in media res

"I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning." -Peter DeVries

As I began to write I suddenly became aware of a gulf inside me. Something was missing. What time was it? What day, what month? Had I really been gone so long, lost in such delusions of mundane reality that I had forgotten to check a clock or a calendar? No, that is preposterous. The working man always knows what time it is. What day. What date and which clients are on the roster.

But seeing as I had no clients and no roster of any kind I sippose I could not claim to be a part of this workaday crowd, no matter how many days I worked. Or how many hours per day. I suppose it wasn’t ever really work. Just time passing while I did things they paid me for. What is work, anyhow?

The sun had risen and set many times, the minutes ticked away, the cows bawled, the kettle boiled, and yet here was I, staring off into a void. Perhaps at the gulf that had now formed in my head. A chasm that contained no thoughts. Well, perhaps thoughts of some kind from some far off places, but no thoughts that I could pull out and drag into my kitchen and clean and gut and eat and enjoy. No sir. There was nothing in my head.

A few days before, I had come up with the idea of writing a log. The log was to be real meta, real introspective and self-reflective and clinical and, well, ugly and boring I suppose. But mostly it was to be about how I don’t do what I really want to do. Now for many of you this may sound paradoxical. How does someone not do what he wants to do? Well, there are many ways. Do you think bears would LIKE to spend all that time catching salmon in their mouths when they could save much more time and energy by building a fishery, a sort of coop to collect all the fish for the collective? Of course, some bear would need to be put in charge. This might cause friction, as we have seen in countless allegories about animals doing human things….

Okay so what about politicians—do you really imagine they WANT to run for office? No. They are called forth, summoned to present their unique gifts of oral flatulence to great body politiques. Sometimes it is God who does the calling. Most times it is people with unfathomable sums of money,

So in this way I suppose it is quite right that we don’t always or ever do what we want.

As interesting as bears certainly are, the topic for my log was, erm, NOT interesting. Yes, that’s the right expression. It lacked interest. That is to say, the readers would lack the interest to read it. Basically it was about not writing but wanting to write. And then the subsequent dreams about that failure to write. The blog was, will, might be titled “Eating Spiders”.

The idea of consuming arachnids as it relates to not-writing comes from, perhaps ironically, a blog entry I found about the significance of dreams. Now, I don’t generally believe in any of that mumbo jumbo about interpretation of things. Interpretation of dreams, bones, stars, cars, reality shows, literature—it’s all the same to me. Except literature of course, which should always be interpreted, and in the appropriate, academically-governed way. However, my skepticism notwithstanding, what I read astounded me. When I happened to pass over a section about spiders, there popped up several subheadings dealing with different ways in which spiders figured into the dream. “Spiders in your room”, “spiders in your pants”, “spiders eating YOU” (only in Soviet Russia, as they say), “spiders crawling on your face” (but what if you are about to eat them?), and finally, fatally, “eating spiders”.

To cut to the chase, the gypsy dream anatomy specialist claimed that it is very common to dream about eating spiders, especially for artists and writers who have not been as productive as they feel they should. Bingo. Wowie wow wee wow. If this wasn’t some kind of wake up call, well then, it might have been a dream. I guess I’ll never know. But it resonated somewhere in my pre-frontal cortex nonetheless, and the sin wave traveled back to my occipital bun and rattled it around for a bit before finally coming to rest on my brain stem. After my leg stopped twitching and I regained motor functioning, the truth of the matter really, truly started to sink in: I am a writer who needs to write but….doesn’t.

So to start this off in the middle, let’s just simply ask the question about writing and creativity, “What is need?” What does it mean for us to “need” something versus want it or desire it? We all know of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. But it seems to be that the slices of the pyramid usually stop being true “needs” (in the sense of survival) about one-third of the way up. Food, water, shelter, a bit of attention. A dearth of anything else wouldn’t be the death of us, would it?

Of course, the pyramid continues up to psychosocial needs, social needs, self-satisfying needs, ego-quenching needs, arrogant needs, Cheetohs-munching needs, and finally, sitting alone at the top like a lonely reflection at the head of a pin, the holy grail of humanness: the attainment of self-actualization.

It goes without saying that this table is outdated, and there have been dozens and dozens of changes and new tables and charts and graphs and diagrams and continuums created to measure needs. But the takeaway message from this is that there IS no baseline for need. There is not even an ideal amount of needs-meeting that will bring Satisfaction with a capital “S”. There IS no “meta-happiness” that can be measured on any scale extant or yet to be devised. So how do we know what we need?

I certainly don’t claim to know. The simple answer is that it is contingent upon what we want. If we WANT “y” then we usually NEED “x” to satisfy it. This is obvious, but perhaps it can move us to new ground. For example, if what we desperately want is money, then we need to develop the tools to make money or possibly a scheme to bring in money. If we strongly desire fame then we first need to decide if we’ll settle for infamy and, barring that compromise, pick a domain and work hard to earn a spot somewhere in the pantheon of the eminent and famous.

Likewise, if what we desire more than anything is to create something good and memorable and lasting, something that is beyond ourselves and that might possibly shape the world for the better if only in some very small way, then what we need is a whole host of tools and regimens, mantras and goals, valuations and schedules. Many of us wannabes find the mere mention of these necessities a kind of air-raid siren bearing down upon us, for they are too many to contemplate without our being in the middle of the work already. Without knowing that you know what you are doing how can you do what you need to do?

So what do we do, we eaters-of-spiders-in-dreams? It is not enough to create theoretical tables of tools and outlines of attack plans and adages of hard work and a nickel and a million other drops of bullshit in the pond. No, want calls for action and nothing else. The action will be auto-catalyzing, will generate momentum to combat the brutal force of entropy, the path-of-least-resistance mindset that denies so many their creative torches to take to the dark alleys and scream poetry at the naked sky. And action often demands collaboration, consultation, collusion, conspiracy. And all these things are needed. But for the artist what is required fundamentally, to cease consumption of those bitter arachnids, is self-reflection and tenacity. But enough with the “-tions”. We need to begin in the middle of things so that we can work it out for ourselves. This blog is my attempt to do that in media res.