“The proof is in the pudding” is not only a really annoying thing to say. It robs the maxim of not just one layer of meaning but two.
The proof isn’t in the pudding, it’s in the eating. And proof doesn’t mean evidence, or imply that we have reached an unarguable conclusion. PUDDING = GOOD. TICK. That’s not the process. Making a pudding, it existing, as a pudding, and that being enough. No further questions.
That’s not it at all.
“Proof” in this instance means “test”, in the word’s original sense, like a printing proof, or leaving bread to prove. The phrase means you test something was well made by finishing and using it for its intended purpose. Saying “The proof is in the pudding” fucks that completely. It’s meaningless.
Oddly, I glanced at a thread of people moaning about the mangling of this phrase and thought ‘yeah, that annoys me too’, between bursts of reading Paul Simpson’s brilliant new memoir of the Liverpool post-punk scene. The Wild Swans’ frontman and Teardrop Explodes founder has written an account of his life that is stuffed with impossibly wonderful musical projects which were mainly abandoned before completion, usually for failing to come up to his expectations, but rarely allowed to bloom. Art rarely proved or tested.
Any piece of art is made three times: planning, creation, edit (or whatever the equivalent is in your chosen medium). And then it is created a fourth time: on release. An audience tells you what you made.
That last stage is scary, but the release of a piece of work, that deliberate relinquishing of control, is part of the process. Brian Eno once described art as a phone call, and noted that a phone call needs someone to pick up the receiver and say “hello”. Then it becomes a conversation. All art is a human communication tool, an analogue to language. Muttering to yourself is still talking, but it’s not why we evolved something as complicated as words. We did that to share ourselves, our inner worlds, more widely.
So of course you *can* bellow down a well, but it’ll get lonely with just you and the echo. Someone needs to be at the other end. That’s the eating of the pudding that proves it. Your art ‘worked’ because your call reached someone and their response tells you what they heard. And then they may even respond, which is the next phase. “Help me out of this well,” they’ll probably say. And that gives your yelling “Hello” down a well a purpose.
Paul Simpson’s book on his lifelong struggle to reach this stage, and how he was often ambushed by the reaction when it does, is wonderful and occasionally heartbreaking. He struggles – so relatably – to allow his art to reach its fourth state. Walking out of projects, self-sabotaging, refusing to finish things. He teeters on the precipice of release again and again. It’s scary there.
He also judges his contemporaries often harshly for doing it ‘wrong’. Every criticism levelled at a friend for their work falling short is an argument supporting his own high standards. Release your work and your friends, and strangers, can tell you what they think. Maybe they’ll hate it like Paul hates Julian Cope’s big hit records and the gated snares on those chartbusting Echo and the Bunnymen LPs. Finish your art and put it on display, and it is no longer yours. And that’s frightening, sure, but it’s also finishing.
My wife is reading and checking her own new book as I type this. She keeps being delighted because doesn’t recognise or remember bits of it. She was deeply uneasy with it before – everyone gets to this point when they’ve been staring at a project for too long and it keeps not quite being perfect, forcing yet another draft, another day’s work. But some early readers and industry people have come back and said they really like it. “Hello!” The phone got answered. So now it is a different book. She left it for a few weeks, as it went round people’s Kindles, and now it is “proving”. Returning to the same book, she is a reader now, not the writer, and the book can actually be itself, in that magic fourth state. Turns out it’s a good pudding.
The writer and music critic Graham Duff (Ideal, Count Arthur Strong) kindly made my band’s new LP his album of the year this week and wrote (as he often does) beautifully, thoughtfully about his reaction to the songs, things I don’t recognise, didn’t put in, at least not consciously, but now am happy to discover are there, for him. I’d stuffed the songs full of resonances and references that were there for me. And I’d felt that nagging temptation to supply liner notes, or a blog, flagging up what they were all about. And of course I’ve had a little thrill from critics who’ve spotted those bits I’d put in. (That’s the phone being picked up.) But Graham had found loads of other stuff. Like someone phoning you back: ‘Oh! And another thing!’ And how delightful is that?
It’s the fourth state. Proving.
It’s also why a culture of rigid gatekeeping is so mentally tortuous. Trying to get published, signed, commissioned is agony. If you make art and it never reaches an audience, it isn’t finished. And that eats away at you. It’s why open-gate distribution (Bandcamp, podcasting, YouTube, blogging, doing live stand-up or gigs at venues that just let you turn up and have a go) is so vital for a lot of creators. Your work needs to prove.
Sometimes I wonder why it seems so important to pour effort into work that can’t or won’t ever really pay a wage. I like my work to work for a living. But if it gets *finished* then that’s essential to your artistic sanity. The madness of professional creatives is that often most of our best work is strangled before the proving stage. Because it gets rejected, or is paid for and then languishes unused, or is cut, or is actually released and fails to reach an audience.
Anyway, what I’m saying is it’s not just pedantry to insist that you get the pudding quote right. Because it contains within it a vital lesson in how we make stuff and relate to the things we make.
The proving stage is part of making and doing. And it’s the most important bit.
Make. Test. Share.