On the Road (with help from Tolkien)

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

I find that as I edit and struggle with the beast of writing I've set to tackle, I consider the road the
script and I have journeyed upon. It's like any life progression, physical, spiritual, or emotional, filled with pit stops and potholes, rivers and rolling roads. Sometimes we stop, sometimes we go, and often we find we've gone nowhere at all, yet progressed forever far.


Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.

This is it, Tolkien. It can sound so glamorous. Who tells the stories of blistered feet and damp days? We remember clearer the glories and summits along the way, rather than the sorry days burdened by sun or rain. And then telling tales like this, remembering the sorrows stronger than those. It's a temporal relativity masquerade: in summer, you remember the fireplace, the christmas dinner, the snowmen and snow days; in winter, you remember the green, being outdoors, walks and warmth and sun. But in both you forget the miseries, sometimes, and so it is with the cruelty of editing and writing for me, this week. It sounds glamorous, but I'm stuck in the ruts of a broken railroad. I believe the story is without value, knowing the pacing is poor, the dialogue dismal, the progression pathetic (puns intended), even though I simultaneously understand its meaningfulness to me.

Boundaries of Words

I haven't written in a little while. It's a busy season. Though the failure isn't entirely due to a lack of writing material as I've actually been doing a good deal of writing (or at least editing). I'm writing a story for the Writers of the Future seasonal competition, and editing my story into something worth reading has been a nightmare. I constantly get stuck in a state of being over-pretentious in my writing, elitist without the prerequisite technique to back up that sort of egotistical behavior.

I have several major problems with my writing, and one of my gravest is that I like writing in a pretentious manner sometimes. One of my recent stories began thus:

There is something sinister in infinity, and magnificent. The stars cease their winking charade and stare: cold, incessant, pitiless in eternal surround.  Space is not a sea in which we float amongst the heavens, but a hole, an absence, crushing ever inwards.  The fragile veil between us and without: beautiful; the journey into the void: fraught.

            Lost stared vacantly behind as his home, all their homes, receded into a glowing point in space.  He didn’t know why, but watching the vods of their departure made him feel… something.  Maudlin? Solemn?  It was getting more difficult to do that these days: feel.  The echoing thrum and whirr of magical machinery whined behind Lost as a counterpoint to the numbing silence of the stars.  The control room faintly glowed with nurturing light, a laughable counterfeit sun, while overhead, a glass dome glimpsed into forever as the vessel glided through space.  

Of course it is pretentious. Of course it doesn't flow well. And this is still an early draft (the NaNo I worked on this recent November past), but that is often a disclaimer for those who dislike the style (most people) even though I have a secret fascination with it. And my recent story is no different. I can't get it to flow; I can't get it to read like a story because I struggle with wanting it to read like a story. I adore puns and elitist easter eggs, and filled my mythical tale with them, but I eschew simplicity too often. We live in an age where the most read books are young-adult books, and the demographic that is reading them is 35-55. But I find those books shallow. Not out of necessity, and they are not all shallow reads, but because the target requires an easy, limited diction and imagery.

I like rules, but I also like to press the boundaries of words and find out just how far I can stretch meanings and interpretations. So I'm editing, and fighting mostly against myself and my innate tendency to be obtuse.

Write til' you drop

A name can be an identity, or the barrier between you and one. Your name is the sohl-reason for your being. But it is not your being. It's a fly tied to the fishing line, and even forgetting, you've not lost everything. 
Sometimes, I think I enjoy sentences without knowing, or caring, how they connect. I often relish writing the words, feeling the taste and texture of them, with an appalling apathy with regards to overarching structure. I love words; I love sentences; sometimes I don't desire any greater tapestry than simply marveling at the few strands of thread I'm twirling in my fingers. 
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/28/specials/dillard-drop.html
Annie Dillard has a remarkable essay on writing, and I've read it often to remind myself why I continue writing. I don't expect to sell my sanity and soul into this, but I do have some small passion for it. 
I often glance at my works and see only the skeleton of artistry, the meatless bones, and I wonder if I'll ever have time to clothe them. I've swirled up the dust of creation, but Adam looks like a halloween dry-bones or those crab shells left by sea gulls on the stones by the ocean. 
I jump from topic to topic, considering a new sentence that inspires me, even if its connection to the last is tenuous, or non-existent. I'm sewing non-sequiturs in patch after patch on a dirty rag, and hoping it will hold together if the patches are pretty enough. And the patches are beautiful, but the motif is all spontaneous confusion.

Finally Fever Free for Fall

This month has not been kind to me in terms of writing. That may seem sort of calm-before-the-storm, as next month will challenge my commitment and time constraints to their limits, but really there's no correlation. I got sick; I've been busy with plenty of people; la-ti-da. Not that my month has been poor; not by any stretch is this so (although, on second thought, the sickness hasn't been ideal). Mostly, life threw writing out the window, and in-flew-enza (okay, I didn't really get the flu - but the old joke poem opportunity was too convenient)
So Matthew asked today what my NaNo was even going to be about. Well... I have no clue. I had a stable beginning to a story, but nowhere for it to go. I've considered a couple of options thus far: make stuff up - I mean, this is what writing, and NaNo specifically, is all about anyway, right? Option #2: pick a story I've already invested more time into, and built a plot or setting on. The problem with this strategy is, I don't want to waste any good stories on the junk that will appear over this following month. Option #3: invest a day or two, sneaky-like, and really really prepare for this new story. Do I have time for this option? It goes well with option 1 if I fail to find the time. This is the most likely candidate at the moment. Option #4: take it a lot easier and hold less high standards. I've considered lowering the 50k lower limit on the story, and simply writing for the heck of it. Sure, it wouldn't be a novel perhaps, but a novella still fits the acronym fine, and I'd be doing the writing that I enjoy. I've also considered, as option #5: not doing nano. This option makes me sad. I could just read a book a day for 30 days, each of 50k words or more. I could write a poem each day for 30 days. I could try to learn something completely new, perhaps even something *ahem* novel, during the month of november, and simply use the month as a means of motivation.
But really, nothing entices me as much as the original intent of a completed novel. I'm going to have to figure this out.
In other news, I'm almost better! It's been about a week, so... about freaking time. The fall has been a little slow in coming, but the colors are filling up, and we're adding golds, browns, yellows, crimson, and scarlet colors to the countryside palette. I'm enjoying it, when I get out of bed and out of doors. Please send this cough and feverishness away for good.

Story Writing Time Approaches

Everything, unwittingly, is old.

this time especially so,

and I don’t know if it understands

what the grass is, young man,

or comprehends spring things just yet.

it weeps without tears to shed;

sleeps without dreams or rest;

it wants with nothing to expect,

and exhales without air

or even breath.

It burns, loves, without anything

inspiring such regrets,

and it moves, with nowhere to go,

and nowhere it has ever been.

The time of stories approaches, and I’m still uncertain where this one is pulling me. At first, I began with a pretty standard fantasy tale, and then realized I wanted something a tad more dramatic. I wasn’t even sure what this meant, but just that I wanted a story that might not bore me initially. Even if the end result isn’t satisfactory, that can always be fixed up. But if the concept is lacking, only so much can be done without a complete rehaul.

But what? That is always the question, no?

So I decided to scrap the original concept of a medieval “tolkein-lewis” mash that perpetuates throughout our simplistic “fantasy fiction” and twist the setting. One of the things I enjoy about Brent Week’s writing is that he doesn’t fear treading on new territory with old themes. He can maintain the semblance of an epic fantasy, but set in Mediterranean Renaissance or pre-industrial revolution era. When western society catches up with the middle east in discovering gunpowder, and warfare gets a strange boost with the discovery that no skill is needed in warfare, only a factory-produced weaponry, a swift lesson on loading, and a bunch of boys with guns.

I don’t particularly plan on joining in on this era, but I think a little branching out, or even inventing of time periods, can certainly spice up an aging genre. I am not trendsetting, mostly because I don’t plan on selling any of this writing, but it will be a bit of a stretch for me doing some of the research required to produce a reasonable and believable setting. The ease of the tolkein-esque world is that it’s been done and overdone, so now we expect every traveler to find an inn, eat some stew, drink a frothy beer in a pub, catch up on the scuttlebutt, roll some dice and head off into the wild unknown after some great reptilian beast that has stolen our gold, burninated the countryside, and needs defeat. I think there is value in these stories, as Gaiman said (after Chesterton said something similar, I believe):

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten

I believe in the merit of fairy tales, but I also believe that if the writing is done right, you can place them anywhere you like.

I’m not exactly writing a fable or fairy tale this November, but a little mythos never hurt anyone.

Tricky Linguistics

English is tricky. Many times we have attempted to teach computers human language, and it has failed. I remember my father telling me at a young age about a computer they were working with that spewed every time with the sentence “time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas.” The twisted, clever, manipulative means of the English language are seemingly boundless, and this may work as both boon and barrier to understanding. In the hands of the skilled writer, it can be as much a sword as a scythe as a plowshare. 

I’ve seen this. A writer plays at the edges of things, manipulating the frills on the fringe of the garment and deftly contorting the webs of weaving. But this obfuscation, this vague toying with greys and hues can confuse the audience, and invites in duplicitous meaning. Intentions are skewed by the bemused, and in the uncertainty – worse, the confident misunderstanding – of the creative work.

I’ve seen this, and I struggle with it myself. Dancing on the borders is attractive; it lends a dangerous, capricious, playful, attractive tension to a piece, though delusion seeps through the cracks and seams. 

It’s a tricky language, and it can be hurtful if not careful used, or inadvertently cruel. 

I was contemplating this capacity for misunderstanding, wondering how often my own words are misleading. I don’t have a lot of works, none of which are particularly important or well-read, but I love the fringes and crave the double meanings, and I wouldn’t change my writing style to accommodate simplicity.

This same truth holds true for speaking, or actions. The more investment a person has in a situation, the more likely, it seems, they are to make hasty assumptions on intuitive leaps. I was reading an article that made a few bold statements, and they were quickly misconstrued into very hurtful replies. The problem being that topics such as depression, anxiety, hurt, psychological disorder, and the like are dangerous topics for any writer to make bold claims upon, as everyone has some connection to these things, and strong opinions abound. Whether or not each person has suffered from depression personally, it is quite likely that each reader has encountered someone dear to them who does struggle, and maybe continues to struggle. I think the writer should have framed the topic as a discussion rather than a dictatorial claim to knowledge and truth.

Nervous Quotations

Standing atop the tallest turtle, Yertle, I think I own the sky. Nothing could be so high as I, I smugly reply to the wind, which turns me around to see a mountain-top nestled within the mighty clouds. Well, and then again, perhaps my head has been misled, and it’s time to climb again.

This weekend, this week, is beyond my comprehension I think, at 2 in the morning. I think the whirlwind of events is more the cause than the hour, but I suspect that little makes sense to my addled brain at 2am, even were I not on being set aflame, with teary eyes, pumping heart, nervous fingers, and lungs remembering what breathing is. So this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.  (TS Eliot, Hollow Men)

You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Rêves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus.
You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.
(Morgenstern, Night Circus)

Let your gentle spirit be made known before all men. The Lord is near. (Philippians 4:5)

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. (Yann Martel Life of Pi)

Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud... (Yann Martel Life of Pi)

You would rather face a life without me than to have me choose a life I would not choose for myself. (Scalzi)

And for you, Em:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
(Mary Oliver)

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
(Mary Oliver)


I don't know what my life is at this time, but here are some quotes that I've left running through my head. Some are relevant, others just for thought. There is much to be found in the world, even when you think you know everything.

You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month and yet, after a hundred years, they can still surprise you. (on the topic of hobbits.. or perhaps anything)
(Lord of the Rings)

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/06/nervous-quotation/ 

Anon

Dawn of a new journal, this morning, always one of my favorite times of the year. I love penning those last words and flipping back over the pages, nodding at the poignant passages, smiling at the triumphs and joys, and musing on the thoughts expressed over months of reflection. I often flip to random entries and read snippets, shaking my head at my ugly writing habits, and remember the days leading into these inked emotions.

Before I put a journal to rest on my shelf, eight since college ended, I flip through it quickly, not bothering to read any sentences, but just gathering in the pages like a flip book, watching time pass in a moment and creating a story I cannot understand at that pace, but seems somehow beautiful, in all the illegible characters flying by.

Finally, with a theatrical sigh and something like reverence, I pull out the descendent, and pen the first words: May 14th, 2014. Beginnings are just as tough as endings, because I want everything to be just so. I wrote a poem about that recently, like a romantic dinner (though I’ve not experienced said occasion, in my head I’ve romanticized the concept of romanticism, romantically), everything organized to a nuanced degree, showing care in preparation of love.

First words are important, and definitely my favorite things to write in longer works. I agonize for days over what the words should be; this is the hook, this hauls people on board and carries, drags them into a new world. But for a journal? This is just for me, and so the hook is simple.

There are a lot of beginnings, lately, and a lot of endings. I think there always are, if you know how to see each. I think this year’s journal is going to be exemplary, filled with some of the greatest moments of my life, captured in celebratory moments with my dearest friends. There will be associated sorrows, but this, too, is time’s prerequisite it seems.

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

But I have plans, oh such plans, and adventures waiting in the wings. But like a magician, I redirect the vision until only I am seen, and not the things moving in the darkness on cue, waiting to spring into view magnificently. A magical year awaits – let the games begin, ladies and gentlemen, for when it comes to these, I’ll win or break trying.

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/anon/

Another Place

I started another blog at: http://benjaminwblog.com/

Or, rather, I started a new place for the same blog. I've still got a lot of work to go on that, and it also is spread out over two domains - but I'm enjoying the project so far. It's also easier to remember a url like benjaminwblog.

I'm still recovering from my marvelous weekend. It's difficult spending time at the beach with friends, and then finding yourself back at work, programming android devices and wishing you could hear the waves, the storms flattening the salty grasses, the voices laughing in every room. I wish I'd had more time for writing this weekend past. When I find myself richer than Smaug, I'm going to purchase a nice castle on the cliffs of Scotland, and write whenever I can drag myself away from the scenery.

One thing that struck me as strange this weekend was a comment made by the host: "I'm thinking next time, because of the stage of life so many are in, I'm going to have to ask that we try and find sitters for dogs and babysitters for children." (paraphrased - may have been speaking particularly of dogs) Fifteen people at a beach house, four dogs and one child consumed an unsurprising amount of attention. What did we expect?

It's strange to think that I may be one of the oldest at the event, and I'm nowhere near that stage of life. Yet, even I've noticed responsibilities resting heavy on my shoulders as I move towards house ownership, some financial decision making, and the organization of my own time. I want to have adventures, be a child, run around in the fields and smell each of the different flowers - but does one balance the requisite responsibilities of adulthood and a youthful outlook and joy?

Some of it is found here: "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?  Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?"  (Matthew 6) You can see it in the eyes of the president, the weight on the shoulders of the exhausted, and the greying hair of the stressed. Worry adds age, and in all this I'm doing my best to avoid worrying about how everything will turn out, and am simply enjoying the process of looking at houses, of writing, drawing, and building a website, and of loving those around me. Life is just the rim of an ocean, rising and receding at the draw of the moon.

Land Octopus

I found a nice knoll this afternoon, worth a stroll and a quiet picnic, and some grass on which to journal. I didn't, the sky's allure was simply intoxicating. Drunk as the bees buzzing in the clusters of dandelions, I just smiled. I dreamed the stars in the sky were falling, and I grew frustrated at every wish I missed, until I realized the stars were streaking down the sky and crashing into my garden, burning entire rows of carefully cultivated crops.
I watched as the barrage from the heavens first decimated, then obliterated every last pea, squash, pepper, tomato, or herb I'd watered, fertilized, and meticulously weeded for weeks, months. Everything was a charred wreck, a blackened, smoldering mess that bubbled like a marshmallow fallen off the stick.
Full of anger, I rushed into the center of the garden, kicking the coals and snatching them up in my fists. It burned, but I was determined to show my ferocity, my fire, was the hotter.
Let go of the coals
Open your fists, and let go of the coals
Open your fists, anger will not solve this, and let go of the coals
Slowly, painfully, I released the coals and, kicking aside the ash that was my garden, I buried each one, the burning remnants of stars. There were no longer any stars in the sky - it was an empty heavens, a blank, black canvas.
When I woke the next morning, the coals had sprouted into flowers of all colors and heights, towering as tall as sunflowers, or huddled close like daisies, and they bloomed in turquoise, citrine, opal, sapphire, peridot, ruby, pearl, emerald, diamond, aquamarine, and garnet. Each color was arranged in rows and formed an intricate squarish-spiral inwards, towards a central flower with a brilliant amethyst purple for each petal and a golden heart. It was tall, as tall as I, and I felt it was staring into me as I stared at it.


I'm an octopus on land, and I can't feel my toes. I want to run and play, but my legs have me anchored here, and I don't have any bones. Dip your pen into my soul and ink will run, thick as blood, and stain your fingers black. So graceful in water, so fragile on land. I'll be braying like a moose in a tree until you free me stuck though I be by my own sucking immobility.

Herbert the Snail

My drawing exercise for today was a shell. I've decided that I'm the worst at shading in the whole of the world. I probably only make it worse because I get impatient and start scribbling, then I get patient again, but it's too late; I've already ruined it. Then I think, maybe I'll get creative and smudge everything with my fingers (this is fun), and try to balance the silly shading that way. It-never-looks-good. Month #1 sketching log: I'm the worst artist in the history of ever.
Right now, practice doesn't seem to be making perfect, it seems to be making pathetic. I'll keep trying.
So for my drawing project, I think the shell is for a mollusc, but when I was drawing one of them, I got frustrated and added a really silly looking snail. I like him a lot - he reminds me of the music machine and Herbert the Snail (have patience)
In other news, I've started reading The Brother's K (Duncan), and I'm getting along. I'm liking it more than I did on my first attempt. I think I like it all the more for having read the Brother's Karamazov (though the similarities are few), because in my head I keep pretending there are connections.
At church today, I drew a snail, a bird, a turtle and a fish, and none of them are on the same gravitational plane. The pastor discussed Thomas, and made him out to be something of an ISTJ, which I appreciated. I think there is more to Thomas than the doubting fellow we disdain, though the Bible contains few passages that even include him.
I won all the games today - I'm pretty much the luckiest.
That was my day.
And snails.




silent the shell your ear is in
echoes the ocean within,
for this mollusc has never been
subsumed by the sea.
oh, I exude the ocean -
it wells in my eyes,
runs in runnels down my spine,
wets my brow.
I swim in my mutable brine
and I am an island, John
unto myself, and this shell
is echoes of me, and I
am contained wholly inside -
hold your ear close and hear me
for I am the sea, old man,
and I will ever be
wild and whimsy -
don't pretend you know
the depths of me, or the swells
of my emotions.
How high I rise when the moon
summons me, and low I sink
when she moves beyond my reach
though she hides her face
or ripples in my waves
her gaze pierces my hide, this shell,
and I sing, howling at the night sky
oh, what heights I'll go
(though never sufficiently)
and in the end, she chose the night
and bears what's beneath behind
as the trail of a wedding dress
spiraling down into a whisper
that echoes in this shell

Just Spring

Drawing with the sloth friend this evening.  Spring was showing its colors in force today, even though the rain is coming (perhaps that is the true face behind today's masquerade). Cherryblossoms are bursting into bloom with radiant pink petals, and the dogwoods accepted the challenge, and effloresced in beautiful whites, and the greengreengreen is trickling out in greater quantities, and the blueblueblue of the sky, why, sometimes this is all a person needs.

hibernation, then, is all
this soul gets and remembers
The freezer too long, friends,
until now, I hear the flute of pan
fawning over the land - listen
the cedar bellows though faintly
listen and you'll hear echoes of nymphs
and dryads giggling with the leaves in the trees
and it's rising, wildflowers caressing the hillsides
crescendo, as the witch's white hand recedes
cold lessens and the world is all puddles and glee
trumpeting, spring into dance the world is blossoming
birds fluttering home and building their nests with the bees
buzzing warily across the newborn earth, and somewhere a star
shines, and passes over a land whose bitterness needs passing over
Immanuel, resurrect in the baptism and christening of vernal verdancy
Floating like cottonwood on the breeze, breathe, the world is whole again.





Some of my favorite ee cummings poems are on spring: in just and I also like the balloonman. I wrote a short story for a competition (and lost) using the balloonman as a basis. Someday, I'll have to return to that short and edit it a bit. I think it had a little potential. Well, the week is coming, and sleep is gearing up in my gut. Back to ye olde hibernation.

Hamburger Writing (yuck)

"Give me a night by the fire, with a book in my hand, not that flickering rectangular son of a bitch that sits screaming in every living room in the land."
~ Helprin

I have not read Winter's Tale yet. Matthew quoted this at me, and I was pleased at the mimicry of my own sentiments, despite not knowing the context.

Always, on long drives I have significant time for thinking. Add into that the fact that I couldn't find my media player, I had some opportunity for *quiet* thought. I was contemplating mostly on the topic of intellectual humility. I think one of my greatest irritations are those who view their own works as intrinsically better than anyone else's, and beyond comparison or improvement. Maybe it is; maybe they've reached the pinnacle of human achievement in writing or artistic endeavor, but I tend to doubt it.
There is always room for improvement.
But even more than that is this internalization that once you immediately assume a new task, you will automatically be a maestro. I mean, c'mon! I've put a week into it! Maybe you are a prodigy, or a savant, but still (yes, still) there is room for improvement, for change, for adaption. One of my favorite quotes by Donald Hall: (it's a long'un)

The United States invented mass quick-consumption and we are very good at it. We are not famous for making Ferraris and Rolls Royces; we are famous for the people's car, the Model T, the Model A—"transportation," as we call it: the particular abstracted into the utilitarian generality—and two in every garage. Quality is all very well but it is not democratic; if we insist on hand-building Rolls Royces most of us will walk to work. Democracy demands the interchangeable part and the worker on the production line; Thomas Jefferson may have had other notions but de Tocqueville was our prophet. Or take American cuisine: it has never added a sauce to the world's palate, but our fast-food industry overruns the planet.

We get into a groove of production and never leave it, all too often. One of the reasons that I started this blog was to try out different forms of writing, and mimic different artists in their creativity. Sometimes, imitation can be incredibly helpful in learning to understand what makes something artistically relevant, or good.
But really, more than anything, I don't want to get caught into the McPoem, McStory groove. I don't want to be the Thomas Kinkade of writing, where I simply discover a beautiful scenery and mass produce it in workshops. I want novelty, innovation, and thoughtfulness. I really appreciate Elizabeth Bishop's argument that if it takes 40 years to write a good poem, then that is how long she'll work on it.
Unfortunately, with capitalistic motivation as the driving force behind art, it becomes more difficult to wait so long for a muse to strike us on the head with the creative mallet. For me, this isn't a problem, because money isn't a driving point at all for me (since I'm earning no money from my pieces at this juncture - nor are they worth any). But the problem for me, at my level, is still that tendency to get rutted into a line of faults.
Some of the statements Donald Hall makes in that essay are frightening, in light of entering the sphere of artistry to any degree. I understand what Keats was saying when he wrote the words: I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
This is the same driving force that sips at the edge of my sanity. Because I know where my tipping point is, the place where I withdraw from society and make a competitive run for greatest "something" in the world. And honestly at this point I don't even know what that something is. I know it could be almost anything that I put my mind to, within the constraints of my mechanical prowess (it's too late for me to become the greatest futbol player of all time).
One thing I know, at the end of the day, is that in order to improve I have to first understand that improvement is possible, and that I need it. If I don't believe that I can improve, I won't; if I don't believe I need improvement, I'll continue creating hamburgers of stories and poems.
Which sounds gross.

Or I can try outrageous, silly, obscure, unusual, messy, ugly attempts at artistic creation and pray something rises from the dust eventually.


You're the worm for the early bird
dressed in asps and newspaper wraps.
your hands read: violent murder/politician/
hundreds wounded in/going under
in smudges of running ink.
but through this window peering back into me
I see Alexander the Great playing violin,
lacrimoso, sharing his odyssey;
and Cleopatra feeding pigeons,
cooing at all the appropriate points
and her hair reads: hostility in/
concealed disaster/media sexist rem-/
how does she not weep with the music,
covered in such head-lines?
pulling back from the vantage, gradually, asking
who's the bleary-eyed captive in the mirror scene?
another snoozing worm, losing
to the carpe-vermis bird

Lousy Poetry, moving right along

do you love me? feed my sheep.

