One Chance

A couple of weeks ago, I drove six hours round trip to see a film I might never have a chance to see again, Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language, a French film shot in 3D. I knew it would never play in a theatre near me and, once released on home video, it wouldn’t be available in its original form. So, I drove to a film festival in another state. There was only one showing.

I'm old enough to remember the time, before video, before a thousand channels, before the internet, when movies were things I might never see again. They played for a week or two in the local theatre then vanished. The midnight movies offered single screenings, often never repeated. Movies could be events, much like theatre, in that one often saw them only once, yet  that single viewing could spark endless conversation and discussion.

In college, still before video, I discovered foreign films. Somewhere on campus, someone was always running something in a classroom or a basement. The Italian Department played Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini. The French Department played Truffaut, Resnais, Godard. I saw Bunuel, Kurosawa, Lang, Pabst. Often in scratchy, jumpy prints, sometimes without subtitles. Every film taught me something about a world I'd never known, every film taught me about film itself. I was hungry for them. I sought them out. I believed, at the time, that one viewing was all I’d have. I wanted to remember them, but how do we watch something we know we’ll never see again?

At first, I tried watching them as a kind of visual catalog. This was the type of memorization I'd been taught in school. I worked to commit every angle, every camera movement, every gesture to memory, but I couldn't repeat the experience over and over in the same way I mouthed dates and events for a History exam until they were stored away. Still, my mind scrambled over details in an attempt to find patterns. Like history class, I was trying to figure out beforehand which elements were important (which might be on the test), so I could concentrate on remembering only those. My mind was working to supply meaning as the film unfolded. The problem with this approach was not only that it didn't work, but that I stopped seeing the film itself; instead I broke it down into pieces in an attempt to memorize manageable fragments. I lost the feel of the film and removed myself from the experience.

Eventually, in the dank basement rooms of the library, I found another kind of observation, a way of giving up to the film in an active way. Much of what I thought of as my mind was turned down low, or off altogether. I was fully engaged, yet quiet; my mind merely one element of the full sensation. I didn’t realize it then, but I was discovering the distinction between mind-memory and body-memory.

It's nearly impossible to see anything on a merely visual level. Seeing itself is irrevocably linked with context and content, with our place in the experience. In memory we may recall the circumstance of the seeing, our position in the room and its temperature, the moment just before. We may remember odd details while dropping supposedly important ones. Because seeing isn't a simple recording; it's a complex of information and response in which we, the observers, are inextricably bound. A camera records, it creates a simple visual representation. We observe.

Seeing happens in our bodies, not simply in our eyes and our head. It’s a fully engaged immersion in the world. Our bodies hold memory in a different way from our minds. Our mind searches for pattern and story, that's its job; our bodies hold a more personal record of our past. Seeing can bring the illusion of objectivity, the cool and passive role of the observer but, in the end, observation is engagement, an active interaction with the world around us.

Mind-memory searches for patterns in what falls within its gaze. Body-memory is omni-present, as the body is always engaged, consciously and subconsciously, in the world around us. Mind-memory constructs pictures of the working of the world while body-memory synthesizes our thoughts and feelings with our physical sensations. Mind-memory is recalled in something akin to a file search, often assembling a picture one piece at a time; body-memory is more unpredictable, often coming upon us all at once.

In the absence of a full memory our mind works to construct one. We can feel it struggling to piece one detail after another into a full picture. These blanks aren’t important to body memory. Body memory is incomplete but whole; it arises of-a-piece and reveals itself with attention.

Let’s say I’ve lost my car keys. The first impulse is to retrace my steps, to try to recall where I might have put them. I methodically attempt to assemble the past, moment by moment, aware of large gaps in memory while uncertain my chronology is correct. This assemblage is just that. It comes about one piece at a time, one image at a time.

Instead, I might suddenly remember myself standing beside the bedside table: the thought I had at the moment, the keys in my hand, the sound they made as I laid them on the tabletop. The first is mind-memory, the second body-memory. Each has their purpose.

As writers, our raw material arises from the creative juxtaposition of what we have experienced and what we can imagine. Our experience can arise from events (seeing more things, going more places) or from deepening our engagement with the world around us. One is outwardly directed while the other is more inward.

Observation, in the sense of being fully engaged with the world, is the first act of the writer. Part of our discipline as writers is to deepen our own experiences of the everyday world and the degree to which we can be engaged, physically, mentally and emotionally. Regardless of what we write, historical romance or hard science fiction, our personal experience allows us to ground our writing in what it means to be human.

This observation is not a passive act. It is fundamentally creative. However, if the mind is already imposing patterns, ideas, beliefs, stories, upon the world as we observe, it occludes our ability to see.

I have to find my own ways of subverting the desire of my mind to capture and claim what I experience. I want to actually have the experience as fully as possible before I try to assess its meaning. I accept something is meaningful simply because it is observed. Other meanings arise later.

I work to find ways to bring this more and more into my life, this initial gesture away from pattern and story toward the richness of experience itself. I want a balance between recognition and the thrill and terror in noticing the world around me.

So here’s, in part, what I’ll remember about Goodbye to Language: the light in the fall leaves as I drove into Southern Virginia, the crisp air and the coffee at an outside café near the theatre, the silly 3D glasses wrapped in plastic, a sense of space and depth widening before me as the film progressed, two hands on a chain link fence in the foreground as a woman watched in the background, a dog by a river in a shifting landscape of color as if I were suddenly seeing somehow deeper into nature, the tone of a voice struggling to find the right words, the silence of the car on the drive back.

This euphoria and confusion is indistinguishable from the film. And it’s important to me to initially reject as little as possible, to allow the experience to manifest in fullness, to be as aware as possible. Later I separate the impressions, later I can tease the brilliant colors of the leaves from my feelings at the precise moment the fingers curled into the chain link fence. Later, a certain discernment or discrimination.

Observation doesn’t just have to do with film or writing. Observation, then, becomes inseparable from life, an essential way of living. Essential, because no moment of our lives ever comes again.

-Steve Mitchell

The Positive Role of Despair

The Positive Role of Despair

I had just finished writing a letter yesterday to a friend who wasn't sure whether her new idea was born of desperation or inspiration, when I received an email from another friend in despair, sure that he'd never get his novel published.
 
When clients walk into a session declaring "I can't do it," "I'll never understand," and other variations of frustration, I've learned that will be the session in which they will have a breakthrough. A workshop participant spent half an hour last month telling me all the reasons why he couldn't possibly share his writing with anyone else. Two sessions later he did read his work and thanked the other participants for what he recognized as a transformation.
 
Despair may be a necessary step in creation. Any new idea, any new piece of writing, any new song, is based on past experience, old assumptions, old techniques. Partway through the process we find ourselves somewhere else, somewhere we had not intended to go. Instead of the landscape we saw ahead of us when we began the project, we find ourselves in a swamp, not knowing which tuft of grass will support us, where we should take the next step.
 
Arriving at the "I can't" or "I don't know" place is a signal that we're going in the right direction. We have already created something new. And we ourselves are not the same writers or singers or entrepreneurs who began the project. Despair arises when we try to force the project - and ourselves - into the old parameters with which we began. 

-Carol Roan

Manifesto and Magic

 WRITING AND THE LONG CON 2

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”   Herman Melville

Toward the end of the interview quoted in the previous article, David Mamet invokes magic as resembling a Con. The distinction is important. No one past the age of eight believes magic is real, that the beautiful Vanda has really been sawed in half; we enter the realm of the magic aware of this. The realm of the magic is a space created by both the magician and the audience, a space in which they choose to believe together. Rather than the simple exchange of the Short Con and the more complex manipulations of the Long Con, magic is a Consensual Con.

Magic is based in accepted untruth. The magician supplies the tricks, the moments in which the audience can believe in the lie, the audience supplies their attention and acceptance, though this attention may be split between the excitement of the show and the wonder at how it's done. The Consensual Con requires a tacit agreement between all parties and places the audience on more or less equal footing, not as passive observers but as participants, each bringing their own qualities to the performance. The audience ‘performs’ by projecting a part of themselves into the show, by imagining what they cannot see.

