Translating being through the creative process
Our access to shared formlessness
When I was in college, the first day of class was probably nerve-inducing…but I don’t remember that. Strength of memory resides not in the worry of finding the classroom, or of peering at all the new faces I didn’t know, or of trying to interpret the strange language of a new professor, but in the receipt of the syllabus and the immediate jolting thrill I felt course through my body. Honestly, it was orgasmic. My physicality was incited, was tingled and tickled, was lit to burn and then melted away at the thought of all the new thought I was going to be introduced to.
I remain turned on by thought—by discovering a writer who phrases the existential sameness with originality, by insights my own mind could never conjure, by perspectives my experience would never allow, and by connections between things or across disciplines or around people’s lives.
And yet. Single parenting, especially where no other parent exists as in my own case, is an indulgence of choice. I can choose how to raise them, how to model being in the world, what to expose them to, what time to put them to bed. But it can also be a grind. School breaks are no vacation for me. The incessant requests come like breathing whilst also tightening it, the whining voices grate my desire to offer generosity of service to another human, and the bickering. Oh god, the fighting. I suppress the intensity I feel when one child hits another. The brutality enrages me. The many arguments between siblings spill out over space, tripping over new toys tossed carelessly, overtaking my energies, mostly about whose item is whose, where someone is “allowed” to be in the house we presumably share, what one can control and others cannot—this constant assertion of being in the world; it must be hard to still have a toe in the non-physical, to have almost-memories of non-existence and its bliss, to want this earthly beauty so badly and to be in the splintering forgetting of how it is and has always been yours.
But yes, my thought stalls amidst the rotations of dirty dishes, the clothes I forget to launder and then exhaustedly begin as night draws on hoping to make it before its strength weakens into morning and there is nothing to wear, amidst the running circles of feet, the whirling pounding pounding of energy, amidst the conflict resolution from which I have always shrunk and now must broker daily, even hourly. When I finally sit down after putting the younger ones to bed in the evening, my mind recognizes the enervation of my being and all thought collapses into a low sinking featureless cloud. I find I can stare out the back window during this time of day and the stillness appears dynamic, almost aggressive. Those garish lights squinting at me from a distance, some animal rustling noisily across the lawn in the dusty light, the branches of white ash with their youthful smooth bark stretching their own day away and reminding each other of a world I can only witness, the smooth waters of the pond anything but static as mist rises or lowers itself back down, or the moon itself considering, hovering, and then lowering its own tiredness into the gray water.
I try to write. Poems come out hulking and square and wooden. The words they use to describe what words cannot are too literal, too logical, too forced through the visible wringer of my thinking, the obviousness of their contrived birth so heavy my stomach hurts.
I have thoughts of topics I want to write about. They tiptoe to me half-formed and then un-form as I sit down at the computer, receding away as I try to grasp their watery essence. Please don’t leave me, but they are a slip of space incapable of hearing requests.
Pieces of thought begin to bubble in the ironed recline of evening, where I lie held at a slight angle by pillows in my bed, where noise has flattened into an expanse of relief. I can hear my exhales, the relinquishment of the immersed doing of day. I chuckle as I read some familiarity of life, of creation and its strange ways of arising into us.
Sparks of ideas ignite the darkness. 2am and they wake me. I try a mnemonic and keep myself frustratingly awake repeating it. I do this for an hour and then, not trusting my middle of the night memory, turn the bedside lamp on and scribble some notes down. The pen runs out and I grab a pencil. Who knows? Sometimes I can interpret my own scrawl the next day and sometimes not. More importantly, I am still here bringing, or rather, as it more authentically feels, channeling thoughts into being. To what end, I have no clue.
What do I become when I’m not thinking? When I am stuck in this stalled place of cacophony—devices left singing Cocomelon with no watcher, yelps and howls and calls of “bro” from basement video gaming, the needs that keep running to me and which I feel too spongy to fulfill. It isn’t the thinking itself that makes me—that which I happily release when meditating, when practicing yoga, when skiing through the woods, when watching the local fleet of birds take to the skies. I remember outcome-oriented men used to ask me all the time at the gym, what are you training for? The question felt so off to me. I wasn’t working towards any end, I was experimenting with my physicality and what it could offer, and where its limits might lie.
Is then the question: what do I become when I am not birthing newness? Often not even newness, I am humbly aware, but the experience of living as it flows through this body surrounding this little bit of consciousness…all of the stuff that feels like, but isn’t, “me.”
It isn’t the newness then either. It isn’t even the writing. The feeling is the same as when I work out, try to surf, or have a snowball with my kids. I ache to play with this physical thing into which a consciousness has been poured, to join intangible with touch. Truly, what a gift to wrap the physical around consciousness. What a chance to explore nothingness with materiality. It’s why I push myself to try unusual things, like training to do a handstand push-up. [Below, my 4th set of wall walks in a workout so I am already tired!]
I remember agreeing to do some consulting work when my third child was just a few weeks old. I sat at the kitchen table with her swaddled tight against me nursing, writing model essays for high schoolers on my laptop. The image looks wild in my memory, looks ridiculous and desperate. But I was desperate. I needed to engage with the insubstantiality of ideas and feel them in the substance of my being. That has always been my need. It is the singular thing which makes me feel most alive. I remember in my late teens choosing to type my writings on my parent’s old portable Smith Corona because the feel and noise of the immaterial was reassuring, animating even.
I was recently asked, when explaining the pain I was experiencing while trying to write a new poem, why I was doing it. In the moment, I mumbled something incomprehensible about just needing to. As I allowed the feelings of need to form into language a few minutes later, I texted: “I have a responsibility to the creative process and what comes to me through it…which is the magic I know and can channel into the world.”
It is hard to wrap words around life’s urges and longings, around the beingness and doingness that we engage in. I don’t know why this is my “thing”—sometimes I don’t even know what it is to be a “writer” in the public square sense of the word. In actuality, it is not my thing at all, but the gift to all of us in being human. If you do not want to wrestle with using words to share your experience of it, that’s fine of course, but hopefully you are wrestling with some aspect of translation from essence into form.
I could just get comfortable in materiality, but to what end? In our materiality, we can (and do) grasp at anything to hold on more tightly—drugs, alcohol, other materiality, even meaning. Trying to find meaning is usually futile and it becomes dangerous if we think we’ve found it and then encircle our being around an opinion or a belief. As Peter Schjeldahl wrote in his moving essay “77 Sunset Me: Notes on an ending” (or at least that was the original print title), penned a few months after being diagnosed with incurable lung cancer:
Meaning is a scrap among other scraps, though stickier. Meaning is so much better than nothing, in that it defines “nothing” as everything that meaning is not. Meaning prevents nothing from being only nothing. The “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” Wallace Stevens noticed. The same nothing, but a different attitude.
But discovery is there…and there for the taking or the moving through. Not in the silly sense of self-knowledge which is just knowledge, though we like to take a lot of personal credit for its acquisition. Discovery is this form of human play, this play with human form, a light-hearted non-grasping movement through life…one that I do not pretend to have mastered, but that I aspire to. Did you ever notice the neat trick of engaging in physical challenge? The active physicality frees you from the physical itself.
It is the same thing with writing where the process of making form of experience frees me from my isolated humanity into something shared and far-reaching, ever reaching really.
Indeed, when I push aside the self-doubt, I feel the knowing beneath. The knowing, not cerebral or logical but a burning ache in my center, that takes my hand and pulls me forward and onward to continue placing plodding words on a page, or viscous paint on a canvas, or even to touch another human as an act of creation—all of these acts of creation reciprocal moments where self is bridged and timelessness is ever so momentarily opened.