Stick your hands in the memory lake,
feel around until you touch something
gliding past, feel for it again, wait until
you have some kind of a grip then start
pulling—some pieces pull straight out,
close to arriving fully formed, others
need a huge amount of straightening
once on dry land. Either way, if it is
touched with music/mystery/magic
it’s the real thing and a place to start.
Not all memories want to be captured
or brought to the surface and will fight
to stay hidden. They are not down there
waiting, hoping to be discovered, and all
you can do is hold on until the beast stops
struggling and then pull with all your might.
Sometimes you just have to tie off your line
and come back later. But when you do come
back, both you and the creature will have been
altered. It’s a new day, a new battle, but still one
that is winnable to the degree of effort involved.
If there isn’t an occasional sense of horror at what
you find, either you’re not reaching deep enough
or you don’t know where to look. Gather words,
phrases, anything that catches your eye or ear,
and put them in a word-pile. As with so much
of the creative process, it’s an act of faith,
trusting that the words have been chosen
for some purpose beyond your current
understanding. Once it reaches a certain
size, stir the pile and read it over and over
until a pattern begins to emerge. With this
essentially being a compost pile, the phrases
begin to break down over time, reform, remake
themselves. Some disappear completely as they
combine with others—their purpose, unknown
at the time of their reception, having been to act
as catalysts—but their flavors remain. The words
that are meant to come together will eventually
find themselves and fresh creatures emerge.
Some will be deformed, unable to stand,
but the best will be strange and strong.
Do not strive to catch an invisible fish
on a see-through hook with a non-existent
line. How would you know if you did catch it?
What value could it be to another? You must have
proof of having at least wrestled with the beast or else
it is all a striving after nothingness. There is a personal
and an impersonal aspect to life and all of existence. We
are driven by infinite longing within a finite existence,
a dynamic force that travels through space and time.
(Press your fingers against your heart and a bulge
appears in the rings of Saturn.) This somethingness
and nothingness, driven by an unbearable longing
and the unavoidable connectedness of existence,
is present everywhere, from the explosion of
a distant star down to the one-celled mortal
trying to divide itself one last time. Strive
to catch the elusive fish with a hook and line
so strong that the reader can see the unseeable,
touch the untouchable; for nothingness is always
wrapped in the actual, and for art to succeed it must
be too. Every living creature, every living inclination,
every ounce of matter contains the impersonally-vast
force that lies behind our shared existence but is also
furred and muscled with the visible. Some are
hypnotized by the mere somethingness of
life and fail to include the mystery. Both
approaches are off-balance: the striving for
nothingness with nothingness, the embracing
of the obvious with the obvious. For the spark
to land on your creations, for someone to be able
to say, “It’s alive!” and have it be true, your art must
be a vessel, able to contain, at its core, the eternal void
of life while presenting a knowable face. Without the spirit
made flesh, where would we be? So it’s up to you to make
the spirit-catcher—keeping in mind that the spirit itself
does not care if it is captured or not—and you can’t do
that if your workshop contains, on the one hand,
nothing but longing and emptiness, or,
at the other extreme, only
cheeseburgers and
tattoos.
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The author reading this poem:
