Printed in the Summer 2024 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Trull, David "Drill, Baby, Drill" Quest 112:3, pg 38-40
By David Trull
Set a timer, put pen to paper, and write. Let your hand dance across the page. Don’t second-guess its path. Whatever emerges is fine. Judge nothing. Pretty soon you’ll find the shrill cries of your inner critic fading. When the timer goes off, walk away and return in ten minutes. Scan the words for something that shines. Pan for gold. Usually you will find some.
I received this advice in a fiction workshop. The goal, our instructor informed us, was to connect the imagination with the subconscious. When too closely coupled with our surface thought processes, the imagination produces material it thinks will please the little conductor that sits behind our eyes and renders the output dull and quotidian. To infuse your writing with vital force, she said, you must bypass the conscious mind. Of course, she also warned us to revise and revise and revise again, but make sure that what you are polishing is the subconscious gold that first caught your eye.
Before I tried this exercise, my stories were semiautobiographical accounts of past travel experiences, childhood incidents, or thinly veiled imitations of stories I had ingested over the years. I loved none of it. After committing to a daily free-writing habit for several months, my stories became about a boy haunted by visions of a self-immolating Buddhist monk, a woman exhibiting her half-finished paintings as a way to expunge her guilt over abandoning her dying mother, and a homeless teen with leukemia hopping freight trains in the early oughts. As I revised the strange and unfamiliar words, I felt alienated, as if I’d glanced in the mirror and locked eyes with a stranger. It wasn’t unsettling, however. More like exhilarating.
After graduation, a college buddy of mine found work on an oil rig off the California coast. At one point, he had a bit of shore leave, and I grabbed a beer with him at a bar near his launch point, a place with walls festooned with taxidermic swordfish and a murky lobster tank gurgling away in the corner.
I grilled him about his experience, and he told me that although he and his crew were engaged in exploration, they’d found nothing so far. I asked how they knew where to drill, and he said they really didn’t know. It was trial and error, tapping one section of ocean floor and then another, praying to hit the motherload. Sure, they used advanced sonic equipment to identify areas that had a high chance of hiding black gold, but they still had to bounce around and stand ready to capture the stuff when they struck.
This conversation reminded me of my stories, not because I’d written about fossil fuel extraction, but because the drilling process bore a strange resemblance to my fiction exercise. In a way, I was circling above the ocean floor of my mind and drilling for something that could move the world. We know how oil deposits come to be where they are, but where did my strange stories come from? And how did they get there without my knowing? Would I have ever uncovered them if I hadn’t gone wandering without judgment?
I have always thought of my imagination as my possession, a private world all my own. As we talked, I started to wonder if my imagination might have more in common with a solitary oil rig glittering amidst a dark and vast ocean, perched above a sea no more mine than the one lapping against the barnacle-encrusted pier beyond the windows.
During undergrad, I spent about a month under the spell of Carl Jung and his concept of the collective unconscious. Jung thought that much of the content of our unconscious mind was the result of genetic inheritance rather than the accumulation of personal experience. This inherited material manifests as archetypes (most clearly seen in the repeated character types in literature and storytelling traditions: the Trickster, the Hero, the Tyrant, the Mother) and in our instinctive behavior, such as traditional religious practices and sexual mores. Much of what we consider individual expression is simply a shaping of shared archetypal clay available as a birth rite to all.
While Jung’s theory of a shared unconscious explains the deep patterns found in human society, religion, and behavior, I wonder if some repeating forms emerge because humanity has remained huddled around the same fire, the same deposit of imaginal energy. We are born into a community that siphons its spirit from a particular repository of the mind. The surrounding landscape is unforgiving, and our survival drive keeps us close to this source. To fraternize with novel imagery would, we feel, be futile at best, and suicidal at worst.
Fossil fuels are dwindling. The supply is not infinite, after all. Toxic by-products have accumulated in the atmosphere, wreaking havoc on weather patterns and poisoning our lungs and bloodstreams. Likewise, the images and archetypes that once served to sustain us have begun to lose their potency.
I am not the first to notice that we seem to be collectively running out of fuel, especially in the realm of art. Theater marquees have become bloated with glossy remakes of aged blockbusters, dance floors throb to resampled choruses from thirty years ago, and aging rockers sue young stars for “stealing” their melodies, to the point where the young can only throw up their hands and wail, “There’s only so many ways to put together seven notes, man!”
I once heard someone say that complex societies collapse when the costs of further complexity outweigh the returns. The torrent of economic, literary, and artistic progress over the last few centuries is perhaps a sign that our species, as it shifted into modernity, struck a rich imaginative well. The present struggle to produce novel and interesting work raises a question: has this deposit at last run dry? Are further attempts to mine it worth the energy cost? Maybe this is why, in recent years, talk of collapse has risen in both pitch and volume.
Speaking from experience, I can tell you that millennial and Gen Z artists feel a strange kinship to those California farmers forced by the depleted aquifers beneath the state’s Central Valley to extend their irrigation wells to expensive and dangerous depths, expending ever greater effort merely to maintain the status quo. Same water, same crops. Same notes, same songs. The present condition of the earth mirrors the state of our minds.
I don’t, however, endorse the “nail in the coffin” stance so many older generations of journalists take: those who love to declare that art is finished, that everything worth saying has been said, that kids these days don’t possess the depth of experience required for true artistic expression.
It feels bizarre, as a younger person, to say this, but perhaps the solution is the imaginal equivalent of that cringey fossil fuel rallying cry, “Drill, baby, drill!” (albeit with far more positive possible outcomes). Before I began to access my subconscious, I had concluded that I didn’t have much to say as a fiction author. The jury is still out on that, but now I am at least able to produce something that excites me and some readers: words and images that hold a charge sufficient to draw me to my pen and paper every day to see what might emerge. The process alone, ripe with uncertainty, is enticing.
Maybe oil rigs are the wrong metaphor. It could be that our imagination more closely resembles the ancient conception of the firmament, a glass dome holding back boundless waters. At our core, we are a nomadic species. The patch of imaginal sky beneath which we have pitched our tents may have succumbed to drought, but there are infinite heavens beyond our encampment, skies which may not, as we fear, restrain the destructive waters of a world-annihilating flood, but instead hold a life-giving rain. Physical migration has always been a part of humanity’s development. Perhaps instead of continuing our futile rain dance, we would do better to pull up stakes and find a fresh piece of mental sky.
David Trull has worked as a fireworks salesman, forensic tax researcher, railroad logistician, teacher, songwriter, and musician. He studied philosophy through a Great Books immersion program at Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, California. A lifelong autodidact, he has advanced his explorations through a self-designed curriculum focused on the intersection of philosophy and theology. Raised in St. Louis, Trull now orbits between Santa Barbara, California, and the San Francisco Bay Area.