Life Under Ink

I try to put my finger on it, but it runs away. That’s its nature, to scramble away, to shift. I could try to describe the process, the hunting for it, hunting it down, the struggle to make it stay put… but why? What for? I would just be writing, then, wasting words, saying what many people already know.

I could make art. Art which holds still, or which is like a pool, at least, in which things live and change and die and scurry away into shadow leaving ripples, maybe, or maybe not, but still it is the same pool and we look into it with the same eyes (almost) from time to time.

There is, perhaps, no point in trying to write about life. What you write about life will always be inaccurate. What you write about writing about it will be inaccurate, too. Such as this. I want to make new things. I want to…. make new pieces of life—life-of-ink—and then set them loose and see where they go. I want to make my life by writing it.

What I say is true. What I write is true. I write it, and it becomes true. Tomorrow I will write something else, and that too will be true. Wait. The longer you wait, the more things will become true, the more things will cease to be true, the more they will scurry away. Stop trying to control everything. You have no power-over, there is no such thing, not even over yourself, not even over your own thoughts, not even over your own consistencies and lies. What you have is power-to, and watch it, quick, it will scurry away. You must always be making more.

Here is a triangle with labeled points. Tomorrow, there is a circle, a web, a wheel, or an old woman. Yesterday the old woman was Inspiring, sipping her coffee in the diner; today she implies the cook is incompetent at toasting bread and insults the waitress. What does it matter that you were wrong today? You were right yesterday. Scurry–quick, now, while there’s still time. There will be other ways for you to be wrong tomorrow.

Obama’s Inaugural Address.

Just finished watching Obama’s inaugural address (couldn’t see it live because my internet connection to the streaming feed was so painfully slow and disrupted, so I watched it on YouTube). I’d like to share a few quotes that particularly moved me.

“The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born.”

O, no, wait. That was George W. Bush at his first inauguration back in 2001. But here’s a powerful statement:

“When our founders boldly declared America’s independence to the world and our purposes to the Almighty, they knew that America, to endure, would have to change. Not change for change’s sake, but change to preserve America’s ideals–life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Though we march to the music of our time, our mission is timeless.”

Shoot, that was Clinton, in 1993. But who can forget this inspiring part of Obama’s speech:

“My friends, we are not the sum of our possessions. They are not the measure of our lives. In our hearts we know what matters. We cannot hope only to leave our children a bigger car, a bigger bank account. We must hope to give them a sense of what it means to be a loyal friend, a loving parent, a citizen who leaves his home, his neighborhood and town better than he found it.”

Or this part:

“We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we are in a time when there are no heroes just don’t know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. You meet heroes across a counter–and they are on both sides of that counter.”

No… wait a second, that was Bush, Sr. in 1989, and Reagan in 1981.

But this had to be one of the best:

“The American dream endures. We must once again have full faith in our country–and in one another. I believe America can be better. We can be even stronger than before. Let our recent mistakes bring a resurgent commitment to the basic principles of our Nation, for we know that if we despise our own government we have no future. We recall in special times when we have stood briefly, but magnificently, united. In those times no prize was beyond our grasp.”

Or was that Carter in 1977?

 

Anyway, it was a great speech, whatever it was he said.

I’m just glad he didn’t rail against demonized Enemies as though they were homogeneous (“for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you”) or portray hope and fear, conformity and chaos, in a reductionist linear view that provides no realistic alternatives (“we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord”) or imply that the militarization of society is a wonderful example of “civic duty” and service towards others (“we honor them not only because they are the guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service”) or suggest that justice can possibly be upheld when failing to hold past leaders accountable for their criminal actions (“we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas”) or state outright that, regardless of any superficial changes, that “we will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense.”

What do they say in France? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Damn the French. What do they know? I mean, at least Obama’s black, right? That’s enough change for most of us.

Being Happy

What, exactly—this is what I would like to know—what, precisely, is wrong with me?

I’ve wanted to be a writer as long as I can remember. I’ve wanted to be a writer so long that it’s no longer something I want to be, it’s just… something… something to be. Something I am. I guess. I think of myself as a writer. If someone asked me who I was, that’s probably one of the first things I’d say. “Druid writer,” or something like that. Or, “a writer, who also practices Druidry”… My spiritual life and my creative life, aside from being intimately entwined, have always been the two most important things to me.

Writing makes me happy. The way breathing makes me happy, or feeling my heart beat when it’s beating regularly and without any murmurs or problems. Writing makes me happy the way lakes and wind and oceans and rocks and tress and sunlight make me happy.

So why can’t I allow myself to be happy? What is this bizarre mental block that I have? I know that once I get into a groove, I’ll be happy, I’ll be prolific, and I’ll even be pleasantly surprised by some of the things I’ll write.

During those several weeks when I managed to write a whole half-a-book, I felt alive, completely at peace with myself and my work, energized and eager to start each day. I had a routine—breakfast, morning walk, write (all in silence), then lunch, errands and/or coffee shop dawdling, maybe more evening writing, relax, enjoy. I was happy, I was productive, I had no life whatsoever. What happened? I don’t understand why I stopped.

I think, perhaps, it was because I would rather be In Control than be happy. This is a powerful realization. Let’s go with it. The same has been true in my spiritual life. I may pick up a practice and stick with it steadily, until I can feel it starting to take effect. Then suddenly I panic. Meditation: all well and good. Creative visualization: certainly very nice. Hill-walking: nothing better on a fine day. But too much consistency and commitment, and I can start to feel myself change, I can feel my powers of concentration and perception growing stronger, sharper. And I think it frightens me a little. So I stop.

The reason I stopped working on my book is because I had been writing it as a gift. I had built up a myth about how I would write this amazing novel, and give it to the person I love, and he would fall (back) in love with me. Then, suddenly, two things happened: (a) the happier I became with my work, the happier I became while with him, until I could hardly stand it (things between us not really having changed), and (b) a backlash suddenly hit me, during which I realized it was pointless, he would never fall back in love with me no matter what, and I had no reason to write the thing. The story wanted to go somewhere else. Not down the happy-romance lane. And I was afraid of both letting go of my original plan and purpose, and afraid that if I let go and lost control, that might actually result in what I had been planning and hoping for, and my relationship with this person might have benefited from it (even if not blossomed into romance).

Control. In a chaotic, unjust world, I want control. I know too much for my own good. What I want most of all is to be able to write. But somewhere people are dying, starving, struggling, and right here are many, many people drifting along in relatively directionless, stagnant lives. I could journal about these things forever—but what I really want, what really makes me happy, is to write, creatively. I suspect that the reason I don’t just stop what I’m doing and write is because I do not trust the world not to fuck everything up and render itself incapable of accepting what I have stepped aside to create. If that makes any sense…

Psychoanalysis bullshit. What’s wrong with me? Here I am, writing about not writing, trying to justify it instead of simply turning the DVD player off, sitting down quietly and doing the goddamn thing. Writing makes me happy. So why is it so difficult?

Why can’t I just relax and do what makes me happy?

Blogging Book Reviews

So I wrote a review of this book on “Pagan ethics” that was supposed to be published this past December, but the journal is undergoing a period of transition, or something, so it hasn’t gotten the issue out yet. Meanwhile, a blogger recently reviewed the same book, with a great deal of criticism and fault-finding, though I found it to be quite a good book that accomplished exactly what it aimed to accomplish (even if this blogger, a whole-hearted academic, found those aims “underwhelming” and maybe a bit too plebeian for his taste—I don’t see why he’s surprised, as the author is not and never has been an academic).

So I left a rather long comment to his post, objecting to some of his criticisms as inaccurate. He accused the author, for instance, of ignoring politics, which seemed to me just a dumb thing to say considering she spent pages and pages on both “traditional” political issues like abortion, war, environmentalism, etc. as well as more subtle subjects dealing with “living in community” (the broadest definition of politics), such as romantic and familial relationships, animal rights, etc. He also railed against the absence of “ancient Pagan philosophies of ethics”—my response to which was, yes, well, she explicitly states that she is not taking an academic/scholarly approach to the question and much of her text is based on group conversations she’s had with real-life modern Pagans dealing with real-life modern problems. Not to say that ancient philosophies don’t have anything to say about such problems or that we shouldn’t study them and even revive them… but that wasn’t the aim of the book. If you want a book like that, then go write one. Nobody’s stopping you.

Of course, for all my careful thought, the blogger responded with one rather dismissive sentence in reply, addressing the readability and practicality of ancient philosophy, which was beside the point I was making anyway. Meanwhile, other readers have responded with very harsh comments about the author’s ideas and personal character based not on having read her book, but solely on this blogger’s review. They accuse her of ignoring or confusing very obvious and important issues that she does, in fact, address at length but which the blogger simply did not bother to mention. As a reviewer on a blog, where replies and feedback are more easily exchanged than in a traditional print format, it seems to me this blogger has the responsibility to step up and correct these false accusations, or at least encourage people to read the book anyway, even if they think they’ll disagree with it.

Jerks. Sometimes I hate the blogosphere.

Madeline, Falling Over.

In case you weren’t already aware, Madeline is god. Here are some details about her: she’s crazy.

That’s actually the only detail that matters.

She hates oreos. She is afraid of cotton balls (when they are dry, they are too dry, and when they are damp, they are horrible). She likes to stare at her own eyes in the mirror sometimes; first, she looks at the outer rim of the iris, which is like the horizon line between the ocean at night and the sky at night; then, she looks at the iris, which is like an iris; and afterwards, she looks at the pupil, which is this dark empty thing that looks back at her, and if she tried to shine a light into it, it would blind her, so she figures eyes are not like glass, which can be looked into, but like green apples lying in green grass, which can be overlooked but seen. Madeline knows somebody who said, “This is a bad metaphor: When they met for the first time, they were like hummingbirds, meeting for the first time.” She also knows somebody who said, “Good.” Very sarcastically. I know these people, too, but Madeline and I are not the same person. I am not god.

Madeline thinks dreaming is like walking on a balance beam made of balsa. Something might happen to throw you off—you might, for instance, find yourself in a wobbly, Buchanan-era hoop skirt; or there may be a number of airplanes with very large propellers and very small  wings; or perhaps all the animals are laying down beside one another and conceiving liombs and porpoiscupines and other infertile, beautiful and deadly creatures. Her theory is, even after you wake up, if you wake up alone it may take a great deal of energy and arm-waving to regain your balance. If you could just reach out and touch something real, something that talks back, it would be as easy as touching a rope strung halfway along the balance beam—just a fingertip would be enough. But if you wake up alone too often, you fall over.

When Madeline was a little girl, she would talk to God. When she grew up, the two of them grew very close, and the closer they got, the more they talked, and the more they talked, the closer they got, until she understood that God wakes up alone all the time. He reaches out to touch a fingertip to someone who will talk back, and it’s like shining a bright light into the middle of the pupil—rip! the pupil is gone, and instead there is the pink, blind back of an eye.

God once had an awful dream, and the dream was James Buchanan, who lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and never married; God dreamt Buchanan was only elected President because he was untainted by intelligent opinion. Still, he could not prevent the Civil War. James Buchanan was bonkers. So is God. So, for that matter, is Madeline. When God and Madeline talk, they’re like two hummingbirds, meeting for the first time. When James Buchanan died, they made his home a museum and young Lancaster girls can visit and dress in hoop-skirts and wobble from room to room, laughing at how tiny the beds are and how a couple might wake up sitting upright next to one another, as if they had been awake the whole time. James Buchanan, having never had a wife, probably slept long-ways, lying on his stomach, and when he died, even he must have said, “Good,” very sarcastically.

Blather.

Finally pushed myself through that book review I’ve been putting off for weeks now. Didn’t turn out half bad, especially towards the end (I rather liked the conclusion, which always risks being a kind of tacked-on superfluous bit of fluff, but this time wrapped things up nicely to give some perspective on how the two books I had been comparing related to each other in a broader philosophical context).

I think my problem, the reason the review was giving me trouble, was that I had begun both books with certain expectations that were not met, and I wanted to address those expectations. I was under the impression that both texts, for instance, would more directly address and define the idea of “honor” as it related to Pagan ethics–and yet I was immensely dissatisfied that neither really did a good job of this (which was tough for me, who had only ever heard of “honor” in the context of either Klingon battle songs or the restrained novels of Jane Austin). On the other hand, I had to reevaluate whether or not either really intended to focus on that concept or make it a foundation of their discussion. In the end, it didn’t seem like that was their intention, or at least, if it was, it was only a kind of “way in” to a much more interesting conversation. The real heart of both books was the idea of engaged relationship and story (as meaning-making), and as soon as I started to focus on that and set myself the task of merely describing what the books did do rather than what I thought they might do but hadn’t… the review became much easier to write.

The reason I was finding it hard to get the review kick-started was probably because my instinct is to keep first-person out of it as much as possible (just try to give readers a general idea of what they might find in a given text and let them decide for themselves if it’s worth the read). And yet the issue of thwarted expectations is essentially a first-person issue, isn’t it? You see what I mean? Or maybe I’m still just confusing myself… Anyway, by discussing what the books really were about, maybe I’ll spare at least a few readers from harboring inaccurate expectations similar to my own.

“Honor” seems like such a Pagan-y thing to base an ethical system on, all Heroic tribal men-with-beards-toasting-mugs-of-mead-after-a-glorious-battle kind of thing, as opposed to the passive, obedient, moon-faced-monks-on-their-knees Christian idea of virtue and morality. But the truth is, Restall Orr and Bren both really wanted to talk about story-telling, and story-telling doesn’t have to be jovial and loud and drunk (though it can be), it can also be subtle and intimate and quiet and mystical. I think that’s far more interesting, and more flexible, than trying to revive an old code of honor and tribal loyalties.

I’m tired. I’m going to bed. I want to spend more time on my creative writing, and less time evaluating other people’s books. Just for a little while, anyway.

Dialect

R. and I are debating the use of dialect in fiction writing. I hate it. I don’t like reading it, and when it’s included, it almost always makes me wonder what motives the author had for writing in dialect. Think of films: movies set in other countries but made for an English-speaking audience either use subtitles, or have all characters speaking in English (allowing the setting to do the work of implying a non-English language). But in neither case does a film use intentionally poorly-translated English the way “dialects” in fictional works sometimes do. And of course, I realize that there truly are dialects, different idiosyncrasies used by different English-speaking communities… Still, I think it’s so easy to rely on dialect as a kind of verbal stereotype and, especially in a text-based art form, deliberately poor language can be used to imply (or maybe only accidentally and subconsciously implies) a lack of intelligence in a character.

Just because some people do speak in dialect doesn’t mean that the stereotypes are somehow “true” and therefore fair to use. I find myself, for instance, changing the way I speak when I’m at work. I put on the waitress uniform, and suddenly everyone (coworker and customer alike) treats me as relatively uneducated working-class. I conform to that projected identity almost without realizing it. I’ve noticed myself conjugating verbs improperly, pronouncing -ing as -en’ and even using particular ejaculations and expressions that I only picked up from that environment. As soon as I leave the workplace, I speak like I always have; and even within the restaurant setting, when someone communicates with me directly or intimately, as a human being rather than just a waitress, I speak with my own voice. (Sometimes I joke with coworkers by intentionally “talking normal” and willfully misunderstanding slang terms and phrases–then they get to laugh at how uncultured I am.) But the fact is that it is all too easy to conform to a projected stereotype of “how waitresses talk” and adapt a waitress-dialect that is not really my own.

Now if this happens to me, why shouldn’t I wonder if other people experience the same thing? How can I tell when a dialect is an honest representation of someone’s voice, or a stylistic quirk adapted because of projected preconceptions, perhaps preconceptions that I myself am projecting onto them? I think the whole attempt to use dialect is rife with complications and potential blindspots…

R. doesn’t agree (does he ever agree with anything I say?). Mostly, I think, because the whole discussion started because of Palahniuk’s next book coming out, written (it would seem) entirely in the “dialect” of an Arabic foreign-exchange student/terrorist. That makes me nervous. There are so many ways in which Palahniuk may be accidentally racist. I have a great admiration for the Arabic language and especially the poetry of that culture (though I’ve only ever been able to read it in translation, I did have the chance to study a little bit of actual Arabic, enough to appreciate the unique sounds and rhythms, anyway). Why an Arabic person would choose to keep a journal (or tell his own story) not only in English but in really bad English is beyond me. It seems, more likely, a stylistic device that Palahniuk is using. And if that’s so… it makes me wonder why, to what purpose.

The book (Pygmy), doesn’t come out until May, 2009. So I have some time before I’ll be able to read it and see how he handles it. Still, I’m not going to say I’m entirely comfortable with the idea. And I’m not going to jump up and defend him to the death before I’ve read it (the way R. does) merely because so far his work has been so good.