So much of my creative process involves the practice of surrender.
I have written on multiple occasions about my love for bewildering poems; works that titillate and obfuscate in the same breath. Most recently, I have felt delightfully confused by “Flood” by Eliza Griswold.
Here is the poem in its entirety:
I woke to a voice within the room. Perhaps. The room itself: "You're wasting this life expecting disappointment." I packed my bag in the night and peered in its leather belly to count the essentials. Nothing is essential. To the east, the flood has begun. Men call to each other on the water for the comfort of voices. Love surprises us. It ends.
Here are recognizable objects (a voice, a room, a bag, a flood) in the conceptually lawless space of a poem. There is a lot to appreciate in the piece but for brevity’s sake, I’ll just explore what part of it has been echoing in my mind since I first read it: the dual presence of disappointment and surprise.
Early on, the poem, or at least the room inside the poem, seems to be firmly against cynicism: “You’re wasting this life / expecting disappointment.” Live in the present, it seems to say, instead of agonizing over potential future disappointments. But then, the last two lines hit like a shock to the system: “Love surprises us. / It ends.”
We are told not to expect disappointment, but then we are blindsided by the “surprise” of the end of love. Surely it would have been easier not to be surprised by this, to enter into love armed with enough jadedness to soften the blow of the eventual demise.
It is fascinating that the “surprise” love causes is not its entrance but its exit. Or perhaps the last few lines could be interpreted as a doomed romance pared down to its most crucial parts. First, “Love surprises us.” We fall into it unexpectedly. Then, after however many weeks or months or years, “It ends.”
I’m also pretty intrigued by the fact that the poem’s title accounts for only a brief section of it: “To the east, the flood has begun. / Men call to each other on the water / for the comfort of voices.” Again, the invocation of voice, but this time its origin and intention both are clear.
The single-word title places the whole poem against a backdrop of disaster without any of the gory details. We are confronted instead with “comfort,” “love,” and “surprise.”
In my enjoyment of the poem, I surrender to a multitude of possible interpretations coexisting at once; to the beauty of its language within and apart from the context of meaning.
Surrender also comes into play when I find myself afflicted by writer’s block. It can be very frustrating to want to write when the words just do not come. To be completely honest, I think I feel a certain entitlement to my own creative abilities. I am an artist; I am a writer; I deserve to be able to write all the time. But is that really true for me or anyone?
Creativity is a wild horse. You can lead that horse to water— have an ample amount of available time and ideas prepared, that is— but you can’t force it to drink— or, you know, allow for the writing of a decent poem.
Instead of becoming frustrated with myself in these moments, now I try to perceive writer’s block as an opportunity to engage more fully and deeply in other people’s art.
It’s essentially the practice of checking my own artistic ego. Creation and art are large, powerful forces and I am lucky to get to wield them on a fairly regular basis. But at the same time, nothing is necessarily being taken from me if I am unable to fall into flow state on a whim.
I’ll get a bit more specific. I almost always listen to music while I write. It is important that I play something rhythmic and constant, something that moves me without distracting me. Usually, instrumental music or music I’ve heard so many times that it’s deeply familiar to me serves this purpose of stimulation without becoming overwhelming.
I listen and “sink into” the music, feeling its rhythms and melodies seemingly move about my brain. (Sidenote: I have aphantasia, which refers to the inability to visualize images inside one’s own mind. Thus, when I listen to music, the sound leads to spatial and auditory sensations and associations rather than visual ones.)
I tend to also read poetry while I’m writing for a similar reason. Poems activate a sense of movement and rhythm inside me. Think of it as a kind of tuning. The same way a guitar player may use a tuner to get their instrument to the right pitch, I tune my mind to begin thinking in rhythmic lines of poetry rather than scattered lines of thought.
These methods are not foolproof, though. If I am listening to music and reading in an attempt to write, but writing does not actually happen, I try to forgo the frustration of the block and surrender to enjoyment of the art I’m already consuming. Its beauty is not dimmed by its momentary inability to fully inspire me or move me into creative action.
Sometimes, I just have to wait a bit longer for the effect to take place. Other times, I end with the same blank page I started with. In any case, it is very important to me to remain steeped in this context of art.
If I cannot deliver anything from out of myself, I instead want to be taken over, taken in. Inhabit the space anyway. Surrender to its confines. Relinquish control and expectation. Let the process be the ultimate purpose.