#the creative block has been utterly out of hand lately but still we weather on

[mxnordberg]

rewatching The Seven and trying to relearn how to draw; it’s been way too long since i’ve done either

[Image ID: a pen and ink illustration of Zelda Donovan. She’s a satyr with huge horns curled around her long, floppy ears. The bridge of her nose is split open, so is her lip and the curve of her cheek, and her visible eye is bruised and swollen. Her nose is bleeding slightly as she looks off to the left with a somber expression. End ID]

[lostboymemoirs]

Finding Your (Creative) Release in Quarantine

“Hey man, gettin’ that release huh?”

Wait, what?

I heard this phrase shouted out from across the street which startled me out of my photo walk daze. Normally my headphones are blaring The Rolling Stones, tickling my hippocampus with tunes to boost my mood in the days of isolation, and I would have never heard this awkward statement.

That day however, I was walking around with my headphones in but playing no music. Sometimes I do this by accident, forgetting to actually start a soundtrack. Other times, like this day, I had them in so I would appear to be listening to music just in case people wanted to interact with me as a deterrent. I wasn’t actually listening to music. I also do this for safety to let me hear traffic since my neighborhood, though quiet, doesn’t have sidewalks.

A statement like this shouted out deserved attention. When I was jolted out of my constant scanning for something to take photos of I looked over and saw this…

In the days of Covid-19, isolation, and social distancing, it’s kind of rare for people to speak to each other let alone look at each other. It’s like we’ve all become ghastly creatures that we can’t bear to look at or are utterly afraid to interact with.

Maybe that was another reason why I was startled as well. I didn’t expect anyone to be calling out across the street at me. And when I first heard it, I immediately thought he was calling me out for walking around with my fly being open or something. Quick glance down and nope, fly was not down. After a couple seconds I processed the message and realized it was probably relating to the fact that I was walking around with my camera in hand.

Internal dialogue: Getting that release. Ahhhh. I get it!

“Yeah, you know, I’m trying to at least!” I shouted back to him across the street. And I also realized how weird that exchange of phrases sounds now.

We both kept walking our respective ways on opposite sides of the street when his whole outfit and appearance hit me. It made me stop in my tracks. Wow, what a photo that would make! So I spun around and paused, still hesitant to ask him for a photo.

You see, that’s one of my biggest struggles — having the courage to ask someone for a photograph. I shoot A LOT of landscapes and travel photos, but asking someone to snap a photo of them seems to be a struggle. But I knew I had to ask. His outfit was the cumulation of life and style in the age of Coronavirus.

So I asked. And he said yes!

It wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought, and I don’t know why asking that simple question has been so hard. Of course his interaction first with me and the acknowledgement of my camera helped. But simple saying, “Excuse me, I really dig your face-mask and that hoodie combo, could I take your photo?” was all it took. Which became the photo above — a really interesting look at life during Covid-19 and our own personal expressions with style.

Now, when I took this photo I was about 30 feet away from him so don’t worry — I practice the social distancing and take all the precautions out in public. Most businesses are closed and all parks are cut off we are still allowed to walk around. This has been my escape lately (when the weather permits me to) and I guess walking can be considered a creative release.

During the last couple of months in lockdown, I’ve struggled to create much of anything. Some days just getting out of bed has been a struggle. I felt like I had to do something — be it writing or photography, but I just couldn’t seem to find the energy to actually start it. I would lay in bed for hours staring at the ceiling. So I forced myself outside. Get out of bed. Put on clothes. Grab the camera. Go outside. Do something! Get it together Ryan!

Just go for a walk and bring your camera just in case I told myself. Stop staring at the ceiling or the wall or the light peeking through the curtains of the window.

I’ve been in the small town of Pawtucket Rhode Island since November, and the combination of not traveling for a long period of time, the cold bleak winter we experienced here, and the loss of clients and work put me into a serious funk.

So how could I beat this and escape this murky period of creative blankness and depression?

Well, it wasn’t really about beating it because I still haven’t. It was more like how I’ve dealt with my depression over the years — adapting to it and filling the void with something. Not wallowing or drowning in it but doing something just to do something.

Sometimes that’s just taking a shower. Other days you find a burst of inspiration and energy. And these photowalks have been my creative release lately.

Walking the neighborhood streets and searching for small misplaced objects or accidental symmetry has been my attempt to boost my creativity for the most part. There isn’t much around here to look at which has stopped me from doing so in the past. Or so I thought.

No ancient castles or bustling foreign marketplaces or mountains and forests or smokey Serbian bars to people watch with cheap beer. Not even the international influence and historic (to America) neighborhoods like you find in Washington DC. No unique character and characters like you might find on the streets of New York.

So what is here in small town Pawtucket?

Pawtucket is mostly just blocks of suburban houses and remnants of an industrial boomtown past its prime. Like an old house that has settled and showing cracks in the foundations and peeling facades. It all sits a little crooked. At first I had no interest in photographing this place, and honestly I didn’t know what to photograph. Many of the streets are covered in litter. Power-lines are the skyline and rusted factories or fast-food chains like Dunkin and McD’s are what make up our array of scenery nearby.

Then something changed after my first couple of walks.

I noticed a lot of trash, yes, but also interesting little things about the neighborhoods. Maybe it’s the way someone’s lawn ornament had fallen over, or the contrast of the rusty industrial towers with the sky, or a colorful and oddly shaped piece of trash that is simultaneously beautiful and disgusting, or one of my favorites — a caution cone that had seemingly fallen into the hole it cautioned of.

It was beginning to become interesting to wander the neighborhood and try to see what caught my eye.

And in turn, this practice also helped me out of a creative rut. Or at the very least supplied a subject for creative release.

You might be surprised by what you observe, experience, and what begins to catch your eye as you walk around sans phone and headphones. Even in a place that you think has nothing to offer you as an outlet for your creativity or even attention might suddenly bestow upon you an unknown element that becomes a catalyst for creativity. Like Pawtucket for me.

I still struggle with being stationary after so many years constantly traveling, and in the age of Coronavirus and all of the restrictions, the adjustment to find something to drive creativity has been slow. But it doesn't mean it isn’t there waiting for you to discover, however rough around the edges it may be or however different from your normal topic of creative release. You just have to open your eyes wider, or just get out of bed and go for a walk.

How have you found your creative release in isolation?

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

Even Celestial Bodies Wither in the Face of Eternity

     Maple leaves are swept into a cyclone in miniature with each gust of wind, the distillation of violence and disorder into something that might be mistaken for beauty. You can faintly make out the pained yelps of your neighbor’s 16 year-old bichon frise as it struggles to make it down a flight of stairs. Poor thing, you think. Maybe one day that’ll be me.

     It is October 27th, and the block on which you live is in repose, save for the neighbor’s dog, which suffers in solitude. But you can hear it, so is it really alone? you ask yourself. But what do we weigh more strongly when pondering the existence of loneliness: the mere presence of others, known or unknown to the self, or the degree to which these others are perceived as playing some role in our day-to-day? The dog doesn’t know that you can hear it. Your reality and its reality don’t intersect, at least not at this moment.

     But anyway, it is October 27th. The sun lurks behind the veil of cumulonimbus, as your block languishes in silence, supine in the face of its treachery. The din of machinery churns somewhere far beyond the hills that mark the end of your hometown. You can recall nights spent with friends in that abandoned factory district, which even now remains caught up in some sort of simulation of life, perpetually grinding along with no beginning or end. Your old friend Daniel, who you had known since the first grade, once accompanied you to the building that decades prior had been known as the L’Oreal Factory. You didn’t know what L’Oreal was, but you insisted that the two of you check it out regardless. So you snuck out of your homes, crept through side streets and alleyways, and eventually arrived at this brick-and-mortar mausoleum. The two of you not-so-nimbly made ingress via an empty window-frame.

