In the Soul Shelter spirit of creative commitment and entrepreneurship, my new book project has carried me into the realm of “micro-philanthropy.” How did that happen?  Long story short, it started with …

A Predicament (or: Necessity is the Mother of Invention)

It’s widely known in the creative community that trends in art funding haven’t exactly arced upward over the last thirty years. And now we see near consensus among forecasts in the philanthropic sector, which show public funding like the National Endowment for the Arts all but disappearing before long.

Clearly we need …

A Vision (or: How I Got Hooked)

Last month I got an invitation to join a leading arts organization known as United States Artists, which bestows $50,000 fellowships on creative practitioners every year. Attending a reception here in Portland to learn more, I found the folks at US Artists coolly, unflappably acknowledging the fact that “historically, public support for the arts and artists is unstable and unreliable.” Cool and unflappable, perhaps, because with the launch of an innovative new Web site US Artists has pioneered an effective way to keep its mission alive in the long run, and to:

• “Foster direct connections between artists and the public”
• “Catalyze new funding for artists”
• “Bring creative projects to life”
• “Build community around the most accomplished artists in America”

The vision behind this Web site entranced me immediately. I and my fellow arts supporters will fight to keep civic backing of the arts however we can. But leveraging the power of social media and the hands-on format of micro-finance to support artists on a project-by-project, tax-deductible basis — well, that’s an idea whose time has come! Let’s call it Democratic Patronage. Which brings me to…

My Project (or: A Writer Makes a Video in Order to Make a Book)

Now in its funding stage at United States Artists, Date of Disappearance, a collection of ten short stories, will appear in illustrated limited edition, hand-numbered and signed, and will be sold exclusively through independent booksellers. (It will also launch a micro-press.)

As far as I can tell, mine is one of the first fiction projects to be featured, and I’m awfully excited to be a part of the USA community. If you’d like to help launch Date of Disappearance by reserving a copy or simply making a pledge, you can learn more in the following video.

Or click over to US Artists to get a first-hand experience of this brilliant new chapter in arts funding, where 200-odd projects (in all artistic disciplines) are currently in development.

You can also help with my project by spreading the word far and wide. Blog it, Facebook it, Share it, Like it, Tweet, link, or embed my video. You’ll have my deepest gratitude, eventually you’ll have a sumptuous, collectible book to enjoy, and you’ll have supported the arts. All longtime Soul Shelter readers know the significance of that!

You might also enjoy:

“You Don’t Have to Be an Insider”

“Do We Need a Cultural Bill of Rights?”

“Why It’s Desirable to Be Eccentric”

“Jump-Start Your Career With a Personal Business Model”

“Two Books to Galvanize Creativity”

“Beautiful, Soul-Affirming Untruths”

So before earning an MBA, consider a do-it-yourself “MPA” — a Master of Personal Administration. Unlike an MBA, which purports to train you to manage organizations, an MPA encourages you to understand yourself and manage your own career. Here are some differences between the two:

1. Organizational business plans versus personal business models

Even though the dotcom meltdown demonstrated more than a decade ago that “business plans” are a lousy basis for entrepreneurial action, MBA programs remain wedded to “business plan” thinking. The MPA, on the other hand, calls for individuals to seek meaningful work by designing and testing personal business models.

2. Big/stable/predictable versus small/chaotic/ever-changing

The “A” in “MBA” assumes a need for administration — people to manage large, stable, predictable organizations. In contrast, the MPA approach acknowledges that work today is messy, unpredictable, and constantly changing — and that small businesses employ half of all private sector workers.

3. Greed versus contribution

The U.S. financial meltdown has exposed greed at its worst — and the dangers of the kinds of financial engineering taught in MBA programs. The MPA calls for learners to do good things for others while helping themselves — the essence of ethical business.

4. Commoditization versus differentiation

MBA degrees are increasingly common and therefore an ever-weaker differentiator in a tight job market. But the candidate with a sound personal business model linked to a clear purpose stands out. As Josh Kaufman writes in The Personal MBA, “Skip business school. Educate yourself.”

So, are you tempted to start studying for your MPA? Where should you start?

Well, there’s no formal curriculum, and no diploma at the end. The first step is to develop a personal business model — a concise definition of your Customers and the Value you provide them, all driven by a Purpose that binds work and personal life. You do this with a Business Model Canvas, which looks like this:

You can find the Canvas and more at Business Model You, where 276 work life wizards from 37 countries are developing the personal business model methodology (thanks to personal branding expert Andres Perez Ortega for his inspiration on the MPA acronym, which I’ve rendered in English).

At Business Model You you’ll also find other resources and experts to help you make the MPA honor roll. Now, that doesn’t mean working on an MPA is easy: One member who uses our methodology in business courses says that “students think making up strategic plans for business is easy, but creating a strategy for yourself is hard — because the personal strategy matters more.”

In fact, I’ll be the first to admit that none of us has actually earned the MPA credential yet. We may never graduate! But maybe that’s the biggest advantage of all. While an MBA costs tens of thousands of dollars for two years of classes, an MPA is free — and the learning continues for a lifetime.

