The Primal Imagination

My new neighbor, in dark slacks and IBM-blue dress shirt, is shaking off the dirt from his BMW's floor mat. Next door, another new neighbor is getting into his shiny black truck, Boxes Inc. emblazoned on the door. The road outside the study window is deserted after they drive away. The world has gone to work elsewhere. Here I am trying to conjure my own work world.

Again and again I realize I don't know how to think with imagination. I am schooled in logic and rationality, thin veneers over the child who felt inherently inadequate with his peers. They flew kites, hit one another with gusto in free-for-all fights, broke rules and reveled in the telling of these and other infractions. I felt inept. I was good out of fear and that goodness keeps me from breaking out of the defensive rationality my little self created as armor and weaponry.

Coming home yesterday afternoon from lunch at my new neighborhood Chinese buffet, I sought out the two-volume set of W. Somerset Maugham's The Complete Short Stories. His stories are dated. He writes about the "natives" like the Englishman whose empire still stretched around the globe. But his stories glitter ever more. He writes so easily that reading just the first couple of sentences he has already drawn you into his world. His narrator seems always that same dated Englishman, a writer no less, but each story is crafted like a solitary gem.

Noah Lukeman in his book, The First Five Pages, writes how the fiction writer does not "tell" but "shows." Instead of simply describing a scene, he should state facts. Avoiding adjectives and adverbs, he uses terse language, each word weighted and necessary. He conjures up vivid scenes and appropriately limned characters: the protagonist is clearly the protagonist, someone the reader likes or dislikes but captures his interest nonetheless. The hero, the villain, the obstacles, all come together in what Maugham writes of as the "shape" of a story.

I fell asleep after beginning the short story, Honululu, and woke up at six thirty this morning drenched in a vivid dream. I was doing my last consultation with group home patients. Two of the case managers were attractive young men, the kind that always makes me want to help. One was going to school in his spare time. I was encouraging the other, smaller and cuter, to do the same. I was thinking I could help him financially but didn't tell him so. 

The dream segued without a break into a scene at home where my parents were still alive. My older sister had booked a flight to Hong Kong with a client. She got the seat cheaply because the travel agent told her three people booking together would get a deal. A woman happened to be at the travel agency and they got the special price. I told Merma I would pay for her to stay an extra day so she could tour Hong Kong. Her eyes lit up.

I told my sister  I'd go, too, even if I paid an exorbitant price for airfare. I was thinking about my waking-life worries about prostate cancer. I didn't know how long I'd be living anyway so why not take every opportunity to do what I wanted to do? I went to a Filipino travel agency. The office looked like a bar. The pudgy Filipino owner showed me  brochures of hotels he could book for us. I asked him about flight tickets. I bought one without even checking the price.

Back home I noticed I had paid $2000 for the plane ticket. For that amount I could have flown back to the States. I still wanted to go on the trip. I woke up.

I imagine the creative mind to possess a kind of coherence similar to what I felt last night after watching Frederick Fonteyn talk about his movie, Gilles' Wife (La Femme de Gilles). He described how he felt shooting the deleted scenes and why he edited them from his movie. Sometimes, he said, you have to cut out even your favorite scenes because the movie doesn't need them. You shoot the scene and it influences subsequent scenes that you shoot. Then you don't need them anymore because what they captured are now in the newer shoots.

The creative mind works on two levels: on the rational mind that chooses not only on the basis of what it sees but with the subconscious mind where mythic images and iconic symbolism resides giving subtle shape to what is chosen. Creativity is a dance hinging on two worlds. I must work from the "real" world while keeping the door ajar so the inner world can give what I write or shoot that complexity that makes anything we create art. From our inner world to the viewer's or reader's, this is the route I should learn to create.