Digipen

Filed Under ( ) by Mike Monroe on Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Posted at : Wednesday, March 18, 2009

The artist is engaged in a perpetual struggle against the positive-feedback loop of the brain, desperate to create an experience that no one has ever had before. And while the poet must struggle to invent a new metaphor and the novelist a new story, the composer must discover the undiscovered pattern, for the originality is the source of the emotion.


If the art feels difficult, it is only because our neurons are stretching to understand it. The pain flows from the growth. As Nietzsche sadistically declared, "If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in; only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory."


This newness, however torturous, is necessary. Positive-feedback loops, like that shrieking microphone, always devour themselves. Without artists like Stavinsky who compulsively make everything new, our sense of sound would become increasingly narrow... ...Works like "The Rite" jolt us out of complacency. They keep us literally open-minded. IF not for the difficulty of the avant-garde, we would worship nothing but that which we already know.


-Proust Was A Neuroscientist

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