made you feel. She was looking for the single meaning consciously intended by the author.
The underlying a priori assumption was that any work of art derives meaning from the conscious intent of its creator and that your job, as perceiver of that artwork, is to ascertain and comprehend the creator's intended meaning.
Around ten years later during my law school tenure, the late, lamented Musician magazine ran a contest for unsigned singer/songwriters and bands. Submit your cassette and hope for the best, as notable musicians and producers listened to the entries. I recorded my song Foreign Script with the help of a keyboard-and-guitar-playing classmate with a home studio.
I submitted a cassette entry, but, alas, never heard back from Musician regarding my entry.
I hadn't heard of any of the contest's top finishers, but recognized a name from that list while checking out the listings for Harvard Square's legendary folk venue Club Passim a few years later after moving to Boston.
Having wanted to check out the coffeehouse where Bob Dylan and Jackson Browne cut their teeth in their younger days, and curious about who or what actually impressed contest judges, I checked out the contest winner's gig there. His music didn't do a whole lot for me, but I hung around to hear the headliner.
The headliner's songs displayed a bit more talent and gravitas than those of the contest winning opener, but his set was dampened for me a bit by his annoying habit of describing each song before its performance. He'd tell the audience what the song is about, so that his consciously intended meaning would inform the experience of listening to the song during his set.
My high school English teachers and this unnamed folk singer couldn't have been more wrong, however.
The creative process through which any artwork is created encompasses more than the conscious intent of the artist or artists whose names are credited with the work.
Actually, all art is created through a collaborative process which models, in miniature, the way in which we collectively create our reality and everything in it.
Sometime between the first sentient thought and next Tuesday, God/Goddess/All That Is/Fill In The Blank dropped needle on spinning vinyl and this thing of ours began.
Inherent in the design are a thousand flavors of pain. We needed something to get us to the next mile marker. "Reason to live, reason to continue," sang the Beach Boys.
The powers that be gave us art. Something which can provide a powerful catharsis (as Jeff Tweedy put it, "a sonic shoulder for you to cry on"), a wonderful distraction, and, most importantly, a finely-tuned resonance through which you see yourself and your place in creation with intense clarity.
That song or movie or novel or painting strikes a responsive chord within you and you think to yourself, "That's exactly how I feel." The work of art aligns perfectly with the very core of your being and it all makes sense.
That center may or may not hold, but at least you know where you can get that feeling, that insight, again later when it's needed.
Whether they recognize it or not, all artists are psychics, of a sort. They've got satellite dishes, you might say, picking up on the needs, wishes, fears, and desires of people who need that resonance with an artwork. The signals which end up in their dishes inform and influence their own creative process by creating a paradigm through which a single visual image or turn of phrase can carry multiple meanings...meanings which meet the needs of all those who cry out for them on ethereal levels.
No single meaning, whether consciously intended by the artist or picked up like some radio frequency and then absorbed by the artist, is the sole true meaning carried by the artwork or reason for the creation of the artwork. Every possible and perceived meaning within an artwork existed from the moment of that work's conception, as the souls or higher selves of artist and audience exchange notes, so that everyone gets exactly what they need.
A single line within a song lyric may have popped into the songwriter's head because exactly, say, 54 people needed to hear that line. Those needs were subconsciously projected into the Mighty Mighty Whatever by all 54 people and the songwriter picked up on it, likely without conscious realization of that fact.
In a moment's inspiration, the exact words which would take on precisely 54 different intended meanings found themselves voiced by the songwriter, committed to paper, tape, or digital chip.
If, as quantum physicists have theorized, linear time is an illusion and all moments in time exist simultaneously, perhaps some of the 54 haven't yet been born (within the linear time construct) and someone will first hear that song and find that needed resonance with the artwork a hundred years from now.
Those same quantum physicists have also theorized that an infinite number of parallel realities exist, in which every possible turn of events which could conceivably take place does occur in one reality or another. (Now known as the Many Worlds Theory, advanced physicist Hugh Everett articulated the theory in the late 1950's. The theory has since worked its way into popular culture within the Star Trek canon and FOX's Sliders and Fringe, to name a few examples). Perhaps the artist's own parallel selves inform the creative process and provide the raw data which winds up in the satellite dish every bit as much as the artist receives information from others.
Reincarnational lineage may play a role in this paradigm, as well. Perhaps certain people become muses or transmitters of information to artists because the roles were reversed between artist and audience member in a past or parallel reality.
