A Movie in Three Acts (That Falls Apart in the Third for the Lack of Experience)

Act I. Fade up on a woman screaming. The woman is unimportant, save that she is giving birth to our hero. We never see her again, nor do we need to. The childhood of our hero is summed up in a single scene where he is forced to choose duty over love. It's played up real sad. A tragic moment that demonstrates the incredible resolve our hero possesses when compelled.

Later, as a young adult, our hero is presented with a similar choice; more complex; more at stake. An inordinate amount of time is spent with the hero ruminating, going back and forth, showing how confusing and emotional it all is. Avoiding the painful choice of an adult, our hero returns with the rationalization that he can pursue both love and duty with equal fervor. He begins his journey confident that by leaving he demonstrates his loyalty, bringing honor to those left behind by finding the love he thinks he's chosen. He'll show them.

Act II. Our hopeful anticipation of watching the boy grow into a man is dashed rather quickly upon the rocks of our plot. Our hero's virtue is revealed as vice in disguise. He is not actually patient, but disconnected from his anger. His self-control but self-eviseration; we watch him discard any feeling he's not supposed to have. The contentment he displayed at the start of his trials was really the total absence of personhood. Indifferent to suffering because his preferences have long been slain, or weeded, or circumcised in some primitively naive attempt to please the gods of his cloistered little world. His noble quest for love a mere obsession with the only feeling he'd felt in years.

The bundle of emotional triggers that comprised his image of god suddenly seemed equivalent with the authoritative expectations of considerably more mortal creatures. His drowning self-surpression was based on spurious correlations with a divine noun. He throws up.

The desert is the only place he can be at this point, no other landscape can properly reflect the lostness. His battle with the cacti an austerely somber action. No one's crying. Depression is numb. He is cutting off every new emotion with each stroke of his weapon, and subsequently shuts down any ability to learn the world could feel differently than it does. His mind is cold and unadaptive. The limited experience from which his knowledge is crafted cannot predict the large reality he now drifts within. Duty conjures his feelings of betrayal. His search for love becomes a search for anything real.

Act III. The story's getting intolerably glum. Cut abruptly to a happy ending. Imagine: the threshold of the desert is crossed, sparks of virtue are discovered, love is found, rekindled, requited! The moral of the film becomes something about our mess, and how free we'll be once it's all been stripped away. Cleansed to the bone by the wilderness. This was a good idea until the realization dawns that there has been no cleansing. Only unpleasant revelations. The mess, if viewed as a set of neural configurations in our hero's head, is not so easily left behind.

Fine. We'll avoid the uninspired, disingenuous finale and go a different route. We'll let our hero die. Starvation, thirst, monsters of some kind, the means are unimportant; the idea is people can't live through states of such disillusionment. We need our mirage of goodness to survive. There is a certain honesty here, but this turn of events still begs the question. What if our hero didn't die? What if he had to keep on living? How do we end a story like that? It doesn't seem to fit into three short little acts when the climax becomes a long agonizing process that is generally unentertaining. The desert goes on. The hero goes on. The film goes on and on and on.

Our only real hope for finding a dramatic close comes from this observation: The desert is too peopled to wander unseen forever. When this perception manifests, our hero wakes from his stupor.

On the Bus

Serendipitously sat next to a woman on the bus who made conversation with me. Typically this is a rare experience for me on public transportation. She told me she saw me writing a while ago, and she liked the idea and had recently purchased a journal for herself to write as well.

I can't really impart how good that made me feel.

On Music

Music and I live in parallel worlds that don't really communicate well. I'm boxed and happy in my world, music boxed and happy in another, somewhere too distant to imagine. Every now and then someone comes to visit me though, people that travel to the world of music often. They bring with them a new band, and offer it to me as something I would enjoy. I usually love it. I'll listen to it over and over again. Until a new visitor brings a new musical offering.

William Blake

A quote from William Blake; A poem; Some thoughts on art and contentment.

***

"Where I to love money, I should lose all power of original thought. Desire of gain deadens the genius in man. My business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes."
    -- William Blake *

I have this struggle: The more I try to monetize my art the more it fades away from me. Which is frustrating, as I want to make a living from my art. I want to work full time on writing and painting, but my creative spark disappears the more I try to make that happen. So I have this funny sort of cycle. I play, creating out of enjoyment, and my output increases. Then I start to get ideas. "Now's the time...let's package this up and try and sell it somehow." Then it all becomes work and toil and the creative spigot is shut off. I wander in darkness for a while, then, much later, I remember how much I enjoyed art, and the cycle starts anew.

Advice

The best Advice I ever got,
That Writers Write and Painters Paint,
Is quickly set aside while trying
To make a Product from my Art.
How I forget my Love of Words!
The wond’rous Joys of Scribbled Thoughts
And Strokes of Colored Ink and Wash
Are Lamps that Light my Space Inside.
But wanting Gold from all my Shapes,
Light fades, and I soon cease to Play.

