Thomas Sullivan

“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

Sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost something till you find it again.  Inspiration, adventure, laughter, love, honesty, idealism.  The best things are like that.  Unscripted, nebulous, ill-defined, ephemeral.  It’s their nonconformist free nature.  After all, how can you define magic?  If you could, it wouldn’t be magic.  And writers depend on magic.

Want to borrow some?

I’m just back from the Dominican Republic and a massive transfusion of the kind of magic I search out 24/7.  People magic.  Nature magic.  And it re-silvered the mirror I hold up to life in my writing every day.  Here.  Take my place.  Hop on the bus or the pickup truck that will take you down the roads, lurching around rubble, flat tires inclusive.  This is your first religious experience.  Because if U-turns into on-coming traffic don’t put the fear of God in you, nothing will.

You have to travel 45 minutes to get to the work site each day, but little Manuel with his chirpy voice and luminous eyes shining with hope, and his thin arms reaching out to you in desperation for love, will be waiting no matter what time you arrive.  And a hundred others like him.  But before that, gaze hard out the window.  Skinny dogs, skinny chickens, skinny people.  70% live in poverty — not the kind of poverty defined in the US that includes color TV and a second car, but sweep-the-dirt poverty, shotgun shack poverty, one room of tin and cinder block with curtains for walls same-clothes-every-day sit ankle deep in water in your “living room” when the slashing rain rolls through every few hours poverty.  Over the next eight days you will not see a toilet seat that is attached, or uninterrupted electricity if any electricity at all, or potable water if uninterrupted water at all, or plumbing that can flush paper, or hot water. 

Welcome to Villa Esfuerzo, or as I call it (because I can’t pronounce it), Villa Espresso.

See the man who was playing dominos when a gang fight broke out, killing two and costing him his leg.  See the razor wire on the church school where you are working.  Yeah, lots of violence, and screaming poverty, BUT… also angels.  Angels everywhere.

The people are not time oriented here.  They are event oriented.  And you are an event.  Even though they have seen you before.  You came and went.  Thousands of times.  So forgive the guardedness in the faces of the adults, especially the women.  Especially the poorest women, who by their early 20s so often have five children and no prospects.  Yeah, you can sneer at that.  But in this depressed neighborhood where children raise children there is very little else, and maybe someone told them they were wonderful at age 15 and so there was the first baby.  I do not know why there were four more in quick succession.  You’d think after the hardship of the first one became acute they would…what?  Stop escaping?  Hey, what do I know?  But the women and dogs seem terrified sometimes, as if to step from the figurative and literal narrow margin between doorstep and road is to invite being run over.  Driving is, in fact, creative.  A car horn is indispensable, and you may see five people on a motorbike, including that 15-year-old girl with her first baby in her arms.

But there is great love here.  Huge love.  You see it in the children first.  They shine with it, and if you look at them a second time, or remember their name, you might as well adopt them, because they will follow you like the crocodile shadowing Captain Hook.  They want so desperately to be held and hugged.  I remember embracing a frail old woman in a church when I felt something clinging to my right leg.  Looking down, there was an angelic little girl about three years of age.  Usually I am the dry rot, the mold, the rust that brings things down, but at that moment I was Sully the bridge.  Quite unforgettable.

Yeah, you can find resentment if you look for it, but those walls collapse pretty quickly.  One can only live on indignation so long, however painful one’s awareness.  And these are not uninformed people.  They get it.  Who they are, who you are.  Most of them have seized the courage to live life with honest pride.  When you own nothing, nothing owns you.  So go ahead.  Walk through the winding streets.  Accept one of the invitations to come inside.  Sit in the cool darkness on a tropical day and drink their tea.  Look hard in the gloom and you’ll notice that medal on the wall for a child who graduated from the church school.  Do you see the elegant purse on the table with its vibrant patterns that looks like a Birkin bag original?  The matriarch of this single-room dwelling weaved that handbag out of bread wrappers.  They throw nothing away.  Pull tabs become chainlink jewelry.  A mason’s level is a string between two cinder blocks.  When you are done working at the end of the week, and decide to throw your skuzzy cement-encrusted clothes away, they will collect them, wash them, sell them, buy medicine for the children.  The kids are so often sick…

I speak a little Spanish, and there were translators, but that wasn’t the lingua franca that broke through with the adults, if you want to know.  It happens like this.  You are pouring third-floor cement when some women bring food.  They form a circle and start clapping.  Then they call out someone’s name and that person is obliged to dance a few steps in the circle amidst much laughter and encouragement.  Everyone knows someone, and so all the names get called, including yours.  Maybe you grab someone up and make them dance with you.  The more outrageous your signature moves the better.  Walls.  You are pouring a floor but walls are falling down.   It happens differently with the men.  The day after the circle dance, you are shoveling cement in the dizzying heat and sweat and you suddenly sing out a line of “La Bomba.”  To your surprise, men you’ve worked with elbow to elbow for three days without exchanging a word spontaneously answer in chorus.  It is impossible not to throw out another line, and in any case, they won’t let you stop.  Like a brush fire in the heat of the day, it keeps flaring up until you’ve lined out “Day-O” and every song you thought you’d forgotten.  Music.  The universal language.

