pipelines, violins, politicians, and love...

Anyone else find Obama’s SOTU mostly really good to listen to this year? I mean except for the saber rattling and nationalistic hoopla that seems to be mandatory for Western leaders? The man and his handlers have a gift for hearing the tone of the zeitgeist, even if I don’t really believe for a second that his banker friends will be letting him do much about any of that social equity and taxation of the rich stuff. He at least makes it sound like it would be a cool thing to see him doing.

MOXNews shared an OWS perspective too. Sort of.

Here in Canada, we have no charismatic leadership, sincere or not. We just have lying, cheating, heartless bastards that are about as exciting as dead fish. I hear what you're thinking, but really, I'm being kind. Our PM can’t even bring himself to tell us that he plans on completely gutting the social safety net that our country has been lauded for over the last fifty years; he goes to Davos and an economic summit, as far away as possible from the citizens he’s supposed to serve, to do it. I swear, this is karma for laughing at the US-ians for electing Dubya…

i'm older today than i was yesterday

It’s my birthday today. Forty-five years. I’m not sure what that means, or if it means anything specifically, or even if it's supposed to.

I’m not much of a sentimentalist, although birthdays and New Years are about the only national holidays that I don’t consider hypocritical in most ways. They remain what they have always been: reasons to party. And numbers don’t mean much either, do they? I appreciate the experience that the extra time provides, and occasionally wish I’d known then what I know now, but I had to not know it at some point to be able to learn it, right? Chickens, eggs, always getting us into arguments.

i don't know stephen elliott

I finished Stephen Eliot’s The Adderall Diaries tonight. I’ll probably say this again, but it’s amazing. And fucked up. I was reading the last couple chapters intermittently, sneaking a few pages in while my coffee partner was in the bathroom or manning the counter for the shop’s owner.

The book is like a drug, like Adderall itself, maybe. First I wanted to read it in 5 milligram doses, and later I wanted to crush it on a TP dispenser in a bathroom and snort it. That’s how I felt driving home with around ten pages left to read. Crush and snort.

My friend and I had this incredible, rambling conversation for almost four hours. We talked about my manuscript first, my “process”. She writes, or did and will again. We took a creative writing class once, long ago in (for me anyway) another lifetime. I think about my “process” in quotations marks because the term suggests an established methodology. I feel the same way thinking of it as my “process” as I do about calling the manuscript my “work in progress”. Both seem dishonest because, well, it’s my first time. I’m making this shit up as I go along. 

If I do stuff the same way next time then maybe I can say it’s part of a process. When I start the second book it’ll be a WIP. Maybe. This time though, it’s just “the work”. I’m involved in “a process” in the sense that I’m working through something, but there’s nothing established yet that I can say is “my process”. It technically is a work in progress, I admit, but talking about it as my WIP seems presumptuous. I’m the only one that actually knows there is or will be any other WIP. You can only take my word for it.

And we talked about artists, meeting them, how there’s a difference between meeting an artist to take their autograph away as a souvenir and actually meeting them, asking them about what they like in life, what matters to them. Having coffee with them (or just wanting to) instead of just wanting to get proof that you met them. She talked about the difference between meeting the band so that you can take a bit more from them after the show, and meeting the band so that you can give something back. Neither is wrong or right, but there's a difference.

There was other stuff too: self-discipline and how it isn’t discipline when we love to do it. How it can look like discipline to other people, maybe, but to the person loving it, it’s just good fun. And music. And the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction. And definitions of success. And how hard it is, when we assume a definition contrary to cultural norms, to express how we’re successful. And on and on and on. It was delicious.

I don’t know quite what to think of The Adderall Diaries beyond my belief that it’s amazing. I don’t want to try to figure Mr. Elliott out from it, or even have it inform my opinion of him as a person. I don’t think I want to have an opinion of him as a person, at least not from his writing. It’s a memoir, and a wonderful read. It’s ugly and beautiful and painful and tense. But it’s not him, you know? Even he says that he writes to figure shit out. Memoir is fun because it’s opinion, not autobiography. Factual accuracy isn’t the point, even if it is accurate. The point is not to take it as fact. The point is to enjoy the experience.

We all want to be known, maybe artists more than anyone. We metaphorically (or literally) bleed into whatever medium is relevant. There’s a cost we decide is worth paying at some point, and then we pay it. We say it’s just for us or for the art, but we want to be known, to share something. To express. But we only share a very little bit.

I love Pearl Jam, love Vedder’s lyrics, the passion and angst. I’d love to have coffee with him and pick his brain, to know him and be known by him. Truth is though, that even in the bizarro world that allowed me to have coffee with Eddie Vedder, we simply might not hit it off. At all. The hypothetical conversation might suck. I might not like him. He might not like me. Doesn’t matter though. I’d still like the music and the words and the voice. He is not his music. His music is not him.

