From the land of Serendip
I received in the post yesterday a magnificent gift, quite unexpected: Nights from the Alhambra, a boxed set recording a live performance by Loreena McKennitt. The donor had no particular reason to suppose I would be favourable to her music: in fact I’ve never before encountered anyone else who shares my taste for it. I think people find her (Loreena, not the donor!) daunting: the intensity of her brilliance and presence, the way she gives herself totally in performance, holding nothing back, transfixing you with her more piercing notes, then caressing you with her feathery softness. She’s Canadian and her music is an odd blend of Celtic and Arabian, with other influences thrown into the pot. I’ve been enchanted by her since 1996. A gift shop in Glastonbury, town of legends, was playing her setting of Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott”. I made inquiries and bought the cassette on the spot. One day I may be able tell you of an extraordinary encounter which occurred in that same visit to Glastonbury. I wrote about it but have been unable to find the document.
I watched the DVD and then again with the commentary turned on. As Loreena McKennitt first walks on to the stage, we hear her voice-over:
I once came across a quote from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
I wrote it down. I never heard it before yesterday. Now if you look to the top of this page, you’ll see it has been adopted as the new epigraph for “A Wayfarer’s Notes”. I think it’s there to stay.
And whilst searching for details of that extraordinary encounter in Glastonbury, I found something else: a long-lost, long deleted earlier blog, predecessor to this one and started ten years ago. On its first day, I wrote four posts, three of which are reproduced below, verbatim.
You may notice that it conveys the same message as my post of two days ago, “Attitude”; only rather more plainly, I fancy. It leaves me astonished, wondering where this stuff comes from, still wanting to make itself heard, somehow independently of its author.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2004
Why do we do it?
I asked my fifteen-year-old daughter, who of course knows everything, whether she has a blog. No. Do some of her friends have one? Yes. Why does anyone do it? To show off.
Hmm. There is something in me which resists the stark simplicity of such a judgement. I could have asked her, “What is showing off? Why do people do it?” But she had already been helpful enough.
These are the sorts of questions I can ask myself, and by extension, the world.
Now this is my definition. A blog is a mirror. You gaze into it, making faces, examining your spots, perhaps, making plans and resolutions, frowning, practising new expressions.
A blog is one of those mirrors in actors’ dressing rooms. It’s surrounded by bare lightbulbs, so you can adjust your makeup to withstand the bright glare of the stage.
But where a dressing room has a certain level of privacy, being the ante-room to the stage itself, a blog is the stage. Within it, I pace the boards, endlessly declaiming my spontaneous soliloquy to all and sundry. Practising my art.
Before I finish, let me thank VL, whose blog I stumbled upon minutes after he first created it, for unconsciously providing the impetus to get going. Special thanks also to Robert. He asked me to show him how to set up a website. I tried to tell him it was more complicated than perhaps he thought. But I should have shown him how to start a blog. With that in mind I thought I better set one up myself, just to find out. But most of all K, for her constant love - and for much more that cannot be said here.
posted by Vincent at 7:00 AM | 2 comments
Showing off
As my daughter said, a blog is for “showing off”. And my immediate thought was, “Showing off is bad. We ought to be modest.” Which is a strange crazy thought, that comes from some childhood conditioning. It is someone else’s thought, planted into me long ago, that should be rooted out like a weed. Not because it is devoid of truth, but because I am grown up and deserve to think my own thoughts, not those which parents, teachers, parsons fed to me.
It is true that I have too often let my light shine under a bushel, whatever a bushel may be. I object to smart-arses and show-offs myself, so I don’t want to be one. But there’s a difference and it’s important to understand.
I don’t want to show myself as better than others. I don’t want to compete. On the contrary. You are my brother, my sister. You are wonderful. You have plenty to boast about. And when I say boast, I mean “proclaim with gratitude”. You are a vital part of this glorious creation and you better know it, appreciate it and improve it.
We look in the mirror not just to admire ourselves but to criticise and improve too; and recognise that with our gifts we also have limitations.
And there is something else I want to say. We are all busy, in our ways. Therefore we “don’t have time”. For what? To tell someone we love them? To give to someone? To give to ourselves? To let ourselves be loved? To listen? To play around reading and writing blogs? Hey, we choose all this. And in choosing we create ourselves. I had a boss once, very English, Catholic; perhaps from a Catholic family that could be traced all the way to the days of Henry VIII who stamped on Catholicism in England good and proper. He (my boss, not Henry VIII) had a tendency to stamp his views on his team; and one view was that the word “create” should be reserved for God.
Ha! Well it depends how he used the word God in his life. He might thereby enslave himself to you-know-what—the whole panoply of disciplines and bowing-downs. Or he might empower himself: “I will let God-in-me enhance the moments of my life, and embellish the world.”
For we have a conscience, and even a hotline to the best that we can know. And I still maintain that we do better to chuck out someone else’s thought, when it controls us against our own will.
posted by Vincent at 10:13 AM | 2 comments
Changing my mind
Allow me to disagree with what I wrote before—about a blog being a mirror and so forth. As if one was in one’s private boudoir, with no one to watch. It’s not like that. Let me explain.
Once I worked in a fancy new building on the ground floor. They had made the windows reflective from the outside. We could see out, but passers-by on the pavement outside could not see in, only themselves. One day a woman stopped and grimaced at herself then started to squeeze a spot on her face. “Uuugh!” we said. It was clear that had she known she was being observed she would not have done it.
I am not saying it’s wrong to let it all hang out, if that is what you want to do, if that is what’s helpful. Nothing is wrong! But it’s not what I want to do. You know when someone listens to themself for the first time on audio tape? “Ugh, is that what I sound like? Is this what others hear?”
But we can change. At least change how we project ourselves. And i don’t just want to pick at spots in my boudoir. I want to share. And this in part is recognising my common humanity. I admit to having taken a perverse pride in being different at certain times. You know, a solitary misunderstood misfit.
But on this wonderful invention, the Internet, which already we cannot imagine doing without, we can, in an uplifting way, track our similarities. And so now, I want what I write to be accessible, and helpful. I want it to reach you. And I hope you will reach me too, for your comments are as important, if not more so, than my posts.
posted by Vincent at 5:30 PM | 0 comments
15 Comments:
We have eight Loreena McKennitt CD's.
I'm glad you have come out of the closet, Tom! It's nice to know one is not alone.
Seriously though, I am envious of your collection. Apart from the expense, the thing that's held me back from buying more of her recorded work is a sense that more of the same could only diminish the experience, that a surfeit would cloy, like a second large helping of ice cream. So an unsolicited gift is extra special.
I'm so glad that you've ressurected thse posts, because this issue of "showing off" touches on a whole nexus of recent thoughts. I have almost TOO MUCH to say on the matter. I have to find an edge where I can get a bite on it.
That very sentiment (and I think I've discussed this elsewhere) is one of the big reasons that I stayed away from blogging much longer than I should have. People talked about it like it was some kind of vanity endeavor, a kind of written act of masturbation, if you'll pardon the metaphor, a pointless infodump of mundane personal details that no one but the writer who themselves could possibly care about, and so on. And then, of course, I actually started reading blogs and I saw how grossly unfair that assessment was. Just because blogging was a format OPEN to those who had absolutely nothing of interest to say, doesn't mean that blogging had to be defined by such people or that others couldn't use it as a platform to say things bother vital and entertaining.
Recently though, I've realized that this issue goes well beyond blogging. It's a doubt that hangs over everything a writer does. After all, the only real difference between blogging and other forms of the written word is that a an publisher and editor usually stand between the writer and the reader, filtering out what they deem to be of no interest to anyone. But the writer stands at the beginning of the process in either case, having to decide whether something NEEDS to be said at all and why. Often times, even beyond the question of whether something is good of bad, is the question of whether it's even FOR anyone. Will someone get something ojt of this and what?
It helps when there's a clear intention to inform or entertain in some way. If you're writing something humorous, you're trying to make people laugh, and you can gauge your efforts by how well you think you're accomplishing that goal. Other times, say with a personal essay or a more literary story, you can't quite put the effect you're after is such specific terms, and really you don't wish to, because you're trying to do something broader. So all you can really do is go, "Well I feel good about this," and hope that others will as well. "
And even when you do have a specific intention, sometimes those doubts can creep in on a finer scale. Is this REALLY as funny or clever as I think it is? Does the tone that I hear this in my head come though in the writing? And so on. So even aside from the overarching doubts of what we're accomplishing can also be the doubts of whether it's THERE in the words or just still stuck in our heads, unconveyed.
