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.

the list post (or why I don't do them)

All the cool kids in the blogosphere do lists. I mean they really do ‘em. They do ‘em to the degree that the damned things are practically art. They:

v      write them for themselves to keep their organized selves all organized and shit;

v      use them to great community-building effect on their blogs, either:

o        Making lists of cool things they’ve learned or done, or;

o        Making lists of questions to ask their readers, or;

o        Making lists of amazing things they’ve found;

v      make them into poetry, with brilliant segues and dazzling syntactic cliffhangers;

I find it awe-inspiring. I’m envious. I’m not a list maker, not at all. Like multi-tasking, I’m capable of writing them, but I find it personally distasteful to actually do. Not in an “I’m going to throw up if I have to write one” way; Just in the sense that it provokes a mild sense of queasiness.

I do write lists from time to time, often for the same reasons that many people I admire write them. I write them to:

v      remind myself of tasks that must get done before I slip back into a pleasantly irresponsible state;

v      order the things I absolutely can’t procrastinate any longer in regards to;

v      create an order of operations so that I can complete boring errands in as efficient a way as possible so as to facilitate slipping back into the aforementioned irresponsible state.

But these are exceptions to my rule of being, things I have to do. They are an equivocation to the way the world is. In my ideal world, the one I usually try to experience in my loopy head, there are only lists consisting of one thing at a time, and a list of one is not a list really, now is it? It’s just an item. I guess maybe I’m an item-maker.

Lists give me no comfort at all. They weigh me down. They loom.

I could have a made a list today about all the things I wanted to get done, but then I would have had to stick to it to gain closure on my day. Surely, on that list, at the end of it, would have been the item: Get to bed at a reasonable time so you can get up early and edit for your freelance job. That is a reasonable and sensible goal to include on a list. And, that item being there, I would have felt a great conflict when, at the appointed time, I decided to write a blog post instead, a post concerning lists, for example. I would have been left with a giant, gaping failure – a huge open check box at the end of my day that would not, could not, subsequently be filled.

I would have been despondent.

You see, I know these things about myself:

v      I am not a goal-setter – I am a dreamer;

v      I do not wish to be a multi-tasker – I desire to be gloriously obsessed;

v      I don’t want to win – I just want to run.

I also have a really hard time making lists longer than three items long, as you might have noticed by now.

I think that maybe it’s genetic or something. I have an anti-list retro-virus, perhaps. We could call it QLV – Quasi-Bohemian Listodefficiency Virus. Or perhaps it’s congenital, a quirk of natural DNA splicing that was undetected in the womb and, in mid-life, has blossomed into an untreatable (I hope) syndrome typified by aimless walks and drives, and ponderous ponderings for extended periods of time during which I could almost appear to be asleep were it not for obsessive chin-whisker fondling, open, unfocused eyes, and occasional, spontaneous outburst of laughter or weepiness.

Here’s the truth: A life without lists feels more to me like the summers of my youth, when I climbed trees and roamed hills and made up stories and even wrote them down sometimes. When I swam for hours, and lay on the raft on the lake and stared up at the clouds all afternoon, seeing heroes and villains and all the characters in between soar over me in a kaleidoscope of private mythology.

Even then, even in my daydreams, I was never the first hero. I was always a supporting character, the dissenting voice on the team, the one that questioned everything, especially himself.

I look back, and forward, from this place and time, and I know these things:

v      that boy was unformed in many ways, but;

v      I was closer to my best self then - I was wild there, and;

v      I need to get back.

So this may be the closest I ever come to a list post. It is, perhaps, too bad, because I love it when other people do them right. I guess it’s just one of those things that I’ll have to learn to appreciate from the outside.

You know, while I’m scratching my chin, happily obsessing, and looking opportunistically for a good metaphorical raft.

climbing (part one)

I love to climb. I will never be really good at it, but that’s fine. I don’t climb to be great: I climb to be better. I climb to be.

Ultimately, climbing is about the movement, the dance and magic of will versus gravity. It is touching a vertical wall with as little of you as possible, making it beautiful and powerful and rhythmic. And not falling. But more than not falling; it is tenacity, trust and autonomy, love and fear and courage.

At its best, climbing is a meditation. Attached to the wall, fingers stuffed into cracks or clinging to pockets and nubs that make golf balls seem enormous, and standing on edges the width of coins, the size of pimples, there is nothing else in the world. It all drifts away and what's left is the six square feet in front of you, and that beautiful dance.

Climbing is an impregnable bubble that holds the world at bay. There’s a reverse magnetism in it, an ineffable pushing away of everything that crowds and bumps and forces. When it’s good, there is no sound but the breath, no sensation but the touch of rough and soft surfaces and the internal sway and pitch of balance and counter-balance.

There isn’t any room for the world, crawling up a wall. If the world is there, you aren’t – you’re falling. And there are days like that, days when life can't be closed out and the simplest moves leave you panting or pealing off. But those days are rare. Mostly, just staring at the rock is enough to quicken the heart and stir the wind that clears away the riff-raff, the kipple.

What’s left are clean angularities; natural geometries and puzzles carved into rock and stone, muscles and bone and blood. On a good day it’s ballet. The pivot and sway, pull and friction – it’s effortless, or it looks that way, feels that way.

When it’s done, make no mistake, there is exhaustion and shuddering breaths and hands shaking on the steering wheel driving home.

But it doesn’t feel like it on the wall, the wind blowing softly and the ground receding by inches. On the wall it’s just you and the ageless stone, a connection formed between fingers and toes and something indescribable. Like being plugged into a timeless energy, as stuck to it as it is to you. Welded to the earth and yet fluid. Climbing is like scaling a Telsa coil.

Climbing is submission and assertion, a giving and taking with the stone that is – must be – equal and complete. It is kinetic poetry, the wheel of thought and action flowing so quickly that it blurs. If success is measured by completion, then that completion only comes through symbiosis. It cannot be conquered, the rock. But it can be shared – it can share. And in the afterglow of that conjoining everything smells stronger, tastes better, feels more pure. Everything takes on a clarity that is heartbreaking and affirming.

It is impossible to not smile at the top of a climb. And often, there are tears. They are in honor of the effort and the grace, the fear and courage, and the sheer beauty of being present, truly present, if only for the time it takes to touch the stone and then walk away.

“The reason of a resolution is more to be considered than the resolution itself.” Sir John Holt

Three guesses as to why (no pun intended - read on for that to make sense) I chose this one for today's post, and the first two don’t count.

Of the W5 questions, I consider ‘why’ to be the most important. It isn’t in journalism, of course, and that’s fine, but to me why is the question. Our motives inform our actions far more than the other way around, some would say entirely (I’d be more on their side), so the quest to understand the why of a choice, an action, a motive, even a resolution, can tell us far more about a given situation or ourselves than any clinical understanding of the facts; the who, what, when or how. When we understand why, we understand something at the deepest level.

I remember, when I was involved in the church, that my pastor considered this concept somewhat subversive. I had suggested that god, a truly loving and caring god, in god’s infinite wisdom and omniscience, would understand the why of us, of our actions, of our thoughts, perceptions, actions and motives, and that, if god, a truly loving and caring god, were even inclined to judge us, that god would do so based on the why regardless of the outcome of our imperfect how or when or what. Apparently that was slightly heretical on several levels and it marked the beginning of a slow exodus out of organized religion for me.

I don’t embrace atheism any more than I embrace a specific theism these days, mostly because I see the concept as, a) too unimaginative, b) contrary to my own anecdotal experience, and c) as rigid and intractable as any of the major religions themselves. I prefer to stay open to the possibilities a bit more than that. I also can’t say as there is any one belief system that presses all of my happy buttons either; I mistrust any and all institutions, for the very act of becoming an institution is a corruption of the natural state of change that marks the character of the world around us. Instead, I prefer the pick-a-part, do-it-yourself method, eclectically and optimistically assuming some truth in the blind-guys-feeling-up-an-elephant explanation for all of the similar yet different versions of faith that sprout up around the world. I assume that most (though definitely not all) seekers have and are looking for an explanation for the unexplainable, and so assume that most (though definitely not all) have caught some piece of the truth even if just by accident. I spend my time sorting through the Olympic-sized pools of murky bathwater looking for whatever pieces of the baby I can find. And that works for me.

This time of year traditionally involves an often comical and almost always ironic tradition of making resolutions that are designed to improve our lives in some way through the next year, sort of a pin the tail on the donkey kind of goal setting and self-improvement. I’ve never been a big fan, admittedly because I have a very, very mediocre success rate at keeping to resolutions. And I’m okay with that too. I’ve learned (and am learning) that my best goals are my simplest ones and that, converse to traditional thinking, they work best when set with very little structure but extremely profound intent. I focus first on the why, then the what, and finally the how and when. (I’ve learned to never try to include any who’s but me in any of my goals – it leaves me wiggle room, and I apparently need wiggle room.) By focusing first on the why of a thing I tend to ensure that if I choose to do something, it will be for the right reasons. I may fail utterly at the what, how and when, but I will know going in that my why was pristine. For me, that self-trust is intrinsic to everything else.

So my resolution is the same one as last year: To continue my search for a perpetually more profound understanding of why.

I’m not suggesting you do the same, but if you like try asking yourself why you are making the resolutions you are making. See if you’re happy with your reasons, if they are the kinds of reasons that make the sacrifices worthwhile making. See if this tiny exercise changes your understanding of the choices you are making.