Author Dusty

This Morning

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This morning I am thinking about perspective.

My wife, who is currently teaching high school art, teaches perspective to her students. There’s a technique to it, and a basic concept that some of the students struggle to master. But if they do master it, there’s more waiting for them. We all know about one-point perspective, and two-point perspective (Don’t we?), but did you know there is also three-point perspective? And four-point? Did you know it goes up to TWELVE-POINT PERSPECTIVE???

If you, like my wife, are a highly trained visual artist, then you might actually know that. In which case your view — your perspective — of this post is different from mine,  and different from most; you might have seen my all-caps and multiple question marks as naive, either irritating or cute depending on how you see me and probably what mood you are in.

If you ARE my wife (and she’ll read this at some point, I hope. I mean, maybe she’s sick of my writing; Lord knows she has to read enough of it. So maybe she’ll skip this one.), then your view of this post will be different again, because not only do you know all of this already, but you are reading about yourself, being used as my example. Again. (And you had to read my little anxiety-comment about being tired of my writing, again, and you probably sighed or rolled your eyes at the apparent need to reassure me, again, that you like what  I write. I mean, 25 years we’ve been together; come on, are we still worrying about this?)

Perspective changes everything.

I was going to lead this off with the old cliche about keeping things in perspective. There are eight weeks left of my school year (I know, fellow teachers, I get out super early, around the third week of May, and it’s sweet — but then we start again around August 1. Inservice is in July. Don’t be too jealous. Though at this end of the school year, with the summer ahead starting before Memorial Day, it looks pretty sweet — so go ahead and be jealous. Just come back at the end of July and read about how miserable I am to be going back to school already, while you probably have a month left of summer; then you can have your revenge on me.), and that makes me both excited to finish and get to my summer, and also terribly stressed that I only have eight weeks left to teach everything I haven’t taught my students this year  — which, of course, is far more than eight weeks’ worth of material. Today is also the first day back to school after Spring Break, which feels terrible right in the moment; but my Break was absolutely lovely and perfect; and of course, there will be many more breaks to enjoy. As sad as going back to work after vacation is, it also means I get to have that last day of work before vacation, and those are wonderful.

So I wanted to make the point that most frustrations are minor. Sure, it’s Monday and I have to go to work; but it’s almost April, and I will have summer soon. Sure, I’m tired; but I’m alive, and generally healthy. Sure, I’m frustrated  with my job and with my lack of a professional writing career; but I’m not a ditch digger nor a slave, not a sex worker nor a sewer worker. You have to keep things in perspective, I thought, and decided that I should write that, as a little encouragement to my fellow workers who are off to their Monday.

But then I thought a bit more about perspective, and I realized: there is no “right” perspective. “Keeping things in perspective” implies that there are big important things, and there are small trivial things, and there is a clear delineation between them, and knowing which are which is the key to happiness, or at least contentment. But I don’t buy that: because importance is relative to the individual. Because the size of issues is time bound, meaning that climate change is a global catastrophe waiting to destroy us all, but it is not affecting me this morning, right now, and my having to go to work is. Having to go to work is infinitely smaller; but it’s also infinitely closer than the climate change catastrophe. (I know it’s not infinite, and I don’t mean to belittle climate change; that catastrophe is closer than we think, and scarier. But I’m trying to make a point here.) That means, essentially, that the two problems are about the same size in my life and in their influence on my mood right now. In fact, the Monday thing is a little bit larger because I’m also tired, which makes Monday worse, and doesn’t have any effect on worrying about climate change. Someone else in the very same situation would have a different view of the relative importance of these things, and who’s  to say that their perspective is wrong? Or right?

So I think the best idea is not to try to keep things in perspective: it is to realize that you can, almost always, change your perspective. (“Almost always” because sometimes things are inescapable, immediate and intense and critical, and then you must deal with them and survive them and get through them.) But when you can gain some distance from a problem, from a feeling, from yourself, then you can shift things around as you wish. You can focus more on a specific aspect, bring it nearer, clearer, larger, and push other things back in relation to that aspect. That power is what’s important — at least right now.

Don’t keep things in perspective. Change your perspective. Make a big deal out of little things, and enjoy your little victories as if they were world championships. Make those large looming abstract worries into tiny, distant problems, and block them out with something right here, right now: do some laundry, and be proud of what you have done. Eat a bagel, and glory in the perfect breakfast. It can be a big deal if you want it to be. In other words, sometimes you can sweat the small stuff and ignore the big things; that is your choice, your privilege, your power. Your perspective.

At least, that’s how I see it.

 

(P.S: I am confident that my metaphor has completely ruined the correlation with the artistic technique of perspective; I’m really talking more about foreground and background and such. I am sorry if that broken parallel was a bigger issue for you than it was for me, but it wasn’t a big problem for me. I’m just happy I got this post written. If you’re my wife and you’re annoyed with me, you can have the pleasure of throwing something at me. If you hit me with it, you win!)

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

Congratulations! This morning you have been visited by the Sunday Sloth.

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The Sunday Sloth gives you his permission to be slothful today. You  may do as little as you like, particularly if it means you get to rest and relax and recuperate. G’ ahead; if sloths can live their lives this slowly, then you can slow down a little, too. At least for today.

And hey look! It’s the Happ Corgo of Happiness! That means you are allowed to be happy today, no matter what! So even if you feel like you can’t be slothy (Which would be a shame, because you would disappoint the Sunday Sloth. You don’t want to do that, do you?), you should be happy while you do your necessaries. The Happ Corgo insists.

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LOOK! HE BROUGHT THE HAPPUPPER WITH HIM! Well, now you have to be TWICE as happy.

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Thank you, Happupper. We all love you.

 

Happy Sunday, everyone.

Book Review: The War of Art

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Image result for the war of art

The War of Art

by Steven Pressfield

In retrospect, I should have known from the foreword that this was the wrong book for me: Robert McKee talks about art like it’s a war that Pressfield will help me to win; and while I think art is a struggle, I really don’t think it’s a war; indeed, as I am a pacifist, couching things in warrior’s terms is just going to push me away. He also references golf as evidence that Pressfield is a consummate professional (Pressfield wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance, which I have neither read nor seen; I guess it’s about golf? I guess Pressfield likes the game? But he writes anyway instead of playing, which – I guess is impressive?), and there’s the second best way to alienate me. He talks about tearing up over the Spartans’ death at Thermopylae, which was the subject of Pressfield’s other big book, Gates of Fire, which I did read, and did like quite a lot – but it didn’t make me weepy, and I don’t know what it has to do with inspiration to make art. So I’m really having trouble relating to this foreword author – and then he ends his intro with this:

“When inspiration touches talent, she gives birth to truth and beauty. And when Steven Pressfield was writing The War of Art, she had her hands all over him.”

Creepy sexual metaphors, especially about things that are not remotely sexual – like the act of putting words on a page – that is the number one way to make me say “Nope.” So I should have known.

Let me say this, though: this is a book intended to inspire artists, to help people break through creative blocks and create art they can be proud of. I can’t think of many more noble things to try to do, and I appreciate Pressfield’s earnest and genuine attempt to give people tools to do what they should be doing. So: if you do appreciate sports metaphors, and war metaphors, and you like a good, strong pep talk – or as the cover blurb calls it “A vital gem… a kick in the ass,” (which also should have been a warning sign for me) – then please ignore this review, and go get this book. I hope it helps.

It didn’t help me.

There are moments when I agree with Pressfield. He talks about questioning his writing, and feeling hopeless, and the strength and stamina it requires to push through all that and just keep working. He calls it work, and talks about how important it is to just keep putting in the hours, to keep trying, to keep seeking to hone your craft and do the best you can – but first and foremost, to just put the goddamn letters on the goddamn page, and to never give up. And I agree with that entirely. He talks about how he was in his 40’s before he found success, and how it came from an entirely unlikely source, which was, logical or not, simply the book he had to write at the time; and as a 44-year-old writer who is working on his second novel about a time-traveling Irish pirate, I appreciate everything about that.

But then there are the places where he talks about being a Marine, and how other servicemen in other branches are weaker than Marines because Marines love being miserable (This is a metaphor for how artists should be: willing to suffer and be miserable. I kind of see that. This whole Marines-have-bigger-dicks-than-other-soldiers? Nah.) and the other services are soft. Where he talks about writing and art like it is a war to be fought and won; or an animal to be hunted and then eaten; or a football game where you have to “leave everything on the field.” And I hate all of that. He talks about the urges and habits that get in the way of art as Resistance, and that’s pretty good, but he also talks about how like not cleaning your room is a way to lose to Resistance, and – what? And how golf is an art, and Tiger Woods is the greatest artist of all because he can be interrupted mid-swing, stop his swing, and then refocus and hit a golf ball really hard and – I fail to see the art in that. And he says that mental illness, depression and anxiety, are not real, but only a failure to combat resistance, which can be overcome by determination and the earnest pursuit of one’s true calling, and hey, fuck you, Pressfield.

