free, classless, urbane

Rain falls through the cool air. In the night, when I removed one of my earplugs, I heard the drumbeat of drops falling on a plastic fitting of the downspout system outside.

It was another wakeful night after 2:25. I reckon I need to return to my sometime practice of getting up to read. I might as well use the time to push my project ahead in some small way.

As it was, my mind was busy in the dark, zipping over wide terrain, not all of it negative. My thoughts had an excited, energetic quality, which made me sure that sleep was not to be forthcoming.

When I got up, I made coffee and read a couple of pages more of Livy's History of Rome (a downloaded public-domain version translated by D. Spillan and published in 1879). Then, unsure what notes I wanted to type, I got an intuitive desire to fetch Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism from my bookshelf. I'm working at learning to trust these hunches, so I got the book and flipped to its conclusion, where I had last left off typing a couple of months ago. I was thrilled with what I found waiting for me there.

One thing that struck me was this quotation from Matthew Arnold:

Culture seeks to do away with classes.

Needless to say, this is no Marxist sentiment. Frye followed it with this gloss:

The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane.

I relived my feeling of amazement when I first read that sentence. It could easily form the thesis of a book or a series of books--or the basis of a lifetime of contemplation.

I don't think I can even say much about it. I will only note that I regard Frye, along with Joseph Campbell, as a key inspiration for me in affirming the value of the arts and of artists. Many people value art and artists, but these men have been among the most articulate, for me, in accounting for exactly why art is so important to the human enterprise, and therefore why artists matter.

For much of our lives, we are not too different from chickens in a laboratory, pecking at the green triangle or the yellow star to make corn drop into a trough. Our emancipation from that condition depends, first and foremost, on artists. In that spirit, I press on.

I'd like to do that

After three years of blogging, I'm finding it hard to come up with ideas for posts these days. Does this mean that my blog has played itself out--that I've covered all the topics that naturally relate to it? Or does it mean that more of my life and work has become "unbloggable"--not of a nature that I can or want to share in this public space? Or perhaps that my creativity is drying up?

This morning, for example, I was going to launch on a post based on John Fowles's critique of his own novel The Magus--that he was trying to create an experience "beyond the literary". But I recalled then that I've already written about that. Dang! I don't want to be that person who's always repeated the same joke or the same anecdote.

Well, it still raises an important idea: the experience of literature. What kind of an experience does the literary creator seek to create in his readers--and why?

In my case, anyway, there seems to be a certain kind of "imitative inspiration". I read or see something that I really enjoy, and want to create something that has that kind of effect on others. I remember feeling that way when I first saw the movie The Big Chill in 1983. Watching the movie alone in the theater, as I often did in those days, I was moved by it, and as I walked home in the dark across the Granville Street Bridge I thought, "I'd like to make a movie like that!"

Why did I think that?

It seems there are a number of factors. We often think that when we see great athletes or pop stars or dancers: I wish I could do that. Yes, it's partly perhaps envy: "I wish I had other people looking at me and being impressed". But I think that is a relatively small part. Larger is the desire for the sense of joy and presence that mastery suggests. An athlete at the peak of performance is in the moment: absorbed in the synchronization of mind and body with the challenge at hand. This is almost the definition of fun--don't you think? So: "That looks like so much fun! I want to do it too!"

Another aspect is giving back. Just as the athlete or artist has given you an experience that you value, and for which you feel grateful, you want to be able to share that with others--to be the vector of such experiences. You want to be a joy-bringer, a fun-bringer. You want to enrich the culture, enrich people's lives.

One more factor. These thoughts remain mere daydreams or wishful thinking unless there is some native talent or aptitude within one. Where the desire to imitate is strong, I suspect it is one's own talent calling to one: "Yes, that's right--this way. Come on!"

The achievements of others send us the message that this is possible. We know that the achievement is difficult, but that is where the excitement lies: it's difficult, but if you try hard enough, it's possible. It's presenting the possibility of the thrill of achievement, like reaching the peak of a mountain: hard but exhilarating, and worth it.

All these things are ingredients in the cocktail called "I'd like to do that".

I've written before about how these feelings were triggered in me by, among other things, reading Crime and Punishment when I was 13. To produce such an excellent work of art is a noble goal, a worthwhile aim for one's life. It's very easy to be seduced by lesser or counterfeit or consolation aims, such as making lots of money or becoming envied for some other reason. But these are lesser, and at some level we know it.

Back at it then. The mountain-peak still towers far above me...

pointing-out instructions

In Vajrayana Buddhism there is a particular class of teachings called "pointing-out instructions". These are essentially tips given by a realized teacher to his student so that the student may recognize aspects of his experience for what they are. The student may already be having the experience, but doesn't know he's having it. So the teacher points it out to him. The teacher can't give you the experience, he can only point to it in the hope that you'll recognize it.

In a more mundane sense, I think this is basically what writing does, or is supposed to do.

For why, I wondered, in a world with so much sensual richness and variety, do I spend so much of my time scanning my eyes along a track of ink-marks on paper? As sensory inputs go, this is thin gruel. Imagine how quickly you would grow tired of scanning your eyes along the pages of a book written in a language you don't know. It would get very boring, very quickly. You would become acutely conscious of how little stimulation you're receiving, and seek to increase it, most likely by tossing that book aside and doing something else.

But reading in English is something I can do, happily, for hours each day. Indeed, I feel I'm missing out if I don't read in a day.

It's not purely a matter of entertainment. Activities that are "purely" entertainment--such as, say, video games--are things I usually tire of quickly.

No, for me reading is about learning. But it's not simply learning for its own sake. For to sustain a positive interest in learning something, you have to feel that it's relevant to your experience, your life. You need to feel that the new knowledge is, in the widest sense, practical. The knowledge will enrich your experience of life.

When I read nonfiction, like, say, A History of Technology, I'm learning in a straightforward, traditional way. The knowledge is practical for me because I'm writing historical fiction and need to know those things; and also because it enriches my appreciation of the world around me. Instead of looking at, say, a ship in the harbor and simply taking it for granted, my view of it is enriched by having learned a little about the history of ships--about how they evolved ultimately from the dugout canoe, and how for a long time they bore traces of that origin in their design and construction. Instead of merely sweeping my eyes over the ship, en route to looking at something else, I might actually see it, notice it. It becomes a more vibrant detail of my experience. In a certain sense, it has been pointed out to me.

Fiction makes this process (potentially anyway) more intimate and intense. A stream of artistic prose carries your mind along a track of pure noticing. Just as, in a painting, every square millimeter of the canvas had to be worked by the artist, had to be seen and depicted, to create a vibrant work that is purely and everywhere the expression of the artist's vision, so in a work of writing every word is a contribution to a total, unflagging act of attention by the writer, communicated to the reader. Word by word, the writer draws your attention to things: sensations, thoughts, feelings. One by one, point by point, in a meaningful, purposeful structure. The writer is pointing out aspects of your experience to you.

This is what makes a resort to cliches such a sin in writing: it is a failure of attention, shoving something fake into an intimate experience of genuineness.

Yes, I like having valuable things pointed out to me. So I'll keep on with my reading.

no gum-chewing

The spoken word has power. The written word has, perhaps, even more. In many ways I find this to be an unfathomable mystery.

It's as though humanity reached as eagerly for writing as a child does for speech. I recently saw a wonderful documentary about how infants learn. Of all the sounds that the developing baby hears in the womb--and it hears plenty--the most audible to it is its mother's voice. At birth we're already very familiar with our mother's voice: its pitch, rhythms, and other qualities.

Experiments show too that at birth the brain is a general-language machine, in the sense that a newborn infant can distinguish between sounds in just about any language. A one-month-old baby of English-speaking parents can clearly distinguish between two different sounds in, say, Hindi, that its parents cannot tell apart. Among adults, only Hindi-speakers can hear the difference in sound. The baby, immersed in the language of its household, loses this universal sound-distinguishing ability soon, by about six months, as I recall. Now habituated to its mother tongue, it too can no longer tell the foreign sounds apart.

Babies work ceaselessly to speak, as they do to walk. As extremely social animals we thirst to communicate. The baby's survival depends in part on its ability to communicate its needs, and babies get very frustrated at the barrier they experience in getting their message across. The acquisition of language has the strongest possible motivation behind it.

Language, as a skill, comes under the heading of technology, and it may be our oldest one. The technology called writing is much more recent, dating to maybe 4000 BC or so. But that too was reached for eagerly by cultures who felt the need for it. And now it would surely be the worst sign of disaster for a culture to slide from literacy to illiteracy: the social equivalent of Alzheimer's disease.

In this culture we're inundated with words and we take writing for granted. There seems to be too much of it: marketing "messages", political campaigning, the disposable chatter of text-messaging. If television is, as Steve Allen put it, "chewing-gum for the eyes", then almost all writing today is chewing-gum for the mind.

Almost all. For man does not live by chewing-gum alone, and it was not as chewing-gum that writing was originally created and valued. In the first place, someone must have had something important enough to say that he wanted to record it, so it would not be forgotten--or altered.

Writing reflects the cast of thought behind it. It is an expression of the values and intentions of its creator. All writing is intended to influence others--this blog is so intended. The question is always, influence people how? in what direction? to do what?

Lying next to my keyboard is the latest statement from my phone-service provider, Rogers. Across the top are emblazoned the words, "Welcome to Rogers"--a typical example of automated and meaningless commercial "friendliness". A more honest headline would be: "We rely on your money for our profits, but in most ways you are a nuisance to us, especially if any of our employees has to pay any individual attention to you. Then you become a cost center. Please don't do that." (Indeed, if they put that message on there, I would gain respect for them--something I have very little of right now.)

Those of us who make an art of writing have a special duty not to be false. The deluge of chewing-gum writing is characterized by its manipulativeness, hypocrisy, and frivolity. Writing as art should be none of these things. But most of all it should be truthful: telling it like it is (or was!).

I don't even like real chewing-gum.

money, fame, and their lack

Yesterday, busy with other aspects of my life, I did nothing toward The Mission, not even write a blog-post--not until the afternoon reading period, when I did press forward with The Cults of the Roman Empire. I didn't feel good about this; it truly felt like downtime.

I need to keep nibbling away at this project, and to do this daily in spite of other responsibilities and commitments. It's an old story for writers and other artists: how to survive while also attending to one's (often unremunerative) vocation. In this respect I've been luckier than most, but it's still a balancing act.

James Joyce, when he first ran away to the Continent with Nora Barnacle, taught languages at the Berlitz School and wrote in his free time. He was poor. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, another of my inspiring guides in literature, was tortured by money worries (at least partly exacerbated by gambling), and this no doubt contributed to his passion for writing Crime and Punishment, in which his poverty-stricken protagonist feverishly talks himself into killing for money.

An interesting alternative to this is when the artist enjoys financial success but critical opprobrium. I'm not thinking here of people like Mickey Spillane, who made no bones about the fact that he wrote first of all for money, and didn't have the least interest in what professional critics thought about his work. I'm thinking more of people like the painter Robert Bateman, who was featured in a brief news segment in the last couple of days. Although enjoying great popular success, and collected by people such as Prince Charles and Prince Philip, Bateman has been mainly ignored or denigrated by the academic art world. His meticulously crafted and arresting nature scenes leave them cold.

Unlike other realist painters launching their careers in the 1950s and 1960s, like Alex Colville and Ken Danby, when nonfigurative art was considered the only valid kind, Bateman has not been "rehabilitated". As I think about it, I suspect this is because his art is inaccessible unless you share something of his passion for nature, which most urban art critics and curators probably do not, beyond a certain obligatory lip-service. Most of us city dwellers have never seen a polar bear or a wolf in the wild, and never will. As subjects they are therefore as remote as figures of Greek mythology--more so, since the Greek gods had human form. His paintings of natural scenes are done with the same kind of painstaking reverence as the Buddhist thangkas painted in Tibet--sacred images to hang over shrines. The painting of them is itself a spiritual practice, the resulting picture being actually secondary. It wouldn't surprise me if Bateman's attitude were similar. The pictures say, "Look! Look!" And if we're not amazed and awed as he is, then we're not really looking yet. His meticulous and masterly technique is really only an attendant and servant of his subject, which you might as well call the goddess Gaia.

But Bateman has enjoyed great popular and commercial success--well earned, in my opinion.

So: it's tough to have it all. But what else is new?

the truth: it keeps on hurting

Might as well get writing something. It's part of my morning routine. Finish keying notes from research books (this morning: A Study of History, volume 2, by Arnold J. Toynbee, and The Cults of the Roman Empire by Robert Turcan), then, second mug of coffee drawing to its lukewarm close and 7:30 drawing close, I switch to Mozilla Firefox and pop open the Create screen of this blog.

Although blog-post ideas sometimes come to me during the day, I seldom remember them when I set out to write. If they come to me, they usually do so mid-post, and I find my topic morphing into a subject I didn't plan on when I started typing. Ah well--it's a free medium, something more structured and disciplined than my personal journal, but less disciplined than a column published and paid for by someone else.

I suppose it should convey some sense of what it's like to be a writer--or anyway to be this writer. I've mentioned before my appreciation of a comment by the writer-producer-director James L. Brooks, that the writer is always to some extent alienated from the filmmaking process. I think this alienation is more general. The writer, if he or she is any good, is more or less alienated from society altogether, and must be.

The creative writer's real job is to tell it like it is--like it really is. To the extent that a writer is simply repeating socially accepted platitudes, he is adding nothing of value to society (although he may be cashing decent paychecks).

The obstacles to telling it like it really is are many, and start first of all within oneself. Do you have the guts to tell the truth? But before that, do you have the guts to face the truth? And even before that: do you have the guts to look for the truth?

And maybe before any of those: do you have the presence of mind to recognize that truth is something that may in fact be looked for, and perhaps found, by yourself--instead of being something simply received and accepted from someone else? Are you capable of thinking critically about the platitudes exchanged around the barbecue among the assembled, wine-sipping guests?

My own relationship with truth has not been simple or easy. It's been more of a life-adventure, a dominant theme that in some ways I did not see as such until relatively lately. The forces that would suppress truth are extremely strong, even within oneself. This is a point that Daniel Goleman investigates very well in his psychological study entitled Vital Lies, Simple Truths. At a deep level, we shield ourselves from pain by blotting out reality--truth. The narcotic bliss of the heroin addict is a state we rest in naturally, at a lower level. Pleasure numbs our attentiveness to what's actually going on.

I remember reading a paper by the American Buddhist teacher Reginald Ray, in which he observed that our conscious attention tends to follow the "moving hot-point of pain". We're preoccupied with seeking ways to escape the painful or unpleasant aspects of our current situation. The Buddhist meditation practice consists in the first place of resisting the urge to run away from the present moment, whatever it may hold. The mind, which habitually squirms like a restless baby, temporarily gives up its escapist habit.

The truth hurts. I suppose that sums it up. The true writer has a special duty to be in touch with that pain at the personal as well as the societal level, and to give it expression--to put it into the consciousness of the audience.

Such a person cannot really belong to, or be accommodated by, any of the institutions of society, whether in business, academia, or politics. Whatever is institutional has been, by definition, automated, systematized, and therefore, in this view, narcotized to the pleasure of autopilot and unquestioned assumptions.

In the Gospel of John, 8:32, Jesus states,

And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

This is a profound truth in itself--but even profound truths can be co-opted and perverted. Last night I read in Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis that this very quote is inscribed in the foyer of the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Maybe soon, if it has not been done already, it will be replaced by a more recent quote:

Ignorance is strength.

technical barriers

Rain has returned at last. It falls heavily in the somber twilight. The dark greenery glints in the amber light from the bright lamp on the east wall of our building--a manufactured star in a dull space.

I study my way forward. By that I mean that my progress, such as it is now, is via study. It is as though there are two urges within me: the urge to create, and the urge to know, and that these compete for processor-time in my brain.

The creative urge presses forward, a variant of the mating instinct, seeking the joy of creation: bringing the new into being, the divine prerogative and act, according to Mircea Eliade. But this runs into two (main) barriers: technique and subject (for want of better terms).

The technical barrier is about matching one's ability to the task at hand. Can I do this? A clearer example would be in music. You might be able to play some piano, but if someone drops the sheet-music for "Claire de Lune" in front of you, do you have the chops to play it? In the case of a musical instrument, the issue of one's adequacy is clear and stark. If you don't read music, for example, that settles the question right away.

In writing it's less clear. We all learn to "write" as part of our elementary education. Our very ability to read fiction seems to point to our ability to write it, since, unlike with music, literacy empowers both reading and writing at the same time.

But of course it's not so. I remember being so inspired as a young man by reading James Joyce that I felt I must be able to write as he did. My ability to experience the power of his language must mean that I had it in me to create such language myself. Only gradually did it become clear that I was nowhere near being able to write as Joyce did--that even if I could acquire Joyce's vocabulary and command of grammar and so on, I would still be only at the base of the mountain of his achievement. Even though I had direct experience of the power of his writing, I really didn't have the first idea of how he achieved his effects. It wasn't just that I didn't have access to his toolkit; I didn't even know what was in his toolkit, or where I might find a kit like it.

It's a little like what Robert McKee says about would-be screenwriters. The apparent simplicity of the final document leads them to severely underestimate the difficulty of creating one. In his words, it's like saying, "I like opera; I think I'll write one." Few opera-lovers would make that mistake, but movie-lovers--and book-lovers--make it all the time.

Writing seduces us into thinking we can do it. (Incidentally, this general delusion of universal proficiency in writing helps to depress the value of writers' work.)

I remember getting an oil-painting set when I was about 12 years old, along with a canvas. Yahoo! I loved all kinds of artistic creation, and was a fairly talented drawer. Now I could create paintings--beautiful, detailed works in color. Fantastic!

I put the canvas on the easel, squeezed some colors onto the palette in the kit, and faced my creative task. I visualized a scene--yes, a scene of trees in the full leaf of summer, with light shining through their leaves. Fantastic! I started mixing green with yellow, a dab of blue...

It soon became clear that I had no idea how to paint. How did those guys get their trees to look realistic? How did they manage to avoid creating messy blobs? How did they get any detail in there? How did they prevent all their colors from merging into excremental brown on their palette?

I abandoned my painting, realizing that I had a lot to learn before I could face a canvas with some sense of knowing what I was doing. Having a painting kit didn't really teach me anything about painting, but I did acquire a new respect for skilled painters. I learned how hard it is to do what they do.

Creative writing is not so different. Apart from the inspirational and creative aspects of the art, it's a skill. What makes it especially difficult and confusing is that there does not even seem to be universal consensus on what constitutes really good technique in writing--no equivalent of the painter's criterion of "likeness". I think this is because writing, unlike the other arts, does not work with the senses directly. Rather, the senses of sight and hearing are used to convey an abstract entity to the imagination of the audience. The real medium of writing is concepts--invisible, tucked away in each person's mind, colored with personal associations. The writer's tubes of paint are concepts, and they do their work in the secret recesses of the soul.

So much for technical barriers. I was going to get on to subject, but perhaps that will be tomorrow. Now the writer needs breakfast.

permit me to do my best

In this household, on Saturday nights, Paul's 80s Festival rolls on. We've made it up to 1988. Last Saturday we watched, for the third time, Babette's Feast, a Danish gem based on a story by Karen Blixen.

If you haven't seen the movie (or read the story), it takes place in a windswept Danish fishing village of the 19th century. Two beautiful sisters are daughters of the local Protestant minister, and devote themselves wholeheartedly to his program of piety and good works among the tiny congregation. Chance events in the outer world bring two young men to the village, one a dissipated and conflicted soldier, the other a successful Parisian tenor. Each falls in love with a different one of the daughters, and each is eventually, but gently, driven off by the strength of the girls' attachment to their father and his mission.

Seventeen years later, a Frenchwoman, Babette, appears at their doorstep, a refugee from the violence rocking Paris in 1871, sent to their care by the tenor, Achille Papin, whose heart still aches for the Danish girl whose singing voice had enchanted him long ago. Although they are poor, they take Babette in as their servant. One day Babette discovers that she's won a French lottery, and insists on celebrating her mistresses' late father's birthday with a feast.

