Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Stupidity and Creativity

You have to risk one to get the other.

I was reading about CS Lewis tonight. (<--- Things that should surprise no one.)

Old Jack had a friend named Ruth Pitter and like all of his friends she was ridiculously smart and talented and made beautiful poetry and thought beautiful and true things about the world. She was the first woman to ever get the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and out of character, the Queen actually showed up for the ceremony. At one point, Lewis said that if was the marrying type, he would have like to marry Ruth Pitter (the fact that he was less than 2 years from a civil marriage to Joy Davidman not withstanding).

Ruth fetched him a good one
on the jaw
 one night.

As he sat with her and his brother Warnie, Lewis asked for her comments on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and while she was generally entertained by it, she pointed out some lapses in the logic of the story. Being the consummate logician and apologist, he found this inconceivable (and he probably wasn't psyched about hearing it from someone with ovaries either, oh Jack) and demanded an example. She asked how it was possible in a land of perpetual winter and without foreign trade partners that the Beavers were able to provide the children with milk, potatoes, oranges, suger, and suet. 

STUMPER!!

And like any good brother,
Warnie burst into laughter
at his brother's inability
to respond.

But is making that mistake 
and suffering that embarrassment 
worth never picking up the pen? 

So many times, I find myself stuck. 

As I read the story tonight, I thought about reading these books to children and what reading does for children. When you get to this moment in the story, you could look at it and say, 'this mistake makes the whole world fall apart, I can't go on.' letting your demand for internal consistency predicate your enjoyment as if the origin of the Beavers' oranges were the atomic mass of the Higgs Boson and its inaccuracy ripped the universe asunder. 

Boom.
Physics.

Or, if you are an attentive reader, 
you ask, 
'where did the oranges come from?'
And now, YOU get to create something totally new.

What's the point of literature and art if it doesn't leave us with questions? Why would we ever want to read, listen to, look at something that was good only because it was correct? I am without doubt that my life is not beautiful because it has been done correctly.

Ask any person that I have played music with. I make a lot of mistakes. Most often than not, if I'm on stage I am playing bass, an instrument that my mom asked me to learn because the church 'had enough acoustic players.' Yea, I know what that means: 

Dear Sloppy McSlopSlop, 

Cut it out and pick up an instrument where you can only misplay four strings instead of six. 


Hugs, 
Your Mom

My main instrument, which I'm not all that bad at these days, was put in my hands as a result of some stupidity. Not knowing what I was doing. Even now, the band leader who has most enjoyed having me as a co-musician pointed out that he doesn't keep me around because I play everything correctly, it's that I take risks and when I make the mistakes, I find a way to make them sound less like mistakes. 

It's a remarkable talent
developed
through years of error and error.

You (I) can't stop what we are doing because we are afraid of someone finding the errors later on and making us look like fools. We (I) are (am) fools. We just need to slide out of those sour notes and figure out where the oranges came from. That's where all the beautiful stuff happens anyway.

PS, What is Suet?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

good words. my favorite part:
"Or, if you are an attentive reader, you ask,'where did the oranges come from?'And now, YOU get to create something totally new.

What's the point of literature and art if it doesn't leave us with questions and why would we ever want to read, listen to, look at something that was good only because it was correct? I am without doubt that my life is not beautiful because it has been done correctly."