When I got home there was a broken mouse dragging a trap across the kitchen floor. The roommates are away, camping. I showed it as much compassion as I could, imagining its fear, and the pain. It was trapped at the hip, broken on the same side I was. I had to euthanize the mouse, right? Right? I know of no non-violent way to do that with a mouse broken in a trap. So the climax of my evening sucked. Finishing Adderall ended up being massively anti-climactic.

Writing about it all works better as a denouement. It’s like using mouth wash.

Memoirs should not be read as biography. We are ridiculously incredible, fragile, strong, broken, ascendant bags of meat. I don’t know Stephen Elliott, not even now. Not at all.

p.s. Revisions on the WIP are going really well. I'm loving my process. ... ... ... uh, yeah.

random check-in

Wow, it’s been a while.

I’ve been a bit confounded by Mom lately, just making sure everything is up to date, chasing clarity and clarification. Truth is she’s doing okay right now. She’s settled since the last couple symptomatic episodes and we’re basking in the eye of the storm for the moment.

Also I was, I think, desperately missing the manuscript. I spent some down time, while I was waiting for beta advice to come in, working on a synopsis (I may actually hate them, synopses, for all the magic they take out of a story), starting the second volume of the saga, but they felt like cheating, like I was being unfaithful. Or maybe it just felt like hubris, as if I was presuming too much. Finishing the first one, making it as shiny (or gritty, as the case may be) as I can has become (appropriately?) a holy grail of sorts.

Anyway, I got the beta critiques back last weekend and started on revisions, possibly the final round before I actually consider it ready for agents to look at, and the clouds broke as I began. You’d think I’d learn.

…

About Mom, one of the things that got me down was the thought that diagnosis of degenerative dementia, probably like any degenerative disease diagnosis, is essentially a call to start grieving now. It’s a time bomb with no counter – it’s just going to go off, a bit at a time, until the final big boom. And there’s not much you can do about it. We can only work hard to try to stay in the moment. And sometimes, often even, that works, mostly when we’re together and laughing and talking. But there are the quiet times and, in the silence, sometimes, the idea of a clock ticking down feels a bit overwhelming.

It’s all the journey though, right? Good goes with bad, darkness with light, the bitter makes the sweet taste better.

…

I was thinking about how it’s our cultural nature to make things as difficult as possible. We create our society based on the square, fighting nature. We make things straight and hard, all roads and stairs and sidewalks, doors and walls and ceilings. Even when we absolutely have to bend to accommodate nature, the goal is still to minimize the incline, reduce the curves as much as possible, tame the topography.

And then I thought about hiking, being out past the manicured paths. Out there you follow the line that makes the most sense, often following in the footsteps of animals. The lines aren’t straight, nothing is manufactured – it’s organic, and logical in a way that only the wild can be. Intuitive.

And hey, when you find a pause on the path, whatever the reason, the view tends to be fucking awesome. Double rainbow awesome.

P.S. Don’t you love how rioters in the UK are either all stupid, selfish looters and hooligans, OR all politically marginalized and disenfranchised citizens expressing legitimate rage? Why don’t they use AND in that equation? How can they not use it? How stupid does one have to be to not see that there’s legitimate rage AND selfish violence in the dynamic? And why is the UK so goddamed different than Egypt or Tunisia where the frustration was lauded?

P.P.S. I’m reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad this week. And loving it. It’s as brilliant as a Pullitzer winner should be. I read Neil Gaman’s American Gods last week (AG was on recommendation from Judy Clement Wall – how did I miss that one?) and loved it too. It’s been a helluva good book month so far.

at the intersection of art, magic, and lotteries

I read Stephen Elliott’s Daily Rumpus e-mail today and a tuning fork exploded in my heart like a pyrotechnic out of Michael Bay movie. It was like Jerry Bruckheimer had just burst out of my chest, alien-like, having epiphanically converted to making art instead of money.

Especially exploding-tuning-fork-like for me were passages like this:

“(John Mayer) was talking about spending more time on your art and less time on your updates. He said, Don't worry about promotion, trust your creation to speak for itself.”

…and this:

“We were talking about the intersection of commerce and art. No one knows where it is. There's no choice except to focus on making the best art you can, the rest is mysticism, a distraction.”

This is something that I’ve talked about here before (click on the art tag in the subject cloud way down to your right if you don’t remember), but I always love seeing someone else talk about it, especially someone important and everything, and especially when they say it better than I could.

No, wait, that part just annoys me. And makes me want to be better. But in an annoying, exploding-tuning-fork kind of way. Good on ya, Mr. Elliott.

P.S. If you don’t subscribe to Mr. Elliot’s Daily Rumpus mails, what the hell are you waiting for? There’s often sex  and sex trade talk, and I get that some may not appreciate everything he has to say, but there’s so much gold in them thar hills too. It’s worth any work you may or may not have to do finding it. 

aside

Writers, good ones, ones that whisper things in the ears of our hearts and minds that wake us up for moments and hours and sometimes even days, tend to be somewhat to completely broken. Notice that? Functionally broken, perhaps, but broken nonetheless. They tend to see things that shouldn't be meant for human eyes, stuff between the lines, just outside the margins, behind the curtain. (Or, at the very least, they're sure that they do.) And the seeing breaks them in ways that never truly heal. They learn to walk and dialog and create and hope in spite of the perpetually open sores. At least for a while. Sometimes for long enough.

I've said before, but again: In psych 201 the prof mentioned studies that show that people prone to depression tend to see the world more realistically; they see no veils. Many people prone to depression seem to lack the ability to ignore what's right in front of their face in favor of the pretty lies that let us eat and drink and amass and horde ourselves into oblivion. 

There might be a correlation between those two paragraphs, but I'll leave that to you to decide.

And: At least I have that going for me. (Or, at the very least, I'm pretty sure that I do.)

#winkyfacesmirk

chrysalis... or gas

Ever notice how sometimes life seems to throw up these undeniable lines of demarcation? These chasms that are invisible as you approach, and then, one day, you look back and notice that you've crossed a great divide, one that can't be re-crossed – there's no going back – and that you couldn't have seen to avoid even if you'd wanted to? And they're only obvious in hindsight?

Well, I think I'm in the middle of one. And from here, being even digitally social feels really hard.

Not that there isn't a lot to talk about going on out there. Part of me is still in shock in the wake of the Canadian federal election. I feel like I don't know where I live anymore. My country feels bi-polar in the bad ways. And then people rioted in Vancouver, people that called themselves fans of a game played by adults but were really just idiots, or alcohol-induced idiots at very least, and watching that play out in the media has been worth talking about too. And there's Syria, and a new Gaza flotilla, and a new illegal war in Libya complete with assassination attempts that fly in the face of international law. Even if I was just taking a break from politics, I'm still loosing sleep thinking about the oil and vinegar symbiosis of art and capitalism; how the oil involved doesn't feel very edible to me, and how I think vinegar is a crappy metaphor for art. Seriously... losing sleep. So it's not like there isn't plenty to talk about...

I just don't have the will to talk. I feel like my hands are pretty full right here at home.

I went through one of these chrysalis periods a couple years ago when the life-inversion started. I guess, to be honest, I sort of felt that one coming too, but I wasn't aware of feeling it until I was past it and had one of those, “Oh, that's what that was” moments. In a sense, maybe, this is still the same process of change that I'm in the middle of. Or maybe, like glissading down a mountain side, there are times when you start something, it gathers its own momentum and takes on a life of its own, and we just have to ride the slope until we stop and hope an avalanche isn't on our heels.

I won't know, of course, until I'm through it, so I could be wrong. I might actually be in that weird space, mid-leap, with gravity pulling at me, fighting the momentum that should carry me over the gap, my arms and legs swinging as if I wish I had something to hold onto. I might have actually noticed this time, in situ as it were, instead of only realizing from the perspective of twenty-twenty hindsight.

Or I might just have eaten something weird and it has me all discombobulated.

I honestly don't know, but everything feels weird, as if I'm in a movie and the DVD is skipping on a frame with a CG scene-to-scene bleed effect. The cat keeps walking by, if you know what I mean...

And even if I'm right, I'm not exactly sure what the feeling signifies; what the chasm is; what the change will be or mean. Which makes being aware of it kind of frustrating. It's a hurry up and wait scenario. I feel like the dog named Stay.

I wonder if, in that last moment before they wake up to their new life, zombies feel like this.

Or maybe they think that it was just some bad brains they ate...

So, yeah, I'm holding my figurative breath. Call it an involuntary hiatus. Or maybe the calm before the storm. Or indigestion. I'm still around though. Miss you guys and all that.

P.S. The manuscript is still with my beta readers. Early returns are good and remarkably helpful. One day I'll have to take a long trip and buy a bunch of dinners.

...yeah, i'm not done yet

There seem to be all these lists of things that MUST BE DONE in order to BUILD PLATFORM and BECOME ATTRACTIVE TO AGENTS AND PUBLISHERS.

I choose to believe that the best thing is to write a good fucking story, and write it well. The good news is that, occasionally, a sane voice calls out from the publishing ether and says exactly the same fucking thing.

If I write the story I wanted to write, if it’s as good as I can make it, then that’s success. Any other definition has to be considered suspect. Selling books is mostly a crapshoot anyway. It’s bingo, at least if you’re talking about Rowling-like sales. We need to get over it and live in the real world.

Don't get me wrong - I’ll be happier than a pig in shit if I can pay bills off of royalties one day. That’s the dream, something I hope for but is largely beyond my control. In the mean time, I’ll be only`as happy as a pig in shit just to write the stories, even if the only people that read them are the ones that I talk to directly or e-mail regularly.

Seems to me that following a whole bunch of other people’s lists and ideas on how to succeed at being original is more than slightly oxymoronic. Seems to me that originality is found off the beaten path.

The life inversion was/is about not keeping score in the standard ways anyway. It was/is supposed to be the opposite of that. The inversion is about letting go of all of those social measurements, all that cultural bullshit, and just being, just loving the process, just living the adventure, just writing and telling the story as honestly as I can.

I was listening to CBC radio the other day and Jion Gomeshi asked Chris Murphy of the Sloans what he thought of the great reviews their latest disc was getting, perhaps the best in their twenty-year career. Murphy said, “We don’t pay attention. If we did, we’d have to believe the bad ones too.”

So I’ll keep score in other ways, like I said a couple weeks ago: by how many days I spend in flip flops instead of suits and ties; by how often I can write something that breaks through my own sense of cool; by how honest and vulnerable I can be in front of the keyboard; by how uncomfortable I can be hitting “publish”; by how “wrong” an action is according to the lists and rule books.

That’s what being an artist is supposed to be about, right? Rebellion? Counter-culture? Targeted subversive behavior? Punk rock and revolution? Isn’t it? Isn't it?

...to be clear...

Someone I adore, someone I respect and admire, thought that when I said I was thinking about balance and careers last week, I was actually saying that I’d decided writing wasn’t as important as I’d thought and that I was dropping the gig, at least as far as doing it for the rest of my life to the exclusion of most other things went.

So, obviously, I wasn’t very clear.

What I meant to say clearly then: What I am abjuring is the clutter that is so often conflated with writing these days, or being any kind of artist for that matter. I told a friend the other day, “I’m a writer. If I wanted to be a marketer,” I said, “I’d get into fucking marketing.”

I don’t want to be an ad-man. I want to tell stories. I want to live them too, but that’s me. Adventure is as much a reason for the life inversion as the writing and story telling is, so for me there has to be a balance of living and writing and imagining. For me, if there isn’t that trichotomy, I’m wasting oxygen.

To be clear then, I hope I die either writing a novel (preferably something really great and at the end) or climbing (preferably something really high and at the top). One or the other; I’d be happy with either.

obsession

I feel like I’m carrying an elephant.

There’s three weeks – well a bit less – until my promised shipping date for the beta version of the manuscript. As usual, this is affecting my posting prolificacy.

At times like this I have to court obsession, give into it, let it own me. It means ignoring as many other things in my life as possible, and that’s not completely healthy, but that’s apparently how I work.

I wonder how much of being creative requires a willingness to be unhealthy? I mean, I know it doesn’t, at least on paper. When I get like this, I feel like a cliché. I hate feeling like a cliché.

So this is an apology of sorts, after the fact in some ways, in advance in others. Part of me feels bad for not nursing the blog the way I should. I feel worse when I realize that I’m temporarily turning my back on something that I love, the blog, while still slaving at the casino, a place I hate. I have to ignore the dissonance of that dynamic or risk being distracted from the obsession.

I’ll see you when there’s a victory to report, or something distracts me enough to overpower the obsession.

Otherwise, I’ll see you on the other side. Be well…

in the absence of answers

What a great day yesterday was.

Like I said yesterday, it was tear down day at the climbing gym, the day we closed early so as to strip every hold off of every wall so that the route setting geniuses can start putting up comp routes for the weekend. So we twisted bolts and climbed ladders and pealed tape from 8 to 10, 14 of us or so, in a hectic, frenetic, kinetic laugh-a-thon.

Before that, I got to do some #amrevising, working on a chapter that required more than just fixing little things, doing a line by line edit in order to take an emaciated framework and add some flesh to it. The more I revise, the more I understand how writers can have a problem letting go of a WIP, especially a first one: There’s so much learning, evolving, improving involved in the first time that, every time I come back to a chapter I haven’t touched for a month or two, I see entirely different ways to make it better.

At this rate, the manuscript will be finished never. That’s not a tenable position, so I’ve set April 21 as my mail-to-beta-readers day. I can get all picky again after that, but I have to actually set a shipping date, because the learning will never end.

 I also got to carry on my favorite ongoing internet conversation before the gym, and I got in a great (if short) session of climbing before the strip-fest began.

And then, as if all of that wasn’t enough, I was provided the bonus of listening to a repeat of this morning's Q with Jion Ghomeshi on the drive home. The part I listened to was an interview with Canadian musical icon Bruce Cockburn. I’ve never actually been a huge fan, but have always respected him. His music has never moved me miles, but his activism and integrity have.

