Austin Kleon

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To increase the variety of the created world

Friday’s newsletter, “Wondrous Variety,” started out with something I read in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia: 

Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it.

I was having trouble coming up with an image for the newsletter and then I remembered this photo I took in a Costco on Oahu.

Read the whole newsletter here.

A tale of two health cares

The cartoonist Gahan Wilson died two Thursdays ago in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, at the age of 89.

The poet and critic Clive James died three days later, in Cambridge, England, at the age of 80.

Reading their obituaries, it struck me how neatly their end-of-life care situations split between their two countries.

* * *

Gahan Wilson died of complications from severe dementia. After Wilson’s wife, Nancy Winters — “his guide through the world” — died earlier in the year, his stepson, Paul Winters, had to move him out of the assisted living facility the couple had been living in.

Wilson was profiled by the Arizona Republic in April. He was still drawing.

Gahan lives in a memory care facility not far from their house. The staff is kind. Gahan is safe. But it’s no way to live, Paul said.

“As an old person without money, you are not respected. You are no one,” he said. “It seems our society doesn’t really honor elders as we should.” […]

Paul and [his wife] Patty navigate the health care system for Gahan. The care he needs is expensive.

They have raised $58,000 on a GoFundMe account. Paul knows people donate because his stepfather is famous. He can imagine how other families must struggle.

“Memory care is wildly expensive,” Paul wrote. “If we could cover the cost ourselves, we would. We can’t, and Gahan and my mother did not save for anything like this.”

* * *

Meanwhile, across the pond, Clive James died “peacefully” at home thanks to a team of hospice nurses, “surrounded by his family and his books,” almost a decade after he’d been diagnosed with leukemia, kidney failure, and emphysema.

Now, any rich person in America can die this way, maybe, but thankfully, James had the National Health Service, whose praises he sang just last year:

The result of all this careful attention is that I have lived several years past my predicted time of extinction, and that my credibility as a dying man is in tatters. Lifting a Paper Mate Flexgrip Ultra ballpoint pen takes all my strength, but the resulting prose says I am still alive and full of energy…. So I’m stuck with still sounding healthy when I write, and the impression is only mildly misleading because the NHS has been doing a marvellous job on me.

In his last years, James wrote everything from death poems to a book about binge-watching television.

He addressed the cost of it all:

The NHS will go on for ever being almost broke because there will always be more things it can do. You might profess to be appalled that the NHS has spent millions on a new drug to stop people suddenly turning upside down and falling on their head, but you will be less appalled the first time you yourself suddenly turn upside down and fall on your head.

It wasn’t just Clive James and his friends and family who benefited from the NHS, it was readers all over the world and into the future.

* * *

“I think one way I could be helpful to British voters is they could imagine me as the Ghost of Christmas Future,” says American comedian Rob Delaney.

He recently posted a video about his experiences with the NHS after the death of his son, Henry.

He said his American friends all hear about what a mess the NHS is on Fox News.

On the contrary, he says, “I’m crazy about it.”

Our American healthcare system is killing us. It’s bankrupting our families, chaining us to jobs we hate, and keeping us from doing the work we’re meant to do.

It is especially hard on artists and other kinds of creative entrepreneurs.

It is why I’m a single issue voter.

Away messages

“Goodbye,” from Bill Knott’s I Am Flying into Myself

I was walking in the cemetery the other day and as I read the tombstones, I thought of how we used to put up “away messages” in AOL’s Instant Messenger. (It was basically a proto-Twitter, come to think of it.) You’d walk away from your computer, the one that weighed fifty pounds and stayed on your desk, and everyone could see how funny and clever you were while you were gone.

Is not a tombstone an away message?

Clive James died.

Whenever an old poet — an old poet — dies, I can’t get too upset.

This is what they’ve been training for! I think. It’s go time!

The great poets and artists spend so much time checking in on death.

Is not every great poem an away message?

Here is a stanza from James’ “Season To Season”:

The trick, I’m learning, is to stay in doubt,
Season to season, of what time might bring,
And patiently await how things turn out.
Eventually time tells you everything.
If it takes time to do so, no surprise
In that. You fold your arms, you scan the skies,
And tell yourself that life has made you wise…

And here’s one from “Japanese Maple”:

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same…

When Mary Beard interviewed James last year, she asked how the Japanese Maple was doing.

“It died!” James said.

Oh well. The poem lives.

The poets go, but they leave us so many away messages.

Be thankful.

“Death,” from Bill Knott’s I Am Flying into Myself

An enemy of envy

When I heard art critic Jerry Saltz say this during his Longform podcast interview, I immediately got up, wrote it down on an index card, and pinned it above my desk. (UPDATE: 4/15/2021: He writes more about it in his book, How To Be an Artist.)