But that music is nothing compared to the haunting rhythms that flow out of the church on the last afternoon.  Choral voices that stab the soul and heal the heart.  Keyboard, drum kit, guitar.  Interpretive dancers.  My kingdom for even just a grainy cell phone recording of that!  I’d give up lemon pie for life for a video.  Not gonna happen.  It’s gone now.  Some things are too perfect for anything but memory.  When it’s your turn to speak, you try to tell them.  You try to say that this simple open room they call a church, with its open wooden shutters and open iron gates and the breath of life flowing in and out and fans whirring overhead like hovering angels, is more alive, more impressive than the cathedral in Santo Domingo with its vaulted domes and cold saints in stone coffins.  You try to say that you came here to this place of contrasts to find the sameness between people.  You try to say that you came to build rooms but together with them have built bridges.  Ruben – my 17-year old translator – is golden and a close friend now, but Lord knows how it all came across the mic we shared.  Doesn’t matter.  We didn’t have to say anything.  Those people knew.

Going to leave off the last million pages here because, well…you just had to be there.  But you see what I mean about finding the magic every day, don’t you?  Easy to discover in the Dominican.  Tougher in your own backyard.  But absolutely do-able (see last month’s column).  There is more about the DR experience in the July Sullygram (newsletter) being released today along with many photos — 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.  And please feel free to follow me on http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  As always, your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

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

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

You guys are really good.  What a smokin’ hot month you dropped on me through e-mails and posted comments.  Seems there is no one on the planet who has not already thought through the gender issues I raised in April’s column, like it was their right of passage.  So I guess a summary is in order here. 

The questions were meant to stimulate fictional character relationships in a novel-in-progress on contemporary marriage, after I ‘fessed up to having zero perspective about normal relationships on account of I’ve only met one woman whose instincts/thinking on “luv” were the same as mine.  Fact is, when it comes to communication I am gender reversed, very much given to talk about mental and emotional things in a supportive way.  You’d think that would lead to a marriage made in heaven, but, of course, the only long-term relationship I’ve had was with someone gender reversed the opposite way and all but autistic (God has a sense of humor).  So I lack a frame of reference for what’s normal.

But guess what!  I’m left wondering if anyone else has one either, because the variety of views was flat out astonishing and yet almost everyone felt they have sorted out definitive truths about gender relationships.  That was the most revealing thing: that everyone has a definite and detailed take on sexual dynamics.  No uncertainties.  The communication biz, for instance…I dunno, it seems to me most women seek emotionally meaningful communication in order to feel safe, respected and cherished.  And it would follow that a marriage could be no more successful than its ongoing meaningful communication, and that it only takes one unwilling or unable party to kill that – which is what I see in most marriages.  So I posed statement #3, expecting to have it accepted or challenged directly.  But of the 40 or so responses that came in, the divide wasn’t over communication skills, rather it was over what is meaningful communication.  Most respondents either lamented the lack of emotional focus in male-female communication or discredited the need for it.  And that’s how responders generally got around one side or the other of an issue.

The infidelity question (#1) brought another sweeping array of interpretations.  Most (but not all) saw women as more concerned about emotional fidelity and men more concerned about physical fidelity.  But some saw those as indistinguishable, and I have to confess, that’s where I was coming from in posing the question.  I was looking to see if I was alone in that view, i.e. male response to physical infidelity is itself a hardwired reflex to emotional infidelity as well.  Why?  Because a man recognizes that emotional connections and security are what drive a woman to give sexual access in a relationship, and therefore her emotional fidelity is his best assurance that his sperm and DNA will win and be proliferated.  In other words, his anger and jealousy over her emotional infidelity is a hard-wired response to the whole emotional aura of sexuality that leads to sexual access.  If that wasn’t true — if what drove him was simply an intellectual and factual guarantee that his sperm would win — then he wouldn’t care about physical fidelity after the woman’s tubes were tied or if she practiced effective birth control or was willing to have an abortion or if her other male lovers were sterile.  Of course, you have to believe in the premise that the mandate of evolution for a male is that his sperm must win exclusively.  All his emotions are then conditioned by that.  It isn’t conscious logic that drives men at the reflex level; it’s feelings – hard-wired emotions.  (Hey, guys, please inform me if at the moment of passion any of you actually think, “Hot diggety, for the sake of my biological imperative, here’s a chance to make sure this woman doesn’t get pregnant with any man’s sperm but mine!”) 

But the premise for a woman’s mandate in evolutionary history seemed to be taken for granted, and that surprised me.  I thought some would regard the “emotion” tag as a sexist Victorian attitude that somehow denied the reality of a woman’s physical appetites.  For the sake of clarity, I’m talking about an evolutionary premise something like: women are more concerned about emotional fidelity because securing safety and support for themselves and their children was their strategy for survival over millions of years before the rule of law and standing armies lessened the practical (but not necessarily the emotional) need for a specific provider/protector.  Hmmm.  No bullet holes in me yet.  Well, we’ve come a long way baby, haven’t we?  So I’ve learned something about those “normal” attitudes I was seeking in order to shape my fictional characters.  I think a few years ago I would’ve been swarmed by Women’s Studies Ninjas for even alluding to evolution’s basic training…and now I’m going to put on my running shoes and tiptoe out of Dodge.

Wish I could include examples of your wonderful responses to the questions, but privacy/anonymity is a must.  Suffice it to say that what came in was feisty, funny, emotional or reasoned.  Much of it was profound.  And I very much appreciate the rending honesties that some people shared.  I’m creating a half dozen marriages in the new novel, and your responses will deepen the nuances.   The original questions and the answers that were posted rather than e-mailed are here: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/04/16/thomas-sullivan-would-you-write-a-book-for-me-or-what-do-you-really-know-about-sex-love-and-terror/

Doc Foto’s latest picture satire struck me as a kind of relationship inkblot test, so I used it to head up this gender article.  The evil doctor’s true identity is folk-singer Mark Manrique, a life-long friend who is much-loved by readers of Sullygrams (newsletters) for his outrageous photo caricatures.  You can link to his original music here:  http://www.youtube.com/user/manriq47#p/a/u/0/iYXd2GAOwkA    Another link to one of his original haunting songs is in this month’s Sullygram.  You can get that and future Sullygrams sent to you once a month for free by emailing me at mn333mn@earthlink.net . 

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at anonymously.  The only thing that changes after you create an account by making up a username and password is that when you click on your account page you’ll see the tweets of anyone you wish to follow, though they won’t see you.  Or simply click this link anytime: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  Sample of recent Tweets:  “Stubbornness is how you prove things to others; honesty is how you prove things to yourself.”  …and  “I am now a full-blooded Indian. Turtles no longer slide off logs when I canoe past.”  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Yoo hoo!  Attention everyone who has been broomed out of a job by Donald Trump.  And you uncounted millions over and above the counted millions who all are out of work — gotta minute?  Also to the rejected, the downtrodden, day dreamers, spurned lovers, adventurers, searchers, fantasizers, philosophers, natural-born psychologists, sob sister, questers, trapped housewives, romantics, gigolos, Delilahs, or otherwise unfulfilled souls with holes in their lives, I’ve got a job for you.  You’re hired!  If you want to be. 

Here’s the standard contract:

On call 24/7.  Report to shift muse.  Irregular hours, no days off.  Weekly pay = 0.  Monthly pay = 0.  Guaranteed annual income = 0.  Retirement = 0.  Health insurance = 0 (think of the “0” as the first letter of Obamacare, as in your first free brain surgery is a frontal Obama-ty).  Paid vacation  = 0.  Additional employee benefits = 0.  In case of actual sale and publisher eventually coming across with the green scratch, subtract Federal tax, State tax, Local tax, both ends of FICA, 15% agent fee, additional agent fee if sub-agenting, business expenses, and all fees, penalties and taxes yet to be invented hereafter in the known and unknown Universe.    

Agreeable?  Good.  Congratulations, you are now a fully functioning writer.  Take a pen with you the next time you go into the bathroom (hopefully you’ll find paper already there).  Here’s your first project:

See, I’ve got some questions and the research is murder.  No, no, not murder as in research for a mystery (though there’s some spooky stuff I’d like help with too); actually, my questions go more toward character relationships, emotional stuff –you know, whathcamacallits…gender relationships, sexual romance and whatever.

Like I said, the research is a killer, on account of my approach to romance is a little out of the mainstream.  Actually, I’ve only met one woman whose instincts/thinking about “luv” were the same as mine, so what do I know about normalcy?  I have two requirements for falling in love with a woman.  One, she must be totally insane and two, she must be utterly intransigent.  The insanity is necessary so that she will fall in love with me in the first place, and stone solid stubbornness ensures that communication will be blocked at some point, effectively annihilating all that I am and leaving me free and independent once again.  Yeah, it’s partly theory, but that’s because of my extremely limited experience, having kept myself off the market 99% of the time (why are you applauding?).  Hello?  Ah…still there and semi-conscious?  Good.  So I figure I can shortcut the research by getting the benefit of your experience and insight.  Here are six questions, five of which you’ll see could underwrite relationships:

If a woman HAD to choose, would she rather have a man be emotionally faithful to her or physically faithful?  And if a man HAD to choose, would he rather have a woman be physically faithful to him or emotionally faithful?

Fear, guilt, love.  Which one drives the bus?  Which one motivates the strongest?  Which one trumps?  And especially I’d like to hear views on which one(s) win if they go head to head against each other.

Which of the following two nightmares would be the scariest: just as you are about to awaken you 1) feel cool air all around you and know that when you open your eyes you will find yourself on a two-foot wide rock ledge jutting out from the side of a cliff, staring into a steaming abyss 9,000 feet below, or 2) you sense that a person who has been dead for a long time and that you miss the most in your life is lying conscious in the bed beside you, though they don’t seem to be breathing.

React to this statement: men are great dumb beasts when it comes to communication and love, but women train in those skills from early ages and are far more practical about emotions over time.

React to this statement: a man is less likely to fall romantically in love with a woman than a woman is with a man, but if he does, he falls hopelessly and idealistically in love whereas most women are more realistic.

