Your Creativity - Early or Late in Life? Quick or Never Done? Malcolm Gladwell makes sense of it

Are you a Jackson Pollack or a Cezanne... an Elvis Costello or a Leonard Cohen? Is your creativity iterative or a one and done? You gotta hear this excellent Malcolm Gladwell podcast, Hallelujah, if you want to better understand your creative process. And, it's even more poignant with the passing of Leonard Cohen.

I got hooked on the series after watching Malcolm Gladwell on Stephen Colbert. The Hallelujah segment spoke to me and helped me understand my process as more Paul Cezanne and Leonard Cohen. (Ha, I drafted this post two months ago.) It offered a connect-the-dots of ideas about creativity. He began with an Elvis Costello song that he likes and described how it changed when you recorded it many years later a second time. He likened the process to Cezanne who was never finished with a piece of art and contrasted it to Jackson Pollock who found his voice early and had many one-and-done paintings. He then went through a list of people and called them either Pollacks or Cezannes. For another example he used the many iterations of the Hallelujah song which I love and now appreciate even more.

Are you a Pollack or a Cezanne?

The podcasts are all 35 to 45 minutes long just about the time to drive into Chicago.

Nana's Clearing - A Child's View of the Death of Her Grandmother

Nana’s Clearing

Nana is dead.

Ranidae, a squat and jumpy five-year-old with black hair and eyes that Nana called toad skin, slipped out the door and headed toward the park.  Chips nipped from the buffet fell from her backpack at the first landing as she leapt from step to step; she stopped to reposition her load. Rani stuffed grapes in the pocket shaped like a nose and a juice box in each front foot. Into the frog’s head, she carefully layered the napkin she found by the coffee urn, chips from the counter, a tin, and the remains of the bag of M&Ms that didn’t fit in the bowl on the coffee table. Setting off again, she tucked Hermione, her last best friend and frog, beneath her arm, admiring her leg worn and dull from years of helping Ranidae suck her thumb. 

Running and jumping, Rani tried to catch the turtles and snakes that appeared and disappeared on the sidewalk as tree branches swayed in the after-nap sun. Ranidae raised Hermione high above her head, stretching to have the frog hold her hand. She turned right at the corner and right again at the next, never needing to cross a street before reaching Lily Pad Park.

The sidewalk melted into a path with soft shredded bark made from trees that once stood there tall. Ranidae spied the trail marker tree that braves once followed to lead her down the right path. She ducked beneath a branch, used her forearm to ward off another and shielded her eyes, when she turned west, onto a stretch with pickers and stickers that led into the sun. Nana told her that paths twist and turn and a moment in the sun will change to a moment in the shade, and life is one moment, then death. Nothing to be afraid of, she’d add. And, in one more bend, Rani and Hermione would reach the clearing that Nana loved.

The clearing was wide enough to show the sky, long enough for a creek with frogs that croaked as loud as the houseful of grownups she left behind. Ranidae heard from her Auntie Evangeline, who wore round, rimmed glasses and true red lips that Nana had croaked too.

Ranidae stopped next to the creek and sat down - brave-style, Nana called it. She pulled off her backpack and placed it on her lap. She zipped slowly and firmly, as Nana showed her, because the zipper sometimes got stuck going around one ear, and flew to the next, and sometimes got stuck again rounding to the other side of the other ear.  Rani laid out the napkin, placing a juice box on two sides. She made two clumps of candy, two clumps of grapes and two clumps of chips next to each.  She moved Hermione onto her lap, opened the tin and poured Nana on the other side of the napkin for a picnic in her favorite place for things that croak.

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Painting: Available
Artist: Mary Longe

The Clearing

11x14" Oil, The Clearing, WI
mary.longe@gmail.com

Learn more about the Trail Trees: Great Lakes Trail Tree Society

I'm Not Above Regifting - Poem

I’m Not Above Regifting

I’m assembling a gift for a poet

Books with other’s words

That remind me of…

That are like a…

To inspire, support and show that hers equal and surpass the other’s published works.

I’m not above regifting

I’m happy to buy used, I mean, aren’t words always reused?

Pulling one from the shelf, the flyleaf held a note in red pen saying the poems by the Buddhist monk were sent in peace and love, with a smiley face.

A card fell out from somewhere in the middle from another long ago love. 
How strange to find it. I don't remember it. 

He looked to me with love, he said. I made a smiley face. I did remember how that felt.

He’d filled the void left by the red penning smiley face drawer.

Only for awhile. I thought.

And yet, those old words reminded me

That books and cards with loving notes are like a coffee in the afternoon before an evening out, or 

Like a crimson dot in Mr. Turner’s sea, or

Like a lesson in using brown, red or sweet onions or a leek.

Used, reused and now regifted.

Mary Longe

November 16, 2016

Painting: The Bookstore at the Clearing

Artist: Mary Longe

11x14" Oil

Ellison Bay, WI

November 1, 2016 

Mary Longe

mary.longe@gmail.com

Available