Category: quotes

Le destin, c’est moi

Nous tissons notre destin, nous le tirons de nous comme l’araignée sa toile. — Francois Muriac
 
We weave our destiny, we draw it from ourselves like the spider spins its web.

I don’t believe in fate. I don’t subscribe to the notion of a higher being with a plan for me. But I know life is not random, either, although there are times when the random delights or damages us for a moment or forever.

In my philosophy, the four most powerful things in the universe are love, joy, fear and choice. History is made from their stew. People live and die for them, from them. We stand tall or twist ourselves out of true by the choices we make from love and joy and fear. Most of those are small daily choices about whether to do, how to respond, what to let in and keep out. And from those things we weave ourselves. My life is the web of my choices.

Destiny is a funny word. I don’t believe in destiny spelled out in a Big Book somewhere, as if the universe was simply some giant cosmic puppet theatre. I choose not to see myself and my life reduced to that. So I do not think there is A Path I Am Meant To Walk, and yet it is clear to me when I’m doing things that… hmm. That fit with the essential core of me, the soul, the spirit, whatever you choose to call it. I know when I feel aligned and when I don’t. I know when I am out of true.

As I get older, I trust more and more my own instincts about these choices. I trust my sense of whether things are right or wrong for me, my sense of when to act and when to stand still. I trust that I can be hurt and survive, and so I no longer always need to blindly defend myself against the possibility of pain. I trust that I can be joyful without the other shoe dropping on me, and so I no longer always need to “deserve” happiness. I trust that I can live with complexity, and so I am no longer so afraid to feel whatever it is that I feel.

And even when the random intervenes, even when things happen that I did not choose, it is still my choice how to respond.

And so I make my choices and my life weaves itself around me. And many of those choices the last couple of years have been big ones, the kind that alter the patterns forever. I am not who I expected to be. And yet I am totally myself. I’m creating daily a destiny that can only be mine, because it is made of my choices, my love, my fear, my joy.

And just in case I’m sounding a little too far inside my own navel, I hasten to add that the Muriac quote from which spring all these musings comes from one of my favorite t-shirts:

Pense Pas Bête t-shirt from threadless.com

You can find all the quotes and translations here. Perhaps they’ll make you muse too, or perhaps they’ll just make you want to find a baguette and the nearest bottle of wine. Happy Saturday, either way.

Two poems for a Saturday

My favorite poem is probably T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But it’s much too long for a Saturday morning… and I woke in the middle of the night with these two poems whispering Choose me, choose me in my ears.

Happy Saturday.

Do Not Be Ashamed
by Wendell Berry

You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.

Lost
by David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Dandelion Wine

Dandelion Wine is a summer book, every word is rich with summer-ness like ice cream and hot sun, and soft heavy evenings full of tree frogs and parents laughing quietly in the other room and screen doors slamming in the distance.

I first read it in high school, and it didn’t really speak to me. It wasn’t weird enough, and the boy in the book was too young for me to care about, and it was set in 1928 — you may imagine the roll of teenage eyes, god, that was like a thousand years ago…

I was in my 30’s before I understood the deep richness of this book, the joy and the sadness and the absolute brilliance with which Bradbury captures a summer that I never had and yet remember so well. Summer as a state of mind. Summer as a collection of moments out of usual time in which we may, if we choose, live slow and do mundane things and find at bedtime that it has been one of the richest days…

We’ve had very unsatisfactory weather in Seattle these last couple weeks, restless laughing autumn weather that I love, but am not yet ready for. But we are promised summer again this week, and although outside my window it’s hazy and 50 degrees, I see sun and hints of blue sky behind the gray smoke. And today, when the sun comes out (and I know it will, I know), I will stretch out in it with iced tea and Dandelion Wine and remember what it’s like when everything in one’s world is exciting and new and so full of possibility. I’ll remember that from my little deck, a place familiar and known and not so much about possibility as it is about perspective and the considered choice to throw myself into things or not, to be new or not, to sit in the sun or go inside. Because I’m no longer twelve, and I need my twelve-year-old summer days more than ever.

