The Shapes of Things

If a man leaves any kind of imprint on this world or anything in it, it is through the force of his will, the strength of his particular personality. This is something that very few people actually have, whatever they may believe to the contrary, and it is something that has to be built through conscious mental effort. Think of the character in the Talking Heads song ‘Seen and Not Seen’ deciding on an ideal face and, through mental effort, compelling his own face into that shape, and you’ll have an idea where this is going.

People who study high-schoolers note that there are something like five to seven basic personality types that serve as molds for their raw mental putty - and the key word there is 'types.' Teenagers are young, therefore stupid and having little understanding of life or the world, and, in an attempt to be an individual as they’ve been instructed, build their identity on a handful of models, which they infrequently escape. It is so easy to remain in the shape in which one was cast. Most adults are still these models, QWERTY-type leftovers from an obsolete phase. These are boring people. If you meet a hundred people of the same type, you tend to have trouble realizing you’ve met more than one. If you have a friend stuck in one of these types, you can’t distinguish between his girlfriends. You can go through dozens of years, meeting new and different people, and not realize that you have for this reason. People with multiple personalities tend to have several of these types, each uninteresting in its own way though sheer logistics may have made the sum of them more interesting.

People who have become a type do little more than embrace the mold that contains them. They are the most perfect casts imaginable, ideally malleable up until the moment they have solidified into the rounded blobs they fell into when the options were few and the need to have shape naively strong. Sometimes their ideally-formed shapes are marred by contact with the people I'll discuss below; in this case, these people are generally called something like 'disciples.' They aren’t much more interesting.

If personality is anything, it is made from exceptions to these molds. The types are designed to be used for a time as scaffolding, and then, like scaffolding, discarded so that each person can be held together until such time as he is able to begin building up his own personality from the means available to him. Though these are never radically unfamiliar, each one is distinguishable from the others and from the original model; it's taken on its own shape. Eventually these unusual shapes can't help but do damage to their surroundings, the sharp edges scraping away at contours worn in by the repetition of the same handful of rounded shapes.

So we find among a morass of bands in the same genre, even one that is long-established, one or two that actually do something interesting. The rules of the genre aren’t broken, but rather run up against by the force of these jagged personalities until an interesting shape emerges. This shape is more or less the same as that of the personality. Now new people can take on this shape as a new mold, in which case a new genre, with its own rules, will probably eventually emerge, or ignore it, in which case the sound will always be associated with this group in particular.

Repeat this example for any art or important action you choose; the results will be the same. This is more or less what is meant when people say of somebody who is a genius in a particular field ‘If he had applied himself to any other field, he’d have achieved the same level of success.’ That particular statement is not true (different types of genius, even if they are equally great, are not interchangeable), but it is true that it was the force of the genius’s personality that made its mark on his work, and that a similar force would make a similar mark on another surface.

Stravinsky claimed to feel he was at his most creative when he was most constrained by rules; this is the meaning of that statement. An artist, here understood broadly as a creative agent, embosses whatever part of the world he takes on with his own shape. Much of his work is to decide the limits within he can have an impact, an incredibly difficult and important decision to make. If we define ourselves in bashing against and doing damage to the dissatisfying shape of the world we've been born into, there can be little more important than choosing the surfaces to bash against judiciously for maximum impact.