020051027 01:30 • 
I caught a recent Bauhaus show at the Warfield in downtown San Francisco. It’s early in their tour and quirks are still being worked together. These creative misfits are legendary, not only for the combined musical power unleashed by their interaction, but for the trouble created by ego and disagreement within their ranks. Watching the show, it was obvious these tensions are still present. At times the gel was difficult, and the edges of each member were apparent as four separate individuals on stage simply playing instruments simultaneously. Then, suddenly, they would snap together for a song and it was like watching a single entity roar to life and come straight off the stage for you.
In any creative endeavor, you’re in this sort of clinch. The path of your life is this exact situation.
In modern Western culture we embrace the myth of the isolate artist, the lone person creating something never seen/heard/touched/felt before. I do feel there are new realms of emotion to be found through art, new worlds to see and hear and live in, but the idea it will be the single work of one mad creator working in the dead of night is not specifically correct. The lone flame of creative chaos has no meaning without its context, cannot create newness at all without embedding in and interacting with the culture surrounding it. You can search out context, place yourself within framework, but you cannot exist as a defined concept without it.
What is lost in the narrow focusing on individual action is the fact both sides of the coin are exactly the same. When you create in reactive feedback with another person or set of genre/cultural rules, you are creating a joint work bouncing off the concepts put forth by the other. When you push against another person or set of concepts, stepping off to “do your own thing,” you are still working with them. They’re providing the negative space, the area you will not enter, the definition for your work in a specified realm for a specified end.
I’ve been cogitating over the life pursuits and creative endeavors of myself and a few friends of late, and return often to a springboard of thoughts expressed in an eloquent post by mAE hYMN, gifted noisician and imagician: This is my faith, this is the faith I have in all of us. One line in particular grabs and shakes:
“As an individual, I threaten only that which you stand to lose, should you be strong enough to let it go.”
The wish for what we see as beneficial change is a choice of focus. Whether we consciously act on life as co-creators or not, we are still co-creating everything, every moment. You storm off screaming, I place my emotions into song in response. She unknowingly says the right word at the right time, his writing block crumbles and the words spill fast, at last. He wanders in without saying a word or even making eye contact, but his choice of scarf today provides the kernel of an idea for your next painting.
Once you realize the true extent of co-creation, terms like egotist, critic, encourager, territorial, obstacle, boundary-maker, threat take on new meanings. They’re not simple descriptors applying to an individual. They’re collaborative actions.
The beauty of this situation: it takes only one aware person to flip the picture, inverting negative space into positive. Realization of reaction permits choice of reaction.
Where your brush falls, which note comes next, where you place a next footstep, which word best describes this feeling of connectedness: choice is the center of all creation.
020051020 15:15 •
The grass, neatly cut away ‘round each stone, whispered to us in the wind-sped air.
“What’s your choice? Which head of the hydra seems likely to make the best use of your scrawny bones?”
Choice is built from hidden questions: what’s inside, what’s outside, what do I really want, what do I really need, what do I really mean… what should I do?
I stood with five alive and a seventh deceased beneath, amidst a sea of graveyard markers. On the surface of a dead city of dead Jews, I listened to the lives surrounding us, arcs of motion struck from the sky, choices once made in tears and joy and flicks of wrist now cut and dry.
“Time re-defines all discrete things.”
Born into this whip-bit whorl of energy, we draw force for growth. We spin and set in motion, as we were spun and set in motion ourselves. Every action continues the threads of choice. We reach into the connectedness, spin and weave, until finally we’ve touched more than taken, wrought more than destroyed, and exit the way we came.
If you love something, place it in the center of your chest.
If you’ve a vision to create, a sonic realm to make, a world to build, a word to fulfill, let it brightly burn.
If you aren’t but know you can, begin today and do not rest.
If your feet follow one path and your heart another, the wilderness is waiting for your return.
The dead speak through wind, grass, rain. They act now in sequences of ideas set in motion by their hands and the hands of those from whom they came. We’re created from their thoughts, their actions, their material shape. If you listen and look, you will learn: humanity is not a race, but perpetual conversation, each voice assuming ever-shifting place.
Let’s cut to the chase and cut to the choice. This is your life to make, and soon chance will end. You’ll join the city beneath while others act in your stead.
“Why do you wait?”
Choose and do, today.
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