Gratitude

didn’t appear with angels,

though they’d be nice, all that hubbub

and buzz about visitation

and the implicit august nod from above.

It’s more like the flump at the top

of a flight of stairs

that runs out of steps

before you do,

or the basketball

you threw in desperation

that hits the rim for three

bounces, then finds its way

through the simple middle.

Or this morning,

unfolding myself from a dark bed

like a letter to the day

and knowing what to do,

happy to carry a thermos of coffee

to the car and stand fixed in the black pre-early morning,

stars like bullet holes

letting in light

over new snow.

The car that starts.  Steam

rising slowly from a thousand chimneys

in this polluted valley and all the sleeping people

fills me.

Creativity/Aristotle/motive/writing

I haven't written for a while, and that's given me the space to turn my gaze to look at my blog from a new POV and notice how strange it is that we should think of creation as "backwards" and daily life as "forewards" by contrast. Weird. Seems to me that this is analogous to the mistake kids often make when they try to understand vision--they see vision as something coming out of them, out of their bodies and consciousness, and it's very hard for them understand that in fact vision goes in the other direction, from the surfaces of the world first, and into their eye as an accident. Our consciousness, then, an accidental catch by a one millimeter circle of black.

I've been listening to Aristotle and have never locked in to anything so wonderful while driving. It may seem a stretch, but to me, Aristotle is talking about the same thing I've been trying to understand, the necessity of practicing and inquiring into the human imperative to create. His logic is not as recondite as I always feared. He argues that we understand things from good examples, and a good example is something that is well suited to its functions and purposes. Hammers make good nail-drivers, for instance. The focus on form and design allows him to ask what tools, animals and even humans so particularly well. For humans, that especiallyy characteristic attribute is that they reason. This reasoning we do is not necessarily philosophical, but could be; it includes all types of decision-making in all trades. In other words, it involves making.

The end of human activitity, then, becomes enhancing and shaping this rational ability, this ability to choose what to make and how to make it. Birds don't exactly do that with their nests, or dogs with their howl (my examples, not Aristotle's). But we do. When we put in a car stereo, build a house, write a book--all these are forms of making that reveal what is uniquely human about us.

My interest is in the uniquely human activity of writing. Not only are there a huge number of specific choices to be made--letters, words, order of phrases, tone, topic, revision--which is fascinating (and a joy to participate in), but there is also the implicated sphere of how one creates the conditions for this writing to happen (teaching). But the real issue is the most nebulous: what sponsors writing? What makes it necessary? What sorts of effects can it have on others and the self? Who exactly is writing? Is writing always good (maybe we should not write as much as we do)?

These seem to be questions of motive and purpose, and as such they are and are not rational activities. So I'm not sure where to go with this...

DF

Writing as Crashing/process/good work

On writing as crashing:

This sort of "dancing," this accretion of new beginnings, the overgeneration of new framing schemes, is a probably a symptom of something very simple: I find ideas *while* writing, not before. For me, writing is a mode of discovery, and though I revise all the time, I revise as I'm writing. Invention and revision are the same moment for me. My writing process moves like a crayfish (backwards). I crash into my ideas that way, running a full-tilt boogie backwards, rather than stalk them. I'm hell in those writing process china shops.

It occurs to me that I've been trying to understand for a long time what it means to develop finished and coherent art: the finished poem, dissertation, curriculum, class, assignment. I think there is something very valuable about the organization and formal qualities of a something well made. But what occurs to me is that such organization is probably not at all as fixed as we are taught to think about it in school. The "well-wrought urn" image is misleading because, like all fundamentalism, it forgets to account for change.

Fundamentalism often gets mighty righteous when it starts to defend form (as in "form-ality" or "in-form-ation").  Form is always understood as "final" form, but that word "final" gets skipped over, doesn't it?  The result is that you start to be oriented by an ever-elusive picture of perfect form.  Audience, process, joy, purpose and discover, in the form-worshipping model, tend to seem like stupid impediments, problems of individual distraction and ability, stopping to pee when you're trying to make time on the interstate.  I see this in teaching a lot. Just tonight I was surprised and disappointed to see a peer nominate himself as the adjudicator of a student magazine project because he knows better and could "increase the quality" of the magazine.  That's no doubt true.  But is it the quality of the final form or the quality of the process that we're after? Sure, it's both.  But it's hard to value the lambent act of learning, as fast to lose its center as a drop of oil on water.  But I'd argue it matters more.  Our job is to teach learning, not form.

What would happen if the focus was on the process of making meaning--on the dynamics (communities, populations, technologies, classrooms) where meaning was made, not on the individual final products? What if instead of focusing on the final and canonized form of great issues, we were actually trusting enough of students to ask them to address the issues that they consider most pressing?  Love, sex, religion, living a meaningful life, excitement, autonomy, authenticity might figure as a pretty serious start--at least these were my issues and in many ways still are.  Are they yours?  If not, isn't it your responsibility to find them?  The big goal of a composition program, it seems to me, is to provide for students a real audience (not real-ish, but real, people who read their stuff with care) and to make the writing important enough to enlist the thoughts of other thinkers (that is, to "write with sources"). Finding older teachers who can read kids writing is very hard.  Richard Haswell has a book that starts with that challenge or paradox.....

I was listening to the radio today.  For the folks at the station, what brought true happiness was not just pleasure, which is ephemeral as everyone over the age of 12 knows, but engagement. In class I call this the difference between "fun" and something that's "interesting." In love relationships, it's the difference between flirting and being in a serious relationship.  In writing, it's the difference between inspiration and revision.  And as anyone who has ever been in a marriage knows, there is nothing about the final form of the union with all its legal guarantees and strictures and allowances that makes it valuable.  What makes is valuable is the day-to-day process of making it valuable, and it's a painful process sometimes because you have to admit your thinking and behavior might need to change.  So it is with true writing: the day-to-day process of sustaining your thinking eventually challenges you to grow up.

