The creative relationship

Creativity is a dialogue. And that's what makes it so powerful

Ernest Hemingway famously said, “There isn’t any symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”

Thus frustrating the absolute hell out of literature teachers everywhere.

To me, though, the interesting point here isn’t the bit about puncturing your tenth grade English teacher’s balloon, it’s the last part: “What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.” Because that’s true of all creative endeavors, isn’t it? When creativity succeeds, it’s a dialogue, not a monologue. We each bring to that dialogue our unique personalities and backgrounds and biases and individuality, and what we each take from it will be just as varied.

I ran into an interesting example of that recently when I was listening to the radio, and heard a song that was new to me—Joywave’s “Tongues.” I was immediately grabbed by the mesmerizing, electro-pop riff that introduces the song (and reappears several times during its run), but the lyrics were what fascinated me most.

They seem to exist at that strange intersection between “evocative” and “fever dream.” They’re downright peculiar in places:

Pick me up, dust me off
Give me breath and let me cough
Drag me back, collect my thoughts
I’ve come back to the land I’d lost

The palms are down, I’m welcomed back to town
Sometimes I feel like they don’t understand me
I hear their mouths making foreign sounds
Sometimes I think they’re all just speaking in tongues

Despite their oddness, the lyrics immediately resonated with me. Pretty much all my life, I’ve been baffled by the behavior of my fellow humans. When I’m in conversations, even with people I know well and feel friendly toward, most of the time I not only never know what they’re going to say next, I don’t really get why they have the emotional reactions they do. I often feel like I’m witnessing something I don’t really understand on any deep level, and even afterward I can’t parse what happened and why. It always brings to mind psychologist and writer Oliver Sacks’s pithy phrase of being “an anthropologist on Mars.”

I’ve described myself as feeling like a changeling—someone who was replaced as a child by a being from another species, and has grown up irredeemably separate from the people around him. And “Tongues” seemed to capture that sense of being a stranger in a strange land pitch-perfectly.

My emotional reaction was so powerful that I thought it’d be interesting to see what others came up with from listening to it. The first place I went was the music video, which took an entirely different tack—this one about how society makes us hide who we actually are. [Nota bene: the video is cool but mildly NSFW, as it shows more human skin than might be appropriate in certain circumstances. Be forewarned.]

Then I did a search to see if I could find out how the songwriters themselves described it, and I found a piece lead singer Daniel Armbruster did with Medium about the origins of the song. Here’s what Armbruster had to say:

There are a few things happening in the lyrics of “Tongues”, but a large chunk of it explores a disconnect with one’s peers. Back when I was DJing in Rochester, I would see the same well-meaning individuals night after night talking about how they were moving to a bigger city, writing a novel, starting a band, etc, etc. All of these things were great in theory, but no one ever did them. They never left the bar so far as I could tell. It really weighed on me after awhile and I’d just have to let it go in one ear and out the other. In a way I felt like I needed to push myself harder to compensate for my peers’ lack of effort. After the song came out, I had a person approach me one night in Rochester and tell me that the song had really resonated with them. I was thrilled until they elaborated and said that they had been traveling on another continent recently and couldn’t understand the local dialect. Hopefully that’s not what you take away from the song.

So there’s yet a third and a fourth interpretation of what “Tongues” means.

As a writer, I share Armbruster’s frustration that sometimes readers (or listeners) don’t take away from a creative work what we intended. But that’s part of the game, isn’t it? Because creativity implies a relationship between producer and consumer, the producer can’t (and shouldn’t try to) control where it goes. Readers, listeners, and observers are one-half of the creative relationship, and their uniqueness is inevitably going to shape what they pull out of the experience. And, of course, this is why sometimes that relationship simply fails to form. I love the music of Stravinsky, while it leaves my wife completely cold—she thinks it’s pointless cacophony. A lot of people are moved to tears by Mozart, but I find much of his music inspires me to say nothing more than “it’s nice, I guess.” My friend Andrew Butters, who is so much like me we’ve been described as sharing a brain, read my favorite book (Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum) solely because he’d heard me rave about it so many times, and forced himself to finish it only out a sense of loyalty. Conversely, his favorite book, Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, got no more than a tepid, “It wasn’t a bad read” from me.

But that’s what we should expect, you know? How monotonous would the world be if we all had the same opinions about creative works?

It’s part of why I have zero patience for genre snobs and self-appointed tastemakers. If some piece of creative work inspires you, or evokes emotions in you, it’s done its job, and no one has the slightest right to tell you that you’re wrong for feeling that way. Honestly, I’m delighted if Mozart grabs you by the heart and swings you around; that’s what music is supposed to do. Just because I’m more likely to have that experience listening to Firebird than Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn’t mean I’m right and you’re wrong. All it means is that human creativity is complex, intricate, and endlessly intriguing.

So the snobs can fuck right off with any nonsense about “all romance novels are trash” or “science fiction is for people who never progressed emotionally after eighth grade” (both statements I have heard people say). If something you read makes you smile, laugh, or cry, makes your heart beat a little faster or teases your brain with an idea you’d never considered, causes you to fall in love with a character and deeply care if they win the day—well, I honestly don’t give a flying rat’s ass what genre it belongs to.

And neither should you.

That’s also why I don’t take it all that seriously if someone tells you what a poem, lyric, or piece of art or music means, even if that person is a college professor. Enjoy what you enjoy, and bring your own creativity to the relationship. It may be that Ernest Hemingway didn’t mean The Old Man and the Sea to be anything more than a depiction of an incident involving a fisherman, a boy, a fish, and some sharks; but that doesn’t mean you can’t bring more to the reading, and pull more out of it, yourself.

And isn’t that what makes the creative experience magical?