Last night, I watched Ethan Hawke give a TED Talk where he discussed how the poet Allen Ginsberg once appeared on a serious political television show, Firing Line. Instead of trying to look clever, Ginsberg sang a Hare Krishna song while playing a small harmonium. Afterward, his friends told him that everyone thought he looked like an idiot. He replied, “That’s my job. I’m a poet. I’m supposed to play the fool.” What I think he meant was that artists exist to shake people out of routine and stagnation, even if it makes them uncomfortable (Though, on the far end of the spectrum, contemporary art’s overreliance on shock value is making the whole attempt to wake us up borderline lazy.) Most people came home tired, watched television, and fell asleep, but after his performance, they couldn’t stop thinking: Who was that strange poet? Why did he do that? In other words, by daring to look foolish, Ginsberg had done his real work. He made people feel something and question their ordinary lives. I think my own playfulness has “adulted” a little, even though I still consider myself fairly childish. I’ve been in a quiet struggle with a perfectionist mindset that only pulls me down. My adult mind is constantly engaged in an inner dialogue, always trying to impress, to produce something polished. Until I reach that point, I redo things a thousand times. And that’s probably one of the many reasons I write in this journal , letting the words bleed onto the pages as unfiltered and unimpressive as they come out of my mind. I think about when I was a child, maybe six or seven years old, and how naturally creative, foolish, and free I was. I was shameless in every way. I would take a large sheet of paper and paint things that didn’t resemble anything, and I felt so proud of them. Everything felt amusing, new, and incredible. I was fascinated by the world. Part of that freedom came from feeling safe enough to be playful. Am I not safe enough to be playful anymore?
Oh, I lost track. Back to the TED Talk. I remember listening to it last night when my brother came in to watch it, too. We were both in awe of how locked in Ethan Hawke was. He was so cool and scatterbrained in the best possible way. It felt like tiny windows were opening in my head with every small story he began but didn’t finish right away. Yet in the end, he made his point: creativity is how you get from A to B via Z. And how wonderful that he played us a little song on his guitar at the end. I had to physically shake myself when it was over. The whole talk was only nine minutes long, but it felt like half an hour.