Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

My “Theory of Creativity” blog was, in a sense, a meditation on how each step we take leads to the next unexpected step. Perhaps it was triggered by the salon Adolph and I go to once a month, where a group of us discuss the issues that occupy our minds. One Sunday Adolph and I facilitated a discussion on the place of play in our lives, and I wrote a summary of the ways play affects what we do. No, it goes back further than that. Maybe to the introduction I wrote to my China journals, China Pennywalk, in the 1980’s. No, back further, to a trip to Tunisia by myself almost fifty years ago. Or still further back, to summer travel with my parents, in Mexico and in Europe: we never had plans or reservations, always played it by ear. Or further still, to my pennywalks with my best friend, Janie, when we were in Junior High.

I’ve unintentionally retraced my steps when actually I’d planned to move forward. I’ll try again. I wrote about play for the salon, built on that for a talk on the creative process to a graduate class at UWM, then built on that for my first presentation at Alverno, broadened it some more for the next Alverno presentation. Last Wednesday night I read it to a UWM graduate class.

Each time I give a presentation I wonder ahead of time why I said I’d do it, why I’m willing to add extra stress to my life at my age (getting near 70). And each time, I’m glad I did! It’s always because of the discussion afterwards. After hearing my Water poem, a man who sails a lot contemplated all the forms water takes in our lives, water as a necessity, water as a threat, our bodies being 68% water. Everyone thought that number was low, that we’re closer to 90% water. Someone googled it and found we’re two-thirds water. I guess we were getting humans mixed up with watermelons.

A woman responded to the idea of putting an issue on the mind’s back burner while doing something else. She said she and her brother used to play a game of trying to visualize something without putting it into words, that doing that expanded the possible images. I told her I’d read that we don’t remember things that happen before the age of two years old because we can’t yet put our experiences into words!

I guess all this is one more example of how each step we take leads to the next unexpected step.

Last fall, and again last week, I had a unique opportunity: to talk to Alverno transfer students about the creative process, to give them an idea of what I do, why I do it, and, most important, how I go about it. Here’s my presentation:

I'd always been a visual artist, but a month before my fortieth birthday, I had an unusual dream: I was searching in the dark for the bus stop. I had to get the number eighty, it was the only way home. My feet led me, over concrete, gravel, clay, through a cornfield, over twigs and underbrush, and finally to a bed of pine needles where I fell asleep.

When I awoke (and this is still part of the dream), light was seeping through pines, and the world was transformed. I walked along roads unknown yet hauntingly familiar, and arrived at home exhausted and exhilarated, unaware that the number eighty had passed me by.

The dream was so vivid I wrote down every detail in the middle of the night. The following day I wrote a short story. Then another. Then another, ten short shorts in a week. It was unsettling. After twenty years of trying to establish myself as an artist, why was I suddenly writing?

That was almost 30 years ago, and I'm still writing. The dream had told me to take another path, and was so intense it became the path. Popping into my mind a few days before I turned forty, it showed me a new route to eighty.

But not a totally new route. Instead of giving up art, I combined it with my writing. While drawing a weeping willow at the duck lagoon, I noticed that weeping willow leaves look like tears, so I used the words weeping willow leaves look like tears to form the leaves of the willow. I soon was drawing ducks using the word duck, and geese using the word goose, and gradually almost all of my drawings became wordrawings.

At first I wrote short shorts, and then short stories. A poet friend invited me to read with her at Woodland Pattern, and soon I was reading the stories in public, something I never thought i'd do. In 1984 Clyde Morgan, dancer in residence at UWM, invited me to write something for him to dance to. After many conversations with him, I wrote my first performance poem, Yoruba Pygmies, based on both Clyde's life as a dancer in Brazil and on my environmental concerns. Here's an excerpt:

ECHOING THE ECOSYSTEM, ECHOING THE ECOSYSTEM,
HE DANCED ON THE ROCKS LIKE A LIZARD, LIKE A LIZARD,
ABSORBING THE WARMTH THROUGH HIS FEET.
HE DREW FROM THE ROCKS LIKE A LIZARD, LIKE A LIZARD,
THE ENERGY BENEATH.
HE DREW FROM THE FORCE OF THE SEA, OF THE SEA,
FLOATING ON THE WAVES
LIKE SEAWEED, LIKE SEAWEED,
HE DREW FROM THE FORCE OF THE SEA, LIKE SEAWEED
SWEEPING SHOREWARD, SWEEPING SEAWARD.
HOW MUCH IS A MAN LIKE A LIZARD, LIKE A LIZARD
ABSORBING FROM THE EARTH BENEATH?
HOW MUCH IS HE LIKE SEAWEED, LIKE SEAWEED,
SWEEPING SHOREWARD, SWEEPING SEAWARD?
HOW MUCH IS HE LIKE SEAWEED
DRIFTING TILL HE'S STRANDED,
DRIFTING TILL HE'S STRANDED?

