Craig Mod on the creative power of the literary hub
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The most complete day I know starts by taking a portrait of a stranger in the middle of nowhere at 10 am. At 8 am, I left for the point of blocking some 20 to 40 kilometers, and at 9:50 am, I generally did not take this portrait. So I approach in a manea way in any shop along the road (a tatami Mat Weaver, a gardening tool shop, a convenience store), or I will scream to a farmer who works his land: Good morning! Uh, can I take your photo?! More often than not, they are perplexed (me, my very obviously non -Japanese face, the fact that I am in the middle of nowhere) and that I am happy to discuss, and shortly after, they are happy to be photographed.
Who unlocks the first creative act of the day, and the rest flows as easily as walking itself. I’m going to talk with a dozen people, while dictating in a growing note on my phone. I speak with the owners of Japanese cafes in the middle of the century of ancient style –to kiss—S and owners of barbers and vegetables and members of the multi-generational family of historic inns. I speak with small children who go to school or from school, massacring next to the road, often shy but above all eager to get involved, but sneaky. I tell them that their city is charming (something more people should say to more children; and I think). We answer: “And what are you?!”, With a creaky voice hidden behind an umbrella.
I have lived in Japan for twenty-five years and this conversation comes easily, even in the countryside where people could carry a thick accent. *Hi*. I plow. Deploy historical facts. Try to show that I am not a complete stranger in these parts, and although I do not look like a room, I know a little of this or that, enough to be considered a subtle, but cautiously.
The old men cut their hedges and I ask them what their city looked like twenty, thirty years ago. We are talking about depopulation, aging population. A social problem where Japan happens to be at the forefront, but the one with which most of the world is – or will soon be – continuous. Like the song of lost birds, those I speak speak of joyers cries and laughter of children who were everywhere, now left. As much, probably, for a long time when these towns and villages disappear from municipal maps and records.
When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total stimulation emptiness beyond the immediate environment. My rules: no news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleportation”, you could say. The phone, the big teleportation apparatus, the big murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: THE Large creativity engine. I now believe with all my heart that it is only in the overwhelming silences of boredom – without all this black -mirror dopamine – that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they have never tried so much to dive into a ladle, and even less to dive into these uncomfortable waters made accessible by boredom.
For me, from this boredom – this emptiness of mind when I sometimes pass fields and sometimes giant play pachinko – the words flow. I can’t stop them. My mind begins to write about what we see and refuse to be silent. This gap created by a lack of artificial stimulation is filled – thanks to the magical plasticity of our brain – with words and more words. Without Candy Crush, an inverted event horizon appears and will come out: thoughts. I dictate while walking. By far, it seems that I am on a meeting of the board of directors with a CEO or that I am crazy. In the midst of all this, in the lulls of dictation, I photograph – people, objects, mountains, trees, strains, deer, sanctuaries, temples, depressed dogs and joyful dogs, well -used houses and those abandoned.
Finally, I arrive in an inn or a hotel (my favorites are anonymous “business hotels”, cheap things dotting the archipelago, uniform, reliable, with fast internet and washing machines and, above all, silence). My feet? Hot in places, a little wobbly, eager to lose their shoes. Every night, I spend three, four or five hours gathering the photographs, compiling my notes, making laundry, creating an archive. As I sit at night, my body is tired but my mind – since I dictated throughout the day, collecting moments and extracts from dialogue – is electric, like a crazy horse giving a kick to a barn door. He opens the door to the door and left us – writing two, three, four thousand words. They are modified in something slightly consistent, combined with a dozen photographs, and sent in what I call a “pop-up newsletter”.
That is to say: a newsletter delimited by time, starting day X and ending the day, how much I delete the thing (including the email addresses of all subscribers). Why delete everyone? Because a pop-up newsletter is a new start, requiring enthusiastic consent. Readers asked to be automatically registered with all my pop -ups, but it goes against philosophy – they are supposed to be one thing, an event, and hitting “subscribing” is an integral part of the process. And, in any case, being not subscribed is a kind of gentleman The gesture – as something Dick Van Dyke could do if he wrote newsletters – we seem to have lost in most online experiences. Here is my promise: X-Number of emails, nothing more, nothing less. The result? High crazy opening rates because people are delighted to be there.
I now believe with all my heart that it is only in the overwhelming silences of boredom – without all this black -mirror dopamine – that you can access your deepest creative wells.
I walk for weeks at a time. The longest walk I made was around forty days. Make that day after day – intense mileage, intense wording, look, conversation, boredom, texture and life, by a day – and you are changed. It is impossible not to be. All, an ascetic practice. I even shave my head like a performative beggar, the one who lives stories like alms. I have been doing walks like this for six years now, and they have made me more patient, more kind, more optimistic about the world, people, more surprised than ever on the number of clumsy animals (monkeys that jump bridges, tiny bear flowing like small pigs, mountain crabs that are not allowed to exist on a look) are there in the woods.
But maybe what I got the most of these days is an understanding of “fullness”. That is to say how much potential exists in the most banal routes. How everyone has a story that is worth listening to, even if it is only for five minutes. How the details and models of life are invisible with a head stuck in a phone. And how – after having walked for eight consecutive hours, a heavy pack on the back (several cameras, a laptop, rain equipment), then after writing for hours, edited, struck the text in a publisable state, added photographs and hit Send, finally at the end of the day) – when my head hits the pillows at night, I smile knowing that there was no more way to have the cards to do morning.
I realize now that I did not know fullness before I start walking like that. The walk taught me fullness. It’s good like that, the walk. Walk. I now have hundreds of “complete” days to my credit. You carry the feeling of these days in your daily life. You now have an archetype for a fully “used” day. It is a powerful thing, and that cannot be learned by the only description. This must be felt in the bones after the twenty mile, the tenth day of twenty miles, the tenth day of hitting a text, of collimiality of the experience of connection with foreigners, to feel the son of those you spend, to merge the day into words, to associate these words with images, to create a complete “object” or piece “as it was. And then push it into the world (the edition at the end of the day creates a kind of participations that I find essential to expel this last drop of fullness).
Anyway, I like these walks, these big stupid walks alone along the old paths, paths formerly full of life, now a little dark, but always beautiful in their own way. What happens to these pop-ups? Sometimes they become the grain of a book. I walked four years ago up to Covid. A thousand kilometers along the old paths of a country peninsula called KII. The trials of this walk have become the basis of Things become other thingsA story of a walk but also a story of a friend, someone I had never forgotten but that I could not look until the march helped me do it, boredom gave me the courage and permission to take a look.
The greatest number of days I know start to leave at 8 am with great mileage in mind. But sometimes the energy of the walk continues, far beyond the walk itself. Years later, slowly, then suddenly, it’s a book, something in hand, something much bigger than a walk alone.
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Things become other things By Craig Mod is available via Random House.
