Thomas Sullivan

You don’t have to read too many of my columns to know that I am an advocate of first-hand inspiration as opposed to letting one’s imagination do all the work.  No matter how good you are, standing pat on your knowledge and memory as you create whole worlds is a sure way to cheat your potential.  If you want your work to be supercharged, you need to keep the chain reaction going in the fission/fusion part of your brain that made you what you are.  Rest on the laurels of your experience, and you will miss the YOU that could’ve been.  Call a halt to learning and growing, and you’ll connect far fewer dots by the time you assume room temperature.  I say this knowing I’m a hypocrite, that I love to hunker down and spin everything out of myself whole cloth, and that I have to overcome inertia every day.  Occasionally life makes it easy to fight that battle.  Case in point, my recent extended travels.  So, now I invite you to the second half of the writer’s diary I began last month in Europe.  It is, perhaps, of no value other than a personal account, except to say that searching and discovery require a certain mindset.  Searching especially.  Because sometimes when you’re lost on the yellow brick road Oz will find you. 

That’s what happened to me on returning from speaking at the House of Literature in Oslo (see last month’s column:  http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2011/04/15/thomas-sullivan-channeling-jack-kerouac-or-why-writers-need-to-get-out-more/#respond ) in the middle of a two-month journey.  In both a literal and a metaphorical sense Oz came to me.  The literal truth is the fact that Aussies Grant & Fiona, otherwise known as the “Oz”-ians, flew in for a visit almost on the tail feathers of my Delta flight from Norway.  The metaphorical truth is that they brought with them the magic of their own wizardry from the fabled land down-under.

The ensuing 10 days were a hoot, a compounded inspiration, and a chain of nonstop adventures.  Our days and nights scintillated with meaningful conversation and irreverent pranks.  Grant & Fiona are a brilliant down-to-earth couple well versed in everything from quantum to psychology, and me – um…did I mention the pranks?  I could have easily missed this core friendship in my life from halfway round the globe.  Grant was simply another interviewer to me two years ago when that interview began by international phone call.  Several hours later we had bonded and were making plans to ocean kayak from atoll to atoll in Tonga.  Now the three of us have shared exquisite times and are planning yet another adventure starting with five days in China and ending on a yak Safari that follows Genghis Khan’s route through the Gobi desert in Mongolia.

But the geography is the least of it.  Life is about people.  And if you’re a writer, you can never be reminded enough of that, because the more broadly and deeply you know people, the more consummate a writer you have a chance of becoming.  Writers tend to dismiss that, perhaps because they think there’s nothing one can do to affect that process.  But you can affect it.  Moreover, making characters up from limited archetypes that you relate to from your past or from favorite movie roles is a little like trying to learn psychology by studying cadavers.  It ensures only a degree of caricature in your work.  If you trust your imagination to do this, you’ll end up cloning yourself on paper or discovering only your own fingerprints all over the world.  In order to exercise the God-power of sympathetically creating genuine and convincing characters, you must know people.  And for that you have to let go of your blueprint, your map, your schematic.  You have to open up to more than yourself and to things/people/ideas that are unlike you and your security zone.  You have to get lost.

Prayer: Dear Muse, if I can only know one person, let it be a certifiable schizophrenic or the biggest heart/mind/soul in the world. 

Alernate prayer:  Let me get lost every day on the yellow brick road to unknown destinations so that things to be discovered can find me.

Allow me to explain in some detail, please, what I mean here by the term “lost,” because as you can tell, I use the word pretty much as a synonym for escape.  Lost means you do not know in advance every hour of your day.  Lost means you aren’t able to walk your rooms with your eyes closed, perform tasks in your sleep, and use the indentation in your favorite easy chair for a mirror.  Lost means you are still learning, growing, searching.  When you know every menu, every TV show, every uninspiring conversation of your “free” time before they come to pass, you may as well replace your pillow with a tombstone, because you are not just asleep, you are as scripted as death.  Your day-to-day life is all mapped out.  Which is fine, if that’s who you really are and you just want to maintain your status unto death.  But that is fatal to creativity…to a writer.  Writers need to be lost.

So there I was between Norway and nowhere, soaking up Oz, and when my Aussie friends left I jumped in the car and headed west, headed back in time, until an adventure or two later I was in the Sawtooth Mountains cc skiing with another incredible friend who lives on a small ranch in Idaho along with two horses and a dog named Ziggy.  But then again, Bruce doesn’t live anywhere that small.  He doesn’t think small, he doesn’t do anything small.  Long ago and far away we swam thousands of meters a day in frigid 50 m pools together.  But now it is as if the water has burst out of those small venues, flowing from narrow lanes into frozen endless ski trails up and down glorious mountains, through paradise after paradise.  [Short video clip Bruce took: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itSpP3y430g  ]  I can’t tell you how haunting it is to hear his voice echoing across misty dawns on a mountain, across time really, filled with the same energy and wonder now as then and yet different now because of how he has lived.  I can tell you that the wonder is seasoned with wisdom and that his remarkable perspectives are hard-earned.  And I can tell you that knowing someone like that over time is gold to the soul and sometimes the only way to discover what is locked up inside yourself.

So now we are back on the highway – you and I – if you are still sharing this little road tour of mine with its object lessons on the benefits of getting lost.  You do not need to leave home to get lost.  I once wrote a book for someone who got lost in a tent for two days, blinded and clinging to life during a raging storm.  And in a sense, this final leg of my journey was a process of coming home even though I was still headed west, because I was going to Oregon to meet my grandson for the first time.  Only…I didn’t just meet my grandson.  I met my daughter.  Who was this woman who put her life on the line in an at-risk pregnancy to carry an at-risk baby to term?  Well, not to term.  Seamus was an 8-week preemie, born struggling and requiring almost heroic care.  My daughter and her husband triumphed in this, and Seamus is fine.  More than fine.  He has climbed a mountain.  That is, his mother climbed the mountain while he was strapped to her chest.  But he never cried, except for 100 yards at the top where the 2500 foot elevation results in a couple of deaths every year.  And the crying wasn’t for that, I don’t believe, but rather because Seamus is not on solid foods yet and the adults – Colleen, Dave and I – had a brief picnic on the narrow trail.  It was an eight mile journey over four hours through spectacular velveteen forests, reminiscent of Pandora in the flick Avatar.  I swear, neither loose slopes, nor perilously positioned logs, nor mossy stones in icy cascades that we had to cross could wipe the smile off Colleen’s face the whole way.  It was an odd displacement of time for me, a bit of closure in an unfulfilled fantasy, because it was exactly the kind of day I had envisioned but never experienced in my own parenting of Colleen and her brother Sean.  Like I said, sometimes when you’re lost on the yellow brick road Oz will find you.

There are many photos of the above in my free monthly newsletter (Sullygram), and if you’d like to see them, e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Here are some extra photos, as follows.  Lead photo above:  Sully, Colleen, Seamus on Mt. Hood.  Photos below: 1-Sully, Grant, Fiona at Crow-Hassan.  2-Bruce & Sully at Galena.  3-Velveteen forest on Mt. Hood.  4-Salmon River flowing down Mt. Hood.  Thanks for reading.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

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I hope you’re as uncomfortable as hell.  Nothing sucks like being too comfortable.  Four walls are comfortable.  6 feet under is comfortable.  Conversely, stepping outside your comfort zone is when you start to live, learn, grow.  If you’re a writer, you thrive on being uncomfortable.

Yet when Norwegian publisher Jan Fredrik Lockert invited me to speak at the House of Literature in Oslo, I was reluctant to interrupt the flow of my life.  After all, I moved to Minnesota for a sanctuary, and I’ve found that here and much, much more.  The thought of taking so many days and traveling halfway around the world hearkened back to the years in my life when I spoke three or four times a week and felt like I could never get away.  All the same, I know that I am easily seduced by isolation, that I can make myself invisible to the point of extinction.  It’s a kind of agoraphobia that attends hyper-thinkers and creative types, I believe.  Writers may or may not end up with parallel speaking careers, but I’ve known enough entertainment people who are constantly in front of a mic or a camera to realize that many of them are timid and shy in special ways, keeping their true selves under the radar.  They may know that they need the limelight, but they can also wither in it and end up fleeing to the deserts of their souls.  It’s a balance, and this is how I must live my life – even though I am more notorious than famous, and little of either in reality.  I hide by getting in people’s faces, but I share my total self with no one.  So, I really need to fight that comfortable isolation.  And when insightful Jan Lockert added the inducement of skiing at (not in – sigh) the World Ski Championships, I went to Norway.

The skiing was grand beyond belief; but as I might have known, the real rewards were all about people [see last month’s story: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2011/03/16/thomas-sullivan-norway-out-takes-from-a-writer%e2%80%99s-diary-or-the-girl-on-the-mountain/ .  And, of course, this is what a writer needs most: to collect people.  True to his word, Jan delivered all the logistics.  The tickets, the connections from planes to express trains and waiting cars and a hotel shift that put me at the doorstep to the Palace and the House of Literature next door and then moved me to another posh hotel where all the international skiers were staying.  It was superb.  Jan even delivered a listening audience of 200,000 fans…well, okay, maybe it was 200,000 ski fans at the Award Ceremony just outside the House of Literature, but I spoke through a mic very loudly, and the window might’ve been open a little, so I’m sure 400,000 ears heard my every word.  I thank them for their applause, which may have coincidently occurred simultaneously with the presentation of the awards to Norway’s rock-star skiers.  Seriously, these athletes are ROCK STARS, making headlines all over Europe.  At the hotel, I even ran into the cynosure of all eyes of the championships, Petter Northug – Norway’s badboy legend and gold medal miser. 

200,000 or not, the intelligent, talented, eclectic audience inside the House of Literature was gold-medal all the way.  Sharing an evening with them was a joy.  A Vice President of Parliament was even there, and later that night, walking outside the palace, King Harald V drove past in his entourage.  (What a cozy country!)  Jan and I had what you might call a serial conversation in the hustle and bustle of my visit.  From car to dinners to ski venues to ceremonies to sight-seeing to hiking up and down Holmenkollen, and finally to an extremely pleasant evening before an embering hotel fireplace, the subjects were equally far-ranging.  A modest man of many accomplishments, it took me three days to find out that Jan was once the 3^rd top ranked classic skier in Oslo. 

I was given so many things by so many people that you might think it had to do with my status as an invited guest; but Norwegians are a sincerely generous population, and most of my contacts were from people who I don’t think knew any more about me than I knew about them.  Like the two teenage girls who shyly approached me twice and never did get out some question one of them wanted to ask.  I signed autographs, though for God knows what.  I remember signing for an intoxicated young woman in a cow costume who hugged me until I felt like a milkshake. 

Oslo may be the most gorgeous city in the world, sitting on a fjord with its mystic islands, swept up into mountains from which you can see vast horizons miles away, and everything is uphill or down with breathtaking fall-aways and awesome grandeur.  I love Scandinavian decor and architecture and innovative electronic technology.  Ditto love the delis – multi-tiered pastries and chocolates – and seeing people clump down the streets in ski boots carrying their skis and poles.  The food was exquisite, from reindeer to incredible salmon delicacies.  Norway is bigger than life but utterly real – you know it’s real when the snowflakes sculptured in the hotel lobby are not plastic but have actual frost on them.  Other memories include the creative driving, particularly by buses, and dogs in the stores, cowbells and flags waving, and riding back to the airport with one of the Finnish cross-country skiers and a woman who was searching for her past in America.  Also novel was walking around airports with three national currencies.  I flew home via Amsterdam and then over northern Europe, Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, and finally – would you believe – right over my house in Maple Grove.  My adoptive family, Norby Nation, had shoveled the driveway, but the pilot declined to drop me off.

And I’m still flying.  Norway was the first segment of a dynamic two months.  As soon as I returned to Minnesota, phase 2 began, a welcome 10-day visit from Australian friends, followed by more incredible adventures with lifelong friend Bruce Norvell in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, and hiking velveteen forested Mt. Hood with my daughter, her husband and my infant grandson in Oregon!  If you want see some short videos, the link below will lead you to my Facebook page, and there among the entries you will find a couple of very professionally done YouTube videos by my Aussie friends from that part of the two months.  Also, many breathtaking pictures and another video of skiing mountains outside Sun Valley and hiking the Pandora-like Mt. hood which was straight out of the magic forests of the movie Avatar.  The sense of being in a movie was echoed nearby when after coming down from Mt. hood we drove around Timberline Lodge, which was where they shot the exteriors for “The Shining.”  I’ll be catching up for a while, so more to follow.  And when I catch up, there are already plans to fly to China, take a train to Mongolia, and trek the Genghis Khan route with yaks.  Hey, it’s research.  Drop me an e-mail, if you like, and I’ll send you a free Sullygram each month with many more adventures, pictures, and thoughts.  So, all best until next time, and – uh…make yourself uncomfortable, won’t you? 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan 

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My recent tweets:  Living with unfulfilled needs is like living with a corpse in your bed.

“I feel more like I do now than I did when I first got here…”

Yeah, that’s one of my stock nonsense lines, but this month it makes sense.  That’s because I’ve been hopping time zones for two weeks now and will continue to do so into April.  Have recently returned from an exquisite trip to Norway where I spoke at the House of Literature in Oslo and spent quality time with some of the finest people I’ve ever met.  It was too good an experience to give it short shrift, so I’ll have to put off a summary until I’ve completed the rest of my odyssey.  At the moment I’m returning from a resort called Cragun’s with some other superb friends who have come all the way from Oz (oh, don’t you just love intelligent conversation with fascinating people), and when they return to Australia in 10 days, I’ll be jumping into the car to visit more unique friends, skiing in Montana and Idaho, then on to Oregon to see my first grandson!  All by way of saying that for now I’ll just give you a brief take on a poignant moment that highlights the people connections you inevitably make on a journey such as Oslo provided.  So call this a writer’s diary entry then, an out-take that maybe you’ll recognize too, and I’ll double down with it both as Sullygram and column this month:

…The morning after my speech in the House of Literature, publisher/host Jan Fredrik Lockert drove me to the World Ski Championships in famed Hollmenkollen and left me to ski to my heart’s content.  The waving flags, cowbells and Alpine mini-horns were exciting, but the mist-shrouded Norwegian pines beckoned me up the mountain until finally I was alone – if “alone” is possible when less than a kilometer below were probably 200,000 people pouring syrupy roars over the elite skiers on the planet who swept past them in the blur of a 30 km race.  It was the best of two worlds for me: contact with the grandeur of the distant fjord upon which Oslo sits while gliding in the serene stillness and solitude of nature’s awesome majesty on a mountain.  Towering Norway pines flanked the trail, and suddenly from over the next crest a beautiful blonde girl came walking.  I squinted in the bright light of sun on snow as I skied uphill, but all I could determine was that she was perhaps still a teenager.  And then as we passed I heard her whisper “hi” in a strangely terrified voice.  Something inside me melted a little.  By the time I glided to a stop and turned, I was 10 m above her and she was walking awkwardly – hesitating as she looked back.  For some reason she was reaching out – I felt sure of this – reaching out, though not wanting to take anything for granted.  Why?  What had she sensed?  What had I sensed?   “Hi, how are you?” I said, skiing back.  Either she had already pegged me for an American or her initial “hi” was actually a Norwegian greeting of “Heia,” but now she responded in broken English.  At first I thought that explained the slight slur in her voice.  And then I saw that speech in any language would be difficult for her…because her face was half frozen by a scar that ran cheek to cheek, paralyzing a corner of her mouth and causing one eyelid to droop. 

I tried not to let my expression change, and in that at least I may have been successful.  She was beautiful now not just because her face had once been gorgeously symmetrical, but because the ghastly accident that had severed its muscles had not severed her spirit.  How beautiful of her to reach out in her terror, her fear of rejection, her need to be accepted for simply being human despite the cruel irony life had played on her.   

All the more unforgivable that in the awkwardness of a language barrier I didn’t keep the conversation going.  I tell myself it was because I was surprised, and because I did not want to stare at her, and I was going up the mountain and she was going down – but my God, man, why did I let myself be surprised?  I barely remember what I said in the minute or two we spoke.  She needed that so desperately, though.  How could I let awkwardness cut it short?  It seems absurd.  I hate the cowardice of vanity – people who worry about how they might look if they reach out.  She had overcome her fear, shown courage, and I had tripped over mine, a mere social fear that exposed both my vanity and my cowardice.  But that’s what happened in that blazing minute.  A New York minute there on a mountain in Oslo, Norway.  I wished her a great day and skied on, and when I looked back from 30 m, she was stopped too, looking up at me.  But it might as well have been half a universe by then.  We both turned away.  She must have felt rejected again.  And I felt hollow.  Which is why I left the trail a few minutes later and skied off between the trees.  Sometimes when you fail, you don’t feel fit to be among your own kind, and I don’t think I could’ve handled meeting anyone else right then.  Despite her youth and disfigurement, she had so much more courage than I did.  Being alone is wonderful, but not all the time.  You’d think I’d know that.  So, I missed another cue – the angel unaware thing – and I need to work on that.  Funny how you can go halfway around the world and find the same object lessons that exist in your own backyard.  I did look for her when I came back down, but that was a pathetic gesture, given that there were 200,000 people…  Wherever she went, I hope she found someone to talk to.  There’s nothing worse than being alone in a crowd. 

Photos below: A gate of a beautiful Norwegian gardens that reminds me of a special place named Noerenberg Gardens near me in Minnesota; a Norwegian forest trail; an overlook from one of the hotels where I stayed; Hollmenkollen Park Rica Hotel; Norwegian ski trail cabins. 

 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan 

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Having spent most my life outside the box, I love being lost.  All right, go ahead, nod your head and smile sadly.  But I mean physically lost.  Like in a snowstorm in the woods.  To be lost is to shed all shackles, to erase the façades of society for a time and – if there is even a little danger – to come fully alive with the effort of surviving by your wits and your will.  Now you might think that’s a classic description of escapism, but somehow the exhilaration of an adventure doesn’t supplant thoughts about the rest of my life, even while it’s happening.  On the contrary, it clarifies and enhances my whole world, putting things in order and perspective the way dreaming does.  I find myself remembering, analyzing, fantasizing, rehearsing.  The two tracks complement and inspire each other as if by metaphor.

Did I say tracks?  Extend that metaphor, if you will (by the time I let go of a double meaning, you’ll have stretch marks on your brain).  The physical tracks in nature and the psychological tracks that people leave in society are each profound with information about motive, purpose, will, i.e. fears and needs and wants.  And that’s where writing comes in.  Because all my writing is about people (how can it be otherwise).  So when I’m reading tracks while lost in the physical world, they often lead through people who inhabit my psychological world.

Most writers get that about themselves – that all stories are really people stories – but I think very few writers learn to find the connections to their writing in the physical surroundings of their days.  Every day, any day.  Instead, they try to isolate their minds from the perceived drudgery of their lives and spin truths wholly out of imagination.  Getting lost is a better way.  Getting lost lets you set up an outpost where you can gain perspective.  You can do it as simply as writing by candlelight in the basement, or in the closet in the middle of the night, or in the bathtub, or on the roof.  Or you can go to a real forest and get lost among the trees, which works for me.  The minimum thing you want to achieve is to erase the four walls you are looking at but no longer seeing.  The maximum thing you are reaching for is an environment that actually inspires you, jangles your senses, awakens awareness, and connects all your circuits with metaphors and imagery.  Time for another Cannibal Essay, by way of example.  Call it the Walter Mitty Shuffle:

…you are on skinny skis, charting your own map through a new woods.  Deer tracks show you the path of least resistance and soon intertwine with known trails where some time in the last two days snowshoes have punched through the crust, creating a Swiss cheese of human tracks to follow.  You are warm with exertion, but beyond the woods is a brutal day of minus double-digit temps which high winds have dropped to a number you don’t even want to know.  Here in the woods it is very much like the routines of your daily relationships where you mindlessly follow the paths of others, sheltered from risk by immovable old growth towering paternally all around you.  Light splinters through the trees, beckoning you to a blinding freedom where life is unscripted and conventions must prove themselves by truth or be discarded as useless to survival.  There is beauty there, and pureness, and most of all insight.  But you stick to the path, which for all its trampled disfigurement suggests that others have survived if not actually thrived by following it. 

Civilization and communication are on this path.  God has been defined here.  By man.  But then, who made the light out there beyond the trees where there is no path if not God?  God not defined by man, then – God unscripted, unencumbered by a history written from the POV of one man-made religion or another.  It would be a generic God sans intermediaries, totally accessible even to those who walked the Earth before there was such a thing as writing.  This is God as First Cause, Prime Mover – a will, a motive for why there should be something as overt as a universe in the first place instead of just nothingness.  Would such a God be a polyglot, writing conflicting letters to his constituents with funny marks on parchment?  Wouldn’t that miss eons of humans who couldn’t read?  Better to communicate a consistent message through nature right from the beginning, don’t you think?  The way it’s happening to you now.  Written with light for ink (talk about illuminated manuscripts) – a picture book painted with light on the pages of time!  A single source in a universal language has its advantages.  Out there in the open, free of the shadows and silhouettes that hem the narrow path you are on, you wouldn’t have to pick a path to follow, wouldn’t have to sift through competing theologies, honest errors, lies, good intentions, manipulations and mythologies.  No translations necessary.  No revised editions of holy Scriptures or changing interpretations.  You can be 100% illiterate, and totally isolated, and still learn all the universal truths you need to live by a priori in nature.  Because there are no politically correct shades of gray out there where the man-made path stops.  White light diffuses evenly into all the colors of the rainbow.  So, what will happen if you dare to leave the path and let the spark within you merge with the natural brilliance beyond?

