Thomas Sullivan

Who you were at your best moment is always who you can be again.  Kind of like summiting a mountain, it becomes a benchmark.  You’ve proven you can reach that far, be that person, do that thing – a minimum standard of excellence that cannot be taken away from you.  That applies pretty much to everything from labor to love, laughter to loss, but especially – I firmly believe – to moments of creativity.

Creativity, after all, is pointedly about excellence, isn’t it?  You reach for perfection, and if your fingers get burned, you gather your courage and reach again.  Artists as a community may be deeply flawed and anything but perfect, but in a world of frauds and disappointments that’s what makes our quests/dreams/passions so necessary.  In the infant innocence of our souls we cannot give up the romantic notion of achieving something godlike.  Is there an addiction or a high as pure as perfection?  I can’t speak for normal people, but for the lost and the damned who think that the sky is too low a limit, it is only in pursuit of excellence that all our senses and sensibilities come fully alive and we breathe rarefied air once again.  Just to be in the game, to make a little progress toward unblemished goals, quickens the blood and restores an urgency that is too easily lost in routine lives.  That said, it is exhausting to soar at that level, and so the real problem – once you find the courage to try – becomes to find the inspiration to act…

Which is what I wrote about last month  —   http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/12/16/thomas-sullivan-sea-lions-in-coffins-getting-lost-writing-without-words/ .  A number of e-mails came in from people who related to the little trick of getting lost in order to find themselves or doing eccentric things to shake the dust of monotony from their souls, so here I go, diving recklessly deeper into the subject.

Most of the feedback came from people who don’t regularly seek CPR from their muses, but I got the sense that whether it was just to escape, say, writer’s block, or something more systemic like stopping suffocation in a routine life, a necessary part of the solution was to gain perspective.  To me gaining perspective is almost the same as defining the problem, which most suffocatees have already done (they can’t breathe!…duh).  The necessary adjunct to gaining perspective, however, seems to be to do something very instinctive, like…walk, run, fly, but get out of Dodge.  In other words, do not let inertia chain you to your prison.

BACKFIELD IN MOTION.  Amazing how many writers regularly use the same strategy in order to re-fill the well.  DNW drives or walks past houses, WAS is drawn like a moth to the cathode tube glow of a night-time Chicago, RB bikes around Los Angeles… Brian Hodge defines the need to break out of routine as hardwired.  My own personal matrix is at least 3-D, so I have mixed motives, but I can’t remember when I did not make daily transits, usually into nature, and for the past three years inevitably a nightly drive.  Last month I suggested getting lost as a way of finding one’s self.  The goal of that was to eliminate the tedium of daily life — those limitations that make us forget our potential.  It’s very hard to see the painting, after all, when you’re standing on the canvas.  So you move outside the frame to a place with no context in your life.  Streets are good – and best at night – because they are margins.  You want to be totally offstage, pure audience.

Okay, let’s assume you achieve this true detachment which is fundamental to escaping whatever is smothering your creative side.  Like the physician who wants to heal, you must “first do no harm,” and remaining in your routine was harming you.  So you’ve stopped the hemorrhaging by taking sanctuary elsewhere, and now you’re ready for a transfusion.  Where do you find a donor for that?  The suffocation was of your mind and spirit, after all.  Where do the stem cells for imagination come from?  How do you kickstart inspiration?  

When was the last time you didn’t have to kickstart inspiration?  Pregnant pause.  Ever see a bored baby? 

THE GANG OF 5…or empowering your five senses.  This is another trick that works for me.  It worked for all of us when we were babies totally indulged in sensory information.  Everything was new and we were keen to examine it all with the full battery of our senses.  But we grew up and started to skip the savoring of the senses — been there, done that — and went straight to the abstractions, and so every time the phone rang with a new message from Taste or Touch or See, we didn’t always answer attentively.  Why should we, if we already knew what it tasted, felt or looked like and had turned it into an abstraction?  But we missed some new info that way, and maybe got disconnected from the inspiration — the total sense of being alive — that only The Gang of 5 can supply.  So going back to your senses and putting your brain on high alert for all incoming calls is good stimulation, even if all it does is repave old roads.  

Chances are, though, that your senses will give you better conversations if you give them some variety to chew on.  And that brings me to the third element of this column, another thing that works for me on a daily basis…

WHO’S THE STIFF?  Yeah, that thing you’re carrying around, the cadaver hanging from your brain, the corpse embalming your heart.  That stiff.  You.  The body.  Maybe you trace your pedigree back to Adam and Eve a few thousand years ago, or maybe you add millions more on the Charles Darwin freeway by believing in evolution, which gives you one helluva lot of basic training no matter how you slice it.  Sure, sure, we live in an intellectual age now, but whether we got here from standing naked talking to snakes and eating apples in the Garden of Eden or through eons of adaptation, most of what came between then and now was a pretty physical world.  You think because modernity has arrived, and the can opener has been invented, you can just ignore all that physical potential?  That’s a lot of dead weight to carry around.  A real drag on those sensory outposts I mentioned a paragraph back, know what I mean?  You sure you want to become a vestigial vagrant — hauling that carcass along through your emotional/psychological/intellectual state of being like it wasn’t a blue elephant standing in the room with you?  What if there’s more of a connection between your mind and your bod than you think?  Ever hear of, “Anima Sana in Corpore Sano”?  Okay, the only Latin I speak has the word “pig” in front of it — but just about everyone from Plato to John Locke is credited with saying, “Sound mind, sound body,” and even if I’m not that smart, I recognize a truism when I see it…feel it.

So do you.

And that’s my third trick this column.  Physicality.  Big part of my life.  True, I’ve been a nut job about it since romper room days, and ego & competition played large for most my life, but it was never JUST ego & competition and now being physical is purely about escape.  Escaping the tyranny of my mind, ditching smallness and paranoia, and about waking up my imagination each day.  It doesn’t have to be rabid physicality.  It can even be dynamic physical surroundings, if it wakes up your body.  This column is pushing my limit for length, so I’ll have to come back to the subject another time.  Right now I have a hunch that taking my Adam & Eve sleeping bag out into the brilliant winter woods for the afternoon will be a hoot.  Seriously.  Think contrast: robust nature vs. down sleeping bag.  Think crystal air and white light.  Imagine yourself all snug and warm while drinking in the pure distillation of winter in bracing sips.  Could be I’ll find my day’s supply of perspective, sensory stimulation, and physicality all in one shot.  You never know what you’ll find when you search for perfection.  And never knowing is part of the magic of inspiration. 

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  2 samples of recent Tweets:  Someone clue me, is the point of Vietnamese music to sing totally off key or did I just get a really bad trio twanging “Seoul” music?  And…  If I was a bat, I’d want to live in Al Gore’s humongous nostrils.  Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters w/photos are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  Happy 2K10! 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan