fearless adventuring

Telephones and highway services have made a road trip a pretty blase thing. Doom doesn't lurk at every corner and blown engines don't spell death at jaws of wolves. Anya and I, fortified with this pacific knowledge, thus embarked yesterday on a none-too-grand adventure - to drive across America, by highway. This is the first leg in a journey that will find us in Peru, South America next week. Theoretically.

Theoretically, you see, because the leg is now broken. Our car has bitten the asphalt in the valvular region of its frontal hemisphere. Ergo, stoppo. No vehicular safety net can account for the harsh reality that cars are frivolously expensive to maintain and repair.

So, in case you were wondering, we're hanging out in Duvall, Washington at a friend's house, trying to figure out what to do with our car and our dog and ourselves. Episode one has been lovely, what could possibly come next?...

contemplating art

Note: masculine-gender-specific language has been used throughout this blurb, on account of I get tired of saying “she” all the time when I mean “he/she”. Affirmative action is cool, but I need a break.

Simplicity is the lynch-pin of artistic “oomph”. An artist must never try to say more than one thing in a piece of art. That one thing he chooses must be the driving purpose of the entire work, into which all other aspects are subsumed. If the artist achieves this, then he’s been true to the piece and multiple shades of meaning will be free to emerge as a result of his subconscious creative self, which is basically just a space/time specific manifestation of the creative Force that is an attribute of the entire universe.

To achieve this, an artist has to strive for abject humility. Humility puts creativity before self-aggrandizement. Pride sounds a death-toll for true creativity. Great artists are not necessarily humble people; but they all have learned the knack of disassociating their sense of self-worth from the work they are completing. This is necessary because a work of art must go through various stages on the path to completeness. These stages are always inferior in self-integration to the desired end, and pride or the self-consciousness it produces prods the artist to take shortcuts to completion. No work is ever perfect, but a great work perfectly expresses the artist’s experience and intention in the given creative moment. This takes time and patience.

Great ideas are something beyond what any one person can claim. They are the major threads woven through the timeless conversation of creative action we call art. For what are one man’s ideas, and what his muse? A hard-working, intelligent man may study and learn and gain mastery of the ideas of others. But the masterful fusion and absorption of ideas necessary to create something truly innovative and great must ultimately come from a source the artist of genius does not control, understand or master. Once the artist is able to recognize this, he can in humility shove his ego aside and let the art come. Rarely is this a holistic experience. For great art, though, you need only be humble enough for the piece of the moment.

The art thus produced can then rightly be called the voice of God, since it is an experience of creation ex nihilo, which is an attribute of the character of God as he is understood by – well, pretty much everybody. Must the artist be aware that he is doing this? I think not. Trees and wallabies don’t cognitively experience their humble state – but they experience it nonetheless.

In point of fact, artistic greatness rarely emanates from great, self-aware people. This is because God is the sort of chap who uses the low to humble the high and the simple to confound the wise. The artist is but a conduit of expression for God’s ongoing creative work. Great art is never made – it’s discovered. The reason it is discovered is that God intends it to be, so that humans will have an outlet for our collective excruciating inexpressible grasp of Him. He does this, essentially, so that we do not explode.

Jon started, Julia finished

All those insecurities about the value in writing/painting/et cetera I'm always blathering about prompted me to do an evil thing. I asked Jon, the master of this website, to figure a way for me to see if anybody is reading what I am writing. Eventually, he emailed me the address of a page where I can go to see exactly how much internet love I'm getting.

Last night, the lovely Julia Margaret asked me if there were any new updates for her to read and the topic got around to how many people in general look at this site. I told her and she said, "Whatever. No, really, about how many hits on average do you get in a day?" After blushing a bit and pretending to be modestly hesitant I repeated myself. She replied with something to the effect of, "no shizzle!" Her next comment got me right between the brain lobes - hard. "don't you just freeze up thinking about all those people who are going to read what you're writing?"

To which I have to say - no Julia, I didn't. Thanks. Now I not only have to deal with the fact that I've gotten my ego and sense of self all somewhat wrapped up in a "score" I can check daily, but also I have to add the fear of screwing up to the list.

Aha! So now you're thinking - why IS he writing this? What particular perversion of human nature is prompting him to put this down? Is he tooting his horn about the hits? If so, does he really think this isn't going to turn people off? To which I have to say - yes. Maybe. I don't know.

Fact is, when Julie said that, I had three options for this site. One, keep writing and try to repress my new fear/ego combo drive. Two, scrap writing and start copying out interesting quotes from other, better writers. Or three, write about the experience of being afraid of people reading what I've written, and hope that defuses it. That is the option I've chosen (of course), because the only way to really dismantle an atom bomb, unequipped as you are with the necessary knowledge and skills, is to sit around and talk about it. The bomb will still be there - it's true - but it probably won't be quite as scary once you have allowed yourself to vent a bit.

So thanks for listening.

And here's a quote: "What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms". - Victor E. Frankl (survivor of Nazi death camps)

Jesus goes to Walmart

It has been a rough past few days. Have I mentioned Ben before? Yah, that’s right – my high school friend who is working with street kids down in “City of God” land in Rio de Janeiro. I got an email from him a few days ago saying that Jeferson, his best young Portuguese friend there, had been shot and killed. The last words on his web log (www.beninrio.blogspot.com) that day were “welcome to the worst three days of my life”.

Ben’s a capital fellow – grade A beef – and a real true friend. He’s been in gut-punch anguish, and there is nothing I have been able to do about it. Worse, though, is the whole situation – with the Brazilian street kids, I mean. I have been thinking a lot about all the injustice down there, and how nobody thinks about it or cares.

It leads me to think about the suffering in other places, about the genocides and religious persecution and natural disasters and the ridiculous poverty in which most of the world is living. It makes me think about how I try and try to get people (including myself) to care, and yet again and again I get reminders of the obsession we all have with stuff and nonsense. It all comes back to the latest flick we’ve GOT to see in theatre and that shirt we got for such a deal (half-price from a hundy) and I keep going back to that scene at the end of Schindler’s list where Schindler’s looking at his gold cuff links and crying and saying, “this was one more person I could have saved”.

The night I heard about Jeferson’s death all this stuff was tumbling and rumbling about in my head. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and wrote the following poem.

Jesus in America

Jesus went to Walmart to see what he could see
but prices all were dropping so the savings there were free.

Jesus went to theatres to free the world from sin.
He didn’t have a ticket so they wouldn’t let him in.

Jesus went into a mall cause all the folks were there
but it was Christmas season so they didn’t really care.

Jesus went to NBC to try to have a say
but someone from the silver screen had banged a whore that day.

Jesus went into a church and walked right out again
‘cause something I’m afraid to name had made him mad just then.

Jesus trudged across this land from sea to shining sea
and kept on walking on the waves, away from you and me.

---

Not the most florid poetic statement ever made, but it gets the message across. You can apply it to whatever first world country in which you happen to live. You can even apply it to yourself.