To Putz or to Pootle: Reflections on Creativity

“I believe that most of us who regularly and purposely engage in artistic or creative work, insulate the central “work” part of the activity with a complicated, flimsy, but highly essential cloud of preparations and distractions. This is largely to keep us fooled into remembering only the fun parts and, at the same time, to prevent us from remembering it would be possible not to do this kind of thing at all.”—By Anita Sullivan

The Highest Cauldron 

By Anita Sullivan

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—9/14/2015—I believe that most of us who regularly and purposely engage in artistic or creative work, insulate the central “work” part of the activity with a complicated, flimsy, but highly essential cloud of preparations and distractions. This is largely to keep us fooled into remembering only the fun parts and, at the same time, to prevent us from remembering it would be possible not to do this kind of thing at all. Especially since we (most of us) don’t even come close to earning a living at it, and although we willingly spend insane numbers of hours with our bodies tense and contorted in a variety of unnatural positions (holding a violin bow, crouched in front of a screen, hunched over a shapeless mass of clay, standing at an easel in a back bedroom, sitting at a table wearing earphones and punching buttons) —and (did I mention?) earning little or no money for it—we are trained and bludgeoned by our current society’s conventions to regard our artistic efforts as “extra,” not as “essential.”

Hard work and no pay for art is a familiar situation. But I want to get back to the “flimsy but highly essential set of preparations and distractions” part, because I was only recently confronted with this largely invisible phenomenon vividly enough to isolate it from the rest of the creative process.

I’m not talking about the normal sequence of getting yourself going in the morning—bathing, making coffee, opening curtains, checking the news, walking the dog, fixing kid’s lunches.  Those things fall into the category of ritual: essential, fairly generic preparatory activities, but occurring like a vaguely conscious extension of normal bodily functions. And I’m not talking about procrastinating either, which tends to substitute an easy, “useful” activity for the more difficult one, and so feeds into the myth that doing art on purpose is self indulgent.

I’m talking about putzing and pootling, which are really instinctive behavior patterns rather than conscious strategies, but behavior patterns that often seem to show up spontaneously just before a person settles down to the business of carrying out a lengthy artistic project. Both words refer to actions that seem to be aimless, and to have little connection to the serious business of filling each minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run.

On days when you don’t have the pesky urgency of earning a living to clutter up your time, and you have a creative project that you are able to devote your attention to, well—there’s simply an enormous gap between the opening rituals of the day, and the hours of stone-crushing energy that creative work requires. You’ve got to pick up your mallet and chisel and walk into that field of boulders, where you will ache and maybe even bleed. But instead of figuring out how to harden yourself for the task, what you really need to do is soften up. How else are the beauty, the fun, the excitement going to find their way in? So, you putz for awhile. It’s like working the cold clay in your warm hands before you can mold it into shape.

I didn’t fully realize that until I moved into a condominium.

What has happened now is that my scope for active putzing and pootling is reduced to almost zero. My newly-regulated local universe assumes I will get up from the breakfast table, walk down the carpeted hall to my desk, seat myself, and begin to write. Bang! I’ve turned into Miss Artificial Intelligence, specially programmed for “Creative Work.”

Because in a condominium you are forced inside. You have purchased an inner kingdom; the space between your walls is your own, but the outside of the building and the entire landscape surrounding it do not belong to you. This means you are forbidden to so much as prune a single rhododendron twig, much less dig a hole in the dry grass lining the sidewalk and poke in a few carrot seeds, or maybe a nasturtium plant. And, if you come down your steps early in the morning just to stand on the pavement in front of the building, blinking and moving your head slowly around like a weather vane to get the feel of the day, you can feel instead your neighbors’ discomfort radiating through their closed blinds. You’re supposed to have outgrown the need for this sort of subjective behavior.

Sure, I have a balcony, but I can’t do anything actively aimless there. I can only stand forlornly by the railing and watch the deer and the turkeys trailing around between the five or six species of acceptable shrubs below, all of them—probably even the plants—like me, deprived of the fullness of their daily putzing needs. Or, in the case of the turkeys at least, their pootling needs.

“Pootling” is a wonderful onomatopoeic British word that is, as I interpret it, more like active putzing, or even (in the case of driving around aimlessly) putzing on wheels. Cars and turkeys and dogs tend to pootle; cats and deer putz; people do both at different times.

I have lost my putzing and pootling rights. I have lost my outdoor picking-up-and-putting-down rights, my latest collection of vague intentions muttered into the morning air, my revisiting of yesterday’s muddle over what to do about the grandfather clock, the wasp nest below the eaves, the bird bath knocked over again by raccoons. Pondering and wandering, touching familiar objects, checking if the plants need watering, generally reconnecting with the “things” in the fullness of my geographic space, I feel my brain nicely split into unequal parts through which cool breezes blow. An entire universe of possibilities begins to flow back and forth between my ears and drift down among my veins and chakras. An hour might pass, or only ten minutes, but when I go “in” again, I am something close to a whole person. I have touched antlers with the real world in all its weight and majesty: we have come to a new understanding together.

Note: The first image above, “Matilda,” by John William Waterhouse, derives from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_William_Waterhouse_-_Matilda_%28formerly_called_%22Beatrice%22%29.jpg; the second image is from Anita Sullivan’s private collection.