Travel doesn’t relieve your problems, it throws them into relief.
You can be woke without waking up to the news
A friend of mine said he didn’t know how long he could wake up to such horrible news every day. I suggested to him that he shouldn’t wake up to the news at all, and neither should anyone else.
There’s almost nothing in the news that any of us need to read in the first hour (or two or three or four…) of our day.
If you’re using news or social media to wake up, try this instead: When you wake up, don’t pick up your phone. Head to the bliss station, play with your kids, write in your notebook, draw, pray, meditate, take a walk, eat breakfast, listen to Mozart, get showered, read a book, or just be silent for a bit. Even if it’s only for half an hour, give yourself some time in the morning to not be completely horrified by the news.
It’s not sticking your head in the sand, it’s retaining some of your inner balance and sanity, so you can be strong and fight.
You can be woke without waking up to the news.
(This post turned into a section in my book, Keep Going.)
What is not machine-like
“REJOICE IN HUMANNESS! Machines can’t make mistakes. If you compete with a machine on its terms YOU LOSE! So don’t reduce your writing to be like type. YOU ARE NOT A TYPEWRITER! Admit mistakes, correct them, & go right on.
—Jacqueline Svaren, Written Letters
Andy Warhol said, “I want to be a machine,” but we’ve been there and done that, and besides, he was delight-full of crap, like all great artists, because when I stood in front of those big silk-screened flowers last week they sure didn’t feel like they were made by machines. You could sense the human behind them…
“These are not yet automata.”
—Studs Terkel, Working
I remember a few years ago how triumphant I felt when the Twitter spam account @horse_ebooks turned out to be a human pretending to be a machine. Some were disappointed, but the feed seemed too weird and beautiful to me to be completely random. I was happy to see a human behind it.
“The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
I like my machines just fine, but I’m not interested in turning into one. I’d like to remain a person. I truly believe one of the most subversive things you can do today is spend as much of your time as possible nurturing what is not machine-like in you.
All nerves
“I really don’t think the artist is an intellectual. I believe that the artist is a set of nerves.”
—Wayne White
I was paging through a catalog of the photomontage work of Hannah Höch when I came across “Angst,” a very simple collage she made in 1970 using a photograph from a 1960 Life magazine article, “Harriet’s Celebrated Show of Nerves”:
It’s not my absolute favorite collage of Höch’s, but the source material fascinated me: the article is about a college janitor who donated her body for dissection after eavesdropping on an anatomy professor complaining in one of his lectures about the availability of corpses to study. (More of the story here.)
On the second page of the article was an image that totally spooked me, because I’d seen it before — I’d found it online back in February, when my son Owen was going through a “human body” phase. I printed it out and gave it to him to copy. I then asked him to write “ALL NERVES” above it:
The drawing currently hangs in my studio. When I look at it, I think about our times, how bombarded with electrical signals we are, how close some of us are to a nervous breakdown, how we all seem to be in the business of getting on each other’s nerves —“the nerve of these creeps!”
Then, sometimes the drawing says to me: Your nerves are all you’ve got. Don’t lose your nerve. Steady your nerves. Touch a nerve.
I think of Frank O’Hara, who said of writing poetry, “You just go on your nerve.”
And Emily Dickinson, who wrote: “If your Nerve, deny you— / Go above your Nerve.”
Part of a cure
“When you draw,” says Ed Emberley, “you go away. You go to another place. It’s a safe place. And it’s a real place.”
“A piece of paper is a place,” says Lynda Barry. “The thing you draw with is the way you travel through that place.”
“I make places I want to go to,” says Renee French.
“It’s sublime,” said Maurice Sendak, “to go into another room and make pictures. It’s magic time, where all your weaknesses of character, the blemishes of your personality, whatever else torments you, fades away, just doesn’t matter.”
In Jules Feiffer’s house when he was growing up, “Everything was a secret. So in order to make my own secrets, to establish my own way out of things I couldn’t understand, [I drew]. And it’s a way of not just escape, but of survival.”
“Drawing is 50,000 years old, isn’t it?” says David Hockney. “I think it comes from very deep within us. When all those people in the 1970s were trying to give up drawing, I did go and see them and they said: ‘Oh, you don’t need to draw now.’ And I did point out: ‘Well, why don’t you tell that to that little child there? Tell them you don’t need to draw and see what happens.’”
“Drawing is my way of explaining to myself what goes on in my mind,” said Saul Steinberg. “It’s not I who makes this drawing. It’s the hand that drew that makes it.”
“As kids,” Lynda Barry says, “we went to the page to find something, to have an experience. As adults, she says, “we have it backwards.” We think that we need to have an experience before we go to the page.
Cy Twombly: “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”
Ken Robinson tells this story: “A little girl was in a drawing lesson. [The teacher] said, ‘What are you drawing?’ And the girl said, ‘I’m drawing a picture of God.’ And the teacher said, ‘But nobody knows what God looks like.’ And the girl said, ‘They will in a minute.’”
“Drawing isn’t work,” says a character in Christophe Blain’s Isaac The Pirate. “It’s a form of prayer.”
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