One day about two years later, I said to my dog, "Lilac, here's your water, hey, Lilac, here's your waterwaterwater." and it struck me that water rapidly repeated sounds like water. I wrote a visual poem called THE SOUND OF WATER, using the word water to look like waves. It was totally visual, handwriting flowing on paper. But one day I decided to figure out a way to read it, and discovered it was actually possible!

Basically I'm saying that all sorts of incidents and challenges can open up your life to new directions, but only if you let them. That applies to whatever you do in your everyday life.

I write in cafes, libraries, airplanes, seldom at home where there are too many other things I have to do. I paint and draw along the lakefront, in parks, department stores, in darkened theaters, immersing myself in the outside world. If I have a routine, I’m more likely to write on a regular basis. Since the unconscious mind may form images that the controlled, conscious mind could never create, before I sit down to write, I swim, bike, or walk and let my mind drift, extremely important in the creative process, at least in mine. In fact a few days before that dream, I had suddenly begun to swim every day, and I'm sure there was a connection!

I once took a fiction workshop, and in her introduction the facilitator said, writing isn't fun, it's hard work. Hmmm, I thought, work and play aren't mutually exclusive. They're often intertwined. And for me, writing is fun. Painting, drawing, dancing, anything creative is fun, so long as I can relax, get into the flow, and not worry about masterpieces. That’s one thing I never do: I never sit down, look at the blank page, and think that I’m going to draw or write a masterpiece.

My physics professor at Oberlin always emphasized that scientific discovery depends on taking advantage of accidents. Adolph, my husband and art teacher, also stressed the importance of accidents. I have to be open to, and not afraid of, the outrageous, the strange, have to be open to play, the kind without rules, to going with the flow, allowing my mind to relax so ideas enter freely and, theoretically at least, take unexpected forms. Most of my dancer drawings were done in the dark during performances. When I write a story, each sentence suggests the next. When I write a travel journal, I want to bring the reader along with me, to catch the thoughts that normally might flit away unnoticed. I sit in the middle of the action and describe what I see, and what I feel. 

Working on a poem, I often take a word and bounce it around. During the first Gulf War, I’d read we were doing apocalyptic damage to Iraq. I bounced apocalypse around and it became I pucker lips! 

APOCALYPSE APOCALYPSE APOCALYPSE
I PUCKER LIPS, I PUCKER LIPS, I PUCKER LIPS
APOCALYPSE, I PUCKER LIPS, A BOMB OR A KISS 

When writing CHANGES IN THE LAKE, I noticed that if I put the last syllable of horizon at the beginning, I got in her eyes. Strange. That's what a horizon is, not a location, except in our eyes:
HORIZON IN HER EYES IN HER EYES IN HER EYES
HORIZON CRYSTALLIZING ON A PINPOINT IN HER HEAD
INFINITY ON A PINPOINT ON AN UNKNOWN PINPOINT
ON AN UNKNOWN PINPOINT IN HER HEAD.

Writing my RAISING CAIN poem, I discovered that "Cain and Abel" sounds like cannibals: FROM CAIN AND ABEL, CAIN AND ABEL, TO CANNIBALS CANNIBALS MOTHER EARTH'S ANIMALS, CONSUMING MOTHER EARTH.

I play around with ideas in the same way, say to myself I want to write about some specific idea, and let it percolate as I walk or bike or swim. Or sleep. And I always have pen and paper with me or next to me, so whatever strikes me won't slip away.

Last Tuesday was balmy in two ways, balmy because I could bike without fear of ice, and balmy because my bike rides led to the unexpected. In fact Tuesday became my double samaritan day.

Early in the morning, as I pedaled quickly to an appointment, I heard a child’s voice call out, turned around, and saw one of my grandsons standing outside his front door in his pajamas. He looked upset.
“I came outside for my skateboard.”
“Oh?”
“And actually I’m locked out.”
“Did you ring the bell?”
“About a hundred times. Everyone’s upstairs.”
I called his parents on my cell phone and waited till he got inside.

Later in the afternoon, as I biked along Jarvis, I heard the voice of an older woman, “Help me, please help me, please come here!!!”

I stopped and looked around. A young woman passed without pausing, not even curious, more interested in her recreational walk than in someone’s call for help.

“Please come here, I’m in the garage!” I couldn’t see the person in trouble, and suspected she couldn’t see me.

“I’m coming,” I called, nervous about what I’d find, and stunned that the passer-by kept right on passing by. I peered into the garage, and a little old lady, neatly pressed jacked covered with mud, was sitting on the concrete floor, trapped between her van and the wall. She’d squeezed through the van door with her grocery bag and slipped in mud. Wedged in too tightly to change her position and invisible to passers-by, she’d been there over an hour.

