Hey, Soul Sister by Train
Apologies for the length, I didn’t have time to make this brief. (Who said that?)
Announcement: Novel Under Construction
Journey through Madness: a Heavenly PTSD Memoir
Much of what has appeared on this blog in the last 8 months or so—artistic performances of mind states, perspectives, and struggles in the aftermath of massive wounding to the loving creative spirit—will be taking form in a novel.
The working title indicates that the form may be memoir, but the genre will likely remain fiction, and the "ending" would be much more like the dream, which I could say for now would be more like Nanny McPhee than Cinderels and ellas in reverse. My own life has been hard these last two years. It was going to no matter what. I knew that, but it was hard in a way that I was not prepared for.
That said, if I'm to take life seriously, apparently I had more cinder work to do, and now that the pain subsides as I make myself right, and as my chronic illness symptoms finally release my brain more, I can see much more of what I missed. I can connect the bigger picture to the smaller one, and probably that will get clearer as I work on this project.
Personal motivations for writing aside, while every artist and writer takes inspiration from real life, nothing here stands for real people, places, or events. As it happens, the central theme of the work will probably be about the ways in which the audience always completes the artist's work, and that this principle applies to life in general, and life is SOOOO much easier when we understand each other's love language and boundary language.
If I can figure out how to make this story work, holy shit. I can't do it without you, so I'll still be in touch through the heart, and through the parts of us that still admire, appreciate, and trust each other. When our hearts break for the world, for each other, for ourselves, it takes a while to recover from the depth of that confusion, but we do... because for every Fiona there is a Shrek, and vice versa, and for every Shrek and Fiona, there is a Donkey, for whom there is a "girl" dragon.
The hypothesis here is that conflicts are usually solved by improving communication, AND that conflicts are also usually caused by communication breakdown. It's very inefficient to misunderstand each other, and fight about things instead of working it out, and at bottom we are lazy, restful creatures. Oh, it's nice to be lazy, isn't it, when things aren't so hard to accomplish, but that's not the case in a lot of ways these days. Yeah, we all have things to be angry about, but it's expensive to work against each other when we could be working together. You end up pulling in different directions even though you are all hoping to get to the same place, where there's plenty of room for everyone, so you scrap it out a bit but ALWAYS keep trying to repair. The tricky part is that you're both artists in a shared project, so shit gets wonky when one of you turns the other away because you're afraid they're dishonest. Then it becomes a game of chicken. No, thank you. My cousin died because some asshole did that. It nearly destroyed my uncle.
Honesty is just more efficient for everyone. One of my roommates taught me and my colleagues that. It's cheaper to trust each other AND work together. By contrast, if one person keeps turning away in something that literally binds you, it gets more and more expensive for everyone. One person cannot resolve a conflict alone, and eventually, we realize that by waiting for that to happen, we have become a big part of the problem. We can't wait to act in good faith, though sometimes what that means takes different forms. For the person who has all the pressure on their shoulders, acting in good faith means stepping back and holding ground until the other comes forward, and letting go if that never happens.
That's something we all have to make peace with, that in some cases, we will never get the reparation we dream of in a conflict, so we let it go, sometimes in waves, until it's gone. We all get to decide where to stop, and if you're not both in that place, you keep going but in a different direction. For those of us who are not ready, it takes longer, but if we keep at it, it gets easier, and life gets better. We learn to look at, accept, and resolve our own shame, which is what holds us in painful places.
Writers and artists are human beings who are working this stuff out. They're not Gods. The writing itself helps a writer refine her/himself. "Good" writing (writing that both troubles and inspires people) stems from the honesty of the writer not to spare themselves the same scrutiny as any "bad guy", and in fact, any "bad guy" in a story is likely at least in part based on something true about the writer, I would wager. How else could the writer understand the bad guy enough to make her/him real enough for the audience. The cool part is that the writer STILL finds us a path through the conflict.
That's the writer's job. It's a pretty cool job, I'd say. I've wanted to do it for a long time, and now feels like the right time.
It's actually therapeutic, something psychologists recommend, writing our own stories, and experimenting with different endings to include how things could have gone better, to include our dreams ... how things could GO better, not just how they could go worse. That's the abyss that stares right back at us.
To do this kind of redemptive narrative, the writer needs honesty, which includes not only the bad, but also the good. We draw on examples from real life or art for inspiration, giving our dreams credence for our hearts and minds to rest in.
And the viewer or reader completes the art. You taught me that, and that can be such a terrifying thing, but it can also be an awesome thing, and in fact, it is every day. The trick for this narrative, like all others but hard for me, will be imagining a True fiction that is hard but feels good because there is a believable, achievable, beautiful resolution.
It would be easier to write straight from life, in some ways, but that can distress real people, which I have no intention of doing, though I do hope that the content might inspire us all to be careful in our forceful and ostracizing actions towards others... that we are not punishing others for our own mistakes, or for something someone else did, or out of the very real desperation of illness, ... or based on lies, half truths, misunderstandings, or lazy or tired thinking. I hope humans can figure out how to respect other's boundaries as we assert our own. Part of that is paying fair attention, respectful of distance and the benefit of the doubt.
That's the rub or the dance, the wrestling match.
Love reminds me of that. It's like a tether that calls to me, Remember who you REALLY are. In the hardest times, it says, You are angry, but you are not your anger. You are frustrated, but you are not your frustration.
Like Violet's scribe vault in Fourth Wing, the voice connected me to my own library of wisdom and inner resources. To a library for one foot on the floor as the power of ancient instinct moved through me, so I didn't explode from it. That's what my body wanted to do. I had visions of it, kind of like in Shadow & Bone, when the main character explodes outward from her chest and on one occasion she sheds dark, and on another she sheds love light.
The interesting thing about that is that the visions came before I watched the TV show, so when I watched it, I was in AWE. That was almost exactly it. I don't know about the surrounding narrative, but those particular moments.
I had one of the dark, full on after a major betrayal that turned the tide for me. I knew I had to go back, that I'd lost them, and all the darkness that had been poured into me, and certainly at least some of my own, came out of me sideways and out along the ceiling, out through the windows and walls, and out into the earth. It formed a sort of bear cave around me. The rest have been light, although less intense. There were lots of other sun spot flares, actually, after gaining safe distance, dark emotion and force of will for understanding and the pain of betrayal, and again, I tried to move those outward instead of up, giving them back to the earth. It all helped open up new spots where the light could get in, and the light helped carry out the dark, and return it to the earth for compost.
Both the dark and the light, even the light, when it starts coming back to us and through us, it can be a bit intense at times, but over time, the intensity wanes if we can ground ourselves, and a sort of peace settles into your heart, but you have to listen to it, feel it, attend to it, and BELIEVE it.
The Fold is the place of lost hope, where people become unimaginably ferocious monsters, but when love light comes through us again, makes its way across that fold more and more successfully, the fold is where people become Shrek and Fiona and Donkey and Lord Farquaad. We have a tragi-comedy in the making here, going in the direction of tragedy beginning to comedy ending (and waves in between).
The meta-fictional element I'm interested in orbits around how the people who control stories about others can sometimes be dangerously false and stem from distorted, selfish motivations, especially when they are used to rationalize excessive force and ostracism.
It's about learning how to tell our own stories.
The central conflict addresses this tension: of determining the role of our instinctual human fierceness and facing the fear of losing sight of the loving aims of achieving justice and peace, blooming in the desert, freedom, balance. It is a time when we realize our old ways of doing things are not working, our old ways of knowing wise action and inaction seem to fail. How do we take that failure and find better ways without exiling essential parts of our humanity? It is about wholeness from fracturing, moving creation into harmony with destruction.