And now the woods thin and you come to the edge of a precipice sweeping white and veiled as far as you can see in the swirling snow.  The path vanishes.  Where did it lead before the storm hit?  To the left along the edge of the woods?  To the right through dunes and scrub?  Your instincts tell you that the shortest distance back is straight down the sweeping precipice and into the open maw of the storm.  Only, what if you’re wrong?  Better to play it safe, turn around and retrace your steps.  But the light is so compelling, and sparks are flickering inside you as if something strong and resolute is awakening.  The wind gusts impatiently, and you almost hear your name.  What is there behind you that is worth spending your life on?  Are you going to follow the same path forever?  And suddenly you are rocketing down the glazed crust while skeins of wind-driven powder lasso your feet and arctic cold slashes across your face.

10 seconds of soaring, 15, and it is too late to struggle back up the scarp.  You are into it now, and it is into you.  Recklessly you go to your poles, getting all you can out of momentum until gravity reasserts itself.  The disheartening drag of inertia brings you to a halt.  There is no calling of your name from the nearly complete white-out now, no sanctioning for what you’ve done, no precedents to guide you.  Stubbornly you begin to skate – hard thrusts with your skis, stabbing drives of your poles.  You do it endlessly to the point of exhaustion, then you do it some more, and when you glance back your tracks are almost invisible mere yards behind you.  Despite the snow pelting into your mouth, you are starting to dehydrate and your muscles are cramping.  Each time a pole bends, or a ski breaks through the surface, you risk a sprain or a muscle tear as you lift against the icy crust.  Only the angle of the wind gives you a sense of direction, but that is so cutting right through your clothes that you have to tack like a sailboat to lessen the risk of frostbite.  And if the wind shifts, will you even know it, or will you just veer in a circle?  Suddenly you doubt everything.  In a moment of panic, the all-forgiving grace of near-death and certain doom comes over you.  Physics isn’t working.  The geometry of who you are, where you are and where you should be is all scrambled.

But then the rushing surf of snow around your skis parts and you see faint tracks – animal tracks.  A dog, a wolf, coyote?  No matter.  Something less dominant than you is out here, surviving, adapting by using all its cunning and capacity.  It is living to the max.  And so are you.  This is who you are.  Not who you were forty minutes ago, following the narrow path of the herd.  And this is where you should be at this moment in time.  You almost laugh at the irony of your situation.  Because whatever the peril (and realistically it is minute), you are as good as dead for far too much of your life already, for the most part merely existing in sheltered conformity, living far below your capacities, following prescribed paths day and night that sacrifice your individuality.

The lee of a rise and the fickleness of the wind have allowed these tracks to remain, but you see now that the storm is also thinning.  To your right, there are trees and a break that might provide a shortcut.  And then you recognize dried husks sticking out of the snow that in summer would grow on the edge of a pond, and so you turn away.  No year-round access would lead through water.  Instead you skate up the rise, and – presto – there are the tracks again.  Inspired by your correct decision, a rush of bravado drives you over the crest.  For a few minutes you ski pell-mell into oblivion, and then the white room descends around you once more and hopelessness returns.  Take a lesson.  Arrogance can be fatal.  Is that your Achilles’ heel in the world of human interactions too?

You skate on blindly, steering by the wind and a vague sense of where the sun might be in the dense overhang of mist and snow.  How you would welcome your traditional antagonists out here now!  Like the yahoos who fire guns willy-nilly in the woods.  Shoot at me, please, so I can follow the sound.  Or the snowtoilets.  That’s what you call snowmobiles that roar up and down trails marked NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES, sometimes missing you by only inches.  I.e., what makes gaseous noises, spreads noxious fumes, and all you do is sit on it?  Um…a toilet?  No – wait, a snowmobile!  Snowtoilets.  Only, you wish one would come rescue you now.  What a hypocrite you are!  Take another lesson in survival: different strokes for different folks.

As if the god of humility is rewarding your epiphany, the windblown snow suddenly swirls into a pair of snow devils that sashay out of your way.  Exit stage left.  And in its place there are the animal tracks!  Out here a dog would be accompanied by a human, you decide, neither are the tracks far enough apart to be a wolf’s, or anywhere near the size of a cougar’s.  A coyote’s, then.  A male marking his territory, it becomes evident, by the configuration of tracks around periodic archipelagoes of yellow snow.  A well-ranged, keen-sensed, wonderful creature left these, and in so doing taught you the difference between making tracks in pursuit of individual fulfillment and following a one-size-fits-all path.  But it was not an either/or choice – it did not exclude the path – because now you see that this instinctual creature found the safety of the woods just before the storm closed in.  That woods.  The one rising in the distance, split by a clear trail.  And thus you are indebted to your inner light as you must be every day that you wish to grow, to learn, to mirror back wisdom and beauty.  If you can manage to get lost for a bit, inspiration will find you.  Disguised, to be sure, but if you have the courage to leave the beaten path and trust your purest instincts, you will be able to read it, even if it’s written in white light and coyote pee. 

It was too cold to take photos during the adventure described above, but I’ve included pictures from similar days in my latest newsletter.  I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  A sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic  .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan   Recent Tweets:

If something has to be kept secret, it must be true. Secrets are self-proving.  Lies are loud and wear red hats.

Dear Muse, may I write today words that are worth 1000 pictures.

“Don’t expect too much” is a self-fulfilling prophecy for accepting too little.

Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways, has kicked off another January.  True, he is two-faced, looking forward and backward at the same time (you can’t sneak up on him!), but I like that.  It sort of shows the circularity of things.

By extension, he gets called the god of beginnings and endings, but I think that’s either sloppy semantics or sloppy thinking.  Just as space can’t begin or end (because you would need a “where” in some other space to mark the beginning and ending), and time can’t begin or end (because you would need a “when” in some other time to mark that beginning and ending), Janus can’t be said to start or finish anything.  That’s the whole point.  His gift is to see the past and future at the same time.  He is a continuum, a bridge, a filter, a redirect, alpha and Omega in a circle, the Yin and Yang, a snake eating its tail. 

Writers – creative people – too often see themselves as on hold, caught in a matrix of beginnings and endings – fresh resolves and familiar rejections – when what they need is to see that they are a continuum in full flight, already underway, leaving indelible footprints whether the world chooses to follow them or not.  Life doesn’t hang around the starting line, and babies don’t wait to be delivered.  If you expect to be announced or sanctioned or heralded or loved before you take yourself and your dreams seriously, you will lose a lot of living.

This is especially true if you let feelings of worthlessness or rejection rule over you.  Who said you have to start at the finish line?  You only have to set out from the starting line and then not quit.  You have to act on your dreams.  Whatever you are at any given moment is quite good enough – but only if you have all your skin in the game!  Not trying, risking nothing, sitting on the bench or in the stands – that’s what you should fear.  That’s the killer, the waste of life, the no-show.  You don’t have to manage failure.  Failure doesn’t need your help.  It will be there by default if you don’t manage success.  And you can always manage success.  On your worst day you can make progress.  Even if success is just getting out of bed or refusing to wallow in self-pity or not succumbing to self-annihilating guilt or not fearing the next rejection or what others think of you.  Do not feel worthless over what you cannot control.  Write the damn book.  Send the manuscript to an editor.  Take your shots!  You are a good and righteous person when you put your honest heart on the line, and to hell with the consequences!  The world, for all its trumped up piety, isn’t your judge.  You are.

