Creative Juice For All

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” From a Ralph Waldo Emerson letter to Walt Whitman

Interesting to read words like these. One smart human writing to another smart human, and there is something powerful in these words for every creative type, maybe for everyone period. Recently I’ve been thinking a great deal about well-being, the care and maintenance of it, specifically. For whatever reason I’m wired to get a great deal of satisfaction from what I consider a job well done. But what inspires this feeling? I work in a handful of mediums and the criteria is different for all of them. Let’s take books first. If a book sells well, good, but if it doesn’t I don’t really care. I’m not a publicist and I don’t have a background in marketing. This isn’t my part of the job, though I’m always willing to help. Good reviews tickle me for sure, and I mostly get good ones (fingers crossed it holds), but the good humor fades. But a blurb from a writer I greatly admire? That’s what counts. The world of books can be a strange one. Your first few agents are always so disappointing (I recently added my name and efforts to 5000 New Literary Agents, a grassroots effort to inspire healthy competition in that field, problem likely solved in the next three years), publishers sometimes cut corners to their detriment and yours (some of them are also amazing when they don’t even need to be). There’s a big bookstore here in Portland where the most common and surprising thing said of me is not about my work but rather a point of personal trivia- I didn’t graduate from high school. It isn’t, I gather, shared in a positive way (underdog? I’ll take it!). That’s a short list of small cons outweighed by a huge list of pros. Writing is fun. Peaceful. Interesting. It helps me understand and appreciate the world around me in new ways. It makes me a better reader. All told, a pleasant experience.

Next, art, from painting to
tattooing. If you work with good people who like and support one another (I do,
but part time) then this is very gratifying. But for some reason the positive
glow of a job well done never lasts all that long. Tattoos are after all
pictures you make on a canvas with legs. They split as soon as you’re done. And
something sorta grim will happen to all of them eventually (don’t think about
it), so maybe that’s it.

Film, and I’m an utter novice here, but the harmonious, the tranquil, the ‘golden glow’… I haven’t seen very much of it yet. A novice wouldn’t. In any case, let’s take it from the top and look at Emerson’s letter one more time. But before you do, read this quote from the excellent KJ Bishop’s The Etched City to give it context. I’ve shared this quote before, but Emerson shines new light on it. Somewhere in all this is the real reward of making things.

“Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just
objects – inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal
to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot
grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be
greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For
primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and
decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He
tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with
the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history,
context, rarity – perhaps rarity most of all – combine to create, magically,
the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few
things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts,
may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor
humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of
the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And
on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of
painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies
life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury – one of
which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself
with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay
and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated
way – as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick – to
make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.”

“-read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

You’re the art.