What happens to creative choices when every choice you make feels like it’s starting from the same place?
What day is it? Many people aren’t sure each morning, with Groundhog Day repetitions starting to dull the senses. Work days have become strangely dislocating. With so much work now being done from kitchen tables and makeshift desks at home, each day in t-shirts and warm-ups looks and feels like every other. Emails come in, emails go out. Virtual meetings fill screens. Tricky efforts to keep work moving productively often takes more time than ever before.
Weekend arrangements? There’s nowhere to go in the middle of a pandemic, for all of the obvious reasons. What to eat? If it isn’t coming out of your own kitchen it’s probably not on the menu. What to read? What to watch? You might have your own plan, but for many people those plans are starting to wear thin.
But what if you’re a creative person, struggling to…y’know….create something?
You’d think there would be a sudden surfeit of free time. Time sitting in traffic has fallen close to zero hours per week. Social outings have disappeared. Nobody travels anywhere to speak of, and daily rhythms have become as predictable and autonomic as morning coffee rituals. Free of our temporal chains, artists of the world should be rejoicing, unshackled from so many bonds that ordinarily keep us from painting, filming, or writing the great American 21st century novel.
Reality is such a kick, right?
For many creatives, the juices aren’t flowing. Granted a reprieve from what ails us most, many can’t figure out what to do with the new stockpiles of time on our hands. Sure, there are reports from certain writers and musicians who’ve found this time of socially suspended animation ideal for self-sequestered artistic exploration. But many confide in a constant struggle to render even a handful of pixels into a single sequences of images. Daydreams are easy, but ask a writer to try and string a few words into a smart sentence, and it’s as if the world has also had to contend with rampant, contagious aphasia
It’s not for lack of desire.
Or, said a little differently, desire on the part of many creatives has been short circuited by distracted thinking. Did I start soaking those dried beans I’m planning for supper tomorrow? What are the latest infection stats for people in my state? Do I need to rake the leaves? Get some exercise? Maybe I could go bake a bread?
This is all to say, my fellow creatives, you’re not alone. The paradox of having plenty of time is that it’s challenging to focus your energies. Without the compressed heat and mixing that daily life typically imposes, creative fermentation sometimes stagnates. We paint what we see; we write what we experience; we sing when we feel. These days we’re seeing the same old t-shirts and sofas. We’re spending too much time doom-scrolling Twitter. We’re tired of making our tried and true recipies for the 100th time.
If these trying days find us healthy and solvent, however, we have no right to complain. So many are struggling with so much real pain this year that laments about elusive screenplays or photographic projects are veritable insults, profound insensitivities. A license to create art in the face of food shortages and lethal illness constitutes what should be regarded as humbling good fortune. But inside the microcosm of creative effort that some of us have spent to make something meaningful, I’m aware of Hippocrates’s perfect aphorism: ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long. Life is short.
Churning skies, stormy weather: there’s a bright spot in all of this. Creatives may be struggling to keep going, but these dark days are protean teaching salons for keeping our own internal factories up and running. Forced to find fuel from internal excavations, we’ve had to develop new ways to engage with the world. We’ve taken notes, we’ve persevered, we’ve started into the darkness in the middle of the night when ideas visit us like familiar spirits. Many times those numinous visions have propelled me up from the covers so that I could capture them for later employment. Many times the traces of those spirits wait for me in the light of day like maps to hidden gold.
Historians will mark 2020 as a dark year for art. Many creatives, already struggling to survive in a culture that doesn’t always value art unless it’s conflated with “entertainment”, barely held on. Many were forced to abandon dreams simply to find a way to get the rent paid or food on the table.
2021 is not a promise of a return to brighter days, but it does augur a thin line of hopeful sun peeking through clouds on the horizon. We all know that nothing will ever be as it was. The future will not be a continuation of the past, divided by the pandemic. For some things, actually, that transformation is long overdue. But for everyone who’s trying to figure out how to keep their own creative lives and projects on track, there is a conduit to connect what came before with what comes after. That conduit is the work itself. It has a life of its own. Creative work is not something artists choose to do. The work itself chooses artists bring it to life (And if you’re not an artists yourself and think that statement is nuts, just ask a creative person in your life if he or she understands. I guarantee they do.) We who tell stories for a living, who sing and dance and write lines of verse simply in order to keep our days organized and whole, will emerge from this year changed forever. But like all who spend their lives in creative endeavors, we will be tempered by experience, and experience itself is the ultimate sharpening tool.