People who create things sometimes talk about divine visitation. I don't know about divine visitation, but a truly creative moment possesses a person, not the other way around. I remember writing the few poems I'm still proud of. I could say there was a roaring in my ears. I don't think there was. I could say that I was unaware of myself. That's not true either. But I see how it could be said by a person who is siezed by those moments often. It felt so perfectly focused. Everything about the writing was inevitable. Necessary and perfect and requiring of both emotional and physical effort to keep riding the wave to where it went next.
I fucking hate it when the wave hits you and you're IN A CAR DRIVING TO WORK. The voice of prophesy love and death is shouting at you and all you can do is keep driving because you don't even have a pen to pull over and scribble on an old bill. (Yes, I've done that before.) Oddly, at this particular juncture, the voice of prophesy, love and death sounded quite a lot like the second track off of David Bowie's Earthling, but I digress.
What was I going to say, good god. What was it? Something that sounds pale and stupid now about the question "Why?" being a damn fool Derridean circular puzzle with no end and, if not a complete waste of a healthy person's time, certainly a question that cannot be dwelt on forever. You have to move on to "What?" and "How?".
Segue from there to a random insight dated in my brain circa 1994 when I was working at the Bretton Woods Committee and hanging with the kids from the Johns Hopkins SAIC program (School of Advanced International Studies) who, when deep in their cups, demonstrated a puppyish arrogant belief that they really were going to be world leaders and my sudden understanding one night that some of them would be, some of them wouldn't. But that puppyish arrogance was a necessary thing. Even beautiful.
Very few things besides writing the occasional poem or essay have ever seemed necessary, inevitable and absolute to me. I remember those kids and for some of them, SAIC really was like prophesy, love and death. I imagine those few really will be diplomats and policy makers.
It seems a cynical pose to say you should stand on the sidelines of life and refuse to participate. But every cynic is a wishful optimist in disguise waiting to be seized by the throat by the one good idea so good it cannot be passed up.
I do wonder what I would have written had I been in front of a computer when the wave hit me. It's gone now. This will have to do.
Posted by karen at June 24, 2004 09:26 AM