your date with...

Yes, I'm having a hard time coming up with ideas for blog-posts (even if it doesn't seem like it). I think it's at least partly due to the fact that my sense of my own work is changing. I feel less and less that what I'm doing makes me part of any kind of identifiable group--even of "writers". Like a dreamer or a psychotic, I wander ever deeper into a solitary world, from which communication can serve no purpose except to indicate just how separated from my society I have become.

Does that sound depressed? I'm not. Far from it: I feel quite good. How about psychotic--am I that? I don't think so, but then, it's probably not my call to make. As a citizen I seem to be functioning OK, which should keep me free from involuntary hospitalization.

The journey, then, is long, and it is solitary. In a way, though, it is thrilling, for what could be richer and more exciting than to be off any beaten track, away from any conventional path? Of course there are no social gains to be had on such a journey--no fame, no prestige, no riches--for these accrue only to those whose status, whose position, is recognized. There's no audience for the solitary trekker in the forest: only the trees, the birds, and whatever creatures move through the dark brush, still innocent of human contact. You trek into the woods for your date with reality, with your self.

switching tracks as a way of life

I've just looked up the word divagate in my Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Here's the definition:

to wander or stray from a course or subject : DIVERGE, DIGRESS

I was trying to come up with a word to express my way of studying, thinking, talking--my way of life, I suppose. It's what sprang to mind and I reckon it's close enough.

When I study, think, or talk--or when I write, for that matter--I keep switching tracks, elaborating on some sub-point before I get to the end of my initial point, and then going down a further digression on a sub-sub-point, until, quite often, I've forgotten my initial point--how I got here. My interlocutor has to help me out and remind me of what I was talking about.

It's not mere wandering attention or an inability to focus. On the contrary, it almost comes from a particular intensity of focus. I want to say exactly what I mean, but often I'm not sure exactly what I mean, and I'm thinking things through as I go. As a result, often, when I'm talking, I start the same sentence or point two or three different ways, searching for the right way in. I'm a strange mix: for the purposes of light conversation and repartee I'm quick and fluent, but when it comes to expressing more serious, important thoughts, I'm hesitant and laborious.

I'm very dissatisfied with lazy, ill-considered thoughts. It seems to me that most of the actions in the world are ill-considered, including--or especially--those taken by the world's most powerful people. Mostly we get by with very flabby, self-serving "reasons" for our views.

One example, which I get from Sven Lindqvist's book "Exterminate All the Brutes", was the thinking about the issue of genocide in European history. From the British point of view, the mass deaths brought to colonized people like the Canary Islanders and the Indians of the Americas by the Spanish were easy to explain: the Spaniards were notoriously cruel and bloodthirsty. There: problem solved. But when natives were dying in large numbers under British colonial rule, and not entirely by disease, but also through mistreatment and massacre, new reasons had to be found. The "science" of colonial domination was developed through the 19th century, greatly aided by Darwin's theory of evolution, which held that "survival of the fittest" was an impersonal law that cannot be altered. The ideology was already well developed when Adolf Hitler was still in short pants.

When I try to say something true, something that I believe, I find myself wondering why I think it's true--and whether I really do indeed think it's true. This trait has me hemming, hawing, and hesitating. In writing it has me taking laborious care to establish a foundation under what I say. (Well, except for this blog! It's more off the cuff. Although even here I find myself going slowly, thinking, typing.)

I hop from subject to subject, all connected, since some sub-point within one leads to the next. But it often takes me a long time to get back to an earlier branch in this garden of forking paths--if I ever get back there.

Somehow, this is how I operate.

species of writers

I thought I would check in with a quick post, to let you know that all is well. Kimmie has this week off from work, and so the routine is different. Snow fell in the night sometime, so now there is a powdery cold blanket of white outside. Traffic, much less than usual, is muted. In fact, right now I can hear none. Love it!

Christmas passed very pleasantly here, and Santa was most generous. Among other things, I received a pair of waterproof Helly Hansen walking-boots made in Vietnam. Maybe I'll break them in today. I have a stack of DVDs that I must return to the library. Shall I take a walk up to Lynn Valley?

As for writing, my god, what can I tell you. Among the stocking-stuffers I received was the Holiday Issue of The New York Review of Books. I rarely read book reviews (except readers' reviews on Amazon.com when I'm considering buying a book). This is partly because my reading program is governed by my research and interests, and therefore not by what people are touting as a good book. It is partly too because I like to find my own reading experiences, and not simply consume products that have been vetted and assessed by others; I like to form my own opinions.

Then there are the specific qualities of "reviewer culture" that I don' t like. There's something depressing and undignified in the attack/counterattack of book reviews. Criticisms are rebutted by authors, then reviewers might get a chance to counter-rebut. These exchanges are often tinged with bitterness, which, while understandable, is not edifying.

I'm not very attuned to literary culture in general, although I read quite a lot and love books. Too often I find reviewers and critics gushing over works that seem very uninteresting to me. I get the feeling that the whole system is governed much more by fashion than anyone realizes or acknowledges.

On top of all that are feelings of intimidation. This issue has an essay on Joyce Carol Oates (including a lovely black-and-white photo of her from 1975: a delicate-looking creature with enormous dark eyes). Oates is a serious, high-quality writer. I've read one or two of her short stories, and thought they were very good. But what she really is, is prolific. She's published dozens of novels, short-story collections, essays, and plays. She seems to spend much of each day writing--many daytime hours and a few nighttime ones.

Egad. If a writer is someone who writes (and I think you can make a good case for that definition), then Joyce Carol Oates is a writer. The real deal. I note that she's a Gemini (born 16 June 1938), the sign of writing and thinking and talking.

It makes me wonder: why aren't I churning out books and stories and scripts by the dozen? What's wrong with me? Why does my "work" in progress consist mostly of hundreds, nay, thousands of pages of notes? I write to myself, for god's sake! What am I doing?

Clearly, I'm some different kind of animal. A slow-spawning one.

