the artist's wandering mind

I'm a distractable person. I'm not sure whether I'm more or less so than other people, but my attention seems to wander.

I venture to guess that most people would say I'm the opposite: I have good apparent powers of concentration. If I recall correctly, in graphoanalysis concentration shows in the smallness of one's handwriting; my handwriting--what little of that there is nowadays--is fairly small, and has definitely grown smaller over the decades of my adulthood.

So what do I mean. I do tend to have an active or hyperactive mind. In my meditation career I had to get used to the busyness of my mind. In general one does not seek to control mental busyness in meditation, since efforts to do so tend only to produce more thoughts, more mental churning. It's like telling someone to relax: it tends to make them more tense. In meditation, the main way to settle the busyness of one's mind is simply to meditate more. This is one of the major benefits of a longer, more intensive meditation program or retreat: one meditates much more than usual, and the mind gradually exhausts itself. You get bored with your thoughts and kind of give up. The present moment becomes much more interesting and stimulating, and you become more anchored in it. I think of a crystal paperweight: the mind becomes clear but also heavy, in the sense that it isn't easily pushed around or jostled away from where it is. It seems to sit down, just as your body sits down on a meditation cushion.

But if you don't have six or more hours a day to meditate, there are some tricks that can be used to tone down the hyperactivity of a restless mind in meditation. One such trick is to think about your own death and the deaths of your loved ones. These thoughts, if entertained seriously, tend to have a depressing effect on the mind, which is the same as saying that its busyness is dampened. When I was a monk at Gampo Abbey, even though there was a fair amount of meditation every day, I found there was not enough sustained meditation to really get my mind to sit down, so I found myself resorting to some of those tricks, with mixed results, I found.

While I could never prove it, I believe that I am more inclined than most people to "dial out" of reality and entertain myself with my own thoughts and fantasies. Indeed, this may be one reason that I am a creator: I have a vivid imagination, and I use it. Or rather, mostly I do not use it, in the sense of harnessing it to productive purpose; but rather I kind of hang out in it. I get bored with what's going on around me, and vanish into my own thoughts. I do this with an ease that I myself find sometimes distressing (because I like to think of myself as a well socialized person). It can also be irritating for others, since they sometimes--not all that often, to be sure--might ask for my agreement or opinion on something, and I have to admit, "Sorry--I wasn't listening."

As I say, I suspect I am more "tuned out" than most people. Most of the time it doesn't seem to make too much difference. Indeed, I'm alone much of each day, so I don't really need to be socialized too much better than Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away. (I don't have a volleyball to talk to, but there are some cushions, glassware, and in fact any inanimate object that can do in a pinch.) But I worry that my distracted state puts me at a disadvantage with regard to my writing projects. The very imagination that makes creative writing possible also pulls me away from the task at hand, and has me chasing other rainbows all the time. Indeed, as evidence I can point to a host of abandoned projects lying rusting at the side of the road of my life. I start things, then, in the slowness of my execution, lose interest in them and start something else. This is entertaining and stimulating for me, but fatal careerwise.

When I was in my early 20s, working as a janitor at Vancouver General Hospital, before I ever took up meditation, and knew I had a reputation as a "thinker" because I often seemed to be absorbed in my own thoughts, I became interested in what I was thinking about. I recall sitting in a chair in the ultrasound department one evening, making a mental inventory of the kinds of things that occupied my mind. In truth, I found that "thinking", in the sense of working through problems and so forth, played a very small part. Mostly I was in reveries: memories or fantasies of one kind or another. Mainly I was just trying to enjoy my mind.

The artist's task is to leave off enjoying his own mind--at least for a little--and to get its products out there for other people to enjoy. Can I stay on track enough to achieve that?

a drop in the thinking bucket

After a few days of poking my nose into another writer's work, maybe it's time to get back to talking, at least tangentially, about my own.

But it seems there's not much to say. The process of writing, considered as a physical act, is unexciting. In some sense writing seems to be the least possible physical result of mental effort--well, perhaps not quite, for what about meditation? The image that springs to mind is this: meditation is like sharpening the knife; writing is like making the smallest possible cuts with the knife.

I'm still making my way through James's The Principles of Psychology, volume 2. He stresses that the natural result of every thought whatsoever is an action. Every thought leads naturally to action, and is prevented from becoming an action only by one or more countervailing thoughts. "Action" might be something physiologically subtle, such as quickened breathing or an elevated heart rate, but every thought will out in the body. There are no "dead-end" nerves; the sensory nerves lead into the brain and the motor nerves lead out; there is no insulating barrier between them. Stuff goes in, bounces around, and comes out; it does not simply vanish.

Hence, in simpler cultures, feelings of elation or joy erupt spontaneously as laughing, singing, and dancing. Feelings of sorrow erupt as groaning and pounding the ground. According to this view, our "civilized" cultures have more taboos on expression--countervailing thoughts--that block the spontaneous expression of thought and feeling, and no doubt (this is what I surmise) put us into a state of physical tension, like a strung bow.

Personally, I think he's on to something. It makes complete intuitive sense. And it occurs to me that even seemingly passive, purely aesthetic feelings, such as looking at a beautiful nature scene, push the body toward action--such as trying to express one's feeling of beauty in a work of art. I'm familiar with this feeling: there is a sense of being filled by an experience, energized by it, and an impulse to express it creatively. The energy comes in, is cycled through the system, and reemerges to join the world again.

