drmstream[writing]

A gen­tle slope drops from the back of our house to an old stone wall, and beyond, a pond sur­rounded by high trees.  The pond was a lime­stone pit once; the still sur­face mir­rors the dark­ness below.  An oak tree fell into the shal­low south end and in the warm months a slen­der grey heron spends his days on the branches that stick up from the water.

I look for the heron when I walk down to the pond.  This is not as fre­quently as I would like.  I’ll stand at the north edge and wait for my eyes to adjust to the shad­ows.  The heron’s shape is like an inad­ver­tent ink stroke on a busy page.

When I look at the heron I want to feel its still­ness, but even as I wait for my eyes to focus, I fight the impulse to move on, to walk up the hill, into the woods, to keep the images danc­ing, to make my heart pump.  I dis­ap­point myself.

*

One day I dis­cov­ered the pho­tos of a man called Ichiro Kishimi.

When he walks the world stills.

I can not know the noise that his mind makes, but imag­ine it is steady and muted.  My mind is like the roar­ing rapids.

He stud­ied Greek phi­los­o­phy and taught in a lan­guage that I can not under­stand. He is a stu­dent of the school of Alfred Adler, who believed that we reward our nature by growth and inflict pain by seek­ing per­fec­tion. He has writ­ten books on the prin­ci­pal of hap­pi­ness and has focused energy on the edu­ca­tion of children.

This may be a wise man that divined from his own desires the dark ten­ta­cle of dis­ap­point­ment that drowns a man in feel­ings of discontent.

But I can not know any­thing of that man, who has lived beyond my reach in place, thought, sen­ti­ment and time.

*

I know the man who walks along the river and through fields in a per­pet­ual spring.

I met him first when he was walk­ing to the hos­pi­tal where his father lay in decay, his mind unteth­ered and eroded. I won­dered at the love this son felt for his father, the sor­row that lay in the uncou­pling of their intel­lects, the wor­ri­some reminder that mor­tal­ity is a word that sig­nals the final suc­cumb­ing to the con­stant haz­ard of life, not an emphatic end point like the iron tres­tle mark­ing the ter­mi­nus of rail line.

He took pho­tographs when he walked of sim­ple and del­i­cate things. A thrush; a heron; a petal; a flower; a clus­ter of grass.

*

This is what each pho­to­graph did:

Because I think I know him, I dis­cover some­thing of myself.

Take the heron. It is still, cap­tured in pro­file, the white of its coat out­lined with the pre­cise bands of ink-black that only nature can achieve.

I don’t look at the heron with a crit­i­cal eye, how­ever. I am arrested by it. I expe­ri­ence it with the intense energy of my shadow neurons.

I can not see a heron this way.

Kishimi helps me see some­thing that I don’t see.

*

What I see invades me and in an instant I am given a fleet­ing glimpse of another me, and I know what it is to still myself, to be present and bear wit­ness to a thing with insis­tent focus, calm and uncrit­i­cal, free from inter­pre­ta­tion. I know what it is to sus­pend the nar­ra­tive, to arrest the impulse to fill in the miss­ing pieces, to relin­quish the what-was and what-will-be.

I can feel what I felt when I saw the heron. I can embrace its essence uniron­i­cally. As the heron bal­anced its weight effort­lessly, the wind fell away, the heat, worry, the city, the refuse tan­gled in the water weeds at the muddy shore.

How can I accept that I did not see the heron? What do I make of the truth that even though I see this way, I can not see this way? So I rumi­nate about Kishimi, this philosopher-saint from Kyoto; I reflect on his seren­ity. I admire his hope­ful­ness, his com­plete­ness, his abil­ity to con­nect with all of the beauty that is around him.

But I am avoid­ing my Self by mak­ing believe.

*

I don’t know this man. I can’t know this man.

What­ever I know of this man is a gift he has given me of dis­cov­er­ing some­thing new in myself.

If I am able to see the heron in the photo, I must be able to see the heron in life. The clues are in those qual­i­ties that I attribute to Kishimi, those attrib­utes that I expe­ri­ence in me through his photo.

I can see because I believe I know a man I don’t know, so I must be know­ing a man I can be.

I can only hope that the man who took this photo, and all the hun­dreds oth­ers I have looked at, feels con­tent­ment and hap­pi­ness. That is why I go to read Adler, to look at pic­tures of Kyoto…to dis­cover what he might have learned.

The pho­tos are a sig­nal that Kishimi might under­stand what makes our expe­ri­ence in the world complete.

A man who wrote a book on hap­pi­ness must either feel peace or despair. I hope that life has given him the gift of peace.

I sus­pect that he would want me to feel the same thing, and to return to my pond to see my heron with the gift of my own eyes.

This blog is an inad­ver­tent place, nei­ther com­mon­place book nor pub­lish­ing plat­form, dis­or­derly in approach but earnest in inten­tion, a bal­ance of self provo­ca­tion, hope­ful procla­ma­tion and inter­mit­tent distraction.

Despite its irres­olute intent, drmstream[writing] frames a rela­tion­ship for a kind-of writer and a kind-of audi­ence.  There is a group of you — a few hun­dred or so– who track what hap­pens here with cour­te­ous inter­est and occa­sional passion.

This is what we accom­plished together in the past year.

I posted on drmstream[writing] 68 times.

There were 7705 vis­i­tors who came 10,157 times and viewed 14,304 pages.  Three-quarters of those vis­i­tors came for the first time and very few came more than once.

Six cities drove the most vis­its:  New York, Port­land, San Fran­cisco, Chicago, Dublin and London.

I’ve shared in the past why work ends up here: this is a place where I am forced to stay account­able to my cre­ative tem­per.  I’ve shared the cir­cum­stances when that tem­per has cooled, and how, as I’ve pro­gressed in life, I’ve come to under­stand that those peri­ods of cool­ing are the root of a non-specific but insis­tent dis­con­tent.  Each time I post on this site,  I’m stok­ing the flick­er­ing flames of creativity.

More often than not the pieces here are frag­ments, unworked and incom­plete.  If I post too much, I lose track of the work that I am doing pri­vately.  If I post too lit­tle, I lose con­fi­dence and start to hear things like the throw-away judg­ment my mother once ren­dered, say­ing “You don’t have the makeup to be an artist.”  Those are the lit­tle splashes of doubt that can eas­ily quench the flames of confidence.

Some­times I man­age to string together a series of words that res­onate for Google, and a lot of the peo­ple who end up on this site come to one of  a hand­ful of posts that appear promi­nently in Google searches:

Snow was gen­eral all over Ire­land (pub­lished March 18, 2010) is a lit­tle rumi­na­tion on the lan­guage used in the last para­graph of James Joyce’s The Dead, one of my favorite pieces of ele­giac writ­ing ever.  I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the por­traits in the world  (pub­lished Sep­tem­ber 4, 2010) is an appre­ci­a­tion of a Frank O’Hara poem.  The three other posts that get a lot of Google hits are More on the uncanny val­ley; The wire spool table; and, The story behind the baby with the cig­a­rette and the mon­o­cle.

Over the past year, there were five posts that attracted a larger than nor­mal read­er­ship.  When I went back to look at each, I could see three themes that res­onated:  the search for iden­tity, the inten­sity of love, and the sim­ple power of a vivid image.

Here are the five posts:

The boy who became a pastor

The grave­yard

Rec­og­niz­ing some­one is com­pli­cated a con­ver­sa­tion about love

To leave a sig­nal a mes­sage of my own

The see­ing of not see­ing from Ali­son Jardine

Out­ing

The last post was in many ways the most per­sonal.  After two years of anonymity, I shared my real iden­tity.  The act felt more momen­tous to me than it was to any­one else, but I guess that’s always the way of uncov­ered secrets.

I’ve said this before, but I owe the few hun­dred of you who read these short pieces reg­u­larly a great debt of grat­i­tude.  You pro­vide me that val­i­da­tion that I strug­gle to pro­vide myself: that my cre­ative work is a wor­thy ven­ture, that I can work at Art with con­fi­dence that it is true to myself, and that I can some­times hit on some­thing that will move a reader.

When I was young I used to play my sax­o­phone on the street.  When peo­ple stopped to lis­ten I knew that I was mak­ing some­thing more than noise.  drmstream[writing] is that street cor­ner and when you stop by, I can remind myself that it is good to write, that I am made to do it, and that what­ever comes from it will be a bonus.

When I walked out­side the wind was rac­ing through the trees and I thought to myself, This is alive.

This is alive, the wind, the sky, the air.

This is alive, me in this moment, my foot sink­ing into the ground.

This is alive.

The moment passed as quickly as it manifested.

Later I took a walk and every­thing was still.  I took a pic­ture of a tree against the blue sky.  When I looked at it later I won­dered what it was that kept my heart from quick­en­ing.  Had I lost some­thing, or was I just lucky to have caught a glimpse of some­thing that we don’t often get to see?

She’s get­ting car­ried off to the evil witch, cap­tured by her demon mon­keys who were sent out to col­lect the inno­cent intruder.  Look at the Tin Wood­man doff­ing his cap, Dorothy sit­ting at the edge of her seat like a lit­tle girl at the movies, and the winged mon­keys wide-eyed and intent.

Where’s the fear?

There’s ter­ror lurk­ing in the dark edges of The Wiz­ard of Oz: the story begins with death and destruc­tion, and through­out the lit­tle girl is under assault, pro­tected only by a mot­ley, impaired rag­tag of friends and allies.

That’s how art can help chil­dren make sense of life, by mak­ing the ter­rors of the unknown known.  The Broth­ers Grimm knew that.

But what fright­ens in words can scar in images — our imag­i­na­tion man­ages the power of fear­ful images when they are left abstract, spo­ken.  An illus­tra­tion makes the image sep­a­rate from our imag­i­na­tion and struc­tures it into dif­fer­ence.  When the image is ter­ror, and mar­ried to words, it can haunt some­one for ever.

So, when Baum’s illus­tra­tor sat down, he took that first step to dilut­ing the wiz­ardry of the Wiz­ard of Oz, the mod­ern fairy­tale that was loyal to the Broth­ers Grimm.  Maybe an edi­tor told him to take the edge off the scary image.  Maybe he didn’t have the true sense of ter­ror in his fingers.

Dorothy would be stark with ter­ror being car­ried off into the unknown.  A child would under­stand that ter­ror and take com­fort in know­ing that it could be spo­ken, be heard and be tol­er­ated.  Bear­ing fear is a crit­i­cal step to walk­ing con­fi­dently into the uncer­tain future.  And, the only thing that we all share is an uncer­tain future: it’s at the essence of the human condition.

An image was stuck in my head. I saw a sin­gle tree in the dis­tance. A dog stood beneath it. The vista was all greys and whites and blacks. The dog and the tree were soli­tary but sep­a­rate. The image evoked some­thing nec­es­sary and almost forgotten.

I went to Flickr and typed in the phrase “far­away tree with dog next to it.” I did the same search on Google.

Hun­dreds of thou­sands of images pop­u­lated the tiny mosaic of my screen. I skimmed them.

I look for an image that exter­nal­izes the sen­sa­tions I feel when I first rec­og­nize my men­tal image.  When I find it, I write.

Some­times, to my dis­may, there is no image lodged in the mam­moth indexes of Google or Flickr that aligns with the shad­ows in my imag­i­na­tion.  Some­times I find an image that leads me to another facet of feel­ing that I am led to explore.

And there are the mag­i­cal times when I see an image that is so dis­tinct, fresh and strong that it takes me hostage.

That hap­pened to me recently when Alenka Sotter’s lyric vision of a woman-tree and a dog was served up in my search.

This illus­tra­tion is noth­ing like the inter­nal arche­type I was explor­ing. My vision was still and remote. The imagination-dog sits on its haunches look­ing directly at us. The tree was bare of leaves. It feels like win­ter. The trunk and branches are ink black and stained with hoar frost. The ter­rain is endless.

Sotter’s woman is a tree, but not quite a tree, in a world filled with waves that are not quite waves.  A small dog looks out at us from the base of the slen­der woman-tree.  The light gath­ers in the cen­ter of the image-space with con­tra­dic­tory energy that could be inter­preted as a light moment in the midst of a storm or as the clear­ing that emerges from a dusty dawn.

As I browsed the other images on Sotter’s web site, I learned she is Sloven­ian and has illus­trated more than 40 books for chil­dren and adults.  Her vision is sim­ple and gen­tle, but never shirks the murky mys­ter­ies of the soul.  We are immersed in the fan­tas­ti­cal, the nor­mal jux­ta­posed with the unknown, guided con­fi­dently by a woman who has her eye glued to the world and who is cap­tur­ing moments that might eas­ily flicker past.

I’m real­iz­ing more and more that when you encounter an artist with a dis­tinct and per­sonal vision on the web, the expe­ri­ence is intense and trans­form­ing.  The com­mu­nity I share on the web through Face­book, Twit­ter, Google and myr­iad RSS feeds pro­vides a con­stant stream of images.  When one point of view stands out, the stream freezes and every­thing that I have seen, that I’m fil­ter­ing, that I under­stand, that I’m sort­ing out, that I’ve won­dered about, that I want to try to do is, brought into focus and re-calibrated.

I look.  I appre­ci­ate.  I remark to myself.  Then I move back into the stream and watch for the next ele­gant surprise.

You can share the par­tic­u­lar plea­sure that comes with dis­cov­er­ing Sotter’s work at her web site here.

Detec­tive Sun­der­son walked back­ward on the beach glanc­ing around now and then to make sure he wasn’t going to trip over a piece of drift­wood. The wind out of the north­west had to be over fifty knots and the blow­ing sand stung his face and grated his eyes. It was below freez­ing and the surf at the river mouth was high and tor­mented where Lake Supe­rior col­lided with the strong out­go­ing river. The wind and surf were deaf­en­ing and Sun­der­son reminded him­self how much he dis­liked Lake Supe­rior other than some­thing admirable to look at like an attrac­tive cal­en­dar. He had been born and raised in the har­bor town of Munis­ing and two of his rel­a­tives who were com­mer­cial fish­er­men had died at sea back in the fifties bring­ing grief and dis­ar­ray to the larger fam­ily. The most alarm­ing fact of pro­longed local his­tory was the death of 280 peo­ple at sea between Mar­quette and Sault Ste. Marie. How could you like a killer? In his soon-to-end career with the Michi­gan St. Police he had never met a killer he liked. His ex-wife who had loved even the crud­est man­i­fes­ta­tions of nature thought his feel­ings about Lake Supe­rior rep­re­hen­si­ble but then she had never been held tightly by a sob­bing aunt at a funeral. With two sons and two daugh­ters his mother had only room to hold his crip­pled brother Bobby who had lost a foot in the rail yard of the local pulp mill.

The Great Leader, Jim Harrison

It’s been a long time since I’ve read any­thing by Jim Har­ri­son. This para­graph made me remem­ber how intim­i­dated I was when I read Wolf: A False Mem­oir. I was a kid who wanted to be a writer, and Har­ri­son swag­gered around in his novel like a man who never wor­ried about what a kid wor­ried about. Expe­ri­ence was declar­a­tive and unswerv­ing in his writ­ing. I got dizzy try­ing to fol­low the struc­ture of every sen­tence through to the inten­tion of the piece and the story of the moment.

This time my read­ing was dif­fer­ent. I wrote this para­graph down after I fin­ished it. It deserved some extra time. The choice of words was con­fi­dent. Each sen­tence in the para­graph car­ried its own weight so that it stood inde­pen­dently like a col­umn. It tells us some­thing of the man who is walk­ing. He is solid and com­mit­ted to each thought. He spans time so that his mem­ory and his atten­tion progress from one idea to the next.

I liked the way that Har­ri­son con­signed the inner work­ings to the mid­dle of each sen­tence with­out rely­ing on too much sub­or­di­na­tion or spin­ning out.

When I was a boy I felt like I was being beat around the head by his writ­ing. My style was loop­ing, each image com­ing into focus as the words cir­cled in an ever-tightening spi­ral, and I had trou­ble keep­ing one idea in mind as I worked my way to the next, but what I knew that I wanted was for a reader to feel the click-jump that the moment of inter­nal recog­ni­tion would bring when they saw the image and sur­ren­dered to the words that sur­rounded them.

Time smooths out worry, I guess. Every­one tries to get where they are going in their own way. I was read­ing a con­fi­dent and good writer, who likes the way that words work, and I par­tic­u­larly appre­ci­ated what he’d done in this one pas­sage. It’s prob­a­bly the best para­graph in the book, and it’s a book that holds your atten­tion at the begin­ning and the end, and that you’ve got to work through some slow stuff about two-thirds through, but if you don’t, you’re not going to appre­ci­ate Sunderson’s con­clu­sions. You’ll think about pas­sion, about blind faith, about char­la­tans and vio­lence, the desire to be close to some­one, the embar­rass­ment of see­ing our weak­nesses, the peace­ful sur­ren­der of fear. Those are good things to think about. Har­ri­son wrote a book that can keep your inter­est with­out mak­ing you too aware of the loftier themes.

I’d feel silly being intim­i­dated by that.

I know I have the life I have because of T.  Not just the things around me, but the way I see them.

She gets the first Thanks.

My chil­dren who have shown me that life is fueled by unsquash­able opti­mism get the sec­ond Thanks.

