iterate (it's great)

This video showcases one of my favorite interviews with Jerry Garcia. It's pulled from a 1976 episode of a local Bay Area TV show called "I Believe", hosted by a grinning, paisley-coated, priest¹ who has the stated goal of figuring out "Who is Jerry Garcia, and what turns him on?"

Despite the strangeness of this setting - or perhaps because of it - Garcia seems comfortable, and speaks eloquently on his values as a musician, and their source in his Catholic upbringing, the acid tests, and the success of the 1976 Grateful Dead.

The whole interview is candid and enjoyable, but on a recent rewatch, one segment struck me in particular. It's the last question of the interview - starting about 25 minutes into the video. They have been discussing the source of Jerry's energy to create ("enthusiasm"), and the Father says "You've also described music as your yoga, as your meditation", to which Jerry replies:

Right, and by that I just mean that I think it's a good thing to have some one thing that you can work on, on more or less a daily basis, and be able to see improvement in your own terms, that is a result only of your own energy being put into the thing.

Anything that you decided to do, if you did it everyday and it was something that you could notice yourself improving, even if it was - whatever it was - cat's cradles, you know, crossword puzzles - whatever. They're all forms, and I think that the things that keep opening in front of you, that the more you do the better you get at them - that idea is really a nice idea to have in your life; it keeps you centered to something.

You don't have to worry about how you're being judged in some absolute sense, but you can judge your own progress on a day to day basis, and when you're doing something like that you know when you're off and you know when you're on.

Here, Garcia describes daily practice as a grounding ritual - a consistent yardstick for measuring personal progress which offers a fixed perspective for introspection in (at least) this one dimension. This depiction resonates with me deeply as someone who has played guitar for more than half of my life. I can directly relate to Garcia's primary experience of music as a daily, iterative practice.

For me, the motivation to pursue this practice has never come from wanting to mimic the best guitar players in the world - from judging myself, as Garcia puts it, by an absolute sense of skill on a scale that runs from zero to Jimi Hendrix. Not only would chasing Jimi, Jerry, or any of the greats be crushingly impossible, but I also think it runs counter to the true goal of practice. As per Thelonious Monk: "A genius is the one most like himself". In other words, the real musical achievement is to hone in on your true sound, through understanding and refining the previous version of your sound discovered the day before. This is the relative progress that Jerry discusses - growth fueled by your own energy and grounded in the self-awareness of whether, to your own ears, your efforts are "off" or "on".

Now, this talk of "relative" measures of success might feel a little rich coming from No. 13 on Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time", but to me, this advice epitomizes Garcia's identity as a lifelong learner - someone who could spend "twenty-four to thirty-eight hours a day"² practicing guitar, banjo, or pedal steel, or even creating early examples of digital art.

But I also think that this conception of practice as a process of growth goes beyond staying motivated or measuring progress. To me, it's at the heart of what it means to produce art - and in this interview, Garcia seems to agree. He paints growth as an essential tenet in his understanding of what it means to be an artist, explaining (at 1:50 in the video):

Well, it [growth] is important to me.. My feelings about that are is that there is a convention in what you could broadly describe as entertainment, that states once you have your act down, once you have it together - keep on doing it. That's what the people want, they're coming back to see Judy Garland for the umpteenth-billionth time, and, whatever, they're coming back to see you do your little dance.

And I feel that that's a serious limit on anybody who feels that they're an artist, rather than an entertainer. Not to say that being an entertainer is no good, but I would rather think that I'm involved in something that's a more open ended than that, I'd rather not be able to see the end that clearly.

Here, Garcia separates the act of creating art from the act of performing music - even professionally with a high level of expertise. For Garcia, the difference between the two isn't about the technical quality of the performance; he shies away from the Apollonian ideals of order and precision. Instead, what differentiates art from entertainment is the Dionysian: the potential for growth, iteration, and surprise. For Garcia, art can only be created, never recreated - it's always the latest step on the pathway of progressive improvement.

With this framing in mind, I've been thinking about how I can create art in my life even outside of traditionally artistic pursuits like playing music. While Garcia highlights the value of having "one thing" - a single form - on which to focus a routine of practice, I increasingly feel that it's not only possible, but crucial, to seek this continued growth (and therefore, to create art) wherever I invest my time and myself.

For example: I have been working for almost two years on building a small (12x16) cabin near my family home in Arkansas. Most people wouldn't think of this process as art. Carpentry is a skill, sure - a trade, or a craft - but it's not usually elevated to the level of an artistic pursuit. And for commercial carpentry, like the eight hundred houses going up a few miles from me, I would agree. These homes are the Judy Garland of construction: consistent and cost-efficient; limited and built with a clear end in sight.

But in my building process, I've attempted to leave the predictable world of Judy behind, flaunt building codes, and construct my cabin using a process that comes closer to Jerry's definition of art. My progress has undoubtedly been iterative: I started this project knowing nothing (NOTHING!) about building, which means that each physical part of the cabin - the foundation, the walls, the ceiling - represents the countless missteps and successes it took to train my understanding of those techniques. Much like Jerry's approach to music, my goal was not to be technically perfect - as my friend Bob Hiegel put it: "We're not building pianos out here." Instead, my process was to make mistakes, learn from them, and improve (slightly) with each piece of the cabin I built.

For me (and, I think, for Jerry), it's all of these tiny cycles of iteration that help elevate a daily practice into the act of making art. Under this approach, your output reflects the hundreds of different "you"s that worked on it over hundreds of different days. It's like knitting - when I look at a scarf I knit, I know that my hands touched every inch of yarn that went into it. This prolonged contact, a byproduct of dedicated energy, imbues the result with each of those minute reflections of your being. That's why when I look at my cabin - at the roof metal that's slightly off kilter - I feel the echo of the triumph of standing on top of it and looking over the valley below, and the anxiety I felt ordering it from the supplier, and the smell of roofing in the rain. And I can REALLY feel the echo of the ass print I left in the metal when I slipped and fell off the roof...!

The lesson I take away here is that growth is only achievable through iteration, and that it's this process of iteration and change which puts the power of art in art. Unfortunately, none of these habits are easy to build. In working on my cabin, for example, I've constantly had to fight against an urge "to do things Exactly Right", and instead move towards "doing things the best way I know how today".

I've gotten better at striking this balance, but, to Garcia's point, these habits are developed best through continuous practice and reflection. My hope in writing here, then, is to have a place where I can add another practice - not daily, but weekly - where I can create and grow, iterate and learn, and most of all, play and have fun doing it. Jerry's response to the interviewer's main question puts it nicely:

Well I'm somebody who plays music, or tries to, and I think of myself as a person who's a music student. And, uh, what turns me on is being able to play, and being able to continue developing.