The Fiction of Writer’s Block

The perennial question that successful authors receive at any session they conduct for aspiring writers is: “How do you deal with writer’s block?” The question assumes that they do occasionally experience the phenomenon.

I contend it does not exist. If it does, it is a figment of the imagination. If it does, there are multiple ways to make it not exist at all. There are means to make it ephemeral at best.

If I wake up and after my morning rituals proceed to my desk to begin my routine of writing (the first task on my daily agenda) to realize the well of ideas has run dry, I go for a walk. I carefully observe every item along the way, cracks in the pavement, birds in the sky, junk cars in the driveway, and the oak tree with the tire swing; up, down, and around I observe. I note the drift of the clouds, the jet overhead—bound for where? Who is aboard? The imagination takes flight as it surely should for the writer’s observant eye and mind. I smell the vegetation, the resin oozing from the pine. I touch the blade of grass and bite, tasting its white end. All senses are engaged, the mind intent on the why and wherefore behind the tennis shoe left on the shoulder of the road. The back story emerges.

Settled in my comfortable chair again, I write, describing everything I saw, heard, touched, smelled, and thought on my walk. The details pour out, because so much happened on that walk in the woods, around the neighborhood block, or down that country road. So much happened too that I didn’t see that happened before I arrived on the scene. The past and the future inhabit the shuttered clapboard house I passed.

Next I enter the haunted chamber of memory. I visit the house in which I grew up and search each room, gaze upon each shelf, and fondle my favorite stuffed animal for a moment. In my mother’s china cabinet is an heirloom teapot. I select that object to contemplate longer and then begin to write all that it evokes, everything it means to me, how it touched our family. Maybe I broke the cherished end table lamp and my father glued it together. You can choose anything from your childhood home and construct an elaborate story around it.

Or turn on the news. Write your reaction to the earthquake in Indonesia, famine in the Sudan, or the last school shooting. Write why you hate listening to the news or why you dislike television and why you prefer a good science fiction movie. Write what your life would have been like if you had married your high school sweetheart or the horror it really was because you married the man from Mars.

Responding to prompts is another way to flex your writing muscles. Many books and websites on the craft provide writing prompts. I developed this method in an adult education course I called “Writing Aerobics,” which I taught at a community college. I give the students a seed of an idea—the prompt—for a piece of writing. For instance, I tell them to think of their mother’s favorite bromide such as “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” and write a story or poem around it. I throw out an image such as “the hobbyhorse in the attic” or “the wedding cake on the sidewalk” to use as a jump-start for their imagination.  Playing a piece of instrumental music also provides a good writing exercise. I ask the students to write down everything that comes into their mind and every concrete image the music evokes. New Age, synthetic, or classical are the best kinds of music for this exercise.  I use selections from the Narada collection and David Arkenstone., and South American group Inti Illimani group. The strangeness of the music helps to release imagination.

If all else fails, just start writing anything and everything that pops into your mind—bad, inconsequential, absurd. I guarantee something will catch fire and you will run with your hair all aflame to carry that idea to its magnificent conclusion in an essay, story, or poem. But it doesn’t have to be the Great American Novel. Just keep dreaming; keep imagining.

Explore my books at mountainofdreamsbooks.com

 

Language and Thought

The connection between language and thought has long fascinated me. It may seem a chicken and egg question of which came first, but clearly they have a reciprocal relationship; they work in tandem. The clarity and coherence of one’s language, thus, reflects the clarity and coherence of one’s thought. One’s speech patterns and prose style are only as good as the organization and logical stream of one’s thinking.

Good writing is impossible without a foundation of careful and critical thinking before the first word is ever written. How I hated those outlines that my teachers had me write as the first step in composition. Now I appreciate the crucial necessity of doing so. Similarly, wise men constantly caution to think before speaking. A suitable inscription for the fool’s memorial plaque is: “He/she opened mouth and inserted foot.”

Words are dangerous; words are weapons. Debate requires definition of terms; otherwise differences in what words mean prevent any mutual understanding and fruitful discussion. Tact and diplomacy at the highest level of government go hand and hand with superior language proficiency. The last four years testify to the damage a blathering, sputtering head of state does to international relations.

In the United States the corruption and abuse of language signal a rise in authoritarianism. Disturbed by this trend, I turned to George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” He incorporates and dramatizes many of the ideas in this essay in his novel 1984, which I also revisited. Orwell contends that slovenliness of language facilitates foolishness of thought, and of course, the reverse is true. “To think clearly,” he writes, “is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.”

