Artistic Initiative
Time flits away while I sit and stare at the pictures in my mind—riding the train up the coast from San Diego to LA, chopping sweet onions and zucchini, waves of salt water wafting into my nose from high above the shoreline, neighbors’ parties echoing into the early AM. I wait for the need to unleash my hands, until it’s been too long and I’m still waiting. I decide to begin, again. I decide and enact my plan as my fingers keep crashing against the keyboard. Excitement erodes from my pores with each new character that appears on the screen, even punctuation mark keeps me moving. I feel tired or I’m not quite awake, I can’t ever seem to tell when is the best time. Now must be. Nothing else compares with the essence of each individual moment as it occurs, then dwindles. I need more time. I need more practice, hours and hours and months. I’ll keep trying. I’ll keep seething with this desire to produce, expecting personal optimization, not perfection but darn close.
A new statement begins where the last one left off. Where was the last one? How do I find it? Continuation is arbitrary and uses its natural ebb to start a new phrase, a new idea. Each day presents a new opportunity to create a path, to fork the road on which we travel. I contemplate then act on the plan that I have been conceiving. I check each bit of minutiae I complete along the way off my list. The key is time management. Ideas blow in heavy gales, stopping by the sea as they waft in the breeze, but composing the ideas requires a set schedule.
On time, I release words, sentences onto the blank scene until my ideas take on a tangible form. I sculpt them, molding pieces to fit into sections, which capture these momentous thoughts with corporeal/surreal images. I see paragraphs become settings, doused in light and air, scents permeating throughout while feelings emit from the activity. Each detail depicted in dialogue forms a new entity. When finished, the whole appears a beautiful fresco carved into relief. The audience can see what I formerly conceived and then displayed, but my picture contains no polygons or colors other than those formed by the combination of letters.
I finish one composition and start the next while sometimes starting another when one is still unfinished. The chain must continue somewhat unbroken. It must prevail. The only other option is to lose my identity. If I am not currently writing, I am no kind of writer. We have so many “talkers” in the world who contend to be things that they have done but no longer do. It can’t be as complicated as these people make it seem. The simple process of composing constitutes one’s status as a writer. When we cease to do, we cease to be. Breaks occur just as instruments rest on certain notes in symphonies, but they always pick up again and continue on the path of the melody. Listen to the timpani as it marches along with the snares and mingles with the bass drum. Hear what I’m seeing? It’s not difficult to think something so much as it is hard to do that thing consistently. Keep it moving, keep it propelling forward out into the unknown. We have all the tools to become what we want to be, but can’t allow the obstacles to slow down and obstruct our initiative.
I stare at the blurbs I rattle out and I seize the chance to refine them, to gloss over the rough edges and overcome the impossible circumstances that deter my overall flow. I decide to decipher and then I dictate the atmosphere my mind details. I inhabit this space, even if only for a short time. I become the story--I embrace the characterization while undergoing the conflict. This process can titillate or it can incinerate—our souls blend with the prose. Our approach to creation is what constructs our identity. The voice and tone we use captures our initiative, displays our veracity for all to inspect. The individual notion is transmitted to the whole entity in an ethereal Morse code. Who will be there to hear it and respond? The anticipation of finding out keeps us all moving perpetually.
