There is a creativity in being a bartender if albeit a humble one. The job itself is something imaginatively created, when you think about it. After all, people could just help themselves (well, sort of) or just have a machine do it with the press of a button, 'here's a cosmo.' Fortunately there is, thanks to ingenuity and creativity, an element of personality in it that is traditionally necessary.

I, or you, get to the end of a week, and the creativity is flowing. I walk down the street on an errand to buy cat food and wish to catch some of it, 'glean my teeming brain,' as Keats has it. "Tyger, tyger, burning bright, in the jungles of the night," Blake wrote, possibly with such a mood and energy in mind, the sense of burning creatively. I find myself singing Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," so I must be in a decent mood.

Maybe it helps that it's Friday, a feeling of being in synch with the main part of the world. But the thought comes, as I walk home, that when you finally have a chance to be creative and do something about it, so many fears melt away, the fear of death, the fear of old age poverty, even the fear of being mugged, or that fear of low level mistrust of the crazy fringes of a society with crazy fringes. God, how nice to just walk past a bar and not have anything to do with it, though of course I am speaking about the gross kind of a bar of drunken loud behavior as one tends to find at the corner of P and 22nd Street by The Fireplace.

Creativity, itself, in its highest and purest form, is humble, has a humility that we might associate with the passage from Corinthians. This is why America is a creative place. (One thinks of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, mining the creativity of people in the situation of being IRS cogs.) We have the humility of the great democracy; we have a great sense of pitching in, innocently and wholeheartedly in our tradition, of mine being equal to yours, philosophically at least, operating under the sense that it will all come out okay if we do our work. (I'm reminded of accounts of late Coltrane, peaceful, drug-free, Buddha-like.)

Creative people are gentled and calmed by their processes. They sense they'll achieve something if they follow an inner voice. The greater the sense of common good intrinsically rests within the artistic motivation, the greater the art.

Children grow up. They try on different art forms. They draw and paint. Maybe they move on to music. Maybe they move on to writing. And always, in that process they are developing and refining, until their art is but the vehicle for the higher spiritual message they are capable of holding. Has the art form itself, the novel, let's say, evolved into, or allowed, a higher form of art? Is a great novel, an Anna Karenina, let's say, something higher than a novel itself, a statement of a personal politic, if you will, based on spiritually minded discovery, no longer 'just a novel.'

Do we always 'get' what an artist might be saying? Do we get Joyce, or Yeats, or Wallace,or are we maybe left thinking.