Tuesday, July 30, 2013
The Enemy of Progress
I’ve become too obsessed with writing fully-formed things, and I owe you, dear reader, an apology, because that obsession has led to my lack of posting for a month.
It started with things getting busy, which led to making excuses, which led to stagnancy, which led to this post. I will, then, write myself out of it.
Nothing is ever fully formed, after all- least of all a work of art. Earth, art, people: all these things adapt and evolve over time, and yet I, when staring at a blinking cursor, too often think that the end result must be something that makes a reader jump out of her skin with excitement.
It need not be that way. Indeed, it can’t be that way. Art, life, love, and so much more arise only from exploration, both internal and external.
Explorers of the external world travel, study people, put entire cultures under a microscope, and the brilliance of the story that emerges is not due to the spinning of words on a page, but from the mere act of writing down the amazing things that are happening.
Explorers of the internal world dig deep into their own psyches, and merely transcribe the things that they find hidden there. The same thing is happening there, too: a mere transcription of the depths of the world.
Not everything that is churned out will be worthy even - especially - of my own standards, but that’s okay. It’s part of the exploration, of the process, of the organizing of information. One doesn’t strike gold with every thrust of the pick.
We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.
~ Marcel Proust
Art is journey, and, to continue the metaphor, not every step is paved with gold. My aim, I think, will be to allow more of the process - the journey - to unfold publicly, rather than hiding the vast majority of the process, and only displaying the nuggets I’ve found.
So to hell with perfectionism.
Side note: to you readers who subscribe on the Kindle, I owe you big. You actually pay me every month to write something, and I’ve let you down this month. I’ll make it up to you. Promise.
Monday, July 29, 2013
‘Honeybee’ by Tom Petty
One of the few songs that made me actually scream “This is my jam!” when I was a kid. (Tom Petty’s ‘Honeybee’)
Sunday, July 28, 2013
…the nightly news broadcasts covered the royal family more than seven times as much as they covered climate change in 2012? What if I told you that the Kardashian family — who seem to amount to royalty in America these days — earned more than 40 times the coverage given to ocean acidification, often referred to as climate change’s “evil twin,” over a recent 18-month period?
Simply put, the press is falling down on the job. If we, as a people, continue to pay more attention to fairy tales than reality, it will spell our doom….
Chip Giller, founder, Girst (via om)
Saturday, July 27, 2013
A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.
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