Identity and creativity, stuff informing other stuff, etc.

[bodlon]

One thing that happened this year was that I entered into a bizarre creative pact* with a friend that has involved buying a guitar.

This has been weird for me, in part because I haven't thought of myself as a musician for a very long time.

I played guitar in my teens before switching to bass guitar in my early twenties. I played in a gigging band for about a year, and then broke my left arm not long after I left. After that, I kind of...well, I quit. The reasons are more convoluted than I usually talk about -- I usually attribute it to physical fall-out from the broken arm -- but some of it was that bass guitar really isn't a solo instrument, and that I wasn't looking to find another band, and so on.

For a while, I held on to my two bass guitars and my practice amp. They symbolized a thing that had been a massive and active part of my identity for a decade. Eventually, though, I ended up selling off one bass guitar with the practice amp. And then the other. And then the weird little vintage electric guitar some kid traded me for something when I was a kid. And then I officially wasn't a musician anymore.

I still don't know that I am, but my guitar teacher has been making very encouraging noises at me, even when lessons turn out to be less about getting instruments out and more about geeking about things like how chords work, or our weird modern obsession with "official" recordings over melodies everyone can learn, interpret, and perform differently.

What I'm discovering is that a lot of the skills I thought I'd lost when the callouses on my fingertips sloughed away aren't really gone. They're buried sometimes, sure, but I'm remembering that I can hear or see someone make a sound and then find and mimic it with moderate skill. I can hear a thing that isn't a guitar thing, like it enough that I want to echo it, and find ways to do that. It's stuff I could do when I was a tiny child, when I was in choirs at school (managing, absurdly, never to learn to read music between first grade and my sophomore year), and later on when I was playing rock music with other people.

And really, I didn't spend ten years not using this. I was in a musical at one point. I've played a lot of Rock Band (which, ridiculously, I enjoy because even apparently mindless button mashing exercises that sense of tone and rhythm; I score well on songs I know, or when I play an instrument line I can feel and intuit). I don't sing as much as I really should -- there's a reason I can't find notes, and that reason is that I don't often go looking for them -- but I can. Well, could. Can sort of. Ish.

I'm not at a point where I'm particularly confident (yet), and I'm not quite to the point where I'm making new things with these skills, or even sure that's a thing that I want to do with any seriousness. On the other hand, I found myself watching performers at this year's pagan pride festival and thinking how satisfying it might be to do that, and have been quietly learning and assembling a few things so that if the weather's favorable (and if my courage doesn't give out) I can go busking downtown on New Year's Eve.

Busking. Downtown.

Who is this person? What do I do with him? What am I learning by being him (other than the fact that guys at guitar shops are a lot friendlier to me as a thirty-year-old guy than they ever were to me as a nineteen-year-old girl)? How is it informing the rest of my work?

That's the other thing I'm noticing. The deep tools of creativity -- the ones I don't always understand as well as I want to because they sort of creep out when I'm not looking -- are responding to this. They're carrying things from guitar over into the writing, from the writing into the visual arts stuff I do now and then, from visual arts into poetry, and so on.

I wouldn't necessarily say that I experience any sort of clinical synaesthesia per se, but that's the nearest word I know for describing the way I "see" music in my head work on it, or "hear" things when I'm writing. I end up describing things as movement a lot (often with many gestures, it seems like) because, again, it's the nearest word that makes sense to me in context.

And really, as a writer, it feels very silly to sit here and talk about a thing that seems not to articulate itself well -- for me, at least, in this moment -- in written language. Then again, if there are things that articulate best in poetry or essay or prose, it probably follows that some things really do come through better as a photograph or a song.

This is exciting to me, and sort of mysterious, and makes me think -- as much as I don't really connect with her work specifically -- that Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk about engaging creativity as a thing we communicate with and build a relationship with rather than simply have is a framework that's freakishly useful in engaging the whole business of freaking out and making stuff.

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* Never let it be said that my life philosophy is not essentially dare-based. It's like being Marty McFly, except that my car only travels forward in time at a 1:1 ratio. In fairness, Marty McFly also only does this because he experiences his own timeline in a linear, 1:1 sort of way, and only benefits from being displaced relative to other peoples' timelines.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com