A Strange Land

Ah hah, I got you.  You thought that this post was going to be about Corned Beef.  That lovely stuff of deli afficianado delight sliced thick or amazingly thin as you choose, then piled so high between two slices of rye bread that a civil person would have to utilize a knife and fork, which , of course, none of us do.  Well, it is after a fashion, although I know relatively little about Corned Beef coming, as I do, from a somewhat ethnically inpoverished background.  Rather this this is about growing old and staying young and the connections in between.

 My husband, when parked at a deli, is fond of inquiring of the compatriots then present “Who makes your favorite corned beef?”  Then, often before they have a chance to respond, he tells them “You favorite corned beef tastes like the stuff from the deli you went to when you were twelve.”  There is a truth in that, or a truth of sorts, believing as I do that truth is largely relative and maleable.

Perhaps much of who we are, of what feels right to us, is set by our experiences when we were young.  How much of our perception of well being as adults comes from how closely we can now approximate our youth?  No, not all of those insecurities and inadequacies that tormented ones childhood and teen years, but the good things.  The memories of food, security, health and youth. 

This all came to me, other than occasionally being queried about corned beef, when I noticed that I was no longer as limber as I had been, as I remembered being in that long past youth.  I had spent years in my youth during high school and college doing ballet and jazz dance.  Being limber, flexible and strong, was what feeling young meant to me.  Now, creeping past fifty, I was beginning to get stiff.  Oh, nothing major, I could still touch my toes, even in three inch heels, but clearly no longer the smooth ease of movement that characterized my decidedly un-wild youth.  Steps need to be taken.  The situation cried out for rectification. 

So, for the new year, Pilates is the answer.  Yoga would serve as well, but according to some Pilates is dance based, so the movements and language are more familiar.  However, the methodology is perhaps less important than the end result.  Means versus ends, ends versus means we shall see.  A different truth..  A question remains grammatically though as to what the verb would be, or perhaps it is the gerund.  My grammatical comprehension is failing also along with the vanishing flexilibity, but admittedly grammer was never a strong point.  I am Pilating, or am I Pilatesing.  I am confused, but that isn’t news either.

With regard to Corned Beef I am even more confused.  Corned Beef always came with cabbage in my family and was pretty much boiled to death.  Not much there that would explain my husband’s passion about it.  Although, admittedly, as with me his passion isn’t for Corned Beef, but rather for youth and that previously ingrained sense of well being.

Lately, I have been thinking, in the odd moments here and there about creativity, or more particularly about my creative process.  How I create? How do others?  Where do interesting ideas come from?  It is a discussion that goes back to my days at Berkeley in the late 70’s.  It was a discussion that at the time, ED3, was more about mood and how to put oneself into a creative thought paradigm.  However, as I think about it now, that is actually the second part of the problem.  The first part is having the raw material to work with.  Ideas don’t occur in a vacuum.  They must be built of something.   Over the years I have taken design classes from a variety of teachers, artists, architects, jewelers, others and none of them have addressed the issue from the point of view of acquiring the raw materials, the thoughts, the images.  You need a vocabulary.  You need to fill the blank slate of your brain.  I don’t believe that children have ideas until they acquire language:  words, sentences, and then ideas.   Finally, when you have crammed your brain with enough odd disparate concepts, you may have interesting ideas.   

Basic language is easily enough acquired, though that may not be sufficient for ones creative purposes, but what about creative disciplines that require other sources?  What is the equivalent in what ever creative paradigm one might engage in that letters and words are to language and writing?  I spent some time as an architect and after I had graduated with a degree in architecture, it seemed to me that my design teachers had left out an essential element, the acquisition of a visual vocabulary.  How could I play with ideas when my exposure to the visual environment was primarily tract houses and suburbs?  If it was not visually a wasteland, then it was certainly visually impoverished if only by its lack of variety.  It became apparent to me that the first thing someone should have relayed was that I needed to look at things, to study the visual world, to create a three dimensional vocabulary, a built vocabulary.  For architecture it was a blend of visual, seeing different possibilities and then technical mastery, what works and what doesn’t, gravity and structure, equating to grammar perhaps.  Until the whole thing comes together and builds and matures you don’t really begin to think creatively.  So, I have spent the years since then doing that, reading magazines, looking at the built world and observing critically.  Critical observation is crucial, but I don’t mean that in the sense that most art, theater or dining critics would.  I am not looking for any one thing to be better than another, but rather at how it comes together. How it fits or conversely contrasts with its context.  What were the design constraints and how were they resolved.  Eventually you start to develop a feel for the thing, for all the myriad details and changes in scale and how they all come together,  for the possibilities to be explored in the shaping of space while not losing track of the texture of the details. 

 So, in how many fields, or how diversely can one successfully be creative.  Even if success is measured only as the ability to sufficiently entertain oneself, which, clearly is mainly what I do.  The interesting thing is that I believe the same process holds true regardless of the particular area of endeavor.  In which case a question would be, how transferable is any of it?  Does having developed an expertise in one particular area mean one can shorten the process in another field, or must the field be somehow related.  Clearly some art related areas cross over well, but would an expertise in art enable one to learn to compose?  Possibly not, but it might depend on the acquisition of a basic vocabulary, or it may be, as with speech, that ones develops a vocabulary in the areas of ones interests naturally.  Thus you may have been acquiring a musical vocabulary over many years and then one day finally have the time to put it to use and discover that it is there waiting for you. 

It is the same process regardless of the discipline:  music, painting, fashion, jewelry, and the same issues of building a vocabulary, then learning to manipulate it pertains to them all.  Learn the vocabulary, learn the technique, and study the history and then …..Well, then we get to the next aspect of the problem, the process of creation.  How do you put yourself into a workable creative paradigm?  ED3 for those who might have been there. (Trusting a somewhat failing memory)  An interesting question as it was thirty years ago.  One of the answers, despite Nike co-opting the phrase, is to “just do it”, but that is a different discussion. 

Ah well, perambulating to no good purpose I suppose.