In this episode, Sanju interviews Justin on his views on the creative process and its mechanics.
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S: This is the DRBU podcast, and I’m Sanju. In this podcast, we’ll be talking to students and faculties from Dharma Realm Buddhist University about topics concerning human experiences, meaning, lifestyle, and philosophical reflection. For the first episode, I invited Justin Howe, who is a translation fellow for graduate certificate in Buddhist translation of DRBU’s International Institute for Translation of Buddhist Texts. Here’s the conversation I had with Justin Howe.
J: “the sky is in possession of
the cipher of life
on this earth (or
is itself &
in itself the
cipher of the earth.)
Where none may see me
solitary underneath the olive tree,
it sees. It sees. Though
you rise early in
the morning, ere the sun itself
is up, still
it sees. O, it sees. But
on the darkest moonless night, as
the weary songbird dreams,
then is it
listening: listening
in the soughing of the breeze.”
Well, Sanju, you wanted me to read this part. Actually, I gave you few of my poems and I told you to pick one and surprise me. And I’m glad I did that because this not the one I would have picked, which is why I asked you to pick one. So, that I wouldn’t have any thoughts prepared. So, you wanted me to read the middle part of the poem. Why?
S – Yeah, you also wanted me to read another poem by Holderlin. I was interested in getting into this idea of..uh.. some kind of mystery that surrounds us. And in this particular stanza, seems like you talk about ‘It’. It sees. Oh, it sees. And that really strikes me that there’s this kind of connection. connection with a mysterious force that you’re not willing to name but you are somehow in touch with that mysterious force. Umm, because in today’s podcast, I really wanted to discuss about what creative process meant for you. How do we understand what creativity is! And I feel like this is a starting point for that, which is to talk about this sense of mystery, and somehow being in touch with that sense of mystery through our creative works.
J – Sense of mystery, hmm… I can tell you kind of like how this poem came about. And then, you can decide if it’s mysterious or not, I guess.
S – Sure.
J – Lets see! I remember, I was with some friends…and I think we were outside a fast-food place or something. I don’t remember exactly what was going on. We went on a little shopping trip. And I think I was looking at the mountains and the sky cause Ukiah is in a valley, and it’s surrounded by mountains. I was looking at the mountain and the sky, and I just have this thought. A lot of poems come from some kind of thought that will usually be a line or a verse and I try to figure out what’s it doing. So, maybe that’s a sense of mystery. So, I thought that the sky is like some kind of reflection of the earth. Or maybe the earth is a reflection of sky. I’m not really sure.
But, I thought you could look up and understand everything that’s happening in the sky then you would understand everything that’s happening on the earth. Because the sky sees everything that’s happening, so it should hold all the information. So, when the poem says, “Where none may see me solitary underneath the olive tree, it sees. It sees.” The sky is there, the sky sees me. And okay, this is another thing that will help you understand how I make a poem, which is that this like, “Where none may see me solitary underneath the olive tree, it sees. It sees.” This is reference to a story about Jesus, which has always struck me very very deeply. It’s about a guy called Nikodemus. Nikodemus is told by a friend about Jesus. And Nikodemus is not doubtful but also not convinced. He just says Okay, He friend says, I really want you to meet this person Jesus, he’s really special. And Nikodemus says, Okay, I’ll see what that’s about. And the friend Jesus to meet Nikodemus. And the first thing the Jesus says is, ‘when you were standing under the olive tree this morning, I saw you.’ And Nikodemus falls down on his knees and says, ‘you’re the real deal. You’re it!’
S – That’s fascinating. Because I remember having several conversations with you before, and one of the conversations we had was about how a person comes to have faith in something. And we also discussed about the nature of this faith, and I thought about that a lot. That someone having this sense this person or this being understanding me more than I understand myself. And I’ve been thinking how can I relate to that idea, but I mean here, that sense of having some relationship with that unknown, I feel that there’s some relationship with the unknown because when you look at the sky, what do you see? Except the color blue and the clouds. It’s pretty.. there isn’t much to abstract from it.
