Why? Why Not?

It has come, this heavy doorman.

It bends over the blistering yellow, squeezes tight the husks with peyote-scented hands and sweetgrass. Its long, ragged sleeve cuff drags small circles in drying soil. It calls out across green, deep ponds. A chalk laugh stirs the fog of mosquitoes. It presses down with thick, stiff boots on the marsh, on the mud, stumbles into lily pads, small stiff islands stuck to the surface of diminishing water. Tadpoles close their null, glass-bead eyes and lament a low, slow warble.

My windows are cold and the walls shake with wind. There is a knock made of twig fingers at the bottom of the door. There is a knock and a slow sniffing at the frame, in the cracks, around the sealing. It throws its arms wide and I smell the inside of its coat, warm and close, the old sweat and smoke wool, of eel bellies, the faint lingering of chlorine in the pocket linings, a half-chewed button stuck to the seam, paprika and burnt leaves, sienna landscapes and deer skulls.

Now there is a hollowing in the place underneath, where selkies slither and slump on oiled skins, vanish into greyness, where things tumble and crawl, carrying small satchels, rucksacks, backpacks, pushing shopping carts full of their summer lives.

My sketchbook is open before me. The leather binding creaks and the metal wolf head clasp taps on the wood table top. Whenever I don’t know what else to do, I open this book and stare at the lack of lines, draw diagrams, wheels, charts on each surface. Tonight I am forming a simple glyph, cloud-like bubbles that feed into a swarm of small, randomly placed squares that feed in turn into long straight rows and finally empty unto simple phrases. The clouds are named for inspiration. The squares are ideas. The long rows shape the outcomes of fiction and non-fiction, artwork and animation, performance.

This may not mean much to you, but to me it’s finally the answer. How do I deal with all the things I see when I close my eyes? And why has nothing before ever worked?

I’ve been raised to think that hard work equates to good results, that struggle and sweat is an investment, that pushing yourself through the unbearable is the way to build strength. Work hard, eat meat and potatoes, go to church, raise your kids. These are firmly ingrained German ethics that sift down to me through generations. They’ve served me very well in living a life, for they are things of the body and of the mind. But I’ve learned finally that the heart asks for much different rules when it asks for rules at all.

My buddy Shorn and I have been talking about the idea of expression and practice, the idea that instead of pushing yourself through a process that you struggle with and find difficulty in, one that is raising stress, you should move on to something that is flowing with you in that moment and revisit the difficult thing later. Don’t force you way through. You should always flow to what is open and leave what is closed closed. I’ve also been thinking about a quote, which I paraphrase here, from the actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman, “Creatively, the second you judge something, you kill it. You kill every single possibility that might have existed and that may have surprised you.”

In every writing book, every artists way book, every discussion I’ve ever had with any performer, artist, writer, musician, these themes continue to surface as truths. I’ve written about them in journals and in this blog, talked to friends and lovers about them, and yet never firmly grasped them in any way other than concept and method. Stop thinking, start doing. And yet, my brain still takes every small idea, strips it of its meat, and weighs it on a scale with a feather on the other platen.

The case in point is this blog, the one you are reading and specifically the way this one began. Since the last posting there have been over a dozen blogs created and deleted because they did not fit the format I have somewhat lain upon my perception of this “work”. In the meantime, in all other categories of expression but music, the same genocide is occurring. Around me my ideas race towards the ocean like newborn turtles. Birds peck at them, the landscape shifts to move them in other directions, large fish wait in the waters, tides toss rough stones and chopped waves. Only a very few survive. The amount of things you did not read about, that I did not bother to write a sentence about in any journal or scrap of paper over the last few years, is staggering.

Stop thinking. Start doing.

It finally explains the nagging question of why I write better when I am depressed or greatly saddened, why things pour from me in that moment more than in other moments. The need for catharsis and expression is certainly greater, but that’s only part of the answer. At times like that, there is overwhelming emotion that floods every sensibility, illogical, rash emotion. And when it overflows, there is no structure or goal, there is no form or desired outcome. It’s all about taking the idea that is burning in you and letting it out in any way it wants to come out just to get it out. But the larger truth is that in times like that, you are touching the raw source. That instinct and need is representative of the natural flow, the natural direction. It is not an exception, but the illustration of how rarely creation is truly as organic as it could be for most of us and how often it is forced through a process of overthought and control. It is what should be sought after in normalcy as well.

The theme of my diagram is “it all flows downward”. Me, I’ve been swimming upstream for many years.

Creating as I have been creating has involved starting with the end result and working backwards from that, with no cache of slip-paper, napkin-scrawled, free-write ideas to pull from. And with that approach, the full retinue of judges and accountants, architects and standards-keepers comes along for the job as well. The end result is whatever ekes through the sieve, given life by whatever inspiration exists solely in the moment and whatever good graces attends the chore of putting skin to bone.

As I look at the diagram, I finally get how backwards that is for me, how inorganic and forced. Because given its will, inspiration can spark ideas that are in turn kept and given their will, that later manifest into form, structure and outcome as is best suited to the idea itself. Starting at the bottom and attempting to write a short story, then looking for an idea to use, then jamming the two together is only a shape-to-slot game that a rather dull child would play, its outcome only clumsy or lucky. Sweat all you want to try to make a elephant into a turnip. It’s never going to happen.

Living in my head as much as I do, it’s very easy to equate the voice of thought with the authority of thought, to make the advisor the decider. And it’s just as easy to take on the mantle of creator because it’s a much more in-control and thus ego-desired position than the actual role, that of translator or facilitator, or even no role at all. We are goal-directed, outcome-nutty, most of us, prone to guilt when we aren’t accomplishing as much product as we feel we should be accomplishing. I was certainly raised that way, and taught often that my little heart-strong wanderings had their source in a feeling of being unsettled, unfulfilled, and unfocused. I’ve spent the better part of the last three years trying to reverse that in my beliefs. And now for me, it’s all about doing and not having done.

So I guess it is fitting to come to this kind of realization and conclusion on the day that the night wins out over the day, when the moon takes over from the sun. And the more I think about it, it’s also a comfortable application of all of the things I learned on my Shiftless Seattle trips to perhaps the last bastion of brain-rule in my life. It makes a good break point for things to come.

What it means for my process with expression is nothing short of revolution, a turning upside-down of every way I’ve ever tried to do anything.

What it means for this blog is many more short entries in the future, and less long, structured entries.

So to honor that idea, I’ll start with this one, nice and short, without any format, goal, or metaphor at all.

….

CRAP!