It's an allusive world. Or maybe only if you have an allusive mind. And mine cross-references like a one-armed bandit, pulling cherries or bars at random depending on who or what pulled the lever.
And if that doesn't turn a straight road, linear worldview into a greased go-cart slick track, my attention span is a shuttlecock smacked around by writers, friends, music, media. If someone whose take I jibe with points me at something cool, I'm off and after it.
This is a good thing, as long as I give myself a chance to catch up. Example: between The Rumpus, Twitter and TWM, over the course of a week my reading list has expanded to include Saul Williams's Dead Emcee Scrolls, Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries, and John Fowles's The Tree, let alone just learning about and wanting to read everything Benjamin Percy has written. It's f-ing hard to keep pace...
Twitter is a dangerous thing for me in its ability to reflect like a prism at the hands of writers and poets and thinkers and cool people. Sometimes I'm too plugged in--restless leg syndrome for the brain.
Sometimes I've got to meditate or run--detatch from it all to cultivate silence and stillness.
My grandfather used to sleep in his truck. Nothing unusual. He drove a truck pre-Bay Bridge when you took a ferry across the Chesapeake Bay. If you didn't time it right, you sat. And waited. And slept if you were tired.
That's a lesson learned, there. A message he left me, without knowing--just by living and working. He wouldn't have meant it as an example.
But that's where the allusive mind kicks in, as I sit in my truck, with the radio off, listening to cars cruise by, waiting.
4 comments:
My creativity lives in a small village somewhere on the fall side of the world, and it is only when I sleep that I am able to have any communication with it. A hatch on the top of my head yawns open in the night with the quiet whine of hydraulics, and a long, golden tendril of monofilament line yawns forth, uncoiling itself from a tiny spool; winding this way and that, it crosses the ocean, drifts over fields, mystifies cows, and is largely invisible to all but buskers and fools living in the streets below.
It forms a tiny golden fist and knocks on the door of my creativity. It becomes an outstretched palm, as though begging for alms. Sometimes my creativity has something to offer, and sometimes the tendril comes home empty-handed. My first impulse, upon waking, is to check my mailbox and see what treasures await. Nothing makes my day like a good breakfast, a solid cup of coffee, the right song playing in my headphones and a tiny parcel in the inbox of my dreams.
Unfortunately, society has seen fit to schedule me to show up at a job during my peak creativity period. This must be kept a secret from my employers, lest an unwelcome conversation should begin with the following words:
“Well, why not use that creativity to generate this quarterly report?”
Old trucks are where it's at,
TWM
That is one of the most "awesome" (proper use of word awesome) descriptions of creativity I have ever read. Brilliant sir.
Also, creativity and quarterly report are mutually exclusive. Necessarily
Yeah, I got nothin to follow dude up there.
Anyway, I liked this, and I think my creativity/solace exists solely in the shower. Man, the shit I come up with in there. I need a dictaphone on the wall...
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