On Catching the Ephemeral with the “I”.

As a writer I constantly get prompts from the exterior world that it might be worth my while to take my creative output seriously. I should keep notes, I hear from my muse.

If I go for a walk, say, along the base of a mountain like last week, something splendid might pop into mind. And, then, there are the water based revelations that are in league with the creative force. If I take a shower or a bath or jog along the Pacific, well, said ideas are likely to float to the surface.

Last, there are the prodigious anecdotes from people like Steven Spielberg that swear to diving LA freeways as a sure curator of plot lines. Hopefully, the later example of the serendipitous creative generator won’t fit into my inquiry: What sort of tools do you prefer, are you old school or more tech oriented.

Obviously, hopefully obviously, if you’re driving the 405 fwy or doing the loop as I used to: 405 S to 90 W to Lincoln N to 10 W and so on in an ouroboric pattern then if I sidle up to you going 60 mph (I drive slow) on that ribbon of asphalt and concrete I expect you are going the digital recording route to capture your creative musings.

Today, I was among a lot of people, mostly kids, and I kept a little notebook in my pocket hanging about kidney level in my windbreaker. I was listening to the children play ukulele for the first time. It was wretched as you might expect but the screeching did a crazy thing; the sound drove me neurologically into some sort of abyss probably out of a primal survival mechanism for maintaining use of my ears. There’s a reason the FBI uses heavy metal to torture holed up cult leaders and their minions. However heinous the source, the trajectory for capturing an idea took hold. The surprising device of the serendipitous worked. Out flowed an answer to a current question.

Lucky for me, I was in this academic milieu mostly of my own accord. I guess the money god would have been the correlative to the actual hold on my physical placement in that cacophony of butchered notes. What I’m saying is the rude reality of economics were in part responsible for my attendance at the impromptu John Cage-esque concert. No disrespect to Mr. Cage, it’s just the best example I have for in relating my limited experimental compositions to today’s event.

The point is this; regardless of my auditory purview, the strength of the thoughts coming through, much like jazz musicians, artists, and poets relate when asked about the source of flow: words or sounds or images or a mass of code, has its own strange impetus.

Anyone who has ever tried to force a beat to text or notes or swaths of color and line to canvas or a screen will relate. Something as mystical as embodying the tinctures of life through the heart through one’s own chest itself is at play.

Thus, the realized act of taking this vein of creative fortitude seriously enough to have tools at hand is an act of communion. So, what do you use for such a precious weapon against existential angst?

Personally, I was using the digital realm of my iPhone’s note app for many years as was necessitated by my will to traveled abroad with a light footprint.

Recently, back in the U.S. for an extended period of time, I have gone old school once again. I have at my ready a pen with real ink that is wet and shiny when I press it onto the page. As the idea spreads themselves out, blue, black, and sometimes metallic disco silver legs akimbo in a train of words, I watch the evidence of an ultra powerful source of thought dry in the sunlight and wonder, if, like that old trick we learned as child magicians with lemon juice, various degrees of illumination and heat will alter the meaning of what I mean…or think I do. Joan Didion used the words of George Orwell to predict a course of meaningfulness to the act of putting the stream of life into essay form, she used paper and digital replicas of the page to answer the dictates of the phrase, Why I Write. As she points out the sound of “I” is all over that Orwellian schema.

Sometimes thumbing through the patches of paper that come out on a patch of an old receipt I’ve clutched at the miraculous moment or a paper towel, soft in its hand clutching a snatch of a sentence or two, I marvel at what the imagination has plundered from the ethers and splayed out for my use. “I, I, I”, Ms. Didion Dunne, am glad you wrote that essay because you speak of the secret well from which you drew, perhaps enriched by the horrors of your impediment, the migraine. Who knows what suffering creates but in your case it was a bounty of female authority in the simple act of inquiry where I find it most interesting to turn it: inside. The main tool is the will to do so, ever at the ready, in fast moving car, silky warm bath, or behind the gaze of trepidation.

At the root of the creative act, we sit around the same storytelling fire, right at the lip of the cave staring out at the black ink welled up on the infinite page of light and dark, the subconscious made conscious, the birth of the imagination pulled through its source, a lemon juice soaked twig, electric with potential, note taking regalia, in hand and ready for the act of divining the “I” .

30,000 years ago we spread our homo sapien hands over the dark walls of Chauvet Cave; in the light of torches we were driven to expression for a variety of reasons. It isn’t the “why” that I find compelling so much as the “what”. What do you feel burning inside you that you must bring out? Joan Didion said she wrote to understand what she thought. That’s a powerful “what”. What is your “what”?