Furnishing Our Stories

 

I suppose there are as many reasons to blog as there are bloggers.  Curiosity about the world, a willingness to accede to Durrell’s conviction that reality can be “reworked to show its significant side“ and the pure pleasure of shaping words all have played a roll in developing and sustaining my personal commitment to this strange new phenomenon of our time.

One thing I particularly enjoy about blogging  is the response I receive from readers.  Comments have ranged from challenging to congratulatory to caustic, but no matter their form, I always find them stimulating and engaging.   To my taste, good blogs exhibit a certain tentativeness, exploring rather than defining the subject at hand, and good comments reflect the same qualities.  Writers and readers work together, inching their way forward through thickets of allusion and argument to reach provisional conclusions.  Occasionally they unearth a real, if unexpected, treasure.

Godot, Meet Godette

 

Very little satisfies more completely than closing the cover on a well-told tale.  Breathing out a sigh and gazing into the middle distance while unmade beds and untended gardens begin to re-stake their necessary claims, we linger for a moment at the threshhold of our half-remembered lives, not quite willing to close the door on the vibrant, constructed world we leave behind, happy to have discovered all the pleasures of diversion, insight or beauty it had to offer. 

The adventures of Godot, my self-effacing little cactus with the phenomenal blooms, was such a story.  As I set aside his chronicle,  I was content.  The drama of his rescue, his determination against all odds to bloom and the glory of his flowering seemed to have satisfied him as much as they did me.  As his blossoms faded and fell, he didn’t fuss or complain but re-dedicated himself to growing quietly in his corner.  Life went on, as life does, and all was at peace on the porch. 

 

 At peace, that is, until one of Godot’s neighbors, a taller, columnar cactus with a shape resembling a starfruit, began to grow restless.  She’d always been a bloomer, putting out pairs or triplets of lovely, small yellow blossoms several times a year.  Like Godot, she kept her blooms for only a few hours, but she set flowers with such regularity it was easy to overlook her efforts. Most of the time, I gave her no more than a cursory glance.  If I missed one set of blossoms, another arrived soon enough.  There wasn’t much surprise with this cactus. Neither dramatic nor spectacular, she was steady and dependable.  She could be counted on to produce.

The Art of Re-Working Reality

 

No book – more precisely, no series of books – has embedded itself more deeply into my life than Lawrence Durrell’s  The Alexandria Quartet. The four companion volumes, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, are remarkable on several counts. Their portrayal of the story’s protagonist, the city of Alexandria herself, is vibrant and evocative. Against the background of her corniche, brothels and souks, the author sets himself the unusual and difficult task of examining the complexity of human relationships, emotions and events in the context of the space/time continuum.  To the degree that he succeeds in reaching that goal, he succeeds as well in making the Quartet a bit of a structural tour de force.

Durrell’s dialogue occasionally creaks and groans like a recalcitrant ox-cart, but his descriptive powers are unrivaled. Whether tracing the outlines of Alexandrian society, plumbing the depths of traditional Egyptian culture or capturing the incomparable beauties of Mediterranean sea and sky, his language is variously lush, languid and spare.  As Justine opens with the insistent force of a natural process, the narrator is living on an island with a companion we know only as “the child”.  Her identity, suggested, is not confirmed. What is clear is the setting, an exquisite  prologue to what will come:

In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea. Its dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made. Empty cadences of seawater, licking its own wounds, sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches – empty, forever empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds.  If ever there are sails here they die before the land shadows them.  Wreckage washed up on the pediments of islands, the last crust, eroded by the weather, stuck in the blue maw of water…gone!

Beyond the elegant structure of Durrell’s story and the  extravagant beauty of his language, there is another reason for artists of every sort to plumb the depths of his narrative.  Few writers provide more clues to their own artistic process or their personal convictions about the nature of art than does Durrell. Painter or poet, novelist, sculptor or photographer – all can find guidance for their craft and the beginnings of wisdom for their art in words which have become as well-known as their author:

I spoke of the uselessness of art, but added nothing truthful about its consolations.  The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies with this ~  that only there, in the silence of the painter or writer can reality be re-ordered, re-worked and made to show its significant side.

Sitting in silence at my desk , I often enjoy little more than a hunch, a suspicion, a tentative sense of direction in which to travel with my words.  Still, I  understand the process by which words can be “re-ordered and re-worked”  to reveal that deeper significance Durrell so rightly prizes, and no one seems inclined to argue the appropriateness of such re-working.

However, as I’ve become more appreciative of  the possibilities offered by photography, I’ve been intrigued and puzzled by arguments between those I privately think of as “purists” and “innovators” – that is, between those who insist photographs never should be retouched in any way, and those who assume tweeks and tricks of every sort will be a natural part of the creative process. 

In simplest terms, the argument seems to boil down to “pure perception is good, manipulation is bad.”  Manipulation most often seems to mean “messing about with a computer”.  But “manipulation” of an image doesn’t begin when someone opens Photoshop or Picnik. It begins at the beginning, when the photographer makes a first decision about what will, or won’t, be in the viewfinder.

 Michael Smith,  member of the North American Nature Photographers and former member of the National Press Photographers Association, ponders these issues in a recent discussion on his fine blog, Dissent Decree.

As he says,  “…I have heard most of the arguments about how far photographic “truth” may be stretched. What it comes down to is context and intent. A photojournalist with ethics will not alter, stage or otherwise contrive a photograph. However, that same photographer must and will decide what to photograph, from what vantage point, and (at which) exact moment.”

“Likewise, he or she will decide what focal length lens to use, what to focus upon, what to frame in the viewfinder (“in-camera cropping”) and what aperture setting and ISO to use. All of these decisions shape and shade the final image – (which becomes) in some degree… editorializing and self-expression as much as reporting. Photojournalism, in spite of what the purists may argue, is in part a form of Art.”

As a writer, I understand the need for constant choice. I spend hours choosing between this word or that, reordering paragraphs, eliminating sentences or adding the necessary phrase.  Photography, it seems, is no less a process of continual decision making. Should I photograph this flower, or that? Would the building be better shot in morning light or evening? Shall I focus here, or there? Will I choose black and white, or color? It intrigues me that some consider these decisions inherently artistic, even as they describe what happens at the computer as undesirable manipulation.

It seems obvious we can’t have it both ways. If deciding to include a cloud or exclude a tree in a photograph is an “artistic decision”, then cropping, framing and applying effects can be artistic decisions, too.  On the other hand, if choosing to transform an image with the special effects available through computer programs is “manipulation”, then choosing a subject, a vantage point, a condition of light is just as surely a manipulation of what viewers will see in the final image.

In fact, whether a photographer chooses to rely on camera settings alone or prefers to crop, tint or otherwise modify an image after its upload to a computer, the goal is the same: to choose a subject and then to “rework” that reality, to frame this bit of landscape or that bit of life in such a way that its emotional depth and temporal significance become accessible.  Like a painter selecting a favorite brush or a writer uncoiling great loops of words, the photographer softens and tints, focuses and frames in such a way that  quite ordinary bits of daily life  become transformed, evoking a sense of unutterable mystery and delight.  Inexplicably, they become living moments, available to serve artists of every sort in a way Durrell understood to his depth:

These are moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one’s life that is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one can never spoil them. In this context too, I recover another such moment, lying beside a sleeping woman in a cheap room near the mosque.  In that early spring dawn, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind muezzin from the mosque reciting the ebed – a voice hanging like a hair in the palm cooled airs of Alexandria…

The great prayer wound its way into my sleepy consciousness like a serpent, coil after shining coil of words, the voice of muezzin sinking from register to register of gravity ~ until the whole world seemed dense with its marvelous healing powers, the intimations of a grace undeserved and unexpected, impregnating that shabby room where Melissa lay, breathing lightly as  a gull, rocked upon the oceanic splendors of a language she would never know.

 

 

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Pelican Briefs

Impassioned by her love of language, Eleanor Johnson would have poured poetry and literature into our heads with a funnel if she’d been able.  Lacking direct access to our distracted childhood brains, my fifth-grade teacher did the next best thing.  She nagged, cajoled, insisted and assigned until we nearly collapsed under the weight of her incessant demands that we pay attention to words.

It was Miss Johnson who insisted we memorize and recite poetry until we thought we were going to throw up.  It was Miss Johnson who assigned the class its first important written theme, an unhappy exercise entitled, What is poetry?   Poetry?  The very thought elicited groans of disapproval and resistance, and I remember sighing as I examined the new burden she’d imposed.  The essay was to be no less than two hundred words!  My distress was eased only by the fact that I knew an answer and suspected it was an answer Miss Johnson might approve.  Poetry, to my way of thinking, was fun.

I learned my first poem at my grandparents’ table.   I still roll it out from time to time, and always laugh even if no one else seems inclined.

 ”Shake and shake the ketchup bottle.
 First a little, then a lot’ll.”

It has rhythm, it has rhyme, and it made me giggle every time mom made a meatloaf for dinner and put the bottle on the table.  Sometimes, when meatloaf wasn’t on the menu, I’d beg for ketchup for my scrambled eggs,  french fries or chicken leg, just to have an excuse to recite my “verse”.   Every time, my Dad would look at me over his glasses and say, “That’s not only verse, it’s the verst”.  And I’d giggle again.

It wasn’t long before I met the mighty pelican, and memorized my version of his poem:

Behold the mighty pelican.
His beak holds more than his belican.
I don’t know how the helican,
but then, he is the pelican.

Part of the giggle of the pelican poem was getting to say ”helican” without being swatted by whichever adult was lurking around. Later I began to collect variants of the ditty, originally penned in 1910 by Dixon Lanier Merritt (1879-1972), an editor for Nashville’s morning paper, The Tennessean.  Ogden Nash often gets the credit for the paean to the wondrous bird, but it’s apparently Merritt who deserves it.  President of the American Press Humorists Association, he was witty and word-perfect.  His original pelican poem was inspired by a post card sent  him by a reader who’d been visiting Florida.

Oh, a wondrous bird is the pelican!
His bill holds more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week.
But I’m darned if I know how the helican.

 

His poem was my introduction to limericks, and I loved them.  Often they popped into my mind without any effort at all.  Even today, I’ll sometimes drop a comment into someone’s blog in limerick form, as I did when oh! said she was going to be busy with real-world obligations and wouldn’t be tending her blog for a bit:

There once was a writer named oh
with too many places to go.
She came and she went
while her bloggie friends lent
her permission to be a no-show.

Unfortunately, poetry hasn’t been all fun and games.  There came a day when I fell into the hands of those who took poetry Seriously, and whose view of poets was less cheerful than my own.  By the time I emerged from college, I’d been fairly well convinced poets either were suicidal or anti-social.  Even worse, I’d learned to analyze the life out of any poem that came my way, often under the tutelage of instructors whose mantra was, “But what does it MEAN?” 

By their standards, the words of a poem were one thing and the meaning quite another.  Our job was to pick poetry apart in search of meaning as though we were back in biology lab.  Poems became  metaphorical equivalents to the one-pound frogs lying scattered about our dissecting tables.  Like their skin, tissue and bones, our piles of simile, strips of metaphor and occasional onomatopoeiaic bits were vaguely interesting but entirely dead.

While I’m certain the various poetry associations and organizations would prefer to avoid having their efforts reduced to the chipper slogan, “Let’s Make Poetry Fun!”,  it’s a fact that wordplay is fun, perfectly suited to this season of road trips, bike excursions, beach lolling and mojitos.  Of course there’s a time to take poetry seriously, and to write serious poetry.  This year’s relatively “artsy” Poetry Month poster quoted T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock and asked the entirely serious question: ”Do I dare disturb the universe?”.   The implied answer was “Yes” - because the universe needs disturbing from time to time, because speaking the right word at the right time can send rippling effects throughout the universe and because poets, above all, are masters of the word.

Unfortunately, promoting poetry by quoting T.S. Eliot can reinforce the common misconception that poetry is for a literary or intellectual elite.  Quite the opposite is true. Poetry isn’t drab or irrelevant, and it’s meant to be enjoyed, both the writing and the reading of it.  Truth be told, the impulse toward poetry can pop up anywhere, as Merritt’s famous pelican-postcard-inspired bit of doggerel shows.  Was his poem “important”?  Hardly. Has anyone ever analyzed it for deeper meaning? Probably not.  But it’s fun and memorable, quotable and perfectly suited to be a jumping-off point for a bit of summer afternoon verbal serve and volley.

 

Working and living around Seabrook, Texas, it’s impossible not to think of Merritt and his Mighty Pelican on a regular basis.  The whimsical creatures on this page are part of Seabrook’s Pelican Path Project, a collection of non-migratory birds that bring smiles to tourists and residents alike.  Some were battered by Hurricane Ike and many had to be moved or taken in for restoration.  Now, one by one, they’re beginning to re-emerge, tucked into the nooks and crannies of the little town like snippets of verse dropped by an inattentive muse.

Spying one for the first time, children are entranced.  Suddenly discovering a “new one”, adults are delighted.  People talk to them, and tourists have their photos taken with them.  I saw a fellow rub one’s beak as though he were rubbing the belly of of the Buddha for good luck, and a bride and groom once had a replica on top of their wedding cake.   Every time I see one I smile, astonished and delighted by their variety and by the creative vision that began populating the town with such elegant birds.  Every now and then, I wish Dixon Lanier Merritt could see them.  I can only imagine what he’d think.

I suppose as these pelicans go
some people would say, “Just for show”.
But they’re handsome and fun
as they bask in their sun
and inspire new verses to flow…

 

 

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Perspiration and Inspiration

 

Becoming a varnish worker isn’t difficult.  If you have a vehicle to serve as a combined corporate headquarters, warehouse and service fleet, about $400 for capital and operating  expenditures like varnish, sandpaper, brushes and power tools and a wardrobe of stylish second-hand tees, I could get you started today.  After years in the business, I’ve  plenty of tips to share and I’d be happy to let you serve a few months’ apprenticeship. That’s more than enough time to understand the basic techniques of the craft and begin to develop the good, short-term weather forecasting skills that will be critical to your success.

Things will go even more smoothly if you already possess some important personal qualities: infinite patience, a tolerance for frustration  and a sense of humor to help keep things in perspective when your fresh coat of varnish is ruined by fog, pollen, insects, rain, wind, dust or The Yard Crew From Hell, that charming band of brothers who decide to rev up their gasoline-powered leaf blowers just as you’re putting away your brush. 

If you’re especially lucky, you’ll internalize what we call “The Rule of Good Enough” early in your career.  I never have seen a “perfect” coat of varnish. No matter how glossy, how reflective, how beautifully deep the shine, there always is something - a gnat, a bristle, a patch of dust, a tiny bit of wood the brush missed – to tempt the compulsive toward a re-do.  It never helps, of course. You may get rid of the gnat only to discover a determined spider has schlepped across your work.  Better to look at wood that’s 99% perfect and say, “That’s good enough.”

Why someone would want to varnish is another question entirely.  The work of stripping and sanding is boring and repetitive.  Weather is unpredictable and can wreak havoc with a schedule, not to mention cash flow.  I happen to like the isolation and solitude, but not everyone does.  And it is, after all, physical labor.  There aren’t many varnishers who head to the gym after work.  There’s enough climbing, stretching, leaning and lifting in the course of a day to keep anyone flexible, and if you park far enough from your current project, you can get a little walking in, too.  Simply put,  boat varnishing is a 19th century job in a 21st century world.  Boat owners on the docks may be twittering and texting within an inch of their lives, but the varnishers, riggers, carpenters and mechanics aren’t - their hands are too busy with the tools of their various trades to take time for electronic gadgets.

As for that question – “Why varnish?” – I always laugh and say, “For the perks, of course.”   I may not have medical coverage or a 401K, but there is that just-back-from-Barbados-tan, a crazy assortment of folks on the dock to provide entertainment and a shoes-optional dress code.  Instead of tracking office politics, I kibbitz with ducks, herons, egrets and coots.  Osprey and pelicans float above, while mullet, drum,  jellyfish and crabs drift and skitter through the water.  My solitude is sandwiched between the bloom of sunrise and sunset’s poignant glow, while I think my thoughts and devote my energy to making something beautiful.

In truth, the positives balance out the negatives nicely, at least until full summer arrives.  For most people, summer means a little laziness, a bit of travel, the pleasures of  indolence.  I experience summer rather differently.  Summer means scorching boat decks, so hot that bare feet are impossible.  Eyes burn from sunscreen, and the freezer fills up with gallons of water. The heat and humidity of the Texas Gulf Coast can be so intense that sweat drips off elbows and chins onto those fresh coat of varnish, frustrating because it means unplanned, unpaid extra work.

But by far the worst thing about summer is the way its heat drains away energy,    At the end of the day, it can be a struggle to do more than shower, plop into a chair and stare off into the middle distance.  A woman I know calls summer “the cereal season”, because cereal for supper takes the least effort to prepare.  At the height of summer, we all begin to experience “seasonal slovenliness” as dust collects, laundry baskets fill up and drooping plants beg for their own drink of water.   We all have good intentions, but the longer days and unrelenting heat can produce an unshakable lethargy.    

Physical tasks aren’t the only chores to be put off.  Creativity and imagination suffer from heat exhaustion, too.  As the temperatures rise, the ability to focus for long periods of time declines.  Thinking about my blogs, I have no shortage of ideas.  Thoughts continue to swirl and the impulse to shape words into form is there,  but actually sitting down to write is another matter.

I’ve been thinking about this a good bit.  Any act of creation requires time and energy – the very energy which summer drains away.  Certainly, I’m one of the lucky ones.  I have the freedom to rearrange my schedule, to begin work early and continue work until late, seeking respite from the heat of the afternoon.  Not everyone enjoys such luxury.  The world is filled with people who spend their days in manual labor throughout the year –  farm workers, construction crews, roofers, lawn care workers. Constrained by necessity to work for others, they lack even minimal control over their days, and they, too, come home exhausted.

 

Some say these communities of people  have no stories to tell, that they are dull and uninspired, lacking in creativity.  I once was told of an English teacher who had her Anglo students write an essay each week but didn’t require essays from Hispanic students.  Confronted on the issue, she seemed genuinely astonished, asking, “But what would they (the Hispanic students) write about?”

It’s an old attitude, neatly summed up in the assertion that certain people are better equipped for creativity - by education, by natural sensitivity, by intellect, training or talent, while the masses are mute by necessity.  Despite his apologists, D.H. Lawrence gives voice to this assumption in Phoenix II when he says,

Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern, or than in the palm tree,
Life is more vivid in the snake than in the butterfly.
Life is more vivid in the wren than in the alligator,
Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me.

What is vivid here is the worst kind of prejudice, and a particularly sad kind of literary elitism.  In fact, the people who tend our lawns, build our roads, harvest our crops and roof our homes may have some of the best stories in the world waiting to be written, if only they weren’t so exhausted and by necessity focused on the basic requirements for life.  In the world of  “just folks”,  hints of wonderfully creative communication abound -  with the yarn spinners in cafes, the musicians in the bars and juke joints, the jokesters on the job site, or the story-telling mother on the porch with her children gathered around.

When I see a construction worker, a roofer, a farm laborer or a fellow rolling out barricades for a highway project, I wonder, “What story would he tell if he had the time, the freedom, the energy?  

When I see a mother walking her children home in the heat, a housekeeper washing windows in the full afternoon sun, a woman struggling toward a laundromat with an unwieldy bundle of clothes, I wonder,  “What verse might she write, if she had solitude, silence and rest?”

Day Laborers at Hopson Plantation ~ Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1940

Out on the docks, the summer heat continues to rise as the fish drift deeper and the birds grow silent, tucking themselves ever more deeply into the dappled shade of their trees.   Watching and listening to the silence, I wonder:  given a respite from their labors and the  freedom to rest in the shade, what songs might our hidden birds sing?

 

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Pens and Pics ~ A Cautionary Tale

The six words came first, like a little roadmap found crinkled under the seat of a car, or the sight of a curious, six-legged creature fleeing over the horizon.   Even the right word takes effort, I thought, the words so clear, so absolute and certain I looked around to see who might have spoken.  Seeing no one, yet possessed by a sudden, compulsive urge  to hold the words captive, to prevent their escape into the thicket of a mind overgrown with phrases like “don’t forget the milk” and “be sure to mail that check”, I looked around for tools to help me construct a cage.

The tools needed, of course, were paper and pencil, or pen.  Ubiquitous in human homes and offices, they can be hard to come by on isolated docks where language means the chatter and chirr of gulls.  Digging around beneath the birds’ inquisitive stares, I finally found a pen under the spare tire in my car’s trunk, laughing that I’d found one at all.  The pen, a white ballpoint imprinted with the LaQuinta logo, looked as though it had knocked around the car for some time, but it worked. Paper was less of a problem.   Junk mail envelopes in the car’s trash were abundant, as were the backs of  business cards , but there on the dock was all the paper I needed.   Pieces of used sandpaper five inches  square and smooth on the back were just big enough for those six words and the title which eventually presented itself: The Task at Hand.  Over the course of several days, words and phrases were added and removed, arranged and stacked and rearranged until at last I brought my little pile of sandpaper home and transcribed the words which gave this blog an identity and purpose.

The fact that I’d written my first poem on sandpaper didn’t seem in the least odd until I began attending a local writers’ group. A few members appeared at meetings with spiral-bound notebooks  and ball point pens straight off the drugstore shelf.   Far more had lovely, leather-bound journals or exquisite notebooks with covers of hand-made paper.   Filled with thick, creamy pages that absorbed ink in an instant or leaves of tissue so delicate they made the very act of writing seem an assault, they were perfect companions for pens far more elegant than my lowly trunk-dweller.  I hadn’t used a real pen in years, but here they were in abundance, their gold nibs, tiny enameled bodies, silver and gold engravings and perfect proportions luscious and appealing.

Before and after the meetings, there was as much talk of pens and paper as about words.  Writers talked about their trips to the stationers like explorers eagerly cataloguing acquisitions of rare butterflies.  Papyrus, vellum, marbeled or mulberry, the papers were rumored to imbue the most pedestrian words with weight and substance.  As for the pens,  it seemed one never was enough.  One writer used only a gold Cross pen for prose,  a Monteverde with purple ink for poetry and a nice rollerball for editing.  Montblanc was a favoite, Conklin esteemed, Montegrappa coveted.  My LaQuinta freebie hid in my purse, embarassed and chagrined.

Certainly there is legitimate pleasure to be taken in artfully produced journals, a paper smooth and heavy to the touch and the flow of ink, a sensuous pleasure that only increases when combined with good coffee, a little time for thought, a window from which to gaze.   When that pleasure slides toward obsession, as it can, it suggests something more – an unspoken conviction that if only one could find the right paper, the perfect pen, the perfectly bound notebook, writing itself would become easier, more fluid, more richly textured and memorable. 

The longing of some writers for these perfect tools is very much akin to the hunger for a perfect setting in which to write.   “I can’t write at home,” says one. “I see the chores needing to be done and become distracted.”    Another fusses, “I only can write in complete solitude.” Some can’t write at night, or in the morning, or in public or facing south.  Some need windows, or beaches or mountain cabins. Others prefer a cafe setting, or a certain, comfortable couch.  I once heard a fellow say, “When I retire, I’m going to have a teak desk, with a beautiful sheen, and a room in muted colors with natural fabrics, and no telephone.  Then, I’ll be able to write.”

I hope he can.  And yet, I remember Annie Dillard’s words on the subject in her marvelous On Writing.  She says, ”Appealing work places are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.  When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window…  Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder block cell over  a parking lot. It overlooked a tar and gravel roof.  This pine shed under trees is not quite so good as the cinder block study was, but it will do.”

While Ms. Dillard’s thoughts might be taken as the strange rantings of a mystical poet, William Zinsser is all prose, and his opinion hardly differs. In his introduction to the 2006 edition of the classic On Writing Well, Zinsser mentions a photograph of E.B. White which hung in his office.  Taken by Jill Krementz, it’s described by Zinsser in this way: 

 ”A white-haired man is sitting on a plain wooden bench at a plain wooden table – three boards nailed to four legs – in a small boathouse. The window is open to a view across the water.  White is typing on a manual typewriter, and the only other objects are an ashtray and a nail keg.  The keg, I don’t have to be told, is his wastebasket.“   Zinsser goes on to add, “White has everything he needs: a writing implement, a piece of paper, and a receptacle for all the sentences that didn’t come out the way he wanted them to.” 

The willingness to imbue simple tools with mysterious powers and to confuse the process of creating art with the ability of its product to intrique, inspire and initiate dialogue is not limited to the writers among us.  A delightful parable of technology, vision, and imagination  comes from painter and photographer Michael Maurer Smith, who tells the story of Snapper’s Disappointment in his blog, Dissent Decree.  As Michael tells it,

Snapper figured if he bought the best he’d be the best. So he made the call and ordered himself one of the finest digital single lens reflex cameras money could buy. This puppy came with 24.5 megapixel full-frame capability, a magnesium body shell, a carbon fiber composite shutter, a 922,000 pixel LCD monitor, and it could shoot 7 frames per second.

Snapper took some time to familiarize himself with his new treasure, with all of its menus and buttons, but found himself increasingly anxious as he realized he hadn’t a clue where to begin taking actual photographs, or why he might choose one subject over another.  Eventually, Michael tells us, as Snapper searched for answers he stumbled upon Henri Cartier-Bresson and the amazements of a different sort of photography.

“Bresson had made his pictures using a completely manual camera—something called a Leica. It had no auto focus, auto exposure or zoom lens. The label also said Bresson rarely used flash. Snapper was dumbfounded. ‘How could Bresson make such stunning photographs using such simple technology?’…

…Snapper was disappointed. The advertising had promised him that the technology built into his new camera would assure great photographs with every click of the shutter. But after seeing Bresson’s work it sure seemed like there was a lot more to photography than just the camera.”

Indeed.  And in his own delightful way, Michael Maurer Smith not only shows us how Snapper resolves his issues, he uses the tale to drive home a point I’ve suspected all along.  The writer searching for a magic pen, the photographer waiting for the perfect technology, the painter constrained by the quality of light ~ all have forgotten a basic truth of the creative process.  It is grounded not in technology and technique, but in what Faulkner in his Nobel Prize speech called “the agony and sweat of the human spirit.”  It is pursued “not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.”

As the logician would say, the tools of any art are necessary but not sufficient for beauty and meaning to emerge.  And however well we succeed, no matter how far short of our goal we may fall, the words of this slightly amended proverb hold true: it is a poor artist who blames the tools. 

You just have to live, and then life will give you photographs.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

Comments are welcome.  To leave a comment or respond, please click below.

And Many Thanks to oh! of WordPress and Sandiquiz of WeatherUnderground and Flickr, both of whom used the proverb “It is a poor workman who blames his tools” within a week of each other and thus started me down this road.  Welcome to Team Muse, and many thanks for your posts and comments!

Kaleidoscope Eyes

 

Writing recently about the coming of the New Year, I admitted to loving “the image of the blank slate, the fresh canvas, the empty page. The thought of turning from the past and moving into a pristine future is deeply appealing. Like feet of freshly-fallen snow, a new year blankets the disappointments and pain, conflicts and loss of the old with beauty and peace.  Glinting in the sunlight, piled high on fenceposts and streets, whorling into intricate patterns against parking lots and sheds, the fresh emptiness of snow gives the illusion of clarity and simplicity.  Clean as a fresh canvas, empty as a page still waiting for words, it tempts us toward an imagined world free of complexity and ambiguity, a world reduced to the twin realities of sunlight and shadow.”

From time to time each of us hungers for the simplicity and clarity of a fresh start, and the New Year is a traditional time to acknowledge and assuage that hunger.  In this week’s Write on Wednesday prompt, Becca narrows the focus a bit by asking, ”What fresh ideas do you have for your writing?”  For a writer, the metaphoric hunger for an empty slate, a blank page free of  stunted paragraphs, unfinished sentences and untidy piles of words can be almost visceral.   When desks pile high with false starts, orphaned phrases and errant thoughts that refuse to lead to any good conclusion, the sense of frustration can be suffocating.   When it comes to a fresh start, writers’ block is not precisely the issue.   Writer’s boredom seems a more adequate description.  There is a certain ennui, a stifling lassitude, a distaste for one’s own thoughts that leads inexorably to that particular dead end called “I don’t have anything original to say.”

No Mo’ WriMo

  

As November 15 approaches, we’re nearly halfway through National Novel Writing Month.  I’d never heard of the event (NaNoWriMo to the cognoscenti) until it was mentioned by Becca, of Write on Wednesday.  Initially I paid it little mind, even when I realized several Write on Wednesday contributors were going to participate.  But NaNoWriMo began popping up everywhere on the Web, as though it suddenly had found a new and better PR firm.  Even the WordPress Forums weren’t immune.  Promoters there sounded a bit like Ron Burgundy.  NaNoWriMo, it seemed, was “sort of a big deal”.  I decided I should pay attention.

First, I read about the program.  (Its goal: for each participant to produce a 50,000 word novel within the month of November.)   I read and considered discussions about the program.  I read reflections from people who had participated in the program in the past.  And then, I decided not to participate. 

The first reason is that I’m not a fiction writer at heart, and I know that.   Becca’s original question about NaNoWriMo  – “Do you have a novel inside you waiting to get out?” - did send me off to have a look around my mental premises.  I reached back into the crannies of my mind, opened up drawers filled with preconceptions and sorted through piles of prejudices.  I pulled out my passions and interests from under the bed, rearranged the stacks of leftover sentences and paragraphs in the back closet and even checked behind my little stash of preferences and neuroses.  There’s no novel in there, anywhere.  I’m not surprised.  I read very little fiction by choice, generally being led to an author’s fiction by their essays or letters.  So, there’s no particular reason to believe the desire to write fiction would be lurking around the edges of my life.

The Joy of Learning to Close Those Tags

 

In 1987, a friend invited me to help celebrate her 40th birthday aboard a chartered catamaran on Galveston Bay. I wasn’t a sailor, and never had boarded a sailboat, but I accepted the invitation because I loved my friend and wanted to share in her happiness.  Driving to Galveston, I never imagined I was heading toward  an experience that would still be affecting my life nearly 20 years later.

As we loosed our lines that hot August night, there was a freshening breeze, and a lapping of wavelets against the hull. As the sun touched the dusky horizon and stars emerged above the mast, I felt a sudden impulse. Walking to the stern, I asked the captain, “Do you teach people to do this?” Glancing in my direction, he mused, “No one’s ever asked”.  When I asked again, he gazed at the darkening shoreline a long moment before saying, “Fine. But you’re going to learn it all.”

He was true to his word, and he taught me well.  No one “learns it all”, but I learned enough over the next months to know the joy of competence, and the discipline of the sea. In bays and waterways, offshore swells and quiet anchorages, we practiced navigation, rehearsed Rules of the Road, bled fuel lines, and mended sails. I learned to single-hand, and I learned to crew.  Above all, I learned to love water, wind and sky in a deep and profound way.

The learning took time, but the most important lesson I learned immediately. On my first day aboard, Tom asked me remove the canvas cover from the mainsail furled on its boom. The boom was higher than I could reach; the sail was tightly stacked and tied. Looking at it, I spoke the first words that came to mind: “I can’t reach it.”

Bent over the anchor chain, Tom never moved. When he spoke, his tone was clear: “Never again will you say, ‘I can’t’. If I tell you to do something which seems difficult or impossible, ask, ‘How can I?’ The answer may be that you ask for help, or find someone else to do it, but that’s not where you start. The only way you’ll succeed is by first asking, ‘How can I?’”

“Over the months, there were difficulties to spare. Each time I hesitated, Tom would grin and say, “You know the rule.”   By that time, I certainly did.  When difficulties arise, the rule says: relinquish pessimistic or petulant “I can’t” for curious and optimistic “How can I?” 

Then, begin again.

Over the years, the question I learned to ask on that sailboat has embedded itself so deeply into my psyche it seems a birthright, true across every realm of life. No matter how painful a relationship, no matter how fearful the unknown, no matter how difficult life’s challenges, there always is a way forward.

I’ve had more than a few occasions to remember my “rule” since coming to WordPress.  When I posted my first blog, I was as Dazed and Confused as the title implied.  Confronted by a site filled with people  comfortable with categories, tags, css, rss and html in the way I’m comfortable with my cousins or my cat, I could only admit to the truth: “When I look at a hyperlink, I hyperventilate.  When I hear the word “tag”, I think of a children’s game.  If any computer guru in the world begins a sentence, “All you have to do is…”, I’ve already done a mental turn and am running for my life.  They mean well, and so do I.   It’s just that “intuitive” is not a word I associate with computers or their programs.”

On the other hand, I’m not oblivious to the fact that the world has changed in my lifetime.  I’ve been forced to admit that, “whether I like it or not, the day of the Number 2 pencil, or even the old, clunky Underwood, is over.  If I am to share my words and my vision, technology must become my friend.”

And so, taking a deep breath and with my somewhat older friend “How Can I?” by my side, I began to create a blog.  Step by step, I learned to work with images, and colorize my text.  I learned not to use Word to create my entries, and how to create links.  I learned about blogrolls and Blogger,  text-wrap and Twitter.  It was slow and more-or-less awkward, but all worked well until my last post.

I met my match in the form of four links which wouldn’t format properly.  I like to emphasize links by making their color different from the text around them, and never had problems doing so.  This time, it was beyond me.  I tried everything I knew and a few wild guesses for good measure.  I simply couldn’t make it work.  The only solution was to swallow hard and head off to the forums, to see if I could ask my question clearly enough to find an answer.

The details of the question and answer aren’t really important.  The fact that I was able to solve my problem with the help of a forum volunteer is wonderful, but somewhat beside the point.  The point of it all appeared a day or so later, when I stopped by my blog to answer a comment.

I’ve begun responding to readers by adding my italicized comment directly beneath their post.  It’s neat and tidy, and helps the flow by keeping comment and response together in one place.  This time, when I added my response, the entire comment-and-response became one large, clickable link.  It didn’t hurt anything, but it wasn’t right.  Staring at the screen, caught up in html-phobia, I stopped hyperventilating long enough to remember my success in repairing those four recalcitrant links simply by re-arranging a bit of code.  I thought to myself, “It was easy enough to fix that, once the problem was pointed out to me.  How can I fix this?”

Clicking into the html editor, I looked over the page.  I examined the code as though it were a lab specimen, looking for the anomaly, the error, the out-of-place character.  Making myself slow down, I went through the code one line at a time, over and over, until I found it: an unclosed < a > tag.  Amost breathless with excitement, I added the necessary  < /a >, saved it, and previewed the page.  It was perfect.  

Sometimes, a tiny triumph is enough.  Sometimes, solving even the smallest problem will do.  Now and then, just a glimpse of a present reality can open our eyes to the wonder of future possibilities.  After two months at WordPress, I’m still a bit dazed but not nearly so confused, and I’m learning once again the power of those simple words: how can I? 

It will take time to learn the vocabulary, the culture and the simple etiquette of this blogging world, but I find it more accessible every day.  There’s a certain elegance to this “other language” called html that intrigues me, not to mention the pleasure of learning so many new skills. 

Now and then, someone will ask, “How can you spend so much time messing around with that computer?”   Reading my words, looking at my images, I ponder a bit, and then ask in return, ”How can I not?”

 

 

 

 

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