Lichtenbergian Precepts: Gestalt

After you produce all your crappy art in your ABORTIVE ATTEMPT, then it’s time to step back and see what’s wrong with it.

Of course, it might be that you step back and there’s nothing wrong with it. If this happens to you, do not be alarmed. You are probably asleep and dreaming, and that is a temporary situation.

In real life, however, there’s almost always something “wrong” with your ABORTIVE ATTEMPT. Let’s face it, you started Making the Thing That Is Not with the idea that you didn’t have to make it any good — you just had to make it. Now you fix it.

GESTALT (geh-SHTAHLT) is a German word meaning “shape”; in English (and in psychology and art in particular) it means “the shape/sense of the whole.” In Lichtenbergianism, it simply means that after we create our ABORTIVE ATTEMPT, we look to see what’s missing from it. What would it take to nudge it towards completion?

Does the painting need more blue? Does that musical phrase need to be repeated? Does that cocktail need more or less green Chartreuse?

Here’s an example from my William Blake’s Inn. When I was composing “10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” there was this text:

“I shall garland my room,” said the tiger,
”With a few of these emerald lights.”
”I shall give up sleeping forever,” I said.
”I shall never part day from night.”

You can follow along at home, starting at measure 60. We’re deep in the Milky Way, and our travelers are experiencing the ultimate wonder of the stars on every side. Originally I set the entire quatrain together, but (as you can read about here) it just wasn’t right. It felt rushed, and not at all like the musical climax of the central poem of the entire piece.

That’s GESTALT: the recognition that what you’ve hammered out still needs some hammering. With “Milky Way,” I took a crowbar to the text, threw in a crescendo, then separated the narrator’s lines with two measures of a motive that I use in the bridge before this passage. I went subito piano, added a third voice with the four-note theme, and did some fairly traditional building of tension. Turn-turn-kick-turn, YES, IT WILL WORK! [1]

So once you’ve stepped back and GESTALTED all over the mess you made, it’s all fixed now, right? Hahahahaha no. More to come!

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[1] This is a quote from Mel Brooks’ genius movie The Producers. If you haven’t seen it, go see it.

You can read a whole lot more about GESTALT and how great minds have used it to create their works in Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.