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.
No comments:
Post a Comment