Fed-Up Writer To A Stubborn Piece of Work

Think and don’t think
My contrary child. 
My shadow, my sun, my rage 
and my thorn in the side. 

What do you want today? 

To feel, and float on feeling, 
Think with the edge of a knife.
To see stories and speak stars
Speak truth and spin attraction.

I see you sitting on the page, 
I see you sitting on my shoulder. 
I see you waiting to be born, 
And I see you slipping away. 

You didn’t like today. Will you like tomorrow?

All I want is for you to want me, 
To crave towards birth like I crave to be done with you. 

(A dramatic narration to the sound of crumpling paper and flying pencils.)

The Success Narrative of the Kandinsky Hot Pocket Affair

Last night my life changed, and I have a Hot Pocket to thank for it. 

The experience itself was deceptively mundane. I was at the second of my two jobs; I paused for dinner. I should clarify that I do not often eat Hot Pockets, but this particular one was an unexpected dinnertime gift. 

The first three bites were unremarkable: cheese, red sauce, warm bland crust. It was the fourth bite that caught me unawares. As my teeth separated the bite from the Pocket, I realized that in that bite – in my mouth – was something perfectly, inexplicably spherical. 

For a moment my thoughts went no further than sheer surprise. The sphere had no apparent taste or texture – the only sensation was that of shape, a perfect roundness of a type alien to food. Then – was this a grape? Perhaps a very small tomato? My mind was left adrift. Those were the most obvious edibles I could recall with such a shape and size. But there was no sugared burst of a grape, no caramelized gush of a roasted cherry tomato. There was – nothing. Just a spheroid in my mouth, and a dawning sense that my understanding of reality was a touch more tenuous than previously realized.

Fortunately, I recently read an article in which this very experience was perfectly described. 

Picture the scene: Moscow, Russia, the year 1896. A gallery hosts an exhibition. A man strolls through, a successful lawyer by profession. The man is named Wassily Kandinsky. 

Mr. Kandinsky pauses in front of a painting. It appears to be one of Claude Monet’s Haystacks series. His expression undergoes several rapid changes. He reaches for the gallery catalog. He stares at the catalog; he stares at the painting. He stares back at the catalog. In his own words:

“That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me. I could not recognise it. This non-recognition was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I dully felt that the object of the painting was missing….”

Let us consider Mr. Kandinsky’s “non-recognition.” This is the instant of tabula rasa – the instant right before a brain is changed. It is the familiar out of context, the unknown within reach; it’s meeting your double and losing your shadow. The discomfort hits as your brain starts to process some sort of meaning you can plausibly tell yourself and your neighbors. It is the classic snowball-to-the-face reaction. You are bemused, astonished, frustrated, outraged, caught off guard. In simple English: you are surprised. 

This surprise is the mark of potential. This is a moment that can change your brain and reshape your life. Since it can hit you like a shot of adrenaline or a natural disaster, discomfort is only natural. Discomfort simply means change. Neuroplasticity is occurring. 

What does Kandinsky think of neuroplasticity? He continues:

“…And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and spendor.” 

As Tank says in The Matrix: “Hey Mikey, I think he likes it!” 1 

From shock to “give me more” – creation work2  requires this rapid recognition of the creative potential of surprise. 

Creation work – such as Kandinsky’s – maps out how little we know. Kandinsky routinely questioned everything. He questioned his career as a lawyer, and became an artist. He questioned what an “artist” did, and pioneered abstract art. People who create things – whether paintings or stem cell research or perfectly fluffy pancakes – know it’s a balancing act. You have to have perfect confidence, and you have to have perfect doubt. You never know it will turn out, until it does. 

This is a largely untold story. In its place, we have a social narrative about knowledge and creativity that is – allegedly, inexorably – linked to success. But that’s an artificial connection. 

This artificial narrative tells us there is a predetermined arc from creation to success. If this arc includes mistakes or surprises or detours, it does so only to count these as further evidence of the inevitability of the creator’s success. It’s the myth of the “fail better” cult.  

It’s hard to spin a motivational narrative about the shock and discomfort and horrendously gnawing doubt that is crucial to making anything of worth. So the narrative doesn’t try. In its place, we have The Myth of the Successful Fill-in-the-Blank. It goes like this:

This artist/scientist/writer/entrepreneur is a success, because they were destined for success. 

Therefore, they are an artist/scientist/etc. because, and only because, they are a success. 

Did you catch that? It’s a subtle flip. It’s easy to do. And it’s an easy story to tell and sell. The artists/scientists/etc. in question frequently tell it themselves. This may be because they understand a good story when they hear it, or it may be because it’s simpler to believe that once things achieve a comfortable status quo, they have always been destined to achieve that status quo3. 

Here’s the damaging part. The corollary is: if you aren’t a success, you aren’t an artist/scientist/writer/what-have-you. 

Why? Experimentation and mistakes aren’t worth money. They aren’t sexy, they aren’t inspirational. They’re just drudgery. But they are essential for anyone to make a glimpse of a different world – even if they’re the only person who ever sees it. 

I speak only for myself: I crave honesty. I crave to know that my failures aren’t unique, and I don’t have to “fail better”. I just have to pick up the pieces, each and every time. I just have to keep wrestling with the ideas in my head – and understand I don’t always get to know if those ideas affect anyone else at all. 

As I reject the “success” narrative, surprise becomes my ally in the struggle through disillusionment and failure. Surprise – and subsequent wonder at the unknown – gives me the courage to look for those moments that make me disoriented, uncomfortable; to look for those moments where gravity pulls me towards the ceiling instead of the floor. I observe them, remember them, pick them up and take them apart, spread them out on the table and imagine what makes them tick. For today, that’s success enough. Tomorrow, I’m looking for Kandinsy’s “fairy-tale power and splendor.”

Oh, and in case you were still wondering about the mysterious sphere – I checked the package. It was a meatball. 

1 Matrix aside, this experience was powerful enough that Kandinsky subsequently quit law and took up art. He became widely known as a painter, art theorist, and pioneer of abstract art, though he would always insist his art was “still deeply ingrained in reality.”

2 Creation work? Yes, it sounds (pick one) either overly pretentious or a euphemism for something slightly more messy than sex work. It’s my pet term to describe anyone who knocks out the walls and floorboards of existing knowledge. I refuse to give in to the false dichotomy between The Arts and STEM – but that’s another post.

3 When the subject is geopolitics instead of creativity, this is also called the “end of history” argument: I like this government, therefore this is the government we were always destined to have.

Fair Play

A species can expect to live about one million years. This is not a span of time we understand; more than a one and six zeroes, it’s the opportunity for a lineage to rewrite Life’s odds against Death. When a species dies, it means one less card up Life’s sleeve. 

On five separate occasions, Life has lost more than three quarters of the cards up its sleeve. (Yes, Life is an epic cheater.) Likely culprits include meteors, volcanoes, climate phenomena, and plants.  

There’s a sixth occasion. Let’s call it “now,” or “soon.” Life’s cheating stash is again disappearing. Death is watching with interest, because Life never wins with fair play. The number of cards – pardon me, species – “…that have gone extinct in the last century would have otherwise taken between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear…” if the game was business as usual. In interest of fair play, one of the species is now evening the score of 3.5 billion years; in interest of fair play, one of the species is now playing on Death’s side. 

In interest of fair play, that species should remember Life and Death play different games. Life will lose the cards to win the game, but Death keeps every card dealt, always. 

And in interest of fair play, when the score gets so close that no one can tell the difference, Life and Death will always remain the best of friends. Together, they’ll pack up any remaining cards1 and go find some other game to while away the time between the stars. Sometimes, it’s just time for a new deck. 

1 Between Life’s stash and Death’s hoard, there’s usually not that many left.

No Dull Topics: Watching Clouds

“There are no dull subjects, just dull writers.”

– said your pick of five writers

As they say: challenge accepted. Once a week, as intrepid writers and readers, we will test the limits of boredom and the meaning of dull. We will establish whether, indeed, there are No Dull Topics.

How? With your help! Each Monday, head over to the Skeleton At The Feast Facebook page to submit your dullest topic idea. What does dull mean? PG, and no more than three words including hyphens. The last comment as of 8 a.m. CT Tuesday morning is next week’s No Dull Topic! My role? To turn it into an entertainingly readable post.

Special thanks to Havoc Octavian Teslasmith for this week’s topic, “Watching Clouds.”

Watching clouds is not something easily pinned down; watching clouds, as a topic, is just as likely as the real thing to shift and coalesce, merge and disappear, leaving you frantically scribbling notes that make no sense to any future version of yourself. The longer you think, the more meanings emerge. 

There is the simple childhood act of laying back and watching the sky change. There is the notion of “the cloud” – that Internet creature that gulps information and stores it indefinitely. Then there is Aristotle’s Meteorologica, the Bible’s many clouds of revelation and concealment; clouds as creatures and clouds as castles; clouds as one of the most obvious harbingers of change in our planet’s weather system. The sources agree: clouds carry meaning – of some sort. 

It is easy to over-simplify water vapor in the sky. It is easy to over-complicate clouds. Today, it is the simplest image that transfixes my mind. The act of watching clouds is an anachronism. I say this not because I believe we are “too busy” or “too attached to our screens” or other easy excuses; as someone who spends most of my time either writing or reading on screens of varying sizes, that would be the height of hypocrisy. Rather, I refer to Merriam Webster’s second definition: “a person or thing that is chronologically out of place.” The act of watching clouds displaces one from time. It is that strange act of spending time with yourself. It is that strange phenomena of watching your own thoughts unfold: checking the weather of your own mind.

You learn things about yourself when you watch clouds. It isn’t something as diagnostic as a Rorschach test, or as flakey as a mood ring. It’s a simple question: are you there?

Are you there, and how do you see the world today? Have you dreamed recently? Have you thought of the thing you want most, have you put yesterday behind you, have you looked another human in the eyes? Do you remember what makes you smile? Do you remember anything, if you can help it? 

Is that dog or a horse? Ah, too late, it’s turning into a duck. 

Is that the person you want to be, or someone you never really liked? Ah, too late, you lost the way to tell them apart. 

You lost your way, with only clouds to give guidance; spring and shower, storm and gold-gray sun. Clouds are not such a bad guide to this sort of thing. Each of these moments is part of your life, each moment a change. 

There is no way to stop this change. There is no way to comprehend its entirety. But there are rare afternoons when you can lie back and watch it unfold, see some sort of balance or beauty between the blue and white. Some afternoons you are at peace with time; some afternoons are a beautiful day for cloud watching, whether cloudy or clear. And some afternoon – just perhaps – you’ll catch a glimpse of a cloud shaped like you, just for a moment, before that cloud also shifts and changes into something completely new.

Good Morning, My Friends

Good morning, my friends! As of this week, there are over fifty of you who follow this strange Skeleton At The Feast. To each one of you: thank you. You brighten my day, give me hope and vision and courage. I sincerely hope my words do the same for you.

I admit to curiosity: what would you like to read? If you could read anything…what types of posts or subject matter would you grin in anticipation of?

Please let me know in the comments.

Very Best,

Marushka

Creation Is An Odd Sort of Work

“The idea of trying to create things that last – forever knowledge – has guided my work for a long time now.”

Edward Tufte

Creation is an odd sort of work. It demands that you pay attention. It expects you to be elbow-deep in questions. 

Questions demand constant thought. There are many ways to approach this ongoing internal engagement, but I prefer the words of Edward Tufte: “The idea of trying to create things that last – forever knowledge – has guided my work for a long time now.”

Given infinite expressions of creativity, “forever knowledge” is the simplest way to describe the focus of creation. Parents and artists and scientists, cooks and mathematicians: each of them coaxes something they hold within towards becoming something separate from themselves. Each of them searches for and coaxes the qualities that will sustain the created to independence.

The goal, always, is that the created takes on a life of its own. That’s the spark of forever – the spark that breathes life, that says, “This thing deserves to be. The world will make room.” 

The Short-Lived Tail of Black Cat Provisions Co.

I once wrote a menu for Black Cat Provisions Co., a brilliant little bakery which promptly vanished into another dimension. I guess that’s what happens when you name things after cats. In honor of #ThrowbackThursday, here’s the menu; grab a cup of coffee and enjoy.

This Morning It’s No Secret

This morning it’s no secret:
Spring is here.
Subtle hints are gone, the weather warm
And green presses near
In all its shades.

The birds in every nest
Sing trees of life;
Generation to next, traits and seed-shaped beaks,
Perch to flight
On instinct’s errand.

This morning it’s no secret
Life is here.
A sixth extinction may not tame
Flame and feather, green and rain –
But will you risk it?

Spring has swept over Texas. I sense it from the wood doves and the scent of mountain laurel, koolaid-sweet and honey-wild. In the midst of biology run rampant, I read grim books and odd theories and ask myself – What should we risk for Life? Or perhaps: do we risk Life for our lives?

The idea of mass extinction is nothing new. Humans have understood it through flood, flame, and ice, tales nearly as old as whichever Creation you please. Today it’s a tale told by science. The question is whether the tale is a truth for now, or later.

For two understandings of that question, see Earth Is Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction, and What is a ‘Mass Extinction’ and Are We In One Now?. The first views the question as a “network collapse problem” – a single problem cascading into spin-off catastrophes. It says: soon. The second questions whether current extinction rates exceed the “background” extinction rate. It says: now.

Both positions depend on how we understand what data we have about the deep past, in light of our current world. The point of agreement: catastrophes are normal, but human actions affect life on a scale unprecedented by any other species1.

When tomorrow depends on today – when do we act? What should we risk for Life?

1 Except, possibly, plants. But plants have been really well-behaved ever since – unless you want to blame them for the coal.

Mouth-to-Mouth for Buck Rogers

“…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?”

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

There are books that inform. There are books that entertain. There are books that motivate. 

And there are books that catapult you from your perch1 to race in pursuit of passersby, tackling them to the ground to forcibly speed-read an entire chapter to their trembling ears.

In other words, these books are so powerful that they have a life of their own. This is obvious because they clearly have a reproductive cycle, as evidenced by them taking control of your frontal lobe to convey their literary DNA to other brains. 

I mention this because I have recently come into possession of such a text2. I refer to Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing. It’s a collection of essays, or chapters, or meditations on the act of writing and the art of living. 

In many ways it’s classic Bradbury. His allusions and metaphors are all over the place. References to comics and carny-creepiness, check and check. Bradbury is a strange creature called “human,” with a skeleton inside and an angel on one shoulder; Lord knows what that is whispering in his other ear. 

But there’s a contagion, a madness, and a hope that spills through each page and sentence. He’s seen what happens when life slips away. It doesn’t look very different from the space left when art slips away. Art and Life, the two of them, are beasts of a feather. We wouldn’t stop to listen if their voices didn’t echo each other, as well as a quiet third called Death. 

They form a writer’s menagerie. Bradbury introduces us to them one by one like goats at a petting zoo. He guides us through with twelve chapters of tips on caring for these rare creatures – what they eat (poetry), where they live (the top of the stairs), and their ideal habitat (whatever you do, pretend to ignore them). 

“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.”

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Now, I’d stay to tell you more, but Buck Rogers just saw another passersby – so I have to get my running shoes.

1 Chair, tree, rooftop, etc. 

2 Or, you know, it’s come into possession of me. We’re still working out the details of the relationship.

Works Consulted is a series in which I share writers and writing whose words change brains. Please share any suggestions! In the meantime, here’s Works Consulted, vol. I.