Greater>Than Clothing

(Part 1)

I’m not very good with blank pages. I find myself overwhelmed by their potential. Anything could be written there (not to mention drawn, etc.) and I know that whatever I scribble on the page isn’t as good as what otherwise could have been put there. When I get a new notebook I leave the first page blank out of respect.

In order to break myself out of that inertia I find that I often need to employ the use of what I’ve heard referred to as “liberating constraints”, those writing workshop games like “just keep your pen moving for 20 minutes” and “write about what you had for breakfast this morning”. It works. Try it. The most important thing is to move from inaction to action; from potential to kinetic. Even if you don’t think you have anything to say, you do, and you find this out as soon as you trick yourself into starting.

I used to think these techniques were somehow impure. I wanted to be able to call great, fully-formed ideas out of the ether. I’m still a big fan of those tremendous moments of inspiration, but I have come to understand that you can’t will them to happen. In fact, it’s best if you are already engaged in the creative process when they come. As Pulitzer winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States Ted Kooser put it, “…you need to be there writing and waiting, as a hunter might say, for that hour when at last the ducks come flying in.*” I’m learning that the art of writing, indeed of all creative activity, is to become adept at putting yourself in the mind-set that allows you to take advantage of those flashes of brilliance when you are lucky enough to earn them.

The problem with trying to create from thin air is that in doing so you are, in a very real sense, working against your own brain. The human brain is, at its core, an associative mechanism. This is true both cognitively and physiologically; the connections between ideas and those between neurons (brain cells) are more than simply analogous.

As soon as the change was made from Superior to Greater Than, I understood that this concept could function as a liberating constraint as well. If all the clothes we make feature the greater than symbol (>) somehow, it can serve as the basis for all kinds of associations, moving creativity from potential to kinetic. To put it another way, it’s hard to create from the starting point of a blank t-shirt; it’s much easier to start with a symbol and work outward. Since this is the only rule, the concept is still flexible enough to include a multitude of different interpretations. In keeping with the idea of including the symbol wherever possible, Greater Than became Greater>Than.

Greater>Than needs ideas! If this liberating constraint resonates with you, please leave t-shirt ideas as comments or e-mail me: joey [at] greaterthanclothing.com

Update: Read (Part 3)

*The Ted Kooser quote was taken from his recent book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual. I also recommend this NPR interview with the artist from October 2005. The second link also includes some examples of his work, which I recommend checking out. I’d like to thank my father, the Poet Laureate of my family, for the assist.