Why not enroll today?

Many thanks to Allie, Lindsay, Chris, Steve, and other friends who sent e-mails over the past weeks, checking in and gently reminding us to write. Now, how to explain ourselves? Mark?

Well, we haven’t exactly been sitting around.

True. We’ve each been sunk deep in our respective core projects. In past months those included completing a new novel, editing a best-selling business book, and finishing a doctoral thesis.

Mark’s too modest, so I’ll tell the latest about his writing: he completed his third novel and immediately won an offer, so the book will be published next year. What’s the new title about, Mark?

Part-love story, part-historical mystery. It follows five generations in an American family, beginning with an immigration in the 1820s, continuing through the Civil War, and concluding in the final years of World War II. Wow, that sounds extremely tedious. But I promise, lots of stuff is left out and I kept only the juicy bits.

You also participated in that wild artist retreat in upstate New York in August. I imagine that involved lots of drunken skinny dipping, orgiastic body-painting, and so forth?

Well, ahem, I had to sign this non-disclosure thing… What I can say is … it was very nice and everybody was, ahem, well-behaved. Also, lots of work got done. But what about you, Tim? You’re even more academically distinguished these days, aren’t you?

I wrapped up my doctorate of business administration (DBA), a daunting task, believe you me. The degree was awarded August 27. My thesis dealt with the question of why some business models transfer more readily to overseas markets than others. As I see it the answer lies in how business models are “culturally imprinted” — and how those imprints affect a business model’s viability outside country of origin.

But you had more on your plate than that.

Yep. While finishing the research, I served as editor and co-author for an extraordinary new book. Business Model Generation is the first book I’ve been involved with that’s sold more than 7,000 copies, so it’s been a thrill (95% of all books published sell fewer than 5,000 copies).

How many copies are we talking? (Author to author here.)

55,000-plus in print.

Whoa, Holy Gutenberg! And overseas?

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, and Indonesian translation rights have been sold.

What, no Antarctic?

I wasn’t supposed to say anything. The contract isn’t quite finished.

Remind me to ask you more often about success in one’s writing life. Now, there’s an interesting story behind the way this book was put together, right? You helmed the editing part of a really sharp team.

Yes, the project involved a remarkable entrepreneurial network (about which more later).

Where can I get a copy?

Barnes & Noble stuck their neck out for us: they ordered an average of more than four copies each for all of their almost 800 U.S. stores (that’s unusual for a $35 business book). So please consider buying it at Barnes & Noble — we’d like to support the remarkable commitment they made to us.

You got it. Well, as for Soul Shelter, the way we’ve kept things shuttered here lately, I think we owe ourselves a reminder of why we started this blog in the first place.

We had a wonderful book of medieval Japanese parables to promote, but more important, we wanted to experience this remarkable medium for ourselves.

Right. We wanted an outlet for the ideas we always tossed around between us in regular conversation. But I think it’s become clear that we lack the, uh, stamina of real bloggers.

Are you saying we fizzled?

Fizzled? No! Flagged a little, maybe. The ideas are still there in abundance. The tough part is the regular blogging thing — the format and upload business…

True. It’s safe to say that we are absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly convinced that we will never, ever, be pro bloggers.

You said it. Blogging is hard, incessant work.

Uh-huh, and to be successful, you’ve got to either 1) have good products or services to flog, 2) write about a subject that’s attractive to advertisers, or 3) be so crazy about writing and self-publishing that you’re care-free about any financial return on your efforts.

That’s why with this post, we’re switching to an occasional rather than a regular posting schedule (actually, we made that transition months ago, but hey, here’s official notice).

And how should we define “occasional”?

Let’s just say, stretches of quietude will not be rare.

And quietude is good for the soul!

Yeah, nicely put. Quietude: un-blog-like, but not without soulful benefits!

Meanwhile, the Soul Shelter archives are fully accessible via the categorical groupings in our sidebar, or via the search box on the bottom right side of all full-post pages.

Soul Shelter lives, and more good writing is (occasionally) on the way!

Tim Clark and Mark Cunningham are both writers, and welcome any inquiries. Write to <authors> at this domain.

Conventional wisdoms are sneaky things. Moderately useful sometimes, they often have a way of eroding confidence in one’s better instincts, even undermining the valid insights of independent thinkers.

Not long ago, while reading through a book of collected interviews with my favorite contemporary filmmaker, the late Anthony Minghella, I felt a fluttery thrill upon finding the following quote:

I think any sane person resists the idea that there is a formal and ineffable structure to films, which is what the Americans have diagnosed as the ‘three-act’ structure. They’ll talk about the problems in the second act, problems in the third act. It seems to me to be absurd that such a liquid form should be calcified into three acts.

The “Three-Act Structure” is a conventional wisdom of American film-writing. It’s referred to, sagely, as “The Form.” And while many a fine movie owes much to The Form (Robert Redford’s stellar Quiz Show comes to mind), Minghella is right. We Americans are absolutely obsessed with a screenwriting approach which is essentially, let’s admit, an industry dogma. The Form, let’s further admit, would more aptly be called The Formula.

