“The Great Monkey Wave”. Click image to view larger version.
More copy/pasting today. A wonderful way to fulfill my NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) goals while I’m busily spending creative time on daily sleep-writing for NaNoWriMo (aka National Novel Writing Month). In his wonderful blog At Twilight, Jonas writes today about Days of Reckoning:
“I’ve long pondered the disintegrations of the human soul I’ve witnessed in the workplace, among acquaintances and intimates. Each story is unique, but there’s a commonality: the death of expectations. It is no small matter to confront the knowledge that one is not to be what one had dreamed to be. To understand that one will never experience or hold whatever once was held so dear. A redefinition of “self” is in order. That’s quite the challenge when the slate is no longer clean, when doors are barred, bridges burned... and dreams have lost their luster. There’s the awareness (either shabby or inspiring) that one’s life story will unfold along unanticipated plotlines.” (do read on here)
Here is the (slightly edited) comment I left in response:
I’ve been navigating these treacherous waves all my life.
Always looking for my ultimate calling.
It’s been a bumpy ride. So many encounters along the way;
A mix of deep satisfaction and utter despair.
Unfortunately, the latter seems to take over all too easily.
Dreams of who we want to be seem so childish now.
And yet without the dreams, we are just shells
of who we could have been. Do shells have value too?
In yesterday’s entry on her blog A Writer’s Notebook, my mum wrote about something I can relate to only too well:
“I’ve discovered I function on an AC/DC -type system that alternates between ‘noirest noir’ and ‘gurgling fountain of mirth’. It’s an antiquated model with separate taps – like those hot and cold water fixtures that don’t have a common mixing spout. In other words, feeling ‘just right’ is a purely accidental feature. A temporary event, if ever there was one.”
In my case, I replied, I’m not sure what model of water taps I got—probably the kind with just one lever for hot and cold and in between since I’m a slightly more recent model—but there’s something wrong with my fixtures too because getting the temperature just right is almost impossible; it requires endless patience and ends up wasting a whole lot of water in the process. I figure I’m doing ok when I just leave the water tap alone and don’t really feel anything one way or another. And I’m doing GREAT when I’m not asking myself existential questions. Video games, surfing the net and TV a great distractions that way.
Image: photographer unknown (an attribution would be appreciated)
There are now so many characters in my NaNoWriMo draft that I can barely keep track of all the storylines each of them is leading me to. I haven’t even bothered to name them all yet. I just sit there and switch from one to another from one chapter to the next, making them more and more unlikeable and creating as many unpleasant situations for them as I can come up with. I do all this while I sit in front of the TV half-watching whatever is on the movie channels (Edward Scissorhands, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Bored to Death, Dexter, and now Underwold: Rise of the Lycans). I’m hoping that by some kind of magic, all these imaginary’s people’s lives will somehow converge and this will all form a cohesive story. But something tells me I need to be paying more attention if there’s any chance at all of that happening. Then again, I HAVE read some best-selling thrillers and wondered page after page what these overpaid authors were doing while they were writing their own drafts for those crappy novels. But unlike them, I don’t have a formula down yet, and I doubt my work will ever get published. You never do know though. For what it’s worth, I'm enjoying the process. And I can’t really ask for more considering I’m so tired I fall asleep a little every time I blink. Energy comes and energy goes, yet somehow I manage to write through it all. Go figure.
There might be a word to define that state you get to that is beyond fatigue and utter exhaustion, but I’m at point right now where I don’t even have the energy to do that 30 second search on merriam-webster.com to find out what other synonyms might possibly exist (something my inner nerd normally thrives on). This state has been brought on by many good things, so this is by no means meant to be a complaint and nobody has cause for feeling sorry for me right now.
I have plenty to tell and plenty to show from these last two days but it’ll all have to wait. I’ll just say: photo shoot with my old musician/architect/photographer friend M and a gorgeous tomboy of a girl who’s got so much going for her the last thing she wants people to know about her is that sometimes she’s also a model, with me as a stylist/makeup artist/control freak aka art director on the fritz trying really hard to keep in mind its not WORK work and it’s OK to really enjoy myself while doing something I obviously have a passion for; A painting class that, to me, makes those survival treks out in the wild seem like child’s play; Followed by dinner with a classmate comparing notes on life, art and bipolar disorder (symptoms, past diagnoses, treatments, lists of pharmaceuticals tried and tested and attending side-effects).
Whew! I just finished myself off with that little synopsis. Off to play SporeOrigins on my iPhone for a bit (stuck at level 30 for now—what eggs are they talking about??) and then it’s straight to dreamland for me.
“If you keep trying you’ll end up succeeding. In other words, the more you fail, the more you have chances of attaining your goal.” ~ Jacques Rouxel, French comics creator
“En essayant continuellement on finit par réussir. Donc : plus ça rate, plus on a de chance que ça marche.” ~ Jacques Rouxel, ilustrateur de BD français
“I say such intelligent things that most of the time I don’t understand what I’m saying”
Shut the gates at sunset After that you can't get out You can see the bigger picture Find out what it's all about You're open to the skyline You won't want to go back home In a garden full of angels You will never be alone
But oh the road is long The stones that you are walking on Have gone
With the moonlight to guide you Feel the joy of being alive The day that you stop running Is the day that you arrive
And the night that you got locked in Was the time to decide Stop chasing shadows Just enjoy the ride
If you close the door to your house Don't let anybody in It's a room that's full of nothing All that underneath your skin Face against the window You can't watch it fade to grey And you'll never catch the fickle wind If you choose to stay
But oh the road is long The stones that you are walking on Have gone
With the moonlight to guide you Feel the joy of being alive The day that you stop running Is the day that you arrive
And the night that you got locked in Was the time to decide Stop chasing shadows Just enjoy the ride
Stop chasing shadows Just enjoy the ride
This song was playing on my iPod while I was making my way home today and I just had to play it over again a few times. Listening to the lyrics I began to sing along. “Stop chasing shadows, just enjoy the ride”... words that really speak to me at the moment and sent chills down my spine. Mind you, the chills could have had something to do with the fact that today is a cold November day. Even though I was dressed for it and had my lovely new hat on, I never get used to the cold. Good thing there’s all this good music around to keep nice and warm on the inside. I’ve watched the video several times and I just don’t get it. Not sure I would have chosen cartoon animation as a visual for this song, but that’s just my opinion.
With NaNoWriMo just begun yesterday, I’ve committed to sitting down and punching out a minimum of 1667 words every day for the next month in a crazy attempt to come up with a rough draft of what could presumably become a readable and maybe even publishable (!) novel someday. I’ll only find out on Nov. 30th and beyond whether the third time is a charm or not, and I certainly hope the first 1700 words I put down yesterday are no indication of things to come because as I was inventing this character which emerged out of nowhere, the exercise quickly became boring and tedious; I may has well have just copied a few pages from my old diaries, though of course I had no intention of making the character anything like me to begin with. But I won’t let my difficult and unsatisfying start deter me: I know better now. So what if I come up with not one good cohesive story but 30 different unrelated mediocre ones? So what if some bits make me want to cry with frustration and other end up making me laugh my socks off for no good reason at all? So what if it all ends up being a royal waste of time? If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past couple of years, it’s that no matter what, if creativity comes calling, my job is to just get it down on any available surface, keep the inner critic locked up and gagged, and stop worrying about the outcome. It’s a lot of work. A very small part of it being the actual act of creation, but on the whole, the work mostly resides in not letting the all those doubts and turmoil get in the way of JUST GETTING IT DOWN. Whether or not I choose to share excerpts in my fifthythousandwords blog will depend on whether or not I find quotable bits to show the world this time around. TBA.
I’ve come to accept that whenever a creative project comes calling, my great and most developed talent for procrastination will inevitably take the lead. And since it seems that whenever I try writing fiction, sudden urges to add posts to my blog become impossible to ignore, I decided to make the best of that situation and also join NaBloPoMo this month (also known as National Blog Posting Month) which will turn my proclivity for procrastinating into a noble pursuit (of sorts). Something like that. Whatever it takes to keep the guilt monsters at bay. In the meantime, I’ve put up the official and unimaginative badge which is available on the NaBloPoMo site, but of course as a self-respecting ex-respectable art director, I’ll just have to make up my own. Another exercise in futility, all in the name of creativity, self-expression and the right to posting decent-to-good content.
Two of a series of four small paintings from today’s Painting as Expression class. Of course the originals look very different and even with my best efforts I couldn’t get the colours quite right here on the screen. Our teacher Vicki had asked us all to bring materials which we could share to inspire each other; images, books, poems or various readings which were in keeping with the prevailing themes of the month; autumn, change of seasons, the dimming of the light, death and dying, Halloween, etc. None of us remembered to bring anything, although I had intended to bring along my book of Charles Baudelaire selected poems to read a piece such as The Enemy*:
My youth was filled with storms; dark thunderheads Lit up by sudden sunshine. Wind and rain Tore at my garden, left the ravaged beds Stripped bare of soil. How few ripe fruits remain!
Now it is autumn; my ideas turn brown. Look at the land; I'll need spade, rake and broom To clear that flooded mess. The sodden ground Is full of holes, each bigger than a tomb.
I dream new flowers now: but who can tell If they’ll take root in this exhausted soil? The nourishment they need is strange and rare.
Time eats at life: no wonder we despair. Our enemy feeds on the blood we lose. He gnaws our heart, and look how strong he grows.
Yes, this poem would have been completely à propos today. As none of us was able to contribute anything, Vicki showed us paintings she’d selected from art books she brought along and then had us do an exercise called Wild Mind Writing (better known to most as stream of consciousness writing) to provide us with a starting point for our painting session. She gave us the first few words then gave us five minutes to write whatever came spontaneously to mind: When the light enters darkness... Here, an excerpt from what I wrote:
When the light enters darkness awakenings of colours emerge with shapes aglow inching closer, wider, always glowing until the sounds overpower our sense of vision.
Red, orange, more red. Red on bicycles, orange bouncing up and down, blue mean streaks across red fields.
The light enters the darkness to awaken all the senses, to reshape the world; awash in colour.
~
* Here, Baudelaire’s original version:
L'Ennemi Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage, Traversé çà et là par de brillants soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils. Voilà que j'ai touché l'automne des idées, Et qu'il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées, Où l'eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux. Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur? — Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie, Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie! ~ Charles Baudelaire
For the third year in a row, I’m at that crucial point where I start telling myself: “What the hell is wrong with me? I’m no fiction writer! Why did I have to go and tell the whole world I’m participating in this stupid NaNoWriMo competition? I haven’t even got a decent storyline to work with and it’s starting in less than two days! Maybe it’s still time to just call the whole thing off?”
What is NaNoWriMo you ask? “National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.” This year will be the 10 year anniversary for this worldwide event which started out in the San Francisco Bay area in 1999 with just 21 participants. As of last year they had over 100,000 novelists on board, including published writers and countless aspirants. It just keeps growing every year as the word gets around thanks to good organization and a web site which, among other things, provides connectivity for all the participants and supporters out there.
I should know better than to commit an idea to memory because 9.9 times out of 10 I am bound to forget said idea, no matter how “good” or even “brilliant” it seems. Around this time last week I came up with a “genius” idea about what and whom my novella would be about this year but forgot to PUT IT IN WRITING and now it has all but vanished. All I know is that there will be a despicable character in the mix: a married man with two kids who decides to troll around on internet dating sites to get himself a little extra action on the side. I don’t know much about him yet—have no clue whether he’ll be a principal character or just be mentioned as a passing anecdote—but interestingly enough, there is one very intimate detail I am absolutely certain of: the guy has a freakishly small penis. I have Anne Lamott to thank for teaching me this great literary device when the need for vengeance becomes too great (a small penis as a literary device? Why not?) though she suggested this trick for those times when the inspiration for a character is taken directly from a real person in order to prevent said muse to sue the writer’s pants off. It’s pretty well my idea of retaliation after a friend went through a terrible shock immediately followed by a difficult separation very recently because her Cro-Magnon of a husband never once considered that sitting down with her and having an honest talk might be a good idea.
Other than that, I know the brilliant story idea I had in mind was very clever, and very suited to my writing style, and... (did I mention it?) very clever, but that’s about it. Funny how the cleverest ideas are the ones you can never quite remember. I’ll just have to do what I do best—sit there in front of a blank screen and let my fingers do the storytelling; there’s a part of my brain which apparently knows what it’s doing. This is not a guarantee of good writing, or of a story that people will actually want to read but sure enough, if I sit there long enough and drink plenty of tea, and dutifully punch out 1667 words (or more) every day, something is bound to happen. Can’t hardly wait. Well, that’s not quite true, but in terms of letting creativity take over, it’s a pretty good way of passing the time and a challenge that’s just difficult enough to bring plenty of satisfaction along the way. After two consecutive wins, can a third be far behind?
In her blog this morning, my mum mentions that she awoke from a dream where the internet service was down only to find that her email accounts were disabled (yet again). On my end of the world, I was woken up by contractors for the cable company drilling and talking loudly just inches bellow my bedroom window and then of course found both my cable and internet were down here this morning too. Interesting coincidence.
I shouldn’t be here writing this now, but I’ve decided I'm spending "graduation day" from the program at the Day Hospital by staying at home today... a combination of mood, hormones, gray skies... not conducive to goodbyes. Besides, I’m not really graduating from anything—just getting on with my life—hopefully a bit better equipped to take care of myself now. They don't mark the event in any way when any one of us is discharged, which is the term they use for it (and how I’ve come to hate that word), unless the dischargee him or herself brings in flowers or baked goods (as I had considered doing) of makes a speech or something, which tends to be the rare exception rather than the rule. But all that seemed like too much effort today. So for many of us, one day you're there, the next you're just gone. No more no less. Sometimes the other remaining participants circulate a greeting card, which is sweet. I just hate goodbyes. There are too many goodbyes in life and besides, I still have a few arts & crafts projects to finish up so it’s already agreed I’ll be there for the workshop session next Wednesday morning and possibly the following week as well. I’ve already got the contacts of most of those I’d like to stay in touch with, and I’ll still be going to that hospital to see my regular shrink periodically, so nothing stops me from popping by and saying hello to whoever happens to be there.
Part of me feels this sense of overwhelming guilt, as if I know I’m not doing the right thing today. Probably the grown-up, responsible, mentally sound thing would have been for me to make that extra effort and pull myself together—put a smile on my lips and courageously face the fact that yet another phase in my life is coming to an end—said my thank you’s and goodbyes, spread some hugs around. But just the thought of it makes me want to cry. I guess I’m just not feeling quite so courageous enough. Sometimes, the grown-up thing to do is to just accept one’s own limitations. And besides, I’ve got a whole drawerful of writing paper and notecards kept especially for writing thoughtful thank-you notes and the like; something I know is always appreciated. That’ll just have to be good enough this time.
Curiosity may have killed the cat but it’s provided this blogger with plenty of content to post about! I may get carried away with my two kitties Fritz & Mimi sometimes, but with all the content here, you’re bound to find plenty of non-cat related material too if that’s more your thing.
