The Agony and Ecstasy of Creation, or, Why I Wish I Was Batman 1 comments

By Lucas Kwong

A few weeks ago I likened God to a kind of cosmic director, and myself to a player on His stage. If that metaphor truly holds water, then it’s high time for an intermission. After taking a brief respite after my church’s Easter play—detailed in my previous post—I plunged into a project perhaps even more daunting than my applications to graduate schools last fall: recording a five song EP of my songs (demos of which can be found here), at a studio that mainly produces Korean pop.

This last stroke of divine directorial genius is particularly hilarious, considering that the songs I’ve written are not exactly material for the Korean top 40 charts (though, don’t get me wrong—like Stephen Colbert, I wouldn’t mind being a Korean pop star).

The upshot of this whole project has been to make me wish I was Batman. Even though I’m enjoying the services of a professional sound studio for an astoundingly reasonable price, every minute spent in the studio makes me wonder how much more relaxed the recording process would be if it weren’t shackled to the demands of the dollar. In my precious few moments of spare time, I find myself fantasizing about someday owning a cavernous subterranean studio, a la Bruce Wayne’s Batcave, where I might tinker with guitar parts and vocal harmonies to my heart’s content. Sometimes I’ll throw in a butler for good measure.

Comic book daydreams, however, don’t do much good in the studio, particularly when you’re frustrated with your own inability to communicate your musical ideas to the Korean speaking sound engineer. And so it is that, whereas I was fixated in my last entry on the possibilities of figurative language—on a metaphor’s ability to unveil interconnectedness—this week I’ve become keenly aware of its failings, its inability to cross the distance between two distinct subjects.

Creative types such as myself like to fixate on God-as-artist, and indeed, it’s true that, before God the Father, Son or Spirit, there is God the ultimate virtuoso, fashioning an entire universe by means of spoken-word poetry. Yet God doesn’t seem to express much agony over whether to give Adam ten fingers or eleven, or whether to fashion Eve from his ribcage or from his collarbone.

Indeed, save for the second verse of Genesis 1, which seems to catch the Spirit of God in a moment of Byronic brooding, God doesn’t seem to evince any of the creative birth pains with which all artists are so familiar.

In short, God is no artist in the sense that humans think of artists; rather, the consummate artistry He displays only serves to emphasize the vast inhuman aspect of God that we can never access in this lifetime—the “God beyond God,” in the words of one theologian. Such a prospect is initially terrifying, particularly for the artist: who is this God who can instinctually and effortlessly produce an entire universe, and who am I, fiddling about on my guitar and fancying myself a creator?

And yet, it seems to me that, for the artist of faith setting out to create something worthwhile, there is no other starting point than this sense of God the Artist’s total Otherness. Wallace Stevens, feisty agnostic that he was, may have argued for the salvific power of poetry, but the fact that Wallace Stevens has gone the way of all God’s creation only underscores the limits of the poet’s similarities to divinity.

Indeed, only after realizing that I can’t create as God creates did I find the humility to scale back the scope of my ambitions. With that humility comes the sense of play that is vital to enjoying the act of creation in the first place. Taking pleasure in the recording process becomes easier when your first concern isn’t whether your music will stand the test of time, or how your songwriting ability stacks up against Thom Yorke, but simply how you can, in your modest way, echo the limitless power and joy contained in that first command: “Let there be light.”

I’m heading into the studio tomorrow to lay down guitar parts; it’s no coincidence that, before that, I’ll be at church for morning prayer.

I still wish I had a Batcave, though.