By The Forge Of Process

It’s not the product, it’s the process. It’s the main ingredient of future becomings. It’s an intoxication with the pith of potential. The reward is in ripping a hole in the fabric of the known world and stepping out into lunar dust. It’s a moment of great euphoria, and the hum of the peculiar is emphatic. It’s weird. It’s soft. It’s wet. It’s rich in nectar. It’s got scales and wings and eighty-two-thousand cataclysmic incongruities flowing freely in a jar of curtsies. It’s terrifying and green and magnificent and actual. Because it’s a metaphor and has nothing in common with the embroideries of the orthodox. It has the texture of immediate experience, and smells of musk and violence and latitude. It trickles insistent craving, that zest for existence that propels an octopus across the sea floor, or explodes into flight like a flock of turmoil.

It’s in the creation of something that the excitements and frustrations of trying to bring something new into the world—something for which there is no plan or map or formula—that the essence of the creative act is found. The product, even if it’s a glorious success, is nothing by comparison. It’s always a disappointment. Even when it’s not disappointing. It’s disappointing. And you’ve got to move on to something else immediately. No cocaine was ever this exciting, or demanding. The need to create is a powerful compulsion. It causes embarrassments and disruptions. It leads to insane wealth or catastrophic poverty. It’s intense. It’s extreme. It’s potent as a jukebox in Kalamazoo, tragic as a rodeo clown, and kinky as a kakapo.

“At times I fancied I knew how to draw, at times I saw that I knew nothing. During the third winter I even realized that I probably would never learn to paint. I thought of sculpture and started engraving. I have always been on good terms only with music,” wrote Paul Klee in his diary. I know that frustration. I’ve lived with it since I was in my late teens. It never goes away. There’s no medication for it, other than running as hard as you can and taking a leap over the wall.

Can AI feel frustration? Does AI have feeling, as yet? Will it one day have feeling? Will its feelings be the feelings of humans or the feelings of some entirely different synthetic consciousness, feelings so unspeakably different that the nothing in the human mind can begin to approximate their heft and color, their range and settings, their durations and volatility?

Processes are interconnected and constantly changing. Each creative act is a universe incarnating itself. As soon as you step into a language you can feel the cool heavenly gases of starry nebulae swirling around your ankles. You’re weightless now because you’re creating something. You’re creating something as you read these words. Your response to these words is a creative act. And you’re probably going to come up with things to say that are far more marvelous than these endeavors to break reality into morsels of savory enigma and are going to make me feel jealous. Jealousy isn’t very creative. I would avoid it. Jealousy is good at intrigues and plots. But leave that up to the Big-League writers with big stacks of books at all the major airports. What’s going on here is an imposition of pattern on experience. My experience and your experience may have some things in common, will almost certainly have some things in common, syllables, for example, and belly dancers and ice cream, but what they don’t have in common is the one fugitive ingredient that fuels the endless appetite of creativity. And it isn’t on the menu.