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Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Contemplating Creativity
-- A Taste from TheInkFlowsLikeWine.com
Last night I watched I'm Not There and thought about my life for while. Every time I seem to watch a good movie, or a film that makes me think in some way, I fall into a sort of contemplative mood that essentially gets existential and judgmental all at once, like Billy Corgan circa 1995 if you will. I'm not sure what specifically triggered this in the film, but it was the sort of story or anti-story, depending how you look at it, that seemed to question a person's worth overall. I mean, here's a guy (Bob Dylan for those under a rock for three years, trying to saw that caught arm off) who at one point in the film gets asked why he does what he does, and if he truly believes what he says in his songs. He famously tells the interviewer, "How am I supposed to answer that if you have the nerve to ask it?" Then he walks away from the interview, jumping out of a moving car in the middle of London, shortly after tripping with the Beatles... Right.
Anyways, it reminded me of a question that a good friend posed to me back when I was in high school, playing in a hardcore band, thinking I was king of the world because people came to our shows, thinking I had it figured out because I was inspired, I had my whole life in front of me after all. Music came easy then, and I had barely even known what I was doing. I taught myself how to play guitar in order to join a band with my friends literally a month beforehand.
While I was hardly the first person to begin playing music with no idea what I was doing, I wonder now if it was better to not know. Half of the time now, I find myself thinking of all that I've learned, and all the possibilities open to me, and then when I strum it always sounds the same to me. Back then, it was just about power chords in drop D, the easiest thing to possibly play. When we'd write, our first drummer would just say, "Make it tech, like such-and-such." That was easy enough, throw in some heaviness, add some melody, and our singer would growl over it all anyways. It wasn't even about the beauty of it, because that would show itself in the form of people slamming into each other at various community centers around town to our shows.
Anyways, back to my friend's question, which was posed to me close to graduation, when I was still considering continuing on with the band while I was at college an hour and a half away. I don't even remember the original conversation in any way, but I believe we were talking about creativity and the creation of art, be it visual or musical. He was a visual artist at the time, though he's shown quite a passion for music as well (kid can kill on harmonica). At one point he asked me, "What are you trying to say?" He could understand me just fine, what he was getting at was, WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF YOUR ART? I feel like you could go up to any artist of any medium, and ask them that and they'll either scowl at you and tell you to piss off, or they'll take it into their mind like a precious gem and let it shine so brightly that it begins to overtake their thoughts. Maybe they'll start to obsess over this, maybe they'll start to overanalyze to the point where they can't possibly be creative on any level anymore because every stroke, every note seems presumptuous or over-saturated. Maybe this is just an excuse, but I still can't answer it.
Maybe his question got to me at that point in my life. Shortly after I stopped playing music, dissolved the band, and began to write stories and poems like crazy. I had seemingly found a new passion and I spent all my spare time writing furiously on a typewriter throughout my four years at college. I don't believe I ever really had any type of message or point in mind though, so even though I was pumping out pages, I still had nothing to say. Two novels later, which do nothing more than hold up other books on my shelf, I found that I wasn't saying anything there either. I was killing time, I was filling in space up to the big message that never appeared.
Later, I moved to Arizona, and ceased to write a word creatively to this day. I took up music again, got very into writing it, found some people that inspired me, and did some recordings. But I wasn't happy with the outcome and the overall situation, so I moved to Brooklyn, where I figured everything would make more sense and my message would come. But the outcome was similar to AZ, I still had nothing to say, and though I wrote a bunch of songs, did some rough recordings, and bought much better gear, I was still unsatisfied. So I moved to Portland, to try and get out in the trees, to remember what the point of this whole creative process is. Up to this point, I've got a bunch of songs, people interested in playing with me somewhat, but I'm still not sure what I'm trying to say completely.
So, I found myself contemplating all this last night as Dylan's unreleased title track of the film, "I'm Not There" played in the background. The film ends with this quote from Dylan, which pretty much sums up the idea of the whole story:
"People are always talking about freedom, the freedom to live a certain way without being kicked around. 'Course the more you live a certain way the less it feels like freedom. Me? I can change during the course of a day. When I wake I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time. It's like you got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen."
Food for thought I suppose, but maybe he's on to something there. Am I stuck being me? Is there someone else inside me that I've ignored? Or am I someone else? I feel like I've changed a lot since I was a passionate 17-year-old kid with a Nirvana hat and a Buick, but maybe I've gone the wrong way, maybe I've been thinking about the whole process all wrong. Maybe I need to be someone else to really pinpoint the story inside me, because I know there's something to say in there but I can't seem to find my tongue. Maybe I'm still there in my hometown in my subconscious, finding solitude in headphones from my surroundings, feeling the excitement and sweat from a successful show or practice, still having the time of my life with music and creativity as a whole. Or maybe I'm not there...
