Disciplined Improvisation

Making Art Under the Influence

Over the course of my last two posts, I compared top-down and bottom-up design. Both of these methods involve different types of significant preparation. Over the next couple of days, I had a nagging feeling that I had missed something, and then I remembered that there is a type of design that escapes this entire paradigm, improvisational design. Where these other frameworks require outlining and structure, the improvisational throws it all out.

In his book *Faith Hope and Carnage*, Nick Cave describes his current creative process. Cave sits in a room with his creative partner, Warren Ellis. For hours at a time, Ellis will play music, any music that comes to mind. In the meantime, Cave vocalizes to the music, sometimes singing nonsense and other times finding the words that will be the seeds of a song.

As someone who grew up in a Pentecostal church, it’s somewhat ironic that I didn’t mention this style of creation (or making, as my friend Bo would say) in my last two explorations on this topic. On Sundays, it was not uncommon to hear voices from the pews call out prophetic words for the congregation, along with speaking in tongues. The framing for these experiences is as a movement of the Holy Spirit, God’s presence felt physically in the room. Within this understanding was also the idea that this movement was not spiritual possession, like you would see in horror movies. This was seen as a partnership with the Divine; if either participant chose to cease, then it would cease.

Photo by Grace Galligan on Unsplash

While all of this is something I am trying to wrap my head around, specifically, I want to play around with how all of this seems to work with the artistic realm. From what I can see, there are two major challenges for pursuing art and design in this way, and they seem to mesh closely together: skill and openness (maybe a third would be humility).

One of Cave’s many achievements is his stellar blog, The Red Hand Files, where he answers questions submitted by fans. In one of my favorite blog posts, Cave responds to an artist struggling because he felt that the muses have left him, and the inspiration has gone. Cave in his blunt prose responds with a line that has rolled around my mind since, “Muses... are for losers!” As stated before, Cave is no stranger to this improvisational (read spiritual) type of artistic exploration. However, Cave does seem to recognize that this process doesn’t only happen in the studio when everything is flowing; it is both a skill that is trained and a discipline that is held. The key is to be ready for when the opportunity arises, to be prepared to strike when the iron is hot.

In many ways, that is what I am trying to do here. I want to train myself to be ready to meet whatever comes for me. I am bad with discipline, so to be honest, this topic scares me. Writing is not easy, and it is time-consuming, but if I don’t do it, I’m not going to get any better. When the gains are obvious, it is easy to commit to it. When the headlamp on our family car went out, it wasn’t too easy to change it once we had everything in order. I struggled a bit, but in the end, it was done, and it had an obvious positive outcome. Compare this to going to the gym or sitting down and writing, often it either feels like there is no change or that you are getting worse. That’s not a very good motivator. My current desire is to learn about what it means to love these things. If I love writing, then you may have to drag a pen from my fingers or a keyboard from my hands.

The closest I think I’ve gotten to this concept is in cooking. I am relatively proficient in home cooking and know what I can look up and reasonably substitute for when missing ingredients. When throwing together a meal from your kitchen, you are given a limited assortment of what you have on hand, and you have to be creative to find a solution that works.

I don’t know where I was going with this post, but I want to end it with this: it may seem ironic, but the people I know who are best able to tap into this flow are the ones who are remarkably disciplined. The only problem for me is, how do I become someone who is disciplined? I guess it’s going to take a lot of trial and error, and I’ll have to get over it and be willing to make a fool of myself many times over.

-Noah (President Foxman)