Escape from Pianosa

“An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.” Especially…

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.

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I love this rant. Especially this:

“The thing is, I really like saying yes. I like new things, projects, plans, getting people together and doing something, trying something, even when it’s corny or stupid. I am not good at saying no. And I do not get along with people who say no. When you die, and it really could be this afternoon, under the same bus wheels I’ll stick my head if need be, you will not be happy about having said no. You will be kicking your ass about all the
no’s you’ve said. No to that opportunity, or no to that trip to Nova Scotia or no to that night out, or no to that project or no to that person who wants to be naked with you but you worry about what your friends will say.

No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.”

And this…

“What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters.”

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Impro, by Keith Johnstone, is a brilliant book. It’s written for comedic improvisers and teachers of improv but it’s so much more than that. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in creativity or human behavior. It begins with an autobiographical description by Johnstone, of his life at school and how his creativity was stunted and hammered out of him by vicious and probably well-meaning teachers.

So you must work to reclaim your imagination. It’s not so much that you are un-imaginative, rather that you are ashamed of what your imagination spits out, and you have been taught to be this way (and sometimes what your subconscious spits out can be rather gruesome or even fearful). Don’t fear your imagination, it’s a great asset. It’s ok if you have nasty thoughts. You can acknowledge them without acting on them.

How is your creativity stamped out? In school your goal is always to be right and correct and to get an A, and this is a great way to stamp out creativity because it fosters the illusion that there is one-right-answer to questions you will face in life, and it exacts a penalty for being wrong. Of course when you are creating, you cannot be wrong. But the system’s not set up to make you creative.

I blame government schools of course, although your friends and family can be just as repressive, starting from a very early age. The schools are inhumane in many ways and one can see that by visiting even the best of the public schools and seeing how many students are falling asleep, bored to tears, and in revolt. I felt intuitively that there was something wrong with the system when I was in high school, although I could never put my finger on it.

Being relatively intelligent, I figured out that to make people happy I could game the system and get the A’s I needed to keep my teachers and parents happy. I felt the same way years later when I worked for Social Security but by then I couldn’t stomach the game anymore.

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