Austin Kleon

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Morning pages (and variations)

“Of all the self-help tools I’ve tested through the years,” Oliver Burkeman (author of The Antidote) writes in his latest issue of The Imperfectionist, “one has proved more enduring than the rest: Morning Pages.”

Julia Cameron writes about morning pages in The Artist’s Way and her shorter spin-off, The Miracle of Morning Pages. She says:

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. *There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages*– they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU4pyiB-kq0

Schoolhouse Rock (and De La Soul) taught us: 3 is a Magic Number.

Somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number
The past and the present and the future
The faith and hope and charity
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number

Is this some Hippie Shit? Yes. But, as Oliver notes, it is Hippie Shit that seems to work!

I do three pages minimum in my diary every morning. It’s not exactly freewriting, more old-fashioned diary, mixed with the occasional comics and diagrams.

My method is cribbed from The Sedaris Method: write things down all day in a pocket notebook, then wake up the next morning, fill out my logbook, and then write longhand about yesterday.

When I don’t know what to write about I answer “The Best Thing” prompt or draw until I feel like writing.  (This morning I wrote about banana bread and palm trees.)

I often do some combination of mind-mapping or what Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction calls “clustering”: starting in the middle of a page, writing a word, putting a box or circle around it, then writing another word, etc., until I have a tree or web. (Maps are magic, too.)

I do this very slowly, and let one thing sort of lead into the other. It’s like emptying out the junk in your brain. The reason I sometimes prefer it to straight prose on notebook paper is that you can more easily see the connections between all the weird crap on your mind. (There’s a blank “mind map” in The Steal Like An Artist Journal.)

I recently found out that the director Harmony Korine does a deranged version of this kind of non-linear map-writing to come up with ideas for his films. Watch the video above (if you dare) to see it in action.

David Byrne, “A History of Mark-Making, ” 2002

In David Byrne’s book of tree drawings, Arboretum, he writes that diagrams like these are “an eclectic blend” of:

…faux science, automatic writing, satire, and an attempt to find connections where none were thought to exist — a sort of self-therapy, allowing the hand to say what the voice cannot. Irrational logic, it’s sometimes called. The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises. To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense. The world keeps opening up, unfolding, and just when we expect it to be closed — to be a sealed, sensible box — it shows us something completely surprising.

Emphasis mine. (See: “The value of nonsense.”)

“There’s a general attitude here that’s well worth cultivating,” Oliver writes, “a healthy scepticism toward the part of your brain that’s so enthusiastic about controlling how things unfold. You just do the pages, and something else does the rest.”

Here, I think, is something else valuable to be uncovered from the morning pages: just as you let go and let the pages unfold, in some small way, you’re also training yourself to let your day unfold. To, hopefully, be as improvisational and playful in filling your day as you were about filling your notebook.

Blexbolex’s Ballad

If you’re lucky, the overlap in the Venn diagram of books you love to read and books your kids love to read is more than a sliver.

Blexbolex’s Ballad is a mysterious little book. Starting with a simple, 3-page chapter about a child who walks home from school (“The school, the road, home.”) the second chapter adds a page in between each previous page (“The school, the street, the road, the forest, home.”) and the author continues that pattern for 7 chapters, eventually culminating in a story of over 50 pages.

There’s a wonderful post over at Picturebook Makers where Blexbolex talks about his process:

The trigger of the form was firstly my stay with a group of artists working on comics in an unconventional way: OuBaPo. One of the exercises captured my imagination. It involved inserting one square of a comic strip between two existing squares, thereby diverting the narrative ellipsis towards another one. Then a meeting with a group of children gave me the real key to the book. They were playing a game where whatever path they took, they always got to arrive home.
a diagram of the book’s structure by Blexbolex

 

Blexbolex’s thumbnail sketches

The OuLiPo-inspired hijinx would be impressive on their own, but what’s truly amazing to me is that for a book that feels so analog and textured, almost all of the artwork was done digitally:

The images for the book are purely digital. Only three backgrounds on paper (two with pencil and one with ink wash painting) were scanned in to allow me to add substance to the shapes drawn on the computer.

This process makes the book something that feels both ancient and futuristic, or rather, simply out-of-time.

This post is the first in a new Bookshelf series in which I’ll be sharing one of my favorite books every Saturday.

There is no finish line

“The pandemic is a marathon without a finish line.” In an article about what teleoanticipation (“teleo,” from the Greek, meaning end, goal, or purpose) can teach us about these COVID days, Alex Hutchinson writes:

It turns out that, if you ask yourself “Can I keep going?” rather than “Can I make it to the finish?” you’re far more likely to answer in the affirmative.

There’s a crazy marathon called Big Dog’s Outdoor Ultra, which is a four-mile loop that runners run until everyone else drops out. In a piece called, fittingly, “A Loop Eternal,” one of the champions, Guillaume Calmettes, said it was actually easier for him to run than a normal marathon:

“Because there is no predefined finish, you cannot think in terms of ‘how many miles do I have left before this thing is all over’, so in fact, I found it very easy mentally. I just had to think about the next loop. The next loop, always the next loop, it’s very easy thinking. You’re never overwhelmed by what you have left to run, because you simply don’t know what you have left to run.”

The Creative Learning Spiral

It’s a little spooky how much this squares with what I wrote in Keep Going about the creative life:

The creative life is not linear. It’s not a straight line from point A to point B. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really “arrive.” Other than death, there is no finish line or retirement for the creative person.

Forget about the finish line. Do this loop. Then do another. Keep going.

Keep Going is now available as an audiobook.

The comedy of survival

One of the most intriguing and helpful books I’ve read all year is Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, first published in 1974. I heard about the book years ago in an essay by Mandy Brown, whose wonderful website, A Working Library, has several posts about it.

As Brown notes, Meeker argues that Western Civilization is mostly founded on the “tragic mode,” inspired by the great tragedies in which a “larger-than-life character attempts to bend the world to his (and it’s always his) image.” The character’s success “is also his undoing,” and tragedies end in bloodshed, death, and a funeral of some kind. Our civilization has been built on the tragic idea that we can bend nature to our will, the result of which has been complete ecological catastrophe.

Meeker proposes an alternative for surviving our disastrous times: the “comic mode,” inspired by comedy:

Comedy is not a philosophy of despair or pessimism, but one which permits people to respond with health and clear vision despite the miseries the world has to offer. Its mode is immediacy of attention, adaptation to rapidly changing circumstances, joy in small things, the avoidance of pain wherever possible, the love of life and kinship with all its parts, the sharpening of intelligence, complexity of thought and action, and strategic responsiveness to novel situations. It permits people to accept themselves and the world as they are, and it helps us make the best of the messes around us and within us.

Upon reading this, I was immediately struck by how well the tragic and comic modes map to Brian Eno’s concept of genius vs. scenius, with one being a egosystem and the other being an ecosystem. Our world is an ecosystem in which our only real chance at survival as a species is cooperation, community, and care, but it’s being lead by people who believe in an egosystem, run on competition, power, and self-interest.

Comedy and scenius show us a way forward. A chance at survival that, in Meeker’s words, “depends upon our ability to change ourselves rather than our environment, and upon our ability to accept limitations rather than to curse fate for limiting us.” Comedy, like scenius, gives all the characters in the story a surviving role and a chance to live to see another day.

So how do we get into the comic mode? In the third edition of the book, published in 1997, Meeker argued that play was the quickest way in. Giving ourselves over to open-ended and improvisational activities, like music, art, gardening, etc.

Humor and jokes, too, of course. I’ve been struck in recent years by how many activists and writers — especially women! — emphasize the importance of a sense of humor for survival.

bell hooks: “We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor. Every time we see the left or any group trying to move forward politically in a radical way, when they’re humorless, they fail.” 

