Random Thoughts: Form and Function

I think for any artist, it is a mistake to think that improving form will automatically improve function.

Consider the career trajectory of a rock musician. The upstart rocker is young, raw, and still developing technical skills on his or her instrument. Sometimes a band will release an album that “takes the world by storm” before its members can read a line of music. What most fans will consider their best album is often an album created from what the band members profess as “little knowledge of what they’re doing.”

An aged rock musician may say, “My skills have improved drastically since my first album.” Though the technical skills may improve, the quality of the music diminishes. The earlier albums had a rawness that lacked sound form, but walloped with effective function. Resonant art requires feeling. A fast solo does nothing without emotion embedding it.

I’m sure the band members of Metallica can play circles around their past selves. They can hit every old solo blindfolded. That does not mean that modern Metallica music is better, however. If anything, the music has objectively staled (almost no one would argue that Death Magnetic is a superior album to Ride the Lightning). Where rock music counterpart Megadeth has an advantage is their continued sense of urgency. Every song is still imbued with feeling. The fifty-year-old has the same attitude as his 18-year-old self. There is still pain, triumph, and loss behind the song structure. The quest continues, and therefore, so does the art.

The issue is similar for a writer. A writer’s prose may improve over the years, but that says nothing of the story he or she may wish to tell. A writer may edit a sentence a hundred times, but each successive edit does not necessarily improve the sentence. The master of syntax is by no means the master storyteller. That first drafted sentence, the impulsive one, may be grammatically worse, but it also may pack more punch. Even if embarrassingly poor in structure, it probably impacts the reader more than the hundredth edit. By the hundredth edit, can it even be said that the writer still maintains the intention of the original sentence? After all, the first sentence was probably written on feeling. The hundredth sentence is often written to impress an audience. Something was lost along the way.

My point is that effective art requires work, but it is a mistake to believe that function requires perfect form. This should be good news to any aspiring artist because it gives him or her permission to be imperfect, so long as they have something to say and a fiery means of saying it. It should also illuminate why a guitar virtuoso is often not the writer of a hit single.

Hustle Culture

Hustle culture can seem omnipresent in the city.

Cars rush forward at the break of dawn because hurry is the queen bee of the hive. Stoplight to stoplight, interstate entry to interstate exit, drivers hope to save ten seconds, for the sake of being on time (the white rabbit is always a slave to the queen). Their mood and their morale are fully dependent on the mercy of the stoplight and the traffic congestion. The roads, and their vehicles, are therefore their masters.

Breakfast is not so much an experience as it is an inconvenience, solved via the drive-through.

Coffee is slammed, not sipped.

There are agendas for the day. Emails to answer. Calls to take. Appointments to arrive at.

The best to-do list, according to hustle culture, is one that forever adds and never subtracts.

To that I say, the best to-do list is one thrown in the garbage and forgotten!

A breakfast is better spent over three hours than over three minutes. Give me jokes, countless cups of good coffee (and no deadline to finish them), merry company, and sunshine! Let me taste real food and engage with real people.

A rushed drive to work is best replaced by a slow walk through a forest.

A screen is best replaced by a book, a painting, or a music album to listen to.

An obsession over retirement is best replaced by a spontaneous and fun hobby for today.

Fretting over the future is best replaced by contentment for this beautiful, precious moment, a moment in which we are aware of our own existence.

This is what I aspire to… which is why I’ll take my time with my coffee this morning.

The Need for a “What If”

I find myself needing a hypothetical “what if” in order to look forward to the future. That “what if” scenario is simple:

“What if my important accomplishment or action, which I was placed on this planet to fulfill, has not yet occurred?”

I find the need to posit this scenario because as a former elite athlete, it was easy to assume for the better part of a decade that my greatest accomplishment already transpired. This is a debilitating state of mind that ensnares many athletes because their athletic careers typically end well before the halfway marker of life.

I freed myself of this mental prison with a hypothetical question, and whether or not it’s true is inconsequential: “What if there is still a greater adventure ahead?”

I think of Bilbo Baggins and his reluctance to leave the safety of the Shire. After all, Gandalf reminds him, there is no guarantee of a safe return, or a return at all.

Yet something catalyzes Bilbo to embark on his greatest adventure and to eventually slay a dragon. He is about 50 years old when he leaves the Shire, which in theory would mark him well past his physical prime.

I am turning 37 soon. I spent the first quarter of age 36 learning to walk, and then run, again. As I embark on longer runs and longer bike rides I have no delusions of winning any sort of championships, nor do I care to.

There is, though, a unique excitement in knowing that I just ran or biked farther than I ever had in my life.

About a week ago I managed a long Sunday run of 15 miles (24 km). That was the longest run of my life, and I finished it feeling fresh. Today I biked a little more than 50 miles (80 km) without stopping. My “injured” foot remains in good health and I find myself feeling physically “lighter” than I have in the past.

Why do I feel lighter? Maybe the burden of expectations has finally been lifted from my spirit. Without it I’m free to experiment and fail.

I suspect that I have a lot of miles to run, and plenty of engine to run them. That’s why I signed up for my first full marathon, which will take place in April 2023. There’s plenty of time to build to it. I have a dream of running several. I’m in it for the long haul.

I don’t obsess over any sort of victory anymore, but I do feel a compulsion in my soul to finish my first marathon without stopping. Maybe it’s yet another form of my battle with my own mortality. Maybe I finally found the metaphorical dragon to slay, as Bilbo did. Or maybe the marathon is simply my “Gandalf”, my catalyst to introduce me to even better adventures ahead.

After all, why run roads when mountains are an option?

What if the best is yet to come?

Weekly Plunder: Week 21 - Romanticizing Nature

That which you romanticize will eat you alive. In the case of nature it often happens quite literally. I am thinking specifically of the documentary Grizzly Man, in which a man sets out to live with Alaskan grizzly bears only to eventually be devoured by one. In the epic battle of nature and civilization there isn’t necessarily a salvation in one or the other; there are merely consequences that one must be aware of when choosing to settle in either.

This thought brings back a memory from 2020. My first sight of the Atlantic Ocean in the Bahamas (Exhuma) enraptured me. The water was a sapphire and translucent blue that one cannot fathom from the polluted shorelines of a heavily populated nation.

I hurried to the nearest docks, threw my shirt off, and jumped into the ocean. A powerful ocean current pushed me sideways, as if attempting to sweep me along the coast. I swam against it, enjoying the challenge. This must be heaven, I thought.

Then I felt a stabbing pain in my stomach. At first I thought that I had been stabbed by a sharp end of barnacle clinging to the dock. I looked into the water, though, which was nearly transparent, and saw what must have been the king of the island’s jellyfish, floating inches from my body.

The skin around my stomach quickly reddened and my bowels weakened. I climbed out of the ocean, knowing that this injury would linger for a few weeks. It did. It scabbed, it caused giant red welts to form over my entire midsection, and it felt like a second degree burn that lasted for days. It was a freakin’ doozy I tell ya.

It’s estimated that up to 100 people die per year of jellyfish stings. I wasn’t close to death, or at least I assume that I wasn’t, but I can attest that the sting hurt a hell of a lot more than a wasp sting. It hurt a hell of a lot more than any sting I’ve experienced, for that matter.

I quickly returned to the ocean—fun always has risk, after all—but that is a story for another blog.

Nature is lovely, but the lumberjacks and hunters of the world have a far more intimate relationship with it than the urban poets who venture to the woods for a respite.

What I’m watching: All of us are Dead, a new Korean zombie series on Netflix. This is supposed to be bonkers. Anything labeled as “bonkers” has my attention.

What I’m reading: Four Thousand Weeks. It’s a book about time. Four thousand weeks is how long it’s estimated that you will live, and even that is not a guarantee. The human lifespan is short: spend your time wisely.

What I’m listening to: “Call Me Little Sunshine” by Ghost. I’m seeing Ghost live next month and I believe they’ve mastered the art of the double entendre. Songs can be both tongue-in-cheek and cerebral, which is a difficult duality to pull off.

What I’m doing: Each week I’m running a little longer. This week I mixed a few random sprints into my routine. The “bad” foot typically feels raw and sore after a run, but the feeling dissipates over the course of two days. My physical therapist told me this feeling happens because the foot’s muscles are still stiff and severely inflamed. The muscle tears are repaired, but the foot still has some work to do before it gets “back to 100%”. However, it’s getting there, bit by bit.

