Creative Processes

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"It's nearly impossible, unsustainable, to live without art. Even when I am not the one creating. To live only once in a life on a daily basis exposed only to worldly things - business, money, industry, entrepreneurism, social structures, societal customs, technology, popular culture - this is the equivalent of a death sentence to me, without all the existential weight that comes with that makes people like Jarvis Masters write memoirs and become more incredible people than they would've been without (a real death sentence)."

- journal from 12.11.11, p.1 

Grey, drab.

Only certain types of people need, I've come to notice. Need:

- Dreams: vivid dreams, the strangest, most far off dreams. It is when I dream of the same things I experience waking that I feel I have been truly ripped off by the universe. Give me strangeness, give me far away, impossible worlds. One of my favorite dreams was the one that asserted the irrefutable truth (in the way that dreams do, of irrational things - one person just IS someone else, one place just IS the place it isn't really), that the word "find" has a bird in it. Obviously. 

- constant and regular exposure to otherworldliness and preternatural things

- art (painting, sculpture, film - anything truly...transporting)

- drugs if they are transporting as well

- subtlety of feeling, for moments, for tricks of light, for...

- the in betweens (a beam of sunlight at a certain time at dusk; dusk itself [my favorite time of day]; the dip of a lash that captures some inexpressible emotion, expression, emotion; an emotive cluster of pain; the upward or downward lilt of a word that all by itself tears you up inside. I could go on with this list a long time). 

- those for whom the following rings true: "Writing is not art...but breathing."

- travel: uncomfortableness, experience in countries far, far, far away from America, countries that have an entirely different history, background, society, way of functioning - anything that makes one expand one's notion of fundamental truths about being alive. Because if all you have to base those on is the society you grew up in, you are so far away from truth. 

- Other languages: goes hand in hand with other cultures. With different languages comes different thinking. 

Charlemagne was reputed to have said that, "To have a second language is to have a second soul" 

I am missing 6,998 out of the roughly 7,000 existing languages there are in the world*

- altars are a necessary part of existence, no matter what, no matter where. Made of expensive votive candles in thick colored glass and jewels, or snickers bars and pennies

- Books. Any and every kind. Great literature - Nietzsche, Rilke, Hesse, but also new, exploratory work, writing by journalists, by drunks, others for the most part unbeknownst to the world. 

this list could go on a long, long time

* It has always been a personal epistemological philosophy of mine that if one were to take on the project of trying to learn everything single language that human kind has ever developed, one would be much closer to grasping "truth" in and of itself (according to humans at least), than any other person. 

**raw incense burning dish was a gift from mom