Also, the dance project continues, now focussing on a story about the Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, from a work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

And this. I was trying to deal with the banal, to find the heart of something ordinary.

Mark Schenker givew teriffic lectures on literature. I wanted to photograph him at once.

Nearing the end of a workshop during the Day of the Dead  in this southern Mexican city.

Below that is the text of an article about what makes good work good. It was published in Communication Arts Magazine several years back.

What is creativity?

Oxford Dictionary says that to create is to bring into being something where before there was no such thing. To make something where there was nothing.

But does that mean there is no template, no parts? If there are already parts, is what we do with them creation?

If we take ingredients and bake an apple pie are we creating it?

If we take words and make a story of them are we creating it?

If the story already existed (Hamlet), did Shakespeare create it?

To simplify and shorten the discussion, let’s borrow an idea from Buddhism. Buddhists talk about void or emptiness a lot, and we think that means there is nothing there, an absolute absence. But a better way of saying it is that in a void there is nothing intrinsic or created, nut there is energy, there is potential that can then be constructed. And that what we do in come up with constructs based on our penchant for coming up with constructs.

And the views that are based on these constructs are sometimes called illusions. And to be illusioned is clearly to stand on shaky ground.

So people think the goal is to take the mind to the point where it is still, thoughtless, passive, unmoving, never participating in illusions. Certainly uncreative.

But there’s another possibility, and that is that the motions of the universe are natural, and no more malignant or wrong-headed than waves and currents on the ocean. And waves and currents do things, move things around, have consequences.

If this is so, then creativity is a manifestation of this, and what we can do, in meditation and in our lives, is just to be aware of this motion and not try to quash it.

I think creativity takes place when we either see something—any object or any connection between things—and have to readjust our narrative to integrate it into our lives. Happens all the time in everyone, and it can range from pleasurable to the catastrophic, from falling in love to losing a child, or ones faith, or ones entire version of existence.

Earliest development is full of expansion, starting with motor and nervous connections, moving on to learning societal and cultural narratives bit by bit, experience by experience. We move from the world of our home to the world of our kindergarten class to the world of the whole high school, to college to the world, and on through it, through life toward death. After that I don’t know.

Each expansion means we have to change our story to accommodate what we encounter.

A version I can’t support:

Each experience we have is stored in memory. And it is not stored coherently, in some way that resembles a book on a shelf deep in a library. It is more as though the book of the experience is assembled, than torn a part and put all over the library. And each time we need to access the experience we pull the elements together and recreate it. And as sure as we may be that  we are remembering it exactly, we are not. It is subject to pressures that change it each time it is told. (Example: experiments on creating memories.)

Which means that the edifice of our experience is either a lot shakier than we think and thus a lot more scary, or else that the world has a fluidity that we can learn to appreciate, find beautiful, and even ride about on. If you lived on a hill overlooking the ocean I suspect you’d never tire of the sunset unless the sun set exactly the same way every evening year after year.

All of this suggests to me that when we talk about creativity, and not as an idea but as action, we are talking about something like this: Noticing what is incongruent in the familiar, rejuggling everything to accommodate it, and then being moved or excited or expanded but the process. We find the world in a  grain of sand, we see a squiggle of light on dark water  (Turner), we hear a crash of notes that defy the ordered beauty of the Baroque (Beethoven), we arrive at a sculpture that is about gravity itself rather than being a sculpted picture of something (Serra). We find a place in our vision from which it is clear that a falling body is also at rest.  (Einstein). Good music students can play music that the best players in the work deemed unplayable (Liszt).These are creative acts we have accepted. There are others that we are in process of, like the idea that a particle can take two different paths to the same end point, simultaneously (John Wheeler).

These all represent changes in one person’s narrative and the subsequent narratives of all of us.

Parsing the Good, from Communication Arts

When we look at the creative work in the commercial world we find, salted here and there in among the ordinary, some good work and also a little really good work. We all notice this, we like it. But if we look around out beyond the reaches of the commercial, out in the realm of art, we find work we all know is….some other kind of good altogether. It’s work that stays with us, opens us to other things, renews our sense of the world. Call it capital G Good. That it exists really intrigues me, perhaps because the mystery of making it is so deep, and because its implications of universality are so great. Though I don’t pretend to understand how this work comes to be, I spend a huge amount of time thinking about it, trying to puzzle how really good art work arises.

