377 Days Blog #117 Creative vs. Destructive

Last week a Facebook friend posted a Cracked.com piece about The Walking Dead.  I watched the first season of that show on Netflix in one big gulp three years ago.  I had just finished working on a play that I hated doing with every fiber of my being.  My body, my emotions, and my brain were tired.  So much that I got sick, as one inevitably does after a series of late night shows and self-medicating - but not self-caring - to avoid any thoughts of that play.  I required some mindless (and maybe even some destructive) distraction to get me through that decompression.  I was living in Worcester at the time and was frequently alone in the house.  The television was in the cellar.  I note this only because my binge took me from daylight into the dark of a fall evening and I was scared to get off the couch to just turn on the lights.

That scared… that getting inside my head and perception of reality… convinced me it was good writing.  I liked the characters and the conflict.  Okay, I liked that it was the guy from Love Actually who does that thing where he zips up his sweater (his very subtle but handsome British style of dress) after Keira Knightly figures out he has a thing for him and his physicality is so jumbled because he can’t express his emotion.  I love those thirty seconds of speechless acting.  And yeah, that was mostly the reason I even bothered to watch.

That said, I went back when the next season was released.  There is something fun, even if infantile, about scaring yourself to the point that you are too frightened to move.  Well.  Fun when you are alone in a well populated neighborhood.  Now… in the darkness of rural New England, it isn’t so much fun.  Plus, in the second season a child was shot.  By accident.  But, nonetheless, a child was shot.  I don’t do well with violent acts against children.  I don’t always do well with violent acts in general… at least if it doesn’t serve the purpose of the story but is just there to add more blood.  I don’t think that was why the accident happened in the script of the episode.  It actually created some conflict and a catalyst for further storylines… but it’s all fuzzy now (and you don’t need to correct me – I don’t care) because I stopped watching it then.  I stopped watching it because I don’t find that entertaining or thought-provoking.  I realized at that point that something in me had changed.  I didn’t even (as several of my peers declare happens) have to have a child of my own to understand that empathetic grief.  Something about that scene just made me draw a line in my own personal taste and tolerance for violence.

Which is the point of those three paragraphs.  This is my personal taste.  I am not asking for a disagreement or a conversion with any arguments of writing or character development.  Nor am I going to condemn you if that is your personal taste.  I find that for me, I would mostly rather watch/read/write something that is creative and not something that destroys.

In spite of the fact I drew that line three years ago, my ability to articulate this proclivity just came to me over the weekend.

Creativity is somewhat approaching a religion with me.  Not in that blind worship way (at least I hope not.)  But in the, this is what I believe in as a higher form of our human existence sort of thing.  Not as a solid truth.  As an aspiration of bettering my soul.  Of improving my life.  I ask all my dinner guests as they sit at my table to tell me of their creative accomplishment from the week.  To tell one another and listen.  To appreciate.  To celebrate what was made from imagination and heart and the belief of possibility.

I love and use to exhaustion the phrase, ‘make good art.’  But I don’t just worship the idea.  I put it into practice.  I invite people over to my house to write.  I host play readings.  I participate in theater.  I encourage writers to start, to talk through an idea, to make the time.  I write my blog.  I write my manuscript.  I turn on music and let it inspire me.  I go to community events. I have dinner parties.  I work in a museum.  So much of my life is surrounded by the beauty of color and the ideas of what could be.

I like that.  I like to do things like that.  I like to spend my Sunday evening sitting in a circle of old couches reading through a script and contemplating what it means.  I like to sit around the table and hear my friends detail their projects of knitting, baking, music, or theater.  I like to put words together and make something new.

I don’t like to sit around a table and tear apart other people’s work.  I don’t like to go to a show or a reading and spend hours of ‘conversation’ dismissing the effort and focusing on what is wrong.  I don’t like to focus my attention on things that continually explore the darker side of our being without any intention of learning from it.  

Okay, that last statement is a little fuzzy.  I don’t really like stories that are puppies and rainbows.  I do like Shakespeare after all.  Light and frothy that is not.  And sometimes you are just left at the end of a play with Horatio standing there compelled to tell the whole story but without a whole lot of point to go on living.  There is some balance  - a sort of karmic playing out of events.  And yes, there are awful things that produce something creative.  That show I don’t want to watch is the fruit of someone’s creativity.

The story is just so… well to me, it’s destructive.

I don’t want to indulge any of my time – time that I increasingly find conflicted between devotion to theater or writing or work or friends – thinking about things that are destructive.  I don’t want to watch shows filled with excessive body counts just for the sake of more body counts.  I don’t like zombies… the destruction of the human intellect and problem solving capability.  Actually, maybe that could even be the crux of the matter.  I love the human soul.  I love the beauty of intelligence that works against a problem.  I don’t like things that diminish it without hope of resolution.

Anyway… that’s just me.

I am going to recognize that there are times when life throws some very stressful things (like a play that made me hate getting up in the morning because it meant thinking about that god damned script again) that make a bit of escape into the destructive an appealing detour.  I just really don’t want to live there.

I would much rather be creative.