J – I guess that would be the problem – to abstract from it. That’s the reason that we don’t really see it. If we really know how to look at it, instead of abstracting from it, we would just see what it contains. So, there’s a story in Chinese Chan at least that a bird leaves a track across the sky. It does. It lasts for something like 24 hours. And if have the eye to see it, you can see it. And if you don’t. then you can’t. But it’s not abstract. Now you can believe that or not. The point is that it’s not abstract. It’s exactly opposite. It’s as immediate as something can be. Everything that happens on the surface of the earth leaves an imprint in the sky. And if we knew how to look to see the imprint, then we would know everything that’s happening. And then this also true of looking inside. You don’t have to look outside. Actually, the only way really to look is to look inside. But the sky is just an image, I guess. At least for me, that’s what these things are. That doesn’t mean they are symbols, which I think is an important distinction.
S – How would you make that distinction?
J – The image is evocative. The symbol stands for something. The symbol represents something. The symbol is a substitute for something. But the image is not a substitute. It’s just itself. However, it sets up a chain reaction in the viewer. So, a well-chosen image will evoke a series of thought. But it’s not by substitution. It’s not because you have a thought that you’re trying to express and then you find the right substitute for the thought that will encapsulate it or something. That’s not how an image works!
S – There seems to be some closer interaction with an image right, then the symbol. You said that the symbol is pointing towards something else other than itself. But with an image, that’s all you have. There seems to be that nearness in that experience with an image than the symbol.
J – I think that’s right. First of all, the image has a very physical reality. And it’s the physical reality of the image that is meaningful. I mean that’s not the right way to put it. But, it’s by investigating the quality of the image in and of itself that one can create meaning or discover meaning, rather than trying to decode. Because the symbol is like decoding. Now I guess I was maybe a little bit cheeky in this poem because I actually used the word ‘Cipher.’
S – I was thinking about that, yes.
J – which is a cryptographic word. So, you could be tripped off by that. But I also think that the thought itself is a little bit. it’s not an entirely a sincere thought. It’s the kind of thought that somebody has who is trying to figure things out. You know like, I don’t necessarily subscribe to this view of things, but it’s a thought.
S – so, language always has this weird thing right, we use a certain word, and we never really know what that really means, truly. I remember you saying that you had a thought before you wrote this poem and you wanted to somehow delve into that thought. I’m sure the nature of that thought was different from the nature of this other thought that we’re talking about, which is more often abstracting ideas and meanings out of a symbol.
J – well, I guess for me, I am trying to talk about the way that I understand how something like a poem works. Because I view a poem as a kind of machine. This is an idea that I got from a couple of French thinkers called Deleuze and Guattari. And they talk about everything about being a machine. And I do think that a poem is a machine. And that if you put a certain stuff in, and turn the crank, then certain stuff comes out. Or if push the button then, it runs along its tract. Or whatever, you know, there’re lots of different kinds of machines. I’m just trying to talk about the way that I think these little machines called a poem work. At least for me, in the work that I make, it’s much more based on an image. So, the image that came to me…I mean these images…how do I say this? Generally, an image would come to me as both a picture and a set of words. Or sometimes the picture would come first. Or sometimes there will just be words. And that’s fine. The point is that by taking that seed, which in this case, was this idea or like line about sky being the cipher of life on the earth, or kind of containing all the information about life on this earth. Then what I do is I try to extend a line out from that starting out. You talked about delving into me. But for me, it’s not a matter of depth, so much it’s a matter of…I don’t wanna say that it’s a superficial process. But it simply involves interrogating a thing where it goes in a variety of directions. I published a piece in student machine about this where I talk about following the lines. So, this how I think about it. This is sort of another concept I got from Deleuze and Guattari, which is that to follow the lines means to… it’s kind of like thinking of the image as an animal. Like there’s some raccoons that come hang around outside DRBU at night.