When I hear myself talking about almost platonic kind of Good I sound to myself like a pie-eyed innocent. In this difficult age of ours (which I suppose is arguably no more so than Plato’s) the notion that there is Good can seem incredibly naïve. But I’m talking about art, and art doesn’t stand apart from our reality. Instead it lets us see into reality in a way that nothing else quite does, and its goodness depends on how well it does that, even though a specific artwork can be difficult, thorny, annoying as well as beautiful. Its effect is that after we see it we’re not quite the same person we were before. Much more about this later.

Of course, thinking about art is like thinking about smoke. When you try to break it down to its components they blur and drift back across one another. But in general art, working in the way it does, offers us insights in a way that is the opposite of analysis. It starts with a small piece of existence and by concentrating on it enlarges it into a kind of gateway to…everything else. A really good painting, a piece of music, a poem or novel or sculpture, provokes a different kind of understanding than analysis does, a larger, unifying awareness of objects, lives, atmospheres, even things that could exist but don’t.

When its good, then, art is not a decoration or a possession but a powerful means of understanding. And the idea that there is some way we might recognize what’s good in art and understand how it does its work—that’s surely a thought worth following. We have some satisfactions from our commercial work, but they’re limited and short-lived. How much more interesting is this thing that operates to get us out beyond what we know, out where we can begin to encompass life and the universe, being and becoming. Whew! I mean, doesn’t that sound more interesting than coming up with three new layouts by tomorrow’s meeting?

To be sure our creative commercial work occurs in the vicinity of art and partakes of some of its techniques and qualities. But there's a sense in which commercial work is done at the back door, while the real stuff that gives Art its capital A goes on deep inside the house. So that’s where I went looking for some understanding. Perhaps, I thought, we can find a way to bring it back out to the porch with us to use when we do our commercial work.

Or we might just want to contrive to stay inside. In any case, the investigation might help us recall who we are.

            Ways of Intelligence

The first step in this investigation looks at how intelligence relates to making art. We have ways of working at art that are simply not measured by the predominant linguistic and mathematical tests of intelligence, but that are real and central to making it. Howard Gardner, a Harvard educator and a McArthur Fellow, calls them multiple intelligences, in his book of the same name.

For example, we have the body-kinesthetic intelligence that is the province of the dancer and the athlete. It lets one know, without calculating, just when to release a ball toward a basket that is behind one’s back while moving through the air, or how to sculpt a perfect shape with the body for a split-second with a dance partner, or how to move the mind’s eye through a space to construct a shot for a film. Outside the realm of art it also serves the sailor, the surgeon, and the engineer.

Because intelligence tests don’t measure this capability we don’t tend to call it intelligence, but Gardner argues that we should. In his expanded list of intelligences he also cites the interpersonal (directors), intrapersonal (novelists), musical (composers and musicians), along with the more familiar verbal (poets) and the mathematical (scientists). None of these intelligences excludes any other. To the contrary, they interact in complex (and beautiful ) ways, and once they’re enumerated it seems clear that both making and apprehending art would call on several of them at any time.

Useful Obsession

Herman Melville wrote that sadness starts with having no great enterprise. The opposite of sadness, which I think would be more engagement than happiness, lies in having some question, some creative obsession, a kind of a bright thing that seems to inhabit one and drive one to creative action. It seems that if the artist doesn’t have such an enterprise, he searches one out or coasts to a stop. This suggests a deep anti-entropic impulse in humankind. We’re built to do this, and to work at it hard.

I almost wrote that doing art work makes us "feel good," but by most accounts "good" is not really what artists feel when they work. There’s a fantasy that really good artists experience work as a serene and exhilarating progression, but all reports suggests that its more like staggering between the poles of anxiety and drudgery. I’ve looked at art that would thrill me if I’d made it, and I know that the artist felt nothing but the struggle. And apparently it never ends. W.H. Auden said, "A poet thinks he’s a poet when he’s putting the last touches on a new poem. The moment before he’s a potential poet, the moment after he’s one who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever."

Maybe it’s sad that artists never get the same enjoyment that others get from what they do. Maybe it’s not. I don’t know. But I’ve read so many artists describing the work as difficult (Van Gogh described it as "coal miner’s work"), that it occurs to me that the difficulty and dissatisfaction may be, perversely, a part of what drives one on to new work.

As an aside, it must also be true that the artist gets something from a work that no one else does. A sense of parentage of a creation, for one thing, and exhilarating views of the process that are hidden within the later work. For example, I have a friend who makes sculpture by pouring molten glass into matrices fashioned of found objects of old wood, metals, stone, etc. The results are stunning in a gallery, but only she gets to glimpse them first through the burst of flame and the roiling clouds of acrid smoke that accompany the exact—and uncertain—moment when the hot glass meets the matrix and becomes something that transcends material and idea. (Or, occasionally, doesn’t.)

One can’t help but notice that there’s also something about working intensely that is exhilarating, recalling a runner's high. It levens the difficulty. Perhaps working hard and deeply releases the same pleasure-inducing endorphins that running does, energizing us and bringing a craving for more endorphins.

So if our work doesn’t make us happy, then what do get from it? Perhaps a level of satisfaction that doesn’t satisfy us quite enough, perhaps a strange moment of separation and pride when this creative thing that was born in us goes out on its own path through the world. As Carl Van Doren once said, at a certain point a poem no longer belongs to the person who wrote it but to the person who reads it. When I first heard that I thought, "Fortunate readers," but now I also sympathize with the poem’s bereft parent.

Intention as Power

In the only certifiably AHA! moment I’ve ever had about making art, I learned that when an artist goes at his work with ferocious focus and power, that very power attracts. And that attraction embeds itself in the work itself and draws in others who come in contact with it. This realization came from an experiment I did with a photography class I was teaching, and when it hit me it was like a flash of lightening illuminating an unexpected landscape.

Here is the experiment: I asked a friend, Alan Arkin, to come and lead some theater exercises with my class. We all spent the morning doing various improvisations and theater games, and it was quite delicious to see photographers pushed out of their cherished observer position and made to interact with each other. But the thing that at once became strikingly clear was that when an "actor" really committed to his part in a scene, when he set self-consciousness aside and became the game—the whole game, all its parts—the very intensity of the commitment itself brought the whole game alive. And if one person did this strongly, the other actors followed that person into the game. And when that happened the spectators followed too, and the scene shifted and became reality for everyone.

On the other hand, if just one of the actors couldn’t make that act of imaginative commitment to it, if he felt foolish and kept slipping out of it—asides and jokes to the audience, that kind of thing—the game stopped and the whole imaginative structure crashed to the ground like a dying kite.

The power of this focus is easily visible in actor’s work because they do it in front of us. Take a look at De Niro, or Streep, or Arkin. They can just stare into the air and you’ll wait and watch them, watch their very intensity, try to see what they’re thinking, what they’ll do next. It’s what makes great actors great.

But afterward as I thought about the revelations of the class, I saw a more subtle correlation with photography and all the arts. I realized that all the best artists I know, in any medium, have that same intensity. Their energy alone creates an artistic reality and engages us in what they’re doing, sweeps us along with them into that reality. Think of any artists you like, their art has a sense of having been completely worked through at high intensity, and it gives off the power that commitment gave it. (I think of Joseph Cornell and Richard Serra, two different birds if there ever were different birds). Even their sketches and notes will have it. Picasso’s notebooks positively vibrate.

The Change

So an artist, a good artist focussing on doing good work, catches us up and brings us along with him, he takes us to an new place, a new idea and shows us with his art something that we never knew was there. What we know is enlarged by this excursion, a little or a lot. Big art, big change. Big bang.

