Video: Thoughts on recent projects

Why am I making videos like this now? Why this, why now? Why something that has no plot or narrative, that tells a story of a place and moment but not one you can adequately summarize? Why images in sequences that are half-scripted, mostly improvised on the spot? Why images that are captures from life rather than carefully planned and properly-executed linear narratives?

I'm making the films that I want to see. That no one seems to be making. It's not really about self-expression, it's about wanting to see certain kinds of art that are unfashionable, even taboo, these days. In the Age of Irony, sincerity is taboo. In the Age of Shallow Surfaces, diving deeper into the waters of the self is frowned upon. In the Age of Artifice, spontaneity is suspect.

All of that is wrong.

Murkiness and ambiguity presented in art, because life can be hard to articulate, are not the same things as obscurity and puzzle-box-making for their own sakes. It's not that art has anything to hide, it's that it wants to hide nothing. I want to know. I want to see the story. Even if the story is about stopping all stories, all narratives, and just being still, even for just a moment.

I'm making the kinds of films that I want to see, that I almost never get to see, because of their uncommercial nature, their unfashionable contents, their often less-than-slickly-perfect style. The artlessness of artfulness. Everyone who's ever written a story knows that fiction tells truths that life finds hard to tell; fiction compresses events into drama; it only seems realistic because it's so artfully put together. We want to be fooled. We want to be fooled, by art, into seeing something like a larger truth.

This is poetic cinema, often nonlinear as well as nonverbal. It can be oblique. It can be moody—in fact, driven entirely by mood and sensibility rather than plot. It's easy to compare this to how music works, often nonverbally and obliquely, creating emotion without the use of linear narrative or text. In fact, it's probably no coincidence that the videos I am making are more like music than they are like stories. Even Romantic program music—Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique for example—that has a scenario and story to tell is still more imagistic and nonlinear than prose. More poetic than prosaic. Even a musical program scenario bows to the actual melodies and rhythms and harmonies used to convey the emotion of the momentary experience.

In my experience, music is both abstract and visceral, realistic yet evocative without being literal. This is that much-discussed territory where music and poetry meet: on the lip of silence and the inexplicable. In the same way that poetry can't be summarized in prose, music can't be either.

I am well aware that the videos I am making are poetic in form and structure, in ways very parallel to how I often conceive of my poems, in terms of form and structure, as cinematic. I have often discussed how I view many of poems as sequences-of-images, nonlinear but evocative in the way music is: recreating an experience in the audience, evoking a mood or sequence of images and moods. I often think of my poetry as cinematic and imagistic. It only makes sense to think of the short films I am making as poetic. I think this may be another territory where the arts meet: just as with music and poetry, we touch here on the convergence of cinematic poetry with poetic cinema.

Video: Approaching Dusk

Approaching Dusk, a video poem, 2012. Words, music & video by Arthur Durkee.

My YouTube video channel, where new short films will be posted as I finish them, is: apdurkee

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A few notes on this video:

This is a mood piece, pure and simple. I had the idea for it one evening, and began working on it immediately. It was shot on consecutive evenings in early May, at dusk. That time of day just after the sun has gone down, but it's still light outside. In summer, twilight lingers a long time. The mood I was feeling when I shot the video segments was haunting, poetic, mystical. Not a cheerful mood, not a dark mood, but that mysterious and beautiful in-between mood you often feel at dusk.

I am working my way towards completing more multimedia video work, incorporating poetry, music, and image, and even adding words moving on the screen at times. I've been working towards this for awhile, but finally am getting there. I have made some films like this before, using still photos and poetry, but this film takes the technique and tools to a new level.

To make this video, I set myself come arbitrary creative constraints.

I learned a big lesson from my mentor in music school, Bill Albright, who once told me that sometimes it's liberating to set an arbitrary limit or boundary on your creative materials. Working within set parameters can sometimes free you up mentally, so you get creative. Many writers find their most difficult moments to be when they're staring at the blank page, when anything is possible. To break through that barrier of too many possibilities, which if it's not pushed past can lead to creative block, is to start small, start anywhere, just improvise, set a limit and go with it. A painter can be just as intimidated by a blank canvas: Where do you start? Sometimes setting the arbitrary limit is enough to get you going. You can choose to stay with it until the finish of the work, or transcend the limit later if necessary, but the most important thing is that it gets you started. If you do break out of the limits, it's for a reason, because inspiration and the creative process has led you in that direction.

This insight about creativity really stuck with me. I explored the idea, as a composition student under Prof. Albright's tutelage, by working with unusual instrumental groupings, and by setting arbitrary choices on musical materials. I wrote a three-movement for the archaic early music ensemble of an unbroken consort of recorders. I wrote a piece for english horn and vibraphone. I wrote a percussion quartet, which won a national award. I found that when a musician friend asked me to write a piece for their instrument, it freed me creatively to learn about the instrument and explore its possibilities. I wasn't thinking about a grand career as an orchestral composer, which was too intimidating, I was thinking about just getting this one piece done. I wrote a lot of chamber music, and most of it got performed, and recorded.

As a writer, the setting of an arbitrary limit also works well. I know that some formalist poets talk about how working within a fixed form frees them up rather than limits them. My version of that is to invent a new form, or discover a form emerging organically from one poem and then use that same invented form when writing new poems later. Most of the poems that I write in a fixed form are within forms that I invented, or discovered. I also write a lot of haiku, which is the poetic form I feel most naturally. I have no "feel" for the sonnet, or the sestina, or most of the forms inherited from the history of English-language literature; they don't come naturally or easily to me, and the results tend to be too intellectual and not very lifelike. For example, the only sonnets I've ever written ended up being stale five-finger exercises rather than finished pieces. Haiku and its related forms, tanka, renga, haibun, and haiga, all come naturally and easily. I can almost always write a haiku on the spot. I often write haiku when editing photographs, as a response to the images I made perhaps a month or a year ago, but haven't looked at again till mastering them in Photoshop.

So i set myself some arbitrary limits for the making of this video, in part to learn my tools better, in part as an aesthetic choice made to constrain technical craft in the service of vision. The limits I set myself for shooting the video segments were:

Shoot at dusk.

Make each take short, between 5 and 12 seconds, with the intention of stringing them together later to assemble the film.

Only sharp cuts and very quick crossfades would be used in editing, so many of the video segments were shot with that intention at the forefront.

There were a couple of exceptions to the set time limit that happened, that I knew in the moment of filming were the very best video segments I had captured that day, two of which ended up as longer segments in the final film. The video was shot on two consecutive evenings in early May, and is basically unaltered except for editing segments for length and putting them together.

The video was shot entirely on my iPhone (my phone!), using one video-capture app to make a consistent look. The audio track was made from an ambient recording of my backyard mixed with music I played in GarageBand on my iPad.

I wrote the poem in my pocket notebook at the same time I was shooting the video, just to keep the mood operating on the same level. The poem was revised slightly, and recorded into the same multitrack mixing mastering software that I used to edit the video and audio tracks, on my home studio computer.

The resulting film took a couple of weeks, off and on, to finish editing and mastering. That's typical: post-production always takes longer. Still, I think the mood is captured and sustained, and all elements converged to make a short film that recaptures exactly what I was feeling at the time I made it.

Songwriting: Storytelling

Having bit the bullet and admitted that I might as well accept the label of songwriter for myself, even at my advanced career age, I have been exploring the terrain, finding out what's out there and what people expect. I've looked into the available networking resources. I've subscribed to American Songwriter magazine, which, unlike many other music mags, is really still more about the music than about celebrity artists and musical gear. In the January/February 2012 issue, which is a Bob Dylan 50th anniversary tribute issue, there are great interviews with Joan Baez and T Bone Burnett. It was a segment of the latter interview that got me thinking this morning, as I sat in my usual morning reading chair, still huddled in night's blankets, starting my day. Here's the exchange that caught my eye:

Do you have an overarching philosophy when it comes to producing?

I've been through so many different stages in my own life. The thing that's been consistent all the way through it is that at the base it's storytelling. All record making, all songwriting, all singing is storytelling. I've always tried to keep that in mind. First you look for the voice.

So you focus mainly on the vocals rather than the music of the sound of an album?

The sound of the music is completely dependent on the sound of the voice. That's reality. The instruments are more or less the same. The human being is completely different. Of course, I don't mean all instruments are exactly the same. There are great and bad sounding instruments, but even bad ones can make a beautiful tone. The person and the voice are so distinct that it changes the way you make sound out of either good or bad instruments. It's about blending the instruments with the tone of the voice.
—T Bone Burnett, interviewed by Hal Bienstock, "T Bone Burnett: The Taste Maker," American Songwriter, January/February 2012, p. 41

The voice is the original instrument. It's integral to the human body. The voice rises out of the center of the body, rises up through the torso, and out through the throat and mouth. The sound is shaped by all these factors, as well as general health. I've noticed that my own singing voice, which was never a robust instrument as an adult, has changed in the past few years when I was at my sickest, and as I've recovered. I have more strength now, more tone, although I'm still not a loud singer. Voices are very individual: you cannot actually standardize the human voice the way you can standardize the manufacture of a guitar or piano, because we're all different. There are some various types that one can identify, certain styles and approaches, but within those parameters there is still a lot of individuality.

One of the things that I've noticed lately in the current wave of over-produced pop stars is that has seemed to be an effort to standardize an interchangeable pop star voice; you may have noticed how pop voices sound more alike now than they ever have, with almost no variation in singer's tone or range. Some of that is because the production is being standardized, and there is a currently a fashion for highly-processed vocals, and a ridiculous fashion on top of that for semi-vocoded voices, so that tone and pitch all sound slightly robotic rather than human. I hope that's a fashion that dies soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

Elsewhere in the interview, Burnett is asked about the current American roots music revival—roots music being the old folk songs and styles, which not only are being researched and performed as they were, but are being used as the basis for new songs by young bands.

It seems like the public has become a lot more interested in roots music over the past decade than it was in the '80s and '90s. What do you attribute that to?

There are a couple of big trends going on in the world. One is towards globalization, the other is localization or tribalism. This is the music of our tribe. The Scots-Irish, Black people, Italians, the people that came here and started cooking up this music. I think things have gotten very depersonalized in the modern world. It started in the 20th century, the century of the self. This is a way to touch base. There songs are hundreds of years old, but they've been rewritten and grown into all kinds of things.

Does roots music speak to a longing for something more authentic?

I think there's always that. My view is that we live in a very de-authenticated world, especially in music. All music has been deauthenticated because it has been compromised so heavily by current technology.
—T Bone Burnett, ibid.

I find the current Top 40 pop music using perfected artificial voices and vocoders to be mannerist, decadent, the result of the end of an artistic era's process. It's representative of the cyberization of late-Modernist culture, in which people aren't sure where they end and their machines begin. Cyberneticists thought about all this in the 60s, and what we're seeing now with people (like me) using their smartphones and tablet computing devices for almost everything has been written about for decades in futurist circles as well as in science fiction. Amazingly thoughtful artistic projects such as the SF anime TV series Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex (based on the manga by Shirow Masamune) ask the question: what happens to culture, and to ourselves, when we stop being able to tell what parts of us are human and what parts are cyberized? Some of the mannerist music being made nowadays reflects an enormous if unconscious anxiety about these questions, reflected especially in the cyberized voices of the singers and the metric perfection of rhythm tracks created using digital beatboxes and instrumental parts that are never out-of-tune because they're produced and filtered using software synthesizers.

The end result is rather lifeless. It often seems like in pop music the machine has already won. After all, humans are an adaptable species; we often take on the shape of our surroundings, affected by geography, climate, nutrition, noosphere. We can certainly adapt to the cyberized future—as both represented in and thought about in pop cultural literature such as cyberpunk, and pop cultural music such as vocoded Top 40 radio. So we adapt, and change, and are changed. And we respond to digital perfection by looking for the unpredictable artistic glitch, the places the machines fail, the noise that often hides the signal—and so we get musical genres such as aleatoric music, noise music, and dubstep. We also get the soundtrack to the cyber movie Tron: Legacy, or the soundtracks to the Matrix movies, all of which brilliantly combine techno/punk hard beats and the more expected blockbuster orchestral movie soundtracks.

And that takes me back to the original comment that Burnett said that got me thinking: All record making, all songwriting, all singing is storytelling.

All of this is storytelling. Even the decadence of mannerist, deauthenticated, depersonalized "artistic product"—reflecting the contemporary attitude that all things are to be commodified and categorized or they are not real—is a particular story that is being told.

All songwriting is storytelling. All myths around art-making are storytelling. I am reminded of what poet Muriel Rukeyser once opined: The universe is not made up of hydrogen, but of stories. Joseph Campbell once defined myths, both religious and cultural, as the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We are a storytelling species. Story is how we communicate with each other. Stories are how we express our communal and individual values, and also how we talk about what went wrong. Movies are storytelling taken to a synergistic level of words-music-image all combined; even journalistic documentary movies are storytelling. Reporting is storytelling. Even cable TV news is storytelling, although you often have to read between the pixels to uncover the narratives being sold us via assumption and innuendo, which lurk beneath the apparent surface of straight-ahead reporting.

So as someone who has been an artist in multiple media for decades, who now finds himself practicing the synergistic art of songwriting, of words-and-music, I find myself becoming a more conscious storyteller than ever before. That is, more consciously aware of the stories I am telling, and more willing to examine those stories as such. I find myself going back to listen to the folk music I explored deeply in an earlier period of life: the roots music, centuries old, that is being remade and reborn now. For Heartlands I wrote a few new folk songs, inspired by the old roots, but brand new. That sensibility, central as it is to living life in the Midwestern Heartlands, is a thread that winds throughout the music, sometimes more overtly, sometimes more deeply buried. And the work overall is storytelling: telling the stories of what it's like to grow up and live as a gay man in the Midwestern Heartlands, which was the origin and purpose of the music being commissioned.

I am now writing new songs. I find myself connecting to the roots Americana musical revival, not because I play an instrument like mandolin (I don't), or because I'm listening to a lot of Americana albums right now (ranging from Alison Krauss to Edgar Meyers' "Appalachia" series to the many artists influenced by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and so on), but rather because I find myself writing story-songs. Probably half of the songs lyrics I've written in the early months of 2012 have been impressionistic, based on things and seen while traveling out West, but the other half have been human stories, based on stories I've witnessed, or read about, or which emerged from my own life. What you observe and what you experience, and what you think about all that, that's all fodder for your art.

This is how we re-authenticate our lives, and re-personalize the world. Storytelling is still myth-making, which is how we make a home in the world, and how we make sense of the world and what it offers us, both soft and hard. Myth is the quest for meaning. Storytelling is the very fabric of the weaving of myth.

Process of Writing 24: Forward Momentum and Emergent Order

I've overheard myself say lately that I'm on a creative roll. The truth is, I'm at a point in the project of writing the new music commission where the writing has become easier, more fluent and fluid, and so I get a lot done each week. A few weeks ago I wrote three songs during the week; I've been averaging about two songs per week since, with some weeks only getting one song done, due to external circumstances that have prevented me from sitting down at the writing table. Not bad distractions, just logistical things that need to be taken care of.

When you finally get the ship going and build up a good head of steam, it keeps going for a long time, and requires effort to slow down and stop. In physics, it's called the law of inertia, of forward momentum: A body in motion tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to stay at rest. (Yes, that's a law of physics, not just a tag line for a TV commercial for some energy drink for athletes.) So I've built up a creative head of steam, now, and am in what athletes like to call "the flow"—that non-ordinary state of consciousness where each move seems simultaneously spontaneous and pre-planned, where the tip of the paradox is that you are moving very fast but to your own perception there seems to be lots of time in which to observe and make decisions, choose paths, decide on tactics within your pre-planned strategy. (Tactics are the operations on the ground. You may have a per-planned strategic goal, and strategy is how you plan to reach your goal. Tactics are what you use in the moment, always adjusting your forces to approach maximizing your end strategy.)

It's easy to get pulled into watching a video or film or TV show and forget that what you are seeing is not continuous motion but a fast series of still frames. Moving pictures are an illusion. To create the illusion, we rely on the persistence of vision, which is a trick of the eye and of perception. The light coming into the eye lands on the retina, triggering bio-electrical waves in the neurons of the eye's sensor elements. Being biological rather than electronic, the waves of neural transmitters take a moment to pulse, and each pulse takes a moment to fade away. So, if you show 24 or 20 frames a second in the front of the eye, it perceives it as continuous motion because each frame lingers in perception long enough to overlap with the next frame, and create the illusion of smooth, continuous flow. You can affect the viewer's experience, in fact, by changing the frame-rate. (Of course, all this could be wrong. Some people like to think so, but seem to have no better explanation as a replacement.)

How can I describe how I feel when I write music? The persistence of pencils? Neurological inertia? The truth is, when a musician looks at one of my scores they perceive it as a seamless, continuous flow. But the writing proceeds by fits and starts, frame by frame. I build up what feels like a static charge of restlessness, when I sit and write for awhile. What I usually need to do is get up and walk around, go do something else for five or ten minutes, then come back to the writing table. I'm sure some writers will view that as seriously undisciplined, but maybe it's just another kind of discipline. The static charge analogy is a good one, because it describes how I literally feel after a half-hour or so of intense concentration on writing music: like I'm about to get struck by lightning. I have to walk it off.

I'm aware, too, that the static build-up is also about catching up to where I am in my mind with the writing. More precisely, I've caught up with writing the notation to the point where I have written down as far as I could go, and I need to go do something else to let the inner voices recharge and give me the next bit of music. This is very hard to put into words. It can feel like waiting to take dictation. Even though I am making musical decisions, and using all my craft to bring the musical idea into being, the inner process is at core very intuitive. it's all about listening with the inner ear.

People complement me for using a particular musical style for a particular piece, assuming it was my conscious intention. (In typographic design, the principle of transparency is often cited: That the type should be the transparent glass in which the wine of the text is contained. If the type is set up ideally, you don't notice it. ¶In poetry, the principle of transparency is similar: The perfect form to suit the content, form following meaning and function.) But as with writing poetry, I don't know what style the music is going to have until I hear it with my inner ear. True, I hear it before I write it down in score notation, but it often arises when I'm reading the lyric through, thinking about what music to use to set it. I might have some idea going in, but it really depends on the inner ear. Sometimes I have even had to reshape the lyrics, once the music started coming, to make them a better match.

This really is hard to describe. Basically, it's about listening to those inner musical voices, which is very intuitive, then using what you hear as the kernel of what you write down, at which point all your knowledge and experience and craft comes into service. The craft and music theory I have learned, which is more than most people ever even imagine, is all in service to the inspiration. It enables me to notate what I hear inside.

Back in music school, all they could teach us was craft. You can't teach inspiration. It's there or it isn't. You can teach how to be receptive to it, but you can't force it to come to you. There was a lot of bland music back in music school, a lot of failed experiments, as we composition students fooled around learning out craft, and often not having much to say. Having something to say is essential, in poetry or in music, or everything you write is hollow, or worse, if it's self-congratulatory for no real reason.

Getting up and walking away from the table, then, is a chance to let that creative voice inside you take a breath and decide where to go next. I can talk about it using analogies to other arts. Creative process is similar no matter what art form you're working in; or I should say, it is similar for me, who practices artistic crop rotation. So, analogies. Stepping away from the music writing table is like painters stepping back from their painting to look it over for awhile, till their eye sees what needs to be done next. Lots of non-artists think that everything artists do is all planned out beforehand, very consciously and deliberately, but that is rarely so. Many painters "follow the brush" at some point, and make decisions during the creative process that surprise even themselves. I am constantly surprised by the music I write, finding things in it later that perfectly support what I am writing, but I wasn't conscious of them being there while I was writing them. I've gone back over sacred music I've written and found numerological and geometric resonance patterns that enhance the meaning of the text, operating on some subliminal level even the composer wasn't aware of till I went back and found them.

Of course, that could partly be the human habit of consciousness that likes to find patterns in even random systems; call it the persistence of form in consciousness. But chaos mathematics has demonstrated very well by now how order is an emergent property, how self-organizing systems arise out of chaos and create self-consistent patterns. This in fact may be how amino acids converged in the early era of our planet to organize itself into life as we know it.

Like many others trained in the sciences, I have no problem believing in a higher level of being, a Great Spirit or whatever label you wish to use, and I find that the mechanisms of how life organizes itself are beautiful and even divine. The problem with the anti-science religious-right creationists, who are for the most part scriptural literalists, is that they have taken a mythic story, a simple story, and tried to explain it as literally true. That is the root error that spawns many others: the belief that mythopoetic scripture is literally, factually accurate and true. They may be right in that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," after all every story has to have a beginning, even the story of spacetime—but they are flat out childish and naive in their explanation of the mechanism of Creation. The story of Creation given us by emergent order arising out of chaos, of self-organizing systems that emerge and evolve into life, is no less a divine story than some anthropomorphized deity waving his hand and making everything in less than a week, some four thousand years ago. In fact, emergence is a more elegant, more wondrous, more beautiful, and more coherent and attractive narrative by far. It contains no less of the divine spark. As a story, like all life, it glitters from within. Visionaries can see the sparking of the mitochondria powering the cell. The fire of life that supports all life, that is the power under life, which can perceived even by the science-trained as divine in source and origin.

The desire of scriptural literalists for a simplistic, even childish, literal story proclaims their unconscious desire to remain children before their God, and never grow up: never be allowed to grow up, never want to grow up. It is an infant's narrative of total dependency on the absent parent. It expresses a desire to remain infantile. Well, adult life can be complicated, and require that one take personal responsibility for the consequences of one's actions. That can be daunting. Some people never do want to grow up, and do everything they can to avoid it. And if not remain infantile children, then remain sheep guided by a shepherd. But anyone who has ever herded sheep, especially up in summer mountain pastures, knows how stupid and helpless sheep really are, unable to get themselves out of trouble without assistance. Is that really who you want to be? Is that really your divine image? The Adult who keeps you a child, the Shepherd who makes you be a sheep?

In my theology, which is not mine alone, the Adult wants you to grow up and become an Adult yourself. The Divine leads by example, not by dictatorship. The lesson of mysticism, as it has appeared again and again in every age and location on this planet, is that experiencing the Divine directly is everyone's birthright. We can all see the sparking of the mitochondria, or the growth of the seed into the tree. All you have to do is look, and watch, and see. It's not hard. It doesn't require special talent or guidance. Intuition and vision is a skill that can be trained, and has a craft to it that can be taught—just like in music school, in art school, and in other creative disciplines.

In my theology, artists are co-creators with the Divine. Everyone is creative, and capable of co-creating with the Divine, although not everyone is overtly an "Artist." Not everyone paints, or writes, or draws, or invents a melody to sing. Well, actually, that's not true: Everyone does do those sorts of things, but in our culture where "artist' is categorized as a discreet profession separate from everyday life (like most jobs, like jobs from which one "needs a vacation:) we tend to view artists as a special class. In other cultures, especially in certain indigenous tribal cultures, everyone is an artist because everyone engages in handicrafts. Ordinary objects are decorated by their owners, who made them, who did not need to go to a specialist to make them, and did not need to hire a specialist to decorate them. We in Western culture have a real blindness about this, because we assume artists are specialists; in fact, we tend to overlook or dismiss this very level of continuous creativity made every day by ordinary people precisely because it is not specialist art, not seen as different and special. We overlook the masterpiece of bone-carving made by an Inuit hunter from the tusk of the walrus that he killed to feed his family last winter, because it's not the Mona Lisa hanging on a museum wall. Western culture is very blind about this. We ignore handicrafts by dismissing them as "handicrafts" when in fact they are the source and origin of all "higher art." They are the emergent order rising out of creative chaos. Even great painters made finger-paintings and humble sketches when they were children.

How did I get here? I was talking about creative inertia: A body that is in the creative flow tends to stay in the creative flow. As I've expressed it before, one the basic laws of creativity seems to be: The more you do, the more you do. Creativity becomes an anentropic self-generating power station: a genuine case of perpetual motion. The more you make, the more you are able to make. This is partly the practice effect, how practice hones and sharpens skill. Raw talent is inchoate and chaotic, not knowing how to do what it wants to do; learning craft that supports the talent turns the talent into a skill: a disciplined, orderly practice that emerges out of inchoate chaos.

The connection between creativity and Creation is obvious: Both are Order emerging from Chaos. This is why when we are engaged in creativity we are co-creators with the Divine. It's not that we are only co-creators when we're making art, it's just the connection is more obvious at those times.

So I have forward momentum. And I'm approaching the completion of the new music commission. This doesn't mean that everything is suddenly easy to write. Some pieces flow very quickly onto the page. Others I still struggle with. I admit that today was a day of some struggle, but I did manage to finish the piece I was working on. Tomorrow is a new start. And we go on.

What I'm Reading This Summer

First off, I've been reading a lot of pamphlets and information packets relating to medical issues. There's even an illustrated booklet describing the surgery I've had, and the next planned surgery, too, co-written by my surgeon. There's lots of forms and papers and guidesheets to various issues pre- and post-operative, and more than one pamphlet on dietary needs and restrictions. Not to mention the exciting "how to" books about the ostomy appliances. These were all real page-turners.

But if that's not exciting enough, there are other things to read, recently acquired. I'll get to some of those in a minute.

First, though, I need to remind myself that I was completely out of commission for almost a month. I didn't go anywhere for weeks, and the truck didn't even get out of the garage for about three weeks. The engine turned over just fine when I finally got around to starting it, and this week I got the front brakes fixed, which had been waiting to be done since before my first date with the scalpel. Since then, I'm still catching up with life. I've spent a little bit of money on books and CDs since I got going again. I spent a fair bit before the surgery, too, laying in DVD movies to watch and books to read while recuperating. I didn't actually get to all of those I'd picked up, usually at random and mostly used at thrift stores for very cheap, but the pile is still there to be gone through. I didn't acquire ephemera, during that pre-surgery stocking-up period, I bought things I knew I'd want to watch, with pleasure, and re-read and re-watch again later.

I was thinking about doing what "What I'm Reading Now" post anyway, earlier today. Then I ran across some online literary friends' thoughts on the same thing, which pushed me over the edge. I've had a difficult night sleeping tonight, so it's the middle of the night now, after I did sleep for awhile, with vivid dreams, and I'm waiting until the pain pill kicks in and I can get through the rest of the night's sleep with better comfort. The idea was to post very short lists of what we've enjoyed reading lately, particularly for summer reading. Some other online poet friends have joined in with their lists, so since I was going to write about what I've been reading anyway, I thought to myself, why not?

Border's, the large bookstore chain, is going out of business. I have very mixed feelings about this. When I lived in Ann Arbor, I was a regular at the original Border's Book Store, the original store before it was ever a national chain. It was a haven for lovers of books. I discovered many treasures there, and they also would order anything you wanted. They were at the time an independent bookstore, the like of which is fading into the past, now. Then they became a chain, but they were still good, and I shopped there often. Now, with their going out of business sales, I've gone down to the closest store and spent a significant amount of money, acquiring rarities that I will treasure for a long time, divided more or less equally among books, CDs, and DVDs. One thing I always liked about Border's is that they were willing to stock music concert DVDs, a particular pleasure of mine, including some rare and unusual ones I never saw anywhere else. In recent years, for example, I picked up a couple of documentaries about Glenn Gould, a German film featuring an historical John Cage concert, and much more.

I've also been having luck at the local Goodwill thrift stores, after not having been to any of them in over a month. That's enough time for stock to turn over, and new things to appear. I found some real treasures earlier this week.

So here's a short list, as recommended, consisting of summer reading: 2 non-fiction books that we have enjoyed; 2 new fiction also enjoyed; and 2 old favorites we've recently re-read. To that list I'll add 2 poetry books also recently enjoyed, as part of this summer's post-surgery reading feast.

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Non-Fiction:

I read a lot of non-fiction. I've usually got several books going at once, dipping in and out of them on different days, when particular topics catch my attention. Sometimes I will become absorbed by a particular book, and finish it that day, ignoring everything else. This list is a very brief and very incomplete overview of what I've been dipping into this summer, both before and after the surgery.

Allan J. Hamilton, MD: The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with surgery, the supernatural, and the healing power of hope. Most surgeons, indeed most doctors, are trained to be highly materialistic, treating the body almost as a malfunctioning machine. There has been change, however, in my lifetime, towards a more holistic, multi-factored, and empathetic practice of medicine. The return of family practice is one sign of this trend. And surgeons like Dr. Hamilton are another. He is one of those who is willing to explore alternative medicine, both as a complement to allopathic medicine and on its own terms. There are stories in his book, all based on his surgical practice, of miracles of healing, and also miracles of spirit. He knows the difference between "healing" and "curing," the latter being the removal of disease, the former being the healing of the soul regardless of whether death is evaded or not. This is wise material. I was very impressed with book, and often surprised. As a patient myself, as the son of a doctor who has been around medicine and hospitals his whole life, I cannot say it better than Dr. Hamilton says here, near the end of one chapter: One of the great secrets of medicine is that, as a physician, you have unparalleled entry into the lives of others. Every patient is an existential conduit to seeing your own struggles. Each patient brings you one step closer to seeing the truth about yourself. I read part of The Scalpel and the Soul before I went for surgery; I will continue reading it through this summer, before my next surgery, and probably again after. It helps a lot.

Scott Herring: Another Country: Queer anti-urbanism. One very important truth about living gay in the United States was crystallized for me by several arguments I got into with other, very urbanized, ghetto-living gay men, soon after the movie Brokeback Mountain came out. I found myself confronted again and again with the truth that one of the most significant rifts in queer culture was not, as often postulated, between gay men and lesbians (and trannies, etc.), but between those who assumed that if you were LGBT you must move to one of the big city gay ghettos and live urban, and those who had chosen to stay in small towns, in rural areas, and make their lives there. As a gay man who has lived in big cities with major urban gay cultures, including San Francisco, but has always enjoyed living in small rural towns outside the big cities, as i do now in Wisconsin, the publication of this book has been a validation, an affirmation, and a blessing. Scott Herring has presented us with a very well-written, readable, and also seriously academic-theoretical book that is one of the best discussions of what lesbina cartoonist Alison Bechdel (who features in a long chapter in the book) "the complicated intersection between topography and destiny." This is a book about queer regionalism. It makes the point that not everybody who is queer wants to or likes living in the big city; nor do all of us like the bar scene, or the urban anonymous cruising scenes, or any of the other big-city scenes that have become the clichés of gay life in media presentations ranging from movies, books, and popular music, which are all assumed to be the pinnacles of gay life. The metropolitan lifestyle has been almost exclusively the focus of queer scholars and queer studies, to the point where it becomes an assumption that is never questioned. But Herring questions and deconstructs such assumptions, presenting several alternatives as they have been developed by individuals and groups outside the gay cultural mainstream. The Radical Faeries are mentioned, a decentralized group of misfits of misfits within gay male culture, which I am affiliated with. So are the rural lesbian communes of Albion, CA, in Mendocino County, which I have visited and enjoyed. The history of queer publications, both rural and urban, is compared and contrasted. And a whole lot more. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who is interested in alternatives to the urban gay lifestyle and subculture, who is looking for something different, or just plain likes country living. This book, one of only a few in its positional genre, is a revelation.

Victor L. Wooten: The Music Lesson: A spiritual search for growth through music. You probably know this author's name, if you know the music scene at all, as one of the greatest bass players currently living. He has his own band, he frequently plays duos with fellow bassist Steve Bailey, and he's with Bela Fleck & The Flecktones. Victor is also a genuinely nice person. His book falls into that small genre of memorable writing that you're never quite sure is either memoir or fiction, an absolutely true story or a fantasy made up of true elements. This book's closest relatives are books such as Richard Bach's Illusions: The adventures of a reluctant messiah, or Dan Millman's Way of the Peaceful Warrior. This is that kind of book. It gets at the difference between being able to play all the right notes, and being able to make Music. That's a distinction I've always made for myself, as a player and composer; I will never be the best player on the planet in terms of technique, but I can play a wide range of instruments, and when I play them I make music. Victor's book not only validates this attitude, he shows how great technical playing really can also be part of making Music—but the attitude has to come first. I have just started this book, but I already find it true and inspirational.

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Fiction:

I don't read much mainstream literary fiction anymore; mostly it's not very good or interesting these days, despite all its pretensions. One of the worst of those pretensions is that mainstream literary fiction places itself above "genre fiction" in terms of writing quality, interest, and relevance to ordinary readers—none of which placements are defensible on the evidence—while denigrating "genre fiction" as basically pulp fiction, all the while ignoring that "realistic narrative mainstream literary fiction" is itself a genre. This attitude is promoted by the guardian gate-keepers of literary artistry, those literary critics who promote prose fiction as great art, usually with an agenda. But for the general reader, a pleasurable rather than critical ideology is more important; and on that criteria, genre fiction is at least as good in terms of writing quality as anything in the post-modernist literary mainstream, and often far more readable.

Jack Vance: The Demon Princes omnibus. Not exactly space opera, not exactly a novel of revenge, not exactly a baroque fiction, not exactly an adventure of discovery, not exactly a 19th C. bildungsroman, not exactly a 20th C. science fantasy escapade—but at the same time, all of these. Vance's style, well known in SF as inclined towards the Baroque, is in fact highly readable and very straightforward, even when it seems its most non-linear. Consisting of five novels originally published between 1964 and 1981, this five-part adventure is also a deeply moral fiction, not only in terms of its plot and its characterizations of future good and evil, but also in novelist and critic John Gardner's sense: a novel of adventure that is also a novel of ideas, with a moral compass that the reader leaves having learned from, beyond the plot itself. Vance was well-known as a great literary stylist, both within SF and in everything else he wrote. His stories were always inventive and colorful beyond the norm, truly a literature of ideas. Reading through these five novels has been great fun, and a reminder all over again that a good space opera can also be just a good story, period.

Patricia A. McKillip: The Bards of Bone Plain. Though this fantasy novel repeats some of the themes that the author is known for, notably the bardic harper on a quest for self-knowledge, which involves some very ancient magic and some very ordinary love—one of the things that attracts me to her fantasy novels, to be honest, of which I have most—in this shorter novel she takes everything to a new level. The key elements of this fantasy, around which all the action orbits, are poetry and music. These are the threads that run all through the story, that are woven into both cause and effect. The characters drive the plot, as it should be, with both good and bad choices having consequences. The culminating scene, in which many mysteries are revealed, was spine-tingling and unpredictable. Some things end conclusively, some threads move on without being tied up—very much like real life. In sum, these is indeed very realistic fiction, very true to life and experience, very natural in execution, with characters both believable and likable, with individual temperaments and quirks. This combination of modernistic realism and ancient magic is McKillip's unique trademark as an author; it's what makes her stand out as feeling very realistic a writer, even as her stories are wound with fantastic elements. If McKillip were not relegated as an author to "genre fiction," she would be a continuous best-seller along the lines of "mainstream" authors who dabble in speculative fiction without being labeled as "genre" writers.

By the way, Patricia McKillip could just as easily go onto my "re-read list," as some of her novels I have read multiple times, each time getting more out of them.

Gene Wolfe: Storeys from the Old Hotel. This collection of short stories and metafictions, experiments, dreams, and more traditional fantasy tales, underlines many critics' opinions that Wolfe is one of the greatest living stylists we have, whether or not you consider any labels for his writing. Like Ursula K. LeGuin, he is one of a handful of "fantasy" authors who has been published in The New Yorker magazine, a publication notoriously picky about what it prints. Wolfe has been called a literary giant, not only in science fiction, but in general, and this collection of stories showcases his talents very well. Contents range from single-page metafictions, including the title story, to longer fantasies, and even a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. I first read Wolfe back in the 1970s, and his writing then was like nothing else SF had to offer: clearly literary in the best sense, and rich in texture and deep in resonance. I can still remember the images evoked in my mind by such early works as "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and other stories." Wolfe has continued to be on the literary leading edge, no matter what genre you try to place him in. I'm still reading this collection, savoring each piece as I go. I'm taking my time and enjoying each piece on its own, as I'd recommend any reader do, as well.

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Old Favorites Re-read:

Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business. The short stories and novellas featuring Chandler's great character Philip Marlowe. I re-read Chandler periodically, both the novels and the collections, enjoying them anew every time. Even though I have this paperback edition, I found a fresh copy of it at a thrift store just before surgery, in nearly-new condition, for almost nothing. So I took that as a hint, and enjoyed re-reading Chandler again.

C.J. Cherryh, omnibus edition of the Chanur saga: The Pride of Chanur, Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur's Homecoming. Four novels set in a particular future history that Cherryh has set several of her novels in, but what makes these unique and different is that humans are the aliens, newly-discovered, and barely comprehended. This is one of the most successful series in SF history for the story being told from an alien viewpoint, with a richly-detailed alien psychology and cultural context. Not only the hani, the lead viewpoint characters, but four or five other alien cultures, all interacting in trade and politics. It's also one of the most suspenseful space operas I've ever read, making you want to go back and re-read it again and again. I've re-read the entire series three times this summer, particularly right after the surgery, when I wanted something comfortable and familiar to read when my mind was still fogged with drugs, and I was tired all the time. I even took this omnibus edition along to my hospital room; I didn't read much of it there, but it was like having an old friend along for comfort's sake.

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Poetry:

William Everson: Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a literary region. Published in 1976, this remains an important study of Pacific Coast literature, including historical writing, prose, fiction, and poetry. Everson was a poet, printer, once a monk, and a student and friend of some of the most famous names in California literature, not least among them Robinson Jeffers, who Everson championed for many years after Jeffers lost popularity with the fickle masses. Everson's thesis is that the coastal West creates its own literary style, and presents convincing arguments. It is quintessentially American writing, the end of the frontier West where it runs into the ocean, and encounters Asia. it is writing that treats nature as a living character, as a dominant feature of literature, not as a mere backdrop for human-centered dramas. Everson draws on many examples, and considers many famous West Coast writers in this study. I'm going to have to read it at least twice before I can absorb it all, but it will be worth it. Everson validates in this study what I've long believed to be true, which is also supported by many other writers of the West, from Jeffers to Gary Snyder, and many others.

Patricia Donegan: Haiku Mind: 108 poems to cultivate awareness and open your heart. A haiku-based self-help book? Why not. Actually, despite that caveat, this is a pretty good read. The author is an experienced haiku student and writer, and a long-time Buddhist meditation leader, so the credentials are in place. The book is divided into 108 chapters, each a meditation on the theme of the haiku cited at each chapter's beginning. The haiku themselves are a mix of classical and brand new, written by writers from Japan, America, and elsewhere. Some are well known classical masters (Basho, Issa), others their modern heirs. It's an interesting idea for a haiku book, and it works rather well; although, it's not really a book about poetry, but a book about life and healing and transcendence that uses poetry as its touchstone. So don't expect any poetry criticism here, but do expect some genuine wisdom.

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Music: What I've Been Listening to This Summer

I also want to mention some CDs that I've been enjoying this summer. I've been on a lucky streak at the thrift stores, finding CDs both new to me, and filling in the gaps in my album collection with some old favorites that I've never owned before, but are classic albums of various kinds. I've been on a, well, not exactly nostalgia kick, but call it a historical review. Great albums from the past I've been picking up here and there to fill in gaps in my music library.

Simon and Garfunkel: Sounds of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Water

Dave Brubeck: a special five-CD edition of all the original "Time" series albums, boxed as a set, with the CD slipcases reproducing the original liner notes and cover art. I'd already acquired the special edition of Time Out, but I'd been looking for Time Further Out for some time now (ahem), and this filled in that gap. The set also includes: Countdown: Time in Outer Space; Time Changes; Time In.

Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen: Poetry for the Beat Generation. A classic with Kerouac reading his poems accompanied by Allen's piano and jazz stylings. This is one of those great albums that anyone interested in mid-20th C. poetry and music needs to hear at least once in their lives.

Igor Stravinsky: Miniature Masterpieces. A large compilation of several short orchestral and chamber pieces, many of them only rarely recorded or performed. The "Dumbarton Oaks" chamber concerto is here, probably the best-known work on this album, but so are the two Suites for Small Orchestra. Even rarer still are the wonderful "Circus Polka" and my personal favorite among Stravinsky's rarely-performed short works for large orchestra: the "Greeting Prelude," which is his arrangement of "Happy Birthday," a very witty and wry orchestral setting of the familiar song.

Various Artists: the original musical soundtrack for 2001: a space odyssey. I wore out two copies of this on vinyl, back in the 1970s. It was my first exposure, as a budding teen proto-composer, as I'm sure it was to many other listeners, of the music of Gyorgy Ligeti, whose dramatic and abstract works figure prominently in the film. Also included of course is a full performance of Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube," which still in mind evokes those spacecraft and space stations dancing gracefully in Earth orbit. This CD gives us all the music exactly as it was used in the film; in many ways, the long passages in the film in which the only sound is music prefigure my ongoing interest in non-verbal cinema, of which 2001: a space odyssey can be seen as a precursor of the entire genre.

Antonio Vivaldi: Cello Concertos, Vol. 4 as performed by cellist Ofra Harnoy. I've been listening to a lot of classical music again this year, and Vivaldi and Telemann have both been prominent in my listening. This CD was a revelation, giving me the chance to experience several beautiful concerti I hadn't really heard before. My favorite here is the Concerto in E-Flat, RV 408, which contains a middle-movement adagio of sublime beauty. It's a lovely cantabile, full of deep ardor and high emotion, which I find both soothing and mournful to listen to.

Notes towards an egoless poetry 16: Cinematic and Poetic

When I write a poem like Yellow Sand, White Wind or this untitled poem or the way of leaves or antler or Slow gods moving between trees, gathering or even a shaman's critique of pure poetry, what I'm writing is a sequence of images. There may be a "voice" in the poem, but it's not my own voice, it's a character. (In any given poem, it's almost always a character.) More interestingly, there is no narrative, no story, apart from the sequence of images. These poems take the cliché dictum of "show, don't tell" to an extreme. They show but don't tell you what to think about what is being shown.

I get complaints about this from other poets, other writers. One complaint is that there's no ideating personality, no human presence, to hang onto, in the poem. But that's the point: this is the opposite of ego-personality poetry. It also questions, by its very nature, the supremacy in contemporary poetry of the "I" poem, the confessional lyric, the much-vilified workshop poem about the enclosed circle of one's own personal life. I always find it remarkable when poets complain about certain kinds of poetry on basically moral grounds, simply because something about the poem questions their assumptions about the nature of poetry. Where in this moralizing is there room for pluralism?

When I write this sort of poem I'm interested in reflecting life, in evoking an experience of consciousness, rather than describing or commenting on it, or telling what I think about it. Poems that tell me what the person in the poem is thinking, detached from the physical, wear thin on me very quickly. A lot of first-person poetry is distressingly narcissistic. A lot more poetry is cerebrally detached, keeping a safe distance from the guts of life. Far safer to talk about an experience rather than recreate it, and not stir the emotional waters too strongly. So we get a lot of tepid, undemanding, chatty poetry. Most of which reads like prose anyway.

The answer to this, by the way, lies not in the even-more-cerebral, even-more-detached extremes of language-based poetry. That's an artistically mannerist answer, an exaggeration of existing trends rather than a replacement of them with something genuinely different. Such poetry is even more Apollonian. The real answer lies in the restoration of balance between Apollo and Dionysus, wherein passionate language can evoke passion, not just talk about evoking it.

The poems I am discussing here are what I have called cinematic poems, the images sequentially making up a quasi-narrative. When filmmakers show sequential images that seem to be related, that are connected because they're set side by side, but with no usual dialogue or narration, people call those films "poetic." When a poem does the same thing with images set side by side, I have no better term than to call such a poem "cinematic."

Cinema such as non-verbal, non-narrative films like Ron Fricke's Baraka, Godfrey Reggio's Powaaqatsi, and Derek jarman's Blue—these films are often called "poetic."

Poems such as the ones I'm discussing here are also sequences of non-linear images, not linked together by traditional narrative, storytelling, or prose constructions of grammar. Images are linked together, rather, by parataxis, by being placed side-by-side. A sequence of images builds in the mind, and due to the persistence of vision, the persistence of memory, becomes connected.

Cinema operates via the principle of persistence of vision: images flicker at the rate of 24 or 30 frames per second, and because of the retinal and neurological phenomenon called the persistence of vision, the viewing experience seems continuous, not quantized.

A poem made of images can potentially operate the same way, based on the cognitive phenomenon of the persistence of memory. Short-term memory overlaps with itself in the small scale of immediate duration. Even if we don't store what we just read permanently in our long-term memory, while we are reading, what we just read hovers for a moment while we move on, creating the illusion of continuity. Or so it seems under normal conditions.

When reading the poem, let the images evoke whatever they evoke, and make up your own inner movie from it. I suppose that someone who's been to the same places on the planet imaged in the poem might find it more evocative than other readers, because of the shared experience. But there's no place in a poem like this for didactic generalities, for description rather than imaging, for telling the reader what's going on. I actually would prefer to be all show and no tell, in this kind of poem. There may be moments of standard syntax, standard grammar, but they are not normative. Shared experience might be good for reading the poem, certainly, but even if a poem is "too local to be universal" somebody's going to read it and get it.

And I'm fine with that happening, or not, as it does. I don't feel the need to control which reader "gets it" and which doesn't. Nor do I feel a need to make sure that all readers "get it." You can never do that anyway.

Many writers, many poets, really seem to believe that I care a great deal more than I actually do about what my poems mean, or that I want to direct the reader's experience somehow down pre-determined channels. The assumption here is that the poet's intention, my intention, is paramount, and that there is only one correct interpretation of the poem, namely, mine, the poet's. I don't feel that way at all. I really don't want to do any of those things. (Call it a differing poetic ethic.)

This attitude leaves out mystery entirely. Once the poem is set loose in the world, I have no control over how it's received, how it's interpreted, and I don't really want any control over that. In a cinematic poem, I want the reader to find whatever they find, and if it's all a bit mysterious, well, then so is life. I could say what I did see when I was making the poem, and in some cases I could link photographs to parts of the poem. BUt that would only be my own experience. Maybe your experience when reading a cinematic poem will have overlap with mine, and maybe it will be different. I am completely comfortable with that.

I am interested in sharing experience in the poem, not in pacifying it. I have no desire to impose order upon chaos—which it seems a lot of writers want to do, perhaps unconsciously, when they write. They construct narratives in part to construct, or discover, an order to life, which is essentially non-linear, I get a lot of negative remarks about this kind of poem from fellow writers, precisely because it's not ordered or non-mysterious enough for them. They want to find the key to the puzzle-box, but there isn't one.

John Cage once said, late in life, and I find this to be a real touchstone for this mode of my writing:

I want people to be mystified by what's happening. The reality of our life is mystery.

Cage made a lot of his creative work with the intent to evoke that mystery, to just let unpredictable things happen, to give up control, and also to provoke the audience, not soothe or reassure them. The Zen goal is to wake up, not be put to sleep. Not to be soothed, but to be challenged. A poetry that merely entertains is deadening, not enlivening. Art needs to be more than that.

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Update:

Film director and historian Peter Bogdanovich, auteur of one or two of my all-time favorite films, has recently posted on the topic of cinema and poetry on his blog. He cites Jean Renoir as probably the most poetic of all film directors, Few directors have addressed cinematic poetry directly, but Bogdanovich defines it this way:

What distinguishes the real film poets is their use of the camera to convey meanings and reverberations beyond the geography of place or the needs of the narrative. Camera placement, and therefore the composition, the lens choices, the lighting of the image, the camera’s movement, the particular juxtaposition of images, are all in the grammar for conveying hidden aspects of the tale or people—-exposing a part of the theme, or the true meaning beyond simply the plot—-endorsing, subverting, enriching the more obvious qualities of setting or performance. This is why the finest filmmakers are generally always remembered for certain of their unique and personal images. Among the other poets, D.W. Griffith comes to mind, and F.W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, King Vidor, John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Flaherty, and Orson Welles.

These are some of the same elements that also define poetry in photography, of course: composition, angle, lens, lighting. What makes cinema poetic, I might add to Mr. Bogdanovich's thought, is timing: camera movement, certainly, but also frame rate, exposure, and other artifacts of filming than can moved in time and space. I urge you to read the rest of Mr. Bogdanovich's entry, in which he discusses further why he thinks Renoir is a cinematic poet. It's fine reading. Also, just on general principles, it's usually worth reading Mr. Bogdanovich, as he is a fine film historian.

Spirits in the Material World

Having been fighting an uphill struggle against chronic illness, working hard to get that under control so I can get my life back, I find myself watching a movie or two over the past week, and being pulled in perhaps more deeply than usual.

Gods and Monsters (1998) is a fictionalized portrait of the last days of James Whale, the great director who set the standard and style of the best Hollywood horror movies in the 1930s. (Based on the novel Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram, this film contains one of Sir Ian McKellan's masterpiece performances.) I watched Gods and Monsters again tonight, having not seen it since I first watched it in the theatre during its initial release. I found it to be deeply affecting, in ways many of my literary friends no doubt would dismiss—but then, the whole LGBT/outsider subtext is beyond most of them, except intellectually. No one knows what it's like to have to encode your self in your art quite like artists who have been closeted and hidden LGBT or other minorities or oppressed groups. Except perhaps intellectually or theoretically,

If you believe the New Age cliché that We're not physical beings having a spiritual experience, we're spiritual beings have a physical experience, you can come around to the idea of the spirit-in-flesh (spirit enfleshed) rather naturally. But what of the monster's flesh? What of the role the monster plays in each of Whale's films, in which it, or he, stands in for the compleat Outsider, the rejected Other? The monster never asked to be made—none of us ask to be born, either—and finds himself in a world that hates and fears him, simply for being alive. It's not hard to view that as a gay subtext within Whale's horror films; and it's a subtext that has been discussed, written about, and portrayed extensively, not least in this modern film. We are our own gods, as well as being monsters. We are both.



Much is made in the film of Whale's experiences in the trenches of World War I, where he first fell in love with another man, only to see him murdered by war. At the end of his life, in the film, Whale can no longer evade or escape the horrors of his own life: he has too much time on his hands, he has lost most of his creative ability to aging and (possibly neurological, although it's not made explicit) disability, and none of the distractions are working anymore. Not even memories of the pretty boys frolicking nude in his pool in the middle of the night, as he watched, smiling.

Having spent a week dealing with my own memories, my own horrors both recently-overcome and recently-renewed, it's hard not to see the parallels. Isolated by distance, age, time, knowledge, experience, sexual identity: things that cut us off from each other, from the general run of humankind, from the usual topics of ordinary conversation—which all seems so dull, anyway, when your feet are in the fire—you relish even a moment of voyeurism. Which is not the same as pornography.

As a photographer I'm more of a voyeur than a pornographer—even when making photos of the erotic (male) nude. I'm not interested in titillation for its own sake, but only as a byproduct of something that is beautiful. Is it the beauty that turns us on, that makes us monstrous? Or is it the monsters that make themselves desirable? The argument about whether or not homosexuality is monstrous or natural is entirely irrelevant: what matters is whether beauty is also terrible.

Well, it is. It inspires awe, which is a form of terror. Beauty is but the beginning of terror. —Rilke

Another movie I re-watched recently is based on a Marvel Comics antihero, Ghost Rider. In its own way, just as campy as a James Whale film. Gods and Monsters is certainly the more serious of these two films. But both carry similar tropes about being the Outsider, the misunderstood: being the Monster. In both, the heroes are the monsters; the point is made absolutely, and explicitly, in each case. There is no pretending otherwise.



I used to read the Ghost Rider comic book regularly during its most philosophical run in the late 1980s. The character of Johnny Blaze, and his inner conflict with his demonic alter ego, appealed to me, I now imagine, because I was feeling more and more like an Outsider myself. My favorite soap opera at that time in my life was not a TV drama, but another Marvel comic book: The Uncanny X-Men. (In its heyday of being written by Chris Claremont and drawn by John Byrne.) I've watched all the movies made from those characters, as well. In the second film, X2: X-Men United, there is an explicit scene in which one of the student mutant characters comes out as a mutant to his family, who are scared and angry. At one point, the mother asks her son, the mutant, "Couldn't you just stop being a mutant?" The parallels to so many coming-out stories of LGBT youth and adults to their families are explicit and absolutely obvious: how many parents have said to their children, "Couldn't you just stop being gay?" The connection of being rejected as being Other is the same whether you're gay, or have mutant powers. It's rare for an otherwise action-oriented movie to get it so openly, so readily. This coming-out scene was so familiar to me, from my own life, that I had to both laugh out loud and cringe at the same time—which again, is the sort of response the coded layers of humor and pain in James Whale's movies also typically evoke in the clued-in watcher. The parallels are again obvious.



Ghost Rider, the Devil's bounty hunter, who takes his curse and makes it something of a force for good rather than evil, is a spiritual being having a physical-world experience. Movies are flickers of light on a screen: it's hard to get less physical than that, and remain substantially part of the physical world. The generations of men and women who have had to hide their true nature from others, for whatever reason, hid behind screens of coded behavior, coded messages, encoded speech and gesture and knowing looks. And each of these are stories that both tell us who we are, and help us figure out who we are, when such stories are reflected in entertainment. And what else are campy horror movies and comic books but entertainments?

Or perhaps they are something much, much more: perhaps they are the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves, however coded or layered with meaning. Perhaps they are a kind of archetypal autobiography: which is why they remain compelling, decades after they were first written, or drawn, or filmed.

And that's what art does, even more than entertainment: It endures. It still speaks to us, to our human condition, to our wounds and our hopes, long after its makers are gone.

Avatar: some meditations

Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron, 2009.

This isn't that kind of review. I'm not interested in writing that kind of review, here or ever. I am not going to spend time picking apart the technical details and elements of the movie, or presenting myself as some sort of film critic. I'm going to spend my time focusing on the mythopoetic and archetypal aspects of the plot, the context, and the characters of the film. On the mythopoetic level—all other debates about its merits aside—this film succeeds very well indeed.

1.

Criticisms have been made that it's not all that original a story. (Remember, originality is the Modernist golden calf, to be worshipped and honored before all others.) There are in fact many similarities to existing story types. John Smith meets Pocahontas and is educated in the ways of survival in the New World. Aliens vs. natives; natives vs. invaders. The US Cavalry vs. the Comanches or Apaches (cavalry films are a particular subset of the Western genre, with unique tropes). Giant heartless corporate greed vs. compassionate independence, which prevails against all odds. The alienated or wounded war veteran, formerly an outsider, who becomes an insider among those he is supposed to be oppressing. The mere soldier becomes a spirited Warrior. Echoes of Vietnam, echoes of the Middle East conflicts. The hero's journey to come of age, to come into his own adult sense of responsibility and power. And of course the love story: the deep encounter with Other. Disaffected, alienated soldier, sick of and sickened by his own militaristic culture, meets the natives, and "goes native." (Perhaps Dances With Takara might be a fitting title.)

Why does the film resonate with so many other stories? Because each point of resonance is a mythic or archetypal turn. The film is built on archetypes, not on conventional dialogue or character or plot. It's a human story, but it's not a human-centric story. (Except of course that all stories are human stories, if not human-centric. As poet Muriel Rukeyser once said, "The universe is made up not of atoms, but of stories.")

We can talk all we want about the technical or purely filmic aspects of the movie; we can decide which succeed and which might have been done better, or differently. I have some thoughts on those points, which I may not get to here. But the issue of originality is a bit disingenuous. Other famous and influential films have been equally based on older stories, older myths, to no harm, and in many ways to their virtue. It doesn't matter: sometimes hte oldest stories are still the best. The point isn't that it's the most original script ever written, but how well it was executed on film. And this particular version of these mythic stories is very well-executed indeed.

Those who insist that this isn't an original enough script are looking to find fault. While on one level they might be right, they're also completely wrong. Movies, like novels, are myths: the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The stories told in Avatar are myths.

There are worldwide myths (Greek, Hindu, etc.) in which "avatar" is the word used to describe a god embodied in human flesh: the divine spirit enters the body. This myth in two senses comes literally true in this movie: through the Avatar technology, which is neurologic telefractoring into another (cloned or genetically manipulated) body; and the moment in the plot when the Hero attains the pinnacle of the natives' achievements, by bonding with the most wild and powerful and dangerous of the planet's flying beasts. (Whose name translates as "Last Shadow," meaning the last shadow you see crossing over you, before you are taken. In other, older myths, what has sometimes been called a Deathbird.) The hero is both an avatar, and becomes a divine avatar; his journey of self-discovery, of empowerment, is a journey also of becoming divinely blessed. In the case of Pandora's sentient ecosystem, Eywa, quite literally.

The archetypal stories and situations of Avatar are numerous. To my mind they're the reason for the film: more of a reason than the ostensible plot, which is admittedly thin at points, the characters (some of whom admittedly are not very 3D), or the somewhat predictable chain of events. Predictability is no sin, by the way, unless you worship at the altar of originality. Children want to hear the same stories told to them over and over again in part because they are predictable. I saw many plot turns coming a long time before they actually arrived; but that didn't bother me, as they were the necessary enacting of the archetypes and myths in operation. The pleasure of the retelling of the old stories is in the details surrounding the predictable, though, in the precise workings out of each archetype, in the little character moments and throwaway lines that flesh out the people in the story who are acting out the archetypes.

