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By Root 719 0

first. That’s the only way to prevent “empty or naive generalizations,” she said. Really it takes more than that, though, since nobody can be good at all the arts, even enough to get a fair sense of them. What we have to do, if we want to say true or wise things about art, is choose the arts we are good enough at to enjoy a few real moments of successfully creating within the art form or medium. But even then, the real artists themselves must be our teachers. So when we later look at art philosophically, aiming to understand how it is created, we need to begin with what the artists say along with what they show us. The uncomfortable truth is that Mick and Keith are doing something you and I can’t do (not at anything like their level), and that’s why we have to listen to their version of what’s happening.

Artists have peculiar ways of talking about what they do, however. Here is Keith, for example, on the question of rhythm:

There’s something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it. We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats per minute. The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then you cross onto another track, the beat moves. It echoes something in the human body. So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us. The human body will feel rhythms even when there’s not one. Listen to “Mystery Train” by Elvis Presley. One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it. It’s just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm. Rhythm really only has to be suggested. Doesn’t have to be pronounced. That’s where they got it wrong with “this rock” and “that rock.” It’s got nothing to do with rock. It’s to do with roll. (Life, p. 244)

This is all over the place. I think I know what he’s getting at here, but this is a string of insights and reports and examples and assertions all tangled together. I’m sure it’s all true, in its context, properly qualified, and so on, but it isn’t in the artist’s temper or among his purposes to explain it all. Langer says:

The philosopher must know the arts, so to speak, “from the inside.” But no one can know all the arts in this way. This entails an arduous amount of non-academic study. [In other words, you have to learn to play guitar or something.] His teachers, furthermore, are artists, and they speak their own language, which largely resists translation into the more careful, literal vocabulary of philosophy. This is likely to arouse his impatience. But it is, in fact, impossible to talk about art without adopting to some extent the language of the artists. The reason why they talk as they do [see Keith above] is not entirely (though it is partly) because they are discursively untrained and popular in their speech; nor [are] they [simply] misled by “bad speech habits” [just the beginning of Keith’s bad habits I’m sure] … Their vocabulary is metaphorical because it has to be plastic and powerful to let them speak their serious and often difficult thoughts. They cannot see art as “merely” this-or-that easily comprehensible phenomenon; they are too interested in it to make concessions to language. (Feeling and Form, p. ix)

Artists really do try to understand what they’re doing, and that’s because they are in constant pursuit of the end product, trying to nail down whatever it is that can pull the best stuff into concrete existence, from all the possibilities. Maybe it’s only rock’n’roll, but that doesn’t matter unless we all like it.

Genius

Even at that, things are still pretty mysterious in the creative process. Maybe it’s better to look at a creative collaboration because at least you get two takes on what happens. That strategy also adds complexities, sure enough, but it may be easier to get at the core of the creative process by triangulating : place yourself at one angle in the triangle and watch the other two move around you. Whatever