I'll say no more about the story, which remains a quiet, unpretentious, one-of-a-kind masterpiece. What struck me most about it on this viewing, though, was the scene in which the older and world-weary Achille Papin composes his letter of introduction for Babette. He reflects ruefully on the fleetingness of fame and fortune, and writes (to the best of my memory): "The artist, the world over, has a single cry: 'Let me be permitted to do my very best!'"

Even as I typed those words now, I found that tears came to my eyes. In this one scene, this one line, an experienced artist has expressed the soul of artistic integrity. (This theme lies close to the heart of the story, for it turns out that Babette too is an artist.) This theme of the artist and his integrity touches me deeply. It forms part of the core of some of my very favorite works, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Sunset Boulevard.

Last night, after Kimmie and I watched a couple of episodes of Fawlty Towers on a DVD from the library, I played the interview with John Cleese that comes as a special feature with the show. In the interview a much older John Cleese reminisced about creating the show (it first aired in 1975) with his then-wife Connie Booth. (Basil Fawlty was based on a real hotelier in Torquay, England, who had accommodated Cleese, Booth, and members of the Monty Python troupe.)

According to Cleese, everyone at the BBC who heard the show concept or read the first script thought it was a dud. They variously regarded it as boring, cliched, and unfunny. It presumably got made because of Cleese's track record and recognition value with Monty Python. When the first season of six episodes ran, it got poor reviews.

But after six more episodes, an audience had found the show and loved it. It became a major worldwide success, and is often regarded as a high point of the sitcom format.

Cleese narrated the early difficulties of the show cheerfully and without rancor, but I felt for him. It's painful to be told by supposedly knowledgeable people that your work is no good. At that point you're driven back on yourself, on your faith in the material itself--on the tenacity of your own convictions about what constitutes quality. When they wrote the show, they thought it was funny. The world agreed with them. The only people offside were the "professionals" in charge of allowing the created work to be produced.

The reason I bring it up is because of one quote from Cleese. He said that he had once asked a film distributor what was the toughest kind of show to sell. The distributor replied: "Anything original."

There you have it. Originality, toxic to the salesman, is the life's blood of the true artist. The true artist wants to do his very best, to be permitted to do his very best. His heart will never be happy with mere familiarity and imitation.

the lion's roar

According to Joseph Campbell, religion begins with art. Before there is any such thing as a church, or a priest, or a prophet, there is the poet: the sensitive soul to whom comes inspiration, a vision, an experience, and the capacity to give it expression.

If the poet's words evoke a similar inspiration in others, then there is the possibility of the spread of a spiritual idea. Depending on how powerful and infectious this original idea is, there is the possibility of institutionalization: the development of a social structure based on the idea. A sect is born, which may possibly, depending on many factors, grow into a religion.

One of the points that Campbell makes in his Masks of God tetralogy is that in our modern age the traditional institutional religions have lost their inspiring force. In the Christian West this loss of inspiration was already happening in the 12th century, just when the cities of Europe were throwing up cathedrals to exalt the God that everyone said they believed in. But the most sensitive souls of the time, the poets, recognized in their own hearts that the forms of Christianity, then more than 1,000 years old, had ceased to inspire educated people. The rites had become a mere routine, and the pulse of genuine life and meaning had to be sought elsewhere.

Where? God was dead. Where was the living water of spiritual value to be found?

This sought-for spiritual life, according to Campbell, became symbolized as the Holy Grail, and the new spiritual story that could excite modern imaginations and rouse modern hearts was the quest. This vision was articulated not by priests, schooled in an already institutionalized faith, and not by prophets, proclaiming the words of a god already known, but by poets, sensitive to their own experience and their own genuine perception of value. They were not professing a creed, not repeating words given them by others; they wrote about what they truly thought and felt. They looked into their own hearts and reported back.

In this way a work of art can turn into a rite: a structured experience that leads one to particular feelings and insights. The architecture and services of a church are intended to have this effect. Originally it certainly does (or the church could not survive), but over time it becomes stale. Endless repetition of the same experience loses its living force, and boredom sets in. It becomes mere duty, habit.

Speaking for myself, I can say that certain works of art--especially novels--have acted as rites for me. The single most powerful instance was reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce when I was 18. I did not understand conceptually what I was going through while reading it, but it was emotionally powerful and undeniable. I experienced the power of language, of poetry, to reconfigure my soul. As with any effective rite, it changed me; I was a changed person, a deeper person, on finishing that book. It initiated me into the sensibility of a poet, and passed to me some of the mental and emotional tools I would need if I were to take up that calling. It showed me how to open to the creative life, how to be an artist.

In Vajrayana Buddhism there is an expression: "The lion's roar is fearless". The lion's roar is the truth. A tyrant can kill 10 million people but cannot scratch the truth. Each of us can die and will, but the truth cannot be killed. Fear of death, though, has us cringing from the truth--hiding, concealing, denying, avoiding. The artist, when he or she is true to his or her vocation, embraces the truth as he or she finds it--and proclaims it, whatever the consequences. That is the lion's roar, sending a shock and a shiver of alertness through all the other creatures within earshot.

This vocation is supremely worth following, wherever it leads. Like any sacred thing, it must be kept pure. It is a desecration to use it for petty motives of social or financial gain. That is the artist's equivalent of simony.

Right. On with it.

politics and the artist

One point I wanted to reach yesterday was to raise the question of what the artist's relationship should be to politics.

It's a complex question. My first instinct is that an artist should not really come out as supporting any particular political view or party. For one thing, as well put by my late brother-in-law the artist Fred Douglas, "I don't see why other people should be interested in my opinions." (Although Freddie was not shy about spouting his opinions at length if you actually happened to be in his company--but still.)

To me, a liberal or a conservative, or a communist or a fascist, artist, seems like a limited thing--sort of the way I feel about, say, Christian rockers. In a sense, you're selling someone else's message, and to that extent are bankrupt as an artist.

At the same time, an artist may have, as anyone may have, political views. Should one then conceal them? Isn't this just mystification--the self-conscious attempt to generate a mystique around oneself, to keep people guessing?

On the other hand, the artist is also an economic entity, someone trying to earn a living. Should one risk alienating potential buyers by exposing one's political views? I think about the Dixie Chicks, and how they landed in hot water with many erstwhile fans when Natalie Maines made critical remarks about George Bush. At the time I thought this was foolish, since the Dixie Chicks' work has nothing to do with politics; the outburst was a taking advantage of the fame of the Dixie Chicks, and the fact that the opinions would get a lot of publicity. Natalie Maines found herself with a soapbox, so she used it. But what, if anything, was the benefit to anyone?

Then again, one doesn't want to be too much of a slut. I recall Michael Jordan's infamous comment that "Republicans buy sneakers too"--invoking his role as shoe salesman to beg off helping a Democrat in North Carolina defeat the notorious Republican incumbent Jesse Helms in 1990. Of course, Michael Jordan is not an artist--but you get the idea.

Then there's the question of what is meant by the very term politics. I remember my late friend and mentor Harvey Burt distinguishing between politics in general and partisan politics--the politics of specific parties. Politics in general has to do with relationships of power between people, and therefore, one would think, is naturally open for comment by artists. And one might naturally incline toward one political or social philosophy over another. Harvey also told me, for example, that Malcolm Lowry, his friend and neighbor in the squatters' camp at Dollarton, was very idealistic about the squatter's life, and romanticized it as being a kind of Thoreau-esque statement by the Common Man against the evil and dehumanizing forces of Civilization. The squatters were the oppressed, decent, principled proletarians up against the faceless State.

As for me, I have for many years now seen partisan politics as being inherently puerile, even as I see the necessity, or anyway the inevitability, of political parties. The public statements of most politicians are embarrassing, flatulent banalities, when they are not outright prevarications or lies. If this behavior wins votes, then that fact reflects on us, the electorate: as a group we are credulous sheep, and therefore must expect to be treated as such. It's depressing to think that a candid, honest politician would be punished at the ballot box. In general, I am suspicious of artists who take partisan politics too seriously.

Can I draw any conclusions? In the last analysis, one should not sacrifice one's integrity for any reason. If you have strong political beliefs, then so be it. But I think artists should tread carefully. Natalie Maines's exclamation that she was ashamed that George Bush was from Texas was, in my view, a pointless gesture. Sincere, no doubt--but empty of content. In effect, she was using her personal stardom as a vehicle for selling dislike of the president. I support her freedom to do so, but I believe that she did no good for herself as an artist, or for society.

That said, I hold musicians and actors to a lower standard in this respect than I do writers. Mostly they're performing other people's work--other people's writing. When the performer is also a songwriter, as the Dixie Chicks are, this still doesn't make too much difference unless they deal with political material in their created work--which they usually don't. Musicians like Billy Bragg, who pump out paeans to social activism and such, I tend to lump in with Christian rockers. They're marketers of ideas conceived by others.

I suppose my advice to myself is: if you have a political statement to make, be sure it's calm, cogent, well supported, objective, mature, and wise.

Is that asking so much?

know the rules

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading Aristotle's Poetics. I found the book to be brief, bracing, even exciting. It made me recognize again how thirsty I am for instruction on how to pursue my art--so thirsty that I don't even realize how thirsty I am until I find a drink of cool water.

I have an arrogant and wayward streak with respect to my own abilities. This might possibly, partly, be necessary in order to develop and hold conviction in one's own vision and one's own execution of it. But such a person is also difficult to teach, and generally has to learn things the hard way.

In my own defence, such teaching as I received with respect to my art, creative writing, has been almost entirely informal and outside any institutional setting. By the time I had become a teenager in the 1970s, there had developed an ethos of "do your own thing" in schools, at least as regards creative expression. True, some technique would be taught in art or in writing, and of course you can't demand too much in this respect from public-school teachers; it's not their job to train "professional" artists for their careers.

And yet there was also a wider, cultural process at work. A couple of years ago I talked with an artist who, along with her husband-to-be, had studied at what was then the Vancouver School of Art. She told me that the school had been founded in 1925 by artists who had been trained in Scotland, and who believed in passing on a thorough training in the techniques of the Old Masters--techniques which the teachers were in a position to teach.

