Liminal Space 3

The unseen

Hercules Protects the Muse of the Arts against Envy and Ignorance, Andries Cornelis Lens

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Welcome to Liminal Spaces, a place for me to put my brief and scattered thoughts (and invite you to share yours) between essays.

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My Thoughts

A few exchanges I had recently got me thinking about (a) the relationship between art and its creators, (b) the relationship between art and its receivers, (c) how little we humans know and understand about almost everything, (d) how easy it is to think we know more than we do, and (e) how the allure of certainty leads to the rotten stench of too many minds filled with bullshit.

My mind is set more to input than output at the moment, though. So what follows will be heavy on block quotes. It will also borrow a bit from what I've written on Notes over the past week. But most of what I post there is written in large part to myself, anyway, to see which thoughts stick and which ones later make me want to hide or puke.

Below are the thoughts that have not (yet) inspired my vomit or shame.

Also below are many Rick Rubin thoughts and quotes, including—broken up into a few parts—the ~400 words that comprise the chapter “The Unseen” in Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being.

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No matter what tools you use to create,
the true instrument is you.
And through you, the universe that surrounds us
all comes into focus.

—Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

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I’ve no clue how many hours I’ve spent listening to Rubin on podcasts, but after listening to these 1.5 the other day, I went back and re-listened to these 3. There’s a lot to love in the conversation, but the exchange beginning at 1:28:12 (transcript below) really resonated with me and the things I’ve had on my mind. I think you’ll find that Rubin’s points at the end about wrestling also apply perfectly to fiction (and perhaps some other things I’m overlooking), but see for yourself:

Andrew Huberman: So we have these filters, perceptual filters. We only can see and hear, smell and taste what we can. And then the brain likes to work in symbols. We tend to like to match—that person whose shoes are messed up must be homeless. [...] Then, the other thing that we do is we tend to put—so we said perception, symbol representations, and then our memories are entirely confabulated, based on already deficient symbol and perceptual representation. And so I never liked the statement that we don't know how the brain works. I think we do know how the brain works, but that it works through very limited filters.

So knowing that and accepting it, it seems to me that this idea of looking to nature, looking outside us, is so critical. And in fact, I hope you won't mind me sharing this, but a few years back, I had sent you something by text. And I was kind of in disbelief about something I had seen in the media. I was like, they got it all wrong. And I knew the person involved, and it was not a good situation for them. And I was like, they got it all wrong, and you wrote back. You said: It's all lies. Back to nature, the only truth.

Rick Rubin: Wow. That's wild.

Huberman: And I wrote that down. I put it over my desk. And I still—I'd tattoo it on my forehead if I didn't already have it well committed to memory. But I know that's true. Right? Nature we can look at and it's—

Rubin: But when I say it's all lies—you just talked about our ability to ... how limited our facility to see and understand what we see. Yes?

Huberman: Yes.

Rubin: So based on that, that leads us to we can't know much. Our resolution is so low on everything that we're really just, like, we're grasping at straws. We have no idea. We have no idea, and there's great power in knowing that. Because if you think you know what's going on, chances are, you're being deceived. Not because somebody is deceiving you, but because they're telling you what they see, and they don't know. It's all made up. Everything we know is made up. Maybe. Maybe it's true.

This brings us to pro wrestling. It's the reason that pro wrestling is closer to reality than anything else we can watch or any other content. We know it's made up. We know that it's a performance. It's storytelling, and that's how everything is, except we think wrestling is fake, and the world is real. Wrestling's real, and the world's fake.

Certainty is an illusion and a performance.

We’re all extremely limited in what we know.

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By conventional definition, the purpose of art is to create physical and digital artifacts. To fill shelves with pottery, books, and records.

Though artists generally aren’t aware of it, that end work is a by-product of a greater desire. We aren’t creating to produce or sell material products. The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.

Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage. The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science. The world of reason can be narrow and filled with dead ends, while a spiritual viewpoint is limitless and invites fantastic possibilities. The unseen world is boundless.

The word spirituality may not speak to those who dwell chiefly in the intellect or those who equate the word with organized religion. If you prefer to think of spirituality as simply believing in connection, that’s fine. If you choose to think of it as believing in magic, that’s fine too. The things we believe carry a charge regardless of whether they can be proven or not.

—Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

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There’s a lot of wisdom in comedian Neal Brennan’s recent podcast with Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age and Eagles of Death Metal. Perhaps nothing makes a better artist than high levels of sensitivity and revolt, and Homme seems to hum with both.

A few notes I made from the podcast over the course of two listens:

• "Anger is the sword I hold in the hand which is hurt." (Homme)

• Homme on his practice of “remembering stories” in his journal/notebook:

  I'm not much for nostalgia because it makes me feel bad. It's like I look back and I tend to remember only the good stuff, so I'm like [in a pained voice] oh, oh. And I think that's part of what I've had to learn to deal with in managing loss. That's all I've got of lots of these people now is memories. So if I'm not willing to be nostalgic, then I'm icing out these people that I love. And I also learned that I can still love them now. I don't have to stop loving someone because they're not here. And in that way, I guess it makes me feel good because it makes me feel like I'm sort of celebrating what I knew about them.

