Orient

Originally Posted Wednesday, May 22, 2013

A sore throat and a bit of a fever kept me from exercising yesterday.  I went to the photo store instead.  I dropped off some film and held a new Leica M camera for awhile, their newest digital.  I shouldn't have.  It is almost $7,000, too much for what it is.  So, of course. . . . 

I was in no hurry, having nothing to do but go home, so I took my time.  I noticed things I don't usually notice.  When I left, I drove back slowly, stopped at the grocery store, marketed.  Unhurried, I watched people, the ones I normally block from my vision, the aggravating ones, the sub-normals.  It was fun being in no hurry, seeing the things that I avoid.  It took an illness to put me in observing speed.  The speed of life. 

I remember vividly (I think) the opening of Bruce Chatwin's "Songlines."  He is riding through the Australian desert in the back of a pickup truck.  An Aborigine is sitting next to him singing a song as quickly as he can.  The faster the truck goes, the faster he tries to sing.  He is "singing" his "map."  It is the way directions are handed down and remembered.  Songs about the landscape, about landmarks.  They are written and performed at walking speed.  Here, Chatwin observed, was a frantic man trying to stay oriented as the speed of life accelerated around him.  He was simply trying to find his place. 

Creativity takes time, and not just in the making of things.  It is the down time, the thinking, or rather the not-thinking about it.  It takes Rip Van Winkle time, teenage time, the time to do nothing but sit and look and think, time to wander endlessly, to waste the afternoon and early evening, to eat in strange restaurants and drink in far off dives, to hear the voices of the marginal and insane geniuses.  Van Gogh time.  Gauguin time. 

I don't know how to get that kind of time back.  Well, I do, I guess, but I'm just not willing to make that move yet.  Maybe I never will be.