Tag creativity

How Do I Say This Nicely?

Dusty Leave a comment

So there I am, just minding my own business, right? It’s a Saturday morning, I just got out of the shower, so I need a minute to cool off because it’s June in Tucson and it’s already 94 degrees outside, so by the time I finish shaving and brushing my teeth my forehead is slicked with sweat, and I need to sit under the fan to return my temperature to equilibrium before I get one last cup of coffee.

  1. No, I should not drink hot coffee when it is 94 degrees. But I’m going to anyway. Forever.
  2. Yes, I should take cold showers — though I will point out that shaving really should be done with hot water, and that would make me sweat regardless because I am applying said hot water to my face. I do rinse with cold. It doesn’t fix the problem. Only sitting quietly under the fan does.
  3. All of this is beside the point.

I’m looking at my phone, trying to decide whether I want to read (I’m trying to get through four more books before the end of June, because I really want to read at least 52 books this year [and I’m at 22 and if I get to 26 before the first six months of the year are gone that will be meaningful, right?] since I have not done that for the last few years, and I know I shouldn’t worry about how many books I read or whether I’m reading books at all, but I’m not going to start another list) or if I should write, because I have really good ideas for blogs that I want to get to while it is summer and school is not destroying me, or if I maybe want to work on my audiobook (I’m recording myself reading Damnation Kane. It’s going slowly.), or maybe just keep building my ULTIMATE FORTRESS in Minecraft, which is what I’ve been doing to relax for the past week or so, because I spent the past week reading 546 essays about napping for the AP Language and Composition exam. And while looking at my phone, I check my email, and there’s a message from Substack (Which I will maybe start posting these essays to, as per my wife’s suggestion, which is a good one and maybe that would get me more readers — but also, can I handle more readers?), so because I’m considering posting to Substack, I go to check it out and see if it’s easy to put a post on there. So I open the email, and I see this teaser and headline:

“I have never felt very comfortable with the stance that writing, as an undertaking, is both very difficult and emotionally intolerable”

In this edition of the Weekender: vows of silence, teenage idols, and exploring whether writing is actually torture.

So I read it.

Now I need to sit under the fan for a minute.

Here, you can read part of what Monica Heisey wrote.

i have never felt very comfortable with the stance, held by some writers, that writing as an undertaking is both very difficult and emotionally intolerable. while i understand there is plenty about being alone with your thoughts, sharing your ideas in public, and attempting to take something from inside your mind and bring it into the physical realm that is uncomfortable, it is not difficult like digging a ditch. it is not intolerable like having your heart broken, or even like having a sunburn. when people say things like “writing is torture,” i often think, if you really feel this way, why not do something else?

i encountered this line of thinking so frequently in the early days of my career that it occasionally caused me to doubt myself. i loved writing. i couldn’t believe i got to do it for a living, and found it, often, actively fun. did this mean i was doing it wrong, somehow? was there a more arduous and therefore more correct method that would lead me to create stronger work? if suffering for one’s art provided no special benefit, why were writers i admired constantly tweeting or appearing on panels to say their working life was hellish and exhausting?

to this day there is a little voice in the back of my mind that pops up once in a while to suggest i am shirking “real work” by enjoying myself. i was immensely soothed to see ali smith, an objectively wonderful writer with a prolific output, call herself “immensely lazy” in an interview at the hay festival, holding a beer and suggesting she doesn’t really work until she has a deadline and a paycheque scheduled, adding that she “does basically nothing until she has to” and considers staring into space an important part of the creative process. there, i thought watching it, is someone who is enjoying their working life.

WORK: it’s supposed to be fun – by monica heisey

Okay, look. I don’t want to attack this person. To each their own (Which is why I’m also not going to comment on the choice this writer made not to use capital letters), and I understand that, indeed, that is the intended point of this piece: not every writer, not every artist, has the same experience as every other. Valid. In some ways I have a much easier time with writing than a number of my fellow wordsmiths because I have a style and a platform that coheres with single draft composition: I get an idea, I go to my computer, I write something close to stream of consciousness, and I hit “Post” without rewriting. I do not, like many of my fellow writers, suffer from anxiety or depression, or struggle with addiction, or trauma. I’m glad that this writer has a generally good time, a generally pleasant experience, both as a writer and with her professional work. I do not think enjoying herself makes her writing worse, and I do not think that it is necessary to suffer for one’s craft, either as an artist or as a professional of any kind.

But hey lady: writing is fucking hard. It is fucking. Hard.

Like I said, I don’t mean to attack, and I don’t mean to judge. The piece does go on to show that the initial stance taken here is not the whole story, because of course it isn’t.

this is not to say that i do not have bad days, or that i am immune from complex feelings about, in particular, the “putting it out into the world” part of writing. in the last week of editing my most recent novel i dreamt every night about dying or being murdered or murdering someone else. one night i physically felt the tip of my nose touch the lid of my own coffin as it closed over me. it was not, let’s say, “chill.” but the actual writing, in the day, sat up in bed and combing through pages, killing only my darlings, was almost pure pleasure.

Okay, that makes more sense. Yes, I agree: writing does feel good when it is flowing, when it is working, when you’re able to see the thing you want to create and you have a path to get there and you can put one metaphorical foot in front of the other on the way towards creating that thing you want. Yes, I do often have fun with my work. I like (sometimes — not lately) reading what I have written in the past. I like laughing at my own jokes: I think I’m funny. I think I have a decent gift for writing the occasional banger of a sentence, and I like reading those when I hit the bullseye. I think that I have sometimes had something valuable to say, and I have said it clearly and well on this blog, and I am proud of that. I am somewhat mystified, but definitely gratified, to see that, despite my lack of production over the last year or two, and despite my constant whinging when I do manage to write something, people are still finding my blog and looking at my old posts. I am equally gratified to have people buy my books from me, and then, as they sometimes do, come back to tell me that they liked reading them. There are many things about writing that are pleasant, and they are certainly part of the reason why I keep doing this.

So I won’t judge you for wanting to focus on similar parts of your own experience. I won’t assume that my writing life is anything like yours, and so I won’t use mine as a standard to lecture you about yours and what you are doing right or what you are doing wrong. As I said: to each their own, and there is no particular reason why someone would have to suffer for their art — but I do understand the cliche that tells us that we should be suffering for our art, and I appreciate the way you question yourself in those terms. No, you are not doing it wrong, and you are not writing inferior art just because you are not suffering.

Oh look, the essay goes on. What else do you have to say on this?

so! four paragraphs of bragging about how i loooove to work and have sooo much fun doing it… this is insufferable, you are probably thinking. i hope this bitch gets back into her own coffin and stays there! give me a minute. i have tips.

Okay. Now. Now you are indeed become insufferable, but not because you have been writing about how much you love work and how much fun you have doing it: now you are insufferable because you have fucking tips.

Let me be clear about a couple of things. One, although I found this piece irksome because it goes some way to invalidating or at least devaluing and minimizing my own experience, I meant what I said: I won’t judge anyone else based on my experience, whether that means thinking they have it better or thinking they have it worse than me. I don’t know enough about another person to even have any opinions about their lives, let alone judge them. Two, I have thus far resisted the temptation to get snotty about the fact that she is young, and talk about how my life as a writer has been harder than hers, because I don’t know her life and because I don’t think it’s fair to use my age and longer lived experience to discredit a younger person’s understanding; and also, as I said, suffering is not a requirement for art, and so the fact that I have had a harder time as a writer than she apparently has doesn’t make me more of a writer. Three, I haven’t wanted to try to flex my writing ability in comparison to hers, nor to humble myself as a writer in comparison to her, because obviously being a good writer doesn’t change someone’s experience of life as a writer, and isn’t necessarily related to one’s process: some artists have the gift of easy production of work, and some of us struggle with every single thing we do; none of that changes good art, and none of it makes any of us less or more of an artist.

But she has tips. She has a newsletter, too. And that means she is not giving anyone else the grace that I am trying to give her: she is specifically telling me (Well, she is speaking to a faceless audience, not to me personally) that I am doing it wrong, and that she knows how to do it better, and if I read her posts — or even better, subscribe to her newsletter — then I can learn to be the same kind of writer that she is. More importantly, this shows that she is not an artist. She’s a hack.

Hold on. Let me sit under the fan for a minute, and cool off.

Nope: it’s not helping.

Okay, it helped a little: I take back the “hack” comment. I’ll explain that first, because I want to be clear about why this angers me so much; and then I want to talk about my own experience of writing. (Right here. Mark this moment. I’ll explain.)

There is a trend in the modern world — maybe an old trend, I don’t know, this is the only world I’ve lived in and been an artist in and been married to another artist in — of people claiming to be artists who are not in fact artists at all. I’m not trying to gatekeep art, by any means; but I think the meanings of words are important, and “artist” is a particularly important word, and therefore the meaning needs to be clear, even while it must be broad enough and inclusive enough to include any and all kinds of art. So here it is:

An artist is someone who defines themselves by their art.

Okay? That’s it, but it’s important, so let me explain — and hold on until the end of this, because I may either confuse you or piss you off, but I’m going somewhere, so come with me until we get there.

Someone who paints or draws for fun is not an artist. Someone who paints or draws for money is not an artist. Someone who teaches painting or drawing is not an artist. Someone who paints houses, or fills in coloring books, or doodles in the margins, is not an artist. Someone who uses drawing and painting as therapy, for themselves or for others, is not an artist.

An artist can be a person who does any of those things. I would assume that most artists do most of those things — certainly making work for fun should be part of the experience of being an artist no matter what the art is. I would hope that everyone who is an artist has the opportunity to make money with their art; it is magical when it happens. As a teacher, married to a former teacher, I think every artist who has the chance to teach their art is doing a good thing both for themselves and for the world. Hopefully we all experiment with various related tasks somehow connected to our art — I would certainly include reading AP Lang essays about napping as connected to my art as a writer, and my wife makes amazing doodles and also is goddamn good at painting houses. And hell yes, my art is therapeutic: why do you think I’m writing this, so I can make money from it? So I can get you to subscribe to my newsletter?

But to be an artist, your identity has to be tied to your art. It has to mean so much to you that it means you. If it doesn’t, it can be a lot of good things, and you can do a lot of good things with it — but it’s not art and you’re not an artist. I will add one caveat to that last comment, which is that art can come from surprising places, so people who are not artists can absolutely produce art, and even great art; and also that people’s identities change, so someone can be an artist for a time, and then change how they identify themselves, how they define themselves, and cease being an artist; that temporary condition is no more or less valid than my lifelong condition (Now it sounds like a disease — Ooo, did you hear? Dusty caught art. Oh man, poor guy.). But during that time, for you to be an artist, you have to see yourself as defined by that art.

I’m not going to get into what is art here; it’s any creative endeavor that, as I’ve been saying, defines the person who pursues it. Art is defined as much by the artist as the artist is defined by the art. It’s the self-definition that matters.

So the trend that is prevalent in the digital world and might have always been present is people who want to make money by calling themselves artists — not people who want to make a living with their art, and not someone who defines themselves as an artist also calling themselves an artist: but someone who is posing as an artist in order to make money. And what these people do is they create a program: a guide, some kind of how-to instruction manual, that tells other people who want to make money by calling themselves an artist, how to do that. And the number one way to do that is to create a program, a guide, some kind of how-to instruction manual on how to make money pretending to be an artist, and then sell it to other people who want to make money by pretending to be an artist.

I see it constantly: any forum, any interaction that connects writing to money, has at least one shmuck trying to shill their system by which they made some remarkable amount of money, and if you pay them money they will tell you the secret how they did it: and that’s the secret. They made a sales pitch to get people to pay them money to find out how to make money “with art.” But, as should be abundantly clear, these people are not artists: they are marketers. They are salespeople. They are, in my own colloquial lexicon, hacks. So now, when I see someone trying to tell me how to be an artist, how to be either successful or happy as an artist, especially someone who has a newsletter, I think, Hack.

Looking through this woman’s tips, I think she may not be a hack. I think she may actually be a writer: one of her tips is to read, and another is to write, and she has some points about not being too hard on yourself, which is all genuinely good advice for other writers. Sharing your own experience as an artist, even selling your own experience as an artist or using your experience as an artist in order to gain a following, are all valid things to do. As I have no experience of this woman’s work other than this one piece, I will try not to judge her too harshly for what seems to me like hackery but might not be. If she is an artist, then my problem is not with her, it is only with what she said here; so we’ll assume that, and let it go for now.

Now let me tell you why she is wrong.

Let me tell you why writing is fucking hard.

Because I never know. Never.

I never know if I should be writing, or not. Sometimes I try, and it doesn’t work, and I get incredibly frustrated and also caustically self-critical — because why the fuck can’t I write? Am I not smart? Am I not wordly (Should I use that word which is not a word? Will people even see that word, or will they just think I wrote “worldly” and skip past it? Have I made this point too obvious by adding this parenthetical?)? Am I not literate? Am I not creative? Do I not have good ideas? At my most generous, I will think I guess this just isn’t the time to write, and at my least I will think: Because I am not a writer. And when I think that — which is fairly frequently — it hurts. I do not want to be not a writer. I define myself as a writer. It matters to me.

But even though I am a writer, I never know if my writing is good. I never know if it is done, which is why I tend towards one-draft posting; because if I write it fast and then publish it fast, I push it away from me, and that way I don’t have to think about it any more, it’s already out there, it’s already published, I can’t make it any better, it has to be good enough. I never finish: I only surrender. And as I said, I sometimes like reading what I have written; but I don’t like how I always find flaws, or at least things I could have improved. Because then I know that I gave up too soon, that I should have kept working; and maybe that’s why I’m not successful, because I give up too soon, because I don’t revise and polish my work enough.

Because I am not a writer.

I have a thousand ideas. I never know which one is the right one to be working on. I never know which one is the right idea, and I never know what is the right time, and I never know what is the right thing to say, and I never know if I have said it or if I have said it well enough. I never know who my audience is or will be, and I never know how they will accept my writing, whether it will seem good to them or not, whether it will be meaningful or not, whether it will be right or not. That’s why I told you to mark that spot, up above: that was the moment when I thought, Ahhh, nobody wants to read that. Nobody wants to know what your experience of being a writer is. They don’t care. They won’t understand. I think that, or some version of it, every single time I write. Am I right about that? Am I wrong? I never know. And if somebody reads my work, and they tell me it was good and meaningful and right, I don’t know why, and I don’t know how to do it again. I never know. I’m always guessing, always taking a chance, especially when I publish my work; because there’s always the chance that I’m wrong, that I did it wrong, that the work is bad or ineffective: that it is not the art I wanted to produce. And that matters to me, it matters to me if the work is not what it should have been, what it could have been if I had worked harder, or if I had thought more, or if I had greater innate skill or more training or more practice or — I don’t know what. I never know what is lacking. But I know that something always is.

Because I am not a writer.

That’s what I end up telling myself. If I were a writer, then I would know. Then I would be sure. Sometimes I think that’s a matter of innate skill or intelligence, because I didn’t do the thing that great writers do, and create THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL when I was in my 20s; sometimes I think it’s a matter of the choices I have made, and the choices I have not been able to make, in my life. I became a teacher because I didn’t think I could write successful novels fast enough to make a living with them right out of college, and I wanted to make a living, so I chose to do something other than writing: and for the last three decades, I have thought that maybe that was the wrong choice. Maybe I could have been a writer if I had tried to do that and nothing else.

But also, I know there are other factors. I couldn’t be a journalist, for instance, because I’m an introvert, so I suck at interviewing people and finding sources and networking and all the rest of that; I didn’t go into film or television writing because I grew up loving books even more than movies or TV. I don’t know if there’s any reason for that, but that’s been my experience, so my writing career has been slow, because I write novels. I have written six, and started several more. And I am still a teacher.

I tried to make a living out of my writing. I tried submitting stories to magazines, and I tried submitting my novels to agents and to publishers. I have never gotten anything other than rejection. Once — once — an agent liked the first six pages I sent them, and asked to see the first 50 pages of my novel; I sent them 50 pages… and they rejected it. (I first wrote “They rejected me.” Which should I say, here? Should I show the self-confidence to recognize that rejection of my work is not rejection of me as a person or as an artist? Or should I say what it felt like, what it always feels like? I know that everyone’s advice is to keep submitting, to never give up, to always send your work in and never take rejection personally. I know that. And I still wrote “They rejected me.” Because that’s how I feel. Should I not feel that way? Maybe I’m doing it all wrong. I guess it’s because I am not a writer.)

I don’t regret becoming a teacher; I am incredibly proud of what I have accomplished as a teacher, the difference I have made in the lives of my students, the ways I have had a positive impact on the world; if I had gone directly into writing and made a career of it, I think I would struggle with not having given back to the world in the way I think I have as a teacher. By the same token, I’m never sorry that I made the life I have: I do not regret moving to the places I have moved, even though I never moved to New York City so I could immerse myself in the writing life. I do not regret the time and energy I have put into being a pet parent, and I am absolutely and always happy with my choice of life partner, because my wife is the best thing in my world, followed by my pets.

But see, maybe if I didn’t have those things, I would be a better writer. Maybe I would have been able to focus more, or been more driven; maybe I would have spent more time, when I was younger and more energetic or more confident or didn’t sometimes struggle with words or didn’t have so many doubts or so many obligations or so many difficult things to deal with — maybe I could have succeeded. Maybe that’s why I am not a writer.

I never know. I never know what I am, or what I am not, or why I got to be this way, or how to change it. I have ideas, and I have feelings, and I have inspirations, and I have despairs: but I never know.

But I still keep trying to write. To be a writer.

That’s why I AM a writer.

That’s why I am an artist. I define myself by my art, by my work, by my ambitions to keep making work, to make better work, to make more work. But because I never know what I’m doing, it’s so goddamn hard to keep coming back to it and trying. I mean, if I had all the time and money in the world, maybe it wouldn’t be hard; and if I knew that a million people would read my work and love it no matter what I wrote, then it wouldn’t be hard; and if I didn’t fucking care, then it wouldn’t be hard.

But none of those things are true. What is always true is: I never know. So it’s always hard. It’s always hard to make myself do this. Even when it’s fun, which it often is, and even when I’m proud of my work, which I often am, and even when I have had some success, which I have had, at least a little, it is still hard to make myself write. Because I never know.

So spare me, Ms. Heisey. I don’t want to attack you, because all this means is that I wasn’t the right audience for your post. I hope the right audience finds it, and I hope it is good and meaningful and right to them. It was not, to me. And I would leave it at that, let your work fly past me to where it belongs — except you tried to tell me how I could live more like you, you tried to give me advice. But you don’t have any idea what this experience of being a writer is like to me, even though you presume to know, and I find that annoying. So spare me.

Let me also stick in here the part that really makes me angry about this, and the reason why I’m not just letting this go: it’s the privilege. I’m glad that this person doesn’t go through what so many artists go through: so many of us deal with depression and anxiety, with mental health issues, with trauma, with addictions; I have none of those, and my life as an artist is still hard. The simple fact of the stress in my life, which is not inconsiderable, makes everything to do with my art even more difficult on top of the difficulties of being an artist that I have tried to show here; I haven’t mentioned all the shit going on right now, which is making everything hard. To go through everything that I go through, AND to suffer as mental illness or trauma make us suffer? Those people, those artists, who deal with that are the strongest fucking people in the world. Everyone who has mental illness or trauma or both, and who nonetheless pursue their life’s goals, are the strongest fucking people in the world. And while that’s certainly not exclusive to artists, it is prevalent among artists, largely because artists are frequently more sensitive and observant and contemplative of the world and our place in it (Is that because we are artists, or are we artists because of that? Egg or chicken?), and I assume also because art is in fact excellent therapy, and because one of the most therapeutic aspects of art is the way it helps us to understand and to connect with our fellow humans so that we can feel less alone, which is so very necessary for someone struggling with mental health or trauma or both. So yeah, a lot of artists have trauma and mental health issues; a lot of people with trauma and mental health issues become artists. And for you to fucking sit there and pull out this, “Ummm, you guys, art is supposed to be fun! If it’s not fun you’re doing it wrong!” That makes me mad. That makes me want to say things to you, and about you, that are not nice. But all I will say directly is this: check your privilege.

