drmstream[writing]

A pho­to­graph can make some­thing mun­dane appear unique and dis­tinc­tive. The ren­dered image metas­ta­sizes into some­thing alto­gether different.

One of my favorite exam­ples is street pho­tog­ra­phy. A tal­ented pho­tog­ra­pher can take a can­did photo of two women at a street cor­ner, star­ing jaun­tily at the cam­era. If we encoun­tered these women in every­day life we wouldn’t give them a sec­ond glance. But frozen in the frame, they imprint some­thing of their energy on us.

The pho­to­graph above, by an anony­mous pho­tog­ra­pher for the Smith­son­ian, accom­plishes some­thing even more profound.

To under­stand the con­text of the photo, think for a moment of Mid­way Island. It har­bors one of the world’s largest pop­u­la­tions of alba­trosses. The birds mass together and are nearly indis­tin­guish­able. They are loud, crass, stubborn.

In this por­trait, the pho­tog­ra­pher has cap­tured a tran­scen­dent and uni­ver­sal image, del­i­cately described in muted tones, an iconic por­trait of moth­er­hood. The com­po­si­tion is rem­i­nis­cent of a sec­tion of a Renais­sance paint­ing, but the lines swoop like a study by Brecht.

I find my eye drawn again and again to the photo. I feel some­how rev­er­ent. I try to imag­ine what the arc of the day was like, how many rolls the pho­tog­ra­pher shot. I won­der whether he had been look­ing for this shot, a bird in its nest, or if this was serendip­i­tous, a quick snap that turned out right. I imag­ine how flat and harsh the light was.

All of my spec­u­la­tion is an attempt to pro­tract the sin­gu­lar emo­tion the photo elic­its: a calm con­fi­dence that every­thing will work out for the lit­tle bird grow­ing in that egg, that its mother is there, watch­ing out, inde­fati­ga­ble and stalwart.

William Blake’s New­ton (1795), colour print with pen & ink and watercolour

Recently, I was talk­ing with a math­e­mati­cian. He was ani­mated as he talked about the beauty of math, the thrill of tak­ing an axiomatic sys­tem and using its prin­ci­ples to build a bridge to a solu­tion for what appears to be a wholly unre­lated prob­lem. The excite­ment in his man­ner was infec­tious and deep.

He became grave. The future of math­e­mat­ics is “soul­less,” he said.

That word was rich with impli­ca­tion: of his world view, of the way that math can touch the human heart, of what he searches for in life.

He is an unas­sum­ing look­ing man, much like you would expect a math­e­mati­cian to be. He is slight, bald, and has thick glasses. He’s pros­per­ous; his exper­tise in math gave him a suc­cess­ful career in finance. In any moment, though, you have to check whether he is truly present or not.

The lan­guage of math, his abil­ity to apply the axioms of his prac­tice to visu­al­ize the absolute abstrac­tion of no-space, of the there-that-is-not-there, lets him drift into a state that accom­mo­dates few peo­ple.  His wife, a tall, ener­getic blonde, will carry him off at those moments, a fer­til­ity god­dess car­ry­ing off the straw husk of a pow­er­ful but dor­mant totem.

Why “soul­less?” I ask.

He talked about the absolute power of com­put­ing sys­tems, the abil­ity to process data on a scale and at a rate beyond any­thing mankind has ever imag­ined. These pow­ers exist today.

“Every prob­lem is going to be answered,” he said. “Every sin­gle one.”

The  solu­tions will ter­mi­nate the unan­swer­able ques­tions, extin­guish the imag­i­na­tion, end the search for the solu­tion to the insoluble.

“Won’t there be a renais­sance of ask­ing ques­tions?” I offer.

He doesn’t seem sure of that.

I don’t tell him that I write, that the prac­tice of cre­at­ing has taught me that our great­est  delu­sion is the con­vic­tion that there are answers, that the best sto­ries have an end, that the bright­est among us are able to see solu­tions oth­ers can not see.

Beauty is in the under­stand­ing that every­thing can change in any instant, but in each instant that we are present, every­thing is com­plete and at rest.

We sat quietly.

He focused on my face.

“The ones who are lucky are the ones who ask their own ques­tions, not the ones who spend time answer­ing other people’s ques­tions,” he said.

“Like William Blake,” I said.

Then we fell silent again.

… All these moments in the individual’s life, when the uni­ver­sal laws of human fate break in upon the pur­poses, expec­ta­tions, and opin­ions of the per­sonal con­scious­ness, are sta­tions along the road of the indi­vid­u­a­tion process. This process is, in effect, the spon­ta­neous real­iza­tion of the whole man. The ego con­scious per­son­al­ity is only a part of the whole man, and its life does not yet rep­re­sent his total life. The more he is merely “I,” the more he splits him­self off from the col­lec­tive man, of whom he is also a part, and may even find him­self in oppo­si­tion to him. But since every­thing liv­ing strives for whole­ness, the inevitable one-sidedness of our con­scious life is con­tin­u­ally being cor­rected and com­pen­sated by the uni­ver­sal human being in us, whose goal is the ulti­mate inte­gra­tion of con­scious and uncon­scious, or bet­ter, the assim­i­la­tion of the ego to a wider personality… .

–Carl Gus­tav Jung. “On The Nature Of Dreams”

We believe that we can know “I.”

We won­der at the mean­ing of “We.”

But when you make Art, when you write or draw or play or sing, you are forced beyond the “I.”

The energy that fuels cre­ation is out­side of the bound­aries of “I.”

You know that because when you come back from the place where you have made things, you will feel uncer­tain, shaky, ten­ta­tive, as if you don’t really fit in to your whole Self, as if the Cre­ative Self changed your con­tours and volume.

It did.

Mak­ing Art put you into the essence of “We.”

Cre­at­ing is the path to individuation.

The ques­tion you have to answer is whether you hold your­self away or throw your­self in; whether you ignore the con­se­quences of fail­ing and insist that the joy is from try­ing; whether you keep mov­ing when you feel your­self slow­ing down.

Here is a parable:

A woman pushes a gro­cery cart up a steep side­walk.  The wind is cold and harsh.  At the first cor­ner, she meets a soli­tary child.  The child says, “You have to give me some­thing to eat or I am going to starve.”  The woman gives the child a loaf of bread.  At the sec­ond cor­ner, she meets an old man who reeks of liquor.  The old man says, “I am des­per­ately in need of a drink.”  She give him a bot­tle of Ken­tucky whiskey.”  At the third cor­ner, she meets a woman who looks just like her.  The woman says, “I am freez­ing cold and fright­ened.  I need some­thing to make me warm.”  She gives the woman her coat.

When she arrives at her home she is tired and bit­terly cold.  She can not hold the key to her door in her fin­gers.  It drops to the side of the stoop into the bushes.  She digs in the bushes but can not find it.  After a time, she sits on the stoop and hugs her­self tightly against the wind.

The child, the old drunk and the woman stand at the bot­tom of the stoop.  “We can’t help you,” they say.  “But if you were able to help us, you can help yourself.”

After a moment the woman takes the gro­cery cart and throws it through the glass door.

When nature wreaks destruc­tion, ele­ment con­fronts element.

In the after­math, the residue lingers and hard­ens. Burnt wood defies decay. Ash wafts in the air.

The insis­tence of fresh growth encum­bers the raw skele­tons with igno­rant radiance.

When man wreaks destruc­tion, fear begets fear.

His heart seeks out a hard shell, his hands crave indus­try, his mind erects a kin­dred shel­ter of defi­ance and denial.

Pris­on­era of a desire to imag­ine for­ever in every moment, he too eas­ily loses the beauty of how what is now projects to perfection.

So when we remem­ber, we must remem­ber with respect. We can not let false sor­row besmirch the honor of lives lived, because we must always pre­pare our heart for the grand­est con­tra­dic­tion of our life: What makes us mat­ter most is that we can mat­ter not at all.

This must be the week that small presses, indie jour­nals and agents plow through their in-boxes. I’ve got­ten a slew of rejec­tions this week — no inter­ests on a short novel I’ve been send­ing around, no thanks you’s on a cou­ple of sto­ries that are cir­cu­lat­ing and flat out nopes on an essay I had a notion to write.

Most of the notes are form let­ters. I get that — these are busy peo­ple and they see a lot of stuff. A cou­ple were per­sonal notes. One edi­tor sug­gested that I try to draw out more reli­gious under­tones in a story. This was a place where I’d paid a $10 read­ing fee for an accel­er­ated turn­around on the sub­mis­sion. I can’t be sure if the per­sonal response was a busi­ness strat­egy intended to keep me sub­mit­ting for pay, or whether there was sin­cere inter­est in the story and my writ­ing, but since I didn’t agree with the entire reli­gious sub­text I’m stu­diously ignor­ing the suggestion.

Rejec­tion is the name of the game. There’s a mar­ket­place out there, there’s a cre­ative imag­i­na­tion in your head, and there’s the rel­a­tive excel­lence of your craft, so it’s a stroke of good for­tune when all three line up to pro­vide you with an out­let and an audience.

What’s struck me about this cycle of rejec­tions is what it’s show­ing me about the engi­neer­ing of my cre­ative foundation.

It’s shaky.

My inter­nal voice reg­is­ters each of the rejec­tions and mut­ters some­thing like, “See. What did you expect?” Then the lit­tle con­duit that my imag­i­na­tion flows through gets choked.

The ink stops flowing.

I love that image for cre­ativ­ity — ink flow­ing from a pen. It’s mag­i­cal: a tube of liq­uid encased in a hard shell, drawn out through a nar­row point by grav­ity and energy, absorbed by paper and trans­formed by some inex­plic­a­ble mys­tery into an image that lives in places that can’t ever be found…my imag­i­na­tion, yours.

So when my lit­tle voice mut­ters “See?” and turns away from those rejec­tion let­ters, it unleashes a spell that clots the ink, clogs the work­ings of the pen.

I’m not going to bore you with every­thing that hap­pens as a result. I won’t tell you how my heart sinks when I read some­thing that uses a word in a great way. Or how I type a few dozen words of the story I’m work­ing on and feel phys­i­cal dis­gust. Or how I try to fig­ure out why I ever thought that the story would be inter­est­ing. Or how fast the excited feel­ing of a new idea is extin­guished when I start writ­ing it down.

I just wanted to write a true thing that came to an end.

That’s the only way to break the magic spell, quell the mut­ter­ing voice, shore up the shaky foun­da­tion and unclog the clot­ted pen.

This is where I am:

An old man dying from can­cer, but still vital and bemused by the inten­sity of life, is walk­ing on a dark path that runs behind an old house down the hill to the run­down apart­ment build­ing he lives in.

The lit­tle patch of woods is the byprod­uct of a geo­log­i­cal quirk. Mil­len­ni­ums ago, a glac­ier took a left turn here and sloughed off big hunks of pre­his­toric rock and wore them to the unfath­omably fine grains of sand that sifted through the swamps that had once sat where the town is now. The rend in the stone face was left behind, and the dirt that set­tled in its cracked side made a lit­tle nest for stub­born trees.

His name is Old Jon. He’s just watched his oncol­o­gist run over a dog in the rain. He’s just left a young woman who’s going through chemother­apy at the same time. She has ovar­ian can­cer. She’s in ter­ri­ble pain. His wife Alice is at home, not wait­ing for him now, but always wait­ing for the end that has been promised but hasn’t come.

Old Jon is walk­ing by the place where peo­ple throw old things that won’t rot, like bro­ken freez­ers and loose pipe and baby mat­tresses. In the heap is an old stove that he put there 20 years ago, when his son grad­u­ated from col­lege, some­thing that Old Jon couldn’t imag­ine and didn’t under­stand but felt proud of. That was his only son and he died later, before Old Jon was ready.

I’m there with Old Jon, right at the start of the story, and I’m see­ing the heap of trash and the dim light of the build­ings through the wood. I’m hear­ing the rain on the leaves and the gears of the buses grind­ing as they go up the hill by the ceme­tery. I feel the ache in his bones, the pain that floats out­side his head, the gen­eral dis­taste, the tired­ness and the urgency. I see all of the mem­o­ries come float­ing up from the trash heap like spir­its on a gloomy midsummer’s eve.

We are trapped there, Old Jon and I. Life is immense and never-ending. We’re adrift. The feel­ing can’t be expressed. He’s in the midst of his entire life; he feels every­thing that he ever felt, but noth­ing feels real.

The story might never get told. I can’t break the spell.

I was at lunch with an artist today and asked him about his work.

“I keep push­ing ahead and it changes,” he said.

I asked him to describe a cre­ative phase that was par­tic­u­larly distinctive.

He became ani­mated as he talked about the chal­lenge of adding a third dimen­sion to his painting.

“I painted a very real­is­tic sky and I took a piece of wire and stretched it across the can­vas. I took more wire and made a man. Arms and legs, hung him off the wire. It’s a tightrope. It came to me in a plane one day.”

Was he able to cap­ture the ten­sion embed­ded in the jux­ta­po­si­tion of the flat can­vas and the twisted wire sculp­ture, I asked.

He wig­gled his hand.

“Maybe ten per­cent of the time,” he said.

I won­dered aloud what he saw first when he looked at the world.

“What do you mean?” he said.

I showed him a black and white photo on my phone. This is how I see it, in the rela­tion­ship between objects, the shadow and light.

He grabbed the phone from my hands.

His fin­gers were long and nim­ble. He cupped the phone gen­tly. He traced an imag­i­nary line around the shape of the young boy in the photo. The imag­i­nary line was con­fi­dent and precise.

“This is what I would do,” he said. “I’d take a bit of sol­der­ing wire and run along the out­line of his shape, here, and I’d stop right here.”

He held his fin­ger­tip on the ter­mi­nal point. For one instant, I could see the whole out­line, the wire like a tracer of mer­cury around the inky fig­ure. It was beautiful.

He handed me back the phone and we fin­ished lunch. There had been a moment of Art, and like every moment of Art, it had passed.

Crit­i­cal Mass by Ali­son Jardine

What I see clearly I pass by.

What I see but do not see, I stand to witness.

My heart goes wan­der­ing, pulls my soul from its slum­ber, pesters mem­o­ries to give up their hard, wary shell and stretch out in child­like glee.

All while I stand cap­tive to what I see but do not see.

Then it appears.

Broad­way unfolds in a stream of ink diluted with tears. Night sheds its scaly skin and slinks down to the end of the island.  Win­dows turn flat and blank. Rooflines lift up like sun­flow­ers in a rain­storm. The air is mealy.  I see things that I don’t think any­one else can see. I see a woman hold­ing a spoon above a bowl of sugar, curs­ing an old man. I see a boy crouched in the dark cor­ri­dor, wait­ing for light to break through the kitchen win­dow. I see two men lay­ing still in bed.. I see me, me some­where and every­where, hold­ing some­one, lis­ten­ing to whis­pers, rush­ing into the room, bang­ing on black glass.

This is not a mem­ory. It is then. It is now. I have slipped into a fold in time; the blur — greens, yel­lows, blues, whites — open­ing in soft focus and enfold­ing the grey angles of another place, of no time.

How can I tell you what a mag­i­cal moment this is? Have you felt it?

If you do, you know. You know how in the instant that I rec­og­nize what I am see­ing, it van­ishes.  The blur is a stand of trees. The tiny cityscape is a shadow cast by a stray cloud.

I feel empty.  Don’t you?

Then one day I encounter this paint­ing by Ali­son Jar­dine and catch my breath.

She has the gift of see­ing what is there but not there.

For one moment, she lets me lose myself in the see­ing of not seeing.

It is a moment to be thank­ful for.

*

For the past year or so I’ve been fol­low­ing the work of the artist Ali­son Jar­dine on Twit­ter.  It has been an excit­ing and sur­pris­ing experience.

Dur­ing that time, Ali­son has been inte­grat­ing a nat­u­ral­is­tic vision of the world with an emerg­ing under­stand­ing and mas­tery of the impact of dig­i­ti­za­tion on images and per­cep­tion.  The leit­mo­tif she’s seized on is the pixel — the root ele­ment for all dig­i­tal images.  Rather than com­pro­mise the entire image by manip­u­lat­ing the under­ly­ing pix­eliza­tion, Ali­son has cre­ated a series of works that raise one or a clus­ter of pix­els to visual promi­nence.  The effect is arrest­ing and con­sis­tently natural.

The exer­cise would be no more than that, an inter­est­ing exer­cise in techno-modern style, if the under­ly­ing foun­da­tion of the work were not so strong.  The works play with jux­ta­po­si­tion with­out being overly pre­cious, cute or mean­ing­ful.  There is beauty in cap­tur­ing the blur that pre­cedes per­cep­tion, and Jardine’s recent work is squarely placed in that excit­ing moment of discovery.

You can see her Pix­el­Na­tion series here on her web site.

The woods ran up to the edge of the pond and every Spring the snow melt would reveal old trees that had crashed to the ground in the Win­ter freeze. We would pick our way around the sod­den husks, pull rot­ten rot­ten branches loose and talk about which trunks would dry out firm and hard in the sum­mer heat. Those were the ones we would use to make a raft.

I was fas­ci­nated by rafts. When I read Huck Finn, I stud­ied the dry­point etch­ings to divine how the logs had been lashed together so firmly that it held together as it spun down the Mis­sis­sippi. I saved the pic­tures of abo­rig­i­nal rafts in National Geo­graphic.   I prac­ticed slip knots and bow­lines on old rope in our barn, hang­ing from the end of the mis­matched strand to see if the knots could hold my weight.

We wanted to make a raft so we could go out to the lit­tle island in the mid­dle of Robin’s Pond. We were afraid to walk out to it in the win­ter. The grown-ups told us sto­ries about peo­ple who had fallen through the ice and died.

In the sum­mer, we would pull logs to the edge of the pond and lash them together. Some­times the raft was too heavy to move. Other times, the logs came apart as we dragged the raft down the shore. One time we got the raft in the water and it sank like a dead weight.

As so often hap­pens to our child­ish dreams, my romance with rafts drifted into the land of metaphor. The raft became an image for life, the plat­form that we make our stand on against the roil­ing waves, the beat­ing sun, the dark, dark ocean night. Life is being alone on the raft, bob­bing up and down, draw­ing strength from what we witness.

These metaphors that worm their way into our lives are insid­i­ous and intran­si­gent. They become a way of think­ing that is too famil­iar and too lit­tle questioned.

When I reached the mid­dle of my life, I’d been rid­ing on that raft all alone with an igno­rant cer­ti­tude that there was no space for any­one else.

I never thought back to those images that had fas­ci­nated me. The image of Huck and Jim. The image of the brown-skinned men stand­ing tall over their women and chil­dren. The image of two lit­tle chil­dren float­ing under the watch­ful eyes of Winkin, Blinkin and Nod.

Then Tami came into my life and nudged my hip bone with hers. “Move over,” she said. She sat down and looked up at the sky. “I’m rid­ing with you.”

One imag­i­na­tion can make enough space to con­tain itself, can hold together a lit­tle raft that gets tossed along with the flot­sam of Life’s big storm.

Two imag­i­na­tions can make a world.

Ever since she put her shoul­der to mine, set­tled her­self by my side, I’ve watched that raft mag­i­cally expand to calm the waters, to lengthen the hori­zon, to bring the world closer, to smooth out the dark clouds, to soften the sun.

We’re still sit­ting in the same place, but every­thing around us has changed.

Thanks for com­ing to sit on my raft with me, baby.

Happy Anniver­sary.