Creatively Unfruitful

does being "a creative" actually mean anything?

Last week my cactus bloomed which I thought was dead for three years, and I laid down under the bitter cherry tree as it dropped its petals.

FLOQ, a free workshop & open mic reading series for Portland’s trans lit community, is starting up again on first Fridays in 2024. The first one is Friday, April 5, and you can find more information here, as well as register for the workshop portion.

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Where I live, pear trees line the streets unfruited, petaled pansy white, blossom fringe cracked open to the rimming sun. Planting male trees of certain fruit cultivars without a nearby female yields a spring of flowers which do their blooming and withering without the follow-up of fruit. Occasionally you’ll find in July a tree heavy with pears planted in the median of some neighborhood, the ground around the trunk rotten with mash and busy with wasps. The fruit—useful, delicious—goes unwanted, harvested only by gravity and grateful insects. It’s the flowers that seem to pass for urban beautification.

Creativity and productivity have an interesting relationship, especially when beauty is involved. There’s the beautiful fact of how many you feed. How you deliver sweetness and spread it to others. And then there’s pure unfulfilling, unproductive pleasure; masturbation or ‘writing just for yourself,’ which I’m not sure is actually a thing. I mean, we can pleasure ourselves, but we are always writing for someone else, even if that’s someone we’ve lodged inside of ourselves.

More and more I hear people claiming the label of “a creative.” Maybe because it’s tax season. Or maybe there’s some real way in which “creative” turned into a noun reflects some inner knowledge of themselves. I can’t rule that out, I suppose. But I find it unconvincing. It introduces more ambiguity—there’s no figure to that ground. Everyone is creative, it is an innate part of being human, whether you make pots or plant gardens or write novels or raise a person. But there’s that making, again. In Education and Critical Consciousness (1974), Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire several definitions of culture vis a vis its relationship to nature:

“the active role of men in and with their reality; the role of mediation which nature plays in relationships and communication among men; culture as the addition made by men to a world they did not make; culture as the result of men’s labor, of their efforts to create and re-create; the transcendental meaning of human relationships […] In short, the role of man as Subject in the world and with the world.”

Leaving aside the unfortunate gendering of this definition in both English and the original Portuguese, I wonder about the importance of addition to this definition. Especially now, a time of overconsumption, runaway production, and a maniacal focus on DeVeLoPmEnT and growth at all costs in global capitalism, it seems important to think about the ways in which culture and creativity can find a home in degrowth, reuse, and the overall movement to reverse course and make do with less. Does being “a creative” always have to mean Making A Thing, virtual, material, biological or otherwise—a path which I’m pretty sure results eventually in all culture being reduced to CONTENT (including human beings as content for the bone-grinding machine of industrial capitalism). Or, if the lexical allure of “a creative” is simply too strong to be discarded, perhaps it could be reinterpreted as one who takes “a creative” approach to power relations in their making of things. One who reimagines how books are made and distributed outside of the supply chains that also move weapons and bombs around the world (for example).

In other words, it’s important to implicate the means of production in any new definitions of creativity. Maybe also the means of destruction, and the interplay between the two. I’ve been reading the fascinating A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq by Fernando Báez, former director of the National Library of Venezuela. In his introduction, Báez writes:

“The apocalyptic narrative projects the human situation and its anguish: in each of us, the origin and the end interact in inevitable processes of creation and dissolution.”

Identifying merely as “a creative” without being clear about what it is you are creating and how, is dangerously reductive and cedes the grounds of destruction to other more nefarious forces. Báez goes on to say “the destructive ritual, like the constructive ritual applied to the building of temples, houses, or any work, fixes patterns that return the individual to the community, to shelter, or to the vertigo of purity.” It’s as succinct a description of fascism as any I’ve read.

If one creates a book defending hate speech or a rocket ship meant to further humanity, what is being destroyed in the same breath? If one seeks the destruction of a multinational conglomerate responsible for distributing millions of books, what new possibility is opened up for creativity? The inversions go on and on. Run with them.

The strategies for reproduction in the fruiting world are numerous. Nature sees no natural path for creation, for making more of something. A “self-unfruitful” tree requires pollen from a genetically different cultivar of the same plant, in other words, requires cross-pollination in order to make fruit. I confess to not completely understanding the mechanics of this; I’m a botanist only in my imagination. But I love this term “self-unfruitful,” which I take to mean both that one cannot make something alone, hermetically, forever, but also, it opens the possibility that being unfruitful and unproductive is also simply a normal way of being. Not making more of something could be a middle path in between creation and destruction—the flower can just fall away after being appreciated for a little while.

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Updates

As mentioned above, FLOQ starts Friday, April 5, in-person at Bishop & Wilde. Then we’ll be FLOQ-ing all summer on first Fridays.

I recently got to share some collaborative works in a gallery setting for the first time through the t4t Art Collective’s *symbiosis* show at Parallax Art Center here in Portland. A few images included below of quilts made with Ebenezer Galluzzo and Sincere Studio, riso prints made with Hope Amico’s keep writing project, clay tablets offered by hannah rubin, and a special performance where I got to read from my new chapbook CATARACT in front of said quilt with accompanying sound by my husband Ruune.

Speaking of my husband’s musical talents, they’ll be touring on the East Coast with their band New Here over the next two weeks. If you’re in any of the cities listed here and you enjoy thrashy queer pop punk, go see them!

And if you happen to be near Ellensburg, WA on April 11, I’ll be giving a craft talk and reading as part of Central Washington University’s Lion Rock Visiting Writer’s Series. Come say hello!

And finally, a little update on Climate and Man, if you remember my previous entry also on the slow march of time and the decay of books. Spring has made the paper soft and see-through.