Creativity & That One Perfect Sentence
I remember the first time I wrote what I thought was a perfect sentence.
It appeared well after I started getting paid to write. As soon as the sentence was on the screen, I stopped to cherish the moment. There were just enough words. In a symbiotic order. I meant what I said, said what I meant.
The creation made me smile. I felt fulfilled.
When the essay was published the next week, the sentence did not appear in ink on paper as it had been written. My editor edited it.
But so proud was I nonetheless, the alteration didn’t phase me. (Which is most unusual. We writers are notorious for our strident belief in the certainty of our works. Such that we often rail against the most miniscule rearrangement.) But here I knew what I had done was right. It mattered not that someone else didn’t agree.
Creativity is a fulsome vexation, as elusive as it is empowering. It comes easily only to the few with a penchant for their craft. (Usually the result of hard work.) There are some for whom it seems anointed. The rest of us plug along, strikethrough, cut and paste, paint over, erase, change color or tone or key, pray for the random victories we then cherish.
The other week on Facebook, a brush fire of colloquy ignited over whether Paul Simon was the equal of Bob Dylan as a songwriter. Leonard Cohen’s name was also tossed in the blaze.
Back and forth we went. One debater mentioned Dylan’s rudimentary musical structure. Another opined his genius was reflected in the power of working in such an enclosed space.
Someone else offered that Simon’s songs that are more harmonically complex, making up for perhaps a lesser level of wordsmithery.
One couldn’t understand Cohen being enough of an equal to be in the argument.
I’d started the back and forth when I lauded Paul Simon after someone else had quoted a line from “Kodachrome.” I said he stood up with Dylan, though I’ve often hyperbolized that the latter is the “second greatest poet in the English language.”
When one debater dismissed Simon as but a pop song writer, another retorted that there could be no higher calling.
So it went until the several of us went on our merry ways without resolution.
Which is when I thought of that sentence writ years ago, the exactitude of which has long since been disremembered.
What resonates for some, falls flat for others. It is nature’s way. It is the elegance of differing perspectives.
“Genghis Khan/ He could not keep/ All his Kings/ Supplied with sleep . . .”
“Suzanne takes you down/ To a place by the river/ You can hear the boats go by/ You can spend the night beside her . . .”
“. . . On the last leg of the journey/ They started a long time ago/ The arc of a love affair/ Rainbows in the high desert air/ Mountain passes slipping into stones/ Hearts and bones . . .”
“I walked 47 miles of barbed wire / Used a cobra snake for a neck tie/ Got a brand new house on the roadside/ Made out of rattlesnake hide/ I got a brand new chimney made on top/ Made out of human skulls/ Take a little walk with me Arlene and tell me/ Who do you love . . .”
Okay, I threw a little Bo Diddley in there too. You know, one man’s pasta is another’s poison.
Of course, these are but the lyrics. Songwriting is melody as well as poesy. Sound, resonance, pitch — they all count too. Words are but part of the equation. Painting adds color and geometry and thickness of medium to the equations. Etc, etc.
Not sure where I’m going with all this. I love Dylan and Cohen and Simon all. There are many more. Anybody who can write the line, “salivates like Pavlov’s dog,” also deserves a mention.
But we love to argue about it all, don’t we? It’s the nature of the human condition — for many if not all of us — that we desire our opinions to be the correct ones.
The beauty of the creative process is that there is so much output. In all the arts. If one piece doesn’t resonate, there are others that always do. Then the colloquy folds back into itself like cake batter in mama’s kitchen.
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