Come check out Saint Patrick Press…

I started a publishing company called Saint Patrick Press. It’s mission is to publish books and other materials that are good and true and beautiful.

I’ll be posting regularly to the Saint Patrick Press blog, similar in style and themes that I’ve been (haphazardly) writing here.

We’ve recently published a short novel called Hunger Strike. It’s about a middle aged senior executive who has a major existential meltdown, and decides to go on a hunger strike against his absurd meaningless life and the manufactured world of the ‘American Dream’. But little does he know what the hunger strike will cost him, and what it will take to find himself again …

Feel free to drop by, and check out the books.

I’ll continue to write for Prefaces on topics that may not fit the publishing company; more spontaneous stuff on writing and the creative process.

This Is A Simple Three Step Process for Writing

3 iterations … ink, typewriter, and the blog post you’re reading

Step 1. It begins with a pen …

When my brother was going through design school, there was a hidden rule that you begin any design process with thumbnail sketches in pencil. Once, he turned in a project that he did entirely on computer–he had skipped the pencil.

The instructor looked at the project and asked, “Did you go right to computer on this one?”

He could tell …

Like any design process that begins with a pencil, to me writing must begin with a pen.

I think better in ink, as if the thoughts are flowing out of my heart, down the bloodstream through my arm, spreading to the hand and flowing out the nib of the pen as ink.

Maybe this is what Hemingway meant that to write one must simply cut a vein and bleed.

The writing must flow first as ink, then undergo typing. Writing fast in ink helps me flow the ideas. I’m not concerned about getting it ‘right’ or pushing out perfectly polished prose. At this stage the writing is just that–writing. And when it’s 6am and I’ve only got 30 minutes to write for the day before heading off to work, I can’t be concerned about polished. All I want to do is get as many words on the page as possible. Don’t judge it, just write it.

Step 2. Typing is really what creates the occasion for reflection.

Preferably I would go to typewriter. I bought one recently and found it really awkward at first. I was so used to little ‘pizza box’ keys on my iPad typepad that I couldn’t handle the full on dexterity needed to type on a manual typewriter. The typewriter is slower and more kinaesthetic, more visceral (‘instinctual, gut, deep down’) than a computer keyboard–you’re literally pounding the words and impressing them into the paper.

The carriage has a finite beginning and end point and must manually be returned to the beginning of the next line. This act of manually moving the carriage back to the next line slows down the process of typing; you must reflect on the writing, find your way back on the page, and continue where you left off when you heard the little bell chime at the end of the line. You need to reflect on the writing while typing it.

Cascading sheets of type …

Another important aspect of the typewriter is the document emerges right away. When you have completed the page, there is an actual material document that is unfurled from the carriage of the machine. It’s so easy to have documents or manuscripts sitting on your desktop somewhere that need to be printed out. I like watching the pages accumulate as I pull them from the carriage, and then the beauty of inserting that new crisp sheet of paper into the typewriter, snapping the page number top centre, hitting the lever a couple of times to get down into the body of the page, then striking those keys again to produce the first word.

Typewriters don’t do Instagram

There is no distraction with the typewriter–you are freely present for the writing, for the words, for the impression of thoughts onto paper. You feel your body while you type–it is an act of intent that goes right down to the tips of the toes.

Once the page is ‘type-set’, you can see the words and how they express the thoughts; you can see the flow of ideas and where there’s congruence and incongruence. And if it’s been typed by typewriter you can see how the ideas are shaping part by part. You can see where large portions of the text hang or fit together or not. You can then edit by pen, going through on a bird’s eye view.

Step 3. Typing the 2nd draft into the computer.

This is like leaving the country roads to the fast lane of the highway. It is a return to the initial vision. It’s like coming home from the mountains along the highway: you’ve seen all you need to see, and want to enjoy the pace of the highway.

Typing on the computer is infinite–it just flows. You’ve done all the hard slow work. This iteration is all about getting another look at the manuscript and by necessity getting it onto a computer where it can be published, sent off to people to proof-read, etc.

The fast work is justified by the slow work that preceded it.

It was Toni Morrison who got me thinking about the process of slowing down. For her, going to computer too early gives you the illusion of writing well: the words are flowing mellifluously and rapidly and they’re all well-formatted which can easily give you the illusion of erudition.

And it was Hemingway who inspired me to consider three eyes on the writing: first, for him, by pencil, second by typing, and third by editing and retyping. There are other writers who have used a version of this approach.

The Art of Slow

The importance for me is working to increasingly slow down. Our world is too fast-paced; technology allows us to speed everything up–even movies. We whip up emails and blog posts in minutes. There’s an importance for all of us writers and artists to master language and communication, and take the time to create well. This may take some less time than others.

I’m not saying this approach is for everyone. But for me, where I want to think deeply and work reflectively, this three part process has been very helpful.

Looking at the work as beginning manually in analogue before going to a digital platform helps you move slowly enough to combat the impact computers and high-speed technology have had on our creative process.

Thus the act of writing, of creating, becomes as it ought to be: reflective and iterative.

This is What Camus and Tarkovsky Can Teach Us About Estrangement, Exile, and the Pursuit of Beauty

Beauty will save the world.

–Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Hannah Arendt & Leaving Planet Earth

“In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe . . .” so begins the Preface to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. “[An] event,” she continues, “second in importance to no other, not even the splitting of the atom.” For Arendt, the significance of the event was, as one journalist put it, “relief about the first step toward escape from man’s imprisonment to the earth,” which, Arendt concludes, unwittingly echos the line etched into the funeral obelisk of one of Russia’s great scientists: “Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.”

Hence for Arendt, at the heart of the satellite launch—and all subsequent travels to space and beyond—lies a deep sense of estrangement, of exile, that the eventual departure from earth somehow promises to remedy. Indeed, the launching of the satellite and subsequent landing of Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969, Arendt observes, point to a new epoch of modernity in which humanity not only rejects God, but also planet Earth itself—“the mother of all living creatures under the sky . . . the very quintessence of the human condition and earthly nature.”

And it is this rejection of the earth, of nature, that further heightens humanity’s estrangement from it. Today, this escape from the earth has become conventional through, for instance, high-profile private enterprises, such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin—projects that seem to mark the height of human technical reason, but may indeed belie a deep rooted ennui.

Camus and the Absurd

The Algerian philosopher Albert Camus observed that life is absurd. Absurdity was not something Camus preached as a way of life, or an objective or nihilist manifesto, but rather what he saw as a veritable tension within human existence itself vis a vis the natural world. Contrary to the 15th Century, we are no longer beings who naively accept the existence of a god, a world that is harmonious, a life that is inherently purposeful. Rather we find ourselves thrown into a world without form, without god, without order, without meaning. And this sense of estrangement to the world, of fallenness or thrown-ness (Heidegger), of absurdity, reached its culmination, its manifestation, through events that became (in the words of Derrida) its very paralysis: the use of human reason not to free humanity, but further subjugate it and ultimately annihilate it, whether through the gulags and gas chambers or the development of weapons of mass destruction. It was World War II and its holocausts that revealed the chimera of enlightenment, namely that human reason is inherently irrational. In modernity, human reason is turned back on itself thus exposing a world that is ultimately absurd. Whether it is a Nietzschean world of pure will or a Darwinian world of survival of the fittest, we find ourselves on a planet in which even our very creative freedom cannot escape its own will to power.

Existence Precedes Essence

That is why for modern philosophy, particularly the existentialists, existence precedes essence: I exist, and then I create who I am (my essence, my meaning, my identity, my destiny) out of it. In this way, I stand outside of the world and create myself over against it. The world does not posit me, rather I posit it. This modernist way of thinking came out of the radical skepticism of Descartes in which he famously concluded, “I think therefore I am”: my being proceeds from my thinking, not the other way around. Hence the thinking analyzing subject stands over against the world as object. It observes the world, it posits the world, it brings the world into existence out of its mind. The world, everything, is buffeted through the mind. Even God becomes a projection of one’s imagination, as claimed by the German Idealist and skeptic Ludwig Feuerbach.

How are we to deal with this world of absurdity? What ought we to do with a failed enlightenment project, when human reason is peeled back only to reveal pure absurdity? We go back to Arendt: we escape it, abscond for some higher star, to start over again.

Stanley Kubrick and Human Estrangement

And what better way to capture Camus, the absurd, and the rejection of and absconding from the natural world than through film. Today, there seems to be a flood of films about the future (indeed, the speed of technological time makes the future the new present), but Stanley Kubrik’s 2001 Space Odyssey remains one of the most iconic of that genre.

Kubrik’s Space Odyssey is a science fiction portrayal of the modern world, a world apprehended through the gaze of the subject, which necessarily establishes an inherent subject/object duality. It is the quintessential buffeted world—reality is projected through the mind, and thus the mind stands over against it. It is the height of human civilization, a world of spiralling space stations and technical reason. Even the monolith, that symbol of reason, is an abstract form—there’s nothing natural about it. It stands over against those who observe it. But in a world in which reason is turned back upon itself, the monolith thus becomes a symbol for something else: that same abstraction that Camus rejected as absurdity. Stanley Kubrik’s 2001 is thus a perfect depiction of the world of absurdity, a cosmic world that once was void, but now being formed in humanity’s own image. A solipsistic world in which the pod of space travel is a symbol of the solitary mind travelling through an otherwise meaningless void.

Hence the leitmotif of Kubrik’s film is not exploration or odyssey, but rather estrangement itself. If Homer’s iconic character Odysseus is the quintessence of journey—to venture out on a mission only to return home—then 2001 is anti-Odyssey: there is no homecoming, there is no destination but pure consciousness itself. Human beings are estranged from the earth, and from one another, which is represented in the scene when the astronaut talks to his daughter through a video call. Relationship with the other and with the world is existential and epistemological, i.e., largely egoistic and framed around technical knowledge, rather than ontological, related to being or that which is. There is very little hint of a world that exists outside the mind, that exists in and of itself.

The climax of the film reaches back to Camus’s absurdity: HAL9000. For by virtue of humanity creating the world in its own image, it creates its machines with the same existential make-up: fear, self-preservation, ego, will to power. Hence, HAL becomes an image of humanity: it seeks its own self-preservation over against the other. When Dave crosses HAL, he is driven out of the space ship and abandoned into the infinite void. The astronaut is treated as a means to HAL’s autonomous ends.

The movie concludes with a semblance of reassurance: that technical reason will win over absurdity, but in the end there is a tacit slipping back into absurdity, into estrangement. We see this in the final part of the movie, Infinity and Beyond, in which Dave ventures beyond space and time, he grows old, dies, and becomes pure consciousness—pure solipsistic reason without any real connection to being itself, without any connection to the other.

This conclusion of the film harks back to, or fulfills, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in which Reason’s journey through human history becomes pure consciousness and thus, somehow, divine: the we that is I and the I that is we. A question remains: Is this Kubrik’s beatific vision or apocalyptic prophecy? And is there something supernatural driving the development of human reason, something that lies behind the veil of mere perception?

Andrei Tarkovsky & The Pursuit of Harmony

It is indeed this world of reason, this world of technical estrangement, that filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky wholly rejects in his films, particularly Solaris which to some extent is a direct critique of Kubrik’s 2001. In fact, Tarkovsky called 2001 “phoney on many points, and a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth” Why? Because ultimately 2001 is a film estranged from the natural world, from being itself, from that which is (which may have been Kubrik’s point in the first place).

Tarkovsky’s view of the world and of art is shaped by his deep roots in Russian Orthodoxy. Russian Orthodoxy maintains a holistic ontology, meaning that nature and humanity are deeply interconnected through God who is everywhere filling all things. Reality is thus something that impinges itself on me, and is thus not a mere projection from my mind. It is a worldview antithetical to modernity. As such, Tarkovsky holds to a classical aesthetic stated, for example, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, namely that art is a mirror into nature, into being itself, into that which is, and not merely projected onto the world by the imagination.

One can see this in the opening scene of Solaris. While it is unequivocally a science fiction movie, the opening setting of Earth is that of immense natural beauty: rivers and streams, fulgent flowers, swaying trees, fish that swim, a galloping horse. Time stands still, almost as if in an eternal present—a technique Tarkovsky called “sculpting in time.” The length of scenes seems to play with a different kind of time horizon, namely kairos time—a creative, sacred, highly purposeful time—over against the chronos of modern technical society. The protagonist, a psychologist Kris Kelvin, is returning home. He is in a state of wonder as he stops at the river and splashes his hands through the water and gazes at the pondweeds that undulate to the current. Later, at his father’s house, he sits on the balcony and basks in the glory of a downpour of rain that soaks him to the bone. The scene represents the fullness of nature and humanity’s deep connection to it. The father’s house is also an icon of humanity’s interconnectedness to life, to meaning, to community. In the house are rooms with plants, a bee settling on partially eaten fruit—scenes from the Old Masters of painting, for Tarkovsky wanted to highlight and point back to timeless scenes of art prior to the rise of modernism and the paint splashes of abstraction.

In spite of the interconnectedness of humanity and nature at the opening of the film, however, there is a deep element of estrangement that broods over the middle scenes. Kris Kelvin is ordered to visit a space station circling the planet Solaris. Strange phenomena have been happening there. One astronaut was released from the space station after claiming to have seen a four-metre tall child on the surface of the water of Solaris. While initially glossed over as a mere hallucination, other members of the space station are having similar observations, hence the necessity for Kelvin to visit and report on what’s going on. But Kelvin is a scientist, a rationalist—“not some philosopher or poet,” he explains. He believes he is immune to absurdity, to any phenomenon that cannot be explained through science. However, when Kelvin visits the space station, he enters a world similar to Kubrik’s 2001: a place of technical reason and absurdity. In fact, the room where he stays strangely resembles that of Bowman’s room in 2001 in that phantasmagoric final scene.

Shortly after his arrival, Kelvin is inflicted with a series of hallucinations: his wife, who had committed suicide years prior, appears to him in a bizarre Nietzschean eternal recurrence of the same. She appears to him, then kills herself, only to reappear and kill herself again. Here is an existential moment of absurdity that Kelvin cannot apply scientific reasoning to. His wife’s appearance unshackles him and he finds himself in a struggle toward meaning, toward harmony, toward completeness. He does not try to push his wife away, but seeks unity with her under the risk of this absurd recurrence. Nevertheless, to fight the absurd, to push it back, Kelvin eventually leaves the technological, the place of estrangement, and returns home—to nature, harmony, and family. He approaches the house, and stares at his father through the window, then walks to the door. His father appears at the the doorstep. Kelvin walks up to his father, falls to his knees and clutches his father’s legs. The father receives his son by placing his hands on his shoulders in a brilliant representation of Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son—the son escaping the absurd and returning home to unity, harmony, and beauty.

Sisyphus and the Secular Age

Back to Camus. Existence is absurd because of the way humans have structured the world into bureaucracies, nation states, corporations, Facebook pages, and weapons of mass destruction. Jacques Ellul’s Technological Society provides a sociological language to Camus’s existential category of the absurd, namely ‘techne’ or technique—the never-ending striving for productivity and efficiency that demands faster and more complex systems. Nevertheless, these technical structures subjugate and estrange us from each other and the natural world, as we are seeing now, for instance, with the rise of AI. The technological world is thus a representation of estrangement; indeed, looking at Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence, technology very shortly will no longer need us, while we will be wholly dependent on it. For Camus, this apprehension of the technical world as estrangement, as absurd, when truly deeply realized leads to despair, and ultimately, when taken to its very end, suicide. But while Camus posits suicide as one way out of the world of absurdity, he is certainly not advocating it. For instance, the thesis of his book The Myth of Sisyphus is precisely that suicide, while one way of dealing with absurdity, is ultimately inadequate. The way to beat back the absurd is through the pursuit of meaning, and, ultimately, love and beauty, though Camus had a hard time fully understanding what that would mean. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in his book A Secular Age, critiques Camus (while applauding his struggle for meaning) that if life is absurd and thus meaningless, how does one go about asserting meaning? For Taylor, the struggle for meaning in Camus points to an a priori desire for the transcendent—something Camus was unwilling to consider or ascend to.

Beauty Will Save the World

One answer to Camus can be found in a Russian writer he deeply loved: Fyodor Dostoevsky. For in the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky writes that it is beauty that will save the world; a beauty that connects one to nature, and fosters harmony with each other and a love for all things. When one confronts this beauty, one comes face to face with being itself, and one is transformed. This was the beauty that changed Dostoevsky when his life was suddenly spared while facing a firing squad–punishment for his part in a socialist revolutionary plot to assassinate the Tsar. When his life was spared, and he was sent into exile in Siberia, he immediately saw life as a gift from God, something to be lived fully with purpose and meaning. And this world of Dostoevsky, full of beauty and purpose and meaning, is Tarkovsky’s world too.

But to encounter this world of beauty, of meaning, and thus to beat back absurdity and despair, requires getting out of one’s head and opening oneself to being itself, to a world that is not a projection of the mind, but a world that is, that is deeply interconnected, that impinges itself upon us. A world to be loved, held, apprehended, and represented through unflagging creative endeavours. Like Tarkovsky shows in his films, beating back the absurd requires an orientation to the world that, contrary to our existence in the technological society that seeks to drive us beyond planet Earth, represents, indeed, a sort of homecoming.

Or as the great poet Czeslaw Milosz in his poem The Sun encourages fellow artists, “who want to paint the variegated world . . . ,”

Let him never look straight up at the sun

Or he will lose the memory of things he has seen.

Rather, in the final stanza,

Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass,

And look at light reflected by the ground.

There he will find everything we have lost:

The stars and the roses, the dusks and the dawns.

Why Writing China Feels Like The Lost Highway

hilton-chengdu

I took a trip to China and left my daily notebook behind. There are two kinds of writers: those who can write away from their work spaces and those who can’t. I read once that Gabriel Garcia Marquez can’t write away from home. I have a hard time writing when I’m away from home too. It’s always a challenge. And I find it hard to write while I’m in the moment of an experience, like on a trip. It’s like I need to filter it all through over time before getting that objective/subjective tension that leads to writing. Photographs don’t help either. For me, I need to be in the moment and then stew on it all for a while and then write about it. It’s like the character in Lost Highway said, something like “I don’t like taking pictures because I like to remember the moment as I experienced it.”

In this trip to China I thought I’d work it into the character of my novel. I had fantasies of ripping through my notebook each evening, or dancing on top of my computer keys at night working all my experiences into my character–didn’t happen. And now that I’m home, it’s still not happening. I don’t know the angle I’d take, and I haven’t had the time to reflect on my trip to see it creatively–it’s still too new and too factual. I don’t want fact–I want poetic fact. I want truth without necessarily being factual, or quantitative or chronological about it.

I still haven’t found my notebook. It’s somewhere. I write in it daily, but haven’t now in almost two weeks. And I’ve dumped this blog for that time too.

But you know, with anything it takes breaking a habit to enter a new one. By writing and publishing this post, I am willing my way back on track.

Now maybe I’ll get around to finding that notebook . . .

This Blog Post Months Later . . . 

If I could be the kind of writer that can write phenomena as it happens. If only I could stare out onto a busy street in Chengdu, as pig bladder from that evening’s hotpot stews away in my burning stomach. If I could write how tea is served at meetings, and how it is perfectly polite to slurp while someone is giving a presentation; and how it took me only two days of meetings to become a shameless raving slurper of the finest green tea that has ever passed these lips. If I could write it all as it’s happening—the bamboo groves, the silent workers in green fields, the red lanterns, the thatched huts, the orange trees . . .

But I have a hard time writing like that. Instead, my pen sits in my pocket, or back at the hotel room, and I quietly gaze out of taxi windows, and pray to God that some day I can make sense of it; that someday the experiences will knit together like quilt making patterns and connections in ways I would not have thought while my hand slips out the taxi window and I feel water droplets form along my wrist. To catch phenomena as it happens—to be that kind of writer . . .

I have returned to this blog after a long time away. There is never reason for me to write; nothing burdensome to release onto the pale white surface of the screen—nothing but desire shot through with a sense of duty. To write . . .

A duty to Whom?

I throw words up, and

Let God sort them out—

That’s how it feels some

times it

seems . . .

And China remains

hidden in my unconscious

as time,

nothing but time and

reflection, draws it from

the depths of memory.

A scene from my trip comingles with a story I heard one day on the way to the Rocky Mountains. The story takes place in Japan, but I transport it effortlessly to China; and my soul transmigrates to the protagonist, and he falls prey to a most obscene display of humiliation. And the forlorn buildings at night and the swishing traffic become the backdrop of an encounter with the supernatural—

past experience becomes myth . . .

A favourite movie line comes from David Lynch’s Lost Highway. The protagonist is asked why he does not take pictures. “Because I want to remember things the way I remember them . . .”

That’s the remembering

of a writer.

That’s the writing

of remembering.

 

Jacques Ellul And The Desensitizing Impact Of Our Technological World: Or, How To Reclaim Your Life From Technological Distraction

jacques ellul

I feel out of touch–literally. Even now, pressing fingers over smooth keys I feel an emptiness of feedback. There’s no feedback in our technological world. The world of touch is a digitized landscape of ultra smooth surfaces and two dimensional images. Our only experience of this world, really, is through the eyes–the other senses are left out.

Do you know that the skin has been proven to ‘see’ colour? What about the skin in this digital world?

Have you ever done research on sensory deprivation? Researchers will take people and pay them money to have no sense of touch or smell or hearing or sight, etc. Then they’ll see how long they can go before they completely freak out. In a world of consensual sensory deprivation, is it a wonder we are feeling so out of touch with the world and each other? Is it a wonder we are all feeling so lonely?

My attention span has diminished also–it seems to be getting worse. I used to spend hours on a single passage of philosophical or poetic text, analyzing the argument, scribbling microscopic notes all over the margins in ultra-fine pencil. I can’t do that any more. Sure, part of it might have to do with age; but I know of 70 year old scholars and writers who could put me to shame. No, it’s not age–it’s that my attention is taken in so many directions when I’m just trying to read something. The quiet page is too dull, too painful, too demanding.

909605-jacques-ellul-quote-modern-technology-has-become-a-total

I talked to a friend who’s in IT. I asked him the same question:

“So, how is your attention span these days?”

“It’s brutal–” he said. “I can’t focus on anything. I used to be much more precise, analytic . . . Now I can hardly get through a book.”

I couldn’t believe it–he was repeating the same things I had been telling myself just days prior. My friend continued.

“Ya, it’s even effecting what used to be entertainment. In the past, I could get through a show or movie without distraction. Now, I get five minutes into a movie before I move on to another one, or my phone distracts me and I lose interest.”

“What can we do?” I asked. “Technology seems to have reached another phase transition–it’s speeding up. Is there a way to push it back?” He looked at me with puzzlement and nodded in agreement.

“I don’t know,” he went on. “I would like to think we can, but it seems too late. I work in this stuff. My job is to create technological systems for people to use made up of the latest technological tools. I wish we could push it back, but I think it’s too late . . .”

It was too late for Jacques Ellus back in 1964 when he wrote one of the most prescient books of our times, The Technological Society. He saw way back then that we had already lost control of our technological tools.

It was then that I started a quest to somehow reclaim my life. It sounds cliche, I know, but I want to recapture what was lost. I want to have time again. I want to feel life, beauty, the sense of wonder I had as a child–back when telephones didn’t have answering machines, TV only had a handful of channels, and I was out all day on my bike returning only when the sun went down.

The next few posts will be an attempt to share some of that reclaiming . . .

On Heidegger And What Writing Truly Is

heidegger-at-spring-gelassenheit-jpg1

I write as a habit; to live a habit, a dwelling place, of writing. Habito in the Latin means to dwell. We dwell among our habits. This was a point Heidegger made in, I believe, What is called Thinking? But Heidegger took the habito in Latin and showed how it led etymologically to the ‘bin’ (the ‘ich bin’) of being. Hence to be is to dwell, to inhabit; and thus our habits are ways in which we dwell, and ways in which we are. So to form a habit of writing daily is to dwell in, abide in, writing daily, and thus writing becomes a way of being. Being and doing come together in this act.

But what is the object of writing? For Heidegger, to be human is to be concerned; to dwell in concern. For Paul Tillich, taking Heidegger and pushing him into the transcendent, to be human is to be concerned ultimately about our lives, which is called ‘faith’. And so what is the nature of dwelling in writing? To work out our ultimate concerns. This is called Truth. We seek out Truth as our ultimate concern. And what ultimately are we concerned about? Meaning, purpose, existence, hope, dreams, goodness, justice, mercy. Hence our dwelling in writing is dwelling in what concerns us ultimately and therefore an act of faith, and act of Truth.

But what is dwelling in faith? What is this dwelling, this habit? It is prayer. And thus this habit of writing, this daily dwelling in writing is prayer itself, is worship. A poet and friend of mine Nicholas Samaras says it is presence that makes worship. Writing, as a form of dwelling in attention, is thus worship, is thus prayer. To write in this way is to pray to the orchestrator and finisher of our faith, Jesus Christ–Being Himself, The One Who Is. (This Being of Christ upends Heidegger’s ontic, supplanting it to the mere ontological, a mere study of being without the real authentic experience of Being Itself. It may be the case that Heidegger revised his ontology on his deathbed when the Priest came to receive his confession–we can only hope.) And this is how we dwell in Christ creatively. We dwell in Him through our ultimate concerns that we articulate in our writing, and for which we seek redemption.

And this dwelling in writing, in ultimate concern, in faith, in prayer is authentic creativity. It is connecting our souls to God’s cosmic work, to the work He is doing through all of creation as He is everywhere and filling all things.

And so writing becomes habit, becomes dwelling, becomes faith, becomes prayer, becomes creative dance with God. This is why I am so drawn to writing, drawn to the place of prayer where my concerns are articulated–and not just the negative stuff, but also the beautiful too: to be close to God in prayer, in reflection, in writing. That is what this writing comes to: what concerns me ultimately: who i am, what I am here on this earth to do, and how to do it.

To seek Love, Joy, and Beauty, then dwell in it.

This Story Of How I Met Paulo Coelho Will Make You Feel Inspired About Your Future

paulo-coelho

The First Time I Saw Paul Coelho

It was the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. My head was down, preparing for a session we were doing on creativity and collaboration. Lionel Richie came in the room turning heads all over the place, including mine. He had charisma, even amidst other high profile figures who were there planning the future of the world. I didn’t notice the famous Brazilian writer who had entered ahead of Richie–short, unassuming, but surrounded by an entourage of fans and assistants. This man, I came to find out, was Paulo Coelho. “Who?” I asked myself.

What is Serendipity?

As a writer, I love serendipity. This is why I keep a notebook and pen with me at all times–and feel empty when I leave them at home. You never know when something will come to you: a thought, idea, book title, name of a writer. Sometimes a book will come up several times in different conversations with different people, which is a kind of flag that I need to pay attention to. This is where our hearts will want something that our heads haven’t caught up to yet. It’s that place of the unconscious that is working when we don’t know it, and will flag us to things when we least expect it.

Lionel Richie Meets Paulo Coelho

There was a plenary session with Richie and Coelho. My job was to take minutes. It was an open mic for people to ask questions about Richie’s and Coelho’s lives and creative process. It was the hardest session to take minutes of in my life, for there were moments when Coelho spoke and my mouth dropped open. He was talking about creativity and the soul, and that it is love that drives our creative process, drives our writing or whatever else we do in the world. That we much approach our work with passion and discovery. I can’t remember details, but when I returned to Calgary I made a note to read The Alchemist–a book he had referenced again and again during that late-night plenary talk amidst the quiet Swiss Alps.

Writing and Passion

How do we write out of passion? Is it a mere emotional free-for-all that’s purely driven by impulse, a blind inspiration? Or is it something else? Can it be more rational, more objective, more calculated? To me, the initial writing can feel like a free-for-all in which I’m writing down at a blistering pace everything that comes to mind. But then comes the revising, the pruning, and that can take forever. I remember reading an article about Coelho: that he would stew and pace and procrastinate for hours and hours. Suddenly, the ideas would hit and he would write for 8-12 hours straight in a creative frenzy. Alas, I don’t have that luxury of time. But indeed there must be passion–there must be a vision we’re striving for, that we’re hungry to articulate. I like getting it all down, then pruning it.

The Intuition: I Am Going To Meet Paulo Coelho!

Fast forward 10 months. I found out I was going to be working at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting again. I was in bed with a stomach flu, and guzzled The Alchemist like medicine. Along with millions of others, I fell in love with Santiago and his journey to discover the treasure of his heart; the treasure that sat buried in the very place from which he ventured. The book captivated me as a writer and human being. As I lay there in bed, I suddenly had a strong sense that I would meet Paulo Coelho that coming January in Davos. “What would I say to him?” I thought. “Well, I would have to thank him for writing such a marvellous book. And I would encourage him to keep writing.” Nonsense!

Creative Time as The Temporal and Eternal

I am fascinated with creative time; with how temporality and eternity can blur in the creative process. How fast does it take you to have a book idea, to see the whole thing come together in your mind? A matter of seconds? It’s happened to me. How much time does it take to bring that vision into fruition? Seconds? If only that were so! That’s because our creative time comes from our souls, from that eternity we carry as creatures in the image of God. But we are still thrown into the temporal world, and thus bear its weight, its heaviness. Like treading through quick sand, we venture out to build what took us a split second to see in our minds; we venture out knowing we may never return, carried by the eternity we bear within us.

When I Met Paulo Coelho

Fast forward again to January. It’s been a busy Annual Meeting. My team and I were working 20 hour days for five days straight. It was not uncommon to find an empty office  on the second floor of the main congress centre and crash out in between sessions. It was about 3pm on the last day, and I hadn’t seen Coelho anywhere. Seeing him wasn’t really on my mind at that point anyway. The work was rigorous, and I was looking forward to the sessions wrapping up so I could get some down time and some rest.

