For the children, by James Richardson
xo, Carrie
Category: Poetry
I DON’T KNOW BUT I’M DOING IT!
Title: poem excerpt by Rilke, drawings by Carrie
Captions: No one lives her life. We come of age as masks. / Our true face never speaks. / Somewhere there must be storehouses where all these lives are laid away. / Maybe all paths lead there, to the repository of unlived things.
Observation: It is easy (and a total delight) to cartoon every day when I’m on holiday. The challenge will be to create cartoons on days when I’m spread super-thin and scarcely keeping up. It will also be a challenge to accept the cartoons that suck — or, more accurately, to move past the idea that my drawing sucks while I’m drawing. This will be good practice in flipping the switch, like Lynda Barry tells us and like I tell my students: turn off that little voice that’s asking DOES THIS SUCK or IS THIS GOOD? Because you don’t know and you can’t know! Instead, tell yourself I DON’T KNOW BUT I’M DOING IT! Sometimes, when I make a glaring error in a drawing, I feel a sense of relief: it’s no longer perfect, and now I can relax and just make the thing without worrying about ruining it.
The mistake I made here was in the first panel, when I drew myself with dots for eyes, which is not my usual style.
Title: Worst sore loser
Captions: This morning we played soccer, and I was the worst sore loser. / The kids and Kevin are playing a board game. / Everyone agrees it’s better that I don’t play. / Self-awareness only goes so far in terms of self-improvement.
On this last day of this old year, I’m trying to figure out how to present my cartoon project. Process fascinates me. I love a long-term project and having completed quite a few know that the process must be simple and easy to manage. The parameters need to be strict enough to make completion challenging yet attainable. Any long-term project will test commitment, and therefore requires enough flexibility to prevent one bad day from destroying the whole task. My goal is to cartoon every day. Will I accept stick figures on a bad day? A single panel cartoon? What if I forget one day? Any long-term project also needs accountability. So I’d like to publish my cartoons throughout the year, likely here on my blog. I don’t publish every day, so I will likely weave the cartoons into weekly posts. We shall see. This is an ongoing experiment, and I am at the very beginning of it.
One of my favourite blog readers is visually impaired (Hi Kerry!), so I’m going to title and caption the cartoons in hopes that this will allow her to “see” them too.
Title: How to be a good person
Caption: Annie is doing a project today where she tries to be a good person. / She is trying mainly, as far as I can see, to pay attention to other people’s needs. / Giving of your time and attention are similar tasks. / Both are hard to do, and we spend lots of both without great thought.
What am I hoping to accomplish through this project? As with any long-term project, the excitement is in the surprise. I DON’T KNOW BUT I’M DOING IT! When I did my 365 self-portrait project, I learned how to be a subject and how to embrace the frame. I also learned the value of editing a day down to a single image. When I did my triathlon project, I discovered previously unrecognized reserves of determination, confidence, and inner strength. When I designed the creativity course last winter, I discovered the surprising joy of putting lines on a page. I learned brevity and gesture. When I write a novel, I discover whole new places and people. Ideas that are otherwise ephemeral become embodied. When I meditate for a year on a single word, the word becomes part of my being.
With this project, I’d like to become a better artist and cartoonist. I’d like to find my voice and style. I’d also like to practice a new way of holding and cherishing the daily, mundane, fleeting bits and pieces of life. I want to pay attention. I want to distill my ideas into an accessible format. But who knows? Who knows what will be accomplished? The project is the process, as it always it.
Title: I know this isn’t a job
Captions: I know this isn’t a job / But I feel so lucky that I get to make up tasks for myself, like this one / And somehow, sometimes, it turns into something real / something I can give to someone else.
xo, Carrie
PS Soundtrack for this post: Way With Words by Bahamas
Illuminate
xo, Carrie
You are sitting here with us, but you are also out walking in a field at dawn
Here we are, day one of a new year. I’ve walked the dogs through gently falling snow flakes. The children slept till 10AM. We have this one last day of our unusually relaxing holiday to do as we please, each of us, before the new year’s schedule clocks in tomorrow morning.
