I was absolutely dying to take my persona off. I’d had it up to here with being polite, chipper, enthusiastic, patient, accommodating and on time. I wriggled out of it so fast I didn’t notice I’d forgotten to hang it up.
I have to put it back on tomorrow and was disheartened to find it compressed under a pile of unaccomplished to-do-list-items and some dirty socks, probably the mates of all those single socks that came out of the laundry as an annoying bafflement.
It looks even heavier than I remembered. I wish there was a Persona drycleaner who could steam it back into something elegant and desirable, maybe stuff its pockets with a few extra witty bon mots and some sincere sounding answers to the question, how was your holidays?.
It’s not that the answer is terrible, I had a lovely holiday, it’s just that I want to be wild and free a little longer. My inner wildness is uncivilized. It doesn’t want to be seen. It wants to be in the woods. But it’s also a bit reckless, tracking mud everywhere, howling and snarling just for fun. I don’t want to get that mud on anyone I care about. I don’t want someone to accidently get snarled at.
The Persona is graceful and kind, she always wipes her feet on the doormat and greets the door opener with a smile. I would like her to greet me first, to tell me everything is going to be ok. Then I would feel comforted as I slipped her back on, knowing that while she constrains, she also prevents regret.
I’ve noticed something that really bugs me, wonderfully accomplished humans are introduced as the feature guest on a podcast and they inevitably say they feel old after the host recounts several decades of achievement.
Is this the sorry outcome after years of doing exactly what you hoped to do when you were young?
Imagine a young person thinking to themself, I want to write books, I want to fall in love and raise children, I want to have a multi-million-dollar business, I want to garden, I want to walk in the woods many times, I want to have a few cool outfits, I want to laugh with my friends. Through a combination of good luck and intention this young person lives two or three decades and gets some of that stuff done. Then they feel bad they aren’t young anymore.
So, at the beginning we feel insecure and anxious about what we have not yet been able to experience and accomplish and at the end we feel insecure and anxious about how much we have experienced and accomplished.
This is just stupid.
We are all getting older. It’s not a choice for anybody. There is no shame in it. Let’s never apologize for it again.
It’s better for everyone, sets a positive example, if we can appreciate where we are on the wheel. I am proud of all the walks around the block, the hundreds of thousands of hours of musical reverie I’ve indulged in, the millions of pages I’ve turned in books and in life. You can’t buy it at a store, you pay for it with time.
We encounter most creative endeavors when they are complete. It seems to be the default to imagine that they were conceived exactly as we see them but as an idea rather than a thing. For some reason people seem to think that thinking is how you get things done. You have an idea; you think about it and then you execute it. All the choices were made in the thinking. Thinking is the most important thing. Thinking is equivalent to intelligence. Thinking is the master.
But really, it’s nothing like this at all. Thinking is at best a tool in the hands of a mysterious master whose methods are almost magical.
To be clear, I do not believe in magic. I use the term in a poetic way. Magic conveys an ability to get results from a process that is not articulable. At least not at the beginning. Once it’s all done you can articulate or recite what happened, but you can’t make up that list in your head before you’ve started. You can try but it won’t work. Or it won’t work as anticipated. Something will go wrong. Wrong is too negative, something will just go different. And how the person or team responds to that is likely to be more influential on the outcome than the original vision.
Perhaps I think about this so often because I am a documentary editor. I am given something and told to make sense of it. It’s like doing a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with no cover art to reference. It could seem that my profession flavors my other art, but I think, it’s the opposite, I came to it because I have an innate editing sensibility. I like to respond more than I like to construct. That’s what the face making is all about. I see something and respond to it. I have not made a single face that originated in my head first.
My abstracts are similar. I put a few marks on the page and everything else flows out of the choice. I usually try to make that choice as surprising to myself as possible so that I will be forced to really respond and not do an action that I have done before. I like art to be an adventure.
Some things, however, necessitate planning and careful execution, like building a house. What I am talking about doesn’t come into play during the construction of the building, planks do need to be measured and cut precisely. But what about the initial imagining of the house? You don’t measure your way into something novel, something never before seen, something special, precious, unique and surprising. You don’t tell your brain to just think it up. You have an impulse that you follow, like tracking an animal through the forest. You read the signs, you grow excited, you feel tense, you wonder if what you are hearing and sensing is real. Are you on a path or are you making a path with your constant trampling back and forth?
My brother texted me recently about a dream he had. He told me about it because he couldn’t believe his unconscious brain could author such a sophisticated story.
That’s not thinking but it is intelligence. It’s not consciously directed but it is available.
Sidewalk Face 