Here I go again

Well... I must write so will.... but how much writing I will manage to squeeze into my 16 hours a day 7 days a week work schedule I am not certain....

The Last Day I will write?

I woke up today, tired as usual, but clear-headed for once.  A week ago I set up a daily schedule in an attempt to find some good, solid time for writing.  I won't go into the banal details of my life which made this effort necessary.  Let me say simply that I have unavoidable duties which take up about 75% of my waking day, and writing and my paid teaching must live in the remainder.

So....this morning I woke up after a short and fitful night's sleep to the cold, grim realisation that this schedule was not working.  I have written nothing since last Wednesday, and even then it was a piddling, fiddling around with photographs for a book I will finish.  No writing.  No words that fly and sing, or plunge to the depths.  None.

So I lay there and came to the calm, considered realisation that i had run out of time to write.  I have been writing for more than ten years now and have a clutch of books to my name.  But four years ago I decided to write things that were me - good, pure, unadulterated works of imagination and verve and fire - poetry, prose-poems, an experimental multimedia work - and some history that interested me.

Well, at this precise moment, I have finished my morning rota of duties, and have eaten and am on my second mug of coffee.  This fuel has given me the energy to allow myself a last day to write - I will go to church to pray and meditate - then see what unfolds today.  I will not force it - poetry is my marker - will any words rise out of me?  Or will that blank emptiness that has been my writing continue?  

Well, enough for now.  

Ted

Martin Luther, individualism and the writing revolution

I am reading the Reformation: a Brief History by Kenneth G Appold. In the current section he is describing the sources of his radical re-interpretation of Christianity. The author goes on to describe the political manoeuvrings around Luther - why he was at first ignored, then the politics of bringing him to trial, or at least debate. This occurred between the time of the posting of the 95 theses in 1517 and 1521, when Luther was excommunicated. In this period a pamphlet war was engaged.

What this all says to me is two factors had changed - one the rise of individualism and the other the necessity of reading and of relatively cheap material to read. Reading is an essentially individual activity - this is not to say it is necessarily private - one can read out loud, one publishes [as here] for others to read. But writing and reading are the dissemination of internal, personal and individual thought.

The Protestant Reformation is usually, and quite sensibly, approached as a revolution in religion - but it can be seen from another angle if you turn it on its side. The Reformation was a cultural turn from the mediaeval world of communal and oral life where what you knew, you knew because others said it to you and you said it to others as you lived your life in a small community. Learning was also visual and tactile. Words and sight and touch moved in a dance of reinforcement, integrated into the oral and communal life of people.

The Reformation is the label historians of religion stick onto a cultural change in western Europe - religion being integral to culture and culture to religion [I use the term 'culture' here in its anthropological sense, of course, as the 'total way of life of a people'].

Reading and writing came to the fore for a growing class of intellectuals in that broad, other cultural movement called the Renaissance. The dissemination of ideas now rocketed off in all directions with the new technology of communication called the printing press, movable type, and paper. This new form of mass communication could not be contained by the old 'powers-that-be', at that time aka the 'Church'. I will here give the standard 'historian's caveat' - this did not all happen at once - the 'Church', now much constrained and limited to far fewer lands than before [well ... and another caveat - European lands, because at this same time, the old religion was busily establishing itself in the Americas and on other continents]. Anyway, this did not all happen at once because there was not to be one Reformation, but rather, 'reformations' - Luther's ideas dominated the northern German and Scandinavian lands, but other Reformations took hold - those of Jean Calvin most importantly, but also the state reformed Catholicism of England, and the small persecuted groups of so-called anabaptists.

Again my point in all this is this cultural turn came out of a perfect storm of multiple changes. The change that interests me here, in this blog, is the very change I am a part of in the 21st century -the communications revolution. To put the Reformations in a modern mode - Luther's ideas went viral - and just as ideas spread via the internet today, were altered and changed as they spun there way across western European society.

Those who defended the old ways - principally what we today call the Catholic Church, or the Roman Catholic church, which until the ideas of Luther went viral, simply, 'The Church', was changed - adapted to the new reality of a war of words and of control over communication.