I was hungry, so I took a walk out to the foyer of the congress centre where there was a buffet table arranged with all kinds of food. I filled a plate and walked back to the large doors of the Aspen Room where we were holding our sessions. Suddenly, a flash of silver caught my eye. I looked back and there, unaccompanied, entirely alone, was Paulo Coelho! I couldn’t believe it. I hesitated for a moment: “Wait a minute,” I said to myself, “what am I going to do now? Should I approach him?” For a moment I thought of just letting him go, of letting that moment slip by–but how anti-Alchemist is that! So, I took took a deep breath, mustered up some courage, and walked over to him.

“Excuse me, Mr. Coelho–may I have a minute with you?” I said approaching with a fast-beating heart, and a scratch in my throat.

“Yes–sure, sure . . .” he said, smiling warmly.

“Mr. Coelho, thank you for writing such amazing books, and inspiring millions of people,” I continued.  “And I want to thank you also on behalf of my wife who has loved your books.”

“Oh–” he replied, “How very kind.” He put his arm around me (did you catch that dear reader) and we walked briefly across the foyer.

I said, “Mr. Coelho, you must continue writing–you must keep going, for you inspire so many people. I don’t know where you are at these days, but you must keep on going–you must keep writing and keep inspiring . . .”

He seemed a bit taken aback, which I interpreted as having hit a spot with him. He thanked me, and I said good-bye and went back to the Aspen Room to resume work, albeit with great joy–with elation in my heart.

Serendipity is Providence

This story on the surface is about serendipity, but to me in its authentic expression is providence. I love the story of how I met Paulo Coelho, because I see meeting him as a gift from God at that time in my life. It was a time of great creative struggle; a time of struggle as a writer. It was a time when I didn’t really see myself as a writer, but held something deep in my heart–a vision for something I could not articulate. Meeting Coelho confirmed to me that writing was what my heart wanted.

And who knows what my encouragement may have done for Coelho himself–grace works both ways. Maybe he was needing encouragement at that moment, and I was the one standing by, ushered by God to do it.

We are all human. We all struggle. We all need the grace of God, even if we don’t believe in Him, which is where I was at the time. And the Lord in His great Love gives us things that let us know that He loves us, and is looking after us. It’s taken thirteen years since meeting Coelho to see this, and it’s beautiful–God is so good to us. Meeting Paulo Coelho was a way for God to say, “Here my son, meet a great author and be inspired; be inspired for the time I will call you to write.

And is this not the point of Santiago’s journey, the whole point of The Alchemist? Indeed, it is to travel out, to venture, to journey, but at all times to remember–or to realize–that what we are seeking is already right there, in our hearts.

But what I didn’t know was that the day I met Paulo Coelho was also going to be the day when I met another epic writer: the great Elie Wiesel—

but that’s another story . . .

This Heartfelt Letter From Merton To Jacques Maritain Will Make You A Better Writer, Artist, Human Being

merton_t658

I used to get real serious about my work, to the point where I would get stressed out. Those thoughts of not being good enough, of not being smart enough, of not being creative enough, or unique enough would overwhelm me. These thoughts were part of my creative blocks and depression. Days and weeks and months would go by and I would write nothing. My strategy was to wait for the inspiration to come. The problem was, it never came. And if it did come, it would be something I would riff off in a notebook at a manic pace without any real way to connect it to anything ongoing and substantial.

One of my favourite past times is to read biographies of creative people. To me, creativity can be taught as a series of habits, rituals, and routines. I read a biography of Goethe once while I was in a major funk. I was writing a novel that was unfolding along with my personal experiences–how else do you write a novel? But it was in that verbose, serpentine biography where I discovered Goethe’s notion of the serious jest. I loved this notion–and still do. To think of writing, of creating, as a kind of play to which the artist brings a high level of intent and intensity. Jazz music is indeed a good example of this. Watch any great jazz band like Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller–watch how they play! The looks on their faces tell it all: one time Hancock is smiling and laughing, another moment he’s cringing, wincing, another he’s nodding his head to someone else’s solo. At the end of the set, there’s typically laughter and even cheers by the band members. This is a wonderful example of serious jest.

goetheundderorient

“Goethe war gut  . . .”

This concept helped me a great deal, but I still couldn’t incorporate it into my work. After my conversion to Christianity after two-decades of atheism, I was looking for an authentic way to create art. And it was here that I turned to Merton.

Merton is known for his letters to writers. He wrote endlessly. One of my favourite letters is to the English poet Evelyn Waugh found in the book The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers. Jacques Maritain played a tremendous role in the cultivation of Merton as a writer. In fact, in Merton’s Seven Story Mountain he lists Maritain, along with St. Augustin, St. Thomas Acquinas, and William Blake, as writers who “turned him on.” Now, in this letter, Maritain is aging, and seems to be having difficulty maintaining intensity and focus in his work.

Merton writes,

“Do not push too hard with the work, God will take care of everything, and will give you strength to do all that needs to be done. The rest is in His hands.”

What is this? A prescription, by a monk no less, to not push too hard, followed up with a seeming platitude to just give it all to God? Is this not the antithesis of writing? Is not good writing pure ego towards a greater will to power? How is one to take that as advice? How is one not to see here a kind of giving up, rather than an artistic letting go?

Then Merton really lays it on thick:

“Realize yourself to be entirely in His love and His care and worry about nothing. In these days you should be carried by Him toward your destination, and do what you do more as play than as work, which does not mean it is not serious: for the most serious thing in the life of a Christian is play.”

It’s seemingly absurd to the point of being childish! Give your self to God. Rest in His love. Be carried by Him . . . Again, where’s the drive, the will, the Promethean fire?

It’s not there. Because the point of creativity is to let God do the work, not you. In fact, the more you divest yourself of your ambitions, the more you are open to receive guidance and ability from God.

But what about this play stuff?

“The seriousness of Christian play is the only genuine seriousness. Our work, when it develops the seriousness of worldly accomplishment, is sad indeed, and it does nothing.”

Do we not hear the echo of Goethe here? I would say so, but what we also see in Merton is a redemption of Goethe’s serious jest; that the serious play of the Christian is transcendent creativity. When it is at its best, it is bereft of ego, it relies wholly on God; it sees the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God as its greatest objective and focus, rather than fame and fortune. Indeed, it is the remedy for Tennessee Williams’s The Catastrophe of Success, for this authentic creativity is about relying on God and letting Him work through our pens, not our egos, whims, desires, and ambitions.

Merton continues:

“But of course it is normal to work ‘against the clock’ when one’s time is clearly measured, and to feel anxiety about not finishing. But this too is part of God’s play in our life, and we will see it in the end . . . . All life is in reality the playing and dancing of the Child-God in His world, and we, alas, have not seen it and know it.”

God is everywhere filling all things. All things are filled by God, and we are part of that interconnectedness of all Creation, especially our creative lives. Here Merton is showing how we can take part in the Creation of God through our creativity–but it takes offering ourselves wholly to Him.

This is why we see in certain areas of Merton’s thought the notion of writing for him as an ascetic practice. That just as important as the writing part is the living; living our lives for God; offering ourselves to Him in surrender saying, “Not my will but Your’s be done.” This is authentic creativity.

What Merton is also talking about here is the false versus the real or authentic self–it is classic Merton. Further down towards the end of the letter, Merton gives us an insight into this dichotomy that separates serious Christian play and inauthentic creativity.

“Dear Jacques, you are going to your journey to God. And perhaps I am too, though I suppose my eagerness to go is partly wishful thinking, for there is yet work to be done in my own life. There are great illusions to be got rid of, and there is a false self that has to be taken off, if it can be done. There is still much to change before I will really be living in the truth and in nothingness and in humility and without anymore self concern.”

There is a lot going on here in these sentences that point to authentic creativity and the connection between creativity and asceticism. The seriousness of the play is that we realize our sinfulness before God and others; that we see the “great illusions,” and struggle through the grace of God to get rid of them. There is no hope in ourselves; but we must rely wholly on God. Merton says that “the false self that has to be taken off, if it can be done.” But there’s another important tie in here, namely the objective: “living in the truth and in nothing and in humility and without anymore self concern.”

This is one of the things we read about in the lives of saints: that when we rely wholly on God, we stop caring about ourselves; we lose that sense of self-concern that we all carry around with us that causes us to feed ourselves, seek comfort, seek attention, seek fame and glory.

This is the ascesis of writing, of creating.

And the playful part?

It’s becoming more of who we have been created to be; it’s taking on more of the likeness of Christ, which elevates our whole lives, and, not least, our creativity, our writing, our Art.

Neil Simon And Why Writers Aren’t Safe At Parties–Or Pretty Much Anywhere

150714170437-neil-simon-exlarge-169

It remains a secret–well, a partial one. To those who know me, I’m a hack writer: I haven’t published yet, and depending on what day or time of day you talk to me I won’t mention writing at all.

Writing In Cognito

Then there are those who don’t really know me, and, because I rarely talk about it, have no clue that I have a very precise routine for writing 5-6 days per week. They don’t ask, I don’t say anything.

So there are two groups of people who are completely unaware that I am constantly monitoring for information everywhere I go. To me, the perfect line could drop in mid-conversation at a dinner party; a line that could change everything. Just last week, I was at a dinner party when out of nowhere came this brilliant line–it was slung across the table and smacked me right between the eyes! It was brilliant! I laughed my head off, gave the friend all the respect and admiration he deserved, then filed it deeply into my long-term memory.

Those around the table, other than my daughter, have no idea I’m a writer, and thus have no idea that part of my bantering and getting “into the issues” was trying to dig up good information for the next morning. And yes, I had a catch. Now reservedly it wasn’t a brilliant catch–I’ve had greater–but a catch nevertheless. I would say it was a good small mouthed bass, which, if you’ve only been pulling in small perch for a while a small mouthed bass is a very nice catch, and definitely one to keep in the boat with you.

You see, that’s the whole point: that with writers, there’s nothing purely subjective–we’re always mining for information.

The Neil Simon Volumes

One day I was at the library with my kids. It was one of those overcast, windswept late March days that draws one in-doors with a heightened state of awareness of comfort and even intrigue–a perfect time to hunt for books. My kids took off into the kids’ section, just outside of which, in the hallway, were several shelves of bargain books. My eyes scanned the shelves swiftly but carefully, picking up three volumes of Neil Simon’s Collected Plays–what a catch! They were fifty-cents each. But what I realized after cracking open the first volume was that Simon’s introduction was alone worth the price of the books; for it’s all about his secret life as a writer.

The Writer Is Loose!

“A look, the sound of a voice, a stranger passing on the street–and in an instant the transformation takes place. The mild-mannered Human Being suddenly dashes for cover behind his protective cloak called skin and peers out, unseen, though two tiny keyholes called eyes. He stands there undetected, unnoticed, a gleeful, malicious smirk on his face watching, penetrating, probing the movements, manners and absurd gestures of those ridiculous creatures performing their inane daily functions. ‘How laughable that woman dresses . . . How pathetically that man eats . . . How forlornly that couple walks . . .’ The writer is loose!” (Collected Plays, Vol. I, Pg. 6-7).

And this is why we’re not safe–but aren’t we?

Leo Tolstoy On Art

leo-tolstoy-1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What are we as writers trying to do anyway?

I would say we are trying to capture the essence of what it means to be human. We are trying to find truth. We are trying to disclose the meaning of existence. We are trying, struggling, to create symbol that transcends daily life.

In Leo Tolstoy’s “What is Art,” he states that art is a struggle between the artist and the divine. God places something in the heart of the artist, and the artist is trying to get what’s in, out. This spiritual struggle between the artist and God is the creative process. And so when I am mining for information in my seat at a dinner party, or sitting in a meeting, or walking the street, I am in a struggle with God over what He wants to show me and what He wants me to communicate. It is indeed a struggle for Truth. And so as a writer, I would argue I’m one of the safest people to have around; for I am always looking for something bigger than me; always looking for redemption; always looking for Truth; always trying to find that light at the end of the tunnel.