Orwell identifies several characteristics that typify the decline of language: staleness of imagery, vagueness, empty verbiage, and use of meaningless words. He states that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” This has always been present in political discourse but not to the proportions seen in Donald Trump’s speech patterns marked by fragments, disjointed sentences, and repetitions. Half-truths and evasions have reached a gargantuan level. As of July 12, 2010, the Washington Post recorded 20,000 of Trump’s false or misleading statements. Both his thought and language exhibit a lack of clarity and coherence.

In the novel 1984, an authoritarian regime thoroughly controls the media and rewrites history to suit its agenda. By repeatedly lying and drumming the same slogans into their ears, the populace comes to accept the government’s lies as the truth. Today the FOX cable network has emerged as the state-sponsored purveyor of misinformation and the megaphone for what the “dear leader” wants the public to believe. Furthermore, The Donald and his minions wage a campaign to discredit any other news outlets, accusing them of “fake news.” These trends are alarming. If Orwell arose from the dead, he would be shaking his head and telling us “I told you so.”

Many news anchors on whatever the network frequently exhibit the same lack of precision and clarity of language. They grab the cliché, engage in empty verbiage, use shop-worn phrases, and pose long-winded questions to their guests. How often have I heard “that’s amazing,” “at the end of the day” or “boots on the ground.” They are not thinking; they are filling in the blanks with stale, meaningless expressions.

Vocabulary development was a part of my primary school education. Every morning the teacher would write on the board a new word to be included in writing a complex sentence. Simple noun, verb, object constructions were not allowed. Subordinate conjunctions to elucidate the relationship of ideas were required—constructions that showed cause-effect, time, place, comparison, and contrast relationships. When I came of age in the 1960s, building a sophisticated vocabulary was an important barometer of intellectual achievement. Recognition of antonyms and synonyms was an important element of building vocabulary as well as skill using the thesaurus and dictionary.

To express the nuances of any topic, comparison through metaphor and analogy are essential tools to clarify meanings. Without imagery ideas fall flat and meaningless. Complex thoughts require a precise, extended range of advanced vocabulary; simple, general thoughts can make do with a fifth-grade vocabulary.

Language and thought are inextricably connected. Just try to think a thought without words. Pictures can be painted with words too, and the master painters are the cogent, eloquent communicators and thinkers so many of whom are absent from political office today. The sentences that clear thinkers design are musical too, lending a cadence and rhythm that falls beautifully upon the ear.

That’s why when I hear some politicians speak on television, I mute the discordant and ignorant sounds.

The Mysterious Yeast in Writing

When I begin a prose piece or a poem, I have a teaspoon of an idea. The process of fingers striking the keyboard or a pen forming cursive letters on paper seem to awaken dormant images and relationships among ideas that I am incapable of imagining before I actually start the physical activity of writing. One idea sparks another, igniting another, until there is a conflagration of thought.

This is the magic of writing, the phenomena that other authors have noted in statements like: I didn’t know what I knew before I wrote it  or I write to find out what I know. They learn what they want to convey after the short story, novel, essay, or poem are written. The piece matured into adulthood as they wrote.  As if by spontaneous generation one idea awoke another and so on until a fully realized work of art emerged assuming depth and proportions that had not been preconceived. They muse that the work took on a life of its own.  I share that same feeling of discovery as I write and sense of that teaspoon of an idea expanding the flour into a warm loaf of bread fresh from the oven.

Expansion, elucidation, dramatization, and utilization of all the resources of language are enlisted in the writing process. At times the writer may feel the writing is being channeled and that some type of automatic writing is occurring. Other times, the process is not that effortless and certainly not magical. It may become labored, stalled, a bit constipated; then the writer pauses, takes stock, and takes a walk. In the out-of-doors, breathing fresh air, the senses awakened to nature; the yeast begins to work its magic again because the writer has paused to knead the dough longer in his mind. The ingredients run amuck in the creative hemisphere of the brain begin to interact spontaneously. Renewed, back from the walk, the writer resumes his work, and the creative juices flow once more.

This is the mysterious yeast of the writing process, in which the indispensable ingredients, imagination and language, coalesce, acting upon each other.

Power of Place

If setting were not important in fiction, then place would have no power in any of our lives. In fact, setting is so important that oftentimes it assumes the power of another character in the plot, as forceful and as determinative as the humans who populate the scene. Think of that gloomy, forbidding house in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” or that misty moor in Wuthering Heights, or the fantastical town Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude, or the shire in The Hobbit.