Stare out over the mountain into the mists

ten paces, the trees, twenty, a ghostly pallor

thirty silver paces away, nothing can be seen.

beneath, a city lies, shrouded in a mantle of white

invisible, though scarcely a mile below, nothing

but the ghosts of fog replying silently:

what force 

can chisel hope into shifting mercury

or forge steely faith from rusty misery

or dredge the drowning soul up from the deeps

my son, do you love me? feed my sheep.

twisting turns are motif and mythos

the advent of the city pulls at me
with its smokestack gravity, distressed
wood houses, brick buildings, sweet sugar maples
cradled in the valley and swaddled in fog.
the stars above hide, and no shepherds flock here today
even horses graze with frosty eyes -
windows golden glow with christmas trees,
and candles dance ballet -
why must the moth chase the light,
and why the firefly insists at being bright,

what can restore the broken-winged bird?
as he flies, wind fills my wings, also

child, do you love me? feed my sheep.

drafts seep and bleed through the walls
creaking with the ancient ache of ice and winter trees
the tomb is cold, encapsulated in morning light
rolling away the stone of slumber,
the world's awakening in lovely sun
you know that I love thee for thy everything -
then know
every heart, beating at once, will shake the world


A few years back, I heard someone discussing the possibility of mastering a new activity every seven years. I firmly believe this can be true, and though I also suspect I could master something far quicker, depending on the task, I realize that lives are none-so-empty. I don't find myself bored and waiting for something to do, thinking: "maybe I should start a seven-year mastery schedule." In fact, I sometimes struggle at finding time at all for all the things I want to do, and I'm freer than most.
Writing is something I've always wanted to master, though I started with a significant handicap in refusing to listen to authoritative figures and their advice regarding the topic, and only realizing that I wanted to acquire mastery over such a thing after school finished in my life. It's like wanting to have mastery of classical literature, but realizing you don't know how to read, or desiring mastery over soccer, but having to work your way through physical therapy first so you can use your legs. I want to perfect my tastes of writing, poetry, essays, story, myth, but my chopstick skills are sorely lacking.
I'm no poet, yet, in my first four months. Granted, I should give myself some slack, and allow for the full seven years for a stronger understanding of poetry and its underlying means, but I'm always hard on myself, so I won't cut myself any slack. I organized all of my poetry into a single text document and read it, and though there is improvement, it's all rather shoddy. Most especially this poem above, though I had to keep writing it because it had some ideas I craved.


But even bad poetry is poetry, and even bad writing is motivating myself to continue writing and that's steps forward. I get the mental imagery of a man struggling through the snow, every step heavier than the last, with the blizzard gusts blowing biting shards of ice into his face, but he's pressing on nonetheless. And, I hope, so do I.

Snow Owls, Marshes

It's been a strange day, a strange week, maybe even a strange month - I wrote and wrote and wrote, often after long work days, until writing was done and nothing but exhaustion remained. Now, I'm thankful that that time is finished, though sad as well.
I drove a long ways today, from home to home. Washington is my first love, and as my friends all get married and disappear on new adventures, I wonder whether my footsteps might eventually return me there. There is a music in the hills that sets my spirit free so easily when I visit my parents' home, and I wonder if I might love Washington more.
The tall grasses, thick with a morning hoarfrost light as a dusting of snow, and the marshy woodlands with mossy limbs and knuckled, gnarly branches beckon to me. The evergreens tall and stately address my verdant needs, but its winter falling today. Why do swamps sound eerie and sodden, or marshes mushy and miserable? Can this, the most beautiful of lands, a bog be? Cobalt-plumed jays whistle away and the snow owl, rare sight indeed, gazes on with golden-gleaming eyes like the wolf of the skies.
It's the golden grasslands, the odious skunkweed, the tendrils of fog like clouds left behind and lost in this ghost of a land, and ramshackle homes that must be empty, empty, empty as the eyes on the longest of nights. No, maybe it is the dreamy rendering, and knowing that if I left this road and followed the lights, I may wander this exemplary purgatory forever, swimming in the grasses with that doe, that deer whose heart I follow through the mists.

I discussed sharks with one of my roommates. We were contemplating spiritual direction and one of my favorite passages of the Kite Runner, and it transformed into a discussion on Christianity and sharks.

I drove a billion hours and collapsed in a heap when I arrived. I started reading again, delving into The Story of Art, Sin City, Selected Poems by ee cummings, Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, White Pine by Mary Oliver, and a Helprin novel (thanks J - he's actually quite wonderful), and an Agatha Christie (too late, huh Matthew?).
I usually only read one book at a time, but I just missed reading so much I read everything until I fell asleep.


This is what holiness is
or perhaps is, I cannot tell
when the marsh is full of fog
the hands of the trees cup the mists
like the wisps of dreams and forgotten things
and you ask - must you always ask?
if I promise
I promise I'll love thee, love thee
love thee beneath the shadow of the willow
in the months of moss and rainy days
and forever if you allow,
set apart in these reeds and grasses
with a heart of eternity and grace

Mountains again, mountains... and a place to finish my book

the fencer and the painter is
a dualism picturesque and particular.
draw me as the ocean breathing
above a coral reef
with your pretty palette mixed
in this fluid motion,
we are the ribbon dance
we are the hummingbird
we are the wind in the wildflowers
galvanized
until each sunflower is only electric
with our souls the conduit of eternity;
it is the rainbow and the breeze
born of storms and souls
spinning, weaving, then
pirouette until
we are the fireworks and
we are the waterfall
we are the hearth flames


....


Sometimes wintry days are the prettiest. It is as though the cold were glass, on the verge of shattering into a thousand diamonds, or tiny stars. The sun shone bright over a cloudless sky, and the mountains were ever so elegant: Hood at the peak of beauty, St. Helens, hatless and whiter than pearls and gossamer, Rainier, at the pinnacle of majesty towering over everything - I could not stop staring, though I drove.
It's good to be back in Washington, in the hills and mountains of home.

Where are you going?

I've been tired the last few days. Hanging out on Friday after a long week; a late night Saturday night, which ended in getting home near midnight with no writing done; waking up after only a few hours of sleep for some writing before church, and then going out to eat. I settled down to take a nap, and the roommates started yelling jokes from one end of the house to the other - no nap.
My thoughts have been ranging all over. I won a competitive game, recently, that took me almost two months to top the charts in; a friend's mother is dying, and has been dying for almost a year, though this will likely be her last week; sick family members; missing people split up over the world; reading poetry, and digesting the intricate imagery; scouring classical pieces for useful tidbits, and contemplating on creation, life, knowledge, sin; friends hurting, living, loving. 
On top of it all, I'm writing hours each day, keeping up with the strict pace I've set for myself for this novel, trying to bring the mystery to life with all its characterization. I even sat for hours in a coffee shop, analyzing each person who walked in, imagining their days - what a bizarre, daydream exercise.  I listened to thoughtful bands: Sufjan, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, trying to fabricate feelings as I enter into different settings, and help myself envision the spacial, temporal, emotional constraints of so many variables.
I'm over-thinking this.

I wanted to write a thousand different things in my journal and blog-blather today, and I'm finding I'm getting none of those done. I wrote two-thousand words and then halted, turned off the lights, lit a candle, put on my slippers, and played guitar. I deliberated over how much I wanted to get done: learning how to write poetry; studying lyric, rhythm, rhyme, meter; understanding more on the nature of mystery and tension; studying character development and setting construction; learning, again, about some of my favorite time periods: victorian, renaissance, feudal, Edo Japan, mandate-of-heaven China, early yerushalayim, aztecs, incas, and the mayans, the mesopotamian fertile crescent: the cradle of man.  I yearned for a study of trees, plants, flowers, and where they naturally grow and flourish. I wanted to follow the patterns of birds, which trees they prefer, and how they build their nests, and when/if they migrate. I wanted to know where the animals go and when they come, and how they find their food, and where they all live.
I wanted to know everything: geology, geography, history, biology, chemistry, physics, mystery, mythology, fantasy, science-fiction, classics, languages, people - people, oh so much! 

But instead, I'm sitting and playing guitar, plucking at chords and singing lightly into the darkening skies of night.  My mind is craving for more, and my heart is telling me to collect some weekend rest, while I may. I miss A, and our roommate adventures, our talks into the night, the last word: chandelier, before we slept. I'm ready to jump, I'm ready to fly. Fire an arrow, Jonathan. Is it beyond me?
Where am I going? Where do I go.

Are you looking for answers
To questions under the stars?
Well, if along the way
You are grown weary
You can rest with me until
A brighter day and you're okay
~ Dave Matthews

This song is my night. I wanted to know everything, and I'm only given more questions, and the light song of fingertips across strings. Does everyone have such nights? Nights when all the colors mix together to grey.


I'm a fledgling, a monarch with morning-cold wings. Breathe on me, and I will fly.

Five Steps Back, Four

Aimed and Aimless Thoughts.

Ever since I started writing, I realized I'd finally found myself an unwinnable game. Or, perhaps, a game I could not surpass everyone in - there is always room for improvement. Another aspect about this game that, perhaps, suits me particularly well is its individuality.  It's also a bit embarrassing. I was always a bit of an individualistic player. I love team games, but I don't believe that they inspire my competitive drive. Since the team relies on me as only a small portion of the victory or defeat, I don't feel as though I need to better myself exponentially. I'm usually more than content simply matching the mean skill level.
Not so with individual games. But the strangest part about my competitive nature is that once I win something, I don't really care about it any longer, win or lose. I know that I CAN win. I don't have to try to win any longer. That doesn't mean I don't try to win, it just means I don't TRY to win.
The difference is spectacular.

Writing is different. It inspires my individualistic cravings for competition and betterment, without having any actual competition - or at least any concrete competition. And the first thing I learned in this competitive marathon, a marathon that may well last the remainder of my life, was that I'm awful. Simply. Awful.
For every discovery I gleaned, improvement I bled for, each sacrifice made, I fall behind five steps. It's like being thrown out of a plane with a sewing kit and cloth. Every time I sew together a piece of my parachute, I fall slower? Maybe? But I'm still falling. More like it, it's rowing a canoe upriver, a white rapids. I'm actually going backwards with each stroke, but eventually, my arms may get strong enough to make headway. (I should have just pulled to the side and walked upriver, huh?)
Now, though, I've improved. Instead of one step forward, five steps back, I'm only retreating four steps.

The same quality of rowing upriver sometimes affects other aspects of my life, and some I've been enduring recently. In church today, the discussion was on vulnerability, clothing yourself in righteousness, openness in the church, the family of the church body. How many things are there that we internalize rather than sharing with our church body, and how often is the church body helpful in overcoming these things? How often does the church body help rather than leave us hanging, or, worse, judge us for our failings?
Things such as anger, shame, depression, panic, pornography, psychological disorders, difficulties in marriage, relationships, the home - none of these are things I struggle with at this time, but how many people do, and don't feel open to tell the church? Or, having told the church, feel judged or "prayed at" rather than aided in the healing process, the grace and mercies of God?

One thing I was thinking about, in relation to this, is the short story "Franny" by JD Salinger, where Franny and Zooey are discussing the short prayer of the Tax Collector in the gospels: "Lord have mercy on me, a sinner." Actually, they are talking about it as a repeatable phrase, and as a way of praying without ceasing. Sometimes I wonder if this is a good way to avoid temptation, to refocus on God with all your might.

Story Writing Mode = Less Blogging I Suppose

Well, what is there? Again and again they ask questions of time, and I've no response. Time is slippery as shadows, as sure as blood in water - stop it, slow, if you may, you'll only gain bloodied hands. And you? Share your heart and I'll shed mine. Emotions, doctor, is it cancer then, this fire within? Only burning sin, killing your insides out. May it never continue so, but on I go, on I go, my breadbin into hell. What gains he who sells his very soul for a pittance of fool's gold? Nothing.
Please, distance as wind to wind, opposite walls of solitary prison. I can hear you think but not breathe, love but not sing, dream but not speak. If we shed these skins and skim the sky, fly not so high, dear, we're on Icarus wings. If must we fly so high, take me, and let's fall as one. How, how such wide eyes, Eckleburg? Green, then? Green as the american dream? Or dollars? Or icy green, on pine tree leaves, frozen in the frost of morning?

I cheated today. I finished some of my first chapter of NaNoWriMo. I didn't want the restriction of NaNoWriMo, but wanted the motivation. I longed to write a story, but not within the exclusive bounds of November, and I got a bit overexcited for the beginning of this one. This one is also different in that I'm co-authoring the endeavor. I'm already feeling the strain on my other writing and reading. It can't be helped, can it? Time to return to story writing mode...

If day has to become night, this is a beautiful way (more cummings)

What if mountains filled the valleys into flatness eternal? No sunsets over the cresting hills from the rich troughs of the valley. Driving down the back roads and up hills towards distant learning, a didactic repose, the trees form a tunnel of red-yellows, and leaves layer the road in a carpet for kings, regal red. I'm not the king these trees shed into death for, nor he who resurrects green come spring.
I'm not a naturally forthright personality. Up through high school, I lived under the impression that all sympathy I'd experienced, outside my family, was counterfeit. Not just sympathy, but curiosity. When someone asked, "how are you doing?" I responded "I'm doing well", because it is the quickest, surest way to countermeasure interrogation missiles. And that's how I saw them. Not as loving queries or curiosity, but as time wasting inquiries of the vein, "it's really pouring outside, eh?" That's hardly even a question at all.
I started writing about the same time the fortress of my personality cracked as jericho from friends hooting and trumpeting about the walls. Even so, I still naturally conceal myself behind these characters. Even in my journal, my private writings, I don't allow my writing to expose my inner dialectics. This has changed, gradually, but what is there to fear so much from these things?
I was walking around today, touching the bark of the trees and running my fingers along the leaf-veins and needles: sugar maple, japanese maple, white fir, quaking aspen, dogwood, cherry, apple, hazelnut.  Mixed, the days are, uncertain of the season. Or maybe uncertainty is the season, from ghoulishly beautiful silver days of striated (nimbus) clouds and stormy popcorn (cumulus) clouds, or sunny cloudless skies wide as the eyes of eternity. A diffidence in days I mimic in my musings.

1. It dived like a fish, but climbed like a dream
2. Whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it's always ourselves we find in the sea
3. (and feeling:that if day  
has to become night  


this is a beautiful way) 
- ee cummings

I've been on an ee cummings frenzy lately. I went to the library and powells, and waltzed my way through as much poetry as I might manage: Frost, Cummings, Wendell Berry, Keats, Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou. I think my next free weekend I'll likely do the same. I'm dragging myself inch by inch into a poetic world, but my self fights every step. I don't interact with writing in an intuitive manner. I'm not an intuitive person, which inhibits my art a great deal. I'm a Bean, not an Ender.  If someone enters the room and leaves, I already cannot remember what they wore, what their hair color was. I'll remember everything they said, and the effects on my mentality of the gestures they made, even when I cannot remember the gestures. I'll remember each analysis of conversational pathing I invented as they spoke, each deft manipulation. I'd remember how often they smiled, but not whether they had braces or not, so intrinsic my disability.
Hence, my weakness with poetry and poetic inventiveness. You must integrate yourself in intuitive leaps and bounds into the world encompassing. You must spirit your mind away, and linger only with the heart sometimes. You must feel beyond the boundaries and fly into the dreams of colors and shapes, the very platonic forms behind reality. Poetry is phantasmagoria, shadow shapes on the wall - what do you see?