On Creativity and Timelessness

The other day I put an old Ani Difranco CD on in my car so I could have something to sing along with. It's actually difficult to sing along with Ani D, she's got this crazy vocal rang and more variance than most Tori Amos songs (is it possible?) so I listened to the lyrics instead.

I know the song by heart but it struck me, suddenly, at how timeless her song was - despite being thirteen years old.

To The Teeth:
the sun is settin on the century and we are armed to the teeth. We are all working together now to make our lives mercifully brief. Schoolkids keep trying to teach us what guns are all about - confuse liberty with weaponry and watch your kids act it out. Every year now like Christmas some boy gets the milk-fed sub-urban blues: reaches for the available arsenal and saunters off to make the news. And women in the middle are learning what poor women have always known - that the edge is closer than you think when your men bring the guns home.

Look at where the profits are, that's how you'll find the source of the big lie that you and I both know so well. The time it takes this cultural death wish to run its course they're gonna make a pretty penny and then they're all going to hell. He said the chickens all come home to roost - yeah, malcom forecasted this flood. Are we really gonna sleep through another century while the rich profit off our blood? True, it may take some doing to see this undoing done but in my humble opinion here's what i suggest we do:

open fire on hollywood, open fire on MTV, open fire on NBC, and CBS and ABC, open fire on the NRA and all the lies they told us along the way, open fire on each weapons manufacturer while he's giving head to some republician senator. And if i hear one more time about fool's rights to his tools of rage I'm gonna take all my friends and I'm gonna move to Canada and we're gonna die of old age.

Why yes, I do share her opinion on gun control. And my comments section is open to your hate mail.

 ~

On a different day, coincidentally also in my car, I was having a conversation with my dear friend Sylvia about writing. Sylvia's a writer too, but a more dedicated one than I. (Hint: Most writers are more dedicated than I.) I was telling her about this opportunity I had to write for a start up publisher that has fallen through. It turns out that it was almost definitely a fake publisher - and that's what I get for responding to ads on craigslist - but at the end I said something along the lines of "But I really had a lot of fun writing it".

Sylvia misunderstood what I said, in a way. "Yeah, you should be writing for fun."

But it was totally and wholly accurate. I should be writing for fun.

Every time I write I put a pressure on myself to create "something" - to have a finished product, to publish a story, to start a whole book, write a blog. I can't think of a time in the past years that - outside of writing in my journal which I no longer do - I have written simply for the joy of writing.

That was why I did it in the first place. I found myself in my writing. Whether it was bad poetry or good poetry, essays or personal narratives, short stories or unfinished stories, I wrote because I wanted to. Not because I needed to. Not because I thought I was going to get somewhere with it, or become famous from it. Not because it defined who I was (or who I wasn't). I just loved to write.

In a way it's just like any other thing I gave up from my youth: Trying to learn how to play guitar, drawing even though I wasn't so great at it, walking everywhere barefoot, skinny dipping in the river. At a certain point we are told we must "give up foolish things that are a waste of time" yet it's usually us who dictates what is foolish and is there really such thing as a waste of time?

As children we have no fear. We learn fear from our parents and our peers. Then we forget what it is like to be fearless. We "can't" do so many things as adults that seems so attainable when we were younger. We stop doing things we loved because we think we ought to or because maybe someone somewhere told us we couldn't.

As soon as I learned to write I wrote where ever I could. I wrote in journals, in day planners and in discarded notebooks. I had floppy disks and hard disks stacks and stacks of papers. You couldn't stop me from jotting something down somewhere. One day, somewhere along the lines, I stopped. I don't recall when and I am not sure why but I did. I gave up this natural thing that brought me joy simply 'because'.

I must have thought that I outgrew it, or maybe I thought that I had devised a better, more efficient way to do it. I know I became focused for awhile on making it "a project" that I had to see through. The Project of 'making myself a credible writer'. Yet it always felt a little empty. I had sucked all the fun out of it, all on my own.

So now my Project is to not have a project at all. I am trying to find new, fun ways to write, digging out stories I left for dead, seeing if I want to tinker on them some more and bring them back to life. I am reading old poems and finding out that some of them were pretty good as poetry goes - especially the ones written in the margins of old notebooks. I am trying, but not too hard. Project No Project is about having fun, or finding the fun again, anyway. Is it like riding a bike? Can we go back to that place of innocent fearlessness that allows us to become astronauts and movie stars and world leaders? Can we ever unteach ourselves something that we learned as a 'survival mechanism'?

I'm dubious, it's true, but I'll let you know when I find out.