I can’t sleep and clearly it’s because I want to write.
And I’m scared to do so.
I’ve had my call for a while now – it’s as if my inner phone is not stopping to ring, despite the fact I’m very consciously not answering the phone and wondering to myself who the heck could be obnoxious enough to not give up calling.
It’s hard to be meditative and yet write. Find language and yet silence. Knowing I am writing words and somehow need to decide on which ones. While at the same time meaning or – Neudeutsch (NewGerman) THE FLOW – will only find words if I don’t follow a purpose.
In all the great intellectual reads that I have encountered in the last months, I find it a striking absence that people talk rarely about creating but not about purpose. Or rather the lack of it. That enables a flow of creativity. I’ve found it in Elizabeth Gilberts book ‚Big Magic‘ – namely that if I lack the knowledge of where I’m headed, it might work (well…) to follow my curiosity.
This is a concept that on first view lacks discipline.
Yet I find discipline incredibly needed – and worthwhile – to trust and follow my curiosity. For it lacks a purpose I can deduct.
I sometimes suspect my smart subconsciousness (yeah, whatever that is, right) to play a brilliant trick on my conscious wish to control it all, by NOT showing the full picture of where my life is headed. But that is such an intellectual concept in itself just thinking about it. Through it. And then in little swirls left right and underneath to just end up in the same dead end.
What moves me with much more energy is the idea of absichtslos. I do hope it translates into purposeless. Nope. Purposefree. Nope. The dictionary says undesigned. I like that.
Actually I love that. The same wisdom of words pointing to the openness of an empty piece of paper. That is open to all the art in the world. Be it words, drawings, paintings, music, or a plate with an immensely fat piece of cake sitting right on top of it.
Undesigned is a space we might encounter outside of our boxes. And I find it comes very close to love – forgive me if I’m stressing a seemingly romantic note here. It’s just so clear to me that love has one symptom. It wants nothing. It is there just out of itself. It just sits there, so to speak. It doesn’t want anything, and it doesn’t need anything. But to be there.
That is amazing.
So doing things – without purpose – seems so impossible.
I am not sure this entry has served a purpose. Or that is has been in the flow. I am however sure that it has followed my curiosity to see what being awake in the middle of the night could lead to, as something wanted to write for no apparent reason. So the big question really is: is there worth to something not fulfilling immediate functionality?
It’s worth my smile.
Beyond being such a smartass, I love floating in that silence of the night, as if I’m watching myself from a short and most lovely distance – stranded by coincidence between bed, laptop and a congenial yearning to write.
The funny thing is – I love that floating sight. And to do so, it doesn’t matter if I’ve just written a masterpiece of poetry, a song of a barbarian nightingale (and we all wonder what that would read like and if you could read it without singing) or – a piece of crap.