more on the creative mind

(No, not "Moron, the Creative Mind.")

To continue our series investigating - via the words of others - the whereness, whatness and wtf-ness of the Poetickal Sensibility,* here is a short passage from the blog of Bobby Farouk. (It's not the whole post, by the way. There's more.) As you can see, Bobby understands.

"Imagination may sound wonderful" (writes Bobby) "but I’m here to tell you this: I have seen it all and I’m sick of it.

"This morning in the shower there’s Our Holy Mother in a strand of hair clinging to the wall. Dancing a sort of jig...

"My parent’s bathroom floor tiles looked like curtains of waterfalls. I’m talking about water falling a long way, and behind them were these moaning faces and contorted bodies, a universe of tormented souls trapped in linoleum. Of course you can’t tell Mom and Dad that when you’re a kid.

"At least the bathroom floor in my apartment isn’t so scary. There’s a centerfielder diving for a fly ball, a waiter walking across the room with a tray of tall drinks, a cowboy riding a bronco, a clown suppressing a sneeze. I’ve seen Teddy Roosevelt, Karl Marx, Lloyd George, John Wilkes Booth, Leon Trotsky, Jerry Garcia, Genghis Khan, and Woodrow Wilson wearing a turban."

This reminds me of something Mama Baroque said to me one time, a long time ago. She was saying something about not understanding how my mind works. Maybe I'd been telling her a dream or something. And she goes, "You know, I've always wanted to spend an hour in your head, just to see what on earth it's like."

I go, "oka-ayyy..."

She goes, "But no more than that! I don't think I could stand it."

And in fact, as it goes: "Not nearly so amusing as it sounds," concludes Bobby.

I think that's what Mom was afraid of.


*By the way, it's not a deliberate, researched, serious, edited series. If it were I'd be hitting you right now with the letters of Keats and Coleridge, and quotations from the Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations.