Category: writing

Creating something every day for 365 days: the writing

The Parable of the Mud

Posted on by Dale

Once a man had a vision as he was meditating. He told his friends:

As you know, my practice is to meditate on the four elements — Fire, Water, Earth, Air — and express my gratitude to the spirit of each for what it has granted me in my life.

Last night, as I meditated, I gave thanks to Air for my breath, my mind, for inspiration. In return, Air gave me inspiration and creative breakthroughs.

I thanked Fire for my will, my blood, my passions. Fire gifted me courage and transformation.

With Water I was grateful for my emotions, my unconscious, even my aging and death. Water gave me love, hope, compassion, and dreams.

To Earth I gave thanks for my body and for the earth’s great riches.

But the spirit of Earth in return mocked me: “You presume to thank us, but your pride in your spirit is misplaced. Soon enough you will die and will be nothing more than mud.”

Mud.

I sat quietly with this thought. I brought to mind the gifts of all four elements, Air, Fire, Water, even Earth — all part of me and the sum of me.

I spoke to Earth. “It is true that I will become mud. But I am not mud now, nor will I become mud until I am Earth again, when I am no longer One of Us.”

Earth was silent.

“And even then, O Earth, I shall be Earth and Air and Water and Fire — I shall be All of Us once again.”

Earth listened.

“And why do you scoff at my mortality, Earth, when you know that soon enough we will all combine again to become a new spirit, a new being, and we will once again be One of Us. You will be One with Us.”

Earth was still silent, but I knew the Earth had blessed me.

“Thank you for this blessing, Earth, for without your harsh truth I might not have found this comfort.”

And his friends marveled.

The Parable of the Setting Sun

Posted on by Dale

A young person journeyed far, on a pilgrimage to gain wisdom from those who possessed it.

One night, as she walked along the road, marveling at the stars above and the earth around her, she saw many people seated in a meadow, all facing the same direction. All were weeping and beating their chests. Some threw themselves prostrate upon the ground in their grief. Their clamor was heartrending.

She approached one and asked, “Who are you? Why do you weep? What great tragedy has befallen you?”

The man replied, “We are the ones who have seen the day and mourn its passing. We sit facing west, mourning the setting of the sun, our grief overwhelming us.” He paused. “This is our wisdom. It brings us no joy.”

“But…” the young person began, but the man was no longer listening. With a loud cry he rejoined his fellows in their clamor.

She stood silently for a moment, observing their pain, and then walked away, toward the east, where the sun was already rising.

A Parable of Light

Posted on by Dale

On another plane than this one:

A man lay dying and called his friends to him.

He said to them, “I know that soon I must die, and I have seen that my life has produced no great works or deeds. I console myself with the thought that I have been as kind and generous as I know how, but I cannot help but ask — what good can one person’s kindness do in the vastness of this world?

His friends murmured sympathetically — what, indeed?

“But,” he said, “I have seen a vision. On another plane than this one…

“I saw myself suspended alone in an infinite darkness. I seemed to be made of glass, so that you could see through me.

I was surrounded by a vast, infinite darkness — the void of the universe, and I was alone.

That darkness was complete. I could see nothing but myself.

Every time I felt a kindness, though, of thought or of deed, it came from my breast in a burst of warm light, which flowed out from me and soon dissipated in the darkness.”

The man’s friends listened politely. He continued.

“But then, in the distance, the faint remains of my light of kindness met… another soul, perhaps? I could not see, but it was as if my light had encountered a node of some kind, which glowed briefly itself before fading.

It began to happen more often — more and more glowing nodes in the darkness, bursting into light and fading into the void.

And then I began to see, as more and more light suffused the void, that all these nodes — lit and unlit — were connected by fine filaments, and the more nodes were lit, the stronger those connections became until I was looking at a galactic mycelium powered by warmth and kindness.

Of course, not all nodes gave off the same amount of light. Some shone brightly — others barely glowed before fading. Very occasionally a node would explode with light, completely overwhelming and then freeing everything in its vicinity.

Slowly, the vast darkness was diffused with light, light that had come from me, light that ebbed and flowed, tenuous light, faint light, but light.

I began to understand that I had been receiving bursts of light myself from others before me, and that I always had been. I knew some of those lights were gone now, but what I received from them I passed on so that the light did not fail.”

“I saw all of this, on another plane, and I knew this was the answer to my question: What good can one person do?” The man smiled at his friends.

“There comes a time…

…he said…

…when your light is no longer enough.”

He paused.

“Nor is it necessary.

In my vision, I saw that my light was gone now, too, and I watched as the darkness spread before me like ripples in a pond.

