| Catching the Big Fish (Lynch, 2006) and The War of Art (Pressfield, 2002) |
[Jun. 25th, 2009|10:39 am] |
I recently read, by accident rather than design, two books of similar form and intent whose authors' sensibilities could scarcely differ more. Both volumes are, broadly speaking, thinnish tracts on overcoming the difficulties of the creative process. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is penned by David Lynch, director of such beloved films as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr.; The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle comes from Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and a bunch of books where dudes battle it out in antiquity but use modern swears. For the malady of creative blockage, Lynch prescribes transcendental meditation (which is more often written as "Transcendental Meditation", but I don't quite understand the rationale for the capitalization). Pressfield's solution leans toward metaphorical and/or literal gods, angels and muses.
Perhaps the richest similarity between the books is how they both inspired and weirded me out in equal measure, by different means. The most striking resemblance appears in their formats: both are more or less assemblies of single pages topped with a semi-grand subject heading and middled-to-bottomed with a related rumination. Here's the text of an entire page, randomly selected, from Lynch's book:DESIRE
Desire is like bait. When you're fishing, you have to have patience. You bait your hook, and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in — those ideas.
The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it's a little fish — a fragment of an idea — that fish will draw in other fish, and they'll hook onto it. Then you're on your way. Soon there are more and more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire. (Echoes of Werner Herzog's "fires start other fires" and "one dwarf knows another" there.)
Now a page from Pressfield's:RESISTANCE IS INSIDIOUS
Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is protean, It will assume any form, if that's what it takes to deceive you. It will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man. Resistance has no conscience. It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned. If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit. Thus, by the accretion of such musings, do the books make their cases. These summaries are perhaps rough, but Lynch seems to argue that creative failures stem from consciousnesses insufficiently expanded and thus unable to reach the depth where the really good ideas — the "big fish" — swim. His recommendation — to his mind, the only possible cure — is a good daily session or two of T to the M. (He's opted, for the past 35 years, for twenty minutes in the morning and twenty in the evening.) Pressfield pins the would-be creator's failure to create on capital-R "Resistance", a banner he hangs over nearly all instances of human fear and indolence. He suggests — nay, demands — that the reluctant doer confront Resistance for what it is and recognize the higher purpose he was meant to fulfill. And then fulfill it.
Both are composed in prose one might call "straightforward," but we're talking about two very aesthetically different ideas of straightforwardness. Lynch, well known for the contrast between his personal gee-whiz plainspokenness — so normal that it almost comes around the other side to weird again — and the bizarre, haunting abstractions of his oeuvre, goes long on sincerity and, possibly as a result, short on polish. "I love dream logic; I just like the way dreams go," he writes. "But I have hardly ever gotten ideas from dreams. I get more ideas from music, or from just walking around." Clunky, maybe, but not without its charm. "Sitting in front of a fire," he writes, "is mesmerizing. It's magical. I feel the same way about electricity. And smoke. And flickering lights." Here he is on his city of residence:I love Los Angeles. I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you're there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there's something about that light that's not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don't know why. It's different from the light in other places. The light in Philadelphia, even in the summer, is not nearly as bright. It was the light that brought everybody to L.A. to make films in the early days. It's still a beautiful place. Though it provides a similarly uncomplicated reading experience, Pressfield's tone evinces much harder labor, oscillating between blunted I'm-tellin'-it-like-it-is harshness and grand, high-flown proclamations about humanity's majesty, between base colloquialisms, goofy dad humor and paeans to the sweeping vistas of potential human accomplishment. This sounds sort of awful and prospects aren't exactly improved by such unpromising packaging elements as a ridiculous metallic cover and an introduction by Robert McKee, but the book proves palatable enough in the event. Here's a taste of Pressfield on Resistance in the everyday guise of procrastination: Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it's the easiest to rationalize. We don't tell ourselves, "I'm never going to write that symphony." Instead we say, "I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow."
[ ... ]
The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.
Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance.
This second, we can sit down and do our work. There's another multi-layered similarity here: I think both Lynch and Pressfield are essentially correct, though the manner in which they express their ultimately sound positions carries, at least for me, an odd aftertaste. Despite his insistence that his words are intended for the religious and secular alike, Pressfield's repeated invocation of the godstuff and ultimate point about how humans must defeat Resistance in order to achieve what the entity that created them intended. (He accompanies one of his salvos of religious terminology with the squirm-inducing single-sentence-paragraph aside, "Does that make you uncomfortable?") For Lynch, transcendental meditation is the solution, and I'm no happier with his talk about "vedic science" than I am with Pressfield's angels and god-given missions, and the sprawling TM organization — hence, I guess, those caps — bears that distinctly culty combination of implausibly big promises and a need for your money.
But. Generalize their messages up a level or two, abstract away their most specific, unsettling oddities and you get what I would call a worthwhile, even necessary recommendations. Clear your mind of unnecessary junk. Widen your awareness to capture the most and best raw idea material. Cultivate a habit that inculcates self-discipline. Make your mind a nice place to be, so that the external world will seem less threatening. Fear is the strongest barrier to success, but it can be brute-forced through. That fear, as well as all the other, lesser enemies standing between creator and creation, lies within. Your creative work can't be relegated to secondary status; you've got to treat it like a job. Solid stuff; solid enough to transcend the weird ways in which it's couched. |
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