Art and family

 
I am not a black Delta blues and reggae phenom. But maybe I am Corey Harris. I don't have his talent or guitars or dreads or cap, but I found out how I am like Corey Harris on Friday at the NightCat, when his five year-old daughter was there with him.

He ordered her a bagel, got her set up with a movie on a laptop and proceeded to transform the house into some club on the Mississippi Delta with a timeless voice and virtuoso finger picking. He is a singular talent. But like those of us with young kids, before every song his eyes found her and made sure she was okay, then he closed them and transformed himself and all of us.

Funny I've been thinking about art and family of late. And how some people who take themselves to be serious artists or writers or musicians will spurn the idea of family or kids in order to focus on/dedicate themselves to their art. Their is some validity to the idea that when you own (or don't have to share) the hours in your day, you can devote more time to studying, creating. Sometimes a quiet evening, free of homework, or a Saturday morning with no soccer or field hockey, where you can go sit in a coffee house or museum, or people watch on a street, would be pretty sweet.

But for me, art or creativity springs from the messy parts, the jumble, the connections, which are sometimes tangled, sometimes free-flowing. My perception and perspective are re-shaped through how our girls see the world and how their words, their ideas and concepts, their humor changes. And how I react to it all.

The discipline to make sure creative time doesn't simply live on the edges of the day, but has it's time to percolate and time to drink deeply off of it, there's a challenge there. For me the answer is often get up early; make that time when everyone is sleeping. With a 90-minute drive to and from work, I often have ideas gel or start from a lyric from The Roots or The White Stripes, or a riff, or a nugget from NPR, or the improvisation of a Robert Glasper.

There isn't a choice between art and family because they are both co-mingling, swirling through the funnel of my experience to hopefully turn into something worthwhile, creatively speaking. Then again, that existential creativity of having a hand in the people the girls are becoming, the person Robin is, the dingbat that I am and am becoming; there is something to be said for that kind of fruitful creativity as well.

I can't speak for Corey Harris, whose music and vibe and daughter are all beautiful and seem interconnected. But I can relate when I see her come up to him on stage to be with her dad and how I feel when Anna or Ava bring notebook or art pad and crayons and spark their own creativity, and how they feed mine.

"You just go on your nerve."

Frank O'Hara is like laxative, creatively speaking. Not that he pulls crap out of you, but that he gets creativity rolling like bran muffins.

O'Hara held that to write, to live, "you just go on your nerve." He writes close to the bone, no unnecessary flourish or convention. This from the cat that wrote a book of poems all during his lunch breaks. His "Lunch Poems" has been one of the seminal inspirational find-you-when-you-need-it books for me.

Erik Mongrain performed at NightCat in Easton last week. His guitar is it for him. His life and dedication pour out from it. He looks at his instrument as holding more sounds and more possibilities than most would consider. He is not constrained by convention. Nor was O'Hara.

I hope to come at words that way. Yet sometimes I feel like words are the lamest medium, for being the most used and thereby hollow or tinny for their misuse. If we spoke in music notes, perhaps they'd be cliche riddled.

But we work with words. And we converse by convention, which makes it harder to break out, to "go on your nerve."

Where are the times when I live by going on my nerve? When I run down a winding, wooded singletrack or quick step over rocks and roots running downhill. No thinking, just instinct, nerve.

When I am lost in the sound and vibration of polyurethane skateboard wheels humming on new pavement. Presence.

In the improvisation of Miles or Monk or Coltrane. Or the nerve of O'Hara.

Through all of it, I learn to peel back the skin, with a ballpoint pen, to expose sinew and bone. To live and write from the core, from beneath the surface, pushing past appearances. At least that's the hope. To sometimes get it right, going on nerve.