writing

The Sky is What Color?

/ Steve Patterson / Leave a comment

So, it’s like this with writing. You can’t find your way through to a new piece unless you work at it. But you can’t make it work until it’s ready. Which means that you spend a lot of time wandering around glassy-eyed, stumbling into posts, getting honked at by cars, or unnerving people on the bus who think you’re staring at them, while all the time, the editor in your head runs images, snippets of dialogue, soundtracks, in an unending, meaningless collage. And you generally are kind of a dick to be around because you only care about this chaotic state you’re in, and you assume everyone else is as crazy as you are.

Then suddenly, usually without warning, you lay your limp, weary pen once more against your rumpled, exhausted notebook, and–BAM!–you’re off. And you’re like, uh…what the hell is going on? What’s going on is you’re writing, and suddenly life seems simpler. And more sunny.

Which is to say that I’ve been living with the pre-writing bends for almost a year on a particular project, and this weekend it jumped up and danced for me and got all weird. And now I’m hanging on and going…wherever we go. Which is a lot better than drifting through life with “No Surprises” playing on an endless, interior loop and generally feeling just a little more miserable than Thom Yorke.

The really perverse part? Every single, goddamn time, you have to get to a point where you forget this is how it works; so that when you actually pass into the writing state, you kick yourself for forgetting, knowing full well that, when it’s over, you’ll just go and forget again.

Want to be a writer? Nothing says glamour like a 1,000-yard stare.

No surprises. Heh.

Options

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As I’ve noted on my blog, I recently bought a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, and I’m learning–slowly–to play. Over the years, I’ve tried a number of kinds of art: writing (obviously), photography, painting, drawing, playing piano and organ, garden design, making prints, stage directing, and even a half-assed attempt at sculpting. Though I’ve enjoyed all of these, writing and photography were the only two that I thought I showed any aptitude for. And, though I love photography and think I’ve grown in the field, selling a print now and then, and even having a couple of shows, I am and always have been a writer. (One day, when I was six, I sat down and wrote a short story. Something about living under the sea. Wish I still had it, but it’s vanished over the years. To me, the funny part was that I took it to my mom and demanded she type it up. I think she was a little taken aback, but she did type it for me. Unlike many artists, I had parents who always supported my efforts. I hit a fallow period between six and eight, and then I distinctly remember thinking, writing that was kind of fun: let’s try it again. So I wrote another short story, and another, and, pretty much, never stopped.)

When I bought the guitar–which I call “Red” because it is a shockingly pure candyapple red–the store provided a free lesson. The instructor was showing me how each fret represented a half-step, which clicked for me as it corresponded to a piano’s keys (and I can read music). I noted the similarity to the instructor, and he said, “Yeah. It’s like having six pianos.” (Which is really not true, because it takes two hands to make a chord on the guitar and one for a keyboard. You also can’t individually bend or vibrate a piano’s strings, but I digress.)

What has struck me are the seemingly infinite options for making sound the electric guitar offers, which I’m just starting to grasp as I’ve learned how chords are formed, how scales apply to solos, the many ways strings can be thumped, rubbed, stretched, and mauled, and the many voicings that emerge from which pickup you’ve selected (three on the Strat with two settings combining pickups), the pickup tone controls, the amp settings, and, in my outfit, with a nifty little foot-operated box called a Digitech RP50, the mind-blowing array of available voicings–from clear, ringing notes with a touch of reverb to create the feeling of playing in a large hall to absolutely demented, psychedelic overdrive, flangers, phase-shifters, noise gates, delays, and various amplifier modulators. You can make it sing, cry, scream, and simulate jet aircraft. It’s absolutely marvelous. I’ll be deaf in no time.

One evening, after playing some teeth-rattling distortion, I just kind of reeled, overwhelmed by athe choices the guitar offered, and I suddenly thought of a favorite quote from Miles Davis, which has actually informed my writing as much as my understanding of music: it’s not just the notes you play, Miles said, it’s also the notes you don’t play.

Which seems obvious, but it lies at the heart of making art, for we’re offered so many techniques, colors, effects, traditions, schools of thought, theories, pacings, and structures, that, once you get past the puppy love period where you want to do everything right now, you understand how holding back is just as important as holding forth. It’s not just a matter of making the right choices: it’s a matter of knowing when to stop, when to step back. Of knowing when, essentially, it’s right.

And, if you’re dedicated enough to be honest with yourself, doing an art–any art–really well is so terribly, terribly difficult that you’d lock up if you thought about it directly. Someone once asked Walter Cronkite if he ever thought about the millions watching his newscasts, and he said no, he thought of it as speaking one-to-one with a single person because, if he really thought about all the people out there, he’d be too terrified to do his job.

I don’t know how much aptitude I have with the guitar. I feel like I’m learning, and once in awhile, I make sounds that please me, and that’s all I’m really in it for. That and developing sufficient skills to play a song or two with friends. It’s refreshing to do an art that’s not a profession. But playing the guitar is devilishly hard to get right, and the more I seem to grasp, the more complicated it becomes. The relationship between difficulty and reward reminds me of an evening at a fiction writing workshop nearly 30 years ago when I’d presented a short story, which, frankly, was terrible–an utter cliche from beginning to end (and not even an interesting cliche). Out came the knives, and, when it was over, my self-esteem had been thoroughly diced. The woman running the workshop said, hey, how about we take a break, and everyone trooped off into the kitchen while I sat immobile, staring at the carpet. A minute or so later, the workshop leader came back and handed me a glass of wine.

“Christ,” I said. “Does it ever get any easier?”

She gently patted me on the shoulder and said, “You better hope not.”

Writing Furiously without a Pen

/ Steve Patterson / 2 Comments

For a writer, it’s important to have understanding people in your life because a good part of what you do looks like goofing off.

That is, you may appear to be sitting on your porch and watching the breeze sway the poppies while listening to Dylan and The Band play “The Basement Tapes,” but, in reality, you are deep down in some inner movie, watching scenes you don’t understand appear and fade. In short, a lot of writing is not knowing what the hell you’re doing and being okay with that. Right now, I’m chasing something. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it. And it’s giving me pictures and little snippets of dialogue, but I don’t know what it’s going to be, how it’s going to emerge, and it’s necessary to kind of operate on faith–faith that your mind will let the rest float up to the surface when it’s ready.

I mean, I don’t have time to write at the moment. For the next couple weeks, my day job is going to be very demanding, and then I’m producing the End of the Pavement festival, and the two take a great deal of energy. I don’t even want to think about how tired I was yesterday and how tired I’m going to be by next Friday. So I can’t really write. I scribble down little bits of stuff in the mornings or lunch hours, but I can’t sustain the kind of extended concentration writing requires. I’ll get there, but the unconscious, after awhile, knows not to let loose until it’s ready. I guess I’ve been doing this long enough that it’s well trained.

And then it’ll be: bam! And you’re off, trying to keep up with the goddamn thing before it can get away from you. In the meantime, you just have to kind of roll with this twilight state where you get glimpses but they’re gone before you can do anything with them. In a way, it’s kind of enjoyable. I get to see the preview reel, unedited, before anyone else. And it looks fun and weird and spooky and intense and, best of all, new…but, of course, I’m sworn to secrecy. There’s nothing worse than talking something out before you can get it on paper.

So I’m sitting on the porch. Watching the poppies dance. And way down underneath, something unknown is taking shape. It just looks like nothing. And, as Dylan sings, too much of nothing makes a man ill of ease….

Learning from the Movies

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A few years ago, I was musing about the usual stuff–writing, Bob Dylan, whether life has any purpose–and I had an odd sort flash into my own writing. Hadn’t looked at it for some time, but I thought about it this morning and went back in the archives, and damned if it was still kind of interesting. I sometimes think on school where students are asked to explicate at heme for a piece by, say, Gogol, and, as a writer, you think: I’ll make you bet Gogol never sat down and said, “I think I’m going to write to this theme.” It just happens. Usually, the last person you want to ask to explicate a theme is an author.

Anyway, here’s the piece:

This morning, I was listening to Bob Dylan’s soundtrack from the Sam Peckinpah film “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” one of those films that has always resonated with me on a level that’s sometimes difficult for even me to understand, and I found myself pondering: who’s the main character in this story? Pat or Billy? Or are they equally weighted?

I finally decided it was Sheriff Pat Garrett’s story as his narrative opens and ends the film, and it is his dilemma whether or not to track down his former friend (Garrett was an outlaw before becoming sheriff) and kill him. Pat changes with the times–the closing of the wild American West–and lives; Billy does not, and, in the end, is killed. Wistfully, these days I identify more with Pat than Billy.