2021, Goodbye Forever

It’s time to pull the curtains on 2021. As Seneca is credited as saying, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

I spent the afternoon lounging outside Mike’s Bike Shop in Central West End with some pals who work the store. We shared a beer together; the weather was cool and yet bracing enough to wear just a tee. The atmosphere was jovial, a festive ambience in the air. Randoms sauntered by the shop, hopefully on walks without destinations, and wished us well.

For a change it seemed the world was content to pause. How nice to spend the last afternoon of the year outside, with random conversation about celebrity deaths (Betty White died shortly before her 100th birthday), crappy Hollywood sequels (common consensus is the new Matrix movie sucks), bike tire upgrades, and aging.

The store owner’s dog was adopted; I was told its previous owners brutally beat and starved it, nearly to death. It was nearly dead when found, reduced to being a skeleton wrapped in torn-up skin and containing a host of internal issues.

The dog cannot keep the owner out of his peripheral version. He constantly rested his head on the owner’s lap and gazed into the owner’s eyes, as if thinking, “my love for you will never end, and I’ll show you this devotion for every moment of my being.” The dog has a gentle demeanor. It’s as though because he realizes the full extent of pain’s possibilities and the horrors accompanying true suffering, he aims to make everything and everyone around him as comfortable as possible.

As the owner told me, “I had to build the dog from the bottom up, from a starved heap of bones to a living thing. Now he knows what the alternative feels like, and he loves what he has with every ounce of himself.”

And with that, my last relevant lesson of 2021: the darkest depths of fear and suffering give us the fullest appreciation for love and life. Further, we can’t fully appreciate health unless we’ve fully experienced a lack of it.

I couldn’t help but think of my foot when I think of the dog. “Building from the bottom up” describes what I’ve been doing with an injured foot for the final months of 2021. A new appreciation for walking is what I’m ending the year with.

Every walk is a gift. I was given a glimpse of the alternative to being bipedal. Therefore, I finished 2021 with a blessing: every painless step now feels like magic.

My friend told me, “God realized He couldn’t give you COVID this year, so he decided to hit you with a freakin’ car instead. Because that’s the equivalent challenge for the Manimal.”

And as I think about the reconstruction of my foot, I also think about the countless adventures from this year. Adventures are great, and if you are lucky enough to experience them with someone else, all the better.

A few highlights (many photos captures in Sights section):

• Lots of important weddings, one of them (my brother’s wedding) giving me a trip to Puerto Rico. And what a lovely week that was!

• A bikepacking trip through the Blue Ridge mountains!

• Key West, Florida, and the Hemingway house cats!

• Hiking Turkey Run in Indiana!

• Megadeth show!

• Hiking Elephant Rock and the forest and bluffs around it, and reaching the highest point of elevation in the state of Missouri!

• Trips to Missouri/Illinois wine country and the imbibing that ensued (Hermann, Augusta, St. Genevieve, Grafton, among others)

• Hiking through Shawnee National Forest (and drinking wine along the Shawnee Wine Trail on top of it).

• A trip down memory lane in North Carolina to see places, people, and things that were a relevant part of my life before my China days.

• Befriending Grant’s Farm goats and camels!

• Incredible Christmas light shows in Saint Louis

And now, on to the next adventure. Don’t spend too much time waxing nostalgic, my constant reader, or you’ll miss your next great opportunity. After all, the only constant is change…

The Weekly Plunder: Week 11 - Off Road

The beauty of the gravel bike is in its lack of limitations. While a road bike has the advantage of speed, it’s also bound to pavement, and therefore subjected to most of the rules of the road.

A gravel bike can handle roads and much more. You can ride through forest, desert, and mountains. You can venture where most dare not walk. You set your own rules when you leave pavement. This gives gravel bike riders a true sense that the world is at their fingertips. Cycling across a country suddenly becomes possible.

Needless to say I’m really enjoying my gravel bike.

What I’m reading: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen. As far as I can tell it’s a book about shame. There’s a passage in the beginning that I found particularly interesting, about a widow whose husband recently died. A pastor who has romantic interest in her suspects that she will only stay alone for a short period of time out of emotional loyalty, but that what she primarily misses is simply the feeling of companionship. After all, the pastor reasons, we tell ourselves that we will never replace our dead pets, but in due time we find justification for a new cat or dog.

This brought to mind a story I heard of a man whose wife died of cancer. He was back in the dating scene within a short period of time. What a dark epiphany about human nature.

What I’m watching: The Circle on Netflix, season 3. It’s just trashy reality television that kills time. I shouldn’t watch it… but then we shouldn’t do a lot of things that we do anyways.

What I’m listening to: “The Scarecrow” by Avantasia. What a dark, nostalgic, and poignant song. Jorn’s vocals are among his best on this one. As far as I can tell it’s a song about a lonely person who sets out on his or her own strange and twisted journey. Along this person’s journey, there is someone else trying to destroy the person’s belief system. I find it interesting; it brings to mind the transition out of school.

What I’m doing: I’m planning some pretty epic bike rides. I’ve also been searching for a physical therapist for my ankle in hopes of getting it healthy enough to run again. I’d like to run before 2021 ends and am faintly optimistic that I can get there. You don’t expect an injury to take you out of the game for so long, but you have to play the cards you’re dealt.

I also finally bought a skateboard. Why? Because I believe there is incredible value in constantly leaving my comfort zone, in seeing new places, in learning new skills, and in trying new things. I’d rather embrace being a beginner and enjoy being awkward while braving the unknown than remain in predictable territory.

I aim to disrupt my own routines when I can. It’s not about “cycling really far every day” or “running really far”. It’s about moving with a smile. That’s why I got the skateboard.

Den Standiga Resan

I’ve always been into Opeth (okay, that is an understatement!)… and as much as I enjoy listening to the English versions of the songs, listening to Mikael sing in his native tongue adds another layer of beauty and richness, even when it’s a cover song such as this one (one of my favorite cover songs).

Den Standiga Resan (The Constant Journey)

Translations:

When I think about the constant journey through life

When it always feels like fall

When the wind slowly turns to north

And the flowers die

It's raining in my dreams

I have to travel again, and search for solace

I have to search again after the voice of tenderness

I have to travel again, to the next fall

The constant journey to the next fall

When I walk on the stony road through life

When it feels like I carried a sorrow

Then the sun slowly hides in the clouds

And the word is goodbye

The snow will soon be falling in my dreams

I have to travel again, and search for solace

I have to search again after the voice of tenderness

I have to travel again, to the next fall

The constant journey to the next fall

Oh, the constant journey to the next fall

https://lyricstranslate.com

The Nothing

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” - Socrates

I had a fun conversation this week with a colleague about the 80’s film The Neverending Story. In the days that followed I found myself thinking about the evil that threatened to destroy the magical world of Fantasia, “The Nothing.”

The Nothing was tied to the human world. In the film it resembled a black hole that swallowed and essentially deleted from existence all of the mystical lands and creatures of Fantasia. It was directly correlated with the adult lack of imagination and failure to dream or read books.

With the film having been released decades ago and the book it’s based on long before that, I wonder if The Nothing would have easily triumphed over Fantasia in today’s world. I suspect it would.

I recalled a friend of mine’s toddler who sat in the back seat while we drove to a museum, the toddler’s eyes glued to her tablet screen. How will such a toddler, always enveloped by dopamine-inducing stimulus, ever have time to imagine? It is through boredom that creativity grows. It seems that The Nothing now swallows many of us before we are even old enough to read in the first place.

The Nothing makes us busy, and in its clutter it makes us barren. With more websites to browse, more things to buy, more emails to answer, more shows to watch, more tasks to complete, The Nothing envelopes us in inadequacy. And at the core of this inadequacy is money. Therefore, money is at the core of The Nothing.

The toddler therefore abandons nature in favor of WiFi.

On the other end of the age spectrum is the retiree. Consumed with planning, the 65-year-old retiree is concerned almost entirely with projections. Projections of lifespan, projections of benefits, projections of health. All of these projections gravitate around money.

Whereas they once fretted for their job security and bonuses, retirees soon fret for health security. The primary question of the consumerist model does not fully disappear: Do I have enough?

Gone are simple days spent being. With money having consumed the retiree’s every thought, every worry, and every bit of motivation, for years upon years, the modern consumerist model has completely devoured the retiree’s spirit. Wholly dependent on the system for what the retiree now values most, which is predictability and stability, the retiree no longer focuses so much on what he or she deems trivial: things like creation and meditation. What money, what insurance, after all, are supplied by creativity? Instead, the retiree’s focus is on wills, on healthcare, and on potential future nursing homes.

Burn me at the stake, I say, before sending me to a damned nursing home!

Free from the shackles of work, the retiree is shackled to insurance and rife with anxiety over pension plans. “Will I get my promotion” is quickly placed with, “But will it get me through?”

The what ifs of the working world subside, and the what ifs of the healthcare world infect.

It is no wonder then that so many retirees struggle to find purpose, when in fact there is a thousand years’ worth of purpose in a single ray of sunshine. The retiree’s sole focus for so many decades was on “finally having security” that the act of retirement only breeds more insecurity: a lack of passion, a renewed anxiety over wellbeing, and a focus solely on money.

The retiree, consumed by being busy, struggles to breathe. He or she will therefore often find new things to be busy over, and there is great risk in these things being too superficial to live long for.

The focus for so many decades was on having enough money that money can become the retiree’s primary value. It will not simply dissipate because one is retired. It will instead shapeshift into forms more sinister. The Nothing will prevail.

And in between the toddler that is introduced to a consumerist model of screens, and the retiree fully consumed by the consumerist model of funeral planning and pension spending, are those lost in between, navigating the unknown, figuring out what is truly valuable to them.

Will The Nothing finish them off, or will they learn to read again?

It is easy to be rendered cynical by the hoard, but it is still relatively easy to defeat The Nothing.

Take a moment to breathe. Do nothing, just stare and breathe. Let your mind wander where it may. Don’t look at any screens or the wasteful notifications that blink from them. Don’t prepare anything or mark anything or clean anything or throw anything away. Was it easy? Then do the same, but for ten minutes. Then try an hour. Look at a plant, or an animal. Let your mind wander. Then when you’re done, pick up a book and read a few pages.

The Nothing just shrank a bit.

Suffering, the Precursor to Art

I was reflecting today on why old Soviet literature encompasses a large portion of my favorite novels.

Most of my favorite works were written under iron-fisted bureaucracies (or shortly prior to their arrival), within systems that repressed and compressed the human soul. I find it interesting that from a system that mashes the individual spirit into flattened dough, some of the finest breads were baked.

Soviet writers and painters were forced to hone their crafts within the narrowest boundaries, and despite not capturing what they likely dreamed of capturing, they created something magnificent within the confines of what was allowed. It was a negotiation in some sense, but then almost all art is. Artists were given a litany of things they couldn’t do, and so they perfected what they could.

This reminds me of modern Hollywood film, in a sense. The best works are created with minimal money and resources because the artist must focus on the visual aesthetic and storytelling as a craft. The added skill compensates for a lack of money. Contrarily, when films are given a limitless budget, they often materialize into disaster.

The Master and Margarita, one of my favorite Soviet novels, was not published until well after the author’s death, and several censored version floated around prior.

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, though written before Lenin, was a product of a rapidly changing time. The aura of the morally degenerating Marxist youths of the time are woven through the book’s pages.

It led me to think that great art requires limitation and perhaps even the total destruction of stability. Confines, therefore, are a precursor to great art, and art is always a negotiation between artist and society.

Yet in America, the best literature was often written in a much different system. I think back to Faulkner, Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot, and the Roaring 20s, and the crash that ensued.

It seems as though with affluence and fame and minimal limitations or censorships, great novels still arose, just with vastly different themes. There were still cultural criticisms to be found, but perhaps the artists themselves, with relatively less censorship, found ways to bring their own demons to the forefront. American authors had a propensity for gluttony and nihilism, and consequently a deep knowledge of the darkest parts of the human soul. Everything good, as shown both internally by the act of alcoholism and drug use, and externally by the Great Depression, will inevitably be destroyed.

Whereas Soviet artists constantly battled their system, the Americans battled their inner demons. Hemingway died of a shotgun wound to the head after decades of chronic alcoholism. Eliot and Faulkner were similarly fond of the bottle. All had ample turmoil within themselves, though of different types for each, which inevitably manifested in their pages.

Therefore it can be assumed that it is not necessarily a repressive system or set of limitations that sets the stage for great art, but rather the act of suffering itself, which can take many forms, both societally and internally.

It is suffering which gives art its meaning because to truly be sustainable, art must tell us something about ourselves that we did not otherwise know, or could not put into words. And to accomplish immortality, the artist must sink into the darkest nether regions of the human soul, and return sane enough to tell what’s down there.

Every artist, regardless of era or upbringing, is sacrificial in some sense because of this.