Emerson responded, “Don’t you think one simplify would have sufficed.”
As I go back and scan these entries, I cringe at their tediousness.
Simplicity isn’t making its way on the page.
That’s okay, for now. This entry is an apology, and an acknowledgement that fiction and nonfiction are entirely different animals from expository writing, no matter how lyric and luminous an expository essay may be. For too many years, I earned kudos for my writing, because I mastered the formula and stuck to it. I was like James Patterson, I knew exactly what my audience wanted, and invariably used it: introduce the topic, ask a question, form a hypothesis, succinctly state the thesis, develop an argument paragraph by paragraph, nod to the alternatives, summarize the argument, then give the conclusion, usually in a clever or nearly poetic summary. Wow them.
I did well at that formula. Really well. So well that I created a comfort zone that was impenetrable, as I knew how to work the formula without failing. Much of my adult life was spent hacking out sentences in the wildly exciting craft of revision. Revision, revision, revision. There’s no simple way to an elegant essay, other than revision.
I succeeded in my academic studies, not because I was brilliant, but because I was willing to put in inordinate hours revising. Sentence by sentence, I was a workhorse of wordsmithing. I was also good at close reading, good at synthesizing the seemingly disparate, and good at interpreting metaphors, which when served by the excessive labors of revision, earned me my coveted rewards. I aimed to please, and I knew how to impress my audience of one, my professor, if I could hide behind the work of others, use my handy dandy formula for success, and spend sleepless nights and days revising.
I’ve abandoned that model, to draw from a deeper creative well. Those years gave me extraordinary writing practice, but now I’m dealing with my own voice, my own stories, my own narrative construction. The consequent prose often flounders, struggles to find its way in this new landscape, isn’t always certain of itself, and the excesses of that exploration are repetitive and strained.
A criticism of the blogosphere is that there’s little editing done. I agree. We rarely see our work’s shortcomings without distance, and social media’s immediacy fails to recognize the space needed for writing’s refinement. No matter how much I edit these entries, they aren’t what they should be. They are blog entries. They are cumbersome. They are redundant. They are poorly proofread, that is, with the eyes that wrote them. They are me thinking out loud much of the time, trying to tie big disparate life elements together in a little package, and I have yet to master that creative bent without the expository essay formula.
However, I am doing what my “About” page states I will be doing here, flushing out ideas, honing my voice, and discovering more about this new territory. In this regard, I’ve been successful. More than successful, for these forays have richly informed my evolving narrative choices.
Simplicity is work until it becomes habit, in life and in art. In life, it’s both discipline and awareness, daily choosing what works over what doesn’t, until habits are lived without thinking about them. In writing, simplicity and elegance mean making every word matter. That’s the practice of writing, and the craft of revision. Sometimes, it’s better to throw down as many words as possible, muck around in the ideas, polish the prose as much as time allows, and then move on, having gained experience in what works and what doesn’t.
In an Ira Glass interview that I posted earlier this year, he exhorted writers beginning their career to produce as much as possible. Just produce. Throw it all down. Make the mistakes. Learn. Move on.
In artistic terms, I think that means that the burgeoning writer will be Thoreau like, saying the same thing over and again, when one word would have sufficed.
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I’m not a big fan of the word “truth” — the people I know who cling to it most tightly tend to be dogmatists, and not much engaged with reality’s malleable and imaginative aspects. Truth becomes a function of certainty, the belief that the world exists in a real way, and there are usually prescriptions for how we are to interpret this reality. That seems to me counterproductive at best, functionally delusional at worst.
My assertions may sound strange, especially as I spent a huge chunk of my life studying philosophy, and pursued an equally strange creature called “God,” or enlightenment.
Love, the practice of compassion, the art of forgiving ourselves and the world, is really the only principle — I deliberately write principle and not truth — that exists, and the best we can do is approximate what that principle looks like in the moment. For myself, the best response is usually intuitive, not something that can be predetermined. The other stuff seems to me just the mind doing its thing, and should be regarded as such, the mind doing its thing.
These days, I’m not too enamored of the mind. I am more or less bemused by its convolutions.
As I set down my story, and a series of other stories, I’m pretty appalled at who I’ve been, and at times gobsmacked by who I’ve become. Not because I was such a horrible person, or that I am so demonstrably awesome now. I’m appalled at the self-destructive behaviors and the self-loathing, the amount of unnecessary angst that I carried as a personal truth written in an unalterable understanding of my story, and my self. It was all so warped, a singularly stellar production of my mind. Who I was is now deeply disconcerting and very uncomfortable, the self-love and self-awareness being more constant with time.
Which got me thinking about all the melodrama and shock value that have been emerging from the pages. I find myself wanting to edit who I was, because that person’s perceptions were so unbelievably skewed. I know why she ended up that way, but seeing her play out the things she played out, makes me more than a little nervous.
Not in the specifics, but in the emotional lenses that got her there. My inclination is to give her an eye roll and hit her upside the head, which was precisely the problem, because all she ever wanted from me was a gentle hug and some understanding.
So I have been questioning the issue of transparency, and if all this “truth” is really necessary in my writing.
The issue, of course, is one of courage, not the narrator’s story. I knew when I began seriously thinking about this memoir that I would use a nom de plume, not because of shame, but because I wanted to create a safety zone. I am crafting from memory a character, and though her story’s emotional contours and extensive experiences are framed from my history, I barely recognize her as “me.”
Two anecdotes come to mind while I buckle up and address my reservations about self-revelation, as the girl that I once was emerges from the pages. During my recent writer’s conference, a poet who has recently published a brutally honest memoir stated, “the more specific, the more universal.” That bit of advice sticks to my skin like something resembling “truth,” a principle irrevocable and inalienable. Be specific, don’t elide the details to make the story palpable. Yes, I will be choosing which details to include, to craft a cohesive story, but I must not omit details simply because I don’t like what I see. Or worse, try to capture her in a way that makes sense, because my choices were chaotic. At times, there’s no making sense of that person, because there’s no making sense of a soul driven but lost. Or creative. Or both. That’s part of the story. The good stuff is the stuff that makes me wince, because that’s where something like beauty or transformation or redemption emerge. And that’s the universal, the material that binds us together.
In Buddhism, “the lotus of enlightenment blooms from the substance of the world.” The pond in which the lotus blooms is usually the nastiest mire of gunk. It’s not the fresh water pool of crystalline blue water in which the lotus takes root. No, it’s all mucky, stagnant, and repugnant. The lotus takes root in the mire, and that’s why its a symbol for the awakened soul, the one whose roots have gone down into the world, while blooming above it’s waters.
In Christian theology, it’s called “grace,” and understood in more stark terms: the more sin increases, the more grace increases. I prefer to side with Jesus (“Father, forgive them, they know not what they do”) and the Buddhists on sin, rather than Paul. I think of sin as ignorance, not an abstruse theological truth requiring violence for atonement. At-one-ment: a recycled label of belief won’t get you there, a shift in consciousness gets you close.
Which brings me to my second anecdote. I once knew a man who wrote a memoir. Because he was married and had children, he omitted the experiences that would have created a compelling and powerful story. He left out all the extra-curricular sex, the buying of it, the affairs, the phone sex, the experiences that men and women need to hear, from a man’s perspective. He omitted much of what made him human, much of his-story. I understand why he left these details out, in deference to his family. But while his sentences were clean and elegant, the story felt disingenuous. Something was missing. Actually, a lot was missing. “The more specific, the more universal.” The specifics didn’t just fall to the ground, they were ignored. Yet it was all there, waiting to be told, the roots of his craft begging to take root in his life experiences.
As memoirists, we certainly have no truth telling us how to write, or what we must include. Life may at times constrain many narrative decisions. I choose to write a memoir that doesn’t ignore the muddy waters, to shape my story as it comes to me, no matter how much I dislike looking at who that girl was, because I am a writer. As memoirists, we don’t just shape stories, we shape ourselves, and our history. I’m writing my story, and in so doing, owning my life, while creating something that I’d like to call art. In a story’s specificity, we raise ourselves beyond our personal history, and touch those who may choose to pick up our book, read our blog entry, while we go deeper into our own personal truth, which is the only truth that life gives us.
Dani Shapiro once wrote: “I think it may be time for a literary education about what memoir is, and what it isn’t. Memoir is not autobiography. You did not pick up my 1998 memoir ‘Slow Motion’ because I’m an important, influential or even controversial person. You did not pick it up because I am, say, running for office, or just won an Academy Award, or am on Death Row. No. You picked up my book because –– whether you know it or not –– you wanted to read a good story shaped out of a lived life. You wanted to sink into a narrative that redeems chaos and heartache and pain by crafting it into something that makes sense. You wanted to read a memoir.”
Another friend — a man who taught creative writing, and is a published memoirist — exhorted me at length several years ago about art for art’s sake, when I mentioned the word “redemption” in relation to the craft of memoir writing. While I value his opinion, I agree with Dani Shapiro. Life is art, and writing is both life and art. To arbitrarily create boundaries and insist on something like art only for art’s sake seems to me to smack of another “truth,” as though we’ve got Venn Diagram aesthetics. “Art and art therefore art” is a valid syllogism; “art and redemption therefore life” is invalid. Embracing life, art, writing, redemption, and letting go of the labels isn’t just easier, it seems to me closer to the art that humans have enjoyed and shared since we first sat in circles to be entertained: our storytelling ancestors didn’t tell stories in an aesthetic vacuum, they connected us to each other, and the world. My friend’s position seems to me too dogmatic, too much a construction of the mind, although I admit that I’m probably stretching his meaning a bit to make a point.
In the craft of life, I see no reason not to be artful; in being artful, I see no reason not to redeem my life from its ignorance, while putting metaphorical pen to paper, one day at a time.
I choose to write a narrative that isn’t always pretty, but in owning its muddy waters, I may come closer to a life and craft that serenely float on the world’s waters, while fully rooted in its muck and heartache.
Last month, after some intense meditation on where next to take the book project, I discovered a conference taking place in Florida. According to its promoters, the conference not only focuses on refining one’s submission, getting the agent, and getting the contract, but on writing from a personal and meaningful space. In other words, the conference’s creative premise is that the quality of content is just as important as understanding the work as a product which must be presented and marketed to get an audience.
Several New York Times best selling authors will be there to help us understand the mechanics of both processes, writing and successfully submitting materials — and offering the best they have to give for those of us hammering out a dream.
When I stumbled on this conference, I felt like this was something I should do — a knowing. I never heard back from the coordinator when I requested information on a scholarship application, and I thought, “well, I guess your gut was wrong.” Then, two weeks ago, out of the proverbial blue, I received an application for the scholarship — tuition reduced by fifty percent. It was the last space, and I didn’t have a dime in the bank. I pressed for the space to be held, and it was reluctantly saved for me.
Through some very fortuitous circumstances — and I do mean, fortuitous, because I lost the scholarship twice, and got it back twice — I procured the scholarship. “We rarely do this, we’re making an exception for you,” the coordinator wrote me last week. Welcome to my world, I thought. Yes, I’m the exception, and the better for it. I’m the one who shouldn’t be here, but here I am.
I also quickly found cheap digs for staying, not easy in the heart of a Florida convention center city, and a generous friend has used his frequent flyer miles to get me there.
Here’s what’s inspired this entry. My dear friend called me yesterday to book the reservation, and I was trying to micromanage flight times, squeezing in this and that, insisting that I could only afford to stay three nights, even though I have this feeling that I should stay the day after the conference. I don’t know why, I just do. Micromanaging the money and then trying to figure out how I could squeeze in an extra day wasn’t working at all: the bus trip from New Hampshire to Boston, then the flight to Florida leaves small windows for transfers and check-ins. I got all wound up in my predictable indecision, frustrated and not really certain how or what to do. When pushed against the wall, I like to let circumstances dictate, pretending that I am going with the flow, when in reality I just don’t know what I am doing. It wasn’t happening, circumstances weren’t dictating anything, I needed to make decisions. My friend gently said to me, “here’s what I recommend,” and he convinced me to stay 5 nights in Florida. It felt right. Logically insane, but it felt right. “You will make it work,” he confidently said, without any doubt that I will do I need to do to stay for five nights in Florida. I realized then that doing this trip right meant honoring the investment of myself that I have already made, and the conference deserves a full investment of my courage and wits. My friend graciously swept away my insecurities, and my limited ideas.
I breathed deep. It was beautiful and it felt right.
Some gifts are priceless, extending beyond a frequent flyer plane ticket.
With this gesture, his confidence broke new ground for me. I majorly upped my life game during the course of one conversation. If this is something that I know I am to do, then why would I worry about the extra bucks and set myself up for unnecessary stress because I thought I had to cram everything into a short time. I’ve already given away most of what I own, hunkered down in the middle of nowhere without a car, and I’m going to worry about two extra nights in Florida? His insight was part of the big picture, the thing that’s unfolding.
Yes, I will make it work. It’s not in the budget, although that assumes that I have a budget. But I will make it work, and it will work. Because it will.
I can also cross one thing off of my new yearly list: “Every year, go one place that you have never gone before.” I can’t say that Florida is a place that I would have wished to go, but I’ve never been. So I’ve got one goal met, and since it’s early in the year, maybe I can squeeze in a visit to somewhere else that I’ve never been before 2015.
Five nights in the land of hanging chads, following my bliss into yet another leap into the unknown.
Couldn’t be happier knowing that my inner GPS and I are working it out just fine.
Not coincidently, I discovered a mesmerizing TEDTalk this past week, and it was part of the game changer mentality.
“Fake it until you become it” is a holy mantra these days.
Amy Cuddy On TEDTalks. Twenty minutes worth investing in, if you’ve not seen it.
A recent mandala. It’s created created with gold, metallics, and lots of iridescence, which didn’t translate in the scan. Peacock inspired.
This above all, to refuse to be a victim. — Margaret Atwood
Last week, a client I’ve been speaking with for most of my professional life called.
A scientist in a prestigious institute, Tracy is transgender, in the closet most of the time. During our first conversation over 15 years ago, my role was cast: I was the go-to girlfriend to help her explore her true self, a person in whom to confide. Our talks explored ways for Terrance to be Tracy, while married to a heterosexual woman, and working as a successful male in the scientific community. Tracy’s come into her own these past years, and I think she has embraced her identity as much as one can without surgery. What I believe Tracy values is that I give her the freedom to be herself, and that I talk with her as a girl — which is to say, I talk to her without assuming that she’s playing gender pretend.
I am proud of this aspect of my career as a sex-worker. I’ve been listening to and encouraging many closeted folks long before this kind of dialogue was in the mainstream. I’ve dealt with many who didn’t fit into normative boxes. All I’ve done is listen, and sometimes dole out too much unsolicited advice in the hope that I may be helping.
After Tracy and I spoke this past week, it bothered me to think of Tracy as transgender — a label that would have her live in a limiting psychological prison, as though she is in between one thing and another, a label that obscures her personhood. It may be true that externally, Tracy’s life has been an evolution from one way of being into another, but in her soul, Tracy has always been just Tracy. She’s a devoted father, a husband, a scientist, a writer, a woman with great taste in clothes and shoes, a compassionate and caring human. She navigates life’s complexities well, and I don’t see her as being “trans” anything. Tracy is Tracy, a woman experiencing life deeply, as she owns her story and herself more fully.
Over the past few months, I’ve been writing these entries as a human with a wide variety of experiences. Broader experiences than many, I suspect, which I think is necessary in order to write with some grace and substance. Several times recently, while thinking about the handful of entries that I’ve offered, I’ve asked myself, “where’s the sex?” “Where’s all the stuff about sex workers rights, and economics, and equality.” The memoir that’s coming together that presumably gives people permission to write their own stories, in order to lovingly embrace every day of their lives, and not be victims of other people’s well intentioned if ignorant narratives — where’s all that stuff, in these entries?
Well, the sex worker story is only one story, and because I am more than just a sex worker, there are hundreds of stories that I own and live and breathe. My problem is too many stories, not enough time (and really poor proofreading skills).
The bigger problem seems to be the label. Society, the socialization game, deems some labels good, some bad. Good labels: doctor, teacher, professor, scientist, married with children, etc. Bad labels: transgender, homosexual, sex worker. Although homosexual and transgender are far less onerous these days then “sex worker.” But all labels do is keep the status quo cozy in its lethargic security blanket, nursing on inertia’s comforting, delusional milk. None of these labels have to do with our personal depths, or capture the breadth of experience signified by the label, as well as the complexities beyond the label. I’d also argue that many of the good labels actually perpetuate bad social norms, but probably best not to start down that road.
When Tracy and I spoke, I talked with her about my own coming out over the past couple of years, and expressed my discomfort at stereotyping sex workers as victims. The label is sympathetic to the work’s many difficulties, and legally necessary within the context of trafficking. However, it is psychologically problematic in helping people wrestle their lives from the grips of other people’s judgements and sympathies when we identify a person as a “victim,” especially in the context of sex work.
I’m not at all convinced that coming out as a “victim” makes one stronger — come out as a survivor, always. That’s where to find the power.
The victim label excludes a wealth of experience, strength, insight, character qualities, and the possibilities that an individual brings to their life, and the lives of others. It reduces a person’s life to a single experience or series of experiences, and reduces the person to a caricature. A cartoon is a simple line drawing depicting the basic elements of form — yet most of us prefer living three dimensionally, in the world of color, light, and shade. By slapping on the victim label we render too many too simply, preventing a more cohesive, developed portrait, a life representation that every human has the right to.
The most profound tragedy may well exist in the label.
****
After I moved to Cambridge several lifetimes ago, I visited an elderly Holocaust survivor through Jewish Family and Children’s Services. To me, Michael was a great teacher, a simple and quiet man, living on the economic margins, with humility and dignity. Michael had been imprisoned in both Dachau and Auschwitz, a Polish Jew who lost everything when the Nazi’s ripped his eleven employee linen business away from him, and separated his wife and only son from him. He never saw them again, never found them after the liberation, they became invisible under history’s weight.
He could have framed his life in the imagery and metaphors of loss and hate. He did not. Instead, he found a more meaningful message in his experiences. Michael told me over my first Jewish Shabbat, that he prepared for us to share: “the Germans were just people, too. Just people, just people . . .” his crooked arthritic index finger gently wagging, his round brown eyes filled with uncommon understanding. I still see his eyes as he described to me how his ten year old son and wife were taken away, screaming, ripped from him, while he was violently ushered away by the Gestapo in the opposite direction. The wisdom that Michael gave to me I have never forgotten: we’re all very small players in the march of history, most of us are trapped in forces larger than we will ever understand, and we’re all just humans.
Michael understood that labels serve little useful purpose, they divide us instead of bringing us together.
And he never once used the label victim in the context of his story: he wrote poetry and prose about his experiences, which he shared, but never in his words, no matter how graphic their images of the camps, did Michael carry bitterness. I never saw Michael carry himself or refer to himself as a Holocaust “victim.” Rather, he saw himself as someone with a story to share, that might help others, lead them beyond hate and into understanding a reality beyond all our moral labels: we’re all just people. Pretty simple. No Elie Wiesel Nobel accolades, just one man’s story, wrestled from more heartache than most of us will ever experience. One story at a time, one poem at a time, never with much fanfare, Michael put it out there, “just people.”
Whenever some well intentioned ideologue talks about the “evils of Hitler and the Nazis,” usually in the context of some distracting, moralizing political discussion, in the heat of demonizing party politics, I often remember Michael, and the gift of his wisdom and friendship. “The Germans were just people.” He was such a rare and special soul that I have always considered myself unworthy of his gentle humanity, and treasure his simplicity as one of my life’s great spiritual teachings.
At first I found it odd that Michael came to mind while writing this entry — but it makes sense. He taught me long ago that those whom it would be easy to demonize are “just people,” part of cultural forces much larger than ourselves. They, too, have their stories, I learned many moons ago. “Just people” is the standard I’ve tried to maintain throughout my professional career as a “sex worker,” a label that reduces an extraordinarily complicated profession into an easily digestible two word phrase for mass consumption. A profession flippantly denigrated in the word “whore,” a term that very few have earned the right to appropriate for use.
“Just people.” Practiced on my end sometimes better than others, because some of the damage that strolls through a sex worker’s life is not for the faint hearted or self-righteous. That’s been my lesson in these years of work.
Sex workers are just people. That sounds like a given, but I think it’s much easier and smarter than worrying about if they are social victims or sexual liberators, which is how such discussions frequently split among social activists: sex workers usually cast either as poor victims or heroic vixens. But they are just people. And because they are just people, they have a right to carve out lives and stories like everyone else, without a stigmatizing label that has less to do with their humanity than a fairly slow machine called “the wheels of progress,” a mechanism propelled by the ubiqutious fear of our creative impulse.
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain. — Carl Jung
Carl Jung’s first mandala, 1917
I’ve worked with mandalas off and on for a long time, and I’ve been something of a Jungian for as long, though I’ve never consciously linked the two. Until recently.
As I wrote in “Creative Confluences,” I’ve returned to making mandalas and working with art journals, creating a dialogue between hands-on works, self, life, and writing. Mixing, coloring, painting, they inspire. I lose myself, and, in the process, I see connections that my writing self fails to make. According to Jung, mandalas are especially powerful, an unconscious and universal symbol of wholeness, a snapshot of the psyche artistically captured. So evocative is mandala practice, that in Buddhist ritual, monks create an intricate, large scale sand mandala, have a community ceremony when its completed, and then ritually destroy it, in a striking meditation on life’s impermanence.
My mandalas are private expressions and suffer no such fate. I quickly finish them, a few hours or so for each. Regardless of the quality, I sign, date, apply a clear acrylic protectant, and place the piece in the growing pile of finished works. They are self revelations and respectfully handled, even if they lack artistry. Modest creatures, they are at home in seclusion — and the better for it. My simple works are offerings made to myself, by myself. Playing both child and parent, I am proud giver and doting recipient.
Freedom. It’s there, in these circular meditations.
Or, as Jung describes them, “psychological expression[s] of the totality of self.”
These expressions have become a primary spiritual practice, as I wrestle my self from myself in the middle of nowhere, while I write a book without a whit about book writing.
Everything’s connected. The book. The mandalas. The spiritual journey that I set my mind to when moving here. The dreams that appear, disappear, reappear. The imaginative roads whose distances shimmer while I put words on the page. Everything’s connected, but if I try to delineate the contours, what I’m doing vanishes in its own mystery. I don’t know what any of it means, or what I’m doing while I’m doing it.
During a conversation last week, I told a friend that I’ve stopped building the social media platform, it’s “a diversion at this juncture. It makes me crazy. There’s so much information, that we’re all getting stupider. Noise, it’s noise. Writing’s the thing, now.”
My ever patient business savvy friend said to me, “I know what you’re doing, and . . .”.
I nearly jumped through the phone in a breathless, ecstatic excitement. Someone who knows what I am doing. I thought my friend literally had an insight that I could wrap around my existence. Apparently, it was merely a convenient turn of phrase. But all I could think of during the comments that I have replaced with ellipses, because I quit listening after, “I know what you’re doing,” was, “Really? You know what I am doing? It’s obvious to you? Tell me, what am I doing, because I haven’t a clue.”
I am writing. I am making mandalas. But I don’t know “what I am doing.” And I’m not certain that I want to, which is frightening and beautiful.
A couple of weeks ago, I started a mandala. Nothing was coming together, the design was strange, the color choices were off, and I was fumbling around, vainly trying to make it better. I put it aside for several days, if not a week. I returned to it. It was as strained and uninspired as I remembered. “Toss it,” I thought, “not salvageable.” Then I begrudgingly remembered the contract that I’ve made with myself, to respect my work, no matter my feelings. Especially the mandalas, given their now privileged status.
“Don’t throw it away,” I told myself, “think outside the mandala.”
I did. I literally thought outside the mandala, started laying down layers around the edges, filled the space beyond its borders, created a deep teal background, and resisted the constraints imposed by the paper’s edges, filling the entire page. I then worked on bands within the circle. Normally, I begin from the center and work out, it avoids smearing, and allows the work to naturally unfold, as is common in mandala meditation practice. I was working from beyond the edges and moving in towards the center. The periphery informed the development: instead of unfolding the work from the core, I folded layers in while reaching for the center. I incorporated the smooth and vibrant ink of gel pens, which I’d never used on a mandala, a few metallic gelatos for sheen, watercolor pencils for rich color washes, and then highlighted areas with oil pastels for added texture.
I ended up with one of the most detailed and multilayered works that I’ve yet made.
Is it one of my favorites? No. Aesthetically, it’s an odd thing. Cohesive, vibrant, multilayered, yet odd. But emotionally and creatively, it’s one of the most satisfying pieces in recent memory. Although I’ve worked outside the mandala in the page’s empty space before, not with this degree of invention. I’ve usually seen the empty space as part of the mandala, coming to the page with an idea of the whole, superimposing my will on the sphere and its surrounding space: I envision what I will do, and if I decide to work beyond the edges, the work is still essentially defined by the mandala’s sphere and it’s center. I’ve rarely if ever truly thought outside the mandala, I simply enlarged its borders, while flattering myself for my cleverness.
In this work, the space outside the sphere existed on its own terms, for itself. I was struggling with the circle’s interior, hadn’t given a thought to exploiting its periphery. The emptiness surrounding a sphere in the middle of a 12 inch by 12 inch piece of paper was a complete unknown that I falteringly entered in order to make sense of the predetermined space that wasn’t coming together. I had to think outside the mandala, because I hadn’t a clue as to what I was doing, and I had committed to completing a ragtag work, no matter what.
“God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.”
Nowhere. Emptiness. The unknown. Outside the imposed limitations that we bring to experience, the “I live in the middle of nowhere, and I don’t know what I am doing,” that’s where life begins, because we put ourselves beyond our cherished and limited ways of looking at the world. This mandala’s most important narrative doesn’t exist on the page that I have signed, dated, sealed, and saved, but in the story born by stepping into a page’s nowhere, its now here, beyond the confines of an inked circumference, and my understanding of that boundary.
Mystery existed in a space that I hadn’t any presumptions about, an experience of not knowing, but that I was willing to enter. When I saved a little faltering mandala and thought differently about its space, I mirrored a deeper reality, one rippling through my psyche and life. I didn’t just enter an unknown space on a piece of paper, this is the life path I’ve chosen. I’ve freed my self to live in the middle of nowhere, to write a book whose destiny is uncertain, to live at peace in this creative uncertainty, and to embrace its mystery. In this acceptance, I’ve touched something that historically we’ve labeled as God, an unfortunately small if not unkind word.
After a lifetime of pursuing knowledge, thinking that “knowing” had something to do with enlightenment, I think I’ve come to understand that it’s not “knowing” that gets us where we desire to be.
Rather, it’s “not knowing” that deeply, radically, and beautifully transforms us, rends the veil between the ego’s illusions and our freest, most creative, loving selves.
To enter the kingdom of God, one must approach as a child, Jesus famously taught. Perhaps he meant that one must not know.
If Buddhist monks destroy a mandala, possibly it’s not just a meditation on impermanence, but a profound archetypal leap into the great unknown, beyond understanding’s circumference, and into life’s mystery.
A leap that’s the greatest gift that we can give to ourselves, when we’re ready.
(YouTube video: Tibetan Sand Mandala, Creation And Destruction)
I’ve recently returned to visual art. I’m making small mandalas, mixed media projects, and developing art journals. These journeys are explorations that I prime, color, pencil, layer, blend, embellish, color some more, blend, and layer again. I then sign, date, and protect the work — an uncensored journey whose colors and forms I uncritically inhabit and own. Because of these artistic jaunts, there’s a creative dialogue emerging in my life, as art seeps into writing, bit by bit.
It’s been a drink of water for my soul, like watching a withering plant come to life after a long needed soaking. Yes, it’s a worn metaphor. But it’s the best one available to me, today.
This hands on practice has flowered in several ways, the best bloom being a satisfaction in greeting the day’s work. All of it. I’ve become less worried about facing demons on a page, and more inspired to simply create — and create a lot. Visual art isn’t an unruly forest of ideas for me: it’s a simple place that I visit in a sacred and unquestioning act. I don’t blind side myself by over thinking. Art. I just do it. After these colorful and arbitrary excursions, when I return to the black and white of words on a page, instead of facing a hedgerow of ego, ideas, and revision decisions blocking me from the story, there’s a more serene acceptance of process, and a kinder forbearance for development.
Writing’s restored. Or at least given a bit of space to grow.
A few weeks ago, in a radical creative declaration, I splurged on art supplies. Not the cheap ones. The good ones. An excess of indulgence, I told myself. “You shouldn’t do this,” I thought, “too much time and money on the superfluous, focus on writing and the social media platform. Buy the art supplies, later, when you have real income. Assuming you will actually have real income someday, dreamer.”
Yes, I still speak to myself like that. I’m working on it.
But the iris purples, cornflower blues, teal greens, assorted roses, marigolds, and metallics of Caran d”Ache kept calling, as did the cotton watercolor vellum, the smooth flow artist pens, the brilliant colored pack of origami papers for folding and collage, and the other miscellaneous media.
Though I tried, they would not be ignored.
When I uneasily hit the order button, the words, “jump and wait for the net to appear” went through my mind.
I jumped. The net did indeed appear.
The pleasure of the materials is near indescribable. A minor purchase for a professional, a luxury for an amateur, these are artist quality supplies whose pigments and application are like a trip to Paris, without packing a bag. There’s sensuous delight in the wealth of variegated color, and in laying down layers effortlessly, exploring depths of hue and overlay, playing with opacity and transparency, mucking around in matte, gloss, and sheen, painting, outlining, stippling, blending, smudging, and then doing it all again. I don’t worry much if my composition is correct, or my color choices are the best, and I don’t double guess if the materials are serving their purpose. I just do it. If I don’t like it, I fix it. Or I don’t fix it, and I move on. I don’t take the visual creations as seriously as the writing. There’s freedom in the process, creative respect in the acceptance.
My analogy machine went into predictable overdrive, and I made the obvious connection, “don’t take your writing so seriously, either.” Prolific ease comes with creation as focused play, letting stuff emerge on a page, learning techniques as you go along, stumbling on different ways to achieve effects, discovering a smarter more nuanced method with practice.
Same with words on a page.
Same with life.
“I’m working on it” revised is better understood as “I’m letting it happen, and it’s better this way. This is the way it’s supposed to be.” It referring to life, creativity, and the production of meaningful artifacts and ideas, and my relationship to them.
Austin Kleon, who published the first blackout poems, writes in “Steal Like An Artist”:
“Side projects and hobbies are important. . . . one thing I’ve learned in my brief tenure as an artist: it’s the side projects that blow up. By side projects I mean the stuff that you thought was just messing around. Stuff that’s just play. That’s actually the good stuff. That’s when the magic happens. The blackout poems were a side project. Had I been focused only on my goal of writing short fiction, had I not allowed myself the room to experiment, I’d never be where I am now.” (Italics and bold added.)
Magic happens. On the page. In life.
I’ve gotten some tool and practice tips from an artist, whose first vocation is image, words are her reluctant side. Today in my universe of magic and creative confluence, she shared an Ira Glass talk on storytelling, as a creativity prompt for her visual art friends, and those of us who inhabit multiple worlds, though not entirely living in any single one, yet.