React to this statement: living fully and loving fully (romantically) are mutually exclusive.

Feel free to e-mail me your responses at mn333mn@earthlink.net or just chunk something in below where it asks for Comments.  I rather suspect that writing a novel this way is going to be the ol’ making-sausage method.  Not pretty, but if it fries up nice in the pan, well, the proof is in the . . . uh, pudding (no), putting (no), sausage (no), blood pudding (no), eating (no) – you see why I’m hiring this out?  Hiring being euphemistic.  I mean, I hope the phrase “you get what you pay for” doesn’t apply here, ‘cause this ship sails empty.  Think of it as a balloon payment on your future as a writer.  And you know what balloons are filled with.  Floating off now…

Please use your newly hired imagination to pretend the photo above is relevant (floating…empty ship = empty canoe floating on ice pack).  It’s from my monthly newsletter which you can get free just by emailing mn333mn@earthlink.net .  The newsletter is mostly inspirational stories and a rave about nature w/photos that has a large and growing global readership.  Past newsletters are at this author’s website under Sullygrams & Columns (http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/sullygrams.htm ) and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out. 

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  The only thing that changes after you create an account by making up a username and password is that when you click on your account page you’ll see the tweets of anyone you wish to follow, though they won’t see you.  Or simply click this link anytime: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan.  Sample of a recent Tweet:  The Easter Bunny just saw his shadow. Which means we’ll have 6 more weeks of basketball…    Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

It’s happening again.  I am suffering from postpartum depression in the wake of an Olympics.  Call this one Vancouver games detox or 50K skinny ski hangover.  It is very similar to what I feel after penning the last word to a novel (been there, done that, as they like to say on Death Row).  In both cases you are caught up in something sublime if not surreal.  You’ve stumbled onto a yellow brick road, fallen down a rabbit hole, passed through a mirror.  Magic has kidnapped you, and life ceases to be a series of pedestrian events — washing clothes, cooking meals, getting the kids off to school — that are an end in themselves.  Suddenly there is adventurous content in your life and unknowns and the potential for…

PERFECTION.            

That’s what the Olympics and writing have in common.  That redeeming pursuit of excellence.  Doesn’t matter that the athletes run out of condoms, piss their names in the snow, or play air guitar from the podium during their national anthem.  Doesn’t matter that the author falls into a bottle for breakfast, or lives a life of quiet desperation whenever he/she is cut off from their secret passion.  The cracks and the flaws do not contaminate the liquid gold of the dream.  What matters is the pursuit of excellence.  What matters is the courage to put yourself in gear for that far horizon, even if you travel only a few steps during stolen moments every day.  The waste and the shame come not with failing to get there but only in failing to set out.  To allow fear of failure or the vanity of guilt to direct your one and only life is the same as hunkering down in the middle of the herd as if you never lived at all.  That is the crime of a cowardly soul and an affront to whatever created you. 

So I love people who dare reach for perfection.  Dreamers.  Risk-takers.  Love them all the more when they fail.  Love them still more when they fail and it doesn’t defeat them.  A writer who keeps faith with his/her pure dream despite unrelenting rejection is still in-process to succeed.  Failing is never failing until you give up, and a journey doesn’t end until you stop moving.  Most of all, I love those who never give up and never stop moving.

You know what I’m talking about.  You’ve been there.  Been made to feel foolish or childish for dreaming.  There is always pressure to conform to the majority who do give up and do stop moving.  Being different is dangerous.  After all, “who do you think you are?”  So, when we get hammered enough by disappointment, most of us resign ourselves, compromise, “mature.”  Thus, the athlete who seeks only medals and hears only applause quits staying fit when the medals and the applause are out of reach; the wannabe author tucks away their mss and demotes themselves to lesser expectations; the life of quiet desperation anesthetizes itself with spectatorship and stupor.  They have reached their destination.  RIP.  But the dreamer, the romantic idealist, the Peter Pan immature oddball keeps trying, and that makes it a lifestyle (at least a closet lifestyle).  Which is how they win at last: by remaining a participant in the Olympics of the Heart, Mind and Soul…

BECAUSE NOW THE EXCITEMENT, HOPE AND VITALITY OF THE ONGOING JOURNEY WILL LAST FOREVER! 

Impractical?  Don’t tell that to the part of yourself that secretly dreams, that wants to stay hopeful.  Idealism is realism of the soul.  In the territory of the heart, surrender and resignation should never be called being realistic.  That is an inversion of the latter term.  The needs of the inner soul (not to be confused with innersole) should not play second fiddle 24/7 to appearances demanded by society.  If fulfilling practical obligations means canceling out who you are, you have morphed into a zombie.  There should be nothing unrealistic about self-honesty trumping conformity especially if you don’t fit your circumstances.  That may be inconvenient, but so is personal extinction.  As Gerard Houarner, psychiatrist and one of our esteemed writers here at Storytellersunplugged, mentioned in his last column, being realistic is often considered anti-social. 

