Creative Engineering

I sit at my desk at 12 midnight, having just finished supper and a good read on the net. My bag lies next to me, packed with schedules and worksheets, books and papers. On my desktop are several folders, or which two stand out to me:

One labeled "EXAMS", the other, "IDEAS"

Oh, and a little document with lots of lines of text and numbers, a nice little DnD character I made with exactly 2.1 million gold in equipment. I feel quite proud of that.

...sad isn't it?

It used to be that I would write poetry and stories like a man breathes air. Bus rides home, evening walks down the street; ideas would come and flow into me, an endless river of inspiration I thought would never cease.

But such rivers run the risk of floods, endangering the village. And thus a dam was set up, to curb the tide, to control the flow, to channel its fury and raw majesty into tame, useful energy.

Examinations. Studying. Revision.

All goals I should be achieving. Am achieving, to an extent.

Yet how many geologists have looked at once mighty Nile and sigh at the small stream that trickles its way across the sand?

Nowadays, the MOE, government, people of this generation. Leaders, if you will, have realized the importance of creative talent. Of dreams, of lateral thinking, of uniqueness. And so they sought to harness it.

Yet I suppose, like a butterfly in captivity it doesn't really work out, does it?

After the river passes through the dam, drained its roar, what's left for the crops, the land, the sea?

One folder has not be updated in months. The other is being constantly filled every other week, with documents I barely read. I feel like a traitor, as though not reading them, not exercising my so-called fullest ability is a crime.

It is a crime, I guess.

I wish this post would have some massive insight. Some message I could impart. But I find I cannot do that now without sounding hollow. To preach, hah, to preach is to feed the masses what they wish to hear. To say what's already been said, that's preaching.

To teach, my friend, is a different story altogether.

So what am I, if not a writer? If not an engineer of words, a researcher of society? I look and think and watch it all seems so...easy. A giant stage, a giant act. So easy to just drift along, follow the ladder, take the golden hand.

I can tell myself anything, and I'll believe it. I am the greatest hypnotist and the most gullible fool. Self-delusion is a weapon, a potent tool one uses to fit in with society, to achieve things we would otherwise never do.

I ask myself, am I teaching or preaching? Are these ideas or exams? Am I truly exploring, or simply testing the market, the readers, the people of their conscience? Testing their lives?

It can be either way. I can choose. I can choose so much its frightening. And thus I become afraid to choose. There is understanding and there is understanding, the true understanding, where the implications and consequences of a certain action or property dawns upon you. Its so easy for the modern generation now to complain about dreams, about death, about hypocrisy and disillusionment and war. But do we understand it? I doubt I do.

There is a feeling that comes with understanding. An emotional weight, if you will. One of potency and heaviness. Like the feeling of a good racket in your hands, or a nice, heavy apple. A sensation of the rightness of it all.

Back to the dams. When power is harnessed, it can be controlled. And somehow, that takes away its power. Certainly, the Nile possesses its great physical power, its rushing waters, potential energy, kinetic energy...yadada...

But what happened to the other sort of powers? The gods, the worship. The power to inspire, to intimidate. To frighten, to awe. These are powers too, in their own right. But unlike the waters it is people they move. And in doing so, move the world.

It feels like creativity ought to be something more. Ceremony might be pointless in the view of efficiency, but it serves a purpose of its own as well. Sometimes, the existence of something is the effect unto itself. There is no cause, not root, simply the existence of that process that causes an effect.

And engineer solves problems. And a writer is simply an engineer of imagination. His bricks are the dreams of man, and his lightning is their drive. He builds a machine from the whispers and sighs of each generation, gathering the cast-off shells of their lives, the tiny after-image we leave where ever we go, welding our thoughts together, oiling the gears of passion.

And so, forge a new world? If only it were that simple.

Teaching or Preaching? So hard to say. It depends on the audience, like how the strength of a river depends on the land. One shapes the other, as the other shapes it back. And it is this dance that is renewal, is creativity, is the joining of ideals, new and old.

You cannot compartmentalize it. You cannot say: these are our writers, they will dream for us. You cannot hush an engineer's secret desire to fly, a lawyer's love of fruit pies, a simple worker's talent for humming. All of them dream, all of them dance. But it is the writer who looks from the balcony above, to chronograph it.

To understand something means it must be understood by you. By you. Not by the writers of the textbooks, not by the teachers in their classes. By you and you alone. Your understanding.

And then the writers can too look upon your dance and see it not as a shadow of a lesser dancer, but as a pattern of glory in its own right, sending ripples through the surface of the lake behind the dam.