Seams

One of my teachers described a novel as a long piece of writing with a flaw in it. I’m not sure whether she meant us to examine our favorite novels for their flaws, or to pre-exonerate us from the inevitable mistakes we would make. Either way the thought stuck. I get a bit obsessed with perfection—thinking that is the armor against failure. It isn’t.

One of the reasons I frequent art museums is because I am constantly reminded that there isn’t one perfect work of art, or rather, that there are thousands of works that are perfect. My Sunday strolls take me from Kandinsky’s Succession to Raphael’s Alba Madonna. I need that reminder because I have a horrible time making peace with the imperfections—the flaws—in my work.

They are As Time Goes By (red) and As Time Goes By (blue), each is 8 x 20 feet.

Right now I am taking particular delight in two painting/prints at the Phillips Collection. The two monumental works—each takes up the better part of a wall—are by the British artist, Howard Hodgkin. They are As Time Goes By (red) and As Time Goes By (blue). Each is a print made across five panels of handmade paper with substantial over-painting. They echo each other and diverge in some wonderful ways (the primary being their predominant colors). I pointed out to one of the docents that these works give the neurodivergent mind quite a lot to play with with. The docent kindly, and as a kindred spirit, agreed.

These are the first (of five) panels of the prints hanging on opposite sides of the room. How do you know they are “prints”? You can see that many of the color patches are not just similar, their placement and shapes are the same. The colors differ to be sure, and there is more than a fair amount of hand painting as well that distinguishes the two. I spent more than a bit of time between the two enjoying the interplay of same and different.

Looking closer at the work, specifically, the shadows the blue painting cast on the wall behind it, I noticed that the seams between the panels are not perfectly aligned. Putting these large pieces together must have been a challenge. When asked about them, Hodgkin said, “They’re big to show that I can do it, despite everything. It’s not a very noble reason, but having been ill with this extremely sinister illness, I felt challenged…It’s the last time I’ll do anything like this…it’s hard work.”

Any work should be a challenge. Sometimes we chalk excellence up to genius, and while I never want to diminish the role of an artist’s peculiar talent—their genius—what distinguishes most work, even beyond the perfection, is the challenge of making—and then seeing—a particular work. As Time Goes By embodies this, because what looks haphazard—like water balloons of paint burst onto paper—is the culmination of precise tactical effort. The artist even made these huge sheets (each sheet is 8’ x 4’) of paper.

What stands out is that in some places Hodgkin painted across the seam, and in others the painting or printing took place on each sheet separately. Do I think the imperfection—the two sheets in the blue not quite matching up—was intentional? A friend once looked at one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings and noticed a daub of brownish paint. “He left it in.” Maybe. Well, he did, but what would removing it have done to the painting. I don’t know why Hodgkin left an uneven seam in his work, and whether it was intentional or not seems to miss the point. The work was hard to make, so much to manage, and the mild misalignment may—may—point to the difficulty of making the piece.

Personally, I love this rough seam, and these two companioned works. But I also love that they are a combination of printing and painting. There are distinct repetitions and distinctly different additions. One might go so far as to say that all his work—all any artist’s work—bears this hallmark. Yes, there are changes. In another gallery at the Phillips there are three works by Picasso—all distinctly “Picasso” and yet and different.

I am aware that I write the same things over and over again. Yes, there are variations and the variations matter, but I do this to show (to myself, to the world) that I can do it, and to express the varieties of experience. The work takes time—no one wrote a novel in a night—and the effort is central to the writing (and the reading). I do it to show myself—and the world—I can. Hodgkin’s work buoys my spirit; it is a challenge worth the effort.

Confluences: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

“This is the west. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

John Wayne as Tom Doniphon and Jimmy Stewart as Ransom Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I finally saw John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I saw it in a theater, with a fairly full house. I saw it two days after watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, and I was surprised by the similarities in the two movies. Either Ford was making a modern myth, or Nolan was making a mythological Western. I think I’m leaning toward the latter.

Both films center on the personal conflicts of their protagonists: Tom Doniphon and Odysseus. The heroes burn down their homes (literally and figuratively). After what they have done, they can’t go back home. What did they do?

Tom Doniphon lives Shinbone, and life in this frontier outpost is definitely not romantic. Cattle barons hire men to terrorize the townspeople. Tom describes one of these hired guns, Liberty Valance, as “the toughest man south of the Picketwire—next to me.” Except, tough as Tom might be, he does not act to stop Liberty Valance. Only when Ransom Stoddard appears and insists on law (an idea he brings in a satchel full of law books from the somewhere back east), does Tom take action. He kills Valance and lets Ransom take credit, which marks the end of a West governed by rough justice of gunfights, and the beginning of a time of law.

This doesn’t mean that the characters will not pine for that time. The movie begins with Ransom and his wife, Hallie, returning to Shinbone to attend Doniphon’s funeral. Has passed without notice; his body is in a plain pine box and he is remembered by only a handful of the town’s populace. Ransom’s return is news because he has gone onto serve as the unnamed state’s governor and senator, as well as the United States ambassador to Great Britain. When Hallie praises her husband, “It was a wilderness. Now it’s a garden. Aren’t you proud?” She means it. This is an achievement. But she also shows a heavy nostalgia—for Tom and the time that was. I suspect that we feel the same way.

Doniphon’s sacrifice—killing Liberty and giving Ransom the credit—erases him from the movie. He leaves Shinbone, the incipient state, and Hallie (the woman he loves) to Ransom because he knows that Ransom can provide something worth reading and writing about. Except, in the end, what we want to read and write about is heroes like him. His presence looms over all the characters who remember him.Their lives have been diminished by his erasure, even if their lives are better. Tom Doniphon understood the trade.

Matt Damon as Odysseus in The Odyssey

In Nolan’s The Odyssey, a law already exists. Zeus’s law—xenia, the rule of hospitality—declares that “suppliants are sacred” (as Nausicaa reminds her father in the poem). This is an extension of the Homer provides in the poem. “Strangers” and “suppliants” are sacred; Penelope and Telemachus endure the suitors because they are bound by a dictum that all guests be fed. In the poem there are limits. Athena advises Telemachus that if Odysseus returned, “a blood wedding, a quick death would take the lot!” Guests have obligations as well.

Other than Zeus’s law, the gods are mostly absent from the film. Athena appears, but not as the wily trickster-warrior of the poem. Nolan’s film is particularly human-focused, in spite of the presence of the Cyclops, Circe, Charybdis, the sirens, and the armor-clad giant Laestrygonians. These are obstacles mortals must overcome by fight, flight, or sacrifice. Gods do not intercede. Hermes does not provide Odysseus with an herb that protects him from Circe’s potions. Leucothea does not tie her magic scarf around Odysseus’s waist. Athena does not send the salvo of the suitors spears wide of the mark during the slaughter in the hall.

Odysseus and his men are human. They may follow Zeus’s law and they may be aware that Poseidon will punish them for blinding Polyphemus, but they live and suffer in human terms—drowning as they wait inside the horse and needing to forage for food on the way home. On Ithaca rumors of “people from the sea”—not rumors of displeased gods—threaten the peace. And when Tiresias counsels that only the “gods say only you make it home,” Odysseus answers, “Then I defy the gods.”

By limiting the role of the gods, Nolan focuses on human experience. Odysseus bears the costs of war. He questions Agamemnon’s motivation for going to war on Troy, suggesting that is as much for trade as to reclaim the wife (Helen) and honor of Menelaus (Agamemnon’s brother). Calypso drugs Odysseus, first to help heal him, then as a way of keeping him, but also as a kindness. Odysseus’s memories of the sacking of Troy are more of a wound than the physical ones he suffered on the sea.

Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus in The Odyssey

He is much like Tom Doniphon, but unlike Doniphon, he is not preparing the world for a garden. In Nolan’s film Odysseus leaves Ithaca because he feels that he has broken Zeus’s law and not because Telemachus is a better, wiser king. In the poem Odysseus is also charged with an exile/exodus, but this is not a journey toward the west, but inland, to a people who mistake his well-planed oar for a fan to aid in the harvest. Odysseus must make this pilgrimage not to make amends for tricking the Trojans in a way that transgressed Zeus’s law, but because he has failed, repeatedly, to bring the men under his charge back home to Ithaca.

Maybe Telemachus will feel an irrevocable nostalgia for the days when his father could kill the suitors, the same way Hallie, Ransom, and a few others feel nostalgia for Doniphon and the erstwhile wilderness. However, Doniphon and Nolan’s Odysseus both recognize what they have done, and willingly pay the price that their actions demand. Let me note that unlike Ford’s Doniphon, Nolan’s Odysseus is accompanied by Penelope when he leaves his home. Nolan can’t quite make his hero suffer alone.

Comparing these works, Ford’s seems more honest and prescient. We (Americans) still harbor a romanticism about the Wild West, and a predilection for savage displays of strength. He acknowledges the trade Doniphon makes in allowing Ransom to don the mantle of the hero while he leaves the story. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus trades the slaughter of the suitors to give his son a fresh start. However, Telemachus is not ushering in a new law to Ithaca. He is neither visionary nor heroic. Nolan shows him to be a middling fighter at best—well beneath his father’s ability. How will he distinguish himself as king? What has Odysseus’s sacrifice and exile left behind?

Maybe the comparison is unfair, after all these are different films separated by almost 65 years. But they are both movies about legends, law, and sacrifice. Ford shows that after the sacrifices, we can build something new and recognizably better, even if we ache for what was. We have to learn to live with the ache. Nolan’s film shows that there is only loss, that memory is undefeatable. Odysseus and Penelope sail away much as Frodo did at the end of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, the world saved, but not for him. But what has Odysseus saved in Nolan’s epic? Is there anything worth saving?

Dream (part other)

At some point last night I had a dream in which I was moving through something—a series of roads or alleys in a city. In the hours before sleep I had watched Scary Movie with my daughter, an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the opening sequence of Ready Player One. My brain was tuned to something like race and chase. In the dream I said to myself, or was told by one of my fellow travelers (who, of course, was still a part of me) that I should know where to go since I had made the maze or laid out the roads or alleys. It was, after all, my dream.

I had gone to sleep reminding myself about an idea I had about a scene I had worked on in the previous week. The scene felt unduly exposition-heavy, which pulled the moment in the novel out of the “vivid and continuous dream” necessary for fiction. I decided to leap over the explanation by allowing the narrator to puncture the narrative—which she has been doing all along. The novel takes place in her head—her memories, thoughts, and concerns as the story progresses. So, when asked how she reached a conclusion, instead of telling how she did it, she dissects the art of conclusion.

I guess I have a few points here. First, whatever you feed yourself image, word, or idea-wise is going to reverberate consciously and unconsciously in your mind. This can be a distraction or a benefit. You don’t always (ever?) know which it will be. Your subconscious will occasionally guide your conscious choices, so be aware of that as well. Call it intuition, call it luck, but know that there is a call.

Second, the same way you sleep every day, diving back into the dream world, replenishing the image and idea bank and recharging your batteries, you should write every day. The sleeping dreams feed the waking dreams and the waking dreams feed the sleeping ones. The cycle and connection are unavoidable, and if you avoid either, you do so at creative peril. Trust the conversation between the waking and sleeping dream; it can keep you from getting stuck or blocked.

And third, even when you tap into that great river of the subconscious, you get to shape what flows out onto the page. While you may feel out of control or at the mercy of forces larger than yourself in any particular moment, you are the author of work. Yes, there are forces beyond your control: the weather for instance. Navigate around bad weather. Shouting at the storm is a particularly ineffective madness.

And storms will come—from outside and from within. You cannot control that. All you can do is decide how you will respond—what you put on the page and that you continue putting something on the page.

Is this true for how you lead your life as well? Perhaps. I know too many writers for whom the page was the only place they found some control that I am reluctant to suggest that we are the authors of our lives. We may be, but it is a far trickier proposition. To extend the storm metaphor: Expect bouts of mal de mer, lightning strikes of varying seriousness, and the occasional drowning. Hope for recovery, repair, and resuscitation, but prepare to proceed retching over the side with torn sails and down a hand or two. Or howl at the wind. Or both. You decide.

And, if you write, while all that is happening, get back to work. Put the inevitable horror into your writing—either spelled out in gruesome detail or couched in metaphor (or both!). We are ready to dream alongside you.

The Association Game

A game in which one player begins with a category. Not an abstraction, like “love” (All you need, is a many splendored thing, means never having to say your sorry, is all around you, in the afternoon, and death, actually), but something specific like the color blue. Then each player calls out something associated with that category.

For instance—and this is from the opening of William Gass’s On Being Blue:

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all that’s dismal—low-down gloomy music; Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentees of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky’s turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese … the pedantic, indecent and censorious … watered twilight, sour seas: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it’s stood for fidelity.