And you will succeed!  When you follow through and finish that book, then you will have succeeded.  Not because the book is finished, but because you will have given it your all and in the process become the best YOU you can be.  And that’s not just faint praise, because the thing of it is, THERE’S NO UPPER LIMIT ON THE BEST YOU, and quite likely (and magically) you will be astonished at what comes out of you when you stop giving up on your dreams and instead let the effort to fulfill them build relentlessly day by day.  The only limit on your potential is the amount of time or opportunity you lose by NOT reaching for your dreams.

To be sure, you need to be receptive to true opportunities that come from outside yourself.  It is simply tragic to miss the wild cards life gives us, the cues, and especially the rare connections.  They can form and fulfill you.  But they seldom fit a safe and convenient life, and they are easy to reject for all kinds of seemingly practical, responsible or even “noble” reasons.  Because what if we take a chance and still fail?  So there is always the danger that we may reject taking a chance out of misplaced fear or guilt.  Our dreams don’t fail or reject us…we reject our dreams.  And that’s real failure.  I think the answer is to strive for total honesty with yourself.  If you act on that, there is no reason for guilt, even if the chance doesn’t pan out.  But act you must.  Else you live by fear, and that can never be worthy of a dream.

If you are unique, then BE unique.  Rejection can’t keep you from living.  Well, it can, but you shouldn’t let it.  Trust me.  I learned the hard way.  Forever waiting.  Forever faithful to a cause or a person or a hope, as if they/it would then reward me.  I’m still that way… sort of terminal in my romantic view of life and still faithful to those same entities.  But the reality is I have no control over externals.  I have control over me.  And that’s what’s ultimately important: not robbing yourself.  I have not robbed myself.  I am living, loving, learning, evolving, giving…CREATING!  Not as a series of false starts, dead ends, rewinds and rejections, but as a continuum.  It is all a growth medium.  Nothing really dies as long as I keep what I control alive.  What decays outside me simply nourishes more knowledge and resolve.  If I give up, the real me ceases to exist.  How many people have that backwards?  Their inner selves never get to exist in the real world, because they give up – they let the external world define them and smother their uniqueness.  They usually do this passively by degrees, simply defaulting out of resignation into the circumstances life metes out to them.  Which, I suppose, is why there are relatively few writers, and maybe why there seems to be so much disillusionment and so little fulfillment generally.  Every month I am dismayed by the e-mails I get from writers, published and otherwise, who feel absolutely dead-ended.  Hey, it’s always about the journey.  Don’t end it prematurely.  Do you expect to die, or strike a permanent pose like a statue, after you achieve something?  Keep reaching and take your joy in that.  Believe me, that’s all there ultimately is.

There is only one person with whom you always have to live, and you know who that is.  You can be alone in a crowd, a career, a family, a marriage, a relationship, but you cannot escape yourself.  Might as well have good company then.  The indomitable, inspired, energized, fearless you wants free rein/reign.  Let yourself have it.  Surround yourself with what you need in order to survive and thrive.  Or if you cannot surround yourself, create an inner sanctum, a sanctuary.  Fill it with the right people, places and things.  It’s 2011!  Listen!  Hear that?  It’s your song.  Come out of the audience and up on the stage…

I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram (a kind of newsletter with stories and photos) once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net  .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic  .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326      

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    Recent Tweets:

 

There are people who are batteries and people who are drains.  Make sure you are compatible when you connect.

Old years are memories, new ones are dreams.

Picture a carrara marble room whose fire pit blazes silver in its reflection on a curved glass wall which overlooks the Grand Canyon by day and tilts upward to magnify the universe at night.  The jaws of the black granite Sphinx in the center of the room open in a kind of Savonarola throne made of solid gold.  Against another wall there are nine cages, each containing a Muse.  This is where I write…

Or maybe not.  (Actually I’m in one of the cages.)

I’ve never been particularly curious about where creative people work, but maybe that’s because I don’t associate the act of inventing or being inspired with a single setting.  Imagination is homeless and inspiration goes comatose whenever it’s confined.  So, when anyone asks where I work, they generally get an elusive answer.  Not sure I can do better here.  I’ve decided to try, though, as much to see if I can find some meaningful pattern for myself as to answer what others ask. 

When I was married I wrote in restaurants, parked cars and bathrooms.  When I taught school I wrote furiously for 2 min. in the library loft each day before first bell – having thought out scenes or narration on the drive in.  I’ve written at weddings and funerals, in a cemetery, in trees, in a phone booth, left key phrases in the snow and with a paint brush while painting flats for a play, left a memory tag in my own blood on a cash receipt, left episodic notes through serial phone calls to an answering machine, and when the plot for my first novel attacked my brain like a case of mental indigestion while jogging I borrowed a pencil and paper from a lady hanging clothes.  You get the idea.  The point is that it’s difficult to pin down the externals that accompany a free-flowing process within.  Sort of like trying to predict the next eruption of a volcano.  But like the scene of the crime certain settings beckon my return.  For what it’s worth, here are some of the current locales w/photos where I corner a Muse.

[NOTE:  I am so toast if these pictures don't post!]

Trees turn me on.  Especially when they’re naked and you can see which way their legs and arms (so many limbs) contort.  It’s like a blueprint or an x-ray of their lives, each turn showing where they made a free choice to grow in another direction.  And yet, ultimately there is structure and form and balance and symmetry and total logic in where they went.  They do it their way and weather the storms.  No clichés in a forest.  Highly unique individuals.   Trees know the nuances of freedom.  I think that’s why I want to look at them when I write.  I wrote a book about a tree once (BORN BURNING), I have a tree in my living room, and I even talk to a certain tree out at Elm Creek.  Am I out of my tree?  In this picture you are looking at my Creatorium (no “m” in the middle, please) where I put down roots in a computer.  The print you see is one of four on the walls.  The other three are stoic oaks in b/w against the Mexicali rose of my inner sanctum.

And the flick Avatar may have a cliché of a plot, but its magic forests (remember the mega tree) and romantically ideal culture make it my fav film (yeah…Jake Sully – irony).  Thing of it is, I go to Pandora every day/night to gather inspiration.  I’ve stood steaming on skis in a violet forest clearing many a magic midnight, listening to the silence of the universe and daring dreams as real as the surreal elements my senses are actually taking in.  You cannot write less than “romantic reality” after that.

Rarely someone will deliberately inspire me to write.  Shared dreams are hard to come by – which makes them all the more potent – but I count visions sent by a soulmate as inspiration.  Here are a couple of triggers that worked on me – photos of Tintern Abbey and of interacting galaxies.  The first photo followed a gift book of the Tintern Abbey poem containing a bookmark that reads “Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air,” and the galaxies photo followed a CD of Howie Day’s “Collide.”  Such communication puts poetry in my head, as in “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”  Wordsworth’s poem was all about how he lost the inspiration nature provided him and recovered it again and searched for a way to keep it in his life.

And then there are my nightly drives to points of light and darkness, like stations of the cross.  Writing fairly roars out of passion and perspective.  I do not want to forget anything meaningful that has happened to me, to lose high points or low, to revise history or heal hope with scar tissue that would forever dull the potential to feel and soar.  Night focuses memory, perception and anticipation.  I would rather bleed fresh than turn my heart into stone, rather gasp in anguish than breathe the sterile air of amnesia.  A writer cannot afford to go numb.  Motion and proximity are essential to keep track of who I was, am and will be.  Driving at night does that for me, particularly if I am right there in the presence of a memory.