Of course I am thinking about what I’d like to do this year, in addition to what I’m already doing; what would I like to try, what experiment shall I undertake, what challenge, what adventure, what’s calling? And I have a small idea, a possibility I’ve been mulling for awhile that seemed affirmed yesterday by the conflating coincidences of driving across town on an unexpected errand while listening to an interview on the radio with Elizabeth Gilbert, who was talking about the creative impulse. The creative impulse is not benign, she said (and I paraphrase). If it isn’t put to use, if it isn’t acknowledged and fed, if it isn’t set free, it will find its own damaging purpose.
I began thinking about rage, just under the surface.
I was driving along a street I don’t very often take anymore, and it triggered a memory: that I’d stopped for gas, at a gas station that no longer exists, in fact, with two toddlers strapped into car seats in the back of our old red truck. I was enormously pregnant with my third child, and it was hot, a summer’s day, and we’d just gotten a load of groceries. I filled up the truck with gas, and as I was walking around the hood of the truck to climb back in to the driver’s seat, a man approached me. He looked, if not homeless, then close to homeless, and with a rough voice he asked if he could bum a cigarette.
My response shocked even me.
Rage. It was rage that poured out, with no warning, no pre-emptive interlude. “Do I look like I would have a cigarette?” I snapped at him, almost shaking with my fury, indicating my pregnant belly.
“No,” he replied sheepishly.
I got into the truck and slammed the driver’s side door, vibrating with rage.
I didn’t know what had come over me. I didn’t know why I was so very angry. I couldn’t think of a good reason to be feeling what I was feeling in that moment.
But now, I think maybe I understand. Like raging people all over this earth, my wider, deeper emotions were not accessible to me at that time in my life. I was repressing a great deal: disappointment about my career, the sense of boredom and aimlessness as I struggled to be a stay-at-home mom, exhaustion from the drudgery of the day-to-day. There were many things I was not telling myself, or allowing myself to feel, because I couldn’t have borne it. So when tapped or triggered, there was only one emotion on offer: rage. Rage is a defensive emotion. It lashes out so as to prevent us from feeling anything else.
I’ll never know exactly why the man’s question set me off, but I think I was afraid of him, and did not want him near me. I felt vulnerable. I also felt morally righteous. Whatever it was, I was feeling something for which rage was a cover. I was ambushed by my own inexplicable fury.
I think unless we allow ourselves to experience a full range of emotions, including those emotions that indict us for our own failings — jealousy, envy, disappointment, humiliation, fear, uncertainty, grief — we will be at the mercy of that one emotion that is always on tap, always available, a defence against what the world may think of us, and what we may think of ourselves deep inside. Rage rage against the dying of the light. Yes. But rage rage against the accusations that we know to be true, and the terror of being fragile, and the admission of loneliness and failure, and the misery of not knowing everything best.
Rage rage against being human and fallible.
Rage rage against culpability.
Rage rage against knowing thyself, because to know thyself truly is to know some awfully dark truths, is to acknowledge enormous imperfections, and ugly vanities, and moral failings.
Yet I maintain that it is better to know thyself than to remain lodged in clotted rage, railing against the world, and spewing harm and hurt. The hurt your rage will cause to your own self is far greater than any hurt you could bring upon yourself by knowing yourself truly. It is only when we see ourselves as vulnerable and weak and wrong (rather than wronged) that we can see others with compassion, and love too.
And the rage will diminish.
It really will. It will not shock you with its sudden emergence, or hurt those you love most dearly. You will feel its potential, yes, but you will know what it means, and hear what it’s saying: you will feel behind the rage to the emotion that rage is trying to protect you from feeling, and you will be able to name it, and to access it, and to experience it. It is only through experiencing the deeper emotion that you can understand yourself, and get through that emotion.
I am alert now to my own rage. I know it’s trying to tell me something more profound. Why am I so angry? Is this moment deserving of my anger? So rarely it is. Almost never, in truth. And pouring out my rage, pouring it onto to someone else, is unacceptable, always. I believe that. So if it happens, when it happens, I try to name that too. To apologize immediately. Never to let myself off the hook. To reflect. There is always more work to do. Because it is easy to mistake rage for purpose, for fuel. At least it’s better to feel something than nothing, maybe? But the opposite of rage is not emptiness, it’s not nothing, it’s not depression, it’s not powerlessness, it’s not silence. The opposite of rage is connection.
Here is my idea. This coming year, I would like to host writing adventures in my home. It will be an experiment, I confess. The point will be to use the physical act of writing — writing by hand onto the page — to bring us into a meditative state of focus, in which we can access memories, draw them forth. We’ll leap from the intensive imaginative images we’re experiencing in our minds into the adventure of fiction. The exercises will be guided, the space will be safe, and none of us will be able to guess in advance where we might travel to on any given evening. Being or becoming a writer is not the point. The process is the point. Play is the point. Adventure is the point. Discovering and mapping our own inner imaginative space is the point. Anyone can participate. Everyone has a creative impulse. This is just one of a myriad of ways to express it, but it’s the method I can offer, if you’re looking for an opening, if you’re looking for a way in. Or out. Or deep down.
Please send me a message if you’re interested and I’ll keep you in the loop as the idea becomes a plan.
Happy New Year!
xo, Carrie
PS The title of this post is the first line of a poem by Rumi called “The diver’s clothes lying empty.” Look it up if you don’t already know it. Read it out loud. It will tell you everything I’ve written here, and much more.
“You who let yourselves feel”
For inspiration and comfort, let me direct you to this poem, below.
Part One, Sonnet IV
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
— By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Joanna Macy
(To hear Joanna Macy read some of her translations of Rilke’s poems, visit the On Being website, where there is also an episode featuring Joanna Macy in conversation with Krista Tippett. On Being is one of my favourite Sunday afternoon kitchen accompaniments, on those rare Sunday afternoons when the house is quiet, and I’m actually at home.)
xo, Carrie
Memory
In my previous post, I published a list poem detailing some of the things in our downstairs bathroom (because, why not?). It included the description of a painting that hangs there, and I was amused to notice while brushing my teeth the other day that my description, written from memory, bears little resemblance to the actual painting.
I remembered horses, for example. There are no horses. I remembered the scene being of a marketplace. The scene is clearly of a busy city street.
I like that there are differences between what I remembered and what exists in actual fact, because I think it’s instructive of how memory fictionalizes reality all the time. At least, that’s my theory. And I like that my memory invented horses in the painting. Horses are a touchstone for me. They symbolize the freedom of childhood, but also some of the confusion of childhood too; I think of going to an auction of wild mustangs with my grandpa, in Tennessee, when I was a kid, and realizing it wasn’t anything like I’d imagined. Wild mustangs! We were going to see wild mustangs! But the horses were skinny and dusty and untamed and seemed frightened, being herded through chutes and into pens. And I just felt … sad to see them like that. A sadness I couldn’t express.
At least, that’s what I remember now, thirty years removed from the experience.
I could write a poem about it, probably. Perhaps I should.
A friend wondered why I’d specified, in the previous post, that the line poem exercise be written by hand, rather than typed — it’s a good question, and here are my reasons. For practical purposes, it keeps laptops off desks in the classroom. But for even more practical purposes, writing by hand forces you to pour out your ideas less automatically, more deliberately. You can’t help but slow down, as pen tries to keep up with train of thought. The exercises we do call for a lot of scribbling, scrawled point form or almost shapeless idea-noting, and even some doodling: this happens best on paper. Finally, writing is a craft and there is something tangible about words written on a page. You can see that words are building blocks, you can move them around, remove them, play with them. So that’s why. (She says, as she types this post via keyboard onto screen.)
In other news, I’ve been working on a ridiculously long post that may or may not actually come into being. It’s really too long to be posted here, but I don’t have a better forum on which to share it. If and when I post it, I’ll give you a heads-up so that if you don’t want delve into a long-form manifesto on art, you can’t skip it! I think it’s an important subject, but I also don’t want to lose readers.
Happy Friday. (Spain next week, here I come!)
xo, Carrie