Minghella’s words struck home because some time ago I completed my own first screenplay, and subsequently engaged with various industry people in deep and thoughtful conversations pertaining to “plot-points” and other facets of the all-holy Three-Act dogma of The Form.

These industry people had read my screenplay and liked it, but some couldn’t get around certain nagging “issues” in the script’s “structure.”

I was all ears, because I found The Form to be a new and refreshing challenge. I’d read some screenwriting guides about The Form, had analyzed some movies flawlessly structured thanks to The Form, and I was striving to get a handle on The Form myself, all in the aim of improving my script, which was, well, a quiet, quirky little comedy/drama about a father and a son, about growing up, about learning not to be one’s own worst enemy.

My script, in other words, was essentially plotless. It was about relationships. It consisted of a series of small, (hopefully) moving human moments. Characters talked to one another, had memories, felt sad, embarrassed, regretful, unsure, talked to each other some more, and finally came to feel a little bit hopeful, but no less clueless.

My movie ended there. That, in a nutshell, was it. It wasn’t a happy ending, but not a sad one either.

That’s all my movie wanted to be, and in truth that’s all it needed to be in order to live up to itself and my vision for it. Still I listened intently to my professional advisers, wholly confident in their counsel, poised all the while to “fix” the script I’d already revised about a hundred times.

For years, I had heard the gospel of The Form and believed it would be my artistic salvation.

My movie needed a plot. It needed big, unmistakable turning points. It needed a First, Second, and Third Act. That, after all, was The Form. I couldn’t expect to produce a worthy screenplay without abiding by The Form. I wanted to sell this thing, didn’t I? Absent The Form, how could I expect anybody in MovieLand to know what to do with my odd little script?

I must have been nuts—not because I should have known I’d already authored a perfect screenplay (no, though it was pretty good), but because I’d somehow failed to recognize that among my small handful of favorite films, the films that never ceased to inspire me (by Agnes Jaoui, Ingmar Bergmann, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Scorsese, and others), nary a one boasted the tried-and-true Three-Act Structure, The Form.

At the top of this private pantheon was Minghella’s The English Patient. I had watched that film forty-three times.

Here’s Minghella in that book of interviews again:

The screenplay of The English Patient was always odd. I remember I sent it to a successful American actress whom I liked a lot, not to be in the film but just as a friend. She wrote back to me saying, ‘I beg you not to make this film –- it has no third act.’ I wrote back and said I didn’t think there was a second act either. It was so far away from the hegemony of the American screenplay –- Act One, Act Two, Act Three –- there’s no way to fit it into that box at all. One of those guys who goes around ‘teaching’ people how to write a screenplay actually uses The English Patient as an illustration of how not to … He’s right, of course.

I looked up from the page, newly awakened. Lordy, it’s shocking to realize the insidiousness of conventional wisdoms. If you’re looking to lead a free and fulfilling creative life, beware “wisdom.”

The funny thing is, I’ve never been a big fan of dogmas—religious, political, or aesthetic. I hear the resounding ring of truth in these words of John Dewey, from his 1933 book Art As Experience:

Impulsion beyond all limits that are externally set inheres in the very nature of the artist’s work. It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the value of that material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience.

Henry James, another favorite voice, also puts it beautifully:

It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase—a kind of revelation—of freedom. One perceives in that case—by the light of a heavenly ray—that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision.

You could say I’ve done my best to go my own way, do my own thing, write my own rules. Yet despite my finely tuned B.S.-detector where artistic ideology is concerned, in this case something had scrambled my instruments, burrowed into me, undermined my self-reliance.

Something had led me to look away from the organic aesthetic demands of my screenplay in search of a formula. (Is this why dealings with Hollywood are so often equated to Faustian bargains?)

Whew. Close call.

Granted, my script may remain nothing more than words on a page. I’ll likely never sell the thing. But that’s OK.

The magnificently talented (and prolific) writer William T. Vollman put it nicely in a fascinating New York Times feature last week when asked whether he was concerned that his new, uncompromisingly long book might cost him readers:

I don’t care. It seems like the important thing in life is pleasing ourselves. The world doesn’t owe me a living, and if the world doesn’t want to buy my books, that’s my problem.

Plot-points or no, three acts or no, I like my script just the way it is.

(This post is from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“On Making Mistakes”

“How to Achieve Even While Losing”

“Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives”

“A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money”

“A Message of Improvement From Self-Help’s Founding Father”

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield dispenses no-nonsense, read-it-in-a-day advice for anybody striving to channel their creative juices into a floodtide of productivity. In brief, snappy chapters titled clearly for easy reference, Pressfield calls it like he sees it:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

“Resistance” becomes Pressfield’s keynote. You’ll get his drift if you’ve ever wished to finish a creative project (or start one, for that matter) only to succumb to procrastination and self-inflicted guilt. Resistance is the nattering, excuse-making voice in our heads that keeps us from quieting down, focusing, and getting to work.

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. …To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.