Play proceeds until a player announces an association that is unknown to the other players. The player making the surprising announcement the must give a specific citation from memory (of course) to support their claim (“Blue Tango,” by Leroy Anderson, and covered by dozens of musicians—you should be so happy to be playing with a group who does not know this, and who allows you to win with such a simple association). If the claim is unsupported (either by the player’s lack of specific reference or obvious deceit—to be decided by the fellow players!), the player who made it is exiled. The game continues without them.

Naturally, this game should be played by those of equal experience and equal fascination for the world. Otherwise, boredom and disdain ensues. Recommended for groups of four to eight. Can be played with fewer (a solitaire version, for instance), but more than eight tends to mean the table (players should be seated at a table) is too large, and associations will not be clearly heard.

No devices permitted either in the generation or confirmation or associations.

The game is played for an hour after dinner, and may continue on as many consecutive nights as necessary. When the game is won, cocktails are served, even to those not yet of drinking age, even to those who eschew alcohol.

The Vivid and Continuous Dream

One of the advantages of the daily writing practice is the arrival of the unexpected.

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner insisted that fiction comprised a “vivid and continuous dream.” Of course. When I write, I am trying to pick the most vivid language to bring a scene or character to life in the mind of the reader. I also try to build a plot that the reader can follow—with enough twists and turns to make the experience satisfactory. But that is continuity—I can’t have a cell phone ring in 17th century France, and if my characters start spouting Nietzsche—two centuries before he was born—well, maybe I need to change the setting.

And this is part of the challenge of writing. One doesn’t just sit down and spew whatever comes to mind. Do that and the reader is more than likely to throw your book—if, somehow you got your story into book form—across the room. But getting it right is a worthy challenge, and a challenge answered in so many different ways to free the writer to explore a thousand different solutions to any given problem.

But solving those problems often relies on an act of will. I want my character to walk across a plaza and into a garden, and so I put her feet on the ground and send her across the stone tiles, to find what? Pick your flowers, keep going. Does the choice of flower matter? Of course it does. Some reader, somewhere, will see those flowers, and, if I’ve done my job, and might even stop to smell them. If it matters. Otherwise, don’t dawdle, keep going. If someone important is waiting in the garden and I spend a paragraph—even a sentence—too long and delay the meeting, I have interrupted the continuous dream.

All that said, there are writers whose talent for encyclopedic detail delights—please show me the long-tongued bee pollinating purple gladiolus under the summer sun. None of that happens by accident.

And yet, I can’t imagine anything as accidental as a dream. They come unbidden in the night and are so full of details and characters as to render most fiction and cinema boring in compare. If dreams are incomprehensible, especially when compared to an episode of Friends—or even better a 60 second TikTok of a scene from an episode of Friends—such is the nature of dreams. Dreams defy the will; even lucid dreamers count on their randomness to produce a landscape that is always a surprise.

When I write only once or twice a week, the writing tends to be more focused on getting from point A to point B (or R). This is also true when I write every day. However, settling in for 3 to 5 hours, and knowing that I will have that 3 to 5 hours the next day and the next (some days getting to 6, some days, leaving after 2 while in the middle of a sentence) creates a space that is more conducive to dreaminess—and the beneficial surprises of dreams.

When Gardner wrote about the “vivid and continuous dream,” he wasn’t writing about hack fiction that simply tells us what we already believe—the well trod road of confirmation. Dreams—and good fiction—surprise us. What is true for the reader must also be true for the writer. Writing a decent piece of fiction should make the familiar strange, should surprise the writer with things previously—and genuinely—unknown.

“Vivid and continuous,” yes, but also a dream.

Wake Up

Roethke writes, “I learn by going where I have to go,” which is the story of writing—which is also to say the story of life. For the moment, lets stick to writing. There is no book, no instruction manual, and no teacher who can replace the hours of work you will spend at the work. You will learn to write by writing—by going where you have to go. The going is, of course, the writing. The “have to” is the need you do the work—perhaps the need to tell a story, but in the end, the need—compulsion, obsession—to to put words on the page.

You can redirect that need—turn it into a need to teach, a need to organize buttons in a jewelry box by size, color, and the number of holes drilled through their centers, or even the need to make a living. You can track your paychecks, note the yearly fluctuations in tax deductions and insurance payments, allot funds to various savings accounts, investments, and because you are not a pre-reformation Scrooge, charities. You will know where every cent ends up, and although you have plenty, there will always be a deficit—a shoe that pinches your toes together just a bit too snuggly, a pair of jeans that fits but is a shade away from the right color, a partner who looks at you as if you smell a little too much like their childhood doctor’s office.

Which is to say, no matter the wealth of lapis lazuli buttons with three holes bored into what must be the vertices of an isosceles triangle—should the sharp end point down or up when sewn onto the back of a blouse?—you will feel unnameably dissatisfied.

Writing will not solve the problem of dissatisfaction. You will be frustrated in a thousand and one new ways. You will complain about your inconsistent use of semi-colons—complaining to anyone who will listen, but mainly, and with a tone bordering on abusive, to yourself. You will natter on about story shapes, query letters, and the predominance of Latinate words, but your feet will slide into your shoes, into every pair of shoes, with an ease you forget to notice because you are working. And you must work.

Perhaps not. Sublimation—damned Latin—is a powerful force, a whirlpool that can suck you into something like a normal life. Writing is not normal—not the way she does it, or he does it, or you do it. You may have snuck it in, adding unnecessary flourishes to your annual report (your supervisor redlined that entire paragraph), but you never did it because you “liked to write.” You may not like to write. You might rather binge the entire run of Buster Crabbe’s Flash Gordon serials, or sew, or take your dog for interminable walks. Writing may make you fundamentally unhappy, but, to be honest, you are fundamentally and essentially unhappy, so writing was never the problem.

You have to write. You don’t like it, as a date once said to me as an offer of amnesty—red, not white, flag. If you have given into the work, it pursues you the way the bottle chases the alcoholic, or the tulip chases the sun—logotropically. You may choose some attendant activity that grants you the release of completion—all those pick-up basketball games that end when one side score 21 points, poker tournaments, or clean plate after clean plate—but until you learn that completion is a grift as glittering as accolades, you have not learned that writing is where you have to go. The ticket is sewn into the lining of your coat, with any luck you will know when it is time to rip it out and show it to the conductor.

This train is for you and you alone, and you will never arrive anywhere but here. And before you know it, you will be the conductor, the engineer, the porter, and the signalman. The train will shake as it crosses the trestle over what—a ravine, an ocean, a galaxy, just a street in Tokyo?—but the shaking will help settle and steady you on your way. You have already arrived.

ADD Serendipity

I was stuck in the middle of a revision. Yes, when I recognize that something is missing—that I had I glided over some weird canyon in the conversation between two characters—I drop a helpful “ADD” into the text to point out my omission. “Helpful.” If I could, I would paste a gif of someone yelling “Clean up on aisle 5!” into the text. This happens frequently. The excitement of a first draft leads to mysterious elisions and weird gaps in logic and consistency that reveal themselves during revision.

Upon reflection, I knew I needed a story at this juncture of the novel. One of my main characters needed to respond with a story—not one from his life (he can remember nothing of his past)—but from the ocean of stories that shine like distant stars in his mind. Wow, mixed metaphor. And so, I spent a few hours digging through folk and fairy tales that somehow suited the novel’s moment, and, finding nothing, I decided to wake up the next day and head back to work to wrestle with this problem.

On the way to work, I happened to be listening to Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes (I am leading a discussion about the book in August and wanted to polish my thoughts) and this passage played:

In recounting the tale of his famous breakthrough to his colleagues, [Leo] Kanner compared himself to the legendary Persian prince Serendip, who “went for a stroll one day, with no particular quest in mind, and unexpectedly came upon a hoard of treasures,” as he put it.

Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes, 141

And that’s how I made a mad dash back through the copy of the Shanameh that sits near my desk, a quick detour through the 1,001 Nights, then a couple of other sources, and added something meaningful to the conversation between my two characters.

I am not above noting the happy irony of serendipity. In fact, I suggest that a writer—at any and every stage of writing—court serendipity with unmatched fervor. Perhaps your mind is constantly percolating with ideas already. Perhaps you feel that you need a kind of absolute quiet to access some hidden cave of treasures accessible only with the gentle murmur of some magic words. Perhaps you fear that you have forgotten the magic words. Or, perhaps serendipity will provide if you open yourself to the possibility.

Lesson for the day. Every day.

The Call of Ritual

The end of Lent means that I can eat sweets again. Even though I am years removed from my Catholic upbringing, and I don’t recall my parents ever guiding us through some chosen fast during the six-week run-up to Easter (although we did not eat meat on Fridays, enjoying fish sticks and cheese pizza during that time), I try to give up something I enjoy during Lent. My practice is partly an exercise in self-control but also, and perhaps mainly, an extended ritual. I wonder how many rituals I practice.

