Probably not. Drifting through the dream mist, in those minutes before the coffee’s poured and you’re stretching sleep-stiffened limbs, eyes not entirely focused on surroundings, mind trying to pull together remembered threads of last night’s reveries or whatever’s floating out there surreal on the brain skim, not required to mesh with mundane realities soon to flood one’s wakefulness. Before i get it together to look at the news, read the email, organize the day’s work, i pass through an unspoken, subtly acknowledged exit from that space in which sentences don’t need verbs and images don’t need reasons. The content of the creative impulse is all Zen meant-to-be-ish, things fit together by choosing their own entries into the frame and whatever enters is accepted as somehow appropriate. Creativity at other times of day is a challenge for me. Ideas that do emerge seem boring, derivative, disconnected from anything another person would be at all interested in. Blogging is a helluva lot easier if you just throw tantrums at other people’s endless outpourings. The other day i was cruising around the net, still working on rebuilding the 2 years of bookmarks inadvertently left behind when i left Palestine, came upon this great little film on Boing Boing TV. Brilliant piece of satire, and even though i’m jealous that someone else came up with the idea, i’m embedding it here in the spirit of supporting his creative impulse. Enjoy!
You can go to Stefan Nadelman’s site for the cuisinary legend, in case some of the actors were unclear.
One of the very few books i left the US with is The Creativity Book, by Eric Maisel, who’s actually a psychologist. It’s a great little “how to” course on stimulating ideas and converting them mostly into written form. Curiously, the first assignment is to write some thousands of words autobiography; i say curiously, because it a person either has led a creative life and they just need to be reminded of it, or s/he’s led a totally boring life and what could be a bigger and more discouraging task than to take your boring little existence and try to turn it into something that would mesmerize Bollywood? As you might has guessed, i skip this first task whenever i decide to start jumping through his self-help hoops again.
One of the things Maisel says that absolutely rings true for me: Self-consciousness kills creativity. However: it seems much easier to subvert the internal censors, whatever their temperament, when dealing with two- or 
even three-dimensional media than with words. Language, for me, is a whole different bulb of wax, never so smoothly shaped or manipulated. Write without self-consciousness? This is a conundrum, since the whole point of writing is to convey your ideas, wherever they come from, in a way other people can digest. How is that done without being conscious of whether what you’re saying makes any kind of sense??
These are musings, merely, and i haven’t gotten to the question of whether words that emerge from creative impulse are per force more meaningful, or potent, than those coming out of raw experiences in which creativity seemingly has no role to play. True enough, the writing of them is itself a creative act. Thus this blog. Thus this ridiculous blog entry. i noticed the other day that on the blogger dashboard, there’s a running ticker of blogs that have just had things added to them. The names change faster than i can read them, which means faster than i can click on them to see what’s going up on all these cyberbahn billboards. i wonder: what were all these nameless bloggers doing with their creative impulses before the internet? Did it take the medium to open the floodgates? i do cruise the virtual highway just to see what’s out there, throw of the dice, and there’s this huge feeding frenzy of people blogging about blogging… medium creates the outlet, outlet becomes the focus, focus becomes somehow transcendent as in: i met this girl in a bar who asked me if i blogged, to which i said ‘yes’, to which she said, ‘cool, it’s totally the thing to be doing’ and so i asked what she wrote about and the answer, ‘ya know, just stuff’. And i had to ask myself whether, if she had continued this exchange and asked me the same thing, i would say, ‘oh, ya know, just Chomsky’ because maybe that wouldn’t fall into the STUFF category as she understands it and then even though i was doing the hip thing, it would turn out to not be part of what matters in the run of all that’s raging.
My good friend K may be on the verge of signing a book deal, which is so terrific and i’m really proud of her for getting her words out. What she says is that she’s just relieved to think they might see the light of day, meaning the light that distinguishes black-inked words from the white of paper… how very 20th century, n’est-ce pas? Yet i get this. It’s tangible. Like a piece of clay that’s moved from the wheel to the kiln and is now awaiting placement on someone’s crockery shelf. Nothing unself-conscious about that. None of that misty stuff-i-ness that permeates this other world. Still, i have to salute the multitude of bloggers for acting on their impulses, and i hope whomever among them who's taken the time to read this will find something to spark them anew, then send that flash of light back to me, cuz i'm sitting here in the dark now, waiting for morning to come and my own lapsed creative forces to reveal themselves, however briefly.
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