So too today, email, instant messenger programs, YouTube, facebook, twitter, Linkedin, cell phone cameras, self published eBooks, website, ftp..... I have probably missed something here - constitute the technological drivers of another cultural revolution not seen in the world since the printing press and movable type and paper.

What is the 'church' today? Well for a writer such as myself, it is the legacy publishers, the academic presses, peer review old style, copyright law. What is the Reformation (s) today? Smashwords, Creative Commons licensing, the world wide web [not to be confused with the internet - the WWW is a part of the internet], experiments in online peer review for academics [for example, the History Working papers project www.historyworkingpapers.org ] , wikipedia.

Who is our Luther? Probably, Tim Berners-Lee who created the first web page and convinced his supporters at CERN where he then worked to give it to the world and built into it the protocols that prevented any one 'church' [as in big computer company] from owning or controlling it. The essence of the WWW is that it cannot be owned or controlled and this philosophy still very much has driven all the changes that I write about in this blog.

All this is something of a personal irony for me, as I am a Roman Catholic - but the double irony is I belong to the Church of Rome, not by birth, but by my individual choice. There is a triple layer of irony also - I belong not through cold reason - an intellectual assent to theological fact, but because I am also an heir of the Romantic movement and enjoy the wafting scent of faux mediaevalism and of even older memories stretching back to the world of imperial Rome.

Ah well, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and to the technological revolution that brought about computers and the internet, I am liberated to choose and write as I will - but thanks even more so to the much older cultural revolution of the early modern era, the essence of which is the rise of the individual and individual ideas.

thought i would post this

Norman McLaren

I am watching a full length film biography of Norman McLaren on my National Film Board of Canada app - part of my ongoing, 'when I get the time' look at creativity.

Creative Process: Norman McLaren by Donald McWilliams

I had to get down my early impressions - especially that I am seeing the same elements as in the film

Gerhard Richter Painting


McLaren, Richter and Picasso all note that their paintings do not follow the artist's plan, but follow their own paths.  I see the same in my writing.  McLaren is interesting to me at the moment.  What little I knew about him was he was some boring old NFB documentary film maker - those old short films with a plummy CBC voice putting you to sleep while you watched uninteresting images in some High School class.

Rather, I see a man who combined painting with film - indeed he says that using the human voice would have been a foreign imposition.  He painted in stages and filmed the stages.. he played with animation, but not in the Pixar or Disney mode.  In one example, he had a drawing of dark mountains on a canvas on an easel which was filmed, then stopped.. then applied white chalk to portions of the mountains... filmed that, and so on, then put it all together.  Picasso is reported to have said of one of McLaren's film paintings... 'At last!  Something new!"

Well, this interests me as I am following this path, but with text as the basic background..... and with film, painting, music etc. mingled - not enhancing as the current mistake in publishing has it - but intrinsic to the whole.

Gerhard Richter Painting - creativity

I am watching this German movie focussed on Gerhard Richter at work. His studio is all white with all his tools carefully arranged and in place - order is the order of his life it seems. After a long shot of the orderliness of the studio he is shown sitting on a back step looking out at a garden. At last, I thought, some needed disorder! But no, a long white, straight walk stretched ahead controlling the greenery on each side such that the straight path controlled the scene and the vegetation played a dissonant supporting role.

Yet his abstracts give the lie to this encompassing order. In his painting, the greenery of chaos rule.

Gerhard Richter Painting

I started to watch a German movie called Gerhard Richter Painting on Netflix today... I am only six minutes into it, but a statement by Richter made me see the unity at some level of all the arts.  He said, "they do what they want"  in response to a comment by the film maker that the paintings he was working on at that point had changed.  Richter then added, "I planned something totally different", then a succinct comment replete with levels of meaning "pretty colorful'...... sounding as though he was observing something he had little to do with, or that perhaps had its own life.

Over the years, I have heard novelists say that the characters in their books take on a life and do things that surprise the novelist, or that the writer had not planned or expected.  I am finding this in my slowly growing eBook fiction - for example, the other day another character showed up and caught Simon's attention.. his full attention.....unplanned, unexpected but wonderful... in the proper sense of the at word.... 'filled with wonder'

Gerhard Richter Painting - official film site