My grandson had been ringing the doorbell; this lady had nothing to ring. Her cell phone was in the house, she couldn’t see around the corner of the garage, no one could see her. “Finally I just started praying for someone to save me,” she said. “Then I glimpsed a wheel of your bike.”

I stood there grasping my handle bars, bike basket loaded with groceries, and tried to figure out what to do. “I can’t lift you myself,” I told her, “I’m going to call the police.”

She didn’t want me to at first, “I’m not even hurt.” Well, I didn’t want to be the one to hurt her. “Maybe you should call the police,” she said.

I dialed 911, was switched to the Shorewood Police, told them she was unhurt and didn’t need an ambulance, then waited with her, chatted and waited, chatted some more. “The other day in the Bayshore parking lot I heard someone calling for help, looked around and saw an old lady lying on the ground next to her car. She had slipped on the ice, so I helped her. Maybe you’re my reward!” she joked. “I would have stopped, even if you hadn’t helped her,” I replied, hoping I won’t need a reward anytime soon. The banter may have been light, but really, I felt so badly for her I wanted to cry!

A door slammed, and a man walked into the alley next to the garage. I explained what had happened, and he, too, tried to figure out how to get her up. The space was too tight and the floor too slippery. “Don’t worry, the police are on their way,” I told him, but he wouldn’t give up.

When the police arrived, one of them squeezed around the van so she had support on both sides. They helped her up, opened the back of her van to give her a spot to sit down for a few minutes, and I left. A few days ago I saw the police digging out a car that had skidded into a snow bank. Now that the snow is melting, they’re lifting people out of mud!

When our daughter, Sarah, was in 7th grade, she wrote a few lines so metaphorical and insightful I knew she could be a poet if she wanted to be one. Years later, after studying with poet William Harrold at UWM, she was well on her way. So come celebrate "One Season Behind," her second book published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, at Schwartz on Oakland on March 16. And listen to WUWM's "Lake Effect" interview with her on Friday morning, March 16, sometime between 9 and 11.

Friday, March 16• 7 pm reading• Schwartz 4093 North Oakland Avenue, Shorewood
Milwaukee poet Sarah Rosenblatt’s One Season Behind is an insightful look at the way life sneaks up on us, and asks the questions we all ask as we move through our days trying to catch up with time’s changes and yearning for things to stay as they are. Inspired by the lake, the trees, the places and people in Milwaukee, Rosenblatt’s poems reflect on our feelings as we watch our children’s lives unfold, ponders the contrast between our parents and ourselves, and tenderly observes the everyday details of our lives. One Season Behind is an engaging read that will leave readers reflecting on the movement of their own lives. Sarah Rosenblatt is the daughter of Milwaukee artists Adolph and Suzanne Rosenblatt.

LOOK BOTH WAYS

Things happen outside our realm of influence.
Presidents are re-elected,
the Chinese New Year blows by.

A day well-spent is taken over by
night.

It has the upper hand,
scrubs the kitchen of its colors.

Our children look up to us
as if what we say goes…
but where?

The patio smells of supper from the night before.

Afternoon blasts the bedspread.
Why are we here?

What was the reason given to us when we were small,
starting out in classrooms
where each of us was the center of something?

Now our children ride bikes,
look both ways
parade into the day.

Copyright 2007 by Sarah Rosenblatt

Several of Sarah's poems from her first book are on our website.

I’m looking forward to July 1, 2009. I’ll admit I would have preferred July 1, 2007, but I guess smokers need time to develop self-control, and businesses need time to design NO SMOKING signs. I wonder if “public entryways” could include bus stops, and bus stop benches, as entryways to buses.

Although studies indicate that business can improve when an establishment becomes smoke-free, I’ve heard this law could put the American Legion Post and the Pub at risk. Unless, of course, they can figure out more creative ways to attract customers.

And sometimes smokers need a little shove on the way to breaking the habit. I once told a woman at Benjy’s Kosher Deli that I’m allergic to smoke and asked if she could please put her cigarette out. A year or so later, she thanked me: that nudge I gave her was the nudge she needed to stop smoking. That’s rare, but it’s possibly one life saved.

I’d think smokers, wearing their addiction on their lips and on their fingertips, would want to puff in hidden spots. I’m not against firsthand smoke; that’s their choice. I AM against secondhand smoke, in fact I'm allergic to it.

There’s an event which all smokers (and non-smokers) should attend that takes place considerably before July of 2009. It’s a discussion of healthcare reform on Sunday, March 18th, 2007, at the Northshore Presbyterian Church, 4048 N. Bartlett. Doors open at 6:00 pm, program begins at 6:30pm.

Here’s additional info from Keith Schmitz of Grassroots Northshore: “On March 18th we are going to start off with a discussion of the three major health plans that are being considered before the State Legislature. This will give you a chance to hear about them, and to come and tell your stories about dealing with our healthcare system. In the coming months we will be presenting more town halls on the healthcare situation in Wisconsin, and talk further about the remedies.”