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”

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)

You may also enjoy:

“Neighbors At Work”

“Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“What We Really Need to Be Happy”

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)

You might also enjoy:

“The Value of Travel: One Household’s Mild Manifesto”

“Soaring Success, Devastating Failure: A Samurai’s Story”

“The Ground Underfoot: Why Stories Matter”

“Looking Deeply, Proceeding On (Lewis & Clark)“

This month we ring in Year Number Three for Soul Shelter! Hard to believe we’ve been around so long already — we’ll soon be grayhairs by the standards of the Web.

We’ve grown Soul Shelter slowly and gently these last two years. Every step of the way we’ve sought to make it unfailingly inspirational, helpful, fun, and informative. Now we’d like to ask you, Dear Reader, to help us celebrate our third year.

If you:

• appreciate Soul Shelter’s perspectives
• find yourself awaiting your weekly Soul Shelter epistles
• have ever caught yourself reflecting — offline — on something you read at Soul Shelter

and/or …

• believe we’ve delivered on the Soul Shelter pledge “to provide a stabilizing, reliably worthy alternative” to the breathless chatter of the blogosphere,

then snap on a bright party hat on our behalf and help us make some celebratory noise: Share us with your friends, Tweet us, Stumble us, Digg us, Forward us, Facebook us, link to us, add us to your blogroll, make us your homepage, and otherwise spread the good Soul Shelter news. We’d love to widen our fold, and what better route to new but long-destined readers than through our faithful current ones?

And allow us to thank You, our loyal visitors and subscribers. We’re in your debt. Without your valued readership and comments, we’d have shriveled long ago.

Today, to further mark our anniversary, we offer the following Soul Shelter round-up. Here’s a Best-Of from our first two years — nine posts of which we’re particularly proud. Maybe you missed them the first time around, maybe they’re a good place to start for any new  readers you’d care to point our way.

And maybe you’d like to add your own favorite Soul Shelter post to the list?

Enjoy, and here’s to the good year ahead.

A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money

Too often, pay doesn’t parallel passion. Fortune falls behind fulfillment. Money and meaning are mismatched. What’s a seeker of reasonable balance to do?

You Don’t Have to Be An Insider

I’m living proof that one needs no golden key or inside connections to pursue the work one most desires. If you find doors closed against you, set your shoulder to them. Push.

Losing a Job, Reclaiming a Life

That mindset — that your well-being and success depends on an organization — just blows me away. Now that I’m older, I see how I’m the one creating value, I’m the one who makes things happen.

Are You An Amateur? Why Not?

Here’s a wonderful but much too uncelebrated means of personal fulfillment and life enrichment: the learning and doing of a thing purely for the love of it — otherwise known as amateurism.

The Rainbow Vanishes

I wanted my kids to understand that someday, all too soon, it would be their father lying before them, cold and lifeless. But they didn’t understand. How could they, when I was just beginning to understand?

The Risk of Happiness

There comes a time when one must recognize that the pursuit of happiness, in its multifarious forms, will always involve a feeling of risk, of embracing a financial or emotional unknown (or sometimes both at once).

Coffee Breakthrough

Dave proudly displayed his brand new, Swiss-made, fully automatic espresso machine, for which he’d slapped down a cool $945. It must be nice to be able to afford a high-end, fully automatic espresso maker, I mused aloud. Dave’s response snapped me to attention. ‘Actually, I can’t afford not to own one.’

The Value of Travel — One Household’s Mild Manifesto

Travel means engaging a larger world, not merely retreating from the one we know. Travel means joining in the human experience.

Time to Give In, Time to Give Up

Suddenly, all bets were off. … Everything was canceled. It was the beginning of Portland’s biggest snowfall in 40 years.

The much-anticipated film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road, has recently hit theaters (but by all means, read it before you see it!).

The Road’s 76-year-old author is a fascinating example of one to whom worldly success and renown have come very late, yet whose career has been marked by consistent excellence, and–apparently–consistent personal fulfillment. Never once in the course of his life as an author has McCarthy sought public attention. The work itself–of writing and publishing–seems to have remained reward enough for him.

McCarthy has been publishing books since 1965 (The Road is his tenth). For nearly thirty years he labored in obscurity, publishing five magnificent novels, none of which sold more than 2,500 copies, though all were critically acclaimed, and one, Blood Meridian (1985), would eventually be named by Time Magazine in a list of the ‘Top 100 Books of All Time.’

It was McCarthy’s sixth book, All the Pretty Horses (1992), that finally brought him a deservedly wide audience (though still McCarthy avoided the limelight, remaining his quiet, hardworking self). Two years back, his ninth novel, No Country for Old Men, was brought to the screen by filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. The film netted a heap of Oscar honors.

A famously private person, McCarthy granted his first television interview in June of 2007 to Oprah Winfrey, who selected The Road for her TV book club. During the discussion the author made a number of fascinating statements on the subjects of following one’s passion, pursuing excellence, avoiding employment, enduring poverty, living and working with dedication, and having the faith to let go of material concerns.

In my own experience as a writer, I’ve never faced the kind of material squalor that McCarthy did in his earlier years, but though his lifestyle offers an extreme example of sacrifice, I find a great deal of wisdom in his words. As I see it, something beautiful comes through in McCarthy’s account of a life lived in total, humble dedication to his artistic pursuit–and the mysterious blessings that came of that dedication.

-McCarthy: …You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve … this interior image that is something that’s absolutely perfect, and that’s your signpost and your guide. You’ll never get there, but without it, you’ll never get anywhere …. You always have that hope that today I’m going to do something better than I’ve ever done [laughs] … How’s that for hubris?

-Oprah: …You were so poor at times, there was absolutely no money. And people would call and say, ‘Come and speak to us, we’ll pay you two thousand dollars’ or whatever, and you’d say, ‘No, everything I know is already on the page.’

-McCarthy: Well, I was busy. I had other things to do.

-Oprah: Are you just not interested in material [things]?

-McCarthy: I’m really not. I mean, it’s not that I don’t like things. Some things are really nice, but they certainly take a distant second place to being able to live your life and do what you want to do. And I always knew that I didn’t want to work.

-Oprah: How did you manage that? Most people want to know how to do that.

-McCarthy: Well, you have to be dedicated. But it was my Number One priority.

-Oprah: That you didn’t want to have a nine-to-five job?

-McCarthy: Yeah. I thought, ‘You’re just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.’ And I don’t have any advice for anybody on how to go about that, except that if you’re really dedicated you can probably do it.

-Oprah: So you worked at not working.

-McCarthy: Absolutely. Yeah, it was the Number One priority.

-Oprah: Was it true you were so poor you got put out of a $40 a month hotel or someplace?

-McCarthy: I did.

-Oprah: [Laughs] That is poor.

-McCarthy: It was in New Orleans, it was a little room … I was very naive….

-Oprah: And wasn’t there another time that you were so poor you didn’t even have toothpaste?

-McCarthy: Yeah, I was living in a shack in Tennessee, and I ran out of toothpaste, and I went down to the mailbox one morning to see if there might be anything there, and in the mailbox there was a tube of toothpaste.

-Oprah: A free sample?

-McCarthy: Yeah, a free sample. But my life, you know, there’s hundreds of anecdotes like that. That’s the way my life has been. Just when things were really, really bleak, something would happen.

I love this notion. McCarthy’s personal story seems to suggest that once he’d devoted himself wholly to the enterprise of writing, and made the material sacrifices necessary to allow him to do excellent work, he created circumstances in which other concerns took care of themselves–not because he was favored by some quasi-supernatural agency, but because he stuck resolutely to his vision, and apparently did so even in bleak circumstances. Tim and I explore a related idea in our book The Prosperous Peasant, though we phrase the principle this way: “Gratitude Attracts Luck.”

-Oprah: So money has never really interested you?

-McCarthy: No, not really. It’s just … I have friends that are wealthy and have spent their lives making money and they seem to be reasonably happy, but I suspect that they became rich because they were doing what they wanted to do. I think it’s hard to just set out in the world and say ‘I’m going to become rich.’ I think you have, as you said, a passion. And if you do it well then you get rich in spite of yourself.

