The Elements of (Your) Style
Do foundational elements of a creative persona exist? If so, how do they work?
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
You feel the tendrils of its exhale, curling around your ankles and screwing invisible barbs into your flesh. The wind. The angry air. It finds no barrier to its task. There are no doors closed to it. No walls capable of withstanding its influence. It pulls and pushes at your imagination, urging you to the edge of sanity with its howl and bellow.
Such a thing is air. Such a thing is this. You are on the knife-edged precipice of sigh or cry.
You are a leaf, a paper cup, a poorly secured garden shed with lifted lid and no defenses. It is relentless, this wind. You are both a victim and beneficiary of its vices. It loves too hard and elevates too emphatically. It flings you toward the direction of success with no thought of flying debris. Pressures drop, change, shift. It is bottle-shaped bravery and you, merely the egg sucked into its enthusiastic embrace.
New air. Another day. A gale. A flurry. A hurricane. This wind’s purpose is to hurl you to the stage of speak and express and boast, even as you’d rather stand still saying nothing against the wall of sameness. It is air with intent. Air on a mission. Air set on ripping the corrugated iron from ego to expose the real of real. No clothes, no shelter, no protection.
To breathe it is to live it. To get caught on the updraft, in the edge of the tornado, flung wildly from the spin. You are a spider ballooning with your gossamer in tow to surf the atmosphere, uncontained, uncontrolled. You are altering the windsocks of the world with your ever-changing shifts.
The exhalation of creation scatters.
Direction is determined by the spin of the vane. Our creative wind, this arbitrary air, picks us up and puts us where we need to be. In the jetstream of the universe. In the gas of this galaxy.
What is this? This is purpose. One breath of many.
Water is air minus malice with a splash of unpredictability. It surprises itself with the constant swirl and flow of its current. With its power to erode your landscapes while filtering out the imperfections of the world. It is the great cleanse. The washing away of all good and evil in the bathtub of your brain.
Water must be read. Water must be divined. It must be oared gently. To dam it is to anger it. To waste it is to disrespect.
Water is life.
Thoughts slip under the surface and whirl and gurgle and are lost down the drain. There are dark puddles of unknown depths to splash and frolic in, many filled with the brackish water of dangerous liaisons, muddied notions, and unforgiving actions. Wash. Soap. Scrub. Call on your clean water to rinse away the mess.
Floods of disapproval will recede, even as you thrash and signal to the bank. Sad clothes sagging under the weight of self-loathing. Touching skin with slimy kelp. When the fogginess gets too much, shrug off your lying robes and expose your naked skin to the purity of water. Float in quiet reverence, buoyed by hope, drifting in the bath, sailing on the sea. Ask yourself:
“Am I drowning or being baptized?”
A brain is 75% water. Earth is 71%. Celery, 95%. Can celery think? Can celery grow a coral reef? Does celery dream of a career on Broadway? A Pulitzer? An Ivor Novello?
Your water is enough. You are better than celery.
Water flows. Water ebbs. Water cascades and waterfalls and trickles and drips. It chokes and drowns and hydrates and enriches. Water erodes with its turbulence. Water dissolves weaker solids. Water powers whole cities with the churn of its personality. It is float and it is flow. This is movement in a fluid state, albeit a fearful one. There, between moments of panic and bliss—you. The shape of you becomes the shape of water. With water in your being, you wear away at the landscape, dissolving misconceptions.
What is this? This is persistence. This is the continual swim in the ocean of potential and catastrophic failure.
Here comes the flame. A flame that takes its tongue to the shell of you to lick the outline away. Flaying skin and searing in the scar of it. The fire finds fuel in the quiet, oxygen-rich corners of your doubt. With a whoosh, it consumes it as a service to the onward creep of energy. Feel the inferno of completion, the rage of jealousy, the burn of deception. Feel it as layers are burnt off like fog on the bay on a lazy San Francisco afternoon.
It is constant. The catching alight with fast and intense enthusiasm, ideas, and the double-cross of possibility. You burn brightly and hot and then right down to the ashes in your makeshift fire ring. Scavengers kick around in the ashes, finding small embers and disintegrating bark. You gather your ash and assemble the char and the wisdom to rise again. Reborn. Anew. Splitting apart, burning down, rising up.
Crackling in the night with a snap and an echo that can be heard all the way back to high school.
The fire rages on. Your haze can be seen from a world away.
Oxygen, fuel, and heat. With determined joy, it races down the mountain, through the valley, on its search for the new fuel of your latest whim. You feel the warmth of it at your back as you run, excited. You are a firebug. You lit the fire. You are forever lighting fires that burn you down to the very wick. Smoke signals on the horizon say: I am burning at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. I am the center of my own sun.
