Li Po, a famous Chinese poet, was totally infatuated with the moon. Legend has it that one night, when out on a boat in a drunken stupor, he saw the moon reflecting on the water, and thought it was so beautiful that he bent over to kiss it and drowned. And somehow, that is totally appropriate (as much as sad, awful deaths can be appropriate) that a poet died because he was too much in love.
I've been thinking about that this morning, on this first day of my summer class (which is my 7th writing workshop here at UVA, although this time it's more of an independent study type deal), about why we writer-type people do what we do. And there really isn't much more of a reason other than that we are in love and we are trying to figure out what to do about it.
And maybe it goes beyond the desire to write and expands to the world that all Creatives inhabit. Because somehow, as if magically implanted into our DNA, we creative people just want to make things. And the making, well, it stems from love, don't you think?
It stems from loving this world. From finding the sounds and images and stories and music of it to be constantly alluring. It's that sense of your soul singing at the fall of rain on your car roof, or the feel of gravel under your feet, how it turns your ankles, or the touch of a familiar blanket or the sound of truck horns on a busy highway - how you find your heart swimming in the details of this earth to the point of wanting to swallow them.
and it stems from loving people, too. From wanting to keep them inside your language, or make their endings better (or worse), or praise them, or celebrate heroes, or rescue someone's story, or make their voice heard. It's about taking the time to get to know them, all their strange habits, and of celebrating that - their weirdness, down to the shape of their fingernails and the number of freckles on their skin.
and it's about loving the mystery of both this world AND people so much that you love your questions about them. you love their complexities. you love the headaches and heartbreaks they cause you. you need to think about them longer, you need to change their scenarios, you need to create art out of them, you need to flip them upside down and shake all the hidden things from their pockets. you need to, because you are so in love that you must understand both better - this world, and people.
and I guess that sometimes, it's about hate, too. which is, in its own way, a rare form of love - because it means that you love something so much that when the opposite of that thing arises, you won't stand for it. It means loving justice and humility and compassion more than anything else in existence, so much that you must write to keep them alive, because you hate their absence.
In the world of Creatives, it is certainly about love. In the same way that our Father made us in the image of Himself, which is love, we have this desire to copy him.
Our response to love is creation.
Which makes me excited, that this summer I get to be thinking about language and poetry, my own little niche of the Creative scene, and ask myself how I can use it to for love, and how it is showing me to be head-over-heels about Creation.
p.s. Cole just wrote a really cool thing about writing and it's awesome.