On this subject of involuntary wealth, McCarthy speaks from first-hand experience. His magnificent work has brought him great material rewards (albeit only recently), which he never clamored for. In addition to the tremendous book sales generated by the Pulitzer and Oprah’s Book Club, last year McCarthy reportedly sold his literary papers to a Texas university for a sum of around $2 million. (This month, his ancient Olivetti typewriter goes to auction, expected to fetch upwards of $15,000 — those proceeds will benefit the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy’s home away from home*).

-Oprah: … Was it a concern at all, not having money? You know, a lot of people … You’re a different kind of man, because a lot of people would be … would have a lot of angst, a lot of anxiety, would feel a lot of lack of self worth, because they couldn’t earn the money.

-McCarthy: … I was very naive. I always assumed that I would be taken care of in some way or other. And I was, I was always very lucky. Something always happened. Just when things were truly, truly bleak some totally unforeseen thing would occur.

-Oprah: Like …

-McCarthy: Like, I was living in Lexington, Kentucky once … A friend of mine had gotten me this job housesitting, so I had a place to live. But I didn’t have any money. I don’t mean that I didn’t have much money. I didn’t have any money. But there were still some groceries left in the house, so I ate those. And then one day someone knocked at the door, and I went to the door and there was a guy standing there and he said, ‘Are you Cormac McCarthy?’ And I thought, ‘I don’t think there are any warrants out for me.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He said, ‘Sign this, please.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I’m a courier.’ And he said thank you and got in his car and drove away, and I opened up the letter and there was a check in it for $20,000. … I was the first fellow of a new foundation that they had started, some people in Chattanooga, the Lyndhurst Foundation. They had some Coca-Cola money … and they were going to give these fellowships to people….

-Oprah: Wow.

-McCarthy: … And you got a [big] check every year for 3 or 4 years.

-Oprah: Do you think you were lucky? Or was there something else going on?

-McCarthy: I wouldn’t get superstitious, but you know, the laws of probability operate everywhere … You know, if you look at Barron’s and see these gurus that have done so well in the market … you’ll notice that next year it’ll be a different group of gurus. This should tell us something. … Some people, at some time in their life, are bound to be in one group [i.e. the lucky group] and not in another group [i.e. the unlucky group]. It’s simply the laws of probability. You don’t have to be superstitious about it. Anyway, it’s a long way of saying that I just think I’ve been very lucky. It could stop, certainly. I don’t think I’m blessed.

-Oprah: You don’t?

-McCarthy: Well, I am blessed because I’m one of the luckiest people I’ve ever known, so that’s certainly a blessing. But I’ve done nothing to be picked out for special … Quite the opposite. If there were justice in the world, they wouldn’t have picked me out to be particularly lucky, because I haven’t done anything to deserve it.

-Oprah: But you made a choice that you were not going to be working in your life. That you were going to do what you really loved.

-McCarthy: That’s right, and that obviously has some influence on it.

Indeed, it seems McCarthy created his own luck, through sacrifice, devotion to excellence, and enduring commitment. Most valuably, this enabled him to channel his energy entirely into his core passion of writing–and later earned him secondary material rewards.

Granted, the circumstances of McCarthy’s life are extreme. Such circumstances, for instance, would likely prohibit a happy marriage and family life. But I believe the substance of his discussion here holds true. He had a vision, and then built a vocation of it by submitting himself to a path that he believed suited and sustained the vision. His work is now destined to endure as some of the finest produced by an American author of his era.

This life path, like all, no doubt has had its share of complications, but within it there’s a main principle at work that is simple and universal: One’s pursuit of a personal vision demands the active qualities of dedication, sacrifice, bravery and hard work, but also a quality more mysterious, and more daunting–Faith.

*UPDATE — McCarthy’s typewriter sold at Christie’s for $254, 500, more than ten times the expected auction price.

(This post has been adapted from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“Stacking Stones, Letting Them Fall”

“What Am I Doing With My Life?”

“Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“Why Failure’s a Better Teacher Than Success”

“What Do We Really Need to Be Happy?”

