Thomas Sullivan

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.”