Some days, it all just works. Some days it feels right. You have flow, inspiration, motivation, enthusiasm, energy and it all comes easily and without effort.
Your ideas, thoughts, excitement, heart, mind and body all spill out through your fingers, hands and feet. They move out through the things you create and easily become lines, sounds and shapes on a page or a canvas or in the water.
It all makes sense.
And then, some days, it’s not like that at all. You stall, and the lines and shapes are stilted and awkward. Ideas come to nothing, there is no motivation and everything feels heavy and cumbersome and badly drawn. Trying harder and pushing more makes little difference and the only thing you can do is…
stop.
Stop fighting and give yourself time to cool or warm, or time or change direction or whatever it is that moves you out of the creative doldrums.
You can stop looking for inspiration and instead allow yourself to just enjoy and feel, and have it sit with you in that moment only – stop trying to find any meaning in it, stop trying to translate it, stop trying to make it say anything.
But it’s good to find meaning and to translate ideas and experiences. And after all, the longer you stop, the more momentum you lose. The creativity begins to curdle inside as it mixes too completely with sadness and boredom so you need to search out points of connection again. Points where things matter and mean something – even if only to you – so you can start yourself up again.
yes, sometimes we cannot just stop: we need to write badly, if only to have a basis from which to understand those infrequent moments in which we have inscribed with brilliance....
From The Dry Salvages by T.S. Eliot (published in 1941) The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices. ---------------- I just read this at the beginning of the Afterword by Jeffrey S. Levinton in the 1989 edition of Rachel Carson's, The Sea Around Us. It is a section of a much longer poem, that itself is part of a set, Four Quartets , that were largely written during World War II. The Dry Salvages was written during the air-raids in Britain, and it is very sad. I'm not vouching for the whole thing, but ...
Today, this image came up on my facebook news feed, and it made me smile. Of course, images on facebook news feeds rarely come with any real contextual information, so I trawled around the net a bit and found some more information... This is an album cover for the ' Warumpi Band ', from the settlement of Papunya in Australia's Northern Territory**. It seems that this image was the cover for an EP of their song 'Jailanguru Pakarnu (Out of Jail)', which was the first ever rock song recorded in an indigenous language. It's a pretty jumping song. It's worth noting that on the Warumpi Band's wikipedia entry , the list of their musical genres includes 'anachro-rock'. *On a personal level, this is absolutely not true. I love Noosa Heads. And surfing! **Update: I had read that the man wearing the t-shirt is singer of the Warumpi Bane, George Burarrawanga. As Dave commented below however, it isn't George. Thanks for your comment, Dave!
Um, WHY have I never heard of this song before? Did it do the blog rounds last year when it was released and I wasn't paying attention? Having missed this song, I feel... inadequate. Not that the song is great, but conceptually... AMAZING! And the photo Jimmy Buffet is talking about is real and here it is! And here is a bonus Einstein sporting shorts and a devil may care attitude! Now, LYRICS!! With the obviously winning lines being 'Cause the universe was his home break/And we’re still all paddlin’ out'. **** There’s a photo of a genius Standing by the ocean In a pea coat and cool hat In 1943 On a beach in Santa Barbara He’s looking quite contented His world is only matter And energy Past the Channel Islands Out into the cosmos There are worlds in motion That only he can see He’s smiling as he’s thinking The harbor lights are blinking He’s the smartest cookie Ever was, ever will be Einstein was a surfer ...
yes, sometimes we cannot just stop: we need to write badly, if only to have a basis from which to understand those infrequent moments in which we have inscribed with brilliance....
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
ReplyDeleteSometimes it's just got to be perseverance, not inspiration.
Sigh.
What are you reading right now 'bec?
ReplyDeleteNothing Pete. Nothing. And maybe that's part of the problem...
ReplyDeleteA writer I always admired said that you can't do one without doing the other
ReplyDeletesounds easy...
ReplyDelete