How TASK AVOIDANCE works

A couple of weeks ago I posted about how my meditations had led me to the realization that — despite not having an AUDIENCE for my work — what I really wanted to do was compose.

There were a couple of candidates for these mythical musical works, but the most likely was SUN TRUE FIRE, the large-scale choral work based on the text of a spam comment on one of my blogs a couple of years ago. Since my new attitude is that I'm not going to worry about possible performance, I'm free to go as big or as weird as I like.  Something very freeing about that.

However, just as my brain settled into that attitude and I began listening for ideas while walking around Albuquerque and Santa Fe, my inner Lichtenbergian struck.

"Rather than composing a new work that apparently interests you," he murmured, "why not write four new books instead?" 

Seems reasonable, yes?

To be fair, one of those books was already in the hopper.  My publisher had already asked if I could go ahead and write the cocktails book by the fall, so that was a done deal.  I even had a WASTE BOOK done, which sat safely untouched in my computer satchel the entire trip.

And another, Lichtenbergianism for Kids, was kind of a no-brainer follow-up to our standard text.

Of the other two, one's just kind of a goof idea based on my trip to Temples of the Cosmos in Santa Fe: write a travel guide book like the ones to which my Lovely First Wife is addicted, only make it about hippie woo sites.  When you're on the road and you need your chakras balanced, where can you go? — that kind of thing. Definitely a back-burner idea.

And that leaves the book that I'd really like to write: [title to be determined]: lessons from folk artists. My two visits to the Museum of International Folk Art (so far) have flooded my brain with the fact that human beings are born to Make the Thing That Is Not. We cannot help it, and every single object in the MIFA is an indictment against anyone who says they "can't even draw a straight line."

The point is that the objects in the museum were not created by "artists" who sat in studios to make them. They were made by people who just needed to make a Thing: a figurine, a stuffed animal, a wall hanging, a devotional object, a toy, a mask, a decoration.

As I said over on my personal blog, this has nothing to do with academic, classical standards. This is not what a man playing a guitar looks like, and it's certainly not what a guitar-playing rat looks like.

So the book would hammer home the point, over and over, that your lack of actual artistic training — or your lack of skill in creating "realistic" looking art — has nothing to do with your ability to create art. All you have to do to Make the Thing That Is Not is to Make the Thing That Is Not.

This book will require some thought, some permissions/collaboration with MIFA, and probably a grant or two to pay for my travel/research.  ::sigh::

But at least I won't have to compose a spam-comment-oratorio, right?