Over a Candle

As anyone who has ever played Role-Playing Games with me can tell you, the hardest thing for me, creatively, is coming up with a name. I have created dozens of characters over the years, and almost every time, the name is decided upon at the last possible minute. (Usually while sitting around the table for the first gaming session, and the GM turns to me and asks me my name. Even then, I will beg for a few extra minutes to come up with it.)

As a gamer, this is mildly annoying. As a writer, it can be downright frustrating. At some point, I need a name for a character (or more recently, a town), and I can’t continue writing until I have a name. I know I can change it later, but that doesn’t feel right, usually. Once named, that’s the name! So it has to be right the first time.

This means I can easily suffer from a very specific sort of writer’s block. Friday, I wrote a couple of pages in my novel. Then I came to the point where I finally had to refer to a town by name. And I could not, for the life of me, come up with anything. I haven’t been able to work on the novel since.

I know, at some point, I will come up with something. I always do. Maybe there is something deeply ambivalent about names for me. I’ve always known they had power. They identify and delineate. The wrong one fails to capture the essence of the thing so named, and thus rings false. Names are often the first thing we learn about a person or a place and can establish the grounds for our first impression.

Also, names are really useful when referring to stuff in writing.

Whenever I have taken a personality inventory, I come out as a very high F (feeling) and hence a very low T (thinking). In the Myers-Briggs typology, this determines the kind of decision making one engages in. (In Kiersey’s sorter, this plays out a little differently, but the details aren’t really relevant to my point.)

I mention this because I’ve been thinking about my writing. It’s not that my Myers-Briggs type is directly relevant to my writing, but thinking about it shed some light, for me, on my writing process. And it has to do with my preference for F over T.

My best writing, in my opinion, comes when I let go. When I just write with little censoring or planning ahead. But too often, I write from the head. My natural inclination is to “think” from the heart, but I keep trying to write from the head.

Is this a function of being in academia, where intellect is valued over emotional response? Where everything must be explained and defended? That’s not how I function. I don’t think my way is better, but I think I have, for too long, tried to make myself into a more rational and coherent person. Maybe I’m just not built that way.

It’s okay to play pretend when I’m working at my academic job, when I’m arguing policy online or in the letters page of my local paper. But when I’m working on my passion, my writing, I do violence to myself by ignoring my natural functioning, by trying to make sense and fit into I think people need. This is not an excuse to write crap and defend it as brilliant. Rather, this is about the drafting process. How does the first draft come off the pen onto the page? Does it go through filters before it is properly born? Shouldn’t it be born, then have the chance to grow and develop?

By writing from my head, I was trying to make it come out perfectly the first time. But for me, maybe for everyone, that is wrong. I need to let it come spewing out. Then I can go back over it with a filter to get it into the form I want.

The birthing process, the writing process, matters. The more I write carefully, the more i let my head get in the way. I need to work on that.

In the grand scheme, nothing matters
It’s not nihilism, it’s that we are all connected
Only the arrangements change, only the modes
The substance stays the same
Spinoza is not a Buddhist, though he shares some of their insights
Everything changes, so nothing does
The level is everything
At one level, the level of modes, change happens
At another, there is no change, no differentiation, only Being
Being is, everything is Being, so everything Is
But events occur at the level of modes
We mistake mode for reality
We believe the superficial is the deep
Mode becomes important
Mode becomes everything
And we miss that everything Is
Nothing changes because nothing is all there is
We fight for illusion instead of embracing the real

Life happens.

It is a cute bumper sticker. Most know that ‘life’ is a stand-in for another four letter word. Yet it seems instructive that ‘life’ itself is a four-letter word.

No one asks to born. Life is thrust upon us, unsuspectingly. And we are supposed to appreciate it, be grateful for the gift of life.

Gift. Another four-letter word.

Have you ever gotten a gift you didn’t want? Yes, it’s the thought that count, but that doesn’t always mean that you want the gift itself. We may thank the person who gave it to us, appreciate that we were thought of, even though the gift itself is unwanted.

So we call life a gift and expect everyone to think of it as the best gift we could ever get. I do admit it is a necessary gift in order to receive any other, but just calling it a gift doesn’t mean everyone wants it. And I can certainly imagine someone deciding that they don’t.

Life happens. But not by choice. Make of that what you will.

This is one of those little insights that hits me now and then. Something I expect everyone else will find completely obvious, but had eluded me for the longest time. Ah well, I still feel the need to share.

I don’t think the same way other people do. Maybe there are others who think the way I do; I can’t be sure. But other people think differently. Not better or worse. But different.

The reason this wasn’t obvious for me is that I had misidentified the problem. For so long, I thought my problem relating to others was communication. I thought I didn’t know how to communicate in a way that would get through.

This explains disagreements I’ve had in my personal life and online. I argue with people and get confused when they seem to misunderstand me. I thought I must be doing something wrong in the way I said things.

It turns out, instead, I think differently. I’m nearly sure of it, now. Doing a better job of listening to others, and noting where things go wrong, I’m picking up on it a little more clearly.

I don’t think I could explain how I think differently. And certainly I know that at least some others think like I do (or perhaps the other way around) at least some of the time. Ronni and I, for instance, sometime make the same connections. Probably we’ve had a great deal of influence on one another.

How this might be useful to me is not clear. What it means for my attempts to communicate is trying to pick up on those times that my thought process has diverged wildly from someone else and not try to plow ahead. I don’t know. But it seems important. And I’m trying to do a better job of stopping and noting the important things that occur to me.

Writing, for me, is really an auditory experience.

The best way for me to proof-read stuff I’ve written is to read it aloud. That process serves two purposes.

The first is practical. Proof-reading my own stuff is very nearly impossible. I believe this is probably true for most people. When I proof-read silently, my mind is happy to supply missing words or correct typos. In other words, I miss mistakes. Reading the material out loud forces me to notice those mistakes more fully than I otherwise would. This is the reason I recommend proof-reading aloud to all my students. It’s not fool-proof, but it’s more thorough.

The second reason, though, is that I want to hear how the words sound. I want to hear the flow of the words, sentences, and paragraphs. How does it sound? Because the process of reading, for me, is auditory. I hear the words in my head, even if I’m reading silently. It is important, then, in my own writing process, that I make sure the words sound how I want them.

This may go a long way towards explaining why I prefer writing dialogue to other parts of the narrative. Dialogue most obviously is auditory in nature. It’s the easiest for me to hear in my head. And it is the easiest for me to produce. Descriptions, movement, action… All are difficult for me to produce. I don’t know how those should sound.

I love reading to other people. Taking the prose on the page and bringing it to life is a simple pleasure. A form of story-telling, perhaps, though more story sharing. When I wrote poetry, I wrote intending it to be spoken, not simply stared at on a page. And I think I approach my prose in a similar way.

We imbue things with meaning. People, places, events… All take one meaning that we assign to them. Whether we are reflecting on those in our past, contemplating those in the present, or expecting what is to come… Meaning comes from within.

The truth is what it is. It may be hard to form an accurate picture of reality, but it’s there, objective. Meaning, though, is far more difficult to pin down. No one singular meaning can be assigned.

I once apologized to someone for something that had happened years earlier. For me, it was a great source of shame and regret. For the other, it was as though it had never happened. They didn’t even remember the slight.

Did it happen? Of course. They didn’t deny its occurrence. But the importance it had held for me was completely absent for the other. Something that had been of great significance in my world, had had little apparent effect on the other person involved.

It happened to both of us, but meant something very different to each of us. The objective occurrence is there to be observed (given the appropriate perspective in space-time), but the meaning of the event is not fully determined merely by the objective facts.

The same is true for every person, place, or event. Everyone I meet is likely to be important to someone, even if they make little impression on my life. Every place I go, someone calls home, even if it’s just a waypoint on my journey.

Even the people and places that are important to me now, may not have been important years ago, or vice versa. Meaning is not only subjective, but it is in perpetual motion, changing as we change.

Too often, we conflate meaning with objective reality. Or the other way around.

My summer class has been over for a week. The last six days, I have had no pressing obligations. I have been free to work on my own research and my own writing. I even got a few things done around the house. In short, I have the freedom to get things done that have been relegated to the back burner for far too long.

As a result, I have the distinct feeling that there is something I ought to be doing, but I cannot remember what it is.

This is one of the pitfalls I expected as I embark on my sabbatical. Sure I can get work done that I’ve wanted to get done for a long time now. What I’m not certain of is whether I can psychologically deal with all of this unstructured time. I am so used to having all of my time taken up with class preparation and grading, I am so used to feeling that, when I’m not working, there is more work I could be doing. Now that I don’t have that, that the work that needs doing is getting done, and there isn’t more to do beyond it, I find myself uneasy.

I admit I have trouble relaxing during the school year. I get as much done as I do because I work in a state of high anxiety: constantly aware of deadlines and how much work yet remains. Now that I am actually free to relax a little, I find myself almost completely incapable of it. My hope is that, over time, my body and mind will learn that it’s okay to relax, and I will. If only a little.

I was skimming through some old materials and came across something Robert Anton Wilson had posted on his website as a “Thought of the Day” (before he died).

13 Internation Relations 3181 y.C. 
(only 819 years to the Millenium!)

The revival of group hatreds in this country has dismayed and even frightened me ever since it began in the late 1960s.

When I was in high school and college, in the late 1940′s – early 1950′s we all remembered Hitler very well. Teachers taught us that Hitler was terrible, not because he hated the wrong group, but because hating any group is illogical, unscientific and leads ultimately to violence. Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different. Sometime while I was busy and didn’t notice, Political Correctness took over Academia and they stopped teaching that. They started teaching that Hitler was terrible because he hated the wrong group, but it’s okay to hate other groups.

Logic has nothing to do with it; logic itself is now suspect (just as it was in Nazi Germany.)

This rebellion against rationality originally intended to make Radical Feminism and its doctrine of male fungibility respectable, and it succeeded, at least in the major media, but it also made fungible group hatred respectable in general. Now the anti-Semites and all the other hate mongers are crawling out from under their rocks, and Academia does not have the ammunition to argue against them. Academia cannot argue the rational principle that hatred of any group does not make sense; they dumped that when they dumped logic (as a “male” perversion.) 

The argument between Left and Right now consists only of debating which are the correct groups to hate. 

I actually wrote several paragraphs about why this passage really stuck with me, both when I first read it and again when I came across it yesterday. I think I’ll keep those to myself for now, and let you, the reader, make of this what you will.

There is a moment…

To be fair, there are a lot of moments. Many different moods and feelings that seem significant in some way. For me, most of these are after the sun has set.

In this case, it is a moment after I’ve gotten into bed and settled in for a long night of insomnia. I may have the television on. Or not. I may have the computer open. Or not. But those details tend not to matter.

The moment comes when I feel as though anything is possible. Day light is a limiting factor. Day light defines. Definition means actuality. Actuality is the death of possibility. The vagueness inherent in the blackness of night could hold anything.

When everything is possible, nothing is certain, nothing definite. I think it may be why it is difficult to sleep. Knowing that there are only a few short hours before the sun rises and sets the world back into stone, I don’t like wasting the chance to capture the many worlds available in the dark. It one of those “points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with the world of dreams.”*

It is a moment… Nothing more. But nothing less. Moments need to be acknowledged and listened to.

* “A Dream within a Dream” by The Alan Parsons Project