“I suppose so,” said Alice.
“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see, a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”
We like it wet and we like it green, and we are the ones that they call obscene.
When she transformed into a butterfly, the caterpillars spoke not of her beauty, but of her weirdness. They wanted her to change back into what she always had been. But she had wings.
—Dean Jackson, The Poetry of Oneness
Public Domain Image via Pixabay
There is nothing like discovering your own secrets in someone else’s story. Those thoughts and feelings you believed were too ugly or strange or idealistic or desperate or whimsical or hungry or sad they had to be just you because there could be no other place for them, anywhere. Books that make you realize you’re not alone, you never were. Those are the ones I like best.
―Courtney Summers
The Two Fridas, Frida Kahlo, 1939
I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.
© Chèvre with CCLicense
There is no need for us all to be alike and think the same way, neither do we need a common enemy to force us to come together and reach out to each other. If we allow ourselves and everyone else the freedom to fully individuate as spiritual beings in human form, there will be no need for us to be forced by worldly circumstances to take hands and stand together. Our souls will automatically want to flock together, like moths to the flame of our shared Divinity, yet each with wings covered in the glimmering colors and unique patterns of our individual human expression.
Cliff Dwellers, George Bellows, 1913
Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it’s not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you’ve been to. I’m not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don’t have to be like anyone else. I’m walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.
Old Woman in Sunbonnet, Doris Ulmann
Over the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying–in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way–but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.
My kids are starting to notice I’m a little different from the other dads. “Why don’t you have a straight job like everyone else?” they asked me the other day.
© Dontheunsane with CCLicense
I told them this story:
In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, “Look at me…I’m tall, and I’m straight, and I’m handsome. Look at you…you’re all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you.” And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, “Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest.” So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.
― Tom Waits
Synkroniciti has quoted Tom Waits before here.
© Bill Nicholls with CCLicense
Flowers don’t often grow in clay and piles of mud seldom win sculpture contests. Are you using your creativity effectively?
Mud is a substance with a myriad of uses, from growing plants and housing animals to creating building materials and ceramics. Many traditions speak of man as created from mud, from the union of earth with water. As we use mud and its derivatives to build our cities, we sometimes forget that mud has life of its own.
© Ian Gallagher with CCLicense
Construction, whether it is of a building, a sculpture, or a simple bowl, depends on placing a hold on the lifecycle inherent in mud. To render a structure stable it must dry out to a great extent. We like to think that this process gives the things we fashion permanence, but erosion and time will destroy and reclaim what has been made, converting it once more to earth and water. Many of our arts and sciences are also an attempt to stop time, to hold on to our tenuous civilization. Just as we often forget that we are dependent on the basic function of mud to grow nourishment and support new life, we often forget that creativity has other purposes than perpetuating tradition and culture, as wonderful as those things are.
© Anwer 21 with CCLicense
I recently entered a peer reviewed poetry contest. Feedback from creative people I knew and respected had been remarkably positive, so I wanted to see how well my poems did with poets themselves. As it turns out, they were resoundingly panned (by the five people that voted on them) and lay near the very bottom of the submissions turned in to the contest. What did I do wrong?
Not understanding the nature of my own work or the qualities sought for by others, I had unwittingly sent a pile of mud to a sculpture contest. Let me explain.
© slworking with CCLicense
The style of my poetry is something that I have been honing in the dark for years. Being a self taught poet who was first a classical singer, my inspiration comes largely from the texts of song literature, most of it in foreign languages. My favorites are the French surrealist poets, especially Apollinaire and Eluard, with their abstraction and ambiguity. I insert spaces where my brain stops to find the next word or phrase, shaping my poems more like an abstract picture than a piece of verse. This was inspired by the graphic works of Robert Rauschenberg, and is an integral part of my process. It helps free my subconscious by removing elements of form so that my critical eye is distracted. I am far more interested in discovering what lies behind my thoughts than I am in structure.
The visual patterns I make can be disconcerting, especially in this set, which is called Fractures, about wounded relationships that have become non-functional. One person said that they felt that the poems were structured as if they had been cut from paper and arranged. This is precisely the effect I desired. Another said the pieces were different for the sake of being different, that they needed to be more poetic. A third mentioned that they were a dialogue within the self and were structurally off-putting. Too abstract. Unemotional… a string of description. Wow. I don’t care much for the sentimentality of some poetry, but I would argue that the emotion was all there, especially in the form and word choice which they all found so radical. What they did not know was that the things they complained about were choices that I made because they felt right to me.
Fractures Part 3: Homecoming © Katherine McDaniel, 2012
Some artists feel that they build up, or fashion their works, and some feel as if they dig them out and uncover them, removing elements that don’t belong. Those of the first group are often protectors of institutions and styles. Their talents are important in keeping the beauty and power of what has gone before us in our minds, eyes, and spirits. Equally important are those who dig, bringing out new things and keeping apace with the evolution of the human spirit. These people do things in new ways, operating with the knowledge that not everything they will do will succeed. What a different world it would be if people like Picasso or Beethoven had listened to their critics and played it safe.
© Dumbledad wirth CCLicense
Traditional arts require a great deal of fashioning and shaping and are ideal for those who operate best when carefully constructing what they envision. I realize now that my natural way of working is by digging, by throwing mud at the wall and seeing what takes shape. I take much more delight in that than creating what is expected, even if it means that others don’t value it.
Are you in the right patch of mud for your skills? If you feel that your creative talents are not traditional and it is hard to find and audience or an outlet, let me encourage you, because I feel our society doesn’t take time to do that. You are the explorers who link us to the creative future; your contributions are important because they may take us somewhere new. And there is a different joy in appreciating something uncommon and unexpected, like discovering a wild place before it becomes a park and the tourists move in. Synkroniciti is a place to find like-minded colleagues, compatriots and playmates who aren’t necessarily comfortable in the cultural establishment. You and your mud are welcome here. Anytime.
