Creative Wormholes are Portals to Peace
To survive this world find a life on other planets.
Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
It’s all too much. The flood of bad news raging down my road, coming straight for my melon head. It is relentless—a heaving torrent, filled with the angry bob of trash and roaring with that “you must take this sensory overload 24-hours-a-day, seven days a week” righteousness. The stained mattress of climate change, the tired tumble dryer of oligarchs and tyrants, the burnt-out car of racists.1 This misery river smashes into my eye and ear holes and I disappear under the surface, choking.
This is not disappear escape. This is disappear drown.
I walk into the bathroom and stand at the vanity, having spent the morning writing. I hate everything I have done and the betrayal of my brain. Each word is a turd, each thought a loser. You suck. You’re the worst. You’re a pox on the arse of the world. You need a break from yourself and your stupid face and your dumb, type-all-the-wrong-words fingers. My eyes look deep into…my eyes and I fall into the outstretched arms of procrastination. Indifference is bliss.
This is not escape disappear, this is self-hate disappear.
Where’s my wormhole? Where’s my portal to another world where I can just feel better? Just for a bit. I’m not saying I need to go there for eternity—I live in reality, a state we should all try to be citizens of—but this other world where things are different. I just want to go to that world for a spell. To right my lifeboat so that I can float a while longer on this shit stream of news. I need oars. Do you have oars? Is there a world populated entirely by oar merchants with stored named…The Moar Oars Store? Dunk and Dis-Oarderly? Out of this Oarbit? I want to go to that world. The oar world. There is escape to be found there.
If only there were a way…?
Holy shit! I just remembered there is. I know where I can find these portals. Portals that have allowed minds to flee ravaged worlds and disappear completely into time and space and fantasy. The bored folk, the melancholy depressed, the self-loathing ‘hate the look of you’ people. Even the ones who are ‘in a fine mood actually, why do you ask?’ All these people have fallen into wormholes willingly and joyfully and you can fall in too.
This way to the wormholes!
Let’s start with some snoot.2 This portal is as old as caves and as contentious as Tiffany Blue.3 Slip on your best wormhole travel pants and escape into the A of ART. Right there in that little hole in the center of the letter itself. Get sucked on into a big A or small a vortex—doesn’t matter. It can start out a bit Picasso, but maybe it’ll turn a little Mondrian before disintegrating into…whatever shit you’re into. This is one of those wormholes that has many branches and alternate timelines. You’ve just got to find one you like.
People might try to tell you how to look at art before you step into that wormhole, but all you need to start, leedies and gantlefolk, are peepers. All that analysis shit can come later. Because the escape is the initial sucking in, and once you’ve been sucked in, you’ll be pulling at your hands to watch the treacle of paint and colors dribble from your fingertips. You’ll be sliding the Vaseline of unexpected and unlocked emotion all over that dried-out husk of a heart, and you will think, “Yes” and “Of course” and “This wormhole makes me feel funny inside”.
Maybe it’ll make you angry? I once stormed out of a gallery—the Whitney, if I recall correctly—because a Twombly made me mad. I still think about that day, and perhaps I’ve mentioned it before. But once I got out on the street and my brow unfurrowed its anger flag, I grinned. Oh, Cy, you little shit-stirrer, you. The point is this: these are just emotions and when you’re in them, you aren’t in this world. You’re in someone else’s made-up world, and “what the actual?” right? That’s the power of the portal. You get sucked in, you feel the escape, and then THEN you process what it means.
People are always telling you to connect, to be present, as though that’s the answer to everything. Someone talking to you? Look them in the eye. Engage. Someone breaking up with you? Which record are you ABSOLUTELY NOT GOING TO LET THEM HAVE in the division of goods? These are in-world situations. What they don’t tell you is that to be present can also mean that you submit to something that takes you out of the world and puts you into another. This is a state of being de-present present. And personally, I think it’s kinda essential if you’re trying to make it through a long life and not go bonkers or sink into a lifetime of anger and sadness. Art is a de-present present wormhole. It’s OK to get out to get in.
You’ll find visual art wormholes every damn where. Galleries, books, on the street, the television, the sides of buses. And there’s this thing called the internet, which you’ll need to be careful with as it’s also the portal to pain with the shit-stream, but there’s plenty of art to take a squiz at, there.
Here’s another classic. As old as stone but light as thought. Let us explore the double-barreled Os of the word BOOK. Put on your word galoshes and wade on in through one of those windows, like you’re watching an episode of Play School4. Feel the tunnel walls as you are pulled into the cavernous vortex of another world. Maybe it’s a world based in reality—in the facts or lies of what happened and when—or maybe it’s a world that’s as fanciful as boy wizards or Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters?5 Whatever the world, it’s wormhole travel that can be as cheap as a library card, which last time I looked was still free.