No controlled burn. No fire lines and suppressive materials. You will burn until you burn yourself out. And then you will rise again. Again. As always.
What is this? This is production. The burning down to build again from the combustion of your mind.
On Earth. This earth. It’s elemental, stable, secure, and true. You are planted firmly in the soil of its foundation. Your body, your mind, your reality. Set fast, like a tree, like a rock, like a pyramid. Order from disorder, you are firm in your rotation, wobbling on your axis to maintain your ceaseless spin.
The shape of you is not perfect but continues to terraform and evolve with the guidance of your trembling hand. Pushing thought lava from your brain, creating earthquakes from your faults that shake the picture frames on your wall before settling to the regular calm. It is in constant motion.
The inhabitants of your earth live upon your surface, admire your vistas, marvel at your oceans, and find support in your geological countenance. But this Earth supports you best. As each rotation occurs—as people and things and places and time come and go—you add more sediment and layers of experience to it. Your crust hardens and crumbles and reseals and settles. It breathes a gentle, earthly sigh before firming up beneath your feet to steady your amble, your run, your jump.
You mine the rich seams of your life—this earth—and create from it. Building, building, building. This layer pain, this layer love. This layer, work, and conversations that lead to nothing. Your core is forever warm. On your surface, your skin is rich and you, the grateful gardener, seem to have been blessed with a never-ending supply of seeds.
What is this? This is presence. The natural order of the means of your survival.
The fifth element. Aether. Space. Filling the empty pockets of God’s jeans between the universe and the terrestrial sphere this is the beyond in which you play. An expanse. The room filled with room. Taking all the elements and throwing them nowhere for no one and nothing and finding everything. The unknowing sky, the dark and bottomless space.
The void.
This is where you fly, you float, you ignite, and land. Without this invisible cauldron, where would you be? A thought kite detached from a nervous hand, dangerously drifting toward a charged and hungry power line. Possibly. Maybe. Who knows?
Aether. Everywhere and nowhere.
What is this? This is a place for nothing to reside, forever. The natural home of the dreaming.
The creative heart—your style—is held together, pushed apart, beaten up in roaring waters, razed to the ground, and scattered to the air to float into a billion tiny pieces. It reassembles itself in new and brilliant configurations every time. Forever changed, forever the same—forever beating and throbbing and ticking wildly in the cage.
It is both wild and domesticated, stretching and expanding with exponential glory within your standard-issue human chest. You create using each of the elements at your disposal to express your heart’s yearnings to the world, learning all there is to know. Dying in the criticism, alive in the make.
Air, Water, Fire, Earth. Aether. You burn, you fly, you drown, and get dirty. You continue to find yourself in the gaps between the dream and the execution, always, always, always in your element.
Always elemental.
Or who knows—maybe it’s all Greek to you?
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
Go behind the scenes and see inspirations for this post👇
This week’s amends…
“Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers’ food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as a witness.”
Via David Foster Wallace - From “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction”, Review of Contemporary Fictions, 13:2 (1993:Summer) PDF here
On Rotation: “Arthur McBride” by Andy Irvine
The use of miniatures in movies was dying out. Filmmakers like Wes Anderson have brought it back and miniature maker Simon Weisse is a guy that deserves a whole lotta salutes. Go behind the curtain and see how the miniatures (and newsflash: they ain’t that miniature) materialize. The Grand Budapest is one of my favorite Wes Anderson movies, so loved seeing the scale of that. I also had no idea they shoot most of this stuff outside (it’s explained why in the video.)
Via Meanwhile
Absolutely fantastic “Formats Unpacked” on LoFi Girl. I fell into such a deep hole with this. Go read the whole post, but here is an embed of LoFi girl to study along with.
Lofi Girl forms part of a student internet phenomenon known as Study With Me. Study With Me videos feature students filming or live-streaming their study sessions. No chat. No “Hey guys”. Just heads down students, reading books, taking notes, hard at work.
One such star of the trend is Lofi Girl who has over 12 million subscribers and 1.6 billion streams. Formerly known as Chilled Cow, the YouTube channel rebranded as Lofi Girl and features continuous animated live streams. The animation shows an anime-style girl wearing headphones and studying at her desk next to her cat and a window. She’s also listening to music, which is what differentiates the three live streams. You can choose from “Lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to” or “Lofi hip hop radio - beats to chill/sleep to”.
Via Formats Unpacked