Thomas Sullivan: BREAST-FED BRAINS vs. NOITANIGAMI
Think back. Way back. Lying-in-your-bassinet back. What kind of formula were you raised on? No-no…I don’t mean breast milk/formula. I mean how was your life orchestrated? Dr. Spock baby? Schedules/organization/chaos/mommy-was-on-Valium? Meat and potatoes lifestyle? (Dunno…I’ve repressed all that)? The answer is very important to your imagination and creativity. No question, creativity can either be given wings or pushed off a cliff while we are still in the cradle – creatle.
True, hardwiring is major. By nature a few of us will never find our way out of the box, and a few others will never find their way into the box; but there’s enough spark of imagination in most of us to escape becoming a zombie spectator to life, if that spark gets kindled early-on. Whether or not that nurturing takes place in a meaningful way may be largely circumstantial. Example:
You are six again…your older sister has taken you to the Roxy theater for a double feature, and you come in two-thirds of the way through the first flick where the plot (and character relationships) has already thickened, as they say. If this isn’t the way you usually see movies, you will probably be overwhelmed, frustrated or bored by an inscrutable story. But if that’s just the way you go to shows – spectator interruptus – then over time you may simply learn to fill in the blanks and connect dots in order to make sense of the films. During that process you’ll need to recognize probabilities in the twists, and patterns in the relationships, and how to reach beyond into possibilities. Some of that will just be predicting things and events, but understanding character relationships and motivations will play large. Did the couple date/mate/hate? Is Lucille trying to marry/bury Hugo? You get good at it after a while. And whenever you’re surprised by a new character revelation or a plot twist, you learn, you grow.
A generation ago that kind of fragmented assimilating was early training for recognizing and understanding patterns and possibilities. You seldom got to hear complete radio shows or saw movies starting from the beginning, owing to the fact that the former were usually heard in short car trips and the latter was the way kids went to theaters – just dropping in, not waiting for a starting time. The result was learning to make inferences, exploiting all the possibilities gleaned from experience, and going beyond into the realm of creativity. It was the beginning of playing “What if…?” But radio as a story medium is largely gone now, and visual media is so comprehensive that there are fewer dots to connect. Imagination, alas, has been spoon fed into dormancy in the average person.
As a writer –and former teacher – I think I’m describing a pretty major generational change here. In short order we’ve evolved from think-on-demand lifestyles through prefabbed consumerism into a world of intense media that seductively offers to relieve us of our last outpost of independent thinking if not individualism itself. Even the process of producing that media has become digitally packaged to play out variables with less need for organic imagination. Need a plot, a character, a story arc? Plenty of apps out there to help you along in whatever medium you are working. Or in almost every other phase of life and labor, for that matter. It’s number painting for the mind. You see the problem here? We need some imagination about our imaginations.
Of course, you don’t have to sign onto passiveness and there will always be mavericks who do not. Is surrendering evermore to the alluring orchestrations of life a moral question? What’s wrong with enjoying the ride, a life of ease and input from outside sources? Well, nothing in an instant gratification and emotive culture; but being dumbed out of the management of existence other than to feel in a world that increasingly offers to take care of you from cradle to crypt has its price. Hello, Big Brother. And if you don’t particularly want to have another sib, big or otherwise, if you bristle at the idea of being kept, if you want to preserve and enhance your native skills and self-reliance, there are ways of doing that. Because the good news is that if you can’t teach creativity, you can still train it. Anyone who enjoys thinking can use the kind of sampling approach I described above to strengthen their grasp of the world around them. But it is always easier to feel than to think. Easier still to make them mutually exclusive and just go with instant gratification and an emotive reflex to the life around us. So, at first, it may require a conscious effort to look for the dots in life that need connecting in a purely analytical way. They’re still there, however. In nature. In prima facie life. Peek through a keyhole, put a cup to the wall, follow some footprints in the snow, or just go stand in nature until “you get it.” Practice extrapolating and interpreting full scenes from scraps and vignettes. It may be as much a matter of NOT joining the masses in the grandstands of life as it is finding your own way. At least that’s a start.