A book can make you disappear completely. Whether you choose the left or right O, you will journey to other worlds, which means you can be sitting on a bus in San Francisco while simultaneously flying a spacecraft on another planet. Words do this. Stupid words that don’t become anything until you smash letters together and they make something great that can change your perception of the passage of time.
Do you think you get called a bookworm because worms eat books? No. It’s because of the wormhole thing. And these wormholes are so accessible you can even listen to books if you don’t like reading6. This brings me to ears and canals.
The word MUSIC has no letters to disappear into. No tunnels. Just lines and curves—that’s all you get. It’s because music is a push-pull wormhole. It is ethereal and mystical and whimsical and harsh and it pulls you in by pushing you away with sound. It comes for you, hunting. It is stealthy air with secret substance that seeps upon your auditory shore. Once it finds root, it smashes into the hammer and anvil of your desires. The escape of music is the dissolution of your marriage to reality.
OK, maybe that’s overstating it a bit, but music’s pretty magnificent. Some music also mixes words (called lyrics) into the recipe of its creation and incarnation. It’s a twofer wormhole. Or really a threefer. Words, sound, art. Where visual languages are mostly experienced via the eyeballs to send signals to the brain to be processed, music sneaks in after a night on the town and throws up all over the carpet of your bedroom. “Blergk. Process this!”
Notes are crowbars prying open the feelings box. Today’s mood: melancholy speed metal with soothing undertones of murk. Music is a dial where the worlds are emotions and the feelings are infinitely tweakable. The bass of your mind, the treble of your heart. Classical swells that soar your brain out of windows into the sky to float about on wafts of notes. Devine symphonies. Cataclysmic din. Walls of sounds that we scale using the ropes of our hearts. This escape is infinite. These worlds are high fidelity, and once they exist in your brain, you can never forget them.
Earworms! I rest my wormhole case.
I could go on and I’ve left a lot of shit out, even in the three wormholes I’ve mentioned here, but you get the picture. All of these escapes change moods. Or reinforce moods. Or bring you further into the melancholy and pain, or joy and triumph, to allow you to feel and wallow and accept the moment so that you may come out the other side and live in the now. Escape is a beacon. Escape is necessary. To come back, first you must go away. It can be easily done, bleachers out in the sun, etc.
Of course, not all wormholes lead to good worlds. There are bad books. There is bad art7. Record stores are stuffed to the bin brims with bad music. But you can’t find what you like without first sticking your tongue onto the battery terminal of taste. And you always can walk away from a sculpture that makes you feel bad. You can stop reading at any point. The off-switch is primed for the soft pad of your finger. You can shut down a wormhole before it sucks away your life force. That’s just some advice I’m throwing in for free. tl;dr: Life’s too short to sit in shit.
Choose your wormholes wisely and disappear like a blissed-out cat on a vortex mat. Words, visual art, earhole magic—whatever. Take the time to disappear into worlds outside your own. The washing-up can wait. Fade right on out and away to another world created by another human being and be an airstrip to their plane of imagination.
Now, a word on endings. People make stuff. Horray! And you escape to that world and you get invested. Good for you! But you don’t own that world. You’re just visiting. The omnipotent observer. You have no say in how it ends. So if you get into that world and it doesn’t end the way you want it to, get over yourself and go make something different. This is not about what you want it’s about what happens, and learning to deal with disappointment is just as critical as learning to live with joy. Disappointment can happen at both ends of the wormhole. Sometimes the person who created it ain’t so chuffed on how it turned out either, and you know what they do? They step away and move on to the next one. Because these wormholes don’t make themselves.
Or, as they say in the classics: Where there’s a world, there’s a way.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
Susan Sontag with some thoughts from Reborn: Journals and Notebooks. Agree or disagree?
Here’s me adding a thought: The writer must sit at the desk8.
On rotation: I love a good cover.
Relevant to my interests.
An ex-coworker of mine used to enter this competition (he said he didn’t have time this year) and I don’t think I realized he was painting ducks for what is essentially a hunting permit stamp and not an actual postage stamp. The Duck with a Pearl Earring is pretty incredible, (and so are the bids on the actual paintings.)
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
Stay vigilant. This shit cannot stand.
Not really. Art is for everyone!
“Tiffany Blue! It's ILLEGAL for you to paint with it, it's trademarked in every category. That's why we had to set it free!” From the guy behind the blackest ink comes Tiff, a “super flat matte high-grade shade” that is, well, the Tiffany color. But legal to use.
I need to get better at providing alternative ways of creating access to work. I think the easiest place to start would be to make audio readings of these posts and attach them. Holy shit! Did I just invent books on tape? Do they do them on tape anymore? Christ, I’m old. I usually write these the day before (or sometimes the morning of) so I’ll need to shuffle things to make that work… Looking into it.
See header image.
Or wherever it is that you do the work.