Teach Me to Care and Not to Care

Well, it started out OK—the day, I mean.  I had slept well, the morning coffee was better than usual, the sky was blue and the morning walk wonderful.

The trouble began, as it so often does, with the computer.  Or in this case, with an anguished email from a cherished sister—Taí!  She has spent three hours undoing some stupidity I had done on the Iguana blog.  Even worse, she APOLOGIZES, claiming the error is her own!

 I feel terrible. I write her an email stating my priorities, the first three of which are: 

1.    My mental and physical health (note the order)
2.    My relationship with Raf
3.    My relationship with my family—of which she is a part, and a BIG part

Relax, dear Reader, it worked out OK. She calls moments after an email I write, we laugh, we are each of us so relieved about…the other!

So it was a failure! A stupid, time-consuming snafu that worked out in the end.

Or was it? Adopting the new philosophy of the Failure Club—which has still not responded, and how am I supposed to read that?—maybe it was a success. (In our terms, not the Failure Club’s….)

Obviously, after this commotion, any creative work is impossible. Or is it? Ah, the Romantic idea of creativity sprung from tumult, despair, confusion. I should surely be able to do a nice Beethovenian post here, right?

My shrink (to put words into his mouth, which he would hate, but hey! I pay him) might say no. Though it now occurs to me that I don’t know what he’d say. He’s a bit off the norm, as shrinks go, and may not subscribe to the idea that creativity has any link to a peaceful, contemplative state.

And shouldn’t I know something about creativity? I wrote a book—well, sort of—and I’ve played the cello. Some of the time it was easy, sometimes hard. Some times I felt great afterward, most of the time no.

But now, slowing down and thinking with the gut, I begin to think that the only test I have for creativity is the feeling after the fact. The revved high that makes me fly through the streets, after I’ve put down the cello, to do whatever chores I’ve appointed myself. The streets and the irritability—people are getting in my WAY!

Even more, the feeling that the work is still going on—the cello still being played in my mind, the writing still spilling out on the mental computer screen.

Like the Justice of the Supreme Court: I can’t define creativity, but I know it when I feel it. (OK, he was talking about pornography….)

Mostly, it’s other people, and especially myself, who block my creativity. A friend makes a comment—and, worse, a positive one—and I then am not writing, but addressing a friend. A cello teacher named Crietz infiltrates my psyche just as his cigarette smoke did my nostrils—he becomes the Crietz figure.

These people are GETTING IN MY WAY!

And how to tell them—fuck off! Is it THEIR problem that I let them in?

OK—so it’s me. Now the trap is…

…that it’s still another person—ME—blocking the creativity….

“Teach me to care and not to care,” I wrote in the last post.

And this morning, it was another line of poetry.  “…the great heron feeds…and does not tax himself with forethoughts of grief to come.”

I think this because the iguanas have all but vanished, on the morning walks. There is, however, a snowy egret.

Whose thoughts are not of grief to come.

Grief—or, here it is again—failure. Yes, I have seen egrets stab the water, extract the fish, and gulp. More often, they simply stub their nose. Or beak…

And if I enter their life, and they find me troublesome—well, they soar away.

Ah, so it’s NOT the people. Nor is it the mind—or at the consciousness of an external presence or world.

Nor do I know why an egret feeding should be an act of creativity—or creativity itself.

I just know it is.

And I know, as Wendell Berry did (words in other peoples’ mouths again, Marc!) that what…?

The thought is gone. The parenthesis in the sentence above, coupled with the worry about how to apostrophize people, chased it away.

Or perhaps—sent it soaring, its white wings catching the golden sun, and morphing it to white?

I want to be on those wings, feeling heat and breeze and excitement and the fish below and my nose or beak…

…not caring for the stubbing.