Brain droppings

[felonius]

Remski! Forgot about him.

Found an old column of his that I thought some writers here might find of interest. It’s one in a series he did several years ago in one of Toronto’s small press literary journals called “Notes toward a theory of autobiography.â€

[felonius]

Some more droppings from Shelby Matthews:

'I' like people

I like people. People driving. People wavering. I call out to them. I shout why. Not babies. I don't like babies. All that growing out of nothing. All that lack. Girls and boys. How does observation differ from experience. A window from a mirror. Reflecting on a tree. It's good to feel deeply when the sun shines. Identity rooted in origin. What grounds have you. Truth is unhinged. Doors ambiguous. Something to slip into. Slip out of. I like swinging back and forth. Every night a different room. A drop of red wine. A bit of fluff. Advance the leg in minute increments. Or pause in mid air. Black is abundant. It's difficult to poke someone with your elbow when edging forward. Quietly listening to a mind running back. Yes I like people. Dogs too. Trout for that matter. They're good with children. French people have pursed lips. Some say they're holding ready for a kiss but actually they're trained to do it. I was trained to eat nicely. The bottom is generally more useful than the top. This is linked to the jaw. To say an american jaw is very loose. All I can do is drop it. Or simultaneous equations. Spend a free moment with the mouth wide open. Mulling the current vogue of thought. It used to be a vacuum. My cocker wears a trilby. It becomes her. Leading to nothing. Try squeezing infinity into a hole. I've lost all my words. To relax I return inside. Try to distinguish bile from gall. Nerve from cord. Intestine from brain. It's depressing. What makes me cry. What makes grown-ups cry. A plume driven by a bird.

[Aunflin]

I like this one.

Reminds me of my rambling "soliloquies" at work when I'm really tired and bored out of my mind (usually when I have to serve the patient trayline when I should actually be cooking )...I just start stringing random thoughts together to amuse myself--everybody ignores it now, but they used to look at me like I'd lost my gourd.

[laurie]

One of my creative writing teachers (a poet) had us keep a "random thoughts" journal during the course. We used lines from it in our poems, which made for some VERY STRANGE poetry, at least on my part.

[felonius]

Aunflin: care to post one of those rambling soliloquies? I'd love to read it.

laurie: save any of that old poetry?

The droppings continue! How about a list of tragic character flaws from Douglas Coupland?

...I am writing a list of tragic character flaws on my dollar bills with a felt pen. I am thinking of the people in my universe and distilling for each of these people the one flaw in their character that will lead to their downfall - the flaw that will be their undoing...

You disguise your laziness as pride.

You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.

You mistake motion for growth and are lured into vexing situations.

You defend other people's ideas at the expense of your own.

You still don't know what you do well.

You are unable to visualize yourself in a future.

Your inability to sustain sexual interest in just one other person drains your life of the possibility of intimacy.

Your own ability to rationalize your bad deeds makes you believe the entire universe is amoral as yourself.

Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships.

You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries.

Your fear of change is too clearly visible in your eyes.

You are wasting your youth, your time, and your money because you won't acknowledge your shortcomings.

Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side.

You worry that if you lower your guard, for even one second, your whole world will disintegrate into chaos.

You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should bringing about yourself.

You are dazed by the ease with which obliteration can be obtained.

You feel you have more memories than you have energy to process those memories.

You are unable to differentiate between façade and substance.

I am afraid of the dark ages.

Let's just hope we accidentally build God.

Imagine yourself befriending a monster.

You are never far from the sound of an engine.

Grow a tail.

We're all theme parks.

Only democracy saves us from the ravage of being animals.

Pick one and write a short story - it's pretty much all there.

[felonius]

Richard Ford:

Most writers' work habits date from the days when they were beginners, and at some base level one's habits always involve a system of naïve appraisal. You proceed in ways that let you figure out if what you're doing is acceptable to yourself.

Stopping and starting during any one day's writing invites you to judge what you just wrote. And enjoying a long interval between weighty endeavors invites such useful reassessments as: Do I have anything important left to add to the store of available reality? (Kurt Vonnegut decided he didn't.) Do I still wish to do this kind of work? Was the last thing I wrote really worth a hill of beans? Is there not something better I could be doing to make a significant mark on civilization's slate? Does anybody read what I write?

I mean, aren't such inquiries always interesting as well as being merely fearsome? Isn't there a measure of coldly cleansing exhilaration involved in appraising one's personal imperatives as though they were moral matters? Isn't that, as much as anything, why we became writers in the first place?

