There’s an Italian Proverb that I like very much, “He who is not impatient, is not in love.” Creativity is a lot like love. In my case—a writer is constantly making sacrifices of time and honesty and necessarily becomes intimate with his subject in an almost spiritual way. Fleshing out insecurities with subtle fearful touches that are motivated by the confusing come-and-go of selfishness and total altruism. Pouncing into a project with unapologetic surges, writing as if in a race, followed for what seems like forever by tip-toe editing and insecure retouches that make so little progress for so much effort yet remain begrudgingly necessary. The hormonal teenaged waxes and wanes of love never totally go away.
So I’m writing a play right now that is up for a workshop performance this spring thanks to the wonderful RainDance Theatre. I’ve got a lot of work to do on that and feel like I’m happily in the netherworld between love’s pushing surges and its insecure side-steps on this project. Which is great for now. But I keep writing and cannot help but fall into that Italian proverb. I’ve got short stories and old crappy plays that need work and more poems than I can shake a foot at and not enough time and focus or discipline to organize and point these various projects in the right direction (characterized, of course, by run-on sentences). But my desire to have them actually read by a critical audience is, lovingly, overwhelming.
I’m not screaming, “hey world, give me more opportunities,” because I’ve probably got exactly as much as I can handle. I am lazy sometimes, after all.
I love heights. I love looking down and feeling securely dizzy and wondering at the mass of emptiness between myself and whatever is below. Traditionally vertigo is the battle in one’s brain between the desire to jump and the instinct of self-preservation. Which is deliciously romantic because we have no other reason to jump from a height than to merely experience the height with more senses than our eyes can offer. Because it is just so spectacular. Better than food. But people are afraid of heights because vertigo kicks in to warn us not to jump lest we die. This occupies our brains, making us dizzy and uncertain.
Sometimes, when I write I feel total vertigo. The instinctual desire to create mixed with a romantic need to have the creativity experienced by a crowed. Oddly, no one can experience it as intimately as I can because I use more than only my eyes when I write. My body falls into the ennui of sitting for long periods of time and my brain, in vertigo, swims downwards, tipping back and forth into whatever words arrange on the page. That is why writers must support writers. We can feed each other something intimate by legitimizing each other with an audience.
The point is this, I am creating, sometimes reluctantly and sometimes against my schedule, with an unhealthy desire for critical audience before some of the work is ready for a critical audience. Busy. And just like love, I want to fall, but hardly know how.
