The Creative's Choice

The perfect idea lives in my head. Not lives, that isn't right. A living thing must exist, be made real, be born. This is more like - potential. The hot, undefined gases of a nebula swirling around in my head, with the ability, the possibility to make stars, planets, comets - to create life.

A perfect embryo of an idea then. All the parts in all the right places, everything accounted for. The perfect story, with the perfect wording, a sublime story that makes the heart ache, and the reader beg for more at its end. Or the perfect painting, not just beautifully executed and exquisitely composed, but which bears open the soul to interrogation, reveals the pain within so acutely it leaves the viewer tearful.

But it isn't real. None of it is. It doesn't exist. An idea is not a thing. A nebula of hot swirling gas is not a sun, nor a planet. Potential is nothing without action. Without action, without the spark, the idea will continue to go on, not existing, for ever.

But how? Even trying to express it to others using stupid, clumsy words is an embarrassment. Words are so utterly inadequate. How can you express a feeling, an emotion, with mere words? Words are not feelings. How can the word rage even come close to articulating the heat, the all-enveloping, sapping, exhausting energy that that emotion generates within? It can't. Not even close.

To bring it into existence requires that most painful of births. For, the moment we put pen to paper, brush to canvas, it becomes tainted, so much less than what we imagined it could be.

There's a decision to be made, an almost unbearable one. For the perfect idea to live on, forever, only in your imagination? Or for it to be born, enter the world, to imperfectly exist.

This is the Creative's Choice.

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