But this change, which lies at the heart of the experience of art, absolutely has to take place first in the artist before it can happen for the audience. Perhaps the very function of art, for the artist at least, is the change and enlargement of consciousness. There is a story that when Mondrian was painting over some old canvases he had lying around, a friend reproached him for covering up perfectly good paintings. "I’m not trying to make paintings," he said, "I’m trying to find things out."

This thought about art-as-change-of-mind seems to get close to a baseline definition of good art, and it was confirmed for me instinctively time after time in artworks I experienced. And I was increasingly curious about the mechanism of this change. Then I found some confirmation in science when I came across the work of Antonio Damaso, a neurologist who is engaged in the mapping of the brain activity using scans that show how the brain responds when it is stimulated in various ways. Damasio has written an extraordinary book, called The Feeling of What Happens, that attempts to locate the phenomenon of consciousness. In it he says that "we become conscious when the organism’s representation devices exhibit a specific kind of wordless knowledge—the knowledge that the organism’s own state has been changed by an object."

There it was. Though Damaso wasn’t talking about art but about consciousness and the brain, his work seems to describe the mechanism of art as it exercises its effect. I take him to mean that the response generated by a stimulus (a painting or sculpture, or an organization of sounds, as in music, or words, or an idea or installation) does not dissipate when the encounter is over, that the neural structure of the brain does not simply drop back into to its pre-stimulated shape. When the brain is stretched to encompass a new stimulus, it stays stretched, as does our consciousness. (I can’t help but visualize that change as areas of brain turning yellow and green like they do in the color illustrations of the scans.)

Mondrian knew that this stretch—call it a state of heightened awareness—is the real point of making art. As the great painter and teacher Robert Henri said, "The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a byproduct of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state." My own feeling is that the artwork, what he calls the "byproduct," carries within it a kind of seed of this heightened state and passes it along to viewers so they too get that state or some version of it.

This all suggests that the reason some people are drawn to doing art work is not to make art objects: it is simply the way that these people stretch, learn, grow, become. The doing changes them.

Now, Damasio is not talking specifically about art, and there’s no good/bad qualifier on the object perceived or on the nature of the shift. He doesn’t require that the organism (us) see something interesting and the change doesn’t have to be "good". In developmental terms, think of the simple act of an infant pulling over a table and thus learning something. (Buckminster Fuller called these childhood disasters "engineering experiments.") In even more basic terms, the act of seeing can set a capability in motion, bring it alive as a tool of investigation and consciousness. A neuro-biologist friend told me that a kitten kept in the dark during a specific week or two in it’s development would never develop the ability to process visual information. The eyes would be mechanically sound, but the kitten would be blind.

Take that thought further and imagine a more developed organism (you) encountering something everyday, say a car. Nothing new there, no change. But if you encounter an artwork the likes of which you have never seen, your mind has to shift and change to encompass it. When I first saw Mark Rothko’s work I had a kind of luminous experience. There was no subject and no idea that I could articulate, but there was this great presence. I looked and looked, and then I saw the work, just saw it, and had the wonderful experience of stimulation and enlargement . Rothko’s work had changed my mind. And the change let me look at that painting, his other paintings, as well as the color of light in air, differently. My reward was the change, the enlargement itself.

The Place of Analysis

Can we get an understanding of the mystery of good art through criticism? Surely it will move us toward an understanding of some things about art, but thinking critically to probe the work uses a different part of the brain than the work’s creator used. Thus critical thinking can describe things about the artistic experience, but it’s not the same thing as having the experience, and it doesn’t provoke the experience. (Note that Damasio referred to "wordless knowledge.") And art is, I think, first about having the experience of the piece.

So analysis offers us a useful tool, but it is not, I think, a primary tool.

When I do the first critique in a workshop, people look at the photos pinned up on the walls and start at once trying to fit them into the matrix of photography, look for ways they relate to what they’ve seen in some book or gallery. They look for what they know, which is the wrong place to look for the new work we’re trying to do in the class. So I direct the class to a prime question that gets to the heart of the work, and that question is, "Is the work alive?" To enliven us it must have it’s own vitality within it. It can use and affirm what we know and draw foundation from it, but it can’t depend on it. Good work changes the mind, a little or a lot. If it is "good", if it is alive, it means that the photographer had to get into a state of aware aliveness, had to see what the casual viewer, the non-artist, would probably not have. Knowledge and critical thinking can serve to make the vision clear, but they don’t substitute for the living experience.