S – Ha-ha, all the time.
J – Yeah, so we see that raccoon for couple of minutes at night whenever it’s poking around, it wants some food. That’s an understandable thing. But what if you were to follow that raccoon after it leaves. Or what if you could turn time around and follow it before it arrives. To me, this is what I’m trying to do. Once I have the seed, once I met the raccoon, then I wanna know where is it coming from and where is it going to. That’s not a process in depth. That’s a process of following a surface along its whatever curves it takes. So, it’s an investigative process. It’s the process of discovery. But I assume that the image has a life of its own, an integrity of its own and my job is simply to figure out what that is, not to dictate it.
S – How does one open up to the process of investigation?
J – Yeah, I think you have to, at least for me, I have to be active. But actually, I like to think of as listening. So, the key is listening. It’s kind of like what you’re doing right now, you know. You’re drawing me out, and you’re letting me tell my story, which is just what at least I’m trying to do. So, I have an image in my mind, sometimes series of images. And I don’t know what they are, and I don’t know what they’re about. And in order to understand them better, I have to engage in a process of listening or anamnesis basically, which is…that’s a technical term for what a doctor does when they’re doing history taking out of patient. But actually, what anamnesis means is unforgetting, which kind of goes back to Plato’s conception of truth. Plato says that we already know what is true and what is real, and we just forgot, and we have to un-forget. And for some reason our medical institution preserved this view of the world.
S – That’s beautiful.
J – I don’t know why. And so, that’s what I feel like I’m doing which is I’m doing history taking on the idea. I’m kind of asking it questions. And how do I do that? Well, the physical process of doing it is by just writing a lot, which is like if you saw my notebooks for this poem, you would probably see that I wrote the same like five or ten times in a row. And the reason that I have to do that is because for me, personally I have to physicalize the thing. I have to actually write it with my hand, with a pen and a piece of paper because if the words don’t move through my body, then I don’t know what they are. And so, I might write the same line five times in a row, because I’m trying, I’m trying really hard to listen to it and to figure out what will happen next. And then, maybe I’ll get couple more words or maybe I will have a sense of what the next phrase is. So, I write out a version and think oh, that’s not right. So, I have to start over. And so, the process is very laborious, for me at least, where I might write five or six lines in a row. And then I will go back and try the first one a couple times and I’ll feel like that’s good, so then I’ll try the next couple. But then, by figuring out what the next couple is, it actually disturbs the first two, so I have to go back and rework them. I don’t know, have you ever done any sewing with a sewing machine?
S – I have not.
J – Sewing with a sewing machine is a very delicate process because every time that you press the pedal, and the fabric moves a little it really wants to bunch up. Writing for me is a lot like this, where every time I put another word in, it causes all the other words to, like, move around. And it might turn that I thought that first two lines are perfect, but when I put in the third line they’re not anymore. So, I have to go back, and I have to figure out. So, everything has to work together in the end, and it just takes a while, but it’s pretty exciting.
intermission
J – I guess, I think of the image as working more like some kind of electrical signal where you put the two things alongside of each other – you put the lion as fighting the wild boar and Achilles fighting some young Trojan man who no doubt comes to tragedy. You put them alongside each other, and sparkle happens across the gap. Because of the qualities of both of those images and because of the space between them. If you put them too close or if you put them too far away, there won’t be a spark. And if the qualities of two images are not correct, then there won’t be a spark. Because you know, if you put two anode and a diode, but you don’t have the right condition, then there won’t be this kind of spark. But if you set it up right, if you select the right image, and you don’t always have to give the other half of the image. Okay, so…Homer is very explicit. He gives both halves of the images. But you don’t have to give both halves of the image. You actually, that’s the work of the reader in many cases, is to figure out, what is the other half of the image? What is the partner to this image that will make the spark happen? That’s the work of the reader to discover. What is the other half that will cause a spark? And the reader might actually have to try a lot to find what’s that perfect material that will cause the spark to happen. That’s a very exciting process!
