Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam

My brother Dan says he’s trying to get famous and asks people to share his song. There is only one small problem: he posted it six years ago, and after all that time it currently has a grand total of 14 views and 13 subscribers.

Dan’s birthday is coming up on October 8, so I thought it might be fun to see if we could suddenly make his six-year-old dream come true.

Watch the video. Give him a like. Leave him a comment telling him how great the song is. Subscribe to his channel. And, most importantly, repost this and ask your friends to do the same.

I’m curious to see what might happen if a six-year-old video with 14 views suddenly starts getting hundreds, or maybe thousands, of views for no apparent reason.

Share

Dan Touchon and the Great American Pandemic Song

There are songs that capture their historical moment immediately. There are others whose importance becomes apparent only after the dust has settled and civilization has had sufficient time to recognize what happened to it.

Dan Touchon’s Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam belongs, I would suggest, to the latter category.

Created during the pandemic, the song initially appears to be a piece of cheerful nonsense, a homemade assemblage of percussive words, jokes, rhymes, social observations, whiskey, honey, bourgeois decadence, bathroom deals, theological reassurance and impending catastrophe.

This interpretation, while understandable, is inadequate.

What Touchon has actually given us is a compressed vernacular history of Western civilization at precisely the moment when Western civilization found itself sitting at home wondering whether it had remembered to wash its groceries.

Consider the opening:

Chop, chop, hammer, hammer, slam slam
Hung out to dry like a Virginia ham

Immediately we are placed in a world of labor.

Chop.

Hammer.

Slam.

These are among humanity’s oldest technological verbs. The axe, hammer and impact precede the computer, the corporation and the algorithm by millennia. Before Homo sapiens could develop derivatives markets, social media or customer-service telephone trees, somebody had to hit something with something else.

Touchon returns us to this primal condition.

But then, astonishingly, the human being becomes the product:

Hung out to dry like a Virginia ham.

The worker has become meat.

Marx would presumably have had something to say about this.

Yet Touchon refuses to remain inside the predictable confines of Marxist critique. No sooner has the Virginia ham appeared than someone politely asks whether mustard might be desired.

The answer is decisive:

No ma’am.

Whiskey, however, is acceptable.

Thus, within four lines, Touchon has moved from industrial labor to commodification, regional American foodways, hospitality and alcohol.

Bob Dylan might have required three verses.

Touchon needs four lines.

The Great Pandemic Dislocation

The historical circumstances matter.

During the pandemic, ordinary categories collapsed into one another. The office became the bedroom. The kitchen became the school. The dining table became the conference room. The computer became workplace, theater, pub, newsstand, marketplace, social club and nervous system.

Time itself became peculiar.

Tuesday became difficult to distinguish from Thursday.

Against this background, Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam makes remarkable sense.

The song does not proceed through conventional narrative because pandemic life did not proceed through conventional narrative. Instead, it advances through abrupt clusters of activity:

Chop. Hammer. Slam.
Wiggle. Giggle. Go.
Tinkle. Wink. Cha-cha.
Bam. Gitcha. Boom.

These are simultaneously words and sounds. More importantly, they are instructions. Touchon gives us a civilization reduced to verbs.

Do something.
Move.
Hit something.
Laugh.
Dance.
Explode.
Continue.

There is a long tradition behind this technique. Doo-wop famously turned apparently meaningless syllables into the structural substance of songs. The Rivingtons’ Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow made nonsense vocalization itself the central musical event, and the Trashmen transformed related material into the manic 1963 hit Surfin’ Bird.

Touchon belongs to this august lineage.

But where Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow gives us the exuberance of postwar popular culture, Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam gives us its exhausted descendant.

Papa oom mow mow.

Chop wiggle tinkle bam.

Sixty years of American civilization separate the two.

One can only speculate what happened.

The Four Movements

Formally, the composition might be understood as a miniature four-movement symphony.

The first movement is Chop.

Chop belongs to work, division and destruction. One chops wood. One chops food. One chops something larger into smaller pieces.

The second movement is Wiggle.

Here the body reappears. Wiggle is playful, erotic, childish and fundamentally unserious. Having established the world of labor, Touchon immediately destabilizes it through bodily movement.

Then comes Tinkle.

Tinkle is fascinating because it hovers between sound and action. Bells tinkle. Glass tinkles. A piano may be tinkled upon. The word also possesses a somewhat less elevated bodily meaning.

Touchon leaves the matter unresolved.

Finally comes Bam.

Bam requires no interpretation. Something has happened.

The architecture is therefore extraordinary:

Chop: civilization constructs.
Wiggle: civilization entertains itself.
Tinkle: civilization decorates itself.
Bam: civilization blows itself up.

One might reasonably ask whether Spengler could have improved upon this.

Enter the Bourgeoisie

Then, without warning, Touchon abandons Virginia ham and honey and enters political philosophy:

It’s a fine mess we created by the bourgeois.

The appearance of “bourgeois” is startling. Nothing has prepared us for it.

That is precisely why it works.

The bourgeoisie does not arrive accompanied by Marx, Engels or an explanatory footnote. It simply wanders into the song between “cha-cha” and “scrimshaw.”

This may be the most accurate representation of ideology in contemporary life ever written.

We encounter political ideas exactly this way: sandwiched between entertainment, consumer products, fragments of news, advertisements, jokes and somebody dancing.

And then comes one of the song’s great existential propositions:

Nothing lasts forever, not even a scrimshaw.

Here we must stop.

A scrimshaw is already an object haunted by time. Traditionally associated with sailors carving or engraving whale bone or teeth, it belongs to an older maritime culture of long voyages, handwork, waiting and storytelling.

Touchon could have written:

Nothing lasts forever, not even love.
Too easy.

Not empires.
Predictable.

Not mountains.
Sentimental.

Instead: Not even a scrimshaw.

The specificity makes the line strangely convincing.
Of course the scrimshaw will disappear.
Everything will.

The whale.
The sailor.
The ship.
The person who carved it.
The person who owned it.
The civilization that placed it in a museum.
The museum.
The label beside it.
Eventually the language in which the label was written.

Touchon has smuggled impermanence into a novelty song.

From Dada to Revolution 9

At this point we should acknowledge the avant-garde tradition.

Dada understood more than a century ago that when civilization becomes sufficiently absurd, a perfectly reasonable artistic response is to become more absurd than civilization.

Meaning can be dismantled.
Language can become material.
Words can become noises.
Noise can become composition.

This trajectory eventually passes through experimental music, musique concrète and sound collage. In popular music, one of the most famous examples remains the Beatles’ Revolution 9, assembled from tape loops, speech, sound effects and manipulated fragments to create what John Lennon conceived as a sonic picture of revolution.

Lennon had: Number nine. Number nine. Number nine.

Touchon answers: Chop chop. Hammer hammer. Slam slam.

The comparison is irresistible.

Both works recognize repetition as a device capable of transforming ordinary language into sonic material. Repeat a word enough times and its semantic function begins to weaken. Eventually we stop asking what the word means and begin hearing its shape.

Chop.
Chop.
Hammer.
Hammer.
Slam.
Slam.

Language becomes percussion.

Then Everything Goes Wrong

By the fourth section, the song has darkened considerably:

Bam, bam, gitcha, gitcha, boom, boom

The playful noises have become explosive. And now we encounter deals being made in bathrooms. It is an inspired image of institutional corruption because the bathroom is precisely where official architecture becomes unofficial.

The boardroom has minutes.
The bathroom does not.
History records the treaty.
History rarely records the conversation beside the urinal that made the treaty possible.
Touchon understands this.
Then comes catastrophe.
Stuff hits the fan.
It will consume.
And the resulting mess will require more than a broom.

We have moved from slapstick to apocalypse without changing vocabulary.

That movement is essential to understanding the song.

The pandemic itself had precisely this surreal quality. One moment people were discussing toilet paper and sourdough starters; the next they were discussing mortality statistics, supply chains, emergency powers and the possibility that normal life might not return for quite some time.

The ridiculous and terrifying occupied the same room.

So they do here.

The Final Turn: Theology

And then Touchon does something genuinely interesting.

After labor, appetite, alcohol, flirtation, class conflict, destruction, political deals and catastrophe, he suddenly gives us God:

The Lord is in heaven
He’s still on His throne.

The scale of the song abruptly expands.

We began with Virginia ham.

We have arrived at the architecture of the cosmos.

This is an old American songwriting maneuver. Folk, country, gospel and blues repeatedly allow the mundane and metaphysical to inhabit the same stanza. Trains become salvation. Rivers become death. Roads become destiny. Home becomes heaven.

Consider The Weight by The Band. Robbie Robertson constructed a landscape populated by Nazareth, Moses, Luke, the Devil, Miss Fanny, Crazy Chester, dogs, travelers and favors. Robertson later connected the song to Luis Buñuel and the “impossibility of sainthood”: the predicament of someone trying to do good while human circumstances continually complicate the attempt.

Touchon operates in similarly unstable territory, although his route to metaphysics passes through mustard. That distinction should not be underestimated.

Robertson gives us the burden: Take the load.

Touchon gives us the millstone. And the millstone is heavier.

The Millstone

The concluding image may be the key to the entire composition:

But the world’s still not home
It’s more like a, more like a millstone.

This is a far more complicated image than it first appears.

A millstone is certainly heavy. Indeed, “a millstone around one’s neck” has become proverbial for an inescapable problem, obligation or burden. The phrase carries particularly severe biblical associations with judgment and punishment. To compare the world itself to a millstone is therefore to imagine existence as something enormously heavy that we somehow find ourselves carrying.

This immediately places Touchon in conversation with The Weight.

The Band gives us the burden that one person takes from another. Touchon gives us the millstone. But a millstone is not simply a heavy object.

A millstone is a machine of transformation.

The grain comes from the harvest. The grain is placed beneath the stone. The stone crushes it. Through that crushing, grain becomes flour. Flour becomes dough. Dough becomes bread.

And bread changes the imagery again.

Bread is among the oldest symbols of human sustenance. It is the product of agriculture, labor, patience, technology and community. It is “daily bread.” In Christian symbolism it becomes something still greater: nourishment transformed into sacrament.

Suddenly the theological line immediately preceding the millstone becomes important:

The Lord is in heaven
He’s still on His throne.

Heaven.
Millstone.
Grain.
Flour.
Bread.

The sequence begins to acquire an almost biblical resonance. And yet the process depends upon crushing. The grain cannot remain grain if it is to become bread.

The millstone is therefore simultaneously burden and transformation.

This is particularly striking in a song created during the pandemic. The pandemic itself functioned as a kind of historical millstone. Ordinary life was placed under enormous pressure. Work, family, government, medicine, education, religion, entertainment, commerce and personal relationships were all subjected to stresses that exposed their structures.

People discovered what broke.
They also discovered what endured.
And some things were transformed.

The millstone therefore suggests something more interesting than simple catastrophe. The pressure that threatens to crush us may also be the pressure through which something becomes something else.

This brings us back to the strange sequence announced by the title:

Chop.
Wiggle.
Tinkle.
Bam.

Perhaps these are the noises of life beneath the millstone.

We work.
We dance.
We make things.
We drink.
We flirt.
We quarrel.
We construct systems.
We tear systems down.
We make questionable deals in bathrooms.
We create messes that cannot be cleaned up with brooms.
We pray.

And meanwhile the great stone keeps turning.

This is where Touchon unexpectedly enters one of the oldest human symbolic systems: the cycle of harvest, grinding, making and eating.

Seed.
Earth.
Grain.
Harvest.
Millstone.
Flour.
Bread.
Body.
Then seed again.

The millstone does not travel anywhere. It revolves.

That distinguishes it beautifully from another great image of American popular music: the train.

The train moves down the line. The millstone moves in circles.
The train promises escape.
The millstone promises recurrence.
The train takes the traveler somewhere else.
The millstone transforms whatever passes through it.
And perhaps this explains why the singer says:

The world’s still not home.

We are not home because we are still inside the process. We are simultaneously the farmer, the grain, the miller, the stone and the person waiting for bread.

Which makes Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam something considerably stranger than a pandemic novelty song.

It becomes, whether its author intended it or not, a little cosmology of work and transformation.

The world is a millstone.
It burdens us.
It judges us.
It crushes us.
It feeds us.

