Habitual

I have not been doing this on the "Storyland" series. Shooting close, I mean. I have been keeping a loose framing, placing more space around the subject, trying to accentuate the idea of frailty and isolation. But Meagan is a photographer and directed me to do this one. I really like it and wonder why I have not bee doing it more. Perhaps the answer is just that I am simple or a fool. What happens to brains? They seem to lock in on an idea, and then they lock up. After that, it is very difficult to remove the parameters you have just established. We make them so that they are difficult to break. It is murder to the creative stuff we do (I almost said "process" but I rebel against such awfully bleak sounding words). I think it was Frost who captured that so easily in a line that went, "He liked having thought of it so much that he said it again." Maybe I shouldn't put quotation marks around it since it might not be Frost and it is probably mis-quoted. But that is the gist of it. We like our ideas too so much. . . .

I've tried doing it the other way, though--hating my own ideas--and it doesn't work well. It is a disorder, really, and is debilitating. Once there, it is difficult to work your way back. Very quickly you can become despondent and then catatonic. It is just not a good way to go.

I've tried the Buddhist path of non-attachment, of just letting my ideas form and then releasing them to drift off downstream, grabbing another for a moment before letting go of that as well. It is hard work, all that letting go. It is the pathway to enlightenment of some kind, I am sure. "But until that day, until that day, until that day," as Donna the Buffalo says, "Sights and sounds they'll get to me."

And so I'll limp along, boxed in by my own design, counting on something to shake me to wakefulness, trusting to my own meager talent.

"But until that day, until that day, until that day, sights and sounds will still get to me."