Though he has to earn a living, man dwells poetically on this earth.
I remember coming across this quote when I was going through the textbooks assigned in my MA in English, a year ago, and it has stayed with me since, partly because the whole reason I ended up pursuing distance education in MA in English despite having a full time well-paying corporate job and an MBA was to fuel the creative energy and urges in my brain.
Lofty Aspirations
As a young child from a very middle class family, I remember often being told at a young age that it was very important to have a stable and viable career first & foremost. Not to quote my father, yet quoting him, "You get a seat into IIT, then Monday to Friday you study your B.Tech, and for weekends, you wake up at 5 am and write. No one will disturb or question you then, if you want to become a writer." Though that never ended up happening, and I did deviate severely career-wise, I still held on and continue to hold on strongly feelings about a stable and viable career.
For the majority of my life, I will be grateful for the decisions I have made. But one 's ego can't help but wonder - would I have been a defining voice of English Literature in India if that was a path I had followed? Would my father, someone who had already published a short story in a prominent Telugu magazine of the time have been responsible for raising Telugu literature to new heights? You can see that a part of me will be in constant wonder about what my generation terms, "wasted potential", and that is a major block to one's creativity, that has continued to haunt me all these years.
Though these are what you may term lofty literature aspirations, I do wonder how much of my creativity is locked up behind the mundane corporateness of my everyday life, and in my struggle to bridge the skill gap of my ability and my taste.
Acceptance
However, as someone once said, we humans are not meant for a life of constant labor that capitalism and the global economy has trapped us into, we are meant to sing, and dance and create. We are the only species (maybe except octopuses and dolphins) who are the closest to all versions of a god - in that we want to create for the sake of creation (and other things that are intangible like personal glory). And what am I doing if not create and derive meaning of the world and life through other creations?
Even if I have bound myself now to the sobering mundanity of corporate, every evening I end up in my desk or in my bed - thinking, creating and building. Thought most of it has never seen the light of the day, and more than half of it has yet to even see pen & paper, I continue to Since I want to eventually write and bring out my ideas to the world build worlds, stories, characters, and my own personal glory in my head where it sometimes spills onto my desktop or papers.
To Write, I Study
Since I want to eventually write and bring some of my ideas (I know I can build a functioning world government and bring world peace, guys), I thought it would be best to first observe, and study.
My life is littered with pieces of art and culture I have loved. I know that they inspire me, and that they influence me. However, to successfully be able to capture my thoughts, I must first observe the thoughts that already exist. There is an insatiable urge in me to learn new things, observe new ideas, because one can never quite tell how strangely our brain connects dots.
That is the reason I study the Greats in English Literature, and that is the reason, I will next pick up Art History. Maybe I will end up studying so extensively that I never write, but in my opinion, the Greats are great for a reason. No one brings ideas to the world in complete isolation, and to understand someone is to understand what has influenced them. There is a reason why the Greats are everlasting - be it in theatre, poetry, music or art.
Studying them gives me a framework to test my ideas against, and I find it rewarding.
For example, I was recently able to draw parallels between Shakespeare's Hamlet and a Japanese Light Novel, Brunhild, which led me to trace out Aristotle's seminal work on defining Tragedy. It thrills me to dot out the traces of influence across these very different items across the world and time.
To become a god.
I have read several works in my life that have impacted me, shook my roots, uprooted me & replanted me. I believe that I am now a comprehensive library so great and so vast that defining those works and the interconnectedness between them requires it's own language, it's own verbs and it's own grammar.
I wish to create a repository of all I have consumed to track what influences me, my creativity, and my own work. Identifying that, I believe will lead me to identify and strengthen my thoughts on what I want to create, whilst I parallelly, try to create.
While these are just beliefs of someone still in the drafting stage, I believe they have some merit.
This is one of the ways in which I step closer to becoming a god, that is, to create (or so my ego wants me to say, let's hope I don't follow in Icarus's footsteps).