But not for Olympians.  At least not during those precious few days every four years when it’s all about performance and society focuses in vicariously.  Those of us audacious enough to try and capture the world’s attention with our writing know the excitement and stress well.  Stories are like single events and novels are like decathlons.  You may be judged by pace and style or beauty and daring.  The rules and execution tricks of language carry their own rewards and penalties for success or failure.  You can lose or win appreciation points from the reader or be totally disqualified if you wander off course.  And as you race ever faster through the baffles and turns of your plot, each chapter becomes another gate in a grand slalom that must be negotiated before the next chapter can be aligned.  A cast of characters is inevitably the source of conflict, competing head-to-head for something or staggered in their interplay or as conspiratorial as a relay, and as these vie and collide they will produce heroes and villains in skeins of interwoven dramas.  Those conflicts may be pulse-pounding with raw physical action or as lyrical as a ballet on ice, but always there will be a countdown to the resolution.  A clock may actually be ticking.  Certain things go hand-in-hand in the tableaux that the writer presents, as in the focused events of an Olympics: risk and reward, heart and mind, body and soul, substance and style.  You are, for all the preparation and execution of your endeavor, presenting the world made simple.  Life through a reduction valve.  Whether that comes out in a series of fictional scenes or the symbolic goals and performance of an Olympic event, it is editing.  But don’t wait for society to give you a gold medal after the fact.  If your dreams are threatening to others, find a secret venue to perform them every day and write on with liquid gold…    

The doctored photo of the Flying Tomato at the head of this article is from folk singer Mark Manrique (Doc Foto), whose novelty pix are a regular feature with which readers of my monthly newsletter are familiar.  The newsletter is mostly inspirational stories and a rave about nature w/photos that has hundreds of subscribers globally.  I’ll be happy to put you on the mailing list for free if you email me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters are at this author’s website under News & Articles (http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/News.htm ) and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out. 

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  The only thing that changes after you create an account by making up a username and password is that when you click on your account page you’ll see the tweets of anyone you wish to follow.  Or you can simply click this link anytime: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  Samples of my recent Tweets: Skis ran slow in the soft snow today.  Like the woman in the bikini, I should have waxed.  And … I have a 1-word solution for the killer whale: SUSHI   And … Valentine’s Day: I shall visit a place where a woman once married me in her heart, mind & soul, and loved me with her body.   Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

I don’t know if I can do this.  I want to, but I don’t know if I can.  I want to tell you about characters, about heroes & villains and the necessity of empathizing with them, but I think it’s a lot like telling you to go through psychoanalysis. 

That’s because you have to be bigger than your characters.  You have to contain them.  All of them.  The ones of the opposite sex, the sinners and saints, the cowards and fools, the twisted and the pure, the children, the obese octogenarian of another culture or another race, the thieves, the liars, the cheats, the Einstein, the Forrest Gump, the suicidal, the politically opposite of what you believe, the warrior and the pacifist.  Fight or flight must be in you in every possible equation.  Fear and desire in all proportions.  You must be in a wheelchair and you must train with Olympians.  So, if you want to be a writer — or even a complete, empathic, insightful, creative human being — you need some serious psychoanalysis.

Whatever makes you snuggle comfortably into your demographic works against this, of course.  Whether you are Joe Sixpack camped in front of the TV or the bored woman who was promised it all when she hauled her advanced degree to the altar, you won’t outrun your own borders without a mental overhaul.  It’s relatively easy to sympathize/empathize with yourself.  Even if you are filled with self-hate, confusion or depression, you can probably recall specific things and events that changed you from positive to negative and therefore you remember a time when whatever you were seemed justified and worthy.  But as an exercise, think of your worst enemy or someone you hate and try to empathize with them.  That’s the acid test if you’re going to assume the God power of creating people, or even the insight to understand the human blueprints for every person.  Creativity doesn’t fit a mold or follow a stereotype.

But how do you achieve such broad-mindedness without sometimes compromising or even contradicting your beliefs and values?  And doesn’t the inherent contradiction in trying to represent everyone’s POV convincingly where they differ from your own threaten who you are?  Ya, you betcha it does.  Small writers — small people — who reach mindlessly in that direction are almost doomed.  They are at risk of losing their souls, of becoming intellectual and emotional whores, or of simply drowning in more life than they can sort out.  But I’m not making a pitch for you to become some giddy, singsong, bleeding heart, all-inclusive, ex-patriot hippie who is so open-minded that their brains are lying in the road behind them.  What I’m saying is that you can let go of your demographic without abandoning it.  You can reach across the aisle into truth about the human condition in all its stripes; you can walk the walk, share the passion, talk the talk.  All you need do is drop prior expectations, judgments (and maybe even a few biases) as you meet/create characters with unique histories and independent motives.  And at the end of the day you can still flee back to familiar things you have chosen to define yourself. 

Of course, that’s where the psychoanalysis comes in.  Because you may not want to go back.  Not completely.  You may change, learn, grow, if you open up in this way.  It’s really quite emancipating — and sometimes even a relief — to go outside the appearances of your life.  And it’s exhilarating to work in the same industry as God, Nicholas Sparks and Dr. Frankenstein.  You never know what you’ll come up with, plus — oh, boy, here’s the door prize — know that above all you will learn to live more honestly within yourself.  The genuine, authentic, uncompromised, absolutely core Version 1.0 of YOU may re-emerge and trump the accumulated Version 99 with all its patches, fixes and updates.  But I hasten to repeat that it doesn’t have to shine a new light over your entire outward life.  It may be enough if it just shines a new light in your head, heart and soul during those times when they are up on deck.  True, you will then be schizophrenic.  Sort of.  But hey, you aren’t all that real when you’re living mostly appearances, if you want to know the truth.  Now at least you can be honest about it half the time.  And for all you know, that might be the best half of your life.

S’pose I should finish off here with a little show ‘n’ tell by way of example.  I’ve never been in therapy, but I’ve been in way deep self-analysis all my life.  Can’t tell you exactly why.  Maybe I was the class clown who got attention by being different; maybe I couldn’t win anything so I took my bat and ball and went home, refusing to play the game; or maybe I really was just different.  Doesn’t matter.  When you don’t belong anywhere, in a sense you belong everywhere.  I had circumstantial help.  A certain rootlessness anchored me to the broader universe — I had lived in a dozen countries by the time I was six, and maybe the different languages were part of the reason I seemed to be tuned to shadows and echoes rather than taking everything at face value.  But whether or not you have circumstances conducive to force you to look over walls, you DO get to choose where to put your borders.  Probably at critical or even life-defining moments.  As Jake Sully (no relation) says in Avatar, “Sometimes your whole life comes down to one insane move.”

The movie Avatar says quite perfectly some of the things I’m trying to say here.  It’s one of those films in which you can find what you want, and its premise is an ancient Hollywood cliché, but the real magic is in its fantasy culture (the Na’vi) and how the characters relate.  The Na’vi are driven by tradition, but their individualism trumps mere appearances of tradition.  Though the chief’s daughter is socially ordained to marry the heir apparent to the chief, the reality of her love for Jake Sully wins unhesitatingly.  They simply mate after vowing their mutual love in a natural setting one afternoon and that bonds them for life.  When a clash of cultures annihilates their home, the Na’vi begin again without looking back.  There is a kind of freedom implicit in their openness to all of nature.  And because they are open to all of it, it is open to them, from messaging through tree roots to riding dragons.  They embrace reality without losing their souls.  They will survive any change because their minds and their spirits are not narrowed into a subset, a demographic.  They live by the truth within themselves, as we all secretly yearn to do.

That’s the kind of childlike honesty that flows through the veins of creativity.  Purest reality and yet, because of its searching honesty, it becomes the hyper-reality of romantic idealism, of perfect empathy.  It is not a short-term perception that fits mere circumstances.  It is an unfettered perception that links beyond one’s circumstances and thus opens the door to understanding and creating truly believable characters.  Any and all characters.

When your writing drags on, try riding dragons.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  Samples of recent Tweets: Valentine’s Day: I shall visit a place where a woman once married me in her heart, mind & soul, and loved me with her body.  And…  I keep seeing what I think is the same deer in the same place. The buck stops here…   And…  Just driving around all night, dodging recalled Toyotas. Missed Toyotas but witnessed a disaster while listening to Howie Day’s “Collide.”  Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters w/photos are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles (http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/News.htm ) and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Who you were at your best moment is always who you can be again.  Kind of like summiting a mountain, it becomes a benchmark.  You’ve proven you can reach that far, be that person, do that thing – a minimum standard of excellence that cannot be taken away from you.  That applies pretty much to everything from labor to love, laughter to loss, but especially – I firmly believe – to moments of creativity.

Creativity, after all, is pointedly about excellence, isn’t it?  You reach for perfection, and if your fingers get burned, you gather your courage and reach again.  Artists as a community may be deeply flawed and anything but perfect, but in a world of frauds and disappointments that’s what makes our quests/dreams/passions so necessary.  In the infant innocence of our souls we cannot give up the romantic notion of achieving something godlike.  Is there an addiction or a high as pure as perfection?  I can’t speak for normal people, but for the lost and the damned who think that the sky is too low a limit, it is only in pursuit of excellence that all our senses and sensibilities come fully alive and we breathe rarefied air once again.  Just to be in the game, to make a little progress toward unblemished goals, quickens the blood and restores an urgency that is too easily lost in routine lives.  That said, it is exhausting to soar at that level, and so the real problem – once you find the courage to try – becomes to find the inspiration to act…

Which is what I wrote about last month  —   http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/12/16/thomas-sullivan-sea-lions-in-coffins-getting-lost-writing-without-words/ .  A number of e-mails came in from people who related to the little trick of getting lost in order to find themselves or doing eccentric things to shake the dust of monotony from their souls, so here I go, diving recklessly deeper into the subject.

Most of the feedback came from people who don’t regularly seek CPR from their muses, but I got the sense that whether it was just to escape, say, writer’s block, or something more systemic like stopping suffocation in a routine life, a necessary part of the solution was to gain perspective.  To me gaining perspective is almost the same as defining the problem, which most suffocatees have already done (they can’t breathe!…duh).  The necessary adjunct to gaining perspective, however, seems to be to do something very instinctive, like…walk, run, fly, but get out of Dodge.  In other words, do not let inertia chain you to your prison.

