notes on creativity

 My drum teacher once told me that every great musician stops hearing the sound of others music after a point in their career. 

They no longer look at others engagement with their instrument with greedy eyes that try to imitate ideas.

It is a different place we must go to as humans. Only in channeling that tempest are we truly living, Competition is mediocrity for with that we will never end up changing the face of a field itself. 

In such a situation, what is our relation to the giants who came before us? Those who inspired us to reach these heights in the first place?

The truth is the fire that burns in this other place. It is beauty and love too.

And to pursue it sincerely demands a certain discipline. 

One can play beats for 40 years of their lives and not understand the internal magic of the drums. That which brings clarity, musicality and otherworldliness. 

To play sports like a musician and to play music like a sportsman. To imbibe the quality of inspiration from the other which is inherent in the sportsman spirit and yet subtly dilute it with the understanding of immanent qualitiative difference - the birthright of every human, every musician. 

I feel dishonest in this examination itself - for my intellect reaches far into the depths of life's contours which my lived experience is unable to keep pace with. The sincerity it demands of me is something that threatens to shatter me. 

And yet I continue to march forward, for that is also my creed as an artist. The haughtiness of the intellect that feels it has seen and the folly inherent in this process that reveals itself as I expose it - they are all I really have at this moment. 

One does not become really good without the sense of meticulousness. But it is not a prescriptive meticulousness that can be taught. Each curve of the beloved's body - To allow oneself to be lost in it sincerely. Our intellects are like the hoods of a cobra, to use a shaivite metaphor. It requires a certain intensity of experience, of beauty or power for it to be shut up.

The intellect is a razor. It cuts through the chaos with its sharpness. In training for any skill, it is this we are training. Insincerity kills its truth. For if it is not grounded in lived real experience, it becomes a fragile existence liable to have the rug pulled from underneath it at any moment.