Kaleidoscope Eyes

 

Writing recently about the coming of the New Year, I admitted to loving “the image of the blank slate, the fresh canvas, the empty page. The thought of turning from the past and moving into a pristine future is deeply appealing. Like feet of freshly-fallen snow, a new year blankets the disappointments and pain, conflicts and loss of the old with beauty and peace.  Glinting in the sunlight, piled high on fenceposts and streets, whorling into intricate patterns against parking lots and sheds, the fresh emptiness of snow gives the illusion of clarity and simplicity.  Clean as a fresh canvas, empty as a page still waiting for words, it tempts us toward an imagined world free of complexity and ambiguity, a world reduced to the twin realities of sunlight and shadow.”

From time to time each of us hungers for the simplicity and clarity of a fresh start, and the New Year is a traditional time to acknowledge and assuage that hunger.  In this week’s Write on Wednesday prompt, Becca narrows the focus a bit by asking, ”What fresh ideas do you have for your writing?”  For a writer, the metaphoric hunger for an empty slate, a blank page free of  stunted paragraphs, unfinished sentences and untidy piles of words can be almost visceral.   When desks pile high with false starts, orphaned phrases and errant thoughts that refuse to lead to any good conclusion, the sense of frustration can be suffocating.   When it comes to a fresh start, writers’ block is not precisely the issue.   Writer’s boredom seems a more adequate description.  There is a certain ennui, a stifling lassitude, a distaste for one’s own thoughts that leads inexorably to that particular dead end called “I don’t have anything original to say.”

Granted, originality is tricky business.   Foregoing any concern for originality in order to write “what appeals to the masses”  leads directly into the heart of literary tract housing where rows of bland, predictable and stolid manuscripts reach off to the horizon.  On the other hand, a writer determined to ”be original” in every detail and at all costs can end up producing the literary equivalent to a purple house with green shutters and gargoyles on the roof.  It’s memorable, but not necessarily attractive.  Striking a balance, speaking with a voice both appealing and memorable, is one of the most difficult things in the world.   

Anyone who’s attempted to please a thesis advisor knows precisely how difficult originality can be.   When the pressure is not merely to publish, but to publish something which never before has been, the truth of the old joke about dissertations takes on life.  The search for a “completely original”  thesis – an academic blank slate, if you will - leads to a continual narrowing of focus.  As the writer says more and more about less and less, the eventual result is saying everything about nothing at all.  Even in academia, that isn’t creative originality, but quirky irrelevance.

Dealing with intertwined issues of creativity, originality and renewal is difficult partly because of our  tendency to reject the constraints of history.  In our writing as in our lives, we are creatures of time, decision and consequence.  Even in writing, all of the bad decisions, every false start, each of the anguished choices  is important.  Wrong words, half-baked sentences and inadequate descriptions are not mistakes but vibrant parts of the creative process.  Whatever use we make of them, even if we merely set them aside, they help to clarify vision and deepen understanding, and should not be denied.    In the same way, attempting to reject our indebtedness to past writers, to wipe the slate clean of every influence or unwind every tendril of literary relationship  in order to claim a spurious originality is simple foolishness.  It is no more achievable than the chimeral world of pure sunlight and shadow we find so appealing, and no more satisfying in the end.

Literary creation never is sui generis.   Believing our words to be purely our own, unsullied by the contaminating presence of others is at best an innocent conceit, and at worst a heartbreaking delusion.  As we move into our new year, determined to make a fresh start, we may face blank pages, but  we ourselves are not blank slates.  We carry our history within us, and we are embedded in time.  Our task not to invent something entirely new, but to build on the foundation of the past as we construct our own works.  At this point, at least, there is no decision to be made.  Truly creative work will be grounded in the words of other writers, the interpretation of critics, the assorted imaginings of dreamers and the tattered and fragmented realities of our own lives.  The words, the history and our tiny bits of life already are given.  Their shape, their pattern and finally their resonance and truth require nothing more than a skillful hand and an attentive heart to rearrange them. 

I always have loved kaleidoscopes.  Holding one to the light, turning it just so, I’m transfixed as I watch the bits of colored glass form an infinite number of patterns.  Rosabeth Kanter, a specialist in strategy, innovation and leadership for Harvard Business School, knows a thing or two herself about fresh starts, and she understands the power of kaleidoscopic images.  “Creativity”, says Ms. Kanter,  ”is a lot like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. You look at a set of elements, the same ones everyone else sees, but then reassemble those floating bits and pieces into an enticing new possibility.”  In the same way, it is the task of writers to hold up reality to the lights of intellect, imagination, and creative passion, turning it this way, and that, until words fall into place and their newly-formed patterns sparkle with beauty and meaning.

Reading my own writings from the past year, remembering  the birth of phrases and the tumbles of words like a doting parent, I see their paragraphs and pages not as static and sequential, frozen in time and forever fixed, but vibrant and alive, broken up and fragmented by circumstance, tossed up and falling out, a confetti of meaning both perfectly familiar and terrifyingly unique.

As I gather my scattered words to make a fresh start in this new year that lies still empty as a page, it is this kaleidoscopic vision I seek.  I’m ready to give life a turn.

 

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