Many years ago I took a poetry class at University with a professor by the name of Don Summerhayes. He was a great teacher and one day presented us with a fascinating project: to look into poems deeper and finding the ‘Machines’ that run them.
I was blown away by the concept. I found it a refreshing way of entering the poem and discovering its inner layers.
I brought this idea up because many people out there sometimes suffer from writers block; or maybe their creativity has fluttered away for a few moments. I believe that being creative is about doing different things: whether it be riding a bike, or attending a court hearing, or writing or even doing something that you wouldn’t normally do.
It’s about entering a different zone; peeling back the thick, tear-inducing onion layers and discovering more layers.
In there you must find something. In what you do or read or experience. The little machines are there hiding without light perhaps. You must find them, exploit them and reveal and unlock elements of your life that were never known to you.
Now this might be crazy and it might be–you have the power to create your own personal Idea Machine!
How you ask? Like a master mechanic building a ferocious hot rod in his garage–spending hours, days, months and years he carefully assembles a car that is unique and all his own. By combining parts that he has carefully curated from junkyards, yard sales, flea markets and trades he assembles the engine–piece by piece. Places the body on the chassis. He is the master of discovering the power of this machine–untapped energy and one day unleashed–gives his world renewed meaning as he is a god and creator of a machine that was once non-existent.
What is ao amazing is he found the machines that he and only he saw within the pages of his mechanical diary that he wrote. He found it by using other sources and plunged head first into his dreams and nightmares and discovered fears he never knew, pleasures he desires to revisit and forged reality and fantasy together in the process.
It is up to you to find these little machines and then building your own Idea Machine. In books. In dumpsters. From the minds of strangers. Compile a journal and read dry books. Randomly analyze a baseball game and find out who should be a superstar. The machines are there–you just need to feel and reveal!
How about watching a terrible film and rewriting the script? Don’t leave anything to chance. The idea machine is in you–it is You. You must unleash a tidal wave of failures before you create the short story you want to read. Create and forge, destroy and endure yourself to art that makes you sick. Cut up magazines with stories that are about people who have accomplished something, look to the moon and the stars and pray that they don’t fall.
Creating your own idea machine is about never relenting to the impending death that sits in every room you enter. Relent to the undying kiss of action, of silence, of reliving beautiful memories. The novel in your mind needs to be written. That comic needs to be collaborated with another willing mind. Apply to odd jobs. Complete endless quests. Never forget to loose yourself. There is no world but the one you are in and show people that there are so many possibilities to discover lives that we have lived and the potential of revealing the unknown by creating, finding, smiling, selling, sleeping and basking in the warm glow of obscurity.
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