BACKFIELD IN MOTION.  Amazing how many writers regularly use the same strategy in order to re-fill the well.  DNW drives or walks past houses, WAS is drawn like a moth to the cathode tube glow of a night-time Chicago, RB bikes around Los Angeles… Brian Hodge defines the need to break out of routine as hardwired.  My own personal matrix is at least 3-D, so I have mixed motives, but I can’t remember when I did not make daily transits, usually into nature, and for the past three years inevitably a nightly drive.  Last month I suggested getting lost as a way of finding one’s self.  The goal of that was to eliminate the tedium of daily life — those limitations that make us forget our potential.  It’s very hard to see the painting, after all, when you’re standing on the canvas.  So you move outside the frame to a place with no context in your life.  Streets are good – and best at night – because they are margins.  You want to be totally offstage, pure audience.

Okay, let’s assume you achieve this true detachment which is fundamental to escaping whatever is smothering your creative side.  Like the physician who wants to heal, you must “first do no harm,” and remaining in your routine was harming you.  So you’ve stopped the hemorrhaging by taking sanctuary elsewhere, and now you’re ready for a transfusion.  Where do you find a donor for that?  The suffocation was of your mind and spirit, after all.  Where do the stem cells for imagination come from?  How do you kickstart inspiration?  

When was the last time you didn’t have to kickstart inspiration?  Pregnant pause.  Ever see a bored baby? 

THE GANG OF 5…or empowering your five senses.  This is another trick that works for me.  It worked for all of us when we were babies totally indulged in sensory information.  Everything was new and we were keen to examine it all with the full battery of our senses.  But we grew up and started to skip the savoring of the senses — been there, done that — and went straight to the abstractions, and so every time the phone rang with a new message from Taste or Touch or See, we didn’t always answer attentively.  Why should we, if we already knew what it tasted, felt or looked like and had turned it into an abstraction?  But we missed some new info that way, and maybe got disconnected from the inspiration — the total sense of being alive — that only The Gang of 5 can supply.  So going back to your senses and putting your brain on high alert for all incoming calls is good stimulation, even if all it does is repave old roads.  

Chances are, though, that your senses will give you better conversations if you give them some variety to chew on.  And that brings me to the third element of this column, another thing that works for me on a daily basis…

WHO’S THE STIFF?  Yeah, that thing you’re carrying around, the cadaver hanging from your brain, the corpse embalming your heart.  That stiff.  You.  The body.  Maybe you trace your pedigree back to Adam and Eve a few thousand years ago, or maybe you add millions more on the Charles Darwin freeway by believing in evolution, which gives you one helluva lot of basic training no matter how you slice it.  Sure, sure, we live in an intellectual age now, but whether we got here from standing naked talking to snakes and eating apples in the Garden of Eden or through eons of adaptation, most of what came between then and now was a pretty physical world.  You think because modernity has arrived, and the can opener has been invented, you can just ignore all that physical potential?  That’s a lot of dead weight to carry around.  A real drag on those sensory outposts I mentioned a paragraph back, know what I mean?  You sure you want to become a vestigial vagrant — hauling that carcass along through your emotional/psychological/intellectual state of being like it wasn’t a blue elephant standing in the room with you?  What if there’s more of a connection between your mind and your bod than you think?  Ever hear of, “Anima Sana in Corpore Sano”?  Okay, the only Latin I speak has the word “pig” in front of it — but just about everyone from Plato to John Locke is credited with saying, “Sound mind, sound body,” and even if I’m not that smart, I recognize a truism when I see it…feel it.

So do you.

And that’s my third trick this column.  Physicality.  Big part of my life.  True, I’ve been a nut job about it since romper room days, and ego & competition played large for most my life, but it was never JUST ego & competition and now being physical is purely about escape.  Escaping the tyranny of my mind, ditching smallness and paranoia, and about waking up my imagination each day.  It doesn’t have to be rabid physicality.  It can even be dynamic physical surroundings, if it wakes up your body.  This column is pushing my limit for length, so I’ll have to come back to the subject another time.  Right now I have a hunch that taking my Adam & Eve sleeping bag out into the brilliant winter woods for the afternoon will be a hoot.  Seriously.  Think contrast: robust nature vs. down sleeping bag.  Think crystal air and white light.  Imagine yourself all snug and warm while drinking in the pure distillation of winter in bracing sips.  Could be I’ll find my day’s supply of perspective, sensory stimulation, and physicality all in one shot.  You never know what you’ll find when you search for perfection.  And never knowing is part of the magic of inspiration. 

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  2 samples of recent Tweets:  Someone clue me, is the point of Vietnamese music to sing totally off key or did I just get a really bad trio twanging “Seoul” music?  And…  If I was a bat, I’d want to live in Al Gore’s humongous nostrils.  Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters w/photos are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  Happy 2K10! 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Pssst…me again.  Thought I’d check in on you.  See what kind of problems you got today.  No problems?  That’s a problem.  You’re an adventurer, a thinker, a romantic, a thrillseeker — something in a Walter Mitty fantasy that needs an adrenaline feed.  You need a problem.  Well…to be precise, you need a problem and a solution all in one shot.  If you’re a writer, you especially need something going on in the — whatchamacallit — inspiration department.

I never run out of inspiration.  Okay…okay, sometimes I run out of inspiration.  Okay, a lot of times I run out of inspiration.  Whenever I’m suffocating, actually.  Apathy suffocates me.  And I tend to get blue around the gills in a room full of oxygen if it’s being breathed by dull people in formal situations.  My least favorite vegetables are cooked carrots, rutabaga and dull people.  People who don’t respond and mistake prattle for conversation are duller than mosquitoes droning a Gregorian chant.  People who veg out like sea lions in coffins make me catatonic.  That’s when my eyes glaze over and my internal rockets launch for the far side of the universe. 

True, I am easily motivated.  But I am just as easily unmotivated.  People I can’t light up unmotivate me.  If you want to call that a lack of inspiration, okay, but really I just go underground.  Inside my head the burners are still blazing as I entertain myself.  I call that: WRITING WITHOUT WORDS.  Sometimes I just crack me up — such a funny guy, ha, ha, sob, sob.  You’d think someone would want to push my best stuff out there in front of people, cultivate an audience.  Oh, the world owes me a living!  But it doesn’t.  It do not.  Uh-uh.  Nope.  So, eventually I have to forgive the world for not loving me, make peace with it, and approach it on its own terms.  Eat your veggies, Sully.

Okay, now comes the part where I throw you some of my favorite tricks for inspiration.  I might as well tell you right now that they sound silly.  But that’s the whole idea.  If they don’t sound frigging ridiculous, they won’t shake anything up, and you need to be shaken up when you are uninspired.  That is what they do for severely depressed patients, you know — shake them up.  For instance, they might wake them in the middle of the night.  That puts the depressed person in a different world.  It’s a change from their expectations, their routine, and the overwhelming hopelessness that has them locked down.  It might seem pointless, but regarding everything as pointless is exactly the rationale we use to procrastinate until we become so inert that doing anything, however unorthodox, is a better option.  We need to stop smoking the brakes.  We need to grind some gears and DO something. 

Example, Sully.  Right.  Example: Go somewhere you have no reason to be.  (Yo, I’ve done this, you betcha – hell, I do it every day without trying.)  Try walking three miles to a corner totally unrelated to your neighborhood or anywhere you normally go.  Then think how disconnected you are at that moment. 

Feel the rain.

Feel the snow.

Feel the sun.

Feel the wind.

Take whatever is there.  Shape it.  Now invent the future you want.  The present is ever sashaying into the past before you can pin it down.  And the past is dead.  Life goes in one direction.  If you missed the life you should have led, at least live the life you have left.  Make it what you want.  There are always flashes of light in the broken glass of your dreams.

As you gaze at the traffic light – red, green, red, green — ask yourself, What if I never go back? 

So now you reinvent yourself right there.  Don’t skimp on the dimensions.  Roles have hammered your shape into what it was before you walked here, but now at this new intersection you can be whatever you want to be.  You can’t be born again, but you can grow, edit, morph.  Once you drop the embalming expectations and the fear-and-guilt driven inhibitions, you may surprise yourself with what emerges from your repressed soul.  The unfettered passion, the unhampered reach, the uncompromised dreams — like seeds trying to grow in the dark. 

This is the beginning of magic.  In you.  Still.  And if it’s still there, you have to ask yourself how/why you let it slip away in the first place.  How did you get to this time and place in your life?  Where were you born?  What or who were your companions for the first 20 years of life?  Are your dreams still alive?  What is crushing you?  What is floating your boat?  Are you who you thought you would be?  Watch the traffic going by and realize you are a stranger.  You have no history, no failures, no disappointments.  Just a stranger standing on a corner.  The intersection of Nowhere and One Way.  You can wait out the red light, or you can follow the green.  Go in any direction you want.  Be anyone you want.  At least for a while.

Now, for whatever reason, you may be saying that you can’t go somewhere you have no reason to be.  Your shackles are a 24/7 job or a family or physical limitations or you’re sitting in a jail cell in DeHoCo (Detroit House of Corrections).  Well…yeah, it’s cool if you can take a trip to Nova Scotia or drive 300 miles on a whim some night, but even if you have to sit backwards in a bath tub (warning: sitting backward on a toilet is not recommended) or go stand in a closet, you can put yourself in a position that makes you see the world differently for a while and stops the clock and causes you to THINK new stuff.  

Vitality is stimulated — or smothered — by context.  But the thing is you get to pick the context, and if you fail to take advantage of that, then what’s left except to fold your hand and take what you get? 

More on this in future columns.  Right now I’ve got to get lost so that magic can find me.  Got to go visit a beaver dam deep in a local woods.  Really.  It’s the wrong time, the wrong season and the wrong place (see photo at start of column) – what could be more lost than that?

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s fun and won’t intrude on your computer.  2 samples of recent Tweets:  I’ve been practicing stupidity all day. Then I realized something very profound. I don’t need to practice…  And…  Considering the number of vitamin pills that have rolled under the ‘fridge, I have the healthiest spiders in the Universe.  Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net.  Past newsletters are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/  

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan