On Casting A Line

Wtf do I know about creativity man? Idk. I hate that word. “Creativity.” It’s like “writing”. I’ve got too many associations with it that come from culture. That come from other people communicating with me in words. It feels like an ultimatum. It’s not, “Play with these sounds while tasting your coffee and see what stands out”. It’s “Be Creative.” “Prove yourself. Generate novel output that demonstrates you deserve to eat.”

I think there’s great power in play, in being playful. But I’m not all that set up to access it, really. I’m curious instead. That’s what The Source is, for me. The source of my discoveries. I could have said the source of my “work”, or my “art”, or my “content” (ugh). But in my case, what I make are all discoveries, and my art is the trail of breadcrumbs, or sometimes the interesting pattern of etching I left in the dirt while I was trying to excavate something but moved on partway through, when my curiosity was satisfied, when I knew what was under there.

Arlo Guthrie said that songwriting is like fishing. I think that’s right. It’s certainly not like a factory. And why not? Why can’t you make art like Model T cars?

I think it’s because the conscious intellect interacts with the world at a much greater distance than the subconscious does. The conscious mind is all about reflection, analysis, extracting what is relevant and tidying things up for ease of symbolic manipulation. Art comes from contact with the world. You’ve gotta make that contact using a part of your mind whose job is not to summarize and understand and make things fit. So it has to be the subconscious.

You can you your conscious mind to choose your fishing site, and even the bait. Those choices are craft, are skill. But you’ve gotta wade into the water with your whole body, and you just can’t be sure what will bite, or when. You can only wade in, over and over. You can only make an offering of your soul.

I wanna help people wade into the stream, and enjoy it. Enjoy it enough that they want to do it every day, just for fun, or because it makes them feel alive. It’s not very fun to fish when most of the moments are failures to catch the rainbow trout you’re after. That’s boring, tedious work.

If you forget about the trout entirely, though, then the water is a cool contrast to the sunlight warming your arms. Two birds are having some kind of argument nearby, and you get to listen in. You’re happy just to be there, as a creature in this beautiful world, and when you find a fish at the end of your line, it’s almost a surprise.

What you do with the fish matters less than getting your line in the water, and leaving it there, every day. It helps to enjoy the fishing, instead of waiting for a catch before you get to feel good.