My bio used to include the phrase “Her musical output responds to the personal discoveries she makes from allowing her mind to roam laterally in undirected exploration of the world.”
I removed that line during this year’s broader effort to de-head-up-my-ass-ify my professional presentation. But this “undirected exploration” remains central to how I work—it’s what’s so great about being a composer (and, incidentally, why having fun is so easy when you have a library card).
Every autumn I share this poem with my composition workshop students at Luther College:
“On Top” by Gary Snyder
All this new stuff goes on top
turn it over, turn it over
wait and water down
from the dark bottom
turn it inside out
let it spread through
Sift down even.
Watch it sprout.
A mind like compost.
And Ursula K. Le Guin embellishes:
“Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in the night, the slant of light on the wall of a child’s room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the novelist’s personal compost bin, where it combines, recombines, changes; gets dark, mulchy, fertile, turns into ground. A seed falls into it, the ground nourishes the seed with the richness that went into it, and something grows. But what grows isn’t an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. It’s a new thing, a new whole. It’s made up.”
Yes. Like Mahler’s proverbial symphony, I embrace everything. For the first two-thirds of my life, my mind’s diet was censored (often self-censored) and my imagination suffered. (And as a free-of-charge side-note, this lack of imaginative depth resulting from a paucity of inputs constitutes, in my mind, one of the many reasons for the pedantic, unidimensional quality of moralistic “art,” be it super cringe evangelical Christian film or achingly politically sensitive TV that functions as little more than a social primer. Both are suffocated by the same quasi-propaganda quality that results when the creator is more focused on hammering home their vision of righteous behavior than on offering an honest artistic response to the complexities of our cultural reality. …Alright, stepping off the soapbox now.)
Finally I ceased censoring my sources (don’t be careful, little eyes—chill, it’s ok) and let my mind wander where it wants to wander. It turns out that when you set the mind loose like this it just naturally does its thing, generating ideas and uncovering dialogue between sources and synthesizing new perspectives and creative insight. Indeed, that’s how Cosmic Fragments was born.
Even Nassim Taleb describes “the job of a scholar” as to “read in bed in the mornings, write at a desk in front of a window, take long walks (slowly), drink espressos (mornings), chamomile tea (afternoons), Lebanese wine (evenings), and Muscat wines (after dinner), take more long walks (slowly), argue with friends and family members (but never in the morning), and read (again) in bed before sleeping…”
While I’m grateful for the robust work ethic that my upbringing imparted to me, its not-so-great consequence has been the psychological difficulty I’ve encountered in trying to shed the guilt associated with spending time “unproductively” during weekday daylight hours. But now I understand the needs of my mind well enough that I’ve succeeded in redefining “productivity” for myself, and I unashamedly engage in undirected exploration upon waking. I’ve also improved at harnessing my need to feel productive in service of my undirected intentions: for instance, beginning the day with a checklist of items I can cross off to satiate the part of my brain that feels happy when I “get stuff done.”
Before breakfast checklist:
- 10 minutes learn a song
- 10 minutes practice harp (new material)
- 10 minutes composing something new
- 10 minutes score study
- 10 minutes writing
- write myself a letter
- transpose chord progressions
At last, I have the permissions and systems in place for finding and internalizing new material, and I’m experiencing the most artistically productive season in my life thus far.
~ Potential objections ~
(because the most accurate belief-formation happens when you also ask why something might not be true)
…Can one over-fertilize?
Yes, I think so. If you only throw things into the compost heap and never create, exploration becomes nothing more than distraction. But that’s not the case for me right now.
…Is this a responsible way to spend time?
Well, this “undirected exploration” thing—as far as I’m concerned, it’s a matter of putting on my own oxygen mask first.