S – That’s wonderful. That really brings me to talk about reading itself as a creative process. How does one engage with the creative work? What does that engagement look like that is more interactive and alive. We could talk about specific examples as well.
J – Sure, yeah. I guess it’s based on two things. It’s based on one, curiously. And two, a sense of trust. By which I mean that, when we approach a creative work, we have to trust that the artist in some sense knew what they were doing, and that they were doing it with purpose. By which I don’t mean that we’re trying to discover the author’s intent. Because that is that is a very mistaken idea. Although, you know, it has a place. Like, one of the things, that I think about when I’m reading is – what did the author think that they were doing?
S – Seems pretty natural to think like that, right?
J – Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you can’t not think that. But there are other things to think at the same time. Regardless, you have to trust that there’s a principle of organization within the work that can be discovered by asking it questions. And I really want to de-mystify… because I felt like some of the things you were saying earlier were sort of like mystifying the process of making art. And I have the sense in our culture generally that art is a very mysterious thing but it’s not mysterious. It’s actually a lot more like a magic trick. I always thought of theatre as being a magic trick, which is that there’s a lot of hard work that happens in advance. And then, not in all cases, but in most cases, it should be covered up when the audience sees it. So, it should look like magic, but of course everybody knows that a magic trick has come physical principle behind it. It’s actually not mystical at all. But part art is to disguise the elements of it, that are just a lot of hard work.
S – I wonder why that is so! That remind me of a movie I recently watched actually. So last night, we watched a movie by Kurosawa, a Japanese film maker. And it’s called dreams. It’s a series of dreams that he saw. And in one of them, he is in an art studio. He looks at the Van Gogh painting and he’s trying to understand it first. And he goes inside the painting. And he’s trying to find where Van Gogh actually is. He asks some people in the painting and they tell him that Van Gogh is across a bridge. And you have to cross the bridge to find him. He crosses the bridge, and he goes there. And Van Gogh is staring at a certain nature and he’s trying to paint. He goes and says, are you Van Gogh? Van Gogh says, yes. Then they have conversation about what painting means and everything, and he goes there will such curiosity and sense of mystery there’s there. But as Van Gogh is telling him about why he’s painting, he says that he’s painting because he cannot stop. It’s like a machine. And suddenly, the movie goes Van Gogh to showing us an actual machine. A huge machine that has different gears and that are working, and it’s unstoppable. Von Gogh thinks of himself as a machine that he cannot stop. So, that’s very fascinating to think about art as something that has working parts. Because I always had this, almost like a struggle every time I go an art museum and I’m trying to understand what art is. Always trying to feel that there’s some kind of mystery there…I don’t really get it. So, I wanna know more about..like.. why is there a disguise, which is there so much mystery behind that?
J – This is the part of the fun, I don’t know. Because at least until the twentieth century, most art was not really about the process. Now there’s a lot of stuff now that is about the process. So, that kind of changes the conversation a little bit. But even that is mysterious. None of it is mysterious. In the sense that, as you said, there are working parts. That’s definitely how I think of it. You know how I think of a poem as that it’s got a bunch of working parts. Those working parts can work in very different ways depending on who wrote it and what the poem is. Like, my friends Hasan reads a lot more poetry than I do. I don’t actually read poetry I just write it, which, you know, means that I write really bad poetry. For him, he doesn’t ever ever ever try to figure out what a poem means, neither do I. But we go about that different ways. For him, he just reads it and he kind of has like a sensory experience. To him, that’s a successful poetry reading. And that’s great. Like that’s, for him, that’s how the machine works. And that could well be that’s how the machine works for lot of writers. They’re just trying to make a machine for a kind of sensory experience and emotional experience. Or maybe not to put any words on that. But some kind of phenomenological experience. By reading the poem, something happens to me. And that’s it. That’s all I need. I don’t need anything more than that.
