Toward Pretensionism 4

Now, something has to be said about my appreciation for the Lichtenstein piece. I was able to enjoy it because despite the origins of my artistic impulses, in my pursuit of craft I have developed an understanding of and appreciation for more formal values in the arts.

Composition, color, technique -- these all have meaning for me. Before I studied art, they influenced my reactions to particular works, but that influence was on a subconscious level. Initially, my interest was in image and narrative content.

And these elements are still central to my appreciation of the visual arts. But now I'm able to enjoy art on another level. Which brings me back to one of my difficulties with fine art -- it the problem with me, or is it with the piece? Is it possible to reach the point where you can in good conscience reject a work on any other basis than, "It didn't do much for me?"

Here's the rub. In works in any media where content is important, I feel a lot more comfortable passing that kind of judgment. 'Was the content effectively conveyed?' is a question I can usually answer with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

But in an arena where formal values are paramount? I can have an opinion -- but I can't pass judgment. And this leaves me feeling uncomfortable.

So. On to the artworks that brought me to the gallery.

The two exhibits of Asian photography caught my interest, involved me -- but now that a few days have gone by, the only pieces that have stayed with me were a number of works dealing with landscapes as abstract images. I can still call them to mind, still recall the emotional state they evoked. In particular there was a series of photographs of the sun on the ocean that evoked a distinctly nocturnal atmosphere. They were beautiful dreams, and I won't forget them.

But the Richard Avedon show... that was something different. As I said, I was in an emotionally distraught state, and I found many of his works to be shattering. There was a wall of small, fairly conventional portraits that did little for me, and many familiar images, such as Nureyev's foot, seemed clever but trivial after the works that most affected me.

These were the large-scale portraits. In photograph after photograph, one was left with the sense of direct contact with the subject of the portraits. Every physical detail of the people portrayed was mercilessly, almost surgically, laid bare. I was reminded of scientific illustration where the absolute specificity of the subject was the only goal of the image. This was heightened by the consistent use of spotless white backgrounds. Every wrinkle, every blemish, every line generated by habitual facial expressions and every bit of physical damage endured by the subjects was there to be seen, inspected, measured. Everything that could be seen was seen in microscopic detail, in black-and-white, with a clarity impossible in live observation.

These were images of the human animal, wounded, wary, vicious, and unconquered.

The subjects returned the gaze of the viewer -- or the photographer -- with no more mercy than had been shown to them. These were images of successful people, people who had achieved, and they seemed haunted. I have no way of knowing how much of this came from the subjects, how much from Avedon, how much from me, but my emotional response was that these were people who had been shattered by trauma and yet refused to die, survivors of a prison camp or a battlefield. I read the names, the professions -- and it grew on me that the horrific environment that had stripped these people of joy and left them hardened against its unrelenting power was the world of privilege of which I am fearful and jealous. Or, more simply, the world.

Then in a smaller area off of the main exhibit, I found two portraits that nearly brought me to tears in a public space.

Not to go into it too deeply, but some of the most important influences on my writing came out of the social group known as the Algonquin Round Table. When I used the word 'shattering' to describe the emotional state this exhibit induced, I was referring specifically to the portraits of Dorothy Parker and Oscar Levant.

Humor has always been my first line of defense. And both Parker and Levant are best known for their humorous remarks, their one-liners, and in both cases their humor is known for its cutting qualities. These portraits showed their subjects without that armor. The results were heartbreaking, horrifying, appalling.

Dorothy Parker has always struck me as a failed talent. She produced some excellent light verse, a few first-class short stories, and a large body of entertaining critical writing. None of these have struck me as a true fruition of her potential abilities. Like many of my other favorite writers (I use the term 'favorite' as contrasted with 'most respected.'), her story is one of great gifts compromised by lack of discipline, self-indulgence and self-pity, bad habits, and most distressingly, lack of vision.

