One of the original reasons I created Sotto Voce, back in the pre-blog days when it was completely invisible, was so that I could use it as a “messy workbench” — a place to build written things out of agglomerated found objects, to throw ideas on the wheel and turn them until they take shape, to just toss scraps of paper (like my typecasts). A long searchable index of ideas that can be read thematically, chronologically, or randomly to help me mark way stations, make free-form associations, trigger inspiration, and point me in new directions. This post is one of those.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about my imagination since moving to Annapolis and returning to my creative life. I definitely wasn’t using it much in Baltimore. But now, having set up my hobby space in the basement with Zorak the halogen lamp, my blue tackle-box of tools, and (of course) my brother Mike’s dirtbike painting, I’m feeling ye aulde feelings again. Nothing like a little styrene therapy, the smell of hot airbrush thinner.

This morning I was listening to the latest Alan Watts Podcast (Taoist Way #5, for future reference) and he reminded me why kids have such active imaginations, why so many people lose theirs as they grow up, and why I haven’t entirely lost mine yet:

“If you see, then, that ‘what you experience’ and ‘you’ are the same thing, then realize also, going beyond that, that you are in the external world you’re looking at. You see, I’m in your external world, you’re in my external world. But I’m in the same world you are. My inside is not separable from the outside world. It’s something the so-called outside world is doing, just as it’s doing the tree and the ocean and everything else that is in the outside world.

“Now isn’t that great, you see? We’ve completely got rid of the person in the trap, the one who either dominates the world or suffers under it. It’s vanished, it never was there. And when that happens, you see, you can play any life game you want to. Link the past and the present and the future together. Play roles. But you know you’ve seen through this . . . great social lie — that one accumulates, owns experiences, memories, sights, sounds, and from that other people, possessions, so on; building up always this idea of one’s self as the ‘haver’ of all this. If you think that, you’ve been had.”

This also obviously deals with the whole “transactional” issue that I’ve always wrestled with in regards to creativity — how can you transact what you never really possessed? The real value lies not with the artifact of the creation (the words, the painting, the sculpture, the song, the dance) but with the passion and the creative spark that created that work, and that can never be transacted, though it can (in the Zen sense) be transmitted. Otherwise it’s like trying to own the finger that points to the moon. It’s my fable: the man who bought the ashes because he wanted to own the fire.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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