I’ve been thinking a lot about the line where the person consuming the art gets to know it more deeply than its creator.

Let’s say you wrote and recorded a hit song in twenty hours, and then I’m so moved by it, I decide to write a book about it, and it takes me five years. At some point, I will have considered every theme, nuance, and lick you thought about. I’ll be able to tell people where your guitar came from, what beer you had the night before you recorded, how your childhood shaped the lyrics, how you chose to keep the bad take in the background for character. I’ll have analyzed your art more thoroughly than you ever did.

Or maybe it’s depth rather than raw hours. Maybe I listen to your song and understand exactly what you were trying to say with it. Maybe I want to push the envelope, so I do a cover, or write a response, or just take the artistic territory you were exploring and venture farther in.

If I spend more time contemplating the ideas that form your art, is it still your art? Is it… my art? Or is art a communal resource, like a fresh blanket of snow?

In one of my favorite podcast episodes ever, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the many iterations that Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah went through to reach its iconic status. The original version was not, uh, that good. If you listen to it now, be mindful that you’re not subconsciously hearing the future Shrek Version (by Rufus Wainwright). That wasn’t what Leonard Cohen created. It took several covers–several people who recognized and built on what he was trying to do–to shape that original version into the song we love today. So whose art is it? Hallelujah wouldn’t exist without Leonard Cohen, but we wouldn’t know it today without Jeff Buckley.

There’s a great TED Talk about this idea by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. It’s hard to pick a representative quote, because, honestly, the whole talk is really good, and I hope you give it a listen. But in short:

I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s... And she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. [...] it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." [...] and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough... and the poem would barrel through her and [...] continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet."

When I first heard the talk fifteen years ago, I focused on the relief from perfectionism that comes when you cede control over your creative flow. You no longer have the be the genius, you just have to show up every day to knock on the sky and listen to the sound, hoping the universe sends something good your way, that your little tentacles catch some good creative plankton, or whatever. That sure takes the pressure off!

But I no longer think we’re conduits of some great artistic current, or the anemone or whatnot. I think we’re the whole damn sea.¹

Stay with me!

Let’s say we go down to the river. I toss in a rock, and it ripples in a way we both find pleasing. (Meanwhile, guy on the other bank gives us the stink eye for disturbing the fish.) We watch for a minute, then I have to go, but you feel compelled to stay. You watch the ripples reverberate for a long, long time. They flow, barely perceptible, all the way to the shore, where they nudge leaves, disturb snails, and turn to playful little eddies. You sit by the riverbank and ponder the meaning of it all, and then maybe you toss another rock in. By now, you’ve thought about it a lot more than I had.

I think art is the ripple. It’s not yours or mine any more than the water or the rocks. One of us makes a splash, the other responds to what happens (or not). Sometimes you’re skipping rocks by yourself, and sometimes you throw the rock in with flair or with a big splash, and others might come to watch and get inspired.

But we didn’t make the river, or create the physics that cause ripples. We don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen each time, or what others are gonna think. All we can do is throw the rock and notice what happens.

¹ And I think that’s what Elizabeth Gilbert was saying in her TED Talk; it just took me a decade to get there.

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