Suffered another of those umbilical cord-like raptures back to known physical realm, sucked like flying rainbow vortex out of Buckingham time tunnels, away from Railroad Time’s green-red gaze and Rey-Rey next to me, and like that was in my own yard again, near the jukebox – that raggedy broken jukebox which had started this all by emitting those strange sounds and then those orbs. And the inspiration was strong – Heart Stars of inspired creation were floating out all over, like dollar store bubbles, each one holding poem or tangent or photographic image or sacred scribble or stack of metal or on and on and on…
I have never understood when people who classify themselves as creative complain about inspiration, or having ideas. I have always been overwhelmed by them. Each day is navigation of expectation of real (and uncaring) world while all these Heart Stars of inspiration appear, my day a clouded daze of colorful ideas, most of which I’ll never get to indulge or explore, but not for lack of trying. I squeeze the indulgences into every crack I can, and attempt to work over as many more as I can each evening. I have found myself more tired, more dull-brained in the evenings, perhaps suffering the ill consequences of decades of sleep deprivation, or maybe the manufactured fog has gotten too thick to fight through, fighting against the unseen wireless riptide at all times fatiguing my spirit to where I can’t get by on my at-one-time-normal four or five hours of sleep a night.
The Heart Stars overfill my hopes, but they remain there, and will pop due to neglect – more burst creative bubbles. There are more ideas or more visualizations of how to beautify my dilapidated world than I could ever actually do. But I’ve never had a problem with them coming to me. I’ll never understand those who complain about such a thing.
But as I found myself standing there in the field, having been raptured home, more beautiful ideas pouring out of less-than-beautiful environs, something I’d never seen before started happening. The Heart Star orbs were still coming from the broken jukebox, from the red maple, from the white trash quartz rock altar, but some of them started to dissipate quickly, before they even got to me. What were in those ideas? Why were they disappearing? This had never happened, and a panic that my virile creationism was being challenged swept over me, heart turned into clenched fist of fear and mind overrun with the failure demons immediately, like a thousand metaphysical black vultures descended upon my insides all at once. Is this what those people talked about? Couldn’t be, because they were always casual about it, like “I have writer’s block” or “I don’t know what to do next”. For me, this was apocalypse level anxiety – THE INSPIRATION WAS GONE BEFORE IT EVER EVEN GOT TO ME!
I guess on technical level if inspiration never reaches you physically, you never had it. So it’s not like I was suffering a loss of creativity so much as I wasn’t creative. But I could see them over there, floating before they fizzled into nothing. This wasn’t like what Ellabell explained about neglected Heart Stars congealing into loss of them existing.
Or was it? Had I left too many ideas, too many worlds from inside my head (or more likely heart) to wither on the vine?
Look, I have tried to be very upfront about how I attempt to be logical and use fairly solid critical thinking skills, even in the midst of all the nonsense mythology going on around me. But in that moment of panic I did what can best be called “pray”. I kneeled in the field that legal documents recognize as mine, leaned my forehead down to the dirt, and prayed to everything – whatever gods may or may not exist, whatever sciences may or may not be true, to the elven elders I’ve held court with on the James River, to all universal magnetics which may or may not be actually charged, called on it all to please come help answer my anxiety, because honestly, I was freaking the fuck out.
I looked up, and the unpolished amethyst on the rock altar started to glow. I hoped this meant Ellabell would appear again. Critically thinking, that’s what it glowing would mean, but fuck man, nothing’s been logical about this whole deal. I’m starting to think I might be a little off, and if I am a little off, AND I start losing my creative inspiration, that’s gonna be a horrible combo to stomach. I had always looked forward to being just crazy enough to be left alone by this bullshit material world to be allowed to fully indulge in my creative nonsense. If I was gonna now be crazy but not have creative impulses? Fuck… I don’t even want to contemplate that living hell.
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