And I thought how, in a way, Billy is a part of Pat that he has to subdue to survive, an aspect of his young, free past, and that they are two parts of the same character. In that way, they sort of represent what Freud called the ego and id, with the ego having to tame the id’s powerful, basic impulses, or–in a model I more readily identify with–Carl Jung’s framing of conscious and unconscious mind, the unconscious being the vast mind that lurks beneath the surface of ordinary consciousness and comes through in drives, neurosis, dreams, fevers, intoxication, etc.

That’s a great theme, I thought. A conflict that I feel in my soul. That’d be a hell of a theme to write about, and I realized it underlies two of my other touchstone films, “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and “Apocalypse Now.” That’s when it struck me: it is my theme. It runs through much of my work, some of which, like “Delusion of Darkness,” give the advantage to the unconscious, and others of which, like the war plays (in which the characters’ rationality must overcome their attraction to the raw madness of violence), give the conscious mind the winning hand.

To give creedence to the power of the unconscious mind, I was not fully aware of the theme until now.

Why Write

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It’s so damned difficult, both doing it well and getting it to the stage. But once a picture appears in the mind and characters speak and become real, there’s such a compulsion to see it become flesh. It’s hard to explain. Productions seldom live up to those images, though once in awhile they transcend it. But the odds are long. What’s that Villon quote Hunter liked? “Life is short, art is long, and success is very far off.” No kidding.

Pause to crank up “Have You Ever Seen the Rain.” Heh.

You have to believe in yourself. Not always easy. Self-doubts come with the job too or else you can’t judge what’s working and what’s not, and that’s tough because you have to fall in love with each play a little bit to get it written, to sustain the process. Love it, measure it, hate it a little. All the while, it’s replaying, replaying, replaying in the mind’s eye/ear, like a video loop. You’re ready to scream if you see it one more time but you can’t look away. Hello, Alex. Ready for a little Ludwig Von? Definitely fucks up your perspective.

When it gets that muddled and you can’t tell what’s working, what’s wishful thinking, what’s inspiration, what’s madness, it’s time to walk away for awhile. Go to the beach, crack open a bottle of Cuervo, slip on the shades, light up, and watch the waves. All goddamn day if necessary. Until the sun goes down and the rain comes, and you sit in the dark, in the rain, listening to the surf, until finally that deep breath lets loose, sometimes tears, sometimes laughter–you are completely nuts, thank you, emotions climbing and crawling and falling on their backs and wiggling their legs like helpless beetles–and you gather up your stuff, and trudge back to the motel, where the open page awaits.

Brick, Mortar, Memory

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It must be winter: I’m listening to Leonard Cohen again.

Who was it who wrote something like: “…we are all boats beating forward, ceaselessly borne into the past?” James Joyce? No, Fitzgerald, from “Gatsby.” I can’t remember the quote exactly, but I can see that flotilla of rowboats on a flat green river, and I can feel my own boat wobble in the current.

Our entire economy is built upon buying things. In some way, that’s what provides and fills the larder, yet when the current finally carries you away, those things become inert boxes and odd objects, stripped of memory and resonance, in drawers someone will one day have to empty.

The common bromide says live for the moment, even though we can live nowhere else. But memory (or nostalgia) and hope (or worry) distance us from the present.

Perhaps architects are happy. They do their work, and their imaginations become part of our mindscape. Doctors, for all the good they do, ultimately lose. Lawyers, soldiers, and police we frankly need only when things go awry. Teachers transmit ideas, which do last, then release them, like caged birds, to go where they will. And the clergy, whose whole business is predicated on the eternal, operate solely on faith, which is all any of us really have.

Sometimes I think the restaurateurs, distillers, and tobacconists give the most to our present, even as their wares draw it away.

And the artists? We have the promise of the architects, but the odds are long. In that way, we’re closer to the clergy. Our job is just to shape and color what we ought to already know. Amusing (I think) to remember the many times people have said to me, in one form or another: how I wish I could do what you do.

It is winter.

Sympathy for the rare Picasso Shark

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So the reading of “Turquoise and Obsidian” went well last night. The turnout was pretty good for a Sunday when all the clocks had been scrambled, and the audience was very responsive. Cast was superb, and I’ll send them a thank-you when I can pull together a conscious thought.

