I keep meeting these people who make things.

Have you noticed that? If you keep your eyes open, and you think about it. Awesome! There are these people who are bravely making things. And there are as many different ways and things to be making - no, there are definitely more, in fact - as there are people. Have you noticed? And have you noticed, there are all these people who somehow don't believe in their own creative capacity, people who either don't or think they don't make anything at all?

I think that we have to talk about this.

I wonder about how we can foster the making of things. The barriers are many, which is kind-of heartbreaking, I find. There are reasons people are afraid to create and this is facilitated by social messages that make it seem satisfying to make selecting from prefabricated options one's manner of self-expression. I know people who will be frustrated by this suggestion. I don't mean to invalidate the process of self-identifying that can be felt in things as innocuous as deciding what books will populate your home or what you wear to keep warm, are you a mittens or a glove person, is it the function or the colour that you prioritise; these things come from you, from your values and your taste, that's all you, and yes, we're all very "free" and "unique" and even within very limited pickings you can be somehow statistically "unique". But can we consider how limiting this really is. Can we consider that that is not enough. Can we consider that critical thought is making something?

Maybe I need to talk about why it's important to make stuff. I mean, first I'm saying everybody's making things, then that not enough people are making things, then that people are afraid to make things, then that selecting a scarf is a creative art and asking "or is it?" - so I'll state this:

I believe that people need to be urged to make things because to live in repetitive sync with expectations and to be motivated by the creation of perfect copies is damaging to people, leaves them vulnerable to emotional onslaught that can strike them unaware and be devastating, and it cripples their potential, all of which has an effect not only on their capacity to enjoy and be present in life but on their community and on society. So it's a public health concern. It affects their children or their friends, it perpetuates norms; it's all wrong. And I submit that that is the alternative that is in play. Someone has an idea in mind and they try to emulate it - often it's an imaginary idea, something from some ad. So I end up with lines of women almost identically frocked, and barely, stalking awkwardly up my street towards the bars nearby on spindly heels and dressed from just below their bottoms to just above their nipples, though it's freezing cold. I shiver just looking at them, partly because it's true - they really do look the same. It's chilling. And, it's an exercise in reproducing a suggested way of being. Or, someone is at a loss to carve out a life that will be well-received, so they stress themselves out in programs that mean nothing to them and/or applying for jobs that are similarly meaningless. So we end up with people doing jobs they hate and growing depressed from sun deprivation and a total stunting of their selves. Or, it could be the child or teenager - or adult student, for that matter - whose only method of learning is to copy down what is on the board, the original thought necessary for learning woefully un-nurtured. So we end up with people thinking that they're just not smart, and certainly they can't learn on their own.

The consequences of this are non-negligible. I have learned that there is something necessary about true self-expression. I think there are many ways to go about this, and I'm not at all saying that everyone should be financially sustaining themselves by some artistic pursuit. But this world is not a stagnant place, for all it often seems that people would like it to be. It is changing and our way of being and living will continue to change; it's a matter of how well-suited we are to change, and it takes the practice of being original to survive in that without becoming overwhelmed at the scriptlessness of it all, or, alternatively, protectively deadened by avoiding the truth of it. And I don't believe the latter will stand the tests of the slings and arrows of our individual and collective lives, nor is it a way in which I want people to live. Deprived of the exhilaration of experiencing and expressing, stressed not about what they're doing and are but about what they're not. Ascribing meaning and stress where there isn't any; missing the scary meaning within brave human expression. So vulnerable, and so often unaided. It does break my heart.

I think my suggestion is both an easy and a difficult demand. I think it begins in the way one conceives of things - I learned from a wise man I know the concept of seeing with "owl eyes", which applies when one is trying to appreciate the vast activity going on everywhere when you walk in the woods and I daresay it applies when one is just trying to be aware. You start with noticing things; you notice what you think of them; you refine your reflections; you notice where they come from and seek to build from your own instincts and reactions; you express your reaction. This is art, this is decision-making, this is something significant. This is something we need. Exploring is art.

I don't think it needs to be all esoteric, either. I can't knit. Can you? What do you make? I think that recognising an interest, honing a skill, producing something, sharing it, this creative process is as healthy a cycle as your blood oxygenating.

That said, I used to enjoy a vivacious argument with a former teacher of mine, an artist and philosopher who in a great loss died recently while exploring the options of exhilaration. He would define art as something which must be identified by not only an individual but by another as art. To be art it must be shared, called art by an external person experiencing it. I at the time was enamoured of the idea that even to view something and call it beautiful, to construct associations in your mind, to appreciate the music of some cacophony or the mixed-media art of some panoramic vantage, was every bit art. I continue to think there is value in this - that if not art, it at least is creative. Maybe what I was missing at the time is that the way of being I described is an important thing to value and is very good practice, but that it needs activity. We need to do, as well as imagine, and to dare to express, as well as appreciate.

