19 December 2003: Vanity

Yesterday evening was my final class of the semester. I was only taking one class this semester, because way back when the semester started, I was putting in 50-hour weeks at my tutoring job. Ah, but what a class! English 111: Scriptwriting & Storyboarding, taught by Lee Marrs. Yes, the Lee Marrs (Heavy Metal, Star*Reach, Epic Illustrated, Pudge: Girl Blimp, Crazy Magazine, Wimmen’s Comix, Gay Comix, Wonder Woman, Zatanna: Come Together, Fault Lines, etc.). Ah, the people one can meet in this great little town! Took me four weeks to get over Stammering Fanboy Syndrome.

Lee is a wonderful woman and a great teacher. Runs a fun, useful, and very, very tough class; about two-thirds of the students who started the semester with me have dropped out because they couldn’t handle the workload. Not surprising, considering how prolific she is. One of the most useful things she taught us was this: In figuring out what they’re going to do professionally, most artists consider two questions: What do I love to do? and What do I do well? The reason that so many fail is that they neglect a third, equally important question: How long does it take me to do it? She intentionally paced the class so as to make this question inescapable.

The first half of the semester was smooth sailing for me, because it was dedicated to scriptwriting, a format at which I’m a natural. Second half was about storyboarding, which gave me a taste of just how tough Ace’s job is. My storytelling, cartooning, spatial relations,and Cinematic Thinking skills are good enough that I was able to pick up storyboarding really quickly, but I wasn’t able to do it very quickly (one of the reasons I’m not becoming any sort of professional visual artist is that I work so slowly; producing enough visual artwork to make a living would leave me no time to have friends, or romance, or children, or exercise, or meals, or sleep). So I’ve spent a whole lot of time immersed in homework recently. Admittedly, I could have done most of the projects in maybe half the time, and still done them well enough to get good grades. But I’m a perfectionist about my work. And my perfectionism, in this case, was compounded by Fanboy Syndrome: I wasn’t about to show the Lee Marrs anything but my very best.

Anyway, it’s done. I finished my final project on time, and handed it in along with a stamped, self-addressed envelope so that Lee could send me any final comments and critiques she had on it. Now I can get busy catching up on all the other aspects of my life that I’ve been neglecting. I’ll have four weeks of having a social life, tinkering with my various art and writing projects, and getting enough exercise, and then I start my new life as a full-time college student.

Speaking of having a social life... Christmas Eve Potluck at Stagewalker’s! Woot woot! I don’t know the starting time yet. Come to it if you’re around and if you know where it is or can convince me or Stagewalker to tell you.

And New Year’s Eve is coming, too, with the annual Long-Expected Party at Aleph’s, and its usual distinguished guest list (Geminica! My parents! Taarna, Galahad, and Grace! Even rumor of an appearance by Zann...).

I don’t know whether the Fourth Annual December 31st Bone Council is happening this year, because we’ve been unable to find a home for it. My apartment is too small for it, and Bonkydog, the other traditional Bone Council host, is going to be on the East Coast for New Year’s this year. If you have any ideas on the subject, see the “December 31st Bone Council” thread in the Events forum of the Moot Jungle.

The most important secrets of any spiritual path are right on the surface, revealed to all students at the very beginning.

Walk through the front door of a Christian church, and you’re looking down the aisle at the deepest teaching of Christianity: Christ on the Cross. If you’re in the right frame of mind (like if - as happened to me when God decided it was time for me to understand Christianity – you’re on a huge dose of acid, and you’ve been wandering around contemplating Kabballistic mysteries, and right as the peak hits you pass a chapel with an open door and remember Hesse’s injunction in Journey to the East that when you’re on a pilgrimage you should stop and worship at every holy site you pass...) you look up at that cross and you understand the whole thing right there; you’re catapulted right into Tiphareth.

Show up at a zen monastery, and within an hour someone will have told you to sit down and breathe and quietly pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s all you need to know. That’s the secret of zen. All the rest is just practice, practice, practice.

Show up at my dojo, and within the first few classes you will have been told all the secrets of the art. All the rest is just practice, practice, practice.

Back when I first started this journal, I thought it would be funny (in the way that zen koans are funny) to follow this pattern by posting the Secret of Life (or my version of it – the most important bit of information about life that God has seen fit to reveal to me) in my very first entry, thus establishing the context, thesis, synopsis, start-point, end-point, intent, explanation, and moral of everything else I would ever write afterwards.

I noted in my referrer logs today that a lot of people have checked out that first entry in the past 24 hours (usually, when there’s a lot of traffic on a specific, non-recent essay or journal entry, it means someone posted a link to it in a discussion forum somewhere). This reminded me that I usually don’t see any traffic at all on that page these days. Which makes sense – this journal’s been going long enough now that new readers are unlikely to go all the way back and start at the beginning. Having recognized this fact, and still wanting to make the Secret as open as possible, I’ve now also posted it in the Notes section, as I’ve done in the past with a few other essays that have first appeared within journal entries.

Tuesday night was the sixth session of the Initiations lab. Yet another new woman in the group, bringing us even closer to a gender balance (7 women & 9 men now) and bringing our number back up to 16. I suspect that we’ll have no further dropouts or new members; I think this is the crew for the next five weeks.

Very distracted and out-of-sorts at the beginning of the session, but got into the groove during the Heat phase of the warmup. The Heat phase of the warmup (staying within a small area of the floor and not interacting with anyone else, you have seven minutes to get yourself to sweat as much as possible) is crucial to the quality of the rest of one’s experience during the session, and is generally excruciating, being the purest possible distillation of the Willpower vs. Inertia struggle. I got a good one going this time; it helped a lot.

Addressed again (ritually, not intellectually) the question of why we were there. My answer this time (not verbalized – my verbalization this time was “No”) was that I was there out of vanity. This proved to be a running theme for me throughout the session – how deep, insidious, pervasive, and inescapable my vanity was.

What a discovery: it was my vanity that was motivating me to seek to transcend my vanity!

It is vanity to seek to be free of vanity. A beautiful koan. Thank you, God.

It’s a puzzler, all right. To expect myself to be free of vanity is sheer vanity. Who do I think I am? Christ? Buddha? Why would I want to be that holy? That sort of ambition is the most grotesque height of vanity.

Robert Crumb has a character called Shuman the Human, who is a brilliant, spot-on caricature of exactly that sort of spiritual vanity. He usually shows up acting as one of Mr. Natural’s foils. Anyone who dedicates themselves to the Work – especially those who, like me, are vain enough to presume to offer guidance in the Work to others – should read Crumb’s Shuman the Human cartoons the way one might do a self-exam for breast or testicle tumors.

Getting upset with oneself for one’s vanity, is, of course, an indulgence in vanity.

On the other hand, neglecting one’s art or one’s Work or one’s god-given mission or one’s relationship with one’s soul in order to avoid indulging in vanity is an even bigger indulgence in vanity – it smacks, in fact, of infantile sulking and tantruming.

The correct answer to the koan, of course, is to accept all, forgive all, laugh, and keep doing the Work.

Funny how often that turns out to be the answer.

If I accept my vanity and embody it fully, I will find out what’s on the other side.

After the session, I asked Sherpa if there was anything he felt I should be working on in this lab.

“Less arms,” he said. He explained that my physical movements in the lab tend to involve very expressive use of my arms, and that I should explore how the motions develop and the expressions emerge if I don’t involve my arms so much.

I need to work on using my arms less in aikido, too, so this is perfect timing for this experiment. I’ll be trying it this Sunday, and we’ll see what happens.

Sherpa just started posting his own notes on the lab, at http://www.paratheatrical.com/pages/initiationslabreport.html.