Chris Spangenberg
Grade 12
Creativity is a nick in the flesh, a blood-sport. At times, a gash above the carotid artery severs lines, great geysers of words spurting and spittle, stream-of-consciousness running like blood appeasement down the stone steps of a Mayan temple. Other times, a paper-cut of slighted capillary jocks dribbles morning dew, the village well runs dry and lips parch and crust over with mantra; no honour amongst the thirsty, no chivalry when there is no mouth left to water. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream child bonding, overgrown toddlers line of inquiry. Indeed, lack of creativity is as gulping down sawdust and expecting to shit out a mahogany rocking chair. Feels like swimming in an ocean of censorship naked, all exposure and suppression, eggs hatching in addled brain and calling out the blank thoughts Mommy... First still-born chirp of futility, when will its mother return? You hope soon, because that newly hatched chick you can't take care of wants to be fed... All this, creativity and lack thereof, it brings to the lumpen individual, the poor sentence sodomite that commits itself to the art of writing. May they live long, in their chosen martyrdom.
But no matter how much the parasite that is writing will suck the life outta you like a babe's thumb, remind oneself that this is only natural. Then proceed to bash one's head in several times with the Encyclopaedia Britannica; arms fully extended, outstretched, before flexing the gripped book to hit the forehead at less than fantastic rates.
That parched throat kerosene desperation. All sentence sodomites, sentenced sodomites, Charles Manson menaces struggle with this premise of writing: Words are not your own. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? William S. Burroughs had commented. “Your very own words.” Indeed! And who are you? Sound of deflating egos like post-birthday party balloons. Smell of burned hair tearing out of scalp. Who am I? The writer puffed out chest huffing and puffing exclaims rhetorically (failed attempt). Why, I am the One that brought into existence these words! Nobody else has! And there the runaway train of thought has to derail, for it is a very megalomaniac track, that only leads to grandiose and self-importance. None of which has no place in the actual being of the word. The word has always been there; the writer is there to make visible, permutate and make orderly the fashion and structure of letter to word to sentence to paragraph to... whatever. Novella, love-letter, papal bull, self-help manual, speech, newspaper. The permutations are endless and claimable, but the disassembled components are free for all.
The Duke doesn't own Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He doesn't own Fear, Loathing, nor does he own Las Vegas. But whatever's well in the scripture he might well hold claim to. Charles Dickens doesn't own Oliver Twist, nor Oliver, nor Twist. But he has dibs on the character. And etc etc.
Ah, it bids well for these mongrels. Watch them scurrying around with their copyright claims and ownership trysts and handshakes with the devil... Watch them write for the sake of money, write for the sake of freedom, write for the sake of fame, but never write for the sake of writing. Though granted, why anybody would write purely for the sake of writing, I do not pretend to understand. Spreading the virus that is language, letting the meat-hooks slide and latch onto the voice house gristle flesh has its own allure, considering all things considered.
Following digression, the question I propose to pose considers this: Was the word already in existence, merely made visible through collage that are sentences in creative fits? Or does the human mechanism truly create the word, conjuring the spectral abstract and slotting them into endless permutations? Or rather, does creativity pertain to the infinite procession of new abstracts, or is creativity merely the reinvention of many wheels?