He was talking about his visit to Afghanistan in 2009. His brother is a Captain and physician in the Canadian Armed Forces (family dinners might be interesting), and he also played a concert for the Canadian troops there. He said that the people he talked to there, members of the medical mission, believed in their role but thought it would take 30 years for it too succeed; that a place like Afghanistan would need that much time just to birth and raise a generation that had a concept of what peace might look like.

They didn’t expect that the mission there would last that long.

I thought of Greg Mortensen (Three Cups of Tea) and his effort to accomplish the same goal – a generation of Afghanis and Pakistanis that understand the concept of peace – through education. I had a hard time not contrasting the two approaches.

Cockburn talked about his other trips to war zones, both as an activist and performer. He said that he’s never gone to a war zone looking for material for his art. There are people, he said, that have a mandate to do so - journalists, writers, photographers, maybe poets – but that for him, doing so would have felt ‘inappropriate’.

But, he said, he always went with his eyes open. He went open to everything, but not looking for anything in specific. If material presented itself, he was prepared to accept it. And if it came, then it was his responsibility to apply all of his skill and craft to make the most of it.

I thought about the concept of manufactured versus organic, of counterfeit versus authentic. I thought it was a great way to view creativity – being open to the truth, and then applying every possibility of craft to take advantage of that truth. I thought about Elizabeth Taylor and how she might be as remembered for her activism (on behalf of HIV/AIDS going back way before it was fashionable) as she will be for the soap opera of her celebrity. I thought about which one I’d want to be remembered for.

It’s easy, I think, in our plastic world of intentional media confusion, our age of persuasion, to forget that people inhabit the caricatures we watch rise and fall on TV; that real people with sincere motives fight in wars that we detest. Lately, for me, it has seemed crucially important to remember how complicated everything is.

There were no conclusions to reach, none that did service to the issues. The perspective of complexity answers no questions at all, makes finite truths seem very far away, but while I sat here and nursed my sore wrists and stiff hands, the questions seemed more important than the answers anyway.

what it is, nothing more

I wrote a rant yesterday, and tried to spice it up with enough tongue-in-cheek sarcasm to feign the appearance of humor. Mostly I was just pissed off and ranting. Then I read a blog about “Tweeting good tweets” and “posting good posts” and how all of that is important to “building an online following” and “getting followers” and “establishing an online presence”.

My first thought was, “I guess I missed the mark and that one.” And then my second thought was, “Fuck it. I'll own that.!”

Not that there’s anything specifically wrong with the tricks and the games, but I know they aren’t for me. If I went that route, I’d never be able to forgive myself. I’m intentionally ignoring all the tricks for expanding my followers list on Twitter, intentionally choosing to post potentially uncomfortable links, expressing opinions, taking stands on issues. It’s been part of the inversion from, literally, day minus one. I know this blog and most of what I post on FB and Twitter has (on the surface of it, anyway) nothing to do with publishing a fantasy novel, but it has everything to do with trying to be authentic.

I’m sure they told Frank Herbert that about Dune too – too political, too ecologically sensitive, too subversive. And I know that Margaret Atwood catches constant shit about her political and social views. I’m not in their league (hell, I’m not in their universe, to be clear), but I admire their courage. I admire the integrity to have an opinion and a voice, damn the torpedoes. They make me want to aspire.

If (when) I publish, I will publish as me, not a persona. I’ve lived dual lives, a professional me and a personal me. It sucked. If my opinions and perspectives make that process harder, then so fucking be it. I refuse to sacrifice my freedom of thought and expression in order to be more popular or an easier sell.

Writing, being an artist, isn’t a game. This isn’t about winning anything or conquering anything. It’s about having a voice and a mind and sharing it, all of it, as honestly as we can. It’s about telling honest stories. If it’s fiction, as mine is, then the Picasso quote (which I found thanks to the inimitable Judy Clement Wall) applies: “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” If that means that I’ll never publish, because I’m not marketable, then so be that too. I’ll wear that, proudly.

Thoreau said, “I’d rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” And then Einstein is attributed with saying something to the affect of, “If two people in the same room share all the same views on everything, one of them doesn’t need to be there.” That shit’s about abjuring the herd mentality, about not succumbing to it.

I won’t play games with my integrity for the sake of the possibility of a career. And if it ever turns into an actual career, I hope I still have enough integrity to be even louder when it counts most, and prove myself worthy of the career. I’d happily own failing as a marketable author for the sake of succeeding as a human with integrity.

If being honest and taking a stand means that I’ll never win the internet, I hope I never win the fucking internet.

