Part 2 - Following the Muse
"...It is a process of getting lost...Sometimes you annihilate yourself; that is something one needs to be able to do."
--Dorothea Lange
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to work collaboratively with other creative people. The problem was, I really didn’t know how to make that happen. Simply suggesting that we work individually upon a communal idea didn’t ever seem to go anywhere. Ultimately, this would have been much more frustrating if, in the first years of One Candle Schoolhouse, I had not had the children and guest teachers to share my enthusiasm for exploring new experiences. Many of those projects we did together were posted on the OCS blog, but many were not. The unexpected experience was so all-consuming, even overwhelming, that I simply could not chronicle all that occurred. Thus, one of the original goals for this website was to remedy that: this website was, and still is, intended as a showcase for celebrating the complex and subtle art in daily lives.
However, last year a series of events occurred that initially galvanized and then polarized my ability to progress with this new website. A large number of the events were direct responses to discovering Todd Walton’s UNDER THE TABLE website. The first was his October '15 post introducing a video using his music, but was additionally packed with links to his astonishing array of talents. It was towards the end of his post that Walton described having had the perfect example of how collaborative art could and did happen with a short video he’d written and directed. These are the words he wrote that electrified me as I read them:
“…I often fantasize about how grand it would be to team up with a drummer or filmmaker or singer or dancers who find my music and words exactly what they’ve been looking for to meld with their artistry…”
Because I’d previously posted to my own blog my fantasy of melding audio music into my visual art, his musing about again collaborating with others reverberated as if he had specifically shouted my name. And, after listening to just the first two samples of his music, there was no doubt in my mind that this was destined. I’d been captured by a Muse informing me it was HIS music I was longing to blend--HIS music that were the singular threads needed to weave a sensually alive tapestry of audible and animated musical score, representing the dynamics of interpersonal experiences.
Ah, well, nice idea, but HOW?
Before approaching Walton I needed to answer that question, so an immediate search began online for tools that would help me create a prototype. I needed to know if it was possible to do this thing I'd never seen done. Thus began my descent into the creative depths that artists plunge themselves into with both feet. Dorothea Lange said it well: "I CHALLENGED MYSELF I WOULD GO DOWN THERE JUST TO SEE IF I COULD GRAB A HUNK OF LIGHTENING."
Aided by an uncanny synchronicity of Walton's posts as I became mired ever-deeper into the muck of too many folders filled with snippets of hopeful inspiration, his November post portended my path:
“...when I was a young writer…my work fueled by a palpable visceral erotic majestic sense of how staggeringly great the story was…I would let it cool for a few weeks before reading the entirety; and more often than not, I found…(it)… less great than…while in the throes of creation…often that was the end of the process…but sometimes there was enough mojo…(remaining)…to inspire a rewrite, and once engaged…again be filled with certainty I was birthing a masterwork."
During the ensuing six months of obsessively thinking about this work of art I'd envisioned (but was totally unable to write about), Walton wrote: "If the inner critic became engaged too early in the process, the flow might stop," (which it did) but more recently it has been Einstein's observation: “No worthy problem is ever solved on the plane of its original conception,” that has finally allowed me to release the 'half-Nelson' my Muse has had me in. While I will continue to gather the puzzle pieces of how to create a work incorporating Todd Walton's music with my own art, a strengthened and greatly clarified goal of posting the creative efforts of others has been returned to me.
Why? How did this happen?
Because I have seen others writing about the multitude of beautiful, unsung art being made daily in the lives all around us. Because I can finally collaborate with others on this topic. We can all participate as a parallel players, nurturing the growing, collective awareness of an intrinsic need for making and sharing the "palpable visceral erotic majestic sense of how staggeringly great" the art of our lives is.
So, excuse me for a short time while I resume crafting a new assembly of still photos taken during a Guest Teacher session at One Candle Schoolhouse. The original slide show posted is no longer (reliably) available but a brief introduction to Marion and Keith Fletcher, aboard Tenacity II, if too eager to wait for next posting, can be read here.
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