a creative quandary (or: excuse me while I wallow in self-importance)
Yesterday I had a rush of creative force slam me in the head. It felt like a photography day, so I grabbed my old battle axe, the Pentax K1000 (if art was a medieval war, this camera would be my trusty stead), and packed some film. I had every intention of wandering the LES in search of compositional jewels and creepy lighting.
The first thing that struck my fancy was a dark, locked up train at the 2nd Ave. station. A ghost train. A haunted train. A dying train lying in wait, come redemption or mercy. But it wasn't a photo that I felt.
Later, I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk, her worldly possessions neatly organized on blankets--the prices undoubtedly negotiable. I saw toys, trinkets, dishes... but it was the children's clothing that broke my heart. There was something so emotionally arresting about those tiny articles. I felt a swift, dark wave of loss come over me; the wings of death rustled softly against my neck, then passed. It was a car accident. (Or so I thought.) And again, my camera remained dormant. I can divine such tenuous histories from a blanket spread with broken clothing, but I cannot, will not take such grief away on a frame of film.
I was in a creative quandary. My eyes were registering, but refused to communicate through a visual medium. Everything I was seeing, thus feeling, came to me in a loose language I had to translate into the written. It was as if my various mediums were disagreeing. Rather than seeing photos I was seeing poems. I was writing pictures. I found this overlap of language and image and was unprepared to deal with such incongruous forces.
As sentient creatures, why, how can we know where photography ends and writing begins? Where do my words seep into dance, and that movement flow into a lump of clay on a potter's wheel? I'm not sure there is a map to be drawn or a consistency to be had. I can't quantify how much of me is a poem or a photo or a dance because my spirit, my creative drive is more than simply the sum of these parts.
What I DO know is that my journal--my battered, stained, paper journal--needs to come with me wherever I go. Far too often I've left that book behind only to be encountered by a situation that necessitates its presence, and I'm forced to relegate my words to loose napkins or backs of menus that may never make it home with me. I think of all my creative outlets as my children, and writing is most certainly Wednesday's child (full of woe), the most petulant, the most stubborn and unpredictable. And I have to respect that because it IS me.
I am not a photographer or a writer or a dancer--I'm a maker, a doer. I'm this dizzying, heady orange smoke that picks apart sounds and thoughts and images and pieces them together anew, leaving behind relics, evidence.
I wonder what will fly out of me today...
The first thing that struck my fancy was a dark, locked up train at the 2nd Ave. station. A ghost train. A haunted train. A dying train lying in wait, come redemption or mercy. But it wasn't a photo that I felt.
Later, I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk, her worldly possessions neatly organized on blankets--the prices undoubtedly negotiable. I saw toys, trinkets, dishes... but it was the children's clothing that broke my heart. There was something so emotionally arresting about those tiny articles. I felt a swift, dark wave of loss come over me; the wings of death rustled softly against my neck, then passed. It was a car accident. (Or so I thought.) And again, my camera remained dormant. I can divine such tenuous histories from a blanket spread with broken clothing, but I cannot, will not take such grief away on a frame of film.
I was in a creative quandary. My eyes were registering, but refused to communicate through a visual medium. Everything I was seeing, thus feeling, came to me in a loose language I had to translate into the written. It was as if my various mediums were disagreeing. Rather than seeing photos I was seeing poems. I was writing pictures. I found this overlap of language and image and was unprepared to deal with such incongruous forces.
As sentient creatures, why, how can we know where photography ends and writing begins? Where do my words seep into dance, and that movement flow into a lump of clay on a potter's wheel? I'm not sure there is a map to be drawn or a consistency to be had. I can't quantify how much of me is a poem or a photo or a dance because my spirit, my creative drive is more than simply the sum of these parts.
What I DO know is that my journal--my battered, stained, paper journal--needs to come with me wherever I go. Far too often I've left that book behind only to be encountered by a situation that necessitates its presence, and I'm forced to relegate my words to loose napkins or backs of menus that may never make it home with me. I think of all my creative outlets as my children, and writing is most certainly Wednesday's child (full of woe), the most petulant, the most stubborn and unpredictable. And I have to respect that because it IS me.
I am not a photographer or a writer or a dancer--I'm a maker, a doer. I'm this dizzying, heady orange smoke that picks apart sounds and thoughts and images and pieces them together anew, leaving behind relics, evidence.
I wonder what will fly out of me today...