How would you describe your process of entering the flow, what other disciplines overlap with your primary vision?

• At about the age of 30, I switched from having my best energies at night to being a morning person. I guard that time simply and carefully. There is no formula—usually formulation is in a manner of speaking antithetical to organic creation. By negating the primacy of formula, I am become the type where art form is a filter or membrane for my ideas, although I can imagine someone of a more athletic relationship to a medium deriving utility from formula. I have parcels of activities—some psychologists call them ‘micro-routines’—to which I may have recourse as the energies prevail in that morning time. There are times where my mood is tinged with spite, and true to the example of Kafka, I leap into an activity that seems in contradiction to the priorities previously established; for example, playing scales when the serotonin levels are high, when my interest for the week might be writing an orchestra piece. I generally find that if I hold to these general principles, I can at the end of the week feel not too high and not too low about what I have done. If there is such a thing as sabotage entering in, I think it might look like choosing the wrong constraints within which we work: there are times when “our fat is on the fire” that heuristics will trump adherence to theory, but there are also times when responsibility dictates our being strong enough to make a theory our own, and to actually live it. I always fail in one sense, but I like to think I play the game well most of the time. As for the disciplines which overlap, philosophy, by which I mean the art/spirit of making distinctions, is of high importance, and harnessed to that come psychology, poetry, literature, history, painting, lapidary arts, classical as well as quantum and relativistic physics, astronomy, mathematics, ornithology, humor, epistemology…perhaps more heavily weighted in the Quadrivium, but not to exclude the Trivium.

  What inspired you from history of art, books, philosophy, science, any other disciplines?

• I was once asked in an interview by a video game designer “what is YOUR style? [compositionally].” My honest answer was “whatever it needs to be,” at which point I watched all sorts of twitches and uneasiness enter into his posture, and I realized that he was seeing this as an opportunistic attitude in me, rather than one which attested to my fluency in many styles. I adjusted my word choice and ended up getting the commission, which I eventually turned down. True, speaking of “need” in art seems to reduce it to utility, but perhaps that is only in a corporate sense—personally, transubstantiating your own memory and processes may be a matter of life and death, which is to say, health. There are some people I know who steadfastly refuse to talk about their work, and I suspect part of that is because they are so thoroughly saturated with their vocational responsibilities that that they adopt this policy so as to exercise part of their brains which otherwise doesn’t get used. Samuel Beckett, a great inspiration to me, was this way.When I was 13 I was secretary of my local astronomy club, and I recall reading about Japanese astronomers, who on finding an astounding new comet, did not stop to celebrate, but continued scanning the sky, and they discovered at least 3 more that evening. To me this speaks of self-control. Superstitions might run rampant in us if we refuse to sustain our personal discomforts while science gathers the materials, or even while we are wielding those materials—like the irritation of uncertainty, or delayed gratification. Some say this is why Kafka never completed a large novel. Speaking of history, there are some who “find” themselves in history—that’s fine, sometimes I do that, just as Prokofiev wrote the Classical Symphony to show he wasn’t just a nasty avante guard guy—but what if the comfort of that finding is deferred? It may be that that person may go on to find himself/herself “justified” by history. And if further even that is found to be delusive….it doesn’t necessarily end, it is such a Newtonian concept. I feel it is time to restore faith in new art after these last decades of postmodernism and people’s heightened disgust with its lack of rigor and sophistication which often masquerades as style. When we back away from the trendy tendency to destroy the masterworks, we may stand solidly on the shoulders of giants, for whose work we should be grateful—but out of a relationship of striving, perhaps against ourselves, perhaps for others… this actually came as a surprise to me, having fallen under the spell of Glenn Gould at an early age—that technology might become so advanced that with the advent of deep fakes, persons’ skepticism would dictate that “if it didn’t happen live, it didn’t happen.” This may even mean that a performer might not have anything new to contribute except for the fact that it is live, as anathema as that may at first sound.

• What place on Earth inspired you the most?
• I grew up in an Appalachian town of a population around 300 people. I spent a great deal of time in solitude, walking the mining trails from 100 years earlier. My irritation with cities is conserved–it just changes modalities. I lived in Las Vegas for 10 years, and I still remember the beauty of the desert. One wonders what would drive a man to fast, pray and isolate himself in such a place, being profoundly social.

• What is the latest dream you had? How would you like this civilization to look like in 100 years?

• I have kept notebooks of my dreams since I was single digits in age, and some of them were startling in the force of their interpretive consistency. After a while, personal interpretation may seem to become reflexive and spontaneous, but the emotional language of the symbols can be turned on its head, when we sit with them long enough. I am content to weigh how much my personal imagery coincides with that of the collective, and then to determine what is noise. Creative tension may come from the endurance of some absurdity which might present itself….this question brings to mind Beckett’s Quad 1 and Quad 2 watched back to back