A (subjectively) racialized view of art forms created and practiced by peoples of colour, haiku (Part IV)

                      Mile, Jazz, Haiku and traversing the impediments to artistic flow

Upon returning to academia I discovered my ability to write artistically, cross culturally, multi lingually, and especially, poetically (haiku & ehi (english haiku idioms)) was greatly diminished, akin to suffering from writers block. It took until the end of my three week xmas break for me to recover the poetic inflections in my writing, just in time to return back to school. It almost seems to me that writing in academia where one must be so unilaterally arbitrary, so definitively opinionated, and technically entrenched, while strictly adhering to MLA or APA techniques, seems to require one to access other segments of the brain, segments which when used in such fixed and narrow minded ways temporarily constricts the artistic cadence in my writing, my poetry.

Here's what Miles Davis said about this artistic phenomena in his autobiography. "A lot of the old guys thought that if you went to school it would make you play like you were white (like a symphonic musician). Or, if you learned something from theory, then you would lose the feeling in your playing. ... I couldn't believe that all them guys like Bird (Charlie Parker) ...  Wouldn't ... Go to the public library and borrow scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban, Berg, Prokofiev. I wanted to see what was going on in all of music. Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery."

Here the professor and musician Ian Carr writes of this same phenomena in his book "Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography". "Unlike Parker's, Miles phrases have very little of the blues in them at this stage in his career. The long periods of formal instruction in western instrumental techniques seem to have drained the tonal inflections of the blues from his playing."

I concur completely. I believe that developing the capacity to turn on and off your intellect, and your artistic sides, your intuition, etc enables one to better integrate them and create, learn, and even collaborate with others on a higher level. If you stay mired in just your little social, intellectual, or peer group, and don't periodically enter and exit a plethora of awkward and novel experiences and interactions, then I believe you stunt your growth as a person and thus as an artists. This is what I fear most people do and why so few truly excel at their endeavors. Being good at something is one thing, but being able to innovate "beyond what you know" is a whole nother. You can't innovate or be great at something unless you gain exposure to what is different, and put yourself in positions where you are not in control, where you have to humble yourself and your ego to others at points throughout your development. 

To me all of this is also akin to the way many artist seek out isolation from time to time or periods in their lives; Thoreau did it, Miles did so for several years, I did so after returning from Japan. My book "Up the Mtn" was written during a three year period of living in my little hovel, in one of Oregon's National Parks, and here James Baldwin speaks of it.

"I had to go through a time of isolation in order to come to terms with who and what I was, as distinguished from all the things I'd been told I was." (James Baldwin, in his Paris Review interview with Jordan Elgrably, 1984).