My view of the writers I admire is not that they are sturdy professionals equipped with a specific set of skills and how-tos, clear steps for career advancement and a saving ethical code; but rather that they are gamblers who practice a sort of fervidly demanding amateurism, whereby one completed, headlong endeavor doesn't teach the next one very much. And in the case of writing novels, one endeavor consumes almost entirely its own resources and generally leaves its author emptied, dazed and bewildered with a ringing in his ears.

Therefore a good spendthrift interval lasting a couple of seasons if not more, or at least until you can no longer stand to read the headlines of the newspaper; much less the articles that follow, can help to freshen the self, to reconfigure the new, while decommissioning worn-out preoccupations, habits, old stylistic tics - in essence help to "forget" everything in order that you "invent" something better. And by doing all this, we pay reverence to art's sacred incentive - that the whole self, the complete will, be engaged.

[laurie]

laurie: save any of that old poetry?

Actually, I saved all my old poetry ... somewhere. Remembering where is the problem.

I'm planning a "Spring Cleaning" blitz in the near future - if it turns up, I'll post some of the poems.

You'd like the one with the line "... the ant swallowed the chair ..." (I will NEVER forget writing that line ...)

[felonius]

I definitely want to hear more about the ant swallowing the chair.

Speaking of poetry and old stuff in storage, perhaps a little Bill Howell:

Dad's Boxes

Tentative love on rainy days: spare sheets
draped over bruised cardboard while you crawled
immersed on nimble daughterly knees around
hypothetical dolls between them.

Each holding concrete
paper evidence of his diligence or preoccupied negligence
but also maybe a kind of pack rat patience: dusty drafts
stuck together with rusty staples.

Those parts of him
your mother never understood or stood for: departures
retained to prove who he might've become but doesn't
remember enough to look for now.

You noticed them gone
afterwards: those indents in the carpet almost longing for
what was left unspoken on each moment of paper
instead of just unsaid to you.

[felonius]

A few plainly-spoken droppings from Stephen King (sent to me by a good friend recently):

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance-abusers - common variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullsh*t. I've heard alcoholic snow-plow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. It doesn't matter if you're James Jones, John Cheever, or a stewbum snoozing in Penn Station; for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter.

/me glances over at bookshelf and spots Hemingway, Anderson, and Thomas volumes. No Fitzgerald though - at least I wasn't four for four.

[Darb]

You disguise your laziness as pride.

FELON: That is a perfectly concise summary of one of Joseph Campbell's observations of India's triple problem of the 'untouchable caste', baksheesh (begging for alms), and a belief in reincarnation ... an entire caste of their culture, locked into perpetual prideful laziness, and beggary, waiting for their next stage of reincarnation. What's the point of trying to better oneself if one's caste is preordained and immutable until after you die ?

Your inability to sustain sexual interest in just one other person drains your life of the possibility of intimacy.

Your own ability to rationalize your bad deeds makes you believe the entire universe is amoral as yourself.

A bullseye description of the character "Christian" in the series "Nip/Tuck".

[Ghost]

Here is a piece of a Doug Giles column which I think falls into the brain dropping category, abet a piece of Christian brain dropping.


[quote]In this day of rabid terrorists, scrappy secularists, and undaunted demons, the believer must seriously have his spiritual act together or he will soon become religious road kill. Given the complications of our current culture, the quality of our Christian life must be ratcheted up a few notches. Unfortunately, for a lot of believers, slothfulness, stupidity, sentimentality, and slush remain the soup de jour. Yes, a lot of Christians are about as substantial as an empty Pez dispenser, and what makes it even worse is that they’re not near as cute.

If, as a Christian, you want to have true influence upon culture, then you must deepen your soul’s relationship with God and refuse to be simply denomination-centered, success-oriented, self-indulgent, and repellently corny. This type of me-monkey religion might be en vogue with an immediate aberrant version of the faith, but hear me loud and clear: such a “faithâ€

[Darb]

Well said.

[felonius]

What's the point of trying to better oneself if one's caste is preordained and immutable until after you die ?

It does seem to be a convenient justification and "blank cheque" for laziness, doesn't it? Very interesting...have to stop mucking about and order that Campbell book already...not familiar with the Nip/Tuck show but that's neat that you pigeonholed a character with the stated flaw...should try that with some more of those...

I like the sincere-and-passionate-yet-wry tone of that Giles column (though as one of those scrappy secularists he mentions I do indeed feel the waning influence of the Church to be quite positive and long overdue). Realistically and modernistically, I think the Christian he longs for "who can live and thrive in the public square without looking like the public square" is a tall order indeed. Too much water under the bridge, or rather, too long since it's been walked-on or turned into wine...

But I'm edging into Soapbox territory and I know how much everyone around here likes compartmentalization...better nip that in the bud...no wait...CAN'T STOP...

Just quickly then, and not to offend anyone's faith with flippancy, BUT: if the central message of Christianity is love, then "having a profound and extensive knowledge" of Scripture is indeed a commendable thing. With obvious exceptions, having that kind of knowledge of almost any written work is commendable. But also worth consideration is that from a certain point of view the Bible is one of the most genocidal books in the entire Western canon. If you read history, God is one of the leading causes of death. Has been for thousands of years, still going strong today in many places.

/end yet another OT (been racking 'em up lately )

[Aunflin]

Just quickly then, and not to offend anyone's faith with flippancy, BUT: if the central message of Christianity is love, then "having a profound and extensive knowledge" of Scripture is indeed a commendable thing. With obvious exceptions, having that kind of knowledge of almost any written work is commendable. But also worth consideration is that from a certain point of view the Bible is one of the most genocidal books in the entire Western canon. If you read history, God is one of the leading causes of death. Has been for thousands of years, still going strong today in many places.

Agree with you, felon.

[Darb]

Did you know that God is a member here ?

You can actually PM the big G, right here in the IBDoF !

/me briefly considers using admin privs to log in as God, and deleting someone at random, just for the sake of being able to claim that I "slew someone in the name of God".

[Aunflin]

[felonius]

Okay - back on topic. Here's a passage by Craig Calhoun that writers might keep in mind when penning certain character dynamics and motivations:

Examining the relationship between individual and society is one of the sources of intellectual excitement in modern sociology, and also one of the reasons why it always remains controversial. This is partly simply because sociology challenges a widespread but often unstated acceptance of individualism in contemporary society - an individualism that is particularly extreme in the U.S. Sociology reminds people who like to think they are in complete control of their own lives that they are not; it reminds people who say they are completely independent that they in fact depend on others and on a whole social system. It even reveals that when we make our own choices they do not simply express our individual distinctiveness, they also tend to reproduce extremely predictable sociological patterns. Much in our contemporary world is set up to encourage people to think in terms of the uniqueness of individual identity and the complete freedom of choice. People sometimes resist recognizing limits to these.

[Aunflin]

Amen!

[felonius]

Today's dropping from Jean Baudrillard:

Anything that bypasses meditation is a source of pleasure. In seduction there is a movement from the one to the other which does not pass via the same. (In cloning, it is the opposite: the movement is from the same to the same without passage via the other; and cloning holds great fascination for us.) In metamorphosis, the shift is from one form to another without passing via meaning. In poetry, from one sign to another without passing via the reference. The collapsing of distances, of intervening spaces, always produces a kind of intoxication. What does speed itself mean to us if not the fact of going from one place to another without traversing time, from one moment to another without passing via duration and movement? Speed is marvellous: time alone is wearisome.

[mccormack44]

Felonius wrote

…I do indeed feel the waning influence of the Church to be quite positive and long overdue.

Felonius, I believe you have made a rather common error. In my view, "the Church" of any denomination IS NOT Christianity. By the same token, the synagogue or temple is not Judaism, the Buddhist monastery isn't Buddhism, and so on.

These are all human establishments; they all eventually tend toward a bureaucratic approach to faith. Faith is right-brained. It can marry with the left brain in the realms of study, meditation, and learning about background and other practitioners' thoughts and practices. In fact, I believe that the faithful SHOULD do this. But the bureaucratic approach is likely to kill faith, not to enhance it.

It's a hard line for the faithful to follow. It's usually necessary and useful to meet with others of like faith; it's usually harmful to let yourself be stratified and fossilized by following the faith of others.

Also, Giles is talking about Christianity, I widened this to other faiths; but I believe this is true outside of religious beliefs. If a person (or character) has faith that people can save the ecology, for example, that person runs the same sort of risk of losing faith or of fossilizing it.

(In case anyone cares, I'm a practicing Christian; I don't have the gall to suppose that I know better than others what is good for other people who are not. I do feel the need to tell people where I stand.)

Sue

[felonius]

Felonius, I believe you have made a rather common error. In my view, "the Church" of any denomination IS NOT Christianity. By the same token, the synagogue or temple is not Judaism, the Buddhist monastery isn't Buddhism, and so on.