No, I don’t hibernate in the summertime.  Contrare, contrare!  And this gazebo at a place called Noerenberg Gardens always seems to inspire possibilities for me.

 

 

 

Okay, whether it’s got a tub or just purposeful plumbing, I still write in the bathroom.  I’ve just finished putting down black granite tile with matching fixtures and a chair rail in one of my four baths.  AND…there are three prints of TREES on the walls.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus…well, at least there’s a Christmas Eve.  You might not believe it, but on most Christmas Eves there is absolutely no one out late at Elm Creek.  So that’s where I go, and it never fails to inform my writing for a while thereafter.  It is a most summary hour or two, bittersweet yet somehow affirming.  And this year I will ski to the highest point and shout out to the crystal universe my warmest regards and gratitude for all the kindnesses that have been given me.  So, if you are suddenly wondering whether or not you heard a faint call in the distance…

Hmmm.  Guess the only pattern this reveals is that I might write anywhere anytime.  In fact, the only place I can think of where I don’t sometimes write is my bedroom.  Now why is that?  Sanctuary?  Timelessness?  Nothing has changed in my bedroom in four years.  Same bed, same furniture, same snowscapes on the walls, cinnamon and vanilla candles, red and white feathers – there had to be something around which the carousel revolves.  Whatever anchors YOUR life, may it never drag you down or keep you from reaching your horizons in 2011.

I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan   Recent Tweets:

 

Cell phone died after 1 call. Figures. You get 1 call when they put you in a cell.

 

Guess I’m a miser with my emotions, but when I spend them, they are non-refundable.

 

 

If this column was a character in a novel, he/she/they/it would be schizophrenic.  Begin with the fact that a month after writing the first two paragraphs, I no longer remember where they were going.  Here they are:

This is for women.  Okay, men can peek.  I mean men like to peek at women, right?  But I’d like to address something that has historically been genderless, and in the nearer term has become more relevant to women – at least in “developed” Western societies.  Call it…um, boredom.

Historically there wasn’t any.  Boredom, I mean.  People were too busy.  Except for the aristocracy.  And the educated class.  And the idle rich.  And the clergy.  And, uh…I guess we could include the working class caught up in the Industrial Revolution doing cog-like things in the big machine.  And the uneducated class scrounging for a living in any old itinerant way – yeah, those too.  Pretty dull when you’re just sweeping, digging, lifting.  And farmers – can’t forget them.  Shooing birds, watching bean sprouts grow, squashing bugs, gathering, picking, more digging.  Borrr-ing.  …okay, maybe I need to call this thing I’m addressing something other than boredom.

See what I mean?  I know I was going to title the column PUSHING BABIES & DRAGGING DOGS, but I don’t know why.  Something to do with exceptional women who dumb down their lives, I think.  Should I turn this orphan beginning into a contest for the best reader-submitted theme?  Feel free to take a shot at where you want it to go…

So now this November’s column takes on a second identity.  Call it DRAGON BURPS, and let’s go with the following list of caveats for writers who dare to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice activation software.  I love version 11 of Dragon, but it still hasn’t figured out my jangly way of speaking or what to make of rogue metaphors.  Some of Dragon’s interpretations are amusing, some are lethal.  I live in mortal fear of alienating God-fearing people everywhere with what slips through.  Here are examples of dictation that Dragon has mangled:

siren mermaid = Syrian mermaid

cheers and best = Cheers and deaths

simpaticos = some tacos

Momma duck baited me = Mama duck dated me

my daughter lives in Oregon = my daughter is an organ

logistics = lard of just six

canoed = nude

Turkey in the Straw [rendered as an anagram] = TITS

whacking my head = lacking my head [so what’s the problem, right?]

your very friends = your fairy friends

bright eyes = bright lies

magic stuff = magic stud

elfin face = elephant face

T-sax = tee sex [I recommend Dragon to Tiger Woods]

that giddy = dead kitty [and on a second try it came out: fat deity]

balmy = ball me

compadre = go potty [second try: cephalopod]

a peace feeler = appeased Hitler

put funny marks on the pulp = put funny marks on the Pope

experimental mode = ass for a medal but

lone swallows = Mona swallows 

musicians = mutations [so…?]

putting my soul through brass = putting my soul through breasts

big thought here = Dick thought here

brassiness = brass anus

sax video = sex video

finely prepared food = finally prepared food

grab a weekend = grab a weak end

So that’s the second identity in this multi-personality column, and I’ll close with a third theme by elaborating – as promised two months ago – on an answer I gave to a comment posted by Janet Berliner.  That column [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/09/16/thomas-sullivan-zen-pot-throwing-combat-boots-128-squirrels/   ] was about respecting your characters, and I was using an example from my recent trip to the Dominican Republic.  I promised to reprise a tale that explains why I fix the line between psychological and practical necessities in the human soul where I do.  Here it is:

“I was a young man in Washington D.C., just entering a government building – I think it was the National Gallery – and there was one of those still lifes, a ragged black man perched on the top step while crowds flowed up and down.  Rail thin, burning eyes in a body that was ashes, he didn’t have his hand out, nor did I read a con in those eyes.  He just looked like he was taking a break from life, from caring, from trying.  Maybe that’s why I stuck out a bill as I reached the top step.  No big show, I just wanted him to take it.  But he didn’t.  And when we made eye contact, I got the challenge.  What the hell, I thought, I ain’t whitey trying to humiliate you, man.  Looking back, I can see how stupid the thing I did next was, but I knew damn well he was desperately hungry, and there was a wire trash basket next to him with McDonald’s bags and plastic cups to the brim.  It occurred to me that he might have been picking through it, or waiting for someone to lob a half-eaten quarter-pounder onto the pile.  So I tucked the bill into the mouth of a bag sitting on top.  That was all.  He saw me do it, but I didn’t look directly at him again.

“When I came out maybe half an hour later my glance caught the empty step and I remembered.  There was the wire basket.  Whether it was to prove I had understood his pride and knew it limits, or perhaps a disquieting suspicion that I had not, I had to look.  Well, you already know what I’m going to tell you.  Because the bill was right where I had left it and the ragged man was gone.

“I’ve never doubted the desire for dignity and independence in another human being since, however oppressed, beaten down, corrupted, or enslaved by false notions that desire for respect may be.  And I see no reason to downscale that universal human need in fictional characters.  Searching out the unexpected contrasting elements in characters can only bring them to life and deepen their authenticity.”

I really appreciate the feedback, most of which seems aimed at my newsletters (Sullygrams) and the photos therein.  I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net  .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic  .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    Recent Tweets:

Cell phone died after 1 call. Figures. You get 1 call when they put you in a cell.

Snow, my element! Pure & perfect, filling the midnight air like white feathers whirling on a carousel.

Writers are like optometrists.  They put their writing on the wall and try to get you to read the bottom line.  If they are good writers, they shift lenses before your eyes, sharpening the focus until you can see what they want you to see with 20-20 vision.  Life goes from blur to blaze, and you find interest and meaning where before you saw only the mundane and the vague.

As a writer, I think you have to do the same thing.  You have to shift lenses until you see deeply enough to find interest and meaning.  You do it by noticing the small and the large and the relationship between the two.  You don’t do it by reveling in your own internal world with the windows and doors shut tight.  The external world is trying to come to you.  Let it.  Read the writing on the wall.  I still catch myself blocking input, blind to all but my own inner vision.  Let me use a recent personal experience and some verbal lenses to show you what I mean.  Here’s the eye chart:

BLURRY     BLURRY

I am sitting in a cold park, playing T-sax under a gazebo this past Labor Day weekend.  A tall thin man holding a toddler by the hand approaches slowly down the hill.  I lean away, trying not to notice them, hoping they won’t interrupt.

