This is Benjamin
Posts Tagged ‘creativity’
The Great Writing Work Day
June 2nd, 2009 | benjamin
Monique and I saw the Alan Berliner documentary Wide Awake at the Istanbul Modern on Sunday. In the film, Berliner struggles to understand the nature of Insomnia, both in general and his own nightly struggles to get to sleep.
What I found most compelling about the documentary was Berliner’s ambivalence to this condition, or lifestyle, in so far as despite the torturous drowsiness during the day, he found he was most productive in the night. In fact, he even seemed to feel that the fact that he spent his nights cutting his films might have given him an artistic edge – not simply because of these few extra hours that amount to years over the course of a lifetime, but because the brain works differently, is stimultaed differently at these hours.
I’m not prepared to give up what I feel is a gift. My body and I cooperate over the amount of sleep I get. If I need to push it a little bit, go without some for a night or so, it plays along, so long as I make up for it later. And becaue I like to get things done, we’ve agreed that seven hours per night, slightly less than ‘ideal’, suits my body’s self restorative designs and my own priority. The best part is, when I decide its time to snooze – bang – I’m asleep, no frustrating tossing and turning.
And yet, if I am to be the successful writer that I think I might some day be, I need an edge. I really need t movoe this thing out of mere fancy and into the realm of passion. At the moment, I can usually manage four hours in a day at best. It got me thinking, what if I could do, eight, or ten, or twelve hours in a day when I decided to? And what would the work be like without all the extraneous considerations by which we mark the day?
So here’s what I’m going to do. Today, I’m shooting for ten hours of work. Ten hours. No excuses, no four hours and then I’m going to the movies. No. Simply ten hours of work.
Let’s review my sustenance kit:
Coffee. I’ll drink one of these every two hours. Its a stimulant and I’m not going to be ashamed of it any more. Not now that I’ve read My Name is Red and divined that one of the writers I admire the most relishes caffeine’s illuminatory charms.
Sesame balls. A nutritious snack that became my guilty pressure during my ten glorious days at the Sivananda Ashram. Also comprised of Jaggery, and sometimes ginger God, we were so pure at that place that eating these things was like taking smack.
Philip Glass. I’ll probably listen to Einstein on the Beach, because it is good, and it is long. I need to listen to classical music, usually twentieth century piano concertos and often symphonies. I find that I write along the contours of the music to places I would not otherwise delve.
So, for the record, I’m going to write like I’ve never written before. I’m going to write fiction until my fingers bleed, and when I can’t write fiction any more, I’ll work on some of my lifestyle articles, and when I can’t do that anymore, I’ll email people to organise interviews, and when I tire of that, I’ll write more fiction, and when I can’t even manage that, I’ll type passages out of the novels that I’m reading, just to prove that it can be done, that time is not my enemy, but my friend.
I’ll keep you updated, it is now:
10:06: Making some coffee, starting work on my novella Dead Flowers. Technically, I’ve been writing already for 20 minutes, if you include this blog which started at 9:45. 9 hours, 40 minutes to go.
10:23: Still haven’t made coffee. Made some minor adjustments to my bio. That counts as writing, right?
10:48: Got the coffee by my side and I’m ready to roll. Fire up Philip Glass.
11:45: Philip Glass doing the trick. Have the urge to call my grandmother who is sick in hospital, but then, we all have to suffer for the sake of art, even those not making the art themselves.
Urge to look at Facebook ignored.
12:45: Two hours of solid fiction. Philip Glass became distracting, switched to Rachmaninoff. Heading out for lunch now.
14:30: Lunch was delicious.
16:30: Spent two hours researching interview subjects for a couple of articles I am writing (ie finding emails etc). Not technically writing, but work nonetheless, and work I normally avoid. Looked at Facebook. ‘Networked’ with some people.
I will now spend following three hours writing fiction.
18:00: I didn’t really get cracking until 17:15, because I spilt coffee down the front of my vest and decided to handwash it and some clothes. But the last 45 minutes were productive.
19:00 Conked out. Consuming beer and KurKure with Monique.
In total, seven hours of work, although probably only three or four hours of solid writing.
Certainly, the role of caffeine cannot be undersold when it comes to my writing. Riding these highs, I delved into short bursts of mania from which I garnered little shards of brilliance.
The greatest obstacle was the Internet, where legitimate research very quickly crossed a grey line into procrastination.
Not a bad start, but do I have an edge?
Notes on a friend lost, lost notes on a friend, notes on a lost friend, a lost friend on notes, a friend lost on notes
December 18th, 2008 | benjamin
Part I: The Encounter
‘You’re here to pity me,’ he says.
The following inferences occur: the maladjusted person is a patient, the patient is sick, the sick is drawn to pity like a fly to cloying treacle. The patient is the fly, overcome, overwhelmed, suffocating, sinking in the noble concern of others.
The patient catches hold of this insight, even as the flux of images and representations engulfs his limbs and regards suspiciously those who come to visit.
I, the friend, say that there is no such thing, as far as I am concerned, that we are Nietzscheans in this regard.
The maladjusted person relaxes.
But in defending myself against this claim of pity, I am only plausible if I have an alternative explanation to our time spent together.
When the adjusted person encounters the maladjusted person there is the perpetual question, overhanging and fluttering like a curtain: ‘Why are you here?’ It is is the question of time spent. It demands an answer.
Someone for whom normal or should I say consensus meaning has broken down is both fascinating and terrifying.
While the connections that this person makes between things, concepts, and senses are not our own, they possess an undeniable logic. This logic reveals our own to be, while surely practicable, also disturbingly provisional.
Meaning and sense becomes a matter of stitching, of finding the peg that fits the hole, the number in the sequence, the missing letter that looms underneath the hanged man.
The same child-like game is played by both the adjusted and the maladjusted, but the latter play with a different set of rules that yield interconnections of an undeniable profundity.
Those of us with insight know that our own logic of meaning, while it allows us to be sane, also facilitates our adjusting to, and complicity with an established social order that in our analytical modes, but not in our everyday existence, we know to be unethical, nonviable, destructive and banal.
Whereas we the sane find ourselves not courageous enough to do so, the maladjusted person with her or his alternative logic of meaning wholly rejects this social world.
At the same time, the logic of the maladjusted person lacks the means through which any social order would be possible at all. Reciprocity is gone, much of the external world is hostile, the very universe itself is malevolent.
For sure, the hypocrisies of our own everyday existence are obliterated by this searing insight, but so too is everything else.
Consciousness becomes an apocalyptic force which does not allow for hope, or a resourcefulness to change the world, for all things in existence are touched by the decay of a malevolent social and psychic order.
This awareness does not permit friendship, mutual concern, or basic reciprocity.
It is here, I think, that we find the beginnings of a plausible answer to the question of time spent between two people at this exceptional moment in their lives.
In place of the ‘visit’, that the pitying do-gooder pays to the ailing patient, I would like to promote the ‘encounter’ between two friends.
With the benefits and shortcomings of both psychic states in mind it becomes possible to see the encounter as one of mutual benefit and ultimately of creative power.
To take but a small example:
The fabric of his pants was of a peculiar jarring contrast that words cannot evoke. My friend was able to express this experience in guttural sound. As such, we shared an experience of the visual that would not otherwise have been possible were it not for his synesthesia.
At other moments, in evoking his beautiful alter ego, and in discussing how her potential has been sadly denied, he showed me, as well as any novel or film, the compromises to banality demanded by the everyday.
And I think that, in return, I brought him back to social reciprocity in some degree. I revealed that not all parts of the world are hostile, that fixations are only attachments to chimera, that the real takes place in the social world of give and take.
It is this give and take that rescues the visit and transforms it into an encounter.
The well-intentioned friend is not there to dispense pity and the insight of sanity, but seeks to learn from the divine poetry of this other person who sees the world differently, while at the same time inviting this person into a world of others.
This other person is no longer psychically sealed from the world of others while being subjected to the authority of its doctors, nurses, police officers, and so on. This maladjusted person subjects their insights to this world of others and in so doing, become a participant in it.
For sure, the encounter can only happen gradually, over time, and always imperfectly. But the thing which draws two friends together is not pity, but that which makes the social world beautiful.
Together, in the encounter, we gather the elements necessary to turn insight into practice – the first delicate charge of revolution – and we are both changed by the experience.
Poetic space (a thought in progress) part 1
October 19th, 2008 | benjamin
Why are some spaces conducive to creativity? I have found a spot, near my home, in the hood of Footscray, which is just such a place. It is a cafe.
The interior is forgettable, it may even be a liability. It is slick and tasteless and way overdone with its metal tables and polished concrete floors, dual LCD televisions both playing their soundtracks at once over the top of background music poorly chosen.
But forget about such spaces.
What really matters is this:
The cafe has a balcony that sits at the rear of the building and overlooks two pairs of railway lines, one of which crosses over the other, the lower descending into a subterranean world strewn with rubbish and graffiti.
In the distance you can make out the walkway that spans across the platforms of Footscray station, and the small figures with their diverse gaits, speeds and intensities to their movements. Further afield you can see another railway line leading to the station and in the far distance, the docklands of Melbourne’s ports with the city skyline spread behind.
It is an unplanned poetry. I think it is the confluence of human destinies and intentions which I find so electrifying. It hints, suggests that at the boundaries of intelligibility lies the dynamism of human life. A dynamism that exists between the lines, so to speak, of the instrumental, functional intentions of the ordered human world.
And yet another cross current, a small park, a reserve with a gazebo across the railway lines and at the top of an embankment covered with rocks shrubs and trees.
Here gathers human detritus with the unofficial sanction of government and police to drink from cans and goon bags, whose laughs carry across the wind, a call high pitched, an answer deep and gnarled.