here in Canada you’re about 6 times as likely to die in a car accident as to be murdered. seriously. cars are dangerous business. they should license drivers or something.. wait.. they should penalize bad driver.. oh fuck.

no word yet on the likelyhood of being murdered by car accident. but you gotta figure you’re pretty safe.

Eye Close Up (via Robert D Bruce)

shiver me timbers.

Short Answer:
I certainly hope so.

Long Answer:
recently a minor tweetbate (see how i mixed twitter and debate? see?) brought on by two seemingly random events. Aenux posting a link to a video about some guy questioning if our school system kills creativity and my fundamental inability to let these sorts of things slip by without comment.

in all fairness to aenux, who unknowingly has been drinking the liberal kool-aid, the matter extends beyond the localized question of do they or don’t they and into larger issues—though i’m sure as a mother she feels there’s no larger issue than her child’s upbringing—and while i feel her intent is clear, her ideals on target, her response is unflatteringly knee jerk.

the question extends to some core liberal ideals and in a larger sense the mechanics of civilized life. I’d like to briefly challenge those two fronts before packing my creativity away for the day and being a productive worker. so here goes.

We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

tyler durden - fight club

on the first front is the liberal ideal that we can all be special, dynamic, game changers. that every child born after 1960 has in them the kernel of some possibly great *insert descriptive terms* inside them. An idea we become very attached to when speaking about our own child without even realizing we’ve become so attached but lets compare this much flaunted thought to how the world works in reality for a second.

Do we really need creative janitors? waitresses, long haul truck drivers, dog catchers, meth addicts, seven eleven workers, hotel concierges, cab drivers, baggage handlers, drywallers, CPAs, receptionists, couriers, line cooks, mailmen, cable installers, clerks, grocery baggers, canadian senators, backhoe operators, security guards, et al?

you can disregard the reality of modern civilization but it’s built on the backs of people who if asked to list their greatest strengths, creativity would very likely never come up in discussion. However, many of the things “soul-deadening” schools imbue their charges with play a central role in keeping our lights on everyday.

the ability to show up at a set time whether you want to or not. the ability to do repeated tasks with some competency. respect for some form of authority and the acceptance of passed on goals and requirements as desirable objectives.

does the guy sitting in a parking lot pay-booth need to figure out more creative ways to count change back to me? no. He needs to turn up for work, watch over our cars and handle simple cash transactions. and he needs to do it reliably.

and it smacks of naivete and arrogance to sit in a warm home, living off the avails of a generation of non-creatives discipline, hard work, and reliability and complain that very system that created the comfort you now enjoy is somehow failing you or your child by continuing to do what it needs to do.

I challenge you all to consider for a moment what the world might look like if liberal ideals actually translated into reality and every single person got to be an artist. I’ll save you some time. A brief swell of utterly meaningless creativity followed by famine, war and the loss of the largest part of the worlds population via attrition.

the success of modern schools in socializing relatively wild humans into productive workers is answered quite effectively by the fact that in a world where a large percentage of the population is still seeking clean water and daily bread we have pockets of people who’ve moved up the ladder of needs to desire things such as creativity. this is positive, but to want that for everyone is to destroy the conditions that allowed room for any creatives in the first place.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

picasso

The next question worth looking at, which i think too often just gets accepted without much thought at all, is how important is creativity as a function of granting humans a life they more or less are satisfied with after completing it?

As a person whose now spent what is likely the better half of my expected life on this planet, trying to work out the problems that accompany life my initial answer is creativity is borderline irrelevant to happiness, satisfaction and a life well lived.

while it may be shouted from the liberal rooftops as a panacea for solving the woes of the “soul” and promises to make your teeth whiter, and sex better the facts, for me at least, suggest this is a lie.

a lie like wealth, or power, or fame is a lie.

while a certain amount of creativity is valuable to us as a species, predictably creative problem solving—like how to undo our fundamental reliance on finite resources, or how to solve the problems of food distribution—and the creation of new ways to find meaning in a meaningless world, creativity in it’s whole moves us no closer to solving the challenges we all face from day to day.

moreover, holding something like creativity as a high ideal in our minds we distract ourselves from more substantial and attainable goals. we expend massive amounts of energy in pursuit of the creative ideal, at the expense of developing real life skills that will bring us happiness, contentment, or a sense of place.

we do this for all the same reasons we do everything else, i suppose. the romantic image of the creative. the panty removing power of the artist, or the respect inspiring reaction of somehow shifting the game through our creativity ( see steve jobs ). But I think, historically, if you look the lives of the most creative people you will find a lot of discontent and unhappiness.

the traditional roles of creatives as painters, writers, and specialists in the other plastic arts rarely if ever shows us a blueprint of a human who worked out how to feel their time here was well spent. most creatives lives are trainwrecks. coated in addiction(s) to booze, drugs, sex, suffering, and melancholy.

while these people may appear to be getting more out of their life than the local junior high school’s janitor there’s a strong argument to be made which suggests that even the most meanial jobs can and often do—due to their structure—provide many of the key elements required for humans to feel engaged in life.

read more about the concept of flow in humans to get an idea what those elements might be.

moreover, engagement is only part of the puzzle. humans thrive when they feel they have a place in the world. well defined and ideally one they like. we find the most meaning and most vital experiences to come from our relationships with other humans. we find, inexplicably, that whether we like it or not, we feel more satisfied on the whole when we are productive—though which terms we evaluate that productivity varies greatly—and despite our protestations to the different there are volumes written throughout human history that acceptance, and engagement trump accomplishment and ambition.

and what is creativity if not ambition in a pretty dress.

however ironic it might seem as a psuedo-creative myself to be bashing creativity it’s apt. I chased that skirt a good portion of my life only to find, after long periods, looking back that creativity, and it’s place in my life—despite having developed in accordance with the energy i’ve put out for that goal—has yet to return half of what a good relationship has for me. or ever granted me a sense of satisfaction nearing that of my deeply under-developed skills for accepting my life, its limitations, it’s blessings and it’s gifts.

in the end, the question is not Do Schools kill creativity, it’s does creativity impact society at large, and individual human experience in the ways we’ve been promised it does? and if not, does it even matter if schools kill some of it in exchange for other values?

I don’t think creativity passes muster, and like so many other misguided surface level ideals our counter culture expounds it’s a distraction from learning skills and tools to get to the real meat of human life.

.

.

lover,

your eye is demanding things of me i feel deeply unable to give or grant or manifest. I stare at it and try to understand it’s shapes. what it needs, or wants. i try to rationalize the simple look of wonder it carries and tear that down into knowable shapes or forms that can be relied upon in times of need. i’m failing on your eye. love.

i bring my mind with me when i sit down to face your eye. i bring it with me and i think how it must want revenge for the all the bright lights i’ve thrown at it. or having to stifle giggles from it’s dear friend your mouth when my penis comes out. i think about how you close your eye and you disappear. or how you find someone genuinely interesting, or at least worth throwing on the mental table for a night and picture how your iris rises and falls with the best or worst of what they offer.

i follow this rising and falling in my mind as i sit before your eye and try to answer it’s questions and it stares back at me tauntingly. it stares back, a delicate combination of light and shadow. an unsolvable riddle of midtone and highlight.

your eye quite obviously hates me and wants me to feel poorly about myself.

i just wanted to write you and tell you i won’t let your rotten beautiful eye best me. i just won’t.

ruzz.

.

.

.