Mary Beard: “A bit of outrage is good, but having your only rhetorical register as outrage is always going to be unsuccessful. You’ve got to vary it. Sometimes, some of the things that sexist men do just deserve to be laughed at.”

Gloria Steinem, when asked why she’s lasted so long:

If I had to pick one reason, it’s because I have a sense of humor. That’s crucial. It allows you to laugh at yourself and say when you’re wrong. One of the things that Native American culture understands and we probably don’t is that laughter is the only emotion you can’t compel. You can’t make anybody laugh unless they want to. I suspect that the people who last the longest, who continue to be trustworthy, are people with a sense of humor.

Camille Paglia: “Comedy is a sign of balanced perspective on life and thought. Humorlessness should be grounds for dismissal. ”

Comedy is also a crucial survival strategy as a parent.

Tragedy vs. comedy maps to Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter, in which she argues that being a good parent is about being a “gardener,” and nurturing children as a plant with the right air and soil, etc. (I should note that I love the gardening half of the metaphor, but I don’t think the other half is right: carpentry seems to me to be an artisanal trade, which requires a sensitivity to materials similar to gardening. Do not some pieces of wood cry out to be certain objects and not others? Think of the story of Pinocchio, which literally starts out with a talking log, and is about the perils of trying to “shape” young boys.)

In the tragic mode of being a parent, you rigidly try to shape your kid into your ideal of a Great person; in the comic mode, you discover who the child is, together, with constant adaptation and improvisation.

An excerpt from Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story explains how I feel about being a parent:

Life itself is a comedy—a slap-stick comedy at that. It is always hitting you over the head with the unexpected. You reach to get the thing you want—slap! bang! It’s gone! You strike at your enemy and hit a friend. You walk confidently, and fall. Whether it is tragedy or comedy depends on how you look at it. There is not a hair’s breadth between them.

Here is another tangent: Tragic and comic modes also seem to me like they could map to the “medical” and “social” models of disability.

Take stuttering, for example.

In a tragic or medical mode, stuttering is seen as a pathological impairment you try to “fix” with endless hours of speech therapy, trying to turn the person who stutters into a “normal” speaker. In the comic or social mode, stuttering is only a disability if it’s made one by the people surrounding the person who stutters. Given the right environment, supportive and understanding of difference, a person who stutters can teach us new things about time and patience, silence and rhythm, and the art of conversation.

I could go on, but I need to stop there for now.

A question we could all ask ourselves every morning: Do you want to live in a tragedy or a comedy?

I know which one works best for me.

“Less blood. More drink.”

Art takes you where it wants you to go

I’ve been making more of tape quilts patchworks in the morning to clear my mind and keep my hands busy.

“I have to have something to with my hands to keep me satisfied,” says 93-year-old quilt artist Laverne Brackens.

Brackens says her designs often come to her in dreams. She then wakes up in the middle of the night and arranges her vision to be sewn the next morning. “You’d be surprised at what you can do with the material,” she explains. “The quilt takes you where it wants you to go, not where you want to go.”

I find that’s true of all of my work, too. Anni Albers said you have to let the materials lead:

Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done. The dictation of the materials.

It’s as true for people who work with words as thread. Here’s an excerpt from Irish poet Ciaran Carson’s obituary:

Mr. Carson — who was also a translator, working in several languages — viewed writing poetry not as an exercise in setting down an idea, but as an exploration.

“The kind of examination question which used to be put, ‘What did the poet have in mind when he said …’ is an assumption that the poet clothes his thought in verse,” he told The Spectator in 2012, “whereas the poet often doesn’t know what he has in mind: He follows the language, and sees where it might lead him, which is usually a very different place from what he thought at the onset.

“If you know exactly what you are going to say in a poem,” he continued, “that poem will be a failure. Besides, there is no interest or fun, in saying what you already know.”

When I came across artist Bisa Butler’s quilts, which are based off of photographs, I wondered if there was still room for this kind of exploration. “I like working from black-and-white photos,” she says, “because it gives me the freedom to put in the colors I feel belong there.”

Lovely.

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