Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:
“Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is – we’re here on Earth to fart around.
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
“The important element here is that you find some way to sidestep the part of your brain that wants perfection or needs to be rewarded right away with a ‘creation’ that it deems ‘good’ — something that supports an ideal vision of yourself as someone who’s serious and smart and accomplished. Basically, you have to learn how to have a party and not invite any part of your psyche that feels a need to judge what you make as a reflection of you. Or more accurately, the part of you that cannot tolerate any outward expression that might be flawed.
“Sadly, this part of who we are wields a lot of control over how much freedom we give ourselves to create. Many, many people I’ve known in my life have never truly gotten past this hang-up. Maybe I’ve met a few who have white-knuckled it enough to create an impressive body of work without letting go of judgment and control, but I must admit I always feel like I can hear a certain mirthless labor in their recordings. What I feel like I can sense is that they never got over having to sound bad to get good, and that they never really learned to embrace the joyousness of sounding ‘bad.’
“Actually, I think it’s a skill that one would more likely relearn than learn. Kids are, in my experience, usually able to commit to creating in a way almost completely devoid of judgment. I love watching kids sprawled out on a carpet drawing or coloring. To me, it’s the ideal creative state, and it’s what I strive for more than any other aspect of what I do. It takes some work, and it takes tricks like the ones we’ve been discussing, but I’ve found it for myself, and it’s worth it.
“What I want you to find is what I’ve found through these practices: the thrill of ‘disappearing,’ as I’ll call it, which I know I’ve talked about before but deserves another reminder here. I know I’ve achieved what I’m looking for in a creative experience when my sense of time and space has been altered — when I look up and all of a sudden it’s three hours later and I’m a little surprised by where I am. It’s those moments that give me the greatest satisfaction, and I find them to be extremely beneficial to my overall well-being. So much so that I decided to write this book because I truly believe that, at the very least, if you can unburden yourself of your more judgmental and discerning self with some regularity, you’ll have a better life.
“So what we’re still talking about here are the different ways to trick yourself into letting your guard down. I’ll admit I don’t have all the answers. But I do think just naming the effort, and explaining it to yourself in these terms, can help.”
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Now take a pencil and draw lines to connect nouns and verbs that don’t normally work together. I like to use this exercise not so much to generate a set of lyrics but to remind myself of how much fun I can have with words when I’m not concerning myself with meaning or judging my poetic abilities. Here’s an example of a quick poem I might make trying to use all of the words above:
the drum is waiting
by the window listening
where the sunlight writes
on the cushions
prescribed
thump the microphone
the guitar is healing
how the turntable is touched
charging the wall
while one lightbulb examines
and scans the carpet
Ok. It isn’t the greatest poem ever written. But I bet it’s not the worst. It might be difficult to sing, and it might not make quite enough sense to follow, but already I’m loving the way some of the scenes are being drawn — the phrase “sunlight writes” makes me think of a hidden world, full of mystery and clues, and alludes to an idea that the natural world might have intentions, might be trying to tell us something… Anyway, that’s the exercise, and I find it almost always works when I’m feeling a need to break out of my normal, well-worn paths of language.
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Hopefully you’ve already had the magical experience of a whole song, or a portion of one, coming together in a way that feels exciting. And maybe you’ve even recorded it and heard yourself sing it. But if not? I guess now is the time to admit that I’ve always been skeptical of the term “writer’s block.” Not because I’ve never experienced a period when I’ve felt unproductive or uninspired. But because I recognized that it isn’t really a block; it’s a judgment. Because it’s rare that you can’t make anything. I don’t believe a writer ever truly loses the ability to create. But all writers go through periods when they don’t like what they’re creating as much as they wish they did.
“Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?”
I’ve been thinking about the later parts of your message for a few days now – about whether, as you say, ‘the failure is general.’ I know we agree that civilization is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of micro plastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition. This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.
“I’m always talking about care ethics and the value of human community, but in my real life I don’t take on the work of caring for anyone except myself. Who in the world relies on me for anything? No one. I can blame myself, and I do, but I also think the failure is general. People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see. Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life. Of course if we all stay alone and practice celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life worthwhile.”
In the Ravine 