Undercreation

this epidemic of pallid living

Friday, January 24 is the LAST DAY to register for our Nonfiction Book Proposal Cohort. If you’ve been considering joining, I urge you to do so—especially if fear has been the factor holding you back. It’s going to be a wonderful group, and you’ll emerge triumphant: a book proposal in hand. Come on!

I thought it was transcendent to live above the physical world, and now I realize that pitching our tents in our minds alone is to live beneath our creation. To swat our bodies away like black flies in June is to live a half life, one in which we’re bound to wake up one day and sing the same sorrowful song as Kristofferson: “Lord, help me Jesus, I’ve wasted it.”

I had a terrible thought recently, as my husband kissed my neck:

Writers make terrible lovers.

The reason why is because we forget we have bodies, or at least I do. We remain grounded only because gravity does not discriminate, and so we are pulled toward the center of the Earth just like everyone else. But our brains, I believe, would often choose to be sliced away from our flesh, toppling free like the core-less half of an avocado.

Our bodies become these clunky things that our brains have to haul around; while they’d like to be somersaulting in the heavens, they’re constantly asked to stop tumbling. The stomach growls, the eyes droop, the toddler hangs at the leg; the physical world is so needy.

There is a lot of talk about overconsumption, this epidemic that—much like the disease itself—causes its victims to be pallid and emaciated. They called it the “white death” back then, did you know? The sickness caused its people to have a pallor about them. They lost their vibrancy.

And I—of the creative ilk—am tempted to point out that the natural result of overconsumption is undercreation. To simplify things: to say, yes, dear ones, if you’d like your vibrancy back, put down that damned rectangle in your hands and pick up a paintbrush, or a pen, or whatever your weapon of choice is against the dark forces of consumption, this strange sickness that you take in and in and into yourself but still you only seem to lose. We are dying of undercreation! I want to say, and yet it’s not as simple as all that.