MAKE A THING

Over the years I have tried many cures for my depression.

Medical ones, questionable ones, spiritual ones, therapeutic ones.  Sometimes these have worked and sometimes not. 

But there is one approach that always works, if only I can remember to do it.  Most artists and designers know this and, for some of us, it is one of the driving forces behind our creative impulse. 

The solution to despair is to make a thing.

Any thing.

To make a thing is to step out of the trap of your own self-awareness and focus your energy on the steps, materials, and rules of the wider world.  Depression cannot flourish without obsessive attention and making a thing diverts this from yourself to the thing itself.

Example: a few years ago, during a particularly bad bout of gloom, I got a crazy idea.  I had been listening to some of my favorite albums to cheer myself up.  This tends to work for the time I am listening but vanishes like dust in the wind when the music ends.  This time, it was the music of Cal Tjader, a famous jazz vibraphonist who joined Latin rhythms with Bossa Nova beats to produce wonderfully rich and resonant sounds. 

A vibraphone, if you do not know it, is a large keyboard made of metal bars that you hit with mallets.  I had never played it myself, not even the little plinky toy some kids have.  But the idea of immersing myself in the music I loved to hear by actually playing it, suddenly seemed like a kind of escape hatch and I decided to learn how to play the vibraphone.

But vibraphones are expensive.  A big investment for such a flimsy whim.  That is when the idea hit me to make my own instrument.  That, at least, was something I knew I could do.  As an artist and designer, I had been making things my whole life.  So I did some research, got some pictures, made some sketches.  In other words, I did my design thing.

I built the frame of the vibraphone out of poplar that smells sweet when cut.  I made the holders of cotter pins and tiny brass rings.  I bought the bars online from a guy in Westchester who had no idea what to do with them.  When I told him my plan, I could not tell whether he laughed at me for the idea or at himself for not thinking of it.  I made the mallets from dowels and yarn.

It took a few months to do it but in the end, I had a playable instrument and was no longer brooding over my own life.  I began to practice scales and intervals and chord structures and eventually even to play along with Cal Tjader…in a tiny way, of course.  It was the kind of sleight of hand – switching joy for gloom while no one is looking – that makes design so powerful.

Music is sensational in the sense that it overwhelms your senses.  So does making a thing.  And if you see it through, you have a new thing that never existed before.  No matter how it looks, it is a beautiful thing because you made it and that changes you.

This did not, of course, silence my depression.  But it drowned it out for a good long time.