The Monogamous Relationship Betwixt Nose & Grindstone

I've been doing mountain ranges of research lately. For this, I've no real attributable reason; it's a task I've been doing, no more, no less. Call it "fun". I can comfortably declare research has become a strange hobby of mine. From the SF Public Library to the bottomless, black-water regions of Google and online research tools I somehow retain access to thanks to either a liberally giving or profoundly inept undergrad technical administration, I've been spending many of my off-writing hours researching for none other than the sake and enjoyment of researching. Just in the past week alone I've studied and read up on the following, spending a few days on each: Pinochet's stranglehold in Argentina; the Shoah and the horrors of WWII in way too much harrowing detail; Indian Removal Act in America and the ensuing Trail of Tears; occultism and Christo-mysticism; random newspaper clippings form the early 1900s, odd, touching, quirky, frustrating and often heartbreaking stories and advertisements found in the Chronicle's library-preserved pages; nuclear fusion and recreating dinosaurs from blood cells, the two of which have nothing to do with each other but are equally as fascinating; and the Greatful Dead. Somehow, all of the above has been influencing my work at large, sometimes in subtle and other times in more conspicuous ways. But that's neither here nor there.

The only reason I provide such a self-important preamble is to equip the following quotes with a context, to answer the likely question that even I myself began to to wonder, which is in fact what prompted this entire post: how on Earth did I stumble upon quotes about Jon Weir, the Grateful Dead's inventive rhythm guitarist, a band whom I've never had much interest in listening to much less learning about? And I'm quite thankful for the discovery.

"He's not a trouble maker as much as he's just different from other people. He was definitely then, as now, marching to his own drummer, and it may not be a drummer."

"Using a commonplace object with a specific tradition differently from how everyone else has used it is an indication of a singular mind."

"I was impressed by their applying themselves so dilligently to finding new ways of handling familiar material, by their responsiveness to each other, their inventiveness, their belief that form would emerge from a context that was still unfocused, and their faith in the music as a means of invoking an intensified and elevated version of experience."

All three of these are interesting to me as examinations and portrayals of an artist and that artist's approach to art. Echoes of Pound's "Make It New" declaration, for sure. Weir wasn't an accomplished guitarist when he began; he wasn't even all that formally trained. He learned to play guitar, and he learned to play in what I imagine was only the most natural way for him to approach the instrument. That's originality, is it not? Devoid of pretense, simply an individual taking his or her own individual approach to their craft and making blissful magic out of it as a result.

Hemingway, when asked to discuss his iconic style in an interview with The Paris Review in 1954, said this: "I might say what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardness in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people can only see the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. " Or consider Faulker's revered style in The Sound and The Fury, where he used four entirely different narratives to tell one story and was heralded as a genius for it, when his own thoughts on the matter were less congratulatory: he tried to write a short story four times and, succeeding none, lumped them together into one. After some serious editing and consolidation and the implementation of compelling interior dialogue to link everything together, voila - masterpiece. What's generally regarded as an artist's brilliant style is none other than that artist's only way, his or her most natural, immediate, necessary, honest, and, perchance at first, ugly means of expression.

"Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom"