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This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I am done with grades. This morning is the last of my school year.

This morning I received notification that California has approved my application for a teaching license. This doesn’t change my immediate plans, I will still be staying in Tucson for the next academic year; but it gives us more options for the year after that. It also shows, I think, that my sordid past is now behind me, because if even the champion nanny state approved me, I don’t think anyone will say nay because I was mean on a blog almost ten years ago.

More importantly, this morning is the last of my wife’s career as a teacher. She returns now to doing what she always should have been doing: making art full time. She has been a wonderful teacher, who has helped many students to improve their skills, gain confidence and interest in art, and especially to see the world in a different way; she will be sorely missed at school. But this is the best thing for her, and this is what is right: because look. Just look.

 

 

 

So congratulations, Toni. You have more than earned this. I am so proud of you for what you have done as a teacher, and I’m even more proud that you are walking away from it to dedicate yourself to art. You amaze me every day.

Especially this morning.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I’m thinking about crime and punishment. Sin and redemption, maybe.

Our school got vandalized this past weekend. The new mural, which my wife’s art students have been working on for months, was severely damaged: they spraypainted racist and sexist words, large phalluses, and extremely stupid pro-drug comments all over it. We don’t know who did it, but whoever it was clearly targeted the mural specifically, as nothing else was damaged (A couple of small tags in the parking lot are the only other marks left behind).

I have no idea why someone would do that. You’re pissed off? Sure, that’s fine; do something about it, confront people, post on the internet that you’re mad, write a letter, hell, stand outside with a sign and say “YOU SUCK!” There are a thousand ways to express your anger, most of them very satisfying. What the hell do you get from something like this? Is it funny to be cruel to innocent people? My presumption is that the anger of those who did it was directed either at the school or at humanity and the world in general; so why go after the artwork being created by people you don’t hate? And if you do hate them, why go after that?

If we do catch who did it — and it was reported to the police as a hate crime, as indeed it was — then their punishment probably won’t be enough, because it probably won’t fix the problem: someone who thinks this is the way to go about expressing your anger is only going to continue targeting the wrong victims in the wrong ways. I don’t know how you fix that.

I know how you fix the mural, though. I know because the students and staff at the school did that yesterday, as soon as the vandalism was discovered. The people who had been leading the mural project were seniors, so they weren’t at the school as they graduated this weekend; two of them did come by, intending to work on the mural, which was unfinished; when they saw what had been done to it, it crushed them. It was the rest of the school, out of affection for those young artists — and for my wife, who was helping out with the mural mainly in an advisory role, though she did also put several difficult hours of work into it — who took it upon themselves to try to clean off the spraypaint, and then to re-paint the original design so as to cover up what could not be removed.

It’s not fixed. It’s not finished; there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. The alumni who were leading it are not sure yet if they want to try to finish the piece, because clearly, it is vulnerable and it is a target, and there’s very little stopping the vandals from coming back and doing it all again. If our artists decided to take the risk, and put whatever spirit they have left into finishing this mural, only to have it defaced a second time? It would be devastating.

That would be a hate crime. That would be vandalism, in the sense of meaningless destruction. And there wouldn’t be enough punishment for people who would do that.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I think I have an answer to my question from yesterday morning.

Yesterday, I was wondering what I could say to my wife, to my students, to myself, that would help comfort us in the face of inevitable suffering, and I wished that I could rely on God as that answer, because then I could at least stop thinking about it — and I should have said worrying about it and fretting about it, because that’s the point; it’s not the idea of not thinking, it’s the idea of “let go and let God.” Which I can’t do, but I appreciate that people can.

But I have another cliche that I have gleaned from outside of the fields of the Lord (And that enormously obscure reference is brought to you by the podcast I’ve been listening to, Sunday School Dropouts. Probably also why God has shown up in this atheist’s morning ramblings.), that as I understand it, many churches focus on as the heart of their message (and others may sprinkle in, in between railing against homosexuals and abortion and Democrats in Washington), which is this: God is love.

Once again, that doesn’t work for me. But it comes with another way of looking at it, that I think does fit in nicely with what I’ve been looking for:

Love is God.

That is to say, love is everything. Everything that matters. It is the alpha and the omega, it is the answer to all questions, all doubts and fears. Love. And love, I think, can offer an answer precisely as satisfying  — and not any more satisfying — as can the answer “God.”

What should I tell my students when the future looms ominously over them? Love. Look for love in your life, look for love in what you do; if you don’t find any love in your life, then change it, and if you don’t find any love in what you do, then stop doing it. Don’t work for money, work for love: and I don’t mean to be flippant there, because I am a person who works for money precisely because he cannot live on what he loves; but for me, the money I earn is spent on those I love, and used to give me an opportunity to do what I love, which I am doing right now. So I never mind my job very much, because it is done for love, if not always in love. And yes, sometimes I love my job: I do love books and poetry, and I love writing, and I guess I don’t entirely loathe my students. (No, I love some of them. More, I love the people they become, and the potential I see in them when they are young.)

What do I tell myself when I am in my darkest, foulest, most hopeless moods? Love. I have lost some of my liberal idealism in these last few years, and I have begun to lean a wee bit more conservative; it has made me worry, because I know that this is a common pattern, especially among aging white men, as we start to get a taste of power and become greedy and start worrying about people taking away what we have. And I do not want to be that guy. But I think that so long as I focus on love, so long as my actions and intentions are begun with love in mind, then I won’t turn into someone I would hate. At least some of my shifting to the right is based on the consideration that people on the right can’t be bad people, can’t be evil people, not all of them. (Trump is.) Not any more than there are evil people on the left. It’s not reasonable to take a person’s political leanings as the sole evidence of their morality or their value, or anything else apart from their political leanings; evil people are conservatives, conservatives aren’t evil people. Thinking that makes me give some conservative ideas (like the free market and lower regulation, the independence of states and, perhaps most shocking to me and those who know me, the value of the Second Amendment) the benefit of the doubt, and that makes me move away from my liberal roots.

But that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I’m a liberal or a libertarian or a moderate or an anarchist: so long as I consider what is best for my fellow men, and treat them always with respect and with love, then my ideas will never be bad, even if they are wrong.

I also need to remember this for myself when I am disappointed in my writing career. When I think about how old I am compared to other writers, and when I realize how good I am compared to some other writers — and then when I think about how entirely devoid of success I am compared to most other writers; I need to remember: love. I do this because I love it, because I love the me who does this. And so long as I write for love, with love, and out of love, then I can’t be a failure. I am a writer.

What do I tell my wife when she worries about our future, about what we’ll do for money, about where we’ll live, about how we’ll see the world and how we’ll live in it? I will tell her, as I do as often as I possibly can, that I love her, without limits and without end, and that I always will, and that love will see us through, no matter what else happens. Always. Love.

It doesn’t solve the problems we all face. But then, neither does God. I hope that it brings you some comfort, as it brings me some. I hope that it gives us all the strength to keep fighting towards our goals, and I hope it keeps us from hating those who fight against us, or at least in the opposite direction. I hope that the love in your life is enough to make you smile, as it is for me, even on a Monday morning.

Thank you for reading what I write. I won’t say I love you, because I don’t know you, but I love the fact of you and the existence of you, and what you give to me. Thank you.

Now go love!

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

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!)

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 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 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

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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.)

Dusty 3 Comments

This is hard.

I wanted to explain why I haven’t been blogging very often, and why I haven’t been talking about the effort to publish my book. Why I don’t  write about writing. As a writer, I should — shouldn’t I? If I’m a writer? And even now, while I am trying to find the words for this, I immediately want to start apologizing for it. I want to say that I know this is a cliché, that everyone who writes, and everyone who makes art, we all have this same problem: that things have been said before, and why would I think that my way of saying them would be any better? I want to say that I know this isn’t interesting to anyone, but I felt a need to write it, so I’m just going to go ahead and do it: unapologetically apologizing. I feel like I’m lost in a fog, and I keep bumping into things, into people; I’m clumsy, and blind, and — sorry. Sorry! Oh, that was your foot. Sorry about that.

I want to apologize a lot. I’ve done a lot of things wrong, as a writer: I’ve made a lot of clumsy mistakes, often fallen on my face. I want to apologize for my first book being too long, which kept it from being published; I want to apologize for giving up on seeking an agent to represent me, and I want to apologize for taking so long to get into self-publishing. I want to apologize for being a teacher, and for being good enough at it, and believing in it enough, to take time away from my writing; clearly I should have taken a shit job so I could focus entirely on accomplishing my dreams. I want to apologize for wasting my years being happily married and not having kids; because even though I never wanted kids, the best reason that I can give anyone who asks me why not is that I wanted to focus on my career; and after all this time, I haven’t done enough to earn justification for that decision. I’m sorry. (Still not sorry I didn’t have kids. Absolutely not sorry about my marriage.) I want to apologize every time I write on this blog, because my book reviews aren’t good enough, because I don’t socialize with other bloggers enough, don’t follow enough, don’t comment and Like enough. I want to apologize for my essay/rant/blogs because I’m sure I’m offending someone, either because what I say is offensive or because it isn’t offensive enough. I want to apologize for not having enough expertise to really teach a general audience something they didn’t know before, and therefore wasting their time with my mediocre insights and tired, angry humor. I want to apologize for not writing short stories and poems, for not getting published in literary journals, for constantly shifting my blogging style and my intent with this blog.

Basically, I want to apologize for being me, at least the me that I think I am, though I’m probably wrong, probably indulging in some ridiculous fantasy so as not to face the truth of my mediocrity. I’m sorry. All I can say is, this is hard.

I’m pretty well lost in the dark out here; I don’t know where I am, or the right way to go, or what’s at the end of the path — or even what’s the path. I think I know what it takes to be a writer, but it’s hard to remember what I think I know, and it’s hard to believe, still, in what I think is true, no matter how many times people, including people I respect and admire, say the same things: never give up. Write every day. Write what you know, and write what you want; don’t try to chase the latest trend or the hottest thing: just don’t give up. I want to hold onto those touchstones, follow that map laid out for me by those I would be honored to follow, whose footsteps I dream of walking in.

But see, those are great writers who say that. People who have found success, who have published books, who have sold books. Not me. They have an audience: people want to read what they have to say. They have interesting and useful thoughts, crafted from the perfect words. They know what they’re doing, they can see the way to go; they can see it all so well that they notice the tiny details, they see little moments of beauty, or oddness, or even horror. I can’t even see the ground under my feet, can’t even see my feet, when I start writing: what makes me think that my thoughts, my words, are the right words? And if they’re not the right words, what the hell am I doing? I could be getting ahead on my school paperwork, and I could be playing video games and binge watching all the shows I haven’t seen. I’d be more comfortable at my day job, and I could participate in the conversations about pop culture. I’d know where I was, and I’d know what I was doing. I’d know what was right.

But when I decide to write, I step away from that comfortable, familiar assurance, that life like an easy walk through a mall. Air conditioning, clear lighting, You Are Here maps. And I step into confusion. Every time I write, I have to wonder: What is the right thing to write?

Who is the right me to be?

Figuring that out is hard. Not that actual figuring: I think that’s pretty simple. I mean, I think I am a writer. But I don’t really know why I think it. Every reason I can think of to support the assertion that I’m a writer, I can instantly, with no trouble at all, think of a counterclaim to disprove it. I’m good with words: but I don’t do enough drafts, don’t spend enough time on the work. And . . .

Oops. Turns out I can’t even think of a second reason to call myself a writer. I can keep going with reasons why I’m not a writer: I haven’t had any success, never sold a story, never got accepted for anything, been blogging for ten years and never broke 100 followers. I have never written a way out of the darkness where I go when I try to find the words. Never reached the light.

It is very hard to keep thinking that I should in fact keep writing at all, let alone finish this blog, let alone keep writing books that I don’t believe anyone will want to read. I mean, really, what’s special about these words? I didn’t create anything new with them. I didn’t describe anything that’s never been described before; in fact, I don’t think I described anything. They’re just words, and they’re just from me. Who cares?

I’m sorry for wasting all of our time.

I’m trying to come up with a final epiphany, an affirmation that can sustain me, keep me writing, make people understand why I do this, and why every other creative should continue to do it, too. (But then the voice in my head says, I’m not that creative. My book concepts are entirely derivative: a vampire story? Really? You wrote a book about a pirate? TWO books? Oh, good Lord. Let me guess: your blogs are about you being an angry progressive who doesn’t understand why our country is so stupid, right?

Have you ever considered that maybe it isn’t the country that’s stupid?)

Sorry. It’s hard to keep that voice silent. Hard to think that all of that isn’t the simple truth.

It’s hard to think.

I also get afraid, sometimes. I don’t deal with depression, myself, but so many artists and writers do. Today is Virginia Woolf’s birthday, and she’d think everything I’ve ever written is absolute shit. She was one of the best writers who ever lived. She killed herself. So that means either that I can’t be a good writer because I don’t have the same problems that the good writers have and had; or if I ever get to be a successful writer, I’ll hate every second of it, and want to get back to where life was simple. I’ll want to walk away from writing, from the place I worked so hard to get into. I’ll get there, and I’ll want to run away.

Why the hell do I do this, again?

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t keep repeating myself. It’s a bad habit. I think I’m looking for something familiar. Safe. Known. Which writing is not. Really, I shouldn’t be writing at all: I have way too many bad habits, and I don’t spend enough time taking extra classes, and studying exactly what my favorite writers do,  and carefully scrutinizing every line of prose I’ve ever written to determine how it could be improved. That’s why I’m not a good writer, which is why I’m not a successful writer. Because writing is hard, and I’m too lazy, and too cowardly, to actually do it right. I’m also too old: all the great writers publish their first great books much younger than me. I’m 43: clearly time to get to work on finding some other hobby that would be better for me, that wouldn’t cause me as much consternation, that wouldn’t be so hard. I can’t keep doing this one. I can’t.

But I’m still writing. Doesn’t that show that I am, in fact, a writer? Maybe even a good one, because I don’t give up? Because I try to be honest? Share what I feel and what I see in the world?

Sure, if what I shared and felt wasn’t shit. But if it is, then people are just rolling their eyes and laughing at me. I mean, I guess I don’t care if people are laughing at me, but I also don’t see any reason to keep going if people aren’t appreciating and enjoying my work.

And yet I’m still writing. Still trying to find a way to finish this, to make a point. I think I may have written myself into a corner with this whole “I should stop doing this” thing. I think I already contradicted myself pretty badly, and I’ve probably confused the shit out of anyone who is reading this. I’m pretty lost, myself.

This is hard.

I don’t want to give up. I don’t want to need readers: I want to write for the sheer joy of writing. I feel that sometimes. I get excited about stories. There have been some moments when I’ve looked back over what I’ve written, and I’ve impressed myself. I want to feel that the thousands upon thousands of words that I have put together are an accomplishment, that they mean — I don’t know, something.

And in my best moments, I do think that. I do think that anyone who has written four books — Jesus, four books! And hundreds of blogs, book reviews, essays, along with two-thirds of two other books — I mean, that person has to be a writer. Right? I don’t know where the line is between writer and non-writer, but I’m pretty damned sure that nothing else I’ve done in my life compares to what I’ve accomplished as a writer. (Not counting the things that matter, but aren’t really accomplishments, like being happily married and taking good care of my pets and such. If those are accomplishments, I’m proud of myself for them. If those define me, I’m proud to be those things.)

Actually, that’s not an if. I am proud of the husband I am, of the marriage I have helped to build and keep. Toni and I have been together for 23 years, and she is still the one thing in the world that makes me happiest. She is my world. I have given a home to an iguana, a dog, and a bunny who have all passed on after long healthy happy years; I am currently taking care of a dog, a cockatiel, and a Sulcata tortoise who are also living happy, healthy lives. I am absolutely and unequivocally proud of that. I am happy to be defined as that man, that husband, that father of many pets. I have no doubt of that: knowing that is not hard. This is where I am comfortable, where I am — mostly — sure of myself, and of the ground on which I stand.

I wish writing was the same way. That art was the same way. Comfortable. Sure. Easy.

But the truth is, it isn’t. Art isn’t easy. Art is never sure. Art is never comfortable. We live on mostly solid ground, and we can see all around us; but art is off the edge of the map. It has to be, because it is created. It could be created out of familiar pieces, it may be shaped to resemble something that we’ve known, but — it’s not something we’ve known. It’s something new. To make something new, you have to go away from solid ground. Where everything floats, and nothing is clear. You can’t see where you are, can’t see where you’re going. That’s the only place you can make art: can make a new place to stand.

Art is too big, too impossible to define, too hard to understand. It’s larger than we are, you know; I mean, of course. Of course the English language, and every concept that can come from all the creative minds that have ever existed, of course that’s all larger than me. And when I compare myself to that, of course I am insignificant, a bug, a nothing. Nothing at all. Trying to find my way in that unending expanse, that eternally shifting and growing universe, that limitless world being created and re-created every day, by every artist? Of course that’s hard. It should be.

And I’m still writing. Goddamn it, I’m still writing. Not as well as some others do, maybe not even as well as I could, given the perfect circumstances: if I didn’t have to work, say, or if I had some perfect storm of idea, and passion, and time, and could burn through my own Fahrenheit 451, my own Bell Jar, my own God of Small Things. But given everything I carry with me when I go marching into this unknown, into this mysterious world where art exists, where I make art, where I am past the familiar, through the looking glass, where even the landmarks do not exist until I create them — I think I do as well as I can. I don’t know if it’s good enough. I don’t know what “good enough” means.

But I’m still writing. Maybe it’s even more impressive if it isn’t good enough, because if I can’t have enough talent to really be good, at least I can have enough courage to keep trying, to keep writing, to keep going out into that chaos of formless possibility, and deciding: choosing: determining: building; and then going back to where I was, to the real, solid, familiar world, and carrying with me the thing I made — which is never like the real world, and every time I compare it, I know that what I made is not as clear, not as solid, not as real as the real world. But still, I bring it back here with me, and I give what I write to other people, and I say, “Here, read this. Look at what I made. Tell me what you think.” That does take courage, to dive into the unknown, and try to build yourself a place to stand before you fall: and then to invite other people to stand there, too. That takes courage.

And I’m still doing it.

I’m still writing.

Book Review: Rediscover Your Story by Drew Kimble

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Rediscover Your Story: A Journal for Creative Exploration

by Drew Kimble

 

I’m going to have to make this quick; because I have writing to do.

I have writing to do because this book inspired me to do it.

I am a writer, both a blog/ranter and a novelist; I am also a full-time high school teacher, because my vocation doesn’t make me money. I struggle, constantly and consistently, with keeping my passion and focus as a writer, because it is so easy to let the writing slide off to the side, to tell myself that I “need” to do work for my job, that my job is “important” and “valuable” and “worth spending time on.” It is even easier to find things that are related to writing, but not actually writing, and do those things in my free time; that way I can tell myself that I am writing, without actually doing too much of it. And of course I have to put aside the actual writing until later; I am too busy, and too tired. I don’t have time.

I’m not going to say that this book changed my life, because I’m not done working with it: I haven’t written out all the prompts, haven’t answered all the questions, haven’t examined and reflected and interacted with all of the inspirations inside. (There is one that I immediately want to turn into a piece of art – which I will do myself, though that scares me – and hang on my wall. It is “The unfed mind devours itself.” Page 134. Though in looking back through the book to find that one, I saw three or four others that I want to give the same treatment – “Do not dare not to dare,” and “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together” leap out at me. It may not sound that impressive that I want to make art of these quotes, but you have to understand: I have never been a visual artist, never made anything other than words on a page – and I’m married to a prodigiously talented illustrator. The bar is high, and I have never jumped. But I will try.) I don’t know that the book will change my life when I’m done interacting with it, though I think it likely if I can focus on small changes, planted seeds, an idea of old habits I would like to replace with new habits. That change, I think is pretty likely.

Because Mr. Kimble knows how to do this. The prompts are varied in style, ranging from internet quiz-style questions (Don’t scoff; we all take them.) to soul-searching checklists and life inventories. The types of prompts run the gamut, and the depth as well; I think that everyone will be able to find something useful in here. The quotations which appear in between each prompt-page are fascinating, also showing a wide range of focus and depth, some about the slow march of particulars, some about leaping to the stars. The book could easily be written in, or one could take the prompts and re-write them and one’s responses in a journal, which is what I will be doing; not that there is anything wrong with writing in a book, but I have all of these excellent journals. Though maybe I’m wrong: maybe I should do something different from my usual habit. Maybe I should write in this book.

I think I will.

One last comment: as a teacher, I could definitely use these as journal-writing prompts for my students. Particularly the prompts that push one to search for and define one’s self, one’s identity – and the ones that get you thinking about your future, too. Those would be good for my high school English classes.

This is a good journal. If you’re looking for one, this is a good choice.