In the first eight pages of the book, Douglas Spaulding, age 12, is out in the woods with his father and younger brother Tom. Doug and Tom are wrestling. And Douglas discovers something amazing:

And at last, slowly, afraid he would find nothing, Douglas opened one eye.
 
And everything, absolutely everything, was there.
 
The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.
 
And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now.
 
I’m alive, he thought.
 
[…]
 
The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing in his wrists, the real heart pounding in his chest. The million pores on his body opened.
 
I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!
 
He yelled it loud but silent, a dozen times! Think of it, think of it! Twelve years old and only now! Now discovering this rare timepiece, this clock gold-bright and guaranteed to run threescore and ten, left under a tree and found while wrestling.
 
“Doug, you okay?”
 
Douglas yelled, grabbed Tom, and rolled.
 
“Doug, you’re crazy!”
 
“Crazy!”
 
They spilled downhill, the sun in their mouths, in their eyes like shattered lemon glass, gasping like trout thrown out on a bank, laughing till they cried.
 
“Doug, you’re not mad?”
 
“No, no, no, no, no!”
 
Douglas, eyes shut, saw spotted leopards pad in the dark.
 
“Tom!” Then, quieter. “Tom… does everyone in the world… know he’s alive?”
 
“Sure. Heck, yes!”
 
The leopards trotted soundlessly off through darker lands where eyeballs could not turn to follow.
 
“I hope they do,” whispered Douglas. “Oh, I sure hope they know.”
 
— from Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

SF/not

Congratulations on your anniversary. Twenty years is some kind of record in this age of planned obsolescence and instant gratification.

Will you ever consider writing anything besides sf?

Anonymous

Thanks very much for your good wishes, and your patience waiting for this response. I’ve been trying to answer your question, only to find that it’s a very slippery one indeed… so here we go down the slide.

I call my published work speculative fiction: I need a broad category, because the stories wander in the spaces between science fiction and fantasy and horror. I’ve had people over my career question (sometimes heatedly) that what I write is sf of any kind, at all. And I never identify myself as an “sf writer” — I call myself a writer, and when people ask What do you write?, I tell them that I write fiction and screenplays, as opposed to saying I write science fiction…

Am I trying to repudiate speculative fiction? Absolutely not. I’m proud of my work and proud to be in a field that so many extraordinary writers call home. But is it my home? I dunno, I think I’m with Nicola and William Gibson on this one. I come from sf, but am I really sf? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s only that I don’t like being categorized, but I think it’s more than that. I think it’s about my concerns as a writer.

To me, sf writers have sf-nal concerns. For science fiction writers, creating alternate realities or new technology or building worlds is part of the point, part of the jazz. For me, it’s just part of the work, and I do it only as much as I need to in service of the characters and the story that wants to be told. Speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, what have you) is a wonderful shortcut — I can create whatever paradigm I want in order to turn the characters loose. I can be extreme. I can create a character whose sexuality is tied into violence (“Eye of the Storm”) without having to explain it in terms of twenty-first century psychological models; I can make a whole city fall down just because it’s right for the story (“City Life”).

But really, when I take a closer look, my work is grounded in the real, in the now — music, martial arts, how the el trains work — and, most importantly for me, in real-world human feelings and experiences. That’s where I always start and end as a writer. That’s my jazz.

I have written non-sf. I just haven’t published any. After Solitaire came out, I began work on two different mainstream novels. I wrote 17,000 words of one and 45,000 words of the other — finished words, proposal-to-my-publisher quality. I wrote detailed outlines. And I was pleased with them both.

I showed them to Nicola. She thought they were pretty good, but slow. In-dwelling, she said. Not enough narrative drive. I showed them to my agent. She thought one was pretty good and hated the other. Practically spit on it. Said my protagonist was “whiny and pathetic,” which I suspected was her version of “in-dwelling.”

I sent the non-spat-upon proposal package to my editor at HarperCollins, who liked it but thought it needed work. And she was right. And I tried to work on it, but I didn’t at that time have the absolute burning passion that I do now for work, and I had no internal compass to tell me what was wrong or where to go from there. I lost my way, and I lost my heart for both novels.

It’s been years since I put them away. And for a long time after that, in terms of writing, I just kicked a metaphorical tin can up and down the sidewalk, until I told Nicola one day that I thought maybe I wasn’t really meant to be a writer after all.

But you know what? I was wrong about that. How I reconnected with my writing soul is another topic for another day, but I am definitely a writer.

But am I definitely an sf writer? (Hah, bet you thought I’d completely lost the thread…) Nope. I’m a writer. I’ll write whatever I write, and I’m making no plans about whether that should or will be speculative fiction or not.

And so the answer to your question is not just I don’t know, it’s I don’t need to know. It’s a huge fucking triumph for me to be a writer. And I’m very clear now on what kind of writer I want to be — as I said in the recent interview at Enter the Octopus:

What are your longterm career goals?

 

To write fiction and screenplays and essays that make me and you feel bigger inside, that make us dream and burn and bring us closer to ourselves. The rest — the big money, the glam, the pretty prizes — either comes or it doesn’t. I can’t control who buys my books or my scripts, but I am totally in charge of what I write and how I feel about myself as a writer. That’s the career I want.

And if this screenwriting thing works out, I might even be a consistently-earning writer, which would be pretty cool too.

And — thinking about your question has made me look at those novels again. The one that went to my editor, nah, I think that’s a goner. It just doesn’t speak to me anymore. But the one my agent hated, well, there’s something there. Not in its current form, but… I read it and I can see the people in my head, hear them, feel their connections and their longings. If Jane feels whiny, well, that’s because I haven’t given her enough to do yet. But there’s something there that makes me sit up and pay attention, and I just might have to go find out what it is one of these days.

In the meantime, if you’d like to judge for yourself, take a look.

If I do ever take it up again, the funny thing is that at least one path could be a ghost story, in which case I would still be writing sf after all. And here I go again, with answers that only expand the questions. Ah, that’s life.

If you’d like to ask a question or start a conversation, please do what this person did — use the talk to me link (also on the sidebar) anytime.

Exploding like spiders across the stars

…because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
— Jack Kerouac from On The Road

I don’t even know where to start about this except to shake my head with wonder at words that do so well what I would like to do — that riff, that rolling rhythmic jazz that can make my heart beat every bit as hard as music sometimes with the way it makes me feel so much bigger inside. I wish all my words could do that.

This isn’t how I see my everyday self — there’s plenty about me and those I love that is commonplace, and sometimes there is nothing finer than to put my feet up with a bottle of beer and talk about the rain. That’s good. But these words go like a bolt of electricity straight into my writer’s soul, into the part of me that always burns this way even, I think, in my sleep.

All artists are a little mad. I used to think that was hyperbole at best and melodrama at worst, but these days I think it is nothing but the truth. And the madness is in the burning, in the drive to be one with the work and with all the self that is underneath, and that is stronger sometimes than anything else, especially common sense. And so we burn ourselves up.

Let’s dance

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.
— Japanese proverb

My dancing debut is Saturday, April 5. Two shifts: 6:30 – 7:00 pm, and 7:30 – 8:00 pm. I’ll dance the first Saturday of every month for the foreseeable future, although I’m not entirely sure that I’ll have the same shifts every time. We’ll see.

A reminder of the pertinent details:

  • Neighbor’s nightclub on Capitol Hill in Seattle.
  • $10 cover
  • Coat check provided, $1 per item, and tip the coat check dude, he’s a sweetie.

It can get crowded, but please let me know you’re there!

I am so excited!

What’s your story?

Have you heard of six-word memoirs? They’re in full swing over at SMITH Magazine (which is, by the way, a pretty cool site in general — wow, the human impulse to tell stories…). You can find out more in this New Yorker article, a brilliant marriage of information and demonstration.

I keep trying to come up with my own six-word memoir, but… can’t tell me in six words.

However, today I stumbled across this, and thought, But here I am in 20…

“I am always doing that which I can not do,
in order that I may learn how to do it.” — Pablo Picasso

What’s your story? (And if it’s six words, go tell it to SMITH too!)

Wild and precious life

What will you do with your one wild and precious life? — Mary Oliver

There are moments like being brushed with a feathertip, a soft fleeting understanding that so many things are so much more possible than I let myself believe. That it doesn’t matter whether I get everything I want, but rather that I want things so fiercely that I try to get them. Against the odds. In spite of my limitations. With disregard for what I know to be possible or, gods help me, appropriate. I want to look at my life and constantly marvel at how wild and precious it is, and the only thing appropriate to that is to love and dance and work and live as well as I can in the face of all my private triumphs and despair.

No, I haven’t been drinking. I’ve been feeling.

Like a Song: Elevation

This is an essay I wrote for @U2, where I am a staff writer. It’s part of an @U2 series called Like a Song, in which staff members offer personal reflections on U2 songs.

Let’s talk about joy.

I am standing in front of the stage with a heart like a jackhammer and a soul ready to take off, a kite that only wants a strong wind. The power of music: to make us fly. I’ve sat on a cold Seattle sidewalk for 12 hours and stood crammed in this crowd for another three, waiting, waiting, wanting to soar. The power of music: to make us feel. And now the crowd is roaring: we are a hurricane of noise, and the eye of our storm is U2, taking the stage, taking a scan of the arena, and then taking us all to the places we all want to go. The power of music: to show me myself in a song. To remind me tonight that I am large inside, so much bigger than the tiny boxes that everyday life sometimes tries to squeeze me into. Tonight I am a creature of hope and love and joy, and there is no better song than “Elevation.”

High
Higher than the sun
You shoot me from a gun
I need you to elevate me here

I listen to U2’s music at different times for different reasons – to feel the fierce abandon of “The Fly,” the anger of “Mofo,” the yearning of “Streets.” Because a song describes a desire so private that I can’t, or won’t, seek it anywhere except inside the music. Or because I need to put a name to some specific pain so I can cry over it, and begin to be healed. The power of music: a stranger sings our innermost self. I put U2 in my headphones to hear myself, and the songs I like best are the ones that are most about me.

But I come to the concerts to see four men make the music happen right in front of me, and here the songs I like best are the ones that are most about them. Forget about being pulled up to dance, or getting the autograph outside the stage door. That’s not where the real juice is. If you want to meet the band, then watch them make their music, because in the instant when they give themselves over to it you will see their souls. You will know all about them in those moments. I have seen their fierceness and their anger and their yearning. And I have seen “Elevation” live, and know that whatever else they may be, Adam, Larry, Edge and Bono are people of joy.

See for yourself.

This is the 2001 Slane performance of “Elevation,” full of joy. The power of love to bring us out of the dark of ourselves into the sun. The jazz of the four-way relationship, the heightened awareness of each other that comes from 25 years of playing together: you can feel it when they share a look, when they lean toward each other for a note.

And above all, there is the sheer joy of making music. Bono can’t wait: he howls it out as the audience quivers in the moment, and then Larry counts them in tap tap tap tap, brings his sticks down BLAM and the lights come up and Bono leaps into the song. Watch it fill him so completely that it propels him around the stage and makes his body move, move, move. Watch Adam lean into the music and smile that private smile. Watch Edge dance with his guitar as Bono sings about jubilation. Watch for that twirl of Larry’s drumsticks at the end. And look at Bono smile as he walks back toward his band. That, my friends, is the joy of U2.

You make me feel like I can fly
So high
Elevation

The power of music: our worlds collide and I am sharing soul with my Irish brothers, whom I never love so much as in these moments when they sing themselves and take me with them. Not let’s get naked love or some kind of worship, but the electric connection of shared humanity: they are full of joy, and so I am too. It’s such a human thing to do, to show our souls and make joy for each other. And that’s why I come. That’s why I wait in line and stand until my back is frozen and offer up my heart. I come to see U2 be human and make music. I come for the joy of it.