Melting Pot

Most days my head is a melting pot of thoughts, ideas, places, people, hopes and fears. Gradually, over the years I’ve learned to handle the fears a little better, even the ones that come true. Money, bills, break-ups, all the usual suspects. Somehow I’ve worked on telling myself that everything will be okay, that it’ll all work out in the end, even if my gut is telling me the exact opposite, and for whatever reason, it works. Maybe, just maybe It really is a case of mind over matter.

Thankfully the hopes founded on a determination to be me are even more powerful. The part that fidgets, pokes, dreams, and screams for attention. The same one that used to get caught staring out the window in school. It still gets me into terrible trouble. The strangled voice of the writer and artist, the hipster with a desperate need to be heard. To be seen. To be different. To succeed. The creative trapped within, submerged by the everyday din. I have to admit that I find relentless routine difficult, it unnerves me and it seems that the older I get the more restless I am to escape its crushing clutches. I should be learning to relax, but if anything it feels like I’m going in the opposite direction. I’m hoping that my next life, if such a thing exists, will be a little smoother. Maybe it’s connected to the gradual dying of the light. It seems that getting older tends to focus the mind on what really matters. And yet it feels to me like I’ve always done this, this constant searching for the answers that lie deep inside to what I’ve always known to be important. That desperate search for understanding and expression awakened when I left school. It has never gone away.

It was then that I started listening to bands like U2, An Emotional Fish, The Golden Horde, Light a Big Fire, The Blades, The Virgin Prunes, Blondie, The Pogues, The Waterboys, and Bruce Springsteen. Up until then I had been told and taught what to think and I didn’t know any better. Thankfully two delightfully crazy French punks Cecile and Veronique, who I met in the hostel where I was working at the time, took me under their wing and introduced me to Dublin’s cultural underworld that existed only after dark. Cabaret clubs and the Olympic Ballroom opened my eyes to what was out there. Suddenly free of the mundane rote learning encouraged by the Leaving Certificate I found my wings and started to fly. I started to discover the wisdom found in song lyrics, a good book, or Hot Press interviews with free spirits such as Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen Junior, and Adam Clayton.

And so I began to ask questions of myself and others. I’ve always been drawn to creative people, whether in real life or through the connection to be found in books, lyrics, melody, art, film, media, humour or whatever forms of expression people use to articulate themselves. In doing so I discovered that being creative is an act of rebellion in itself. It challenges the status quo, it challenges who we are and what we’re told. Get a steady job, get married, buy a house and have kids, retire and die. Except thankfully there is a lot more to life than that. Dying is only the end afterall, or maybe it’s a new beginning. Who knows?

For me, creative people have always been on the frontline. The ones who are prepared to take it right to the edge and often jump-off with no concern for themselves. They are the brave ones who are prepared to bare their souls in the search for their authentic selves. In doing so they embrace our vulnerability. They take us to the places where most of us fear to tread. They ask about death. That’s why they sometimes end up in troubled waters. Knowledge, meaning, understanding, knowing, freedom, and truth often come at a terrible cost. It’s the reason why we admire them because we know that through their struggles we might learn something about ourselves.

I was told in college by one of my supervisors that I brought rock ‘n roll to the class. That pleased me more than anything, more than any grade could ever do. Another one of my most treasured and wisest friends recently pointed out that I had a love of the extraordinary and I am proud to say I plead guilty as charged. It fills me with much-needed confidence when the people I really trust notice these things because putting yourself out there can mean inhabiting a very lonely space. It is often very isolating. Often a lot of people don’t get it.

To be true to yourself is to occupy the place in between the real self and the false self until eventually, you are able to transcend both. The magnetic pull of retreating to a safer place rattles frequently around my head. It leads to self-doubt. And sometimes, for whatever reason, I do retreat with my tail between my legs. Maybe I need to take a step back for some much-needed solace. Maybe it’s so that I feel the vacant nature of conformity again, but it never lasts. True freedom lives only on the other side of fear. Often I wonder if life would be a lot easier if I didn’t constantly ask these questions about meaning and just accepted the way things are and learned, like so many others seem to have done, to wait patiently for Godot.

But that’s not me and I know by now it never will be. Because there’s a certain fascination in surfing the subconscious and letting it wash over you until it hurls you headfirst into the rapids below. Ultimately that’s where real safety is for me. And the more I experience it, the more of it I want. The chase is endless because there is no end. That’s why I keep going back. Chasing the dragon again and again. It helps enormously that there’s lots of fun to be had there too. It’s where I come face-to-face with the different versions of myself and the countless other characters I have had the pleasure or displeasure of meeting along the way. It’s where I can change good and bad experiences into something else, for example, a character or a scene in a book. It’s where I go to find peace.

