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March 31: After two naps of about an hour each yesterday, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, I felt better. Relaxed. At ease with my loss of creativity. I read for a while, argued who wrote Shakespeare on the Internet a bit, and spent an hour riding my bike to and from the nearest supermarket to get cheese and various things to drink, including a cheap version of Mountain Dew. I drink a lot. Didn't partake of the Dew, but had a couple of large glasses of the green Hawaiian Punch concoction. Suddenly I came up with the brilliant idea of changing one of the terms in the mathemaku that had defeated me. This quickly led to the idea of changing two of its terms. I even thought what one should be, but am still working on the second. Ridiculous. I always play with different words or phrases as the terms of my mathemaku but earlier I couldn't; I couldn't eve think that that was what I should do.
So I'm a mathemakuist again. I'm hoping for a rough draft with possibilities today, once I post this (which I'm writing yesterday afternoon). I still consider the probable result mostly mechanically arrived at, but I can live with that. Below, by the way, is an image-in-progress that I may use in it:
I made a version of it Saturday, then added two blobs of color at the bottom of it yesterday that I think improved it a lot. I sorta like it, but don't come close to getting excited about it. Just a nice combination of colors in what seems a fairly balanced composition. Happy.
Meanwhile, I've been thinking a little more about mechanical and creative composition. I think my first mathemaku were creative compositions--because I was doing something significantly new for me in them; then followed what I think it fair to call a period of creative exploitation of my new-for-me construction. At length, I was mechanically exploiting the construction. My next period of creative composition began when I started adding illumages to my mathemaku. A third was when I started using color--which I'm now mechanically exploiting. With maybe two secondary periods of creativity having to do with sequentiality, and use of background. I think maybe the use of three-dimensionality and representational illumagery are two ways I might get creative again. They're both too much for me right now.
Hmmm, nice to review my career as a mathemakuist--however self-centered it may seem to others. Makes me feel maybe I did do something at one time! In any case, I do quite a bit of self-reviewing. I think it helpful. I even think my writing about it should be helpful to others, particularly younger artists. I assume others are similarly self-checking but don't know. One would lose direction without it, yes? But many poets seem to want directionlessness. Having some idea where I've been and where I'm going have always been important to me, though. Not that I would want to know the latter too exactly.
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