By the time that the art school changed its name in 1978 to the Emily Carr College of Art, the outlook was much changed. She said that the school had gotten away from teaching technique, and that students were encouraged to explore their creative urges in any way they saw fit. As a result, artists were emerging who had had only a piecemeal introduction to techniques, often self-taught. I recall too my late brother-in-law Freddie, who had been professor of art at the University of Victoria for many years, telling me that oil painting and other techniques could be learned fairly quickly from a book. He believed in jumping in with what you wanted to do, and gaining technique as you went, learning it or developing it yourself. Indeed, this had seemed to work for him.

There has been a pervasive sense that telling people, even raw newbies, how to do things crimps their creativity. Robert McKee, in his book Story, takes some pains to explain why this viewpoint is wrong and detrimental, which suggests that he has faced this criticism or objection many times. Telling people how to do things is not the same as telling them what to do. In the creative arts as well as in other things, the old adage applies: Know the rules before you break them.

My adolescent self would have bristled and fought against being told how to do things. I would have rebelled, refused, probably mainly simply not done them. I would have been a pain in the butt and might not have learned much. But if I had received that kind of technical instruction from someone who knew what they were doing, I would at least have perceived that there were proven methods, even if I was rejecting them. Later, I would see that I had fouled myself up to the extent that I had not paid attention.

As things stand, I don't think I missed much in the way of creative education. If I had spent thousands in tuition on a creative-writing degree, I probably would have emerged from the program knowing not much more than when I entered it how to execute an effective creative work. I would have read a lot of stories and novels, and discussed them with my classmates. In screenwriting I would have been trained in technique, and possibly also in playwriting. But fiction? The universities were already heading into the wilderness of postmodernism and Marxism, where, as far as I know, they're still lost.

Some of my best instruction was informal and outside the system. A big influence was the late Harvey Burt, who had been a writer and teacher of writing for most of his adult life. When I was a teenager he gave me my first "how to" book on creative writing: The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, a text on how to write a stageplay, published in 1946. I was thrilled with the book, and got my first experience of drinking cool water to ease my thirst for knowledge of the craft.

I've still got the book. I just pulled it out, and flipped it open. At some point, on some rereading, probably around 1984, I highlighted a few phrases in it. Here's one that I opened it to:

What is a weak character? One who, for any reason, cannot make a decision.

Good stuff. It strikes me even now, today, as I read it again. (Does this mean Hamlet is a weak character?)

Here was a book that told you what kinds of effects you should be striving for as a dramatic writer, and how to achieve them. Fantastic! I downed it eagerly, and started making my first fumbling attempts at organizing my creative work around specific intentions, trying to give them structure.

I'm still at it. Aristotle's Poetics is another excellent "how to" text, not written as such, but maybe all the better for being the work not of an artist but of a thinker--one who identified more with the audience than with the creator. My copy is now liberally highlighted.

art imitates life

I'm reading--indeed, am close to finishing--Aristotle's Poetics. The text runs only 46 pages, plus notes. In that brief space he says a great deal.

The text, or the portion of it that has survived, is devoted mainly to tragic drama, which Aristotle regarded as the highest form of poetry yet devised. But despite the fact that his book is about poetry performed as live musical theater--which was how it was staged in ancient Greece--Aristotle's work is still highly relevant to the storyteller of today. This is because, among all the aspects of tragedy, the one he regarded as most important, and making the largest contribution to the power of a work, was the choice and arrangement of the events depicted: in other words, plotting.

As far as Aristotle was concerned, the tragic poet's number-one concern was storytelling. And while the Poetics was not intended as a handbook for writers, but rather as an analysis of an art form to help in understanding and assessing the quality of specific works, nonetheless it is of great potential benefit to crafters of story. Indeed, Aristotle's Poetics is, I see now, the main source of ideas for Robert McKee's teachings on storytelling. McKee's work is largely a matter of explaining, expanding, illustrating, and adapting Aristotle's ideas to the modern storytelling medium of filmmaking.

The ideas are excellent, and still have that quality of freshness and immediacy that all great and original thinking has, regardless of the passage of time (Aristotle died in 322 BC).

Aristotle starts off by saying that tragic poetry, like all other poetry (and indeed all other types of art), is an imitation--that is, an imitation of things in life. Malcolm chose the word imitation to translate the Greek mimesis, rather than the usual representation, because he feels that this is closer to the sense intended by Aristotle. Whereas a representation of something may not look like the thing represented--a dot on a map might represent a city, for example--an imitation is something intended to resemble the thing imitated. The aesthetic experience is the recognition of the thing imitated in the artist's imitation of it: the better the imitation or depiction, the greater the pleasure experienced by the viewer or audience.

I sense that this distinction is important. I think of how "modern" art arose in the 19th century, leading on to nonfigurative art by the turn of the 20th, when, in painting, not only imitation but also representation went out the window. With Abstract Expressionism, the notion that a painter was trying to depict some external visual object was abandoned; the aim was to "express" something within--to project outward the contents of the painter's psyche, perhaps the collective unconscious.

I believe that in fiction-writing and drama, the turn away from story was part of this same trend toward nonfigurative art. Artists and writers wanted to free themselves from the shackles of tradition and do things that were utterly new.