Back to meditation: a practice in which one does not physically do anything, except maintain a particular posture. The effort of meditation is an effort of attention: bringing the mind repeatedly into the here and now. I've read that there are characteristic physical changes that come over the meditator: a slightly elevated heart rate and blood pressure. These things say "exertion", do they not?

And writing this blog-post? Here my thoughts and feelings, such as they are, find organized expression. How often have I sat thinking, when the output was merely a few muscle-clenchings, finger-drummings, impatient sighs, and the like? The energy of thought dissipating randomly, like heat from a running engine. So I have many times told myself: "If you're going to think, write it down."

Thus thousands of pages of journals and notes--and now blog-posts--have been generated in my life. No doubt a drop in the thinking bucket, but better than nothing.

be honest

While there is no one right way to write something, there are endless wrong ways. I've never taken a creative-writing course, although I have given tips to others on writing--those who have asked for them.

I'm trying to think whether there is a general statement for writing that is comparable to the general statement for visual artists: "draw what you see". I remember giving this tip to Kimmie years ago when she was drawing something on the dining-table up at my sister's place. She asked me how to draw better, and I gave her the "draw what you see, not what you think" tip. It was a revelation to her. She was amazed at the power of this simple advice; it changed the way she saw, and immediately and dramatically improved the way she drew.

Is there something similar for writing? The first thing that springs to mind is this: "be honest".

This advice, like the drawing advice, is deceptively simple. And, like the drawing advice, it calls first of all for a change in attitude. It has nothing to do with technique--with how to execute the work. It has to do with the way of perceiving what it is you're trying to portray. The painter detaches from his thoughts, his beliefs about what he is depicting, and shifts his attention to the raw input of his eyes. My stapler sits next to my keyboard. If I were drawing it, I would pretend I had never seen one before, and did not know what it was used for. It is mere colors and shapes on my retina, which I translate to paper.

Writing is perhaps more subtle, in that the writer's medium itself is conceptual: words. Nonetheless, the best writers are those who are able to detach from their preconceived beliefs about what they're depicting and see them with fresh eyes, shrugging off the conceptual influences of morality, religion, convention, and "common sense" to describe the thing as it is in itself. This, in my view, is a much more difficult trick to achieve than the painter's ability to set aside his conceptions when looking at an object.

The other day I had an unsettling taste of the flavor of honesty in reading this (compressed) extract in James's Principles of Psychology, volume 2, from the chapter on "Instinct":

As Rochefoucauld says, there is something in the misfortunes of our very friends that does not altogether displease us; and an apostle of peace will feel a certain vicious thrill run through him, and enjoy a vicarious brutality, as he turns to the column in his newspaper at the top of which "Shocking Atrocity" stands printed. See how the crowd flocks round a street-brawl! Consider the enormous annual sale of revolvers to persons, not one in a thousand of whom has any serious intention of using them, but of whom each one has his carnivorous self-consciousness agreeably tickled by the notion that he will be rather a dangerous customer to meet. See the ignoble crew that escorts every great pugilist--parasites who feel as if the glory of his brutality rubbed off upon them. Let a curtain be drawn over the ferocity with which otherwise fairly decent men may be animated, when (at the sacking of a town, for instance), the victory long delayed, the sudden freedom of rapine and of lust, the contagion of a crowd, and the impulse to imitate and outdo, all combine to swell the blind drunkenness of the killing-instinct. Our ferocity is blind, and can only be explained from below.

When I read that first observation by Rochefoucauld, I had an unpleasant sensation of recognizing something in myself. Rochefoucauld was reporting--writing--something about himself as well, of course: something unpleasant but true. He was being honest.

Honesty compels both the attention and the assent of the reader. The mind thirsts for truth, even as we spend so much of our time trying, for various reasons, conscious and unconscious, to bury the truth and substitute something more pleasant. But just as only water, in the last analysis, answers the body's thirst, only truth answers the mind's.

So the writer's dictum, "be honest", is not so easy. It means going within; it means not accepting the pat answers and slogans that we usually live by. It means looking to find out what one really thinks and feels, and then calling a spade a spade.

What one really thinks and feels: it sounds easy. It should be easy, since this is the stuff of our most immediate experience. But it's hard--very hard. For even the visual artist's approach of shaking of visual conventions is harder than it sounds--many people can't seem to do it at all. They don't understand what it means to look at, say, a table and not regard it as a table, but only as colors and shapes. This is why artists, for training, sometimes deliberately get away from a conventional point of view. One of the best likenesses in drawing I've ever achieved was when I drew Kimmie's sleeping face from a position where it was upside-down to me. Lacking any conceptual guidance, I was forced to draw only what I saw, as exactly as I could. While I drew I had no idea how accurate my likeness was; I was puzzled and shocked by some of the line-combinations I found. Not till I was finished and rotated the sketchbook could I see how I'd done, and I was very surprised and pleased with the result. My sleeping wife! Amazing!

I'm not aware of any comparable mental trick that a writer can use to see things differently. But a writer, to be any good, to have a chance of writing something that might stay in print, must see things differently. For, just as what we conventionally call a table is just colors and shapes on our retina, so what we conventionally call an event is made up of components--thoughts, feelings, intentions. We may not acknowledge these to ourselves most of the time, but we recognize them when they are shown to us, reported to us by a writer who has acknowledged them.

Thus the writer, the artist, as a denizen of this usually ignored world, is an alien, even as he is more intimate with our inner selves and inner lives than anyone else.

searching for beliefs

I'm searching for my beliefs.

It has been a lifelong search, and it's not over. In fact, at this stage, it seems quite possible, even likely, that it will never be over. The awareness that my beliefs are provisional and lack a solid foundation has held me back, I think, in my worldly life, my career.

To my great satisfaction and delight, William James tackles the question of belief head-on (the way he tackles everything) in a chapter of its own in volume 2 of his Principles of Psychology, chapter 21, "The Perception of Reality". He opens the chapter thus:

Everyone knows the difference between imagining a thing and believing in its existence, between supposing a proposition and acquiescing in its truth. In the case of acquiescence or belief, the object is not only apprehended by the mind, but is held to have reality. Belief is thus the mental state or function of cognizing reality.

He goes on to say:

In its inner nature, belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else.

He says that belief resembles consent or willingness. Then:

What characterizes both consent and belief is the cessation of theoretic agitation, through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is the case, motor effects are apt to follow. Hence the states of consent and belief, characterized by repose on the purely intellectual side, are both intimately connected with subsequent practical activity.

There it is, something that I have long maintained myself: beliefs are the mental states that specifically guide our actions. Once again I find in William James support for my own thoughts, arrived at via different means in a different world.

It follows that having strong, stable, and harmonious beliefs will make one vigorous and consistent in one's actions, which clearly will lead on to success in one's aims, all other things being equal.

James would go on to develop this idea further into the philosophy of pragmatism, which holds that truth itself has no meaning apart from its practical consequences--a view that I myself have pretty much come to hold, again via an independent route.

Beliefs have different intensities, or levels of conviction. James puts it thus:

The quality of arousing emotion, of moving us or inciting us to action, has as much to do with our belief in an object's reality as the quality of giving pleasure or pain. Generally, the more a conceived object excites us, the more reality it has. The same object excites us differently at different times.

At the high end of the scale is the feeling of certainty--true conviction. On this James quotes Emerson:

Our faith comes in moments,...yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

And this, to me, fascinating observation by Bagehot, the 19th-century British journalist and founding brain of The Economist newspaper:

Probably conviction will be found to be one of the intensest of human emotions, and one most closely connected with the bodily state,...accompanied or preceded by the sensation that Scott makes his seer describe as the prelude of a prophecy:

At length the fatal answer came,
In characters of living flame--
Not spoke in words, nor blazed in scroll,
But borne and branded on my soul.

A hot flash seems to burn across the brain. Men in these intense states of mind have altered all history, changed for better or worse the creed of myriads, and desolated or redeemed provinces or ages. Nor is this intensity a sign of truth, for it is precisely strongest in those points in which men differ most from each other.

The intensity of conviction is not a sign of truth. But it will get us deliberately flying aircraft into high-rises and invading Middle Eastern countries.

What is this thing?

Like everyone else, I take actions through the day. Right now I'm writing this blog-post. That means I have certain specific beliefs, in James's view, that are propelling me to this action. I believe that writing this post is furthering my interests or aims somehow. His point would be that those beliefs, whatever they are, are already there; they already exist and are active, whether I'm aware of them or not.

But I would like to be aware of them. I would like to bring my beliefs into the realm of my conscious understanding--to consent to them consciously and willingly, rather than unconsciously. I don't want to be the passive victim of a useless, destructive certainty. I don't want to hijack airplanes or invade countries.

I'd just like to know what the hell I'm doing, and why.

ego is my hobby

Stephen King said that he wrote 365 days a year, including Christmas and his birthday, because that's what he liked to do. Book after book was written in this way, seven days a week, many thousands of words a day. Hence his famous prolificness.

I write fewer than 365 days a year--but not that many fewer. It's probably about 350. (Of course my output per day is also much less. Sigh.) But I'm not always pushing a single project forward. Continuous, unremitting work on a single thing I find exhausting and eventually boring and confining; I need a break, I need to let my mind loose on other things.

So on weekends I turn my mind away from The Mission and focus elsewhere. Right now I'm back to my musings on identity, writing notes toward what may, I hope, eventually become a nonfiction book project of its own. On Saturday and Sunday I sat here keying notes in much the same way I do with The Mission, including notes from research books. This project has its own folders set up on my PC, just as the novel does.

It's a hobby project, undertaken for love and interest, in exactly the same way that Kimmie makes a hobby right now of creating haute couture costumes for Barbie dolls up in her sewing room. Purely for love, not for any monetary or pragmatic reason, she diligently puts together patterns with carefully chosen fabrics, and makes little accessories from scratch such as hats with plumes and little handbags with special details; she even sews up Barbie-scale lace panties from sections of stretch ribbon. Over this past weekend she spent hours preparing an inventory of all her work on it to date, and counted 73 outfits already made, many of which are modeled on the three dozen or so dolls she has ranged in tiers atop her white shelving unit. Many of the costumes are Victorian and antebellum gowns--her favorite period. Like everything that's done for love, they're all excellent.

I'm trying to work for love as much as possible (I'm certainly not working for money!). And certainly my weekend hobby is done for love. I'm driven by pure curiosity and a desire to understand.

And what am I coming up with? I'm working toward a unified belief system for myself. I'd like to find out what I believe--what I think is true, what my real values are. In various problems and conflicts around the world, from the Iraq War to global warming to mass violence and starvation in Darfur, I think about what the solutions might be--not merely band-aids but solutions to the underlying problems. This means identifying the underlying problems correctly, just as a doctor can't treat a disease without diagnosing it properly first. What are the root causes of these problems?

The Buddha identified the root cause of all suffering as ego fixation: clinging to the notion that one's self is a real, existent thing that needs continual care and feeding. His insight was that this universal conviction is in fact a mistake, and that if one can gain clear insight into this mistake, everything changes--for the better. Specifically, your suffering is at a complete and permanent end, and you become a truly useful person to the rest of humanity.

Sounds good. I spent 15 years fairly intensively studying and practicing those teachings; they form the great bulk of my spiritual education, such as it is. I haven't achieved the enlightenment of the Buddha--far from it--and I came to see that that eventuality is probably some way off, not in this lifetime, not for me. But in all those years I made an examination of ego from the Buddhist perspective, for Buddhism is, in a certain sense, an intensive effort to understand ego through study and introspection. Now I've changed my approach, and am looking at it from a "Western" perspective--a philosophical and scientific approach, you might say.

What is it that makes us hate? What is it that has us identifying with an in-group and seeing ourselves in antagonistic competition with other perceived groups? Why are "Arabs" slaughtering "blacks" in Darfur? What, at bottom, do Shiites have against Sunnis, and vice versa? Why do I want more than my share?

These are all questions relating to ego, which I have rebranded as "identity" for my purposes. And that, friends, is my hobby.

innies and outies

Most Sundays Kimmie and I watch the CBC current-affairs show Sunday Night with Evan Solomon and Carole MacNeil. Last night they had a segment on introverts and extroverts. Apparently 75% of people are extroverts, 25% introverts. Two (introverted) American professors talked about the problems of being an introvert in an extroverted world.

I watched with interest, because I've quietly (in my introverted way) followed the issue since I first seriously encountered when reading Jung, who, I believe, invented the terms, or at least developed the concepts into an important part of his psychological theory. It wasn't my favorite part of his system, since it seemed simplistic to me. Was it useful to categorize people into one of two great bins, according to whether they are habitually outgoing or more inward?

They had a pop-questionnaire on the show so you could tell which bin you fit into. Here are the traits. You are an extrovert if:

• You like to be in the thick of things.
• You enjoy chitchat, even with strangers.
• You feel stoked after activity.
• You know lots of people and consider them friends.
• You’re generally quite peppy.
• You tend to speak or act without needing to think first.
• And you tend to talk more than listen.

You are an introvert if:

• You enjoy time alone or with a few close friends.
• You experience a blank mind in groups or under pressure.
• You feel drained after activities, even the ones you like.
• You consider only deep relationships as friendships.
• You appear calm, self-contained, and like to observe.
• You think before you act or speak.
• And you tend to listen, but talk a lot about topics of importance to you.

Hands down, no question, I'm an introvert--point for point. (Kimmie felt she was a blend of the two.)

One thing that surprised me in the show was that introverts felt a need to justify themselves, that they feel beleaguered or undervalued in an extroverted world. I suppose I feel that way to some extent; certainly any introvert has felt envy for those who can mingle and schmooze easily. But when they put up the names of some famous introverts they included the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein--and I don't mind being grouped with them.

Indeed, as I said to Kimmie during the show, society seems to advance mainly through the efforts of introverts.

But what is the deeper meaning of introversion and extroversion, if these are real traits? The professors on the show put it down to brain chemistry--always a weak and unsatisfying explanation for me. No, to my mind, it raises the fascinating question of identity, and I see introversion/extroversion in terms of it.

I think that when we're born, we are immediately faced with the task of understanding our world--making sense of the barrage of inputs. Gradually we have to sort our experience into two categories: things that are "us", and things that are "not us". When we form a more or less conscious idea of a single thing that can be called "us", then we have arrived at a sense of identity. It is a learned thing: we learn about ourselves in the same way we learn about the world--as an already existent fact, or set of facts. We discover who we are, just we discover what the world is and how it works.

This process of discovery never stops. We learn about ourselves continually, up until we die, just as we learn about the world (provided we are willing to learn). This continued learning about ourselves is what is known as maturation or individuation. For, just as when we learn something new about the world, we have to make allowances for that fact in our thinking and behavior, so when we learn something new about ourselves must we make allowances for that fact.

I believe that the terms extrovert and introvert point to whether one's main orientation is toward learning about the world without, or toward learning about the world within--for both worlds are of unknown scope and depth. And they are no doubt, in some way, mirrors of each other, so that to know one deeply is to know the other by reflection.

Those are my thoughts, based on much introverted reflection.

more imagination

Yesterday I was talking about imagination, sparked by my reading volume 2 of William James's The Principles of Psychology. Here is some of the text (compressed) from the top of chapter 18:

Sensations, once experienced, modify the nervous organism, so that copies of them arise again in the mind after the original outward stimulus is gone. No mental copy can arise in the mind, of any kind of sensation which has never been directly excited from without.

