ideas.

From a blog post titled little bits of bone, 29 August 2009.

"Ideas happen in a frozen rush. They form always, interminable, and at unexpected intervals pop like match strikes against all of your senses. You lose track of where you are, what’s playing the radio, airing on the television, and God knows whoever and whatever else might be watching. They can paralyze or ride you to your feet, spinning, muttering as though you’re caught in an infinite conversation with the universe, with the hours, and in buckshot-like scatters of language, clips and phrases of coherency, you are abruptly speaking in the tongues of angels even if it is on the devils you are elaborating. You have lost your moorings and, aware of it, grope for both a hold as well as a hand up higher, always higher and so find a pen or cigarette, a keyboard or a drink (the very fortunate find all of these) and because the minutes are mumbling dire warnings of running out and the taste of fear in the back of your throat says sweetly this all may go pew-pew or kaboom or up, up in ashes and embers if you don’t get it out, get it down, right now, before your heart thuds another beat, you write."

Ideas have been on my mind today. Everyone asks where they come from, but what I want to know is where they go. They go to the page or the computer screen or they sit inside of you, waiting impatiently for their turn. Sometimes the last you see of them is their backs as they walk away, fade out, neglected and malnourished. Ideas can take you anywhere and the bad ones do so with elegiac smiles and beckoning hands. You don't always know they're bad until you're halfway to the end or, if you're really unlucky, not until it's all over. 

Sometimes you have to the let idea lead you where it will to find out how good it is, how good it can be. Other times it's best to get a jump on the idea, wrap it up, tuck it in and take it with you.

I'm going to go on and take the one I have now and get it down. More later. 

Katie made me do it.

Inspiration.

Main Entry: in·spi·ra·tion
Pronunciation: \ˌin(t)-spə-ˈrā-shən, -(ˌ)spi-\
Function: noun
Date: 14th century

1 a : a divine influence or action on a person believed to qualify him or her to receive and communicate sacred revelation b : the action or power of moving the intellect or emotions c : the act of influencing or suggesting opinions
2 : the act of drawing in; specifically : the drawing of air into the lungs

With regard to inspiration of the first variety, breathing sometimes helps. Breathing seems less important in the throes of inspiration; in my experience, one (read: Daniel) becomes so spastic that breathing is the last thing on one's mind. Then, if focus comes, awesomeness ensues. But artists of all varieties struggle with the question of inspiration. Teachers say art is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and that's great and all, probably true, but rarely seems to help. A woo-woo inclined therapist of mine once told me that inspiration is something you really do have to consciously breathe in sometimes. She asked me how often I go take a walk someplace I find beautiful, go look at art in a gallery or museum (not online), add fuel to the fire in my belly? Answer: not as frequently as I should.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said a beautiful young person is an accident of nature, but a beautiful old person is a work of art. I have been wondering lately if this applies also to the robustness of an artist's imagination. It certainly seemed to come easier and of its own volition back in the day.

This isn't actually meant to be a rant, and even this feels like pulling teeth. I would hate to make a generality about Generation X and beyond, to say that we don't have the discipline of previous generations, because it's not true of many individuals, and I wouldn't know how to actually measure aggregate discipline. Suffice it to say that school came easily enough for me as a child that I never learned good study habits, and that translates to my writing (such as it is). At twenty-nine, am I too old a dog to learn new tricks? Perhaps not, but the muscles to initiate and maintain this are certainly atrophied.

I think I chose this (perhaps) trite subject because despite knowing the problems and the solutions, I still struggle with this and I know other people do too. Sometimes it seems like Einstein's definition of insanity: "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." But so it goes.

So I suppose we as writers and artists must develop our voices, our discipline, and maintain that pool of inspiration. When the pool runs dry, discipline can keep us working until we can refill it. Martha Graham said, "It takes about ten years to make a mature dancer." That's disheartening in one sense, that it takes so long to mature as an artist, but it can also be heartening in that a carefully tended artistic spirit can endure indefinitely.

apropos.

It's amazing what writers will ask a person. What is even more amazing is what writers will consider to be a perfectly legit question at, say, two o'clock in the bloody ante meridiem. If the question is posed from one writer to another, then all bets are off. The questioned might not be capable of stopping herself from launching into paragraphs of tangential, so-called "answers" that might cause normal people to feel as though they've been assaulted (molested?) by an O'Brien's dreadful-to-hold-onto nothing. 


One writer needs a biochemical weapon idea to give to a space pirate. Another writer is trying to come up with an appropriate character name that will become adopted as a title (such as "Ceasar", but, you know, not). Someone else is forgetting that they are, in fact, on the intertubes and it would probably be faster to look up the name of the Union general who went against Lee in the Battle of Sharpsburg than ask you who may or may not recall that particular history class (McClellan, if you're wondering). 


These are merely some of the more recent questions, demands and/or pleas that have been put to me seemingly apropos to nothing. Only, of course, they are relevant and even the afore-mentioned endless, "nothing" answers often are. Why?


Because like I said in an earlier post before I hauled my blog here, ideas happen in a frozen rush. They form always, interminable, and at unexpected intervals pop like match strikes against all of your senses. You lose track of where you are, what's playing the radio, airing on the television, and God knows whoever and whatever else might be watching. They can paralyze or ride you to your feet, spinning, muttering as though you're caught in an infinite conversation with the universe, with the hours, and in buckshot-like scatters of language, clips and phrases of coherency, you are abruptly speaking in the tongues of angels even if it is on the devils you are elaborating. You've lost your moorings and, aware of it, grope for both a hold as well as a hand up higher, always higher and so find a pen or cigarette, a keyboard or a drink (the very fortunate find all of these) and because the minutes are mumbling dire warnings of running out and the taste of fear in the back of your throat says sweetly this all may go pew-pew or kaboom or up, up in ashes and embers if you don't get it out, get it down, right now, before your heart thuds another beat, you write.


Ideas are fond of ambushes. Everything is apropos, even nothing.