Years of Suddenness

My hunger for experience (and finding connections with other people) leads me into some strange places. And no, I am not talking about crashing my van into a Dutch police car high on dope with Neil Gaiman’s daughter passed out in the passenger seat. You have me confused with Amanda Palmer -- yet again. I’m talking about finding myself on the ice with a leading astrophysicist, thinking.

“Yeah, I know just what you’re feeling, man.” What, you might well ask, does a loser writing about creativity (stuck in the middle of Minnesota) have in common with a world renowned scientist? And am I SURE I’m not on crack? Answer: we both create for living (and struggle to understand that process in the same way that a jet pilot really should know how his airplane works) and, no... I’m not high -- right now. But if I get into the creative zone (and I feel it coming on) I might be soaring.

I have been watching a DVD called “Me and Isaac Newton” just because I have a insatiable hunger for knowledge of all kinds. At times it was boring as hell, but at other times (when the scientists discussed how they came up with their ideas) it was a revelation. I have been talking to songwriters to understand the process. It never even occurred to me to ask a scientist about creativity. Oh! I’m an idiot! Scientist create, take much better notes and rarely run afoul of the Dutch authorities. I should have done this ages ago.

Writers Block

“When things go wrong, I get on the ice and all the problems just melt away. ‘cause once I'm on the ice rink it is just me and Isaac Newton. I realize that Isaac Newton’s law’s have been well understood for 300 years. I don’t have to bat my brains against the quantum theory, against black holes, against the big bang. It’s just me and Isaac Newton skating on the ice, free of all the constraints I had before.” -- Michio Kaku (Theoretical Physicist)

“I think, we get stuck all the time. All of us that are doing exploration. Because you pursue a path and then suddenly it looks like a dead-end... Sitting down and saying, ‘Okay, let me think about it really hard while it is silent around me,’ doesn’t really work for me. It is better to do twenty different things per day. Often you end up doing one of the little things -- and that kind of gets your brain thinking laterally. Next time you look at your problem you might have a new insight.” -- Maja Mataric (Computer Scientist)

“I think the failures, in some ways, are kind of fertilizer for accomplishments. I think you sit there, you’ve just had a paper rejected. You know, something just didn’t work out... your whole world has been shattered. I think out of that you actually build something better.” -- Patricia Wright (Primatologist)

Years of Suddenness

“I’m often asked if there were these wonderful eureka moments when you know you had finally accomplished what you sought. But I don’t think so. I think there are a lot of little eureka moments when you are heading for something and you suddenly find that the pieces begin to fall into place. So that doesn’t mean you’re there yet. It is never the kind of thing as described in movies or in books... suddenly the light dawned and you knew you were there. It’s not quite that sudden, it’s years of suddenness.” -- Gertrude Elion (Pharmaceutical Chemist)

“Like a lot of people, I often think ideas occur in a flash of inspiration, welling up form the unconscious or a light bulb goes off and all of a sudden a brand new idea occurs without warning. But there are psychologists who study creativity and genuinely creative people: brilliant scientist and artists. And they often work with historians and go back over their diaries, correspondence and notebooks. The usual finding is that what seems like a sudden epiphany is actually a tiny little step from hundreds of little baby steps that went before.” -- Steven Pinker (Cognitive Scientist)

Scientist and artist? Both are explorers of thought. The mind is as vast and unknown as the universe. Then again, with space telescopes we can almost see to the end of the universe. The mind? Dang, we still have not fathomed its true depths. I still haven’t the faintest idea what makes me tick.

A Box of Joy

When I rounded the corner there it was on my doorstep: a box the size of a small refrigerator. Wow, I thought, my friend Tami said she was going to send us a box but this was pretty stunning. She lives near New Orleans and it is Mardi Gras time. The first thing I thought was, “That is an awful lot of beads.” Then another idea crept into my head, bending down, I rapped on the vast box and said, “Tami -- are you in there?!” No answer. Perhaps she was sleeping. It had been a long journey.

I decided not to open the box until Diva showed up. After all, if Tami did jump out, she’d be ever so disappointed that Diva wasn’t there screaming and falling unconscious with terror. You never get a second chance to make that all important first impression.

Yep, I had to wait for Diva before I opened it. I knew this was a box of joy -- and happiness is always better when shared. Diva called and asked if she could come over. “Dang yes,” I said, “but bring the camera, Kitten. Tami sent us a really big box.”

When Diva arrived she was stunned. I took the camera and gave her a knife to open the package. Slowly she rocked the box, then she looked at me as she whispered, “Maybe Tami is in there.”

