2003-03-06 - 10:13 p.m.
Back when they believed the earth was flat, cartographers indicated on maps, in the area beyond the known world: Here be monsters. I don't know why I remembered that just now, except that I was going to say that I have not fallen off the earth. I have not been consumed by the monsters, but this is the longest I have gone without updating since I started this journal.
I think I am kind of struggling with what I want to do, in terms of my creative work. The easiest thing is not to decide and to just keep forgetting the whole thing for another day, and just concentrate on the have-to's. But I'm still stubbornly trying to keep hold of the tiny thread of original thought and creative activity in the overwhelming stream of busyness. I've been too busy at work to steal a bit of reading and writing time, so there is all this pressure on the evenings. The need to live my whole life in the last 5 hours of the day. It is hard not to resent the fact that all the best hours of all the best days of all the best years of my life will be spend at a job. Where I pretend to be something I am not in order to earn a paycheck.
I've been working on a poem for about three weeks, and can't quite make it work. I come home and sit in front of it, trying to push myself past the inevitable high center I always hit before I complete anything. I want to start doing portraits again-- I've been thinking about them, watching people's expressions, thinking of what people I would like to draw. And I have all these other ideas for art projects, stuff I'm saving for collages, some beautiful new paper and sepia pens..... I'd like to illustrate another book.....
And sometimes I wish I didn't need to do any of these things. Because it is a NEED. Even when everything is going along fine, and I'm on top of work, and the house is under control and the bills are paid and there is gas in the car, and I don't owe anybody a call or a lunch or a birthday gift, and I'm exercising and eating right and having a good hair day.... I still feel like there is a hole in my life if I am not creating anything. There is an emptiness, an ache somewhere I can't point to, like the ache in a phantom limb. It is really a kind of torment, because creative work is so difficult, and nobody else cares if I do it or not, it only really matters to me. In fact, it is usually better for others if I don't do it, because it is such an anti-social thing, an elusive pursuit that has sometimes made me neglect the real people in my life.
Sometimes I wonder why I can't be content with just living up to my responsibilities and stopping to smell the roses occasionally. As John Lennon said "Life is what's happening while you're busy making other plans." And sometimes I am afraid I am sleepwalking through big chunks of my life, always focusing on something else, like the misguided hero of the fairy tales who is greedy for gold, but eventually finds "true" gold only at home. Yet I can't give it up. Part of what keeps me looking toward the future with any degree of optimism (difficult in these times) is the belief that I still have a great untapped potential. It is part of who I am.
So meanwhile, I keep trying to figure out how to strike a balance. For me, the most creative times have been the times when I had minimal obligations and could just savor my days without watching the clock. I was reading something recently in which the author said, in effect, that every line of poetry she wrote represented about eight hours of looking out the window. This is the problem: I don't have any looking out the window time. I miss that time to just do nothing, and see where nothing will take me. Unfortunately, I can't go from zero to art in 15 seconds.
Theoretically you could write a book on your lunch hour: an hour a day over the course of a year. I know someone who said she did that.(Well, it was a book on time management!) But that is assuming your book is just work to be performed, words to be processed. In my life, I have to have time to redirect my thoughts, focus my energy differently, gather inspiration. Art grows from art-- not from meetings, ringing telephones, data analysis. Not that I think you can't plan for creative work or that you have to wait for some lightening bolt of inspiration to strike--I know that doesn't happen unless you ARE working. But you do have to be living in ways that keep your creative juices flowing. Or they dry up and you can't reconstitute them on demand just because you have an an hour to kill before dinner.
There are several huge ironies in all of this. In order to make good use of time you have to be willing to waste it. The very act of being uptight about time seems to poison the part of the soul that creates. Much like being concerned about the cost of materials is the very thing that sabotages the spontaneity that makes a good painting. So if you are worried about ruining that thirty dollar canvas, you probably will. I suppose I have identified my own brand of monster out at the edge of my world. Fortunately there are no clear winners or losers in this wrestling match, and if you pay attention sometimes there is a third answer, some new, unpredicted idea that arises from all the struggle. So I am holding on for that.
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