Creativity and Sex
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics which I turned over to a colleague, Wayno, in January of 2018. Wayno does a weekly blog post, too, and I highly recommend it.
DOOR OR WINDOW?
My comic this week features an imagining of a combo of winter and summer Olympics. I could use this as a springboard to talk about the recent stories of world-class athletes and their responses to the COVID vaccine—Aaron Rogers and that excellent tennis player whose name I would have to look up to come within five letters of the correct spelling—but I’ve heard quite enough about that virus and am tired of it. The current strain running around the globe is mild if you’ve been vaccinated and are not in a risk group, which describes Olive and me— so we’re through worrying about it. An animal’s survival instinct is stronger than almost anything else but I’ve always felt that placing quantity of life over quality is a mistake that can lead to a long and miserable life. I’m ready to choose quality so let’s talk about something else.
One of my favorite topics is creativity. If our species has a superpower, this is it. It’s what gave us language, which gave us group effort, which gave us societies, architecture, art, music, literature, and so much else. Even science and math can be creative endeavors when you’re trying to solve a problem in a new way or investigate a new question.
Accordingly, I’ve often thought that if you’re not being creative, you’re not being fully human; like a cheetah that doesn’t run, a bird that doesn’t fly, a cat that doesn’t dupe humans into being its slave.
Now, people have often said to me, “I’m just not creative,” but I think they are wrong. They may think they’re not able to compose a song, write a novel, or paint a portrait of their family that their spouse and children would not deeply resent, but there’s so much more to creativity than that. What those people are really saying is that they’re not commercial-grade artisans. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be trying those things if they have a mind to. It’s like saying that if you can’t qualify to compete at Wimbledon, there’s no reason to play tennis. Just like exercising your body, creating something is its own reward, regardless of what others think of it or whether it has commercial value.
I admit that I was born into this arena in a very fortunate way. Since I was a toddler, I had the ability to draw better than the average person my age and I was encouraged to do so by the adults in my life. Without that skill and encouragement, I may have given up art and creativity at some time during my childhood as so many of us do. But we shouldn’t. If you enjoy art, crafts, writing, music, cooking, fashion, gardening, coloring, sewing, carpentry, cosplay, or anything else that uses your mind and hands to bring something new into existence—even if it is a needlepoint spare tire cover representing the Battle of Hastings and all you have is gray and hot pink thread—you should go for it. You’ll likely find the experience more powerful and uplifting than any antidepressant.
I’ve been intrinsically compelled to create art all of my life—some stuff I’m very proud of and some utterly embarrassing crap—and here’s how it seems to work for me.
There are two kinds of creative endeavors: the kind that comes from my own thoughts and the kind that arrives from somewhere outside of my consciousness. Though they can start with an inspiration from somewhere else, cartoons are mostly the kind that comes from my own mind; I have a deadline, I need a cartoon, it needs to be understandable and amusing to a large enough portion of the population to make sense in a commercial product like Bizarro. There is inspiration involved, but it is within a defined framework so the process is inherently less free-form. Then there’s the other kind that comes from somewhere else.
“Somewhere else” is the place that paintings and writing projects like Peyote Cowboy come from. I get a somewhat vague inspiration to do something, then I dig into it and see where it leads. Rather than thinking real hard and trying to come up with something, I sit quietly and listen (look? feel?) for inspiration and see what comes. It’s like the difference between forcing yourself to sleep and allowing yourself to fall asleep. That is to say, it is more of a letting-go than a hammering-out.
Doing this feels like opening an aperture of some sort, a kind of opening in my consciousness that allows things to flow through, rather than generating them from within.
I used to refer to it as “opening the back door” but in modern vernacular, that can be construed to refer to anal sex. You may be surprised to learn this but none of my creative process has to do with anal sex, so I now refer to it as “opening the attic window”.
Peyote Cowboy came to me that way. I was inking Bizarro cartoons that I’d already written and sketched one day, and without any inciting event, the idea for the opening scenes to a story came to me from who-knows-where. I jotted them down because I thought it was interesting, but then forgot about it. A few days later, more came to me in the same way. Bit by bit, over a period of a few years, the story got written.
It was truly revelatory because I had not asked for it and didn’t know where the story was going or what the point of it would be. It just sort of came to me as though I was watching a TV series, waiting to see what was next. Because it was the first time a long-form story came to me it seemed unique, but then it occurred to me that I’d been doing this for years with my fine art. Unlike a Bizarro cartoon, my endeavors in fine art have no stated purpose or framework and they don’t require that anyone like or understand them; they are just pure inspiration that I receive bit by bit through that attic window at the top of my consciousness. I never know where they are going or what they might mean until I am finished and live with them for a while; only then do I find all kinds of hidden ideas and messages in them and I often feel they are teaching me something about myself. All of the paintings on my Diego Piraro site were completed in this way.
The ability to bring something into existence is a kind of divine gift that no other type of creature has to the degree that we do. None are even close. Regardless of your beliefs about goings-on outside of this 3-dimensional existence, creativity seems to be innately considered by us humans to be of the utmost value, evidenced in the fact that all cultures associate it with God. If you’re not practicing it, you’re missing out on a free experience of ecstasy, a chance to temporarily be a God. (This is a metaphor so don’t get hung up on the spiritual language.)
Now it’s time to see what inspirations Wayno was tuning into in his Bizarro cartoons for the week!…
He was driving around at midnight in his Hyundai Sonata.
The darkest thing about this very dark joke is that someone old enough to drink would wear that outfit into a bar.
This is from our very popular Corporate Mascots Buried Alive series.
Every thought about how different the world would be if we could see smells?
Wayno points out on his blog post this week that this cartoon is NOT meant to be political, it’s just a fun combination of words. Of course, people went nuts associating it with their favorite target of disdain. (sigh)
Regardless of how you feel about tattoos, it is thoughtless and rude to tattoo someone against their will. At the very least, you could get hit in the head with an apple.
That signals the end of this week’s festival of free advice. Thanks for dropping by to ignore it. If you like what we do and that we don’t charge you or hit you with a tsunami of ads and clickbait, please help us keep it this way by visiting some of our links below. We’ll engrave your name into the Wall of Appreciation in our minds.
Until next week, keep your attic window clean and unlocked.
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