29 July 2004: Fount

Finished reading The Confusion. It ate much of my life on Monday and Tuesday. Good books tend to do that, so I've learned (the hard way) to be careful about when, and how often, I'll start on one.

It would be great if every day I did some yoga or aikido or other somatic work, and did some writing and some reading, and ate a few moderately-sized meals, and got six hours of sleep (that's how much I seem to need these days). But that's not how I operate. When I pick up a book, it eats my life until it's finished. Most Sundays, I do three hours of aikido, an hour-and-a-half of intense yoga, and three hours of paratheatrical ritual work. There are days when I sit at the computer for fourteen hours. I stay up all night doing homework. I forget to eat until I'm famished, and then eat quantities of food that would make most people explode. I sleep three or four hours a night for a week or two at a stretch, and then make up for it by sleeping for a 10-hour stretch.

Popular wisdom says I should be a mess, living like this. Fortunately, "popular wisdom" is an oxymoron. Physically, mentally, and emotionally, I'm in exceptionally good shape for my age. I'm a straight-A student, most people guess me to be five to seven years younger than my chronological age, and I feel good most of the time.

The moral? Well-being comes from accepting and being true to one's own nature. Popular wisdom is always wrong, because even at best it only addresses what's true for normal, average people, and no actual person conforms exactly to anyone's concept of normalcy or to any statistical average.

On the other hand, the advice "be true to your own nature" ends up fucking up most people who try to heed it, because most people don't understand the sort of work one must do to discover and embrace one's true nature. Most people who think that they're being true to their own nature are actually being true to what they think their nature should be, or what they wish their nature was. Trying to live according to a set of concepts is a recipe for disharmony and misery.

But I digress. Where was I?

I finished The Confusion. It's really, really good, and contains such marvellous sentences as:

Every day he knelt beside me in the side-chapel and prayed for the intercession of St. Nicholas of Frisia, whose emblem was a Viking broad-axe embedded in the exact centerline of his tonsure: a wound that had given him the miraculous gift of understanding the speech of terns.

And:

The Elector Joahann Georg IV belonged to a sort of fraternity whose members were to be found in every country in the world, and among every class of society: Men Who Had Been Hit on the Head as Boys.

And:

You are as ever a fount of treasonous raillery.

The third book in the trilogy, The System of the World, is due to hit the bookstores in October, which means I’ll probably read it in late December and/or early January. Until then, I’m staying off the fiction for a while... back to reading Grotowski-related stuff, which, while highly intriguing and edifying, does not suck me in the way a good yarn does, and which I can therefore read without the risk of getting sucked into a binge. Which is important, because in a couple of weeks I’ll need to start channeling my bingeing impulses into schoolwork again.

My classes for the coming semester will be Intro to Biology, Interpersonal Communication Skills, and American Indian History & Culture.

Which reminds me that I was going to say a bit more about the fabulous summer-term Creative Writing class that ended a week ago. Six-week term. The first two weeks were spent on poetry, and resulted in the poems that I posted to the Poetry section back on June 25th.

The second two weeks were devoted to prose fiction. Everyone in the class worked on short stories, except me. I wrote two brief excerpts from that long-ago-concieved and long-since-abandoned novel about my time with the Khan in Philadelphia.

The final two weeks of the class were spent on drama – meaning that we wrote in stage play or screenplay format, not that anyone threw tantrums in class. I wrote up another scene from that same novel of mine, in screenplay form.

The teacher was one of the best teachers I’ve had in school. He knew an awful lot about writing (he showed us one of his own short stories, which had been published in Granta, and the skills it demonstrated were impressive). To teach us about good screenwriting and effective plot, theme, and character development, he showed us the first few scenes of Miller’s Crossing, one of my all-time favorite movies. He never talked at us; he facilitated our discussion and critique of our own work and each other’s work, and then added just enough. He didn’t play favorites and he never once put anyone down (unlike every other creative writing teacher I’ve heard tell of over the years).

The students were also great. The supportiveness and cohesiveness of the class was extraordinary enough that the teacher marvelled aloud about it on several occasions. I’ve tended, as most people do, to form friendly acquaintanceships with various people in my classes. But this time, I actually made some friends, with whom I’ll be keeping in touch (in fact, three of them showed up at my aikido class this past Sunday).

This Creative Writing class was also the reason I produced no journal entries for a month. I’m a slow writer, and my journaling time was spent on the two novel excerpts and the one novel-excerpt-in-screenplay-form.

The big repercussion of the class is that I’m going to write that novel. Not now, because I’m too busy with school and all the other things I do. But eventually. After I’m done with school. I’ve got the skill for it, I’ve found the voice, and I’m in love with the whole thing. What really clarified it all for me, what really led me to make up my mind that this was a book worth finishing, was how much my classmates loved the characters. Not the writing, because I’ve known for years that other people like my writing. The characters. After reading the first two pages of the first excerpt, people in the class were talking about the characters like they were talking about people in their lives, or the way that fans of TV series like Star Trek and Buffy talk about their favorite characters on those series. The characters were alive; they had life and reality and appeal for people other than me and my circle of friends.

So yeah, I’m going to write it. But not now. In a few years. After school.

Big breakthroughs in aikido lately, stemming mostly from the paratheatrical work, the Grotowski reading, and the two Butoh classes I’ve attended so far.

More soon. Time to post this, send in my vote on the Lila/Valkyrie bet, check out other people’s journals, take a shower, and head out to the Y to do some moving.