Writer Amy Tan on Creativity

"What is chance, what is luck, what are things

that you get from the universe that you can't really explain?"

Amy Tan, TED Lecture, Feb. 2008

Tan sets the perception of randomness against her mother's sense that everything has an explanation, yet she states that ambiguity, a lack of clarity (like her mother's or even greater), is part of her writing process as it should be. Still, she finds herself being pointed in directions, and she wonders how things happen, why they happen, and how she herself makes them happen. She has observed that the more she notices strange occurrences the more they happen. Creative people, she suggests, are "multi-dimensional." Her resolve: "I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe as the creator of that universe."

Perhaps what Tan is saying is two-fold: one, creative people don't exist in multiple dimensions or as multiply-dimensional without willful engagement of other dimensions or realms and, two, that their sense of what is real is partly influenced by their own involvement in creation of their universe. Accordingly, my cosmology would be I think both what exists and what I see (or otherwise sense) and acknowledge.

Deep stuff. Listen to Tan's lecture here.

Stuck Betwixt and Between

I've been writing elsewhere, but I miss writing here. Here's where I risk putting strange ideas out into the universe. Here's where it's okay to suggest that all of my work in genealogy is being assisted. I'm glad to be back!

In a blog post from 2008, I wrote about how a ninety six-year-old woman I interviewed turned the tables on me (or "depthed" me, her word) during the hour I spent with her. It was the first time we'd ever met, yet she seemed to know me. She in fact had a message for me: "You're well equipped."

How could she know that I doubt myself all of the time, that I put stuff out there into the universe and then want very much to pull it back before anyone sees it?

I'm not sure if my once ninety six-year-old--who would be more like a hundred mark by now--is still alive, but I thought of her this week as I sought funding advice for an important project I'm working on, a genealogical project which potentially touches hundreds of thousands of families. I was advised to pull into my work leading scholars from prestigious research institutions, leaders in slavery research. Sitting in an office chair across from my grant advisor I began to sink as he spoke of budgets and boards.

The next day, I scheduled lunch with a friend just so that I could vent, so that I could admit to someone that my passion for genealogy is working at the ground level--sorting through old records, getting their residue on my hands, being enveloped into the aura of a different time. It is there where I have experienced the most wonderfully strange things.

Yet my lunch date reminds me that without money my work will only take longer; I will only grow poorer as I continue funding my own research, and she is right of course, well, at least partly right. I nod my head for her, knowing all the while that I am not buying what she is saying. I am stubborn, and my ninety six-year-old's message to me also is not assuring me that I can administer a grant-funded genealogical-turned-Civil War historical project complete, I suppose, with articles, books, and conferences. And, I'm almost certain that I do not want to take things to that "next" level.

I am stuck then betwixt and between the place where the universe delivered important information to me--placed it right into my lap--and institutionalizing the information before it even has a chance to breathe its old life.

What would the ancestors say about my hesitation? Well, I suppose that they have already spoken. So, I must take my own advice (see blog post of July 7, 2010) and keep moving. If they can travel with me on trains, planes, and automobiles, they can move with me also through the various machinations of higher education, through funding agencies, book publishers, etc. Equipped? Okay. Equipped.