Category: Lichtenbergianism

Summer Countdown: Day 26

Posted on by Dale

Lichtenbergian goals:

I got almost nothing done. I opened up the Resignation file and played around with a couple of idea for variations, but I soon gave that up. Did the same thing with “Prelude (no fugue) No. 2.”

Well, it was Lichtenberg Eve.

Lichtenbergian distractions:

Instead of being creative, I did some major updating in Quicken. For some reason, I’ve failed to balance my credit card statement for some months. I don’t know why, unless it was some kind of subliminal avoidance thing , and if you saw my balance you’d completely agree. This required reconstructing the statements for two of those months, because amazingly not all of the documents I required were buried on my desk.

This simple task took a great deal of the morning. Then UPS delivered the St. Augustine grass plugs I’d ordered. I’m trying to find something that is shade tolerant, and this seemed to be the thing. However, upon opening the box, I was not so sure. The fescue I’ve been trying to grow is so pretty, and the St. Augustine is more weedlike. I’m conflicted about where to plant it, or even whether to plant it.

However, I do remember that the back yard at our house in Macon, when I was a wee thing, was St. Augustine. Maybe it will be a good thing.

On the other hand, I fear that its spreading habits will create a constant battle to keep the paving stones uncovered. What will be, will be. I will plant them Friday. Maybe guidance will appear before then.

After lunch, I still had no inspiration. Well, actually I did: I was inspired to make some scrumptious chocolate cookies from Dessert in Half the Time. Twelve minutes from start to finish. Yum.

Then the mail delivered, from Netflix, the first disc of The First Churchills. This series was the first Masterpiece Theatre presentation, way back in 1970 or so. Starring Susan Hampshire (for whom I had the true hots) and John Neville, it traced the career of the Duke of Marlborough and his formidable Duchess from their early love in the court of Charles II through their ultimate power and sidelining in the days of Anne.

What’s not to like? Costumes, power, intrigue, wit , this show had it all. Half the flavor of Hofvonstein came from this depiction of the Stuart court. I watched it religiously, often with the Encyclopedia Britannica at my side so I could learn who was who in more detail. (It always amazed me at how closely the performers resembled the historical characters they played.)

After having gone more than six months with the same three Netflix DVDs sitting on the television, I finally watched two of the three (The Station Agent and Hedwig and the Angry Inch , excellent, both, but uninspiring) and shipped them all back, after manipulating Churchills to the top of the list.

So I have my soap opera to watch, and I have chocolate cookies to scarf down while doing so. Was there ever a better Lichtenberg Eve?

Art & Fear: 3

Posted on by Dale

Art & Fear does suggest a remedy for the problem of destination for your work:

A. Make friends with others who make art, and share your in-progress work with each other frequently.
B. Learn to think of [A], rather than the Museum of Modern Art, as the destination of your work. [p. 12]

And that exactly is what I have in the Lichtenbergian Society: a group of creative men who joke about their procrastinatory proclivities, but who are in fact a vibrant core of collaborators. The fact that we gather at the Winter Solstice to record our artistic goals for the following year, and to confess progress, or not, on the previous year’s goals is enough to make them my [A].

But of course we gather throughout the year, and many times the question arises, “What are you working on?” We don’t exactly trot out our work and pass it around like the Inklings did, although I do show some of my paintings, but just the opportunity to talk about our work is enough. We also have our blog to share on, and I usually post any music in progress on my blog.

I guess I’ve solved the [A]/[B] problem for my painting. After all, most of what I’m working on in that regard is for the Lichtenbergians anyway. It’s with my music that I haven’t solved the [B] aspect quite yet. It would help if the Lichtenbergians could play in a string quartet. Lousy slackers.

Lichtenbergian Goal #6

Posted on by Dale

Lichtenbergian Goal #6: in conjunction with all of the above, produce a lot of crap, i.e., produce boatloads of work

Right. This one may be the hardest one of all.

First of all, it requires time. It’s all fine and good to say that the more you produce, the more likely it is that you’ll produce something of value in the midst of all the crap, or that “10,000 hours of practice” blah blah blah and you get good at whatever it is you’re doing. But producing a lot of crap also requires that you have the time to do it, if you’re going to be mindful of what you’re doing.

And that’s the problem anyway, isn’t it? Lichtenbergians don’t really procrastinate, we just don’t have time available to us to sit down and work. Just now, for example, I was stopped in the middle of a sentence by the appearance of my lovely first wife with marching instructions for my day off. This is in my upstairs study, where she never comes, at a time when normally she should be at work. And that’s just for a quickie morning blogpost, never mind the ELP or the symphony.*

Real life intervenes. Leaf by Niggle. Family and friends. Nine-to-five. We wait for a block of time that never comes, and we keep pushing our hearts’ desires forever ahead of us, out of reach.

, , ,

* Polemics aside, I am bound in honesty to say that my lovely first wife is not a stumbling block to anything I need to accomplish. Quite the contrary: she is amazingly supportive in almost never demanding my presence when I’m trying to get something done. Just had to say that.

Clarification

Posted on by Dale

When I said I had a “dread feeling” about getting started on A Perfect Life in the previous post, I didn’t mean that I have some silly premonition that I’m running out of time to do this. I meant that I have a real dread of the messiness, the incoherence of how I think I need to approach the project.

I have a vague image of what a finished version might look/read like, but of course I cannot sit down and start writing that finished version. First of all, I only have a vague image. Duh.

Second of all, there is no second of all. I only have a vague image of what should be in the book (“Everything!” is the only answer I can get out of the Muse), and absolutely no idea of where to begin.

So I must simply begin. Open the book and start writing about my life and how I live it, here in Newnan, on College Street, in the late 20th/early 21st centuries.

How I wake up and get ready. What College Street looks like, winter, spring, summer, fall. My study. Driving through downtown. Walking through downtown. Being married. Being a father. What I wear. What I don’t wear. Front porches, their decline and fall. School. Parks. The theatre. Lichtenbergians. Lichtenbergianism. The ELP. William Blake’s Inn. The changes in all of the above over the years.

“Everything!” says the Muse.

And that fills me with dread. My stomach churns and my shoulders tense up even as I type this.

“Everything!”

Lichtenbergian Goal #5

Posted on by Dale

Lichtenbergian Goal #5: begin work on A Perfect Life, my proposed description of what it’s like to live a life like mine
Longtime readers may remember that last June I bought a huge handmade journal. My stated goal at the time was, and I quote:

I want to write a book called A Perfect Life. I want to document my life in general and in particular. I have a phenomenal life, one that by any standard on this planet is enviable. I am materially comfortable, my environment is great, my family and friends are wonderful, and I am intellectually and creatively alive. That’s what I want to do. Whether I will cast it as a journal, or essay, or fiction, I don’t know.
But I do feel compelled to start telling what it was like to live in this time, in this place.

I still do not know how I want to do this. But I think I need to begin. I have a dread feeling that I just need to fill the book, fill it completely, a patchwork of observations, descriptions, sketches, literal drawings, literally a patchwork on the page. Let the editors sort it out.

It will be my Red Book. Only different. (Not this different, although that would be a fun project as well. Lichtenbergian assignment, maybe?)

Lichtenbergian Goal #1

Posted on by Dale

Lichtenbergian Goal #1: to continue my painting/drawing, which has two avenues at this point, and I’m thinking of adding a third.

First of all is my Field series, which began with a couple of news photos the composition of which I thought would make a good basis for abstract paintings. Those first two were based directly on the photos. Indeed, the first one I actually painted over the photo itself.

The main issue I’m exploring now is how to create these compositions on my own without bogging down in the “figures playing in snow” motif. (That’s exactly what the first two were based on, of course.)

Many of the avenues I’ve tried recently don’t really work, which is the point. Keep exploring until you find something that does. Then the problem is how to use that which works without it becoming cliché. It’s the accursed cycle of creativity.

With the portraiture, I have two problems I need to solve. The first is the ongoing issue of verisimilitude: does what I’ve painted accurately reflect the subject? Can you “tell who it is”? That’s what I was working on fairly assiduously in my sketchbook, until it dawned on me that it did me very little good to be able to draw Jeff’s face if I had then to turn around and use paint to achieve the same goal.

(Which is not to say that the drawing is not critical to the painting. It is: it allows me to see in a more leisurely and forgiving, and cheaper, medium how faces are put together.)

The second issue is that of style. If we assume that in this best of all possible worlds I will end up with a eight-foot long oil painting of the Lichtenbergians standing in the labyrinth, then what do I want it to look like? Caravaggio-like finish? Rembrandt? Renoir? Bacon? Hockney? Something new, readily recognizable as Lylesian even?

What kind of stylistic approach will best achieve my goal, which is to show a group of men who have a certain authority just by dint of having lived? To show the aging of the male body not as a matter of decay but of changing, even growing, powers? Can I even do that?

With the Field series, my plan of attack is to continue working on the pieces I have currently going, i.e., IV and V, then grow from there.

With the ELP, my plan of attack is two-fold: quick stylistic studies, and slower, more layered attempts at verisimilitudinosity.

I foresee two stumbling blocks that my Lichtenbergian self will seize on as excuses not to proceed, and that is that I am already chafing at the size restrictions with the Field series, and at the limitations of gouache as a medium overall. However, I have no room for larger canvases/boards, and I certainly cannot afford to fill them with oils, which have environmental issues of their own.

Onward.

Oh. The third avenue. I may start exploring collage. That is all.

Lichtenbergians, part two

Posted on by Dale

Before I write about each of my Lichtenbergian goals, I need to explain why this group means so much to me, if I can.

As part of our discussion Saturday night, Craig kept asking why, given the Void that is ignorant of our efforts, is it useful at all to talk about our creativity? Jeff finally replied that it provides us with a sense of community, that we are not alone in our efforts. There are others like us.

A truism, of course, since the other side of our discussion was the idea that we are evolutionarily compelled to create the thing-that-is-not, but sometimes in our modern world we can forget that. Especially as men in small town, middle class America, we find ourselves on the outside, wondering indeed whether all the time we scrape together to pursue our art is worth it.

So this group of men meets fairly often, but especially this once, to say those things which rattle around inside us, to share the ideas and theories and plans we have, to meet and understand that we are not alone, that what we feel we must do is in fact understandable by someone else.

And this night, the Annual Meeting, with all of its made-up ceremony and ritual, is the most important night. Because that ceremony, that fake little ritual, requires us to present our selves as Accomplished. We must drop the pretense that we’re not really artists and instead proclaim what we want to do in the coming year. We must bind ourselves to our fellow Lichtenbergians in a trust that demands that we regard our creative impulses as legitimate and not merely impulses, but imperatives.

This is the third year we’ve done this, and I have found my three lists to be interesting in their arc. Last year I had seven goals. I don’t even remember what all of them were, but I didn’t meet a single one. It was stinging.

And so I lowered my sights. Last solstice I set only four goals, and they were ones I knew I could meet. And I met them, all four. It was stinging.

I felt as though I had cheated, as if I had lowballed myself and the Society. I did not feel accomplished, smug, or even happy that I had made all four goals. They were measly goals, cramped, little things that might have made others proud, but not me.

This year, therefore, I made some goals I felt would be honorable to make, and some more that I felt would be honorable even to fail at.

Because when I bind myself to these guys, it means something.

Lichtenbergians

Posted on by Dale

This past Saturday was the Annual Meeting of the Lichtenbergian Society, a top-secret organization for creative procrastinators. That is, creative men who procrastinate, not men who procrastinate creatively. We celebrate the virtues of procrastination. We are a veritable support group for procrastination. With drinking.

This Annual Meeting is one of the most important evenings of the year for me. Even though we gather often during the year and are companionable and argumentative, even though we have a website through which we communicate our ideas and passions, still this particular meeting stands out, because it’s the only meeting in which we have a ritualized ceremony.

We toast our genius Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German physicist, aphorist, and satirist, and inveterate procrastinator. We submit Corroborative Evidence of our Claims, i.e., creative works the creators of which would have been well-advised to have procrastinated over a good deal longer. Then we Consign said Corroborative Evidence to the Flames.

