There's a glimmer of something, it can be music, it can be a phrase on a cheesy TV show, it can be a single scene in a movie or something in a manga, an anime or a game that ignites a tiny creative spark and makes me want to get to know the source material a little more in-depth.
ADHD folk take something like that and run. They'll gloss over stuff that doesn't interest them deeply, but then become completely wrapped up in things that tweak their endorphins in just the right way.
Time isn't a thing. Time becomes immaterial when you're in a creative process of any kind, and some folk describe this as 'wasted time' when it is anything but. If you can experience something that can take you out of the world, but doesn't involve drugs or other illicit means, or stuff that's going to slowly kill your body as the years progress, then how can that be wasted time?
I was in a liminal space the other day, the sort of place that people hurry through. It was lit in just the right way to qualify as liminal, and there was unidentifiable machine music tinkering away in the background, something that no human probably played any creative part in, but nevertheless it fitted that space so perfectly - like a second skin, but made out of sound.
I became aware that at some point that liminal space was once a bare set of bones waiting to be clad, waiting to become something entirely different, transformation in a raw form that alluded to architectural control or influence, but was actually created more on a whim. Perhaps by a set of happy accidents, perhaps by the rough hands of a labourer who clad that space in plasterboard and glossed over the whole thing with plastic or mastic or some material created for the space programme that now found its home on earth in a liminal space instead, failing its potential.
My first urge was to cry, or express an emotion that would change the aura and aesthetics of that space into something that the accidental creator had not intended. However, I passed through that space only to muse on it later on.
Power eternal stems from the urge to create not the ability, and this is the thing that is lost on folk who are in love with the short cut methods of...wait...what can you call it? It's not creativity. It's not art. It's feeding an algorithm a clever enough prompt to allow it to produce something that its user finds that same neuro-response in that an artist feels when they take a blank piece of paper and fill it with a drawing, a design, a finished piece of art or just a meaningless derped-up doodle that will eventually find itself in the recycle bin.
Artists have now become a resource to be scraped and mined, emulated and detached from their work. There is no longer a process. Instead there is a wait, a loading screen, a piece of twee animation depicting two geometric forms moving around each other like enemies sizing each other up at a fist fight, burned into the retinas of someone who could not be bothered to learn a craft or trade or art form but instead chose the short path to blandness instead. Because regardless of how you dress it up, algorithms produce no chaos, no pen-slips or mistakes or "Out-there" works of inspired craziness. Everything has to be an ordered mathematical construct.
Do you understand the situation we're heading for? We are cooking the planet for these short-cut fucks, self obsessed and hell bent on pretending whatever they're showing off on their social media feeds is somehow 'their work'.
They deserve our derision. Not our hatred, but perhaps our pity, a wee bit of scorn, a smidgeon of distain.
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