Is Creativity a Thing?
Electromagnetism, Rick Rubin, and personal Jabberwockys
Is Creativity a Thing?
Electromagnetism, Rick Rubin, and personal Jabberwockys
Radio waves—invisible photons traveling at the speed of light in all directions, encoded with information that can then be received, decoded, and observed as sound, picture, video, text—have and always will be utterly mind-blowing to me.
I watched over my father’s shoulder as he’d take apart his tube stereo receiver, clean the components, and put it back together. In college he was the local radio station disc jockey. He beamed Elvis, Buddy Holly, Perry Como, Bob Dylan, and his voice all over rural Oklahoma.
Somewhere in the cosmos, I suppose, if someone or something had a sensitive enough antenna, they could hear my father’s voice giving the temperature on some day in 1962 before dropping the needle on “Peggy Sue.”
Isn’t that wonderful?
Recently, a student gave me a copy of The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Rubin is a record producer and cofounder of Def Jam Records—think Run-D.M.C., Beastie Boys—but he has produced for everyone from Johnny Cash to Lady Gaga. He looks like Ayahuasca Jesus ordering In-N-Out Burger on his way home from a MAGA yoga retreat.
The Creative Act is part self-help book, part religious theory, arguing that creativity is a physical element of the universe that can be tapped into and harnessed. He believes this explains why art experiences certain periods and why artists from disparate regions of the earth, with no knowledge of one another, can explore what we later categorize as Realism, Expressionism, or Surrealism.
Creativity, as Rubin describes it, is like a cacophony of radio waves vibrating throughout the universe, waiting to be received by the sensitive antennas of our egoless brains.
I like this idea. I don’t think it’s true, but storytelling and religion teach us—for better or worse—that something doesn’t have to be true to be real or helpful.
I am at my most creative when—as Rick Rubin suggests—I remove myself from the process of creating. It is the dissolution of ourselves and our ego that makes us the most receptive to the cosmic creative transmissions from the universe.
I have two examples of this.
I stutter, and stuttering can be a son of a bitch when you talk for a living. When I am anxious, nervous, or even aware of the fact that I, Jeremy, stutter, I stutter more. But when I tune past the static of my own thoughts and insecurities and concentrate on the purpose of my character’s words or, more telling, when I simply forget that I stutter, I stutter less, if at all.
It truly feels like I’m riding the wave of some other signal that is not me, yet somehow more me at the same time. I feel a creative abandon.
Another offer of proof for Rubin’s theory is my recent—ahem—attempt to write a novel in the month of November. I have never been more motivated and inspired for a creative endeavor at which I ultimately unequivocally failed. Thankfully, I know exactly why I epically nuts-bucked this project.
I tied writing the book to my ultimate fraud complex: posting on social media. Knowing that views, engagements, thumbsies, mimsies, and zillows were so important to the “business” of being an artist these days, I took my vorpal sword in hand to slay the Jabberwocky of Instagram.
But for me to be creative—just like with my stutter—I have to get out of my own way. There’s too much bullshit surrounding my perception of me, and social media is the 2500 kW Russian Taldom transmitter broadcasting the noise of my insecurities into the universe and drowning out every frequency of creativity available to me.
If creativity is a thing, intrinsic to itself, vibrating throughout the universe, then I am certainly not a transmitter.
No, I need regular maintenance—to be taken apart and put back together again—in order to receive clear signals free of static.
I feel most creative decoding the universe, not broadcasting my own noise.
Perhaps, if I listen closely enough, I might just hear…
“…clear skies today with a high of 85—this is KHEN…”
Yes and yes and yes to every last word.