It’s also where I get to confront the most frightening character of them all - the person I am really meant to be. To face him down requires empathy, courage, and brutal honesty. We are all good actors, it’s how we survive. Playing at being someone else is the easy part. The part that hides us from ourselves. It’s where I am adventurous. It’s where I learn to live by my wits, meandering the twists and turns in the road, trusting in my individuality to get me through.

And If that’s what it takes, then so be it. We are thrown out into a desperate world, full of purity and curiosity, unblemished by what’s to come, and it’s my contention that we spend the rest of our lives trying to find our way back to that special place. Life is what happens in between. It’s about going home again. Some only realise it when it’s too late, but maybe they’re happier that way. Some take the straight, and narrow, and that’s okay too, but some of us are destined to wander the road less travelled in search of what we truly believe in and who we really are. In the end, death is what we become.

To feel less than yourself is to be nowhere. It’s like being in a kind of purgatory waiting for someone else to make the choices that matter for you. For some, it’s an easy way out. Cut off from the responsibility they can blame someone or something else for the things they haven’t done. Maybe it’s because it’s so difficult to separate ourselves from the world we live in that so many settle for less. Often it is necessary to live by the rules to survive. After all, that’s what a conformist society demands of us.

But thankfully there are other influences that light the way. They are many and varied, maybe too many to mention here, but those that come to mind are Bono with his ability to see stuff from a different viewpoint, blessed with a mind that turns things inside out and upside down searching for the answers that matter. You gave me nothing, now it’s all I’ve got is a perfect example of the end of love in One. Another is Mike Scott and his wonderful view of the world. Mike really did allow me to see the whole of the moon. Shane McGowan. Michael Harding, Ger Whelan, Jim Gavin, and Arsene Wenger. All visionaries in a short-sighted world. I have often walked and talked with these people in my head, I’ve even argued with Brendan Behan when I’ve been lying in my bed, which I assure you is not for the fainthearted, even in a dream. I go to them when I need creative sustenance, and I’m happy enough to say it’s something I require on a daily basis.

And I go to places too. The rage within is calmed by a walk along the seafront on a warm summer’s day or a winter’s one when the waves are crashing against the shore to match my mood as they throw themselves back and forward on the strong winds blowing in off the Irish Sea. Thankfully in this part of the world, we are rich in landscape and wonderful with words. The Burren, West Cork, Connemara, Dingle, or the surfers dancing on the ocean in Lahinch. It can also be a quiet boreen that’s lost its way. The depth of the subconscious is stirred by the darkness within, turning easily into the light brought by such beautiful things.

It might be Jack Kerouac patting me on the back after I’ve read a few more pages of On The Road or Charles Bukowski cursing the man within to fuel the load. Charles doesn’t suffer fools gladly or a system that rewards mediocrity over genius. It might be Patti Smith on the M Train sitting in a coffee shop eating a cinnamon bun having fun with the words swirling around her head before they hit the page and explode. To be different is to challenge the status quo and everything it stands for, everything you’re told to believe until you finally shout No! No more!

I’ve tried to step out, only to step back in again. You see there are bills to be paid and people to please, and yet I’ve never felt freer than when the wind was at my back. Maybe it was a lack of confidence. Maybe it was a lack of opportunity. Maybe I wasn’t brave enough to trust myself back then or even still. Maybe I just needed a little bit of luck or a helping hand that I struggled so hard to find until it dawned on me that the only one with the tools to do it was myself. Maybe I jumped too soon. And yes, I’ve more than paid the price. It’s hard to push the boulder back up the hill once it starts to roll and when you get to the bottom there’s only the boulder left and everything else is gone. But hopefully, the lessons learned will help to guide me better the next time I try. Because there will be the next time and the next time after that. Of that, I have no doubt. That’s what it’s like when you’re fighting for your life. It’s where the hope lies that I can’t live without.

I’ve always liked being around creative people, whether in person or through books, music, film, poetry, sport, humour, or whatever form creativity takes. It’s in all of us. It’s often just a case of it finding a way out. I’m still dreaming, still ducking and diving and trying new things, still trying to find a path so that when my ashes catch on the wind and spread their final wings, I can at least say that I tried my best to do the things I was meant to do, to be the person I was born to be. I’m still rolling with the punches because for me there is no other way.

Maybe in the end it’s about throwing whatever you’ve got into the melting pot, letting it boil away, and waiting to see what bubbles up.