 

LESS BLURRY    LESS BLURRY

Despite my negative body language, they are still coming.  The man is wearing a dashiki.  He is Somali – maybe Nigerian – and probably doesn’t speak English.  The toddler is stumbling.  Something is wrong with him.  Sometimes I play for mentally challenged children in wheelchairs in this park, but right now I don’t want to lose my focus.  My world seems more meaningful to me.  I do not want this connection.  This could be awkward.  Please don’t stop…

 

CLEAR     CLEAR

They stop.  The toddler cannot be more than three or four years old.  Hard to tell because he has sunglasses on and his face has something unique about it, ghostly.  He has black features but his skin is white.  The man, who I take to be his father, is almost holding him up, yet the child tries to squat and jump to the rhythm, clearly enchanted by the music.  I stop playing and ask the boy if he wants to be a sax player, telling him that with his sunglasses he already looks the part. 

 

RIVETING                    RIVETING

In soft graceful English, the father says something about eyes and removes the boy’s sunglasses, revealing a lack of pigmentation.  Suddenly I get it.  Albinism and maybe something more.  The father is here on a holiday from his job, using the music to share something with this fragile child who perhaps has no other language.  I keep my sunglasses on, a little choked up by the child’s infirmities coupled with his shy enthusiasm for the music.  And I play and play and play for him.  At one point in his squirming to the music, he falls back off the picnic table where he is sitting and his father’s hand shoots out and grabs him just before his head can hit the cement.  Even that scare doesn’t dampen the boy’s glee.  So simple to give him pleasure, so very simple.  We are communicating in the world’s most basic language – music – and I am privileged to share for an hour the lives of two other travelers with all that affords of insight and passion and the humanness I say that as a writer I want to discover.  Sometimes putting your soul through tarnished brass touches other souls made of pure glass.

 

I could’ve missed this.  The writer’s window opened for me just in time.  If you want to capture the world in words, you have to know it.  And the first thing you must know is:  It Isn’t About You.  If you only tell your story, you will miss everyone else’s.

 

Last month I included a tale from a recent trip to the Dominican Republic to make a point in my column (Zen Pot Throwing, Combat Boots, & 128 Squirrels), and Janet Berliner made a comment that I promised to answer more fully in this column.  Going to put that off until December, if I may.  I really do appreciate all the feedback.  Much of that seems aimed at my newsletter (Sullygram), which always has photos as well.  I’ll be happy to send it to you once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net  .  And I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (that’s sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample trick-or-treat:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic   .  You can also hit the Subscribe button in there to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    Recent Tweets:

 

“It’s one thing to get what you want, and it’s another to know what to do with it.”

“You can’t make a dead duck fly…a dead phoenix maybe.”

“Quiet onstage, please!  Go live with the mics.  Cue Aretha Franklin.  R-E-S-P-E-C-T…find out what it means to me!”

Oh, that haunts me.  See, I done a bad thing once…um, more than once.  And it seriously disrespected Aretha.  Can’t tell you the details because – well, I just can’t.  But it has to do with 128 squirrels, and a pink Cadillac, and a roofer I met – on a roof – in the remnants of a hurricane, and a house in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and midnight sojourns, and a G.I. Joe doll.  And Aretha Franklin.  So I listen up whenever she sings her mega-hit song, as if she is staring down her nose at me and wagging a finger in my face.

What RESPECT means to me when I’m inventing characters is: do not underestimate a human being.  I have to believe it’s the same for any writer trying to breathe life into meaningful characters.  After all, you become The Creator when you manufacture mortals, and even though you’re doing it with paper, would God make paper dolls? 

This has nothing necessarily to do with virtue.  Not that kind of respect.  The capacity for evil can still be there in these characters you’re respecting.  Evil as greed.  As self-centeredness.  Megalomania, lust, pride – count the deadly sins, and when you get to seven, keep on going.  Respect the range in people, is what I mean.  It doesn’t even have to be their depth.  If superficiality, or aimlessness, or innocence, or ignorance, are what you are illustrating, a shallow person makes a spiffy character (e.g. Candide, Billy Budd, Mishkin, Huck Finn, Casper Milquetoast, Walter Mitty, Oblomov).  But most people are genuinely complex.  They are worthy of sustained examination as they evolve through life or the chapters of a book.  As authors, or just students of human nature studying erect bipeds with hair, it is one thing to delineate a truly simple subject and quite another to simplify a person because of our own lack of insight. 

But that’s what we tend to do as observers of people, isn’t it?  Simplify them.  Rob them of dimensions so that we can fit our minds around who we want them to be, or because that’s as much as we see.  Our limitations become the authors of their limitations.  Sometimes we do this because we want the world to be black and white, sometimes we do it to rationalize our relationships, but most of the time we are just modifying individuals to fit the collection of stereotypes in our minds.  Speaking strictly for myself, I don’t want a collection of (borrr-ring!) stereotypes, no matter how much simpler it makes sizing up life.  Sure, you need familiar patterns in order to make sense of people or put them in context.  But what you don’t need are so few patterns that you end up distorting the people you know to fit them.

A writer may have a natural bent for uncovering layer upon layer of meaningful characterization.  Or not.  The people I know who I consider have the most insight into their fellow humans are not writers.  What they have is enough objectivity to eliminate their personal motives in sizing up others.  You can learn a lot if you consciously and objectively slip out of your own combat boots and stand in the shoes of whoever you meet. 

That said, I love it when I’m caught ignoring my own advice.  The aftermath of underestimating someone or taking something for granted is when I learn the most.  Last month I promised that if there was enough interest I’d go one more column mentioning things from the Dominican adventure (there was), so that’s where I’ll turn here for an example of really stepping in it.

Recall, if you will, the richly peopled textures of Villa Esfuerzo, an impoverished and crime-blighted village in the Dominican where I spent 8 days in June.  I told you about the people who sit ankle-deep in water in their living rooms, and about the songs and dances at the worksite, about the children with luminous eyes, and the handbags woven from bread wrappers, and the tarantula badlands.  This time I want to take you to downtown Santo Domingo, population 2+ million people.  Welcome to The Mercado (Market).

Alas, I ain’t proud of the fact that some of my companions wanted me to negotiate their purchases in the barter atmosphere of this collection of stalls.  Yeah, nice to be thought of as having the gift of gab, but then too there is the recognition that I would be uncompromising in an atmosphere where poor vendors are cutting pretty close to the bone to sell their wares.  How do you tell a landscape painter with huge talent and marginal circumstances that he is worth half of what he’s asking when he’s just come down a third?  But I did that and worse.  I should have just nodded and walked away, leaving him his dignity.  To be fair to myself, I took a break from the hard dealing, wandering behind the scenes to a loft where I discovered painters cranking out canvases and a Zen pot thrower in an off-shoulder robe spinning his clay at warp speed.  I resisted offering up my cement-encrusted work shoes as a joke to a shoe shiner, realizing he might actually try to polish them.  But there were no twinges of conscience holding me back when I got to the final stall and asked for postcards.  A child shouted to a woman, who called to a man, who ran off to acquire the sought for merchandise while everyone held up their hands in a communal plea for me to wait.

