'Bob Dylan's Brain' by Deborah Batterman
[caption id="attachment_12378" align="alignright" width="200"]
Photo © Abe Frajndlich[/caption]
Many years ago, on a trip to Japan, I visited a temple, Shisendo, the “House of the Hermit Poet.” Built in 1642 by Ishikawa Jozan, a warrior-turned-scholar of Chinese literature and poet who lived out his years as a recluse, the gardens and building now encompass a Buddhist retreat. On the second level of the building is a single room, “tower for whistling at the moon,” with a 360-degree view of the sky. If that weren’t enough to impress on me the Japanese reverence for poetry (second-story rooms were not typical), something else that has stayed with me from that trip was a more typical detail of traditional Japanese architecture, namely the continuity of interior and exterior space. Movable panels open to the outside garden, in essence framing the view, quintessentially landscape in its wide panorama. It allows for a certain contemplative mood, if not complete serenity. I imagine it gave rise to the picture window.
It strikes me as no accident of nature that the language of thought – insight, visualization, imagination – is rooted in the ability to see. The greater the capacity to visualize, the deeper the insight. The stronger the images we can conjure, the better equipped we are for transcending the bounds of the literal and weaving metaphor into everyday consciousness. For the poet meditating on the lines swirling in the sand of a rock garden or gazing at ten thousand dancing daffodils or entranced by a grasshopper eating sugar from her hand, looking out becomes a way of looking in. By extension, art in any form – painting, photograph, artifacts, sculpture, music – becomes a source of reflection, if not pure inspiration.
At its core, ‘inspiration’ is rooted in breath, the Latin inspirare (literally, ‘breathe into’), with its suggestion of something outside of us, beyond the daily grind and logic of how we create art. Neuroscience tells us that it’s not something outside but the very inner workings of the brain that bring the aha! moment. Putting aside the unfortunate pickle Jonah Lehrer has gotten himself into via plagiarism (mostly of his own writings, if that’s not a tad oxymoronic), his latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, is a fascinating distillation – with attribution – of the science that both demystifies and enhances our understanding of the creative process. The title of the first chapter, “Bob Dylan’s Brain,” was enough to make me want to read the book. It tells the story of a poet/musician (of the genius variety) who essentially reinvents himself at a point when, apparently, he was ready to give it all up – the music that was feeling formulaic, the sold-out concerts, the constant spotlight – after a tour in 1965. He gets on his motorcycle, heads to Woodstock, alone at last. Within days he finds himself composing a narrative, the words just spewing out, and with this new freewheeling approach to writing, the conviction that “this is what I should do.” The song? “Like a Rolling Stone.” The book is peppered with several more anecdotes of writers/musicians/artists/inventors for whom moments of insight more often came when they stopped trying for them.
Isn’t that so often the case? I sit and stare at my laptop screen, struggling with a sentence, a paragraph, an idea that refuses to fully take shape. Frustrated, I get up and go for a walk. Not far into the walk, the very words that eluded me magically pop into my head. It’s taken some time, but I’ve learned to trust that ‘epiphanies’ tend to come in their own time and space. That’s not to negate the power of all the groundwork. If anything, it’s an intuitive reinforcement. Does understanding, as I do now, that giving the left side of the brain a rest so that the right side of my brain can kick in, makes this happen? Well, yes. Knowledge is power.
And, apparently, we should not underestimate the power of daydreaming. “When our minds are at ease – when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain – we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere,” writes Lehrer. Those ‘remote’ associations – the painting you looked at last week at the Met, the Chopin prelude or Bonnie Raitt song running through your head, the article you read three months ago that you completely forgot about until the moment its relevance to the very thing you’re working on crept into your consciousness – isn’t that what feeds the wellspring of creativity? It’s a little like knowing that you know something before it surfaces from the deep recesses of your mind.
The point being that, as writers, we’re always on the lookout for inspirational sparks and that’s a good thing. Ekphrasis, the Greek term for “telling at length, description,” initially was a way of exploring art via description and evolved to becoming an inspirational tool for poets and fiction writers alike. Many writers listen to background music when they write. Yo-Yo Ma looks at a piece of music “like a detective novel.” Keith Richards, in an interview, tells of passing out one night with a guitar and tape recorder on his bed. When he wakes up and hits the playback button, this is what he hears: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” More often than not, those sparks are inadvertent.
In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield’s clever spin on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, he quotes W. Somerset Maugham’s response to the question of whether inspiration dictates his writing schedule. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” Maugham replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
All of which is to say, the Muse may well favor the idle moment but too much time spent idle gives her little or nothing with which to surprise you.
Note: In light of using Jonah Lehrer as a resource here, I would be remiss in not owning up to the fact that the first paragraphs of my essay are indeed taken from another essay I wrote, this time spinning off into a different trajectory, a variation on a theme. No glibness is intended here, simply full disclosure, with a knowing wink from my very own Muse.