     You found yourself in what used to be the product-testing room, not that you were aware of this. Most of the supplies were still there, frozen in time, waiting to be acted upon by a motley crew of frustrated chemists. Daniel and you took everything in, silently making note of any details that caught your interest. Satisfied that you had done this, you turned to him and caught him looking at you with such profound, tangible sadness. Do you remember what he said? He kept his gaze level with yours and told you that he had recently dreamed of his father’s house burning to a crisp. He was riding his violet mountain bike, coming home from baseball practice, choking on the foul tendrils of smoke before he even knew that something was amiss. Then suddenly, there it was. His father’s house, reduced to a fine black ash. Daniel said he couldn’t stop weeping or smiling, and that each response only magnified the other. He was visibly holding back tears as he told you this. You hesitated for a moment and then grabbed his hand before asking yourself whether that was appropriate, partly because you didn’t know what else to do and partly because you had been in love with him for so long, so very long. Four years later he drowned in the reservoir behind the local library. Love having faded into little more than unpredictable pangs of longing by then, you wanted to cry but couldn’t produce anything more than a whimper. Your closest friends apologized to you, as if you had suffered a great loss. In some ways, maybe you had.

     The weather where you live is all sorts of fucked up. It was 80 °F two weeks ago. Today saw a high of 48 °F with a substantial wind chill.

     Putrefied garbage litters the front porch of a semi-abandoned house down the street. Semi-abandoned in the sense that it is now occupied by a corpse. The cleaners don’t come until Monday. It is currently Thursday. You wonder how much temperature affects the decomposition process, if at all.

     In the room over, a light-bulb wavers in and out of existence. You look out the window and see rays of light briefly explode through holes in the clouds, and suddenly it dawns on you that you haven’t left the house in a year. And maybe that’s because there’s a real risk in that, walking down those steps and out your front door, because you know that once you leave you won’t be able to control the outcome. But how many times have you relied on that very same lack of control as a viable exit strategy? Our rationalizations are so malleable, wouldn’t you agree? They are wonderful evidence of our adaptability. They attract and repulse us in equal measure.

     To your left sits an orange spiral notebook, its pages a distinct Joycean yellow. Near the back rests your proudest moment. During the final weeks of your Junior year in college, after you had stopped taking Xanax and started running ten miles a day, you wrote a poem that linked the Nietzchean concepts of eternal recurrence and Amor Fati to the central tenets of Tantra Yoga, because you are an intellectual first and foremost. Your creative nonfiction professor loved the way it conveyed our need to take solace in our mortality. You loved that you stumbled upon a more academic way of writing about dying.

     After some gentle prodding on the part of your classmates, you submitted it to your school’s poetry journal. What was it called? The Tribune? Something like that, I think. As always, you both loved and loathed your creation, somehow convinced that a) in comparison to the fluffy nonsense your peers had submitted, your poem was an undeniable masterstroke of subtle brilliance, and b) it was the long-sought after piece of evidence that would finally reveal you for the fraud you always suspected you were.

     The truth typically residing somewhere in the middle, what ended up happening was 25 or so of your peers picked up that copy of The Tribune(?!?), skimmed through it once, and promptly forgot about it. Everyone expect one student that is, a trans woman named Marcie who will one day go on to become a well-respected writer and activist. She read your poem night after night, lost in the throes of staggering depression and dysphoria, letting every syllable linger on her lips the way one glides their fingers across the back of a lover that is drifting off to sleep. You will never know that Marcie exists, and surely enough, one week after first reading your poem she couldn’t even remember your name. So maybe you were right all along. Maybe your intuition was spot on, and you’re really a fraud. But Marcie, the only person in the history of the universe that will ever commit your words to memory, would beg to differ.

