We’ve been out for three days and I’m starting to hear from friends about the show, and they’ve been highly complimentary, which has been lovely. One of them, in passing, referred to Mat as a magician. This had me reminiscing about the first time I saw his act. (In fact, it was the only time, what with Mat being unable to travel for work these last 15 months, and the rest of us being unable to travel for pleasure. Which also means, as Mat notes in one of the later episodes, that although we’ve been collaborating on this project since January we’ve never yet met face to face. So that’s weird.)

I tell this story in Episode 1: I was inspired by Mat’s act to want to tell people about it, but I had the hardest time describing what he does. He’s not a magician, although he isn’t above the occasional trick with a prop. I wouldn’t call him a juggler, although he’s an expert juggler. He started out as a busker, but he isn’t one anymore. “Vaudevillian” doesn’t do justice to the ultramodernity of his presentation, and “New vaudevillian” sounds like you wanted to say “vaudevillian” and lost your nerve. “Variety performer” seems to be a term he’s comfortable with, but here in the States, at least, it isn’t widely known, nor is variety much thought of as a viable style of performance.

I struggled with this. “I’m working on a podcast with this… guy,” I’d tell people. “He’s a —” and here my voice would trail away as I realized that none of the terms my brain was queueing up were right, exactly. I sounded ridiculous. I struggled right up to the runup to release. And then, suddenly, I didn’t, because I realized something I should have known all along: Indescribability is an absolute plus. It’s a virtue.

We’re here to talk about creativity, so let me posit a theory: Creative work isn’t always indescribable, but it always ought to aim its aspirations in that direction. So much art is exactly what it appears to be if you happen to glance it at while whizzing by at 100 mph, which in an overcrowded cultural landscape is all most of us can do. It’s an inch deep, trivial to apprehend and easy to put a label to, and it leaves nothing behind but the empty calories of a sugar rush. If he could, what creator wouldn’t want to do something that confounded his audience’s ability to boil it down and toss it away? Who wouldn’t want to break people’s brains a little bit?

Mat titled one of his cabaret shows “The Extraordinary Gentleman.” That alluring ambiguity says it all. It’s description enough.

/BB

Image: Khaydock, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons