The Wall
I’ve been staring at the screen for fifteen minutes.
At least it doesn’t flicker. Those old fat monitors, sometimes I convince myself I miss them. They had a dull droning hum like a white noise machine. They could get warm enough to keep your hands from freezing. It was a nice feature in the winter time, as I’d usually just sit there and shiver in the cathode glow to save money. But they flickered. Constantly. It was enough to give you eye strain in under an hour.
But at least I didn’t sit there. Just staring at the screen, waiting. I’m not sure which is worse. The wait until my hands move, skittering like long legged insects as I breathe life into a new world. Or the fact nostalgia has tinted everything I do to the point I’d sooner be drunk on memory than proceed. Writing. I used to write all the time.
On my worst days, I tell myself that my best pieces are behind me. There’s nothing new under the sun. No word or turn of phrase I could utter that-like magick-could exorcise the demons of self doubt, fear and panic that seem to nest in the heart of my audience. I’m a hack, I tell myself. Or worse yet, a fraud that didn’t know when to cut his losses. Most days aren’t like that-but it doesn’t change the fact I’m still sitting there. Waiting for something to happen.
As creatives, I’ve found we’re lulled by moments just like this. This long, seemingly unending pause between commissions and pieces. We could create for joy, sure. But who would want to see it?
I’ve a thousand ideas that have been stricken dead in the womb. Others that birthed as these monsters, shoved and contained in the deeper parts of drawers and wastebaskets. So many different tales. So many projects that all get shoved aside in order to meet this incredibly artificial restraint I’ve put on myself.
It’s not that I miss the early days, before the eyes and the money and attention. I surely don’t miss that flickering screen. It’s that I miss having absolutely nothing to lose. It wasn’t about gains, be it financial or merely popular recognition. It’s that total abandonment of fear and doubt. That barreling charge ahead into the unknown, ‘cause hell or highwater I was here to make something. God, I was practically fucking feral to make work.
Knowing that my experience isn’t isolated is a thin but welcome comfort.
There’s a euphoria to the pure act of creation. A limited taste of godhood in making something truly your own, to pluck it from your head like Zeus and set it out into the world. It’s addictive and absolutely intoxicating. It feels endless in those moments, infinite in a way I personally have never experienced in the waking world.
But all things have their limits. Even godhood. Arcadia isn’t bound in ivy alone, but walls. Ones built with financial constraints, limited means and time. God, having enough time to make things. The sands of our own hourglass constantly slip through our fingers, never to be recovered.
Yet the screen sits there, the page empty. Waiting. Beyond the wall of our own self loathing lay beauty unbound, freedom of expression and the self we’ll never find in the flesh. All we have to do is begin.
But how, and where?
Even the most familiar of ways feel fake, imitations of those first hits we had. So we seek new inspirations and sensations, shoving jumper cables into our brains full of stimulation.
Does it work?
Do we care, so long as something happens?
I’ve asked myself this a score of times as I, and Splathouse, have grown.
I still don’t have an answer, but these pages are slowly beginning to fill.
So.
I’m going to take just a moment, and share it with you. Just the few of us.
We’re going to talk about creation. Inspiration.
We’re going to talk about priming that pump of godhood again.
The Siren Song of The Fleeting Muse
She comes to me in a dream, as beautiful as she is horrific in her implications. Unlike the immaterial fluff of that world, I feel her. When she wraps her hands around my wrists. When she presses her lips on my forehead, stilling my entire body. Her warmth is like laying out nude on a summer day.
I wake, sweating and hard. I can’t get that old monitor to stabilize, I’m typing far too fast. My word processor nearly crashes at a manic pace. Yet, when I finally lean back in my chair, she’s here. With me. In the world, if only through the form of words. I didn’t give her a name. I didn’t have to-she had told me herself what it was.
She’d said it in the dreams.
Jen was, is, and continues to be an archetype for many characters in my work. She’s one of the few I’ve given a firm description to as well. And she leaped from the aether into my mind. Albeit from self-neglect and over working. Regardless, she’s been a steadfast support throughout the years in crafting capable lead characters. Many of you have directly told me how much you enjoyed her under the guise of whatever independent, feisty and sharp-tongued lead a work called for.
All that from a jerk off fantasy is pretty astounding.
Inspiration and muses can come from a multitude of different places. The Alchemist, one of my favorite beat creators, has stated before he got inspired from water dripping in a sink. Begotten, another musician, inspired others not only with their works but the real narrative surrounding them. To this day, nobody actually knows who they are. Regardless of where you individually take your creative drive from, it’s valid. It works.
There comes a time however when using that muse may prove fruitless. Sometimes Jen simply doesn’t whisper in my ear. During these moments, we as creatives can feel frustrated. Those walls of Arcadia loom ever closer. During these moments, don’t close your eyes and listen for the muse.
Open your eyes to where they dwell. Breathe it in. What does that place smell like? What does it feel like beneath your fingertips? Is it an endless horizon, a void or hell? You’ve undoubtedly some vivid imagery conjuring up from the depths just thinking about it. Are these too not muses? Is a muse by any other guise not still inspiring?
It’s incredibly easy to fall into the siren song. But, much like the crew with which Odysseuss sailed with, binding ourselves to the course in of itself can prove a tale worth telling. Be not bound to your muse, but instead attentive to what it can do for your needs. Jen gave me warmth in the lonely hours I needed it most. Now? She often flits to the surface here, her lips turned upwards in a smug grin as I write about hips, busts and butts.
The Illusory Wall
The walls of Arcadia, however gilded, are inevitable. No matter how rosey their embrace, therein lies the thorn of “oh fuck, I didn’t make content today”.
In earnest, that’s what the walls are. The illusions we wrap ourselves in just to be a part of a social group. To fit in, to meet the capitalist grind of measuring ourselves by our work and thus finding validity. It’s killing artists, it’s killing ideas, and it’s killing all forms of expression.
Though we may overlap in mediums, concepts and even raw mechanical skill, creation is very much an individual, isolated activity. We pull ourselves away from the rest of the world to make one of our own, and to populate it as a place we’d rather be. How odd I find it then that almost all artists, writers and performers I know are usually somersaulting to shove their own boots in their asses for not making something. “If only I was as good as ____, if only I was recognized”.
It’s all such a sorrowful drone. I say “drone” because that’s precisely what it is-a dull hum that radiates from the base of your skull, ever pulling those walls and hurdles closer. It’s the swan song of many people. What happens when an artist quits or stalls? Where do they go? From the outside looking in, it sometimes feels like they were dragged into Niflheim. All that’s left is what they cared to open up to us about, these shards of a world so private and intimate we live as voyeurs just witnessing them.
So. Before the mists take you, some things to keep in mind.
This is yours and yours alone. Algorithms, upvotes, likes, retweets and shares are all synonyms for the same hideous beast. It hasn’t a form in the flesh, but one in the mind. A mental parasite that eats away at our lobes until only the horrendous shadow of failure looms.
Fuck that monster.
Numbers literally don’t matter. Retweets, likes, reblogs or whatever they’re called literally do not critically measure your work in any quantifiable fashion. Creation is inherently a subjective thing-none among us can truly answer why a god did things this way or that. Even the gods themselves rarely can. Why then should we ever let that extra-dimensional tendril of self hate in via social platforms?
Your creation belongs to you, and answers to you only. It is an extension of you, of your view of the world, of existence. No one in the entire universe or recorded history will ever see the world precisely the same way you do. What you create, thus, will never be the purview of anyone but yourself. It also will be no one’s responsibility but yours. So treat it kindly.
Both of these at the forefront of your mind turn those walls into dust. You can step right through them, whole and unharmed and well. The road to your magnum opus is long, but this isn’t a race. There aren’t even any hurdles.
Keep going.
The Final Flicker
I’ve been staring at this screen for two hours.
I’ve been pacing back and forth. A word appears, then another. There’s a paragraph now, with another to follow. It’s slow going, but I’m getting there. I can feel it again. The dull pulse of euphoria I felt so long ago.
I got there on my own.
Sober, away from the drunken stagger of nostalgia.
This time, the screen doesn’t flicker. Even a little bit. The path is clear.
Arcadia is beautiful and free.
So am I.
-J