[ creativity ]
Every post ran through the same sequence:
find the source, watch it, cut to sixty seconds, copy the transcript, write the caption, and save everything.
Joseph Campbell gave us The Hero's Journey, Steven Pressfield gave us The Artist's Journey, but six hundred videos taught me something slightly more dull...
There is no homecoming.
I've identified a loop with seven problems in it, and you meet all seven again later in life:
Am I even allowed
Nawal El Saadawi refused the idea that creativity is a department. Not novels, not music. Creativity, she said, means to revolt against injustice, and without it we cannot revolt at all. You need it in friendship, in love, in any human work. We are all born with it, men and women, poor and rich, Swedish or Egyptian. The education system kills it.
Someone told me no
Tracey Emin's answer is that when people say no, you don't listen to them. She knew at twelve what she wanted to be and let nobody stop her.
People are watching now
This one is more dangerous than the no. David Bowie's warning runs to five words. "Never play to the gallery." Working to other people's expectations, he said, is where artists produce their worst work.
I'm doing this on my own
Brian Eno spent years listening to art history single out people and call them geniuses, and noticed that every one of them turns out to have been sitting inside a crowded, working scene, one element among many. He coined a word for the creative intelligence of a community: scenius.
Does any of this matter
Ursula K. Le Guin thought so, and said why. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.
Someone wants it stopped
El Saadawi was jailed for three months under Sadat in 1981. Political prisoners were denied paper and pens, and by her account the jailer told her that finding them in her cell would be more dangerous than finding a gun. A woman who brought bread into the prison, who had read her work, smuggled her a roll of toilet paper and an eyebrow pencil. She wrote at night after the jailer went home. The book came out two years later. She said the pleasure of writing made her forget where she was.
It's finished and I can't control what happens next
David Lynch quotes an old Vedic line for this: man has control of action alone, never the fruit of the action. You get it as close to the idea as you can. You say it is done. What the world does with it afterwards was never yours.
Then you start again at the first one.