S – Right.
J – But, when I’m reading, I’m asking myself what is this thing doing? And how is it doing it? Those are the main two questions. Sometimes I might ask, why would someone want something that does that? Because that can be important information. For instance, a book I think about lot about is ‘Moby Dick’. To me, ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about I’m putting quotes around it, so – “it’s a book Herman Melville tries to process the world that is resulting from scientific investigation and from the destruction of universal Christian narrative. So, it’s a book about doubt. It’s a book about the Leviathan. The Leviathan in Job is an image of the fact that we can’t know what’s really going on. That God’s plan is mysterious. And that Melville is sensing that the scientific and technological advancements that were happening during his lifetime and before that have presented a new problem which is that you cannot even believe in God anymore. So, it’s a story about confronting this Leviathan, this Leviathan of uncertainty and doubt. Why did he want to write that? I guess because he was pretty disturbed and confused. That doesn’t mean that he was necessarily a Christian person who was upset by the loss of Christian values. I don’t know much about him. I doubt that that’s true, just based on the book. I think that he was trying to process something that was happening to the entire culture at the time. So, he was this kind of crucible in which this thought was taking place. This thought that in some sense, everyone must have been having at one level or another – unconsciously or not. And so, he himself in his own being was a sort of crucible for this thought to be happening. And the way this thought took place was through the writing of this book called Moby Dick.
S – I haven’t read the book. But that seems like the idea of demystifying art. It’s almost like I wanna describe art more like a skill, which can be learned. Would you agree with that?
J – Yeah, to some degree I would agree with that. I mean I think there’s something to be said happy what people call ‘inspiration’. I don’t know where it comes from and what it’s about and I’m not gonna speculate too much on it. I think there are people who are more open…you know, maybe you can..I don’t know..I have heard you talk about Jungian mass unconscious. So, maybe if you wanted to put it in Jungian terms, you could say there are people who are more open and sensitive to the mass unconscious. If you want to put it in Buddhist terms, you could say there are people who, because of their past causes and conditions, they have certain elements of their being that are open to receive that kind of information. Whatever, I don’t know what the story is. But it seems like, to me that, yes, there is kind of a difference in terms of people’s receptivity. So, if you wanted to be an artist and you are not very receptive, you probably not gonna do very well, which is fine. You know, that is fine. Then there’s an element which is more technical, basically anybody can learn if they commit time and energy to it. The problem is that the machine only works so well if it doesn’t have the fuel and the fuel is what I was just talking about. Like the fuel is that stuff. Because we’re talking about the inner organization of the work. The inner organization of a work comes from that very living process just like that organization of a living being comes from a living process. Your body was organized by this very very complex living process. And I think that happens within artwork too, through the artist. The artist is kind of giving birth to this thing. I mean that’s just really trite old image. But in my mind, that’s extremely accurate. The artist is actually giving birth. And of course, like when a person is pregnant with another person that’s a lot of that process that’s not conducted very consciously, you know. The responsibility of the pregnant person is just to take care pf themselves while that happens. To some degree, that’s true of the artist. Of course, there’s like little bit more of a physical activity in terms of like, okay. A painter has to stand in front of the canvas or stand above the canvas or whatever weird stuff they’re doing now, standing under the canvas and has to apply the paint one way or another. But they’re following the line of a kind of organization.
S – In my experience, at least the act of creation, like you said is like giving birth. Although giving birth seems to be very laborious. There’s a lot of…you have to push; you have to do a lot of work in that sense. In artwork there also seems to be some kind of spontaneity that’s in play there. There’s work – of course you have to put into it in a very structured way. But there’s that ability to relax and let it happen, seems to also be part of that. I’m thinking of a poem that I read by Rumi where he talks about birds. I can recite it if you like –
“Birds make great sky circles
Of their freedom,
How they learn it?
