Check check check it out #2

Want another website to while away some literary hours, until you feel bad for not writing?

Check out Brain Pickings. They post a lot, and I just can't keep up with all of them, but it's great to peruse through and see what strikes your fancy.

Also, happy birthday F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thanks for the good words.

What Mary Brown Taught Me: Art as Community

Nine years ago I met Dr. Mary Brown. And I thought she was the most self-rightous bitch. You know the professor who thinks that her class is the only one you’re taking? The work load for Creative Writing, a simple 200–level class, was overwhelming. I was an athlete. I worked, I paid rent. I had other things to do.

              At mid-terms of that particular class, Mary and I had a sit-down meeting. I had missed over half of the class periods up to that point. I told her that I was sorry and that I would do better, and I mostly meant it. I was also dealing with a defeating case of post-breakup depression, a pretty consuming party schedule, life as a year-round college athlete. In my mind, I had a lot going on. A 200-level writing class wasn’t particularly meaningful in the scheme of my priorities.

              In fairness to my immature self, I only had so many hours in the day. I decided that I was more interested in what I would learn from a class than what grade I would receive, so any level of “jumping through hoops” (including participation/attendance grades, which I summarily dismissed at the time) I just rejected. This wasn’t necessarily all-out belligerence, although that cropped up at times. Really it was a decision that experience and learning trumped feedback and grades. I still mostly stand by this value, but at the time I misunderstood the relationship of feedback to learning. Still, I lived according to a certain degree of individual value judgment.

              Mary Brown, however, would not fall in line with my assessment of academic life. And it drove me crazy. She was this uptight, rule-driven taskmaster who insisted that doing things properly was better than doing them well. She insisted that class attendance was importance, which reeked of ego. Oh, yes, Mary, I must be in your class, to gorge on your endless wisdom?

              Life has, as it does, continued its onward march. Nearly a decade of it, and I’ve grown up a little bit. Even by the time I graduated, I had learned that Mary was more or less the opposite of all I had assumed: her approach to writing and teaching was humble, and yet ambitious. She encouraged readers and writers to dare, to buck the rules and to create great works rather than good assignments. She rapidly became one of my favorite professors, and her faith, her approach to work, her belief in the power of literature is one of the prevailing theologies, ontologies, foundations of life that I hold to. It is mystical and spiritual and hard to peg down, but it’s so very real, and so very foundational to how I approach the written word.

              Mary Brown did not care that I was there to hear her lectures. She cared that I was there to engage in the sacred art of literature. Writers cannot exist without readers, and readers cannot exist without writers, and a class setting cannot operate without both in ample supply. I believe that what she was interested in was not blind obedience, was not simply the rules of attendance, but rather steeping students in the two-way, multi-dimensional act of creation.

              I have come to believe that a work of art is not complete when it is finished. A written piece is not complete unless it is presented to a reader, who continues the creative work through interpretation. A work of art is presented by an artist and interpreted through viewing, reading, engaging. What creates a work of art is not simply what the artist brings, but what the viewer brings as well; these two things fuse in a mystery not unlike marriage, or sex: two become one, amplified. What makes an enduring work, a classic, an eternal gesture, is a piece that resonates with readers, with consumers, infinitely. Thus, it never stops creating, which is a sacred act. We are still moved by Shakespeare’s characters, or the enduring, ancient struggles of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, talked about the necessity of tackling enduring themes rather than topical situations. It is these themes that continue to resonate throughout humanity, throughout time, throughout the experience of interaction and interpretation that round out what a piece of art can and ought to be: infinitely creative, infinitely holy. 

              Mary Brown understood this. She understood that creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. She understood and taught me—not aggressively, but through the seeds of her convictions, that took years to bloom—that art is a collaborative effort. That art is a mystical experience, that art builds on the history of those who have come before and weaves into the creative work of a creative god, that art requires us to live in community, to both engage and shed our loneliness, our disparate value judgments, and instead live the vulnerable and terrifying life of an artist: a life that is lived wide open on the page, that cannot exist without some great and mysterious other reading, viewing, engaging, and creating alongside us. This is eternity: the endless rhythm and rhyme of creation mating with creation to offer something new and beautiful to the world, something that, at its best, resonates across space and time and continues to create long after the work of the artist is done.

Check check check it out.

If you're looking for a cool website, and I know you are, check out Advice To Writers. Or follow them on Twitter. Really. It's good.

Have a good weekend, kids.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ladies and gentlemen.

Do you ever read something and you just think, "I'm so happy reading this that I'm angry about it." Garcia Marquez keeps me trying to make my brain bend in different ways, to describe things in new and confusing and illuminating ways.

"...but he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

If you like that, you should read how he describes a phallus. It's so good. Maybe next time, lit nerds. 

Wedding Bells are Ringing

I was going to write a different piece for today, but life happens, and it changes the way we approach art, right? 

My sister got married this weekend. Eckhardt weddings are wonderful, but there’s also this underlying tension. It’s one of the few times that my mom and dad are in the same place. There’s a certain irony in what brings us together: the backdrop of re-entering the hum and thrum, the incessant background electrical noise of all that has been unspoken since their divorce in 1990. 

My parents are divorced. My grandparents were divorced, on each side. Two thirds of my parents’ generation (i.e. them and their siblings) are divorced. I have a cousin who is divorced, and his brother who has divorced and remarried more times than I can keep count of (3 or 4? 5?). It’s messiness. 

So it was a palpable moment come together. My brother and I officiated, and there was this moment, as my dad is walking my baby sister down the aisle, and she’s such a woman, grown and beautiful. And we had this family moment at the front, this belief that we can be better than our past. This incredible sense of hope within the fear. Our family history is a constant, an unchangeable pain. And yet we keep trying, through that pain and heartache and fear, to make the story better for the next generation. 

Dearly beloved, we are here together today to celebrate the joining of two lives we hold dear: Caleb and Bethany. This union is the joining of two lives under the banner of a God who defined himself as love, and as we witness the fusion of two lives we point to a Creator who became one with his creation, to know and to be known, to serve in the mode and miracle of love. We join these two in an incarnational love, where they become one another, to know and to be known, to serve their united whole in the mode and miracle of love. 

Lots of tears were shed (classic Eckhardts), and I think there was healing available in that moment, and hope for a future that gets better. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. In the face of the awkward tension of us all in one place, we can see the resurrection of new faith, hope, and love. 

Two lives never join in a vacuum. In this space we are joining two families, and pulling together your upbringings, your histories, and your understandings of life. Bethany, as you become a Figg, you carry with you all of the weird and wonderful things that it means to grow up an Eckhardt. And both of you will quickly realize that Eckhardt norms are not quite normal at all. I suspect, as well, there are some quirks on the Figg side too. So your goal becomes carving out a new normal, to be patient and loving and kind, and to learn to choose the best in one another as you continually define this newly forms space, this nation of two, this Caleb and Bethany. 

Congratulations, Caleb and Bethany. Do better. We believe in you.

Dear Poetry

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” Mary Oliver

Dear poetry:

I'm in. I'm trying. I'm going to give it a go. I've been skeptical, because there is so much silliness in your lines. I've been cynical, of the esoteric walls you build. The truth is, if I'm honest, I love you: your laughter and your cascading doubts, the nebulous cotton of your walls, the metaphor that is truer than facts. I'm going to give it a serious go. I hope we can make this work.

Pat

Slight Update

After much soul-searching (actually, during a timed free-writing exercise) I decided to push this blog a bit more seriously. It's still a casual space that will meander through topics as they strike me, but first and foremost it will be about what it started out as: the beauty of the written word. Of course, story is a part of art as an encompassing concept; creativity, creation, the holiness and godliness of creative work, and so forth will trickle in and out because, well, that's the altar that I find myself serving on these days.

There's still some space for theology and psychology, because art fuels and is fueled by these. Ultimately everything is Art, and Art is everything: the hum of a computer fan, the ghost wind blowing against a stubborn window, the phases of water: steam, stream, or ice. Art is in everything, it is all around us, so my focus is nice in that it gives me a place to land when in doubt, but doesn't actually constrain me to anything.

My plan is to post daily updates--small blog posts, thoughts, quotes that inspire me or challenge me, and short vignettes or exercises. Once a week I will post a more substantive post (I'm picking Tuesday) that delves a bit more into what I'm wrestling with, or tired of, or crying over as I try to engage and pursue and love (and sometimes hate) writing.

Thanks for reading. Art only becomes eternal when it's shared (more on this Tuesday).

"Sometimes I know what I believe because of what I’ve written." J.K. ROWLING

"Sometimes I know what I believe because of what I’ve written." J.K. ROWLING

I love the way writing defines our indefinable spaces. And yet within that definition, it allows us to have depth, have gray space within us, and live in contradiction with ourselves. Dave Eggers talks about writing down our past as presenting snakeskins—it is a representation of what we are, now, or what we once were, that can help us understand who we are to become. In writing, in creative work, we present something static, something revelatory, and that moment creates a data point of our constantly expanding selves. The more we learn to create beyond the internal editor, beyond the endless self-critic, the more we are able to grow and own our full, true selves.