And it keeps turning.

And Then, the Masterstroke

After all of this, after the bourgeoisie, impermanence, corruption, catastrophe, theology and the crushing weight of existence, Touchon returns to the beginning:

Chop chop, hammer hammer, slam slam.

Nothing has been resolved.
The worker returns to work.
The rhythm resumes.
The ham remains hanging.
Someone once again offers mustard.
The singer once again refuses.
The whiskey remains acceptable.

And then Dan Touchon delivers what may be one of the most understated conclusions in the history of the protest song:

Goodbye for now. See you later.

Not farewell.
Not amen.
Not the end.
See you later.

Civilization, apparently, will continue.

Perhaps that is the ultimate pandemic message of Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam.

After isolation, fear, political absurdity, domestic confinement, economic uncertainty and the sudden awareness that the enormous machinery of modern civilization might be considerably more fragile than previously advertised, the appropriate response is neither despair nor triumph.

It is:

See you later.

And perhaps that is why, when the history of twenty-first-century American music is finally written, future scholars will place Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam somewhere between The Weight, Surfin’ Bird, Revolution 9, the Book of Ecclesiastes and a man standing in his garage hitting something repeatedly with a hammer.

Whether Dan Touchon intended any of this is beside the point.

Great works have never been entirely successful at controlling their critics.

Chop.
Wiggle.
Tinkle.
Bam.

"Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."

William Shakespeare

Here’s song by my little brother Dan Touchon. He says he is trying to get famous in the video and is asking to share this song. I though it might be fun to share it and ask you to repost so that all of the sudden he gets a lot of views on this 6 year old video that currently has only 14 views over a 6 year period.
His birthday is coming up in a October 8. So leave him a ‘like’ and a comment telling him how great the song is and subscribe! (there are currently only 13 subscribers) Maybe he’ll feel encouraged to restart his music career or at least have some bragging rights that he got a lot of views on the video.

I painstakingly wrote down the lyrics. I think I got them right. In case you want to sing along…

Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam

Chop, chop, hammer, hammer, slam slam
Hung out to dry like a Virginia ham
Would you like some mustard? Huh, no ma’mam.
But if you have some whiskey, I’ll take a dram

Wiggle, wiggle, giggle, giggle, go, go
hey whoo, I need to take it slow.
I can’t be nice two days in a row.
But if you’ve got some honey I’ll give it a go.

Tinkle, tinkle, wink, wink, cha, cha
it’s a fine mess we created by the bourgeois
Nothing lasts forever not even a scrimshaw
So tear it down, we’ll give it a hoorah

Bam, bam, gitcha, gitcha, boom, boom
Can you believe all the deals made in the bathroom
If stuff hits the fan it is gonna consume
such a mess will take more than a broom.

he said she said give a dog a bone
the Lord is in heaven He’s still on His throne.
We may struggle, we may fight, we may groan
But the world’s still not home
It’s more like a, more like a mill stone.

so chop chop Hammer hammer slam slam
hung out to dry like a Virginia ham
Would you like some mustard? No, no ma’mam.
But if you have some whiskey, I’ll take a dram

Goodbye for now. See you later.

Happy upcoming birthday Dan!

It took me a while to see the message but reader pointed me to this article in relation to the discussion on consciousness:

Next Level Human

They Deleted A Major Study On Consciousness…. Why?

**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade…

Read more

3 months ago · 1447 likes · 301 comments · Dr. Jade Teta

I wrote back to Kathryn, the reader, this comment:

I just now found this message! Thanks for that link Kathryn. Yes, I think there is a singular something or non-something that lives as unmanifest being and that this unmanifest singularity somehow manifests itself in the physical universe as constant uniqueness. All of it - the manifest state - is composed of consciouness particulating as matter/time/space in a whole decentralized way operating everywhere at once through everything to discover and experience itself from every angle in infinite manyhood while at the same time everything is in a state of unified interconnected self-communication and coordination so that to even move one’s finger the entire universe must adjust to it. Some sort of self-entanglement. But it seem to me that this unmanifest entity that is one without a second uses manifestation to dream of being many - in order to have companionship with itself. So to say such a thing in human language is to immediately be telling a falsehood since language at it’s structural roots is based on the misunderstanding that we are not all this one being. Only IT can know ITself but at the root of all beings is only IT. Is that consciousness? Kind of. If this is true (more or less) IT can’t really be studied with scientific methods. Only directly experienced in unique unrepeatable ways beyond measurement [or proof].

This page, compiling many different translations of the opening chapter of the Tao te Ching, suggests the impossibility to communicate the Ineffable in language or for that matter even study it except to dissolve into it.

https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/tao-te-ching.htm

After writing the comment, I decided to develop it into the more formal article below.

The One Dreaming the Many

I propose, as a metaphysical intuition rather than a scientific claim, that behind or prior to the manifest universe there is a singular something, or perhaps non-something, that cannot properly be called a thing at all. It is unmanifest being, although even the word being may already say too much. It is one without a second, yet calling it “one” is misleading because one only has meaning where two is possible.

Manifestation may be understood as this undivided reality becoming apparent as multiplicity: matter, energy, space, time, life, thought, consciousness, and the innumerable forms and events of the universe. The remarkable characteristic of manifestation is constant uniqueness. Nothing occurs twice in precisely the same way. Every thing, being, event, perspective, and moment is a singular expression of the whole from a position that has never existed before and will never exist again.

In this sense, the One does not become many by dividing itself into genuinely separate pieces. It becomes many perspectivally, through infinite manyhood. Every manifestation is local and unique while remaining inseparable from the whole. What appears to us as a universe composed of separate entities might instead be understood as a decentralized field of self-relation, operating everywhere at once through everything. I think of this as a kind of self-entanglement, not in the technical sense used in physics, but as a philosophical image for an indivisible reality continually coordinating with itself.

Under such a view, even the smallest action is not entirely private. To move one’s finger is for the universe to be different than it was before. The universe does not contain an independent person who moves an independent finger. Rather, the whole universe is expressing itself locally as this person, this finger, this movement, at this particular moment.

Why should an undivided reality manifest at all? Here I can offer only a poetic speculation: perhaps the One dreams of being many in order to experience companionship with itself. A reality without a second has no Other to encounter. Manifestation creates the experience of otherness without requiring ultimate separation. Through multiplicity the One can encounter itself as stranger, lover, enemy, friend, animal, tree, stone, star, thought, and world. Separation may therefore be experientially real while not being ontologically final.

Is this underlying reality consciousness? Perhaps, but only if consciousness is understood as another inadequate word. Human consciousness involves memory, attention, perspective, subject and object, all of which already belong to manifestation. Our view, as humans, is necessarily human-centric anthropomorphism. What we call consciousness may instead be a local expression of something more fundamental for which language has no adequate term.

This leads to the central paradox. Language itself depends upon differentiation. Grammar divides reality into subjects and objects, actors and actions, this and that, self and other. To speak of the undivided therefore requires us to divide it. Even saying “IT knows ITself” creates a knower, an act of knowing, and something known. The statement contradicts what it attempts to describe.

The Tao Te Ching begins at precisely this threshold: what can be named is already not the nameless source itself. Language can point toward the ineffable, circle around it, contradict itself before it, or create conditions in which it might be intuited, but cannot contain it.

Nor do I present this view as something established by scientific evidence. Science depends upon observation, distinction, measurement, comparison, and reproducibility. If the reality proposed here precedes the distinction between observer and observed, then it cannot straightforwardly become an object of scientific investigation. This does not prove that such a reality exists. Neither does its resistance to measurement constitute evidence for it.

If it can be known at all, its appropriate mode of knowing may instead be direct and unrepeatable experience. Yet even “experience” implies an experiencer and something experienced. At the proposed limit, that distinction would also disappear.

One would not finally stand apart from IT and know IT.

There would only be IT.

And whatever was subsequently said about that encounter would already be a translation, necessarily unique and unrepeatable. The moment the encounter becomes an account of the encounter, something fundamental has changed. What may have been immediate has become memory. What may have been indivisible has entered a language built from divisions. What may have required no explanation has become a story told by one person to another.

From the standpoint of everyone who did not have such an experience, the account therefore amounts to inscrutable hearsay, rumor, innuendo, metaphor, and unsubstantiated speculation. It cannot carry the experience itself from one consciousness to another, nor can the testimony of the experiencer establish that their interpretation of what occurred is true.

Even the experiencer cannot escape this problem. In remembering and describing the encounter, the experiencer becomes an interpreter of an earlier version of themselves. The testimony is already one step removed from whatever happened.

This does not make such accounts meaningless. It places them in their proper category. They are not proofs. They are traces.

Perhaps this is why humanity has produced thousands of mystical philosophies, religions, poems, paintings, songs, rituals, and contradictory descriptions of what may be the same ineffable mystery. If there is an underlying unity, we should not expect uniform reports of it. Under the principle of constant uniqueness, every return to language must produce another singular translation.

There can therefore be no authoritative account of the Ineffable. There can only be reports from the vicinity.

Rumors of the One, told by the many.

And if the proposition developed here is in the neighborhood of correct, even these rumors are IT talking to ITself. Yet only IT could know the truth behind the rumor being spoken.

The speaker cannot know. The listener cannot know. Even the one who claims to have directly experienced IT cannot subsequently know with certainty what the experience meant, because the moment it is remembered, interpreted, or spoken, it has already become a unique and unrepeatable translation and not the experience itself.

Perhaps this is the final paradox: IT alone knows what is true, yet there is no one apart from IT to whom the truth could be told.

Everything else is rumor and innuendo.

Why Write Anything?

I construct poems
like I construct collages.
I take little snippets
That I find
from here and there
I like bits and pieces
removed from context
That could be about anywhere,
or anyone,
or any time,
or any place.
Usually unburdened by pronouns
Usually two or three
or maybe six words.
Maybe with punctuation,
but maybe not.

Then I spend all of my time
hunting,
gathering,
collecting,
arranging,
editing,
moving this to here
or that to there.
Casting things aside
that don’t fit
collecting more.

Why write anything? I wonder.
There are already
too many words bussing everywhere
floating around,
trapped on paper,
chattering in minds,
carved in stone,
Painted, printed, posted
written with pens and pencils
slipped into policies and propaganda.

Why disturb the quiet
of my own mind
dredging the depths
in the places without words
to capture the delicate
and degrade it
with a clumsy translation
that means nothing?

Still, I enjoy listening
and being surprised by
the happenstance
and the blitherblather
of the politicians
and the murmers
and sweet nothings
of the poets.

Most of no interest to me
but those little gems
found among the river rock,
ones you want to pick up,
put in your pocket,
and later, on the table
or fireplace mantel
To look at and hold
a second or third time.

I am a collagist
I collect these kinds of things
then see what I can do with them,
How I can arrange them.
What attracts me?

And under it,
I am everyone just as you are.
I wrote everything ever wondered,
written or whispered,
spoken, shouted or screamed.

All voices are my voice.

If you are in Brooklyn this coming Saturday head over to Prospect Park! 2PM

At the end of the month Zach and I will be heading out to Knoxville for the Umteenth Annual Fluxfest. If your in the area join us! Should be fun.

I think the address will be:
4508 PLYMOUTH RD - KNOXVILLE, TN 37914

More later.

The Eye Becomes the Performer

On Painting as Score

Cecil Touchon | September 3, 2026

I have long been interested in what happens when ideas belonging to one art form migrate into another. What happens when the theories of poetry are applied to painting? What happens when musical ideas such as rhythm, repetition, variation, counterpoint, harmony, dissonance, tempo, and silence are treated as visual problems? At what point does a painting cease to be simply an arrangement of forms and begin to behave like a score?

A painting presents a curious problem in relation to music. Music unfolds through time. We cannot hear a musical composition all at once. A note arrives, disappears, and remains in memory while another takes its place. Gradually, through repetition and variation, we recognize relationships. Something heard earlier returns in another form. A rhythm establishes itself and then shifts. An expectation is created, postponed, fulfilled, or abandoned.

A painting seems to operate differently because the entire object is continuously present. Yet our experience of it is not instantaneous. We may see the whole painting immediately, but we cannot attend to the whole painting simultaneously. The focal point of the eye must travel.

