Tag: purpose

Brokeworld

In 2016 HBO aired a radical revisioning of Michael Crichton’s clunky trash science fiction thriller, Westworld. The old movie issued a direct threat and moral: technology combined with profit motives is bad. Nothing new here, just a variation on the muck-racking novels of late 19th century America or a schlockier version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The series that launched in 2016 delved into deeper issues: consciousness formation, the nature of humanity, and, yes, the moral bankruptcy of late capitalist culture.  There was more if you wanted to find it, all wrapped up in a glossy, sexy, and violent package. Quintessential HBO.

The drive for climactic set-pieces led to a gruesome and fairly well-earned massacre at the end of the first season. However, gruesome massacres are not easy to build on. The second season stumbled through the aftermath of all that death—even if many of the dead were robots. The rest of the dead were the rich—or servants of the rich—and, as such, were easy prey. The third season addressed the “real world” (such as it was portrayed in the show) consequences of those deaths and added human characters whose lives were made robotic by, yes, you guessed it, the rich.

I teach creative writing. When I started teaching, I forbade my students from killing characters in their stories. Yes, the presence of death galvanizes fiction, bestowing instant importance on what might otherwise be a mundane series of events. When I think of some of my favorite short pieces, death abounds. Think of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” or J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bannafish.” At least the threat of death—real complete annihilation—hovers around the characters. However, when it does, it has weight. Great—and most good—writers acknowledge mortality as a meaningful limit.

The first season of Westworld used cavalier attitudes about murder and violence to make a point—all the while delighting viewers with plenty of simulated death (the show walked on a sneaky edge) The point was that the cavalier attitude about death and violence revealed a moral failing in the characters. Even when the violence was simulated. That edge has become more and more blunted with each new season, finally becoming little more than a heavy and dumbly wielded club.

Halfway through the third season, the main antagonist, Serac, reveals that he and his brother built the monstrous AI, Rehoboam, after witnessing the nuclear bombing of Paris. The bombing is not explained. It exists only to justify Serac’s desire to prevent either another such event or series of such events. Boom! goes Paris. And Boom! Westworld tottered off into the realm of irretrievably bad writing.

I teach my students that anything can happen in their fiction. I try not to put false limits on their work (no fantasy, no science fiction, no romance). I only ask that whatever they do, they must avoid cliché, which is hard for young writers because everything seems so new to them. And this is hard for older writers too, because everything seems to have been done. How many ways can two people arrive at “I love you”?  Or “I hate you” for that matter? And everything in between. Make it your own, and find the surprise.

Also, I advise that they treat their fiction as if it is true, that they should consider themselves magicians of a sort, wielding magic words to create reality.  They must be responsible for the world they create, not just for the beetles that scurry across the floors of the houses they build with words, but for the vision of the world they invent. If someone falls in love in one of their stories, then they are nothing less than Eros, conferring love on the world. If someone dies in one of their stories, then they wear the grim reaper’s long black robes. No, not all writing is made with such high purpose. Plenty of successful prose falls back on sheer entertainment. Love and death are little more than emotional levers that the writer pushes and pulls to keep the reader reading. So does plenty of literary fiction—thank goodness.

Sometimes writers break the compact with the reader. They pull the levers without any concern for what they have made. A friend once asked whether I could just do what I wanted in my work. I can, of course, I can, but I must grapple with the repercussions of what I write. Does what I want to happen fit the world which I have created? Not just, “Does it make sense?” but does that sense bear up to moral, emotional, and intellectual scrutiny? Not only must there be a feeling of necessity in the work, but that necessity must be guided by an inner logic that binds all the images, all the ideas, all the characters, and all the vision. That is no easy objective.

One way to guarantee that a work will miss that mark is to play fast and loose with life, to use death as a plot enhancement. By its own logic—by the claims it made in its first season—Westworld has fallen off the horse. Yes, the show remains pretty (sexy and gruesome) picture, but the writing no longer cares to do anything but sling gore and blow up cities. Nothing matters. Time to move on.

 

Shoulders And Work

Several months ago, my right shoulder started to hurt—not the dull pain of repeated effort, but a sharp bite. The trainer at my club diagnosed it as a rotator cuff injury. I was not surprised. Years ago, I tore at my shoulders when I swam miles and miles every day. Another trainer put a finer point on my struggles, telling me that backstroke (which had been a staple of my midlife training regimen) often drove swimmers out of the pool. And so, I tended my form, keeping my hands and grips in neutral positions while I pushed and pulled weight. Then I gave up the weights for a couple of months and added exercises to strengthen my rotator cuffs. Time has taught me to listen to my body more carefully. And taught me that old wounds can return decades later.

This past month, stuck inside during the pandemic, I started lifting again and welcomed the natural hurts that result from earnest work. It feels good to work and to bear with the pain. The endorphins from extended workouts help carry me through the barrage of news, which, much to my chagrin, I cannot ignore. Lift this. Watch the heart rate settle into the 170s. At least it makes sleep come more easily.

Not everything true for the body is true for the mind. Or the heart.
I also wrapped up a more extensive revision of one book while stewing over the next. The most recent update of Grammarly highlighted the more prolix passages of the old work, so even though images and scenes in the new book pile up, I felt the call to rewrite. Rewriting leads to re-visioning. The question, “How did I leave that out?” occurred more than I liked, and so I added connective tissue. I edited my more complicated impulses into simpler—and more direct?—chunks.

And revision, though inspired by some strange angels, does not require the same fiery vision as the initial draft. Without rooms of art to goad me (the DC museums have been closed since early March), it was easier to return to the old work. “Easier” is hardly the right word. The same way that I had to restart lifting below the peaks I had reached in December, I came back to the book with a diminished sense of it. In that diminishment, I found a new way in. I was no longer in love with the characters, or with myself as their creator. I was able to question my motives and choices in ways that I was unable six months ago when I made my first rattling revision.

Still, as much as I rediscovered and redirected in this recent edit, I felt as if I was betraying my new work. I have begun to dream about those characters. While others around me are infected with fever driven dreams of the pandemic, I have felt pulled to another vision—the anxiety churns a different sea. Just as I lift barbells in an otherwise empty gym—counting my reps out loud while Arthur Morey narrates Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct—this new work pushes me. It is familiar and different.

The ache in my shoulder is familiar and different. I know what to avoid and how to strengthen the weak places. The old wounds and old ways remind me of a past that I have lived, but there are new steps to take. My narrator welcomes me into her thoughts and reflections and challenges me to get out of my own way. A whole world opens ahead of me, dream-laden, and no longer bound to anything I have worked on before. There will be work.

London, Flying, Writing

It has been a year and a few months since I was in London. I’m thinking about London while I sit and study Monet’s “Houses of Parliament, Sunset” at the National Gallery of Art. The memory of looking across the Thames at that building, with Big Ben swathed in the latticework of repair, has faded only a little. The memories of walking the streets of the original square mile and beyond remain startlingly vivid. I used them to paint scenes when the characters in my novel walked through London. The memories of the places and the memories of the feelings.

When I was there, I had just begun what would become my first completed novel. I had changed my life, but was only taking the first steps out of the extended shadow under which I had lived my life for much too long. I had been grounded—too grounded.

This morning I woke from a dream of flight. I had to deliver a package, and the way to the place I had to deliver it to was blocked. The streets were closed—barricades blocked alleys and police redirected traffic. I picked up the box—a box of books, perhaps? In a previous job, I often carried boxes of books and was required, on occasion, to pick up from warehouses and deliver them. I carried the box through city streets, all the while receiving instructions about exactly where I was and exactly where I should go. Except, I knew where I was, and knew where I had to go. The instructions were extraneous, the kind of litany of “You are… You should…” that have too long tethered me. And so I did the only thing left to me. I flew. I flew in between the buildings in the city, sometimes following the spaces above the streets, sometimes flying over the buildings—skyscrapers. I flew past a circus parade, as performers prepared to enter their theater. I flew and wondered where I should ply my flying trade—the circus came to mind, naturally, but so did the military (I was a secret weapon). I scooped up a bully who was tormenting a younger child and instructed, “Superheroes live, and we are watching,” before setting him back on the ground, edified.

img_2173When I was last in London, I was taking steps into a world where I knew I could live, where I had longed to live. Just like in the dream, writing—flight—was not foreign to me, but something I had traded in for a more certain, more directed existence. While “You are…You should” can feel like shackles, flying—writing—is formless and uncertain. Anywhere is possible. Everywhere is almost a mandate. Just like in the dream, I had written before—had flown—and had lived closer to the limits of my existence. But I had to leave my self-imposed limits. I had to accept that I might fall—and fail—but just as I accepted that in my dream—soaring up the side of a steel and glass edifice, wondering, “What if I forget? What if I fall?—I thought, even as the thrill of fear invigorated me, “You are flying now. Even if you fall, you will remember as you fall, and fly again. Keep flying.”

img_2761Two women look at the Monet—taking seat in the National Gallery beside me. They think it is beautiful, but claim, “It doesn’t look like that.” Of course, the Houses of Parliament look like that, as does the river Thames, as does the sunset. “We didn’t see it,” they claim, “We were tourists, doing touristy things, like thinking about where to have dinner.” I did not think about dinner when I was in London. As much as I love dinner, even food became a secondary thought while I was in London. Even the pubs and ales became little more than way-stations along the bigger task—the journey, the seeing, the walking, and the flying. And the writing.

At some point, you leave behind what holds you back, and you push off the ground and make your first tentative moves into the air. At first, it feels more like swimming than flying. Wait. That will change. Once you have flown, you do not lose the gift of flight. You may set it aside, for whatever reason (You are…You should), but when you—finally—return to it, the inspiration, the ecstasy, and the certainty will return as well. You will accept the fear and even turned it to your use—flying and writing into places that scare you, outpacing your fear and using it as a goad—higher, faster, stranger, more beautiful, and then more.

I want to say that you do not have to wait until you are 58 years old to rediscover flight. But even at 58, then 59, you can recapture that rapturous joy of flight—and writing. While, in the dream, I was younger than I am now, and yet I could remember all of my current life. Maybe that was what I carried in my box: life. My life.

When I made my way to the circus—because, of course, the circus calls for a flier—an older man (I recognized him as the father of a former girlfriend, although I never met him in real life) warned me against the life I desired, not merely the circus, but flight in general. He did not say, “You are, you should,” but as his daughter had inveighed, he advised, “You are not… You should not.” He was an old musician, and soured by his work in the circus band. Another older man joined us and said, “Let him fly.” But he was dotty, had tufts of white hair on his fingers, and was probably drunk. Looking at these two, I thought, perhaps, that the circus is not for me. There are other places to fly—not into the dark above the audience’s —but into the light. I thought that while I dreamt.

I think about all this while I dream. And when I walk. And when I see. And when I write. And when I wake up.

I write this to you now because you may be 59. Or 29. However, you stopped flying—or writing. You stopped something. Or maybe you never started. I wrote in 9th and 10th grades. Again as a senior in college. Then I started working on a novel when I was 21. Again when I was 24. Again when I was 26. In grad school, I wrote 20 stories, a short book of prose poems, and two starts at novels. Then nothing that endured for years. A few poems, some prose (sermons and stories and articles), the start and start and start and start of a novel. Whatever I was doing felt like silence. You may be facing a silence of your own. I write to you.

Barricades may block the road ahead of you. You may need to get out of your dream car and carry that box (what is in your box?) through the city on foot. You know the way. Plus—and this is your secret—you know how to fly.

There is another world. It doesn’t feel like there is. I remember that feeling, and the horrible weight of “should and should not,” “are and are not.” Part of the way back to this world is the repeated practice of returning to it—fingers to keyboard, pen to paper. Revel in the count of words, in the hours in the air. Try to think of the inches, then yards, then miles you have traveled, and enjoy the journey.

Plenty of people will remind you of what you lack, will cast blank aspersions on the life you have lived, will denigrate what you have done to get where you are, and will sow doubt in the field where you play. They are not your friends, and you can do without them. Do not try to solve the problems they foist on you, or—worse—take them on as your own. The work, even when you fly, is hard enough without taking on unnecessary freight. There is weight enough in this work.

And there is lightness ahead. And light. You can soar as you wish. I wait, standing on the ground, or suspended in the air among clouds and antennae, and wait to cheer you. Fly! Wake up and fly again.

Intention

IMG_3667

“A Swarm of Bi

Thousands of jade bi (pronounced bee) have been unearthed in elite Liangzhu culture burial sites, varying in size, quality of stone, level of workmanship, and finish. Yet the meaning, purpose, and ritual significance of bi remain unknown.”—from display text at the Freer Gallery of Art

 

The bi in the Smithsonian National Museum of Asia Art (The Freer/Sackler Galleries) are 4000-4500 years old. Some of the other jades are a thousand years older. I like that bi are so old, and among the earliest pieces of art in all the museums in Washington DC. I also like that we do not know the significance of the bi—that over 4000 years, their meanings have gone missing. They had a significance; we just don’t know what it was.

What matters is what we leave behind.

IMG_3336In the other corner of the Freer Gallery, an exhibit of Hokusai’s paintings and illustrations includes quotations from the artist about what he intended—not just in the specific works, but as an artist. He wrote about discovering himself as an artist late in life. He was already an artist, but he claims to come into his own in his 50s and thought that he might attain his most complete vision if he lived to 110. He died at 90. His work is sweeping and intimate—monumental nature and quiet personal moments—fantastic and humorous—heroes wrestling demons and uproarious coworkers. Whatever else he meant to last in his work—why that hero wrestled that demon (as if one could easily answer such a question)?—he meant it to last. He aspired to capture a vision that would last long after he died.

 

What matters is what we leave behind.

 

My students struggle with knowing what writers meant when they wrote a particular poem or piece of fiction. I try to help them understand that the question is nearly impossible to answer, that the writer’s intention is a mystery even to him or her self. There’s a parcel of psychology served with that lesson—the ineffable subconscious meets the unruly and unpredictable conscious mind. They get confused when I make assertions about what is in James Joyce’s fiction—and, honestly, I have no idea what the human being writing his stories intended, but I can perform some intertextual acrobatics that will catch many of the ideas that spin through his work—thinking that I am implying that Joyce intended one thing or another. I’m just making connections informed by study and a willingness to play with and without a net.

 

What matters is what we leave behind.

https://archive.asia.si.edu/publications/jades/object.php?q=F1917.79#scroll-down
Bi, ca. 3300-2250 BCE

 

Of course, I tell my young writers to align their intentions with what is on the page. It is nearly impossible to write without a sense of the outcome. We, quite naturally, want our ideas and images to catch fire in the mind of our readers. I cannot help but think of the artist who chiseled an image into the side of a bi. The images are so faint that one can easily overlook them. Were they only meant for decoration? Someone, sometime knew. We can only guess. What excites me is that someone did know, once, 5300-4250 years ago. Imagine making a mark and that it lasts long enough to cause some stranger to wonder thousands of years in the future.

What matters is what we leave behind.

When I write about the djinn, I am aware that I do not know how or why they were called into being. What made us need or want an order of magical creatures separate from gods and angels? I am aware that our perception of the djinn changed over time, in some part, due to the influence of Islam. But Islam—as a formal religion—is only 1400 years old. Only. Djinn and gods existed in Mesopotamia for thousands of years before Islam gripped the region—and a quarter of the world. But, for the most part, they are a mystery—as are the gods and goddesses I call into my fiction. While there are fragments of stories, the past has swallowed them.

What matters is what we leave behind.

I wonder, if in 5000 years, whether I will be a mystery. A friend commented that writing and reading are escapes, and I disagree. I read to reclaim the past and reframe the present. Knowledge of the past makes our understanding of the present more complex, more nuanced, and more true. I write to give life more weight, more depth, more of what the past holds, and what the present should hold. After all, that is what makes a good story a good story—a vision that makes us stop and take account of our present moment and our lives. If I have any intention that lasts past the next three months, let alone 300 years, or 5000 (5000 years?), that is it.

What matters is what we leave behind.

 

The Music of Effort

I start paying attention after 17 minutes or so — the meter on the elliptical estimates that I am burning 24.3 calories every minute. I am about halfway through the current “run,” and I will burn through 720 calories in 30 minutes and well over 800 when I include the five minutes of cool-down time that the machine grants me at the end of the workout. I get pissed because the timer starts as soon as I start moving my feet, and the first 15 seconds are “slow.” I make up for it. After a five minute break, I jump on another machine that allows me to take longer strides, and run for 12 minutes, aiming for 7-minute miles. It’s a workout.

This is not about working out.

I listen to music while I work out. My playlist is a series of hard and fast (mostly) rock and roll songs. If you were in the gym with me, you would see me silently singing along. “Need a little time to wake up. Need a little time to wake up, wake up. Need a little time to rest your mind. You know you should, so I guess you might as well…” Or  “Save the strong, lose the weak—never turning the other cheek. Trust nobody, don’t be no fool. Whatever happened to the golden rule?” Or, “Touch me, take me to that other place. Reach me, I know I’m not a hopeless case. What you don’t have, you don’t need it now. What you don’t know, you can feel it somehow. What you have you don’t need it now, don’t need it now.” Or “We’re going boom, boom, boom, and that’s the way we live.” There are others.

This is not about the music I listen to while I work out.

When I was a swimmer—in high school, college, and after—there was no music in the pool—at least no music that wasn’t already in my head. I had a much shorter playlist then—just a four or five songs any given day that I played over and over again in my head while I churned through mile after mile. I had a little hortator pounding away, beat after beat, distracting me from the pain in my shoulders and knees, guiding me through the agony of hard work. When I took swimming back up, there was a waterproof mp3 player that took over that task, but by then, I felt swum out — besides, it’s hard to sing with your face in the water. Drowning.

Seriously, this is not about music and workouts.

Several years ago, I tipped my hat to loud music in a sermon that praised the virtues of Rock and Roll as a way to access the spiritual. I noted how Coldplay’s “Sky Full of Stars” worked up to and encouraged a communal moment of dance/rave. I pointed to U2’s “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” as a memoir about the discovery of the Ramones by someone “young, not dumb, and wishing to be blinded.”  It might as well be my memoir. Or yours. Rock and Roll has the power to blind us, the way a flash of lightning blinds us. There are times when we need to be blinded, when we need to erase all the sordid images of the day from our mind’s eye so that we can start fresh, and see with new eyes, hear with new ears, and feel with newly opened arms. Or something like that.

When I work out, I play music that beats back the exhaustion of the day, and that transports me into the steady hard effort that burns an extra few calories and raises my heartbeat to 170 beats a minute. I don’t want much—just a kind of blindness. And yet, I’m not blind to any of it. I feel all the effort—I love it—every ache, every heartbeat, every drop of sweat. The music helps me break through the “tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-lust of intentional indifference.” I sweat “with a decent happiness.”

I play music while I write. Listening to the same piece helps me reenter the dream with the same mood. Unlike Annie Dillard, who demands a Spartan silence while she works, I need the wall of sound. Maybe this is because I spent years with a sound in my head while I sped through the pool in repeated max-effort swims. I have an affinity for noise and the distraction of the world. After all, I am, always, writing about the world—how could it be a distraction? Yes, there are moments when the actual world fades, when the world made of words engulfs me, and when I get blinded, properly and completely blinded by the work.

I wish that experience for any and every writer. Whatever it takes to get you properly and completely consumed by the world that you strive to create, do it. If silence gets you there, find a quiet place. If noise and distraction get you into the state of mind that produces all the words, then find that noisy place and work it.

As I revised my novel, I discovered that my book needed a scene or two—how did I leave THAT out? (I know why. I wasn’t ready to write it, not yet.) And so, knowing that the magic of Gorecki’s Symphony Number 3 was not going to generate the energy that these scenes needed, I dug into the catalog and pulled out Led Zepplin’s “When The Levee Breaks,” because weeping and moaning were ahead. And, yes, that song is on the workout playlist. When it plays, I feel the story coming from the muscles in my arms and legs—not just my head. I breathe deep, my heart races, and the words flow like sweat. Fortunately, I like to sweat.

If it keeps on raining, levee’s goin’ to break. Let it break, I’m ready for the onslaught—bright and loud.

 

Stage Fright

Just over a year ago, I went to the LA Bar in Arlington and did karaoke. It was New Year’s Eve, and I had just come from a fairly routine party, where we had counted down the end of the old year and beginning of the new. It wasn’t enough. And so, away I went with my date, and we signed up to sing the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.”

I had never done karaoke.

I began to sing in elementary school. First in chorus, where we performed a melange of patriotic and Disney songs, along with the occasional show tune (think “Impossible Dream”). Later, I tried out for the musical Hans Christian Andersen. There were more performances in school, but music, such as it was, was not a priority in my family.

When I took up the trombone—I wanted drums, but the music teacher redirected me with “You have a trombone player’s lips”—there was no insistence on practice. Who could blame anyone for discouraging the initial rumblings of beginner trombone player from the evening routine? My father had a trumpet, which I switched to after a year of trombone. This too proved too much. A few years later my father gave away this instrument from his youth.

I liked music class though, which was almost entirely singing. I explored a bass voice as a counterpoise to my natural nascent tenor. It was fun to dig up those low tones. I also enjoyed singing along to songs on the radio and then to records. This persisted throughout my life, and I recall an incident in my 40’s when I regaled my passengers with “Get Me to the Church on Time,” following Stanley Holloway note for note and comic inflection for comic inflection.

I had long since stopped singing in public as part of a choir or chorus. I was strictly a car singer.