• On being suicidal for the first time in his forties:

  I was storing up emotion for years in a dam that when it cracked it almost killed me. [...] I had never had a suicidal thought in my life, so this was such a new experience—to understand Tony [Bourdain]. I was so mad at him. To understand him all of a sudden. And to be like, Oh, I got it, I see. So every second's like a minute, every minute's like an hour, every hour's like a day, and every day is an eternity. [...] You see no way out. Every time you push it just collapses on itself.

• Homme’s defense of comedy/humor around sensitive topics, which leads to a brief but heartfelt discussion about the 2015 attack at the Bataclan during the Eagles of Death Metal’s performance there, which concludes with Homme’s defense of comedy/humor around sensitive topics:

  I know how I feel about it. There's nothing that can change that. My feelings about it remain unaffected by jokes for, against, with, about. [...] I already have that experience. When people get offended, I always think to myself, Oh my god, you're such a precious motherfucker. […] I can't imagine saying, “I don't want to hear about this, and also, I need the entire conversation of everyone else about it to stop.”

• On art as an avenue to being vulnerable and saying the things that feel otherwise impossible to say:

  I've really learned through the record-making process to be okay with saying I'm terrified when I'm in pain and when I miss something. And I'm really thankful for the record-making process for that. I'm not interested in being in the biggest band in the world. I've never presumed that I could be in such a thing. But I would like to be in the most honest thing humanly possibly. And that requires doing that. Being honest and saying things that are hard to say. But I do think because you're singing them, and you're pulling them into glaring relief in the framework of the music, that they get a chance to be beautiful even when they're terrifying. And I really cherish that because it's so much different than just simply saying out loud what I'm terrified about. Being able to put it together in this kind of sonic photograph really creates this opportunity to get it really close to emotionally accurate, and to simply just go, "Do you know what I mean?"

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Free fall from the nest, then glide to the left
A shine catch the eye, so flow to the right
Flying high, realize there are no more mountains to climb

We live, we die
We fail, we rise
I'm a vulture, so I hear goodbyes
There's no end to life
On and on, always life
On and on, always life

—Josh Homme, “Carnavoyeur,” In Times New Roman…

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Inspiration of the Painter, Jacek Malczewski

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Friends close, enemies closеr
Lend me your ear
I say safеty's an illusion, that's why it
Disappear
Infiltrators, saboteurs
Affix your blades and steel your nerves
Maraud the façade 'cause the children want answers
Corrode from the inside like a good type of cancer
Oh, piss on the clergy, the new age heathens
The old guard, avant-garde, technolojesus
The hand-made jury, cage-free corporate raiders
Patriotic, probiotic, deletist, eracist
The world, yeah
She don't need saving
'Cept from you and me and our
Misbehaving

—Josh Homme, “Straight Jacket Fitting,” In Times New Roman…

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I tire of all the common enemies and codependencies dumped daily into our internet feedbags, friends.

The left needs the right and the right needs the left. The wokesters need the anti-wokesters and the anti-wokesters need the wokesters. The optimists need the doomers and the doomers need the optimists. People who are for x need people who are against it, and people who are against it need people who are for it. People who find their identities in being for or against anything need its opposition to survive and thrive so they can survive and thrive, too.

I’ve tangoed with all sides, and I buy none of what they’re selling. Not in the sure and imbalanced and absolute form that they’re selling it in, anyway. It’s all just sport. Pro wrestling posing as reality.

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What if we don’t try to go back to anything? What if we slough off the idea of ‘saving the world’? What if we reject all the utopias and frown at all the gadgets and the grand plans, what if we take off our shoes and get our feet back properly on the ground? At this time of year, the soil is warm out here. There are a lot of nettles around, it’s true, but the sting is never as painful as you think it’s going to be.

Yes, I know what you’re asking. ‘But how?’ I can’t answer the question. I don’t know you. But I have worked through this for long enough to understand that if we start from where we are, things will ripple out. If we don’t have an endgame - ‘saving the world’, say - then everything gets easier. The Earth still turns. There are churches. Prayer works. Nature gives and takes. The sunset is astonishing. There is poverty and death and injustice. There are miracles and there is some strange, saving love. It’s all still here.

[...]

The age of the Machine is not after all a hopeless time. Actually, it is the time we were born for. We can’t leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it. We have to understand it, challenge it, resist it, subvert it. If we can see what it is, we have a duty to speak the words to those who do not yet see, all the while struggling to remain human.

—

Paul Kingsnorth

, The Raindance

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The practice of spirituality is a way of looking at a world where you’re not alone. There are deeper meanings behind the surface. The energy around you can be harnessed to elevate your work. You are part of something much larger than can be explained—a world of immense possibilities.

Harnessing this energy can be marvelously useful in your creative pursuits. The principle operates on faith. Believing and behaving as if it’s true. No proof is needed.

When you’re working on a project, you may notice apparent coincidences appearing more often than randomness allows—almost as if there is another hand guiding yours in a certain direction. As if there is an inner knowing gently informing your movements. Faith allows you to trust the direction without needing to understand it.

Pay particular attention to the moments that take your breath away—a beautiful sunset, an unusual eye color, a moving piece of music, the elegant design of a complex machine.

If a piece of work, a fragment of consciousness, or an element of nature is somehow allowing us to access something bigger, that is its spiritual component made manifest. It awards us a glimpse of the unseen.

—Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

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Your Thoughts

Do you know what I mean? Let me know over email or in the comments below.

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