Here lies my one significant quibble with Pressfield’s book. I find his terms, though helpful in a wake-up-call kind of way, to be a bit extreme.

For isn’t Resistance sort of … necessary to creativity? Rather than seeking to wholly suppress and kill Resistance, isn’t the artist’s task to tame it and train it to one’s service? (“Resistance sparks the flame,” goes the old adage.)

For me, the edict “You must declare Resistance evil” sets up a false duality that seems a little Manichean. I personally favor John Dewey’s more nuanced outlook on the very same subject (Resistance and the Artist) in his 1933 book Art As Experience:

Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. … The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life.

In other words, without Resistance, how could we know artistic success?

Nevertheless Pressfield’s central point is sound. “It’s not the writing part that’s hard,” he observes, “What’s hard is sitting down to write.” And the perspectives of The War of Art are frequently salutary. For instance, I love this bit:

As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.

The War of Art gets somewhat New Agey for my tastes toward its close, but it nevertheless serves like all good books of the “Inspiration” genre to affirm creative expression.

Creative work is not a selfish act nor a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.

That is a message of inestimable value to artists striving in a culture that all too often instills shame in answer to creative enterprise. Even those entities that ostensibly nurture the fledgling artist (e.g., university MFA-programs) can be tacit accomplices in this shame game, for they inadvertently suggest that only a degree, or firm “career track,” can dignify the artistic attempt.

Iconoclastic playwright David Mamet, in his wonderful 1997 book True & False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, excoriates such sham authority, and extols artistic self-reliance. (True & False is a resource of wisdom and solace for any kind of artist, actor or not.)

It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill-equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.

If the value in The War of Art is how it galvanizes the artist to get working and keep at it, the value of True & False lies in its authoritative philosophy about the creative life. Mamet continually vindicates the artist in his or her headlong impracticality. I’ll leave you with the following passage which does just that.

Read Pressfield and Mamet and be inspired. Work and be well.

The best advice one can give an aspiring artist is ‘Have something to fall back on.’ The merit of the instruction is this: those who adopt it spare themselves the rigor of the artistic life. … Those with ‘something to fall back on’ invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently. The old story has the mother say to the sea captain, ‘Take special care of my son, he cannot swim,’ to which the captain responds, ‘Well, then, he’d better stay in the boat.’ … Those of you with nothing to fall back on, you will find, are home.

(Thanks to Chris at the The Art of Non-Conformity for alerting me to Pressfield’s book)

(This post comes to you from the Soul Shelter archives)

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“Knuckling Down to the Hard Work of Writing”

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“Opting Out of the Deferred Life Plan”

“Born Ready”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“You Don’t Have to Be an Insider“

Andy Goldsworthy talks to rocks. He stacks driftwood. He bites at finger-like chunks of ice and welds them together into swirling lines. With strands of stem he sews broad green leaves into ribbons and sends them afloat on rivers, where they glide as sinuous as snakes.

Goldsworthy is a sculptor –- but not of marble or of metal. Often his works endure for a matter of moments –- no longer. Their home is under the sun, in the rain or snow or dappled autumnal light. His sculptures stand on beaches, in fields. They sway in trees or drift atop natural water. Ultimately, they fall apart.

In Rivers and Tides, the mesmerizing 2001 documentary by director Thomas Riedelsheimer, we see Goldsworthy in his element, at work in the elements, borrowing all his materials from nature and letting nature bring his sculpture to life, then undo it –- and, by the same token, patiently submitting when nature resists collaboration, stymieing his work or destroying it too soon.

Goldsworthy’s delicate, painstaking process teaches much about the creative or artistic endeavor, which is almost always a matter of surrender. And Rivers and Tides contemplates beautifully, through breathtaking imagery and Goldsworthy’s own soft-spoken voice-overs, the nature of meaningful creative work.

On a damp, solitary beach Goldsworthy arranges gathered stones, stacking them one at a time, studying his placement of each. The stones are large and heavy, but seem to oblige his design for them. He feels he understands the stone, and that his work will emerge from this understanding, to exist, if only momentarily, as a complement to its natural setting.

The stones accumulate, a gesture toward the instructive sculptings of nature herself. A form arises. But something is off, and the stones begin to resist one another. They lean and pull apart. The form collapses. Sighing, Goldsworthy reconsiders. He dismantles the rubble and starts anew.

He intends to construct an enormous cone, taller than a man, wider than a tractor tire, before the tide draws in to cover his working area. He wants the cone to be ready, finished and standing, when the water arrives, because the flooding is part of the sculpture. The cone will drown away. The tide will dismantle it. The vision for the work includes the work’s impermanence.

Goldsworthy does not have cash on his mind, nor career trajectory. His work is a way of life, wonderfully impractical,  rich with mysterious rewards.

The stones topple again –- and for an agonizing moment Goldsworthy is crushed. But he collects himself.

That’s the fourth –- the fourth collapse. And the tide is coming in. I think it would be better to wait. Oh, the moment when something collapses, it is intensely disappointing. And this is the fourth time it’s fallen, and each time I got to know the stone a little bit more, and it got higher each time, so it grew in proportion to my understanding of the stone. And that is really one of the things my art is trying to do –- is trying to understand the stone. I obviously don’t understand it well enough … yet.

Process is paramount. Many a creative aspirant bears constant reminding of this inspiriting truth. The true artist works wholeheartedly and faces failure willingly, devoted to an end that is often of no practical significance, striving simply to better understand the materials at hand. If the material resists, the artist seeks to glean the lessons in its resistance. The artist does this all in the faith that something beautiful, if gleamingly ephemeral, will come forth.

For those undertaking it, and for those witnessing it, there’s a message in work of this kind, pointing toward a fulfilled life.

(See Goldsworthy at work here, in this breathtaking clip from Rivers & Tides.)

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

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In 1799 the English mystic, poet, and painter William Blake sat down to pen a lively document in defense of the imagination, the inventively eccentric, in sum: the artistic spirit. For anybody laboring in service to a dream, an image, or voice of inspiration, whose work defies convention or leaves folks wagging their heads in disapproval or bewilderment, this text is a prime comfort.

Blake was addressing a dissatisfied client. Reverend John Trusler had commissioned from him some illustrations, but upon receipt found them to be stylistically disagreeable — and, one guesses, too drastic a departure from traditional Christian iconography. Blake specialized in the unorthodox but evidently what Trusler whiffed most clearly in the artist’s flair was “immorality.”

August 23, 1799.

Revd. Sir,

I really am sorry that you are fall’n out with the Spiritual World, especially if I should have to answer for it. I feel very sorry that your ideas & mine on moral painting differ so much as to have made you angry with my method of study. If I am wrong, I am wrong in good company. I had hoped your plan comprehended all species of this Art, & especially that you would not regret that species which gives existence to every other; namely, Visions of Eternity. You say that I want somebody to elucidate my ideas. But you ought to know that what is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the ancients consider’d what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Aesop, Homer, Plato.

Given Blake’s uninhibited defense of his own work –an act justifiably recognized in some as blind egotism — it’s worth bearing in mind that he had by this point in his career attained a stage of technical mastery. For all his eccentricities, his self-confidence (righteous indignation?) was just. In other words, it was not self-importance, delusional pride, or base implacability that prompted his letter, but something far more profound. Blake knew well — and said himself — that “Without unceasing practice nothing can be done. Practice is Art. If you leave off you are lost.” And he knew the intensity and dedication with which he practiced.

Because Blake was consummate he could be honestly unconventional, and rise to his own defense without unduly flattering himself regarding his gifts. There’s an important difference between faith in one’s unique vision and fallacious pride.

But as you have favor’d me with your remarks on my design, permit me in return to defend it … I perceive that your eye is perverted by caricature prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, & happiness is better than mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of Imagination & Vision. I see everything I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser, a Guinea is far more beautiful than the sun, & a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule & deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; & some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers. You certainly mistake, when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all one continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, & I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil, & Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but mediately to the Understanding or Reason? Such is true painting, and such was alone valued by the Greeks & the best modern artists. …

Blake’s religious regard for the Imagination (capital I) reminds me of some remarks by his contemporary John Keats, written in a different letter some years after: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth, whether it existed before or not.” What was it Blake said at the outset? “If I am wrong, I’m wrong in good company.”

I am happy to find a great majority of fellow mortals who can elucidate my Visions, & particularly they have been elucidated by children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my pictures than I even hoped. Neither youth nor childhood is folly or incapacity. Some children are fools & so are some old men. But there is a vast majority on the side of Imagination or spiritual sensation.

To engrave after another painter is infinitely more laborious than to engrave one’s own inventions. And of the size you require my price has been thirty Guineas, & I cannot afford to do it for less. …

I am, Revd. Sir, your very obedient servant,

William Blake

There it is: the stout and soundly articulated refusal to compromise or let one’s Art be co-opted for fear of missing out on a buck. And time has proved the rightness of Blake’s refusal. His work is still very much with us. Who over the last several generations has not read or memorized in school those haunting lines…

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

(As for the good Reverend Trusler? We’re told he was the author of two books: Hogarth Moralized and The Way to be Rich and Respectable. Says it all, I fear.)

“[Blake] was a commercial artist who was a genius in poetry, painting, and religion,” say the editors of The Portable Blake. “He was a libertarian obsessed with God; a mystic who reversed the mystical pattern, for he sought man as the end of his search. He was a Christian who hated the churches; a revolutionary who abhorred the materialism of the radicals. He was a drudge, sometimes living on a dollar a week, who called himself “a mental prince”; and was one.” Yes, Blake knew what he was about, knew how to go about it, and didn’t let anything divert his vision — certainly not a crabby critic.

Note, by the way, that little biographical tidbit about living on a dollar a day. Uh-huh, Blake was poor. Good art has never guaranteed good income, much as being guided by one’s own lights rarely does. Therein we find a caution for the faint of heart. … But also, perhaps, comfort for creatives unpaid but as yet undaunted.

Stay the course. William Blake and countless others have got your back.

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Some years ago, in the Special Collections of the Free Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts, I sat for several hours with a thin green notebook, poring over the distinctive scrawl in its pages. A forty-five-year-old writer had worked on this manuscript in his last days, considerably weakened with tuberculosis. At several points in the notebook the scrawl broke off, replaced by a neater feminine script. The manuscript was the first draft of the famous essay, “Walking,” one of Henry David Thoreau’s crowning creations. Thoreau’s sister and deathbed nurse, Sophia, took dictation when he was too weak to write.

My feelings upon holding that notebook are probably indescribable. Eighteen years old, I had crossed the country to Concord, alone on the longest journey of my life. I wanted to walk through the historical world of Thoreau and Emerson, the writers who meant most to me then. I wanted to pay my respects at their gravestones. I wanted to see Walden Pond. But I’d never expected to enjoy the transcendent, time-defying privilege of turning through Thoreau’s last handwritten pages. Nobody had told me such things were possible!

As I held them, I imagined the pages changing hands. First Thoreau had propped them in his lap as he sat up in his sickbed immersed in his poetic outpouring. Later, seeing that he’d fallen asleep, Sophia gently drew them from beneath his hands. Henry stirred and said he would like to keep working and asked her to take down his words. The pages in her lap now, Sophia sat beside the bed transcribing. Eventually the pages were delivered to Henry’s publisher Ticknor & Fields. Years later Mr. Fields donated them, bound in the green notebook, to Concord’s Public Library. And a century after that a young literary pilgrim on the longest journey of his life sat in the library basement reading the pages for hours, alone in the ghostly presence of his literary hero.

This profound experience taught me conclusively that the artistic and historical past lives on beyond textbooks or centennial editions of great works. The past abides in centuries-old rough drafts, or in the rooms where these were written, or in the village or city where the rooms were located, or in the very landscape where the village or city stood. The past is not the room or village or landscape itself, but can be found there. It can be held in hand. It can be felt underfoot.

Why look for the past this way? Because as the playwright John Guare observes, inspiration does not arrive merely because one waits around for it. Rather, inspiration is an assertive act:

If you love something it is a categorical imperative commanding you to absorb what it is you love and make it yours.

By an act of inspirational pilgrimage we make the past ours – and once the past is ours, the present turns powerfully prescient. Whatever our hopes may be, we find them enlivened with new possibility, given vital precedents to support them and speed them on. This, precisely, is what I learned in the Concord Free Public Library that day. The past can come alive within us, more significant than textbook pages, more useful than legend, more personal than hagiography.

So, since that first long journey to Concord, my life has been punctuated by pilgrimages. Being a naturally solitary person (and a non-academic), I have, over the last twelve years or so, searched among literary ghosts for kindred spirits, for guiding voices, and a godspeed from the enduring past. This has been a remarkable — and remarkably vivid — education. The ghosts themselves have been my teachers.

My pilgrimages have affirmed beyond doubt what Thoreau’s friend and mentor Emerson proclaimed in a poem.

The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.

Human beings are mutable and mortal, of course. But the human spirit never vanishes without a trace. Humans, living in a place or passing through it, will always be in that place for having been there once. Pilgrimage can reawaken one to this important mystery (it’s no coincidence that the word is often used to describe human existence).

As the ruminative narrator of Thornton Wilder’s ageless play, Our Town, observes while standing in the hilltop cemetery above Grover’s Corners:

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses, and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars. Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.

Pilgrimage can connect us to one another across a gulf of generations. Wherever the span of time threatens to make a person remote or an event impersonal, pilgrimage can restore immediacy and facilitate intimacy. Pilgrimage reminds that every past had its present (just as our present will eventually be a past).

And for the artist or aspirant, pilgrimage reveals that every enduring work was once unborn and unknown to the world — each required the vision, commitment, and often seemingly senseless dedication of a living person. Is that particular person now a so-called “immortal”? It wasn’t always so. Once, however long ago, in a room in a village or city, a solitary soul filled pages with words, covered a canvas with paint, or dotted a scoresheet with musical notes (and did so, perhaps, despite looming anxiety about paying the bills, staying healthy, or striving not to disappoint friends and relations).

My pilgrimages have taken me across the globe (and not because I have money to burn; I don’t).

In the Wye Valley of Wales, high on the hill overlooking Tintern Abbey, I declaimed Wordsworth’s famous poem and understood anew his rendering of the surrounding countryside:

…hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

In Prague, I wandered the labyrinthine, paranoia-inducing streets of Rainer Maria Rilke’s fearful boyhood (and of Kafka’s).

In Glen Ellen, California I stood in Jack London’s living room and read multiple rejection letters of The Call of the Wild. (“The reading public doesn’t care to read stories about the Yukon, thank you all the same.”)

More recently, I took a somewhat less literary pilgrimage to a tiny township (population 700) in the heart of the Midwest. Nobody particularly famous ever came out of this place, though local lore has it that Jesse James passed through at least once. One drizzly morning I visited the old cemetery on the edge of town and found the weathered headstone of an ancestor from five generations past.

