8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: Part 5 – Embracing Nowhere

The soul of creativity is often burrowed deep within a search for a path to connection and purpose in a complex universe. The inspired self and creativity go hand in hand, and the philosophical conundrum of mashing legacy, vulnerability and purpose into our art is worth pondering.

Chapter List

  • Race Day

    I’m a distance runner. I’ve noted this on numerous occasions, and suggested on every one of those occasions that running has been a great metaphor for many life lessons.

    Hold onto your hat.

    When I travel, it’s race day.

    No, not for running. (At least not always.)

    See, for every race a runner runs there are often months of training. If I’m running a half marathon in August, then in April we’re starting hills, planning weekly increases in distance and working out a strategy for all the other bits that go into a successful showing.

    Race day is the last day of a very long era of practice, honing, patience, suffering, and growing.

    When I travel, it’s race day for my hobbies: my art, my photography, and often my writing.

    I’ve just spent months out in the neighbourhood pointing my camera at interesting suburban things, colourful patches of trees, and posed pictures of my dog. I’ve hunkered down with a sketchbook and inked endless mundane nearby objects, strolling people, and familiar landscapes. I’ve sat in the field and written essays, penned journals, and compiled updates for social media.

    All of that is practice.

    And then I step off a plane, camera strapped over a shoulder, pen and paper ready, and a blank journal stuffed into my backpack—ready to perform. Ready to take the best photos I know how. Ready to sketch things I’ve never seen before. Ready to scribble notes about experiences and impressions into pages for later perusal.

    Race day is the last day of a very long era of practice, honing, patience, suffering, and growing, even if that is about running… or art and hobbies and habits.

  • Death Taxes

    I don’t particularly dwell on it but, just like the rest of you, I’m getting older.

    A few weeks after this post goes live and before the year is out I’ll be turning fifty.

    Five-oh.

    Naturally, as I was putting together the list of topics to write about in this writing project, the notion of my inevitable post-existence emerged as a real strong contender… because we might not dwell on it, but we do occasionally remember that someday all that will be left of any of us is memory and artifacts of our time here. If even that much.

    Creative folks don’t necessarily make shit because they are trying to leave a legacy, but a legacy of our efforts is certainly a side product of living and breathing and dreaming big ideas that translate into written words or composed music or clever little bits of art hanging in someone’s living room.

    Heck, as I walked into my home office I passed a framed cross-stitch sampler we have hanging on the wall that was made by a long-passed ancestor of my spouse. I doubt she sat down to make that, spent hours sewing every single stitch, and pondered whether it would be the one thing that her great-granddaughter someday had left to remember she had ever existed. It’s a morbid thought, but these little things, moments captured in creativity and craftsmanship might turn into exactly that much for most of us—if we’re even that lucky.

    Will some painting I’ve already painted be all that is left of everything I ever aspired to sketch?

    Are there collections of words and photos yet to be pounded into keys or snapped through lenses that will ultimately and solely remain to mark my interest in those hobbies?

    What will the legacy of any of our creative lives become after we die?

    Like I said, I don’t particularly dwell on it but under the category of Death & Taxes I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Pomp Popularity

    I always have an eye open for interesting unpolished creative stones when I’m wading through the streams of my social feeds.

    There is an urgency in many of us who make stuff to fit in. We work towards a certain grade of production quality. We make to fit into a mould of commercial viability. We try to stand out in a crowded field by following the so-called rules.

    It’s all so much water rushing past our feet.

    It’s the stranger things that capture my attention, the jagged, colourful rock stuck mostly in the muck of the riverbed, just poking out and catching the light in an interesting way, that snags my eye.

    I have explored this theme routinely on this project. There is a gentle conflict between the pursuit of high quality products that build one’s portfolio, represent one’s best work, and meet a threshold of acceptable value—and on the other side, transcend formula, represent something new and interesting, and break the mould.

    In the middle is a tension in the heart of many artists of any field. To ignore the rules completely is to be overlooked for failing to meet expectations, but then to become little more than a photocopier for ideas of others before us is to be shrugged off as uninteresting.

    We all want to be a polished stone. But someone needs to pluck us out of the river of obscurity before that happens. 

    Under the category of Pomp & Popularity I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Photographic Oddity

    I’ve written a few times about the black and white photography that accompanies the posts on this project.  What I haven’t mentioned as often is the shades of vulnerability I encounter in that act of taking such non-traditional photos in public.

    Let’s define something: I think of a traditional photo as something that someone out in the wilds of a public space might expect one to take a photo of, like say, a scenic view, a bit of shapely architecture, a group of people, an animal, flowers, or some kind of public performance. Everyone takes pics of these things. They are quote… normal.

    A non-traditional photo is something else that usually falls outside of that category: say, snapping pics of a crack in the pavement, a macro of the textured bark on a tree, a storm drain cover, a street sign, one’s own feet, or even the whorls of clouds in the sky. Not everyone points their camera at these sorts of things. They are, um… less normal.

    My black and white photography tends to stray almost exclusively into the non-traditional realm.

    And having partaken in increasingly frequent acts of non-traditional photography over the last few months, I have noticed that with every click of the shutter I have been putting myself into a weird sort of public performance and place and vulnerability.

    I stopped while walking through Paris in August (when we were there on vacation) pausing to point my camera at a mailbox. Parisians who for the most part went about their lives indifferent to my existence on that trip, instead turned their heads and payed a bit more attention to my non-traditional moment of photography.

    It draws more attention to take odd photos than to take photos of things people expect to take photos of. People’s heads turn. There is a moment of “what’s that guy doing?” and then they move on… but still a moment.

    It didn’t bother me, of course.

    It was just a curiosity of consideration, and I couldn’t help but ponder what was going through the minds of commuting Parisians as some curious Canadian snapped serious pics of the relatively mundane in an otherwise massively photogenic city like that.

    I was a standout, an oddity, and temporarily creatively vulnerable to something I can’t quite put my finger on.

  • Rights Wrongs

    This project of introspective writing is coming at you from nowhere. It says so, right in the title. Dispatches from Nowhere. And sometimes it literally feels that way.

    Plonk right in backish-middle of my topic list I need to surface a challenge that defines much of my creative existence. I am certainly not alone in feeling this way, but it really is the problem of being in the middle of nowhere.

    I have a small, loyal audience of friends who seem to enjoy what I make, and for many people who make stuff that would be enough: the ability to share your art with the people you love, the practice of writing for close confidants, or performing for local enthusiasts who smile when you play or act or sing… it is all right.

    But nearly every artist would be lying to you if they were to say they don’t feel the indifference of the larger world with every note, every keystroke, every bit of ink scratched onto the page.

    Creativity, after all, is an expression of who we are and part of me—as I suspect a part of many who create anything worthy of the thought—crave to express that to a bigger world, to bridge across culture and politics, to link arms right through language barriers, and to muddle our souls with humans living in nowheres on the far other side of the planet.

    Being from nowhere forces one to look across the gaps of heart and hands and ask how we can bridge that gap and cure the indifference.

    Under the category of Rights & Wrongs I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.