Something and Then Nothing: Creativity After Everyone Stops Paying Attention

On impatience, winter heat waves and the ebbs and flows of creativity

"Still Life with Peacock Pie." Pieter Claesz, 1627.

At the end of February, it was 92 degrees and it was not cooling off at night. The vibes were bad – feral, even. “Cooling off” is part of the unspoken contract we have with this place¹. “It can get hot, but it always cools off in the morning and at night” should be the city’s official slogan.

One of these mornings at sunrise, I watched a gull fly solo towards the Hollywood sign, which was softly illuminated by the golden-pink first light of day. The view was hazily beautiful like the Old Hollywood films where they’d rub Vaseline on the lenses to make the actresses look angelically romantic (the “Kardashian Hulu lighting” of a bygone era). I try to take advantage of the twilight hours in their lavender dusk and bronzed dawn, especially during an unexpected heat wave. I feel calmer there than I do under the unrelenting rays. I am at my best when the sun is modestly beginning and humbly ending.

I’ve been feeling more “in between things” than I normally do. The rollercoaster of creating in the modern day is as such: something exciting or encouraging will happen – something that feels like a milestone or a success marker of some kind – and I feel newly reenergized and “it all makes sense” for one shining, blissful moment. A post goes “viral,” you get an influx of new followers, people compliment your writing and say they shared it with their friends. You feel good for a brief moment during this lovely wave, and then it ends – as all things do. And then nothing else happens for a while. Then, in the in-between, I’m left wondering when something like that will happen again, how long I have to wait, when the waves will have mercy on me and pick back up and lap my side of the shore. It is during this woe-is-me period that I completely forget the feeling that assured me “it all made sense” just days ago.

I wish I was the gull. I doubt a gull ever lands after a flight and thinks impatiently, “When will I ever get to do that again?” This opens up an entire can of worms² about birds and if they think even at all. Birds have no need for existentialism – they fly or they don’t. They also get the luxury of not overanalyzing why they’re on the ground, why they’re hanging out on a wire or a tree branch, or why they’re soaring. They are truly free. Damn them.

I got really into Dutch Golden Era paintings last month after stumbling upon an artist who had a variation of my last name (Pieter Claesz). After digitally rummaging through collections of still life after still life, I noticed a trend in the paintings of this era: tables overflowing with luxurious and plentiful quantities of food, but rarely without mess, rot or waste of some kind. This artistic theme was known as memento mori – a Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die.”

The juxtaposition of abundance and decay is only one of many nuances that make up an existence, like motion that feels stagnant or summer that occurs in winter. The part I always struggle with is the middle – missing the point entirely that living means being casually situated between diametrically opposed things at all times. I have always assumed there was some near-final step somewhere up ahead, wherein lies a magical treasure chest full of reached dreams and pure fulfillment. And as far back as I can remember, I have tried desperately to will into existence a mythical shortcut to get there. While it can be helpful to know “the end” you envision (this is how goal-setting and planning works, after all), it can also become destructive, dulling the very gift that is the present³.

Something happens and then nothing happens. That’s how life goes. Who are you in the “nothing” though? Who do you become when everyone has stopped paying attention? And how can you find the value in what you inaccurately dismiss as nothingness?

I am learning how to accept somehow that I am a mere mortal who cannot control the timing or direction of the waves. As with everything in life, all pleasures end – but it would be a sin to waste them.

“Still Life of Fruits with Insects, Bird's Nest and a Lizard.” Rachel Ruysch, around 1710.

1. Los Angeles

2. pun intended

3. you won’t be surprised to learn, then, that I have an on-again/off-again relationship with meditation…