It is from this state of aliveness that good work is churned. The "good" component of such work cannot be planned and executed. (I heard a composer call such attempts "the fallacy of intention.") Work arises from the doing, and it stands a chance of being good when you dive into the circumstances and let it occur. You slide paint around, or string words like beads, then restring them. If you are fortunate, something starts to happen, you see a shape, a glow, a story that calls you on. It reveals itself as you work further, and you then craft what is revealed. The work may start with a plan or outline, but if it is going to really take off, it quickly enlarges beyond the plan. You can choose direction, structure, materials, etc., but you just can’t plan "good."

The poet James Wright described it as, "(writing) to find out what it is I have to say." It’s still the most succinct description of the process I know.

 (An aside to all of us who work in the commercial process: you will have noticed that the search for a transformative aliveness is mostly remmoved from the creative work we do for a living. Art-with-a-purpose is a work negotiated from a set of givens. That’s not at all wrong for commercial work, but it is n ot art.

Art that is Ugly

If art is good, must we like it?

My god, of course not. Good work can be unfamiliar and disturbing. Finding something good is not about hanging it on the wall, it’s about that change. And while art may provoke a response, it won’t necessarily be a pleasurable one. In fact, for all that art generates emotion, making art doesn’t usually begin with it, and it’s probably best that way. Emotion arises from our interaction with the art. Reviewing the recent Walker Evans retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Anthony Lane talked about what he calls the "ruthlessness" of the artist. "It should not be confused with meanness; it entails no more than looking with a clear eye, unclouded by the trace of a tear, and rebuffing all blandishments—the need to please, say, or the cry for change—as you struggle to set down your observations. The beauty is in the beholding, not in the beheld." Though one may have emotion when faced with Evans' photography, no one would ever call him an emotional artist.

(Shall we take an interesting little side excursion into the realm of Eastern thought? This business of setting aside intention seems quit alien to most of us, so much so that it takes a lot of words to explain it. But Taoism covers it with a simple phrase, wu wei. It is usually translated as non-doing, but that suggests passiveness and stasis. What it really means is allowing action to go forward naturally as it is going without controlling it. Water flowing down hill offers a good example of wu wei. The recently-reversed work of the Army Corps of Engineers in the Everglades, in which they dammed the slow flow that was literally the arterial circulation of the swamp, would be an example of it’s opposite.

The suggestion is that wu wei is a natural state of awareness and expansion and integration that we lose sight of. There is a Tibetan meditation practice called Dzogchen that is done to recover it. It’s aim is not a suspension of mental activity, but a state of alive awareness of that activity and of everything else that is taking place. I once asked a Dzogchen master if making artwork wasn’t just a matter of spinning out more illusory existence, and he replied that, to the contrary, the state in which art is made is one of singular awareness and one-pointedness, not one of cogitation and interpretation, and this was well worth practicing, a meditation in itself.)

So let’s sum up this whole part of the discussion by saying that a piece of artwork that has changed the artist can change the viewer. Comfort is not the measure. Good work can irritate us and still change us. Often I find myself coming to like, or at least appreciate, work that I didn’t at first. So now, when I don’t really like something, I wait to see how things ripen in me. After all, I don’t want to be in the position of some French critic who wrote, "Does Monsieur Monet really think his smears of paint are worthy of the Temple of the Goddess of Art?"

Suspending Judgement

How can the artist get out beyond what he knows, his likes and dislikes?

The above-mentioned James Wright spoke about tossing out possibilities and then keeping them in the air and not grasping at any of them too soon. He suggests that if one can keep the possibilities afloat, one allows connections to develop that are new and unexpected and that make immediate and perfect sense. The newness and the sense combine to provoke that moment of insight when we wake up out beyond ourselves, where we can see things in a new way, where our mind changes. Art functions rather like a like a Zen koan.