And with my Sheep Blog I face these kinds of doubts on two fronts. Not only is there the sentiment that blogging is "making faces in a mirror", but there's also a similar and perhaps even more pervasive sentiment regarding telling people about your dreams. I hear it over and over. NO ONE cares about your dreams. And I can kind of even understand where they're coming from. So I find that doubt plaguing me much more than I'd like to admit. And it's funny, because on the one hand, I feel that I've had ideas come to me in dreams that are more interesting and complex that anything I could ... well DREAM of in waking life. And yet, on the other hand, there's a part of me that thinks those ideas are inherently suspect because they come from dreams and I keep hearing, "No one cares about your dreams."
So eventually it comes round full circle. You end up coming back to the idea that you ARE ultimately doing it for yourself, because otherwise you're led to madness. At some point I have put all that aside and go, "I like writing these pieces, and if nothing else I'm preserving a personal record. I'm preserving those ideas and impressions and places so that I can return there myself when the mood arises. And if someone else enjoys it, wonderful. If not, then the heck with it. I keep it for me.
Whew! Had to break that up into two comments. Haven't had that happen I a while.
Haven't seen all the typos there, but I'm sure there's many.
This comment has been removed by the author.
I wanted to edit that last comment a little, as they typos were even worse in that one. So I deleted it and recopied it here with some adjustments. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I wish blogger had a comment editing feature.
Also, aside from the doubts raised by public opinion, there's also the fact that often times what appeals to me about a particular dream is the sense I get of a certain place that the dream seems to have cobbled together, and that often feels like the hardest part to convey.
I remember we once discussed this under one of the old posts on the Sheep Blog. It was a dream I had about working as a guard in this little white shack at a railroad crossing. There wasn't much to it, but it was that PLACE that the dream took me to, and it is in fact, one of my favorite dreams that I've written about.
And in the comments I was saying that it was frustrating because I couldn't completely feel that I could get that across, that I could take the reader with me to that specific place. That they would never imagine it quite the same way. And then you made the point that they didn't have to. That they cobble something together out of their own reservoir or memories and experiences. And in the way of example, you shared with me -- I don't remember if it was a dream or a daydream of a childhood fantasy -- but you told me about this tea party that took place in a boxcar.
And it was such a charming thing, and I pictured it my own mind, of course in my own way, drawing on grassy fields and abandoned box cars and picture book illustrations that I had seen in my own experience, until it became a place every bit as enchanting as any I'd seen in my dreams. And I've always remembered that, and I always kind of keep that in the back of my mind as a reminder. Whenever those doubts creep I that I can't bring the reader to a certain place, I think about that tea party in that boxcar, and I tell myself, "You just have to give them the pieces and they'll put them together in their own way out of their own resources."
That was worth waiting for!
This was worth waiting for!
Bryan I'm so glad you corrected the last comment, because I couldn't remember any dream of a teaparty in a box. But then I remembered telling you of a dream about a disused railway carriage in a big garden, connected in some way with Alice in Wonderland - only when you amended box to boxcar. Still we were not quite connected because your boxcar is our goods van, and our railway carriage is your passenger car.
Despite all these obstacles, good communication can happen. And in other contexts people understand one another so little that they give up trying and make war. Mysterious but nothing new.
Ellie, it does seem like a coming together, as in comments on the last post.
Coming back to your earlier comments, Bryan, about when you publish something and you don't know whether people will get anything from it, will find it funny if it is meant to be funny etc. I go through exactly the same, but it depends on the effort put in and how pleased I am with the end result.
I think in the end the writer has to be his own best critic, & though I crave positive feedback I often think I'll leave it to posterity to decide, and cannot bring myself to lift a finger to publish more formally. And as for editing, I find it a nightmare because I know there are terrible imperfections to be corrected but one gets so fed up with the same old words. Suddenly I think of Vincent van Gogh. He didn't go in for perfect paintings, in the sense of brushstrokes being neat. He just went on and kept trying. It's a tricky business. Needs "attitude"!
Ah, I see, a passenger car. That makes sense, or at least as much sense as something like that can make. At either event, I like the idea of it there in the garden, far from any rail, uncoupled from any train, not going anywhere, just the quiet scene of a tea party, the loud and rumbling life of travel long behind It existing merely as an echo in the Imaginations of the children playing there. There's something strangely magical about that.
The magical thing is that we recover scattered pieces long forgotten and reassemble them into a new image to present to the world. It delights me to have a idea pop-up, remember an image, locate a quote, string together some words, and ask the blogger to make it into a post. I think of this as my 'work'. Housework, yardwork, and such are drudgery in comparison.
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