The search for roots entails the discovery of the place of ancestral origins. In today’s mobile America, tracing that place is not simple. It is rare to find the person who is born, raised, and lived his entire life in one place, much less in one house. More than one place can affect one’s consciousness in both obvious and subtle ways. Of course, the ambience, the environment of a particular area–its natural and man-made details–affect mood and tone. Long, overcast winters produce seasonal affective disorder. It’s that “drizzly November” in the soul that Ishmael remarks as he joins the crew of the “Pequod.” When one is raised smelling the salty breeze near the sea, the draw to water is irresistible.

I have now lived in one place for twenty years–the longest I have lived anywhere in my life–longer than the place where I spent my childhood. I harbor no nostalgia for my childhood home, for it fills me with sadness to return to where I was raised. It is unrecognizable. For the first six years of my life, I lived in the upstairs apartment of my grandmother’s brick bungalow on the far northwest side of Chicago. After one-year in an inner-city tenement, my family bought a tract home in one of the first subdivisions in a semi-rural village where there were still truck farms.  Roadside vegetable stands selling the local produce were still to be seen. There were no big box stores or shopping malls yet. I ran through cornfield rows, explored the creek, investigated abandoned barns, climbed trees, and rode my bike on country roads, passing pig pens and pastures of dairy cows. As I grew from eight to eighteen, so did the community with more housing developments, gas stations, and supermarkets. When I entered my teens, the community still did not have its own public high school, so I had to be bused to a neighboring town. When I went away to college, I returned for only brief visits. As the years sped, the rest of my family also migrated to different places. None of my family remains there.

I recognize I was part of the urban flight that created the asphalt sprawl and buried the open fields of my youth. No farm land separates this village that at the beginning of the twentieth century had been measured to be about a half-day’s carriage ride beyond Chicago. This is the tale of every city in America.

How did living neither entirely in the country or entirely in the city shape my consciousness? Something in me was repulsed by the rapid expansion and the rampant materialism of post-World War II America. Something jangled. The environment became increasingly noisy, strident, disconnected from Mother Earth. I disliked existence in an inbetween land, neither this nor that. It seemed preferable to either live in the inner city or solidly in the country without another house in sight.

America is a vast land of astounding contrasts affording a multitude of landscapes, climates, and socio-economic environments for a writer to choose a fictional setting. That particular place will powerfully shape the character and fortunes of the characters who inhabit it. The writer’s task is to skillfully integrate those two elements.  On a macrocosmic level, the very success of the United States as an imperial power was determined by its land mass, its seemingly unlimited natural resources, and the very bounty the land bestowed. The United States on the macrocosmic level epitomizes the power of place, positioned as it is between two oceans.

Another aspect of American culture that should not be overlooked is the sense of uprootedness or rootlessness attendant on a people that has constantly moved from coast to coast, across mountains, deserts, and plains in search of that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow–a nation of fortune-seekers. Some hit a gusher in the oil fields or struck it rich on a silver lode. Others fell by the wayside in shanty towns or eked out a living as a sodbuster. Oil field, silver lode, shanty town, prairie farm–all these are powerful places in American fiction.

On the microcosmic or personal level, I turn to poetry to reflect upon how place affected my perceptions of self, family, and the nation:

Suburb

Surprised by stars that city lights obscured
Eight-year old eyes first met the mystic sky
Where silent sounds somehow are secured.

The vault overhead was studded with holes
From which pinpricks of light stippled the sky,
Slim flickerings like resurrected souls.

In the dark, the crickets scraped their wings
Striking a new sound upon her childish ears
While in bed, she mulled over new things:

The new prefab tract ranch home she slept in,
The subdivision with scads of new friends,
The yard seeded with new grass to play in.

As the sameness of it grew upon her like a mold
And barns and meadows disappeared like dew
She longed deeply for the gracefully old:

Victorian houses with widow walks,
Ancient mariners mending fishing nets,
Western redwood forests with circling hawks.

She fled the suburbs like a horse set loose
From strip malls and pavement to run wild
In fields where gizmos were of little use.

Boundaries between city and suburb vanish
In continuous signs and new car dealerships–
Thus evolved her parents’ pastoral wish.

The seedbed perhaps of what all went wrong
In ascent to world dominance and might
Families rushed to the suburbs headlong.

Something was amiss in the cookie-cutter clique
A taste of the bland her palate disliked;
She craved the unique, tilted toward the antique.

