(www.marieread.com)

So, two thoughts have been coming together and though I cannot seem to extricate them from one another I also do not have a clear plan of attack for writing about them together so I decided to just plow ahead.

A week ago I started to think a great deal about how much writing has to do with seduction. And while I’m not in any way ignoring the fact that words can be, and frequently are, used to literally – sexually – seduce people, I am mostly thinking about how when words are written by one human being with the express hope that they will allow another human being to slip inside the writer’s mind – willingly, gratefully – seduction takes on a whole new form. I believe, too, that sexual seduction and mental seduction are intertwined often enough that one can, at times, get terribly muddled about whether one is attracted to a person or to an idea. Given that ideas often inspire other ideas as they move from mind to mind, one cannot even always be certain that one isn’t simply seducing oneself.

Also last week, I wrote about how there were birds I was seeing around and that I had seen them last year around this time as well. I did not write then, but will write now, that they are beautiful and their song is an enchanting combination of trills and chirps. Well, as it turns out they are called Bohemian Waxwings. “Bohemian” because they have no fixed breeding grounds and do a lot of wandering. From the website where I found out what they were, I borrow this:

The Bohemian Waxwing does not hold breeding territories, probably because the fruits it eats are abundant, but available only for short periods. One consequence of this non-territorial lifestyle is that it has no true song. It does not need one to defend a territory.

And this intrigued me greatly. Birdsong, I’ve always thought, is inextricably linked with mating… Sing your pretty ditty, boy-birds, and preen those pretty plumes for that’s how you will win your woman… But, and this really shouldn’t surprise me, these breed-specific songs are, it would appear, also about property; bird real estate boundaries established by songs meant also to sexually seduce, thereby perpetuating the breed and, subsequently, raising more birds to protect the same territory and so on and so on…

The idea that without “ownership” being at issue, a bird species might not ever bother to create a unique song is intriguing and a little disturbing to me all at the same time. It immediately raised the question:

Are creative expression and seduction about ownership?

One can, I think, immediately answer “yes” if one loosens the definition of ownership up enough to include the idea of “leases”; temporary ownership. To have one body “belong” to another body even if only for a night. To win and grip another’s mind for the duration of a short story, a play, a post. If these things can be construed as ownership then, yes, “creative” seduction is inevitably about ownership.

If, however, we are talking about wholesale, outright, private, life-time ownership then things get more complicated and not a little bit more ugly around the edges, I fear… For, as I’ve found myself thinking a lot this week, there is something very unsavoury indeed about artists who lay claim to the turf of, for example, creating definitive anti-heroines or who argue that only reading truly works the mind and soul while TV is for lazy morons.

Creative people peeing on corners this way always makes me vaguely ill because it seems to stem from the belief that ideas must be “unique” – in the most pure and exclusionary way – to be worthy of attention. As if ideas – as I intimated above, are not born and reborn of each other every day and inside every mind they touch. As if history and the fact that most ideas have been around in one form or another for an incredibly long time, is irrelevant and yet paramount, too, for why else would we make claims of creating “definitive” anything if not to stake out turf that transcends time? That will beat all competitors away for all eternity?

All of this sits badly with me because I want human creativity to constantly trump itself by getting better and more interesting with every passing day and every new contribution. I want human beings to just keep getting better and more interesting and though most days I hold out little hope of that, I do not think it will ever be accomplished by clinging wholesale to the past, by singing the same songs again and again or by using our creativity as a weapon to keep other birds from our turf. There is comfort found in the repetition of old themes, in the singing of old songs and there is much to be learned from history – be it personal, political, biological etc. – but, we must also be able to let go and move forward.

Otherwise – as the current landsacpe of reruns and rehashes and revamps will attest – the world winds up full of people who look to what is already successful in order to try to find a formula – an inherited territorial mating call – meant to seduce the same kind of readers/viewers again and again. This strategy often fails. Not always, but often and perhaps this is because ownership is, itself, pernicious or because shoe-horning creativity into the same shape/song, to protect the same territory, again and again is not good for creativity, whether it helps birds get laid or not.

When I look at my own motivations for writing they are largely and primarily rooted in sanity. I write because otherwise I go tear-my-hair-out nutty. But, I am also well-past any fanciful fear-soaked notion that I only write for myself. I may write for myself first, but I do not wish, as a friend of mine often describes it, to “toil in obscurity.” I want to share ideas. I want to be read.

Which, of course, begs the question “why?” And though I seem to feel strongly – in “bohemian” fashion – about not wishing to target and protect one particular area of creative expression as my own in favour of simply being allowed to sing my “songs” along with everyone else. I do find myself returning to the question of seduction and thinking that, “Yes, I undoubtedly write to seduce.”

I write to seduce in all the ways and for all the reasons one might ever try to seduce. I do this consciously at times and unconsciously at others, so that I do not know I am doing it until I look back. Sometimes I see that my wooing words were meant to reel in anyone who’d listen. Sometimes I see that I have been seduced by an idea or a person, or the idea of a person and – like getting dressed with one person in mind, a person you might not even see that day – I am dressing a page in words meant to woo one person, and one person only.

Clearly, birds can manage to perpetuate their species without having turf to protect and without having a specific mating song. The website says that Bohemian Waxwings are thriving in fact. And I can’t help feeling that there is something beautiful to the idea that they are free to just sing and offer themselves to each other and be. So, here I am, at the end of this exploratory ramble now espousing what is essentially the “free love” mantra of the 60s and of many other Bohemian philosophies which have come and gone before me. There is very little that is genuinely new in this world and I am okay with that if for no other reason than it is typically the recognition of similarities even across massive cultural gaps which open hearts and un-clench minds.

So, I will sing my songs. I will endeavour not to stake out turf. I will be grateful for those who listen.

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The photo above was taken by Marie Read and was borrowed from HERE     where you can (and should) also click a link to hear how the Bohemian Waxwing sounds.

To purchase this or other work by Marie Read please see her website www.marieread.com