Our mission, as writers, is to draw our reader into the work while leaving enough room that they might imagine themselves into it. We want to draw the reader into our lie then convince them it's not a lie, at least until the moment just after the piece has ended. As I said in the earlier piece, a reader may be engaged by the author's vulnerability, the 'confidence' the author gives to the reader by way of initiating the relationship.

Commitment is another quality that engages the reader. How committed am I to exploring the world and the characters I've created, how much of myself, in some form or another, informs the text. A total commitment in the face of risk engages us: think of the magician bound and suspended as the tank rapidly fills with water. The commitment and risk are obvious; they draw us in even as we may be horrified.

Yet I, as the writer, can't commit to what I haven't considered; I can't really commit until I understand what's at risk. And something must be at risk. My vulnerabilities are essential to connecting to the reader.

Writing is a way of identifying and exploring what my fears and vulnerabilities are, as well as my joys. I might feel these are self-evident even to myself but, if I go deeper I'm always surprised. Writing helps sort my false vulnerabilities from the true. And these vulnerabilities aren't only what I see as my weaknesses, but my questions too, the things that haunt and confuse me.

Writing is an exploration of personal vulnerability, whether experiential (that is,  whether I’m writing about something that happened to me or someone near me) or technical (that is, my insecurities about the writing itself, whether I feel I’m good enough, or can accomplish the task I’ve set), or both.

A recurring step in the process of writing can be a manifesto. A manifesto is a proud declaration of vulnerability; it is a tool of self-exploration and self discovery. It embraces our weaknesses, beginning as it does with questions: what do I want to explore and how. What are the parts of me I'm putting into play, how much am I at risk? A manifesto is the ticket and not the map. And, it's not an artist statement.

Artist Statements were imported from the business world, from the Mission Statement which came into vogue years ago and remains the consultants’ favorite prod. Artist Statements are about selling, usually coming across as answers to a number of Frequently Asked Questions, except with longer words, obscurantist language, and a touch of personal trauma.

A manifesto, on the other hand, arises from a different, older era in which art, in and of itself, was seen as being as vital and necessary as air or water. A manifesto is about staking out my own ground, declaring at the top of my lungs what I want to believe, what I want to achieve: what it is I want to manifest. Every manifesto is personal and inherently dramatic. It’s Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the church door or Jimi Hendrix setting fire to his guitar. In its best iteration, a manifesto pushes me toward the boundaries of what I think I know.

There's a Mullah Nasrudin story related by Idries Shah:

A neighbor of the Mullah notices him in the street on his hands and knees beneath the streetlight. He leaves his house to check on the Mullah, who's combing the dust and bushes in the glow of the light.

            "Mullah, what are you doing?" he asks.

            "I'm searching for my key."

The neighbor, being a decent sort, gets down on his hands and knees to help the Mullah. They search for over an hour, until both are covered in dust, their arms scratched by the shrubs.

            Finally, the neighbor asks the Mullah, "Are you sure this is where you lost it?"

            "Oh, I lost it down the road a way," the Mullah replies, "but the light is better here.”

I would naturally prefer to search where there is more light but that is not usually where my work leads me.. Usually it takes me to the very edge of what I think I know.

I find what I can commit to in the doing. One of the things I'm interested in exploring in my writing is our ideas and experiences of intimacy: how we find it, how we recognize it, how we back away. This wasn't a place I started but a place I came to in the writing. One of my overarching themes.

I don't feel I have any special insight in this area. I don’t know any more about it than anyone else. It wasn’t something I chose, rather it was something I found myself drawn to. Given a choice, I could have found a place with more light to look for my key.

But I can only truly commit to something I honestly and deeply believe. With the Short Con and the Long Cone, I operate from a level of more or less complex falsehoods which require my skill at ‘selling’ the lie; the level to which I can sell is the level to which I am successful.

In The Consensual Con, I ask readers to enter a space with me, a realm defined by curiousity, commitment, and a sense of discovery. Generally, that reader can only be engaged and vulnerable to the degree I am.

One of my longest-standing manifestos is this: I want to make something beautiful that works. There are days when I have absolutely no idea what that means and others when it is simple, clear and deep, and it’s all I need.

Truth and Lying

Carol's Response to Steve's Previous Post

Some artists purposefully avoid analyzing the creative process that works for them. They’re afraid that they may change or destroy the process by thinking about it.

Some artists develop superstitions about what works and what doesn’t. If they ate poached chicken before a successful performance, then they will eat poached chicken before every performance. The riders attached to their contracts may specify what color of M&M’s will be provided, what material the eating utensils will be made of, and on and on for 10 pages.

Other artists attempt an analysis of the creative process without the self-analysis that is also necessary. Their conclusions become as irrelevant as green M&M’s. 

Mamet falls into the last category. I’m one of the relatively few people who have seen a production of “The Woods.” None of his statements about that play bear any resemblance to what I saw on stage. (Full disclosure: I left after the first act.) I was enrolled in a playwriting seminar based on Mamet’s tenets, with Glengarry Glen Ross the required text. Not only was the teacher unable to explain Mamet’s philosophy, but she didn’t use it in her own work. I later attended an acting workshop that used Mamet’s methods, but found them unusable in the classes I taught. And again, she didn’t apply those methods to her own work.

Without any trustworthy experience of Mamet, why would I trust such statements as  “everybody’s fascinated with cons” or that a con is “like magic?” Any fascination with cons ends when we become the “poor schmuck” who falls for one. Then we blame ourselves for being  idiots and become suspicious of anyone or any approach that has a whiff of “conness” attached.

The question that Steve raises, however, is about truth in writing. And, by extension, in all art. 

I’m going to separate here the business of art from the creation of art. If one is writing to formula, that’s business and may be, in some instances, a con. If one’s intent, however, is to create a meaningful experience, both for the writer - or the painter, the dancer, the singer - and for his or her audience, that effort involves a search for truth.

The apparent “vulnerability” of the next boy band is an imitation of what worked for the last boy band. But real vulnerability involves risk. And it is that willingness to risk that an audience recognizes and applauds.

Is manipulation of character and dialogue, plot and structure lying to our readers? 

I jot down funny or poignant exchanges I hear in the supermarket. When I read off those words to someone else, I act out what I heard and saw, imitate the voices, wave my arms, for the listener. When I try to share that experience with a reader, the exact, “true” words will fall flat without the accompanying body language and inflection. For a reader to laugh or sigh over that incident, I have to change the words. Have I lied? Or am I manipulating the words in order to convey the truth?  

-Carol Roan  

Short and Long Con

WRITING AND THE LONG CON  1

Everything I know about the Long Con I learned from David Mamet. He’s always been fascinated with the Con, both short and long, in his plays (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross) and his films (House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner). As a short, general description, here’s Mamet in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine in the spring 1998 issue:

“The Spanish Prisoner con is still being done today. It’s a fairly long con and involves getting a substantial amount of money off a person and putting the person ‘on the send.’ Making a connection with the guy and sending him off to get some money and come back. That’s the long con. Of course, I’ve seen a lot of the short con. In New York, a short con takes place on a street corner – someone’s trying to sell you a stolen watch or a set of stamps or get you to lend you money to X, Y or Z. I think everybody’s fascinated with cons. There’s something fascinating about people not being who they are, and our capacity to use our intelligence to try to anticipate where they’re going, and then failing and being tricked. That’s like magic. Most people like magic.”

Our usual experience of the Short Con is being approached on a street corner and asked for money. Some of these are desultory (‘Hey man, got a quarter?’) and some are more complex and personal, involving long stories about sick mothers faraway and the need for a bus ticket to get back home. For most of us, the Long Con is only something we’ve heard about: the poor schmuck who gets an email from a Nigerian prince and sends him $1000, believing ten million will be deposited in his bank account the next day. These are Long Cons because they involve multiple interactions and complex instructions.

The essence of any Con, as explained in Mamet’s House of Games, is that the con artist reveals his vulnerability first, he gives ‘the mark’ his confidence. The guy who needs the bus ticket, the Nigerian prince, they have a problem, they are in need; they draw us in, if at all, both by being vulnerable and by giving us something in return. In the case of a bus ticket, it’s simply the chance to feel good about ourselves because we’ve helped someone; with the Nigerian prince, a complex relationship is established and we believe we’ll get something for nothing.

The other essential element of a Con is relationship. Regardless of whether the connection is objectively true or false, there must be a sense of it between the con artist and the mark, and this relationship is initiated by the con artist in the form of vulnerability or ‘confidence’.

All writing is a con. As writers we manipulate a confidence we’ve chosen, whether real or imagined, in an attempt to engage the reader. Often, we as writers feel this as a vulnerability, a fragment of ourselves we are revealing; nearly as often we’re not aware of exactly what we are revealing.

At the center of every story is a confidence: the characters, the plot, the subtext, we are trying to sell to the reader in order to entice them.  What we want from this exchange first is attention, the reader’s attention to the piece, then response (be it conversation, accolades, or cash).

Either way, what we are doing is lying to the reader. But lying in a way we believe will engage them. We may even hope our lies approach a different level of truth, in the same way that a series of negative numbers multiplied together creates a positive number.

By deciding on a structure, by limiting the number of characters, by narrowing the focus here and expanding it there, by choosing some details over others, we are not interested in the truth in any usual sense of the word. We are working to create the truest lies we can imagine.

The least involving Short Cons are only interested in effect and result. The guy who asks ‘Hey man, got a quarter?’ doesn’t really care to have any kind of relationship, he’s not even interested in human interaction. He’s only interested in his quarter.

The most involving Short Cons are composed of more or less elaborate stories that, at the very least, allow the con artist and the mark to interact on a human level, regardless of whether the story is true or not. It is already a more complex relationship. In the best Short Cons, you can’t see the lie, you can’t know whether the mother really is dying of lung cancer and the bus really does cost $35. These details are important, by the way. Every detail of the Con is crafted for maximum effect. Too few and it doesn’t seem real. Too many and you lose the mark in statistics.

A single piece---a short story, essay, poem---is a Short Con. A brief interaction in which that balance of detail and the lack of it is tantamount. The single piece can be based on a simple confidence, a single vulnerability. A book---a novel or collection---is a Long Con, revealing a series of confidences or vulnerabilities as the reader leaves and returns, leaves and returns. The Long Con of a book is about the relationship between the artist and the mark.

Because the Long Con is what we’re aiming for as writers, we want our mark coming back; we’re not happy with a single interaction. We want our con to be compelling enough that, even if the mark wanders off, they’ll circle back around our way again.

If this arrangement is going to work at all, we must imagine our reader, our mark, before we meet them; or, at the very least, believe that they are out there somewhere and we will find them. We use our own vulnerabilities in this process, whether they are false or true, incidental or committed. Those vulnerabilities may be simple and technical (Am I good enough?) or they might be deeper and more personal, as when we consciously explore elements of ourselves (which all our writing does in one fashion or another).

We use these Short Cons to build toward the Longest Con, the Big Score shall we say, which is our personal body of work. This is the true Long Con for the writer, the con requiring vision, vigilance, and courage.

We are the ones guiding this Con. Where are we, as the artist, going, and what do we want from it? It might be something we only ever need articulate for ourselves, but we must articulate it.

-Steve Mitchell

Stories

We are constantly telling ourselves stories. That’s what consciousness is. That’s who we are. Storytelling beings, made up of the stories we tell.

The material from which we create our stories, and our selves, originates outside the body from sensory stimuli. We’re bombarded by our senses every second, sorting out at a physical or subconscious level those most necessary to our survival and bringing those to consciousness. That some of our stories never reach the conscious level doesn’t mean that our subconscious or our bodies are not telling, often acting upon, their own stories.

I am not, at this moment, conscious of the pressure of my hips on the chair seat or of my feet on the floor, the weight of my coffee cup, or the taste of the coffee. Nor of the sounds of the refrigerator or the air conditioner. I do, however, notice when something unexpectedly crosses my line of vision. My body tenses a bit. Oh, just a fly. My body relaxes because it has had enough experience with house flies to know that they’re not a threat. I didn’t have to think through, make a decision about that process.    

Ordinarily a fly would not become part of my storytelling, but having brought it to consciousness by writing about it, I am now involved in memories of a particular fly family, black flies. Memories of the job that required in-depth research of black flies for a real-estate venture. Memories of my boss, who he was during the five years I worked for him as his personal assistant.

One of my tasks was to protect him from the media. No photos, no interviews. But I’ve recently seen a photo of him at a gala with a new wife. I’ve seen an interview that mentions an affair with a celebrity, political alignments that I wouldn’t have thought possible. I’ve had to re-cast and re-interpret memories in order to understand how he became a man I don’t recognize. And I’ve had to retell myself the story of five years of my own life, who I was then and who I am now.

We all tell ourselves stories so that we can bring some sense of order and meaning into the randomness of life. New stimuli require new stories as we continue to create ourselves.

-Carol Roan

Writing What We Find and Steal

A writer's job is to watch, to see. We are voyeurs. We steal from others, from who they are. We steal from ourselves. We are hungry and ruthless, never satisfied, always wanting more. Always searching for another way in which someone might reveal themselves to us without knowing it.

We are promiscuous. Everything has a possible use, from the greatest tragedies to the most intimate moments. We enter every experience as a writer searching for material.

It is a writers job to remember. Not the color of the sky or the way she wore her hair, but the full import of the event. Its heart, its most tender passage. It is our job to live within the moment we create. Everything we might steal from others we also lay bare within ourselves.

It is part of the job to extend our own suffering, not to suppress it but to allow it to flower into full bloom so that it might be seen and fully experienced. Not just the suffering we are comfortable with (because we are all comfortable with some suffering), but the sorrows we avoid or run from. It is our job to allow those terrors to become completely real.

We trade in the ecstasies of living, of seeing every feature possible; we steal the joy of others but also their misery. We steal who they are but we give them a name.

We are the witnesses to every act we can imagine. The witnesses to our own joys and transgressions and the ways in which we move those through the world. We are the witnesses of Now. Right Now. Now.

I want a literature in which people are trying to find their own worlds, trying to enter them, develop a faith in them. In which people are trying to find other people whose world resonates or coincides with their own in such a way that something can happen between them. I want a literature of search, of faith, of terror and beauty; one in which people may succeed or fail but they are reaching out toward something.

I want a literature of small events which linger. A literature in which something glanced on the street by chance may be more important than years in a person's life. In which two or three words, or a glance, or a touch, takes on more prominence than a career or a degree. In which relationships may be inexplicable but true nonetheless; in which we may constantly tell ourselves we don't know what we are doing, yet we are doing nonetheless; in which an element of love does not just bring pleasantness and comfort but the actual material we need to shape who we are; in which true understanding is hardly ever spoken but is known nonetheless.

It is the writer's job to listen. In restaurants, on the street, in the grocery store. To everyone, to each distinct voice and its cadence, its memory, its life.

It is our job to observe, free from judgment, free from meaning. To see only what is there and nothing else.

It is our job to notice the tenderness of a mother bending to her child, a lover's hand upon a knee, a spontaneous laugh.

It is our job not to know, to suspend knowing, in the service of observation. It is our job not to know even what we are doing.

We use the world in every terror and jubilation. We feel things, think things, which don't belong to us. We devote ourselves to condensing all of human experience through the ages down to just one thing: this page.

It is our job to see. To listen. To remember. To celebrate and to mourn.

To quieten ourselves, slowly, patiently, cycling down into a single still point within which our experience might speak.

            
 Then, to sit before the page, as white as a open field of fresh snow, and mark out a path.

-Steve Mitchell