christabelll
Too...Gone Baby Gone
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2007
- Posts
- 1,801
Removing the Veil of Consciousness/Embracing the Transformation
Last month I had the pleasure of catching Gilberto Gil in concert at
Carnegie Hall. Now, Carnegie Hall seats 2,804 people. Gilberto Gil, in
the August of his career, strolls out to a full house and sits on a
diamond shaped, raised platform surrounded by a glass of water, his
guitar, and an extra guitar (presumably just in case he pops a guitar
string and needs a spare. That's it: no back up singers, no back up
vocalists, no lights, no drama; just him and his guitar.
I felt, as I felt when catching Lorna Simpson's retrospective at the
Whitney, how wonderful it is to be an artist who can devote their life
to speaking in her or his own voice. More than the money or the fame
(though I'll take both in varying degrees), the ability to create, to
spend a life creating, and then mount those creations to a public that
gets it and appreciates your work seems like a luxury to me. It is a
luxury I want to experience in this lifetime.
Of course the external view of something is never quite like the
internal view of it. Walking around dreaming about the day when you
can have the whole floor of a museum to fill with whatever kind of art
your imagination can conceive brings a veil of consciousness to the
creative process that wedges between the artist and the art. This
veil—a hyper-consciousness of sorts—may make the process of creation
torturous, pressing the artist to judge her every stroke, impulse, or
line. The veil may force a certain tone or approach the artist has
deemed lucrative or deep or counterculture or whatever. But worst of
all, the veil may block the artist from ever letting her bodies of
work come to life.
More than thinking about learning to write better or be a better
artist, I've been meditating on how to get out of my own way. Just
today I found my way on up-and-coming vocalist Alice Smith's myspace
page. She was ruminating on the concept of soul music and she said,
referring to Björk, "the music there told me wow, that's really her
soul there. I thought about her a lot, about the sound of her music…
well it isn't exactly about the sound…. Her music made me contemplate
her soul."
On the one hand, it is about the sound. You have to figure out how to
make sounds and how to put them together and how to record them and
distribute them, but on the most profound level it isn't about the
sound; it's about the soul bleeding through the sounds; it's about
putting the sounds in the service of the soul.
I thought about the uniqueness of the soul when I heard the sounds
coming out of Gilberto Gil's throat. If you've ever heard Gil sing,
you know he likes to vocalize—his vocalizations are nothing like
scatting, they are more like sighs and cries and bird sounds and
creative little twists and turns of the voice that aren't notes, at
least not notes anyone would sit around and think of or write on a
piece of paper to represent a certain emotion. At the concert, I
marveled at his sounds, some of them discordant and odd, and
appreciated how they were just his special and particular way of
expressing himself—it was Gilberto Gil's soul coming out in sound.
So many of us artists come to the page or the canvas or the clay or
the studio or the theater needing the art to be something, do
something for us. Our art can't just be an expression of life, it has
to be us; it has to prove that we are viable, fresh, creative,
cutting-edge, profitable, sustainable. We need it to earn us money so
we can come back to the page or the canvas or the clay the next day
and the day after.
When the artist grapples with who she is as an artist and how she
relates to her art and what it means to create art, the need for the
art to shore up the pocketbook and the ego can get the better of us;
it can pin us down to the mat and start to define us and our
connection with our work.
Gilberto Gil is a prolific songwriter and poet. He has one song whose
lyrics I am fascinated by. I've called people and told them about the
lyrics to the song and they ask: what does that mean? I tell them I
don't know. It's not that I don't know what it means, it's that I
can't say. The central metaphor of the song speaks to me so profoundly
that its impact can't be measured in words. (Maybe I should just let
out a Gilberto Gil-like groan when someone asks me what the songs
mean.)
It's a relationship song, titled "Drão." Working around the metaphor
of the seed, he celebrates love—not as a joyride in a stolen car, but
as a hard walk down a long dark road; as a deeply transformative act
that requires much stretching and growing and turning inside and out.
The song is about a romantic relationship, but, for me, it's about me:
the artist and my relationship to art.
Gil sings: "Drão, our love is like a grain/A seed of illusion/It has
to die to sprout. Once planted/Our hard seed resuscitates in the
soil."