My fam­ily who has pro­vided the foun­da­tion of mem­ory that forms the way that I go out into the world, regard­less of what I’ve expe­ri­enced in the world since, gets the third Thanks.

Each of you who has spent time read­ing my work some­time leav­ing com­ments and always let­ting me be a writer who holds you for a moment: you get the pub­lic Thanks.  Our rela­tion­ship was some­thing that was unex­pected and has added rich­ness to my world.

Happy Thanks­giv­ing.

Writ­ing prac­tice keeps your brain awake and alive; it improves your abil­ity to con­cen­trate.  Whether or not you ever pub­lish a thing, reg­u­lar writ­ing prac­tice will give you skills you can use in your work and your per­sonal life, and make you feel more empow­ered.  It will improve your abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate, stim­u­late your curios­ity, and make you more aware of the world around you and the world of your imagination.

How To Be A Write: Build­ing Your Cre­ative Skills Through Prac­tice, by Bar­bara Baig

I love quotes like this. I want to plas­ter them all over the place. I want to set up a table at a busy street cor­ner and hand out small note­books with this quotes printed on the cover. I’d give peo­ple nubby pen­cils that are worn dull so that the points didn’t stick in the paper. I’d get excited when they stopped a lit­tle ways away and wrote some­thing down. They would bump into each other. They wouldn’t get angry, though. They would smile.

“A good pho­to­graph is one that com­mu­ni­cates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed per­son for hav­ing seen it; it is in one word, effective.”

Irv­ing Penn

Irv­ing Penn reminds us that there’s a com­mon thread in the expe­ri­ence of beauty, whether it’s organic or inert, whether it’s tamed or wild, whether it’s famil­iar or strange.  Penn’s vision pre­sented the essence of beauty as some­thing stark and sep­a­rate, almost fore­bod­ing but insis­tently attracting.

See some exam­ples here  or see what images the Inter­net throws up to you here.

To put it even more bluntly: whereas one would have expected that a cri­sis of lit­er­acy would have called for a greater appre­ci­a­tion of the mul­ti­plic­ity of func­tions that lan­guage per­forms, the fore­most of which is the abil­ity to code and transcode expe­ri­ence and to pro­vide cul­tural direc­tions for its inter­pre­ta­tion, han­dling and elab­o­ra­tion, one finds a fur­ther instru­men­tal­iza­tion of lan­guage, where the lat­ter is shat­tered into a mul­ti­plic­ity of autonomous, unre­lated lan­guages, with the com­pe­tence to be acquired restricted to just one of them.

The Cul­ture of Lit­er­acy, Wlad Godzich

We speak and we speak and we speak.

We talk of our jobs. We talk of peo­ple who make us feel frus­trated. We talk of our indig­na­tion at per­ceived slights. We talk of our excite­ment at a beau­ti­fully struck kick on the soc­cer pitch. We talk of our rude desire for a stranger pass­ing by. 

We talk about what we have heard from oth­ers. We talk about the way an insult makes us want to strike out. We talk about the way an angry word makes us want to slink away.

We talk about the way that two cells won’t tie out in a spread­sheet that our boss is mak­ing us fin­ish too soon. We talk about fudg­ing num­bers to make the out­come look better.

We talk about how bad peo­ple need to be for­given, about how cir­cum­stances make it impos­si­ble do what we said we would do, about what stu­pid things our adult chil­dren have done and how we never get to see them, about how we are feel­ing impa­tient with things that we’ve tol­er­ated before, about how we would have been some­thing else if our part­ners hadn’t made us give up our dreams, how we don’t like the way old peo­ple smell in the gro­cery line, about how we’ve had a tin­gling feel­ing in our right arm that ends up some­place in our chest, but our insur­ance won’t cover a visit, so we’re wait­ing until the new year to make an appointment.

We talk about how things are being done to us. We talk about how rag­heads and tow­el­heads and dot­heads and believ­ers and unbe­liev­ers and sin­ners and the inso­lent want to do things that shouldn’t be allowed in a coun­try like ours.

When we write down the things we talk about, we write from the left to the right, we go from the top of the page to the bot­tom, we pick from 24 let­ters to make our words, we use peri­ods to sig­nal full stops. We write down what we talk about and we real­ize that we don’t have a fuck­ing clue what we really mean, and nei­ther does any­one else. But we feel it. Man, we feel it.

You bet­ter feel it too.