After Burrows

A tuning exercise for refreshing, expanding, or redrawing the map of your self-understanding as a maker after you’ve been making things for a long time.

In A Choreographer’s Handbook, an aphoristic book oriented toward the capacity to enter and stay in the process of composition, Jonathan Burrows writes, “The idea that you can make what you want is a fantasy. You are you, and you can only make what you can make . . . The trick is to find out what you can make.”

I’ve held onto this little pith for years, drawing out two ideas: one, that it’s useless to model your creative vision on what others have made—better to discover what happens when you put yourself into a process that leads idiosyncratically toward making than to try to shape-shift your creative mind into someone else’s; and two, that finding out what you can make is as good a description as any of what animates a long-term devotion to making stuff: it’s always a process of discovery, of encounter with something unknown. At its largest circumference, it’s a process in which you find out you can make something you didn’t realize you could make. At its tightest core, it is a process of finding out something about who you are.

If you’ve been making things for a long time, you might have some idea of what you can make. That is, you might have a decent understanding of the conditions under which you can best write or create, the seeds that germinate into workable, depth-seeking ideas, the figures you are capable of activating in a composition, the types of resources that feed you, the other makers living and dead that you are in conversation or affinity with, the ways your particular creative intelligence gets excited, the scale of composition that you think you can manage. You have, in other words, been finding out what you can make, and in so doing, might have also found out what you can’t seem to make, might notice certain moods that never occur in your work, areas defined by genre or topic that you don’t go near. 

There is a grounding and stability that comes from this form of self-understanding as an artist, a courage nurtured by trust and a relief from a certain kind of anxiety. But I want to propose this tuning exercise as a moment to consider anew the question of what you can make. I propose this not so much in the spirit of unsettling, abandoning, or countering what you’ve found, but toward the possibility of both expanding the area in which we feel grounded, at home and perhaps letting certain old homes go as we recognize who we are in the present. It is a prompt for sitting with the phrase, “finding out,” for thinking about the activity of finding for a while. Thoughts on a few forms of finding below, followed by a framework for doing the reflection. 

finding out where we are

In the course of my scholarly years (Are they over? Is this school their continuation, just not in the drag of an academic?) I spent an inordinately long time with the sentence, “Where do we find ourselves?” It’s the first part of the first paragraph of an essay by Emerson (“Experience”) that I spent several years drawing into connection with both process-oriented philosophy and traditions of creative process that I’d found myself drawn toward. “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes . . . ” That is — we can’t tell exactly where it (our lives, this vocation) started and we don’t know exactly where it (our life, our vocation) will end. 

To find out where we are, perhaps we need to relinquish the assumptions we carry about the trajectory we are on. That trajectory might be understood in terms of a place inside a group or tradition or profession. That trajectory might also be understood in terms of the negotiations between the public self-conception that drives us to write or make—ambition and desire are all wound up in here—and the reality of how that drive actually sits within our private days. What brought us to what we’re doing might not be the same thing that keeps us here. To find out where we are involves taking stock of the transitions, displacements, migrations, and transformations that have occurred between whenever we decided to start making something, and where we are in our lives today. Maybe we’ll notice a different trajectory, a swerving path.

To find out where we are also involves looking outward. Where have we put our attention? What are we drawn to? What of the world are we putting ourselves in relationship to through the act of writing or making?

finding out what we can make

Finding out what we can make starts with finding out what we have already made, followed by finding out what capabilities we have nurtured or learned or, somewhere along the way, absorbed or invented. It is a measure of the objects we can make, but also of the kind of experiences we can make. It’s also a measure of ways of making: a measure of craft and technique (knowing how to work certain materials, knowing how to combine and sequence them) but also of the subtle registers of understanding (of what potential something has to grow, of what fits with what) we possess — our particular seismographs or dog snouts (take your pick or substitute your own exquisite instrument), let’s say, that mark potential material with interest and significance. 

the exercise, part one of two (mapping)

Begin by mapping your self-understanding as a writer or maker based on what you understand yourself to have made. Exclude any processes that are in progress and focus on works that are complete. 

Take “map” as literally or suggestively as you’d like. It might be fruitful to use the idea of a region or area, with centers, margins, throughways, and unexplored zones. You might instead make notes in a more scattered, doodle-style way. Or if it works better for you, write your answers.

Questions you might ask to fill in your map: 

What figures recur in my work? What types of events am I drawn to? (In map mode you might think of this as a statue or monument in the center of a town, or the emblem on a flag, or a set of important buildings, or pictograms drawn on rocks. . . )

What are the sources that feed my work? (In map mode, you can think of this as natural or cultivated resources — rivers, forests, fields, storehouses.)

What types of experiences (of reading, of performance, of witness) occupy the entrances into and exits from my work, its beginnings and endings? (In map mode, you might think of these as border crossings, signposts.)

What skills or craft knowledge do I rely on to make the transition from an idea to something in progress? (In map mode, you might think of this as a the holding of a library or the activity of a club.)

What kind of experiences does my work offer a reader or witness? (In map mode you might think of this as the weather.)

Looking at your map, select a few elements you could represent with a symbol, place on a flag in the mode of a family crest. 

Then, in a pen of a different color, augment the map with answers to the same questions, this time gleaning from what you are in the middle of making. Use this secondary color as a tool for seeing what’s new or shifting. Use it also to add shading or double lines to elements that are stable, consistent. 

the exercise, part two of two

The question inside this exercise is about expansion, re-centering, or both. But it’s not a question of what else can I do, what else can I be. The question is, where am I? Where do I find myself? Follow the map with a five-minute freewrite reflecting on what you’ve found out you can make. Point the question toward the unfolding present, toward the projects that are in front of you. If it helps, use this simple fill-in-the-blanks form on a loop. 

I can make _____. Can I make _____?