There’s a quiet cruelty in creative work where you have to keep loving the thing while it resists incarnation.
I’m yearning for empty time: frivolous time, in the way that I understand frivolity, as an opening into imagination without any focus on outcomes. That imagination is exactly when incarnation starts to happen, when you’ve let it all go. It’s the empty chaos of creation.
I know I need this space - liminal space, truly – but the things I’m working to dream into being haven’t yet become tangible and my time for this kind of emptiness gets eaten over and over again with prosaic, diddly administrative responsibilities.
(Keeping all of the cogs working so Spillian continues to function, along with all of the other stuff life throws out there; worrying about frozen pipes and ice dam leaks, and that light that keeps coming on in my car, and putting off that dentist appointment because I can’t even. All of that. Every day.)
I have pushed so hard against this pattern: to do the Gottadoes at the expense of the dream work. It’s so much easier to do them. It’s safer. It’s what the world clamors for, and sees, and respects.
This, by the way, is a Gottado. It attaches itself to you every time you think “I’ve got to do that.” Or “I need to do this.”
They’re pernicious little beasts, and surprisingly heavy.
I think this at the heart of the grief that every artist navigates: being expected, demanded, rewarded for the crap that doesn’t matter really at the expense of what truly does.
Because the world doesn’t see it or understand it and doesn’t think it’s possible anyway. It is so hard-baked into the American mythic psyche. Yes, we deify opportunity, but only really if it’s practical and measurable and all of that shit. It breathes echoes of Puritanical morality and the endless (to steal a line from my grad school friend Victor Faessel) tyranny of the horizon, deferring what we truly want to do to the vague promise of some cool stuff after we die.
But the quantum physics of dreaming something into being is lurching and gorgeous and incomprehensible and unexpected and doesn’t behave itself or put itself into neat categories and may actually defy its own logic or promises.
And yet it’s the thing that actually COULD explode everything open.
I’d write more, but my dog Riley is putting his nose under my hand and flipping it up off the keyboard because I’m late going out to feed horses and this offends his sensibilities.
See Gottadoes...
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PS: The Gottado lives in ‘The Adventures of the Queen of Frivolity,’ originally a part of my dissertation on frivolity and included in my book, Psyche’s Choice: The Frivolous Revolution. We’re prepping a new interactive print edition (am so jazzed about this and noting that it’s also still not totally tangible, hence the yearning for frivolous time).
If you’re impatient for frivolity before then, you can find the ebook here.