On Creativity

Light and shadow, lichen and stone. Today, everything is texture, even sound. Gently overlapping conversations mesh well with kitchen clatter but are absorbed by the moist mossy bark of a stream-side oak. Oddly crazed sidewalks contrast with coruscations of dwindling sunlight flung off the mica-bedizened coping atop eroded stone walls.

Edges define shapes, but textures connote feeling. Function necessarily follows form, but ephemera such as emotion and context flow from texture. Verdigris weathervanes against cerulean sky. Note the forms: pointed flat rigid weathervane and domed distant formless sky, and the textures: mottled slightly flaky verdigris and untouchable ineffably clear cerulean.

Textures lodge in my mind but the visions behind my eyes are all of edges and boundaries; positive and negative space regionally flat and without texture, but unifying into images meaningfully imbued with both form and feature...

Lost amongst these scenes, dreaming, I dance at the edge of an internal abyss. Falling would not be despair; it would be flying the only way available to a wingless creature such as me.

This is not the real world, where an abyss must taper and end. This is the limitless mind, where memories impressed upon the walls will fleet past, a brilliant mosaic of thought. Gravity is irrelevant here, but the inexorable force of creativity will accelerate me ever faster, ever deeper into the world of archetypes, symbols, and ideas.

A new opinion forms within myself: to be an artist is to give one's self up to forces one cannot control. Artists are interpreters of ideas, not arbiters of meaning. One can no more attempt to constrain the way experiences mingle in the mind and thereby affect the expressive product than one can control free fall. The attempt merely smears itself prettily down a cliff face.

I gaze downward as I dance at the edge of the abyss: a sublime maelstrom gazes back. I know what I must do. It is time to end a lifetime of resistance. Time to break that most formidable of habits, the desire to control what happens to me. Understandable, this habit; and natural, this resistance. But only the unfettered may fly.

Dare I? Will I? The desire to understand my own nature and some part of the nature of all that I reflect compels me. The answer is here; an aspect of the geography. I crouch, focusing every detectable fibre of desire to control my circumstances that I still possess and directing this energy into my legs. The last thing I will control will be the moment; the time; the choice. For a heart-beat longer I wait, an equipoise that can resolve itself in only one way. And so I leap.

The transformation of commitment is wrought upon my nature. My chosen leap inevitably becomes an uncontrollable fall. True creativity begins as my soul learns to fly.