Maybe when you have collected more experiences like mine, you will understand more why those of us who say that art is hard keep saying that; maybe when you do, if you do, you will want to read something written by someone who knows why art is hard, why it is always hard. Maybe you’ll even read this. Maybe it will be interesting, and meaningful, and right.

I’ll never know.

Brave New World Aftermath: Can’t we all just get along?

Dusty Leave a comment

Image result for brave new world

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World  is a classic dystopian novel.

In which everyone is happy.

It’s quite wonderfully insidious; usually a dystopian novel shows us a world where no one is happy, and challenges us to find a way to imagine happiness in it: in 1984, everyone suffers all the time, until Winston Smith tries to find a way to, well, live, laugh, and love; the jackboots of Big Brother and the Thought Police stomp that dream out of him. In Fahrenheit 451, the people are committing suicide and killing each other, while screaming at their television sets and cringing away from their devilish firemen; but when Clarisse McClellan tries to think for herself, she is vanished (and probably killed), and when Guy Montag wants to read books instead of burning them, he is arrested and forced to murder his former friend and then run for his life. In The Handmaid’s Tale, happiness is not the thing; purity is. Nobody gives a shit about happiness, and so that’s exactly what they get: shit happiness.

But in Brave New World, when John the Savage wants to be different from the people of the Brave New World, he demands the right to be sad and miserable and angry. And then he is chased out of society, because everyone there is happy, and no one has the freedom to frown, so to speak. Really, no one has the freedom to be alone, which is probably the more disturbing part; that is a common thread in all four books, and I think in all dystopias; everyone is watched, all the time, and it’s horrifying.

I should point out here that we are also watched all the time, and it’s no less horrifying for being real; but there is still some difference for us: the government has the ability to watch us all the time, but they don’t actually care about what 99% of us do.  And while our friends and neighbors are in our business every day, it’s usually because we put our business on social media, or on the grapevine. We still, generally speaking, have the option of privacy. Corporations building data profiles of us are involved in every second of our day that they can be, and that’s probably the most ominous; but really, they just want to sell us shit, so while it’s creepy that the Facebook ads reflect what we were just thinking or talking about, it’s nothing more than something to scroll past. At some point the corporations will realize that they can create markets for their products by screwing with us; that’s when it will get bad. It’s also incredibly dangerous that the data collected on each of us could very easily be turned over to the government (I was going to write “seized by,” but really, what corporation would ever say no to Uncle Sam come looking for intel? They can still sell things to people under NSA surveillance, after all. Maybe rotate some ads for firearms or “Don’t Tread On Me” flags into their feeds.), because the government is certainly willing to screw with us; but as of this moment, to quote the Doors, “They got the guns, but we got the numbers,” and so these tools are not yet  effective. Certainly something to watch out for.

But in the Brave New World, the people don’t have to watch out, they don’t have to suspect their government: they are happy. All of them. All the time. The Big Speech — another common thread through all these books, and perhaps in some form in all dystopian novels, as every dystopian novel has a message to give, and an important one, so the authors don’t want to take a chance on us missing it — given by World Controller Mustapha Mond (Huxley was a brilliant writer, but really, his names are lame. The use of Communist/Socialist names — Marx, “Lenina,” Trotsky — is annoyingly on the nose, and while it’s kinda clever that Mustapha in Arabic means “chosen” or “selected,” the fact that “Mond” means “world” and Mond controls the world… well.) at the end of the novel explains why the society of Brave New World chose happiness and stability over freedom and progress: because there was a terrible war, and afterwards, people wanted to be safe. So they chose to create a stable, safe society, and the only way to do that was to make everyone happy, all the time — or rather, maybe the goal was to achieve happiness for everyone, and the only way to do that was to make sure society was stable, was safe, was static. Every aspect controlled, nothing left to chance.

The result? A society where everyone is designed to be happy. Where the people are cloned, genetically and chemically modified, conditioned and trained from birth to have specific needs and specific wants and specific fears and specific aversions, all of that intended simply to make them happy with their life exactly as it is. They are built to do specific tasks in society, to enjoy simple things like sex, sports, and soma, the wonder euphoria drug that eliminates all chance negative emotions, and never to want to do or be anything other than exactly what they are.

And I read this, and I think: are they right?

Isn’t a happy, stable society better than one that has misery and suffering? Even if, as John the Savage (The one person in the society born to be a part of society, but not raised in it, so not controlled by it) argues — rightly, I think — that sorrow is necessary for tragedy, which is necessary for great art and great genius? Do we really need art and genius? It seems like a reasonable argument to say that most people would prefer to be happy, rather than great, and that happiness — contentment — seems much more likely to make us productive and useful members of society, and to ensure the continuation of the species. Aren’t those the goals?

