Prologue By Joseph Germana
“There is an old Sanskrit word - Lila, which means play. Richer than our word, LILA, which means divine play. The play of creation, destruction, re-creation, the folding and unfolding of the cosmos. LILA, free and deep, is both the delight and enjoyment of God, it also means Love.”
Stephen Nachmanovitch. FREE PLAY IN LIFE AND ART.
He then asks: How does it feel to fall in love with an instrument or an art?”
As put by Carl Jung : “The creative mind plays with the object it loves. Artists play with COLOR and space. Musicians play with sound and silence. Eros plays with lovers. Gods play with the Universe. Children play with everything they can get their hands on” In Nachmanovitch.
Musical note in which there is the dynamic interplay of vision and revision:
“The idea of a work to be done is for me so closely bound up with the idea of the arranging of materials and the pleasure that the actual doing of the work affords us be given to me in a completed form. I should be embarrassed …. as by a hoax.” Igor Stravinsky (1974). POETICS of MUSIC.
Cultivation of World through Dynamic Interplay of Vision and Revision
“Each piece, whether improvised or written down, danced or painted, can evolve its own structure, it’s own world. The word ‘create’ comes from ‘to make grow,’ as in the act of cultivating plants. We grow or evolve a set of rules to incorporate the unfolding of our imagination. We create new rules of progression, fresh channels in which play can flow.” Nachmanovitch. FREE PLAY
And: “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities.In the expert’s mind, there are but few.” Shunyru Susuki
“Worlds take on a life of their own, develop their own rules and requirements, and artists have the ability to attend to such subtleties …. The key challenge is for the artist to hear the voice of the emerging work… Even in the early stages, a work of art begins to have about what it needs and wants to be. The artist must be able to hear it’s demands, what IT requires for its full realization….. All art is made in dialogue.” Eric Booth. THE EVERYDAY WORK OF ART.
“The evolving organism takes on a momentum and identity of its own. We conduct a dialogue with the living work in progress.” Nachmanovitch. FREE PLAY
Knowing and Unknowing in the Cultivation of Worlds or Fields
KNOWING: prior experience, learning, schemata, scripts, acquired protocols; techniques, applicable proficiencies…for simple inclusion, KNOWING: the knowing that allows us to see, read, behold. envision the object or process, to develop and follow plans of engagement…all existing psychological organization according to which we may begin a project and serve as its running guides, protocols. As essential as they are to productive engagement, these past-based protocols of knowing can form relationships out-of-true, missing alternative and high-quality tangents and promotes revision, re-seeing and moving in more improvisational ways.
“…the technique can get too solid–we can become so used to knowing how it should be done that we become distanced from the freshness of today’s situation. This is the danger that inheres in the very competence that we acquire in practice. Competence that loses a sense of its roots in the playful spirit becomes ensconced ….” Nachmanovitch
UNKNOWING: In his posthumously published work, THE FARTHER REACHES OF HUMAN NATURE, Abraham Maslow respresented the “creative attitude” as manifesting properties such as giving up the past…… being without a priori expectations….” or non attachment, or unknowing. A.Maslow. THE FARTHER REACHES OF HUMAN NATURE.
“Unknowing ….needs that a man be in a certain state of grace …..playful, artless, inwardly acquitted of opinion….” Travers, P.L. on Unknowing. Parabola, 1985.