Fantasy, or imagination, are the names given to the faculty of reproducing copies of originals once felt. The imagination is called "reproductive" when the copies are literal; "productive" when elements from different originals are recombined so as to make new wholes.

So imagination, in the sense of creative imagination, is simply the calling up and combining of sensations from memory.

One of my first thoughts on reading this was to wonder about dreams. Dreams contain a tremendous amount of novelty. Last night (well, about 3:15 this morning) I dreamed (again) that I was aboard a bus, actually more like our SeaBus here in Vancouver--a pedestrian ferry that crosses Burrard Inlet. This bus, jammed with commuters in the dream, had the same rows of white plastic seats facing each other, but with the new feature of having a kind of oblong ring-aisle off the main long aisle of the bus. The bus-loop we were approaching was more like an airport in the size and vacancy of the tarmac. So while the sensory elements of the dream were familiar, in the sense of being made of familiar substances and based on familiar objects, the actual objects and their configurations were new. So the "originals" being combined were of elements smaller than the whole objects themselves.

A few nights ago I had a dream of being in a cavern with a rushing river. In the river I saw a monster: a sharklike beast maybe 15 feet long, but with three heads on flexible necks protruding in a triangular array from the front of its body (the heads all had long sharp teeth--a very frightening creature). Again, the elements that went to make up this beast were small parts of itself--the fins, the skin, the necks, each tooth--all put together into a new whole. All the rest of the dream-elements too were new images assembled from much smaller pieces to create a strong sense of novelty in the whole.

I accept James's assertion that any imagined object must have a sensory original; a person blind from birth cannot visualize, period, and has dreams that feature only the other senses. But I suppose I'm wondering where this tremendous, productive, recombinant power of imagination comes from--spontaneously in dreaming, and with some conscious direction in creative art--and what guides it and shapes it.

The author of our dreams rips up our sensory memories and reassembles them into collages that have their own integrity, novelty, and emotional power. The pixels of our sensations are reformed into personal stories that have feeling and significance--that have purpose. It's as though the dream-stuff (known as "subtle matter" in ancient Indian philosophy) is a cloth draped over an otherwise invisible form, revealing its shape. And this shape has a purpose; it is not random or arbitrary. How much effort would it cost me to "write" a dream? To come up with its setting, cast, and plot? Quite a lot. Whoever is writing my dreams is putting out that much effort, while making it seem effortless. It can't be to no purpose, any more than my own creative efforts are to no purpose.

From this point of view, then, imagination is a tool, a means to an end, a way of getting something done. It's a way of seeing the invisible, speaking the unspeakable. The purposes or structuring forces underlying the organization of imaginative elements would be, I think, what Joseph Campbell would call myth. Or the whole process of draping these purposive forces with imagined elements, and showing and sharing the results, is myth.

If this isn't exactly clear, you're in no worse a position than I am. This is me working through an idea, a blog-post that reads a bit like an entry in one of my Thinking documents. There's something fascinating here--and very important for us creative artists, as well as us dreamers.

imagination

Recently I started reading volume 2 of William James's The Principles of Psychology. The second chapter in this volume, chapter 18, is entitled "Imagination". I was struck, even astonished, by what I read in there.

Psychologists of the 19th century made wide-ranging, if relatively informal, surveys of people's ability to imagine visually--to visualize objects and scenes not present--and were astonished to discover a huge variety in people who outwardly showed no great difference in their ability to function normally in life. In particular, I was amazed to read the following, quoted from an 1880 work by the psychologist Galton:

Scientific men, as a class, have feeble powers of visual representation. The highest minds are probably those in which it is not lost, but subordinated, and ready for use on suitable occasions. However, men who declare themselves entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures can nevertheless give lifelike descriptions of what they have seen, and can express themselves as if they were gifted with a vivid visual imagination.

Many of the scientists that Galton surveyed reported that they could not come up with any mental image at all even for very familiar objects, like their own dining-tables at breakfast-time! By contrast, Galton found:

The power of visualizing is higher in the female sex than in the male, and is somewhat, but not much, higher in public-school boys than in men. After maturity is reached, the further advance of age does not seem to dim the faculty, but rather the reverse; but advancing years are sometimes accompanied by a growing habit of hard abstract thinking, and in these cases the faculty becomes impaired. Language and book-learning certainly tend to dull it.

Galton also found that women in general were much more interested in introspection than men, and much better able to do it. Some men seemed barely to have considered the idea that it was possible to examine the inner content and tone of their own minds!

Of course, artists, novelists, and such were (usually) the exception, and had better powers of imagination than most other people.

All this got me wondering: where do I fit in in the world of imagination? I did some of the exercises, such as imagining things not present, and was relieved to find that I could indeed bring mental pictures to mind, although not nearly as vividly as some of Galton's subjects could. I fretted further, since I am a scientific type by nature (Miss Warden, my grade 1 teacher, wrote on one of my report cards that she was concerned that "Paul seems to lack imagination; he prefers facts to stories about imaginary things"), plus I have done a very large amount of book-learning in my life--notorious killer of the imaginative faculty. Could I visualize my own breakfast-table?

Whew, yes, I could. (I eat my morning granola at the coffee-table in the living-room, incidentally, a habit I somehow got into while wearing a cast for my ruptured Achilles tendon in 2002.) As I sit here now, and close my eyes, I can see the coffee-table before me, with its stack of books and the copy of The Economist that I tossed on it this morning on my way downstairs, and the soft burgundy leather furniture surrounding it, and the spruce-green walls...

The images are not very vivid, but they are there. When I was a child I had quite strong imaginative powers, and liked to spend time in my imagination. I used to deliberately "trip" into my imagination often, visualizing myself in stories. When I was a teenager I sometimes used to read novels in a deliberately imaginative way. When I came to any descriptive passage--and some writers were much better for this than others; one of my favorites was Mary Stewart--I would pause, close my eyes, and mentally build the sensuous environment evoked by the writer. I tried mentally to put myself into the scene, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling it. I found that this greatly heightened the enjoyment of reading. I didn't like reading just "to find out what happens"--I felt that was a waste, and I still do. For that reason I didn't like stories that were too suspenseful, and I still don't.

No doubt some would be astonished that someone like me, co-creator and -writer of a successful fantasy TV series, might have any doubts about his imaginative abilities--but there it is.

I should get back to some of that imaginative reading. I don't want to lose this faculty altogether, like the grumpy scientists who responded to Galton that they didn't know what he was talking about. And indeed it has always been my aim as a fiction-writer to create material that others can read in this imaginative way. In fact, that is one of my chief aims altogether.

feelings and the moon

In from my (short) run, taking advantage of the gap in the rain. Today it has been uneven, with squalls interspersed with periods of moist calm, as now.

My mind is torn, or anyway tugged, in various directions. I lay awake in the dark after 3:30 this morning, troubled by thoughts and feelings. The night is definitely a more emotional time. I might have the same thoughts during the day, but they do not arouse the same emotional response. No doubt there are physiological and psychological reasons for that: low biorhythms, the activity of the brain focused in different regions related to dreaming, and so on. In the ancient world it was all summed up by saying that the night was ruled by the Moon, visible sign of the Great Goddess, and she ruled the feelings.

Graves referred to the White Goddess in his books--the shining white of the Moon. But of course the Moon is not only white; it is black too--as now, during the new Moon. Makes me think of something I read about the Tao in one of the books lying around the apartment on 12th Avenue back when I was 21: "Neither speech nor silence is enough to express the Tao."

Neither speech nor silence is enough to express the Moon.

I've just sat here for several minutes staring at the screen after writing that last sentence. Mentally becalmed. Might as well go and do up some dishes, and move on to the reading course.

Reading, yes: I heartily recommend it.

life as adventure

It's a sunny day. I was just out running. The city was almost hidden in smoke-blue haze. The harbor water flared like white-hot metal beneath the low sun.

Last night, at teatime, I sat with my tea at the coffee-table, looking at the two stacks of books I've got on the go, and again did not feel like reading any of them. (I did spend a bit of time writing a review on Amazon.com for Peoples, Nations and Cultures; if you want to check out the link. My policy for writing Amazon reviews: I'll write one for any book I've read that doesn't already have a review, or if I disagree with the consensus of reviews. The main thing is to have a usable review there when someone looks for the book; I so appreciate that when I'm looking for one.) I came down again to pick up my copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces and read a little more of that. This morning I opened my new document based on Campbell's text and tunneled further into the question of my life.

As ever, the material hit me hard. I reread this extract:

The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives. And they may remain unsuspected, or, on the other hand, some chance word, the smell of a landscape, the taste of a cup of tea, or the glance of an eye may touch a magic spring, and then dangerous messengers begin to appear in the brain. These are dangerous because they threaten the fabric of the security into which we have built ourselves and our family. But they are fiendishly fascinating too, for they carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self. Destruction of the world that we have built and in which we live, and of ourselves within it; but then a wonderful reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life--that is the lure, the promise and terror, of these disturbing night visitants from the mythological realm that we carry within.

I feel a cold clutching at my own heart. The "realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self" is exactly where I want to go. Or is it? Am I merely a lollygagger in the foyer of life? Am I deluding myself about how cemented in habit I truly am? A cosmic sofa-spud, willing only to watch others' adventures? It is an anxiety-provoking line of thought.

I wrote these notes this morning under the above extract:

Life is a gamble. Campbell stresses the adventure quality of it as that which we seek and yearn for. "The desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self": risk. Risk is about uncertainty, about the unknown quality of the future, and the recognition that life brings both pleasure and pain. We make choices, which is always a gamble, a speculation, an investment, in some sense. We're looking to make a return, to invest our time wisely.

For is this not what it's about? My recent thoughts have included ideas about how the finiteness of our lives has a fundamental effect on our thinking and behavior. Even in avoiding the thought of death, trying to deny it, we are giving it huge--even exaggerated--psychological importance. Time is the ultimate wealth, the ultimate currency. We exchange the minutes and hours of our lives for...what? That is our basic decision. What's the best way to spend our time?

We trade in each minute of our limited, nonrenewable stock of time for what? Right now I sit typing this blog post. In less than an hour I will drive Kimmie up to her after-work hair appointment. Thus I spend the currency called life.

The hero by definition is he who crosses the threshold of adventure--the adventure of the discovery of the self. And what is an adventure? My Webster's, once again:

1 a: an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks

There are levels of danger. As Campbell puts it later in his own book:

Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former--the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers--prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole. Tribal or local heroes commit their boons to a single folk; universal heroes--Mohammed, Jesus, Gautama Buddha--bring a message for the entire world.