An example from writing: the writer Annie Proulx writes of a flock of wild ducks taking off "like a deck of cards flung into the air." The satisfaction, the release, comes exactly from the aptness of this image which is both unexpected AND makes perfect sense. It wakes us.

(The same principle is the basis of humor. A woman walks into a bar with a duck under her arm. And a man comes up to her and says, "Where d’ja get the pig?"

And she says, "That’s not a pig, it’s a duck."

And he says, "I was talking to the duck!"

Exact same thing. It gives us one expectation, then hits us with something else that we didn’t see coming, but which also makes a perfect—and loony—sense. The more unexpected and the more right, the funnier.)

So art gets beyond its contents, and its quality can’t be summarized in its constituent parts. It may use words or pictures, or objects or sounds, or light, it may represent certain things, but they are there only to start a process. The content conjures the effect from somewhere quite beyond itself. Thus it lets us experience things that we just can’t get at any other way, and that experience is what’s real. It’s the way art works.

Actually, mediocre art does tend to reside in its information, and it usually tells us stuff we already know. And that really comforts a lot of people, while new, living art frightens and offends a lot of people at the same time that it astounds and awakens some others.

Hey, What’s Wrong with Advertising?

In this kind of discourse there’s usually someone who comes along and defends good advertising, pointing out that the purpose of advertising is to move goods, and that advertising that achieves that is good and should be recognized as good. If we confine ourselves to the loop of advertising, they are right. But if we take this very same standard into the larger cultural arena, we wind up at the notion that sales is the measure of what is good. And that’s not so. Have you looked at your television lately?

To give it it’s due, advertising is a genre, and as such doesn’t ever intend to rise above itself. Good advertising is good advertising, just as good soft rock is good soft rock…good in terms of the genre, and people accept it as such. But really good work transcends limits and takes its maker and its audience somewhere out beyond where they thought they might be heading. Occasionally a commercial project gets toward that in some of its particulars, but that is so, so rare.

 Art slash Work

Well, getting back to daily reality, what is the point of all this in our working world? What does it have to do with getting today’s job out the door?

Well, not all that much…at least not with work. But it has a lot to do with our lives. Most of us started fooling with photography or sketching or designing things, or writing BECAUSE DOING IT TAUGHT US THINGS. Like Mondrian, we weren’t trying to make good art, we were trying to find things out. And when we did, these were our first good photographs or paintings, and probably the first alive things we had ever done. And our response to them was to want to do more and to make them better still. We were hooked and gone.

Now, it’s unlikely anyone reading this is a Mondrian or Mark Rothko or Robert DeNiro. But we are who we are, and if we’re at all creative our mechanisms are set up the same way as theirs are, and we want—and even need—to do work that is good…ugly or messy or beautiful, but really good.

If really good work enlivens and stretches and changes the mind, if it touches everything in us, then that’s all the reason we need to seek it out and think about it and try to make it ourselves.

Words Fail Me, as They Must

Well, after all that talk are we any closer to knowing what good work is?

As you can see, I’ve convinced myself that I know some of the things that constitute it and lead to making it, something of the way we function when we make it, and some of the ways it works on whomever sees it. But when I pull the pieces apart there’s always that last tantalizing bit that I can’t get at, even though I know it’s the most important part. For a while I thought I simply wasn’t intelligent enough, not analytical and verbal enough. Lately though I’ve concluded that the last bit lies beyond where this kind of analysis even operates. The best I seem to be able to do is stand at the edge of the intellect and point excitedly into consciousness, and anyone who wants to grasp what is there simply has to go and see for himself.

A few years ago I saw a photograph accompanying a review of a retrospective by Roy de Carava at the Museum of Modern Art. It was one of the best things I’d ever seen, and it struck me deeply. There seemed to be nothing in it that accounted for its power. Let me describe it to you. It is of an empty hallway. We see the dark gray planes of the walls, a ceramic tiled floor, and a halation of light from a light bulb hanging just out of frame. And that’s it.