“Cut carefully,” I said and began documenting the whole adventure with the camera. I now realize how boring it is doing anything without Diva. To watch the excitement in her face, to hear her comments -- I really come alive when we are together. I have thought about that a lot, the idea that I have been afraid to show my real emotions. I was taught that as a child: men don’t cry, be John Wayne, be impassive and tough it out. I have missed out on my own life by not allowing myself to feel.

When I am with Diva, or I am creating, it’s all about the real emotion -- my emotion. I am crap as an artist but I am aces at being me. Here is the time when I can feel what I hadn’t allowed myself to. This is my chance to become real -- kind of like the -- the velveteen rabbit.

Out of the box Diva pulled bags as big as she was. She was exploding with joy as first a giant plush dog and then an enormous plush frog was flying around the apartment: jumping, dancing and giggling. We both started laughing and couldn’t stop.

Later, laying on the couch we four (Diva, dog, frog and me) all cuddled and looked at the photos. I thought I could use them as reference for our book, Stay. They capture the joy I see in Diva all the time.

“You are always smiling,” I said.

“I don’t smile that much,“ she admitted, “only when I’m with you.”

It was a grand box. Thank you, Tami.

Clay Therapy

Diva gave me the gift of clay. That may sound funny but it was sweet. While watching me making sculptures (references for my book) she said it was the happiest she’d ever seen me -- outside being with her, of course. She will be on vacation for a week and decided to give me weapons grade clay. Well, weapons of peace. Clay, my drawing and the book are very selfish acts. They are as much for myself as anyone else -- as any art really is. They bring me peace when my mind is at war.

How? Well, I was riding home on the bus the other day and felt so out of sorts. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t focus enough to write. I couldn’t pull myself together enough to draw. In the past I would have sat on the couch watching a documentary on Nazis and feeling pretty worthless.

Now I have another possibility, another way to play and find joy tucked away in unexpected places: sculpture. I think of nothing else as I work. Out of a lump of clay, I twist and pull into creation things that were once only in my unfathomable head. Like a fisherman trolling unknown depths, I often don‘t know what will break the surface. My imagination and my emotions seem to seep into it in ways that surprise even me. The clay has as much to do with the process as me. It so cold when I start, but the heat of my fingers (and all of my tugging) warms it. It flowers into something so happy. I look at what I have done and smirk -- I am myself again. On those days when my thoughts scatter like pigeons being chased by a dog in the park -- this, art, is my path back to myself.

A Dog Named Van Gogh

It is not often that I recall the moment that inspired a great idea. After all, it is generally over forty years of inspiration that has been collecting in my brain: bad romances, good food, sunlight on a lake on the last day of summer break -- all those emotions that make me and go into everything I write. Yet yesterday I saw an emotional thread that everything I have been trying to say -- those beads of feelings -- can hang on for the book I am writing called Stay:

In a very busy coffee shop sat an elderly man all alone. Around him was a whirlwind of much younger people in a mad rush with their lives. I suddenly felt such sympathy for that elderly man by himself and looking so fragile. What was his life like? Did he have anyone to go home to? What did he think of the world rushing around him? I had made an odd connection to him and my childhood pet, a dog named Lightning.

Lightning was my best friend -- well, often my only friend. She was a huge collie, so sweet and gentle. I lived a half a mile from the bus stop down a country lane. Lightning would walk with me rain, shine or snow down the old gravel road and would be waiting from me when I got back from school.

I would tell her all the important events of my world. The tragic bean sprout shame -- it didn’t grow in the milk carton farm, my finger painting mishaps -- yeah, I would spill my guts as we walked up that country road. Even if it was a wind chill of thirty below, she would hang on my every word. She would follow me over snowdrift after snowdrift as we weaved from side to side to look at that cardinal in that pine tree or that funny shape on the other side of the road It was a dragon -- if you turned your head just so -- and in need of slaying or at least a good barking at. Lighting was the warmest spirit that any child could want.

My brother would come home and see the crazy twisted trail of our foot prints in the snow and wonder aloud if I was drunk. Well, no one got me as a kid. No one but Lightning.

When I was in junior high we moved from a huge idyllic house in the country to a tiny place in the city. Lightning couldn’t come. She was too big, too old and had arthritis anyway. We’d be doing her a favor by putting her to sleep. I was a good kid, I didn’t complain. One day they just took her away, we moved the next day. I haven't thought about it -- not really -- until I saw that gentleman in the coffee shop.

Today I’m thinking about her a lot, that beautiful spirit I miss and how I have never really let myself feel that pain when she was taken away. Odd, I had been wracking my brain on how I could give an emotional center to my story and how I could give the main character a soul. I will give it Lightning's soul: a dog, a best friend and someone that the world didn’t have any further use for -- someone who was too old, too damaged and no one could possibly want -- someone who had endless patients and so much love to give: a dog named Van Gogh.