I am currently reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit and thinking hard about using it in my upcoming creativity course. One of the key creative habits, she notes, is keeping an effective archive of intriguing materials and potential ideas. She likes to use filing boxes, but notes that other people use a system of desk drawers, or index cards, or put it on their computers. “Anything can work,” she says, “so long as it lets you store and retrieve your ideas — and never lose them.”
Losing material is hard on my mind this evening. My friend Lamar wrote to me this afternoon to say that a video of us performing Lizz Wright's "Another Angel" has suddenly and inexplicably gone missing from YouTube. I’ve searched unsuccessfully for a copy online, on my hard drive, on my wife’s computer, in a box of old Hi-8 videotapes, and tried to search an external hard drive we use to back up our files. That external drive, however, which worked fine in August, will now not connect with any computer in the house — and that is a terrifying prospect since we have 25 years’ worth of our writings, photos, videos, class materials, and the like on it. We clearly need a better system.
Today’s losses remind me of other, older losses of material. I am now able to locate exactly three papers I wrote as an undergraduate, all from the same American literature course, and one notebook: my personal, line-by-line translation of Beowulf from the Old English. In like manner, exactly two poems and one song of mine have survived from my high school and college days. I can only imagine that I threw it all out in some kind of petulant fit, or burned it in some foolish “liberation” ceremony, or simply chucked it all indiscriminately when I moved to Colorado. But it is gone, nonetheless.
Truth be told, I lost a whole decade to drugs and alcohol between 1978 and 1988. I have very little memory of my five years of undergraduate education, for instance. There are courses on my transcript I have absolutely no recollection of taking. I missed concerts because I was passed out in my seat or on the arena floor before they started, including Peter Gabriel at Stony Brook, the Dead at the Nassau Coliseum, and Utopia at the Ritz. And once I got sober, I lost most of my friends from those days through a series of conversations that went like this: “Dude! Remember that time we got really stoned and went tubing down the Esopus River?” And I would have to respond, “No, I’m afraid I don’t remember that.” “Or remember that time we got really drunk and went to that Yankees game?” And I would have to respond, “No, I’m afraid I don’t remember that, either.” We quickly learned that we had nothing else in common, really, nothing else to talk about.
An addendum: My friend Rick notes that one of the Yankee games we attended and I do not remember was on Phil Rizzuto Day, a special occasion to honor the team's beloved shortstop and play-by-play announcer, whose signature style and expression -- "Holy Cow!" -- are immortalized in the middle section of Meatloaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." During the ceremony, Rizzuto was presented with an actual cow wearing a papier-mâché halo, which promptly stepped on his foot and knocked him down. In addition, this is the game when beloved Mets pitcher, Tom Seaver, then throwing for the Chicago White Sox, won his 300th game. You would think I remember at least some of these extraordinary events. I remember none of it.
What kind of musician, what kind of guitar player, what kind of singer and songwriter might I have become if I hadn’t lost those ten years? What opportunities did I squander? What might I have accomplished? And where might I be now as a result? On the one hand, it’s too sad, too embarrassing to even think about. On the other hand, such speculations are pointless, anyway. The truth is that I drank and drugged the way I did because I had to, because it was the best I could come up with, because the very height of my coping skills at that time was to get oblivious drunk and stoned just about every night for ten years.
If I could have cut short my using, I certainly would have. I knew something was seriously wrong with my drinking from the very first time I got drunk, drinking warm Schaefer beer in the woods with some friends and and ending up flat on my back in the middle of the busiest road in my hometown. Still, getting miserable enough to change took every last drink, every last drug, every last mortifying experience, horrific hangover, and remorse-filled morning. I could not have cut short that process by a single second. And I was lucky. I was a “high-bottom” drunk: never went to jail, never got a DUI, never totaled a car, never lost a job, hadn’t failed out of school, was still on good terms with my family. But all of that was coming for me soon enough: I am still a skinny dude, but when I finally stopped using, I weighed 50 pounds less than I do now – a walking skeleton, death warmed over.
In my recovery, I was told that one day I would not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it, and while I thought this was utter bullshit at first — I mean, I had done all sorts of things I really, really regretted and never wanted to think about again — I believe it has come to pass. What I know now is that whatever strength, whatever resiliency, whatever wisdom, whatever contentment, whatever creativity I can now claim in my life and share with others flows directly out of those 10 “lost” years and what I have made of them, make of them on a daily basis.
I realize that this sounds like I am suggesting that artists need to suffer, that pain is necessary for the creation of art. To be clear, I do not believe this is true. Even Wikipedia notes that the “tortured artist is a stock figure and real-life stereotype.” Suffering and loss are parts of the human experience, no doubt, but they are not necessarily the most interesting or productive ones. They may, in fact, be the easiest ones to turn into art, so where is the challenge there? With all the colors available to us, why do we keep using the same two or three on the palette, the ones within our easiest reach? Still, we can look at any number of famous writers, musicians, artists, actors and the like who clearly believe this is true, that they must suffer for their art. They certainly go out of their ways to invite or generate chaos and misery and loss in their lives, and sometimes we even admire and celebrate them for doing so. Far more frequently, though, we mourn their lives cut tragically short and the loss of the art they might have created.