Photo © Abe Frajndlich[/caption]Many years ago, on a trip to Japan, I visited a temple, Shisendo, the “House of the Hermit Poet.” Built in 1642 by Ishikawa Jozan, a warrior-turned-scholar of Chinese literature and poet who lived out his years as a recluse, the gardens and building now encompass a Buddhist retreat. On the second level of the building is a single room, “tower for whistling at the moon,” with a 360-degree view of the sky. If that weren’t enough to impress on me the Japanese reverence for poetry (second-story rooms were not typical), something else that has stayed with me from that trip was a more typical detail of traditional Japanese architecture, namely the continuity of interior and exterior space. Movable panels open to the outside garden, in essence framing the view, quintessentially landscape in its wide panorama. It allows for a certain contemplative mood, if not complete serenity. I imagine it gave rise to the picture window.
It strikes me as no accident of nature that the language of thought – insight, visualization, imagination – is rooted in the ability to see. The greater the capacity to visualize, the deeper the insight. The stronger the images we can conjure, the better equipped we are for transcending the bounds of the literal and weaving metaphor into everyday consciousness. For the poet meditating on the lines swirling in the sand of a rock garden or gazing at ten thousand dancing daffodils or entranced by a grasshopper eating sugar from her hand, looking out becomes a way of looking in. By extension, art in any form – painting, photograph, artifacts, sculpture, music – becomes a source of reflection, if not pure inspiration.
At its core, ‘inspiration’ is rooted in breath, the Latin inspirare (literally, ‘breathe into’), with its suggestion of something outside of us, beyond the daily grind and logic of how we create art. Neuroscience tells us that it’s not something outside but the very inner workings of the brain that bring the aha! moment. Putting aside the unfortunate pickle Jonah Lehrer has gotten himself into via plagiarism (mostly of his own writings, if that’s not a tad oxymoronic), his latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, is a fascinating distillation – with attribution – of the science that both demystifies and enhances our understanding of the creative process. The title of the first chapter, “Bob Dylan’s Brain,” was enough to make me want to read the book. It tells the story of a poet/musician (of the genius variety) who essentially reinvents himself at a point when, apparently, he was ready to give it all up – the music that was feeling formulaic, the sold-out concerts, the constant spotlight – after a tour in 1965. He gets on his motorcycle, heads to Woodstock, alone at last. Within days he finds himself composing a narrative, the words just spewing out, and with this new freewheeling approach to writing, the conviction that “this is what I should do.” The song? “Like a Rolling Stone.” The book is peppered with several more anecdotes of writers/musicians/artists/inventors for whom moments of insight more often came when they stopped trying for them.
Isn’t that so often the case? I sit and stare at my laptop screen, struggling with a sentence, a paragraph, an idea that refuses to fully take shape. Frustrated, I get up and go for a walk. Not far into the walk, the very words that eluded me magically pop into my head. It’s taken some time, but I’ve learned to trust that ‘epiphanies’ tend to come in their own time and space. That’s not to negate the power of all the groundwork. If anything, it’s an intuitive reinforcement. Does understanding, as I do now, that giving the left side of the brain a rest so that the right side of my brain can kick in, makes this happen? Well, yes. Knowledge is power.
And, apparently, we should not underestimate the power of daydreaming. “When our minds are at ease – when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain – we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere,” writes Lehrer. Those ‘remote’ associations – the painting you looked at last week at the Met, the Chopin prelude or Bonnie Raitt song running through your head, the article you read three months ago that you completely forgot about until the moment its relevance to the very thing you’re working on crept into your consciousness – isn’t that what feeds the wellspring of creativity? It’s a little like knowing that you know something before it surfaces from the deep recesses of your mind.
The point being that, as writers, we’re always on the lookout for inspirational sparks and that’s a good thing. Ekphrasis, the Greek term for “telling at length, description,” initially was a way of exploring art via description and evolved to becoming an inspirational tool for poets and fiction writers alike. Many writers listen to background music when they write. Yo-Yo Ma looks at a piece of music “like a detective novel.” Keith Richards, in an interview, tells of passing out one night with a guitar and tape recorder on his bed. When he wakes up and hits the playback button, this is what he hears: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” More often than not, those sparks are inadvertent.
In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield’s clever spin on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, he quotes W. Somerset Maugham’s response to the question of whether inspiration dictates his writing schedule. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” Maugham replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
All of which is to say, the Muse may well favor the idle moment but too much time spent idle gives her little or nothing with which to surprise you.
Note: In light of using Jonah Lehrer as a resource here, I would be remiss in not owning up to the fact that the first paragraphs of my essay are indeed taken from another essay I wrote, this time spinning off into a different trajectory, a variation on a theme. No glibness is intended here, simply full disclosure, with a knowing wink from my very own Muse.
