Month: August 2008

Fear

This morning I read this on PostSecret:

Today I made a list of my fears. It wasn’t as long as I thought it would be. — an anonymous postcard from PostSecret today

Fear’s a tricky thing: some fear is there for a good reason, and it’s as if all the rest of our fear — our insecurities, our denials of self or others, our defensiveness, the way we turn from risk or adventure — piggybacks onto it. As if the fact that there are some things to be afraid of in the world makes it reasonable to be afraid of everything. Fear makes us think that everything will kill us in some way. And our culture makes us think that being afraid of anything makes us weak and wimpy and…. well, there are very few positive words.

Talk about a no-win situation. But here’s my take on it. Running away from someone trying to harm you = Good. Running away from our personal fears, in my experience = Fear Grows Bigger Teeth, Bites Harder, Rules Me More. But when I let that happen — when I let fear bite me in the ass — that doesn’t make me weak. It just makes me a person who is so scared right now that I put myself in a box to “keep myself safe.” And there’s nothing at all wrong with being safe. But it turns out that I can’t have all the things I want if I’m safely in the box, and so, as with everything else, I have to choose.

I’m not sure we always have to tackle fear head-on — we don’t always need that kind of stress, you know? — but I think it’s good to look it square in the eye and say I see you there. For me, knowing what I’m really afraid of at least lets me choose whether to take it on, as opposed to finding myself blinking in a box wondering how the hell did I get here?

I hope that person’s list was really short, and I hope the things on it are all things that will make her shake her head and say, okay, I can live with that, and then drop her box in the recycling bin on her way out the door.

Le destin, c’est moi

Nous tissons notre destin, nous le tirons de nous comme l’araignée sa toile. — Francois Muriac
 
We weave our destiny, we draw it from ourselves like the spider spins its web.

I don’t believe in fate. I don’t subscribe to the notion of a higher being with a plan for me. But I know life is not random, either, although there are times when the random delights or damages us for a moment or forever.

In my philosophy, the four most powerful things in the universe are love, joy, fear and choice. History is made from their stew. People live and die for them, from them. We stand tall or twist ourselves out of true by the choices we make from love and joy and fear. Most of those are small daily choices about whether to do, how to respond, what to let in and keep out. And from those things we weave ourselves. My life is the web of my choices.

Destiny is a funny word. I don’t believe in destiny spelled out in a Big Book somewhere, as if the universe was simply some giant cosmic puppet theatre. I choose not to see myself and my life reduced to that. So I do not think there is A Path I Am Meant To Walk, and yet it is clear to me when I’m doing things that… hmm. That fit with the essential core of me, the soul, the spirit, whatever you choose to call it. I know when I feel aligned and when I don’t. I know when I am out of true.

As I get older, I trust more and more my own instincts about these choices. I trust my sense of whether things are right or wrong for me, my sense of when to act and when to stand still. I trust that I can be hurt and survive, and so I no longer always need to blindly defend myself against the possibility of pain. I trust that I can be joyful without the other shoe dropping on me, and so I no longer always need to “deserve” happiness. I trust that I can live with complexity, and so I am no longer so afraid to feel whatever it is that I feel.

And even when the random intervenes, even when things happen that I did not choose, it is still my choice how to respond.

And so I make my choices and my life weaves itself around me. And many of those choices the last couple of years have been big ones, the kind that alter the patterns forever. I am not who I expected to be. And yet I am totally myself. I’m creating daily a destiny that can only be mine, because it is made of my choices, my love, my fear, my joy.

And just in case I’m sounding a little too far inside my own navel, I hasten to add that the Muriac quote from which spring all these musings comes from one of my favorite t-shirts:

Pense Pas Bête t-shirt from threadless.com

You can find all the quotes and translations here. Perhaps they’ll make you muse too, or perhaps they’ll just make you want to find a baguette and the nearest bottle of wine. Happy Saturday, either way.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint Archives.

Three pints today — 60 ounces of posty goodness. These three ended up being loosely related, all touching on reading somehow. Nothing particularly deep and meaningful. Just enjoyable (for me) little conversations with people who took the time to write in with questions or comments.

If you’d like to start a conversation anytime, use the Want to talk? link on the sidebar.

Cheers.

F&SF questions about online publishing

Gordon Van Gelder of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is asking for input about publishing short fiction online. His questions are an interesting indication of how print publishing, especially for fiction magazines, is changing. The responses are equally interesting. I’m in particular agreement with the folks who say with regard to magazines, free fiction online benefits the writers more than the publishers.

Demons

Nicola writes today about the official exorcist of the Westminster diocese… Apparently, I am essentially a “rational satanist” and am going Straight To Hell without even a milkshake or anything.

From my perspective this priest is easy to dismiss: I’m not Christian and his threats of hell have no power over me. They are literally meaningless to me. And that’s when I got interested. Because I am curious about what demons mean to people who believe in them. I ask from genuine curiosity. Would anyone be willing to speak here about your understanding of demons? What are they, how do they manifest? Do they frighten you?

Pale blue dot

After I left high school, I spent a year at Northwestern University. Going to St. Paul’s was one of the five best choices I’ve ever made, and going to Northwestern was certainly one of the five worst. Utter misery. I fled after a year. By this point, I had been away from home for five years, and I felt completely out of sync with other 18-year-olds. Dislocated, rootless. So I moved back to Tampa and lived with my mom and enrolled in the theatre department of the University of South Florida.

There are a million stories from those years. This one is about Cosmos.

Cosmos was a television show about science and the universe, presented by Carl Sagan. We loved it. We’d cook dinner and sit on the floor at the coffee table in front of the TV, eating tuna casserole or spaghetti, absolutely enraptured. And then we’d talk and talk about what we had learned.

Sagan was astonishingly good at making science personal. He was luminous with love of the universe, and passionate about stewardship of the earth. He was clear-eyed about the fact that our planet and we ourselves are both cosmically insignificant, and that we are also amazing, astonishing, capable of extraordinary things. He told us that everything here, including us, was made of star stuff. He made me remember that I did have roots — on this little blue planet on the fringes of the Milky Way, itself only one of a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars. He single-handedly restored my sense of wonder in a universe of which, it turned out, I was not the center. Good lessons in so many ways.

I can highly recommend his nonfiction works, of which there are many (The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain, and Pale Blue Dot, the list goes on). He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, which was made into a movie starring Jodie Foster.

Every single time I saw or heard or read him, it was so clear that he was stone in love with life, the universe and everything. It was all just amazing to him, and he wanted the rest of us to understand how precious it is.

April Gornik

I am an artist that values, above all, the ability of art to move me emotionally and psychically. I make art that makes me question, that derives its power from being vulnerable to interpretation, that is intuitive, that is beautiful. — April Gornik

I have been wanting for a while to write about April Gornik’s paintings. But instead I just get lost in them, and then eventually wander away from the computer feeling full of light and stillness, full of the under-the-skin hum of a storm on the horizon, full of something bubbling up from deep places.
Storm Above Sea by April Gornik, 80" x 71"

These paintings punch into me and grab tight, pull me close, closer, right into them. Me inside the painting, the painting inside me. That amazing ecstatic moment of utter connection with the art and with myself.

This is what I look for. Connection with others, connection with self. The fascinating conversation where minds vibrate on the same frequency and time disappears while people wander around in each other’s heads. The meal and the drink that are perfect for the moment, whether it’s nine courses with ancient Margaux or curry and a beer. The kind of sex that is also love and discovery. Music in my headphones, or coming alive right in front of me as the band begins to play. Dancing. Writing something that makes me feel fierce and focused and for that moment totally aligned inside, the tumblers of me all coming together and unlocking parts of myself that I have always hoped would someday be free. The heart-stopping beauty of a dragonfly against a blue sky, or storm clouds, or cool, careless wind rising against a gray autumn sky that makes me feel so full of possibility.

I look for that which will lever me open and expand me, and I find it in April Gornik’s work.
Dune Sky by April Gornik, 70" x 81"

Gornik says her work is non-narrative but yes, full of story. I think so too. The story is there the light — my god, the light. It’s in the size — immense and yet so intimate, so personal. It’s in the motion and the stillness. It’s in the structure, the particular focal points that draw me in, that make me want to find my way into the distance of it and just keep going.
Field and Flames by April Gornik, 76" x 81"

I think of these works as internal landscapes — Gornik isn’t painting a patch of planet Earth, she’s painting her own interior, and mine too. I stand on the edge of these paintings and feel as though I am stepping into myself. If I follow that green path as it begins to burn, in the forest beyond something is waiting to happen, something that already makes me feel huge inside…

Not a narrative, but a story that I understand not so much with my head as with my heart.

…visual arts are and always have been a certain kind of virtual reality. The real power of the visual arts in their capacity as virtual reality is the physicality of the experience, the somatic connection that remains between the work of art, the artist who made it, and the person looking at it. That connection is an essential part of the human experience…
— “An Artist’s Perspective on Visual Literacy” by April Gornik

Amen, sister.

See April Gornik’s work at her website. Read about it here.

And watch this excerpt from a 2007 interview in which Gornik speaks about her work and takes us into her studio as she paints.

I talk in this blog a fair amount about what it means to me to be a human being and a writer. It’s an absolute pleasure to write this little love letter to an artist who talks back to those essential parts of me.

April, thank you for permission to use your images, and thank you so much for your work. I really love it.

Knowing where to find it

On Lisa Gold’s new research blog, you’ll learn that Samuel Johnson didn’t actually say “œThe next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.” Although he should have, it’s a lot more pithy that what he did actually say… which you can read for yourself in Lisa’s post.

If you’re a writer, or a research junkie, check out the blog and get in on the ground floor — there is already a pile of useful information, with the promise of much more to come. Lisa is a research specialist with years of experience and a lot of good pointers for finding those needles in the great big haystack of the internet. Next time I don’t know where to find something, I’m betting that she will.

A Monday giggle with Eddie

I think Eddie Izzard is fantastic. He’s a great film and television actor, and a brilliant stand-up comic. He’s an English Catholic Jesuit-educated cross-dressing straight man who speaks three languages (at least) and is blindingly smart about many things. His comedy shows are full of historical references and stories, musings on language, and wry observations of pop culture, human nature and the vagaries of the universe.

An added spice for me in watching his work is that he does a thing that I learned to call “role shifting” when I studied American Sign Language. ASL grammar includes role shifting as part of storytelling. If I’m telling you in English about going to the movies with three friends, I will generally use pronouns (he said, she said) or name them (then Jane punched Susan) when I report something about them. But ASL uses role shift instead, which includes locating multiple characters in space (Jane is here, Susan is there, Tom is at the end), and taking on characteristics of whomever is speaking (he said, she said) or acting (then Jane punched Susan). It’s a really cool part of ASL grammar, and I’ve never seen a hearing performer do it like Izzard. I believe it makes the experience that much richer for everyone.

I had the great good fortune to see him live in Seattle last year, a wonderful evening which included a completely ad-libbed conversation with a moth… a funny, smart man who clearly loves his work.

I couldn’t decide between these two clips (both from his show Dressed to Kill). The first takes on historical mass-murderers like Hitler and Pol Pot and why they get away with it. Like much good comedy, it is based in hard and uncomfortable truth. Then we move to imperialism and flags. The clip ends with the famous Cake or Death sequence. The second clip is a take on British versus American films.

And because the clips are from the same show, if you watch them both, you’ll see how Izzard’s themes keep re-emerging so that the show becomes a sort of tapestry.

These are absolutely positively not safe for work!

Have a giggle. Happy Monday.

A nice day

It turns out that I do not have a single interesting thing to say today about changing paradigms or the state of publishing or the power of story, or anything else. I am just living life right now, doing things that are of great value to me but perhaps not so fascinating to the rest of the world. Yesterday I made banana bread because Nicola loves it. And then I went dancing — not a work evening, just a night to dance on the floor. There was a baseball game, and parking downtown was hopeless. Then a homeless man helped me find a parking place, and I gave him some money, and we talked to each other like people about the heat and driving, and we wished each other a good evening. And we both knew that our definitions of “good” were pretty different in our personal contexts. It was hot in the club, and they brought two enormous box fans (almost as tall as me) that blew a cool wind through us, and the women danced, danced, danced. And the men who worked at the club, who brought out the fans, tried hard not to look at the dancing women, and I wondered briefly what it is like for (presumably straight) men to be in a place where looking at women is wrong. DJ Stacey played “Relax” for me (thanks, Stacey), and as it came up I bowed to her and she smiled. I talked to a 50-year-old woman who just came out a year ago and is being brave about everything, including coming to these dances and talking to strangers and maybe even thinking about putting her essay collection out there into the world for publishers to consider… you go, Rebecca. And when it was time to leave, I went out into the street and said no, thank you, I think I’ll be fine to the nice bouncer guy who offered to escort me to my car, and I walked in the custard light of a city sunset past bars and pizza palaces and people sleeping in corners, through the smell of urine and phad thai, through the sounds of the baseball game on someone’s radio, past the watchful gaze of other bouncers in their red-roped doorways and the impassive visual sweep of a cop on patrol. And I got in my car and came home to Nicola with a great big cheeseburger and fries and a chocolate shake that I drank on the way home. And then we had a beer and I told her everything I’ve just told you, and she told me about her evening full of Anglo-Saxon rings and Indian food and the frustration of regionalized DVDs (c’mon, world, can we all just get together on the DVD format if nothing else?) and all the things she was thinking in the quiet peace of our house while I was moving inside the bass beat of music.

It was a nice day.