We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
Ray Bradbury
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
There has been a bit of talk concerning my last entry about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. A consensus strikes at the combination of having knowledge and knowing how to use it.
We are all receptacles of information, too much sometimes. The passing fads and the gossip tend to take up too much importance in our lives. Well, all right, in some people's lives. It almost seems that you don't know anything if you don't know the latest bit of superficial information that passes into oblivion almost as soon as it emerges from the public fog.
I like gathering information, that's why I'm a addicted reader of everything that passes before my eyes. I like to know what's in my can of beans as much as what the historians say about Thermapolae. But when does it become knowledge? When does it get tucked away in the tool box or the paint box for later use?
That's where the artist steps in, the artist that lives inside everyone, the maker of things. There's art and there's art. There are simple songs and symphonies, embroidered samplers and murals, limericks and novels. teaspoons and temples The woman who collect yarn of different colors because she knows what to do with them is going to turn her knowledge into something beautiful. It's because she wants to make something beautiful that gives her the wisdom.
To echo what I wrote yesterday, in the process of turning knowledge into wisdom,, whether in art or in life, settling for less than the best you can do is not an option.
DB
http://db-vagabondtales.blogspot.com/
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Dear Brian and Christy fans.
I so enjoy reading your opinions and assumptions as to how the story is going, what's happening, what's going to happen and what the various characters are up to. I think of you as archers: one gets close to the mark, another one misses the target. And since I'm the only one who knows how it's going to fadge, I'm feeling quite smug.
D
D
Analogous Authenticities 12/10/08
Endowed with wisdom, women and men are led through visible realities to those which are invisible.
Saint Ambrose
*********************
So what is wisdom and how do I get it? We live now in what's known as the information age. We are pummeled with facts and figures, opinions and advice. One sage analyzes things one way and another sage another way. And yet the word informed means to be formed from within. Ah ha! you say, that requires thought. You betcha.
T. S. Eliot once said that information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom. Wisdom is a real pathway to the invisible and perhaps unknowable and once attained becomes true information.
One of the vagabond's favorite lines is "Search for the invisible." What do you do when your foot suddenly reaches the edge of the cliff, the edge of your known world, the knowable? Is there something beyond? At this point the uninformed turn back. The risk is too great. Others may sit and stare into space.
What I want to know is that which I cannot see nor measure, that which is neither under my feet nor over my head. I want to know the heart of the invisible.
A certain Kabbalist scholar described God this way: If the universe is a tree, then God is that which is behind the power that moves the sap.
DB - Vagabond Journeys
http://db-vagabondtales.blogspot.com/
Saint Ambrose
*********************
So what is wisdom and how do I get it? We live now in what's known as the information age. We are pummeled with facts and figures, opinions and advice. One sage analyzes things one way and another sage another way. And yet the word informed means to be formed from within. Ah ha! you say, that requires thought. You betcha.
T. S. Eliot once said that information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom. Wisdom is a real pathway to the invisible and perhaps unknowable and once attained becomes true information.
One of the vagabond's favorite lines is "Search for the invisible." What do you do when your foot suddenly reaches the edge of the cliff, the edge of your known world, the knowable? Is there something beyond? At this point the uninformed turn back. The risk is too great. Others may sit and stare into space.
What I want to know is that which I cannot see nor measure, that which is neither under my feet nor over my head. I want to know the heart of the invisible.
A certain Kabbalist scholar described God this way: If the universe is a tree, then God is that which is behind the power that moves the sap.
DB - Vagabond Journeys
http://db-vagabondtales.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Zesty Zaniness 12/09/08
Doing your best is a process of trying to do your best.
Townes Van Zandt
**************************
This was the question I would ask myself often as an actor: Are you doing the best you can? The rehearsal period is a confusing and frustrating time for every one. It is particularly frustrating to watch, which is probably why so many directors get cranky. A good director has to recognize process and development when he can't see results.
For the actor the frustrations are myriad. Early on there is getting to know the play and the other actors and how they work, if you don't know them. If one is lucky to have enough table time to discuss the play and hear everyone's thoughts, that process can have long lasting and important results.
Then comes the staging part where one gets to move around and be placed by the director. This is also the period of learning the lines and that has a built in frustration. If you learn 8 pages after the rehearsal one evening, you may know them cold when you go to sleep. But when you wake up the next mooring they're gone. The brain has tucked them away in some hidden chamber and you have to start doing something that resemble relearning them. But it doesn't take long. Pretty soon they reappear. I always liked to know my lines as soon as possible, it's very frustrating to try to develop the play and find the character while holding a script. Some actors don't put the script down until the last minute which is very frustrating for the other actors.
Later in rehearsal is when the details, dynamics and subtleties of the production are worked out. It is frustrating because it requires constant repetition. Sometimes theatre patrons will ask if they can come and watch rehearsals. They think they are going to see a performance in the rough, but what they see is a rhearsal in the rough. They generally leave after half an hour or so.
