These past few weeks have not been easy. I have a very sick friend. We have a very sick leader and a very sick country and the key to survival feels like it goes against the grain of everything we humans are built to do -- touch, listen, show affection, bathe in the warm glow of others.
So, I can't say I've been terribly productive. Because I really haven't. In fact, I found myself so stressed last week that I decided to postpone a show I'd advertised for Halloween night. Bottom line is I recognized about 36 hours ahead of time, that I was pushing forward with the show in order to not allow myself to feel the stress and sadness and anger that's just part of where I am right now.
And if you've ever tried that sort of self-deception, you know it doesn't really work. So I was starting to resent this little solo musical I'd conceived of as a wholly improvised bit of horror and instead of opening my mind to possibility all I felt was dread. So that was good. I'll do the thing in a month or two and it'll probably (hopefully) be better for it.
But the stress and exhaustion I'm battling make is almost impossible to work on imagining or writing new material. And key for me during periods of unrelenting stress is to stop forcing the sort of creative work I think I should be doing and instead turn to some of the the things I really do need to attend to that don't demand the same brain power.
So, for example, I have piles and piles of note cards, notebooks, scrap paper notes, note pads and even the odd cocktail napkin with scrawled ideas, outlines, titles, themes, areas to investigate, questions to answer all potentially leading to dozens and dozens of projects I may or may not ever complete but which really should be organized into some sort of accessible core to which I could go from time to time as I wonder what in the world I might make next.
So I'm going though these and I'm just sorting them by category. Not by type of work, which you might expect. Like: all the ideas for plays go in folder A and all the ideas for songs go in folder B, etc. etc. No. I'm sorting them by a kind of murky set of criteria which would be hard to explain to you here but which make sense to me. It's sort of like: stuff that is tiny micro and painful vs. stuff that calls into question enormous assumptions or accepted wisdom about life itself. Or stuff inspired by concrete things that happened to me in my real life. Or stuff inspired by something I overhead someone say which made me follow a totally subjective set of assumptions about its implications which may be way off base but still do lead me to some fascinating stuff.
So for the month of November at least, that's where my focus will be. Herding the myriad cats that have been crawling into my domain to rest beside me waiting for a chance to prove themselves worthy of attention. Of course the truth of creative work is that all the ideas are worthy of our attention. That seems indisputable to me.
The thing is: ideas have their seasons. Not every fruit will ripen at the moment we arrive to pick it. If we come for it too soon or too late, we do need to find a way of figuring out where to put it down. A place in the shade where it won't rot, but far enough out of the way of our weekly work so as not to constantly distract us.
Oh! And this just dawned on me this very minute! Finding a place for things during a pandemic which has left most of us feeling rootless in various ways makes very good sense. Take my nagging unconscious yearning for place that is lost and channel it into a new file system for every little one of my creative flights.
When we write, we do so on the wings of fantasy. If that disappears we will have to find a more favorable wind.
My father Leon Tec was fond of coining aphorisms. One of my favorite went like this:
A sailor without a destination cannot hope for a favorable wind.