I'm like an evangelist singing the gospel to my friends, my brilliant
talented and tortured friends who are also not writing their novels or
taking their pictures or making their shoes. I want to open a church
for artists; fling the doors open wide and shout: Kill the romance,
kill the ego, kill the high visions about what your particular brand
of artistic genius will bring to the world. Kill what you think you're
creating about, and then just create. Let that dead seed of
what-you-need-art-to-do-for-you resuscitate in the soil of creativity.
Water what sprouts and let it grow.
I have decided I've got to write this novel. And because my life is
currently all about survival, I'll write like it's one more necessary
task for my survival. I'll stop thinking about it as the first step
towards my salvation from ordinary life; or the foundation of reaching
the above-mentioned luxury of spending all my time creating. I have
taken a vow to work on my novel like I do the dishes; like I wash
lettuce; like I feed my daughter; like I play computer games before
bed (not like I'm fulfilling my destiny; not like I'm being brilliant;
not like I'm solving a problem; not like I'm doing what I should). I'm
vowing to write like I breathe.
Again, I turn to Gil's "Drão," in which he says, "Don't think of
separation/Don't trouble your heart/True love is vast, it extends
infinitely/It's an immense monolith, it's our architecture." Except
it's not "true love" I'm thinking of as vast, it's art and my ability
to produce it. The great wellspring of creativity that is my very
architecture. To crawl around writing tentatively, fearful that what
I'm writing is not compelling enough or brilliant enough, investing
the act of writing with my own ideas of what it means to write. The
act of writing (or making any art) is what it is, and I need only
plant it someplace and let it grow.
The road is anything but easy. Human beings are just so darn creative
at creating difficulties, complications, blocks and obstacles. Part of
the story we tell ourselves is that it needs to be brilliant the
moment it materializes from our thoughts. In insisting on instant
perfection we trample on the process, the flowering of our own art. We
reason that we must know the end when we begin. We must see the
brilliance, it must dazzle and perform. Forget all that madness, Gil's
lyrics sing to me.
No the road is not easy, but the road need not be easy to be true.
"Drão" acknowledges the pain, embraces transformation, praises the
process, however hurtful it may be, because as Gilberto Gil figures it
"if love is like a grain, then when it dies it is reborn as wheat and
when it lives, it dies as bread."
Be well. Be love(d).
Kiini Ibura Salaam
Last month I had the pleasure of catching Gilberto Gil in concert at
Carnegie Hall. Now, Carnegie Hall seats 2,804 people. Gilberto Gil, in
the August of his career, strolls out to a full house and sits on a
diamond shaped, raised platform surrounded by a glass of water, his
guitar, and an extra guitar (presumably just in case he pops a guitar
string and needs a spare. That's it: no back up singers, no back up
vocalists, no lights, no drama; just him and his guitar.
I felt, as I felt when catching Lorna Simpson's retrospective at the
Whitney, how wonderful it is to be an artist who can devote their life
to speaking in her or his own voice. More than the money or the fame
(though I'll take both in varying degrees), the ability to create, to
spend a life creating, and then mount those creations to a public that
gets it and appreciates your work seems like a luxury to me. It is a
luxury I want to experience in this lifetime.
Of course the external view of something is never quite like the
internal view of it. Walking around dreaming about the day when you
can have the whole floor of a museum to fill with whatever kind of art
your imagination can conceive brings a veil of consciousness to the
creative process that wedges between the artist and the art. This
veil—a hyper-consciousness of sorts—may make the process of creation
torturous, pressing the artist to judge her every stroke, impulse, or
line. The veil may force a certain tone or approach the artist has
deemed lucrative or deep or counterculture or whatever. But worst of
all, the veil may block the artist from ever letting her bodies of
work come to life.
More than thinking about learning to write better or be a better
artist, I've been meditating on how to get out of my own way. Just
today I found my way on up-and-coming vocalist Alice Smith's myspace
page. She was ruminating on the concept of soul music and she said,
referring to Björk, "the music there told me wow, that's really her
soul there. I thought about her a lot, about the sound of her music…
well it isn't exactly about the sound…. Her music made me contemplate
her soul."
On the one hand, it is about the sound. You have to figure out how to
make sounds and how to put them together and how to record them and
distribute them, but on the most profound level it isn't about the
sound; it's about the soul bleeding through the sounds; it's about
putting the sounds in the service of the soul.