More and more, I don't think the final form matters much. Excellence matters, and the process of revising and reflecting will bring about excellence in most cases if pursued sincerely.  Let others worry about the final form.  Let them say Lou Reed is too talky, Kenneth Burke is too dense, Steven King is too derivative and gross, etc.  My brother and I were talking today about workmanship -- he is an excellent craftsman and honorable worker, though he charges WAY too little everything he does -- and he said the most interesting thing, that when he's working on a house he is always thinking "what would someone think if they came behind me and looked at how I decided to solve problems?"  And yet, he is able to take risks, be creative, and stay in the moment.  He has good products because he has a good (and sustained) process.  This is perhaps all another way of saying, hard work with take care of its worker.  When it doesn't then we need to kick the system in the teeth.

DF

following the rules/breaking the rules

Last time I was asking about finding a trail that would wind between the extremes of nihilism and fundamentalism. There is a sort of allergy or sensitivity, a proclivity, a readiness that comes from asking certain questions repeatedly. In Zen today, my teacher talked about this very issue. How do you go for things without pushing for *that* particular goal? In Christianity, they talk about God moving in mysterious ways, and though it's too often spoken as a weak salve against tragedy, I think it could also be a way to acknowledge that it's very hard to let go of our intentionality.

This is connected to teaching and writing in at least three ways. First of all, a course is a creation, a composition, and you have to be able to develop it with an eye toward some *general* goal, but you also can't have a narrow notch for the course to fall into, not if you're trying to experiment. Secondly, writers certainly know that the hardest thing to learn is not how to control the writing, but how to trust that there is a process of meaning-making that will, by impulsion and molecular *frisson*, push the work into a new place so that new ideas fall into a resonance with other ideas. This trust--is it faith?--is tested by every blank, austere page and the cheap satisfactions of images and storylines that chicken out before they actually risk. Third, with writing in particular, people tend to assume that quality is *either* a matter of following the rules of grammar and the conventions of topic *or* a matter of abandoning the rules in an ecstacy of inspiration and a cloud of incense.

I want to argue for the practical politics of the middle way.
I want to talk about politics as creation, but done in public.
Following the rules versus making the rules is my Big Life Theme of the moment.

More later.

David

Freud/creativity/the arrogance of nihilism

My partner is reading Freud's *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* and it's exciting in two ways. First, it's a thrill to hear her summarize in a breath what I'd be groping for in infinite regression; second, it's exciting because it resonates with some of the thinking I've been doing about writing and thinking and the way thoughts are connected.

Freud seems to be puzzling about why people do things that debilitate them, that interfere with pleasure, immediate or deferred. Instead, they will get tangled in myths and practices that don't do them any good and make them unhappy. What logic is that? But the answer, that we seem driven to engage in a sort of imaginative control over events we can't actually control, rings true for me. It seems to be another way of arguing for the utility of myth--that we create stories because they give us something even more valuable than pleasure: they give us meaning. Usually I think of "making meaning" as a pretty definite and constructive act: figuring out mysteries in science or just personal memory; finding a form that will enable you to engage in a certain kind of conversation (such as a blog!); noting the results of long effort and planning for the future based on that feedback. Making meaning--as opposed to just doing stuff--is something you have to intend to do, right?

Or not. And here is the problem. For creative acts, including meditation and love, the most important events of making meaning are not all about achieving a goal; lots of times, it's more a matter of falling into a conclusion, discovering something, not just driving toward it. So does uncertainty matter? Can it be a necessary part of making things meaningful? What does it do for people (like me!) who are very goal-directed and serious? How can I encounter the limits of my own control without succumbing to either nihilism or fundamentalism?

These two poles--nihilism and fundamentalism--for me are about the same. Nihilism is cynicism at the ground-out end of a bad week of drinking. Nihilism is quietly histrionic, but also ironic, unintentionally. It rejects meaning (curiousity, patience, change) by displacing it with a flat assertion, a kind of flat certainty about the ultimate failure of meaning (a paradox that would be funny to anyone but a nihilist!). It's an intellectual response to being depressed (and depression is often a lack of oxygen and sleep, I've found). In this way, nihilism is a instantiation of going *beyond* the Pleasure Principle: one finds meaning, in this case, in the conviction that there is no meaning that can, certainly and enduringly, endure or redeem us. It's a kind of absolutism.

Fundamenalism is the same assertion flipped on its back. Fundamentalism claims that there is an ultimate order that stitches all events together ("even the hairs on your head are numbered"); it's an extrapolation of one's own hope for absolute, guaranteed meaning. Fundamentalists, unlike nihilists, have heaven to retreat to; their actions are guaranteed and sanctioned.

Both nihilists and fundamentalists tend not to be very curious or humorous, in my experience. Both nihilism and fundamentalism are struggles: one professes losing the struggle to make meaning; the other professes to have won. They are ultimate states, imaginative absolutes taken as accurate descriptions of a shared world (but a world only the wise can see clearly, they claim).

So how do you do it, negotiate between a deep anticipation of ultimate order (fundamentalism) and a disparing nostalgia for absolute order (nihilism)? How do people do this? How also do you teach this (I'm a teacher, so I use an image of teaching it as my way of making sense of it)? How do you construct a college classroom, a writing class, a writing assignment sequence, a curriculum, a college so that people can make sense of things?

More tomorrow....(I have an agreement with my class to write daily)....

DF