Accepting Rejection/Rejecting Acceptance

When I read the Martian Chronicles, I did it thinking that it is one of the most famous books in the English language, so I better have read it. It was an imperative undertaking rather than an anticipated delight. That attitude lasted half way through the first page, which is so beautifully written that I fell in love with Ray Bradbury right then.

Many people don’t know that aside from his brilliant science fiction works (like The Martian Chronicles and Farenheit 451) Bradbury also wrote a good deal about writing, and I’ve always found his words inspiring. Today I came across a quote from him that made me stop and think. Talking about the creative life, he said,

“You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”

The quote put me in mind of my aesthetic journey as artist and teacher. I was a very unsophisticated art student from a blue collar family. I lacked the understanding needed to determine good work from bad work, or art from saccharin imagery. My instructors had the difficult task of teaching me that while reproducing images resembling greeting card illustrations might win praise from family, such work would prevent me from becoming an artist. I remember some embarrassing moments, but I still consider that to have been one of the most important lessons of my life. Not only could I not seek praise from my family, I had to question anything that elicited praise. If my mother said, “Oh, that’s pretty”, I knew it wasn’t art.

I didn’t stop wanting praise, of course, I just shifted the target audience. Eventually, (and this took a couple of years) when I looked at my work, I could see the influence of certain teachers, and I knew then that the work wasn’t completely mine because at its core was my desire to receive praise. It didn’t matter that the source of that praise was a sophisticated professor, I had to reach a place where I rejected that acceptance, too.

Even today, I see the seesaw effect of outside praise and acceptance in my work and that of my students. Most of us need acknowledgement, but it must come with mutual respect and without coercive ideological or emotional pressure. I love dialog with colleagues whose work, knowledge, and understanding stems from a committed period of personal struggle. I know they’ll be as tough in their evaluation of my work, as they are in theirs. I belong to a crit group where everyone’s work is different. One person creates work with cut paper elements, one is a figurative artist, one focuses on landscapes in watercolors, and another is a sculptor working in clay. Our dialog is rooted in knowledge, experience, and mutual respect. We ask important questions and make unique observations.

If I submit work to a gallery, and it is rejected, I’m stuck in the first half of Bradbury’s statement: accepting rejection. I always hope to learn something from rejection, but frankly, it’s been most valuable to know that years of accumulated rejections have proved my undying commitment to the work. Reading Bradbury, in fact, I realized that I accept rejection so much that I presume it, and frequently stop myself from submitting work. That assures me that I’m creating truthfully without influence from the saleable marketplace, but, obviously, I’m also protecting myself from more rejection. (Not something I’m proud of.)

Creative people are tightrope walkers, constantly fighting to stay in balance, living in the real world, and true to ourselves. I’d love to hear how Bradbury’s quote resonated in your life.

           *My painting above is titled:     "Whisper"     24" x 24" Acrylic on Canvas © 2005

On Being Interviewed

Unity minister, Maggie Oman Shannon has an interesting radio show that airs at 4 p.m. (Pacific) each Wednesday.  (Go to Unity.fm for a whole schedule of interesting programming). On March 18th you can hear my interview with Maggie.
    The preparation for an interview is pretty interesting. Some part of me felt that I should reread something or do some kind of homework. I listened to Maggie's other interviews, and even answered for myself some of the questions she asked the other guest. I went to my copy of Freeing the Creative Spirit, knowing she'd ask something about it. Going through the pages, I realized how well I still knew that material and the layout of the subjects covered. I was glad to see that I still felt good about something I'd written in the 1990's.
    Putting away all the other research possibilities, I came to realize that I am the subject, and I've been researching me my entire life. Creativity and the pursuit of an artful life is no longer a separate topic. I realized that habit in me to prepare, and at least in this case, living my life was all the homework I needed to do. That realization gave me a warm sense of integrity, in the sense that everything is integrated. What I do is a dynamic of who I am. Who I am is at the root of the work I do.
     Being interviewed is a very educational thing. I recommend it for everyone.
     I suggest setting up a series of interviews that you do, in a kind of Round Robin, with your friends. Each of you is responsible for your questions, so no one knows exactly what questions will come at you. Be mindful of the whole process. Write down your reflections of how it felt to be the interviewer. What did you learn? How did it feel. Then write your reflections about being interviewed. Were there any surprises?
     Hope you listen to my interview. Even if you miss it on the 18th, it is available on the website.
I'd love to hear responses to the interview and to the Round Robin, or however you design your personal interviews.

A Short Short Story

As this is National Women's Month, and I started Women Write Now! to strengthen the voices of women where I live, it is my pleasure to post here a short short story by Ms. Kaye Williams, a member of my writing circle.

Dapper Cat

by Kaye Williams
(c) 2015

      James’ first job in Chicago was as a maintenance man for the housing authority, he was assigned to a building on West Lake Street, an apartment for him and Naomi, his wife, came with the position. They were both gamblers, James liked dominos and Naomi preferred black jack.  Soon after moving in, they began inviting their neighbors over for gambling parties.

     People started showing up to their small, cluttered and dusty apartment after work on Fridays.  Most everyone was from Mississippi, they all talked and laughed loudly, mostly about an ole mule and the girl or the guy they left behind when they jumped on the train bound for Chicago.  They also spoke regularly about the house they grew up in, where they heard gospel songs hummed throughout the day and at night they listened to the tunes of bluesmen such as Muddy Waters. Both sounds found their way to Chicago, it was the Mississippi blues that was always playing at James and Naomi’s casino parties.

     Among the regulars were Doris and Lindsey.  Doris, a beauty queen in her own right, had the looks to be a cover girl on a widely circulated fashion magazine.  Her shoulder length light brown hair was always freshly pressed and tightly curled. Her clothes flattered her, she wore see through blouses with a lace slip and bra clearly visible underneath, and a nice dark skirt, all ways worn much shorter than a church going woman.  She carried herself as though she was available, even asking for it, which is why she showed up at James and Naomi’s.  Lindsey, James’ nephew, always brought the same girl with him. They crammed into the high back chair in the corner, allowing the casino activity to go on without them.

     One Friday night, a tall, thin, dapper “cat” strolled in, capturing everyone’s attention instantly.  An obvious silence came quickly upon the apartment, as Chester, made his way through the small crowd of new friends.  Wearing a fedora, tipped to the right, he stood still once he reached the table.

     James took control of the game, ordered his friend, Eddie, up from the table and motioned for Chester to sit down.  Chester placed his hat on the table before taking the seat.  The regulars knew the scheme as James dealt from a deck that he kept in a drawer next to the table.  The pace picked up, the normal chatter resumed.  Chester recognized that everyone was suspicious of him, his palms started to sweat.  He abruptly asked for a quick bathroom break.  This was an old trick, James along with everyone else at the table had pulled this one before.  They all pulled their guns and followed Chester.   Chester grabbed the bathroom door, opening it, took two steps in and in a single motion, raised the window and jumped.

     The game was over, James claimed the hat as his own, and they all spent the next several hours laughing, to the break of day!

Last year I announced the start of my project called Women Write Now! and brought a powerful force into my life. That force is the power of the word. I have talked before about my fascination with the phenomenon of language, and how I have focused visual art to explore the unnameable role that language plays in our existence. With the beginning of WWN! words and language moved to an even more central role in my life.

The title of this painting is "Breath", the most essential aspect of the spoken word. The painting is part of a series I created in the 1990's to begin my exploration of language as a human phenomenon. I recognized that the experience of growing up speaking and listening to two languages played an important role in my experience of language and my intuitive relationship to it. English is not my definition of language, and my paintings were not about the experience of speaking English. The paintings are about the experience of being an animal who is linguistic. The experience of speaking more than one language allows me to feel my brain go into "language mode". We hear a sound, we mimic that sound, and soon we have a collection of sounds that are mutually understood, and we create a culture that the sounds are a part of, they are even the tool for defining our culture, and forming it into a life pattern. Eventually then, we have ethnicity, regionalism, flags, countries, and laws. All of that based on the fact that we have a common language. Of course, we now live in a time when languages spill across borders, swim across oceans, and fly into the remotest corners of the planet. So we have translation, and the influence (for better or worse) of one culture over others.

Women Write Now! has given me new relationships with people and with writing and with the whole process of communication through written words. So when a friend recently posted a quotation from the American essayist Dinty Moore, it grabbed me into a big bear hug. And here it is for others to enjoy:

"If you want to be a writer, you have to love to write, love revision, love shaping sentences. You have to adore words and the endless possibilities of words in combination. You have to know in your heart that even if no one ever read a word of what you have written, you would still do it, for yourself, because the process, the practice, is thrilling and inescapable." 

As the paintings from the nineties illustrate, I've been approaching words for some time. I have been feeling them in my bones, oozing their physicality out my fingers. I've been a writer all my life, but now I am part of the Word Tribe. Yes, we are a tribe that roams the world, that speaks in many tongues, that listens with antennae, and speaks even when silent. 

Last weekend I went to Codex, the book fair at the Richmond marina. That's when I realized that I was part of a tribe. Those books were not published a thousand copies at a time. No, they were, in some cases, hand sewn, hand painted, drawn, imprinted. In the air, every language could be heard, and yet, it felt like a single language was spoken.  It felt like home.

Giving Thanks for Robin Williams

            Last night the Mark Twain Award program was aired on PBS. This year it was given to Jay Leno. It always bothered me that it was never awarded to Robin Williams who, in my mind, was one of the funniest and wittiest people of his generation. He was a humorist, an actor, a stand-up comedian, and a philanthropist. I didn’t watch the program on PBS, but this morning I came across this blog post that I wrote about a month after Robin’s death, so I decided to post it today, as  little way of saying thank you to his spirit.

            I haven’t written a blog post for a while. Honestly, I didn’t like the things happening in the world, and I found it painful to reflect on them. We have suffered collective loss, and at first I was too close to grief to write anything worth reading. But since Robin Williams’ death, I’ve marveled at the human ability to adjust and adapt.

There’s no doubt that adaptability is one of the great blessings of human evolution, but the next day when I woke up to a world without Robin Williams in it, I didn’t want to adapt. I wished I could stand out in the street and protest, as I did over the Farmworkers Strike, or the abuse of Tibetans by the Chinese. I wanted to have some kind of power to bring him back. But all that was left was adaptability. Sure, I could feel sad, and sad, and sad day after day. But eventually I had to accept, especially in this case, that he chose this absence.

            I went through this to a greater extent when my father died. Not by choice.

            We had stoically nursed him, encouraging him in the smallest gestures: ‘Great, you finished your Jell-o.’ ‘You’ve managed to drink more water today than yesterday, that’s really good.’ But the fact was, though we didn’t want him to be so ill, at least he was with us, and we could love him, and touch him with our love. Then, he wasn’t with us anymore. Grief is a tornado that rips you from your moorings like Dorothy’s house in Kansas, without Oz. It whips you around and shakes you til your teeth hurt. Then it drops you back into your life, and all you can do is ‘adapt’. Get used to it. The world is a different place. Then you have to go back to work. You have to get your car lubed. Pick up the dry cleaning. Christmas saunters in again like a cruel, arrogant creature, red and hurtful as thorny holly. But it doesn’t kill you, and when it’s over you say to yourself, Okay, I can do this. I can keep going.

            The thing with Robin is that he was in a way an avatar of our inner wild child. Most of us tamed our wild child to stay out of the Principal’s office, or to ease up on the spankings (past generation). But Robin managed to feed that genie inside him, the creative genius who he managed to control at times, and sometimes not. And we loved him because he pulled us into his imagination and his lightning fast improvisations. When we watched him or were near him, we lived in that magic land inside of him, the type of place we tamed ourselves away from. It is right that he came to us as Mork, because he really did come from a place few people have ever visited, the world of uncensored, raw creativity. And now there’s no one to take us there, not the way Robin did. Watching him was like a hold-onto-your-seat roller coaster ride of the mind.

            I can’t imagine the loss felt by his family and friends. I mean, if the man was loved by millions of people around the world, people who didn’t even know him personally, how deeply must his family and friends have loved him? We can’t measure these things. No reason for measurement. But love endures, and the whole world will love Robin Williams far into the future. New generations will love him the way we love Charlie Chaplin. These are people who transcend their own lifetime. They live on in the laughter that meant so much to them, more to them than tears.