2.

I didn't watch the film in 3D. (Yes, I know, I missed out, dude.) I never got to the theatre during it's 3D release, largely because I was on the road at the time, and no theatrical-release films had my attention, for several weeks. I never watched the film in theatrical release at all, to be honest. I was traveling. I was making my own art at the time, on a creative roadtrip. (Isn't it interesting how judgmental some people can get when you don't keep up with the latest cultural trend or tickle of the moment, as though you were missing out on all of life by missing out on what's the newest popular entertainment? One wonders at times if that isn't overcompensation for a deep, unacknowledged sense of the hollowness and soullessness of such pursuits and trends.)

And anyway I'm not sold on even the newest 3D technology. I'm still not sure that it isn't just another fad, another gimmick, experiencing a wave of popularity that won't endure past the "gee whiz!" period into a genuinely artistic period. (Not that there have no good 3D films made recently; Coraline was sublime.) I am turned off by the cheap tricks that a lot of films use. I tend to like to wait for a new technology to be used to make art, not just used to show off.

I'm told that Avatar uses it's 3D conservatively: as though you were looking through a window onto a world. There are no intrusions that break the fourth wall into the movie theater's space over the heads of the crowd in front of you; my least favorite gimmick of 3D, to be blunt. The choice in Avatar was to create depth of field, not make the audience gasp in their seats with a cheap trick. Knowing the filmmakers involved, I accept the probability of this being true.

3.

I tend to be a quiet fan of James Cameron films. I tend to like most of what he does, most of the time. The first time I saw Terminator, I felt changed, if only for an evening, the way a great film is supposed to get under your skin and change you. (Cameron has always worked with grand archetypes in his stories.) I came out of the movie theatre with my friend, unable to talk—about anything, not just the film—which happens to me after the most moving times watching a film. I let myself get immersed in the film, and the shift back to the "real world" can take some time, when the film is particularly immersive or overwhelming or life-changing. (My DInner WIth André shut me up for a whole week, more or less.) I came out of the movie theater, after watching Terminator, at night: down the street was an idle road construction site, lit surreally by the sodium and mercury vapor streetlights, with a few big diggers and tractors parked next to the broken road and the revealed dirt beneath: a miniature post-apocalyptic sketch of dread. I kept my eye on the digging machines, afraid they might come to dangerous life, and attack, like the technology is the movie. I skirted around them and stayed on the other side of the street. My friend laughed in sympathy, but that's how much the film got under my skin, that first time.

I never watched Titanic, and I doubt I ever will. In some ways it says a great deal about our culture that Cameron's most popularly conventional love story film has been his most commercially successful. (The stories we like to tell ourselves about ourselves are not always life-changing, but re-affirm the status quo.) I have no doubt it's a very well-made film. Yet I find myself uninterested in Titanic, the popular movie, and far more interested in Cameron's documentary work, alongside Dr. Robert Ballard, in discovering and filming the actual Titanic wreck in the deep waters of the cold North Atlantic. The side-films, the documentaries, the preparation work, the undersea filming that Cameron did for the actual discovery of the lost ship—all these are more compelling to me than the love-story movie. I'm just not conventionally sentimental or nostalgic, I guess.

I think Cameron's masterpiece is probably The Abyss. In its own way, as deeply an innovative a film as has ever been made, both in terms of the undersea setting and filming, and of the encounter with the alien Other. (Are all Cameron's films about the encounter with the Other? A case could be made for that, even for Titanic, which is also a story critiquing social-class stratigraphy.)

Strange Days, which Cameron wrote but did not direct, is an interesting little film, that I think often gets overlooked. It exemplifies what Cameron films often do: blend genres. Strange Days is a film about the apocalypse in both its positive and negative connotations, and it's also a murder mystery. Terminator is the modern (postmodern) Frankenstein, while also being a meditation on love and death and impermanence.

The newly released DVD of Avatar is no-frills. It's just the movie, with a commentary track. There is no second DVD of special features, making-of documentaries, and so forth. And the DVD release is not the 3D version of the film. One wonders if there will be an extended director's cut released later. Cameron has done that before: The Abyss was a full half hour longer in extended release, and that actually made it a much better film. Perhaps a similar version of Avatar will someday be released, with special features, and the option to view it in 3D at home. Maybe even a digital copy of the 2D version, for your portable player; those have become very popular lately. The gods forbid we should not be able to go one moment, or to one location, where we could not be somehow entertained.

If I were to wish for an extended cut of Avatar, what I would want would be: more of the small character moments that flesh out the film; some more on the science behind the film (is that flux vortex which creates the region of floating mountains a geomagnetic or gravitational/tidal or even more exotic phenomenon?), including some more on the biology of Pandora; and more scenes of Jake learning to go native. That part of the film I would have liked to see a lot more of, at least another ten minutes or so of film-time. The process of learning to live in a foreign culture is always interesting for me—having done so myself a number of times. It would also have been interesting to see more of jake's video logs, in which he begins to question himself, and lose his former sense of self, the process during which he becomes made anew; this process of losing the self to gain the self is another deeply mythic part of the hero's journey. It's sketched out in the film, but my own peculiar constellation of interests made me want more.



4.

Entertainment is not art. It's the dead detritus of art congealed by marketing and the economy of scale to maximize profits for some at the expense of everybody else. Art is life: entertainment is death.

I don't think Avatar has pretensions towards being High Art rather than entertainment. Yet it is artfully done, and at times is so breathtakingly beautiful that it approaches the threshold of art, even toes over it. The night scenes in the planetary jungle, with many colors of bioluminescence, some of them activated only by touch, are particularly lovely. The sheer profligacy and variety of species and elements at times overwhelm the foreground action, and I lose track of the love story because I'm watching the background. The realization of the world, the power of the details, are what give it believability and resonance. It is truly a Paradise: an Eden, an unspoiled place in which all beings live in relative harmony.

It is at night, in the film, that the message becomes most obvious that everything on this planet is connected by the neural bonding fibers: the entire ecosystem is sentient. Eywa is Gaea writ large. One short speech even makes the comparison between the living Eywa, the soul of Pandora, and the Gaea spirit of Earth, which humans in their manic exploitation have perhaps succeeded in murdering. The ecological message is rather blunt, then; yet within the action's context, I don't feel preached at, just strongly reminded that maybe, just maybe, it isn't too late for Gaea after all.

5.

Yes, there's a bit of exoticism in the film—the encounter with the Other—which I have to say has been emphasized in the way the film's been marketed. Merchandising makes the producers of any film a lot of money, especially in science fiction. So there are lots of Navi trinkets and action figures available. Did Dances With Wolves get so much exotic marketing? Not much, because the producers intended to be respectful of the First Nations depicted in the film. The Avatar merchandising is more akin to Star Wars style merchandising, even while the film's marketing posters and graphics echo Dances With Wolves: the Other who is ourselves, we who appear to be so different but whose hearts are one.

Exoticism and colonialism go hand in hand: the dominating colonial forces are always in conflict with the Other, in part because they project onto the other all their own dark, repressed traits. Hence the natives get called "savages" or "primitives." They are technologically inferior to the colonizing paramilitary forces, certainly; on the other hand, the more complex the toy, the easier it is to break. Technological civilization has often been seen as the dominator, colonial force; and it has often been successfully resisted by the natives. There are echoes of the unhealthy US Cavalry incursions into First Nations geographical and conceptual space presented in the last act of Dances With Wolves. Again, these are mythic echoes, not literal quotes or references.

One plot-point the movie leaves open, at the end, when we see the lines of humans being force-marched into the space shuttle to be evacuated—or to be exiled from Paradise—is the tendency of large corporations, when the natives win a battle, to return later with overwhelming force. The British Empire was built very much by the British East India Tea Company, ruthless in their suppression of local uprisings that interfered with their profits.

So Pandora remains a threatened Paradise, not a permanent one. A subtle nuance of the film is that there are no permanent Paradises: the Hometree is destroyed, a sacred site where the natives can connect with their ancestors via bonding with the ecosystem's neuro-fibers is also destroyed. An entire tribe is made homeless. We can only live in the moment, with the ones we have right now, today.

6.

I have no grand conclusive statements to make. no quick thumbs-up or thumbs-down recommendations (with all their subtle echoes of Nero's gladitorial coliseum). I leave other viewers to decide for themselves how well they enjoy the film. For myself, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the DVD, and expect to watch it again soon, picking up more subtle details that I missed the first time through.

James Cameron continues to make films I want to watch. As I said above, a case could be made for all of his films being mythic encounters with the Other—both the Other out there, the truly Other, and the Other we find within ourselves. The question as to which Other, the inner or the outer, is the more alien, lies at the heart of Cameron's films, as it does here in Avatar.

Happy Birthday, Akira Kurosawa

Born 100 years ago, the highly influential Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa is remembered today for a long legacy of great films.



I first saw Seven Samurai at one of those university student film group shows in Ann Arbor, but I saw in a big lecture hall presented on a full-size screen, sitting in the second row center. To say that the movie was overwhelming and left a permanent impression on me is an understatement. I've been interested in, and have studied, Japanese arts and culture for many years, and Kurosawa has been one of my guides. Sanjuro is one of my all-time favorite films, in any language. Ran, which is Kurosawa's feudal-era samurai version of King Lear is one of the shortest three-hour movies I've ever sat through: I was so drawn in to the tragedy, the beauty and power of the acting and cinematography, that I had no sense of the passing of time.

Dreams is a film about art, as much as it is about life. In some ways, it's Kurosawa's ars poetica, his poem about making poems; in his case, poetic films. To call this film a linear narrative is wrong, since dreams themselves are non-linear and only appear to be narrative. To call it "magic realism" is also wrong, because that label, which is a descendent of Surrealism really, cannot contain the way dreams free-associate: they make complete sense while we are immersed in them, and proceed by their own internal logic.



Last year I found a copy of Kurosawa's only memoir, Something Like An Autobiography (1983), which contains many insights into the history of Japanese film. He doesn't talk about his own art much, except to tell stories about the making of many of his early films, but when he does it's compelling reading.

A lasting legacy, not only in film, but on culture and the arts in general. Arigato, Kurosawa-domo.

Dreams With Sharp Teeth: Harlan Ellison

Last week I watched an excellent documentary about writer's writer Harlan Ellison titled Dreams With Sharp Teeth, directed by Erik Nelson. I found it exhilarating, exciting, and inspirational. One thing you can say about Ellison: he's energized, he's alive, he's never been seen among the typically conformist creative undead. Watching the documentary led me to some deep inner reflections about my own life and creative work. I found myself, not for the first time, mirrored in Harlan Ellison; not an exact reflection, but surprisingly a lot more things in common than I had realized. Here's the documentary's trailer:



There's a lot of additional content on the documentary's website, also called Dreams With Sharp Teeth.

Later that night, after watching the documentary, doing some household chores, making dinner, I wrote a lot in my journal. I was inspired in part by watching Harlan's boundless energy. I decided to leave this in stream-of-consciousness format, as it was written that way, with everything all jumbled together. It's not artless to write this way, nor does it show a lack of attention, or intention. It does all tumble out this way, at times. Most writers choose to make it Look Pretty, later. But in the spirit of Harlan Ellison, uncensored and unequivocal, here is what I wrote. Call it a response, call it a personal review, call it crap, I don't really care.

•

I never went out today. I am experiencing a full-blown relapse of the ulcerative colitis, and it’s kept me down all day today. I spent most of the day thinking, reading a little, writing a little, watching TV. Watching a documentary on Harlan Ellison, a very good one, full of great quotes I wish I could remember. I realize that he was bullied as a boy even worse than I was, and that seems to be one root of his perpetual anger at the world’s stupidity. I recognize something similar in myself. I also recognize that Harlan is almost always the smartest person in the room, and he long ago lost patience with that; one of the things that really ticks him off is when people do not live up to their full potential. I understand that impatience. Have I lived up to my own potential? I’m not sure that I can say that I have. I have certainly tried to, and struggled with it. I’ve felt held down and held back, the way the bullies used to hold me down when they were beating me up, my whole life, and I’ve certainly not had the career success of a Harlan Ellison. His anger does hold him back, too, in that he is incapable of even necessary compromise, personally or artistically, and so some projects that should have happened never have. And maybe never will. I can say the same. I can also say that only now, in my aging, do I feel like I am approaching my own height of creative ability, my own peak, and getting closer than ever before to my own potential. I still don’t know if I’ve ever lived up to it, or ever can. And I feel extremely frustrated by feeling held back: by stress, by family drama, by this annoying illness, by being surrounded by stupid people or at least people seemingly unable keep up with me, and by the sucking black hole of negative depression and ugliness that I feel surrounded by so much, these past few years. People seem almost willfully to reject their highest potentials, their biggest growths and evolutions, their highest goods. Yesterday I wrote another Spiral Dance essay, which ended up being titled from what inspired it, The Most Excellent Human Quality, as usual only realizing what it was when it approached completion, writing as usual for that group of essays writing at white heat; I am always so focused on the writing that I never think about it till it’s done, which is as it should be. It’s wrong to call the Spiral Dance essays a series, they’re not; they’re more like a class, or genus, a gathering of related species under one taxonomy. I wonder if I have been too passive in life, too outward and other-directed, not driven or ambitious enough. Probably that’s true. Probably I could have made more of myself, if I’d fought harder for it, been more ambitious, more debonair, more in-your-face; in other words, more like Harlan. I don’t know if that would have made a difference though, and I don’t know if that other person would have been me. Are all writers introverts? I don’t think they are, but I know I am. There are times I wonder about all of this, and it only makes me depressed and mad at my limitations, my own failings. So I can’t afford to think about it that much; or it will kill me. I may have been made to be a monk rather than a writer or an artist, and everything that I make creatively is for me, only for me, in my lifetime, with the world never caring about any of it. Which is a Victim whine, of course, which I am also bored with. So I spent some time this week sending out writing submissions to various publications. Most of those will no doubt disappear into the void. Harlan is one of those writers who quite rightly says, and lives by way of example, that what matters is not the person, but the creative legacy. I’ll probably never know if anyone cares about my creative legacy, when I’m dead. I’ll probably never have any fame or success as an artist. Many days, that’s more a cause for depression than ambition; which is one way I’m different than Ellison. Yet I’m getting better about what Ellison says a writer needs, that ability to not care if no one else in the room agrees with you, or agrees with you, or what they think of you: when you’re right about something, and you know it, you just have to speak up. You simply must. I’m getting better at realizing that rejection, even personal attack, tells me so much more about the person doing the attacking than about the work under attack. I’m perfectly clear that when I write in certain kinds of styles, some people think it must be a mistake—but let me be clear: if I put it out in that form, saying what it says, you can be sure I meant it, I meant every word of it, and I meant to present it exactly as intended. The limitation is with your expectations, your filters and ignorance, not my intentions. But then, you’ll never make a lot of friends by speaking the truth. Any sort of truth, not merely that sort of truth. Ellison lacks a self-censor on his mouth, it all just spills out; even he knows there are some things that he probably should have sat on. I’m not as bad as Ellison about letting it all hang out—but maybe I ought to be. Maybe I need to be less Norwegian Bachelor Farmer, and more Harlan Ellison Uncensored. So consider this a warning. The gloves are off, the candy jar is full, I’m dealing with a chronic illness that saps most of my physical energy leaving me frustrated and isolated and lonely, and furthermore saps all of the energy I usually put into being Nice, being Polite, being civil even when it’s pointless. My lack of strength right now makes me less patient with stupidity, less willing to sit on my mouth, and far less willing to let my valuable time be wasted by the claptrap of others. Do I offend you? If so, perhaps it’s overdue, and you needed to be offended anyway. The thing is, you can tell that everything that spills out of Harlan’s mouth is sincere and honest and well-crafted, even when spontaneous. He is THAT good a writer, that good a speaker. I do not subscribe to the critical theory of snark, in which invective is what the professor uses to humble the students till only the tough and non-dilettantes are left. Yet I do see the value, at times, of telling people the honest truth about their work, and their attitudes towards life. I’m actually a very good writer. I can write circles around many people. And Ellison is a far better writer than me. So are most of the writers he thinks are great writers. It’s not a hierarchy of talent, it’s a tier of inspirations. In a way, I missed out on having a living writer as a mentor, because no writing mentor ever felt strongly enough about my talent to threaten me physical harm if I did not dedicate myself to making art. I’ve had some great creative mentors in my life, but they were guides, not goads. They cajoled and inspired and enticed. I never had a goad, not like Ellison is often a goad, in the writers’ workshops he’s taught, in lecturing life, and elsewhere. I never had anybody care enough about my art to threaten to hurt me if I stopped doing it. I feel that as a loss, right now, when I am struggling to have enough energy to even stand upright all day long. I have to force myself to do it. I have to take action. I have to take responsibility for goading myself. I usually prefer to cajole. But now I’m angry, and I feel like being a goad, and being goaded myself. If someone who reads this tries to fulfill that need for me, having read this, it won’t mean anything, because they only made the threat after reading this, which makes it non-real. When I recognize that Ellison was almost always the smartest guy in the room, I’m admitting that has often been true for me, too—but that I didn’t respond to it the way Harlan did, by trying to raise everyone else up. Most of the time, I’ve just felt isolation and inward loneliness, and even though I refused to let myself be dragged down, I still didn’t try to goad everyone else up towards being their better selves. I realize my goading is sometimes disguised as cajoling, though. I know that sometimes I write something inspirational, but there’s a fist inside it, an “or else!” that they’d better hear, or they’re going to fail, and fail hard, and it won’t be anybody’s fault but their own. I can speak hard truths, and hard spiritual truths—I exchange this all the time with my closest friends—and still make people want to hear them. I can be blunt to the point of rudeness, if it’s called for. So I’m a little bit like Harlan that way. Perhaps I just don’t think I always see it, or accept it, or act on it—and I have a better self-censor on my mouth. Better, in the sense of not alienating so many people, of keeping to the social contract; but maybe not better for art, for my art, for their art, for anybody’s growth and survival as an artist. When I choose to write in this manner, it’s not really a choice, I’m necessarily just letting it all spill out, and letting it be what it is. I don’t care what anybody thinks about it, because it’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. My responsibility stops at my skin, my job is to better myself, to take care of myself, not to be Nice to others. (Minnesota Nice or otherwise.) At the moment, being nice is in direct conflict with my own survival, and I will not lie down and die, just to make everybody not hate me. Where do we learn to do that, anyway? At our mothers’ knees? In school, getting beat up every day by bullies? In church, being told to sit quietly and conform in thought to what we’re being told is true? (Especially when it’s not.) Where do we learn to just take it and lie down and die, just to make everybody love us? Of course, that’s not really love, that’s just a lack of disapproval, an absence of malice. Sometimes the bullies have no reason for why they want to beat you up, you didn’t make them do that, and not even your mother will understand. And that’s a major revelation in the frontier of self-awareness and the dawning light within. I’m more like Harlan Ellison than I ever realized, and at the moment, that makes me happy.