But there’s so much going on in the image. I went to the museum and saw the print, and afterward I went and got the book and turned to that page. And each time I looked at it I had the same undiminished response to it’s power and perfection and to the enigma of how it achieved them. I’ve showed it to others who are not photographers and they’ve had the same response. I tried to write about it, but I wound up writing a poem to the picture. That was as close as I could get to expressing myself. In the end I looked at the harmonies and rhythms and tensions of the picture and decided that it must work somewhat the way music does. And I have no idea how music works.

So when I think about what good is, I get part of the way there, but the last part of the answer doesn’t come and I’m reduced to silence. But here’s the important thing: it’s not an empty silence, it’s a kind of charged state, very awake, very intense, full of new possibilities.

And that state is the result of experiencing a work. What gives rise to that state can’t be extracted and taken away from it, because it is entwined in the work itself. One can only take away an awareness of what the work has done to one. But to get the state one has to go—travel, really—into the work itself, like a pilgrim, because the good of the work is consciousness itself, embodied and then imparted.

That’s what good is.

If you Google the phrase above, you'll eventually reach a corner of the World Wide Labyrinth in which there are a small number of books filed on a shelf...not the books themselves, actually, but references to them.

This is a shelf of chimerical books that are referred to in works by the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. But do they actually exist? Well, yes, in the sense that you can read about them in Borges' stories.

On the other hand, Borges also wrote "The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books." 

So the shelf, as it turns out, is in a corner of Borges' mind! And it has attracted  the attention of a website called themodernword.com. This amazing site has a section on Borges, and nested there is a list of  "Books Borges Never Wrote." It details numerous examples, including one on what maybe his most extensively explored, the legendary Encyclopedia of Tlon. I won't even try to sum up the short story, but it features several false trails in the search for this book.

AND the man who wrote up this list, Allen Ruch, spices it with a few false trails of his own, including the following: "More than a few bibliophiles have declared the entire project to be as apocryphal as Tlon itself. This confusion is only made worse by persistant hoaxes and spurious fragments, such as the Thessaloniki Manuscripts, Sean Kernan's faux set of 'Early Plates on the Morphology of Insects of the Axa Delta.'"

So you are left standing in a corner of the vast enterprise of the Borgesian library holding a book that never existed by an author that does.

Note: (Borges loved notes) the Thessaloniki reference is to an event called Photosynkyria, held throughout that city every year. In 2001 the entire event was given to work inspired by Borges. And the great prize was won by...The Secret Books, a volume that is quite real. Here is a picture of one room in that library, and you can see the rest here.

So is the mystery solved? You can decide that for yourself.

Here is my early portrait of Eugene Ionesco. See what I mean? A year before, I had been reading this avant-garde Franco-Romanian playwright in college, and now here I was photographing him...looking at me! I felt as though I had joined the world of art somewhere near the top. (And, coincidently, that college was...Penn!)

And here we are, from last week, a portrait of the writer John Irving. Still at it.

My friend Duane Michals, speaking of Penn, said that he was "a classic, like a Chanel dress."

I once wrote and asked if I might sit in while he did a portrait. He wrote back saying no, that he was always trying to forge a strong connection with a sitter, and that having someone else there, even off in a corner, would bend the line of that connection and weaken it.

I decided I'd settle for a print, so I wrote and asked what they cost. Someone at his office wrote back and gave a price of $250. Ha! There wasn't that much in the world...in my world, anyway. Don't I wish now I'd scraped it up somehow!

Several years ago I was wandering through the photography rooms at the Museum of Modern art for the first time in a while. I came into the last room a bit distractedly, and was struck by the feeling that I was being looked at...but there was no one there. Then I realized where the feeling was coming from. I was in a room full of Penn portraits. Ah, yes.

Last year there was a show of his portraits of artists and writers at the Morgan Library in New York. I spent several hours circling around the 70 or so prints. It was kind of like seeing old friends at a reunion, but the friends were the pictures, not the subjects. Slowly, I started to notice that the spaces around the subject's heads were more interesting than most people's photographs. No kidding.