He’s got a strange (And contradictory) section where he tries to talk about thinking territorially instead of hierarchically, and basically he means you should do what you think is right rather than worry about what other people think is right, and okay, sure – but first, he says elsewhere in the book that he knows he’s written well when his family is pleased and proud of him, which is hierarchical thinking by his own definition and explanation, so either he’s a REALLY bad editor who missed that continuity break, or he’s full of crap in one of these places; and second, his example of someone thinking territorially is Arnold Schwarzenegger going to the gym. Which is both weird and not at all artistically inspiring. It gets really weird in the third section, where the devout Christian Pressfield (Though he also admires the ancient Greeks so damn much that he seems to kinda want to worship Zeus and Apollo. I can’t really disagree with that, though I wouldn’t pick the same gods.) talks about angels who help inspire artists to work, because God wants us to create beautiful things for Him to admire, and how everything an artist is comes from God and we should understand that we contribute nothing, that we are only the vessel through which the divine will is worked. I mean, when we’re not being hardcore fucking Marines. Or hitting 310 yards off the tee. Otherwise, though, we should be all humble before God. It is not quite this Christian – he really does admire and know a lot about the Greeks – but it does read that way, as a repudiation of human accomplishment and a glorification of the eternal Whatever. And as an atheist and a part-time humanist, I am not at all down with that.

This thing reads exactly like what it is: a privileged Baby Boomer looking down on everyone else who doesn’t have all of his privileges; and by the way, he says some interesting and intelligent things that show me he really is an artist like me. Just way more of a shmuck. Hoo rah.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I am thinking about books.

I have too many books. I have too many books and I don’t read enough. I have a hard and demanding and time-consuming job, one that is important to me to do well, and so that takes up a ton of time and energy; maybe the worst thing about it is that my most-free time is late at night before I go to bed — but I can’t read then because it puts me to sleep. Which sucks because I want to read! And it also makes me feel like a lame-o who doesn’t care enough about reading, I mean, if I loved reading enough, I wouldn’t fall asleep doing it. But that’s dumb, because reading relaxes me, and I’m tired, et voila. Nodding off mid-page and dropping the book, which I do all the time. Scares my dogs. Though fortunately I rarely hit myself in the face. Not never; but rarely.

I also have this second job where I’m trying to write books. That also is draining and difficult and time- and energy-consuming, and so the two things together leave very little time for reading. This one gives me a strange feedback loop, too, because while I want to read as much as possible, as it gives me inspiration and fodder for writing, that means that when I read, it makes me want to write, so if the reading is going well that’s generally when I stop reading to write. Conversely, if the writing is not going well, it makes me want to read more, but then I also feel bad for not getting my writing done, because as much as I want to read, that is still my avocation, my hobby, my peaceful relaxing thing; it’s not my job. I don’t have goals and ambitions as a reader, but I do as a writer, so when I’m reading with the intention of getting back to writing, I am more focused on the getting back to writing, which makes me not enjoy the reading as much.

But I love reading. I love getting lost in a book. I love finding a new hidden thing, or a lovely turn of phrase. I love arguing with the author, or questioning why they did a thing — and I adore when I realize later in the book exactly why they did that thing. I love getting to know and understand characters, and I love seeing how things unfold in their lives. I love seeing how authors begin a story, and how they end one. I love reading detailed descriptions, and perfect metaphors, and ideas that I’ve never thought of before but that resonate with me down to the iron strings inside that Emerson talked about in “On Self-Reliance.” I love doing that, too, thinking of things I’ve read while I’m out in the world, and realizing that the book has had an influence on me, that it matters outside of the time I spend between the covers, wandering across the pages.

I love long books and short books, fiction books and fact books, children’s books and adult books, fantasy and science fiction and horror and romance and everything in between. There is no genre I won’t read, and no subject I won’t at least read about, though of course I have my preferences. Bookstores are dangerous for me, because every time I stop and notice something, I want to buy it. Even knowing that I have too many books at home and I don’t know if or when I’ll ever get to read that new book, I still want to buy it. I want it to be mine. I want to have the opportunity to pick that one right off my shelf, and then dive in and start reading it. When I travel, I pack extra books, because I don’t know when I’m packing which book I will want to read next, and I want that first moment of opening a book to be exciting and welcome, not feel onerous or like it’s just the best I can do. I don’t mind too much having too many books, because I just read that Umberto Eco had a personal library of 30,000 volumes, which he never could have read, but that it’s good to have more books than you can read because then you have to choose, which makes you more invested in the book and gives you the chance to learn new things throughout your life. I like that. I want to die with books unread: but not as many as  books read. That’s my goal.