The problem I'm looking at here exists in the many people who don't believe they're creative, who don't have time to be creative, who view the world in sets of multiple-choice options with no space for "none of the above." To those who view themselves in that category, I suppose I would say, I dare you. I dare you to walk around with owl-eyes and to decide it is worth it to bravely call your views your own, I dare you to find the loves and urges inside you and build things with them. Take pictures in your mind, know that the things you choose to appreciate are expressions, decide they're of value and dare to express them. I once went for a walk with someone who wanted help learning to use his brand new-to-him 1973 SLR, but not only did he follow tips on settings for aperture and shutter speed, he actually mimicked each perspective my own camera took. This baffled me. There isn't a correct photograph to take. There are infinite photographs to take. Classically trained musicians will know that Bach would have us all doing four-part harmonizations that must have airtight defences against an unforgiving red corrective pen - to my gratitude that isn't the world we live in. Dissonance, parallel fifths, seven and a quarter bars of silence and outrageous changes in time signatures welcome. There are no wrong notes.

But then, there are the many people who know they are creative and who still don't make things. There are ugly barriers to art. Expectations, finances, priorities, time. Procrastination, I believe to be fear.

For my part I know I am creative, which it takes courage to know even if you would defend, as I would, that every person is creative. Because I value the effort it's taken to be brave enough just to know it, I demand I be brave enough to say, I know I'm creative. And this is where the demands are for activity. For saying you know what? Fuck this. For identifying the obstacles to being fucking brave, and making stuff. If something fascinates you, its pursuit is a creative act. If something is blocking you, patiently, lovingly figuring it out is an important act. If something enrages you, learning about it and talking about it and doing something about it is a creative act. If something brings you joy, if you're good at something, if you find beauty somewhere, do something about it, prioritise this creative act. You have time. Prioritise figuring out how. And as for fear . . . well, there are no wrong notes. It's not what's important. And evolution is part of the game; we all have to start where we're at.

Since my überblog below I have, I'm sorry to confess, begun and failed to finish more than one new blog entry. For instance I have more to say about the g20 and I have a problem with hate, I wonder about the definition of music and I find discussions of the concept of violence to have interesting potential. But false-startedness this is clearly to be a weakness of mine. (a fact to which anyone who has ever made plans with me to do something creative can, sadly, attest.)

I am going to make an effort to write something weekly, and my mandate is for chrissakes relax. I'm giving myself an hour-long time limit because the alternative to relaxing is apparently silence. So, with apologies to those who are reading, this blog will be eminently imperfect, and I hope in return you tell me some of the things you have to say. Especially if you think I'm full of shit.

And in the mean time, thank you for making things, thank you for inspiring, thank you for painting and knitting and programming and writing, thank you for organizing and postering and singing and whistling, thank you for imagining and implementing and exploring and considering, thank you for challenging and rejecting, thank you for concocting and inventing and cobbling together, thank you for considering, thank you for daring, and thank you for being.

I'm concluding this post by referring to a poem which writing this has caused to rise up from my memory to rattle around in my head. Thank you for etching on the earth.

peace and love [how subversive]

-Rache

Write a poem
they're dying out
they're all out there waiting to be born
Write a poem
Write on the number 22
on the colour blue
on you
i hate
watching someone walking in the wrong
direction on the other side of my own
reflection in a window and I know
they're gonna hafta go
all the way to the end to
realise it's a dead one and they're
gonna have to come all the way
back and past this pane of
glass again and go out of sight and
I'll probably never happen to know if they ever
find their way in somewhere.

I hate how sometimes a big truck a huge,
fuck, ugly polluted and filthy
machine obstruction
blocks
my view of that Paradise
from the already distancing thick unkempt
windows of the bus, as we both speed
past it on an ugly Road.
and I can't see it and I worry so much
it's not there
I can hardly
bear that.

And yet poems are in everything write,
write poems. In the dirt,
footprints, blueprints, raw prints or however
you etch on the earth, write!
with the primal drive
with which we
people
the earth with souls, a drive which we
feel in our bodies and mouths and
fingertips and cores, makes us crazy in
"love" or lust-ing for procreation,
with that kind of urgent
hunger!
that wanting, we want
to express that poetry that we experience,
felt and found in that place that scares you
like in the art gallery
the dark painting with the horse and train that hit you
when you turned a corner
somebody saved that poem.

And poems, like people, live lives.
They
are encountered by travellers and impact and
change and influence and teach
in unpredictable ways
that have shaped this world.
Poems and people are
manifestations of beauty, I think.
New combinations, creations, explanations
expressions, confessions, manipulations
illuminations. Evolutions.

The world (to say nothing of space)
mirrors
the task of the human race.
Evolving. Creating, considering, imagining
we are just
letting the soft animals of our bodies
want what they want, love what they love
which I borrowed
from another poem
I think
that the litter of pups
and the dewed yellow cups
and the child
are loved, a connection, a knowing
before birth
by the life that makes them
or they're wounded.
And we should love our poems
love our songs
love our notions-not-yet-expressed or it's
wrong
it's urgent
I've seen people
dying
from the worthlessness
we give the poems we've it in us to say
and the fear
of being alive enough to know them.

Write the poems; they're dying out
and with them. . .