What Next?

There are two kinds of people in the world. No. That’s silly. There are as many kinds of people in the world as there are people in the world.

I want to talk about what happens to me when the book or story I’m writing is done or abandoned and a new something has yet to manifest in my creative life. Sometimes something new immediately manifests: a story that’s been waiting for the chance to claim my synapses. When that happens, the mechanics of my daily life are not disrupted. My work continues with a new something.

But sometimes nothing new immediately manifests, and the ensuing emptiness in the pattern of my life makes me feel… well, I should say the ensuing emptiness used to make me feel uneasy, depressed, lost. Nowadays, after a lifetime of experiencing these breaks between stories, I understand these spaces are opportunities to allow things to manifest rather than forcing something into being.

Oh I used to be a great forcer of things into being. I forced millions of words out of hundreds of pens onto thousands of pages, and not one of those forced words was any good to me or anyone else. The engine for such forcing was my intellect working in collaboration with my fear of what might emerge from the emptiness. And though I know many people will disagree with me, I don’t think art created by the intellect has any intrinsic value, unless one hungers for imitation, because imitation is all the intellect is capable of producing.

By the way, Artificial Intelligence is also only capable of imitation, which is why artists need not fear AI, in case you were afraid AI would replace creativity. AI certainly may displace lots of creative works, but it cannot replace creativity, which is non-linear, non-digital, and not quantifiable.

Times of creative gestation – another way of thinking about the time in between stories or songs or poems or paintings manifesting – are opportunities to practice letting go of defining ourselves by what we do, and instead feeling ourselves as we are, allowing our thoughts to go every which way, or to not have any thoughts. In these times between, we can open ourselves to things we were previously unaware of because we were so focused on the previous whatever.

And when the new something does begin to manifest without any intellectual forcing… well, I’m reminded of my favorite poem by Lew Welch, not because his poem explains anything about the space between stories, but because the feeling of his poem captures how I feel when a new something arrives and begins to sing to me.

[I SAW MYSELF]

I saw myself

a ring of bone

in the clear stream

of all of it

and vowed,

always to be open to it

that all of it

might flow through

and then heard

“ring of bone” where

ring is what a

bell does

                        Lew Welch

fin

One Fell Swoop piano solo from Todd’s album 43 short piano improvisations