But though I was no longer giving light, the light I had already given continued its journey through the network of nodes, of souls, each soul now giving its own light to the universe. I watched as the light, my light, traveled far ahead, leaving an expanding darkness behind, until there was nothing more.”

He spoke.

“The rest is peace.”

“But…” said his friends.

He spoke no more, not on that plane or any other.

The Parable of the Fire

Posted on by Dale

The people came to a wise man and asked, “Tell us, who is good?”

The wise man said:

There were three men, each of whom was building a fire.

The first man has enough wood to build his fire, plus enough to keep it going until bedtime. His fire starts slowly, but soon it is crackling merrily. He is sure to be warm.

Sometimes the flame is high and hot; other times it flickers and is warm. The man makes adjustments as needed, moving logs and adding more to keep the fire going.

He knows that eventually it will be bedtime — should he add an other log to keep it warm, or should he let it die down? He knows there is an end to the fire and to the evening.

The second man has a very large woodpile, enough for months of fires. He uses lighter fluid to start his fire — his father gave him that — so his fire starts explosively, high and hot, and he expects it to stay that way.

He adds logs to the fire constantly, piling on even when the logs beneath have barely started to burn. He will always have more logs.

The third man, alas, has only two or three logs and not very much to start his fire with —some twigs, perhaps some cardboard. His fire starts slowly, oh so slowly, and it never becomes what you would call high or hot. In any case, it will not burn for very long.

The wise man turned to the people and asked — “Which of these men is good?”

In other news…

Posted on by Dale

I’m double-posting here, because that’s what us self-marketers do.

From Lichtenbergianism.com:

It’s almost here! On Friday, November 17, you will be able to give me money via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other venues!

In return, of course, you will be receive your very own copy of Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, first edition!

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

As a special promotional deal, anyone who buys the book from Amazon on launch day will receive a couple of bonus gifts. From me, you will receive an autographed Official Lichtenbergianism Precepts Bookmark and an invitation to join the Lichtenbergianism: Doing the Work group on Facebook, where you will have access to my advice and guidance on any of your ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS.

Also, several of my friends are offering freebies of their own: things like chapters from one of their books and other goodies.  You’ll have the opportunity to request one of these.  (A page listing these goodies is forthcoming.)

How do you avail yourself of this treasure trove?

  1. Buy the book on Friday, November 17, on Amazon.
  2. Email your purchase receipt or a screenshot of same to dale@Lichtenbergianism.com.
  3. I’ll send you a link to the form to claim your bonus items. Easy!

This is so exciting! Start spreading the news.

A free idea

Posted on by Dale

If you’re sitting there trying to come up with the central idea for your next science fiction novel, have I got an idea for you!  Feel free to use it.  If it makes you rich, invite me to your yacht sometime.

Imagine a planet like Saturn, with huge gorgeous rings.  They would have to dominate the sky, right?

But imagine that this planet has a smallish continent at one of its poles.  (It’s close enough to its sun that it’s warm, etc.)  It’s isolated enough that they’ve never had any contact with any other cultures on any other continents on the planet.  And they cannot see the rings.

Viz.:

So they hit their Age of Exploration, and an expedition sets out.  (No, I don’t know why they’d go sailing off the edge of the world if there weren’t pepper involved, leave me alone.  I’m not going to do all your work for you.)

What happens when they sail south and these rings begin to slide up over the horizon?  What is their reaction?  What do they tell people back home? How do they explain and incorporate this thing? Is there religion involved?  How much might this affect their society and its worldview, so to speak?

Anyway, there’s the idea.  That’s all I got: the look on their faces when they first encounter the rings.  (Or maybe the entire novel plays out on ship, their society in microcosm…)

The book

Posted on by Dale

Yes, it’s true, I have written a book.

The title is Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, and yes I have a macro that types that out for me.  I was a little startled a couple of weeks ago when I started checking the blank spots in the text I needed to fill in and found that there were none.  I was, in essence, done.

Why haven’t you heard about this?  You have if you also read my other blog, Lichtenbergianism.com, where I have tended to shunt all my whining about creative work.  Even there, though, I haven’t really documented the travails of the process.[1]  It’s more of a marketing/social media tie-in for the book, the sales of which of course I expect to catapult me into the first ranks of Twitter like Austin Kleon and others.  Too much whining is not customer-friendly.

So why can’t you give me money this very moment?  Several reasons, and here you get to read me whine because THIS IS MY BLOG, KENNETH.

√ 1. I invited my fellow Lichtenbergians to proof and kibbitz the text along with a select few others.  Their input has been valuable, so thank you, guys!

√ 2. That necessitated—as it should—corrections and emendations of the text, and I’m about done with that.  I have two or three more sticky notes on my monitor to do, and then it’s on to…

3. I have to export the text from Scrivener, the most excellent authoring tool from Literature & Latte.  (If you are writing anything of any length, go buy this software and before you do anything go through the entire tutorial.  Pro tip: after the third time you’re thinking there must be an easier way to accomplish something in the program, take the tutorial again.)

4. I have to edit that Word file, applying styles to paragraphs and terms so that I’ll have a slightly easier time of it when…

5. I import the text file into InDesign to lay out the book.  I expect this to be an orgy of moaning and whining.  I’ve done a little work already, but I’m not really happy about any of it.  For one thing, the font I thought I was using for the main text doesn’t really work for me, so I switched to a simply sans serif font, and now I can’t find a contrasting font for headings and quotes that I like.  Ugh.

5a. I have to go back and make sure that all the images I’m using are at least 300 dpi for publishing purposes.

6. I have to design the cover.  Again, I’ve done some work but hate all of it.  (My placeholder design, which I’ve used as an image in several posts, doesn’t even have my name on it.)

7. I have to export all of that above and send it to my estimable publisher, fellow Lichtenbergian Jeff Bishop at Boll Weevil Press, where he will publish it via our Lichtenbergian Press imprint.[2]

Then you can give me money.  Two weeks, maybe?

—————

[1] Aren’t you glad I didn’t write “haven’t logged my slog”?  You’re welcome.

[2] Jeff’s most recent book, Agatahi, is a marvel: the Cherokee Removal, aka The Trail of Tears, told via first-person accounts of the Cherokees themselves.  Go buy it.  It is profoundly moving.

Dear Mr. Dickle, I fixed it for you.

Posted on by Dale

The other day my good friend Pilliard Dickle (no really) showed up in my labyrinth and gave me a copy of his new book, Avocado Avenue.  It is published by Boll Weevil Press, who will also publish Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy in a few short weeks.

It is, like all of Billiard’s work, inventive and twisted and funny and highly entertaining.

However,  I have to say that after reading the first eleven pages I was fully expecting that it would end in cataclysm and flame.  It only made sense, given the subtle buildup of absolute stasis on Sally and Rodney’s front porch.

I was severely disappointed, then, when it failed to live up to my expectations.  It was much the same when George Lucas failed to end Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in an appropriate manner.  Or when Peter Jackson made three Hobbit movies instead two.  Or when Michael Bay made movies.

This time, though, since Dilliard is such a dear friend, I am able to fix it for him.

And now, the exciting conclusion of Avocado Avenue—

BACK ON THE PORCH, LATER, AND WHAT HAPPENED THEN[1]

Sally opened the front door.  It was long past midnight.

“What on earth are you doing out here?” she asked. The old man was standing there, agitatedly staring out into the dark.

“It ain’t right,” the old man muttered.  “It ain’t right.”

“What’s not right?” asked Rodney, who had wakened to find Sally gone from their queen-sized bed.  Rodney had actually wanted a king-sized bed, but their bedroom wasn’t big enough handle a mattress of that width.  It still nagged at him.

Rodney never found out what was not right, because at that moment the old man trotted off the front porch into the night, picking up speed as he ran.

Sally and Rodney stared at each other in shock as they listened to the cries of “It ain’t right” diminishing in the distance.  Rodney fleetingly wondered whether the old man’s bedroom would hold a king before he too ran off into the dark.

“What on earth…?” Sally said, then she too began to run.

The old man was standing in the back yard of Doris and Delores’ house when Sally and Rodney caught up with him.  He was weeping openly.

“Whatever is the matter with you?” Rodney gasped as they ran up.  The old man turned to them.

“This…” he began in a hoarse whisper, but what he said next was overwhelmed by the sound of an explosion behind them.

Sally and Rodney never had time to realize that their house had exploded because Doris and Delores’ house was now similarly engulfed in a roaring fireball.

“Just like in the movies of Michael Bay,” thought Rodney, or at least that’s what he began thinking before thinking was no longer an option for him or for Sally.

“This is for you, Horace!” screamed the old man as he plunged into the conflagration.

Then there was only the night and the flame.

No one ever saw the lone female figure escaping into the darkness.  If they had, they might have wondered why she was nude.

There you go, Gilliard, a proper ending.  You’re welcome.

—————

[1] You should probably read the book first before reading this.

Backstreet Writers

Posted on by Dale

One of my Lichtenbergian proposed efforts for this year is to develop a writing/writers program at Backstreet Arts.

As with any major project, I have a Waste Book:

I began it back in 2015, on a camping trip on a sweltering couple of days in July.  Kim Ramey and I had been talking about her dream of establishing a free art studio for homeless/underserved populations, and several streams of thought had begun to merge in my life that led me to this goal.

The first was the realization that my life was no longer governed by cycles, e.g., the school year, the GHP cycle, the theatre season.  I no longer knew where I would be and what I would be doing a year in advance.  My life was now linear and it was up to me to plan it.

The second was an exhibit we saw in Asheville that featured the publications of Temporary Services, an organization in Chicago that publishes a broad range of work, from serious authors to folk/street/outsider writers.  I began to think that I needed to be doing something similar here, although I am under no illusions that I am going to end up with a major operation like that.

So yesterday those of us who are going to offer classes/workshops at Backstreet had a meeting to begin shaping what our services were going to look like.  I pulled this waste book out and looked over what I had written eighteen months ago.  It was instructive.

Here are my Abortive Attempts:

It is my VISION to create a space where anyone in the community is comfortable enough to come and tell their story to the rest of the community in printed form.

It will be the MISSION of the Writing Project to produce printed material—books, booklets, pamphlets [et al.]—that reflect the history of members of the community, particularly those who have been marginalized by our society.

  • The art of writing is a political act.
  • Storytelling is innately human.
  • [blank]

I CONFESS THAT

  • In my privilege, I have no idea who the writers may be, nor what their stories are, and therefore
  • I have as much to learn as anyone who comes to me.
  • I have no idea what the needs of our writers may be.
  • The quality of our publications may or may not be “worth” reading, but
  • Every work we publish creates a new center of influence, the ripples of which may affect a reader or potential writer in ways we cannot foretell, and
  • The more circles of influence we can establish, the more likely it is that we will produce works of real value.

Now that I actually have to Do The Thing, I find that these scribbled notes are still valid.  I have no idea of who is going to be coming to work with me.  They may be nearly illiterate; they may already be polished writers.  They may write drivel; they may have a compelling story to tell.  They may be eager learners; they may be obnoxious know-it-alls.

In other words, it will be just like teaching writing in my classroom.

At the moment, pending further reality, I am thinking we may shoot for some kind of quarterly journal kind of thing, perhaps a 16-page booklet, that we can put out at the coffee shops, waiting rooms, etc., to create those ripples.  Having a deadline and a venue for publication [AUDIENCE] is also a great motivator for anyone.

Whatever my plans are, of course, they all have to wait until I actually have writers.  I’ll keep you posted.

Writing, art, and galas galore

Posted on by Dale

You should do these things.

NTC Season Gala

This Sat, Jan 21, at 8:00, the Newnan Theatre Company will announce its 2017–18 season.  I will be directing the big spring show, [redacted].  No, the name of the show is not [redacted].  The name of the show is literally redacted, since it hasn’t been announced yet.  But I am directing it next year and will be directing a scene from it for the Gala.  (I will also be appearing in it, since apparently there are not eleven males who could give up four nights in their total life to do this scene.  I’m not bitter or anything.  Yet.)

Backstreet Arts Gala

Backstreet Community Arts (full name) is ready to open its doors, and to celebrate they too are having a gala.  And how convenient is this?  It’s across the street and about the same time as NTC’s!  (Both were trying to avoid competing with Newnan’s Burns Supper on the next weekend, and so they ran headlong into each other.)  That’s Sat, Jan 21, at 7:00—so you could start at Backstreet and end up at NTC.  I understand there will be a signature cocktail, which I did not create.

a clean, well-lighted space

Backstreet Arts Open House

Then on Sun, Jan 22, 2:00–4:00, Backstreet will have an open house so you can come and meet the artists who will be offering classes/workshops for the target population.  At both events you can give money to help support this group’s mission, which is to provide space, supplies, and instruction for those in our community who would not otherwise have the opportunity to express themselves through art.

I will be there because I will be starting the Backstreet Writers.  Inspired by some of the work of Temporary Services in Chicago, I want to see if I can provide a venue for people to tell their story.  That’s all I have at the moment; since I don’t know who will be interested enough to attend any seminars, nor their skill level, nor anything; all I can do is say that I’m doing this thing, welcome anyone who shows up, and then meet their needs however I can.

You will recall that this project is actually one of my Lichtenbergian Proposed Efforts. I will write in more detail about my thinking about this tomorrow.  In the meantime, here’s a photo of me that Kim Ramey took up against her angel wall:

You see why you want to be there.