Writers' methods must differ not only because our temperaments are different, but because our aims are different. What kind of experience are you looking for from a book? I remember reading a rueful comment by John Fowles, who was always embarrassed that his most popular book was The Magus, his second novel, published in 1965. He said (as I recall) that in it he had tried to create an experience "beyond the literary"--and meant this as a criticism.

I thought I knew what he meant--sort of. I remember my excitement and enjoyment when I first read The Magus, probably about 1977 or so. It was a fast-moving, thrilleresque story, but written with a mystical aim. It seemed to be an example of the "spiritual adventure-story" that I myself became interested in writing. (Last time I tried reading The Magus, about 10 years ago, I couldn't get into it.) But was it a bad thing to want to create an experience "beyond the literary"? And what is a "literary" experience, anyway?

Maybe I'm not sure what kind of experience I'm aiming to create. But whatever it is, it's not something I can come up with quickly. I'm seeing a book like a tree, or a tooth: something with roots. The roots are its hidden connection with reality. A work of fiction is a fantasy, but its power, its effect, comes from its connection with reality. I say this knowing how slippery and unsure a word reality is. But let it stand. Reality is that which we care about. A work of art affects us to the extent that it arises from or has implications for that which we care about.

My reality-detector is a fussy, finnicky gadget. As I work through my great epic, I think, "not real enough..." and am sent off on another errand, in search of more reality, like finding potting soil with which to surround the deep, vast root-system of the oak I'm planting.

I guess it's like the sloth watching the cheetah (assuming they could find a continent to share). The cheetah is dynamic, fast-moving. The sloth, for whatever reason, conserves its energy. (The sloth was named after the sin, by the way--not the other way round.) Its habits are so sedentary that lichen grows in its fur, tinging it green as though it were a rock or a stump. But sloths have their place.

At least, I hope we do.

what to do when the Muse is busy elsewhere

I sit in a little pool of light in my dim office. The blinds are still closed to the deep-blue twilight outside. The dark is just now lifting, and there is 2° of frost out there.

I'm on track with my usual morning routine: I've read my way further into Microsoft Windows XP Inside Out, highlighter in hand (I'm now on page 463--about 1/3 of the way through), trying the techniques as I go. I've keyed notes from The Roman Conquest of Italy and from The Pagan God. I've finished both mugs of coffee, and now it's blog-post time.

This orderly, routine approach is, for me, essential if I want to get anywhere (although you could make a reasonably strong case that I'm not getting anywhere...). I have no kinship at all with those "inspired", chaotic artists who work in crazed, sometimes drug-suffused, bursts of activity. I believe Thomas Wolfe was one such; certainly his writer-protagonist Monk in You Can't Go Home Again was. He would write in an ecstasy or frenzy for 24 hours or more at a stretch, and eventually collapse from exhaustion. Wolfe must have known this type of approach in order to write about it.

Or D M Thomas, when he wrote The White Hotel: he too wrote in a kind of trance for 12 or 16 hours a day, finishing the first draft with lightning speed. It just came to him.

Of course Hunter S. Thompson was famous for writing (and living) while wasted on every type of drug procurable. Many novelists are alcoholics, and many of those write while drunk.

Unthinkable for me. The first sip of alcohol is itself the end of my productive day. (Well, almost--I do finish my afternoon reading period while drinking my first glass of wine.) It lets in the clutch of my mind and I go out of gear. I'm not good for any more mental load-pulling; only for light social conversation. If I had to produce something coherent while intoxicated, I'd be in deep trouble.

My approach is orderly and workmanlike. I enjoy wrestling with details of administration--how to set up filing systems, working out the naming conventions for documents, and so on. These things can make me feel busy and productive, and thus boost my confidence. And I find that when I am dispirited and afraid of my task (as I am now), these simple tasks and my structured approach help to see me through. I'm not a living skeleton lying on a dry plain, croaking for a Muse who never arrives; I'm more like the same living skeleton trudging forward, staff in hand, at a slow, measured pace. I may well keel over long before reaching my goal, to be covered with sand and forgotten like the Muse-supplicator, but at least I died while in progress.

writers and nonwriters

When I used to work at the Insurance Corporation, one of my colleagues was a fellow writer named Greg. He was also serious about the craft, and had an MFA and about two draft novels to his credit, among other things. I think we were quite different as writers, but we enjoyed talking with each other and recognized that we were kindred spirits: writers who actually wrote, who had carved out time and space for it in our lives at basement desks and in predawn hours. I thought of him just now because we came up with a Latinized term to describe getting back to work after a break: rockus pilus. Opening up the page here at Blogger to enter another post, I thought, "rockus pilus".

Sometimes, when people find out that I'm a writer, they say, "Oh! I have a great idea for a book!" or "I have a great idea for a TV show!" An old schoolmate recently asked me about how to get a TV sitcom going, since she thought the madcap aspects of her little store would make a good TV show. My response?

"Well, I've created and written a successful TV series already, and no one will take my calls."

That dashed some water on her enthusiasm, but she didn't seem too crestfallen. After all, she hadn't invested too much in the idea yet.

Others have tried to persuade me to write the life stories of their relatives and such. Richard, who used to cut my hair, was one such. He wanted me to write about his mother in Chilliwack, who apparently had had quite a wild life.

"I just have all these ideas," he would say, between bouts of speaking in a Donald Duck voice and teasing the women stylists around him, "but I'm no good at writing."

If it sounds like people are serious, as I think Richard was, I have to come up with a response. Usually I just report, truthfully, that I already have more ideas than I can write. Coming up with ideas is not my problem and never has been. Choosing one and then executing it fully has been my problem.

Sometimes they're serious or semi-serious projects, as when a fellow dharma student, Betty, approached me once with her idea of having our center put on a show to commemorate the life of our teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche.

"And you're a writer," she said in her quiet, breathy voice. "So maybe you could write some ideas."

"And you're the producer," I said.

"Producer?" she said. (She had never had any experience in show business.) She sounded mystified, impressed, and wary.

"Yes. The producer is someone who wants to put on a show, and her first job is to sweet-talk a writer into working for free."

Of course, there was no question of such a project being a paying job--we both knew this. I wouldn't dream of charging for it. But I also didn't want to do it, and I wriggled away with the laugh that my statement got.

Often I give encouragement back to them: "How do you know you can't write? Go ahead--give it a try."

Yes: stage productions, memoirs, TV shows--people have these great ideas but they "don't have the time" or "don't know how" to write. They'd love to see their idea executed by someone who knows what he's doing--why not me?

Well, for one thing, as I said to Michael (who eventually went on to produce The Odyssey) when he was trying to put together a movie project and suggesting that Warren and I could write a script for it on spec, "If I'm going to work for free, I'm going to write something that I want to write."

For another, of course I'm not going to let myself get hooked into other people's frivolous vanity projects! Do the same people, upon meeting a builder, say, "I have a great idea for a house--how about building it for me?"--with the idea that it will done gratis? I think people believe they are flattering the writer by being willing to share their fabulous idea with him.

People love the idea of having some record made of their thoughts, but they don't want to, well, go to all that effort. But it's easy when you're already a writer, right? No sweat off your back!

Alas, I suspect that writing is no easier for a "writer" than for a "nonwriter". The main difference between them is probably the desire, drive, and willingness to actually do it. When Warren and I wrote our first TV pilot script (Flash Dispatch, a sitcom about bicycle couriers, written in 1984), we worked between midnight and 3:00 a.m. each night in his little apartment over Bageland on Oak Street. It was the time we had together, after I'd finished my evening shift at ICBC, and after he'd taken a nap following his own daytime shift working as a messenger downtown. We were both tired and not at our best, but we wanted to do this, so we did it. The script got written, and it got read. It wound up opening doors for us.

So there you have it. A writer is not someone who finds writing easy. A writer is someone who writes.

calibrating my frivolometer

I sit here staring at the blank window of the blog-creation screen. All kinds of thoughts tumble through my head. What to say? What to write? Where am I going? What do I report?

One thought leads to another in a vast network of tinker-toy connections (I loved my tinker-toy set when I was five or six). For an investigator, like me, the search seems endless. Search for what, you ask? For stable beliefs.

Books are again accumulating in my reading-stack like planes over a crowded airport. Two more arrived yesterday: one from Amazon.com and one from a used-book dealer in Eugene, Oregon. One was a text on website development; the other a hard-to-get monograph on religion in the ancient Near East. I didn't start either one; I've got too much on the go. A feeling of limitation starts to encroach: the sense that I can read only so many books in my life; I need to choose carefully.

One of the thoughts that came up in the bouquet or fountain of possibilities when I was trying to think of how to start this was about frivolity. I think it was a couple of years ago that this word finally came to me as the label for what troubles me about most contemporary fiction and other cultural products. It's frivolous, generating a "who cares?" response in me.

As I tried to figure out what exactly is the difference between a frivolous and a nonfrivolous work, I eventually recalled these words from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to his collection of short stories, Slow Learner:

When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death--how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate.

I thought this hit the nail on the head. Now I would calibrate my frivolometer by measuring how completely a book or an artist is ignoring the fact of death. When you're dying, life matters. When you're not, you might think you can afford to pretend that it doesn't. It's mere delusion and denial--nothing more. But it is pervasive.

Being cognizant of death doesn't mean being depressing or humorless. It means being honest about your values. I believe it means looking at life from the perspective of a dying person--from the perspective of your deathbed. In fact, I think you could do worse as a writer than to imagine you're on your deathbed right now, and look to see what matters to you. That's what you should be writing about.

Coming to grips with death--with one's own death--is the task of middle life and beyond. The problem of how to swallow our own impending death is the core of the midlife crisis. If successfully met, it has a strongly maturing effect. I think this maturing effect can be visible in the work of writers and other artists, as it is in people's lives generally. The talented youngster becomes a mature artist, or, in Pynchon's terms, the apprentice writer becomes a journeyman.

Some authorities believe there's no hurrying this maturing process. I recall reading an opinion given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn on a debate about whether Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don was written when Sholokhov was only in his early 20s, as was alleged. Solzhenitsyn dismissed this idea, since he regarded it as impossible for any writer, no matter how talented, to write anything of real maturity and worth until he or she gets into the 40s.

But I'm not so sure. There may be such a thing as "old souls", those who are mature beyond their years--in fact that seems obvious, in my experience. The opposite is certainly true: there are those who are immature for their years. And it may be possible, if you're serious and have the imaginative talent, to journey to a place of maturity, to visit it intensely enough to be able to write. My mother and I have been working our way through James Joyce's Dubliners, which he wrote in his 20s, and these works are anything but frivolous. His insight and expressive power already exceeded anything that almost any other writer could ever come up with, no matter how old they get.

Ach, I'm trying to console myself here a bit. As the world seems to whiz by, I bend over my scholarly books, reading, searching, puzzling...

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.

what to write about?

Yesterday I talked about the problem of whether one knows enough about how to write as a possible barrier to progressing with the work: the "technical barrier".

Another barrier is what I suggested might be called the "subject barrier": whether one knows enough about what to write--one's subject. Do I know enough about what I'm trying to talk about?

Even before that is the related problem of what to write about in the first place. What is my subject? This, for me, has been an especially difficult one.

Throughout my life I recall having critical and judgmental thoughts about people who say things like, "I want to be a writer, but I don't know what to write about." I would think. What makes you think you want to be a writer, then? Maybe Wal-Mart greeter is more your speed.

Not coincidentally, that very description fit myself. I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write about. I'm still that way. Very gradually, over the course of years, I found the subject-matter for this work, The Mission, and decided to go ahead and start creating it. I knew it would take me years, but felt that was fair enough, since it had taken me years just to arrive at the project, to choose it.

Before this, there have been many other projects: some complete, but many more incomplete. Aside from The Odyssey, which did see the light of day and make it onto the air, I would say that they were all more or less the wrong thing. What do I mean by "wrong"? Ultimately, I think, a mismatch between the subject and my true self, my true being.

How do you tell whether what you're doing is consonant with your true being? I'm not sure. Spontaneous passion is one clue: do you feel a real, emotional charge from the idea? Or is your enthusiasm really coming from some other source, such as the belief that you can have a hit, or that you're going along with some desirable crowd? Fashion is a powerful motivator. When I worked as a clerk at North Shore West Claim Centre in 1996, some of the estimators talked enthusiastically about their new cigar humidors--there was a buzz around cigars and how to appreciate them properly. Cigars were fashionable--they were appearing on the covers of magazines. How many cigars are those guys smoking now? What are they doing with their humidors? Much of fame and fortune is related to fashion, but, speaking for myself, I'm much too slow-moving to be able to respond to fashion effectively, and, more importantly, fashion is too shallow a motivator for anything that could be called art.

Only your intuition can tell you whether you're really on the beam of your true self. Intuition is sure, but quiet--easily drowned out by other inputs unless you tune in to it. It's that knowing voice within--the one that we wish we'd listened to when we later get into trouble by not following it. I'm slowly learning to listen to mine. Very slowly, it sometimes seems.

A person truly in tune with his or her intuition is not seduced by externals: fame, fortune, fashion, peer acceptance. These things provide external reassurances that we're ok, we're doing the right thing.

But for an artist, these things are inauthentic (they're inauthentic for everyone, in my opinion). In the long run, our success in life cannot be measured by how well we conform, certainly not in an individualistic part of the world such as the West. We should conform only as much as is necessary to provide us with the freedom to be ourselves.

All right: so finding the subject of one's work is an intuitive matter. There's no quick way of finding it except by exercising our intuition. Then there is the next phase of knowledge of subject: knowing enough about the subject to write about it.

But that's another topic...

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.

restless and dissatisfied--just like the pros

Gradually I'm becoming acquainted with my updated computer. Except for the box itself, which is a new black tower resting on bricks under the table (on bricks because I'm in the basement, and there have been floods here before...), it's still the same old gear: same massive 19" Dell CRT (works great), same Harmon/Kardon speakers, same Microsoft ergonomic keyboard. Yesterday I did switch to a new optical mouse, but mainly it's the same physical experience sitting here--it's just that the computer behaves differently: it's very noticeably faster, snappier. Now, when I click a command, it executes--immediately! I feel more in charge again, instead of feeling that I'm asking the PC to do me favors all the time, which is how it felt before.

I'm now running Windows XP Home Edition, which means learning a new user interface. I've decided to take this more seriously than I did when I got the old Windows 98 computer. I see I still have the Windows 98 Bible in my nearby bookshelf, and a bookmark about 12% into the text. That's as far as I got with my read-through by the keyboard.

I enjoy this thorough method of learning from the ground up. My gaining of familiarity with a subject tends to be slow, but total. I notice it's different from the way most other people learn. Most people seem to jump into the middle somewhere, and start working their way around from there. With a computer, for instance, I think many people move as quickly as they can to achieving some particular result with it, and build out from that early accomplishment.

This approach gains quick but limited--although always growing--proficiency. Why isn't that my style? I think the reason is that in that approach, you never know for sure how much mastery you've gained. How much more of this subject is there to learn? Do I know 60%? 80%? If you don't survey the field beforehand, you might never know (and probably, of course, never care either!).

Another, more important factor is one's attitude to learning in general. For each of us, this is different according to what topic is under consideration. I recall reading in a Scientific American article about expertise that one important difference between the expert or master and the average practitioner of any subject is the point at which one is satisfied with one's level of knowledge or command. In any skill, we usually reach a point where we're satisfied: we can do what we want to do, and don't push to improve beyond that point.

An example might be cooking: if you're not a gourmet, you may achieve a level of proficiency with a range of dishes that you're content with. You may learn more, but it will be slowly, unsystematically. But if you have a passion for food and its preparation (as, say, Kimmie does), you won't rest content. You'll be on the lookout for new techniques and ideas; you'll tweak already excellent recipes using promising new tips; you'll keep reading up on your subject and keep practicing it often. You may never come to a point where you say to yourself, "okay, that's enough--on to other things".

The greats are never content, but are always obsessed with improvement, even when they're already the best in the world, or near it.

I've plateaued in most of my activities in life--chess, drawing, guitar--but there are two in which I remain restless: writing and what I suppose I could call general knowledge. I'm not satisfied with what I know, or with how I express it. In a sense I'm driven by a feeling of lack in these areas. So I keep practicing: I read, I write. In my own opinion, I don't do enough of either one.

Well then. I'll finish off this bit of writing, so I can go read a bit over breakfast.

restless attention

I never have only one project on the go. I'm not like, say, Kimmie, who can keep at a single activity almost indefinitely. Up in her sewing-room, her "mad scientist's lab" as we call it, putting together patterns, fabrics, and trim for Barbie clothes (or as she now calls them, "11.5 FD clothes"--meaning 11.5-inch fashion dolls, the technical term), Kimmie can go all day, pausing only reluctantly for meal-breaks. (It helps that I provide room service for hot drinks and, later, wine.)

Not me. I tire of things. The activity of which I'm capable of the most sustained effort is reading, and the utmost I can manage there is about three hours. I can rarely read from a single book for longer than an hour, no matter how interesting I find it. It palls on me; my mind wanders and I feel overfed. I need a change.

For a long time I saw this trait as a sign of native dilettantism. If you can't focus on any one thing for any length of time, how can you achieve anything meaningful?

When I attended the Vajradhatu Buddhist Seminary in the Colorado Rockies in 1994, my meditation instructor was Ruth Astor, an elderly woman (who has since died) of, I believe, the famous American Astor family, which became prominent through the fur trade and New York real estate. A former filmmaker and veteran of the three-year meditation retreat, the pinnacle program for Vajrayana students, she was one of the instructors of the seminary, and developed a special fondness for me over the course of the 11-week program. One day I expressed to her my worries about this shifting attention of mine, how I couldn't stick with any one project. Her answer was immediate: "You need to organize your space so you can grab whatever you want to work on at that moment."