Even if they aren’t, isn’t the loss of freedom worth the great benefit that the society actively seeks in the novel: the elimination of war? There is not a doubt in my mind that war is the greatest evil, the most abhorrent atrocity, that humanity has ever created or faced; what price should we be willing to pay to free us of it?

After reading this book — though it did genuinely give me pause and make me think twice, and then a couple more times after that — I think the answer is No. No, the price of safety and stability is not worth it. No, the goal is not simply happiness and contentment for all people at all times. Even, I think at least half of the time, if we achieved the end of war.

Because what makes war such an abomination is that it degrades our humanity. In addition to creating or multiplying every other horror we face — death, famine, pestilence, cruelty, greed, deception, hysteria, you name it and war is where you will find it more often and to a greater degree than anywhere else — war takes away everything that ennobles us. In the midst of famine, we can find unmatched ingenuity, and inconceivable endurance, and breathtaking altruism and generosity and self-sacrifice; in the midst of plague, we find kindness and grace and dignity in the midst of and because of the suffering; and so on, through all of it.

But war does quite the opposite. War makes kind people cruel, and healthy people sick, and civilized people into savages. War is the triumph of inhumanity over humanity.

But so is the Brave New World. Because whatever those people are, they are not human. Humans are not designed, and humans are not crafted and shaped like pottery on a wheel, and humans are not set into a groove out of which they will never skip. Humans cannot be perfectly ordered: we are chaos, we create chaos. It’s one of the reasons we are so good at war, because we are so very, very good at destroying things. Especially ourselves. We’re good at building — or else there wouldn’t be any targets for war to aim at — but we’re even better at burning it all down.

And that’s necessary. Because without destroying what is there now, you would never be able to build anything new. Creation implies destruction, but it is valuable  when destruction is for the purpose of creation, when it is part of a continuing cycle: whereas if we end destruction, and end creation too (The people in the book are not created as humans are, through the act of love and the processes of nature; they are built like machines, which is origination, but not, I would argue, creation — and I’m not even touching on the religious argument, which would be a much more poetic way to say the same thing), what we achieve is — stasis. The end of movement.

Death. And not a death that continues the circle of life, giving rise to something new to replace what is lost; here nothing is lost, and so nothing can replace it. Everything is just — still. Stopped. Perfectly motionless, without growth, without progress, without change. Which is no less dead than death itself. And while I will often argue that progress for the sake of progress is cancerous and absurd and deadly, I certainly wouldn’t prefer the final end of all progress.

Not even if it made me happy.

 

I do not think that this means we need to accept war. I still believe it is the extreme end, the Ultima Thule, of human malignancy; which means we can draw back from it, lessen it, even essentially eliminate it; though it is probably also true that some shadow, some residue, will always remain to harm and torment us. It is in our nature: not that we are made to war, but that we are made to try and reach and explore and find new ways to do things, and one of the ways to do things is to go to war; so even if we forgot it, we would rediscover it again, and again. Curiosity killed the cat, and we are forever curious. But just as more freedom and individuality is better than less, even if it is an imperfect freedom and individuality (which is what we have now), less war and more peace is better than the reverse. So I think there is a goal, and a way to achieve it, without also losing everything that we are.

I also recognize that there are events and actions that might be labeled war, but are not the horrors I’ve been describing; there are times when people have taken up arms to put an end to the horrors, when military intervention is the only way to save people. I don’t want to use the phrase “police action,” because Vietnam was a lie and the police as saviors is a fraught idea anyway; but there are times when force is both necessary and humanely applied. Someone who uses force to defend themselves or another from an attacking force has done nothing wrong. I don’t mean to either denigrate that, nor argue that even that should be (or could be) eliminated; that is the shadow and the residue of war that probably should remain — though ideally, since that sort of violence is triggered by the inhumane violence of dictatorship and oppression and vast chaotic upheavals, if we could end those, we wouldn’t need to send the Marines to intervene. But I’m not sure we could end those, either, because I think having the good and valuable tool of a defensive force can very quickly be turned to evil purposes (Which is why the Founding Fathers of this country pushed for a militia and abhorred the idea of a standing army — COUGH COUGH LOOKING AT YOU, MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX), and then the solution becomes the problem. So it goes. We can’t close Pandora’s box.

So no. I don’t think we can live like the Brave New World. (And let me point out that, we discover, neither can they, not entirely, because there are people who don’t fit their molds, and who cause problems, and who are eventually exiled; Mustapha Mond is grateful that there are so many islands in the world to send misfit toys to — but that’s not a  solution, it’s just pretense.) I don’t think we can all just get along.

But I think we can get by. And get to be ourselves. And that’s probably better. Because that way we get to have art and beauty and truth — and that, I think, is really the point.

Shakespeare, as usual, (and as Huxley himself recognized) probably said it best:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

The Brave New World, for us, is wondrous because of the people in it; it is brave because it faces turmoil and tribulation and suffering; it is new because it moves through the cycle of destruction and creation. It lives, and it changes, and it grows. Like us.

In the book, the quote is used ironically. We have to make it true.

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.

Who Goes There?

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I am an atheist: start from there. There is no God, no higher power, no consciousness directing the universe. Everything that happens, happens because of random chance, multiplied by time. The essential symbol of my worldview is the Big Bang: everything that exists came from an explosion.

So then how do things make sense?

How does an explosion create a stable planet, in a stable solar system, at the Goldilocks distance from the sun, with liquid water and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere? With a tilted axis and an oversized moon allowing for seasons and tides? How does an explosion, nothing more than energy added to matter, create life? How does that life continue to exist long enough for evolution to take place, which eventually leads to – me? How can I be sitting in my air-conditioned living room, next to my dog (who is lying on his back waiting for tum rubs [He gets a good skritch every time I pause. Like now.]), typing these words in English on my laptop computer, drinking coffee with half-and-half and stevia and and cinnamon-flavored honey – because of an explosion?

People of faith see the answer to these questions clearly: the answer is God. We are surrounded by miracles, and there is no clearer evidence of the existence of a benevolent creator. People have been reaching that same conclusion independently for tens of thousands of years, all the way back to the people who were buried with Earth Mother figurines, and those who raised Stonehenge or made the heads on Easter Island. We look at the amazing world we live in, and we assume it had to come from someone or something divine.

But there is no God: that is the starting assumption. So then how?

I hear people say, “Let go, and let God.” I mock it, because I find the idea of surrendering free will, of one’s own free will, inconceivable. I hate being told what to do. I hate trusting someone else to figure things out for me. If I could, I would grow my own food, fix my own car, whittle my own furniture. I have been struggling recently because in the upcoming school year, I have been instructed to use a pre-determined curriculum, one detailed and prescribed down to two-minute intervals, scripted and designed and carefully laid out in every way. Oh, I’ve been told that I can, and should, adapt it to my own preferences; but my preference is to chuck the entire thing out of a moving car, preferably into the midst of a brawl between switchblade-wielding badgers. I don’t want to teach what someone else tells me to to teach. I have never liked that, and I have never done it: other than some small things here and there, an idea for a lesson, a single handout, I have never followed anyone else’s plan for a class (Except for one: I taught David Schmor’s Speech class, pretty much start to finish; his assignments, his lectures, his grading methods. But that says more about how well David designs a class than it does about my predilections. We’ll call it the exception that proves the rule.). Whenever problems arise in my life, I handle them, either by myself or with my wife by my side: two of us against the world. I don’t like the idea of relying on anyone else: certainly not on God, whom I don’t believe in and wouldn’t trust if I did.

But how can I do that? How can I create everything I do as a teacher out of my own head? I was a terrible high school student – skipped or slept through many of my classes, never did the work, passed because of a good memory and a love of reading, and with the mercy of more than one teacher. I didn’t learn anything in my teacher-preparation program, except from the time I spent student teaching – which I largely did on my own; that is to say, I got advice and feedback from my master teachers, but I designed the lessons, I taught the material, I graded the work. I read pedagogical textbooks with an eye so jaundiced it’s nearly blind; whenever I take any teacher training workshop, I either don’t pay attention or I don’t do what I’m told. So how on Earth am I a good high school teacher? Where did that come from?

It’s nearly the same thing when I write. I have never really studied writing, other than as literature I have read; I’ve never had a writing mentor. I don’t edit: the first draft is pretty much the final draft. I don’t think much about what I’m writing in advance; I plan out my novels pretty extensively, but my blogs? I just pick a theme, think of an opening, and go. When I hit the last sentence, I post it On top of that, I’m generally pretty damned lazy, and unfocused: I am one of those people who pick up new hobbies and put them down again right away, because I’d rather be playing video games. How did I get to be a good writer? Where did this ability come from? Not from my parents, who are both intelligent but non-creative. I have writers in my family tree, but are creativity and writing acumen really genetic?

The miracles that surround us aren’t just natural: this morning as I stood in my shower, hot water streaming over me, sluicing away the shampoo and soap, looking at the tile walls, glass window, wood and brick house, electric lights, municipal water supply and sewers, I thought about: how could people possibly create all this? Particularly what has been added to our world, in terms of capability, of convenience, of complexity, all in the last century? A hundred years ago, if I had the running water (Never happen on a teacher’s salary then – but would I have been a teacher 100 years ago?), it wouldn’t have been hot, and I wouldn’t have had the electric lights, the coffeemaker, the refrigerator (Maybe an icebox), the computer, the dog adopted from the animal shelter. Just 100 years ago. My grandparents were there. How have human beings been capable of creating all of this? Did we have guidance? Divine inspiration? Can we create because we were made in the image of a creator? And if not (Not, indeed), how?

When one of the millions of the faithful “lets go and lets God –” what happens? Who goes there? Things don’t stop happening, and the lives of those who put their faith in God do not fall apart in a spectacular collapse; things often work out just fine. It’s like someone’s guiding them, making things work out. So if it isn’t God (And it isn’t. Spoiler alert: this writing is not leading to my spontaneous conversion.), then who is steering the ship? Starting from my basic assumption of atheism, of a universe without a creator; who or what makes things work out for the best?

My wife and I have adopted two dogs from shelters, one in California and the second here in Tucson. Both of our dogs have been absolutely lovely: very smart, very loving, almost no trouble to train and care for. In neither case could we possibly have predicted, when we chose them and brought them home, that those dogs could have been the sweet, wonderful companions they both proved to be. And we frequently ask ourselves: How did we get so lucky?

I’ve been reading The Watchmen, and one of my favorite moments in the book is when Dr. Manhattan, a man-turned-divine being who is trying to decide if he should save corrupt and fallible humanity, tells his former (and very human) sweetheart that he longs to see a thermodynamic miracle: an event so unlikely that is is effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously turning into gold. He says that he has realized, in talking to her, that he is in the presence of one such event: her. The chances of her parents coming together to make a child; of one particular sperm out of hundreds of millions uniting with one specific egg; of that zygote’s survival to become a child; of her upbringing and life experience turning her into the woman she is, and of her meeting and loving (and being loved by) Dr. Manhattan, a blue-skinned superbeing who can see neutrinos – that’s a miracle. Every human being is a miracle, Manhattan says; and he decides he will save humanity because of that.

I’ve used a similar example with my students. I met my wife Toni at Cabrillo Community College in Santa Cruz, California. She worked in the bookstore for her workstudy, and I had a job one semester taking ID photos, in the cafeteria upstairs from the bookstore. The IDs were $8, and so I always had to get change; I went down to the bookstore to get it. That’s how we met.

But look at the probabilities involved. Toni didn’t go to college right out of high school; like me, her academic transcript was spotty at best. She chose to enter the world of employment, where she did quite well for several years. She decided to leave a perfectly acceptable middle-class lifestyle, one that would have satisfied millions of Americans, and go back to school to study art. She decided to start her education at the community college; she decided to go full-time, and leave her job, which is how she ended up working in the bookstore. If she had gone to school earlier, or later, or if she’d kept her full-time job or gone to work in the registrar’s office instead of the bookstore, we’d never have met. Me, I wanted to go to UCSC because I wanted to study creative writing, and because my father, who worked at Stanford at the time, had a friend who taught physics at UCSC, who told my father, who told me, that they had a good creative writing program. He showed me the town on one visit, and so I decided to go there. But my grades were terrible, and so I couldn’t get in to UCSC. But rather than choose one of the thousands of other schools – rather than stay in Massachusetts, where I grew up – rather than join the Peace Corps or start a grunge-rock garage band, I decided to go to the community college in Santa Cruz, 3,000 miles away from the place where I lived, with no better recommendation for the university I had decided on than the word of my dad’s friend, for two years before transferring to UCSC. Except then my Cabrillo counselor screwed up, and my general ed. program turned into three years, instead of two.

I met Toni during that third year.

How did this absurd chain of events (And it goes farther: I had just ended a relationship about a month before meeting her. What if I hadn’t? Our first conversation ever featured me acting like an idiot, mumbling and stumbling through every sentence; what if she hadn’t wanted to speak to me again? What if, what if, what if?) come to pass, and lead eventually to my finding the love of my life, my soulmate? It’s no wonder people decide that fate is real, or karma, or God. What other explanation makes sense?

When people pray, and then hear the voice of God tell them the answer, what voice is that? Something tells them what to do, where to go, how to act; something gives them the solution to their problems, the inspiration they need to create something new and revolutionary, or the comfort to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. If it’s not God, then what is it?

It’s not God. That I’m sure of. So you know what I’ve decided it is? What is responsible for humanity’s incredible accomplishments, and our unbelievable resilience, and adaptability? The reason we can handle anything put before us? The force that makes our world full of wonders, that brings long chains of coincidences into some kind of order?

It’s us. We do these things ourselves. Because we’re fucking awesome.

How can I teach well, without any resources other than my own brain? Because I’m just that good. How do I write well? Because I’m a genius, and because I read the writing of other geniuses, and I pay attention. I am standing on the shoulders of giants, but they are tall because they stand on others’ shoulders – not because God raised them up. Human beings made the miracles, not the other way around.

How did Toni and I get to be the couple we are? The actual meeting had some dumb luck to it, but mostly, we made it happen because we wanted to. She chose to speak to me, and then she chose to speak to me again; eventually, I broke through my awkward shell, and she saw how awesome I am.

How did we get awesome dogs? Because dogs are awesome, and we treat them well and appreciate them for what they are.

How can people handle whatever terrible trials that life throws at us? By being absolutely incredible, strong and determined and intelligent and resilient.

We are incredible. We can do anything. There is no God: we need no God. We are enough, and more. We are.

So the next time your life seems about to overwhelm and drown, remember: remember what humans have done, remember what humans can do. You can do it. You’re human. You’re awesome.

No better way to close this than with the collaborative work of several of my all-time favorite creative humans.