In another interview, he explains:

When I was an artist, I used to walk around feeling sorry for myself, always. Looked at every loft, every apartment. Hated everyone I saw. Everyone. Hated you if you had a better apartment. Hated you if you had more hair. Hated this one for being tall. Hated that one. Everybody had it better than poor me. They had more money. Oh, I was cynical. I knew why she was getting what she got and he got what he got, and I was eaten alive by this envy. Eaten alive, and now I tell young artists and writers: “You must make an enemy of envy today. Today. By tonight, because it will eat you alive.”

I agree with him: it will eat you alive if you keep it inside. I think one thing you can do is spit it out, cut it out, or get it out by whatever means available — write it down or draw it out on paper — and take a hard look at it so it might actually teach you something.

Over at The School of Life, here’s a bit about how Friedrich Nietzsche felt envy could be useful to us:

Nietzsche thought of envy as a confused but important signal from our deeper selves about what we really want. Everything that makes us envious is a fragment of our true potential, which we disown at our peril. We should learn to study our envy forensically, keeping a diary of envious moments, and then sift through episodes to discern the shape of a future, better self…. The envy we don’t own up to will otherwise end up emitting what Nietzsche called ‘sulfurous odours.’ Bitterness is envy that doesn’t understand itself.

So, first, don’t deny your envy, and second, if you can, try to examine it.

My life coach: Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven

My favorite writing on the subject of envy is the “Jealousy” chapter of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. “Jealousy is one of the occupational hazards of being a writer,” she writes.

Some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know—people who are, in other words, not you.

She says the only things that seem to help with jealousy are: “(a) getting older, (b) talking about it until the fever breaks, and (c) using it as material.” As an example of (c), she points out a favorite poem of mine: Clive James’ deliciously nasty poem, “The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered.” It begins:

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized…

The narrator of the poem goes on to admit, “Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,” but in his case it will be “due / to a miscalculated print run, a marketing error — / Nothing to do with merit.”

A good deal of this can be traced to problems of ego. Here’s how Zen Buddhist nun Jeong Kwan puts it in season 3, episode 1 of Chef’s Table:

Creativity and ego cannot go together. If you free yourself from the comparing and jealous mind, your creativity opens up endlessly. Just as water springs from a fountain, creativity springs from every moment. You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you are in. You must own the environment, the phenomenal world around you. You must be able to freely move in and out of your mind. This is being free. There is no way you can’t open up your creativity. There is no ego to speak of. That is my belief.

Easier said than done.

You could try to practice the opposite of jealousy, which is something like the concept of “mudita”: “Mudita is word from Sanskrit and Pali that has no counterpart in English. It means sympathetic or unselfish joy, or joy in the good fortune of others.”

Easier than that, even, is to just pretend. Have a script that you rehearse and repeat when necessary.

Practice these words:

“Good for him.”

“Good for her.”

“Good for them.”

“Good for you.”

(That last one is sometimes the hardest.)

You say these words, and then you keep your head down, and you do your work.

And should you get everything you always wanted, remember the words on a pillow Joan Rivers kept in her apartment: “Don’t Expect Praise Without Envy Until You Are Dead.”

Checking in with death


I found this in an old notebook, copied from this article, which later became a book. I was reminded of it yesterday when I saw a twitter thread by a pediatrician who works with terminal patients in palliative care. He asked the dying kids for the opposite of regrets: “what they had enjoyed in life, and what gave it meaning.” His summary:

Be kind. Read more books. Spend time with your family. Crack jokes. Go to the beach. Hug your dog. Tell that special person you love them.

These are the things these kids wished they could’ve done more. The rest is details.

Oh… and eat ice-cream.

When I was re-reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning last month, I was struck by his emphasis on imagination: how prisoners hold on by conjuring images of their loved ones, and how a patient can more easily sort out her decisions by pretending she’s lying on her death bed, looking back at her life: “Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning in it, a meaning which even included all her sufferings.”

The great poets and philosophers all know that death is what gives life meaning. (Montaigne: “To philosophize is to learn how to die.”) To check in with death is to check in with life. (This is why I like to read obituaries—they are near-death experiences for cowards.) As Ghost Dog reads aloud from Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure: The Book of The Samurai:

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

Meditation upon death need not be serious. A favorite little book of mine is Japanese Death Poems, a collection of jisei, or death poems, written by Zen monks and haiku poets. It’s funny how many are light-hearted, like Moriya Sen’an’s, from 1838:

Bury me when I die
beneath a wine barrel
in a tavern.
With luck
the cask will leak.

There are modern English versions of jisei, like Clive James’ “Japanese Maple,” from Sentenced to Life, or, more recently, Helen Dunmore’s “My life’s stem was cut,” a poem from Inside The Wave:

I know I am dying
But why not keep flowering
As long as I can
From my cut stem?

The weird thing about being in what is, statistically, the middle of your life is that you have to simultaneously live as if there is no tomorrow and live as if there will be a thousand tomorrows. It never hurts to do a little deathbed check. We’re all headed there sooner or later…

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