P.S. This isn’t about anybody in particular. I’m just in a rant mood this week. Everything is coming out as a rant. I blame Gov. Scott Walker and my #amrevising playlist, which is largely comprised of Pearl Jam, Pink, Eminem, Foo Fighters, and Linkin Park. But, while I blame them, I still own every. Fucking. Word.


...


P.P.S. FYI: Intense Debate is acting weird on me. I have no moderation settings set, but comments are getting lost in the ether or, for some reason, to moderation. My apologies if you get lost - I have a help ticket submitted. I still appreciate every word of every comment though. Persevere for me, please.

whispering really loud

Sunday afternoons are quickly becoming one of my favorite times of the week. First, it marks the end of my weekly sojourn into hell, er, I mean, my three shifts at the casino. Getting off work is always an enormous relief.

Then I have the satisfaction of knowing that I’m driving home to Aikido practice. It’s a strange contradiction, squishing the place that I hate the most right now with the practice that I love the most. If I were #amwriting instead of #amrevising, I might not feel that way, but the two hours on the mat every Sunday night is like a bit of heaven, even better than the climbing at the moment.

Yeah, I said it.

Finally, my commute home Sunday afternoons blissfully coincides with Tapestry on CBC Radio 1, and the hour or so of driving feels a bit like a cocoon in which amazing people talk about amazing things with a degree of enlightenment that is always moving.

Last week, for instance, they were talking to ministers and pastors who had lost their faith, some of whom were still struggling to perform their duties in that absence of that faith, still working as ministers and pastors. I think that would tear me to pieces.

This week, host Mary Hynes was speaking with Pakistani musician Salman Ahmad, of the band Junoon (which translates as ‘obsessive passion’). Ahmad spoke eloquently of his love for Led Zeppelin and Suffi mystical traditions, and he quoted Iqbal: 

“The whisper in the heart has strength; it may not have wings but it has the power to fly.” 

He talked about the creative spark within us, all of us, being our connection to the source, the base layer, or the divine. And also that it unites us; that it is the spark that, if we acknowledge it, connects us through art.

And then he said: 

“We all have that whisper of the heart, but the world is so loud that we can’t hear unless we really try.” 

It seems to me, at times, that it’s the other way around though; that our culture works so hard to not hear even when the natural arc of the universe, to steal one more quote, curves towards justice.

If we’d just get out of the fucking way and let it. Or maybe the artist’s truth is to be an amplifier; to scream that spark so loudly that nobody can ignore it. Maybe that’s part of breaking the ceiling too.


P.S. (Because I forgot) - http://www.cbc.ca/tapestry/ 

smoke and mirrors

I had a strange week last week, full of flatness and a decided lack of inspiration. It wasn’t writer’s block (whatever that is) – you have to be trying to move forward to encounter a blockage. Instead, I was vaguely unhappy about having no desire to move forward. It was like being in fog, or thick smoke. Like I couldn't see farther than my hand, so it was most prudent to stand still.

I listened to an interview with Iain Banks (or Iain M Banks). He writes under both names, publishing high-end sci-fi and critically-acclaimed non-genre. He said that he had no clue what writer’s block was and apologized for being flippant about it. I want to identify with that perspective one day. So far, so good, but it’s early. It’s the lack of motivation that gets me sometimes.

So I posted old stuff, a story and a poem. Bloggers love comments, we do, but stories and (especially) poetry don’t encourage them the way current events and navel-gazing does.

A friend and I agreed that commenting on poetry is intimidating. There’s this sort of expectation to “get” what the writer was saying, even when it’s (unavoidably) so ambiguous with poetry. Poetry is meant to be full of the unobvious, sometimes only meant to be pretty, but always brimming over with implied metaphors.

Commenting on poetry is like describing a ship that passes in the fog.

…

If we’ve been to school, studied poetry (for example), there’s this ingrained reaction to critique according the metrics we were taught – the metrics of criticism. Often, we were told to avoid trying to read it as auto-biography, but there’s always the temptation to do just that – to try to see into the artist’s mind and learn about them. That temptation is naturally stronger when we’re viewing famous works by famous artists, but I think the professors are right no matter what. We should avoid it.

If we get caught up with studying craft too much, or looking for biographical clues, or practicing pseudo-forensic psychiatry, then we miss the beauty of art; the chance to let is wash over us and teach us about ourselves the way a fortune teller reads tea leaves. We need to steep ourselves in art and then, during and much later, read the detritus it washes up onto the sides of the cup.

I agree with the thought that art is a mirror. Of society? Yes, but I think the most prevalent value of art is as a mirror we use to see our selves in.

Even when we just want to make something pretty, with no meaning at all beyond the beauty of creating, if we share it, there’s the mirror. Somebody sees it and they see… what? Something of themselves. Has to happen. We look and see that post, picture, story, poem through our own lens. And we see our selves in our reaction to it. If we’re looking for it. The better the art, often the more profound the reaction. But not always.