So there are some lessons and some fruitfulness from Penn. Thank you, Irving, and goodbye.

I’ve just broken out of a whirlwind of activity to see that our workshop is only a few weeks off, and a wave of excitement has hit me. This wave always breaks just before a class, and it reminds me that I am heading out into a world that is more about possibilities than conclusions.  And the work of the workshops is to wade into these possibilities and manifest them as much as possible, not to analyze and control them.

 This is different than the way most of us come to function in the world, at least after the age of about 5. From birth to 5 we “play”, then we get serious and start school.

But if you think of the vast amount of growth we accomplish in those first 5 years, we must see that there are lessons for us in that play. There may be reasons begin focusing on outcomes at 5, but there are also reasons to resume playing at any point.

And that is a lot of what our workshop will be about.

You may be thinking Well, that sounds interesting, but what are we actually going to do? It is a fair question, and I want you to know that I have answers.

Of course, I’m not going to tell you what they are, because surprise is part of the way they work, but I’ll drop some hints.

To begin with, it might help to think of it as a creativity refresher class, more than a photography class, though we will be using photography throughout and will come home with new pictures. And since you have been creative from birth, you already have what you need to make them. You’e kind of like Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentleman who is delighted to discover he speaks Prose. Like this gentleman, you don’t have to learn the language of creativity, but you will begin to work with consciously and learn some new ways to get at it.

To do this, we will begin our time with a series of exercises that have very specific starting points and actions, so you will know where to begin day by day. They produce experiences in a sequence that is more stochastic than linear. What you will dour main task is to go at them with a lot of energy.

In general, we will be using exercises in areas other than photography to practice just seeing without regard to seeing pictures.  For these exercises we will set the camera aside so you can see that you see. Then we will pick the camera up again and carry whatever new seeing we have done into the photographic realm to allow it to work there. 

We will be doing this in the context of an unusual event, in a beautiful vibrant city. Sometimes such strong “subject matter” can actually interfere with our real art work, since the making of our art is about being fully present wherever we are. The danger is that we might be tempted to let a fascinating place do the lifting for us.  But I think we have time enough both to work internally with our creativity and to practice it in the world.

I have been doing this workshop---actually it is different every time—for many years. And many years ago both Enrique Cervera and Jonathan Safir were in it. So it is a particular pleasure to have them joining in the teaching and supporting of all of us. You might know one or the other of them, or you have read their bios, but in brief, Enrique is a photographer/artist/teacher in Mexico, and Jonathan is an artist/filmmaker/teacher who has been working on a film about the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca for 5 years. So these two are going to make this event special for all of us. They have done the setup, scouting and production, and have made wonderful connections in the museums and other venues in Oaxaca. And as co-teachers they will be stretching and supporting us each day.

One of the wonderful things about any workshop is that it suspends all the little micro-gravities of our lives—our jobs, our families, the obligations that preoccupy us—and lets us just float. Another big thing is that we get to work in concert with others so we can share responses, insights and strengths, something artists don’t really do that much. A third is that we get to explore other ways of being ourselves.

When I think about how this all  works, the model is more like laying out a string of dominos in some new direction, as opposed to laying up another course of bricks in the edifice of ourselves.

It sounds like fun and a little alarming at the same time…and it is. But you’ll be well supported in your work, and you’ll tend to find that the things you might be apprehensive about were never a problem at all.

A few practical matters:

The point is to generate pictures out of your experiences so that we can look at and learn from them. So you should certainly have a laptop to process and edit on.

You probably won’t need lights. Better to see the light that is there. A tripod might come in handy, though, in case there isn’t enough of it for hand-holding.

If you want to read a bit about how I approach things, I have a number of articles about the creative process on my website, mostly written for Communication Arts, along with some book introductions and graduation speeches.

So that’s if for just now. If you have any questions you can email me at sean@seankernan.com, Enrique at pix@lalux.com, or Jonathan at jonsafir@yahoo.com. We’ll answer as best we can.

Other than that, we’re all really looking forward to seeing you and working with you soon in Oaxaca. It will be good, hard work, serious and fun.