Momentum

The crippling loss of momentum in creative pursuits, and the importance of returning to them.

Photo by the blowup

Truly, each work carries with it an identity and a momentum that is lost to us once we turn our back to it. Once we become strangers to the edges and the lines of our art, they become strangers to us: unfathomable, alien, cold. They were once so familiar. They meant so much to us. They gave a sense of life, of practice, of accomplishment. Now, even that memory of satisfaction is lost to us.

There is no joy in anticipating a return to it, because the recollection has become too distant. It feels like too much of a burden, doesn’t it, to take up the work again and grapple with its incomplete, painful, bittersweet formation? All you can feel is the dull weight and delicate ache that is bound up in all you left in the scattered concepts and vague intentions that gave birth to the work in the first place.

You may avoid, perhaps, the intoxicating risk of falling back in love with it all, because it’s easier it seems, to remain dead to it’s charms, it’s allure, it’s promise of purpose and fulfillment. There is so much of the world that asks nothing of you, and as such, demands more than you may think. Every promise of an easy and convenient pleasure carries with it the emptiness of knowing that you haven’t created anything. You haven’t questioned anything. You haven’t mused, pondered or grappled with a thought, or an art, or an act that demands that you labour, that you reach, that you go beyond the inert stupor that asks nothing, but takes everything.

When you flirt with the act of a creative gesture, a discipline, a study, it takes so little to be lost to it once more. I know it when I open my guitar case and smell the lacquer as it comes off the body of the instrument. I know it when I trace the first scant words across the page. When I press my fingers on the strings, and they hum against the fretboard, it’s over. When the first truth comes forth in unexpected words upon the page, it’s over. When I mutter the first words of the psalmody, it’s over.

It’s midnight as I sit down to finish this piece. Three times tonight I fell asleep whilst settling my kids into bed and taking a mandatory moment to lie beside them. I even set my alarm to wake me, knowing that I was going to fade, after such a long day. It’s been three months since I last posted here on Wristwatches and Radios, breaking a promise to myself that I made when I started the project. I’ve broken it damn near in half, I might add. Three months.

And it got to the point where it felt as though it didn’t matter. In a lot of ways, I know, as a husband, father, it doesn’t matter in the grands scheme of things. But I keep scribbling down ideas for pieces that I want to write. Things that I want to say, knowing this is the best place for me to bring them. And putting these words down now, it all makes sense once more. It all matters once again, to bring these notions to light, for myself more than anyone.

So many of us have projects, aspirations, abandoned intentions that have never run their full course. When we turn away from them, even briefly, they begin to turn away from us, and it’s hard to recognise all that we loved about them in the first place. But this alienation from ourselves, our works, only festers as long as we let it - and it takes so little to return and to recall the spirit, the intent, the fulfillment of a work and all it can bring us, if not the world beyond ourselves. Then again, we never truly know how far a notion will travel - nor should we - if that is all that will ever matter about it.