“Roadblocks, Restrictions, and Other Helpful Things”

“For A Fulfilling Life, Beware of ‘Wisdom’”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“Four Complications of Property“

In my school days I was the painfully reticent kid in the back of the class who paid attention, behaved himself, and made the honor roll every quarter, but would never ever raise his hand or volunteer to speak in front of the other kids. When called upon I would either turn catatonic or talk with a doubt-ridden quiver.

Partly it was natural shyness that paralyzed me. Yet in school theater productions I strutted the stage without fear, happily performing to packed auditoriums. What accounted for my contradictory nature? Simple. While acting in a play, I could rely upon a script. I didn’t have to venture my own thoughts or guesses. Speaking in class, however, I risked saying something silly or giving the wrong answer. In class, I was vulnerable to mistakes — and mistakes are a shameful thing. Or so we’re led to believe.

Ours is a success-or-failure culture. We covet seemingly flawless wins, and avoid at all costs missteps, goofs, or even well-intentioned blunders. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed back in 1841:

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.

Success — early, gracefully, and infallibly achieved — is the main idea; God help us if we cannot leap clear over all errors to attain it. We learn these attitudes early: Answer right and go to the front of the class. Ace the test and advance to the top of the grade-sheet. Make no mistakes and excel. But err and you will fail to advance — or fail, period.

Absurd, of course. Human beings cannot learn without making mistakes. We ought to know this, even in youth. The cliché, Nothing ventured nothing gained, dances in our brains from an early age — yes, but being a cliché it fails to penetrate. And so throughout our lives we must teach and re-teach ourselves that mistakes are natural and even useful – not shameful.

Personally, the realities of adulthood re-teach me this lesson often — as does my writing process, which necessitates engaging mistakes and building successes upon them.

In the wonderful book The Conversations, legendary film editor Walter Murch puts it beautifully:

Truly great lessons can be learned from work that fails, but failure is stamped on the product and there’s a tendency to think everything you did was wrong, and you vow not to go there again. You have to resist this impulse, just as you have to resist the syrupy entanglements of success. These are, almost, religious issues. What the world thinks is success, what it rewards, has sometimes very little to do with the essential content of the work and how it relates to the author and his own development.

Like Emerson, Murch speaks here to our success-or-failure culture, but with different nuance. We tend not to credit the value — indeed the necessity — of the mistake, the attempt, the unprofitable or impractical venture, and consequently we often do not understand the real nature of success when we see it.

In his wonderful book Blue Highways William Least-Heat Moon notes:

The annals of scientific discovery are full of errors that opened new worlds: Bell was working on an apparatus to aid the deaf when he invented the telephone; Edison was tinkering with the telephone when he invented the phonograph. If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.

Thomas Edison faced many a doomed venture, including a scheme to build houses of poured concrete all over America. I recently heard it said, however, that his outlook was always: I never fail, I just find out a thousand ways that something doesn’t work.

My poet Rilke puts it more boldly: “The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.”

I can’t help feeling Rilke is right. Meditating upon the subject long enough, I begin to see that worthy mistakes — and not easy successes — are in fact what life is all about. What a freeing thought!

The writer Paul Zweig wrote, “Making our wish, we make ourselves. We exist in the time between the wish and its fulfillment.” For today’s post I paraphrase Zweig thusly:

Making our attempt, we make ourselves. We exist in the time between the attempt and the attainment.

So throw off timidity, young person at school, and raise your hand! It’s your mistakes that will guide you to the front of the class. Onward through worthy errors. Fail, grow, and keep on venturing.

(This post has re-emerged from Soul Shelter’s year-one archives.)

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Recently a famous, award-winning author invited some literary cronies and me to visit him at his rural getaway. “C’mon over,” he said. “There’ll be lots of people, good food, and conversation.”

The invitation seemed providential. My four fellow scribblers and I had housed ourselves in the remote Northwest for a three-day writers’ group, and this famous author’s summer digs happened to lie twenty-odd miles from our spot. Normally a bit reclusive, the author (call him Churchill) opens his thirty-acre home for one weekend a year. It so happened that we’d come to his neck of the woods on that very weekend. Providence indeed.

