Once I had a writing teacher, a real teacher not an instructor, who told us we could write about anything, anything at all. Anything could be written about, just approach the subject matter correctly. One of our tasks was to keep a writer's journal, which was very difficult for all the members of my class because not one person in the class kept a regular journal. So a number of us got together and talked about the difficulty of this task, and task it was because the journal was a large part of our grade.
One girl thought that a writer's journal must be all the ideas and clever thoughts she had during the day and that was what she was going to put in her journal; another fellow said he thought maybe his journal was going to be a real diary type journal, like how he felt about his parents and his relationships, and a somewhat mysterious "best friend"; another guy said his journal was just going to be his poetry. The discussion proceeded like that, each person describing what they were going to put in their journal. I told the group I kept a dream journal, but thought because we had to turn this thing in every other day, that might not be such a good idea and everybody laughed. And when they laughed I got the idea that what my journal was going to cover was the progress I could make on each of my writing projects for the class. The fellow with the mysterious friend told me he thought that was the best idea, but everyone else thought their own way to proceed best and then we all went our separate ways till the next class session.
At the next session the teacher asked us all for our journals and dutifully, we pulled them all out except the fellow who said his poetry was to be the only thing in his journal. He asked the teacher, "what if nothing happened to write about?" To which she replied, "then write in your journal..nothing to write about today." He looked very puzzled. At the beginning of the term, he always dressed rather like a lumberjack in plaid shirts and Levi's and he wore his hair very long and loose and his beard and mustache could not have been cut for a very long time; he was a young man, so maybe it had been growing since it had started growing. Both his hair and his beard were slightly redder than strawberry blond, so when he came to class and I didn't know his name, I thought of him as Eric the Red. It wasn't until maybe the third class that I found out his name really was Eric, and he even had a Scandinavian last name. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I really was, and I got taken a little off guard one day when he came to class with his hair cut short and his beard and mustache completely shaved off, and to everyone's surprise he looked a lot like Eric Stoltz. During that class period he didn't say anything to anyone except when I said to him at the end of class, "I uh see..you uh...gave up the viking look, huh?" And to my real surprise, he answered saying very quietly, "oh! I didn't think anyone would...you know...recognize...notice."
It was right then that I realized that the teacher was right. Anything can be written about. It doesn't matter what the subject is and it doesn't matter if the subject is deep or important or funny or serious. It can be written about if the writer can figure out a way to write down the experience. What is harder, is to write down experiences that have never happened, imaginary experiences. Fiction is the hardest thing to write for myself anyway, because I have to know how the thing is going to end before I start. If I just started writing like so many writers say they do, and just let the story tell itself, the story never seems to stop. Someone might say, well, that probably is because what you've got there is the beginning of a novel, and you are just going to have to tough it out till the end. Sometimes they have said they would like to read it when I finish.
What they don't understand is that those little pieces they've read aren't the beginning of a novel, they are more like the terribly small end slices that get left in some loaves of bread. You can't possibly use them to make toast, they are way too small to turn into a sandwich face, they are even too small to use for just good old bread and butter! The only things they might be good for are turning them into croutons or bread pudding if you can collect enough, which, because they are so small, usually takes so long, they have to be frozen or they turn blue with mold.
However, when I do know the end of a story, the rest just seems to write itself. The writing of the thing almost seems backward or upside-down. Navigationally, I know where I am going, all I really need to decide is which road I am going to take, and how I am going to travel; will I walk or take the train, drive or fly? And occasionally, that decision is more fun than finally arriving at the destination itself. And sometimes, I have to go back to the beginning to get something that I forgot, just like when you leave your house and remember halfway to your goal that the reason your going was left at home sitting on the hall table waiting to leave with you, and anthropomorphically, maybe its feelings are hurt because it thinks you've forgotten it. Maybe. Even that part is fun. And then there is a kind of happy-ever-after feeling when you finally arrive with the reason for going and all is going to be well.
I felt that way when I finished that writing class. So many things seemed to happen along the way, and I had to go back and find lost experiences that seemed to need exposure to the air. It was great fun. And there, at the end of the story, were all the people who had been my companions in the original journal meeting, whom it turned out, were all great stories in themselves. The girl with all her ideas written down in her journal? Frustrated because she couldn't seem to find her "voice" and took it out on everyone in the class. The fellow with the mysterious best friend, he wrote these incredibly beautiful sentences in the midst of horrible and horribly written stories and poems, just like flowers growing in garbage heaps. We became friends for the period of the term and he began to confide in me slowly over the term, and finally, on a rainy spring evening, with the streetlights sparkling on wet pavements, in a neighborhood coffee house, against what seemed like an eternity, he confessed to me that he, this young man of just twenty, was a member of NA and his best friend was a drug.
Just like most journeys, this one lost some travelers. Looking back at the experience, I remember some of them telling us in their own way, I wasn't really prepared for this journey and I must turn back now, or I may not make it home. One older lady, a charming person who liked to write about puppies and love, told me it scared her that maybe "the old gods" might rise up and come back to power; she ran for a school board office and did very respectably, even though she had died a month before the election.
Some simply vanished, like the man, Eric, who disappeared without a trace the day after he shaved.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Friday, June 1, 2007
The Undiscovered Country
There is something seductively interesting and at the same time fairly creepy going on in the world. The creepy part seems to be a psychic response to unvoiced questions.
Reviewing reading I have done over the years it has become clear that I, as an individual, and probably everyone, develop patterns of recognition, or psychological templates, to find that for which we are seeking. I think this is similar to fulfilling "drives". The body knows it needs certain nutrients and little switches somewhere kick on a kind of radar that seeks out those nutrients and little recognition lights flash and little buzzers buzz when the sought-after nutrient comes within range of the senses.
The pattern I am recognizing is in the reading I have been attracted to over the years. Certain books I have kept since childhood which, when I first read them, left a definite impression, an idea that there might be more in them than seen when first read. Interestingly there is only one of those books that is actually a "kid's book"; all the rest were meant for an adult, or at least a young adult. I have re-read all of these books many times and almost every time I re-read one of them something pops out that I either hadn't noticed at all or touched me in a new way. I suspect that re-reading these books programmed me in some mysterious way that I have only the dimmest of shadows of an idea about.
There are also books which I have kept because I knew their importance at first read, but have rarely if ever re-read, but images and ideas from them have remained with me quite constantly over time. Some of these books have included ideas which seem to be coming to pass, and I am not talking about Science-fiction prediction of cell phones or computer based technological miracles, although it is true that SF writers, especially "golden age" SF writers were almost always ahead of the tech curve. It has even become fun to see how far ahead of the curve they were; a recent television program spoke about imagined advances that have actually come about because techno-geeks were watching Star Trek. What I am talking about are social change ideas.
A couple of those unremarkable literary efforts (although certainly major publishing successes) was a series which included the idea of a synthesis of all major religions. While there hasn't been any such real synthesis yet, I keep reading news articles and seeing videos that approach this very subject. The approach must be very oblique considering the state of world politics. Who would, in the current climate, propose a joining of Islam to Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism or any of the above to Buddhism in a serious forum? Such a suggestion might well be suicidal.
But indeed, this is the base of an idea being proposed. In my mind this is not a radical idea but a necessary idea. It is not a new idea as I have stated, but it is fascinating that it is happening now, and it seems to be happening because of people like the neo-cons in the United States and fundamentaist muslims. And I think with a little applied mental shifting one can see the reason. Simply put, survival.
Forces such as the above mentioned do not contain anywhere a majority of any population, but they do seem to promote movement away from themselves, generally it seems to me, toward the "center". It is of course, impossible to say where that center lies, but like herd animals, the greater part of the population will tend to escape from the violent fringes where the slow are also the dead. These actions of violent extremists on any side will cause a population movement away from where they perceive the violence to exist. Hence, vast numbers of people escaping, for example, Iraq.
It is a rare population, such as the Jewish population of Israel that will remain in place instead of trying to escape the hostile surround, and it is probable that without external support even they would tend to migrate. The Iraqi population has no such support and neither does the Palestinian or the internal Russian populations. At the high point of the conflict in Afghanistan there were nearly five and half million refugees living just outside the borders in Iran and Pakistan and a million more displaced within the country. All of this migration was man-made, but natural disasters cause the same sort of movement of populations. It does not matter what the trigger for violence is or was; it is very difficult to live in a zone of violence. These displaced people seek less violent environments and to the degree that they succeed, begin to influence the new environment and its old inhabitants. There is always some disturbance of previous local norms when an "alien" population arrives.
In a commercial empire such as the one based in the United States, it is necessary to have a population wealthy enough to buy the products produced for consumption. A population wealthy enough to buy such products cannot be stressed with too much violence for the above reasons. Arriving populations from Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Russia and other parts of the old Soviet Union have made room for themselves in various parts of the U.S. pushing the less socially stressed native population into fearful xenophobic mindsets. One of the new factors arriving with these immigrants is their old religious forms. It has become clear to me that every population and culture, stressed by various forces moves in a direction away from the stress moment. Religion appears to be one of those stressors.
Paraphrasing a well known writer, it seems to be true that religion bears the same relationship to the "soul" as predator does to prey. Inevitably there occurs an evolution between the pair where the predator loses its advantage because the prey has adapted a new survival strategy which the predator must then adapt to overcome and so on. No one so far has answered the question of what the soul might be or why there is a force created to pursue it, or what might make the pursuit of that substance nutritive to anything, but religious formulations are prepared for certain groups at certain points in their development and tend to become obsolete.
Can it be that as the planet tends toward monoculture a new religious formulation is coming into existance?
Reviewing reading I have done over the years it has become clear that I, as an individual, and probably everyone, develop patterns of recognition, or psychological templates, to find that for which we are seeking. I think this is similar to fulfilling "drives". The body knows it needs certain nutrients and little switches somewhere kick on a kind of radar that seeks out those nutrients and little recognition lights flash and little buzzers buzz when the sought-after nutrient comes within range of the senses.
The pattern I am recognizing is in the reading I have been attracted to over the years. Certain books I have kept since childhood which, when I first read them, left a definite impression, an idea that there might be more in them than seen when first read. Interestingly there is only one of those books that is actually a "kid's book"; all the rest were meant for an adult, or at least a young adult. I have re-read all of these books many times and almost every time I re-read one of them something pops out that I either hadn't noticed at all or touched me in a new way. I suspect that re-reading these books programmed me in some mysterious way that I have only the dimmest of shadows of an idea about.
There are also books which I have kept because I knew their importance at first read, but have rarely if ever re-read, but images and ideas from them have remained with me quite constantly over time. Some of these books have included ideas which seem to be coming to pass, and I am not talking about Science-fiction prediction of cell phones or computer based technological miracles, although it is true that SF writers, especially "golden age" SF writers were almost always ahead of the tech curve. It has even become fun to see how far ahead of the curve they were; a recent television program spoke about imagined advances that have actually come about because techno-geeks were watching Star Trek. What I am talking about are social change ideas.
A couple of those unremarkable literary efforts (although certainly major publishing successes) was a series which included the idea of a synthesis of all major religions. While there hasn't been any such real synthesis yet, I keep reading news articles and seeing videos that approach this very subject. The approach must be very oblique considering the state of world politics. Who would, in the current climate, propose a joining of Islam to Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism or any of the above to Buddhism in a serious forum? Such a suggestion might well be suicidal.
But indeed, this is the base of an idea being proposed. In my mind this is not a radical idea but a necessary idea. It is not a new idea as I have stated, but it is fascinating that it is happening now, and it seems to be happening because of people like the neo-cons in the United States and fundamentaist muslims. And I think with a little applied mental shifting one can see the reason. Simply put, survival.
Forces such as the above mentioned do not contain anywhere a majority of any population, but they do seem to promote movement away from themselves, generally it seems to me, toward the "center". It is of course, impossible to say where that center lies, but like herd animals, the greater part of the population will tend to escape from the violent fringes where the slow are also the dead. These actions of violent extremists on any side will cause a population movement away from where they perceive the violence to exist. Hence, vast numbers of people escaping, for example, Iraq.
It is a rare population, such as the Jewish population of Israel that will remain in place instead of trying to escape the hostile surround, and it is probable that without external support even they would tend to migrate. The Iraqi population has no such support and neither does the Palestinian or the internal Russian populations. At the high point of the conflict in Afghanistan there were nearly five and half million refugees living just outside the borders in Iran and Pakistan and a million more displaced within the country. All of this migration was man-made, but natural disasters cause the same sort of movement of populations. It does not matter what the trigger for violence is or was; it is very difficult to live in a zone of violence. These displaced people seek less violent environments and to the degree that they succeed, begin to influence the new environment and its old inhabitants. There is always some disturbance of previous local norms when an "alien" population arrives.
In a commercial empire such as the one based in the United States, it is necessary to have a population wealthy enough to buy the products produced for consumption. A population wealthy enough to buy such products cannot be stressed with too much violence for the above reasons. Arriving populations from Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Russia and other parts of the old Soviet Union have made room for themselves in various parts of the U.S. pushing the less socially stressed native population into fearful xenophobic mindsets. One of the new factors arriving with these immigrants is their old religious forms. It has become clear to me that every population and culture, stressed by various forces moves in a direction away from the stress moment. Religion appears to be one of those stressors.
Paraphrasing a well known writer, it seems to be true that religion bears the same relationship to the "soul" as predator does to prey. Inevitably there occurs an evolution between the pair where the predator loses its advantage because the prey has adapted a new survival strategy which the predator must then adapt to overcome and so on. No one so far has answered the question of what the soul might be or why there is a force created to pursue it, or what might make the pursuit of that substance nutritive to anything, but religious formulations are prepared for certain groups at certain points in their development and tend to become obsolete.
Can it be that as the planet tends toward monoculture a new religious formulation is coming into existance?
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
The Moving Word
A word, a printed word can't scream, can't emote, can't send out pheromones or wave its serifs in gestures.
Sometimes though, in the hand of a skillful writer, which I someday hope to be, some kind of alphabetic synergetic phenomenon happens and a reader can hear the screams and emotion coming through the printed (or electron bytten) words. I know that the printed word, electronically or otherwise, is a set of symbols contrived to give the decrypting reader a kind of sense of reality. One of my favorite writers, Idries Shah, wrote that reading about reality has about the same relationship to true reality as dried onions have to fresh onions. It's there but you have to use your imagination.
I have been attempting to find this combination when I write about anything. Anything except words. This and all the above feel like symbols of symbols of symbols. I have the feeling that whenever someone writes about an "intellectual" subject this is what happens, which is probably why intellectuals seem so foggy most of the time. They probably keep seeing symbols floating in their heads and as long as the symbol has any relativity to their subject they follow it around until another symbol catches their interest.
Trying to attract my brother's attention from a book he was reading I would have to yell, "hey GG, get up and help me with this!" whatever "this" was and he would slowly, slowly try to tear his eyes away from the words on the page to my increasingly insistent tone. He and my sisters did the same thing; they would seem to crawl inside the book until the only thing showing was their feet by which they would have to be dragged out. After I had their attention it was still divided because their emotional fingers still had to be pried loose from whatever book was providing my competition.
This was a mystery to me because I hated to read for at least the first nine years of my life. The only reason I finally took it up was because the family television, yes, we only had one, had a nervous breakdown and my liberal minded beatnik parents decided we didn't need to replace it. Whenever I complained to them about having nothing to do, my father would say read a book; my mother usually gave me some tedious make work task but she might say read a book, which I thought at the time was pretty much the same thing.
I suppose I should say that because of my liberal minded beatnik parents and an older brother and sister who could read, I was taught to read before I entered Kindergarten. I think the first book I read by myself was one of the "Cowboy Sam" series by the late Edna Walker Chandler and I remember those books having the feel of dusty roads, smokey exhaust and the smell of bacon (which I hate). But the only reason I remember them that way was because Ms. Chandler wrote them for boys my age and more importantly to boys my age. Somehow she knew our "language" so the word symbols she used, assisted by simple illustrations, spoke directly to the little cowboy in me.
Much later than "Cowboy Sam" I took a college creative writing course where the teacher told us to use words that "color" our writing. The example she used was very simple; she wrote on the board "money", "coin" and "doubloon". She also said that if we denied ourselves the usage of profanity we would discover new choices. At the beginning of the semester I really thought she was just being dictatorial and taking the vote for everyone, but when the term had come to a close, I thanked her because what she had said was true. If I took away the automatic and the habitual, I had to find another way to express myself, even though I still have the impulse to write in colorful Mamet-esque street terms.
Borrowing words from Shakespeare, the task now seems to be to find some ability to write for and to some undiscovered country.
Sometimes though, in the hand of a skillful writer, which I someday hope to be, some kind of alphabetic synergetic phenomenon happens and a reader can hear the screams and emotion coming through the printed (or electron bytten) words. I know that the printed word, electronically or otherwise, is a set of symbols contrived to give the decrypting reader a kind of sense of reality. One of my favorite writers, Idries Shah, wrote that reading about reality has about the same relationship to true reality as dried onions have to fresh onions. It's there but you have to use your imagination.
I have been attempting to find this combination when I write about anything. Anything except words. This and all the above feel like symbols of symbols of symbols. I have the feeling that whenever someone writes about an "intellectual" subject this is what happens, which is probably why intellectuals seem so foggy most of the time. They probably keep seeing symbols floating in their heads and as long as the symbol has any relativity to their subject they follow it around until another symbol catches their interest.
Trying to attract my brother's attention from a book he was reading I would have to yell, "hey GG, get up and help me with this!" whatever "this" was and he would slowly, slowly try to tear his eyes away from the words on the page to my increasingly insistent tone. He and my sisters did the same thing; they would seem to crawl inside the book until the only thing showing was their feet by which they would have to be dragged out. After I had their attention it was still divided because their emotional fingers still had to be pried loose from whatever book was providing my competition.
This was a mystery to me because I hated to read for at least the first nine years of my life. The only reason I finally took it up was because the family television, yes, we only had one, had a nervous breakdown and my liberal minded beatnik parents decided we didn't need to replace it. Whenever I complained to them about having nothing to do, my father would say read a book; my mother usually gave me some tedious make work task but she might say read a book, which I thought at the time was pretty much the same thing.
I suppose I should say that because of my liberal minded beatnik parents and an older brother and sister who could read, I was taught to read before I entered Kindergarten. I think the first book I read by myself was one of the "Cowboy Sam" series by the late Edna Walker Chandler and I remember those books having the feel of dusty roads, smokey exhaust and the smell of bacon (which I hate). But the only reason I remember them that way was because Ms. Chandler wrote them for boys my age and more importantly to boys my age. Somehow she knew our "language" so the word symbols she used, assisted by simple illustrations, spoke directly to the little cowboy in me.
Much later than "Cowboy Sam" I took a college creative writing course where the teacher told us to use words that "color" our writing. The example she used was very simple; she wrote on the board "money", "coin" and "doubloon". She also said that if we denied ourselves the usage of profanity we would discover new choices. At the beginning of the semester I really thought she was just being dictatorial and taking the vote for everyone, but when the term had come to a close, I thanked her because what she had said was true. If I took away the automatic and the habitual, I had to find another way to express myself, even though I still have the impulse to write in colorful Mamet-esque street terms.
Borrowing words from Shakespeare, the task now seems to be to find some ability to write for and to some undiscovered country.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Breaking the Surface
For a first post, I told my friend, this is like jumping into the deep end of the pool. She said maybe, but there are way more advanced forms of blogging which are like jumping off the cliff in Acapulco. Now why should it be that just writing down some thoughts is so intimidating? I mean anyone's thoughts, not just mine.
I have sort of made a commitment to myself that if what I write isn't any good at least I like the way the blog looks, at least at this point. I also think that maybe what I am doing requires a rare kind of introspection. Not that I am not introspective, I am, but sometimes I think my introspection is more like really thin, wet spaghetti in a collander with really big holes. Lots of ideas just kind of hanging out here and there and the only thing you can do is let them hang because if you pull them back in they break and if you try to push them through they break. Just stuff you wish you could ignore or take back or fix but you can't. Wasted spaghetti.
I have this idea that mastering something, even blogging, is something I am never going to do because mastering something means taking a task and continuing to find interest in it no matter how much you already know. Not being afraid of being bored by learning little tiny interesting bits about your subject sends you into depths you couldn't conceive when you first began. See, there is that Acapulco metaphor. And maybe once you get down into those depths you will see things you never saw before and maybe some of those things are scary, or maybe it could really be like Acapulco and you take the risk of missing the deep part altogether and break your skull on the rocks.
Why do I want to master something like blogging? I don't even know. I always think that when I solve a problem, the solution might come in handy later, or maybe just the lesson. I like to write and lots of times I read something and I think, Uí, I can do better than that, but then I write something and I look and look and look and think, that sucks! Not always but often enough I have the thought that breaking my skull on the rocks would be less embarrassing.
So every once in a while I pick up my sister's writer's market or one of her writing books or I look at poetry in the New Yorker magazine and I think, yep, this is why they are in the New Yorker. They use all the same words I do, they just put them together differently.
I have sort of made a commitment to myself that if what I write isn't any good at least I like the way the blog looks, at least at this point. I also think that maybe what I am doing requires a rare kind of introspection. Not that I am not introspective, I am, but sometimes I think my introspection is more like really thin, wet spaghetti in a collander with really big holes. Lots of ideas just kind of hanging out here and there and the only thing you can do is let them hang because if you pull them back in they break and if you try to push them through they break. Just stuff you wish you could ignore or take back or fix but you can't. Wasted spaghetti.
I have this idea that mastering something, even blogging, is something I am never going to do because mastering something means taking a task and continuing to find interest in it no matter how much you already know. Not being afraid of being bored by learning little tiny interesting bits about your subject sends you into depths you couldn't conceive when you first began. See, there is that Acapulco metaphor. And maybe once you get down into those depths you will see things you never saw before and maybe some of those things are scary, or maybe it could really be like Acapulco and you take the risk of missing the deep part altogether and break your skull on the rocks.
Why do I want to master something like blogging? I don't even know. I always think that when I solve a problem, the solution might come in handy later, or maybe just the lesson. I like to write and lots of times I read something and I think, Uí, I can do better than that, but then I write something and I look and look and look and think, that sucks! Not always but often enough I have the thought that breaking my skull on the rocks would be less embarrassing.
So every once in a while I pick up my sister's writer's market or one of her writing books or I look at poetry in the New Yorker magazine and I think, yep, this is why they are in the New Yorker. They use all the same words I do, they just put them together differently.
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