Writing In Cognito–Then Lying About It

It’s evening. My friend and I have been travelling all day from Toronto to Calgary. We’re at a hotel in Regina. The drive was a gong-show. My friend was receiving calls from people who are highly respected in their respective fields, but so hilarious. At one point I was so distracted by my friend on the phone next to me–he had burst into laughter so loudly that he started choking. I thought he was having a heart attack–that I lost track of my speed and was pulled over by the RCMP. That night, while he was watching “Call the Midwife” on his tablet across on the other bed, he looked over at me. I was frantically writing down everything I had heard and witness before it had faded from memory.

“What are you writing?” he asked.

“Nothing.” What else am I going to say?

“So . . . you’re not writing down all that stuff that went down today are you?”

“Nah . . . Just stuff. I try to write a little bit every day–that’s all.”

My only consolation in lying to him was that he knew I was lying to him. He is one of the few who knows I’m a writer. He chuckled, slipped his earbuds back into his ear, and left me to it.

Now that stuff, that stuff I was frantically jotting down, that was pike material; it was game-changing stuff. And when you’ve been catching perch and suddenly have a pike at the end of your line, you’re going to do everything you can to reel it in, and take it home. That stuff I wrote down in that hotel room in Regina has gone directly into my latest manuscript. It was a game changer because it opened up a whole new set of truths in the book, and created the leitmotif I was after–because it was all about redemption, about truth, about Being, about God, about mercy, and transformation.

And that’s why it can be a very good thing to have a writer at your dinner party.

 

This Is How Looking For Camus Led Me To Charles Dickens And The Great Canadian Novel

albert20camus20-2074_lg

I was going to write about The Myth of Sisyphus, but can’t find the damn book. It’s late, and I’m prone to ambiguous sarcasm and slop.

Looking for Sisyphus

I looked all over for the damn book. My shelves are stuffed with books of all kinds. I’ve got books on so many different topics that I can’t keep it all together. So many times I’ve wandered by the shelves only to berate myself that they’re all out of whack and there’s no order to ’em and I can’t find a damn thing when I need to.

What My Son Had To Say About Sisyphus

My six year old son even joked with me tonight just after I helped brush his teeth.

I said to him, “Look, if you find the Myth of Sisyphus let me know ok?”

So he went into his room and said, “Dad–I found the Myth of Sisyphus. It’s right here.”

He got me–for a split second.

“What?”

“Just kidding!” And then he started to laugh a mischievous laugh. The whole thing was absurd anyway, I mean what kind of six year old kid can find the Myth of Sisyphus among thousands of books on several different floors of the house all in complete random order–it’s absurd.

And I would argue it’s just as absurd for a six year old to even mention the title of The Myth of Sisyphus anyway–I mean really, how damn absurd is that?

Absurd Combinations–Or Are They?

So anyway, I went looking everywhere for the damn book. It’s small. Paperback (I should buy a hard copy!). The perfect size to get tucked in somewhere between a book on the history of India and another on the Boer War.

Or squished in between one on the Ottoman Empire and another of the best of Garfield or the Far Side Gallery or something.

Ah–what I think it would best be suited next to would be (say) Slavoj Zizek’s Paralax View and Kierkegaard’s Either/Or–no, way too damn obvious.

How about Baudrillard’s America and Alice in Wonderland–no, way too damn obvious too!

How about the King James Bible and Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf? All too linear!

I’ve got it–Barney Sharing and Caring and Karouac’s On the Road?

Ah forget it!

On Buying Houses Just To Store Books

What bugs me, what really burns my backside, is that I have it somewhere! The threat here is that I somehow lost it or gave it away to someone and forgot about it. That’s why I should never give away books, especially those I think I’ll need in the future. But at that rate, I’ll need to buy another house just to store my books! (Not a bad concept actually. I’ve read about people like this–real bibliophiles: they’ll collect so many books that they need to buy another house to put them in. But not in these times–no. Now we have the cloud, so we can store stuff anywhere but in the physical world. But people need to still collect stuff and buy houses for them, so I’ve read now that people are buying houses just to serve as a giant walk-in closet. Imagine doing that for books? Buying a whole house just to put your books in–well, that would be a library I guess. But still, not a bad concept, really.)

Charles Dickens Loved Late Night Walks

So I was going to write about flaneury–no, not ‘flattery’ you damn spellcheck! For as I was looking for The Myth of Sisyphus I spotted a book on those writers who loved to go for long walks at night, such as Charles Dickens. I must say, I’ve never done that before. When I wake up in the middle of the night, and can’t get to sleep, my first inclination is not to get up and go outside in the dark and walk 20 kilometres through the city to another house; but that’s just what Charles Dickens was known to do. He’d get up–he was a terrible sleeper–and walk out of the house and wander the streets in the middle of the night. It sounds splendid, but I believe it just wouldn’t work as well out here in the suburbs of Calgary in -25 degrees celsius. It just wouldn’t.

But you see, Dickens did this, and he loved it–oh the writing that oozed out of him at the end of these walks! He wrote about how alive he felt after walking almost eight hours straight in the middle of the night and finally reaching his destination. The walks kept him energized–he couldn’t write without them!

I read that and then think about what it would be like for me to do that.

Death In The Snow–Or The Beginnings Of The Next Great Canadian Novel

It’s 2am–can’t sleep. I get this frantic urge to go for a walk. Slipping downstairs, I stretch on my winter jacket and fumble around for half an hour in the dark for my gloves–can only find one . . . Then when I finally find my gloves, another ten minutes for my hat . . . Then I pull my knee high winter boots on, the ones that protect one up to -65 degrees celsius. I open the door as the wind blows a foot of snow into my doorway. I venture out, my heart pounding and this drive to be outside takes hold of me–oh the prose that shall pour forth! Then, I get about two blocks down the street and am overtaken by the cold. My face freezes up, my feet slip on a glassy surface of ice, and I tumble into a snow bank where I freeze to death belly up. Then–it starts snowing.

Sounds to me like the ultimate Canadian novel . . .