“Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”

It’s a question that can freeze the heart of a creative person, but specific questions can get worse. To the writer of a novel about a dysfunctional family: “Were your parents really that crazy?” To the painter of landscapes that blend reality and dream: “Where were you standing when you painted that?” (Or, “Is that painted from a photograph?”) I’m sure sculptors and poets and clothing designers could easily give the typical question that they are asked over and over, but I’m also sure that all creative people must be asked the general question, “Where do you get your ideas?” 

 

Whether an answer is given graciously or irritably or not at all – whether the artist questioned knows where his or her ideas come from or not! – will vary. As a sometime writer of occasional poetry (almost all unpublished), fiction (all unpublished), and nonfiction (some traditionally published, much self-published here), I can only say that for me ideas come, unbidden, in strange, wondrous, and puzzling forms. A stranger glimpsed one day may be a character in my mind when I wake the next morning, or an unforgettable image germinates after weeks or years as the core of a situation. Sometimes the seed is neither character nor image but simply a phrase that won’t leave my thoughts. Jot it down on a paper napkin and carry it around, and maybe it will generate further phrases – and maybe it won’t;

 

I do not give myself as an example because I am some kind of great writer to be worshipped and studied! It’s just that my own process is the only one I know intimately. Other writers have told their stories in their own books and interviews, but probably none of them can tell the whole story, any more than I can. There is a lot of mystery to it. 

 

What turns an idea into a work is the more important question and much easier to answer. As a writer, you sit your butt down in a chair and see where sentences on paper or a screen take you. A painter or sculptor or dress designer gets to work with her or his given tools. Work never gets dreamed into being. That’s why it’s called work. It has to be done.

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Other kinds of ideas and beliefs motivate life choices we make every day. We are not cameras or digital recorders making copies of the world beyond our own skins. Our senses do not simply send copies to our brains to be filed. All our prior personal experience, however limited (and there is no one on earth whose experience is unlimited), comes into play, interpreting what we see and hear and read. I remember sitting in the same room years ago with my then-brother-in-law as we watched a political debate, televised live. Same screen, same faces, same words presented to us both. I actually felt sorry for one of the debaters, who seemed to my mind to make a pitiful showing, but at the end my brother-in-law turned to me and said, “Well, he [the one I felt sorry for] really came out on top, didn’t he?” It was as if we had been in two different rooms, watching two completely different events. 

 

Even on-the-scene eyewitnesses can “see” what isn’t there or miss what is, as many experiments have shown. We see for the most part what we expect to see. We also see what we look for. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can become aware of our prejudices – pre-judgments – and work to develop more accurate perceptions.

 

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Originally I thought that this post on creative work and perception/misperception involved a leap from one idea (creating) to another (perceiving), but I see now – and there is an example of what we can learn for and from ourselves when we start working, which in this case for me is writing – that both come from the same place: being open to the world. Being open to seeing something new.

 

Today is Inauguration Day, and while I would like to feel celebratory, my feelings can better be described as a mix of anxiety and weariness. Don’t get me wrong: I voted for Biden and Harris and am grateful for a change of course in Washington, D.C. My anxiety comes from the events of January 6, my weariness from conversations with those who see a different America from the one I see. --Which leads me to the questions I was asking people yesterday, questions that I hoped would give me some clarity on their perceptions and opinions (so different from my own), questions that gave me the idea for today’s topic on Books in Northport. The questions did kickstart this blog post, but I gained no clarity on views held by those who disagree with me.

 

Where do you get your news? Over and over for months I have been hearing and reading jeers of “Fake news!” Some monolith identified as “mainstream media” is accused of spreading lies. What I have tried to ask in the past two days is, What news sources do you distrust, and, more to the point, what sources do you trust? Because the people who disagree with me – so vehemently! – are getting their beliefs in reality from somewhere, and if I knew where, if I could look in that direction, maybe it would help me understand why our perspectives are so completely far apart that even a Venn diagram of them hardly yields common ground. But there must be some common ground, and we sure as hell need to find it if we’re going to reunite this country! 

 

Here is one important truth I have managed to uncover recently. It is that across the divide we opponents have many shared values. We don’t share all values, by a long shot, but we share many of the most basic, and that is not trivial. We disagree in many places on translating values into action. Well, ‘twas ever thus, and that’s what makes politics. The much, much larger and deeper and more intransigeant problem is that we disagree on facts, on truth.

 

And that brings me back to my question: Where do you get your news? What sources do you trust?

 

I wish I could report that I received even one concrete answer to that question, but I did not. I was told from more than one person that s/he relied on multiple unnamed sources. “Then I turn it off.” (What do you turn off?) Or, “Honestly, I don’t know what to believe.” Yet the people who "don't know what to believe" have beliefs. Where do they come from?

 

Over seventy percent of Republicans still believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election! Where did this come from, and why do they believe it? 

 

County clerks around the country, many of them Republicans, scrupulously distributed ballots and counted votes. State governors, both Democrat and Republican, certified election results from their states. There were recounts. Courts upheld the results and dismissed lawsuits claiming fraud as baseless. “Mainstream media” did not invent these results. The election results come from all across grassroots America.

 

“People have concerns about the legitimacy of the election,” we have heard over and over. Yet all of those concerns, wherever they have been voiced, wherever they have been reported, can be traced to one source, one man: the outgoing president. What must be so painful and difficult for his supporters to acknowledge is that the person to whom they gave their vote and pledged their faith is lying to them. The “concerns” about election fraud come from the same man who started the rumor that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, the man who flogged that falsehood for months and then, finally, after making as much political hay from it as possible, took credit for revealing it as falsehood, as if that made him some kind of saint.

 

I went to my township office and picked up my absentee ballot in person from the township clerk and delivered it back in person. She is someone whose integrity I trust. For me, it really comes down to that. Nor rumors or conspiracies or “alternate facts” or one corporate news source over another but trust. 

 

I can understand feeling disappointed in election results. (I have felt that more than once in my life.) What I cannot understand is taking the word of a compulsive serial liar and his enablers over people whose business is truth. And while I can forgive the misled, I find it hard to forgive the misleaders, who have taken cruel advantage of many good hearts and set brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, parent against child, for nothing but an illusion.

Postscript 1/21/2021: So many dates long awaited have come and gone without banishing my nightmares, but last night at last I slept well and awakened today calm and hopeful. We listened to the inauguration on the radio, and I found it dignified, sincere, meaningful, and moving. There will be so much work yet to do -- and so many Americans yet to convince that the sky has not fallen -- but I find my heart renewed for tasks ahead.

Contradiction, Ambivalence, and Time

Open Doors

To believe both A and not-A, the truth and non truth of any statement, is to believe in an impossible state of affairs, says logic. If “I am standing in the rain” is true, “I am not standing in the rain” cannot at the same time be true. Logic takes a binary approach to reality and separates the realm of fact from that of non-fact, with no wishy-washy grey areas. Is it possible to believe a contradiction? What would it take to do that?

Someone I know personally though not intimately distinguishes his life’s acquaintances as either “wonderful” or “terrible” human beings. These judgments continually astonish me me. I have been unable to determine what broad, general categories of sins or characteristics decide him to banish any particular individual into the “terrible” group, but I’ve heard enough specific examples of those to be astonished that anyone manages “wonderful” status. His is a world of angels and demons — or, we might say, the worthy and the not-worthy. I have no trouble seeing more or less goodness and badness in people, but can anyone be purely good or evil, without flaw or without some spark of goodness? 

Often I think of the story (and I know I’ve written about it before, sometime in the 11 years this blog has been in existence) within Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, of St. Peter and the stingy, selfish old woman. When she dies and arrives at the pearly gates, the old woman is asked by St. Peter if she has ever, in her entire life, done a single thing for another human being. She answers that she once gave a peasant an onion. After that story is told within the novel, a character thanked for a kindness demurs, saying something like, “It was only a little onion, such a little onion.” 

Such a little onion!

In certain situations, though, a little onion might make all the difference, no?

True, not true. Worthy, not worthy. What about desirable and undesirable? As Labor Day approaches, I think a lot about ambivalence. Is ambivalence a kind of contradiction existing in the realm of emotion rather than belief? To want more and at the same time not-want? To be relieved and simultaneously disappointed? 

Summer’s end calls up conflicting emotions in many of us, but an emotion is not true or false. It just is. There’s no arguing with it. Sometimes we can talk ourselves out of an emotion or be talked out of one, but that only means we stop feeling a certain way, not that we never felt that way. It was, and now it isn’t. As, when the rain stops, I don’t doubt the rain of the past hour.

But can we feel satisfaction and dissatisfaction at the same time? Or does our spirit alternate, tugged first one way and then the other, between two opposing and contradictory feelings? Psychology identifies what it calls double approach-avoidance conflicts — wow! — in which two choices are presented, each with both attractive and repellent features, such that the closer we approach one decision, Choice A, the worse it looks, while the one we are tempted to reject looks better and better — until we change course, turn and approach Choice B, only to see its negative aspects more and more clearly as we get closer, while Choice A’s appeal increases with distance. An example might be moving to an exciting new place vs. staying in a familiar, comfortable home. Talk about ambivalence!

Time, however, offers us no choice. We don’t get to choose whether or not we will traverse the days and years of our lives. 

Do we want summer to end? Wish it would go on forever? Well, feel one way, feel another, feel both ways at once or in turn — it doesn’t matter. The nights turn cool, the leaves turn color. That word: turn. Turn, turn — “To every thing there is a season.” In time, there will be return. Until there isn’t.

Good night, Aretha. Good night, John. We’d have kept you with us longer if we’d had a choice. 

Year’s-End Thoughts

My year’s-end reading can get a little frantic, as I’m trying to finish one book and squeeze in another, but I found time this morning to go through some articles I’d missed in the November 24 New York Review of Books. One was a review of a new intellectual biography of Alexander Herzen, who had been little more than a name to me up to now, and from that review I see Herzen as a fascinating, congenial writer and quite possibly (I need to learn more) a kindred spirit.

According to Gary Saul Morson, reviewer of The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen, and quotations he gives from  Aileen M. Kelly’s book in support, Herzen was, throughout his life, tugged in two directions, “inclined in turn to romantic utopianism and ironic realism.” As a self-described romantic pragmatist, I was instantly sympathetic.

Herzen did not buy general formulae -- big slogans, principles, goals, abstractions, e.g., the idea of ‘progress.’ A thinker ahead of his time, he denied teleology to nature before such a view became the norm. Nineteenth-century determinism saw the future unrolling necessarily from the present, such that if we could but identify all contributing factors we would have complete foreknowledge. Herzen, like Henri Bergson, denied the sweeping claims of determinism, then so firmly held across disciplines and political views. In his essays, he saw the determinist view as one of many absolutes people used as substitutes for God, “the mysticism of science.” As Morson puts it, “[L]aws and chance interact. Repeat a situation, and it might develop differently.” Evolution without a predetermined endpoint. Darwinian.

Here is a line, quoted in the reviewed book from Herzen’s own book, From the Other Shore:

The future does not exist.

It is not necessary, according to research paper guidelines, to set apart and center such a brief quotation as that, but I do it intentionally, as it is the crucial kernel of any denial of determinism.

To his Bergsonian denial (I cannot help seeing it as Bergonian) of determinism, Herzen joined a Wittgensteinian propensity to question himself as rigorously as he questioned others. It is a rare philosopher -- a rare human being -- who can say of a view he held formerly with great conviction and passion, “I was wrong,” so I very much want to explore the thought of Alexander Herzen in 2017. For now, for this week, I am delighted to have stumbled on an introduction to his work.

Denying determinism, Herzen went on to say of the future,

It is created by the combination of a thousand causes, some necessary, some accidental, plus human will....

And so, from what little I have read in a single book review, I’m pretty sure Herzen would not have seen moral progress as inevitable. He would not have seen the “long arc of the universe” bending necessarily toward justice or any predetermined end. He would have seen that as simply one more silly myth, a comforting but basically irrational belief.

Where does that leave us? Well, please note, if there is no predetermined end, no “necessary” direction that will manifest in one future rather than another, the possibility of moral progress cannot be ruled out, either. (“He loved italics,” the reviewer notes of Herzen, listing some of his other writing excesses. Sigh! We have that in common, too!) And note also Herzen’s inclusion of “human will” in the myriad of causes that will bring about whatever future comes about. I think it leaves us with a lot of possible outcomes, some of them desirable.

Now if someone says, “I don’t believe in x” but engages in x on a consistent basis, does that person really hold the stated belief? I don’t see it. On the other hand, I see other people all the time, in my own life and in the public arena, who act on and live their beliefs. This is what I was struggling, probably very awkwardly, to say in my previous post about faith as practice, creating a future of justice.

The future is in our hands. The world will be what we make of it. What shall it be, my friends? What will we make of this year so soon to begin?

“In My Next Life....”

Sometimes I like to say, “In my next life, I’m going to be High Maintenance.” In that scenario I imagine myself commanding every room, like visiting royalty, and not giving a rip how much anyone else might be annoyed by my indifferent take-over. Yeah, right. I know! Not in a hundred lifetimes would that be me!

But say it’s a different career path that looks alluring. “In my next life, I’ll be a geologist,” I occasionally say. Not that I want to work for an oil company--no, I’m thinking more of those survey camping/field trips up into the Boundary Waters, exploring and mapping, and, of course, being able to identify rock samples, knowing how old every stone is and how it was formed. So what’s stopping me now? If I really cared all that much?

Fact is, I’m not counting on a “next life,” don’t have any sense of having had “past lives,” and don’t expect an “afterlife.” This one life I have is the only life I expect, and I believe (despite these silly imaginings) that it’s up to me to live it well and to make it what I want, within the constraints of my starting place and historical and circumstances. Whatever “garbage” I need to shed, I believe I’ve picked it up in this lifetime, and the same for whatever good “karma” (I’d call that goodwill) I’ve accumulated. If I live well and treat people decently, I believe I’ll be happier and make the world a better place than if I live and treat people badly.

Is mine a boring point of view? Not to me. Odds are, anyway, that if “past lives” were reality I’d have been scrabbling around for a crust with the faceless, illiterate hordes, not ruling the surrounding countryside from a castle.

No, this is my time, and I’m happy with it. I was born into a post-Hitler world that still had passenger trains running, and as a kid I got to ride them often. Being a woman did not keep me out of university. My world is one of freedom, nature, art and books, not only for me but for more and more people worldwide. And while I’ve never been (and never expect to be) wealthy, I am able to do my small part for those less fortunate. So all in all, I call this a good life, a downright priceless gift of a life.

But what of those who believe in reincarnation, who believe they have lived before and will live again, in other bodies and other parts of the world? “Doesn’t it explain a lot that’s hard to make sense of otherwise?” a friend asked me years ago. I remember where we were standing when she asked the question. It felt to me as if the Grand Canyon had opened up between us. But we are still friends.

How so? Because pragmatically, there is no distance between us effected by our diametrically opposed beliefs. We both try to live good lives—she for what it means to her in terms of future lives, I because I believe this is my only chance at life. Our reasons are different. So what? It’s like the difference another friend and I discovered when she acknowledged that she thought the universe had a specific plan for her life and I admitted that I didn’t think any such plan was setting up personal lessons for me. The sameness of our living is that both of us look to see what we can learn from whatever happens to us, so (again) pragmatically there is no difference in how we approach life.

Wow, I didn’t plan to go on and on like this on the subject when I set out this morning! What got me started was thinking again about The Book of Lost Fragrances, by M. J. Rose, and how that fictional story required that I perform a “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to enter its world. (What I wrote earlier about the book can be found here.) For quite a way into the story, I kept pulling back, and part of my hesitancy the author encouraged, through the doubts of the main character. Maybe her traumatic experiences were psychotic episodes rather than insights into former existences? This uncertainty added to the story’s interest.

I said in my last post--and not for the first time--that I love the way books let me travel through space and time. Rose’s novel took me back to ancient Egypt, forward to modern New York, and gave me long stretches in my beloved Paris. The story was engaging, entertaining and suspenseful. I particularly appreciated the author’s lingering, voluptuous descriptions of aromas, scents, smells—call them what you will.

Buy a novel’s philosophy wholesale or take it on trial for the length of the book? Either way is possible. Reading knows no boundaries to the possible!