Literature as Religion

Harold Bloom uses the religious symbolism of the Kabbalah to link literature to the spiritual impulse. He views the nature of writing as a religious pursuit through which the writer delves into his own consciousness. In turn, the writing produced expands the consciousness of readers. In seeking enduring truths about the nature of humanity, the writer identifies the divine in mankind. Often founded upon prophetic visions, religions aspire to uplift and sanctify. Similarly, literature aims to enlighten, using flights of imagination to illuminate. Bloom groups the authors he discusses in his book Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Minds, 2002, under the ten divine attributes, the genius of God, illustrated by rays of light both emanating and remaining within the divine center.

Furthermore, Bloom claims that writers are gnostics and that literature is the practice of gnosticism.  Bloom writes that “gnosticism has been indistinguishable from imaginative genius.” He contends that gnosticism is the religion of literature. It frees the creative mind from any theology except its creative self and the unquenchable thirst for knowing. Gnostics are intoxicated with creative consciousness. Gnosticism is the search for knowledge about the human condition and the revelation of the divine spark that animates creation. The act of creation is the primal force that religions attribute to the Godhead. To create, then, is to partake of the divine.

It can very well be said that the eminent literary critic Harold Bloom has pursued in his eighty-seven years the study of literature as passionately as any theologian.  The correlation of literature and religion carries merit. As I became less and less dogmatic about religion and my attachment to the ultimate veracity of any particular faith, literature did assume the stature of theology in my mind. I pursued writing and reading as devotedly as Paul followed Christ. I accepted the credo that reading widely and expansively in the classics and the accepted canon of the world’s literature broadens vision, builds a life with greater meaning, and creates a sense of kinship with people of different races, nationalities, cultures, and epochs. It enlarges the spiritual capacity for sympathetic understanding. It makes possible forgiveness of our own and others’ limitations and errors. What could be more spiritual? What could provide more amplitude for the soul to grow than the bountiful garden of the world’s literature?

When Adam and Eve ate of the apple, the fruit of the Tree of Good and Knowledge, it metaphorically portrayed man’s desire to partake of divine attributes. In the Kabbalah, the Sefirot are depicted as tree branches representing the ten divine traits, which are in constant motion. Bloom lists the Sefirot as: Keter, crown; Hokmah, wisdom; Binah, intellect in a recipient mode; Hesod, love; Din, strict judgment; Tefiret, beauty; sefirah, God’s victory or endurance; Hod, splendor of prophetic force; Yesod, foundation or a fathering force; Malkhut, female radiance of God.  In Bloom’s estimation, great art induces greater consciousness or knowledge of nature. He states the use of literature is to “augment awareness.” The measure of art is the degree to which it accomplishes this goal. According to Bloom, great literature must go beyond entertainment. If it stops at entertainment, it is not genius. This strikes me as harkening back to Horace’s dictum that art should both delight and instruct. Bloom would agree, but he elucidates it further, asserting that the greatest art is that which also expands to the greatest extend the reader’s consciousness.

 

Jigsaw Puzzles and Writing

Margaret Drabble’s The Pattern in the Carpet starts out as an exploration of the history, development, and popularity of jigsaw puzzles. It progresses into a long disquisition among other topics on childhood, board games, card-playing, needlecraft, Roman mosaics, collectibles, and aging. Putting together jigsaw puzzles is intimately connected in her mind with reminiscences of her maiden Aunt Philly and her growing up in a town situated on the Great North Road in England. Her narrative takes many side paths to reach its conclusion in which she clarifies the similarity of doing jigsaws to writing books.

I warmed immediately to Drabble’s point of departure in her ramblings because I also have fond memories of working jigsaw puzzles when I visited my Aunt Irene first in girlhood and then as an adult when she lived alone in retirement.  In childhood, I received Christmas presents of jigsaw puzzles and remember putting them together (usually by myself because my parents and siblings did not share this pleasure) on the dining room table while the television played in the background.  I set my Kindle ebook to text-to-speech and mounted my exercise bicycle to enjoy Drabble’s book. I did this to divert my mind from thinking while I pedaled, “Is this work-out over yet?” My strategy worked and time sped, believe it or not, pleasurably on the bike.

Avid jigsaw puzzlers know that the frame is assembled first; next colors are sorted in separated groups; then a section is worked from the border that appears most promising; from there the picture is built. Drabble does not immediately draw comparisons between her career as a prolific novelist to jigsaws. The drift of where the direction of her meanderings is going is put together rather like a jigsaw puzzle slowly unfolding. A clue to her meaning can be unraveled in her title, which she leaves the reader to decipher, because nowhere in the book does she explicitly unpack the reason for her choice of title. What are the reasons for the words pattern and why carpet? She does not discuss carpets in her book, but carpets are a frame too placed on the floor; they are all of a piece, that too must be woven together by numerous threads to form a whole. The carpet suggests a journey, as in the magic carpet to adventure and perhaps an unknown destination to be revealed as the flight continues. Drabble writes her book as a journey along which she pauses and observes many sites, objects, and phenomena. Similarly, the jigsaw is a pattern that only reveals itself at the end of the journey in its making.

