The Grouch and the Brainstorm
By Zac Walsh
Where ideas come from still appears to be an ironically latent mystery to us all, and how could it be otherwise, for from every conceivable angle we continue to argue about the hard problem of “where” consciousness comes from, all of this strangely happening somewhere amidst invisible stuff called dark matter by which we seem to be endlessly confused as well. This may be why early on in attempting to create something as arrogant and vast and unmappable as literature, most of my ideas, most of my daily conscious awareness, seemingly came from one of two sources. There was the grouch, that murmuring voice who expertly finds fault like a bloodhound finds death, and there was the brainstorm, the ravenous desire to know and the stubborn refusal to understand. So it is, tardily at the age of 40, that it becomes a bit clearer: how powerful the grouch and the brainstorm can fool me into feeling that I am, and consequently, how deadly they are to art.
A certain piece of spiritual literature (which itself asks to remain unnamed) says this on the matter: “If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal [people], but for [us] these things are poison.” And what does a young writer crave more than poison of all kinds? Abstract fame, hypothetical eyeballs, the idolatry of lusty post-reading encounters, ego engraved in eternity by a single golden stamp on a book jacket, the idea of one day being taught in the same way as you were taught the masters who came before you… All of these and legion more haunt the minds of many young creatives; and, it is because this haunting masquerades as hope that many of us, myself painfully included, come crashing upon rocky shores where there is no siren to be found, only a business of ego survival that, as Schopenhauer taught us, no longer covers its costs.
So if the grouch and brainstorm are poison to the work of art, then how to avoid the grouch when it is artthat is meant to give language to what ails human nature, to what has ailed and will ail until we finally invent ourselves out of our own story? And how to reign in the grandiose and bludgeoning brainstorm when the act of creating requires so much of the mortal wanting to taste what is only and unfairly for the gods? Answers to these questions certainly once felt demanded—from myself, I suppose, as an answer for myself to what I can only poorly untangle as also and lamely myself. As a way of validating, perhaps, to all that appears (by the nasty trick of my very own eyes) to swirl about me at every inexplicable and uncontrollable moment … why one would spend so much priceless time in front of a blank white screen, heart keeping pace with the judgmental cursor, that indifferent black line that comes and goes and is thus eternally taken away before it fully arrives. How some days the keys come voluntarily to meet the intent of each finger, frictionless and ordained. While other days the fingers clunk and revolt in the exact same domain, the brain too busy to be kind. And finally, after 17 years of chasing down mere ego appearances, I consider all of that process a gift, because that is how it feels to be a person who writes, a constant two-way coming and going, a ripping away and tethering back, never fully together or thankfully ever complete, yet always at its work, trying to find that elusive right-sized spot in this infinitely serious spinning play.
It was the great Joan Didion who said the act of writing is one of imposing yourself, your I, on the world, an act she willfully termed “aggressive,” and while Didion is right (and seemingly always is) and writing must begin with the hostile move—that involuntary, unsilenceable the world is not complete without me move—it also can be, maybe even must be at its core, a humble, nimble tightroping over and under and in between the constant gravitational pull of the grouch and the brainstorm. And as I ruefully look out onto where humanity is heading at this marvelously breakneck pace, with its stacking up of existentially threatening grievances and its ever-growing technologically expressed certainties of who or what is to blame, a cavalcade of miseries we seem to be banking on machines themselves to soothe, I believe the world needs writers who deftly span the space between the grouch and the brainstorm now more than ever, likely as it always has, and hopefully as it always will.
AUTHOR BIO
Zac Walsh’s work has appeared in journals such as Calliope, Ink in Thirds, Blue Unicorn, LUMINA, Gulf Stream, Cimarron Review, Oakwood, Alligator Juniper, The Awakenings Review, The Other Journal, The Charleston Anvil, Light/Dark, Pissior, Inscape, Big Lucks, Lime Hawk, Spectre Magazine, the DuPage Valley Review and The Platte Valley Review, as well as in the anthologies Extrasensory Overload, Blood on the Floor and Small Batch. He lives in a small, unincorporated town in Oregon with his wife and a very old dog.
Angry Gable Press 