On Writer's (Painter's) Block or On the Normality of Dormant Periods in the Creative Process

My dear friend and patron,

So, you have not yet got the painting.  Neither have I.  Nor can I promise a date.  (I shouldn't have been so optimistic when you called last month.)  I would send you your deposit back, but I don't have the money- either.

The fact is that I am in long period of creative dormancy, commonly called "block," i.e., "writer's block," "painter's block," et cetera, ad nauseum.  I have learned to avoid the term, "block," though; it sounds so much like a complaint of the lower bowel.  It is not a disease, though it causes dis-ease.  It is more like the fallowness that the earth goes through each winter.  It is part of the natural flow of things.  Or the natural unflow of things.  The river is frozen, and while the current still runs deep under the ice, the surface is lifeless and impenetrable. Sorry that you were the one to get caught on the floes.  If it is any comfort, I am here with you, trying not to mutter and cuss, waiting for the rifle-shot cracks that signal the breakup and the coming of spring.

There are plenty of reasons for this winter.  You may remember that your commission was given when I was in the midst of a turbulent career-altering set of circumstances.  These were things that I had no control over.  Believe me,  I was black and blue before I finally gave up and admitted this.  Then there was the move.  ("First, the shove, then the move," I had almost said.)  Eight months later I am still looking for painting supplies that were before so organized that I could have found them in the dark.  Then there was the "settling in"- deceptive phrase.  Who can adequately describe the fears, anxieties, four o'clock in the morning terrors, humiliations, embarassments, intimidations, and countless little daily insults of settling in to a new and strange place.  It's more like "unsettling in." Add to this the work load of my daily job, the new things and people to learn, the sheer exhaustion at the end of the day.  There is little doubt that all of this has knocked my inner-life into a bumper-car experience of disorientation.  And when the inner-life goes, the creative life goes with it.

You may well accuse me of bitching and whining.  I will not argue with you.  Though I think that I am simply trying to explain to you what I have already explained to myself:  that is, how I got to where I am and why you have not yet got your painting.   I can go on and knock something out for you,  but I won't be pleased with it and neither with you.  Be patient with me as I am trying to be with myself.  We are not talking here about laziness, or procrastination, or unethical dilly-dallying.  We are talking about creativity and the tug and tow of its tides.  As Victoria Nelson has written in her book On Writer's Block, "The creative experience can and must be guided, but it cannot be controlled" p. 35.

So, again I plead, be patient with me and try to remember how much you (used to) love me.  The painting will come.  Of that I am sure.  Unless I am hit by a bus or felled by one of the many medical foes of a sixty year old man who loves tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, and barbecue.

Cheers and jeers,

Rabbi Tbone