Next comes the part that means the most to me. We have a journal in which the recording secretary has recorded each member’s Proposed Efforts the preceding year. The secretary reads out the list of what we thought we might accomplish this year, and to each we have to respond: “Accomplished” or “Cras melior est” (our motto, which means “Tomorrow is better”). After everyone has confessed responded to the secretary, and there’s a lot of discussion and commentary, we stand and have a silent meditation on the Year’s Efforts, followed by a silent toast.

This year, I am ashamed to say, I accomplished all four of my goals. Last year I was zero for seven, which is also pretty bad, but at least had the virtue of making me an exemplary Lichtenbergian. This year I felt cheesy, as if I had cheated somehow by choosing easy-to-conquer goals, and as if I had not set goals extravagant enough to be worth attempting. Success did not make me feel as if I had accomplished anything.

So in the next part of our ceremony, I was determined to challenge myself more. This is the Engrossment of the Proposed Efforts: each Lichtenbergian states for the record what he hopes to accomplish creatively this year. This is an awe-inspiring exercise, because you know that at the next winter solstice, you’re going to be confronted with your claims and have to acknowledge your success or failure.

After everyone is done, we have another toast, to the Proposed Efforts, followed by the agenda. This year’s topic was “compulsion and void,” revolving around the polar ideas that a) we are compelled by our nature to create, and b) we are confronted by the void which renders our creations pointless. How do we deal with these ideas as artists? And it may be that more toasts are made as the evening progresses. You get the idea.

What were my Proposed Efforts?

  • continue my painting, both the abstract Field series and my studies for the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait
  • restart the 24-Hour Challenge, which to my surprise I had proposed last year to do only for six months, which is just about what I managed
  • compose one complete work, any description
  • write one good short story
  • begin work on A Perfect Life, my proposed description of what it’s like to live a life like mine
  • and in conjunction with all of the above, produce a lot of crap, i.e., produce boatloads of work

I think what I’ll do is blog about this for a couple of days. I need to write more anyway, and I need to set forth some ideas about this whole process and each of the particulars.

Musings

Posted on by Dale

I don’t have a coherent post to offer today, just random thoughts.

I’ve been having a recurring dream for the past few days. It’s annoying and I can’t figure out why I’m fixating on this particular image. It involves the Union Jack and its components somehow: I am usually trying to explain the pieces, or assemble the pieces, or explain how to assemble the pieces, or something. I’m not clear on what’s going on, and I’m thinking the dream itself is not very linear.

Sometimes a little girl is involved (hush, Jeff), sometimes a large group (hush, Jobie). The overriding feeling is one of frustration, but since I don’t have any clear (waking) idea of what I’m trying to accomplish, I’m not sure what the frustration is about. It’s entirely possible that not knowing what I’m trying to do in the dream is the frustration.

The easy symbolism is that it’s a metaphor for my composing. I know what the pieces are and have some idea of how they go together, but I don’t know enough to actually assemble them. What the little girl has to do with it, I have no idea. It’s like Faulkner’s Little Sister Death that I mentioned the other night at the Lichtenbergian Annual Meeting: in the face of some college student’s question, he claimed not even to remember the character in The Sound and the Fury. (I think I placed her in Absalom, Absalom at the meeting, but I got the character Quentin Compson right.)

As for the Lichtenbergian Annual Meeting, let’s just say that I was the essential Lichtenbergian: of the seven goals that I had listed at last year’s meeting, I had accomplished not one. The ones I can remember are picking up painting again; completing the symphony; completing the songs for A Day in the Moonlight; writing a trio for piano, trombone and saxophone; and getting some pieces done for a couple of choral competitions. There were two more, but I can’t remember even what they are.

I put off working on Moonlight to work on the symphony. That was scuttled when Czarkowski decided not to return to GHP. I didn’t have time during the summer to work on the trio, and no drive to work on the choral works, and then everything was subordinated to the labyrinth. So there you go.

All the non-Lichtenbergians in my life ask if I just rolled them all over to next year, and the answer is, of course, no. I’m pulling back in a lot of ways. Fewer goals, smaller goals, baby steps. Who knows? Perhaps the symphony will come bursting out of me in January, but I’m not planning for it.