I think of childhood as an explosion of creativity. For most people, growing up and earning a living means leaving all that behind. But an artist never leaves that behind. Edwin Mullhouse was my way of exploring the child as artist and, under the guise of childhood, something larger.
Interpretation
Childhood is a time of creativity that many abandon in adulthood, but artists retain that childlike imagination.
In this quote, Steven Millhauser reflects on the idea that childhood is a period rich with creativity and imagination, a vital part of an artist's identity. He suggests that while many people lose their creative instincts as they grow up and take on adult responsibilities, true artists manage to preserve that childhood essence in their work, allowing them to explore deeper themes and ideas through the lens of their imaginative beginnings.
In practice
During a creative workshop, I shared this quote to inspire participants to tap into their childhood creativity.
That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.
Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.
I often use nameless places in my work as a way of allowing the readers to create more of the novel and to make it potentially about their experiences, what they know, a city that they have perhaps seen on television.
However, there's no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.
A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn't really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I'm trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.
A line is a dot that went for a walk.
So now, from this mad passion Which made me take art for an idol and a king I have learnt the burden of error that it bore And what misfortune springs from man's desire... The world's frivolities have robbed me of the time That I was given for reflecting upon God.
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