Finding your Way (Getting Lost & Why it's Good for the Soul)

Today, is a spirit jam:

"What do you do to feel free?"

I don't know.
I really don't.

One of the hardest questions I have been asked in a while.
The other being:

"What do you do for fun/play?"

I was without answer then as well.

Art is hard.
And by that, I mean the artist life.

Enter the Slings and the Arrows

Meet Slings & Arrows.
One of the scariest portrayals of artistry that I have ever seen.
Mostly because it is too real.
Mostly because it is too art.
Meaning, it is a show about a Canadian Shakespeare Festival that is run by incompetents, the insane, and all around artists.

It revolves around the travails of the festival and the man on the left, Geoffrey Tennant.
Who, in the first season, ignores his mentor until said mentor commits accidental suicide by pig truck, only to have Geoffrey haunted by his ghost/hallucination in a Kafka-esque/Family Guy question: IS THE GHOST REAL? IS HE NOT?
Oh and Geoffrey is the Artistic Director of the festival...meaning he runs the whole things.
For those not in the know, a synonymous theatre festival's budget was approximately 57.4 million dollars last year. 
He is the CEO of a multi-million dollar corporation!

Artists love this show.
I love this show.
As evidenced by this video:

Stuff people say at a Shakespeare Festival:

"This is exactly like Slings & Arrows. This is just like Slings & Arrows. It's better than Slings & Arrows! We're just like Slings & Arrows!"

Over and over again, classical companies compare themselves to this show.
And why?
Because it is a great show that makes you want to be a part of a festival.
It is also psychotic, maladjusted, and lacks any semblance of communication.
At one point, Geoffrey stabs his artistic rival Darren Nichols in a duel. Twice.
It makes for great television, but why do we love to compare it to our lives?
Maybe because it is a little bit true.

That while we get to wake up for work every day and go in and do sword fights and play...well, maybe that is actually really hard work.
Yes, there is an incredible pay off.
Nevertheless, that is work.

The reason I bring all of this up?
There is a wonderful scene where one of the characters is getting audited.
She has no idea what to do, so she goes to her acting friends.
They tell her:

"Claim everything. Make up, skin cream, shampoo. And every book you read and every record you play. We, as actors, have to be in touch with the zeitgeist."

This did something very interesting to a young and burgeoning artist such as myself (me).
It taught me that every single thing that I do is a part of what we might call: research.
This does wonders come tax season, not so great for my mental health.
And why?

Well, damn near everything that every reasonable person does for fun or as a hobby now becomes an exercise in futility and a drain on energy for me:

• reading
• writing
• walking
• hiking
• exercise
• cooking
• nights out
• nights in
• move nights
• learning skills
• whittling wood

All of it becomes character work.

All of it is transformed from play into something that is done for the benefit of the art.

Which is really, really hard, because they are fun activities that I enjoy. But,...

It is really hard because I burn out very quickly with no sense of play or rest.

So what do I do for play?

I consider almost synonymous with

What do you do to feel free.

Because I am trapped in a world of work.
I have to work to play.
I have to work really hard to feel free.
So I find I often have to trick myself.
So I start with a common hobby that I have turned into research: walking.
And I keep doing that.
I keep doing it and keep doing it, exhausting myself.
And then I find myself in a new place.
A new experience.
Usually on accident.
Something unexpected works its way into the exercise and I am given a choice, embrace it or keep going with the exercise.
If the prospect is free and a lot of fun, I go with the flow.
If it isn't, I often have to wrestle myself into it for a while.
Point being you can keep walking/running:

Joy.

 Or join the lantern festival you didn't know was happening downtown:

You wanna set fire to the night?

So to come back full circle...

What do I do to feel free?

I get a little lost.

It is one of the hardest things to do in this day and age.
We have enough distractions, mini maps inside our pockets, and enough social media events happening pretty god damn constantly.
But, it is worth it to get a little lost.

How Earnest Hemingway Taught me to Live (And other tall tales)

Today, we discuss this guy:

(Ernest!)

Hemingway.
It's Hemingway.
How do you write like Hemingway?
And by that I mean it literally.
I don't have answers in this post.
This is me banging my head up against a wall.

See, Hemingway lived.
No questions asked.
My friend, who is a literal Spartan (every sense--yes, 300) idolizes this man.
And for good reason.
He fought in a world war as an ambulance medic.
Was at the storming of Normandy.
He chronologued the other as a journalist.
Was at the liberation of Paris.
Married and divorced four times.
Turned all the women into literature.
Wrote reams of material as a novelist, journalist, & short story writer.
Got injured in TWO SUCCESSIVE PLANE CRASHES IN THE AFRICA.
Got the Nobel Prize in Literature for his efforts.
As well as the Pulitzer.

This guy.
He is a legend.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
For a full reading of his biography, check out here.
For a close reading of his pseudo-biography, just read his books.

So how did he do it?
I have been trying to live like Hemingway.
Maybe not literally, but figuratively.
Consistently, the professional writers that I meet are lonely people.
Nanowrimo for writers is like Pokemon Go for depressives.
It just gets people out of the door to do what they love.

The problem with writing:

Is that it is enjoyable.
People who write or are creative genuinely enjoy it.
But, it is work.
But, most of the work is invisible or private.
Meaning, writers work

• inside their heads, 
• or in their notebooks
• or in their computers
• or on the Goggle machine

Nobody gets to see it until they publish.

AND once it is published:

• most of the books/audience is outside the realm of their experience.

Some nameless, faceless person downloads it off Amazon and reads it off their digital reader. Sure, the writer's salary is inflated, but the direct connection is with the book and not with the author.

The author doesn't get to see the well worn pages.

The author doesn't get to see someone cry and cradle their book late at night (I'm looking at you JK)

The author doesn't get to meet each and every single person.

(though they may be friends/family/acquaintances at conferences, and that is lovely. Sometimes the audience base becomes an extended family and that I think is beautiful and right and good)

At least in the performing arts, we get to meet our audience directly and immediately.

Our finished product is done for an audience that is physically there.

They pay before walking in the door and are present.

We can go up to them after and greet them.

Sure, it can be lonely, but those parties and meet and greets and student talk backs are great.

But, for anyone who doesn't perform...well...no wonder writers work at Starbucks and coffee shops.

They want to feel connected.

It can be incredibly isolating.

So Nanowrimo gets them out the door. 

But, what then?

So now, writers are writing out of doors. 

What else do they do?

To be honest, many of the professional writers I have met so far, that is about it.

They write.

For many it is a livelihood that takes up 10-14 hours of their day.

That leaves little enough time for 

1. exercise
2. family
3. cooking
4. cleaning
5. adventure
6. life

Most travel, but it is to conferences where they promote and sell their books.

They meet other authors in the area.

They work and collaborate together. 

On writing.

All of this sounds fantastic, but what about life?

What about adventure?

What about Hemingway's wars and the dames and the adventures (hunting in Africa)?

They are conspicuously absent. 

And that is not to say everyone has to hunt down wild game in Africa to be happy or as great a writer as Hemingway.

But, I am finding adventure to be incredibly enlivening in my life.

Every day I try to go somewhere new, try a food or restaurant I've never been, see new sights, go on adventures.

It takes up an exhausting amount of my day.

And when I come home at the end of it, I go to bed early and wake up late (10pm-8am).

Why?

Because I'm tuckered out (as Mum would say).

So where/how do I do it all?

How can I have adventure and make art and live with friends/family and eat my cake?

The answer according to Hemingway is pretty bleak:

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

That was at his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Which, he couldn't attend.
He was still recovering from a plane crash (or two).
According to Hemingway, loneliness is the key to great art.
Staring into the abyss is what I call it.
Facing eternity is what Hemingway calls it.

"She does her work alone and good writers become worse ones as they shed their loneliness." (to paraphrase Hemingway...words I never thought I would say)

With all due respect to Hemingway, I think that that is bullshit.
There has got to be a way to balance the adventurous life with art and companions.
Even if you have to drag your comrades around the world while writing/dictating to a tape recorder (if those still exist) there has got to be a way.
I am committed to living by my own personal legend and that is my criteria for a successful life:

1. Adventure
2. Art/arting
3. Company along the road

If you have any thoughts or suggestions on how to do that besides "just doing it" (I'm working on that part), please leave your thoughts and comments here.
I love and adore each and every one of you.
I hope you're happy.

Learning & Creativity: How Babies Rule the World (3:13)

Creativity is the most valuable resource we have available.
It is the foundation upon which both the arts and sciences are established.
There is no situation in the world where the phrase, "Oh, what a predictable solution!" is considered praise.
And yet, institutions, I would say categorically kill creativity in youth.
Sir Ken Robinson makes one of the most compelling appeals to redeveloping the school model in order to capitalize rather than economize our growing workforce in an ever-changing world:

If you don't have time to watch the entire TED talk (which is brilliant) here are some key points:

• Creativity (defined) is the ability to come up with new ideas that have value
• Creativity is impossible without the ability to fail or to make mistakes
• Failure and mistakes are precisely the thing schools stigmatize every day
• Creativity is not learned, but natural, and can be schooled out of children

Don't believe me?
Here is a chart of the Scientific Method:

I've made it color coded for convenience and to be less scary.

It is a flow chart, essentially you come up with an idea, draw on past experience, test it, figure out of it is working, and if it is, draw conclusions, and finally share that with others.

Now this chart daunts middle/high schoolers of all ages.

AND YET! AAAAAAND YET!

Babies do this.

That's right.

Fucking babies:

Babies perform research.

They have rich, detailed ideas about how the world works, and when it doesn't fit into their mold, they engage with it, expecting further discoveries.

Creativity and research go hand in hand since we are infants.

To squash one will kill the other.

It is so innately human to be curious about the world, to feel awe in the face of wondrous objects, and to search for truth and replicate it.

And yet we deny children and teenagers the ability to search for their own unique perspective on the world: schools cut funding to sports and arts programs, colleges are reduced or combined, and parents and teachers tell children that their hobbies are not careers.
This is the single greatest calamity to happen to the education of our youth, a remnant of the Industrial Era where our education system is lodged, where children are run with factory bells to train them (can you say: Pavlovian conditioning?), where maths, sciences, and finally the humanities are given importance, rather than equal or individual study.

Keith Johnstone, an improviser and theatre teacher, says this in his seminal work Improv:

I once had a close rapport with a teenager who seemed 'mad' when she was with other people, but relativly normal when she was with me. I treated her rather as I would a Mask--that is to say, I was gentle, and I didn't try to impose my reality on her.

I'm remembering her now because of an interaction she had with a very gentle,  motherly schoolteacher. We were in a beautiful garden (where the teenager had just seen God) and the teacher picked a flower and said: 'Look at the pretty flower, Betty.'

Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, 'All the flowers are beautiful.'

'Ah,' said the teacher, blocking her, 'but this flower is especially beautiful.'Betty rolled on the ground screaming. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming, 'Can't you see? Can't you see!'

In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorising, and selecting. Actually it is crazy to insist that one flower is especially beautiful in a whole garden of flowers, but the teacher is allowed to do this, and it is not perceived by sane people as violent. Grown-ups are expected to distort the perceptions of the child in this way. Since then I've noticed sch behavior constantly, but it took the mad girl to open my eyes to it.

I say let us be gentle with one another, let us not insist or push our own realities on one another.
In so doing, I hope that we can understand one another and learn from one another.
No one can teach you to be creative, no one can teach you to be an artist, no one can teach you to be a scientist; you already are one.
And no one can take that from you.