I thought about the uniqueness of the soul when I heard the sounds
coming out of Gilberto Gil's throat. If you've ever heard Gil sing,
you know he likes to vocalize—his vocalizations are nothing like
scatting, they are more like sighs and cries and bird sounds and
creative little twists and turns of the voice that aren't notes, at
least not notes anyone would sit around and think of or write on a
piece of paper to represent a certain emotion. At the concert, I
marveled at his sounds, some of them discordant and odd, and
appreciated how they were just his special and particular way of
expressing himself—it was Gilberto Gil's soul coming out in sound.
So many of us artists come to the page or the canvas or the clay or
the studio or the theater needing the art to be something, do
something for us. Our art can't just be an expression of life, it has
to be us; it has to prove that we are viable, fresh, creative,
cutting-edge, profitable, sustainable. We need it to earn us money so
we can come back to the page or the canvas or the clay the next day
and the day after.
When the artist grapples with who she is as an artist and how she
relates to her art and what it means to create art, the need for the
art to shore up the pocketbook and the ego can get the better of us;
it can pin us down to the mat and start to define us and our
connection with our work.
Gilberto Gil is a prolific songwriter and poet. He has one song whose
lyrics I am fascinated by. I've called people and told them about the
lyrics to the song and they ask: what does that mean? I tell them I
don't know. It's not that I don't know what it means, it's that I
can't say. The central metaphor of the song speaks to me so profoundly
that its impact can't be measured in words. (Maybe I should just let
out a Gilberto Gil-like groan when someone asks me what the songs
mean.)
It's a relationship song, titled "Drão." Working around the metaphor
of the seed, he celebrates love—not as a joyride in a stolen car, but
as a hard walk down a long dark road; as a deeply transformative act
that requires much stretching and growing and turning inside and out.
The song is about a romantic relationship, but, for me, it's about me:
the artist and my relationship to art.
Gil sings: "Drão, our love is like a grain/A seed of illusion/It has
to die to sprout. Once planted/Our hard seed resuscitates in the
soil."
I'm like an evangelist singing the gospel to my friends, my brilliant
talented and tortured friends who are also not writing their novels or
taking their pictures or making their shoes. I want to open a church
for artists; fling the doors open wide and shout: Kill the romance,
kill the ego, kill the high visions about what your particular brand
of artistic genius will bring to the world. Kill what you think you're
creating about, and then just create. Let that dead seed of
what-you-need-art-to-do-for-you resuscitate in the soil of creativity.
Water what sprouts and let it grow.
I have decided I've got to write this novel. And because my life is
currently all about survival, I'll write like it's one more necessary
task for my survival. I'll stop thinking about it as the first step
towards my salvation from ordinary life; or the foundation of reaching
the above-mentioned luxury of spending all my time creating. I have
taken a vow to work on my novel like I do the dishes; like I wash
lettuce; like I feed my daughter; like I play computer games before
bed (not like I'm fulfilling my destiny; not like I'm being brilliant;
not like I'm solving a problem; not like I'm doing what I should). I'm
vowing to write like I breathe.
Again, I turn to Gil's "Drão," in which he says, "Don't think of
separation/Don't trouble your heart/True love is vast, it extends
infinitely/It's an immense monolith, it's our architecture." Except
it's not "true love" I'm thinking of as vast, it's art and my ability
to produce it. The great wellspring of creativity that is my very
architecture. To crawl around writing tentatively, fearful that what
I'm writing is not compelling enough or brilliant enough, investing
the act of writing with my own ideas of what it means to write. The
act of writing (or making any art) is what it is, and I need only
plant it someplace and let it grow.
The road is anything but easy. Human beings are just so darn creative
at creating difficulties, complications, blocks and obstacles. Part of
the story we tell ourselves is that it needs to be brilliant the
moment it materializes from our thoughts. In insisting on instant
perfection we trample on the process, the flowering of our own art. We
reason that we must know the end when we begin. We must see the
brilliance, it must dazzle and perform. Forget all that madness, Gil's
lyrics sing to me.
No the road is not easy, but the road need not be easy to be true.
"Drão" acknowledges the pain, embraces transformation, praises the
process, however hurtful it may be, because as Gilberto Gil figures it
"if love is like a grain, then when it dies it is reborn as wheat and
when it lives, it dies as bread."
Be well. Be love(d).
Kiini Ibura Salaam
Yep, and 'dirt shovelling'. Good on you for remembering it was Newton.
