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resonantI played the violin in high school. Before you can play a violin, you have to tune it, which requires patience and concentration. It doesn't take long, but you can't rush it. When I experienced hypnosis later in life, it felt a little bit like tuning a violin.
You also have to put resin on the bow, which I always found very pleasurable -- the piney smell of the resin block, the velvety friction you felt as you drew the bow across it, the faint stickiness it left on your fingers.
A lot of art forms have these rituals, these bits of mindless, but pleasantly tactile, noodling that have to be done in addition to the intensely creative work.
Painters mix paints, clean brushes, stretch and prepare canvases. Calligraphers draw baseline guides before writing and erase them afterwards. Singers warm up their voices; dancers warm up their muscles. Even people who do art on computer can get that trancelike feeling while they're building perspective guides or cleaning up scans.
There must have been a time when writing had rituals like that, too -- choosing a quill and cutting it, maybe, or mixing ink, or cutting paper to size. (Things like outlining and research seem more like part of the creative work to me -- like playing scales, as opposed to resining a bow.)
Opening an AppleWorks document or clicking up a little more lead in the mechanical pencil just isn't the same.
You also have to put resin on the bow, which I always found very pleasurable -- the piney smell of the resin block, the velvety friction you felt as you drew the bow across it, the faint stickiness it left on your fingers.
A lot of art forms have these rituals, these bits of mindless, but pleasantly tactile, noodling that have to be done in addition to the intensely creative work.
Painters mix paints, clean brushes, stretch and prepare canvases. Calligraphers draw baseline guides before writing and erase them afterwards. Singers warm up their voices; dancers warm up their muscles. Even people who do art on computer can get that trancelike feeling while they're building perspective guides or cleaning up scans.
There must have been a time when writing had rituals like that, too -- choosing a quill and cutting it, maybe, or mixing ink, or cutting paper to size. (Things like outlining and research seem more like part of the creative work to me -- like playing scales, as opposed to resining a bow.)
Opening an AppleWorks document or clicking up a little more lead in the mechanical pencil just isn't the same.
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(no subject)
Date: 9/4/02 05:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9/5/02 07:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9/6/02 05:41 pm (UTC)But if they developed a technology of direct download from brain to narrative sometime in the future, people might look back with nostalgia on the buzzes and whirrs of the computer booting up, the feel of the mouse in hand as you clicked through to the last file, the phosphor visual of the glowing screen, the feel of the plastic keys under your fingers, the ritual of opening the new document and formatting the page numbers or whatever it is you have to do in preparation for committing words.
And maybe the guy cutting his quill and sanding his vellum thought wistfully about the days when storytelling started with a group gathering at a hearth, the smell of woodsmoke and food cooking...
(no subject)
Date: 9/8/02 11:44 am (UTC)Also, your post reminded me that in my childhood I sometimes had to do various dimly remembered messy things with the inked-cloth ribbon of our old manual typewriter, a task that I'm not nostalgic for in the least.
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Date: 9/9/02 07:12 pm (UTC)Inky, icky, tactile. Perfect.