forty-seven: abandon normal instruments
I've wanted an Oblique Strategies deck since about the moment I heard of them: divination for artists, yeah, but just the very name makes something stir in my head. Something wiry, deliberate, and veiled. Here are the secret tactics! Rah!
And finally: I got one for Christmas this year! (Part of why I held off so long is because they aren't cheap.) Now I can pull Creative Process Tarot at my whim.
But as a stopgap, I've kept the Oblique Strategies bot feed on Mastodon, which pops up at interesting and sometimes opportune times: a bit like a wizard who wanders in, pours another cup of tea, and wanders out of your day again. This month's newsletter title is one of my favourites in its current rotation. It's deliciously Biblical if you just squint it out of focus and read the right way -- the voice of be not afraid. Abandon normal instruments! Yes, Wizard, right away. And as a theme it seems to be holding rather tightly through the first month of the year.
I ended/started the year -- four or five weeks of grey skies at this point, the most fog we've had overwinter in my lifetime -- in a state of somewhat frayed exhaustion: all the NYE options felt a bit too much like mandatory fun, like ritual divorced from actual meaning, and it was pouring besides, so I shut off all the lights, ran a bath, lit candles, put on Nick Cave, wrapped myself in quiet. I spent the minute before 2023 ended writing about buildings fixed like teeth in an island's winter jaw, and the minute 2024 started writing about sly footprints along the sidewalk, and trying to catch the feet. The moon finally came out; the light was alive and steady. I let the year slip quietly from one state to the next.
And the state I have slipped into is drafting. I am cleaning increasingly stickier things that haven't been cleaned in (cough cough ahem)! I am being a total conversational airhead in person! I'm not going to say external crises cannot touch me, but they have to work that much harder to try. I am writing every day! [Peter Capaldi noises] Drafting. [/Capaldi] Brain like a chemical suspension, body like a compulsion, heart full. It feels so messy and all-consuming and good.
So everything in January has been about ditching most everything, drafting, and finding all the things that are stuck and deliberately, firmly unsticking them. Every morning I wake up and run face-first into the grey and the general emotional terrorism online and outside, and then all afternoon I unstick, arrange, write, shimmy my way upward back to the light, understanding something new about Bradbury's overquoted comment about writing so the world cannot destroy you (seriously, someone should have checked what year he said it in and drawn some conclusions about context there). These aren't my most unusual tactics? But they're not ones I've been working lately, and they're pulling a better world out of thin air and my own skin.
care and feeding
As per last month's comments on the all-round caloric requirements of a good written word, I have been serious and dedicated about the nutrition beat: getting in the proper resource requirements to do the work I want to do. I am making this a metric. Let's count what's worth counting.
Words have been fed this month by Barry's Irish Tea with evaporated milk (a winner), actually using some of those candles I own, four full seasons of Doctor Who (I never watched this at the time, and I have thoughts, mostly structural, and surprise at how far the fan narrative is from the actual text) and three of Upstart Crow (funny!), fresh figs on cheap at the secret cheap grocery store, a profusion of climate action seminars, Galerie Au Chocolat Almond and Sea Salt bars, and vicious, persistence-predator housecleaning, the kind you can only manage when you are writing a draft. We have gone so far as to get behind the refrigerator coils and tighten toilet seat bolts that were too loose for my liking.
In the last few days it's slowed to a trickle, for the first time in six (!) weeks. I find myself moving lines and paragraphs into different places more than adding them, which is telling me it's grown to a point where I have enough on the page, and in my head, to think of this in terms of a unified structure: think about flow, think about realistically how all these puzzle pieces arrange into a whole. Both my protagonists have rolled over, sat up, and spoken their own desires to me. They've each yanked the whole thing off its axis by doing something marvelous and unexpected -- in one case, twice. This is good. I've grown the body; now I set its limbs in joint correctly to enable dancing.
(Can you tell? I'm really happy with this. This book is alive in my belly and it feels epiphantic. I am the least interesting person to other people and the most interesting person to me when I'm doing this properly: My brain is like a lit match, there are living voices in my head again, I am emptying words out of myself in long ropes. Flow is glory. <3)
oh no it's discourse (contains no actual discourse)
Elsewhere, outside the walls of the work -- oh boy. (See: the world of emotional terrorism?) Drafting tends to mean bunkering in my cave (also, did I mention it's dark? And cold?) and sadly that means more Internet than is good for me, and it's not been a happy time on the Internet world.
But: I did figure out something legitimate by watching how people are still spinning on various major issues -- COVID, climate, wars plural. My filters these days are quite good at screening out things that, while nonetheless true, are only going to wear down my capacity for good, generative action. But there is still a lot of leakage, digital and physical. There's a balance to walk between filtering out stuff that sucks you dry and just totally disconnecting from the world in scary ways.
The situation with Discourse (tm) seems increasingly to do with stuckness. Someone's worked the problem to the place where, for whatever reason, they can't get farther -- and they stop. Nervous system stages a revolt, the thinking slides off the problem into the frustration (this person did this to me, if only you would, maybe if I use emotional blackmail tactics people will) and all the people willing to participate in this, who have frozen on various points of the process, come in and repeat their personal stasis point over and over, ad infinitum. When people invoke discourse, all they are telling me is where they got stuck. And finding the people who are stuck in the same problem-solving localities. Because the people who have solved the problem, one way or another, good or ill -- they aren't sticking around. They've left for the next situation.
So I had this flash of light about what discourse is: a calcified version of a thought process. It's the inanimate form of a conversation, and since I prefer animate forms of conversation, it's not a favourite. Resentment is such a shitty lens through which to view the world. Not just as in: it is annoying to be around. As in: it occludes. You see less. You know less.
And I am thinking, maybe the question that releases you is: What do you do when you don't know how to solve the problem? Or: I am stuck. What unsticks me? Change your answer to that, and maybe the wheels start moving.
getting unstuck
Along those lines, and partly the spur for that last thought: I watched Union Maids (1976) right at the end of 2023, half as research, half because I was doing a grand sweep of my documentary queue before my Kanopy credits expired for the month. It's a fascinating hour-long narrative documentary covering three women organizers' experiences in the 1930s -- before and within established unions. They are blunt, funny, smart, salty, and overall a thorough good time to listen to.
While I took a handful of screenshot notes, one's lingered: one organizer characterizing the McCarthy Era as "There was an atrophy of creativity then." It's such an evocative phrase, and one that feels...familiar, in terms of how American progressives have seemed to bend around one source of gravity since 2016? Trauma sees in black and white, fear is the opposite of play, etcetera, and -- yeah, when she put it that way, good organizing is absolutely a creative act. You've got to do some lateral thinking to get the job done.
And organizing has been happening this month too, even if off to a slow start post-holiday. I'm taking flyers for the chili project around on my regular errands, and getting them posted in store windows or community boards for places I think likely. I have not had one bad or indifferent response to this. Everyone I ask to host that flyer, and explain that project to, is this strange combination of shocked and awed and thrilled. They are so nice to me after. Never, I think, underestimate the appetite for hearing competent people in your neighbourhood are trying to improve shit in a sustainable way and you can too. Flyering days are emotionally amazing.
This also pairs excellently well with Mandy Brown's short "A unified theory of fucks", which is immensely worth reading. There's some thinking bopping around that's starting to coalesce into -- birds going in the same direction. Not necessarily a Movement yet, but we're definitely catching each other's slipstreams? I'm liking it.
things to read
I scored my contributor's copy of The Deadlands: Year One this month -- the first year's collected fiction, essays, and poetry from said magazine. My contribution here is "Rows of Houses", the Stephen King by way of Dan Mangan haunted house poem. It is a shockingly strong first year for a magazine; the link goes to the ebook, but there is a print edition too.
I've also laid hands on my contributor's copies of the Muriel's Journey Prize winners' chapbook for 2023, containing smol poem "what Mama says". It is available at both Chapters/Indigo and Barnes & Noble for broad diffusion.
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Light month, but I figure there's only so much you all want to hear about chores and how much I like my book.
Next month: A great deal about urban agriculture (someone signed up for a last-minute course!), definitely reviews, light psychogeography, and better visual action. I'm still figuring out the design options on this software, so expect this to be more visually interesting going forward.