All you need is weirdness


Thomas Wolfe wrote how humanity is often "touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world".  One manifestation of that dark miracle is 'crazy wisdom'. This is found in Buddhism and Taoism, and crazy wisdom inspired the insights and teachings of the most radical masters of the these wisdom traditions. In his underground classic The Essential Crazy Wisdom irreverent radio personality and Buddhism-inflected stand-up comedian Wes 'Scoop' Nisker explained that crazy wisdom reveals that we live in a world of many illusions, that the emperor has no clothes, and that much of human belief and behaviour is ritualized nonsense.

Tantric rituals are one of many ways of harnessing this essential new magic, and Philip Glass' endorsement of tantra in his Foreword to Lama Yeshe's seminal Introduction to Tantra provides a bridge from the weirdness of crazy wisdom to the world of creativity. Scientific support for the importance of weirdness in creativity comes from social psychologist and scholar Donald T. Campbell. He explained that for evolution to work, variability is essential. Experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Yon developed this thinking in his recent book A Trick of the Mind  to propose that random mutation of ideas - crazy wisdom and weirdness  - is an essential requirement for the continuing evolution of creativity. 

Composer, pianist, and performer Missy Mazzoli is a case study in support of the proposition that all you need is weirdness. I came into contact with Missy years ago through our shared passion for the weird cultural explorer, Sufi adept and libertine Isabelle Eberhardt, who has been described as a Swiss-born female Lawrence of Arabia in man-drag. Missy exploited this weirdness to great effect in her multi-media opera Song from the Uproar: the Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt.  Alex Ross has praised Missy for her 'apocalyptic imagination', which has produced memorable, original and still slightly weird albums such as Cathedral City from chamber-rock female quintet Victoire, and Vespers for a New Dark Age with an alternative liturgy by poet Matthew Zapruder and electronic interludes. 

These left-field projects mutated into Missy's Dark with Excessive Bright album, with the title work a concerto scored for orchestra and solo violin. Dark with Excessive Bright is one of the outstanding new contemporary albums of recent years which wears its weirdness lightly enough to be released on the eclectic BIS label. It was listed by Alex Ross in the The New Yorker as one of the notable classical recordings of 2023. Missy's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) even received a heads-up from Norman Lebrecht. But this was probably just to unleash the usual reactionary comments from his readers which included - "If you think this whiny woman shit is a symphony, More phony contemporary crap, So tired of this PR game around people whose only talent is their gender, Unworthy of a woman, Totally forgettable, Pointless to even listen to it". 

Without the serendipity of weird mutations and crazy wisdom, culture becomes bland, predictable and incestuous. Which is exactly what is happening as our lives become controlled by 'more of the same' algorithms, social media validation, and bigoted Slipped Disc comments. Instead let's praise culture's outliers and let's celebrate their weirdness and crazy wisdom. Because, as William Blake, told us in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,  'If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise'. 


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