They fall, and falling-
They’re given wings.”
So that idea of falling, idea of letting it happen and not trying too hard. Cause in my experience, I’ve felt like sometimes I sit down with a piece of paper and I’m just trying too hard. That sense of holding on or trying to push that machine in a certain direction whether it actually wants to probably go in other direction. To have that sense of which two words will probably combine in a way that fits the essence of what I’m trying to get at – that original thought that came to me. So, there seems to me that there’s a delicate balance there between doing and not-doing.
J – I think that’s right, but the issue is that you have to apply a lot of effort. But you apply an effort in a different place than you relax. That’s the issue. You’re sitting down to write. You’re trying to apply an effort in a place you’re supposed to relax. You’re not applying the effort in a right place. That’s why I’m trying to de-mystify the issue, which is that you have to apply a lot of effort to the mechanical elements of the problem. But when it comes to the non-mechanical elements of the problems, you have to really be willing to just listen and let it tell you where to go. So, a lot of the way that I figure out where it’s trying to go is that I just try a whole bunch of things. I’ll just write over and over and over again. And then I look over them, and I say, this one has something about it that other ones don’t. And now I look at that and now I actually approach it as reader.
S – This is where the reading and writing go together.
J – And I read it as I ask myself – what is happening in this thing that makes it more alive? And how can I do more of that? So, I try to extract. Ah, okay it’s because of this and this and this about it, that’s what’s exciting. So, can I do more of that? Now I have little bit more information. I’m working very hard to..you could say ..it’s like composting thing. You have to compost a lot of bad attempts to get that one good one. And far as the birth metaphor goes, I don’t know, you know, my mom told me that my older brother took many many many hours to be born. And then with me, she showed up at the hospital and I just came flying out. She literally went to a party later that night. So, I don’t know, some births are easier than others, I guess. And I told you the story about Rilke writing the Duonologies the other day. He had this vision or something as a young man, I think he was maybe even a late teenager. And he wrote first two and half poems or something like this and then he completely couldn’t proceed. And then twenty years later after he was already a very well-established poet, quite famous. He was able to finish them, all in one go of few weeks or a month. So, what happened in that period of time? I don’t know. But he was completely unable to proceed, and something had to happen inside of him for a long time before those poems were able to be bodied forth. I don’t know that I would call a little bit mysterious. But in a sense, it’s not mysterious because even those processes have a kind of mechanical reality to them. It’s just that I don’t know what they about, that’s all.
S – That’s wonderful. Great, this has been so wonderful to talk to you. I definitely have some change in prospective about how to think about art. I guess we could wrap up by reciting your poetry that we started with. Perhaps, would you like to recite the whole thing for us please?
J – Sure, I would love to. So, this poem doesn’t have a title. Most of my poems don’t. And I’ll tell you the other context about it which I neglected earlier which was that I actually wrote this and included this in a paper on Heidegger. So, part of this was actually a way of processing Heidegger’s thought.
“And though we all suspect it,
don’t we?, how we shrink
from even the whisper!… &
dare not discuss it openly,
but only in seclusion — in
a rush, in that hush
of a drowsy afternoon,
stolen into nearness
in the close
of summer’s bower:
the sky is in possession of
the cipher of life
on this earth (or
is itself &
in itself the
cipher of the earth.)
Where none may see me
solitary underneath the olive tree,
it sees. It sees. Though
you rise early in
the morning, ere the sun itself
is up, still
it sees. O, it sees. But
on the darkest moonless night, as
the weary songbird dreams,
then is it
listening: listening
in the soughing of the breeze.
So we envy the alpine heights
their heights, and trample
on the clouds. All urgently
we strive to see
farther, unobstructed. We amble
off the mountainside to stroll
across the sky.
We laud the tender plants
their shoots, stretching
toward the sky; &
the arms they open
wide. And we
would be like
them, the plants,
who stand
naively tall.”