The creative urge and the desire to learn.

I started writing poetry when I was sixteen after watching the U2 film 'Rattle and Hum'. There is a point in the film when it changes from black and white into colour. The stage backdrop turns a blood red and Bono starts giving it loads! I remember rushing up to my bedroom afterwards, finding a scrap of paper and starting to compose.

The funny thing was that I didn't identify with myself in the poem. It was a deeply personal verse but I didn't sense I was feeling the way the poem described. It is true that I was not use to 'expressing my feelings.' That had only become cool a few moments before. But more important than the poem was the window this opened up for me.

Until I was sixteen, I didn't read anything unless I had to. I took no interest in things that were not of my immediate concern. My school grades probably reflected this. I lacked curiousity. That year, however, I started visiting a secondhand book shop in my home town. I would at random pick up things that I knew very little about- whether that be Italian poets or a biography of a London school in the early eighties.

This all delighted me and was worth a hundred years of compulsory schooling.

I was smitten. I had caught the bug. This desire to learn is worth more than intelligence or riches. It is the factor that makes sure that things get done. It also teaches moderation for one begins to learn that the world is a wonderful and strange place. Before I had lived within myself, cut off from so many possibilities. This had changed all of a sudden. I began to look outwards.

People Are Strange

It was Jim Morrison who wrote and sung, "People are strange, when you're a stranger. Faces look ugly when your alone. Women seem wicked when you're unwanted. Streets are uneven when you're down."

It is a fantastic song and one of The Doors best loved. Again, it is an example of how language can marshall behaviours and dampen creativity. These lyrics also seem to be a response to something that is probably instilled within all cultures.

I once got a school report in which my English teacher commented, "Glenn is a unique and interesting individual." Which is a kind of nice way of saying that I was weird!

It doesn't have the same effect though. I was proud of this comment and it helped build my confidence in myself. I have certain ways of dealing with people and seeing the world and that is okay!

Of course, there are huge presures to fit in. Sometimes people need say nothing. Someone just has to give a look and you know that they disapprove. It can therefore take a lot of guts and determination to remain creative. Creative people by defination don't always fit in. They more than likely stand out for they don't think and behave in ways that are expected. In such circumstances, you can also be ignored because people don't know how to deal with you.

Returning to The Doors song one notices that there is a double bind with feeling out of place. The world can become strange too. One can have a sense of anomie and the desire can then become an overpowering one of wanting to belong. That this song actually exists gives one another answer. The song still manages to communicate without there being such a desire to fit in. It has a 'take me or leave me' attitude. More in fact- there is an empathy with this way of communicating. It is a song that is concerned with other human beings. It is saying- don't judge me because I am different or not like you. I can understand your desire to judge but there is no need! I am different but the same.

On Graham Greene: 'The End of The Affair'.

Consider the following two passages. They are written by the same author, in the same book and as the same narrator:

"When young one builds up habits of work that one believes will last a lifetime and withstand any catastrophe. Over twenty years I have probably averaged five hundred words a day for five days a week. I can produce a novel in a year, and that allows time for revision and the correction of the typescript. I have always been very methodical and when my quota of work is done, I break off even in the middle of a scene. Every now and then during the morning's work I count what I have done and mark off the hundreds on my typescript. No printer need make careful cast-off of my work, for there on the front page of my typescript is marked the figure- 83,764. When I was young not even a love affair would alter my schedule. A love affair had to begin after lunch, and however late I might be getting to bed- I would read the morning's work over and over and sleep on it...It needed Sarah to upset my self-imposed discipline... When she left the house I couldn't settle or work...But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly."

(Graham Greene, The End of The Affair, pp.24-25)

Then contrast this passage:

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem to be aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and no one other. But happiness annilates us: we lose our identity...The act of love itself has been discribed as the little death and lovers sometimes experience too little the peace. It is odd to find myself writing these phrases as though I love in fact what I hate."

(Graham Greene, The end of The Affair, p.36)

What an apparent contradiction! The first passage indicates that the writer is able to write in most circumstances and that this only became disturbed when he began to hate his lover Sarah. Only when he wanted the relationship to end, did his work pattern become disrupted. The second passage says something different. The argument here indicates that it is only through pain and hatred that one can press one's identity, that in love one becomes lost at sea, dissolved in an almost religious moment of loss.

Yet as one who has been trained in scholastic method, I am not willing to leave it there. Can one, reach a 'higher' understanding that does not make these two positions contrary to each other?

Certainly, the first passage speaks more about 'work' and 'habit.' It focuses on the formal aspect of writing, of the excerise of a technical ability. The second passage deals more with the content of the art. What is written about can become clearer when one hates or wants to assert one's identity. It might be a stretch to far to suggest that this is an outcome of the authors reported bi-polarity. Rather, what it demonstrates is that for great work to exist, there needs to be several sittings on the one peice, so that these two aspects can become entwined. When one swings to the technical extreme, the raw material of words is produced. Then at the other end, something more beautiful is produced when the content of the work can become visible. Surely this an indication that great writing- and indeed great art, cannot be the outcome of one brilliant moment of divine intervention. Instead, different treatments need to be considered and worked upon. Only then, can the masterpeice become possible!