I used to work for a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and they treated rituals like a kind of smorgasbord (one of these, one of those, absolutely none of those), depending on the season. While I understand being open to possibilities (I often quote Dickinson: “I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose”), that kind of openness can too easily lead to egoism: my belief reflects what I think and feel and want. When egoism is brandished without the perpetual interrogation of the self (What do I want? Why do I want it? And: what are the consequences of my desire?), it tends to become a rather sloppy exercise. We may fall back on Whitman’s handy “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself” (If he can do it, why can’t I?) but without putting in the hard work of loving the contradictory multitudes of the kosmos.

Belief is more like weather. You know that it is there and part of an intricate system, but the weather does not care if you have a picnic scheduled for Saturday afternoon. In fact, the weather does not care; it simply is. Sailing taught me that hard lesson. We would huddle around the satellite radio for the computer-generated voice that told us what was likely to be around us in the nights and days ahead, but short of sailing out of the way of a microburst—sometimes reversing course for hours—we plunged through. Stormy sea, or sun-drenched calm with the motor running to push us out of windless placidity, forward was our only way.

Much of life, the universe, and everything is like that: out of our control and uncaring. Either that casts you into an existential crisis (as it should), or you declare, “Fuck it (choose your exclamation)! I’ll do whatever I want,” or you put on clothes that suit the moment and struggle on. I’m a fan of the struggle. Many of my rituals—you might think of them as routines—engage the struggle. My 5-6 day-a-week workouts are arduous enough to get my heart rate above 170 bpm. My Sundays in the museums set a benchmark for my writing—the art beckons: Beauty and brilliance are possible. Attain this! Even my mornings, jump-starting my brain with some puzzle before driving 30-40 minutes accompanied by music that sets the course for the work day ahead, are parts of my daily ritual.

What is the difference between a ritual and a routine? Perhaps intention. My brain switches to full-on during ritual. I recognize that some who meditate (and meditate as a ritual) do so to quiet their minds. I recall sitting in Quaker Meeting, having left the world at the Meeting House doors, and waiting for that still, strong voice to rekindle my spirit. Some days, it did; many days, it did not. Many days the world clattered too noisily. Many more days, my mind was dropping plates and banging a wooden spoon against a dented pot. I can understand the wisdom in trying to quiet the mind of its desires.

Perhaps I use ritual to find music in the cacophony of life. The external and internal noise blend together to create something like order in the chaos. I write “something like” because part of my writing ritual is to transcribe something that doesn’t simply seem real but mimics the real in all its disorder.

I try not to say this part out loud too much, but as a writer, the whole idea of silencing the mind is antithetical to my craft. I always listen for a voice that is sometimes still and strong, sometimes bumptious, sometimes shrill, sometimes serious, sometimes frivolous, sometimes the voice of two women discussing the responsibilities of sovereignty, sometimes the voice of a horse who charges into the abyss, sometimes the voice of a man contemplating the relationship between light and gravity, and sometimes something like my voice. Ritual helps me set aside voices and noises that make claims on my precious attention. More often than not, those noises are not discordant but precisely organized like steps in a march, and they would regiment my music out of me—even if that music is a march, or a waltz, or some mad scramble on some impossible dance floor, or just the call of birds at dawn.

Ritual does not preclude thought (or my self) so much as it helps me tune out everything that stridently insists: “not your thought, not your self.” Ritual is an exercise of will against everything outside the demands of my work—so that I can listen freely to all the voices; so that I can be distracted into flights of fancy; so that I can (and will) think more deeply, reflect more keenly, and write.

“But, isn’t that just egoism? Aren’t you just doing what you want? And weren’t you just complaining about that?” you ask. And yes, if writing were just a routine, something I did by rote, or just to accumulate something else (appreciation, remuneration), then I would agree. But ritual is also sacred, part of a trumpet call from the unknown, wherever and everywhere that is.  To borrow from Kafka: “Ich weiß es nicht,” sagte ich, “nur weg von hier, nur weg von hier. Immerfort weg von hier, nur so kann ich mein Ziel erreichen.” Ritual opens the door back into the unknown world.

