Creation

Something magical is happening. These meetings with a creative partner have started oiling all the rusty gears, even identified unknown mechanisms in my creative process. I'm getting to know me, and liking this person better. Not that I ever really disliked him, just didn't always know how to work with him. Realizing that privacy is part of the bundle, I hesitate to discuss specifics here. I need acknowledgment, too, bust must watch carefully to strike a balance.

The morning pages have started producing more than the usual complaints and navel-gazing. The imagination has reared its shimmering dragon head.

What would you do with unlimited time alone on a planet? Let's say you're immortal. I might build cities to populate with imaginary people. But how could one person develop enough skills to do such a thing? Let's say I have access to an unlimited information resource, as if our species had vanished but left behind the Web.

Even in a million years, I doubt that I could build one city. Christians talk about mankind being made in God's image, but when you start thinking honestly you realize our minds could have nothing in common with whatever force constructed the universe. Actually, it doesn't take intelligence, it takes a few profound, complex, simple processes evolving over a Very Long Time. Creationists must rely on an underdeveloped sense of wonder and imagination.

Thirteen billion years is a long time and there are so many things happening at once. Remember that incident near the end of Amélie?

Meanwhile, on a bench in Villette Square, Félix Lerbier learns there are more links in his brain than atoms in the universe.

Is that true? If it is, how could any consciousness outside my own begin to contemplate what's going on inside?

No wonder it's overwhelming whenever you aspire to the role of a creator. This is what artists and writers do, whether or not they're conscious of it. It can give you insomnia and indigestion. Somehow you must find the trick to fool yourself into just doing it, never mind that the world you invent will be puny and flawed.

Fortunately I'm surrounded by beauty enough to inflame me, so the tasks do not daunt. Not today, at least. Maybe this time around I am liking winter.





( another photo )