I was, and this surprises most, shy. After college, several years in the restaurant business took the edge off most of my shyness. I learned the value of being professionally—and personally—outgoing. But when I was doing something that mattered to me—interviewing for a position I really wanted, reading my work in front of a panel of judges, singing—the old reserve kicked in. In time, that abated. Mostly. Years in the classroom and standing in front of a congregation taught me how to perform. I may have had some nervous moments—leading “Jingle Bells” without accompaniment stands out—but I found my way. Once, I even promised my recalcitrant students that if they behaved for an entire class that I would deliver a solo rendition of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” They did, and I did.

But singing, really singing, belting it out or digging it up? I still experienced stage fright.

So, fueled by champagne and scotch, I took to the stage at the LA Bar, and my date and I traded verses in and out of the Talking Heads. Whether it was the booze, the company, or my familiarity with the song, which I had sung since I was 20, we killed it.

A year later, I joined my students at the mic for John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” I had suggested the song to them months before, and they graciosuly allowed me to sing along. Not karaoke, but a couple of guitars and three voices weaving together the wistful “To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.” I had 40 years on my students but I remind myself that Prine was only 25 when he wrote the song. How did it turn out? Who knows? I think I stayed on key, and that maybe I added a proper sense of grey to the tenor.

I’m not sure where the shyness came from. Okay, that’s a lie. I know it it was one part nature and one part nurture and which of those parts was larger no longer matters. Derring-do, the genuine impulse to break the limits and cut loose occurs in my life in streaks—often at the edges. When I have been engaged in my most meaningful work (and yes, singing counts), an odd conservative bent takes over. The “Brian YaYa” that my friends called out seems to be replaced by a “Brian Yawn-Yawn.” Okay, it’s not that bad, but when you feel a wilder impulse in your guts, anything else—almost anything else, is a snooze.

Not any more. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” as Warren Zevon said. Until then, I have things to do. I remind myself even now, with 60 around the corner. I have things to do. Best to do them wildly, bravely, and with the full potential of failure waiting. And more, always more. I live with the stage fright.

See the man with the stage fright

Just standing up there to give it all his might

And he got caught in the spotlight

But when we get to the end

He wants to start all over again.

Stage Fright

 

It’s time to start all over again. Again.

Distractions

The past week I have been distracted by the possibility that my country would once again go to war in the Middle East/Central Asia—in Persia. The thought transfixed me and kept me up at night. I have no control over the policy of my country—besides the meager franchise I exercise. Who, after all, is going to listen to a 59 year old English teacher? That said, I have little doubt that policy, even policy set by people with greater expertise than I possess, has been ramshackle and reactive over the past 50 years. Longer. Without a clear and positive vision of what we support—say, the spread of human rights—my country ends up defining its mission in terms of what it does not want—not communism, not Islamic Fundamentalism, not terrorism. When a positive goal is enunciated—we want the free flow of oil—that goal tends to be acted on only in a self-serving and too often militaristic fashion.

Too often this misses the point. Those with the oil want to sell the oil. Naturally, they also wanted to possess the oil first, and then, of course, to sell it.

But this is true of any commodity, or anything one has that is valuable, whether that is a resource found under the ground or made by the work of hands. And even if one does not wish to sell—to escape the cycle of commodification—one wishes control over that which one possesses or makes.

I am sitting in a museum while I write this. I am surrounded by works of Alexander Calder. They are gifts, but he also sold them. There is a fabulous photograph of his workshop in this gallery.

I wonder what distracted him, if he was distracted by the world around him?

When I look at any of the works of art at the National Gallery, I do not immediately think of the dates and the events that were taking place in the world at any given time. Art is timeless in a way. And it is not. I am reminded that horror in the world was never limited to acts of overt war, but that it proceeded—and proceeds—in an endless stream of cruelty and misfortune. And yet, in all times, there has been art.

Maybe we keep art in a box—even when it responds directly to the events of any given era (as contemporary art more pointedly and more often) does. Artists (and writers) also have something which they make. Maybe they need to stay in a box, to ignore the world and engage in the process. This seems like a fairly effete vision of art. While there is something self-serving about making art (my vision!), art only lives when it enters the world, partakes of the world, and reflects the world in all its grizzly terrible presence. The horrible beautiful world.

So, I am reminded while I am distracted, to include the world in my work, even as a reflection in some fragmented shards of a broken mirror. This too.