How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none … And no one has a right to say that no water babies exist till they have seen no water babies existing, which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water babies.

Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby

Ten years ago, a woman walked into my life. Today we celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary.

She is my muse, my partner, my friend, my inspiration. I’d rather be in the world with her than anywhere else.

Before I met her, I believed in Love, but couldn’t believe what Love turned out to be. That’s a danger that comes with being facile with words: you can describe what you see, so you believe what you say.

I’ve found that true Love leaves you speechless, gives you the strength to look at the world with clear sight and quiets the restless uncertainty of the soul. I can’t tell which is more profound…the experience of loving T. or being loved by her.

We got married on the beach. The day unfolded shrouded in mist, welcomed a brilliant summer sun, and ended under the speckled starlight by a bonfire with tom-tom drums pounding and our bodies melting together in their primal rhythm. Today they are fused more deeply. When I close my eyes, it is her heart that I hear beating.

Happy anniversary, baby.

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Love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There’s a purpose to this great thing that the Internet has spawned beyond the creation of commerce engines, marketing campaigns and wealth beyond our wildest imagination.

The world has become too large, genius too widely distributed, stories too important and creativity too vital for the traditional gatekeepers — publishers, editors, producers, curators — to do the job of finding, shaping and presenting Art.

Into the breach step unknowns, driven by passion, personal aesthetic and generosity.

Chris Al-Aswad was one of those souls.

Now he’s dead.

I woke up early this morning, while the night dark still cloaked the yard and every soul in the house was sleeping. In the kitchen, I checked Twitter. @escapeintolife had died.

It’s a strange thing to register the death of a person who exists wholly as a live, vibrant concept, whose voice you never heard, face you never saw, skin you never felt. I was saddened.

You can learn about Al-Aswad. Start at Escape Into Life. It is one of the most distinctive creative sites I’ve encountered on the web. The spirit is of discovery and inclusion, exactly the way that life of the creative soul should be approached. Al-Aswad was the founder and driving force behind it.

Escape into Life hosts over 1000 contemporary artist profiles, and is also an online arts journal with contributions from nearly 25 different writers. Many of our contributors—ranging from well-known published authors, university professors, and freelance journalists—continue to publish art reviews and art history essays month after month.

The sadness I feel is a testament to the mark that Al-Aswad made in the world in his short life. I mourn the passing of a pure aesthetic and a generous soul. I wish his family strength during this time.

But I’m also reminded that the end of Al-Aswad’s life comes at the beginning of a great revolution for creativity, and that one distinctive legacy he leaves behind is the power that comes from approaching this world of freedom and discovery with responsibility and dignity.

God rest his soul.

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The 1920′s are characterized as a decade of prosperity. Though initially economic in nature, this prosperity diffused into all other arenas of American life. It was the age of the flapper, of speakeasies, and of trivial spending. It was an era that threatened the image of the Victorian woman – - timid, conservative and polite in character — and an era that toyed with social taboos. The Media popularization of Freud’s ideas unraveled the social hush on matters of a sexual nature and made sex appeal a staple fixture of the advertisement industry.

We all think our era explores new frontiers of debauchery, but it’s just our own silly ignorance at work.  Think about it:  close to 100 years ago, American culture brought sex out of the shadows and made it an emblem of proud exploration.  The sociological reasons are complex, and theories ever changing, but the implications for experience are no more profound than they are today.  Look good, feel good, have fun!

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We drove from Granite Springs to Stamford in the middle of the night. You were born in the midst of drama and fanfare. I held you in the hospital room, fell in love with you and have loved you ever since. I had to go home to walk McDougal. I drove back in the middle of a summer rain shower. The Pulsar broke down on Long Ridge Road. I walked up to a house with all the shades drawn. A mossy little woman came to the door. She refused to let me use her phone. I went next door. A cab picked me up and brought me to the hospital. I didn’t have enough money to afford the cab, or a rental, but I didn’t care. My little girl was in the world. And you’ve been in it ever since, making me happy and proud and engaged. I love you.

Your dad

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I want to assure you with all earnestness that no writing is a waste of time — no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding. I know that. Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make a cent from it, I would still keep on writing.

If You Want To Write, Barbara Euland

I have just started a new workbook. I use a large, soft-covered Moleskine notebook with unlined pages as a place to record ideas, research, sketches and other marginalia that make up the things I do as a writer. The notebook was the inspiration for this blog, in fact. I thought that it would be interesting to share some of the things that I encountered and created while working on different projects.

When I begin a new notebook, I sit down at my old typewriter and type out excerpts from Barbara Euland’s book about writing. The one at the top of this post is the first I type and maybe the most evocative for me.

When I am done typing the excerpts, I re-type the last paragraph of Joyce’s The Dead. Then I take a scissor, cut the pages to the size of the notebook and paste them in with a glue stick.

As I type, the old keys clicking and clacking, I get happy. I feel centered and purposeful. The joy is childish. Euland’s words are my permission, my affirmation, my launching point.

Joyce’s paragraph is a reminder about what can take your breath away. Music lives in words. The images, the connotations, the memories, the associations all build together to bring you to a moment of clarity, an understanding of what life is about.

These are my two starting points: joyful exuberance that comes with being given permission to play and breathless desire to move someone else that way that Joyce’s story moved me.

Those two points capture the purpose of my workbook. Part of what I need is a place to keep track of ideas. But I also need the workbook to remind me what I am reaching for when I write, the simultaneous experience of comfort and exertion, the ever-deepening understanding of what Life is.

If you have ever thought about writing, or desire to be confident and excited about creating new things, you should read Euland’s book. It’s been a great friend to me.

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I must have dozed for a few minutes.  A dream rushed by the threshold of my consciousness, making a gentle noise.  Death was in the dream.  He drove a black Cadillac loaded with flowers.  When I woke up, the cigarette was starting to burn my fingers.  A thin man in a gray flannel shirt was standing over me with a doubtful look on his face.

He was big-nosed and small-chinned, and he wasn’t as young as he gave the impression of being.  His teeth were bad, the sandy hair was thinning and receding.  He was the typical old youth who scrounged and wheedled his living around motor courts and restaurants and hotels, and hung on desperately to the frayed edge of other people’s lives.

“What do you want?” he said.  ”Who are you?  What do you wnat?”  His voice was reedy and changeable like an adolescent’s.

“A room.”

“Is that all you want?”

From where I sat, it sounded like an accusation.  I let it pass.  ”What else is there?  Circassian dancing girls?  Free popcorn?”

He tried to smile without showing bis bad teeth.  The smile was a dismal failure, like my joke.  ”I”m sorry, sir,” he said.  ” You woke me up.  I never make much sense right after I just wake up.”

“Have a nightmare?”

His vauge eyes expanded like blue bubblegum bubbles. “Why did you ask me that?”

The Imaginary Blonde, Ross MacDonald

The small-chinned man did have a nightmare, a living nightmare, that becomes clear as we move through the story. We are in the hands of a confident, playful writer. MacDonald wrote for pulp magazines, the hard-boiled mystery compilations printed on cheap paper and decorated with lurid covers, a form of mid-century mass entertainment. He told stories of crime, misfortune and corruption in southern California, seen through the eyes of tough, fair-minded men who were exceptional only in their comfort with the multitude of grey shades that people live in. When I read MacDonald, I’m inspired by his choices, the things he leaves out and the things that he puts in. Form isn’t a constraint for him; it’s an inspiration.

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A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

Orhan Pamuk, excerpted from his Nobel acceptance speech

I have struggled to keep building with these words that are stones my entire life.

The struggle has been filled with doubt, uncertainty and judgment. These have been the elements of a cancer that chokes off my ability to write.

When I can bring myself to go off alone, I find great satisfaction and I feel like I am doing good work. What is that good work? I can share the things I see in a way that makes sense to others, that shows something new. And, I can make sense for myself of the world around me.

But I struggle with the fear of taking chances. I can tell when the fear is gaining the upper hand. I start writing in circles, the language becomes more abstract and flowery, and I lose the pace of discovering things.

I get anxious then, because I worry that the fear will win and take the writing away from me again.

I don’t want that.

It wouldn’t matter to anyone but me. There’s no imperative that I write, no destiny that I need to fulfill. I have a good and full life, filled with unimaginable gifts of love. But I would let myself down if I couldn’t write. I would walk away from who I am at my very core.

It is an odd thing to know that your truest essence will make no enduring mark on the world. But that is not a reason to deny your truest essence. I have learned that, if nothing else, and when the fear rises I try to push back and hold on to the habit of writing that I have worked hard to win.

I read Pamuk’s speech with tremendous recognition and appreciation. I feel the same pride and uncertainty. I know what it is like to hear other writers’ voices in your work. I know what it means to question whether you’ll ever do good work, but to feel compelled to continue, to finish what you started, to bring the world to life, regardless of the doubts and struggle. I’ve experienced the evocations of a father’s private world to a son’s imagination.

But I am not Pamuk, no pale shadow of his genius. I am Pamuk’s father. I am a person who writes, this blog is my satchel, and my hope is his father’s wry smile.

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As dusk falls, the lights on the rides illuminate and silence seeps into the day. The waves are low. The moon sits high in the sky, aloof but comfortable. The night gains momentum on the boardwalk.

You sit on the beach and plunge your hands deep in the sand. The surface is cool. Just below, the sand is still warm from the mid-day sun.

The photo is taken with an iPhone 4 from the boardwalk in Ocean City, MD.

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Theo, in the living room, evening light, soft time, muted gold, an eye wash of sunlight and inner life, the big photo album balanced gently on his knees. Blonde hair across his face, hiding the curiosity in his eye, matching gazes with the young woman in the picture, head crowned in braids, skin fair and translucent, sepia wash across her, face gentle, eyes wise and open.

“Grandma was so beautiful, mom,” Theo whispered.

“She was very beautiful,” Mariah said.

“It’s not fair that she suffered so much,” Theo said. “No one should be locked away like that.”

“She couldn’t take care of herself, baby. She was going to hurt herself and they needed to watch her all the time.”

Mariah leaned in against her little boy, felt the uplifting music of his thoughts vibrate through his frame.

“Is that when you went to live with Aunt Catherine?” Theo asked.

“Around then,” Mariah said.

“When will we see Aunt Catherine?” Theo asked.

“Sometime soon, baby. Sometime soon. ”

They fell silent, mother and son. The light soothed Mariah, gave her a gentle thread to tug and pull, to draw into and discover. There were new things there beyond her sight, discoveries, uncertainties that coaxed her.

“I wouldn’t let anyone take you, Mom. I’d hold you tight and make you better. I’d put all my love into you and get everything bad out. “

This is excerpted from a short story that I just finished the draft of. Please read it if you are interested and leave any feedback or suggestions that you have. The story is meant to be very impressionistic, and I’m not comfortable at this point that this draft works.

The full text is below.

Mariah Drove to Canada — DRAFT

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1857 lithograph by Armand Gautier, showing personifications of dementia, megalomania, acute mania, melancholia, idiocy, hallucination, erotic mania and paralysis in the gardens of the Hospice de la Salpêtrière.

In an attempt to catalog madness, the artist has created a zoo exhibit for lunacy.

They are curious objects, these women who have lost their mind with such intensity that they have to be locked up behind thick, high walls.

We look at this illustration with detachment, as an historical oddity. But once it was a diagnostic tool: a young medical student with an interest in the illness of the mind would study this lithograph and, on the basis of a woman’s appearance, coupled with her behavior, determine what mental illness she suffered and what treatment she should get.

A woman would pay a profound cost for being declared mad.

Today’s diagnostic devices are not much better. The lithograph has been replaced with video of therapeutic sessions, treatments and symptoms. The doctor still works with a check list of questions, trying to triangulate patterns of excitement, absence of control, lassitude and apathy to make a diagnosis that can be managed with pills and talk.

The effort is sincere but superficial. Madness is a mystery.

Don’t think madness doesn’t exist, or that it is a gift from God, a sign of genius, a creative emblem. Madness is pure pain, a deep, impenetrable hole where nothing makes sense.

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