I began these reflection on creativity because, outside of my family and the triggering physics of nuclear weapons systems, there is not a subject I think about more.
One of the aspects of creativity that fascinates me the most is its relationship to time.
Even the most simple idea is not immediate. It takes some span of time to make it from your head to your arms or to whatever other outlet you are using to express yourself. No act of creation is instantaneous.
That said, sometimes the creative impulse gets diverted, or even derailed. With the best of intentions, our expression becomes blocked. It gets lost along the way.
I am distracted and fascinated by these blockages—in no small part because I spend so much of my creative life adrift in them. I am a collector of stories about how we get lost, and how sometimes we are able to escape.
Take, for example, the scientist, Michael Faraday.
He was born in a hovel in Britain in the late eighteenth century. He was not well educated, and his station in life was severely restricted by the classism in England at the time.
Nevertheless, through a set of circumstances, Faraday managed to gain the attention of a prominent scientist - Humphrey Davy.
Working as Davy's sometimes abused assistant, Faraday made many discoveries in chemistry.
Moreover, he pioneered understandings of electricity and magnetism that helped pave the way for the engines that run our modern world.
Humphrey Davy became jealous of Faraday and his accomplishments - so he put Faraday to work on a different project. For four years, Faraday worked on the problem of reverse-engineering optical glass, to discover the closely guarded secrets of this craft.
This assignment pulled Faraday away from his strength - electromagnetic research - and pulled him out of praise and notoriety. It was a move by which Davy attempted to have his light shine brighter, by hiding Faraday's light under a bushel.
After years of work, Faraday did not crack the secret. He was, in this respect, a failure.
When he was finally allowed to cease his toils in the glassworks, he kept a memento of the time - a brick of leaded glass.
Faraday went back to his researches in electromagnetism, and found some success - but he was also struck by a nervous breakdown, and memory loss, and crippling anxiety. So much so, that he was often unable to work effectively.
Over time, Faraday returned to a problem that had perplexed him. He had managed to demonstrate that electricity and magnetism were related, but he wished to explore whether light was also connected to these other two forces.
To accomplish this investigation, he conducted a long series of experiments with polarized light - in the attempt to see if the influence of an electromagnetic field on a medium could affect the path of the light through a polarizing filter.
He was meticulous, and tried substance after substance. Solids, solutions, gases - each was tested, and each was found to not yield any result. The imagined connection between electromagnetism and light remained elusive. Perhaps there was no connection, after all.
After so many failed attempts, Faraday one day turned in desperation to testing a random collection of objects in his laboratory.
Simply because it was there in his lab, Faraday picked up the glass brick - the object from those years when he had been banished from his research, for the sake of another man's fragile ego.
When he shined the polarized light through the glass brick, and applied the field, the polarized light—at long last—was attenuated. After so many failed attempts, the very symbol of his earlier failure provided the pathway to a breakthrough.
It is not an exaggeration to state that everything in our modern world - including the possibility of the very device upon which you are reading this - would not have been possible, were it not for Michael Faraday.
This man was plagued by daily anxiety, and crippling doubt, and a social system designed to keep him "in his place."
Yet - in a strange twist of fate so cosmically precise, I am tempted to call it divine - the very obstacle placed in his path became the vehicle of opportunity that allowed success.
Earlier this week, Taylor Swift released her new album, folklore. I keep writing about it, because I am so stunned by how good it is. You should listen to it. You really should.
Anyway, one of the tracks on folklore is a collaboration between Swift and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, and that has put another collected case of creative blockage on my mind: the crazy and tortured journey of “iMi,” the first track off last year’s release i,i.
The story of “iMi” (read, so far as I can tell, as “I am I” as opposed to “eemee”) began in a barn, one old night about six years before the album was finished. Vernon was improvising with his friend, Trevor Hagan.
What they were recording that night wasn’t so much “music,” as it was simply a collage of found sounds and noise.
Nevertheless, Vernon heard something in the chaos, and soon was telling his producer/collaborator Brad Cook, “This is going to be the first song on the new album.”
But Cook kept pointing out the obvious” “It’s not a song.”
What I love is how many tricks and kitchen sinks got thrown at this tenacious obstacle.
Instead of giving up, like a sane person would have done, Justin Vernon embodied one of my favorite creative touchstones: he was simply too dumb to quit on the idea that this hissing cardboard and radio static was going to be a song.
The result is—in my opinion—stunningly beautiful. Over its three and a quarter minutes, the song takes you on an emotional journey that, not gonna lie, brings me to tears many of the times I listen to it.
But part of what I love about the finished song is that you hear the blockages woven into its structure. Like many Bon Iver songs, “iMi” is about distances—physical as well as emotional—and it’s also about breaking through, finding the words.
I like you. I like you. And that ain’t nothin’ new.
I think a lot about the creative process employed by Peter Gabriel. He also throws everything and the kitchen sink at his projects. Then, like a gardener, Gabriel slowly pulls back and prunes pieces until what is left is a beautiful, perfect sculpture of sound.
What’s different in the two approaches is that I have rarely understood Gabriel to be coming from a place of desperation. In contrast, Justin Vernon’s approach to “iMi” was all desperation.
But what I came to understand the desperation was not rooted in the material; it was rooted in Vernon himself. He speaks about all the ways he was blocked—inability to form relationships, inability to feel connections.
Breaking through and crafting the sound snippets into a finished song required Vernon figuring out those blocks and getting through them, and even incorporating the wisdom gained into the lyrics of the song itself.
if forgiveness is a chore, what you waitin for?
My favorite little bit from the entire saga of how “iMi” came to be is when Vernon says of Brad Cook, “He produced me as a person, as much as producing the music.”
Both my children were born at our home. That was an amazing, almost indescribable experience. But one of the lessons I learned from it, that I can put into words, is that the whole thing was not possible, until it was.
Watching my wife transform into a warrior who surmounted pain and fear—twice—to bring these tenacious creatures into the world, was breathtaking.
It brings me back to the idea of time. Things take time. Your creative process takes time. That’s okay. It has to be okay.
We are not machines on an assembly line.
Discipline is important, yes. Showing up each day to put in the work, yes—this is necessary.
But sometimes what you have is a pile of noises, and everyone else is telling you there is no song in there.
But you hear it. You can’t spell it out yet, but you hear it. So you keep going.
You keep going, because you hear what no one else can hear.
Sometimes all you have is a brick. A stupid glass brick.
It’s a brick that hurts you to look at it, because it is the brick that reminds you of failure, and all the problems you haven’t solved. It’s a brick that reminds you that you have been pushed aside and used. It is your loss, and your pain.
But it’s a brick, so you grab it, because you’ve got to build.
Don’t stop. Don’t quit.
What you hear is in there. The key that helps the rest of us blind folks see the world in a new and unimaginable way. It’s in there.
Fight for what you hear in the static.
Build.
I’d be honored to hear your story about times you have been blocked, and how you found your way through. If you feel like sharing, please leave me a comment:
and if you find these reflections valuable, please consider sharing them with your friends. Thank you!
Finally, in case you haven’t heard it, here’s the final version of iMi: