Keeping the Cat Alive

What can Schrödinger's cat teach about helping us & our projects to thrive?

My husband Martin, a musician and composer, got trapped in some boxes while sitting at the studio console editing tiny jagged lines of tracks from a recent recording. He told me he discovered himself closed up in the Diatonic Box, flaps and sides built from assumptions about music theory. He also realized that he had been bound up in the Pop Music Box by sheets and sheets of bubble wrap made out of other people’s expectations.

Bottom line: he felt really stuck.

Background: the Cat in the box

In Schrödinger's thought experiment (native to quantum mechanics), a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead while it is unobserved in a closed box. The parallel truths are a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

While I would love to say something clever about quantum mechanics, it ain’t gonna happen. What follows is a bunch of fast-and-loose metaphor appropriation and adaptation in the interest of unpacking the boxes that happen as we work.

The Creative Conundrum

As creatives, we tend to dwell in three—if not simultaneous, then overlapping sequential—possibilities. One: the project inside the box is viable and I’m going to be a star. Two: the project inside the box has croaked and I was a fool to have dreamed. Three: my creativity (and possibly I) will expire while speculating obsessively about the viability of the project and it will, therefore, never be finished.

Ideally, we finish and, in the end, form will follow function. That is to say that the box holding the project is the project itself—or, rather, the finished project organically becomes its own container.

If the final container already exists before we’ve invented it, we’re not creating, we’re imitating. Imitation is good training, but not good output. However, on the way to completion our developing work has got to inhabit various boxes, some pre-existing, to give it sustainable form.

Occasionally, boxes constrain us unawares, like the ones Martin found himself trapped in while composing. He’d identified the first key to originality: discovering that the box or boxes exist. Distinguishing the container (aka scaffolding) from the project is a creative skill and, at some point, essential to moving forward.

On Boxes

Boxes themselves are neutral things—typically meant to be useful and transient. Imagine moving house without boxes. Imagine living in a home with nothing unpacked. Or think how you’d manage when throwing a party and need to transfer a bunch of food from the car to the buffet.

When we’re engaged in a creative process, once any particular box has done its work, we must move on. We neither dwell, nor present our masterpieces from, within boxes. We use them, then set them aside and scoot closer to the main event, free to make appropriately elegant or shocking or indiscernible transitions from the volume and configuration of one box to the space and potential that the next box holds.

Photo by iam_os on Unsplash

But aren’t boxes supposed to be the thing we’re trying to escape? to think outside of?

So they say, but in fact, it’s impossible or at the very least completely exhausting to exist, boxless, on the amorphous crest of invention all the time. Allegedly some sublime individuals have that sort of stamina—but I don’t, and I don’t advocate relying on it as a go-to work method. Invention for me comes in waves and bursts on the heels of interesting input, tumbling in and out of boxes, and buoyed by general good habits of nutrition, sleep, and exercise. Similar for you?

Besides—if no box, how to be in- or outside of it? Not-ness and is-ness are interdependent. Every word is a box redefined by then merged into the prior and next to create meaning. Yet that meaning exists both because of and outside of the string of discrete cases each word and the aggregation comprise.

Packing Tape

It can be difficult to identify the boxes we, ourselves, occupy—sometimes we just feel trapped, or stopped, or blocked. Which makes sense. Boxes are designed to contain things (see above). When we’re in them, though the vista is limited, we develop and grow until we come to feel crowded in by the other occupants—cats, or expectations, or influential teachers and models whose voices, styles, plots or chord structures we’ve trained with.

Even when we’ve diagnosed that we’re in a box it can be challenging to devise a strategy for getting out. Sitting and staring at the box prolly won’t do it, even though the box fills our field of vision. Hating on the box is not a good strategy; it wastes time and energy and sort of misses the point.

Gentle Blade

So, if you discover that you’re in a box, don’t despair! The cat’s alive. It just needed some box time. It may still be contentedly sleeping or it may be feisty and annoyed that you kept it confined, but once the box has done its work, set the cat free.

As in some techniques of meditation and a counseling I’ve heard of for dealing with emotions and regulating one’s amygdala, one can acknowledge the box, thank it for the work it’s done carrying you and/or your ideas thus far, and excuse yourself from its confines.

Take a peek around to see what’s beyond. Get on with it.

The life you’re living and the things you make are the main thing. Not, ultimately, the fully recyclable storage & shipping materials.

What’s New?

The past many weeks have represented a gratifying amount of work—actually doing it, not just thinking that doing it would be a good idea. The results are a load of satisfied students & lecture attendees, but, notably, two new books published. Yay!

Blade fra skuffen—en midtjysk antologi

to order EU

If that title doesn’t sing for you, don’t worry—you just might not be a speaker of Danish. It means this: a lot of writers I’ve worked with or know have pulled their leaves/pages (blade) from the drawer (skuffen) and allowed me to publish them in this anthology. Their work includes poetry, fiction, memoir, comics, illustrations and the result of lots of vision, writing group feedback sessions, revision & courage. I’m so proud.

(I’ve also included my first piece of writing in Danish. It’s a little poem, but I’ve had several trusted native speakers sign off on my language choices. Let’s hope it flies!)

Cut-out Poetry—Thousands of Wonderful Words

to order US — to order EU

This one’s for fun and games, and represents a project that’s long been in my (enormous) partially-done pile. I have high hopes that it will catch on and merit a few sequels.

With both of these books I’ve been migrating the center of my publishing efforts to a new platform, BoD—Books on Demand (links pending). It looks like a good number of small presses in Europe use this company for print-on-demand services and the rates are comparable to the better-known behemoth. If all goes well, this is a step closer to moving all my independent publications into my own webshop. I actually enjoy the business end of things, but mainly when it’s going well!

Hope you’re doing fine and are headed into a productive and rewarding late spring.

Warmly,

Leslie