Tag Archives: artistically creative

Words Now More Than Ever

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While writer’s make us think or might even provide a little comfort, their most important task, as Matthew Zapruder writes in Why Poetry, is to “create space where individual imagination can be activated…which helps preserve our minds as well as the possibility of mutual understanding, not by arguing for it, but by demonstrating it.”

It’s a shitty, frustrating time. The rise of Trump & Co coupled with global conflicts and a population that has been crippled by an excessively intense addiction to phones has bred a world of isolation and fear where there is a new terror to be ingested every day.

As crippling and out of control as it all appears, everything is as it was: air is air, water is water, the world on the same axis. And so…some words to mull:

Alien: exotic

Duende – the line between life and death (according to poet Federico Garcia Lorca)

Reverie: a state of being pleasantly lost in one’s thoughts

Rising Fjords

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A pair of snowboarders, Macro and Vartex, went into the record store, a relic from those long ago days, after the fire. They found a pigeon – and an actor portraying the same – which had been stomped with iron-studded boots, brutalized, all but murdered and maybe even that.

Messed-up bird

They took a couple of pictures that they would post when they got home and slid a couple of records, warped by the heat, into their backpacks. I stood with them by the garbage reviewing my footage of their excursion, thinking it might be a good film if only because of the carnage.

Embarrassing Letters II: My Response

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My parents gave me all the financial support I would need for my 1983 hitchhiking trip. I sent the following letter after the trip, in November:     

Dear Mom and Dad,

Hello, it’s me, it may be cliché, but time certainly goes by very quickly. I find it amazing that I’ve been alive for nearly twenty years – that’s a long time for me – a lifetime in fact.

Throughout my life, or at least the at eight years I have rebelled against so many things ranging from private school to civilization. This may have all seemed ludicrous and counter-productive to you, but I think that I have achieved much in my personal development. Now, I see a very unpredictable future for me, but that’s the way I want it. I am happy. I love writing, filming and creating.

I don’t want you to be upset if I fail (not that I plan to) or drop out (again, not that I plan to), I refuse to enter any life that is not artistically creative. For me to achieve anything that I will be satisfied by, I must leave the norm, the average ‘desk job’; otherwise I will have failed my liberal goals. I doubt that this is what you will have wished for me, but there it is. I am what I am, and I won’t pretend to be anything else. (I feel that the Canada trip was brilliantly successful as it opened my mind to so many things and has motivated me to write a book of some sort.)

What can I say, I intend to stay in an artistic and undependable (sic) field, and I thank you for your love and help. So there you have it, no bullshit (there isn’t a suitable word), just honesty.

McP