At age eighteen or nineteen this great-great-great grandfather was severely wounded in the Civil War. He suffered the privations of a deplorable Confederate prison and lived to tell of it.

While I’d read his regiment’s various histories, that young Union soldier had remained an essentially fictional character to me. But now I knelt before his simple grave-marker and ran my fingers over the etched letters of his name, regiment, and company number — and was flooded with unexpected emotion. I whipped the cap from my head, letting the rain wet my hair as I paid proper respects.

In that powerful moment, as in many another transformative moment of pilgrimage, I heard a voice like the one in Walt Whitman’s majestic poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry“:

What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or the hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not — distance avails not, and place avails not …

… Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

Every past was once the present. Its voices are real, as mine is real. The process goes on, and I am part of it. We all are.

Feeling uninspired, inconsequential, disconnected? Seek inspiration, consequence, and connection. Consider a pilgrimage.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

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I’m closing in on the completion of my new manuscript. I mean it this time.

Those who know me know I’ve been saying this regularly for the last year, as my personal “deadlines” keep retreating by weeks, months, seasons. The fiction-writing process is so inherently anti-efficient, so non-streamlined, based so much on necessary detours, excavations, mysterious distractions (“What’s this secondary character’s back-story? His upbringing? Romantic disappointments? Obsessions and hang-ups? What does he like to eat for supper?”) that a self-imposed deadline is, more often than not, just a helpful illusion. Almost there, almost there … but wait, what’s the rush? Why not push the finish line back a bit and take some time to flesh out this sub-plot.

There are, of course, other reasons for a rubbery deadline. Daily life tempts, absorbs, distracts — sometimes disrupts. For instance, you happen to spend three months battling a sinus infection, as I did this winter, or you happen to have back problems, or you can’t shake those migraines, or you’ve got loved ones in town and would rather rack up on quality time than word count, or your household appliances stage a revolt and begin leaking, smoking, screeching, or kicking the bucket one by one. As distractions go I have not been undersupplied this past year. I’ve enjoyed the blessed kind (visitors), and cursed the perplexing (appliances).

And yet returning to my work, as I somehow manage to do for hours upon hours each week (thanks to late nights and sacrificial weekends), I’m conscious of a steady, if glacial, progress. Pages accumulate. Plot tightens. Lines grow leaner, tauter. Characters walk and breathe. It’s sort of mysterious, almost inexplicable. After many a frantic day spent fretting about receding personal deadlines and all the work I am not managing to do, I come back to the desk to find an ever thickening stack of pages, an ever stronger book.

Going Strong While Getting By is how I’ve come to think of it. It’s a time-honored tradition among novelists, if not among artists in general. Somehow, somehow, patiently abiding interruptions while remaining intent on the continuing imaginative process, you make headway.

It made me smile today to come across this snippet in The Journal of Jules Renard, penned in 1889:

I can’t get around this dilemma: I have a horror of troubles, but they whip me up, they make me talented. Peace and well-being, on the contrary, paralyze me. Either be a nobody, or everlastingly plagued. I must make a choice. I prefer to be plagued. I am stating it. I’ll be properly annoyed when I am taken at my word.

Renard was rather more declarative on the subject than I care to be, but his words strike a chord.

Last month the bank account was overdrawn. The kitchen window-pane has been broken for nine months (yes, nine; thank God for storm windows). The car steering makes a noise. One headlight is out. There are bees in the wall of my writing room. My toddler has a runny nose and has cut the length of his naps in half. The lawn is shin-high. At the flip of a switch the other night, three overhead lights made a zapping sound and went black (not a fuse issue –  something in the wiring, as I learned by shocking myself at the fuse box during a bumbling troubleshoot). And, oh yes, I’m a day late writing this post.

But I’m not complaining. I’m getting by, I’m also going strong. Here’s to making the best of  it, and seeing that it brings out the best in me.

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In the Absence of “Yes”

Here’s an egregious adaptation of some famous words by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult to get current events, wealth or social standing from the arts, but people die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Author Bill Ivey would agree, as attested in his stirring book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights.

Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is convinced that America’s collective appreciation for — and cultivation of — art and culture is withering in a social climate where the mentality of big business reigns and a mania for the bottom line severely impoverishes the cultural lives of Americans.

Not only is our intake of art reduced to “product” that best “performs” — i.e., conforms to market analyses — but since the early twentieth-century our nation’s artistic heritage (in other words, private art-making passed down through tradition) has been increasingly threatened, a result of America’s steady development into an almost strictly consumer culture (recall that our recessional woes owe much to our 70 percent consumer-driven economy). Ivey writes:

By the 1920s new arts companies offering new arts products were converting engagement in art into an act of consumption. The notion of participation was reshaped — its sense of doing replaced by passive activities like purchasing a recording or attending a concert or exhibition. … The commoditization of emerging art forms pumped up the taking in (consumption) at the expense of making art.

