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Creativity, etc.
"Unused creativity is not benign. It turns into grief. Do something with it." –Ray Bradbury
Oh, wow. Curse you, Ray Bradbury. Trying to light a fire under me, are you?
No, wait. I don't need to take this personally. When I hear a pronouncement like this—and react to it with guilt—I realize how narrow is my definition of creativity.
Somewhere in the depths of my mind I mistakenly imagine fiction as the ultimate (only authentic?) manifestation of creativity. So in this quote I see Ray urging me—nay, shoving me!—toward fiction as the only outlet for my creativity (which, if I don't use it, will turn to grief, etc.).
Well, Ray, I need to tell you why I won't be writing fiction any time soon. 1) I am incapable of imagining plots. 2) Dialogue, unless it is "me" talking to some other aspect of "me", is impossible for me. 3) The thought of trying to create a viable character—no, a whole story's worth of them—exhausts me. Which brings me to 4) I'm too lazy to want to apply myself to any of the above. To be more forgiving toward myself, I can say that I have too many other irons in the fire—and thus no time to devote to the impossible world of fiction.
Of course, Ray, you are not responsible for my narrow definition of creativity, are you? Let me expand it here. I can be creative in other aspects of my life, just not with a pen in my hand. (And even with the pen, there are other forms than fiction to apply myself to.)
Having brandished my sword at Ray Bradbury's dragon and my own paper tiger, I will move on to talk about my real interest today: silence. Living in a large city I will never know the profound silence that, for example, Henning Mankell evokes when he describes Sweden's far north. City noise never sleeps.
Acting on my firm belief that everything is relative, however, I do notice silence in the city. It may not be complete, but in contrast to what we take for granted as normal, the sudden eruption of relative silence is deafening.
I remember walking south on Broadview from the subway station to Dearborn, the first cross street. Broadview traffic—heavy and heavily streetcar-laden—was the soup I swam in. As I reached the corner, ten feet ahead of me a worker was wheeling a rattle-trap cart loaded with recycling bins (bang, rattle-rattle, bang) from the front of his store on Broadview around the corner and into the alley behind the store.
It was Toronto. It was noisy. But it didn't really register as noise because it was so familiar. When I turned off Broadview onto Dearborn, the traffic noise disappeared. On this day, however, the noise continued as the cart rattle-rattled ahead of me.
Suddenly the worker turned into the alley with his wheelie-bins and stopped. All noise ceased and I was in a bubble of silence that washed over me like a blessing. Blessed-be for silence.
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
