Tag Archives: Creativity

The Game

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Visiting Hours

Worked all day and evening.
Haven’t seen her since yesterday.
Trundled into the house, she hugging my heels.
No time for whiskey; She has an appetite.
Order up!
Purrs and paws my pants while I take too long
to scoop her kibbles from the plastic bin.
Now what the hell, you furry fickle?
Two bites and you’re scratching at the door?
You’re spayed! That tom won’t take you.
But I see that the moon will. 

Aug. 13, 2013

When I wrote the above first version of this poem I imitated my daughter’s writing process.  I had an experience, recognized its potential, and immediately wrote it down.  It should be simple.
This process works well for my daughter partly because I’ve taught her to always swing for the fence.  Partly also because I’m careful to stay out of her way, and because there has been less crap in her life to pollute her perceptions.  She mostly throws down the right words on her first try.  If she makes small mistakes, they shouldn’t matter–proper punctuation is for adults.
I am an adult.  Tenderized by middle age, I don’t often swing for the fence.  Hell, my life experiences have made the fence all but invisible.  Instead of exploring my thoughts, I tend to write what I believe I ought to be thinking, or what I hope will seem to others to be good thinking.  So I must approach writing, especially poetry, incrementally.  Instead of baseball, I play golf.
Every poem has a par.  I tee off with a driver (usually hooked behind a handsome tree) and proceed toward a distant hole in fits and fights against my own mysterious nature.  A hole-in-one is theoretically possible but highly improbable.  For me, writing is a game of one damned thing after another–of seeing the light but listening for the tick of the bullshit meter.  Writing is rewriting.  Driver, six iron, wedge, putter—perception, delusion, epiphany, closure (that’s a good hole).  What keeps me playing the game is knowing the woods are full of as many flowers as lost balls.
Here is what may be the finished version of the above poem.  My daughter warned me against fiddling too much with the original.  For me, though, such weightless subjects as cats are opportunities to disregard the bullshit meter.  It’s not Eliot, and that’s fine.


Visiting Hour

Worked all day and evening.
Haven’t seen her since last night.
Trundle into the house, she hugging my heels.
No time for whiskey; Rosie has an appetite.
Purrs and paws my pants while I take too long
to fumble through the cupboard, shuffling beans
and soup and sauce to finally find the fish flakes,
and bend to scoop her kibbles from the bin.
Order up!
Now what the hell, you furry fickle?
Two bites and you’re scratching at the door?
You’re spayed! That tom won’t take you.
But I see that the moon will. 

Aug. 17, 2013

Deviant Art

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I sometimes wonder if creative thought isn’t just the anarchism of our synapses; and, by nurture or nature, works of art are the ad hoc quelling of neural insurrections. In that sense, art could be seen as the product of personal fascist juntas which we allow to beat  insurgent imaginations into the warp and weft of canvas, or regiment emotions into marks at risk of universal misunderstanding, or decode dissonance tight to a staff, or toss bodies gently in the wake of a whale’s dancing tail. They then leave us adrift: supine in a short, bright, cold silence, which we adore but know will kill us if we linger. Perhaps, to sleep, we shoot these little dictators, and raise new insurrections in our dreams.

Oct. 25, 2012

Bodhisattvas and the Art of Seeming Sane

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Holy Order

Anthropologist: a man
smelling another man’s hands.
Poet: a man
smelling his own hands.
Philosopher: a man
smelling with his hands.
God: among us
smelling our hands?

It occurs to me that artistic endeavors may relate to autistic endeavors—perhaps very closely.  Our leaps beyond linear logic—to what we usually call creative thinking—are anomalous and counter-evolutionary coping behaviors when they don’t relate directly to survival and procreation.  We generally consider our ability to leap great mental distances to be evolutionary; but where and why we leap is often less so.  By definition, creativity is an unbalancing activity.  It gains validation through its defiance of social organization.  At the same time, subtleties of social organization are dissected and illuminated through this defiance.
The defiant mindsets of creative people count as psychological outliers representing the extreme estrangement of intellect from instinct, and thus are difficult for us to qualify.  Creatives aren’t really part of our societies, but they do know our societies.  They are rocks jutting from fast rivers: they may exist outside of mainstream society, but society’s feet must leap from one rock to another to cross the river safely.  A cynic would snark that our species began to devolve the day we first imagined living on the other side of the river.  Nonetheless, it’s there.  So are the rocks—our rocks.  Also, there is the history of genetics that designed our eyes—eyes which watch those rocks.
The really good rocks are marked and adored according to public consensus.  When we can’t account for our responses to the beautiful chaos of cracks and textures in these rocks, we call them genius and declare them God-given.  When our astonishment at a rock’s qualities rises above a certain level, we worship it as a prophet or god.  If we have a negative response, and others don’t convince us that a rock has value, we say it is damned.  Thus, the distinction between a genius and a savant is thin and flexible.
When we can’t reach a consensus on which rocks form a good path, as well as what each rock means to us, we hire experts, such as culture critics, philosophers, and scientists.  The most relevant science for this task is anthropology.  But anthropologists, like culture critics (especially art critics), have a weakness: they might accurately describe the wet footprints on the rocks, but not the rocks themselves.  So, in as much as rocks seldom talk to feet, creatives seldom make sense to normal, linear minds.  It may even be true that creatives seldom make sense to each other, though they would instinctively disagree.  They would also disagree that creativity is an apologia for evolution—a rock is a rock and is divorced from any prima facie claims.
There are a few great minds that seem to have succeeded in penetrating these rocks beyond their footprints.  We celebrate them as bodhisattvas returning from deep journeys into the unknown.  They offer substance beyond what otherwise seems a thin, impenetrable shell.  Their selfless sojourns bring hope of purpose to our linear lives.  But a revisionist glimpse at these great minds might reveal we misunderstand where their journeys actually began.  Consider en Hedu’Anna*, Themistoclea, Socrates, Plato, Archimedes, Homer, Sappho, Hypatia, Laozi, Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama, Jesus, Mohamed, Galileo, Michelangelo, Li-Po, Cervantes, Kant, Einstein, Simone de Beauvoir, and Stephen Hawking: all great diggers of truth—all rock hounds.  Never the less, considering the tilted biographies of these great minds, we have to wonder in the end if they all are rocks, and not hounds.
When we send a thief to catch a thief, we understand the risk of our investment and can calculate its return (if he returns).  But if we’ve been mistakenly sending creatives to catch creatives, they’ll force us to call good whatever puzzling paellas of realities they bring back.  Also, if our own spies are double agents, should we guess that creatives send spies to figure out who we really are?  Well, of course they do—of course we do.

*Of the uncommon names in this list, I will tell you nothing except that they belong here.  Look them up.

My thanks to Jo Ann Teter for activating this sleeper cell by asking a question I couldn’t answer on Facebook.

June 14, 2012