The nature of the artistic process, as described above, also serves as a model for the creation of all reality. If thought, will, emotion, and conscious intention can influence others for the purpose of creating art, the same dynamic may very well apply to the creation of physical reality as we know it. For example, author Masaru Emoto has written a series of published books detailing experiments involving the impact which words, music, and images can have upon water crystals. Experiments conducted by Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR), conducted under traditional empirical methodology, have demonstrated the effect of thought and consciousness upon mechanical, electronic, optical, acoustical, and fluid devices to a degree which their website labels "highly significant statistical deviations from chance expectations."
Former PEAR Coordinator of Research, Roger Nelson, Ph.D., has also directed Princeton's Global Consciousness Project since 1997. Their work provides empirical evidence of the ability of thought and emotion to have an effect upon someone or something other than the thinker. Random number generators placed in 65 locations worldwide have displayed results deviating from expected norms immediately before, during, and after significant world events, such as the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/papers/pdf/GCP.Events.Mar08.prepress.pdf
"Thought Creates Reality" is more than just a New Age homily. Viewing this law at work within the artistic process shines a light upon how this concept works within systems larger than the creation of a painting, poem, or song.
I first began to gain insight into this process from events surrounding the writing of one of my songs in the early 1980's. As detailed in my blog post here, The other internet, I awoke from a vivid dream one morning, having seen myself floating above an operating table where I viewed an operation. Soon after awakening, I wrote a song filled with references to transcending the human form. Within a week, I found out that my best friend from college had been in a serious car accident during the same night that I had that dream.
Clearly, a psychic event occurred during which my consciousness and/or the consciousness of my injured friend connected in some manner and influenced my own artistic output.
Over the course of the following three decades, I have witnessed countless examples of synchronicity between my own life (and my own art) and the creative output of other artists whose work holds special significance for me.
Even when anything which I've said, done, or written in any remotely public forum is excluded -- after all, anything put on the internet is freely available to anyone in the world with internet connectivity -- I've seen many examples of synchronicity beyond coincidence in and around the work of artists to whom I pay attention.
Here's one example: During the mid-90's, I struck up a platonic friendship with a young woman for a couple of years which crashed and burned a few years later in fairly messy fashion. I wrote a very nasty song about her in 1997 called Turpentine.
Our friendship briefly resumed a few years later in the early 2000's. During that time, I gave her a copy of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. She quickly became a devoted Wilco and Jeff Tweedy fan; she even traveled to NYC to see one of the few performances ever of Loose Fur, a side project involving two members of Wilco.
She and I soon drifted apart again, albeit in a more tranquil way this time around. (I never did tell her about the song).
Anyway, in June of 2004, Wilco released A Ghost Is Born, which contains a song titled "The Late Greats," which contains this line:
"The greatest lost track of all time: The Late Greats' Turpentine.
Coincidence? The more skeptical among you will certainly say so. Then again, the more skeptical among you probably stopped reading a dozen or so paragraphs ago. (For what it's worth, my song Turpentine was not recorded or performed in public.)
I've been an avid Elvis Costello fan since I heard the import single Alison in late Spring/early Summer 1977.
I've seen Elvis perform 33 times since 1978, as of this writing, and I traveled from Syracuse to Boston to catch his three shows at the Orpheum Theatre in October 1986.
I had a seat in the front row of the mezzanine for the final night of the engagement, which turned out to be one of the best concerts I've ever seen anyone perform.
The whole of Costello's album King Of America had been performed at the Orpheum earlier in the engagement, except for Jack Of All Parades. I was disappointed that he omitted the song, since I found a lot of personal significance in that song.
Well, even though the song had been recorded with the Confederates, with whom Elvis Costello performed earlier at the Orpheum, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Elvis and the Attractions perform Jack Of All Parades at the third Orpheum concert.
During the song, Elvis sang the lines "But from my chequered past/To this shattered terrace."
As he sang the lines, I looked to my left. The illumination spilling from the stage lighting into the house was just bright enough for me to notice that a huge chunk of plaster was missing from the exterior of the mezzanine's overhang. It looked as if it had been damaged by a grenade or some other armament. It looked like...a shattered terrace.
Don't take my word for it, though. Look at your own personal history as a patron of the arts and you just might find similar examples of synchronicity which evidence a guiding hand and master plan greater than mere chance or coincidence.
As I wrote in my song A Tennis Match some years ago...
Faced with numerous impending wishes
There are satellite dishes in a few backyards
One becomes a transmitter when life shatters to shards
Inspiration to the painter and a balm to the bard
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