Step 1) Take each art form that enchants you. Expose yourself to as much of it as local bylaws permit. Write down a list of the works you admire. Detail your response to them: use those words that best describe your feelings, the qualities that make you feel the way you feel, what you like, what you dislike. For example, isolate those passages in literature that give you the greatest pleasure, that teach you the most profound lessons. This is the benchmark against which to judge everything else. You have formulated your own canon. It contains only the very best and everything must now bow to and be measured by it.

Step 2) Painting appeals to sight, music to hearing, sculpture to sight and touch, fiction to all senses through the imagination. Each has its own aesthetic vocabulary. Learn the lingo. It’ll help you to understand and evaluate your feelings. Equally important, each art form is rooted in a discipline of craft. Learning these disciplines and knowing what techniques are used teaches purpose, structure, observation, selective criteria and judgment of execution. It also provides objective evaluative tools which can be used to assess quality of process and the ultimate value of finished work.

Step 3) Read the critics, past and present; those generally revered, those whose opinions you respect; those whose you vehemently reject. Identify what they look for. Compare your criteria to theirs’. Perhaps they use a measure that you don’t. Add it to your tool bag if it fits. There’s nothing so fine as meeting a critic who expresses exactly what you feel, who shares the same enthusiasms that live in your heart.

Step 4) To stay cool, purposefully seek out the new and address what you hate. Look for those who think what you like sucks and learn their systems of taste. Try to understand them. By so doing you’re guaranteed not to stagnate. Your taste will evolve while staying honest and coherent.

In David Hume’s writing, as portrayed above, you see him wrestling with the soup of creativity.

Yoda combined all of that into very simple instructions, that managed to slide over the soup of philosophy. Holding nuanced ideas, for instance, is like seeing the future, which is always clouded, and full of conflicting emotions. Seeing the past, requires a kind of fatalistic acceptance of how things are. Yoda must accept his place in a backwoods, filthy swamp, hiding from the mighty Empire that would destroy him.

Yoda would say, about art, “Try not. Do or do not.” I have found that advice far more useful as a creative fellow than any debate about subjective or objective.

See the future, in all its emotional tangles, and disasters. Work to shape that future towards a relativistic goodness that promotes life, but – in the end – accept what has already occurred as immutable.

I think Yoda’s approach to creativity via the Force is more useful to me than Hume.

I know it may be less nuanced, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Large flagpoles are easier to see on the horizon.

In short, for some reason, all I can think of while reading this blog post is that Yoda really ought to have his own Penguin Classic.

Episodes 5 and 6, of course. The CGI Yoda shouldn’t get any book deal whatsoever.

Nor can I see suicide outside of the context of terminal illness as anything other than selfish to those left behind. …There is something about the act of suicide that is both cowardly and brave.

Generally speaking, for those suicides that are true suicides and not cries for help, by the time they’ve reached the point that suicide is the only option available, they’re beyond caring about those that will be affected by the aftermath. I believe that to be a clear indication of just how far beyond help such people can go, have gone, and it raises the question of how the people it would be selfish to leave let them progress so far. Ultimately, you can’t live soley for other people.

It is probably worthy of note that Hume was a lifelong depressive, especially in his earlier years when he decided to spend a full decade *only* reading and writing and eventually suffered a nervous breakdown. He later – with the advent of the Poker Club – discovered a far lighter side of life among fellow minds such as Sir Walter Scott and Adam Smith.

All interesting stuff.