MC, you’re right of course. I suppose I did make a semantical error when I used “the Churchâ€

[Aunflin]

EWW! I just stepped in felonius's Brain Droppings! Ick!

[Sorry, couldn't help myself...]

[mccormack44]

Felonius

Your excerpt from Douglas Coupland is still referring to that part of Christianity which I consider to be on the shaky grounds of being ONLY right brained.

I believe it would be useful to present some views from the more reasoned side, but feel that I am on very shaky ground; both because I do have right brain reactions here — and this IS NOT a place for proselytizing — and because I don't pick up good quotes. One reason I like this thread is that those of you who can do this well are presenting ideas I wouldn't find on my own.

Please note that I'm not arguing with Douglas Coupland's position; I'm merely stating that some Christians present a more reasoned approach. I wish someone who CAN pick out good expositions of points of view would post something by C. S. Lewis or Richard J. Foster which would show the reasoned approach to faith that some of us believe is the way to believe.

In passing, I have been told that Foster's books appeal equally well to conservative Christians and to very liberal Christians.

Before I asked for this help, I did spend some time trying to figure out what I could post from these authors, but I truly can't figure out how to do this.

Sue

[felonius]

this IS NOT a place for proselytizing

Right again. Something I should keep in mind too. Have a tendency to spout off a little much at times. On a keyboard, anyway.

I wish someone who CAN pick out good expositions of points of view would post something by C. S. Lewis or Richard J. Foster which would show the reasoned approach to faith that some of us believe is the way to believe.

In passing, I have been told that Foster's books appeal equally well to conservative Christians and to very liberal Christians.

Not familiar with Foster, all I've read from Lewis are the Narnia chronicles. If anyone knows any nice n' steamy droppings from either one they'd care to post I'd certainly be interested in reading them as well.

Today's cranial bowel movement comes from a ways back. You might enjoy chewing on this one, mccormack. It's Fable 529 from Aesop:

True Dreams and False Dreams

Apollo, who is the leader of the Muses, once asked Zeus to give him the power of foresight, so that he could be the best oracle. Zeus agreed, but when Apollo was then able to provoke the wonder of all mankind, he began to think that he was better than all the other gods and he treated them with even greater arrogance than before. This angered Zeus (and he was Apollo's superior, after all). Since Zeus didn't want Apollo to have so much power over people, he devised a true kind of dream that would reveal to people in their sleep what was going to happen. When Apollo realized that no one would need him for his prophecies any more, he asked Zeus to be reconciled to him, imploring Zeus not to subvert his own prophetic power. Zeus forgave Apollo and proceeded to devise yet more dreams for mankind, so that there were now false dreams that came to them in their sleep, in addition to the true dreams. Once the people realized that their dreams were unreliable, they had to turn once again to Apollo, the original source of prophetic divination.

[mccormack44]

I'm not sure that it's wrong to mount a soap box (for a very brief time) as long as you allow others to mount theirs. And, indeed, I do find that kind of politeness on the threads I've explored.

I suspect that we're exploring our feelings as we type out these exchanges. As long as we're willing to accept other points of view, we all continue learning.

Mind you, I don't expect to do a 180° turn and I don't expect that of others, either. What I find I do is that I modify and/or enrich my view of life (philosophy with a decidedly SMALL p) as I seek to understand other points of view.

I don't think I was ever the type of youngster who KNEW she was right and everyone else was wrong. But as I've learned during the last 65 years (I began to become aware of others at about 12), I can be more narrow-visioned than I wish to be.

At the same time, I DO have beliefs which I've worked on throughout my life. I feel a need to make a polite statement about them. I ALSO expect that others will feel a similar need. I wish you to listen, politely; therefore I MUST listen, just as politely, to you.

I believe bigots of any faith refuses others any input. I also believe that as they do so, they become more weak in their faith. It always seems to me that such people are screaming loudly about their view in order to block out all other sounds. I can't speak for others, but I truly believe that the loving, creator God who is the center of my faith frowns on such attitudes. If there is a God who created us (as I do believe), it is obvious that he created a rich diversity of people and attitudes.

Who am I to say this diversity is wrong? I'm not God; I believe he is infinitely wiser than I will ever be. I believe the average bigot of the Christian variety screams that "God is Love" but believes that God is power and that that power belongs exclusively to the bigot. And this looks like a lack of faith to me, rather than an excess of it.

OOPS! That was my soapbox. Anyway, I love discussions like this, and I hope to grown in knowledge from an exchange of honest differences of opinion, honestly and politely expressed.

Sue