Calvin and Hobbes: I admire Watterson

My earliest memory of an interest in the arts came in the form of comics and church music. With comics, it was Archie and Peanuts. With music, it was the chance to add a harmony to a hymn using only my sense of hearing the harmony in my head.

But Calvin and Hobbes is the penultimate comic. Bill Watterson's  writing and drawing skills interleave to create the perfect comic strip. That's why so often when I am trying to convey some thought about the arts, it will find it's expression in a Watterson-inspired image, just like the one above.

This week I have been contemplating this idea of creating, of writing songs, performing, etc. If you don't have any desire to dabble in these areas, it may seem somewhat mysterious why anyone would try this. For the majority of creatives, there's no money in it. There's usually little respect. And the rewards can be fleeting or obscured completely by the lack of interest from any audience.

That's why it was tough when all four of my children grew up with this creative impulse as part of their landscape. This was something I didn't necessarily discourage in them. But my wife and I tried to paint a vivid picture of what it would probably be like to pursue anything in the arts.

On the other side of the coin though is this adventure that comes with this creative journey. Whenever I sit down to work on a new song or a painting there is this exciting anticipation of discovery. There is never a time when it's not that sort of experience initially. The ideas captivate. The chase for that mysterious something, that vehicle of words or chords or imagery that invokes an integrity and power fitting to the idea.

Somewhere in the middle it usually becomes an anvil-bludgeoning mess as the hammering out of the idea becomes an endurance test.

When these excursions are successful. . . wow! But they are rare.

Creatives have their stories about this kind of pursuit of some sort of perfection or synergism of their creative efforts. For example, famous clarinetist Artie Shaw of the Big Band era, once remarked. "Maybe twice in my life I reached what I wanted to. Once we were playing 'These Foolish Things' and at the end the band stops and I play a little cadenza. That cadenza — no one can do it better. Let's say it's five bars. That's a very good thing to have done in a lifetime. An artist should be judged by his best, just as an athlete. Pick out my one or two best things and say, 'That's what we did: the rest is rehearsal.'"



Jazz legend John Coltrane, who played for Miles Davis and Dizzie Gillespie, expressed a similar observation after one amazing performance of his composition "A Love Supreme." When the final note was put to rest, Coltrane stepped off the stage, put down his sax, and said, "Nunc dimittis." (These are the opening Latin words for Simeon's ancient prayer, traditionally sung at evening prayers: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.") It's that sense of believing that he could never play the piece more perfectly — if nothing else came of his life — that thirty-two minute jazz prayer would've been worth it all.



These are the moments in a creative life when never happier — those times when we are allowed to express the deepest gifts that reflect who we are as humans.

I can think of one song of the two hundred plus I've penned where I believe I've created something that joined in me a similar response as Shaw or Coltrane articulated.