Yeah, I know, sounds silly. Sounds Orwellian or Huxleyistic or some other dire apocalyptic warning done in flashing crimson neon about society going to hell in a basket. But really, evolutionary changes are not revolutionary. They are slow, sometimes insidious. If something restless inside you sparks with recognition as you read this, then maybe you’re a candidate for escaping group-think, for living more freely and independently, for resisting the wave of media-driven usurpation. Maybe you’re an – oh, I don’t know – A WRITER! Leave the crowd behind and you’ll be on your way to something. I don’t have a clue as to what. I mean, this isn’t a formula, is it? That would be going back to breast and bottle. You’re on your own now. IMAGINE that…
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com
). Anyway, it must’ve taken 20 min. to drag it up those cocoa-matted stairs, clinging to the rungs with one hand, hanging onto the dead weight of the cart with the other while trying to thump it up one more step and another and another, all without committing sudden-death by pitching off the sprawling divers gestalt of platforms and boards (I am terrified of heights). So, when at last the cart was up there, I went through a little ritual of running it the full length of the platform and pushing it off the end, savoring the freefall and smiling with satisfaction – though it did not waft to the bottom like the Titanic but rather sank like a stone (duh). Then I turned to descend the stairs, and that’s when the Detroit police car pulled out of the bushes up to the iron fence next to the diving platform. Both officers got out of the car to regard me on high, and the ensuing conversation was brief but earnest. “Why did you do that, son?” floated up to me as in a dream. Realizing that I had been ambushed by a bush, and that they had been parked behind it through the whole preliminary of bloody cart being dragged up three stories, I allowed as to how I had brought the thing up there for the divers towels and that it had slipped. In retrospect, I can see that that was a tad lame…a ton lame actually. I probably should’ve said something like I had a seizure, or better yet, that Birdman [my swimmer] made me do it. But there it was, the treacherous absurdity “slipped.” The nice officers just kept smiling and staring. And then they told me to “get it out of there.” There? They couldn’t possibly mean out of the 18-foot deep well, right? The well whose steep sides sloped abruptly up to the 9-foot deep level? Yes, alas, they could mean that. And they stayed there for the next hour or so while Seaweed Sully set world records for frustration, for holding his breath, and for futile attempts to raise the Titanic. Each effort was the same: push the diabolical cart up the sloping sides of the well by kicking breaststroke like a banshee; and if it finally made it to the 9-foot level where it teetered on the slightly lesser slope of the 55-yard pool, hook one foot through the handle and frantically bob for air. I was like the Coyote and the cart was like the Roadrunner. Inevitably, air and gravity would win. Which is to say the cart would slide back into the depths, and I would gasp and gurgle for a while in plain view of two stony-faced cops. But then there came that one superb effort, which cost me several million brain cells (though I could not have had many more than that when I hatched the idea, could I), when I managed to get the cart not only out of the well, but a few feet further up the length of the 55-yard pool to where it was perhaps 8 feet deep. This worked well for the oxygen, though I was now developing Charlie horses. The idea here was that I had to get the cart out of the deep-well end of the pool and all the way to the other end, which was about 5 feet deep, so that I could somehow hoist it onto the deck. You may recall, Birdman, that the curb edge of the pool all the way around was probably a good 2 feet high as well, since it doubled as starting blocks. So, when I finally managed to breaststroke kick the cart the whole length of the pool as if it were a kickboard, it was another tactical feat to drag it out by hanging onto the poles of the ladder with one arm. The kicker – so to speak – was that when Detroit’s finest left the scene, another swimmer – can’t remember if it was BN or maybe KK (you remember when I trapped him in the sewer and also got Big John to serve the phony extradition papers on him after he broke out of jail in the Bahamas?) – came blithely onto the deck. Immediately I suggested that he haul the supermarket cart up to the 10-meter and push it off. Which that swimmer did. Alas, I scrutinized the bushes in vain, because no Keystone cops showed to make the pinch. Some days are just like that. [Photo at top is from the 10-meter, but you can only just see the start of the well at the very bottom of the pix]
