Author: berwynsean

Have you ever stopped for a moment to think about why you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing, or, how many times a day you do something for no other reason than it’s what you’ve always done, or the way you’ve always done it?

If I wear the collar long enough, after a while I forget it’s there.

I’m a great fan of the rhetorical question. In fact, it may well be my favorite kind of question. It’s more than a question, you see, but also a kind of dialogue, in miniature. Unlike the typical query, it requests nor requires any response, and yet, paradoxically, suggests and embodies an answer uniquely its own. It is the expression of an idea existing in an indefinite, and suspended, state of self-examination.

THE ARTIST IN ME is the conjoined twin of the worker bee in me. We must live together, by Nature’s decree. The worker bee must rise and shine and shower and brush and drive to work and punch the clock and file these papers and dig those holes and put out that fire and punch the clock again and get in the car and drive again and shop for food and fill the gas tank and wash the dishes and feed the pets, and vacuum the floors or pull the weeds, depending on the season. The artist in me must wait and watch while the worker bee balances the checkbook and budgets the month and lists all the things to do tomorrow and check off all the things that were done today.

Nominally in charge, sometimes the worker bee will set aside some time for the artist, but always remembering the importance of the structure that keeps the machine running smoothly. This, the artist would hasten to admit, is only fair.

Sometimes however the artist will, seized by inspiration (a fancy word for creative starvation), stage a coup, and commandeer the ship’s bridge for a while. The worker bee will always step aside and graciously allow this, because he knows the artist is acting neither capriciously, nor gratuitously, and that he is compelled by grave necessity.

Sadly, regardless of whether the artist has seized his time or received it, he carries with him many of the habits of the worker bee. After all, they live side by side. Without realizing it, he often finds himself using the worker bee’s tools to form his art. But the artist and his art are at the same time naturally resistant to his brother’s ways; to the precise, linear implements so necessary to the worker bee, to help him navigate the day, to allow him to steer clear of the many hazards that lurk beneath the surface.

The artist stands before his canvas and maps out his color scheme. He divides it into complementary yet dynamic segments. He considers the cost of his paints, and the paucity of sunlight his garret allows. He wonders how far he will get, or if he will ever finish. Similarly, he sits before his typewriter and wrestles with family trees and chronologies, with story arcs and denouements. He finds himself tiring before he even begins. But how else can he proceed? It all needs to make sense, doesn’t it? Otherwise, he’s left with chaos, and what then?

He has forgotten what he once knew, and what he’s forgotten and remembered many times since: that the best of his ideas are born from chaos. They are begotten within the turmoil of dreams, from the swirl of memories that in turn blend with his childhood fantasies and teenage heroes, from inspirational myths and exciting movies and insightful books and sublime music, all of which at one time or another in his lifetime ignited a spark and then a flame within him, all of which stirred him before he even had a chance to put his finger on why.

Faced with the absence of structure though, he feels adrift: alone and afraid. He clings to the comfort of the idea of a solid foundation, unaware that he is, in a way, a prisoner of it.

But what if his first impulse, the attempt to impose a pattern onto the chaos, is doomed before the fact? Sometimes he succeeds. Sometimes the conventional approach bears fruit. He remembers also that too often the attempt begins well but peters out, stillborn. So what to do?

He has read Breton’s first manifesto, and agrees with him, more or less, but finds him pompous and long-winded. Besides, of what help to the artist can the hundred-year-old musings of a French intellectual possibly be? Then the artist concedes his admiration for the man, and admits that he is perhaps a little jealous.

The artist allows his thoughts to float upon the surface of the question, but then allows himself to sink, to slowly fall until he is resting upon and then deeply embedded in the spongy earth of the seabed. Oddly, he is not holding his breath, but breathing deeply. What if there is a pattern, he asks himself, to be found buried within the chaos? Don’t patterns emerge, regardless of whether they are conjured or unbidden?

We are by nature inclined to see patterns where none (seemingly) exist. We see problems and search for solutions. Addicted to rational thought we look for linear and concrete answers to creative dilemmas in much the same way we set about organizing our day, or in the way we approach a clogged drain, or a malfunctioning appliance. We make lists, sometimes on paper, sometimes not. We enumerate the benefits and line them up beside the disadvantages. We believe a measured series of observations will yield a path forward.

This works fine for the worker bee. But perhaps, the artist wonders, he should be searching for less confining solutions. Perhaps the idea of a solution is itself a misdirection.

No one taught us how to seek out chaos. We’re taught that it’s a dangerous place. But what if invoking the word chaos is just another way of talking about the unexpected? Every day we stumble upon it inadvertently, and are continually startled by its therapeutic effects. The best of jokes catch us by surprise. We laugh, or cry, when we least expect to.

And then we forget. We close the book, and bookmark the page; we change the channel. We resume our normal lives. We fluff the pillow and pull back the bedding. We rise and shine. This is no surprise. It’s where we spend most of our time, within the here and now, between yesterday and tomorrow.

So, we return. But consider, the artist asks himself, that as we do so we might also be re-surfacing, and by the logic of the dream, by the laws of chaos, by virtue of the unexpected point of view, we are by necessity also holding our breaths, wondering, as the weeks become months, and the months become years, where the devil the magic went.

And by we, the worker bee says, I mean me.

I rose before the sun. I hugged momma and poppa and cried. I wondered where I was going. I passed into mountains. I sat to tea among empty chairs and watched the trucks roll by. I wished I was a truck driver. I stopped at the edge of the valley, looked over, and forgot to take pictures. I wished I was a photographer. I found the small roads. I drove past gas stations with one pump. At red lights, I looked through the trees at houses with white-washed gables. I wished that I lived in them. I wrinkled my nose and watched as grass fires ran past. I wondered when I would see my friends again. I remembered an old friend who had moved before me and swerved off the main road to meet her. She lived in Detroit with a man whose company she disliked, so we met in her car. Once she had seemed so grown up. Now her car seemed to be her crib and I wanted to get out and I wanted to stay but my aunt was waiting in Chicago. Besides it just ain’t like it was cause we just ain’t like we were like when my aunt used to tickle me till the laughing hurt and I cried. Now her fingers are busy with Lucky Strikes and crosswords and the garden by the back fence where she grows bonsai in her trench-coat and sunglasses while above the trains go by every ten minutes like thunder rumbling through the old gray house where grandma died and grandpa died before I could remember to remember. I followed my aunt to a lake in Wisconsin where we found a boat with three white sails, a ready captain and ready mates. Since it was summer she put on her sunglasses and trench-coat. At night I slept in the hold and used a hand-held flashlight to see the pictures I drew and read the letters I wrote on lined yellow pages. I pressed my nose against the plastic window to watch the storms that leaked onto my bed and kept me awake. I wished my home was a houseboat. I followed my uncle to his house in Minneapolis. I lived in his attic and dreamed about the lover I left behind. Together in the den my uncle and I watched educational television. Together in the kitchen we crushed gimlets. Together we lost each other in a bar. Together we coveted women with yellow hair and empty eyes. I secretly made love to a Navajo, while secretly he bedded a Viking. I painted pictures and gave his Viking lover one and another to him. My Navajo lover gave me a charm. I took long walks in the wood. I wished I lived in a wood. Winter came. My winter lover found me. I wrote a poem for her, and she played her piano for me. But summer was gone and I knew it was time to leave.