Later on, in his Masks of God series, Campbell goes on to say that the primary myth-makers now are not priests, theologians, or philosophers, but artists: the writers, dramatists, and filmmakers who are able to command our attention and move our hearts. That includes me. How I live and understand my own life makes all the difference in the kind of work I can produce, and its value for my fellow beings.

Peering down into the Aladdin caves...what is there?

master pieces

Apart from my recent astro-ponderings, which had me checking the foundations of my motivation (I'm still checking; I'm always checking), I also had project-fear yesterday as vacation-time ended and it was time to get back to my PC in my diurnally empty house. Project-fear manifests as a vague but definite reluctance to open files related to my project. Upon introspection, also undertaken with reluctance, I find that the underlying emotion and cause is fear.

Fear of...? I'm not exactly sure. Inadequacy, probably. Having disengaged from the project for about a week (the last part of Kimmie's vacation), I don't exactly remember what I was doing, and am afraid I won't be able to get back up to speed; or I have a lazy disinclination to put in the effort to remember what I was up to; or, most likely, am afraid that once I rediscover what I was up to, I won't think it's very good.

Another problem is being harsh with myself. This is the stern-voiced taskmaster in my mind that commands me, "Get down there and write five pages, you useless sloth!" Well, what does any sane sentient being do when spoken to that way? He might, at most, make a show of compliance, but he'll certainly slack off, just to show the taskmaster who's really boss. Yeah, you can talk nastily to me, but you can't make me produce, muvvah!

So there's that. I try to unplug the taskmaster and replace it with this gentler guide: Just try looking at your project, and only do stuff that's fun. If it's not fun, don't do it.

This guidance feels pretty nonthreatening. Under this noncoercive regime, this morning I opened up my notes document for chapter 19 and reviewed the last entry. Hm, not bad. I thought of another idea, something maybe to be addressed in the next draft, and keyed a new note in the document. That was ok, yeah, even kind of fun.

I opened up the chapter draft (arrested at page 18) and looked at it. This wasn't as pleasant for me as opening up the notes document--something along the lines of "potential" (notes) vs. "actuality" (draft). Actuality always loses those contests. Still, I know the score: if you want to have a book, you have to actually write it. There's nothing for it. So I checked out the material, and, braced by my new notes, started typing. (Always remember the Truman Capote quote, I believe in reference to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, "That's not writing, that's typing".) Having thought through my scene a bit more, I had an idea of what needed to happen, and I unblocked somewhat. I wrote 3 pages.

A couple of days ago I got from the library a DVD version of an Italian miniseries on the life of Leonardo da Vinci. When I started watching it I realized that it was the same miniseries I had watched at age 13 or so--1972. (The production date is nowhere on the DVD package.) I was happy about this, though, because I have always had fond memories of that series, and it made an impact on me. I remember being struck even at the time by Leonardo's restless dissatisfaction and obsessively inquiring mind. He left so many projects unfinished, and many that he did finish came to bad ends.

I identified with Leonardo, and I still do. My life has also been a restless quest for knowledge. I'm not an inventor--not in the sense he was, anyway--but I am a seeker. And the search in many cases has been more important than the works that may have resulted along the way.

So I watch the isolated and lonely Italian genius on TV, thinking his thoughts, making his cool, objective notes, being mocked and ridiculed by the younger genius Michelangelo (although worshipped by another young master, Raphael) and creating works of art that draw the eye and the mind to this day.

What is the meaning of an unfinished masterpiece?

the mission

Morning rain has given way to afternoon sun, shy and late, gently turning the drops in the neighbors' yew hedge into sparkles. The sky is pale, clean blue amid the litter of torn clouds.

This morning, back to the astrological analysis of my life. I pressed on with it, looking up passages in The Twelve Houses by Howard Sasportas and Planets in Transit by Robert Hand. Feeling threads of meaning draw together, I worked on intently. I have studied my chart many times over the years and decades; it's been my main research tool and example (as with any astrologer). Now I dug deeper, trying to find the hierarchy of importance of the various factors.

I was born with Neptune in the 1st house of immediate relationship with the world. Here is an extract I keyed from Sasportas:

With Neptune in the 1st house, something could have gone askew at either of these two important stages [of the infant's relationship with the mother] of symbiosis and separation. If there was not a secure enough tie with the mother, then they might be afraid to develop a strong, individual identity. But if they were forbidden by her to separate, they may never have had the chance to find out who they are in their own right.

I was also born with Sun in the 4th house of the home and inner world. More Sasportas:

Those with Sun in the 4th need to delve deep inside to find themselves. What is achieved in the outer world is perhaps less important than what is accomplished in terms of soul-growth and inner spiritual development.... Those with the Sun here might have experienced the father as so powerful and authoritative that they subsequently cannot surmount a crippling sense of their own smallness and inferiority. They may have to do battle with the father to sever the hold he has on them. In other cases, the father may have been physically or psychologically absent. For the boy-child this could mean there wasn't a clear sense of father upon which to model his own masculine qualities.

Sun in the 4th suggests that they come more into their own in the second half of life. A renewed sense of creative potency, vitality, and the joys of self-expression are potentially available in the later years.

And from my own notes:

Neptune in the 1st points to inherent difficulties in developing self-knowledge. It is square the Moon-Uranus conjunction, emphasizing the conflict.... Sun in the 4th repeats the theme of "finding myself" as a life-task. Indeed, it suggests that this is my supreme life-task.

The natal square of Neptune to the Sun again emphasizes the difficulty of the task: the profundity of confusion and not-knowing, and the transcendent depths from which the fog of unknowing originates. But, as in a good story, the achievement of the hero is only as great as the forces of antagonism. The antagonism here is indirect, subtle, and systemic. It is unconscious and transcendent. It may be infinite.

For if I believe in Hillman's "acorn" theory, then my life, my birth, is exactly the one needed for me to fulfill my life purpose. The neuroses and conflicts of my parents were necessary in order to grow the person I had to be--have to be. My obstacles have been large and deep--and mostly invisible. They have been within.

Whatever I may discover on this journey of self-knowledge can't be for myself alone. No doubt the Moon-Uranus combination in the 10th points to the social urge: the need to make my findings public, so to say. Uranus here suggests the ability to reach all of humanity. The Moon suggests the personal need to do so.

In short, my birth chart is of someone who has special problems in discovering who he is, whose own self, identity, is an abiding mystery even to himself. This reminded me of the powerful closing words of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery. Man is that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed. Man, understood however not as "I" but as "Thou": for the ideals and temporal institutions of no tribe, race, continent, social class, or century, can be the measure of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful divine existence that is the life in all of us.

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal--carries the cross of the redeemer--not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

There it is: my problem is the world's problem. I believe it has been given to me, not to solve the world's problem(!), but to work on it. My background, attributes, and passions are just those of someone whose destiny is tied up with this monumental and difficult question. As I put it in my journal:

I may not have true self-knowledge--for the discovery of that is precisely the problem, the quest, not just of myself but of all mankind. But I may be arriving at the knowledge that that is my quest, my role, and my mission. And arriving at some idea of how to pursue it.

This is a truly exciting possibility, about which I feel good--even wonderful. Here is one more extract from today's long journal entry:

When I reread the Campbell extract I felt a sense of relaxation, even joy. The mission is bigger than just my personal happiness or petty ambitions.

If I can keep that in mind, I should be able to weather the storm of the coming months and years.

lover of wisdom

Yesterday a dense white overcast drew in around noon. It started to rain, slowly at first. It rained through the night and it's raining now, a residual pecking of heavy drops at boards, tarps, and leaves after the dark drenching of this morning.

I feel I want to talk about something, but I don't know how to express it. It has to do with thinking about life--one's own life. What are the core issues of my life? What are the values over which I experience my conflicts?

In 1982, when I was 23 and unemployed, working on a novel, and living with my mother and aunt after spending half a year abroad, I used to go each evening to a pub in False Creek called Stamp's Landing. Since I was broke, Mom would compassionately give me $5 which would buy me two pints and get me out of the house. I would drink alone at the amber-lit pub that looked out on the dark water, watching other people talking and laughing as though I were invisible or an alien, and only occasionally would get into a conversation with anyone. (Most memorable: an older man who had just been released from prison for robbing a bank. I astonished him by knowing the definition of floccinaucinihilipilification--the act of estimating as worthless--when he said none of the lawyers he had asked had known it. Since the word was in the Guinness Book of Records, where I'd learned it, I didn't think it was a big deal.)

One night I was sitting at the bar itself, drinking one of my two pints. The woman sitting next to me started talking.

"Is that what you'd call a leather jacket?" she said.

She was referring to my coat. She was small and wiry, wearing pants and a light sweater. Her hair was cut short to her head. Her eyes were very deep-set, her cheeks hollow, and her nose had a strong hook. She was drunk.

"Yes," I said, "I would."

"What makes that a leather jacket?" she said.

"Well, it's leather," I said, "and it's a jacket. So I call it a leather jacket."

She nodded. She turned toward me.

"Are you a philosopher?" she said.

"No."

"I'm a lawyer," she said. "You seem like a philosopher."

"Not really," I said.

I slipped away. When I told my mother the story she said, "That was very perceptive of her."

"Does it really take a philosopher to know that something that's leather and a jacket is a leather jacket?" I said.

Of course I was a philosopher--and still am. When I found out a few years later that the word philosophy itself was supposedly coined by Pythagoras to mean "lover of wisdom," I felt myself even more a philosopher. So are we all, to the extent that we ever wonder why things are the way they are.

Hence my remark above about the search for the core values of my life. What matters most to me? There was a long time in my life--from the age of 20 to as recently as 43--when I would have said "enlightenment", meaning it in the Buddhist sense of complete realization of the nature of existence. I suppose I've given up on enlightenment as a goal.

I had this thought as I strode into the rain this afternoon to dump the little plastic bucket of kitchen compost into the big black compost-barrel at the side of the house. I unscrewed the lid to see the usual sight of wet worms huddled together, little frenzied flies, glistening slugs curled under tabs of plastic: a profusion of life that will all soon be dead--as will I. The ambitions of youth crumble away, and one sees instead only a short length of trail leading to the door of permanent absence from life, this life anyway.

As I screwed the lid, glossy with rain, back on, I felt calm. In some way the burden of success is lifted from my shoulders. There's no use struggling. I should enjoy myself.