Our Addiction to Creativity
It’s got you hooked. You just don’t want to admit it.
I started this article yesterday as I sat beneath an umbrella at my market stall in a tiny village in the French Aveyron. It was in one of the red towns. Most of the ancient villages in France are built from honey colored sandstone, but there are a few areas where the prevalence of iron oxides left the original stone masons with a beautiful ochre reddened building material.
Some years ago, my wife was seriously ill and I closed my business and moved near to a hospital where we could fully engage in the harrowing business of fighting her way back to health.
As is so often the case when confronted by calamity, we did a great deal of soul searching and promised ourselves that if we made it through that long dark tunnel, we would do something different with our lives; something more meaningful - to us at least.
Now my life is divided between writing and craft making. It has been one of the most economically devastating decisions I have ever made, and one that I least regret.
We are licensed as ‘artisan creators ambulant’ under the French employment code. The French love to box you into a category and they have extensive lists by which they can pigeon hole any worker. There is even a specific code for people who write crossword clues for a living.
What there isn’t, is a code for people who grab recovered driftwood, old tools and bits of rusted metal and make them into saleable items.
In the end, after lots of head scratching and a concerted effort to put us off, the bureaucrats opted to class us as people who are licensed to make wooden decorative items for sale at markets and galleries throughout France. That was vague enough for me.
We have a van in which we can live semi-autonomously for days, if not week at a time and I built the bed in such a way as to enable us to easily carry loads of stock as we go.
Many of the towns, like the pretty little village we were in yesterday, host an annual market and it becomes something of a community affair where the locals can attract visitors and show off their best face and hospitality for the day.
The artists, sculptors, basket weavers, black smiths and jewelry makers that arrive for these events are the draw card. A sort of strange cross between a circus and a touring freak show. With our relatively conservative appearance, my wife and I are the odd ones out. Often the adjacent stands will be manned by people with dangling dreadlocks, excruciating looking body piercings, and collections of tattoos that would have made Walt Disney green with envy.
When we started doing this, I would eye these characters, and that is definitely what they are, with jaundiced suspicion. They would eye us in much the same way. The common ground is creativity.
You are not assessed by what you wear, your accent, or the car you drive, as you might be in a more mainstream environment. At these markets, it is what you make that earns you a place on the social ladder. It is creativity that bridges the gap in age, background and even ethnicity.
I have come to like these people who can take a bunch of old wire and turn it into a magical fairy, or tear up some old newspaper and reconstruct it in the form of a cat with a canary sitting on its shoulder.
Many of the crafters and artists are foreign. At the local market that I work most often, my neighboring stand holders are a Russian, a Mexican, a Colombian and a Senegalese. I keep trying to persuade them that we have all the ingredients of a perfect drug cartel, and that the money would definitely be better.
COVID hit many of the creators hard. Always teetering close to the cusp of poverty, many of them didn’t have a second string to their bows like I did with my writing. When the lockdowns started, they were often forced to make decisions that saw them having to give up the creative life.
Even when the markets were allowed again, artists and creators were not deemed a necessity and we remained locked out of the system for longer than people selling say olives, cheese or vegetables.
COVID may have been the catalyst, but it is cheap imports that are really killing the creativity that one has seen at these markets for so long.
When we first started, the streets of the towns and villages we worked would be filled with dozens of people huddled under their colorful umbrellas selling the goods they spent so long making. Now, many of them have given up in despair or resigned themselves to the shame of selling imported mass-produced knick-knacks from Asia.
Generally, the public don’t seem to care. Why buy a hand made piece of silver, delicately crafted into a tiny pair of earrings, when you can pick up a mass-produced pair stamped out in a factory in China for half the price? Worst of all, are those people who love nothing better than to beat our prices down. They will saunter up with their designer clothes and a manicure that probably cost more than most of us will make all day, and haggle delightedly.
They wouldn’t dream of doing that over a bag of tomatoes at the billion-dollar supermarket they shop at, or with the hairdresser who just fitted their extravagant hair extensions. We grin and bear it — and hate them for it. My Senegalese colleague gets this treatment far more than we do. Apparently, racial equality doesn’t extend to buying handmade leather goods.
All of this raises the question, why do we do this? Not one of the artists or craftworkers I have worked with over the years was making serious money. So why get up at dawn to set up a stand where you might sit in the wind or the rain all day before a crowd that see you as some sort of free tourist attraction?
The answer is creativity. When I take a rusty bucket, a broken alarm clock and two pieces of driftwood and turn them into something sale-able, it gives me pleasure that I can’t fully explain. When I take a blank piece of paper and add some words to create a poem or an article or a short story, it is the same thing, so perhaps you can empathize.
I believe that we are all created beings, and perhaps, some of the creativity has been built into us from the dust and ashes that we were originally so skillfully formed from.
Many of those people passing the sideshow we put on probably feel an element of sympathy for us, with our battered vans, and overly worn clothes. The truth is, most of us would never swap places with them, even if you threw in the sharp suit and imported luxury car.
That desire to make something from nothing is just too strong.
You suffer the same addiction. Fight it if you will. Try to bury it beneath listicles and self-help articles that you write in the hope they might earn you a buck or two. You were born to create, and the longer you pretend otherwise, the longer you try to bury it, the longer you will be fighting with your inner self.
Thank you for reading.
If you want to read more of my writings, check out the following articles.
- As Goliath Laughs
- Many French Want the Guillotine Back
- I Don’t Want to Get Rich but I Do Want to Change the World
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