Friday, March 23, 2012

Knitting and Herding Bubbles

An episode in my new tender and tentative endeavor to write …

I spent nearly the whole day yesterday (4 days ago by the time this gets “published”) knitting a scarf. Despite using a technique to make the project lie flat, it still curled up till it was just a long tube. I read in my proudly purchased knitting book about steam-blocking, but the methods were different depending on whether the material was synthetic or natural. I didn’t know what this yarn was made from, since I had thrown away (or “stored” in a scary shoebox) the labels, but I guessed it was more fake than real since I never paid much for any of my yarn. So I went for the “lay-a-wet-towel-on-top-and-dry-iron-it-until-it-steams” method. And discovered 3 things.

           1.     It was real wool. I knew this because it smelled like the sheep barns at the state fair. Wet wool and sheep manure (droppings?) seem like a synonymous smell to me ~ not exactly unpleasant though. It smelled like a world I would gladly exchange for this one – a world, that is, where I envision myself living on acres of raw earth, living (is there a word that evokes a sense of living where every sense is absorbing life to a thrilling degree ... that differs from being merely alive in the medical sense?) … coming alive to life in direct proportion to my cultivation of earth, animals, and offspring. From a detached, journalistic perspective, I realize that this longing for a creative, self-made, natural life also flourishes in direct proportion to the number of moments I spend withering in a concrete, soulless chain-driven city-world. (I choose the word “chain” not only because it serves the purpose of sounding melodramatic, but also to describe the unnatural overtaking of chain restaurants, apartment complexes, theme parks, hospitals, and craft stores.)
     
      2.   (I had to go back and re-read this to remember that I had started listing some minutiae of day-to-day revelations.) The steam and weight of the iron had not only flattened the scarf, but also muted the design I had so laboriously created, using a chopstick as a makeshift cable needle. Discouraging much?

      3.     I have no idea what the third thing was going to be. When I start writing, the writing takes over and it’s all I can do to keep up with it, trying my best to herd coherent bubbles of thought onto the train of … well, point in case. Or case in point. Just in case.

What does “case” even mean??

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Unspeakable

I (used to think that I) have a superpower.

When I’m listening to music, I can close my eyes and see a whole world of brilliant, dazzling dancing, choreographed perfectly to the music … the colors of the costumes, the energy in the movement, the spins and swirls and solo acts or arrays of synchronized, rhythmic, human art …

But it’s all mine, trapped in my mind. I can only close my eyes and watch the show. One time it was so breathtaking I snapped my eyes open and said “            “ … nothing. My thoughts caught on my tongue and I found myself literally speechless. I was momentarily shell shocked by the complete frustration at not being able to translate vision to language. If I could only capture this, I knew I could create Broadway-worthy musicals, Grammy-award-winning theatre … but it was always and only a dream – vivid, lucid, perfect, and completely unspeakable.

Which brought me around to thinking again about a question I had spent years and hours contemplating – how do deaf people think? Or more specifically and abstractly – how would a person who was cut off from language of any sort process thought? How much would this isolation limit his ability to observe and make sense of this life? How much are our thoughts confined to formally defined and acquired vocabulary? To what extent are we sheltered from the infinite spheres of thought, just because the right words haven’t been spoken that would unlock worlds of ideas beyond the initiation and creation of our own mind? If someone was locked out of language altogether, need he be stunted in his intellectual thought-processing abilities? Or does the vast majority of our subjective understanding occur without language? While no one can truly exist in an intellectual vacuum, it is worth considering the limitations set by our domain of information.

And yet … surely our mind can access realms unknown to communication – as I realized in that startling moment of open-mouthed surprise, shocked that my words could betray me and leave me so thoroughly alone in myself. Our minds must have a touch of eternity, an element of the infinite; but to access that requires something that can break beyond the standard framework-barriers of language, something that can defy description. I know that music and art can do this, that a rainy day, scented candles, fuzzy blankets and peace with the world can do this. I believe that birth and death, love or hate can trigger this – this connection with infinite spheres of thought, sense, and visceral feeling known completely in oneself but unintelligible in communication.

And to express a fraction of an idea, a flash of a scene, a deeply intuitive sense of something elusively beautiful … this is art. 

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Observations in Translation

In my creative writing classes we had to keep an observation journal to help train our brain to notice details and practice pinning down ethereal, visceral THINGS onto paper, recreating them in a medium which could be handed off to a random, literate, passerby (passerby-er?) and in their hands conjure up images similar to what we had seen. I am still dubious as to how effective even the best author-artist can be in this regard, since everyone brings their own back-story to any piece of writing and invariably filters new words and images through previous sounds, smells, tastes, and touches.

But regardless of the effect a description creates, it is still an incredible exercise to fashion a one-dimensional, monotone script of any 3-dimensional object, or multi-dimensional moment, complete with an infinite array of sense and emotions that cacophonously arrived at that point through a fractal-like series of decision and circumstances.

Try, for example, to describe a sunset as it actually looks and feels, while avoiding the pitfalls of overused, underrepresented clichés. Try writing “the sky was awash with brilliant hues of pinks and blues, decorated here and there with pillowy towers of cotton clouds. The red earth smelled fragrant from the cathartic days’ worth of rain and the air felt clean, ready to start fresh tomorrow.” Try writing that in a way that describes the scene purely, rather than uses faux-scenery to advance a plot or set a mood. Let the actual picture set the mood. If words can truly paint a picture, then plot is just a sideline to the story.

But it has to be written in the moment if it has any hope of presenting itself as genuine. I missed that moment last night, so I’ll try, like a photographer waiting for the right combination of light and shadow, to capture it the next time it encounters me.