Ms. Parker's portrait broke my heart. Her self-imposed isolation had left its mark on her features. The set of her mouth, her eyes -- a lifetime of unrelieved bitterness and the kind of misanthropy generated by disappointment in oneself had branded her. It was an unfair portrait. To deny her the consolation of wit was genuinely cruel. This was not a portrait of Dorothy Parker; it was a portrait of her shadow, of a woman stripped of her saving graces.

This cruelty was nothing next to that shown to Oscar Levant. Unlike the other portraits in the exhibit, this one was blurred by motion. Blown up to twice life-size, mouth open, lunging forward with his remaining teeth on display, I was -- and this is my cruelty -- irresistibly reminded of an elephant in agony, bellowing in pain and rage. The image was monstrous, almost inhuman. It was a dying thing, the human animal in defeat, the other side of the first photographs in the exhibit. To associate that image with the gentleman whose witty comments I'd been reading my whole life was a reminder of the inevitability of death and decay, that there is nothing we can ever do to distance ourselves from the traumatic corruption of the body.

After this, I'd had enough Avedon. I was not in a state to re-inspect the works I'd seen once. It was time to move on.

Toward Pretensionism 3

Or How I Learned To Start Worrying When I Stopped Hating Roy Lichtenstein

On Tuesday I had an experience that will have long-term effects on the way I feel about the fine arts. My digital photography class had a field trip to a showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I was in, shall we say, an emotionally vulnerable state. I was feeling weak and helpless, and the idea of entering into a temple of privilege was not something that held a lot of appeal for me at that moment. I wandered around the city for half an hour before meeting the rest of the group, and came very close to just going home.

As someone who began to study art with the intention of learning how to illustrate comic books, I've always had conflicted feelings about the world of fine art and just about all of those feelings have been negative. I've felt threatened, overwhelmed, judged, intimidated, mistrustful, and scornful of much fine art, or rather, of the social and academic structures surrounding the actual works.

These feelings are best understood in a context of class. I am a member of the working class, what Tom Wolfe would refer to as a stone prole. While many participants in the fine arts have similar backgrounds, the context of the fine arts is relentlessly upper class.

I've already used the term 'temple of privilege.' What I mean by this is... well, think about what a museum or a high-end gallery looks like, what it feels like to be in that space. Vast, airy, quiet, well-lit, impeccably painted and maintained, guarded -- these spaces are temples. One has a sense of reverence generated and enforced by architecture. And this context is specifically the product of wealth. I don't feel comfortable in these spaces. I feel excluded, unwanted, and inadequate. I also feel angry, envious, and resentful.Smaller galleries and public art spaces attempt to mimic this effect with less and less effectiveness as the budget in question shrinks.

When thinking in terms of the allocation of public funds, it's difficult to imagine an aware member of the working classes choosing to support these spaces over education, public transportation, and all of the other obvious inadequately supported elements of our lives. Frankly, it would do more good for the arts to have larger numbers of smaller institutions similar to the art labs of dole-era Britain, where people would be given the opportunity to create rather than observe. One of the great harms mass culture has inflicted on the human species is the transformation of creativity from activity to product, and art spaces such as the MOMA reinforce the distinction between artist and audience.

Art for the working class consists of reproductions. This predates our current notions of fine and academic art by hundreds of years. The nobility and clergy looked at paintings; the peasants looked at woodcuts. This is still the common experience. My introduction to the arts came through comic books, magazines, and illustrated fiction, and these are my primary models. The fact that so much of my work is digital stems from this -- digital art is inherently reproduced art.

Art for commercial purposes, art for reproduction -- these are, like it or not, regarded as more trivial than what we call the fine arts. And much of the time, these works are trivial. The serious work done in these forms is typically first recognized outside of the culture that generates them -- look at the French appreciation of American comics, or European appreciation of Japanese brocade prints. Inside their home culture, those who produce these works are not given the respect afforded to fine artists. And when they are? The sign that they have arrived is that they have a show in a major gallery or museum. Art intended for reproduction is thought of as second-rate. And my intention to work in the arena which is most natural to me has always left me feeling as though I am a second-rater, regardless of how well, how seriously I work.

When my involvement in art led me to study the works of what are referred to as the great artists, I did not have the opportunity to study their works. I studied reproductions of their works. The words of my teachers and my few experiences of museums and galleries made it plain to me that there is very little in common between the experiences of seeing a work reproduced in miniature and seeing it in person. So much of the information in a hand-crafted work of art is eliminated or changed in the process of reproduction that it's difficult to see more than a rough resemblance between the two modes. While it is possible to learn much from a reproduction, the true emotional impact of a work derives from its physical presence.

What this visit to the MOMA really taught me was how much of that experience is dependent on the physical attributes of an art space as well as the work itself. How the grammar of the space informs the dialog between the work and its audience.

As someone with both janitorial and building experience, it's impossible for me to enter a museum without an awareness of the effort and finances involved in its construction and maintenance. The two thoughts this provoked in me were first, that the physical skills involved in keeping the marble, the glass, the chrome and brushed aluminum shining and free of fingerprints, the installation of the drywall, the mudding and taping and painting of the walls and ceilings -- these skills are actually very similar and in some cases identical to the physical skills involved in the execution of a work of art.

The second thought was that the mood, the tone inherent in a museum is found in two other types of public space -- banks and churches. In all these cases, it is a sense of reverence that is inculcated in the individual, and part of this reverence is unavoidably directed toward the privilege that allows these spaces to be constructed.

The feeling that one is undergoing a spiritual experience is not-very-subtly heightened in the MOMA by the use of black marble in the entrance. It's a large room with a high ceiling, but the reflective black walls and floor combine with the dim lighting to make a space that I found both oppressive and visually confusing. I felt a sense of relief when I climbed the stairs and emerged into a space defined by comfortable light and unobtrusively warm colors. An open, pleasant space. This application of discomfort followed by ease is a classic element of an initiation process, and it worked on me.

The first work I noticed was a huge canvas, maybe seven or eight feet tall and nearly twice as wide. It was executed in bright, heavily saturated colors and made use of line and large dots used to mimic the Benday dots of reproduction. I liked it. I stared at it for a while. I looked at the impeccable precision with which the paint had been applied to the canvas -- this showed at least as much skill as had been applied to polishing the marble downstairs. More, in fact. The composition was pleasing. The emotional tone of it was practically non-existent and that was fine. The bland confidence of the piece pleased me.

And when I finally went to look at the plaque and see who had done it, I was muttering (mentally -- I was in a bad mood, not a psychotic one) "Don't be Roy Lichtenstein, don't be Roy Lichtenstein."

It was Roy Lichtenstein.

I've always had a nemesis relationship with Lichtenstein's work. His appropriation of compositions from comic books seemed to be shallow, contemptuous, and artsy in the worst sense of the word. I've even done a large scale print that satirized those paintings, and in researching his oeuvre in preparation for that piece, I found myself actually growing angry at his treatment of commercial and popular culture.

But when I was face to face with one of his works, my reaction was one I had feared for years. I liked it. I respected it. And I no longer felt comfortable with my scorn.

Of course this disturbed me. One of my most important emotional defenses against the oppression I felt from the world of the fine arts has been the feeling, vague at first, that a lot of that stuff was fraudulent.

At first I felt as though that feeling was reflective of ignorance, of an inferior capacity to appreciate art. But when I read an article in Art World magazine about a company that repaired conceptual art, I felt confirmed in my belief.

There were two pieces in particular that left me feeling comfortable with dismissing them without seeing them. One was a pile of Sweet & Low packets that the artist had dumped from a carton onto the floor. A visitor to the gallery had kicked it. The Sweet & Low packets were gathered and meticulously rearranged to duplicate photographs that had been taken of the original installation. And there were doubts expressed about the validity of the piece post-repair. After all, they hadn't been able to duplicate its internal structure!

Hoo-boy.

The other piece was an eighty-pound wad of butter that a sculptor in the Netherlands had jammed into the corner of his studio, up at the ceiling. (Shall we discuss willful eccentricity? Not knowing the artist in question, we shall refrain.) A Spanish collector walks comes to visit, sees the butter wad, and says, "I must have it." Said wad is transferred to a room in Barcelona. Where -- believe it or not, art fans -- it melts.

In the course of reproducing this work, the company in question found that different countries produced butter that melted at different temperatures. In order to properly duplicate the original, they needed to use Dutch butter. And the room it was displayed in had to be refrigerated.

You can understand how the word fraud seemed applicable.

But the sight of the Lichtenstein drove home a thought that had been lurking in in the back of my mind throughout my involvement with the arts.

What if I'd seen the pile of Sweet & Low packets or the butter wad in their intended context? What if I'd liked them?

Was I going to have to abandon the concept of fraud in the fine arts?

(To Be Continued!)

Toward Pretensionism 2

A color scheme for Halloween...

Okay, let's start off with something easy. This will draw from the following questions.

How is an artist to find his feet in a culture that is becoming all cultures, where it seems as if everything has been done before and done better?

How is one to process the tsunami of possible influences, goals, and directions now available?

Are traditional modes of art still valid?

Are Modernism, Post-Modernism, and other such movements still valid?

I've run across the statement in more than one place that traditional art forms are over. They're done. They're played out. Because they've been around for so long that everything that can possibly be said in them, has been said.

In my opinion -- and you shouldn't take my opinion too seriously -- it that this statement is hogwash. Balderdash. It's the monkey's bathwater. Bullshit. Utter nonsense. Without any value whatsoever. You with me so far?

Here's why.

First off, here's a hypothesis of mine. When a particular form of behavior shows up repeatedly throughout human cultures, throughout the span of time, throughout the world, it might not be a bad idea to see if there's something about it which essential to human nature. A view common in Post-Modernist thought is that everything is essentially cultural. To ignore our fundamentally biological nature, to assume that the human mind is not a function of the human body, is reflective of a retrograde mindset, a profound ignorance which is difficult to respect.

The picture, the story, the song -- these all answer human needs which are physically built into us. It is possible to consciously reject these forms, but to do so is to isolate oneself from the mainstream of humanity in a way which can be unhealthy. And I've noticed that frequently creators or critics who are relentlessly avant-garde in one arena will be surprisingly retrograde in another -- or will have personal tastes that are strongly at odds with their own work.

The song, the picture, and the story satisfy us -- and for most people, they prefer to have art that is reflective of their times and their experiences. I like to expose myself to a wide variety of cultural influences, but as a creator I am dedicated to working with the material provided to me by my life, my times, my experience of the world.

The story, the song, and the picture are vital, living means of communication that spring from deep roots -- they are intimate reflections of the physical nature of our minds. To disavow them is to render oneself unable to speak truth.

We are living in a period strikingly different from any other in human history. We are experiencing things no one has experienced before. The amount of information and the rapidity of change we live with are increasing on a daily basis.

No one has created works about the current human experience until now. And the old forms are old because they work for us. To constantly seek radically new methods is a dead end -- and one that is specific to our culture.

To seek the new is an essential artistic impulse, but it's one that has been short-circuited. To flee commercialism, to flee tradition, to flee the predictable, the comprehensible -- try as you may, your attempts to do these things will be co-opted before you can blink your fucking eye. We've developed an art culture capable of commodifying quite literally anything you can create. How much is Picabia's canned shit worth these days? Transgression for its own sake is over.

But just because something is a creative dead end, that doesn't mean it lacks value. All experiments teach us something -- and an open-minded creator can gain much from the study of flawed or limited works.

I may speak poorly of Post-Modernism. There really is no clear and functional definition of the term, and there is a lot of nonsense associated with it -- but I have learned a few things from it. There are times when a work of art may be more enriching when regarded as a social construct as well as an entity in itself, for instance. It's now a truism that works outside of the traditional Euro-centric canon of older academia are worthy of examination. Let's not throw the monkey out with the bathwater.

(That said, there are a lot of dead white male Europeans who fucking rocked, and who have legitimately earned their position in world culture.)

Most importantly, Post-Modernism recognizes that the world is changing, that our attitudes and beliefs shape our perceptions of reality in ways that we can only escape through radical experience or dedicated self-criticism.

As creators, most of us are adrift. Our cultures are shifting, untrustworthy things. As an American, I come from a nation that's younger than the bars in which many people drink -- and the popular culture of my country has infiltrated virtually every other nation on Earth.

The current interpenetration of cultural influences can act against the sense of personal identity which enables an artist to work with confidence and power -- it goes hand in hand with the feeling that everything's already been said and done.

But to say that one should or should not make use of the techniques and approaches of previous artists is foolish. All artists exist in a continuity of influences. They may act in reaction to those influences or they may embrace them, but no artist has ever sprung fully blown out of a cultural vacuum.

Right now we have more different kinds of art readily available to us than at any other time. To reject any of them on the basis of being tired or worn-out is absurd. "Can I use this? Does this speak to me? Does this tell me the truth and can it help me tell the truth?" These are the questions we need to ask, not, "Is this overdone? What's the next thing?"

Rather than feeling overwhelmed by what has gone before, we need to embrace it, examine it, and find our individual ancestors. Speaking for myself? The musicians of Mali are my ancestors. The printmakers of Japan are my ancestors. The pulp writers of early Twentieth-century America are my ancestors.

I have many ancestors, and the more I look at the history of the arts, the more ancestors I find. The history of art is not a burden to me; it reaches out to give me the tools I need to speak my truths.

We are unique. We are in a new world, and when we wake up tomorrow morning we will be in another new world.

We have lost tradition, or retain it as a pose. Transgression has become a tool of commodification. The search for novelty has become shallow and reflexive.

What do we have left?

Truth. The human constants. Our lives as we live them.

These are enough, because they have to be enough.

Rather than feel overwhelmed by the works of the past, by the vast history of human creativity, we should take pride in them. And we should be willing to go to the effort of creating works that will be part of that history, so that those who follow us can benefit from our lives long after they've ended.

Should the species live long enough, our time will be studied.

Do you want the art of our time to be regarded as the trivial creations of a confused and troubled people?

Or do you want to have our time and ourselves reflected in works worthy of their place in the history of the arts?

I want the latter. And I work hard with the desire to participate in the arts as an equal to those who have gone before me and who will go after me.

That is what makes me a Pretensionist.

Toward Pretensionism 1

Observation. Creation. Pretension.

So I'm going to break one of my rules today. Since I got back from Viable Paradise, I've worked on the novel first thing every morning. But yesterday I finished my current batch of line edits, and right now the missus is in bed sick. She finally fell asleep after a night spent wrestling with some respiratory illness -- lots of hacking, snorting, and snottery of diverse sorts. I've got a manuscript downstairs I want to get off to the Windblown Coalition today, but I don't want to turn on the light and risk disturbing her.

And I've been up since three, thinking about pretensionism. (Also trying to drive the songs Oh, Mickey and Twilight Zone from my mind. Hatin' the eighties right now...)

Long-time readers know that I've been wrestling for some time with my sense of identity as an artist. The events of the last year, year and a half have changed my attitudes toward myself and my work radically. My communications with Glendon Mellow and more recently Catherine Schaff-Stump have crystallized my thoughts, and now I feel as if I have a basis for explaining things to myself.

I always say that I don't know what something looks like until I draw it, and that I don't know what I think about something until I write about it. I've been fixating on this issue recently, and I've realized that it's time to write an artistic manifesto. I may well repudiate it at a later date, but I am on the verge of being able to explain my intent -- and let's face it, us insecure loudmouths love our manifestos. And I've always wanted to be part of an artistic movement. Now that I'm engaged in a number of artistic communities, I'm thinking the time has come. And if no-one else is gonna make a big-ass pretentious gesture, it may as well be me.

So for the next while I'll be blogging as a means of exploring my thoughts, making them more concrete. Afterward I'll organize my ideas into a real manifesto, but for now I'm engaged in a process of exploration.

Why Pretensionism?

Let's face it, labels are fun. They're also useful. To name something is to claim it -- and literally, that's what pretension is. It's the act of claiming something. Pretensionism is, in one sense, my personal claim to the status of artist. It's my hope that it may allow others to feel more comfortable in making that same claim.

It's also a reactionary statement. For the last while, I've referred to myself as pretentious. That's because I've thought of myself as a fine artist, as a literary writer, and I've become willing to make that statement in public. And I've had a few people tell me, "Man, you've got balls to say that about yourself." Others have acknowledged some pretension on their part.

That's because in my culture -- which is a big component of the burgeoning monoculture -- to call someone pretentious is to insult them. It's interpreted as a claim to a station which you haven't really achieved. From below, you look like a snob. From above, you're gauche.

But pretension isn't about making a false claim. It is (hit the dictionary) about making a claim, true or false. You can be pretentious and right at the same time. Or, as Dizzy Dean said, "It ain't braggin' if you can back it up." Yeah, the name Pretensionism is a reactionary statement -- but if the culture pushes you, if you're marginalized, fucking push back.

If you want to claim you're a Pretensionist? Then you're in the club.

So Where the Hell is this Going?

The Pretensionist Manifesto is going to concern itself with the issues relating to a sense of artistic identity, including but not limited to:

What makes a person an artist?

How do we cope with the schism between high and low art?

What is the role of the marketplace?

How is an artist to find his feet in a culture that is becoming all cultures, where it seems as if everything has been done before and done better?

How is one to process the tsunami of possible influences, goals, and directions now available?

Are traditional modes of art still valid?

Are Modernism, Post-Modernism, and other such movements still valid?

What is the role of appropriation in the arts?

Of what real value is art, both personal and public?

Can the act of artistic creation be regarded as a legitimate form of labor?

How can one function in a system that is clearly unstable, a world that is unmistakeably on the path to disaster?

How does one reconcile personal and public art?

What are worthy artistic aspirations? Worthy artistic values?

These questions are inherently subjective. They will not produce answers. They will provoke opinion. And my opinions will be oriented toward providing me with a basis to work well.

Yeah, I'm talking about producing a philosophy of art, when my knowledge of art history and theory is far from complete. But this is not really art theory. It's the product of a working artist, intended to support and encourage both myself and other artists.

It comes from inside an experience growing out of a post-post modernist world, a digital world, a world where the boundaries separating times and cultures are being shattered, rebuilt, stirred, and confused on a moment by moment basis. We are living through a phase change, a singularity. The monoculture is emerging and the apocalypse is threatening. This is my attempt to engage them both forthrightly, without blind optimism or reflexive pessimism. To find a way to work productively and effectively in a world whose future is unimaginable.

Of course that's pretentious. I am, after all, a Pretensionist.

About the Novel

Here's the cover I've used for print copies over the last few years. Maybe it's time to do a new one, one that uses grown-up design instead of this punk stuff.

Before I left for Viable Paradise, I printed up a copy of the novel and had it spiral-bound. I started doing line edits on the flight to Boston; this morning I finished them. I still have to incorporate quite literally thousands of pages of crits from my writer's groups, and The Homework Club has just passed the halfway mark in the manuscript, but the bulk of the work is now done; I'll be able to start revising this week.

This got me thinking about the novel, and the impact it's had on my life. I never intended for it to be this big. My original idea was simple; I wanted to tell an M.R. James-style story about a haunted garage band. This was in 2004.

The story got out of hand. The first version was the longest piece of fiction I'd written at that point. The criticism I got from the original cast of the Monday night group was that the naturalistic scenes were good and the supernatural scenes were good, but they didn't seem to belong in the same story.

At that point I was strongly focused on short fiction. I was at the start of the learning curve, and I needed to be able to experiment. So I set the story aside as a failure, and went on to do other things.

But I kept going back and pecking at it. It was the first fiction I'd written in 'my' voice, the voice I speak with. (The voice of this blog, actually...) When I picked a setting for the initial story, I used the Santa Cruz of my late teens and early twenties, and used myself as the narrator. As I said, I kept pecking at it from time to time, inserting more and more autobiographical details.

After a couple of years it was apparent that I was working on a novel. It became the focus of my creative life without any conscious decision on my part. I had to do it; it was a compulsion.

I've written about this before, but for those who missed out on those hysterical self-pitying posts, I've got fairly serious psychiatric issues. During the years I spent in Santa Cruz, I was suicidal. I was also hallucinating. If I were to literally write about my experiences, it would be like a more depressing version of Communion, and Whitley Strieber's already written that one.

That's something that a lot of people have a hard time with. I've seen Strieber called a liar in print more than once. While I do not believe in the physical existence of visitors from another planet, I can assure you that people do have these kinds of experiences. When you experience a break from reality, its form is shaped by your culture. Other people would have seen Jesus or spies or a dead relative.

These experiences are not without value; the trick is to accept them in a way that allows you to continue to interact with conventional reality. (Which, like Gibson's cyberspace, is a consensual hallucination in its own right.) Because I've had these kinds of experiences, in order to write literally about my life I'm obligated to include elements of the fantastic in my work.

Anyway, at a certain point I realized that the novel was a conversation with three participants. One was myself, the writer. I was addressing myself-the-young-nutbar, telling him to hold on. Telling him he was of value. Telling him that things would get better.

I was also addressing -- shall we call it the feminine principal or should we be honest and say 'every girl in the world?' I was saying, yeah, I'm a man. I'm a big, hairy, trash-talking dangerous stinking animal. Please, tell me there's room for me in world fit for you.

It wasn't until I went through my epiphany at Viable Paradise that I realized the core story I was telling. A wounded man is healed through his determination to be worthy of love.

Writing that sentence brought tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat. That's not just the story of the novel. That's the story of my life. What I hadn't expected was that the novel itself would be an agent of healing.

Part of this has occurred through the act of writing itself; I've come to understand myself in a way that would not have been otherwise possible. I've come to realize that I'm much more of an intuitive person than an intellectual one, for instance. By regarding the protagonist of the novel with sympathy, I was able to begin the process of having sympathy for myself -- and without that grounding, my recent transformation would not have been possible.

Beyond that, it's changed my relationship with the missus immeasurably. After my back went out on me, she'd begun to regard me poorly. She hates it when I'm weak, and my inability to find a place in the world due to my disability led her to a certain attitude of contempt. It wasn't that she was going to dump me, but she was permanently impatient with me. To be blunt, she had no respect for me as a man. Which, naturally, went hand-in-hand with my contempt for the masculine, and my loathing of it in myself. We weren't in a downhill spiral, there was a lot of good in our relationship, but it was deeply flawed.

But a couple of years ago, she started reading the manuscript on impulse. She couldn't stop. And when she got to the end her reaction was to be furious that she didn't have the whole story. (I treasure the image of her shaking the manuscript at me and saying, "Look at these pages! They're double-spaced! There's hardly any words here!")

After that, her whole attitude toward me changed. She saw something in me not just worthy of love, but worthy of admiration. She saw value in the work I did, and in my dedication to my chosen art. (She still wishes I'd focus entirely on writing, but I think she's coming to understand that it's just part of the creative stew and that I need to do everything I do.) As a result, our relationship has grown, deepened, and strengthened. And again, her changed attitude helped make it possible for me to grow.

So now I have a new hope for the novel, one that goes beyond being readable or salable. I hope that some of the healing that the book is about, that the book has given to Karen and myself, carries through. That in some way it can be an agent for positive change in others. That it can make life better for someone else.

Part of me feels like an idiot for feeling that way. But the rest of me is working hard to try and make that hope come true. Every comma, every word, every tiny detail is there to bring that sense of hope, of growth, of healing and love to the reader.

Plus, there's a knife-fight with a two-headed dead guy.

Apatosaurus Louisae 10

There we go. Now the background has a little something going on, and it sets the figure off properly. That's it. This time I'm really done.

I swear.

Apatosaurus louisae 9

Okay, I lied. I needed to fiddle with it some more -- the background was simultaneously oversaturated and boring. It failed to support the figure. But now I'm done. Really. I swear.

Now I'll go take a shower, and wait to play bass.