Fragmentation Recreation

“I forget everything and behave like a madman.” 

            Until somebody walks into the realm of my madness. Then the illusion is shattered, broken, and only restorable through fragments. Fragments of. Words and. Ideas and. Emotions.

            Through a series of letters to friends, composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky tells his ideas behind creativity and the process surrounding it. Throughout these letters, he focuses on the world people enter whilst creating anything. Waiting for bouts of inspiration is equivalent to waiting for the rain in a season of drought to water the garden. Being interrupted while working helps piece together different worlds of creativity. Nothing is seamless and everything is stitched without the help of a perfect machine.

            While reading this piece, I couldn’t help but glance back to my writing notebook that I’ve been keeping since I was 14. Glancing through pages and looking over the messy pre-writes: highlighted phrases in colors of green, orange and pink; red ink dabbled next to the black words; green arrows connecting ideas.

            Until I got something that resembled prose.

            Until stanzas tumbled down the page.

            Until sentences were no longer

            Sentences but rather

            A rhythm and a

            Feeling.

            But it never came all at once: it was over several hours of work, tweaking, revisiting, editing, deriving and critiquing. “The parts appear as a completely welded hole,” Tchaikovsky wrote. They appear welded in the most methodic and beautiful sense of the word: a completed and a touched up work of art.

            I never truly understood that artists were supposed to go through this kind of process. I always had this contrived image that someone who creates knows exactly what they want and how to properly execute it.

            But what if their ideas change? What if the artist CHAnges halfway through their creation? What if he/she is interrupted by other thoughts and events?

            What of their work then?

            It’s the job of the artist to meld these notions together. Working with the obstacles and the challenges only adds to the piece in the end.

            Being a madman. Helps to. Restore those.

            Matted

                        Fragments.

                                    And pieces of

                                                Life

                                                            Into something

            Beautiful.