I waited.  And when the man returned puffing and glistening with exertion, I low-balled his modest price for a few postcards.  Yes, I did that, but believe me it was pure reflex.  When I realized what I was doing, I deliberately overpaid him – not with rounded up bills but in coins.  And that was my real sin.  Because he saw through it.  He knew that I expected he would say nothing and keep the extra change.  How patronizing of me, how cynical and condescending.  I, who believe in human excellence, in motivating people to fulfill the highest expectations possible, had slipped into the crippling philosophy of misguided charity that I detest.  More to the point, I had reduced him to a stereotype that must have been lurking in the laziest part of my mind.  You RESPECT people by holding them to account for what you should respect them for, not by underestimating them.  What a thin price I put on his integrity.  It is an old lesson I should have remembered, namely what I wrote above about limiting people to fit your expectations.  I took the change, but I will be a long time forgetting the indignation in his eyes…

There are new photos from the DR adventure in the September Sullygram (newsletter) being released today — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.  The July and August Sullygrams have cool pictures from the Dominican as well as full accounts [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/07/16/thomas-sullivan-skinny-dogs-skinny-chickens-skinny-people-or-how-to-blow-the-cap-on-your-own-deep-water-well-and-free-your-imagination/   and http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/08/16/thomas-sullivan-a-red-shirt-molasses-in-a-feathered-world-the-other-side-of-the-wall/  ].   

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  Sample of recent Tweets:  “Kill your so-called foolish dreams and you become the person everyone expected you to be.”  …and  “Trying to undo who you have become is like trying to make a warped record flat again by pressing it under an encyclopedia.”  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

“Don’t worry.  I forgot your name too.”  That’s what my red T-shirt proclaims.  I don’t wear it to be funny.  I wear it out of fear.  Names zip into and out of my ears like grease through a goose.  I’m dense as a box of rocks when it comes to retaining that most basic of labels.  Given that I’ve mingled in mobs most of my life, this is a major problem.  I use the term “mobs” lovingly – referring to coaching, teaching, a stint as city commissioner, writing & public speaking, and just generally rolling along like a drop of misplaced molasses in a feathered world.  Used to beat up on myself over my inability to remember names.  Sheer arrogance, I thought.  Which is what the nameless victims of my selective amnesia had a right to feel about me.  But I’ve come to believe it is anything but arrogance.  Moreover, I think it underlies a critical author skill.

Mmm.   Skill.  Maybe that’s wishful thinking.  Okay, an author focus.  But critical.  Definitely that.  Because the reason I don’t catch names is that I am intensely focused on whatever is coming at me below the verbal level.  When I first meet someone my attention is like an iceberg, 7/8ths beneath the surface of what they are saying.  I will notice minute psychological details, mannerisms, gestures, expressions, verbal clues behind spoken words — tone, repetitions, hesitations, any pattern — the choices the person makes as indicated by their appearance, where their attention drifts, their responses, fears, wants, ad infinitum.  I am overwhelmed with information to process.  But I am unlikely to remember their name.  Whether I do the below-ground noticing with any particular insight, or even accurately, does not really matter, I suppose, as far as being an author.  The relevant thing is that I am engaged in perceiving people, and whether I’m spot-on in what I see or simply inventing stuff it all goes into the bit bucket of my imagination and mental filing cabinet for new characters.

It does matter, however, that I do this without being threatening or judgmental.  After all, if I’m going to learn anything, I need to be trusted and accepted as capable of understanding.  Moreover, what I personally want is to know truth.  In human relations it is very hard not to unconsciously cue people as to what you want or expect.  And so we end up with anything but truth, namely lip service, false testimonials, and illusions presented to us by those with whom we interact.  The deepest human passions and the darkest secrets reveal themselves best when they come at you without being bidden in any way.  Create an expectation for them and you will likely get what you wanted rather than truth.  So dialing back on your persuasiveness and repressing your subtle expectations as best you can makes learning truths possible.  Authors need to have that objective mode, if only so they can give back truth in their writings.  

Permit me to double down here.  Last month I received a large amount of e-mail pertaining to that column about my stay in a Dominican slum (http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/07/16/thomas-sullivan-skinny-dogs-skinny-chickens-skinny-people-or-how-to-blow-the-cap-on-your-own-deep-water-well-and-free-your-imagination/  ).  I promised to follow through with more info about that, and I’ll do it here by way of illustrating the above points – it was a time of truth-gathering for me. 

Poverty wracked Villa Esfuerzo, where people may sit ankle-deep in water in their one-room shotgun shacks as slashing rains come through, has its outposts of security behind razor wire and iron bars.  There was a wall and iron bars around where we slept.  Beyond the wall roosters crowed all night and local children gathered in silent packs to watch us through the bars as we talked of profound things or sang the evenings away.  This mute audience bothered me greatly.  Children shout, children move and make noise, children laugh.  Not these.  They stood barefoot in their worn shirts and shorts and watched and watched and watched in total stillness as we moved and laughed.  They stood as if they were watching an irresistible movie.  It haunted me.  It still haunts me.  The first time I saw them I was reminded of a home-made movie I saw years ago taken of some stone-age hunters in Borneo who had never visited civilization but were taken to a modern airport where they stood in silence outside a chain link fence watching giant airplanes land and take-off.  During WWII these same hunters had aided marines who had come in planes and given them chocolate.  When the war ended the natives built a crude narrow runway and erected a model plane lure and lit the sides of the runway with torches at night while they watched the skies for a return.  They watched and waited for decades.  And here they stood in their feathered finery and fierce face paint, looking very small before the soaring airliners on the other side of the chain link.  What were they thinking?  What did these children here now in the Dominican think?   

Every night that they came I went to the iron bars and in broken Spanish tried to talk to them.  I asked them their names.  And, of course, I don’t remember any of them.  Well…one.  I remember one.  Juanita.  All the same I was searching for answers, for clues as to what they felt and how they would remember our presence in their world and what that might tell them about the rest of the planet.  My concentration was as fierce as the Borneo hunters’ faces, but I could glean nothing.  Nada.  They watched expressionlessly through the bars or smiled shyly when I talked to them — the older boys hanging back a little warily — and that was it.  Not a clue.  They came each night by climbing a second stone wall into a kind of garden that I had jokingly dubbed “the tarantula badlands” because we had hunted down the giant hairy spiders there one night.  They seemed so transitory – these watchers.  Impossible in eternity.  I wanted to open those gates and bring them in.  Did they sense that?  Have they forgiven me for not finding a way to include them?  Ah, vanity.  I want to be forgiven.  That’s the kind of liberal guilt I can’t stand.  Love is what you give, not what you get.

Lots more to tell, but no space to tell it.  Well.  Actually I’ve been saying it a lot lately face to face with people.  So, I’ll tell you what.  If there’s enough interest in this, as there was last month, I’ll go one more column with something else from the Dominican adventure.  Maybe that’s how I’ll take some of the bars down and exorcise my vanity of conscience.

There are new photos from the DR adventure in the August Sullygram (newsletter) being released today — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you along with July’s Dominican photos.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.   

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  Sample of recent Tweets:  “Kill your so-called foolish dreams and you become the person everyone expected you to be.”  …and  “I wish I didn’t know all the things that have been lost or thrown away, and I wish I could forget the time wasted in the wrong life.”  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan