Sketchbook for the Project (Part 2 of 3)

The following is an excerpt from a 17 October 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. 

Philip Glass "20.IX Book of Longing" by MITO SettembreMusica - originally posted to Flickr as 20.IX Book of Longing. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Art:

"Sketchbook for the project" is exactly right. And yes, it may very well be the project, full stop. 

The difference is that we open that sketchbook for everyone to see. This is nothing new; a seed of this has been present from the very beginning of the project and perhaps from much earlier. 

It's only now that we're beginning to understand it. 

We're letting everyone have a glimpse at the formlessness that is, in some sense, a precondition for creation. The sculptural aspects of the blog provide the requisite Apollonian stage through which we can gaze into the abyss and not be destroyed in the process. And Nietzsche asserts that the Apollonian will be "energized and raised aloft" by this encounter--another explanation for why generosity of this type generates something! 

Paradoxically, the best way to get the plastic project up and running is keep "going back to the well," that is, highlighting that moment at which form comes out of formlessness. 

There's always the fear that we might devolve into what my college housemates dubbed a "Mind Party," where we end up wandering the streets with an untuned, 2-string guitar singing snatches of Christmas carols to bewildered neighbors until someone offers us Rice Krispy Treats. 

Or, even worse, "The Whitewater Tapes." Not even going to go into that one. 

Of course, this story originates from those days, when I was getting down to some artistically entropic states that only now, nearly 20 years later, am I "capitalizing on" in any appreciable way. That is the exact moment at which the first Arthur White songs came into being. That's when I built the cardboard tunnels, snaking along the sandy floor of our Michigan basement. That's when my friend and I wrote The Principles of Theory: A Systematic Approach to Ideas. 

And none of that material ever saw the light of day, except for The Principles of Theory, which was unceremoniously presented to Philip Glass (without any contact information or way for him to follow up, of course). 

I think the difference between then and now is the persistently Apollonian intentionality of the current project. We need to keep on approaching this formless state with the goal of containing it, of framing it, of shaping it into something, of getting it to annunciate itself more clearly...not letting it languish in its formless, inarticulate fecundity. 

I like the idea of explaining the project somewhere on the site. Maybe we can start working on the wording for that. That said, there's also much damage to be done by following up Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey with 2010: The Year We Make Contact. As usual, we'll have to affect the usual Dickinsonian tack of "tell the truth but tell it slant." 

I like the idea of JamKazam too and I think it's a good fit for this current impulse. Keep me updated on that!