Feeding Back: Answering Art with Art
F. Christopher Reynolds
4/22/07
Over the years, I’ve learned that many persons began feeling they weren’t creative during adolescence and that overly harsh criticism was the cause. Sometimes the criticism came from a peer, teacher or family member. At other times, it was self-inflicted, based on feelings of inadequacy when comparing self to others. Most often, it was a combination of both. Raising the creative bar in the community includes removing that destructive criticism from the picture altogether, if possible. Feeding back is one method of sidelining the inner and outer negative critics.
Feeding back is giving an original response to what is original. The goal of feeding back is to help bring forth and feed originality whenever you come in contact with it. The example I like to use to describe this is a parent and child where the child is learning how to speak. The first attempts at speech are gurgles and coos, later comes attempts at words and phrases. A loving parent responds to the beginnings of speech with a response that encourages further attempts.
We would think it foolish if we saw a parent striving to correct the first words out of the infant’s mouth. Perhaps it would go like this:
Child: Wa, wa?
Adult: No! you’re not saying it right!
Child: Wa, wa, ha?
Adult: Do us all a favor and quit trying to talk!
It’s absurd, yet often first attempts at originality, creating something that has never been before, are responded to in this manner. The early efforts at making an original work are notoriously imperfect , fragile, and prone to critical attacks. However, it only takes a bit of training to learn to feed back and the nurturing that feeding back brings can make all the difference.
There are 4 levels to feeding back based on the generosity of the responder. They are:
1. Reminds me of...
2. ...occurred to me, popped into my mind
3. Creativity answers creativity
4. Silence
In all levels, I use my imagination when I come across the one-of-a-kind. A classic example is a student’s first love poem. As I read the poem, I receive it and let it work on me. It may stir up memories from my life, or memories of the works of other poets, characters in books, films, songs. Who knows what I will remember? The feeding back at the first level is to tell the poet my memories that their work stirred in me. It’s important to share using the imagery from the poem. For example, I say, “I remember when I felt like dried and cracked paint too long in the sun, it was when…and by the way, your use of language reminds me of e. e. cummings. Look up his poem…..”
At the second level, as I read, I may get very clear images in my mind’s eye, hear sounds with my mind’s ear, or feel a response like warm chills. This is a deeper level of inspiration in response to an original work. Feeding back is sharing these more imaginative effects with the writer. I literally tell the creator what I experienced as specifically as possible. “When I read your poem, especially at the point of the image of the broken jar, I got a mental image of shattered glass on a kitchen floor.”
At the third level, I respond to the poet with an original work in an area of one of my talents. For example, I take the love poem of the student and I create a song with the poem as the lyrics and feed back the art with art.
At the fourth level, responding with silence, there are two aspects.
The first, if it is really true that the creative work of another invokes no clear inner response on my part and I can find no memory connected to the work, then I tell the author that my response on this one is silence. In this I strive to do no harm to what is emerging, even though I may not understand it. The other aspect involves what is called, aesthetic arrest. In this, I am held still by the originality I am perceiving. When the poem is done, I may find that I have no words because I was so moved. Silence is the most powerful form of feeding back. As a songwriter, my creativity is most nourished when the listener sits silent at the end of the song with tears in his/her eyes.
To close, there is a teaching image I like to use to talk about feeding back. It comes from a French Renaissance tapestry entitled, La Dame a la Licorne. In English it’s called The Lady and the Unicorn. In the tapestry, a woman is surrounded by animals that represent the 5 senses.
She is holding a mirror and she has tamed a unicorn by using that mirror to show the unicorn its own reflection. There are many interpretations of this image, however, the one that I like to use is that the woman represents the individual imaginative capacity and that her mirror represents the unique angle of perception and reflection native to it.
Feeding back is conscious use of that mirror, not for ourselves, but in the service to the flourishing of the greater good. The tapestry says that where souls can behave in this manner, the greatest beauty and mystery desires to be present.
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