     By now the sky has grown a dark, somber shade of blue. The lights from the nearby city ensure that you will never be lost in that perfect darkness you desire. Didn’t one of your teammates on the tennis team say something to that effect? It was late one evening, if memory serves. You were walking home from practice. You were standing on the corner of Valley and Styles, waiting for the light to turn red, when they observed that you seek a perfect darkness in which to submerge yourself. You looked at them with what I’ll call feigned surprise. They knew what it was too, because they continued, saying that nothing less than perfect darkness will ever do. Of course, you know damn well that nothing of that caliber will ever truly manifest, because in the innermost recesses of your consciousness you will always be scared to die. But what did they know? you ask yourself while staring at the branches of your neighbor’s evergreen. They moved to California after saving up money that they had earned working at the local food court, only to die a week later when their brakes gave out on the highway.

     Our rationalizations attract and repulse us in equal measure, but at all times they are just a form of system justification. The self, being a system first and foremost, and a fragile one at that, must remain properly insulated at all times, lest the universe tear it to shreds.

     You think about this for a moment. You pour yourself into something that you hope will be remembered as a work of beauty. Like all acts of creation, this process involves a mixture of performance and genuine out-of-body flow, and...well, maybe it isn’t entirely fair to paint the creative process with such broad strokes. But if creativity is an extension of the self, and the self is a constantly generated performance, why would it be unfair to characterize creation as, at the very least, a somewhat performative thing? And at any rate, if........but anyway, you spend all this time cultivating a very particular product, expecting - well, expecting what, exactly? Should people hold their breath because you’ve created something? Might the noosphere become a unified consciousness that subsequently anoints you its sole philosophical and artistic voice?

     No. No, things limp forward as always. And fuck, even if something did happen, then what? Will that make any difference when your body starts breaking down? You put something into the world. Well, what about it? Sooner or later you will die, regardless of whatever faux-profound drivel you deliriously dredge up. You never had any control. Before you know it, all traces of your existence will make their bed amongst the stars. And that is but a temporary state, for even celestial bodies wither in the face of eternity.

     A motorcycle tears down your street like an elemental force. Concrete melts away, revealing a profound, unending void where the core of the world ought to be. Now the houses aren’t connected to anything. They just hover, seemingly untouched by the passing of time. The moon presides over all of this, but only partially. It is utterly disinterested. You wish you could be such an impartial observer.

      Across the way there emerges a simple chord progression. ii-V7-IV-vi7, or something like that - your ear was never the best. But your ears perk up nevertheless, and now the drums are coming in with a steady beat. The synth is playing a familiar melody. A voice intones something in a language you don’t understand, but for the love of god you feel like you know what’s being said.

     What do you think this voice is saying? It’s saying you never had any control, and you never will, but there’s a hell of a gap between domination and passive observance. You don’t want either of these things. You know that life is nothing but a series of potentialities. Though it is tempting to believe that these potentialities can only be realized under strict conditions, the truth is we only believe this because we know these conditions will likely never come to pass. And we don’t want them to. Anything less than perfect won’t do, and perfection is an artificial construct. Comfortable with these facts, we sit stock still and don’t do a god damn thing because we are scared. You are fucking terrified of putting yourself out there because you want to preserve this image of yourself that you didn’t do shit to earn. You pay lip service to perfection and cling to the chaos that keeps it from being, because that lack of control shields you from the sting of failure, even as it opens you up to the much longer-lasting pain of regret. Maybe you want to believe that you won’t become that person whose final days are consumed by an endless litany of what if’s. But that will be you. Rest assured, if you continue to sit still that will almost certainly be you.

     So you take a deep breath and stand up. The quarter note pulse of the drums shakes the walls of your bedroom. You stand up, brace yourself, and leap out the window because by now the ground has disintegrated completely and there’s no longer such a thing as gravity. You float above that infinite void, that imperfect darkness, and before you know it the music has become a cyclone in miniature that envelops you. One year removed since you last left your house, you swear it feels like your flesh is being stripped off the bone. The air is toxic. With every breath you burn from the inside-out. But the music doesn’t mind this. Each chord cuts through the toxicity. So what do you do? You dance. For the first time in your life you dance like you are truly comfortable with yourself. There won’t be many moments like this going forward, though truth be told, there will be more of them than you probably expect. The beat persists and you keep dancing, hovering above the imperfect darkness while the sliver of moon impassively looks on, a truly impartial observer.