The art may have been unshackled and new, but how effective was it? Through study I have learned how to appreciate and enjoy some nonfigurative art. Once you've learned some of the underlying ideas, there is a certain mind-expanding pleasure in regarding the cubist works of Picasso, for instance. But I can't say that a cubist work like Picasso's "Still Life with Carafe and Candlestick" (1909) has ever struck me with the immediate, visceral sense of power and enjoyment that the painters of the animals on the cave-walls at Lascaux and Altamira were able to generate across a gulf of 30,000 years. And I feel sure that if Picasso's work survives 30,000 years, any proper enjoyment of it will require a guidebook--so we'd better hope one of those survives along with it.

Aristotle is saying that art imitates life, and that in viewing or appreciating such art, we experience the pleasure of recognition, which is at bottom the pleasure of learning. This does not mean that art is or should be didactic, but that in recognizing our world in the forms created by an artist, we necessarily learn about it. There's no need for art to preach; it's enough for it to exist.

So then: the function of art is to imitate life, and the writer's primary tool for such imitation is the sequence of the events of life: story. The difference between a good, well-told story and a feeble, poorly told one is the difference between a successful work of art and a failed one.

the work behind the work

In the long march to the beginning of this project (the novel series I'm calling The Age of Pisces) I spent some time in the 1990s trying to develop my ideas, my beliefs, in the form of pencil notes on a long roll of paper I got, I think, at Ikea. I used to clear off the pine coffee-table (also from Ikea), set the roll on the floor next to it, and unroll the paper across the tabletop. I would then kneel at the table with my pencil, working on my notes. My cowriter Warren dubbed this thing The Scroll, and I still have it: now a bit yellowed with age, it stands against the blue wall of my office next to my wicker wastebasket.

Unrolling the first few inches on the table next to me, I see that I labeled it "Literary Mandala", and it's dated 4 Nov 1994. The idea of the scroll was to set down all my various thoughts and ideas in different areas, and then link them with lines and arrows. I used sketches and diagrams as well--anything that might express my thoughts.

Under the title of the scroll I wrote the heading "Factors or Realities to Relate", and made a bulleted list down the end of the paper (about 24 inches high--the whole roll was maybe, I don't know, 50 feet long):

• God, Satan, angelology/demonology
• mathematical-geometric dimensions
• "science": physics
• prophetic history: the Great Pyramid & the messianic mission
• the gyre of astrological history: the precessional ages of man
• extraterrestrial species & ufology
• gnosis: salvation thru knowledge (Gnosticism)
• Hermetism (alchemy): keys to gnosis?
• Vajrayana: ultimate reality & enlightened society
• spiritualism & channeling
• scientific revolution; paradigm-shift
• personal mythologies, projected mandalas
• Tarot journey
• the Holy Grail
• sacred alphabets
  

Then I listed a few book titles, and then started writing notes along the paper, mainly in printed majuscules, often putting them in boxes. As I got a few feet in, it started to look a bit like a flowchart.

Out of curiosity, I've just unrolled the scroll on my office floor. I was surprised to discover that I actually made it most of the way through the roll of paper, maybe 40 feet in, all marked up with small penciled notes. Toward the end there is more white space around the notes, and I mainly was drawing radiant diagrams of central concepts such as "the Holy Grail" surrounded by associated ideas (things like "coincidence of opposites", "symbol of supreme value", "transcendence of any single system of symbolism or imagery"), all connected by wandering strands of pencil-lead.

The scroll was a crude paper website. After I got a Windows computer in 1998 (jeepers, the same one I'm using right now) I got myself Microsoft FrontPage so I could build websites for my work. I made some progress with that, but gave up on it when I felt that I was spending too much time learning how to build and maintain the web and not enough actually thinking through my ideas, especially since the web was only for my personal use and not intended to be made public. I could progress faster, I thought, just by keeping my notes in Word documents on the PC.

"Faster" is a relative term, of course. Here it is AD 2007. But I do believe there is something special, and especially intriguing and authoritative, about works of art that have a great depth of preparation underlying them. Da Vinci's "Last Supper" was not something he just sketched out quickly; it was the product of much preliminary work and reflection.

I remember too watching a TV documentary about Canadian painters, back in the 1970s. I'm pretty sure the painter in question was Christopher Pratt. He was working on a painting of a boy and a girl picking apples in an orchard. He did many sketches, and came to represent the scene as having the boy putting red apples into the girl's skirt, the hem of which she held up to form a carrying-bag. The painter narrated the progression of his work. Eventually he came to feel that the boy was redundant. The finished picture showed the girl, facing the viewer, holding up the hem of her skirt, which was full of red apples--an intimate moment of sharing.

"Now the viewer is the boy," said the painter.

I found this to be striking and moving, and it deepened my appreciation of pictures and how a good artist works. The originality and specificness of the finished picture derives from the developmental process the artist went through to arrive at it; the picture is rich with its own history. It's fully evolved and complete.

A work that is thoroughly prepared always has more polish and authority than one that isn't. It also has more originality and personality. These are qualities that I'm seeking for my own work, and I'm willing to devote the time--a great deal of it--to do the preliminary work.