Paths

As he stared at the land around him, he began to see footprints from an earlier time, but not just earlier on this day, from days and years past. He saw how travelers had crisscrossed the terrain—running after a stray animal, chasing their heart’s desire. No portion of the land was untouched. When he concentrated, he saw how set after set of footprints overlapped and extended back in time. There was a history in the land. He walked for hours, accompanied by all the travelers from the past. He imagined his prints mixed with those of all the people who had passed, all those yet to come. The landscape sang with the presence of travelers; he was only one among many.

What had they seen? Did they share his awareness? How could he have forgotten so much? How could he see all this and not remember his past and all the paths he had walked? And yet, he began to see, almost for the first time, something else. He felt himself walking again on this ground, felt a future unfolding before him. He could not forget what had not yet happened, and so it began to flow into him—thousands of footsteps, more, millions began to unfurl ahead of him. He saw the future and all the possible paths. The future led him this way and that. It blew him here and there, and he propped himself against the strong wind. Not remember, but imagine.

Distractions (again)

After my last post, my friend, Brian Clements, responded:

“Writing is more about limiting the scope of one’s vision, on not-seeing.” This is exactly why I gave up on writing fiction—seeing too many possible directions and being unable to focus on a path. In poetry, leaping around can be more of a virtue.

A quick note, you should read Brian Clements’s poetry, especially his Book of Common Rituals. It does leap, in fact, Brian’s leaping goes a long way back to when Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry was a regular feature of his early Introduction to Creative Writing syllabi.

And here, let me disagree and agree with my friend—and myself. Yes, novel writing is about staying on a path, but like any wonderful walk along a path, the point of the walk is not the gravel, pavement, or dirt under the walker’s feet. We walk to see, to be surprised by the hue of an early autumn petal, or the way the person we walk with traverses a wet rock, or the conversation heard in passing (“Who’s castle was that?” asks the woman with a group of her friends while passing the Smithsonian Castle). Yes, when reading (or writing) a novel we want to follow the lives of the characters, but because the novel should in some way mirror some kind of experience of the world, what makes the reading (and the writing) breathe are the surprises (distractions) along the way.

Today at the National Museum of Asian Art, a screen caught my attention. It was painted by Tawaraya Sōsetsu early in the 17th century—400 years ago. It is a painting (on a screen) of painted fans: 30 or so fans over 6 panels. My initial impression—a painting of paintings (art of and about art) puts it in along line of more recent works (Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings, Marcel DuChamps’ LHOOQ, Matisse’s artist’s studio paintings, an innumerable run of pop art works, works by Carrie Mae Weems and Cindy Sherman, this list is far from exhaustive, feel free to suggest additions). I briefly dove down an attribution rabbit hole (is it “Sōsetsu” as the gallery card reads, or “Sōtatsu” as the website indicates? Has the name been revised as an understanding of transliterations of Japanese has altered? There is research ahead and an email to send). So the distractions and connections are many.

The one that I hold onto, that brings me back to my path, are the duplications and variations, and that both fans and screens, while art, are also useful objects. They exist in distinct categories (or realms)—not only useful and, for want of a better word, useless, but also “art” and “decoration.” Things (or people) that exceed the boundaries of single categories? I’m all in, and I suspect that all the work I produce over the next 20-40 years will hearken back to this. The current work is hitting that hard.

So these screens are a distraction and a reminder. While my book has nothing to do with 17th century Japan, no one in it carries a fan (Could they? Should they?), and no Tawaraya Sōsetsu (or is it “Sōtatsu,” damn, that’s going to bug me until it doesn’t) appears, thwacks me in the head and gets me on something like the path.

Last week I received a post card from this same Brian Clements. It reminded me of another old friend, Ross Martin, an artists who made (and please let it be “makes”) “mail-art” and then “book art” (quick check on Ross, whose friendship I lost in a break-up two decades ago). Brian’s card—prose poem, really—echoes back to many things we shared (Lupos, Nebraska, seriously, Newt Gingrich?) and all the automatic writing leaps that guide and distract us. It’s always both, yes? Surely this won’t be on the path.

But then there is an incantation, magic words that change the course of the characters in the book—some stripped down to their most basic, path-like essence (“Forget” and “Remember”), others more ornate, more specific, and less understandable—as if specificity conferred clarity. I will be sure to hone that incantation as this final revision wraps up, and then will consign the project to someone else’s hands while I get back to the next, applying the lessons I have learned to what follows. I will “move along.”

Paths beckon.