Churchill is a sort of living legend (when I say award-winning I mean major awards). We’d be crazy to miss out on hanging with such an eminent elder.

Here is where this becomes a cautionary tale about opportunity, and what to do (or not to do) when it arrives. The invitation was for Sunday evening. We spent Friday and Saturday anxiously awaiting it. Then Sunday came and I realized, with a gulp, that I didn’t want to go. It had suddenly occurred to me that the whole scenario was a bit weird. I mean, there were five of us, but only one of us, Bob, had actually met Churchill (Bob had secured the invitation). What business, really, did the rest of us — a vanload of literary anchovy — have diving into this Great White’s waters?

I’m not one for what they call “schmoozing.” And I get anxious around famous authors because I always fear my motives are in question. I don’t want a writer I especially admire — or anybody else — to think I’m angling for a connection, favor, or whatever.

So I’d asked myself, Why do I want to go to Churchill’s? To gawk at fame? to worship at a shrine? to sniff around for “connections”? None of those, truly. More, I just hoped to glean a little inspiration from the presence of an inspired and accomplished writer.

But imagining the evening, I just got embarrassed. As a self-respecting author, I didn’t want to give off the slightest glister of an inspiration leech. At best, I realized, I would feel like a paparazzo.

“I’m not going,” I told the group.

They looked at me like I’d put my pants on backwards. “What!?”

“It makes me feel slimy,” I said. “Like he’ll know I’m there just because he’s famous. And worse, I’ll know that he knows that I know he knows.”

They asked me if I wanted them to check my head. But then a silence descended and everybody started to brood. I’d made a point, and it had given them all reservations. That was Sunday morning and, long story short, by Sunday afternoon all of us but Bob had cold feet.

“It won’t be weird,” Bob reassured. “It’s loose. Churchill expects strangers to be there.”

But we’d talked ourselves out of the expedition already. Nah, we’d feel better not going, we said.

Still, we kept brooding about it. Writers excel at over-thinking.

Long story short again, by 5:30 that evening we were all packed in the van and on our way to Churchill’s. “We’re not slimy,” we were telling ourselves. “He invited us. It would be rude not to show.”

And we really weren’t slimy, just writers eager to shake a master’s hand. But secretly I already felt, and knew I would feel all evening, like a star-worshiping dufus — and what a demeaning feeling. Where had the self-respecting author in me gone?

We arrived at Churchill’s bearing dessert. See, we’re here as guests, not gawkers. We’ve brought pie as proof.

Churchill’s wife, a true sweetheart, welcomed us one by one, and moments later we were shaking Churchill’s God-graced hand, introducing ourselves.

It was a little weird. Hi, I’m Nobody. Thanks for inviting me from my Nowhere to your Genius-gilded, Prize-heaped Somewhere. But before we knew it we were filing through the potluck line amidst thirty or forty other guests.

We found a table and sat to eat, chatting with Mrs. Churchill when she joined us. Her kindness made abundantly clear that she didn’t think our presence strange at all. Churchill ate at a separate table with five or six of the other guests. Some of those people must have been famous too, we thought.

When we’d finished eating we didn’t know what to do. For some reason, we got up en masse and loitered near the edge of the author’s table. It seemed to have an impenetrable fame-bubble around it. I felt every bit the dufus.

We retreated to the potluck table and stood around. Then Bob saved us by proposing that we all take a walk up the wooded hill behind the house. He’d heard Churchill was building a writing shack in the cedars up there. Like a flock we wheeled in that direction.

We murmured amongst ourselves as we went. “Yeah, it’s a little weird after all. Not as weird as we thought, but weird. Let’s stay an hour or so, then say thanks and split.”

Before we reached the writing shack we heard something rumbling behind us.

“It’s Churchill,” one of us said.

The author overtook us in a brown pickup. “Hop in,” he said. Apparently, he’d left his dinner group down at the house so he could show us around personally.

For the next half-hour he carted the five of us here and there about the property, pointing out things and telling us stories. He showed us the writing shack, the creek, an old totem pole. He was a really nice guy.

I realized, ashamed, that in all my worrying and speculating about this evening, I’d completely failed to allow for the possibility of Churchill’s goodwill. But here he was, giving five young writers his special welcome, no questions asked — and no suspicions about why we’d accepted his invitation. He’d invited us, it was that simple.

In that half-hour I learned what my co-blogger Tim, in his book The Swordless Samurai, articulates with the elegant phrase:

To gain trust, give it.

This lesson alone would have made the evening valuable. Because I’d failed to have faith in others’ goodwill, I’d nearly talked myself out of accepting Churchill’s invitation. And if I hadn’t met Churchill I would have missed what happened next — the night’s second most valuable moment. (And here is where this becomes a story about inspiration and its unexpected forms.)

Churchill had brought us down to a pond at the bottom of his property. He gestured to a boathouse at its edge. “That’s my writing office. Here, I’ll show you.”

We followed him into a dim, disorderly, book-cluttered room. His desk, small and shabby, stood beneath a window. This lauded author works in that lonely, musty space. Why did I feel surprised? My own writing office, while roomy and bright, is no Homes & Gardens centerfold. Had I expected to find glamour in his? Did I believe literary achievement led to material luster?

A piece of paper was tacked above the window. In penned block letters it said:

If it takes 2,000 pages and 200 years, so be it.

Truth hit me like a hard slap on the back. Prize-winner or not, living legend or not, that’s how a novelist must approach his work, in the spirit of those words. No tricks, no shortcuts — and a glitzy office certainly won’t help either.

So be it.

We left the party a little later, after a bit of dessert. As our van bore along the dark forest roads, I no longer wondered why I’d gone to Churchill’s house in the wilderness, or what I’d been meant to see there.

I wanted to get back to my own humble desk.

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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 darn 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 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.

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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.)

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The day is young, an average Tuesday, and neighbor Carson is walking his dog. I’m finishing my raisin bran when he passes my front window. He and his Corgi have made their circuit through the neighborhood and now they’re heading back home to the house at the end of the street, four doors down from mine. Once inside, the dog probably heads to his water bowl, and Carson probably settles down to the day’s work.

This always inspires me, this tiny glimpse.

You see, Carson is a little bit famous, and I’ve been a fan since before we were neighbors. Now, don’t cry “Stalker!” just yet. I assure you I never plotted to live on Carson’s street. Actually I hadn’t a clue I’d neighbored up to this favorite graphic artist of mine till six months after moving in, attending a neighborhood potluck. Carson wasn’t present, but his next-door neighbors were.

They asked me what I did.

“Oh, a novelist,” they said. “Isn’t that funny? The fellow next to us is an artist. We’re surrounded by creative people.”

I asked the artist’s name and felt a little pitter-patter of disbelief. But sure enough, I began to spot the fellow walking his dog: none other than the Carson whose work I’d spent hours poring through.

Don’t worry. I haven’t cornered Carson on the sidewalk, waving copies of his work and pleading for an autograph. I haven’t rapped at his door to wax effusive, nor tried to weedle my way into his workspace.

In fact, I’ve never even let him know that I’m familiar with the excellent work he’s created—let alone that I’m a fan. I’m not sure why. We’ve traded Good Mornings and Hellos on many an occasion. It would be natural enough to mention my appreciation. But I feel slightly … protective of the guy. I feel a certain unspoken camaraderie. And I don’t want to adulterate this pure, inspirational connection.

Though I work with words (not pictures), I know a bit about Carson’s line. Every project he undertakes demands years of arduous labor. We both know what it’s like to confront the barren white page. To sit alone in a quiet room, drawing upon mysteries, summoning up images, striving to do justice to an ideal imaginative glimmer. It’s illogical, impractical—this process to which we devote ourselves. And meanwhile, outside around us, the workaday world earns, builds, and produces apace.

Life is lonely for the novelist, as for many artists. It’s a job requirement. And it’s weirdly, well … helpful to know that, as I sit with my manuscript, deep in my fourth year of work on my novel, Carson’s over there, hunkered in his workspace, laboring in a kind of unwitting solidarity, imagination ahum at midday.

Keep working, Carson, I say as he passes with dog at my window. I’ll do the same.

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