As readers of the world, we need to be critical of all narratives, all systems of knowing, including our own, in order not to fall prey (from both inside and outside of us) to emotional manipulation and other forms of logical fallacy that are so captivating to the human mind and heart.
But we also need to listen to OUR OWN emotion. It links us to our empathy. When we listen to our own anger and desire (commonly exiled emotions) are able to resolve them within ourselves, … the logical mind actually works better in communication with emotion. When we exile emotions, the logical mind doesn’t always know the message the emotion is trying to convey.
Paradox = Paradigm shift AND Resolve. It’s a beautiful number 13. It’s your love for the rain. I come from a place where you pray for the rain like your life depends on it sometimes… because sometimes it does.
Vancouver, Quesnel, and Japan have taught me a lot about the beauty of a good paradox. That is what’s meant to be the thread. (add ancestral names?)
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I hope that this particular narrative comes together with valuable human experience, strength, and hope for finding our way through an increasingly confusing world, which has so many complex elements to consider that many of us are overwhelmed and frustrated. Many of our lives have become unmanageable despite our amazing progress on so many fronts. That unmanageability can cause us to forget what we have that is STILL valuable, but maybe just needs some cinder or mechanical or scribe work... or sleep, laughter, fun.
Who among us doesn't feel guilty sleeping, laughing, and having fun outside of very specific contexts? If that's you, then you know what I mean. We have this saying now that anyone who isn't at least a little depressed isn't paying attention, and I still think this is true because we have problems to solve, but I also think our collective trauma is very near its turn of the tide, if we keep putting one foot in front of the other, and let go of our needs for perfection as a condition for BEGINNING to cooperate when conflict is at its worst. We need rest for that. People say, We will not rest until we have justice! I say, Don't burn out! Trust me. Honour your body like the magical temple of architecture that it is. Enjoy this rest. Team up. Tap each other out as needed.
This advice isn't just relevant to me. Chronic illness, burnout, mental health, and addiction are at all-time highs, and problems like food and home insecurity are big realities even in so-called first-world nations.
The project aims to take a bold look at such modern problems but also compassionate and appreciative of all the beautiful things that people do in life, even in such hard times, especially in such hard times. These tell us something about who we are.
There is an undercurrent of how-to in the concept, in the vein of: how to lose your mind and find it again… and again… and again when life throws its curve balls our way. This will be limited by my own ability to do (or not do) so, but there will be much research, background engagement, and editorial work to support this aim.
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Thank you for stopping by these past 8 months or so to see some of this project unfold. It has been tremendously valuable to get feedback and wrestle with elements of audience and voice and perspective in these preliminary stages of engaging with the big ideas, forms, and content here. This will ALL be considered in the final formation of the project, in the spirit of apt appreciation, amends, and standing ground, in respect for big picture Truth and Love and the complexities of being human.
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Big Dreams ;) Can I deliver? We'll see. It's all very experimental still, but the vision is taking shape.
The timing of this creative work will depend on a number of life factors: chronic illness, life stressors, how my real life fourth wall goes, and my own clarity of mind. I will keep you posted.
If anyone wants to join me, perhaps I can make my own tentative first draft date for November this year, for NaNoWrimo: National Novel Writing Month. If it still exists. Oh, but using the blog content would be cheating, so I'd have to maybe call it a second draft and not steal from my notes, or not even look at them while I write.
Just an idea. Anyone can write a novel if they want to and can devote the time. Not all of us can write a GOOD novel, myself included if past efforts are any indication, but anyone with a word processor and some ideas can put down the right number of words and paragraphs.
Join me! if you want. :)
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This blog moving forward will focus on my visual art and its big ideas, announcements about exhibitions, and possibly the odd poem or literary reading. It will also feature thoughts on the struggles in life as an artist and human being with debilitating (but also somehow redeeming) chronic illness.
I hope you find something here that speaks to you and inspires you in your life somehow. Thank you for how you've spoken to me and inspired me in my own life.
Yours,
J
