I have a recurring genre of nightmares in which I’m trying to say something…but I can’t. In one, my mouth feels sewn shut. In another, it seems like it’s stuck together with some adhesive from hell. In the worst, there’s nothing stopping me from opening my mouth–but I can’t get my lips to part. I keep shaking people by the shoulders, making muffled noises inside my mouth, which feels at once painfully constricted and cavernously large. Often I can hear myself whimpering in my sleep, and those whimpers wake me up. Sweaty and spent, I’m so glad to be awake, that that worst thing ever–I want to tell you something, but I can’t get you to understand–not because you are inadequate, but because I am–is over.
Sometimes I think my choice to be a television writer is the best choice I could have made, because I love TV, I love writing, I love the drama/comedy of the human experience. And sometimes I think it is the most idiotic choice I could have made, because I obsess about communication, ruminate over it, and I’m driven to tears because I’m trying so hard and often feel I’m not getting across what I want to convey. At those times, I think I should become a landscape artist, or fix rollercoasters at amusement parks, or monetize my love of dance and teach a movement class for pre-school age children. I think I should do anything but stay in my head, the source of so much horror and pain. I should be in the world, putting my hands in the Earth, tinkering with doodads and doohickeys, or using the kinetic energy of dance as a nutritive succor for me and others. But I’m always drawn back to writing, to communicating. Because my head is also the source of so much ecstasy and beauty
Related: Another vexing topic: memory.
I asked one of my rhetorical mentors, Professor Robert Gaines, who teaches rhetoric at Sewanee University in Sewanee, Tennessee–what the ancients–they who invented rhetoric as tool of communication–would think about how creativity is painful. He said they would think it was an unhelpful way to approach the topic. Rhetoric was so real, such a lived experience, and such a daily concern for them. They had to make persuasive arguments to defend themselves in court or serve in the Senate.
“I think the ancients would have considered this sort of theory [my “Creativity Is Painful” theory] inefficient and unnecessary,” Gaines told me in an email exchange.
I too, think it’s inefficient and unnecessary, to be honest! But I do feel that when I have an idea for, say a television script, it becomes an illness, or a demon, inside me. And it moves through different parts of my body–my head, my legs, my back–causing pain and discomfort, twisting around. I can almost hear it make gurgling and fizzing noises–until the first words come out. And then I can breathe. Because I know I will give birth to this freak of nature inside me!.Before it felt stuck inside forever, and those are the times I think I should go to the center of town and stand on my head, or spray myself with our garden hose, or ask someone to punch me as hard as they can. And in doing so, I’d exchange the mute compulsiveness of this feeling of wanting to tell you something with a wild and outrageous living in the now and feeling my body and its relation to its surroundings.
Various philosophers over the centuries have grappled with what I always call The Problem of Red, just because that’s how I remember it first being explained to me: “When I say the word, ‘red’, how do I know you’re thinking of the exact same thing I am?” When a teacher said this to me in an undergraduate English/rhetoric class, I was again pulled in two directions. Part of me wanted to leap for joy, to thank this genius professor for finally giving words to this anxiety I’ve had since I can remember remembering things. Another part of me wanted to scream, “Why!??! Why did you have to give it words?!” Maybe it could have remained a monster without fangs, haunting me in my mute nightmares but never daring to be seen in the open. Ultimately, I think it’s better that it has a name, this problem.
Philosopher John Locke addressed this issue in his “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, in which he said language gave humans the ability to give voice to thoughts that would have otherwise remained private. And they lived happily ever after.
And: A Limerick about my favorite delegate in the Maryland General Assembly, Eric Ebersole (D-44)!
If only that had been the end of the thought. Instead it was the beginning of one. A centuries-long musing by jundreds of philosophers on imparting knowledge to another. Perhaps the best we can hope for is something my friend, Tara, said to me about an unrelated topic. She taught science for many years. “We think of it like an asymptote: you get closer and closer to the answer but never get one-hundred percent of the way there.” Maybe you and I will get closer and closer to understanding each other, and I’ll just have to give up this obsession with exactitude.
In the ultimate irony, as I wrote this article, my mother asked me, “What’s it about?” My answer: “I can’t explain.”
Also: A lesson in lived history, from a close friend and lifetime activist, Carole Fisher.
I’m grateful for your readership! Check back with me each week here at politicalpoetrypastiche as my linguistic, literary, and generally loquacious involvement in local politics takes on a mélange of prose and poetry genres. After all: All Politics Is HoCo-al™. Join me on Facebook here, find me on Twitter at @politicalpoetr3, and follow me on Instagram using the handle @politicalpoetrypastiche.