Sometimes it’s just serendipitous timing and the mundane provokes violent upheavals. Other times, the most amazing art barely makes a ripple. But there’s always the mirror, telling us about ourselves if we are willing to listen. It’s a mystery. I love that, the use of art to help solve ourselves.

…

I read this a couple weeks ago and it has stuck with me like a virus.

"It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second." ~ John Steinbeck

It’s a blatant societal mirror, but it works on a personal level too. What do we value?

…

ALSO: If you haven’t already, you should go check out Judy Clement Wall’s Love Project. I think it’s kind of beautiful; a grass rootsy kind of thing that could turn into a tsunami. I hope it does. A love tsunami – it’s a nice thought.

ALSO AGAIN: Annie Syed talks about art and originality in her Still Sundays post this week. She’s always worth reading, but if you’re an artist, it’s especially pertinent.

november

When I was eleven, the academic curriculum I was involved in at school was provided the opportunity to do a remarkable thing. Remarkable to us, in any case. We were allowed to make the big, dangerous walk across the street, through the sports fields, and into the giant halls of the Senior Secondary School to the confines of the band class so that we could participate in a unique grade seven music program. Through a quirk of fate and germs, I managed to miss the first visit. When I arrived in the second week, all of the really cool boy instruments – the trombones and trumpets, saxophones and tympanis, the lone guitar and drum kit – were taken.

I was left with the choice of clarinet or flute. The teacher said I had a good embouchure for flute (if @migroddy wanders through, maybe he can explain that concept in the comments), so that’s what I got. In time, I came to appreciate that placement – there are some really cute girls in the flute section – but at the time, just stumbling out of the blocks into pubescence with all of its sharp corners and early-adolescent contrasts, I did not feel lucky. I felt ripped off, like a cruel joke was being played on me. Like a giant “kick me” sign (to replace the one, only slightly smaller, that I already thought I possessed) had just been hung around my neck. I was not an enthusiastic student.

Three months later and heading towards the holiday break, I was facing my first test; about sixteen bars of simple melody that I could not complete on my best day. Not even close. My inadequacy was earned; I didn’t practice. The space between that band class and my closet space at school where I could hide the offending instrument, or home where I could hide it even better, was a bit of grade school social hell for me. Subsequently, I was on the road to failing said test, a probability that was, to me, as or more horrifying than the sentence of having to walk around in public with a flute case.

Not doing really well in school was not something I was comfortable with, in any subject. I was a nerd and proud of it. So with a few nights left before the test I suddenly came face to face with my desperation to excel and please my teachers, dug the flute out at home, and tried to practice.

It was dismal. When Mom now complains about tinnitus, I wonder whether that evening had something to do with it. I know that it didn’t, but still, I now know that nothing says “I love you” like a parent suffering through the early stages of music tutelage. After a whole fifteen minutes of trying and failing I was frustrated and ready to give up. I’d just quit the music program. I hated flute anyway, hated the snickers and the jokes and the insults. Mostly, to be honest, I hated not being better than the others. I hated standing out for the wrong reasons.

And then, for what was to be the first and last time, Mom made me keep trying. Like the one spanking I received, it had a profound effect. And like that one spanking, I’ve later wished she’d done it more. A lot more. I never really learned about how good discipline could be for you as a kid, but I wish sometimes that I’d had the opportunity to learn that lesson better, and younger.

But on that night, she was stern and strong and unwilling to equivocate on the subject of my practicing. As I got up to quit, she got in my face and made me sit back down. On that night, my fear of failure was confronted by that fierce motherly aspect, and my fear backed down.

I took my seat and tried again, her at my shoulder. And then I tried again because that time sounded as much like bird torture as the time before it. And again, and again, and again. It took another thirty minutes of really trying, of having no safe place to retreat to, of being stuck between a flute and a hardass, before the crux passage finally worked. Magically, my spasmodic fingers managed to function together and I made it through the bar of eighth notes and through to the finish. The only smile in the room bigger than mine was Mom’s.

Band and jazz band and orchestra ended up being extremely dependable and relatively easy A’s for me for the rest of my public school career. I was never exceptional, just a bit better than most, good enough for first flute but not enough to ever worry about a scholarship, and I was (sadly) okay with that. I learned to enjoy playing and being surrounded by girls even more. (A good embouchure is also useful for kissing.) All thanks to Mom and half an hour of not quitting.

But, as I said, it was a one-time lesson. I could have, should have, received that lesson many, many more times. But Mom got pretty busy with the boarders, and I was always too proud to ask or admit I needed it. So I coasted, and then floundered, and finally learned how to avoid challenges so as to avoid failure with an alacrity that bordered on evil genius.

It didn’t affect every part of my life, that aversion to risk, just the creative ones. Just the important ones. I did well in my chosen jobs, was successful when I went pack to school at 26 to re-educate following a motorcycle accident, and managed to get through most things looking like I sort of knew what I was doing. But I also didn’t really “complete” a lot of things. When the going got tough, I got going… the other way.

Through my thirties I was provided opportunities to learn lessons that I wish I’d learned in my teens. Somehow I managed to stumble into management positions, and where I was comfortable failing myself, I found I wasn’t comfortable at all failing the teams that depended on me. That sense of obligation or responsibility was the leverage my mind and heart needed to get over the hump and push through to completion, even when my legs wanted to go the other way.

Those lessons took a long time to learn though. I wrote the first draft of the prologue of the story I’m writing nearly fourteen years ago, got forty or so pages in, drew maps, and then abandoned it. I told myself it was just fantasy and not literary enough. I told myself that it was unrealistic to want to be a writer. I told myself that I was almost thirty and should start being a responsible adult. And they were all excuses.

At forty-three, I finally had enough confidence, frustration, angst, disillusionment, hope… whatever… to try again.

You know this part of the story if you’ve been reading along for a bit. (If not, search “life inversion” and catch up.) I quit again, but this time only the parts that were really bad for me – the corporate job, the consumerism, the stuff-accumulation, the pretending and pretension. I decided to put all my eggs in one basket, say “fuck it”, and write that goddamned novel I’d always said I was going to write.

I finished the bastard last Friday.

Well, not “finished” it in the sense that I’m ready to try to sell it just yet, but I finished a second draft. It’s close. There’s a bit of polishing, then the sharing with trusted and valued readers, then a final polish. But then, soon, only a couple months away now, I’ll be trying to find an agent.

When I typed the last word of the last chapter on Friday, it felt a bit like vindication. Not over anyone else. But over me. To me it felt like giving a big middle finger to the part of me that thought I’d never do it; to the voice that whispered in the dark that I was deluding myself; to the piece that was still convinced I was a fuck up. I felt like I was standing over that remnant, that vestigial quitter, on the field of battle, my foot on its corpse, sword in hand, screaming something primordial into the cold gloaming air. My own Barbaric Yawp.

It was how I’d felt, just that once as an eleven-year old, when Mom made me keep trying until I fucking got it, only better.

Some lessons, I suppose, take longer to learn than others. Mostly the important ones.

Epilogue: The mss is essentially done. Like I said, there’s a bit of polishing to do, but it’s pretty much complete at 180k words. I edited over 50k of them in the last month (my own sort-of NaNoWriMo), so thanks for hanging around while I took that break. Regular posts will now commence again. I’ll keep you updated.

P.S. I missed you all.

"Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working." Pablo Picasso

Except for the blog I haven’t written much for the last three days. I spent an evening updating the map for my novel so a friend with artistic ability can continue her project helping me out, spent today working on my TJ so it continues to run, and spent a day volunteering down at the climbing gym with 8-year olds in exchange for a bit of free climbing time.

All worthy endeavors and I don’t feel a bit of guilt, but it doesn’t change the fact that the novel isn’t going to write itself. Today I’m back on mission.

Some great writer, it may have been Stephen King (yes, I consider him ‘great’ – maybe not always, but taken as a whole, and for "On Writing" alone if need be…), said that the difference between a good writer and a successful writer is that the ‘successful one put’s his or her ass in the chair’. Every writer has their own ritual or system for getting the words out, but there is a system, some commitment to discipline that puts them, ass in seat and hands on keyboard 9or pen, or pencil, or microphone) to do the writing.

That sense of self-discipline (or lack thereof) is one of the things that I’ve had to deal with over the last seven months. I have my excuses, ones that are fairly typical for writers: fear of failure, fear of rejection, deep and abiding commitment to procrastination, yada yada… 

I call them excuses instead of reasons because I believe that once we know about a dynamic of some weakness, it stops being a reason and starts being an excuse. If we know about it, we can start to correct it, change it, and make the choices that will eliminate it. If we don’t make those choices, using a flaw or neurosis to explain not doing something just becomes an excuse.
I think I’m mostly over the excuses now. 

The writing discipline has become a good habit now more than not, and when I miss more than a day or two, I really miss it, like an ache in my bones. The blog has helped in the way a hobby can, but it’s no replacement. More like a supplement in place of a meal – it leaves me healthy but still hungry.

So tomorrow I’m placing my ass eagerly back in the chair. When inspiration comes knocking, I’ll be in the right place at the right time. I have a world and characters waiting for me, and I find that I care about them quite a bit. 

What’s your mission? What are you doing, or what should you be doing, so that inspiration can come knocking and get a warm welcome?