Hipsters Did Not Invent Irony

            I recently finished Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.  I sort of wish it had inspired me in the same writer-oriented fashion that Cervantes and Bunyan did.  Both of those writers led to research and LOTS of writing, which obviously translates well to blog format.  Gulliver's Travels, on the other hand, has led to a quite different project.  I've actually started making a little book that will be something along the lines of Gulliver and Bell's Travels.  I might make a couple versions, but roughly speaking I'll end up with a small accordion book that includes pictures, postcards, collage-work, and words relating to places Gulliver went, places I've gone, and thoughts on travel in general.  If I ever master the art of scanning things or taking pictures, I might post some of it here.  But in general, it's not a bloggy project.
            However, there still remains my obvious duty of convincing you that you should also read Gulliver's Travels.  For one thing, it's short and could be read very quickly if, unlike me, you are capable of reading without taking pages and pages of notes and looking up dozens of references every hour or so.
            Also, it's hilarious.  And so, in lieu of sharing my own literary thoughts and responses to Gulliver's Travels, I thought I'd instead share some excerpts over the next couple of weeks.  And trust me:  there is so, so much more where this came from.
            And so, without further ado, here is a section from the first Book, A Voyage to Lilliput.  For those who don't already know, Lilliput is an island roughly equidistant from India and Australia, inhabited entirely by people who stand about three inches high.  Gulliver, having spent some time in their illustrious though tiny company, is struck by the wisdom of many of their social institutions:


            Their notions relating to the duties of parents and children differ extremely from ours.  For since the conjugation* of male and female is founded upon the great law of nature, in order to propagate and continue the species, the Lilliputians will needs have it, that men and women are joined together like other animals, by the motives of concupiscence**; and that their tenderness towards their young proceeds from the like natural principle:  for which reason they will never allow, that a child is under any obligation to his father for begetting him, or his mother for bringing him into the world; which, considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit in itself, nor intended so by his parents, whose thoughts in their love-encounters*** were otherwise employed.  Upon these, and the like reasonings, their opinion is, that parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the education of their own children:  and therefore they have in every town public nurseries, where all parents...are obliged to send their infants of both sexes to be reared and educated when they come to the age of twenty moons...Their parents are suffered to see them only twice a year; the visit is to last but an hour.  They are allowed to kiss the child at meeting and parting; but a professor, who always stands by on these occasions, will not suffer them to whisper, or use any fondling expressions, or bring any presents of toys, sweetmeats, and the like.


The nanny in me sighs happily.  Finally, someone had the courage to say it.  And just to be sure you're also building your vocabulary...

conjugation:  a.  The inflection of a particular verb...  b.  Chromosome pairing in the first meiotic division...  c.  Getting it on.

concupiscence:  a.  Sexual desire; lust; sensuality.  SOMEONE PLEASE USE THIS WORD SOON!

love-encounters:  Okay, okay.  You get it.

Atheism for Artists: Practical Gains

            Thoughts after reading Chapter 3 of The Artist's Way.  Part three of twelve on creativity.



            Perhaps I should preface what I am about to say with the following:  I am weird about "belief."  I seem to have no difficulty "believing" in a god, and the next moment happily conceding that the universe is entirely physical.  I've been studying a lot of philosophical literature lately, and was stunned to discover that, while I identify strongly as a Christian, I don't really consider myself a theist.
            I'm not sure why.  It could be argued my mind is good at "holding opposites in tension with one another," or something equally grandiose.  Also, I love all things French.  Or I might just be indecisive.  But so as to avoid leaving the impression that I am arguing for a denial of the existence of a god, let me be clear:  I choose my beliefs, in the sense that I choose the best metaphors.  In other words, I don't buy that we all look at all the evidence, weigh it up even-handedly, and experience what we call "being convinced."  I clearly remember the moment I became convinced of evolution (as opposed to the seven-day creationism I was raised with).  I chose to switch allegiances because I liked the consequences of evolution.  The consequences I saw at the time were that it meant humans were part of the system.  Not something special that could step outside of the system and manipulate it.  Since then I have also become aware of some of the more chilling consequences of the theory of evolution — Richard Dawkins describes them with cozy brutality in the first few minutes of a Radiolab podcast.  But my point is, I like to toy with beliefs in my head and see what they do for me in certain circumstances.
            In Chapter 3 of the Artist's Way, Cameron asserts that we are more frightened that god exists than that he or she or it does not exist.  According to her, the majority of humans still "believe in God," (factually true, based on polls), or believe in a god, or however you want to put it.  I don't know why we continue as we do, and I don't argue that we should change or continue or whatever.  But what I remember of being an atheist was primarily this:  a profound sense of responsibility.  If there is no god, then I can't pray for something and wait for it to happen.  If there is no god, and my life sucks, I have to take ownership of that.  I may not be responsible for all the sucking — certainly a child is not responsible for being born into an abusive or dysfunctional home — but there's no one to turn to to fix it or blame it on.
            I get that Cameron is trying to encourage nascent artists.  I get that she's trying to give us all reason to hope.  And I want to encourage nascent artists, and to have reason to hope, too.  But my vision of being an artist is quite different from what she says in this chapter in particular, and I actually like experimenting with the idea of no god in heaven in order to get me to stop asking for things and start doing things.
            I want to be clear on this point, because I know some people who are artists still fighting their way out of the shell, and make no mistake:  fighting their way out of the shell kills a good number of animals before they even get into the world.  It's difficult and nasty and sticky.  But that's the good news!  It's hard.  It's not just hard for you because you're not talented or lazy or don't have a supportive enough partner.  It's hard work, for a million reasons.  You'll make ugly art.  You'll write meaningless stories (though they sounded meaningful in your head).  You'll embarrass yourself over and over again.  You'll spend money you can't afford to spend on classes that lead to dead ends and materials you'll feel are wasted.  And yes, there will be critics.  Some of them will say helpful things.  Some will attack you personally.  But while you might find it helpful to comfort yourself with God or gods or a Universal Spirit after the initial agony, my suggestion is this:  now take God out of the picture.  Pretend there is no one to help you.  Now what do you do?
            Seriously, what do you do?  Allow me to make a suggestion, taking the negative critic as an example.  If you're dealing with a critic that you think can handle him- or herself in a fight, you knock them down.  Then they'll knock you down.  Hit them again.  Proceed thusly.  After awhile the fight will end.  After several months of physical therapy and suicidal despair, you will make the best thing you have ever made in your life (unless you have kids, in which case, sorry; they're the best thing you'll ever make).  Congratulations.  Now you're an artist.
            To repeat:  this is good news.  The good news is that Cameron is totally and completely wrong when she says "Art requires a safe hatchery."  You may need to fortify the hatchery.  You may very well need to kick some people out of the hatchery.  But whatever hatchery you're in, you can be a creative person because you are a creative person because human beings are fucking creative.  It's what we do.  Those of us without kids might have more energy to pour pour into sculpture or food or poetry or even a job that might appear humdrum on the surface.  But we've all got it.  If God working through you is a concept that gets the work done for you, then go for it.  But please, for somebody's sake, don't wait for a safe hatchery; it will never, ever come.

on the german landscape, and oh, how romantic it is

Some thoughts on the film Young Goethe in Love.

  Towards the end of 2011, or maybe the beginning of 2012, mostly on a whim, I went to see a German movie co-written and directed by Philipp Stölzl.  For reasons I cannot fathom, while its German title was, reasonably enough, Goethe, for English audiences they felt compelled to call it Young Goethe in Love.  I suppose the marketers figured no on in this country knows who Johann von Goethe was.

  Okay, okay, I know lots of people don't know who Goethe was.  For your edification, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  He wrote one of the most famous versions of the story of Faust, fed into the very prettily-named sturm und drang movement ("storm and drive," or "storm and urge"), and in so doing also helped start the Romantic movement.  Also perhaps not so well known amongst Americans is that English speakers did NOT invent Romanticism; German-speakers did.  And the film is about a seminal period in Goethe's life, when he met Charlotte Buff and in falling in love with her felt inspired to write The Sorrows of Young Werther.  Which, incidentally, set off some of the first-known copycat suicides upon publication.

  Anyway, enough facts from the germanophile.  What I really want to say about the movie is that it was gorgeous.  At times the plot was simple, and, yes, romanticized; but I think we can let Stölzl have that given his subject matter.  I'm fairly certain that there was a bit of "cleaning up" of the images of the German landscape and all the young, beautiful Germans romping through it, but I suspect the landscape itself is real (and even the young, beautiful Germans).

  I don't know enough about the history of Romanticism to speak at length on the subject, but the movie did make me wonder if the German landscape itself — all that endless, rolling green; the rivers winding around hills; and the sort of always slightly askew look of very-well-built-but-also-very-damp houses in German towns — if maybe the attachment to that landscape might explain more about the emergence of Romanticism in Germany than a revival of interest in Ancient Greek literature.

  The love story was sweet, though my heart will always belong to the clear-seeing pragmatism of a Charlotte rather than the convinced idealism of a Johann.  And I did learn, as a result of seeing the movie, the somewhat chilling fact that in German there are different words for different kinds of suicide.  But in the end, I re-watched and ultimately bought the movie because of the visuals.  I've also been reading a lot of poetry by another German poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, another lover of the German countryside.  So it's on my mind.  But I think I will happily rewatch, over and over again, one shot:  from a distance of perhaps a mile or more, Johann and Charlotte approach each other from opposite directions, the clouds moving the shadows around the hills; the grass still, gold, and green; the trees moving with the unconcern of those who have watched this scene play out before.

Identity, Artistic and Otherwise

            The title of the second chapter of The Artist's Way is "Recovering a Sense of Identity."  So I guess this is part two of twelve on creativity.


            Most of the time I distrust the idea of identity.  Identity feels like a trap.  You tell yourself, "I'm the sort of person who..." and then you re-enact a behavior over and over again.  Say, I don't know, hurling yourself at romantic partners before knowing whether or not they have your best interests at heart.  (I know nothing about that.)  Then, when you decide you don't like the behavior's consequences anymore, you have to undo a sense of identity.  No small task.  But let's just say you achieve it.  You actually manage to change your deepest ideas about who you are.
            Congratulations.  Now you say, "I'm the sort of person who..."  Doesn't trust people?  Or, no, waits to get to know people really, really well and analyzes them with a therapist for years before you display any affection?  But now, what about the negative consequences of this identity?  How long before you decide it's time to change identities again?  I'm sure the correct answer is that you replace your old, defective identity with a new, perfectly well-adjusted version; someone who never smokes or drinks too much and always communicates clearly.
            Please, please post in the comments below if you or anyone you know displays these supposedly functional behaviors.
            "I am like this and this.  I am not like that or that."
            It's a curious mixture of reflection and willful ignorance.  To say that I am the sort of person who...jumps a little when I hear an ambulance siren...is to say that I have observed my body reacting a certain way when I hear an ambulance siren.  But rather than saying, "I notice that my body jumps a little when I hear an ambulance siren," I say that "I jump a little when I hear an ambulance siren."  Also, this particular reaction (which I've observed in myself since my accident this past summer), is really quite short-lived.  There's no reason to think that I went 32 years without displaying this behavior, and now it's suddenly a permanent part of who I am.
            I want to refrain from trying to sound too Buddhist here, mostly because I don't know enough about Buddhism to be more than a dabbler at this point.  But I will say that after relatively little experience with meditation, I'm pretty sure that 99% of who we think we are is made up.  Not just made up by us, either; made up by our societies, our families, our teachers and lovers and friends.  And perhaps more powerfully, by the gaps in our lives where those people should have been.
            At the same time, I notice that consciously working on a sense of identity can be extremely helpful as a writer.  American culture is none too kind to its artists, and to a certain extent you sort of have to repeat over and over to yourself that you're an artist, or poet, or composer, or whatever.
            But the catch is, I think, that it's only a starter.  I have been, since I started the Artist's Way this past summer, diligently returning again and again to affirmations.  I struggled with them initially, feeling they were corny, but then settled on a nice compromise with myself:  I never "affirm" anything that isn't true.  So, while Cameron at one point suggested writing something like "I am a prolific artist," I couldn't live with this phrase because even in my best moments I am not prolific.  If a female rabbit can theoretically produce as many as 800 children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in a single reproductive season (!!!), a female blue whale is more my pace:  one baby whale every two or three years.  I can't remember exactly what the phrase I settled on was, but I went with something like, "productive."
            But then, what if I'm ever not productive?  Given that I'm a woman of still-re-productive capacity, a several-year-long distraction might be in my future.  At that point, since I think it's silly to say things which aren't true, I guess I could just say to myself, "I'm open."  Can I affirm I'm a poet at that point?  Is it helpful to do so, when I see myself failing to live out the identity I'm insisting on because Julia Cameron told me to do it?
            I've mentioned baby-making a couple of times here, and I suppose it's on my mind.  Because in all honesty, if I ever do take that particular leap, I would like to set aside my "poet" identity for a little while.  It seems like insanity to be nursing a newborn and dealing with things like colic and ear infections and sleep problems and (I assume) a rapidly deteriorating romantic relationship while trying to write inspired poetry.  Maybe it would be better to stick to "mom" and hopefully "decent partner" for a little while.
            But can you set aside your identity like this?  So much of who I am seems to have been waiting for me at birth:  caucasian; female; introverted; intellectually driven (and distracted); heterosexual; American; even Christian, to a certain extent; and on and on.  Can I set aside being a poet?  In my experience, my inspiration makes me miserable every time I try to set it down, and this makes me wonder if I'm entirely wrong in thinking identity is self-made.
            Vocation is a lovely old word, a very Christian old word, and one I like very much.  "Spiritual path" conveys the same sense, but I think my agnostic and atheist friends have a vocation to reject everything I believe in and they'd bristle to hear their work referred to as spiritual.  (For all I know they'd bristle to hear me call their convictions a vocation; I beg them to extend Christian forgiveness to me.)
            Vocation means "calling."  As in, someone called you.  Presumably, someone who is not you.  All I can come up with when I look at Samuel is that maybe when the soul says, "Here am I," it doesn't get to know the path beforehand, doesn't even know the identity it's been called to.

A Poem About Poems

Like an Ant Carrying Her Bits of Leaf or Sand
        by Jane Hirshfield


Like an ant carrying her bits of leaf or sand,
the poem carries its words.
Moving one, then another, into place.

Something in an ant is sure where these morsels belong,
but the ant could not explain this.
Something in a poem is certain where its words belong,
but the poet could not explain this.

All day the ant obeys an inexplicable order.
All day the poet obeys an incomprehensible demand.

The world changes or does not change by these labors;
the geode peeled open gives off its cold scent or does not.
But that is no concern of the ant's, of the poem's.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding.
What dissolves will dissolve —
you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.
The potato's sugary hunger for growing larger.
The unblinking heat of the tiger.

No thimble of cloud or stone that will not vanish,
and still the rearrangements continue.

The ant's work belongs to the ant.
The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing.

On Creativity, and the Safety of the Mind

            If you look at the top of this page, you will note that the subtitle of this blog — what I am taking as my mission statement, I suppose — is "on the life of the mind."
            It's an old phrase, one I came across when I was much younger, and I also discovered upon a search for the phrase that Hannah Arendt wrote a book by that title.  Which is appropriate, because I have a conflicted relationship with Hannah Arendt, and I like those things best with which I have a conflicted relationship.
            But for the moment, I want to talk about creativity, the mind, and safety.  I think I had creativity as one of the topics up for discussion on this blog, and I haven't gotten there much yet.  I recently finished Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, and I've decided to take her chapter titles as a (very, very loose) guideline for some posts on creation and being an artist.

            We all hear common threads in how various artists, poets, actors, dancers, composers, and other creative folks describe the creative process for them.  My process is, for better or for worse, violently connected to my intellect.  I have emotional responses to many simple pleasures, yes, but ecstasy rarely comes without intense intellectual exercise.  (Though the times when it does are glorious.)
            So the life of the mind is my life, or the one I am called to at least.  There is much heart here, as well, something some exponents of literature and art would doubt.  I've heard every insult that can be hurled at James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Robert Browning and Thomas Mann and all the rest of the dead white males who were nonetheless brilliant dead white males.  To those who find their work overly-intellectual, demanding too broad a sweep of knowledge of classical myth and literature, I can only say — for God's sake don't read them.  Don't read them, since it obviously causes you pain, and the time I spend listening to you could be better spent reading Kant.  That's right:  Kant.  Even Kant would be better than people insulting the things I love.
            Which succinctly brings me to my larger point:  reading and writing and thinking have, since I was a child, been a retreat from the world of people.
            Recently I joined a philosophy discussion group, which has made me even more conscious of how intensely introverted I really am.  Everyone in the group, I think, is under the impression that I am quiet.  Suffice to say, I am not quiet.  What I am is abjectly terrified.  There are PEOPLE, for goodness' sake, and they're TALKING TO ME, and they want me to actually ENGAGE with them when we've only just met (albeit months ago), and I cannot understand why I didn't stay home with a book and a glass of wine.
            Add to this the fact that I was bullied when I was a kid, and that I grew up in a culture that has no idea whatsoever to do with poets and artists.  The safe place was in books.  In murder mysteries, where things cleared up simply and tidily.  In Wordsworth and Lewis and Shakespeare and Yeats' Ireland and the Grimms' Germany.  I know many people recognize this use of literature:  escape.  Escape from the rich kids rolling their eyes at my too-short pants; escape from the girls who accused me of a sexual precocity/anxiety they apparently recognized before I did; escape from the boys who tortured animals and found me more friendly-looking than all the other kids; escape from the religion that I loved and feared in equal parts.
            If anyone reading this can relate, it is because we are among those who almost can't help but be carried away by books.  Images, stories, romances, deaths, and the gorgeous, sumptuous words roiling through your brain.  And all without running any real risk!  This is so safe!  A safe, comforting retreat.
            Recently a friend and I went out for dinner and talked about how various people in our lives have affected our creativity.  Family, friends, enemies, lovers, teachers...  One of the most useful discoveries I've ever made about being an artist came in 2010 when I tried to do the Artist's Way the first time.  It all hinged on the word "weird."  I realized that whenever I started to write something, and I didn't know where it was going, and I didn't like where it looked like it was going, the phrase "that's weird" would pop into my head, and away went the project.  My friend and I discussed this and many other discoveries we've made along the way of being writers, and we also talked about how we tended to use literature as a way of escaping the pains of social interaction and intrusion.  When suddenly my friend exclaimed, "But if those voices from family and teachers and whoever are in there saying 'This is too weird,' or 'This is too sexual,' or 'This is too intellectual,' or whatever, then how safe is your mind, really?"
            Which is to say, not at all.  I hate drawing oversimplified comparisons to current events about which I know little, but the recent shootings in Newtown, Massachusetts demonstrate accurately just how unsafe the mind can be.  Families with suicides can tell you.  So can addicts, or just folks with a good old-fashioned guilt complex.
            It's scary in there, the mind.  Full of the past.  Full of fears, both well- and ill-founded.  Full of loathing and nausea and so, so grasping.  Full of...well, you.

Before the Words

            I watched Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette back in November.  I was so taken I actually bought it (something that almost never happens) and re-watched the movie.  There are many things to love about Coppola's work in this film, but chief among them, I think, is her ability to tell a story "before" a script.
            What I mean by this is that most filmmakers need the script in order to tell the story.  I'm sure if you watched most movies with the sound off, you would understand the story arc fairly well (we will exclude super-artsy Criterion Collection-type stuff for the moment).  But this is for two reasons which are not flattering to filmmakers:  one, we are visual creatures and love images; and two, there are only a few stories that keep getting retold, and even fewer in American movies, so as long as they didn't tell a completely nonsense tale, we'll get the gist of what happened.
            Coppola offers far more in Marie Antoinette.  Before the words (and I'm drawing a distinction between "script," which I think of as the whole conceptual storyline, and spoken words or lines), there is Coppola's movie.  There is Marie Antoinette, her eternal boredom and cluelessness, both of which she was clearly bred up for.  There is the fumbling and blandly endearing Louis XVI.  Marie's sexual frustration at the inept hands of her husband, and eventual passion with Count Fersen.  The necessity of producing a male heir, and her social stigmatization up until that feat was accomplished.  And of course, court politics assert themselves over and over again, far more, in fact, than the actual politics of France.
            "The problem of leisure / What to do for pleasure."  In the opening of the film, Gang of Four's lyrics tell you quite clearly the central problem of Marie's life.  It sounds like a joke problem — "Oh, how awful for you dear, so much money and no idea how to spend it" — but by the end of the film her life looked miserable to me, and not because of how it ended.  As in Lost in Translation, there are long, beautiful scenes which might very well lack words altogether, and Coppola has told you the story perfectly.
            It's been a long time since I saw it, but in Visions of Light: the Art of Cinematography, I remember some discussion about the ability to tell a story without words, before talkies came along.  Coppola, of course, doesn't deserve sole credit; Lance Acord, her cinematographer for both Marie Antoinette and Lost in Translation has a not-too-shabby list of credits to his name as well.  But I guess the point I want to make is that Coppola gives us a whole piece.  Not just a bunch of actors acting; not just a bunch of well-put-together scenes; and not even just a bunch of pretty pictures.  Her movies — from their soundtracks to their acting, from their cinematography to their lines, and even the post-production decisions — are of a piece.  One, lovely, consistent whole.