Drabble comments that jigsaw puzzles provide a welcome relief and refreshing diversion from the intensity of writing. Both require pattern-making  and a working out of meaning from disjointed fragments, an order out of chaos, with the difference that jigsaws are visual, physical, involving manipulation of color to achieve pattern. It’s a shift from the verbal to the non-verbal. She acknowledges that activities like crocheting and knitting achieve that same change of pace for the writer. Having worked two 1000-piece puzzles in the last few years as well as being an obsessive knitter, I share Drabble’s experience of their beneficial effects.

I like to describe novel-writing as a long journey into night. Putting a jigsaw puzzle together is often a long journey into night as it is not unusual to stay up until 2:00 o’clock in the morning finding that obstinate last piece to insert in a glaring gap. The motif of the journey becomes abundantly clear at the end of the book when Drabble writes: “The concept of life as a journey, a pilgrimage, a quest, a ladder, or a spiral track may be attractive to some, but to me the notion of a goal is not.” I believe that Drabble did not have a definite goal in mind when she started her book; she reveled in the journey as she wrote, exploring every alley and corner as she went along. For Drabble what has meaning is the journey itself, the endurance on the path, both the indignity and the dignity of her Aunt Philly’s dying in the nursing home. The persistence in completion of the jigsaw puzzle is laudable. She goes on: “In the larger pattern, all the solitary journeys combine, and we arrive together. The jigsaw, with its frame, is a simulacrum of meaning, order and design.” Startlingly, she ends by stating books too attempt to make a pattern and fail.  The last sentences of the book read: “The admission of failure is the best that we can do. It is a form of progress.”

The puzzle remains. Drabble’s meaning is not entirely clear. Maybe this is by design. I must pause and think, ponder the meaning. And that underscores the journey again. The process of seeking and forming the pattern is what makes us unutterably human and what makes jigsaw puzzles and writing similar. The process of writing itself has a way of creating a pattern unpredictable at its beginning, taking unexpected turns in the middle, and revealing a goal in the end that was not there.

Writers’ Retreats

Open any distinguished literary magazine to the classified section and the number of advertisements for writers’ retreats are remarkable, some at rather exotic locations like Tuscany, a Greek Island, or Andalucia. Supposedly, a writer whether experiencing the spurious writer’s block or not, may need a vacation from the ordinary routine for inspiration. Apparently, the ambience of a get-away from it all provides the lubricant to oil the gears of creativity again, causing me to wonder what happened to the artist’s garret, the cramped quarters in a rotten borough that gave birth to some great works of literature.

In times past a quiet corner in a greasy spoon cafe provided enough fuel to fire the imagination. All that was required to write were a table, a pad of yellow paper, and a stubby pencil with a useable eraser at the end. The compulsion to write no matter what the environment was sufficient. Nowadays the pursuit responds to commercialism as so many other endeavors in contemporary life. The cyclist needs a proper suit, helmet, and shoes to ride a technologically up-to-date ten-speed bicycle. Every sport needs its high quality equipment for success, so why not writing. Writers are encouraged to invest in writers’ conferences and the still more expensive retreats. Hire the services of an editor or professional critiquer. Purchase computer software to grammar and spellcheck. Register for a course on how to write the blockbuster novel. Spend, spend, spend.

I am fortunate to actually live in a writer’s retreat–a log house abutting a national forest in northwest Montana. Born in Chicago, raised watching urban sprawl spread around me in a village outside the city, I now spend my golden years removed from traffic and commercialism.  I toyed with the idea once of hosting a writers’ retreat here in the tranquility of the mountains, but something in my nature resisted the effort to plan such an enterprise. Besides, conducting a writer’s retreat would deflect from my own writing. Consequently, I decided that my energy was best spent in actually writing more.

Although I have beautiful surroundings in which to write and ample solitude for reflection, neither are together or alone, the magic pill for prolific writing. A determined writer can produce volumes in a dump. A motivated writer can screen out distractions while the television blares in the background. I don’t fall in the latter category, for I require solitude and the only sound I find conducive is contemplative music to my taste. The retreat is into the writer’s head, that special place where imagination dwells, where the images become words, sentences, paragraphs, and extend into infinity. The imagination in not finite nor is the human will. It is the will to create anytime, anyplace, anyhow that gets that brain child born into the light of day. The stillpoint of creation resides in the compulsion to write no matter what the circumstances. Virginia Woolf famously demanded a room of her own. Where that room is, how the writer creates that room, is up to him or her alone.  Anyone who successfully writes has retreated into that private space wherever it may be, beautiful or ugly, near or far. However, it is not necessarily a physical place but the intangible domain of the imagination, which can be activated anywhere.

Retrospective on Six Years of Blogging

When I began this venture into online writing six years ago, I viewed it as my outlet to the world–an instant digital plug-in to communicate with bookworms and bibliophiles around the globe from my isolated mountain retreat far from the country’s cultural centers. As an obscure, unknown writer, I would send missives to unknown addressees. Luckily, none of my posts would come back marked “Return to Sender.” In Emily Dickinson’s terms, if the world did not come to visit me or write letters to me, then I would write little essays to the world that never wrote to me. Like sending a message in a bottle out to sea, I would post short commentaries on the art of writing, favorite books and authors, films, all things literary, and any topic cultural or political that appealed to me and send my little essays to float off into the blogosphere and land willy-nilly where they may.

As a blogger I hoped to spark a conversation. In retrospect, blogging has been a successful and satisfying form of self-expression, but it has not produced the dialogue to the extent I had hoped for between me and readers. Although I often invite readers to add their thoughts and ideas on the topic of my posts, they have not generated a great deal of comments, at least not as many as I would have liked. Despite this, I am a little frog with boundless temerity in an ocean of bloggers and have collected my posts over the period May 2011 to May 2017 into a book titled How Public Like a Frog.

I am a frog on a log in my blog. I may be croaking alone, but I enjoy the sound of my croaks. Blended from the labial at the end of the word web and from log, as in a ship’s log or journal, the blog emerged in the 1990s and quickly caught fire. The blog can simply be an online personal journal, a ranting platform, or an informational forum on any conceivable hobby or interest. Essentially, it is informal non-fiction writing, making anyone in the world an opinion columnist. I aim for my blog posts to be mini-essays. In the classic sense, their goal is to delight and instruct, appealing to writers and readers of all genres even poetry lovers.

Sometimes my blog frog has ventured into the political swamp. I believe this topic is not off-limits to serious writers. Not only opinion columnists and political scientists are entitled to wade through this territory, but fiction writers as story-tellers must uphold honesty. In a way, fiction writers tell honest lies. They fabricate fictional truth by creating a made-up world in which they can illuminate reality and expose hypocrisy and venality under the guise of storytelling. They change the names of people and places, alter clothes and accents, add a mustache or curl the hair here and there to protect both the innocent and the guilty. As for poetry, it embodies heightened life; it encapsulates the life lived well and honestly. A faked poem is readily apparent; it is sentimental, forced, pompous, and gerrymandered. No higher praise can be awarded a novel, a poem, a film, any literary work than to pronounce it true to life. The frog alone in its bog reflects upon what it sees. His small pond is a microcosm of the macrocosm. Those reflections may find a kindred spirit in the universe, and when that happens, I croak happily.

As long as I have breath and functioning brain cells, my frog will publicize my thoughts and observations on this blog. I like commenting on books and films that have enlightened me. They are like flies I catch here and there while I am sitting on my log. My roving eye enjoys movies and will  not resist telling you why I think they are worth viewing. I love art, music, and painting.  In case you haven’t noticed, I go absolutely gaga over history.  Perhaps I am a hopeless dilettante, a dabbler in the arts, a goggle-eyed egg-headed intellectual. That’s not to say I avoid exercise. I do like to jump from lily pad to lily pad, to dive in the water and make a small splash, a little ping in the pond now and then. I hope you’ll be standing by the shore and listening.

Art by William Chippich

 

Pop Culture Wins in 2016

Pop culture wins in more than one area in 2016.

In October when the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan, I questioned its appropriateness. Wasn’t the creation of a separate category more in order than pronouncing Dylan’s lyrics an accomplishment in world literature considering that songwriting spans the realms of music and literature? I recognize that poetry no longer has a general readership and that most Americans’ exposure  to poetry today comes solely through song lyrics. I have no elitist quarrel with this state of affairs, for clearly poetry has its roots in an oral tradition. Yet the gushing of some authors such as Salman Rusdie and Joyce Carol Oates over Dylan’s award struck me as excessive and unwarranted. The Academy justified the award because Dylan “had created new poetic expression within the great American song tradition”–a peculiar rationale, which seemed to justify a new category–songwriting–not a prize for outstanding accomplishment in literature.

I wondered if I was missing something. Did others see literary merit where I had only heard successful popular folk music that I had enjoyed while growing up? I wondered if the lyrics would impress me as great poetry when I read them on the printed page. I determined to read all of Dylan’s lyrics and to formulate my own judgment. With this purpose in mind, I ordered the 679-page volume of The Lyrics 1961-2012.

It has taken me two months to read the entire book. By page 100, I was bored. Granted, there are some clever lines scattered here and there; but I didn’t see enough meat on the bones to pronounce this great poetry. I struggled to finish the book, only able to read a few pages at a time. Much is monotonous, boring, silly, lame, and the usual mournful love laments. The lyrics are dependent on refrain and repetition and are often rather banal. Dylan is a genius in use of rhyme, but on the printed page they come across as too forced. “Blowin’ in the Wind,” of course, stands out as rising above the ordinary lyric and reads well as a poem. Much of what I read is pure doggerel, light verse à la limerick. Did the Academy members actually read all of the complete lyrics?  How did they stay awake for the duration?

About page eighty-five the language is becoming more political, and in “One Too Many Mornings,” Dylan creates one of his memorable refrains: For I’m one too many mornings/And a thousand miles behind. A good example of his word wizardry that everyone enjoys occurs in “All I Really Want to Do:” I don’t want to meet your kin/Make you spin or do you in/Or select you or dissect you/Or inspect you or reject you. Or these unforgettable lines in “My Black Pages:” Ah, but I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now. Of the intermittent lyrics that I consider crossing the border into what may be termed literary in the canonical sense is “Chimes of Freedom” in which the one-line, end-of-stanza refrain is not overdone and the line Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales/for the disrobed faceless forms . . . possesses the fresh, vivid imagery, assonance and consonance my senses love in fine poetry.

But moments of verbal virtuosity are lost  in pages of verse that are flat and trite. There are too many to choose from, but I’ll settle on this from “I Shall Be Free No. 10:” Now they asked me to read a poem/At the sorority sisters’ home/I got knocked down and my head was swimmin’/I wound up with the Dean of Women/Yippee! I’m a poet, and I know it/Hope I don’t blow it. Ogden Nash could do better. Dylan’s gymnastics with rhyme augurs the rise of rap and hip hop at the end of the twentieth century.

Half-way through the book, I began to note poems that seemed to transcend the jingle-jangle of merely a song lyric. “Tin Angels,” “Golden Loom,” and “Romance in Durango” (a bilingual ballad) have glimmers of more substance, and “Too much of Nothing” has the clever line evocative of Dylan’s social commentary. Then I rejoice, hearing the sounds of my favorite song lyrics in “Forever Young,” and “Simple Twist of Fate.” Am I swayed by memories of listening to these songs, or are they also good, if not great poems? The Academy’s consensus apparently was that Dylan’s body of work rose above the trite and time-worn found in love ballads and folk songs. I am not so sure, especially, when I come to this final verse in “Where Teardrops Fall” toward the end of the volume: Roses are red, violets are blue/And time is beginning to crawl/I just might have to come see you/Where teardrops fall. Sometimes Dylan runs out of steam in playful language and his last lines bomb into vacuity. Is that his intention? Laughing at his own verbal play? Here’s another ending from “Dignity:” Sometimes I wonder what it’s gonna take/To find dignity. Here I hit the bottom of an empty well.

We have another figure of pop culture rising to prominent heights this year: Donald J. Trump, impresario of  the TV reality show “The Apprentice.” Pop culture has colored the nation’s judgment, taste, manners, and morals. So should I really wonder at the Swedish Academy’s wisdom in selecting Bob Dylan as recipient for the Nobel Prize in Literature?  Can the world at large discern quality in literature any better than the general electorate of the United States can distinguish character and fitness for office among political candidates? Pop culture has triumphed in all spheres of life. Pop culture is largely entertainment and is supposed to be fun. I don’t fault it for being that, but I do fault those who are unable to appreciate that dealing with important national and global issues is no laughing matter.

 

The Writer and Politics

Writers form part of the intelligentsia–the group of creative minds who through their writings, paintings, sculpture, music, and other forms of art, reflect upon and portray the spirit of their times. In doing so they cannot ignore politics. Who are the current players upon the national stage? What is the moral climate? How is the fabric of society being effected by events, styles, fads, popular opinion, new inventions, gadgetry, and fashions? Even if they write historical fiction, their narratives of the past seek to shed light on the contemporary milieu. It is not necessary for them to be polemical or take to the streets as activists. They can stay home and compose The Grapes of Wrath.

In the two weeks since the shocking election of Donald Trump, I have reflected how this event, thought so impossible by the intelligentsia, could have occurred. Like so many citizens who prided themselves on being informed and thoughtful voters, I was stupefied within one hour of listening to the election returns on November 8th and, thoroughly aghast, I turned off the television by seven o’clock. The country rejected elitist thought and chose a vulgar, ignorant, duplicitous man to be its president. My judgment had been terribly wrong. All Trump’s negatives, lack of temperament and qualifications did not matter to a goodly portion of Americans, both educated and non-educated, well-informed or ill-informed. They kicked elitists in the butt. Crudity and vulgarity ruled, which translated into not being politically correct–now considered a virtue. I moped. I still admired good manners.

I had invested time and energy in the last year and a half expecting him to be defeated. He was too absurd, too bizarre, too incoherent, to ever be elected. I am a pointy-headed intellectual who misread my country and my countrymen. It is a humbling experience. It is my comeuppance. It is the pride that goes before the fall, and the outcome made me extremely crestfallen.

Water therapy helps. Several bubble baths later, I can calmly reconsider this catastrophic event. This is my wake-up call, my eye-opener, not exactly being knocked off a horse like Saul on the way to Damascus, but it will have to do to give me new vision. I now have regained some serenity in the matter. My daily anodyne for twenty-five years has been A Course in Miracles, which tells me now “to loose the world from all I thought it was” and “not value what is valueless.”

Escaping from the political bombshell, I soaked in the tub, reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. In the first paragraph the narrator Genly Ai, the peace envoy to the planet of Winter, states “Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.” I nod my head, thinking “Isn’t that the truth in this campaign cycle?” Facts were inconsequential, ephemeral, irrelevant; but still precious as pearls. This science-fiction novel holds out the hope for peace when the two main characters, alone crossing the glacier, build trust and love for each other despite their differences. A dose of the Chinese yin and yang was a salve to my jangled soul. Light is the left hand of darkness/and darkness the right hand of light, Le Guin writes. Bingo! A light seemed to glimmer in my darkness. Trump is the shadow side of America, and I am a part of that America. I must own it, and in that darkness also acknowledge there is accompanying light. Something good may come of this bad.

Trump can’t fix the world; no one can, and certainly not one elected official alone. What’s real is love–the only fix-it-upper. To continue to lambaste this man is not the road to peace. To continue to find fault and to blame will not solve one problem (even if he did that in spades). The problem is in ourselves–our failure to forgive. Politics too much lately has been an exclusive game of fault-finding and finger-pointing. After the car breaks down, the owner has to fix it or buy a new one. I do not wish a failed presidency on anyone, but I feel the elevation of Trump to high office is bound to enlighten him and everyone who voted for him despite his inadequacies. He will have ample opportunity to fall off his high horse as I did. If he stumbles and falls, the experiment in electing an unqualified, low-minded person will have been tested, and we will have to form and test another hypothesis.

What I want to do in the next four years is first, stay alive; two, read a lot more books because that’s what an egghead does; three, play my harp while Washington squabbles; fourth, write some more blogs like this one that few people will ever read; five, knit fifty lace shawls; and last but not least, make new friends but keep the old ones. Have I given up following politics? No. I’ll just get my information entirely from reputable print and online news sources. Will I break down and watch the inauguration on January 20? No. I’ll be remembering my mother who was born on that day in 1917.

I append to these election reflections a two-part poem on the subject. The first part I wrote the morning of November 8th; the second part I wrote ten days afterwords.

Election Reflections

A.M.

Election morning brings feeling
That in the evening
We’ll have a leader that is female
Then the world in one breath will exhale.

To play footsie with an ignoramus
Was terribly dangerous.
The chance of a bigot as POTUS
Was a blemish on all of us.

With the counting seek the polestar
That in the evening
Will project in bright light
All are not without foresight.

Election morning I’m foreseeing
That in the evening
Love’s heel crushes the head of hate
Then binds a divided state.

P.M.

Premonitions are often wrong
Like morning’s hopeful song
That collapses like the twin tower
Folding in upon itself in horror.

Beyond dumbstruck by the dumb
Who’ve elected the worse than dumb
Stupefies and I’ve become the buffoon
Babbling like a baboon.

Reason is trumped, resentment
Excuses bad judgment,
Moral compass is jettisoned
And I’m utterly disillusioned.

The navigational guides are jinxed;
We’ve been hoodwinked.
The ship of fools sails on with broken spar,
Can Ahab steer to safe harbor?