She didn't see my restless attention as any kind of problem in itself; she saw the issue only as one of setting up my office space. (She also predicted that I would be famous.)

I have tried to keep her advice in mind. The advent of the PC has made things a lot easier. Now I have folders for my various projects and ideas, and I can shift between them at will with a few keystrokes.

But still I worry. For as new ideas arise, new projects crop up, the old ones get muscled aside. They become the runts of the litter that can't make their way to a teat, and they shrivel and starve. I'm the sow lying on her side, unconcerned with the accumulating corpses of my farrow, because I'm always interested in the latest, and there's always plenty more where they came from.

In short, I write the way I read: with more or less intense concentration applied in short bursts. And as you can tell from the growing reading-list in the sidebar of this blog, I always have several books on the go, and many of these lapse unfinished. My interest and attention move on, and I need new inputs; the old ones die away, perhaps to be picked up another day.

Rarely do I commit to finishing the reading of a book. I can't stand the slog of continuing to read material that I have lost interest in, that I am continuing to read only because of an artificial decision to reach the end. I like to trust the wayward horse of my interest to find its own way. Because, even as it continually changes direction, it's always going somewhere. And I'd rather be animated by the passion of the present moment than by a promise made in the past.

But while this noncommittal, devil-may-care approach seems harmless in reading, I feel more anxious about applying it to writing--my creative output. Nonetheless, I have to acknowledge the pattern is there. Just as in my reading-list, so in my writing-list: there are a lot of unfinished works lying dead at the roadside. I have to take solace from the fact that, as in my reading-list, so in my writing-list, there are also finished works. I do finish reading some books, and I can even say that I also, sometimes, finish writing them.

At this stage, that's just going to have to do.

An interesting side-note: Three-year-retreats are conducted not in complete solitude, but in small groups. (The actual length of the retreat is three years, three months, and three days.) One of Ruth Astor's fellow retreatants was Migme, an ordained nun and one of the senior residents at Gampo Abbey, who had spent her working career as a paleobotanist. When I was a temporarily ordained monk at the Abbey in 2002, Migme, well into her 70s, was my meditation instructor. I remember how she teared up in recollection when I mentioned that Ruth Astor had been my MI at Seminary. As with Ruth, I felt that I had a special connection with Migme. It feels very significant to me, as well as profoundly fortunate, that I have had a deep and beneficial spiritual connection with these two women.

May I live up to the teachings I have received from them!

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?

integrity and adequacy

I find myself engaged in a major rethinking of my project--the reason that I have had it up on blocks, so to speak, for a couple of months now.

When I say "rethink", I don't mean I intend to junk major portions or completely alter what I'm doing. Maybe the word think would be better than rethink. It's a process of learning more, of going deeper, asking why, and forging connections.

In order for a work of art to have integrity, to have unity, everything in it must relate with everything else. Everything in it needs to belong, and needs to be felt to belong. I suppose that the larger and more complex the work, the more difficult it is to meet this requirement.

It's hard to be more specific about this without going into details about the work itself, which I don't really want to do (the spoiler factor). But there is sometimes the feeling that an idea for one part of the story can be applied to others parts, thus knitting them together thematically. My current investigation into ancient credit and finance, for example: I am working with it as a means of creating tension and interest in my current chapter, but I'm also asking how this might be applied to other sections of the story. If it's meaningful and relevant here, it should be meaningful and relevant elsewhere.

Credit could thus become a thematic strand: a kind of thread running through the work, tugging the pieces into closer union with each other. It becomes part of the meaning of the work.

An exciting but scary aspect of this process is that such meanings cannot really be forced onto the work; they are discovered. There is something organic about it. I think of the image of neurons forging connections among each other in the brain: they branch out, their fibers fastening on to each other and fusing, the junctions growing stronger with each impulse that passes through them. The brain, composed of countless complex parts and subunits, becomes a functioning whole.

I continue to worry about my work in progress. When I wake at night and lie thinking, it is still one of my main concerns. Or while watching TV in the evening: something I see will trigger a thought about my work, and I will actually gasp as though an electric shock had been applied, startling my wife. It's fear that I've missed something important, or that my work is deficient in some deep but specific--and irreparable--way.

Life. A story must capture the flavor of life. There are endless ways of doing so, but it's not easy. A story represents both your understanding of life and your ability to express it. When you're offering up a story, you're saying, "I think life is like this." Even supposed escapist and fantasy works say this. As Joseph Campbell observes, stories of magic and monsters are really about the psychological world--our inner life. The story is a test and an expression of the writer's personal adequacy to the world.

In this view, the greatest works are by writers who are highly adequate. They see into life and are able to paint what they see--to express it. As with any endeavor, excellence is only for the few.

Could it be that a truly unified work can come only from a unified personality? Someone who has attained personal integrity in the deepest and widest sense?

I don't know. The question marks here express the truth of my own situation.

seek, and ye shall find

I'll be away for the next two days. I'll probably resume posting on Monday 27 August 2007.

Yesterday I played hookey from the blog. I started reading an article on the international situation, "America on the Downward Slope" by journalist Dilip Hiro, and found myself absorbed. Blog-writing time came and went.

I'm brimming with thoughts, with ideas and anxieties. They run in many different directions, and one of my challenges--a major challenge of my life--is to unify them, bring them into relationship with each other. My intuition is that if one's ideas and thoughts don't come into harmonious relationship with each other, one has not really found the core of one's being--one's true self. In some sense one is in a fragmented state, like somebody suffering with multiple personality disorder.

I search for causes. I look at things that interest me and ask why. In that way I am a scientist or a philosopher. But for a long time I have not been satisfied with the way scientists address problems--or perhaps I should say, have not been satisfied with the limits on the kinds of problems that scientists can address. Nor have I been satisfied with the assumptions under which scientists generally work.

For example, an obvious problem arises with the assumption that the world is made out of matter. For one thing, we have the experience of our minds, which are immaterial. And while we take it for granted in our everyday lives and in the way we run our society that we can make decisions and act on them--that is, that our minds can cause our bodies to do things--we have no scientific way of accounting for how matter can be influenced by mind. Matter requires physical energy to move it, and the mind is nonphysical. This is the classic mind-body problem, and it remains unanswered and mostly unaddressed by modern science.

This problem is considered the province of philosophy, but there has not been a good working answer in this field either. At least, not one that the practical, scientific world has been able to accept. Mainly in philosophy there have been attempts to clarify the problem, rather than solve it.

I think of this extract (compressed) from a work by John Dewey, the American educator, quoted in Campbell's Creative Mythology:

The shock and uncertainty so characteristic of the present marks the discovery that the older ideals themselves are undermined. Instead of science and technology giving us better means for bringing them to pass, they are shaking our confidence in all large and comprehensive beliefs and purposes.

It is psychologically natural that the outcome should be a collapse of faith in all fundamental organizing and directive ideas. Skepticism becomes the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. It is the more influential because it is no longer directed against this and that article of the older creeds but is rather a bias against any kind of far-reaching ideas, and a denial of systematic participation on the part of such ideas in the intelligent direction of affairs.

The popular philosophy of life is filled with desire to attain such an all-embracing unity, and formal philosophies have been devoted to an intellectual fulfillment of the desire. Consider the place occupied in popular thought by search for the meaning of life and the purpose of the universe. Men who look for a single purport and a single end either frame an idea of them according to their private desires and tradition, or else, not finding any such single unity, give up in despair and conclude that there is no genuine meaning and value of life's episodes.

The alternatives are not exhaustive, however. There is no need of deciding between no meaning at all and one single, all-embracing meaning. There are many meanings and many purposes in the situations with which we are confronted—one, so to say, for each situation.

Campbell concludes: "In sum: the individual is now on his own."

Dewey's words were published in 1931, and they still apply. When you're on your own, where do you find your answers?

Answer: wherever you can. I think about a question that has sometimes been asked me: How do you get to work in television? Or: how do you get a TV show on the air?

The truthful answer is: I don't know. I've done it myself, but there is no process, no recipe. I use the image of shipwrecked people swimming around a lifeboat that is already overcrowded. How do you get aboard? The people on board don't want you on there; they'll smash you with an oar if you try to climb in. You'll just have to think of something--or drown.

It's a joke. But like all jokes, it contains a kernel of truth. In reality I trust those spiritual teachers who say, "Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." The real issue is not lack of answers, but lack of looking.

So I'm looking. That's my life.

on showing off

To think that when I started this blog I was worried that I would not have enough ideas for posts! I used to keep a Word file of possible post ideas, in case I dried up. Now I positively enjoy coming to my post with a blank mind, even if I do have to sit here staring at the screen for a few minutes before finally starting to type.

My approach is just to open up my Word document (I no longer compose my posts in Blogger, since there is a problem with the way typed text shows up slowly there), clear out the previous day's post, and let my mind wander to my book. Even if I haven't really been working on it, what are my thoughts?

In truth, though, I am working on it, even if it is just in the form of research. In this area I feel I do follow Goethe's personal motto, "without haste, and without rest". There's no getting around the fact that if you're writing about a remote time and place, you've got a lot of learning to do first. Otherwise your work will be amateurish and unconvincing.

The historical novelist must necessarily face the problem of the tour de force--a literary phenomenon that I'm generally skeptical and disapproving of.

What do I mean?

Webster's defines tour de force thus:

tour de force : a feat of strength, skill, or ingenuity

My idea of a literary tour de force is a story that involves persons and places remote from the writer's experience. This would be those stories in which a man narrates a story in the voice of a woman, or vice versa, or a European sets his story in an African village. It's not that I have anything intrinsically against it--and I deplore the concept of, what's it called, can't think of the name...the criticism that for a white writer to write a black character is paternalistic...cultural appropriation? Seems I've successfully dismissed that concept from my mind.

I have nothing against that in principle, but my question is: why would you want to do it? Why does a Dane need to write about a Nigerian village? I can't help but feel that at least part of the answer is: showing off.

Showing off is a bad motivation for a writer, in my opinion. I've had a lot of that motivation in my writing life, and maybe I still do. It's not something I'm happy about.

And yet I do think that both self-esteem and ambition are necessary for a good writer. John Milton, before writing Paradise Lost, said that he wanted to create a work that people would not willingly let die. No doubt Dante and Tolstoy and Melville must have had fevers of ambition in writing their masterpieces. But I don't think this is the same as showing off. What's the difference?

Showing off has as its primary motivation the desire to impress and draw admiration and praise. The ego needs of the writer are placed ahead of the meaning of the work itself; the work is subservient to the writer's ego. Just like the showoff child, who aims to grab attention by any which means, you're making demands on people's attention without fully earning it. Instead of moving people and seeking to enrich their souls, you're tying to get them to say, "wow".

So if you're a proud, ambitious writer, the proper way to exercise your abilities is in tackling a project of suitable size and importance (Dante, Tolstoy, Melville). If you pull it off, people will indeed be impressed, but they will be impressed by the depth and scope and power of your message--not by your tricks. The Divine Comedy is 100 cantos of a verse form known as terza rima, structured in three equal parts, each devoted to one of the zones of the nonterrestrial cosmos: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It is a poetically conceived map of the universe, structured as an epic journey by a visionary poet conscious of his unique cosmic mission. There is no lack of ambition or self-esteem in Dante's work, but the work itself demands these from its creator, and its message is worth it.

But if I, a man born and raised in Vancouver, sat down to write a story from the point of view of, say, a little girl growing up in Texas, what the hell would I be doing? Even if I could pull it off, why am I pulling it off?

To show off.

The historical novelist is taking on a burden that is not dissimilar in some ways. One excuse we have is that there are no living writers who are in a better position than oneself to write about a bygone age. There are women in Texas who are better placed than I am to write about their childhood there, but there is no one who is better placed to write about the ancient world.

But in my opinion the "research overhead" of a historical novel means that it should have something important to say. The writer who's writing a trivial story set in Elizabethan times is, I think, guilty of the tour de force syndrome: he or she is showing off. Yes, maybe you love the Elizabethan period and happen to know a lot about it, but, I don't know...there should be a reason for setting a story in a certain time and place. It shouldn't just be about local color, trying to elevate your pedestrian story with an exotic setting.

Readers of this blog know that I have plenty of anxiety about the scope and nature of my project. I don't doubt its importance, so it's not mere showing off. As for whether I can actually execute the idea, well, time will tell. I'm guessing it wasn't easy for Dante, Tolstoy, or Melville either.

a tortoise on Everest

The computer is still working. (Might be more than I'll be able to say today, having woken at 2:30 and never returned to sleep--mind too hyperactive.) I was able to write four pages yesterday, which is tolerably near my daily target of five. Three pages I regard as an adequate output; two is disappointing, and one is a sign that I have struggled to make even a token advance in my work.

Yesterday I had my weekly lunch with my mother. One of the things we talked about was work: some people like to work. Kimmie is one of these: she gets positive, recreational-style pleasure from working at tasks, like painting rooms or making gourmet meals. My niece Chella seems to be another one: thinks nothing of helping paint a friend's place or digging a flower-bed. Through their willingness, ability, and a sense of responsibility, these people also tend to be exploited by employers, working extra hours without pay and generally being the willing horses that get the whip.

I don't have a taste for work for its own sake. I don't get a recreational pleasure from working, in the sense of needing to be busy. I think my father is somewhat that way: while vacationing he wouldn't be among those lounging around on blankets or sunning themselves on the deck of a sailboat; he'd be polishing brass, mending things, barbecuing. His hands craved activity. He's an inherently productive person.

I'm not the same way. I do enjoy effort--but it needs to be effort in some direction that is meaningful and interesting to me. In order for me to enjoy it, it also needs to be on my time-frame. I can't stand being rushed, pushed, or driven. The way I apply effort is slowly, steadily (or sometimes intermittently!), and thoroughly. I can work fast when I want to--but I usually don't want to.

Also, I tend to spread my effort out so that it is not focused too intently at any one time. My reading, which I do for pleasure, is actually also work--I read almost nothing that is not related to some project or other, and I rarely read without a highlighter. Most people would regard this type of studious reading as punitive--as work;, but I positively enjoy it.

One creative area where I do like to work quickly is in drawing. I was born with quite a bit of drawing talent, but the drawing I like best and am most drawn to is cartooning. Capturing the essence of a person or expression quickly, in a few strokes, is what I find most satisfying. Among more serious types of drawing, I've found that I like media that let the image develop fast--especially charcoal. In the visual world, I'm not fond of fussy, exacting techniques.

But in writing, it seems that I am. I'm the tortoise heading up Everest. I may very well make it--it's just that most people won't live long enough to see it.

on dilettantism

Ever since I learned the meaning of the word dilettante, I have lived in fear.

Here is the definition in my Merriam Webster's:

dilettante n [It, fr. prp. of dilettare to delight, fr. L dilectare--more at DELIGHT] (1748) 1 : an admirer or lover of the arts 2 : a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge : DABBLER syn see AMATEUR

And on to one of my favorite features of the Merriam Webster's, a paragraph on synonyms, in this case under its entry for amateur:

amateur n, often attrib [F, fr. L amator lover, fr. amare to love] (1784) 1 : DEVOTEE, ADMIRER 2 : one who engages in a pursuit, study, science, or sport as a pastime rather than as a profession 3 : one lacking in experience and competence in an art or science

syn AMATEUR, DILETTANTE, DABBLER, TYRO mean a person who follows a pursuit without attaining proficiency or professional status. AMATEUR often applies to one practicing an art without mastery of its essentials (a painting obviously done by an amateur); in sports it may also suggest not so much lack of skill but avoidance of direct remuneration (remained an amateur despite lucrative offers). DILETTANTE may apply to the lover of an art rather than its skilled practitioner but usu. implies elegant trifling in the arts and an absence of serious commitment (had no patience for dilettantes). DABBLER suggests desultory habits of work and lack of persistence (had remained a dabbler who started novels but never finished them). TYRO implies inexperience often combined with audacity with resulting crudeness or blundering (shows talent but is still a mere tyro).

What makes me think I might be a dilettante? For one thing, I have a wide range of interests, and I pursue them all to some extent. Since time spent on one thing is necessarily time you're not spending on another, this inevitably means a certain scattering of focus. I remember tussling over the question of whether to enter the Arts faculty or Science at university. I mulled the question for two years while I was out of school, then, still unsure, opted for a program that kept my options open. (In the event, I dropped out of first year, nullifying the question altogether.)

Earlier, as a teenager, I was very passionate about playing chess, and wondered whether I might be potentially good enough to pursue it seriously (I wasn't). Later, in my 20s, I set up a garage band with a couple of friends, and found great enjoyment in playing with them (our sound, found through trial and error, turned out to be basically R & B--a surprise to all of us). I considered making that a vocation, but again, did not.

At around the same time I was passionate about my spiritual quest for meaning and truth. I felt that the only wholehearted way of expressing that passion would be to make it the top priority in my life, and specifically to immerse myself in a spiritual education, as at a Zen monastery in Japan. I considered it, but again did not follow through, feeling dilettantish about something in which I regarded dilettantism as particularly shameful.

Another passion at that time was astrology: a field that I had dismissed as obvious bunk, but that, in my quest for other ways of knowing, now beckoned to me. I included it in my studies, and got some tutoring from a prominent Vancouver astrologer. But it takes long time to become good enough at astrology to be paid as a consultant, and anyway, I lacked the consistent passion for it.

And there perhaps is where my true fear of dilettantism stems from: the feeling that the hallmark of the dilettante is inconstant pursuit of a field of effort or study. And of that I knew I was certainly guilty. Where was the commitment? Where was the passion? I was an intellectual and artistic philanderer, endlessly chasing skirt.

Always in the background was the vocation of writing. I knew could write--and I wanted to. But the question was: what do I write? What do I have to say? I launched on ambitious projects that mostly did not see completion. I fretted that it could take me years, decades, to find something worthwhile to say to my fellow human beings. What would I do in the meantime?

What indeed. I suppose the answer lies in my life to date. Yes, I've certainly known success: I got The Odyssey on the air, and that was no mean feat. But I've also toiled in blue-collar and office jobs, with stretches away from wage-labor to pursue my craft. Indeed, that's what I'm doing right now. At a time when some of my friends are starting to muse about retirement, I'm still tooling up for production.

For some reason, I recall an old TV ad for California wines, in which Orson Welles intoned the tag-line, "Paul Masson will serve no wine before its time." Well, this wine has been in the bottle, in the cave, a good long time. Has it merely been forgotten? Or is a wise vintner keeping his eye on it, ready to draw it from darkness and serve in its own good time?

the worldly artist

A quasi day off yesterday. Kimmie took the day off to celebrate Robin's birthday; we took her out to lunch at Milestones in Park Royal. It was a sunny day, like summer, and we dined outside on the wide, closed-in patio by the parking-lot. Robin is now 26, the age I was when I first formed a serious relationship with her mother. She is a self-composed independent adult; who knows how I might have changed in the same period?

I'm still looking to provide breathing-space for The Mission. For more than a week I have just been ticking over with my research reading. Yes, I need to work on how to balance my various responsibilities--any copywriting or other revenue-generating work I might have along with my artistic project. This has always been a challenge for anyone involved in the creative life. There is no simple way to solve it; it's a personal matter.

In my case, I'm relatively practical, hard-nosed, and bourgeois for a creative type. I'm attracted to business, science, and political affairs, especially public policy, and especially as this affects people on a global scale. Although I'm strange and eccentric and somewhat neurotic, I've never been an otherworldly aesthete who has no head for practical things or for figures or business. On the contrary, I'm generally a shrewd and inventive negotiator, and I positively enjoy putting together deals (although I'm not by nature a salesman or a trader in any sense). I like finding mutually beneficial arrangements bounded by clear agreements and rules. I like structure and clarity.

I'm interested by money and am very good at handling it. For a layman I have a solid grasp of capital markets, investing, and finance. I understand interest rates and compounding, and have a pretty good knowledge of the Canadian tax system. I hate wasting money (or anything else) but I'm not stingy; I like getting good value for money, and I can live on very little--indeed, I tend to be interested and stimulated by the problem of living within my means. I believe that the best value for money is a good charitable donation; when I was single I dedicated 10% of my earnings to CARE Canada to feed people who weren't eating enough--a cause that still haunts my heart and to which I still donate.

As a result of all this, although I'm an artist by nature, I own my own house and am debt-free. I can talk business with worldly people and enjoy it. In an important sense, I'm one of them.

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?

leaving the trail

Another week launches, and our household has leapt up from our sickbeds. I speak metaphorically. The long, clinging cold that infected both Kimmie and me two weeks ago seemed to break on Friday sometime, so this week we are back to business as usual. The gray morning is wet with freshly fallen rain; I have discharged my weekly duty of unlocking the wooden garbage-box at the back of our property for today's pickup; Kimmie prepares herself for the 12-minute walk to work.

In all, I don't know whether I would recommend being a writer. I think I would say it's a bad choice, if you have real alternatives. That is, if you have other abilities or interests that might provide you with as much satisfaction, then you should pursue those, for the satisfactions of being a writer are quite intangible and, often, quite infrequent.

It is isolating to be a writer. For, in spite of a certain glamor and romanticism attaching to the writer's lifestyle, a writer's real value lies in an independent view of things, which means that the writer cannot simply mouth the words "me too" at whatever cliches are being uttered at the backyard barbecue. There's always something artificial about a writer "joining in" with a group, even a group of writers--it's not much different from a conclave of hermits. At least, speaking for myself, I usually find that what divides me from other writers is much greater than whatever might unite us, whatever we might have in common. To the extent that writing is an art form, the writer's value lies exactly in his honesty and integrity in expressing his solitary point of view. Solitude is not just an accident of the writer's lifestyle, it's of the essence of his vocation.

To the writer as an artist, this is the supreme value; all other issues--matters of technique, productivity, earnings, fame--fall in behind it somewhere.

The ideal of the writer is of someone who has freedom and integrity, one who uses these in the service of creative expression. The old idea of people wanting to write the great American novel was always a cry for a life that was less sold-out, less subordinated to others' wishes and demands (although the idea that one might toss aside one's life as a corporate lawyer to write the great American novel seems as unlikely as tossing it aside to design a great public building or to compose a great symphony). Yes: a life in service of beauty and truth. But how much do beauty and truth matter to you?

And how much confidence do you have in yourself and your vision? How steady is that confidence? What seemed like beauty and truth at first might stop looking that way after awhile. Then what?

Here on the North Shore an ongoing problem and debate is what, if anything, to do about the many people who like to hike or snowboard in the nearby mountains, and who, looking for adventure, insist on leaving the marked trails. Time and again our volunteer rescuers head into the bush to search for people woefully underexperienced and underequipped to face the wilderness. Thanks to the skill of the rescuers, most of them are saved. Some though die out in the woods, their thinly clad, ill-shod bodies discovered days or weeks later at the feet of cliffs or huddled in hollows where they died of exposure. They went looking for adventure, and they found it.

The life of a true writer is off the marked trail. For those who stay on the trail, the idea of heading into the bush is a seductive fantasy--but not one they usually want to risk their lives for. Some do decide to risk their lives, but mostly they are dilettantes who don't even know they are doing so; they are fools. I think the true writer has left the trail, accepted the risk, and has only his inner qualities to rely on for his survival in the wilderness. There may have been a thrill at the actual moment of leaving the trail, but after that it's all a matter of life and death, with no guarantee whatever that you won't die cold and alone in a forest that never asked you to come in.