I chatted with my friend Al yesterday about y'know "what does it all mean?" And by that, I mean my work and the projects I've done. It's a recurring worry for me that I might not be able to define or represent what some things really meant, why they were done, what good came of them.
Al told me this story, which Herbie Hancock opens his autobiography with:
Herbie goes on to explain that what happened was that as he played the "bad" chord, he judged it, he decided it was awful, but Miles didn't judge it, he just took it and ran with it. In theatre improvisation people say "everything is an offer" meaning don't throw back stuff that you don't immediately get - Miles took the bad chord as an offer and built on it. And Herbie learned a valuable lesson.
OK.
But when it's my work, my stuff that goes out there and feels like a weighty clanger collection of bum notes, it's not so easy to remember that it only has meaning in connection with other people and through them taking the offer and running with it themselves in ways that I possibly will never see myself, or which might take a very very long time to come back. My job isn't to track (and judge) what happens to it, my job is to keep making offers.