I'm beginning to think about art differently though. Instead of Art as a viable means to make a living, which is something I keep trying to force it to be, I'm beginning to think of art simply as a blessing. I am so incredibly rich to have the leisure to write or paint. I can afford oil paints. I have access to poetry, books, museums, etc. In the grand sceme of history, I really have an unprecidented amount of time and resources to spend on such things. I may not ever have the opportunity to work full-time on my art, but compared to what William Blake had, who lived most of his life in poverty, I am incredibly rich. I find that I am becoming content and grateful that I can practice any sort of art at all.



* Quote from William Blake: The Gates of Paradise, p136.

2008 in Review

Last year I purposed to start taking public transportation to work. Schedules being what they were, to make it work I would have to leave the house at about 6:30 in the morning. Normally I was leaving around 9:00. Or 10:00. (Sometimes as late as 11:00). I am not a morning person.

My wife was pretty surprised though when I started getting up early to get to the train on time. I've been taking the train for the last year now. And it's been great.

I have a 20-30min train ride plus a 10 minute bus ride into work now, which I've used to read, write, or just unwind. This turns out to be a lot of time. While I used to think of myself as "quite a reader", the reality is I'd buy lots of books, and look at them, but not necessarily read them. I'd probably read parts of them. But throughout the year maybe only read half a dozen books all the way through, which is something that embaresses me.

This past year, thanks to the train, I read 27 books, and that feels really good. I even made a new rule for myself: I must read one book at a time. "This is practical," I told myself, "you only have room for a single book while on the train". (Normally, I'd be "reading" anywhere from 4-12 books at a time.)

Throughout the year, this rule ended up branching out into other areas of my life. I had many, many projects in various states of completion, and I started to make some cuts. Normally I "put projects on hold" indefinitely, but this time I called them quits. Threw things out. "Never going to do that." I told myself. Some would call that sad, but the sadder thing is being so bogged down with projects I don't actually care about that I never end up working on what my heart really enjoys. Net result of the purging: Less stress, less distractions, less to think about, more space, more time.

What did I do this year then? I learned to play Tennis. I learned to swim. I went to Comic-Con where I rediscovered my creative spark. I saw Neil Gaiman read a chapter out of his new book. I wrote a good chunk of my first Novel. I went to Seattle. I wrote a lot of poetry, and even got some recognition for it.

When I look back on it all, thinking about the goals I set last year, and the goals I'm looking to set this coming year, it came to my attention that my choice to take the train really enabled the completion of a lot of my other goals. I did most of my writing on the train, and nearly all my reading. As I was thinking about this I came across this post which made this little comment about New Years Resolutions: "Don’t make resolutions, create a new habit. It lasts longer".

That's when I realized taking the train was never a "goal" like that of writing a novel. It was a change of behavior (a goal in and of itself to be sure). It was a habit. It was a habit that really enabled a lot of other desirable behaviors to flourish. I began to think about my goals for 2009 in this way--what change of behavior would most empower me?

For now I settled on this, the idea that first thing in the morning (or close to) I'd sit down and ask myself what I need to get done, then writing those things down. This happens automatically for my wife, she couldn't turn it off if she tried. But I'm the opposite. I can go days and weeks without ever checking in with myself and realize I'm supposed to actually be doing something besides starting new projects. Hopefully this will help keep me connected to my intentions.

A New Little Poem

My NaNoWriMo results, plus a story that led to a little poem.

***



NaNoWriMo is over. I did not reach my goal of 50,000 words. I didn't write anything during our trip to Seattle, and I haven't written much since. I still have a strong desire to finish, but I've realized two things. 1) 50,000 words is really going to be about the halfway mark in the story, meaning I now expect the finished draft to be in the neighborhood of 80,000 - 100,000 words. 2) It's going to take a while to write all that. I'm still debating what to do with these realizations, how to fit the novel into my life, and at what intensity it should be.

When I started NaNoWriMo one of my concerns was whether or not it would interrupt what had been a rather steady flow of little poems I had been writing since last August. Sometimes (alright, quite often) when I leave one thing to do another, I never return to finish. So I was quite pleased when on the bus ride home the other day something amusing happened, and before I knew it'd written another little poem:

O.J.'s Going to Jail

Over the radio the quote
Was spoken with the cheeky host
A trifle gleeful in his tone,
"Now O.J.'s saying," he began,
"'I didn't know it was illegal.'"
On our way home, we working folk
All turned to one another, snickered,
And placing buds into our ears
We did enjoy our Friday ride
Away from all our weekly woes.

Poetry Contest Victory!

Dinner Guests, originally uploaded by brweaver.

At the beginning of the month I entered a poetry contest, and I placed as a runner up! I was very excited to hear the news upon my return from our Thanksgiving adventure in Seattle. Here is a larger version of my runner-up winning poem.

You can see more examples of blackout poems here.