Art Changes Everything

Art Changes Everything – 27/52, BlackBerry 52 — Week 27 Jump-Off for week beginning July 4th, 2011, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 2011, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved. Medium: Droid snapshot of the wall outside Intermedia Arts, taken Pride weekend, altered in Photoshop Elements, b&w version.

Heat index over 100, sweat soaking through clothes. Last week was one of those weeks when I was searching for inspiration. Lids heavy from the day, the eyes kept roaming, leaped over to the bookshelf, and landed on Ray Bradbury’s Zen In The Art Of Writing. There are books I go back to again and again—for reminders that it’s okay to struggle. For stories about moments of success, paragraphs that sum up in a few words what it means to be an artist or a writer. I don’t separate the two. For me, writing and art are connected. They collectively make up the Arts.

I ran my fingers over the worn cover, then opened Ray’s book to the Preface. That’s as far as I had to go. Maybe a few tidbits in these paragraphs will have meaning for you, too. There are hours when I stop dead in my tracks; I don’t want to write anymore. Somehow, the practice keeps going. Not perfect. Tracks. Cairns inside eroded pockets of sandstone cliffs.

I enter the Preface right after Ray’s story of the day he breathed a second life into his childhood hero, Buck Rogers:

So I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World’s Fairs and began to write. And what, you ask, does writing teach us?

First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

So while art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

Secondly, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.

A variation of this is true for writers. Not that your style, whatever it is, would melt out of shape in those few days.

But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

     -Ray Bradbury from the Preface of Zen In The Art Of Writing: Essays On Creativity, © 1990 Ray Bradbury, original from “The Joy of Writing,” Zen & the Art of Writing, Capra Chapbook Thirteen, Capra Press, 1973.

And that is why I went to my studio and ate up the time with myself. So the world would not devour me. Time to sit and listen to music, to stare out the window, to write a few lines of poetry, to sketch at the ragged edges of the page, to find inspiration on a wall outside Intermedia Arts. Time to take up arms and fight, the smallest battle, the smallest effort to win.

Art changes everything.

Lotus and I will continue to respond to each other’s BlackBerry Jump-Off photos with text, photography, poetry (however we are inspired) for the 52 weeks of 2011. You can read more at BlackBerry 52 Collaboration. If you are inspired to join us, send us a link to your images, poetry, or prose and we’ll add them to our posts.

-posted on red Ravine, Thursday, July 7th, 2011

-related to posts: Flying Solo — Dragonfly In Yellow Rain, Dragon Fight — June Mandalas, The Sketchbook Project, Under The Rainbow — Twin Cities Pride

Art Changes Everything – 27/52, BlackBerry 52 — Week 27 Jump-Off for week beginning July 4th, 2011, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 2011, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved. Medium: Droid snapshot of the wall outside Intermedia Arts, taken Pride weekend, altered in Photoshop Elements, color version.

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Nine-Year-Old Reflections On Monkey Mind

I wonder if the 8-year-old girl, who was sketching at the Frida Kahlo exhibit a few weeks ago, will someday look back with wonder like Ray Bradbury. It could happen.

Sometimes I am stunned at my capacity as a nine-year-old, to understand my entrapment and escape it.

How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting?

Where did that judgment and strength come from? What sort of process did I experience to enable me to say: I am as good as dead. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What’s the cure?

I was able, obviously, to answer all of the above. I named the sickness: my tearing up the strips. I found the cure: go back to collecting, no matter what.

I did. And was made well.

But still. At that age? When we are accustomed to responding to peer pressure?

Where did I find the courage to rebel, change my life, live alone?

I don’t want to over-estimate all this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was. Without him, I could not have survived to introduce these essays.

Part of the answer, of course, is in the fact that I was so madly in love with Buck Rogers, I could not see my love, my hero, my life, destroyed. It is almost that simple. It was like having your best all-around greatest-loving-buddy, pal, center-of-life drown or get shot-gun killed. Friends, so killed, cannot be saved from funerals. Buck Rogers, I realized, might know a second life, if I gave it to him. So I breathed in his mouth and, lo!, he sat up and talked and said, what?

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They’ll never live the way you live. Go do it.

Except I never used the S.O.B words. They were not allowed. Heck! was about the size and strength of my outcry. Stay alive!

So I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World’s Fairs and began to write. And what, you ask, does writing teach us?

First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

Secondly, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.

A variation of this is true for writers. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days.

But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

So that, in one way or another, is what this book is all about.

-excerpt from the Preface of Zen In the Art of Writing, Essays on Creativity by Ray Bradbury, How To Climb the Tree of Life, Throw Rocks at Yourself, and Get Down Again Without Breaking Your Bones or Your Spirit, A Preface With a Title Not Much Longer Than the Book, Capra Press, 1990

Makes you want to read the book doesn’t it? Just think, this is only part of the first few pages. I was reminded by The Other Ivy’s post to check my shelves. 

There is was, Zen In the Art of Writing. I picked up the book and started reading it again.

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, January 13th, 2008

-related to post, White Elephants On Art

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PRACTICE – Holding My Breath – 10min

The center of a Blow Pop. That’s what it’s like to hold my breath. The uneaten half of a Tootsie Roll. I’ve got candy on the brain. Substantial unanimity. For the good of the whole. Holding my breath.

Swimming across the pool. Remember that John Cheever short story where the whole story is about him swimming from pool to pool to pool in his neighborhood? But then when you read further about his life, you find out he lived in a groundskeeper’s cottage on a wealthier man’s estate.

Puddle to puddle to puddle.

The story about the pool, what was the name of it? There was one about a radio, too. They stick in my mind like white on rice. Like white on rice; the rice can’t shake it. I prefer brown rice – more vitamins and roughage. I switched over a long time ago. Unless I’m going to have barbecue hash, Southern style. In which case, I go for the white rice every time.

I have to get Mom to go to that barbecue place in Georgia we always go to. I can’t remember the name of that place either. Just that they have green rocking chairs and a creek running under a bridge you walk over to get to the restaurant. And then you dive up some stairs and it’s always real crowded. And they give those peppermint soft sucking mints at the end to freshen the breath.

Holding my breath.

I hold my breath when I am afraid. And then again right before I’m going to blow the seeds off a dandelion. Remember Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine? When I was a freshman in college an artist friend named Anne introduced me to Ray Bradbury. He wrote a great book on writing. I like to read what famous writers have to say about writing.

I think I like it because I know they are going to say the same things I already know. Practice. Write a lot. Tell the truth. Write every day. Don’t mince words. Keep your day job. Find community. They never talk about the money. I wonder why they never tell you how poor you’re going to be in the early years? Maybe your whole life.

How many writers do we hear about that die before their work really hits the big time. I have heard of writers who become famous and then quit and go back to their day jobs because writing is too much work. That one on The Writer’s Almanac that Garrison Keillor was talking about in the background one morning when I was making a bologna sandwich to drop into my purple lunch bucket on the way to my part time day job.

Holding my breath. I used to take pride in diving into Granddaddy’s pool and being able to swim the whole under length without coming up for air. Sometimes that’s how I feel. Like I want to come up for air. But I’ve already broken the surface. And I know I’m breathing in.

Friday, May 4th, 2007

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