As revealed by the virtually unrestrained media conglomeration and rise of big-box retailers over the last quarter-century or so (witness your neighborhood’s own Wal-Marts, Targets, and Best Buys), this culture of consumption-over-creation has only gotten worse. Which means, says Ivey, that we are all being cheated out of something that ought to be endemic to any thriving culture built upon democratic, pluralistic values, namely: our “expressive life.”

The term is Ivey’s coinage, and refers to “a reservoir of identity and spiritual renewal powerful enough to replace the fading allure of empty consumerism.”

Today this Expressive Life is rarely attributed the importance it deserves, but is nevertheless a vital-sign of culture and societal health, or as Ivey puts it:

A realm of being and behavior that …can be as distinct as ‘family life’ or ‘work life.’ …[It is] something akin to tradition, a place where community heritage interacts with individual creativity, maintaining the past while letting in the new.

Who is working effectively to repair our diminished Expressive Life?

Ivey pleads passionately for Americans to take the pulse of their nation’s cultural wellbeing and see if we don’t need a new cultural fitness program. Not only is personal art-making at risk in a society where the marketplace rules all, but professional art-making is in distress, thanks in no small part to bottom-line thinking, as well as to the predominance of “intellectual property” and broad expansions in restrictive copyright:

By failing to link our expressive life to America’s public purpose, we have placed our nation’s heart and soul at risk. We are forcing our great artists to navigate a complex and discouraging marketplace in order to survive. We have converted the shared memory embedded in our priceless cultural heritage into mere ‘intellectual property,’ which is bought, sold, abandoned, or simply locked away in the vaults of giant media companies.

For the record, Ivey’s subtitle, How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, dangles unfittingly; better if it continued: … And What We Can Do About It, for he offers a range of fresh policy ideas, all of which gravitate around his astonishing central premise that America ought to adopt a “Cultural Bill of Rights” and establish an office of cultural affairs dedicated to the protection of those rights.

Arts, Inc. even includes Ivey’s prototype for just such a document (which, it should be noted, would advocate not for the rights of any one artistic community, but for artistic culture in the broadest sense):

The right to explore [the arts of]…both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.

It’s wonderfully fresh thinking — and makes for an affirming read. Surely we’d all agree that more art for everybody can only be a cultural positive. (Writer D.K. Row hints as much in this fine Oregonian article in support of gallery-going in hard economic times).

But … there’s a frightful prospect that inevitably accompanies any vision of legislative cultural advocacy like Ivey’s, and that is a government empowered to tell us what art is, how it should sound, what it should show, etc. Censorship, and all the gray areas that come with it, is the big ugly genie in the bottle here.

Or … maybe not. Ivey (who, by the way, was an advisor on President Obama’s transition team) compellingly demonstrates that de facto government censorship is already with us, through heavy fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission.

We must lay our fears of a new McCarthyism to rest, says Ivey, if we are to counterbalance the prevalence of corporate mindset in our arts system.

One example of that prevalence (not mentioned in Ivey’s book): Ever heard of BookScan? It’s a point-of-sale technology used by mega-bookstores (nefariously) to track the sales history of authors — and to excise store inventories of those writers whose “product” fails to “move.” This means that if your last book sold less than 20,000 copies you’re likely to miss your shot at shelf space in such a store — that is, unless your publisher coughs up the fee for a special co-op display. “Who can argue with that?” say BookScan apologists. “Sales figures don’t lie.” And so the gatekeepers of the present cultural system (read: market executives) keep on looking for the next sure “big thing.”

Until we articulate our cultural rights and take measures to protect them, such cash-cow worship will continue unfettered, and will further narrow what cultural offerings come readily available to the public.

Likewise, private ownership of our cultural heritage will only grow broader. (Did you know that the monolithic firm CORBIS owns the famous photograph of JFK Jr. standing in short-pants and saluting his father’s coffin? Thought that image was a part of every American’s heritage? Actually, it’s “intellectual property.” Happen to be a teacher and want to use it in a history lesson? Fine, but it’ll cost you.)

Where, in such a system, do we see the artists and cultural advocates having their say? Federal entities like the NEA, says Ivey, are well-meaning but politicized to the point of dysfunction. Lacking a central and binding proclamation of cultural rights, such organizations inevitably get bogged down in petty congressional partisanship. The public non-profits sector, on the other hand, is in a shambles and has succeeded in little more than polarizing culture by class: expensive highbrow versus popular lowbrow. (Maybe Creative Commons, for one, is a start.)

But what we need is an organized office working in service to our fully articulated rights to cultural wellbeing.

Ivey asks the right question:

How could a department of cultural affairs possibly generate a cultural system less functional, less attuned to public purposes, than the one we’ve been handed by a century of marketplace arrogance and government indifference?

Are you ready to claim your Expressive Life and stand up for your cultural rights? Read Arts, Inc. and decide.

* * *

A society that does not labor to be beautiful becomes indifferent to smog, litter, what Henry James called ‘trash triumphant,’ lurid communications, wretched TV, billboards, strip malls, blatancies of noise and confusion — or it considers these things the price you have to pay to make more money. — Denis Donaghue

(This post appears from the Soul Shelter archives)

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