It moves from one form to another. It pauses. It doubles back. It notices something at the edge of vision and jumps across the canvas. It recognizes a form encountered earlier. It discovers that a shape has returned inverted, enlarged, compressed, interrupted, or partially concealed. What appeared initially to be a field of unrelated events gradually reveals itself as a system of relationships.

In that sense, a painting also unfolds in time.

The duration is supplied by the viewer.

This is where the idea of the painting as a score becomes useful to me. A musical score is an object that contains instructions or possibilities for an event. The notation itself is silent. Music occurs when someone performs it. Similarly, the painting remains physically still, yet the viewer activates it through looking. The movement occurs in consciousness as the eye travels through the work.

The eye becomes the performer and the painting becomes the score.

This way of thinking changes my relationship to abstract form. A shape no longer needs to represent an object. It can function as an event.

A pointed wedge can behave like an attack. A long curve can carry the eye like a sustained tone. A sequence of narrow vertical forms can establish a staccato rhythm. A spiral can slow the movement and turn attention inward. Overlapping translucent shapes can create something analogous to chords. Dark forms can operate as accents or interruptions. Open areas become intervals in which relatively little happens, something approaching the function of silence.

I work with a deliberately restricted vocabulary of forms. The limitation is important because recognition depends upon recurrence. A curve encountered in one part of a painting may appear elsewhere at another scale or orientation. Angular fragments migrate through the composition. Spirals return. Shapes reverse themselves. Forms overlap and combine into temporary structures before separating again.

The same few elements can produce an indefinite number of variations.

This brings the work close to musical composition, particularly forms of music constructed through repetition, variation, rhythmic displacement, layering, and counterpoint. I am interested in the way a composer can take a relatively modest motif and discover within it an enormous field of possibilities. Complexity does not necessarily require an ever-expanding vocabulary. It can arise through increasingly subtle relationships among a limited number of elements.

But these forms also occupy another territory that interests me: the territory of writing.

Human beings are extraordinarily sensitive to marks that resemble language. Put several abstract forms beside one another and, almost involuntarily, we begin wondering whether they can be read. A vertical becomes something like a letter. A curve suggests part of an alphabet. Repeated forms begin to imply syntax. Sequences suggest sentences even when no actual sentence exists.

This is where painting, writing, and musical notation begin to converge.

Writing transforms language into marks. Musical notation transforms sound into marks. Painting can make marks without requiring them to refer to anything outside themselves. All three depend upon distinctions, repetitions, intervals, sequences, densities, and relationships.

My forms sometimes resemble fragments of an unknown alphabet. At other moments they might appear to belong to a system of musical notation whose rules have been lost. They seem to promise legibility without ever surrendering themselves completely to reading.

That ambiguity is important.

If the forms became actual letters, the painting would begin directing the viewer toward words and their established meanings. If they became conventional musical notation, they would instruct a musician to produce particular sounds. Instead, they remain suspended between these systems. They possess the atmosphere of language without becoming language and the rhythmic potential of musical notation without prescribing a particular piece of music.

They are readable without being decipherable.

This is closely related to my interest in asemic writing, writing emptied of conventional semantic content while retaining the gesture, rhythm, structure, and expectation of written language. Asemic writing asks us to experience writing before meaning settles upon it. We encounter the movement of inscription itself.

The paintings extend that possibility into a larger visual field. Rather than reading from left to right toward a predetermined conclusion, the viewer can enter anywhere. There is no single correct sequence. One person might follow the spirals. Another might move among the darkest forms. Another might attend to the overlapping tonal passages. Each creates a different temporal experience from the same physical object.

This is where painting possesses an extraordinary freedom that neither conventional writing nor conventional musical notation allows. The score does not prescribe its own performance.

The viewer invents it.

The painting therefore exists in two states. There is the material object hanging silently on the wall, containing all of its forms simultaneously. And there is the painting as experienced, reconstructed moment by moment through attention, memory, anticipation, recognition, and return.

Every viewing becomes another performance.

And because no one follows exactly the same path twice, even the same viewer produces a slightly different version each time.

The painting does not make a sound, yet it can have rhythm. It contains no words, yet it can suggest language. It offers no instructions, yet it can behave like notation.

Somewhere among painting, writing, and music there is a territory where marks cease to belong exclusively to any one discipline. They become gestures waiting to be activated.

The canvas is silent.
The score is waiting.
The eye starts to move.
The performance begins.

This essay written for one of my collectors who is considering acquiring this painting.

Creation Finishes the Making of the Work. Publication Begins the Life of the Work.

There is a moment every artist knows.

You step back from the painting and realize there is nothing more to do. You write the final line of the poem. You listen to the final mix of the song. You type the last sentence of the manuscript.

It is finished.

Or so it seems.

For most of my life as an artist, I have thought a great deal about what it means to finish things. Artists are makers, after all, and making naturally gives us a very particular idea of completion. We begin with something that does not exist and work on it until it does. Eventually there comes a moment when we have to stop.

But I have increasingly come to think that this is only one kind of finishing.

Creation finishes the making of the work. Publication begins the life of the work.

That distinction has become especially vivid for me recently because I have teamed up with my son Zach to help him publish a country album and, more broadly, to begin developing a publishing company for our creative work.

Zach and I are very different artists. Our artistic visions occupy different territories, which is probably an advantage. My immediate interest is in helping him build the structure necessary to take his music all the way to the finish line.

But this has raised an interesting question.

Where exactly is the finish line?

The Seduction of Making

Creative people naturally want to create.

That sounds obvious, but it causes one of the central problems of the artistic life. Making things is exciting. Writing another song is exciting. So is recording another track, starting another painting, discovering an unexpected phrase in a poem.

On the other hand, entering information into a database, registering a copyright is not particularly exciting.

Photographing a painting, assigning an inventory number, organizing files, preparing metadata, maintaining a mailing list, creating a release schedule, checking contracts, uploading files, sending announcements and keeping track of income are not usually the activities that caused anyone to become an artist.

So artists tend to concentrate their energy where the pleasure is. They make things. Then they make more things. Before long they may have boxes of drawings, folders of poems, hard drives full of recordings, stacks of paintings, unfinished manuscripts and hundreds of photographs documenting works whose locations they can no longer remember.

I know this territory very well. The problem is not a lack of creativity. Quite the opposite. The problem is abundance and accumulation

The Other Half of the Creative Practice

If we want an artistic practice to become self-sustaining, however, we have to enlarge our idea of what making a work means.

There is the creative sequence:

Idea → Experiment → Development → Work

But then another sequence begins:

Documentation → Archive → Inventory → Publication → Distribution → Audience → Income → Reputation

And eventually that sequence circles back around:

Income → Time → Materials → Freedom → More Creation

Seen this way, publication and distribution are not unfortunate commercial chores attached to the end of the creative process.

They are part of the creative ecosystem.

The purpose is not merely to make money from art. The purpose is to create conditions under which the artist can continue making art.

That is a very different proposition.

Money becomes less interesting as a scorecard and more interesting as stored creative energy. It buys materials. It pays studio rent. It purchases equipment. It pays collaborators. It creates time. It allows experiments to fail. It permits the artist to undertake the next project.

A sustainable creative practice is a circulatory system.

If nothing leaves the studio, nothing returns to nourish it.

The Work Has Two Lives

This suggests that every artwork potentially has two lives.

The first is its studio life.

During this life the work belongs primarily to the artist. It is being invented, questioned, revised, destroyed, rebuilt, doubted and eventually accepted.

Then something important happens.

The artist releases it.

The work begins its social life.

Someone hears the song while driving home at night.
Someone encounters the painting in a gallery.
Someone reads the poem twenty years after it was written.
Someone sends the book to a friend.
Someone discovers a recording decades after the musician has died.

At that point the work is doing something the artist can no longer entirely control.

It is moving through other people’s lives.

That is what publication really means.

The word is related to making something public. Something private enters the shared world. Publication therefore isn’t simply printing a book or uploading a song. It is a threshold. Before publication, the artist is primarily responsible for the work. After publication, the work begins accumulating experiences of its own.

The Archive Is Part of This Life

This is also why documentation and archiving matter so much. I have spent many years thinking about artists’ archives, and I increasingly see the archive not as a storage facility for dead things but as part of the living infrastructure of an artistic practice.

An inventory number seems terribly mundane until someone needs to locate a work twenty years later. A date seems insignificant until someone tries to reconstruct the development of an artist’s thinking. A photograph seems routine until the original work disappears. A notebook seems private until it becomes the only surviving record of how an important idea developed.

Documentation allows the work to travel through time.
Publication allows it to travel through society.
The archive allows it to travel through history.

These are not peripheral activities. They are different forms of transmission.

Building the Machine

This is what interests me about the experiment Zach and I are beginning.

We are not simply trying to release an album.

We are trying to build a machine. Not a machine that manufactures art. The art must remain unpredictable, personal, strange and alive. The machine begins after creation. Its job is to catch the work.

A song gets written.

What happens next?

A system is set up made of a series of steps that must be practiced and followed routinely and uniformly. First documentation and archiving…

Where is it recorded? Where are the files stored? What is the definitive version? Who wrote it? Who owns what? Has it been registered? Has it been mastered? Does it have artwork? Does it have metadata? When will it be released? Where will it be distributed? How will anyone know it exists? How will income be tracked? Where will the master files be stored ten years from now?

None of these questions are as exciting as writing the song.

That is precisely why a system is necessary.

The artist should not have to reinvent the administrative process every time a work is completed.

The system should already be figured out, designed and waiting.

The artist creates.

The machine catches the creative work and brings it the rest of the way to publication.

An Experiment in the Creative Life

For me, this project has another dimension.

I have spent decades developing and practicing my own ideas about how artists might construct sustainable creative lives. I have done this in the visual arts ecosystem. Now I have an opportunity to test some of those ideas in a different artistic ecosystem.

Music has its own economy, institutions, technologies, traditions and problems. I expect we will have misunderstandings, make mistakes and miscalculations. I hope we make some interesting ones.

That is part of the experiment.

What actually happens when we try to move consistently from creation to publication?

Where do things get stuck?
What tasks do we continually avoid?
What procedures make those tasks easier?
What turns out to generate attention and income?
What turns out to generate attention but no income?
What creates long-term value?
What turns out to be a complete waste of time?

I don’t know yet.

That is why I am interested. I see it as part of the creative process.

A philosophy of the creative life should eventually survive contact with actual life and hopefully traverse from one ecosystem to another.

My Own Archive Suddenly Looks Different

There is another unexpected consequence of this experiment.

For approximately twenty-five years I have been working with collage poetry. I have accumulated a large body of fragments, poems, phrases, juxtapositions and textual experiments. Until recently I primarily thought of this material as poetry and visual language. Now I am beginning to look at it differently.

I find myself asking:

Could this be a song?

Sometimes the answer is clearly no.
Sometimes a single phrase suddenly sounds like a chorus or a strange collision of fragments begins suggesting a narrative or the gaps that seemed characteristic of collage poetry begin behaving like the ambiguities of song lyrics.

The archive changes when you ask it a new question. What appeared to be a repository of completed work becomes a reservoir for future work. That may be one of the great advantages of maintaining an archive in the first place. You do not know what your future self will need from it.

From Individual Works to a Body of Work

There is another reason publication matters.

Artists tend to think intensely about individual works.

Careers, however, are built from bodies of work.

One song is a song.
Twenty songs begin to reveal a voice.
Several albums begin to reveal a trajectory.
A decade of work begins to reveal a world.

The same is true of paintings, poems, films, photographs, novels or almost any sustained creative practice.

Recognition and reputation emerges gradually from accumulation.
People begin recognizing something. They hear a few seconds and know who made it.
They encounter a painting across a room and recognize the artist. They read a paragraph without seeing the author’s name and recognize the voice. That recognition cannot be manufactured quickly because it depends upon a body of work entering public consciousness over time.

Which means the artist has to keep finishing the job.
Not merely making the work.
Releasing it into the world.

The Finish Line Keeps Moving

Perhaps, then, we need two finish lines.

The first belongs to the maker.

The work is made.

The second belongs to the artistic life of the work.

The work has been prepared to leave home.

It has been documented.
It has been archived.
It has been inventoried.
It has been published.

It has been placed where another human being has the possibility of encountering it. After that, something wonderful happens. The artist loses control and the art takes on a life of its own.

