What's the big idea?

Or rather, what’s your big idea? Not trusting great ideas to conscious memory, I dutifully transcribe them. Some capture the wild beast in few words:

‘You cannot see the red-hot knitting needles spirted [sic] out by that red-faced trumpeter... which needles aforesaid penetrating the tympanum, pierce through and through your brain without remorse.’
Subversive Sounds, Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Some hold kernels of truth, ancient and modern:

‘All down history nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining tenth and have been paid with husks and bidden to thank god they had the husks.’
David Lloyd George

Others suggest seeds of change:

‘It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius for the first time in a black. We literally never saw a black then in any but a servant’s capacity. It had simply never entered my mind - that I would see this for the first time in a black man. But Louis [Armstrong] opened my eyes wide, and put me to a choice. Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place.’ What was the ‘place’ of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?’
The Louis Armstrong Companion, Joshua Barrett

Excellent ideas can be complex:

'Jazz was not simply the free expression of individuals who happened to be black, Creole, or white. Race shaped the music, but the effect of race goes beyond the race of the musicians. A political analysis of the music must take into account the multifaceted interactions among musicians, audience members, and opponents of the music.’
Subversive Sounds, Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Big ideas can hit you in the gut:

‘The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours. The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.’
Ignore Everybody

So what’s the big idea, writing about creativity? All these quotation marks are like chicken feet, poised outside the great ah-ha.

Cluck cluck. Time to brave honest thought, from inside out.

Public domain image, Stamp of the Faroe Islands

Chron us

My nephew drives his invention, pictured here, around southern California, for no apparent reason.  Were he selling busses, boats or amusement, he’d have the perfect schtick.  Crazy contradiction gets our attention.

His cousin, new college grad, went from cap and gown to shirt and shoes in a day, writing code for a midwest start-up.  He loves his job but sometimes wishes he’d majored in design, a place he gets lost in.

Losing track of time while cramming it with pleasure is what artists do.  The problem being, of course, that unless there’s somebody minding the store, monetizing all this pleasurable time, artists starve for lack of food - or recognition.

Venues stocked with savvy patrons did not seem to be a problem for early jazz musicians.  Nor did time.  Charles Hersch explores the role of time in the emergence of New Orleans jazz.

‘A defining feature of slavery was its near total control of the slave’s time... Emancipation held out the promise of, so to speak, time recaptured, but sharecropping and routinized industrial labor monopolized time in a particularly dehumanizing way.  Improvising musicians controlled time and how it felt - for what is music but sound unfolded in time? - and created a variety of experiences (rushed, languid, tense, or relaxed) with the rhythmic figures they played.
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds

Musicians who tinkered with time in rhythms that challenged long established norms found a willing audience in the beleaguered workers of New Orleans.  Jazz was escape from and revolt against oppression.

‘In this liminal state, individuals exist both ‘in and out of time,’ as if the clock were stopped as timepieces become useless or a hindrance to the flow of activities.  As a contemporary jazz musician once said about the trancelike ‘groove’ created by good jazz, “it’s about feeling like time itself is pleasurable.”’
Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds

Time is not so pleasurable when monopolized by the boss, unless that boss is muse or spirit.

‘I came upon a photograph in a book; it was a small statue of a woman... But she had no face.  She was crowned with waves of water, covering her head, overshadowing the face.  It was her entire body which spoke, her breast-belly body, a thick bulb rooted, pushing up a halo of water, the water which moved within me.  I’ve been looking for her face ever since.  I had then, and still have one essential prayer: “Show me your face.”’
Meinrad Craighead, The Mother’s Songs: Images of God the Mother

Yesterday my phone rang as I hunted down gifts at the mall.  My family wanted to know if I’d join them for lunch any time soon.  Jaded by the numbing assault of ten thousand consumer items blinking and winking their wild desire for my cash, I wanted to interrupt the time warp of shopping.  But I still needed smart socks from Dick’s and a book from Border’s.  What to do?  Drive home in my busboat of crazy contradiction?  Tinker with a day’s rhythm, shrug off the new (old) oppressor: stuff?  Prove I’m an artist, not a drone?

A funny thing happened on the way to Dick’s.  I lost the impression I had to be there for any other boss save the muse.  Art had its way with me.  To this end, time and I eloped, by busboat, to the Aegean archipelago.

Photo credit razielthomas