ARTIST: EVERY MOTHER'S SON
FORMAT: 7" 45 RPM
TITLE: "COME ON DOWN TO MY BOAT"
YEAR: 1967
LABEL: MGM
I don't have much to say about this band or song, but I was obsessing about something while listening to it that I've gotta exorcise.
Earlier this week I was watching Josh and Benny Safdie selecting some of their favorite films from the Criterion vault. After pulling The Player, Benny mentioned that he was moved by a part of Robert Altman's speech at the 2006 Oscars (given just months before he died). I've excerpted it below, but you should watch it.
I've always said that making a film is like making a sandcastle at the beach. You invite your friends and you get them down there and you build this beautiful structure, several of you, and then you sit back and watch the tide come in. Have a drink, watch the tide come in and the ocean just takes it away. And that sandcastle remains in your mind.
There's a few things about this metaphor that I find therapeutic. First, the centering of creativity on process. Any person who has done publicly-consumed creative work (and believe me most stuff I've done -- including this thing -- has been seen by only friends and acquaintances) can understand the feelings of despair and satisfaction unique to the process. Meaning: the final product, as it's received in the world and, if you're lucky, gets circulated or reinterpreted, never quite matches how it takes shapes to you when the final brick is placed in your mind. There's a special thrill to the mental model made during the process. If you're like me, inevitably the shape that model finally takes here and now i some physical form is a shadow that, as Altman says, gets swept away. I've always found it interesting who can and can't reckon with that.
For those in the latter group (me included), I think Altman offers a way forward, in that the "sandcastle remains in your mind." There's something to be said for every person taking pride in some simple, habitual act of creation (not thing created) -- finding comfort in the process and not its product -- both to allay the difficulty of something you've made being dispersed (in those rare instances when a creative thing actually gets seen/heard/read/etc.) as well as the far more common case of your made-thing just remaining, forever, a part of an ephemeral, creative moment that took place. If we're to live good lives as humans we might as well make use of what makes us special, and as far as I can tell creativity is about it.
And while I appreciate the thought behind the oft-uttered advice of "Just finish the damn thing" when it comes to creativity (and to be honest this is some of the best advice for dissertation writing), I also think it occludes the potential satisfaction in tinkering and ephemeral making that has no end game: crude, improvisational sandcastles welcomely swept away. I'm starting to think that that's the real work: the Algebra doodler, the subway knitter, the tabletop drummer, the walking freestyler.
If it's not obvious already, all of this is me trying to come to terms with how my own writing has been going for about three decades. It's something my mom always encouraged, and I guess why this project is this project. Her death was a galvanizing moment for me. It showed me that time might be running out faster than I ever thought (she died at 65 but dementia took her at 58-59). I'm now a person I would've never imagined I'd be: I have a notebook with a multi-year plan for my writing.
Dignan's notebook from the movie Bottle Rocket.
During her time with me, my mom was never that creative -- although she was constantly scribbling in Mead notebooks: making lists, writing short reflections, doing endless budget calculations. I don't recall her doing crafts or creative writing, however. She'd play piano, but only Christmas songs during December. My dad did mention here and there that she'd written poetry. On a couple occasions, my mom even pulled out some of her poems. They were mostly love letters to my dad, stuffed in a shoebox or something like that. I can't recall much of them beyond her quintessentially 1960s-teenage-curly-cursive writing (truly a lost art form) and the aging loose leaf paper and envelopes.
She also loved, as was her baby boomer duty, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" -- that famously misinterpreted and misapplied poem if you, like me, side with David Orr's interpretation. My mom, like just about everyone else in the world, saw Frost's narrator as reflecting on and affirming his unconventional, non-conformist choices in life (i.e. taking the "road less travelled" which "made all the difference"). She explained this poem to me in this way using her copy of Frost's collected poems, one of the very few books she had that wasn't a biography or cookbook.
For people like my mom, I wonder how creativity is expressed through home and family?
Frost's poem, however, is more cleverly about how choices, in the moment, are arbitrary, and it's in retrospect that we make sense out of them, weaving narratives that apply order to the chaos. For many of us, this means convincing ourselves we broke from the norm and followed the less-traveled path. We string together moments, manufacture decision points, and apply a teleology where everything makes sense. It's a romantic notion of rugged individuality, particularly for Americans. But what was my mom's narrative? Which road was she on? What of her box of poems? I'm not sure, but I do know she supported every one of my ever-altering creative vectors.
For people like my mom, I wonder how creativity is expressed through home and family? Perhaps that sense of the collaborative, generative process can also be applied to the memory one has of being in a household, sharing a space and a set of experiences, building a micro-culture. For my family, our home was, mainly, my mom's -- a kind of exoskeleton bearing the marks of all her eccentricities, from piles of magazines, to Coca-Cola memorabilia, to unopened VHS tapes of Eric Roberts movies. She built something there for sure. It was an artful mess.
Even though our family as it was then is gone now, swept away in a protracted tide of mental illness, divorce, foreclosure, dementia, and death, I'm left with something in my mind that feels created and complete, a fading design carved in the sand. And when I drive by our old house that was once ours and then a bank's and then a house flipper's and now a home to some new family, I just see a house.