Thomas Sullivan: A BULLET IN THE BRAIN, A KICK IN THE TEETH, AND OTHER ORGASMS
Used to be that my muse had to put a bullet in my brain to get my attention. Now I can hear the gun cock. Hell, sometimes I hear the barrel clearing leather. All by way of saying that recognizing where stories come from is an acquired skill.
Yes, you can take the shortcut just by living on the edge, thus making your life full of ready-made dynamic tales. Climb Mount Everest. Smuggle exotic pets across borders in your underwear. Absolutely. But if you open your eyes, mind, heart and soul to the every-day poetry and the magic all around you, you’ll find fragments of stories by the long ton that need only imagination to come together with sweeping wisdom and consummate beauty. That’s only the circumstantial part of it, of course. You still have to see the meanings, the patterns, the connections to larger life before a story will emerge. By any name this is insight. We all know people who have insight and people who don’t — those who can travel all around the world but go nowhere, and those who travel nowhere but still seem to grasp the world as seen through a microscope and the universe as seen through a telescope, plus the hidden stuff as it might be exposed by an MRI and a digital x-ray. Making yourself into the latter is the ultimate enhancement to a writer and the ultimate enrichment to life.
It starts with getting outside of yourself. That’s because the world wants ever so much to put on appearances for you. And because when we take everything as a reflection on ourselves, we become blind to most of what is out there. It isn’t about you. It’s about what is really there. So if you want to see the world in all its vignettes and sagas, you have to step beyond your own limitations. That’s trickier than what you might think. But there are three things you can will yourself to bring to the table that will help in your quest. COURAGE will get you off the dime and out the door. If you’re afraid of losing your comfort zone or are paralyzed by doubt, you need this. BELIEF has the power to motivate as well as to deliver a positive outcome from the sheer force of its charisma. If you don’t believe there is magic all around you, you’ll never see it. And ENERGY is simply your guarantee against giving up before you do see it. Energy never accepts failure and never stops connecting the dots.
This is mind control. Yours. You can condition yourself to almost anything — believing something, feeling something (or not believing and not feeling something) — so will your self through the early stages until habit makes it easier. Yeah, that’s dishonesty, but it’s dishonesty of method not of reality, like stowing away in an empty freight car to get to a very real destination. If what you discover doesn’t make you a true “believer,” you can always ride the cattle car back. When you become that relatively free and objective person you want to be, you will have the insight and empathy to be the writer you want to be as well.
Okay, insert example. Cannibal Essay time. For newer readers, cannibal essays are peeks at the conversion of facts into fiction, that process or method by which one learns to put frames around every-day reality, i.e. recognizing stories as stated above. Here’s how it worked for me last week:
Tuesday evening and I’m shrinking. What’s my motivation, what’s my motivation? I am pissed. Trying to train for 13 days of sea kayaking in Tonga, but it’s been so windy all week that all I see are little dogs named Toto flying out of Kansas on the way to Duluth. And now a genuine storm is threatening. The weather has me under siege, trapped in my own little world of narrow perceptions and expectations. Then I remember, open your eyes, mind, heart and soul, Sully – courage…belief…energy. Overcome the obstacles. Seize the minus and make it a plus. The best roads are always detours.
The impulse becomes a resolve, and I’m out the door, carrying my canoe to the lake shore. My neighbor, who is battening down a patio umbrella, hollers a warning, to which I reply that I’m going after Somali pirates. He has his own little world of preparation — his own story worthy of note. And so does every other living thing I encounter. The sky is dead calm — like the eye of a hurricane — but even the least reasoning creature around me knows what is coming. White herons settle like snowflakes in the distant lees of larger trees, turtles slip into the water, a lone swallow arrows for the sanctuary of a bridge, a fish, oblivious to it all, takes a last foolish insect that has not headed for the underside of a leaf or tall grass on the banks. What is my strategy for survival? Why am I not following some predictable pattern? I am odd man out. A little adrenaline rush comes out of that, some minor risk, but also perspective. An irresistible force, deeper than instinct, is driving all populations in a single direction, countermanding all routines, usurping evening rituals, unifying unlike things to an overriding purpose — survival!
Excitement spikes my heart, and I can taste the iron in my blood. Yes, I could have hunkered down in my sterile bunker , but I am out here, moving with the herds and flocks and swarms, taking my chances, believing in mortal things again and in imminent adventure. More importantly, I am privy to life and death dramas large and small. The stench of rotting fish belly-up in virulent blue-green algae seems to decree a warning and the first lightning glares at me — an impossibly long flash — as I paddle hard for the end of the lake where the creek begins.
The next 20 minutes are a pointless race in the wrong direction through the curves of a creek that widens to 80 yards or shrinks to 10, ending at a small waterfall whose edge I tease with the bow of the canoe as I turn back. And now, as if it has been waiting to stare me in the face, the wind rushes at me beneath a blackened sky, like the rank breath of a bruised boxer on the assault. As a writer, I have all I need of seeing stories and feeling them. Time to make shore, haul the canoe out, take shelter. Feel free to jump out on the bank and make for the gazebo at the foot the bridge, if you like. But — and this is optional — I want the adventure.
This is it. The main event. The limit to be tested. So now the lightning goes crazy, winking like flash bulbs capturing the “you want it, you got it” moment. I dig the paddle into the chop with long J strokes side to side, trying to knife the heart of the wind and still negotiate the bends of the creek. The excitement, the uncertainty, the burn as muscles fill with lead — this is what I work out for. It is impossible not to laugh with exhilaration, just as it is impossible not to be afraid.
What is probably hundreds of strokes seems like thousands, but then I am under the last bridge and around the final curve onto the lake where the wind catches me and spins me completely around. BIG chop. Lightning is spidering all over the place now. I am obliged to sweep back into the creek to try again. This time I round the turn, but I can barely make progress along the banks. The canoe is driven under every leaning trunk held above the lake surface by dead branches. And here comes this tent caterpillar-webbed thing that threatens to engulf my head, and the wind is pushing me into it, so I swing the paddle to snap off the branches, only I swing too hard and the branches snap easily and the canoe is going over. I grab onto what is left of the trunk sticking out of the lake shore bank. Hardly matters, as a slashing rain erupts now, and the wind and lightning take charge, and I am hanging onto twisted branches to keep from being blasted back to the creek.
A gamut of boat docks separates me from my house half a mile away, and I’ll never be able to paddle around them. Something similar happened to me a few years back, only it was just wind then, and I was in a sailboat (the SS Plastic), so now — thoroughly soaked — I do what I did then: I jump out and drag the hull home through the shallows African Queen style.
Yeah, totally unnecessary mini-odyssey. But a hoot. And the best part is stripping down in the garage, throwing my clothes in the dryer, and sitting in a hot bath to savor the impressions. The ready-made adventure is obvious, but the elements of story are more subtle than that. From my neighbor’s warning, which could be an element of foretelling in any tale, to the indelible sensory imprint of a rising storm, and the contagion of wing, fin and claw scurrying in primal panic for survival, I have been in touch with what life is all about. It didn’t have to be that dramatic. But it did have to engage me – my body, my mind, my spirit. I had to interact.
If you got out of the canoe back at the gazebo on the creek, you got all you needed in the way of insights. Light and air infused your body, you touched palpable reality, and life paraded its truisms past your eyes. Fragments of dramas, romances and comedies entered your experience, paralleling, confirming and inspiring what you already know. They joined thousands of other fragments available to you which collectively may stir the poetry and wisdom that is in your soul. They are the fuel of your creative process, the Cliff Notes, the cheat sheet, the Rolodex, the cribbed prompts written on the palm of your imagination. Search for just that much every day and you will never lack for a metaphor, simile, thing & event, or insight to express your deepest passions.
Now all you need is an audience – be it a soulmate or the world.
Finally, a very special notice: editor Denise Wydra – daughter of our beloved and illustrious colleague Frank Wydra who passed away in 2008 – has collected his Gonquin Table essays and other material in a professional book available here at http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?fListingClass=0&fSearch=Frank+Wydra True to his wishes, at his final services Flamingo Frank was propped up in his casket with a silver dollar and a glass of Jack in his hands. Do you get a sense of legacy from that? The man can never die, and I am honored that my funeral oration for him and a column are also included in the book.
May I also invite you to receive my Sullygrams free? Email me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll add you to the list. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