I don’t ever want to be without books.

This Morning

Dusty 3 Comments

This morning I am thinking about space.

I worry constantly about giving people space. I hate feeling like an imposition, and for some reason, I feel like anything I ask other people to do for me is always, always an imposition. Even the smallest things: if I email a friend and I’m eager for them to write me back, I don’t want to ask them to do it, and I don’t want to hurry them or remind them that they haven’t written me back yet, because — that would be an imposition. I ask my wife, every night, what she wants for dinner, what she wants to watch if we’re going to watch TV; I never start with my opinions or my preferences, because I don’t want to influence her decision by pushing for what I want. And somehow I see simply stating, “I feel like tacos tonight” would be — pushing. Imposing. Rude.

I honestly do not know if this is because I am introverted, or overly polite, or timid, or too nice; or if this is something that everyone worries about, or at least most people, or just some. I think, in fact, that I am annoying with this: I think sometimes my wife would like me to just say, “Hey, we’re having tacos for dinner tonight, and then we’re going to watch  The Umbrella Academy,” so that she doesn’t have to decide for both of us. Especially because I will usually go and get the groceries and make the tacos, if I am the one wanting that dinner. It should seem like less of an imposition if I am doing everything myself, and not asking other people to do things for me. I worry that my writing is an imposition, that I am too wordy or boring, and so asking people to read my work is rude and demanding. Somehow I never think that people enjoy reading my work  and would do so voluntarily. Somehow I never think that I’m the one doing the heavy lifting here; that writing is hard, but reading what I write is probably pretty easy.

On some level this attitude is good; it keeps me humble and grateful. I never take anything for granted. (I’m sure I do, and I don’t know what it is, because  I don’t think about it, because I take it for granted. This is the problem with being aware of what you are unaware of: you can’t be unless someone else points it out to you. So hey, if you know me, and you can tell me something I take for granted and am not grateful for, tell me, okay? If it’s not too much trouble. Thanks.) I think it is quite valuable in my teaching, because I do as much as I can to give control to my students. Because I don’t want to impose: I don’t want to assume that what I think is important is actually important for them, and what I think is fun is actually fun for them, and what I think is right is actually right for them. I am happy to offer my opinions — and if my wife asks what I want for dinner, I will tell her; sometimes, at least — but only as considerations, and only insofar as I can explain and argue for them. I think that sends a useful message and sets a positive example for my students, and I’m happy with that. I also think that everyone is constantly trying to control teenagers, and they need at least some adults in their lives who don’t do that to them, and I am glad when I can be one of those adults. I am also aware that I am a white man, and therefore my word gets taken over essentially anyone else’s, and so I try very hard not to be the one dominating the conversation or making all of the choices in a public/professional setting. I do not want my voice to drown out other people’s.

But I avoid imposing on others so much that I think I disappear sometimes. Which is too bad, mostly for me, but also because I’m a pretty good guy, with pretty reasonable opinions and mostly good taste; I can contribute a lot to most conversations and decisions. And I should do it more. I still like being consulted, so once I get to know people I hope they learn to ask me what I think, and then I will gladly say something; but I should also volunteer what I think, or what I want: as long as I don’t do it in an insistent, domineering, rude manner, it shouldn’t really be an imposition. Right? Just my opinion. Just an expression of my desires.

Hey: you all should buy my book, if you haven’t. And if you have, you should read it. And if you’ve read it, you should rate or review it on the site where you bought it, or on Goodreads. And you should like this post, and subscribe to this blog. And you should comment, if you have comments. You should tell me what you think. I am curious. I would like to know.

If it’s not asking too much.

 

Here: links to make it easier.

My book on Amazon

My book on Lulu.com, where if you don’t mind signing up for a new account with them, I get about twenty times more money because I don’t have to give most of the cover price to Amazon.

My book in ebook format on Smashwords, which links to a dozen other sites where you can buy it in whatever ebook format you prefer. Note that the ebook is broken into four smaller parts, and is appreciably cheaper than the paperback.

My book listing on Goodreads, though there are also listings for the individual ebooks if you want to rate and review those.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about the work of art.

I have often questioned whether or not I’m an artist, a writer. And whether or not I should be an artist. I think that I don’t take it seriously enough, because art doesn’t always come first for me; I do all sorts of things other than art. The most obvious is work: as a teacher, I put in fifty or so hours a week on my job, and since I’m an English teacher, a lot of that time is spent reading and writing and talking about reading and writing. I took the job because I thought it would be both fun and beneficial for me to be surrounded by language and literature,  and to some extent it has been both; but I don’t understand why I didn’t think about how much effort it would take to do the job well. I question all the time whether I should have stayed a janitor, some kind of nice, essentially mindless work that would allow me to go home at the end of the day and write, for hours on end. I ask myself: are you really an artist if you spend all of this time and energy on your job? Shouldn’t all of that effort go into writing? Shouldn’t you quit your job and find a mindless one? Or at the least do your job poorly, with the minimum expenditure of effort?

Maybe so.

I also took this job because of summers off, and the several week(s)-long vacations; I figured I could use that time to write more seriously. And I have; summer has always been my primary writing time, along with spring break and winter break, and fall break, now that I have that. But even in those times, I only spend a couple of hours a day, at most, on actual writing. I’ve read about authors who work for eight hours a day, or who lock themselves away for a month, two months, six months at a time, and do nothing but write, all day every day. And here I am with two or three months off, and I write for — an hour a day? Clearly I can’t be much of a writer if that’s all I can stand to do.

But that’s not fair. Because the truth is that writing is fucking hard. It takes an enormous effort to focus on every single word, every single punctuation mark, every sentence, every paragraph, and make exactly the right choices in exactly the right places; and to do that at the same time that I am trying to keep a larger story in mind? Especially when the story is a novel, and so I have both the complete scene I am writing and the overall story to keep in mind while I am selecting each and every word? Jesus Christ, it’s amazing I can do this at all, if you don’t mind my bragging a little. Of course I don’t make all of the right choices, I probably make wrong choices most of the time; but I’m good enough at this that even my wrong choices are generally not terrible, not unforgivable. And just as a doctor’s first rule is “Do no harm,” meaning make sure you don’t do the wrong thing even before you try to do the right thing, I think my first rule as a writer is, “Don’t write shit. Or at least if you write shit, don’t let anybody else see it.”

But even that is hard, because shit is enormously easy to write. Just ask James Patterson. BOOM! No, I’m kidding, he’s not a bad writer. He’s a whore who made a name for himself and then let his publisher pimp that name out in “collaborations” that Patterson likely has almost no hand in, but his name is prominent on the front cover in order to boost sales — but he’s not a bad writer. I don’t want to actually name any bad writers; I’m not going to throw any writers under the bus quite that hard, because all of us struggle with this. All of us have to put in this colossal effort, and then take this terrible soul-searing step of letting other people read what we write.

It’s brutal. It is laborious and effortful and wearing and taxing and just hard.

And I keep doing it. And I keep doing it well enough that I am pleased with what I produce. And I do it sincerely enough that I feel better emotionally after I’ve done it, after I’ve written honestly and as well as I can; even though I’m generally mentally exhausted after I do it. I will also say that I don’t write much more than an hour most days, but I can always put in that hour: these morning blogs have been quite good for that, it turns out; I’ve also worked on my book every day for the last few days, and I’ll do it today, too. I am also capable of some serious marathon sessions of writing: I wrote the final chapter of my most recent book over one weekend, two days of solid writing for more than eight hours each day; I produced something like fifty pages.

Huh. Maybe that’s why I haven’t written that much in the months since.

But even when I hit these dry patches, I still come back to it. Even though it’s hard — and it is hard, though I sometimes fool even myself into thinking that it’s easy because sometimes the words just come and are perfect; but that is the end result of a whoooooooooole lot of hours spent slogging, and writing and rewriting and discarding the whole thing and then starting over again. Still I put in the time. I put in the work. Because I love it, and I believe in it, and I like myself better when I do it than when I don’t.

I guess I am an artist, after all.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about my wife.

It’s not surprising, I think about my wife all the time: she is always worth thinking about. Everything with her is worth the doing: she is worth seeing all the time, in her beauty and grace and her sweetness; she is worth talking to all the time, in her intelligence and her humor and her generosity; she is worth holding all the time, and supporting all the time, and relying on all the time. She is worth all my time. She is worth all.

