What I'm thinking about: Something I've used at every job I've ever had

When I worked at the bank, my job was not taxing because it required an incredible intellect straining itself against titanic problems. It was not taxing because it took sixty hours a week. It was not taxing because it wore down my body.

No, my job was difficult because it required near superhuman levels of emotional suppression.

This suppression is something that many people are incapable or unwilling to exhibit. As such, they are cut off from what I believe to be the vast majority of job opportunities in corporate customer service positions. My ability to be yelled at, wrongly blamed, cried to (etc) while still acting the way that is most profitable for my employer is largely what I got paid for and what I will be paid for in the future. And I'm willing to wager it is at least part of what you've been paid for as well.

Weekly Writing Extravaganza! Spetacular!

I wrote almost every day. I submitted a poem to adbusters. Immediately realized that nobody cares about poetry.

Sample of Something I Wrote this Week:

"The hole was a glorious thing. The shell went straight through thin kevlar of the armor around the joint, taking the kevlar and the bone and the meat and pushing it all out the back. The leg was held together more by the remaining black weave then anything else. Still moving when the bullet hit, the creature tumbled forward, cracking its face on the unforgiving asphalt and tumbling closer to me.

The thing began to get back to its feet. I wasted no time. Better prepared for the recoil now, I put a round through each of its eyes. Or close enough to make two holes in the skull. Bloody, ragged voids stared at me where eyes should have been. By my estimation I had taken out about thirty percent of the cancer's brain... but it kept talking."

What I'm Thinking About: Ritual

I have been thinking about rituals, and what they're used for.

I think I should frame this with a reference to my own faith, and how I view some things as far as my religion goes. So here's my story.

I was raised very protestant. And like all good protestants, I was raised with a certain degree of antipathy for Catholicism. The issues protestants take with catholic are many, far too many to list in this blog post, but the one that is pertinent for this post is protestants sometimes accuse Catholics as being idolaters.

In Christianity, idolitry is a big deal. Namely, two commandments (depending on who you ask) deal with this subject:
1. You shall have no other gods before Me.
2. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments (Exodus 20:2-7).

As such, protestants think things like the rosary, or pictures of the saints or other objects that help Catholics pray are potential idols. They argue that the person isn't worshiping God, they're worshiping the image of St. Peter, or St. Jude or any of the thousand other ritual aids that Catholics employ.

All was well and good in my head. But as I've gotten older, I've begun to work after these things...

In my butchered understanding of Heidegger (about as unchristian a viewpoint as possible), the philosopher argues that art is a work that creates a separate space for a human/thinking being to exist. For instance, a great painting is a work of art because looking at it will take you out of your ordinary world, will transport you somewhere else.

In the same way, all the things that Catholics employ that piss of Protestents so much: shrines, rosaries, cathedrals you name it can perhaps be understood not as idols (ie things that are themselves worshiped, and thus sinful) but instead as the seeds and aids to get someone's head and heart and soul somewhere else. God does prohibit idols but later gives rather explicit instructions to build an arc of the covenant (followed by a temple) which were themselves holy things that helped symbolize and dedicate a space, a people for a unique religious purpose.

So if rosary beads are idols, was the arc?

Stepping away from the big concept of religion, I find that ritual effects so many aspects of my behavior. I work at work because that is where I work. It might be recursive and irrational, but it's human. Dedicated spaces, warmups and ritual habits help prep out brains for whatever we have to do. In writing, I have heard it said (and I have observed it in myself) that you brain does not tell your fingers to type (trying that is called writers block) but rather setting aside a certain time every day and typing tells your brain that it is time to get going with the whole writing bit.

This is all a little frustrating. I want to be able to do whatever I need to do whenever I have time to do and not be so dependent on external cues to get me working. But I guess what needs to change is that I have to alter how I understand myself. I am not a discrete, pristine entity that extends only as far as the fine hair on my knuckles. I am instead a being of a place, which is to say that my environment effects where our head is at (duh). The only reason I point this out is because so often I try to muscle through getting my head someplace with disastrous results. A far better option is to consecrate a place, a sound, a sight for a specific purpose so that the cue will get me where I need to be.

That's what I mean by ritual. The deliberate action, change, routine, performance that changes my environment so that a changed environment changes me.

Place matters. Habits matter. Ritual matters. By working out and modifying the rituals of our own life we can actually do the things we want to do. Just like Catholic rituals potentially help Catholics in getting their heads focused on God. Which is possibly one of the hardest places to get the Dasein.

The only other thing I have to say about ritual is that while we have dedicated spaces (offices, bathtubs etc) dedicated sights and sounds and even textures (the nubby texture of my netbook is strongly associated with writing in my mind, and as such I tend to write more when I feel the keys under my fingers) we underuse smell in creating ritualized behvaior. This is odd, because smell is so strongly evocative. I assume it is because unlike our auditory (headphones) and our visual (computer monitor) senses, smell is not something we easily control.

WEEKLY WRITING UPDATE!

Much to my suprise, having a vacation week was not good for writing.

I think I still wrote every day, barely. But I had dreams of entire novellas completed in my vaction time, but I probably ended up writing less. A routine is a terrible thing to lose.

A sample of what I wrote this week:

"The dots were spread about the city: blue for free Agents, yellow for incapacitatied agents (there was one right near us for the body of agent Claire). Red indicated where firefights were going, the darker the shade of red the more intense the fighting. I looked around the field, found a couple of blotches of red so dark they were nearly black.

“Got our target, bout half a mile that way.”

I realized that I was hearing gunshots, lots of stuttering pops from all around. They were faint, and they had been easy to block out (of course, the ringing of my ears born of the shooting in the storm drains and the missile strike half an hour ago certainly weren’t helping my auditory senses). I realized the full scope of our mission that night, the scale of the cancer we were fighting against.

I went through the biofeedback rituals to calm my fear."

Writing Log

Not much to report. I wrote CHEMO every day. When I felt like it, I tinkered on "Life like Chainmail" which is a new project directly related to my old proposed 'Orientation Manual for Life and Death in the Twenty First Century." Confirmed that the actor group is going to read my play "Leave a Man Behind." Still working on developing a stable of five submission ready stories.

Sample of something I Wrote this week:

"We began to jog again, down the deserted sidewalks in early morning drizzle. I could see faces peering out of windows, dialing away on phones. We really needed to rap up with mission soon, or all the 'understandings' in the world wouldn't keep the mayor from calling the national guard in."

Creativity as Symbolic Dislexia

I have a persistent idea.  

That creativity is, or at least starts with, a joyful symbolic dislexia.

Each and everyday we swim in a sea of symbol.  We're told stories beginning the moment we can understand them.  It is through the recombination of these symbolic messages that we can create something new.   When we are children, developing our imagination, we seem to just recast ourselves in our favorite stories of others, or make half baked new creatures of of ideas and symbols half digested.

I don't think we ever stop creating that way, we just get better at refining and processing the output of our childhood exhuberance.  

So I think that creativity is symblic dislexia with a good filter while madness is symbolic dislexia with no filter. 

I think I will expand more on this later.

This Week in Writing...

This week I wrote CHEMO everyday, and not much else.

Important realization of the week: I need more salable stories. I have one, maybe two. Before the end of December, I want to have at least five stories ready to be sold. After that I want to try and keep at least ten on hand, circulating and ready to go.

Sample of something I wrote this week (something other then CHEMO for once):

"His name is Kermit, which is apt because he looks like a muppet. He has a head like a great pink dome, and everywhere he is flecked with the brown spots of age. What hair there is to fuzz about his head is cropped short to contrast with thick tufts of white chest fur. When he talks, he talks with the babble of the saints, of the prophets. Which is to say that he talks like a madman."