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There’s a telling line in my novel Dead Daffodils. An artist, the grand-aunt of a little girl who is emerging as a musical prodigy, speaks to the girl in front of her paintings on display in the gallery. Listen to what Auntie Leanne says: Nothing in art ever happens all at once. People look at my painting, or listen to your music, and think, well, that’s that. But it’s never just that.” A work of art (be it a painting, piece of music, or novel) can seem to have arisen from a spasm of inspiration and creativity on the part of the artist. However, it takes a lot of hard work to get that artistic creation into a form that can intrigue or delight. A song I play in two and a half minutes at the coffee shop evolved over weeks at the practice keyboard. Harmonic structures, phrasing and rhythm had to be developed to embrace and support you as you hum along with the riffs. There was a great deal of error in the trial-and-error process: harmonies went a-wandering without resolution and tempos didn’t mesh. Until, finally, they did. There’s a good chance that in reading a portion of one of my novels a sudden smile will pull at the corners or your mouth, or a tear might come to your eye, or your brow may furrow, or a sense of disgust will curl your upper lip. That brief spasm of emotion coursing through you came as a result of dozens of rewrites and edits. I share conversation about the creative process with an artist friend. Recently he spoke of the problems that he had to solve as he worked on a painting. Looking at the painting I’m compelled by the elements that were once the problems, seeing them as they finally ended up. Skill, and diligence and patience went into solving those problems. But my artist friend is clear that the key issue is not how the problems were solved but the why of the painting. It is that why that compels the work to find the how. I invite you to marvel at his beautiful work by following this link: https://www.stevemitts.com. At the coffeeshop I get a chance to answer the question why when it comes to my music. There, with the smell of the brew and the bustle of people coming in for something other than music, I get to watch people respond to my jazz. I fade into the background for most of the patrons as they pursue their table conversations or phone scrolling. But I also notice some folk intentionally listening. I read their emotional response by watching their faces. What occurs to me in that moment is they’re feeling what I felt in the creating of the piece, my perplexity or delight or melancholy or curiosity. When that listener connects to my music I’m not so alone with my emotional self. And neither are they with theirs. I refuse to play covers, standards or perform music that has already been all written out. Somebody else, be it a composer or arranger, has already done the work of that piece. Similarly, I don’t write in established genres, the plug-and-play approach to plot lines and character types. I don’t because someone else has already solved the problems, given their answers to the nature of human nature. When I have to find my own answers, to grapple with my own why of doing a creative work, I better understand myself and the world around me. The irony or the pathos you as a reader experience as plot elements unfold around my characters tells you something about what I’ve noticed about human nature. Then as you come to the resolution of a novel the illusive why might emerge for you, the sense of what it’s all about. And in that, we will be together. Spending decades as a psychotherapist, I eschewed standardized thinking about human suffering and wellness. My field wanted me to think in terms of making an accurate diagnosis and then applying the most scientifically proven treatments. It wanted to do the work of figuring out what should be done quite separate from me and my client. I was just supposed to apply best practices. All the creativity and critical thinking was the purview of someone else. The equivalent in music would be playing covers, or performing music already set out in notation. In literature it would be writing pulp fiction. In art, paint-by-numbers. Over the course of my career, a comprehensive manual of mental health diagnosis elaborated itself over successive editions to become a 1000 page tome. Human suffering was reduced to objectively defined symptoms. Diagnosis was accomplished through symptom counting and decision trees. Years of research and consensus building went into laying out the proper process to get the right diagnosis. But the etymology of the word diagnosis is working through (dia) awareness (gnosis) not through knowledge. Awareness is personal knowing rather than intellectual knowing. I came to knowing-awareness by entering the intersubjective space with my clients, appreciating them for their unique histories, perspectives and perplexities of circumstance. To truly bring my clients’ needs into my awareness, I didn’t need to count symptoms but I needed to know what counted in their lives. My profession wanted psychotherapy to be the diligent application of treatment protocols. It was something I was never very good at. Instead I worked to find with my clients what worked for them, for their solutions to be their own rather than that smarts of some therapy developer working out steps to be followed. In this approach to the therapy room I found the why. It was about discovering meaning, sanity, and functionality in the context of human relationship. I treasure the intentional listener in the coffeeshop. I get excited when a beta-reader really gets the theme and human-nature perplexity in one of my works of fiction. It’s so like the therapy office: meaning, wisdom and wellness found together. That sharing of human experience is what makes something beautiful. Clickable links to previous blogsDecember 2024 - About the Dark
www.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/12-2024 November 2024 - Now that's interesting www.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/11-2024 October 2024 - Valuing the relational over the objective www.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/10-2024 September 2024 - Emergent from the creative process. www.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/09-2024 August 2024 On Beauty www.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/08-2024 July 2024 - Friends www.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/07-2024 May 2024 - In the zone April 2024 - How creativity happens ... well, for me anywayclick-click.html March 2024 - Your bridge to cross February 2024 - A little Deeper into the human condition January 2024 - On Darkness December 2023 - Note Perfect ... or not! November 2023 - Just noteswww.twiltondale.ca/blog/archives/04-2024 October 2023 - About endings September 2023 - Sacred ground August 2023 - Are we there yet? July 2023 - How smart is SMART? June 2023 - Only half there May 2023 - Who gets to write the story? April 2023 - Intersubjectivity. Hunh? March 2023 - A disturbing trend February 2023 - About being in the middle January 2023 - Can we have a little heart here please? December 2022 - A story about story November 2022 - Facing One's Fears October 2022 - Transitional folk September 2022 - Transitions August 2022 —At the other end of life's journey July 2022—The problem with what emerges. June 2022 — So who am I doing this for anyway? May 2022 - Wait for it ... wait ... April 2022 — Someone called me a Nazi. March 2022 — Shush! Don't tell anyone. February 2022 — So does life imitate art? Well, maybe sometimes. January 2022 — The two most powerful lines in the book. December 2021 — About time and being human. November 2021 — Not a tidy little murder mystery October 2021 — Flow versus focus. September 2021 -- It's beautiful because it tells the truth.
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