Today is our 15th wedding anniversary, though we had been together for almost ten years before we got married. I am excited to give her her present, and eager to get about our day’s activities — I highly recommend to teachers to have celebratory occasions during regular vacations — and so I’m not going to spend any more time writing this.

I wish you all love and joy and perfection. I go to enjoy mine.

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This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about work.

It’s an interesting word, one that we use in many different ways: it is simple effort (“That looks like a lot of work!”), it is our profession (“I have to go to work. Please kill me.”), it means to stretch (“You have to work the joint”) or to exercise (“I have to go work out. Please kill me.”). It means to move or to move into place (“Her mouth worked furiously as she worked the Q-tip into her ear”), it means to control or manipulate or stress the emotions (“He worked himself into a tizzy, and then he went out on stage and worked the crowd like a pro.”). It means to maximize reward or response through confidence and panache (“Work it, girl!”) and it is the final product and achievement (“This is a work of art.”).

It is, for an artist, the goal. The purpose. We do this for the sake of the work. And not just the final product, because you can’t know going into it that what you will end up with will be a masterwork, will be your magnum opus (Magnum means great. Want to guess what opus means? Other than the most adorable cartoon penguin in history, that is?); we do what we do for the sake of doing it, for what doing it makes us feel, and what it makes us not feel; for who we are when we are doing the work and who we become after we do it and after we decide to keep doing it.

Sorry if that was too abstract. Let me be more clear. (Let me also give a modicum of credit to Steven Pressfield, because while he’s a toxic-masculine doofus who wrote a bad motivational book, he does talk about the value of artists simply doing the work, putting in the time and the effort, and so he has inspired me despite his doofery.) I write because writing brings me joy, and it gives me solace. When I am upset about something, particularly when the thing upsetting me is confusing or complex, my first urge is always to get out a journal of some form and write about it. When I have an idea, I always want to write it down; and then once I start writing about it, I want to keep writing about it until I have explored all of the possibilities. I am always happiest communicating through writing (Though I’m still, always, a little nervous when someone is reading what I have written.). This relationship with the page, the pen, the written word, along with my lifelong passion for reading, has led me to become a writer. That is how I define myself, how I view myself. It’s where the monogram that makes up my banner on this site came from (Also note: my brilliant wife, who is an artist and illustrator because everything I say about writing, she would say the same about drawing, made that banner for me.) My most important work, the thing that I was born to do, is write. Thus, when I write, both while I am in the act of writing and when I have done enough writing to have produced something worth reading, I feel most myself. I like myself best at those times. I like my life best at those times. That’s why I write: not for reward, not for applause or respect; but because of who I am when I write.

One of my favorite poems, We Are Many by Pablo Neruda, includes these lines:

While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.

I’ve taught this poem several times, and students always struggle to understand it (Not just because of these lines: the whole thing is about multiple selves, particularly perceived self vs. actual self, and it’s fantastically bizarre to read — “and so I never know just WHO I AM,/ nor how many I am, nor WHO WE WILL BE BEING.”). but I understand this part perfectly, and I think other artists would, as well, if they change the verb “am writing” to something appropriate to them, am dancing, am painting, am carving, am composing, am playing. Am working. While I am writing, I do not feel connected to the world; I am in my mind, sifting through words and phrases, images and metaphors, like the child I once was at the beach, when I would grab up handfuls of sand and pour them onto the ground, onto my legs, from one hand onto another, just to see how the sand piled up and how it fell, how it felt running through my fingers and sliding across my skin. I would thrust my hand, palm down, into the dry whispers of sand, and then I would lift my hand straight up to watch myself emerge from the Earth, and to see the way the sand would remain in skeletal ridges on the backs of my fingers; then I would drop my wrist and watch the sand blow away in a swirl of motes.

Just now, I forgot that I am sitting on my couch next to my dog, with a blanket around my shoulders and my laptop perched atop my crossed legs. I was remembering being on the beach and playing, and I was trying to dig for the right words to capture that moment. I was far away.  And now that I’ve come back, I’ve already left — which line I think has two meanings, both that the self that Neruda most clearly takes as his own, his writing self, the part of his mind that rises to find the words and put them in place, is only present while he is actually writing; and also that once he has written down what he was thinking, and he returns to awareness of the world and sees the words as a completed thought on the page, his writing mind is already off on another voyage through the clouds, soaring far above or below where he sits, suddenly aware that his ankles ache. It makes me want to just keep writing, to recapture that feeling of weightlessness, of timelessness, of pure and simple being; the fact that I can do it, and the fact that when I do it, I have this evidence, this product, this work that is my words, pleases me enormously. So much so that the potential rewards of that work, while I want them for the sake of my non-writing self, don’t matter so much as this: I did the work, and the work now exists because of me. It is both humbling in that I don’t matter nearly so much as the words do, and also flattering in that I am capable of making those words do what they do.

I am proud of my work.  I hope my work is proud of me.

 

I do have to note that this was not where I intended this entry to go; I was going to talk about the effort required to make art, and how it has to be done regularly, constantly, no matter how onerous it feels — and it does feel onerous sometimes; but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow. I am happy with this work.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about art.

These thoughts were inspired by a book I just finished reading, Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art; I’ll be reviewing it later, (Sneak peek: IT SUCKS.) though after  yesterday’s post I’ve decided to keep the book reviews and This Morning separate. This Morning is what I think a blog should be, and what I haven’t been doing well despite my years of keeping a site for my writing: it should be a Web-log, a recounting of events, thoughts, feelings, etc. Part of me says “Then why the hell would anyone want to read it?” But that takes me to what art is.

Art is one of the two pursuits, ambitions, goals, that make humanity what we are, that set us apart. We share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and everything we have — tools, technology, society, language, family, war — is echoed in the animal world. The only two things that make us unique (And they may not actually make us unique, as there may be other creatures on Earth with the same pursuits) are art, and truth. We  pursue truth for the sake of truth, and art for the sake of art, and I think there are no other creatures that can definitively be said to do the same. The argument could be made for birdsong and whale song, and for the way some animals play, and the way some animals dance; but I think all of those can be identified as survival traits in one way or another.

I think art  and truth can be seen as survival traits for humanity, as well, but the connection is more tenuous, more distant. Art and truth can be paths to personal success, financial or social, in society, and thus are they survival strategies; they can create pleasure in the individual, which makes us more likely to do other things that help us survive that we tend to do when we’re happy, and also helps us deal with the stress that kills us; they can be used to achieve pragmatic and temporal goals and to transmit and influence culture, which are all part of the survival strategies of the social animals that we are.

But the thing is, there are a lot of us who pursue art and truth despite those pursuits taking away from everything that would be seen as beneficial to Darwinian survival strategies. My art cuts me off from other people. It often makes me sad. It takes time away from the things that earn me money, that earn me social success. Art kills quite a few of us: Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, David Foster Wallace, among others, by suicide; James Joyce and Jack London and Dylan Thomas, among others, by alcoholism. (I’m oversimplifying: they all suffered from various conditions that surely contributed to their deaths, particularly, in the case of the suicides, severe depression; but if you don’t think that the life of an artist was a factor as well, then you don’t do enough art. You should try to do more. I promise it won’t make you suicidal. Well, I don’t think it will.) Truth does a lot of the same things to scientists and mathematicians and philosophers, and where it has been used to have a direct impact on society, then sometimes lots of people die, particularly the one who speaks truth: this category, I would argue, includes Dr. Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther and Karl Marx. Also J. Robert Oppenheimer and the rest of the Manhattan Project, and Werner von Braun.

So art and truth are not, or not only, survival strategies; in some cases they are hazards — and yet we continue to pursue them. Because there is value in them, for society and for the individual, beyond survival, beyond life and death. That’s what art is: value beyond life and death. It’s something worthwhile even if we can’t say precisely why it is; we know it is. There are as many reasons why as there are people, but I think that for all of us, there is a reason why art is worthwhile beyond life and death. That’s not to say that we should die for art, nor that we should want to; it means the value of art is nothing to do with living or dying.

(I will say I think there is a biological evolutionary explanation for the pursuits of art and truth: I think our giant complicated brains evolved in order to keep us alive despite our essentially incompetent bodies, but then our brains got a jump on survival pressures when we created society, and gave ourselves an enormous lead in the race for survival — so strong a lead, in fact, that we’re probably going to kill ourselves off with the very things that help us survive, like the food we eat and the technology we create and the standard of living we uphold and the population  we sustain. But another aspect of this oversuccess is that we don’t actually need all of our brains in order to live; so we turn that excess energy into a pursuit that consumes brain power, and offers us some kind of valuable reward, but that doesn’t contribute to survival. Art. And truth.)

The difference between these two is the distinction between heart and mind, emotion and thought. Truth is thought, and art is emotion. That’s too glib and simplistic, of course; they almost always blend and combine and lead from one to the other and back. But one of my favorite quotes, from Vladimir Nabokov, is, “To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.” The goal of fiction, which is Nabokov’s subject there, is not to depict the world, but to interpret the world; the same should be true for pictorial art, and for music, and for anything else that isn’t trying to capture and explain the world; that is the realm of truth-seekers, not artists.

When I think of the pursuit of truth, by the way, I think of my father. My father is a retired particle physicist, and for years, since before he retired, he’s been working on a physics problem in his free time. I can’t explain it; it has something to do with reconciling Newtonian physics with quantum mechanics. He had an inspiration years ago, and he’s been searching for the math to make it work ever since. He does this without expectation of reward; the best he can hope for is publishing an article in a physics journal, which would lead to no tangible reward. He has hit many stumbling blocks: he has had to look for math texts that can give him a formula or a method that he thinks he needs, and those are often dead ends. He has come close, only to find a flaw in his own math, which means he needs to start over again. He’s still working on it. He does it late at night when he can’t sleep, because simply working on it gives him peace. That’s the pursuit of truth, because all of those things would apply to someone, say, writing a novel, except my father is looking for an answer. That’s his goal even more than publication: he thinks this idea will work, and he wants to assure himself that it will. He is his own audience.

That, with the goal of capturing or creating a feeling, is art.

(To be continued. Because the pursuit of art never ends.)

This Morning (Book Review: Everything Box)

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I don’t know if this is a good idea? I wrote a book review, which I want to post; I don’t want to interrupt this stream of This Morning blogs, so I thought I would use the book review for This Morning. Opinions? Is this a copout? Just the wrong sort of thing for me to do, because This Morning is about my thoughts and feelings? I dunno.

I can make book reviews a part of this streak, or I can make separate posts.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think, if you have thoughts.

 

The Everything Box

by Richard Kadrey

I’ve read three Sandman Slim novels (And if you haven’t, you should – dark horror/fantasy with a punk edge and a great sense of humor), so I had some idea of what to expect with this book; but I didn’t expect this book.

It’s a caper story, a one-off novel with no connection to other Kadrey books (And I just found out this second that there are sequels) about a professional thief who gets hired to steal the wrong thing, and even though he manages to do it, he gets sold out on the job by a fellow thief, who, predictably, has no honor. Coop (Charlie Cooper, though no one calls him that) gets sent to a special prison for the next few years, before he is sprung, by the same guy who put him away, and for the opposite reason: this time the guy, Morty, needs Coop’s help.

He needs Coop’s help specifically for the same reason that Coop was in a special jail: because Coop is not a normal thief. He is a magical thief, who steals mystical and mysterious items for mystical and mysterious people who can pay him in cold, hard cash.

That’s the setup (And forgive me for spoiling the first two chapters), and it’s a good one. The opening scene when Coop is on the job is a lot of fun, and the subsequent caper action is just as good, all the way through. The book does start a little slow, as Kadrey has a pretty broad cast of characters; there’s a madcap element to this, as it ends up with one of those Mad Mad Mad Mad World scenarios, with everyone running around looking for the same thing – the Everything Box of the title – and so getting all of those characters with their disparate personalities and motivations into the reader’s mind is a challenge. Kadrey does it as well as any, I think, but simply because it’s a single book, he has to fall back on some fairly generic tropes and character types. He does at least one wonderful thing, though, which is to completely flip some of those tropes: there are two different demon-worshipping doomsday cults involved, one led by a High Dark Magister (Or is it Dark High Magister?) with a bad back whose throne is a Barcalounger, and the other led by a very traditional suburban family who hold bake sales to raise funds for their dark rituals. (The bake sale scene is one of the funniest things in the book, and one of the funniest scenes I’ve read in a long while.) But there are some confusing moments: there was one character who I actually thought was a different character until they met each other, and I got lost in the earlier chapters and had to slog a bit. But it picks up, and the last 100 pages whiz by; the ending is great.

Apart from the caper action – which takes more than enough twists to keep you guessing; I honestly kept thinking, “That’s it? That can’t be it. Oh wait – that’s not it!” – the book does one other thing remarkably well, which is make you like the characters. Almost all of them are generally likable and amusing, including the ones opposed to our hero Coop, who is an excellent sort of everyman guy who just happens to be a thief. But both because they are a bit one-dimensional, and also because they are pretty goofy, you don’t mind too much when bad things happen to them – and like all of Kadrey’s books in my experience, a lot of bad things happen to a lot of people.

And I liked it.