Where the play stands at this point? Pretty well, I think. I expect I’ll get some decent notes, probably have to tweak a few things, but, when it comes to be big global changes, well, I doubt it. There’s a certain point where you have to go: that’s as good as it’s going to get. Move the hell on!

Writers are kind of like sharks: if we don’t keep moving, we die. Or at least we do a decent impression of a dead person who still drinks and smokes and burns holes in ratty recliners.

Though he was kind of reprehensible in the way he treated others, especially women, I’ve always admired Picasso in that he was never afraid to try to new things. So many artists achieve a certain success and freeze, terrified to slip outside of their hits. But, firmly established post-World War II, Picasso, arguably the most famous painter in the world, pulled up his roots and moved his whole family to the south of France so he could study pottery with noted artisans in this one town. So he did pottery, and it was brilliant and still distinctively Picasso. When he got old, he amused himself by repainting famous paintings by other, older masters, seeing them through his style and poking fun at both the canon and himself.

I don’t know if he died with a brush in hand, but there are worse ways to cash out.

Steve

Gore-Tex Dreams

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Traditionally—and who knows if tradition applies to weather anymore—the Northwest rainy season begins on Halloween night and ends April 15th. Oregon children trick-or-treat in Gore-Tex. That doesn’t mean it rains every single day, but…well, yes, it does.

And though it’s said true Oregonians don’t squint in the rain, the rainy season is really not all that much fun, and consecutive gray skies lend themselves to a certain introspection. Maybe that’s why so many Oregonians write. I knew a handsome old gent in Oregon logging country who said it was too risky to go to town because “there’s a widder behind every stump.” Much the same can be said of Northwest writers.

So it’s not surprising that we’re home to Powell’s Books, possibly the best independently owned bookstore in the U.S. (unlike The Strand, you can find things) or that winners of the Oregon Book Awards consistently produce work of such quality. But it may be surprising to know Portland is increasingly known as a home for new stage works. There are some very fine playwrights here—many of them are friends of mine—and artistic directors around the country are looking to Portland Center Stage’s JAW Playwrights Festival as a source for hot new plays and playwrights, with JAW plays and authors being picked up by the regional theatre circuit. My suspicion is that trend will not only continue but grow.

Another notable Portland characteristic, which I think fuels new work development, is that there’s a very strong DIY spirit here. Toss any three people together at a Portland coffeehouse—and we are rotten with coffeehouses—and you’ll end up with either a band, a restaurant, or, possibly, a theatre company. You can produce a play here for a fraction of what it costs elsewhere, and, if the local critics slaughter you, you don’t have to throw yourself in front of the MAX train—you just mope for awhile, listen to too much Elliott Smith, then begin writing again.

Oregon’s mountains, particularly the Coast Range, are unbelievably verdant, overflowing with life and pocketed with thickets rich with mood and mystery. If there’s a relationship between environment and psychology, perhaps it’s no surprise that Northwesterners inhabit equally complex inner worlds that sprout ideas the way fall rains breed mushrooms: overnight, whole landscapes change.

Flashback: Winter Cascades

/ Steve Patterson / 2 Comments

rain on evergreens.

trying to start the fire, more and more newspaper, burning, curling faces of politicians, until the kindling finally catches. still wearing your coat until the cabin begins to warm. light a pipe with a heavy, cherry-flavored tobacco. pour a glass of brandy. put on some slow, sad Brahms, shut off the light. watching chill rain, waiting on snow. the feeling coming back to your hands and feet. wet boots steaming before the fireplace. alone. relieved you’re alone, but also wishing someone was there. the fit never quite right. here on top of a mountain, thinking of the city, and, if in the city, dreaming of the mountain. never able to be just where you are. waiting for something to possess you, an outside event or idea. ever hanging. forever standing on your toes. and then suddenly, through the fogged window: snow in circles, rush of silence. weight of the brandy, pulling down into cushions. smell or burning pine. skillets on the walls. books. fishing tackle. phone, unplugged. desk with writing tablets, pens. no computers.

rising heavily, feeling the brandy vertigo come and pass, and opening the door to the soft hiss of snow, already filling in your footprints. no need to lock the door, closing it softly, and feeling the forest move around you. a slow-turning vortex of dark green memory. turning, turning, with all the faces past, the lost moments, ghost memories or piercing lost opportunties.

write something. save yourself from yourself.