The portal to the divine is temporarily closed.

The portal to the divine is temporarily closed. We’re sorry for any inconvenience as this outage is unexpected and took us completely by surprise.  You have to understand that in the creative world this happens.  The circle of creativity is much like the circle of life.  An idea, like a child, if lucky is born and born into a nurturing environment where exploration and development are encouraged and supported.  Creativity to me is a bit of a mystery. 

I really don’t know much about the making of art.  I have few peers that are artists and anything I’ve learned about the endeavor has been either by my own exploration or from devouring biographies and documentaries of personalities apparently important to the cultural identity.  I would like to think that if I understand anything at all it’s my relationship with my imagination but I think in actuality I’m just blowing sunshine up my skirt.  I grew up with a fundamental dire need to understand the physical world in terms of causality.  I desperately wanted to understand how things worked.  I would take apart toys and examine the gears and motors and plastic bits that linked them all together.  I would question why, why are the guts of this machine packed together this way? I would play doctor and perform little experiments by picking and prodding at various pieces and seeing what happens.  I would pull out parts and study the resulting behavior. I would try to put it all back together again. It was like trying to unexplode something. Sometimes it would work.  Sometimes not.  Mostly not and aside from being left with a pile of meaningless spare parts, I would be left still asking the same questions I started with: why this way?  What was this person thinking when they set about to construct this thing and in the process orchestrated this alien mess of conjoined plastic and metal spinning with some purpose I would not comprehend.

I carried that desire to know and comprehend the hidden bridge between intent and how it was manifested as I grew from a child through adolescence into adulthood.  Except now that I am where I am on the spectrum of human experience and age, I have extended that curiosity.  I have extended it both inward to try to understand how I work but also to others to figure out how they work and finally the relationship between everything else.  It’s kind of a heavy trip to lay upon oneself and it probably explains the vacillation of my general emotional climate between the states of stone cold serious and I don’t give a shit.  It’s the singular forceful desire to understand the why to everything I observe and experience, that gravity of a deep inner sun so massive that no matter how I try to sway from it’s pull I am cannot escape this continual wondering.  I am revolving around myself and at the same time struggling fiercely to disengage from the orbit. 

There are times when my mouth salivates and my lips drool as I suck on the idea of jabbing a jagged hunting knife straight into the heart of Plato’s unexamined life.  Perhaps in times like these maybe the idiots have it right that the meek deserve to inherit the world.  Thinking about it otherwise just leads to frustration and it’s associated neurotic manifestations – drinking, drugs, cutting, protests, general mayhem and insanity.  The real problem is when the inner self decides to take up arms against it’s own government. It’s times like these I am left asking the perennial question of why? I thought I understood it – my relationship to my imagination -- the causal link between “I think therefore I am” and “I am therefore I do”.  It would be wonderfully divine to be able to understand the underlying topology and functioning of any relationship because (ideally) if one can understand the equation at the heart of whatever is examined that understanding can lead to influence and manipulation.  This, of course, is the basis of power. What I covet is the power to create at will.

It has been my experience, however, that creativity is the result of unexplained response to external stimuli.  I see something and if the wind is blowing from the right direction and the heavens are smiling and I’ve had my daily coffee then I have an idea as a result.  And it’s an idea of something to create – a picture or a story.  It’s as close as I’ve ever come to getting religion – this voodoo in my head that makes pictures appear out of nowhere. It’s the wizard behind the smokescreen of my imagination.  But sometimes the wizard takes a nap and then all worry hell breaks loose.  Questions start bubbling up from the brook of despair.  The self starts wondering if it’s all over forever and ever.  Did the wizard just step out for a smoke or did he skip bail and run for the hills? It’s a holy-shit kind of worry.

After a few days I get the identity DT’s – internal shakes and visions of vultures snacking on the carcass of my creative soul.  It makes me wonder if the magic will happen again. It makes me want to give up.  I’ve been through it so many times.  And I’m sure I’m not alone in this.  I’ve heard there are books written that are devoted entirely to telling readers how to get their mojo back; how to get the wizard back behind the screen; how to be creative.  I haven’t read any of them but I know they’re out there because I’ve had people tell me there are.  And there are times when I consider reading a few of them, I get that desperate.  It’s like the idea of reading one of those books that advertise an all-you-can-eat magic formula on how to pick up chicks and how to get laid .  But I just can’t stomach the idea inching through some collection of confectionary platitudes and wives tales.  My data has to come from empirical evidence and experimentation.  I have to do it the hard way.  I’m not a desperate measures for desperate times kind of guy. 

Right now the hard way is figuring out how to start it up again.  Finding something small and working on it little by little. Making something that will hopefully build upon itself and entice the wizard back to his post.  Finding something worth doing that will slowly rebuild the decay that apathy has wrought. Sand bags to shore up the levy and make it sturdy enough to stand upon and wave the flag that is the pride of creation.  For me that lurch forward was writing this essay.  I don’t know if anyone will find it meaningful.  But really it’s value is personal in that it has been yet another first step.  Another exercise in the exorcising of a demon.

The portal to the divine is temporarily closed, but we’re working to reopen it as soon as humanly possible.