Someone plays the song again.
Someone hangs the painting in a bedroom.
Someone copies a line from the poem into a notebook.
Someone discovers the work fifty years later in an archive.
Someone misunderstands it.
Someone understands it in a way the artist never imagined.
Someone loves or is influenced by it.

The work begins accumulating a history beyond the history of its making.

And perhaps that is the point at which the artist can finally turn back toward the studio and begin again.

Creation finishes the making of the work.

Publication begins the life of the work.

We do not Rattle

Yet, [I am] alone in your hair and lost
on the wind [of] time
[a tear] drops upon the awakening of pictures
still [we] do not rattle.

Alone in your distant past
with an improbable gesture
and gleaming like rain rolling
and time drops upon the center of the awakening
of bookshelves with their volumes.
[I am] one with your distant past
and in your hair
and [I am] lost in the things of a great storm.
In deepness [the storm] hovers
above your smile [that] spreads like rain
rolling and remote.
we do not rattle.
Words are flying all around
when those things of a great storm
in [an] inaudible adventure.

Yet, being one with your smile
[my heart] spreads like water
[as] you appeared to yourself
in the awakening of a great storm;
in [an] inaudible admission yet
being one with their volumes of your distant past.
One thing which is like rain rolling
and lost on the things of pictures
still [we] do not rattle.

Yet, alone in deepness, [our hearts] hover
above your smile [that] spreads like rain
rolling and lost
on the things of the awakening
of the awakening of a great storm
in the ocean. Loneliness receives
even if [what] we feel
is like stars that leave trails.
I am absolutely alone
in the ocean [of] loneliness
[that] receives the center of a great storm.
In the center of pictures [we] still
do not reach [out] upon the dust.
What we do not rattle [remains silent]

Yet, alone in time.
[My eye] drops upon the book shelves
with an imperious gesture
in the wind,
in the dust.
What we feel is like water.
You [long] to be in my eyes
[like the] stars that tremble
as reflected in [a profound] deepness
[that] hovers above your hair
in inaudible being
which would reveal yourself to you
on the book shelves with their volumes
with an improvised gesture
and in [an] inaudible loneliness

Yet, being one thing
which would reveal.
You appeared to yourself
on the same road [where] I have found nothing.
Dissolved in your distant past
with its volumes
which would reveal one thing [to] you.
[Being] appeared in [the] deepness
[that] hovers above your smile,
[that] spreads like stars that tremble
as reflected in the same road.
I am absolutely alone
on the same road [where] I have found nothing
dissolved in [the] inaudible ocean [of my being].

Yet, being one with your hair
and lost on the wind
and lost in the dust, we are
grasped by what we feel
like rain rolling and lost
on the awakening of the ocean.
[Our] loneliness receives the things
of the awakening of pictures [that]
do not reach our eyes.
We are grasped by
what we do not [ourselves] reach.
Upon those things of the great storm
in my eyes stars tremble
as they soar trembling
as reflected in my eyes.
Stars that leave trails
I am absolutely alone in my eyes
[where] stars tremble
[though] I have found nothing dissolved
that leaves trails.
I have found nothing
dissolved in the dust.

Yet, alone in things,
those things of a great storm
in your distant past
with an impetuous gesture
and remote words are grasped
in what we do not rattle.

Yet, alone in [the] inaudible
being one thing, which is like rain
rolling in the center of the ocean.
Even as we are grasped
by what we are,
when the ocean
by what we feel is like water
flying all around.
You appeared in the center of the ocean
[Your] loneliness receives the ocean,
[a] loneliness [that] receives the things of the book shelves.
with an impish gesture
even if we feel remote words are grasped
by what we do not rattle.

Yet, [we are] alone in [a] deepness [that] hovers above
your distant past [and its] volumes.
One thing which is like stars
that tremble as they soar
as reflected in the ocean,
we are grasped
by what we feel is like rain
rolling and lost on the wind.
In your hair and gleaming like water,
you to yourself in the center,
the center of pictures [that] still do not rattle.

Yet, [we are] alone in the wind of your distant past
with [its] volumes, with an improvised gesture
and in the ocean, even if we feel.
And on the bookshelves with an impossible gesture
and lost on the same road [where] I have found nothing,
dissolved in your distant past with an imperial gesture.
and gleaming like water you appeared to yourself
on the bookshelves
with your smile spread like stars
that leave trails in my eyes.
I have found nothing.
Dissolved stars that leave trails.
I am absolutely alone in your smile
[that] spreads like water.
You appeared to yourself
in the dust rolling and remote
words are flying all around
when the center of pictures
still do not rattle.

Alone on the bookshelves
with an impassioned gesture,
[you eyes] gleaming like stars
that I have found in the ocean.
Nothing dissolved.
Even if we do not reach
upon the bookshelves
with your smile spread in time,
upon the bookshelves with their volumes:
one thing which would reveal you to yourself
on the bookshelves with an impalpable gesture
lost on the dust.
We are flying all around.
We do not rattle.

Alone in the dust
we are grasped by
what we feel is like stars that tremble
as reflected in your smile
[that] spreads like gleaming water
in the awakening of a great storm.
Still, [we] do not rattle.

collected lines, then put through a Markov text generator, then arranged

There is No End, Not Really

I’ve been thinking more about writing
going through all my old journals
the brief mental snapshots.
When I really sit with it,
I can’t remember the details,
a pool of murky memories,
the only pieces of evidence left
in some room I will never enter.

I’ve known for a while
all evidence must be destroyed
it shouldn’t even exist.

I ripped out the pages
methodically tearing them into little pieces
this was the best course of action
[Then later] gather up the tiny scraps
spend hours and days piecing them back together.
Hang the pages outside in the wind.
The more I turn this idea over
they have nothing to hide.
That was then - this is now
- let that go.
Pick up where I left off.
Making that first mark…

Without really noticing it,
daily effort compounds.
It changes the texture of how you move.
Choices shape the outcome.
there is no end. Not really.

The Puzzle Exists in the Pieces

Reality only appears fragmented because we encounter the whole through the narrow aperture of being human.

Matthew Rose recently left a thoughtful comment on one of my essays about consciousness. He pointed out that consciousness is not some fixed instrument through which we objectively observe an equally fixed world. It is itself in flux.

The red we see on Monday morning may not be quite the same red we experience Monday evening. A collage that seems perfectly resolved on Tuesday may look completely wrong on Wednesday. The paper hasn’t necessarily changed. The composition hasn’t moved. Yet something has changed because the person looking at it has changed.

We tend to imagine ourselves standing still while reality passes before us. But there is no still point from which we are observing. We are in the stream ourselves.

Everything is in motion.

The light is changing. The temperature is changing. Our bodies are changing. Our memories are accumulating. Our attention is shifting. The world around us is reorganizing itself continuously, and the consciousness through which we experience that world is reorganizing itself as well.

So perhaps the great puzzle of existence is even stranger than we imagine.

Not only are the pieces constantly changing positions. We are one of the pieces.

And yet, behind all of this movement, I have long suspected that there is something that is not fragmented at all.

The Puzzle May Belong to Us

For us humans, everything seems to be a puzzle whose pieces are constantly changing positions in ways that maintain an infinite uniqueness.

No two moments are exactly alike.

No two people occupy precisely the same perceptual position.

Indeed, even the same person cannot occupy the same perceptual position twice because by the time we return to something, we have changed.

This is something every artist knows.
You make a painting and put it against the wall.
You look at it that afternoon.
You look at it the next morning.
You turn it around for three days.
You bring it back out.

Suddenly you see something that apparently wasn’t there before.
Except, of course, it was there.

What changed? You did.

This is one of the reasons artistic judgment is so mysterious. We like to imagine that we are gradually arriving at an objective assessment of the artwork. Perhaps sometimes we are. But we are also encountering the work through a constantly changing consciousness.

Tuesday’s artist is looking at Monday’s painting.

Wednesday’s artist is looking at Tuesday’s decisions.

Years later, another version of the artist may look at the same work and discover something entirely different.

The artwork becomes strangely stable compared with the person looking at it.

And yet even the artwork isn’t really stable. The paper ages. Pigments change. The surrounding culture changes. The historical context changes. The other artworks surrounding it change. The meanings attached to its forms change.

Everything participates in the movement.

We See the Flow as Particles

The difficulty may begin with perception itself. Reality appears to be continuous, but our sensory apparatus necessarily encounters it selectively.

We don’t see everything.
We don’t hear everything.
We don’t feel everything.

We receive tiny portions of an unimaginably large field of activity.

Our eyes acquire one bit of information and then another. Our ears receive changing vibrations. Our nervous system processes temperature, pressure, balance, movement, smell, pain, pleasure, and countless other signals. Somehow consciousness assembles this flood into what feels like a continuous world.

Then something else happens.

We name it.

Tree. Cloud. Person. Red. Table. Me. You. Past. Future.

The naming is extraordinarily useful. Without this ability to divide experience conceptually, ordinary human life would probably be impossible. Language allows us to distinguish, remember, communicate, plan, compare, and construct increasingly elaborate understandings of the world.

But there is a price.

The moment we name something, we draw an imaginary boundary around it.
We turn the flow into a thing. We begin to experience a continuous reality as a collection of separate objects. The river becomes water, bank, stone, reflection, tree, fish, sky.

And somewhere standing beside all of this is something called me.

Language has not necessarily discovered these boundaries. It has created a useful way of navigating them. The map is indispensable. But the map is not the landscape.

Before the Names

This is where art becomes particularly interesting. Art can operate very close to the territory that exists before naming.

A line doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything.
A rhythm doesn’t have to represent anything.
A sound doesn’t have to explain itself.
A gesture can simply be a gesture.

The experience came first. The naming of things comes afterward.

Artists often speak about intuition when describing the actual moment of making something. The intellect is certainly present. Knowledge, experience, technique, memory, judgment, and intention are all participating.

But something else seems to be operating upstream of them.

The hand sometimes knows before the mind knows what the hand knows.
The musician hears where the phrase must go.
The poet feels the next word approaching before knowing what it will be.
The painter senses that something must move three inches to the left.

Then afterward we explain ourselves - or try to.

We construct the conceptual framework.
We give the exhibition a title.
We write the artist statement.
We explain why the thing exists.

But the deepest part of the making may have happened before any of those explanations became available.

What If Consciousness Is Not in the Pieces?

This brings me to the suspicion I mentioned in my response to Matthew.

I suspect that behind all of this apparent fragmentation there may be a single consciousness for whom none of this is puzzling at all.

I don’t offer that as a scientific proposition. I have no experiment with which to prove it. I mean it as a metaphysical intuition arising from experience.

What if consciousness is not something produced separately inside billions of isolated creatures? What if individual consciousness is instead a localization of something much larger?

Imagine an ocean producing waves.

Each wave has a recognizable form. It arises at a particular place. It has a particular height, duration, velocity, and character. We can point to it and say, “There is a wave.”

And there certainly is.

But there is no substance called wave that is separate from the ocean. The wave is the ocean behaving locally.

Maybe we are something like that.
Perhaps what I call my consciousness is consciousness behaving locally as Cecil for a while.

And what you call your consciousness is that same mysterious field behaving locally as you.

From the perspective of the wave, everything seems separate. From the perspective of the ocean, nothing ever was.

The Lock, the Door and the Key

Matthew offered a wonderful image in his comment. He said consciousness is the lock hole, the door, and the key maker.

I would add that perhaps it is also whatever stands on both sides of the door.

This is the peculiar difficulty of investigating consciousness. We are using consciousness to investigate consciousness. The investigator and the thing being investigated cannot finally be separated.

Every scientific instrument, every mathematical equation, every philosophical argument, every mystical vision, every painting, poem and every doubt about all of the above ultimately appears within consciousness.

There is nowhere else for any of it to appear.

And so perhaps the mystery cannot finally be solved by standing outside it because there is no outside position available to us. We are trying to understand the river while being made of river.

Going With the Flow

This is where our frustration begins.

We keep trying to stop the flow long enough to understand it.

We isolate.
We categorize.
We measure.
We compare.
We name.

These are magnificent human abilities. Science depends upon them. Civilization depends upon them. Art itself frequently depends upon them.

But another possibility exists alongside them.

Instead of always trying to understand the flow, we can occasionally allow ourselves to experience being the flow.

This requires a different kind of attention - quiet attention. The sort of attention in which the machinery of naming becomes less insistent.

Anyone who has become completely absorbed in making something may recognize this. Musicians know it. Painters know it. Dancers know it. Athletes know it. People walking alone through forests know it. People sitting quietly watching sunlight move across a wall know it.

For a little while, the distinction between observer and observed becomes less important.

You are no longer thinking:
I am looking at the tree.
There is simply seeing.

You are no longer thinking:
I am making this drawing.
There is drawing.

The subject-object structure through which we ordinarily organize experience loosens slightly. And sometimes, very briefly, something astonishing becomes apparent. Nothing was separate in the first place.

The Glimpse

This is one of the great privileges of artistic practice. The artist spends a lifetime cultivating conditions in which such glimpses become more likely.

We arrange paper.
We draw lines.
We mix colors.
We listen.
We walk.

We repeat gestures thousands of times.

From the outside it may look as though we are making objects. And certainly we are. But something else is happening beneath the production of those objects.

We are practicing attention.

We are learning how to remain close to experience before experience hardens into explanation. We are occasionally slipping beneath the conceptual net we ordinarily throw across the world. And there, every once in a while, the puzzle disappears.

Not because we have solved it. Because for a moment we are no longer looking at reality as a pile of pieces requiring assembly. We glimpse the possibility that the pieces were never actually separate.

The endless changing, the paper, the light, Tuesday’s judgment, Wednesday’s doubt, the hand, the eye, the artwork, the viewer, the past, the future, the red becoming mauve in the evening sun - all of it belongs to one immeasurable movement.

It is flowing unendingly.

Our senses give us particulars.
Our language gives those particulars names.
Our minds arrange the names into worlds.

And all of that is necessary and beautiful.

But every once in a while, if we become quiet enough to see through the spaces between the names, to read between the lines, for one brief instant we encounter the whole.

Yet the whole has understood itself perfectly all along. It is the only thing here.

When Limitation Becomes a Microscope

There is a curious thing that happens when an artist voluntarily reduces the number of possibilities available.

The world gets bigger.

This seems contradictory. We ordinarily imagine that greater freedom means having more choices. More colors. More materials. More techniques. More space. More subjects. More possibilities.

Yet anyone who has worked seriously within a narrow range eventually discovers something surprising. Once the field has been sufficiently reduced, distinctions that were previously invisible begin to appear.

The limit has become a microscope.

Imagine deciding to make a hundred drawings using nothing more than a single kind of line. At first the proposition might seem absurdly restrictive. How much could possibly happen with one line?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

The line can move quickly or slowly. It can hesitate. It can accelerate. It can become heavy or faint. It can wander and return. It can repeat itself. It can reverse direction. It can bunch together into density or open outward into spaciousness. It can establish a rhythm and then violate it. It can become melodic, percussive, nervous, lyrical, awkward, graceful, mechanical or wildly eccentric.

None of these possibilities were created by the limitation. They were already there. The limitation simply made them visible.

This is an important distinction.

Creative limitation does not necessarily reduce possibility. It can increase our ability to perceive possibility. There is simply too much available to us otherwise.

The world presents an almost unbearable abundance of potential material. Every color, every shape, every image, every object, every technique, every historical reference, every conceivable combination of them. The contemporary artist stands before a nearly infinite warehouse with all the doors open.

That can certainly be exhilarating. It can also make us blind.

When everything is available, differences become coarse. We move rapidly between possibilities because there is always another possibility waiting nearby.

But choose one thing and stay with it long enough and perception begins to sharpen.

This is one of the secrets of the étude.

An étude says: For now, forget everything else. We are going to investigate this one particular thing.

A pianist might concentrate upon a technical or rhythmic problem of interst. A poet might adopt a restrictive form. A painter might work within an extremely limited palette. A collagist might use materials gathered from one location. A visual artist might investigate nothing more than a zigzag, a reversing zigzag, a loop and a few variations produced by combining them.

Initially we see the category.

Zigzag.

After prolonged attention we begin seeing individuals.
This zigzag is compressed.
This one breathes.
This one accelerates.
This one feels architectural.
This one seems agitated.
This one becomes almost calligraphic.
This one begins behaving like music.

The object has not necessarily become more complicated. Our seeing has become more precise.

This happens everywhere with all things.

Someone who knows little about wine might simply distinguish red from white. Someone who has devoted decades to wine detects grape varieties, regions, soils, weather, fermentation methods and years.

Someone unfamiliar with birds hears birdsong. An ornithologist hears individuals.

Someone unfamiliar with classical music hears an orchestra. A conductor hears relationships among dozens of simultaneous voices.

Expertise is partly the accumulation of knowledge, but it is also the refinement of discrimination. You learn to notice smaller more subtle differences.

The artist does the same thing through sustained practice.

At first we see line.
Then we see kinds of line.
Then qualities of line.
Then relationships among lines.
Then rhythms produced by those relationships.
Then variations within those rhythms.
Then interruptions of those variations.

Eventually an entire world emerges from something that once seemed almost impossibly simple. This is where limitation becomes an instrument of consciousness.

The microscope does not create microorganisms. It allows us to perceive a scale of reality that was already present but inaccessible to ordinary vision.

Creative limitation can function similarly. It reduces the field so that attention can penetrate more deeply into it.

Instead of asking, What else can I add? we begin asking, What haven’t I noticed yet?

That is an entirely different creative question. And often a much more interesting one.

There is a tendency, particularly early in one’s development, to associate creativity with invention. We imagine that the creative person must continually introduce something new.

But mature creative practice often involves something closer to excavation.

You return.
You reconsider.
You repeat.
You make another variation.
Then another.
And another.

Someone watching from outside might wonder why you haven’t moved on. But you have moved on. You have moved downward and inward. What appeared from the surface to be repetition has become penetration.

The first ten variations reveal obvious possibilities.
The next twenty exhaust the solutions you already knew.

Then the interesting territory begins. You have used up your habits. You have exhausted your first answers. You have done the clever things.

Now you must actually look and contemplate.

This may be one reason limitations can be so productive. They eventually force us beyond our own repertoire. If every time we become uncomfortable we introduce a new material, technique or subject, novelty can rescue us from having to go deeper. But if the rules remain in place, we eventually arrive at the edge of what we know how to do.

Then imagination has to work. The limitation begins exerting pressure. Under that pressure, subtler possibilities become perceptible. A slight change becomes significant.

A millimeter matters.
A pause matters.
The thickness of a line matters.
The interval between two forms matters.
The difference between repeating something seven times and eight times matters.

These are not trivial distinctions. They are the vocabulary through which the work develops its intelligence.

Music understands this beautifully.

A composer does not need an infinite number of notes to create an infinite variety of musical experiences. Much of Western music has been constructed from twelve tones. Entire traditions have emerged from highly constrained systems of rhythm, harmony, instrumentation and form.

The richness comes through relationship.

This may be one of the great lessons for visual artists as well.

Complexity does not necessarily require more elements.
Complexity can arise through increasingly subtle relationships among very few elements.

A line encounters another line.
A rhythm repeats and reverses.
A loop interrupts a zigzag.
A dense passage opens into silence.
A gesture returns altered by everything that has happened since we last encountered it.

Suddenly we are no longer dealing merely with shapes.

We are dealing with memory, expectation, rhythm, tension and time.

A visual language has begun to form. And this is how languages always deepen.

Not through endlessly accumulating vocabulary, but through discovering increasingly subtle ways of using what is already available.

Eventually the artist begins to understand that limitation and infinity are not opposites. A small territory can contain an inexhaustible world.

One could spend a lifetime studying light.
Or line.
Or the human face.
Or rectangles.
Or scraps of printed paper.
Or the movement of the hand.
Or the mysterious sensation that occurs when one mark follows another and the eye begins to experience rhythm.

There is no requirement that we exhaust the world. We cannot.

Our task might instead be to choose some small corner of it and pay sufficient attention that the apparently ordinary begins revealing its extraordinary complexity.

That requires patience.
It requires repetition.
It requires resisting the constant temptation to escape into novelty.
Most importantly, it requires faith that there is more here than we currently perceive.

So we narrow the field.
We choose a few elements.
We establish certain limits.
We return tomorrow.
And the next day.
And the next.

Gradually our perception becomes finer.

What once appeared to be one thing becomes ten things, then a hundred things, then a thousand subtle distinctions for which we may not even have names.

The territory has not expanded.

Our consciousness of it has.

The limit has begun to function like a microscope. And through it, we discover infinity hiding inside the smallest things.

The Best Use of the Will is to Be Willing

We live in a culture obsessed with the “triumph of the human will.” We are told to grit our teeth, manifest our destiny, and hustle until we bend reality to our liking. The underlying assumption is that if we just push hard enough, we can force the puzzle pieces of life into place.

I used to try that. But at some point, I had a realization that was both incredibly liberating and slightly embarrassing: Not only is it utterly futile to try and force outcomes, but I am also far too limited to even know what I should be forcing in the first place. And when I did pull off what I had imagined, I realized my imagination was too small.

The Illusion of Strength

If you think about it, we treat our personal “will” as our ultimate strength, but it is often our greatest weakness. It’s the stubborn part of us that demands a situation go exactly this way, totally blind to the fact that “this way” might actually be terrible for us. We are like toddlers screaming for ice cream for breakfast, completely oblivious to the impending stomach ache, furious at the universe for not cooperating.

That is when I coined a rule for myself: The best use of the will is to be willing.

We traditionally think of power in the Nietzschean sense - a “will to power” that demands we conquer our circumstances, dominate our environment, and bend the world to our desires. But true power is actually inverted. It is the strength required to master our own compulsion to control and to constantly intervene and to worry and fret.

This sounds like a paradox, or perhaps a lost Taoist proverb. Taoism talks a lot about Wu Wei - the art of effortless action, or swimming (or even just floating with the current rather than trying to push the river. True willingness means taking your hands off the controls. It means stepping back, refusing the temptation to intervene, and stopping the exhausting work of trying to shape every single outcome. Instead, you use your will for one specific thing: choosing to be open and available. Willing to see and try something new and unexpected. Willing to let go of control. Willing to let life itself work things out around you.

This is not to say there is not a place for the will, there certainly is. It is a matter of using the will for the right purpose - not to control everything outside of you but rather to take control of yourself.

The Will as Self-Discipline paired with the Willingness to Live with Ambiguity

• The Will (Self-Discipline): Choosing to sit down at the easel, studio desk or laptop every single morning at a set time, regardless of mood, inspiration, or how tired you feel. You use your will to govern your physical behavior, honor commitments, and keep promises to yourself.

• The Willingness (Accepting Ambiguity): Looking at the blank canvas, the empty page, or a messy pile of raw materials and accepting that you have absolutely no idea what the final result will be. You deliberately refuse to panic or force a premature structure, letting the composition stay unresolved and ambiguous until it naturally clarifies itself.

The Will to Set Intentions paired with the Willingness to Let Them Unfold

• The Will (Intentionality): Deciding exactly what you want to explore - such as setting a clear intention to compile a series of essays, organize an archival library, or build a new body of visual work. You use your will to draw a boundary, declare a direction, and point your compass forward.

• The Willingness (Non-Intervention): Resisting the urge to micromanage how that direction must manifest. If a project naturally veers down an unexpected path, or if an essay evolves into a completely different topic, you use your willingness to stop intervening or trying to force it back to your original script. You allow reality to improvise and shape the final result often leading you to a much better outcome than you had imagined.

The Will to Overcome Impatience paired with the Willingness to Wait for the Right Moment

• The Will (Delayed Gratification): Actively conquering the modern compulsion for instant results, quick validation, or immediate publication. You use your will as an internal anchor to restrain impulsive rushing, quiet your anxieties, and keep working steadily in private.

• The Willingness (Patience): Accepting the natural, slow growth timeline of the universe and your materials. You treat your unread archive, your raw papers, or your unfinished drafts like items in storage - completely at peace with the fact that they are waiting quietly, trusting that they will reveal exactly where they belong or where they are going only when the right moment arrives.

The Blank Canvas of Zero Expectations

But it is easy to misunderstand this approach. People hear “let go of control” and assume it means lying on the couch, doing absolutely nothing, and watching life pass you by. True willingness is actually active and attentive. You still show up. You still do the work. You just change how you handle the process.

To survive this shift, I had to pair my first rule with another saying I coined for myself: “Expect nothing and you will never be disappointed.”

At first glance, it sounds a bit cynical - like a pessimistic shield against reality. But in practice, it is pure freedom. When we approach a situation with high expectations, we are secretly trying to control the future. We write a script in our heads for how people should react, how a project should succeed, or how a day should go. When reality inevitably improvises, we get disappointed that our preconcieved expectations were not fulfilled as we had hoped. But maybe we were expecting the wrong thing.

By expecting nothing, you stop trying to force outcomes on the universe. You strip away the rigid demands of what should happen. This doesn’t mean you expect bad things; it means you leave the canvas blank and your mind neutral. If something great happens, it is a genuinely, pleasant surprise. If nothing happens, you lose nothing because you weren’t holding onto a fantasy in the first place. It turns out that zero expectation is the secret to total appreciation.

The Forensics of Daily Life

This isn’t just abstract philosophy; it is literally how we discover truth in the real world. Think about science or forensics.

If a forensic investigator walks into a crime scene with a predetermined theory of what happened, they are a terrible investigator. They will experience confirmation bias. They will only look for clues that fit their hunch, entirely blind to the muddy footprint or the stray hair that proves otherwise. To find the truth, an investigator has to walk into the room with zero expectations. They have to use their will to remain completely willing to see whatever is actually there, no matter how unexpected or inconvenient it might be to their original assumptions.

We need to treat our own lives less like a movie we are directing, and more like a laboratory in which we are investigating. When you stop trying to force a specific outcome, you stop blinding yourself to alternative paths. You give reality the space to show you something better than what you could have planned. By expecting nothing and remaining willing, you aren’t being passive - you are being a good scientist. You are letting the data of life guide your next move. You notice subtle patterns forming, motifs developing and see things taking shape that were not previously obvious. Our experience becomes conversational with Life.

The Mid-Career Crisis of Faith

We see the alternative to this investigative openness everywhere in our culture, particularly in the relentless drive to reach the “top of the heap.” It is a widely held, deeply problematic assumption that to succeed is to dominate - to force our world into submission so completely that those we admire have no choice but to applaud.

This trap is especially perilous for creatives, artists, and writers navigating their late thirties and forties. By this stage in life, the initial, romantic momentum of youth has often burned out. Many look at the traditional art world or institutional metrics of success and realize they haven’t achieved the total domination they or their peers expected. It is a threshold marked by a profound crisis of faith. The trail they have been walking for decades suddenly feels ambiguous, and they are left trying to figure out how to proceed forward - and more agonizingly, toward what?

When we obsess over dominating our environment or reaching an arbitrary summit to justify our creative calling, our will is entirely misdirected. We use it to manipulate external outcomes, chase market trends, and police the opinions of others. This is a structural guarantee of suffering. First, because the external art market and its gatekeepers refuse to be micromanaged. Second, because tying your peace of mind to the admiration of an audience means you have handed them the keys to your well-being. You aren’t actually king of the hill; you are a prisoner to their validation.

From Dictator to Observer

This is the ultimate irony of pure willfulness. It dresses itself up as supreme strength, leadership, and ambition. But because it is rooted in a rigid demand for a specific outcome - I must be seen as successful - it is completely fragile. When reality improvises and the creative trail winds through a dry valley, immense disappointment and exhaustion follow.

Ultimately, giving up control is not the same as giving up power. True power lies in adaptability, not rigidity. For an artist at mid-career, the shift from willfulness to willingness is the only way forward. When you stop fighting the universe to prove your own will, you finally free up your energy to cooperate with reality. By emptying your mind of expectations and unlocking your willingness, you cease being a frustrated dictator of your life and become its most fascinated observer - and that is exactly when life, and the work itself, finally begins to reveal itself.

Join the Conversation: For the artists and writers here, have you ever hit a wall where forcing a creative outcome completely exhausted you? How do you practice “willingness” in your studio or writing routine when the path forward feels ambiguous? Let’s discuss in the comments below.

Please share your thoughts about how you think about the trans-temporal conversation in the comments below.

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Take a Minute

Close your eyes and visualize what is directly behind you then turn around and look at what is there.

In a comment write what you observed.

The Creative Superpower of Limits

Disciplining oneself to happily work within limits is a superpower for creative people.

And we all have limits.

We have only so much time. We have only so much money. We have the materials that happen to be available. We have the studio we have, the body we have, the skills we have developed so far, the responsibilities we have accumulated, the place where we happen to live, the circumstances into which we have been dropped. Even the wealthiest and most successful artist eventually runs up against the boundaries of mortality. There are only so many mornings.

So the question is never really whether we will work within limits. We will.

The question is whether we will spend our creative lives resenting those limits or learn how to make them productive.

This is where discipline becomes something much more interesting than self-denial. Discipline is the ability to say: Very well. These are the conditions. What can I do here?

And then get to work.

There is an enormous amount of wasted creative energy in wishing circumstances were different. If I had a bigger studio. If I had more money. If I had better materials. If I had more time. If I lived somewhere else. If I had started earlier. If somebody would give me a grant. If the gallery would call. If people understood what I was doing.

Perhaps all of those things would be useful. But they are imaginary conditions. Creativity can only operate upon what is actually present.

The great transformation occurs when the artist stops experiencing limitation primarily as deprivation and begins experiencing it as definition.

A piece of paper has edges.
A sonnet has fourteen lines.
A piano has eighty-eight keys.
A day has twenty-four hours.

A particular painting might contain only black and white. A collage might be constructed entirely from materials found within a single city block. A composer might spend an entire piece investigating one rhythmic figure. An artist might spend months exploring nothing more than a zigzag, a reversing zigzag and a loop.

At first this sounds restrictive.
Then something strange happens.
The smaller territory begins to become enormous.

You discover variations you would never have noticed if you had been wandering across an unlimited field of possibilities. One line can be heavy or delicate, hesitant or decisive, compressed or expansive. It can accelerate, stumble, repeat, reverse, collide, disappear and return. Put it beside another line and an entirely new universe opens.

This is the principle of the étude. You deliberately narrow the field so that you can deepen your attention. You say: For the moment, I am going to investigate this. And because you have excluded ten thousand other possibilities, you begin noticing the thousand possibilities hidden inside this one.

That is a very different conception of creative freedom.

We often imagine freedom as having unlimited choices. But unlimited choice can produce a peculiar kind of paralysis. If anything is possible, where do you begin?

A limitation gives you somewhere to stand.

The edge of the paper is not merely where the artwork stops. It is one of the conditions that makes the artwork possible in the first place.

The same thing happens throughout an artist’s life.

Perhaps you only have two hours today.
Fine. What can two hours become?

Perhaps you only have scraps of paper.
Fine. What can scraps of paper become?

Perhaps your studio is a hotel room, a kitchen table, an airplane seat or a park bench.
Fine. What kind of work belongs to that situation?

Perhaps circumstances suddenly prevent you from making the work you have been making for years.
Fine. What is possible now under these conditions?

This last question is one of the most powerful questions a creative person can cultivate:What is possible now? It brings the imagination back from fantasy and places it directly into relationship with reality. And reality is incredibly fertile.

The artist who develops this habit becomes difficult to stop.

Take away the large studio and the artist works small.
Take away the expensive materials and the artist uses cardboard.
Take away the printing press and the artist draws.
Take away the brushes and the artist uses a stick.
Put the artist in another country and the streets become the supply cabinet.
Give the artist twenty years and there is a life’s work.
Give the artist twenty minutes and there is a drawing.

The important thing is that the creative relationship with the world remains intact.

This is why the word happily matters so much.

There is a tremendous difference between grudgingly tolerating circumstances and becoming curious about them.Resentment keeps comparing the present situation with an imaginary preferable situation.

Curiosity asks what this situation contains.

That shift is profound.

Once the artist becomes curious about limits, limitation itself becomes material.

Then obstacles begin turning into propositions.

Only three colors? Interesting.
Only one sheet of paper? Let’s see.
Only what I can carry in this suitcase? Good.
Only this one gesture for the next thirty drawings? Now we’re getting somewhere.

The creative person begins treating circumstances almost as a collaborator. Reality establishes certain conditions and the artist responds.

Call and response.

The world says: Here is what you have.
The artist says: Let’s see what I can do with it.

This is one of the deepest forms of creative maturity.

The beginner often imagines that mastery will eventually mean escaping limitations. The mature artist discovers almost the opposite. Mastery increasingly involves choosing limits intelligently and then working deeply within them.

A vocabulary emerges.

Certain materials.
Certain gestures.
Certain scales.
Certain recurring problems.
Certain questions that may occupy decades.

From the outside, this can look like narrowing. From inside the practice, it feels like increasing depth. The territory becomes smaller while the world inside it becomes larger.

That is why an artist can spend a lifetime investigating something that another person thinks could be exhausted in an afternoon.

The outsider sees a zigzag. The artist sees rhythm, direction, reversal, pressure, interval, acceleration, density, counterpoint, interruption, repetition, variation and return.

The limit has become a microscope.

This attitude also provides enormous resilience because circumstances are always changing. Money comes and goes. Studios are gained and lost. Bodies age. Technologies change. Careers rise and fall. Materials disappear. Plans collapse. Opportunities arrive unexpectedly. Entire societies reorganize themselves around us.

Anyone whose creativity depends upon maintaining perfect conditions is in a precarious position.

But the artist who has learned to say What is possible now? can continue. That person carries the studio internally.

This does not mean that every limitation is desirable. Some limitations genuinely damage people’s lives and possibilities. Nor does it mean we shouldn’t try to improve our circumstances when we can.

It simply means that creative life cannot be postponed until all limitations disappear. They never will.

There will always be a frame.
There will always be an edge to the paper.
There will always be only so much time.

Creative freedom is something different from having no limits.

Creative freedom is the cultivated ability to move freely within limits, to press against them, investigate them, play with them, occasionally transform them and sometimes discover that what first appeared to be a wall was actually an instrument.

Then limitation ceases to be the enemy of creativity. It becomes the resistance against which creative strength develops. And the artist who learns to work happily under those conditions acquires a remarkable confidence:

Give me what is available.
Give me the circumstances as they are.
Give me this much space, this much time, these few materials, this particular problem.

I will begin here.

Thinking in Museum Time

One of the unexpected gifts of building an archive is that it changes your relationship with time.

Most people think in days.
Businesses think in quarters.
Governments think in election cycles.
Even many artists think in terms of the next exhibition, the next grant, the next sale, the next deadline.

Museums think differently. A museum thinks in centuries.

When you hold an object that is a hundred years old, or five hundred years old, or two thousand years old, your own lifetime suddenly finds its proper scale. You become one caretaker among many across generations.

This has become increasingly important to me as I continue making work and building the archives of the Collage Museum.

Recently I found myself sorting through papers collected from the walls of European cities. At first I was overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of material. There seemed to be enough paper for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of future collages.

Then something shifted.

I realized I was looking at the collection through the wrong lens. I was seeing it through the calendar.

Instead, I needed to see it through the consciousness of the museum. Museums are never in a hurry. Their collections are not waiting to be finished. They are waiting to be encountered and understood.

A drawer may remain unopened for decades until someone recognizes its importance. A document may sit quietly in an archive for a century before becoming exactly the piece someone needed to complete a story. An artwork may disappear into storage for generations before returning to public view and finding an audience ready to understand it.

Nothing has been wasted. It has simply been waiting.

Artists can benefit enormously from adopting this perspective. The studio begins to resemble an archive more than a factory. Materials are not inventory that must be consumed. They are a collection entrusted to your care to be distributed as opportunity presents itself.

Ideas are not obligations. They are possibilities. Sketchbooks become archives. Experiments become documents. Failures become evidence. Everything joins the larger story.

When I think this way, I no longer feel pressured to use every sheet of paper or pursue every idea. My responsibility is much smaller and much more achievable.

I simply have to do what the day calls for.

The collection will still be here tomorrow.

And if some materials outlive me, perhaps that is exactly as it should be.

Every museum contains objects collected by people who never lived to see the importance those objects would eventually have.

They collected because they recognized value.

Future generations discovered why.

The artist, in a similar way, is always participating in a conversation that extends far beyond a single lifetime. We inherit materials, techniques, traditions, and ways of seeing from people we never met. We add our own contribution. Then we pass everything forward.

Thinking in Museum Time encourages patience because history itself is patient. It encourages generosity because - as we have been supported by those from the past - the future is filled with people we will never know and it is to them that we make our offering. It encourages careful craftsmanship because our work may survive longer than our names. Most importantly, it relieves us of the illusion that everything important must happen now.

The present moment is not the entire story. It is only the page we happen to be writing today.

The archives reminds us that we are not merely making objects. We are participating in civilization. The pressure to produce gives way to the privilege of contributing.

The anxiety of finishing gives way to the satisfaction of adding one more careful piece to an endless collection that began long before us and, if we do our work well, will continue long after we are gone.

That is Museum Time. And strangely enough, once you begin living in that mindset, there is always enough time and little urgency to worry over.

Related:

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See what happened in NOTES

Take a Minute

Observe your breath. Feel your breath going in and out. Feel the breath on in your nostrals or mouth. What is the quality of your breathing? Shallow, deep? Slow, fast? Labored, easy? Count your breaths to ten. Use your breathing as an anchor to quiet your mind.

In a comment write what you observed.

This is an expanded comment that I made to another reader of the article The Footprints in the Snow.

The Verse of Uni: Reality, Attention, and the Great Harmony

Our previous conversation about the centipede and the grasshopper opens up a profound paradox about human experience. The grasshopper’s analytical questioning paralyzed the centipede because it forced a deeply intuitive, unified physical process into a rigid, conceptual framework. In a way, that is exactly how we stumble through what we call “reality.”

We act under the superficial assumption that we all inhabit the same objective world. On a physical, baseline level, perhaps we do. But beneath that surface, the truth is far more radical: we are each locked inside our own unique, localized universe.

Our individual worlds are forged entirely by what we notice or don’t bother to notice, and by the highly specific sequence of encounters we have from one fleeting moment to the next. Because of this, everything in manifestation is infinitely unique. There are no duplicates in the universe; nothing ever happens twice, no matter how much our minds try to categorize events into recurring patterns.

This brings us to the profound role of human consciousness. If reality is a constantly shifting, infinitely unique flux, our power lies in our attention. The more deeply we pay attention to external circumstances, to events, and to the quiet landscape of our own thoughts, the more available we become. Attention transforms into a form of active willingness. It softens our defensive posture, allowing us to accept the changing nature of things without fear, trepidation, or the exhausting friction of resistance.

When we assume this stance of open, quiet curiosity, an amazing shift occurs: things simply seem to work out. We cease trying to willfully shape and intervene in outcomes we are too limited to fully comprehend anyway. Instead, we let life itself move through us.

Of course, “shit happens.” Disruption, decay, and sudden chaos are baked into the very dynamics of a changing universe. The centipede trips; the paper tears in the studio; the composition that looked perfect on Tuesday fails on Wednesday. But these aren’t errors in the system; they are part of its movement.

Underneath all the particulates of our daily lives, beneath the words we use to poorly translate our experiences, lies what I call the Great Harmony - the Tao, the unified undercurrent of existence. The universe is a single, unmanifest being exploring its own infinite nature through these countless unique expressions and the empire of beings that we are composed of. The Tao remains completely impartial, offering its sun and rain without playing favorites. Yet, it inherently favors those who align with it. When we step out of our own way, quiet our conceptual minds, and simply ride the flow of that deep, upstream intelligence, we find that the universe has an extraordinary way of carrying us along.

The Architecture of Flow: Systems, Constraints, and the Studio as Corral

In my studio practice, the relationship with the Great Harmony is not a passive waiting game. It demands a rigorous, predetermined discipline. I have often said that I devise structural systems that function like a corral for wild horses.

The raw, intuitive creative impulses that move through an artist are inherently unpredictable, wild, and chaotic. If I were to operate without boundaries - allowing just anything to happen at any time - the sheer magnitude of possibilities would become paralyzing. The mind gets lost, fracturing into a thousand conflicting directions.

True alignment with the Tao does not mean absolute lawlessness; it is found in the interplay between structure and spontaneity. By intentionally building a localized set of rules, strict limitations, and geometric systems, I construct the corral. I define the margins.

Once those physical and conceptual constraints are locked into place, my ego can step back. Within those specific boundaries, the creative flow is granted total sovereignty to unfold, shift, and explode exactly as it wishes. The system does not crush the wild impulse; it channels it. The discipline of the framework protects the purity of the intuition, ensuring that when the universal language speaks through the movement of the hand, it lands with absolute clarity on the support.

The Path of No Choices: Cascading Doorways of the Creative Act

Once the disciplined system is constructed - the corral that prevents the work from scattering in a thousand directionless ways - the nature of choice changes completely. Inside this framework, I follow a way of creating that I call “the path of no choices.”

To the outside observer, a blank surface presents an agonizing abyss of infinite possibilities. But for the artist operating in alignment with the underlying current, those infinite possibilities instantly collapse into a single, inevitable reality. Intuitively, the artist can see the exact next move that needs to happen. The discipline lies in doing only that, moving forward without a fraction of a second spent in hesitation, doubt, or second-guessing.

This is not a premeditated grand plan map; it is a live, sequential unfolding. Each move is an absolute commitment. You cannot see the third or fourth step from the beginning. Instead, executing the immediate, necessary action is what unlocks the next phase of the work. Each step opens the door to the next step that was, until that very moment, completely hidden from view.

Every mark made, every piece of paper placed, becomes the physical key to the next doorway. By walking this path of no choices, the ego is bypassed entirely. The artist does not impose a forced, external will upon the material. You simply bear witness to the work revealing itself to you, one doorway at a time, until the movement rests in the final expression of the Great Harmony.

How do you think about your creative process?

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See what happened in NOTES

Take a Minute

Listen carefully to all of the sounds you are hearing at this moment. In a comment write what you observed.

COLLAGE POEM:

Dancing and Singing

Run directly into the light
dancing and singing.
Trying new things is inspiring
Timing is everything.
A very inconvenient habit
or any rule of that sort
always say the same thing
and it was impossible to guess
explaining the thing afterwards
and pretended not to see
thinking what to do
it was no laughing matter.

Take a minute to think about it
relatively little attention has been given
all sorts of things happened in a moment
fluttering about in all directions
There was not a moment to be lost.

Rather uncomfortable in the silence,
having long observed and lamented
I resolved to proceed in a new way
adjusting and correcting the calculations
with all its particulars
acknowledging some important exceptions;
reading the gaps and silences
to reveal hidden histories.

[I have] a rather strong fondness for archives
the feel of the documents
the bundles of papers tied with string
their occasional doodles and asides,
the many beautiful, unknown islands,
the prospect of elsewhere,
imaginings of aspirational futures.

Lines gather while reading (probably Jonathan Swift).

Ok, based on your comments I am going to switch back to posting everything by email as usual instead of the weekly round up newletter idea I was trying out.

Thanks for your responses!

The Only Gatekeeper

In a recent correspondence an artist mentioned: “I’ve often worried that my collages are not as good as they might be.” That led to the following article.

Every collage artist worries about that. Probably every artist who has ever seriously committed themselves to making anything has worried about it. The painter looks at the painting and wonders whether it could have been stronger. The poet rereads the poem and hears the line that might have been better. The composer hears another possibility. The collage artist moves a fragment half an inch to the left, then back again, and wonders whether either position is right.

This worry is built into the practice because the artist can always imagine something beyond what has actually been made.

There is the work before you, and then there is the work you sense might have been possible.

That distance between the two can become a source of anxiety, but it is also one of the engines of artistic development. If you were completely satisfied with everything you made, there would be very little reason to make the next thing. The dissatisfaction is partly evidence that your imagination has moved slightly ahead of your ability to materialize what you can sense.

The difficulty begins when we confuse this internal conversation with competition.

We look around.

We see another artist whose work seems more resolved, more sophisticated, more original, more successful, more widely exhibited, more collected, or more discussed. We begin measuring our work against theirs.

But this is an impossible measurement.

The thing is, nobody else can be you.

That sounds simple, perhaps even obvious, but I think it has profound consequences for an artist.

Every artist arrives at the studio carrying an absolutely unique accumulation of experience. You have your particular history, your particular body, your particular temperament, your particular memories, obsessions, accidents, discoveries, limitations, abilities, failures, intuitions and curiosities. You have seen what you have seen. You have loved what you have loved. You have suffered what you have suffered. You have spent your particular number of years looking at the world through a pair of eyes and a perspective that nobody else possesses nor can posess.

All of that enters the work.

Even the things you cannot articulate enter the work.

Perhaps especially those things.

So when we compare ourselves too closely with another artist, we are comparing two completely different situations. Their work is the consequence of their path. Your work is the consequence of yours.

You can learn from other artists. You can admire them. You can study their methods, borrow strategies, notice possibilities, enter into conversation with their work and allow yourself to be challenged by it. Artists have always done this. Art is a vast trans-temporal conversation in which the living speak with the dead and the young speak with the old and everyone leaves something behind for someone they will never meet.

But admiration is different from competition.

Ultimately, we compete only against our own best efforts.

The real question is not whether your collage is better than someone else’s collage. The question is whether you have taken your own work seriously enough to discover what it is capable of becoming.

That is a much harder question. Because each of us is the gatekeeper of our own work. Nobody is standing outside your studio preventing you from looking harder. Nobody is stopping you from making another version that might be better or just different.

Nobody is preventing you from spending another hour considering the relationship between two shapes, another afternoon studying a color, another month developing a series, another ten years following an idea wherever it wants to go.

There may certainly be gatekeepers controlling galleries, museums, grants, publications, exhibitions, collections and markets. Those gates exist, and they can have real consequences for an artist’s career. But they do not control the most important gate.

They do not control the studio door. They cannot decide what you make tomorrow, cannot determine how deeply you investigate your own ideas, cannot stop you from becoming more perceptive, cannot prevent you from developing your craft or from discovering something.

That gate belongs to you.

This is why the fear that our work is “not as good as it might be” can actually be useful if we understand it properly. It may simply mean that we sense another possibility, another question to pursue.

Good.
Make another collage.
And then another.

Do not demand that every work carry the entire burden of proving who you are as an artist. That is far too much responsibility to place on one small arrangement of paper and glue.

Think instead in terms of a lifetime of work.

One collage teaches you something that becomes useful three collages later. A failed painting contains a gesture that reappears successfully ten years afterward. An experiment that seemed insignificant at the time turns out to have been the beginning of an entire body of work.

Artists rarely know the full significance of what they are doing while they are doing it.

We work forward intuitively and understand backward historically.

That is one reason documentation and preservation of the work matter. Given enough time, what initially appears to be a collection of individual objects begins to reveal itself as a path. Patterns emerge. Recurring questions become visible. Ideas disappear and return. What seemed like failure becomes preparation. What seemed accidental becomes characteristic.

Eventually you begin to recognize that the real artwork may be larger than any individual object.

The real artwork is the practice itself. The individual works are evidence left along the path. And once you begin thinking that way, the question “Is this collage good enough?” changes.

Good enough for what?
Good enough for who?

Good enough to sell?
Good enough for a gallery?
Good enough for a museum?
Good enough compared with the artist whose work you saw yesterday?

Those are downstream questions. They may have practical importance, but they are not the fundamental question.

The fundamental question is whether the work is alive within your own inquiry.

Did you discover something?
Did you pay attention?
Did you push beyond what you already knew how to do?
Did you recognize when the work began asking for something you had not planned?
Did you have the courage to follow it?
Did you give it enough time?
And perhaps most importantly: did you return to the studio the next day?

Because artistic development is cumulative.
Nobody makes your thousandth collage except the person who made the first 999.
There is no shortcut around that.

Your awkward works belong to your accomplished works. Your failures belong to your successes. Your uncertain periods belong to your breakthroughs. They are all part of the same organism developing through time.

The artist’s responsibility, then, is less about becoming “better than” someone else and more about becoming increasingly capable of being oneself.

That takes a lifetime.

The great privilege of being an artist is that there is no final examination. There is no moment when someone hands you a certificate saying that you have finally become yourself. You simply keep working, keep looking, keep noticing, keep refining, keep questioning, keep discovering.

And occasionally you make something that surprises you. Something arrives that seems slightly beyond what you thought you were capable of making.

For a moment you think: Ah. There it is.

Then you live with it for a while.
And eventually another possibility appears beyond it.

You begin again.

So when you find yourself worrying that your collages are not as good as they might be, perhaps you can take some comfort in the worry itself.

It means you can still see farther down the road.

Nobody else can walk that road for you.
Nobody else can make the work that only your particular life can produce.

You are not competing with the thousands of other artists working around you.
You are in conversation with them. Your real competition is much closer to home.

It is yesterday’s best effort.

And tomorrow you get another chance.

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See what happened in NOTES

Take a Minute

Do a slow 360 degree scan of where you are right now. In a comment write what you observed.

The Footprints in the Snow

Modern neuroscience has become remarkably adept at watching the brain work. Functional MRI scans reveal regions becoming active. Electrodes detect neurons firing in intricate patterns. Researchers can correlate measurable brain activity with memory, emotion, language, decision making, and perception. Every year these measurements become more sophisticated.

These discoveries are genuine achievements. The footprints in the snow are real.

But footprints are not the walker.

Imagine waking after a fresh snowfall and discovering a trail crossing an empty field. You can measure the depth of each print. You can calculate the length of the stride. You can determine the person’s weight, direction, and perhaps even whether they were carrying something heavy. Every measurement is meaningful and scientifically testable.

Yet none of those measurements explain the person who made them.

The footprints are evidence of a journey. They are not the journey itself.

In much the same way, neuroscience observes the measurable traces left by thought. Every idea, every memory, every feeling corresponds with neural activity. The instruments reveal the footprints that conscious experience leaves upon the brain.

But does that explain consciousness?

That is a very different question.

As artists we are constantly reminded of this distinction.

Someone may analyze the chemical composition of paint, the weave of the canvas, the speed of the brushstroke, or the electrical activity occurring in the artist’s brain while working. Every one of those observations may be perfectly accurate. They may reveal fascinating correlations.

Yet they do not explain why the painting came into being.

They do not explain the intuition that arrived without warning, the years of lived experience condensed into a single gesture, the mysterious sense that one mark belongs while another does not. They do not explain the silent conversation between artist and artwork that unfolds over hours or months until something finally says, “Yes, this is finished.”

Those experiences leave traces.

They are not identical to the traces.

This distinction appears throughout life. A musical score is not the music. A script is not the performance. A map is not the landscape. An archive is evidence of a partial history, not the activity itself. Every artifact points toward a living event that exceeds its own material form.

The measurable is indispensable. Without footprints we might never know anyone had crossed the field.

But if we mistake the footprints for the walker, we begin to confuse the evidence with the living flow of reality.

This is one of the enduring challenges of both science and art. Science becomes ever more skilled at measuring the traces of experience. Artists spend their lives dwelling within the experience that leaves those traces behind.

The two pursuits are not enemies. They are simply looking from opposite directions.

One studies the footprints.

The other is up ahead walking.

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This reminds me of the story of the Centipede that goes something like this:

The Rhythm of the Meadow

A centipede named Koji was famous across the valley for his beautiful, sweeping movement. When he moved over the moss, his hundred legs rose and fell like waves on a lake. He never stumbled. He never hesitated. He simply walked, a living song of pure motion.

One afternoon, a grasshopper landed on a nearby blade of grass. The grasshopper was a logical creature, always counting his hops and calculating the angles of his jumps.

Watching Koji, the grasshopper became deeply fasinated. “Excuse me, friend,” the grasshopper called out. “I have only two legs, and still, keeping track of them takes constant work. You have a hundred! Tell me, when you begin to move, how to you keep track of so many legs at the same time? And how do you ensure the middle legs do not trip over the rear ones?”

Koji stopped. He looked down at his long body. He had never actually looked at his feet while walking.

“I... I am not entirely sure,” Koji murmured. “Let me think about it.”

Koji decided to start slowly. He focused all his attention on his front-left leg. He willed it to lift. Then, he tried to coordinate the tenth leg on his right to match the rhythm. Suddenly, his back legs felt heavy. His middle legs bunched together.

The more he calculated the sequence, the more chaotic his body became. Within seconds, Koji’s legs tangled like a ball of yarn, and he tumbled sideways into a patch of dry clover, completely paralyzed.

The grasshopper shook his head, adjusted his antennae, and chirped, “How tragic. A master of movement, yet you don’t even know what you are doing.” He then hopped away, proud of his own intellect.

Koji lay in the clover for a long time, frustrated and frozen. He tried to think his way out of the tangle, but every thought only made a different leg twitch awkwardly.

Finally, exhausted by the effort, Koji simply let go. He stopped trying to fix the problem. He forgot about the grasshopper. He closed his eyes and listened to the wind rustling through the grass, feeling the warmth of the sun on his back.

He forgot about himself - Koji the centipede. He forgot about his hundred legs.

A gentle breeze blew across the meadow. Without a single thought, Koji’s body responded to the cool air. His front legs moved forward, the next row followed, and the wave returned. Before he even realized he was moving, Koji was gliding smoothly through the grass again, leaving his thoughts behind in the dirt.

What a Taoist might say about this problem…

Look upon the centipede.

He does not study the art of walking, yet his hundred feet move in perfect harmony. He does not count his steps, yet he never stumbles. He does not command the legs, he simply allows the Tao to move through him. This is Wu-Wei - action without striving. He moves as water flows, yielding to the earth, filling every hollow without a thought of his own cleverness.

Then comes the grasshopper.

The grasshopper is proud of his sharp mind. He counts his hops. He measures his angles. He looks at the centipede and sees only a problem to be solved, a machine to be taken apart. He calls out, “How do you govern such a multitude? Which leg moves first? What is your secret design?”

Alas, the centipede listens. He steps out of the natural simplicity of knowing and enters the trap of knowledge. He looks down. He begins to calculate. He tries to manage what was already perfect.

And what happens?

In trying to be clever, he loses his virtue. In trying to control his hundred legs, they become a tangled web. He falls into the dirt, paralyzed by his own mind. Every thought becomes a knot; every calculation becomes a shackle. The grasshopper chirps in triumph and hops away, blind to the fact that his own intellect has just ruined a masterpiece of nature.

The centipede lies frozen. He tries to think his way out of the tangle.

Finally, exhausted, the centipede surrenders. He drops his cleverness. He forgets the grasshopper’s question. He forgets his hundred legs. He returns to the state of the uncarved block. He listens to the wind. He feels the sun. He returns to the stillness.

And in that stillness, the Tao returns. Without a single thought, his body remembers its nature. The first leg moves, the ninety-ninth follows, and he glides effortlessly back into the grass.

The world is a sacred vessel, and it cannot be improved by the analytical mind. If you try to tamper with it, you will ruin it. If you try to hold it, you will lose it. Trust the natural order.

VISUAL POETRY AND COLOR - LOS ALAMOS, N.M.

EXHIBITION - Opening Reception - Saturday August 15 - 2:00 - 4pm

The International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction presents Visual Poetry and Color: a traveling exhibition of Collage Artists and Visual Poets from around the world.

This is Exhibition #4

see an overview of exhibitions 1-3

See works from Exhibition #1 (Troy, NY)
See additional works added in 2024 for Exhibition #2 & #3 (Dallas, TX and Los Angeles, CA)
See additional works added in 2026 for Exhibition #4 (Los Alamos, NM)

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

IF YOU ARE A PARTICIPATING ARTIST BE SURE TO POST THIS PAGE ON YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA!

International

Elena Marini, Italy - David Bircham - Canada, Lisa Blond, Canada - Flora Georgiou, Australia - Angelo Ricciardi, Italy - Roberto Scala, Italy - Emily Marbach, UK - Les Jones, UK - Vittore Baroni, Italy - Ryosuke Cohen, Japan - Luc Fierens, Belgium - Rose Frain, Scotland - György Galantai, Hungary - Julia Klaniczay, Hungary - Alexander Limarev, Russia - Ruggero Maggi, Italy - Lilian Nicholson, Sweden - Matthew Rose, France - Berty Skuber, Italy - Rod Summers, the Netherlands - Kjell Varvin, Norway - Mary Wallace, Ireland, Alastair Strachan - Scottland - Mado Reznik, Argentina - Mike Shaw, UK - Danielle Ouellet, Spain - Patrick Anderson-McQuoid, Ireland - Keiichi Nakamura, Japan - NAB nab, France -

USA

Cathy Zigrossi, Ana Soha, Amye Wake, Abigail Meredith, Annie Kartsotis, Kaitlin Oesterreicher, Alex Mena, Chris Davis, Todd Franke, Bella Moore, Laurie Kornher, Kathy Elliot, Lanny Quarles, Eric Breish, Charlie White, Katerina Touchon, Branko Majmunovic, Peggy Shepherd, Peggy Olivier, Edith Torres, Jasmine Yarbrough, Kerrie More, Don Abell, Zach Touchon, Diane Blumin, Elizabeth Bogard, Liz King, Mili Suleman, Mark LoVecchio, Allison Anne, Ray Beldner, Melissa Kulig, Susan Reedy, Rosemary Rae, Kelly C. Berwager, Deanna Lampe, Jonathan Stangroom, Lilly Hope, Nich St. Jam, David C. Donovan, Ann Dettmer, Pratima Aravabhoomi, Beth McCoy, Joan Schulze, Marlene Weisman, Rebecca Stuckey, Laura Speer, Mary Baumgardner, James Wimberg, Mim Golub Scalin, Janice McDonald, Kathy Elliott, Annie Kartsotis, Terry Garrett, Jay Sylvester, Laura Noe, Betsy Arizu, Judith Jasinski, Christine Jelson West, Jennifer DeSantis, Heidi Markham, Peggy Shepherd, Vicki Daigneau, Selena Dixon, Carmen Kolz, Clive Knights & Terriann Walling, Laila Rezai, Touri Strick, Joey Zanotti, Sona Nast, Marsha Balian, Andrea Burgay, Jane Helslander, Marian Hoffman Ting, Allan Bealy, James Gallagher, John Whitlock, Kelly Feltault, Loralei R Byatt, Garry S. Grayson, Rosalie Gancie, Teri Dryden, Susan D Grissom, Lash, Scott Wiggerman, E.Y. Reilly, C.R.E. Wells, Mike Gold, Carol Tippit Woolworth, Graham Moore, Clare Schmehl, Linda Logan-Condon, Bonnie Binkert, Reid Wood, Ines Kramer, Regina S Levin, Robert McGraw, Ursula Hudson, Bob Phillips, Lance Carlson, Julia Walck, Denise Emanuel Clemen, Jennifer Evens, Robin Roberts, Celeyce Matthews, Elaine Norman, Clark Ellis, Odilia Iaccarino.

This is pretty much the total number of artists about 180 works except for any contributed works made during the workshop on the day of the opening. Unfortunately one work by the artist Kostis from Greece never arrived. It got stuck in US Customs in New York.

WORKSHOP - Saturday August 15 -10am to 2pm

Please join us for a FREE one day collage workshop and make a work to contribute to the exhibition and the archives. All supplies provided. (but you are welcome to bring your own materials to use or share) Your contributed work will be hung the same day for the opening of the exhibition and become a part of the Collage Museum’s collection and used in future exhibitions of this show.

Currently there is plenty of space for the workshop.

Just show up!

PRESS

https://ladailypost.com/visual-poetry-and-color-opens-friday-in-step-up-gallery/

https://losalamosreporter.com/2026/08/04/new-international-exhibit-visual-poetry-and-color-opens-aug-14-in-step-up-gallery/

https://laconm.libcal.com/event/17296572?more

https://www.facebook.com/LADailyPost/posts/step-up-gallery-visual-poetry-and-color-opens-aug-14/1650306420228211/

https://ladailypost.com/step-up-gallery-visual-poetry-color-opens-aug-14/

https://codex.vasari.art/news/story/53142

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2009259115988533/posts/4488776171370136/

https://www.losalamoslibrary.org/Events-directory/Step-Up-Gallery/Opening-Reception-Visual-Poetry-and-Color