The tech rehearsal comes close to the performance night. The actors run through the play, but they have to stop frequently while a light is refocused, a costume is adjusted, the phone bell has to be rewired, the glass is changed to a mug, etc. If one is lucky the tech rehearsal only lasts one night. Then comes a dress rehearsal where everything is finished and working properly, one hopes. After that comes opening night.
All the way through this process I keep asking myself if I'm doing my best, my best for the play and the director, my best for the other players and most of all am I doing my particular best.
Even after opening when the play is running I still look for ways that I can be better. Not to remove anything from the production or add anything, but to perform my role with as much color, energy, depth and honesty as I can.
In the arts, settling is not doing one's best.
DB - Vagabond Journeys
Townes Van Zandt
**************************
This was the question I would ask myself often as an actor: Are you doing the best you can? The rehearsal period is a confusing and frustrating time for every one. It is particularly frustrating to watch, which is probably why so many directors get cranky. A good director has to recognize process and development when he can't see results.
For the actor the frustrations are myriad. Early on there is getting to know the play and the other actors and how they work, if you don't know them. If one is lucky to have enough table time to discuss the play and hear everyone's thoughts, that process can have long lasting and important results.
Then comes the staging part where one gets to move around and be placed by the director. This is also the period of learning the lines and that has a built in frustration. If you learn 8 pages after the rehearsal one evening, you may know them cold when you go to sleep. But when you wake up the next mooring they're gone. The brain has tucked them away in some hidden chamber and you have to start doing something that resemble relearning them. But it doesn't take long. Pretty soon they reappear. I always liked to know my lines as soon as possible, it's very frustrating to try to develop the play and find the character while holding a script. Some actors don't put the script down until the last minute which is very frustrating for the other actors.
Later in rehearsal is when the details, dynamics and subtleties of the production are worked out. It is frustrating because it requires constant repetition. Sometimes theatre patrons will ask if they can come and watch rehearsals. They think they are going to see a performance in the rough, but what they see is a rhearsal in the rough. They generally leave after half an hour or so.
The tech rehearsal comes close to the performance night. The actors run through the play, but they have to stop frequently while a light is refocused, a costume is adjusted, the phone bell has to be rewired, the glass is changed to a mug, etc. If one is lucky the tech rehearsal only lasts one night. Then comes a dress rehearsal where everything is finished and working properly, one hopes. After that comes opening night.
All the way through this process I keep asking myself if I'm doing my best, my best for the play and the director, my best for the other players and most of all am I doing my particular best.
Even after opening when the play is running I still look for ways that I can be better. Not to remove anything from the production or add anything, but to perform my role with as much color, energy, depth and honesty as I can.
In the arts, settling is not doing one's best.
DB - Vagabond Journeys
Monday, December 8, 2008
Youthful Yearnings 12/08/08
I would ride with you upon the wind
and dance upon the mountains like a flame.
Yeats
and dance upon the mountains like a flame.
Yeats
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Xenophilic Xenion 12/07/08
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seeded refusal of that which others have made of us.
Jean Paul Sartre
*******************************
I had a freshman English teacher in college, I shan't name him, who was in many ways the epitome of Bob Newhart's "buttoned down mind." He rarely smiled, seemed to have no sense of humor, had us reading boring novels by obscure authors and deferred embarrassingly to his favorites in the class. I tried my best to respect that man. He was the teacher assigned to our class and therefore deserved my attention and as much honor as I could give him, which wasn't much.
The biggest problem I had with him was his habit of easily categorizing all of his students. If he made up his mind that one was brilliant then he would praise everything that one said, even if it was ignorant. If he decided that one was stupid then nothing that one said would receive any respect.
But it was even worse when he got to labeling us and putting us in neat little philosophical boxes: this one was an idealist, that one was a pragmatist, the other one was an empiricist, the one over there was a liberal, the one in front a conservative, and so on. And we were expected henceforth to follow whatever ethical, intellectual line we were assigned by him. It was as if he felt obliged to describe ourselves to us in simple, clearly defined terms, like photographs hanging on a wall, and to declare his findings loudly to the class.
I finally locked horns with him one day when I turned in a paper on the subject of opera. I was a music major. He was a music lover, or so he said. I made certain statements in the paper with which he disagreed. It didn't matter to him that I had plenty of research to explain my statements, and he wasn't going to concern himself with the quality of my writing, he just set out to tell me I was wrong because he considered himself a better musicologist than I. In the process he missed the whole theme of my paper. He had made up his mind early on that I was of substandard intelligence and that therefore I couldn't do well at any writing project. But that I happened to step on the sensitive toe of his belief in himself as a superior scholar of opera, just made matters worse. I classified him as a jerk.
It would have been impossible, I think, for the two of us to ever become friends, but now, older and with more experience in my bag, I can admit that there was probably more to the man than just "jerk" and I hope that he is considering that there is more to other people than he wants to find.
It is vitally important to our emotional survival that we kick down the sides of the box that others want to tuck us into and claim a rangy and complex individuality for ourselves. There is more to every human being than meets the opinion of others. And it is equally important that we don't prepare a box for anyone else.
No one has authority over another person's identity.
DB
Saturday night is a lonely time.
Jean Paul Sartre
*******************************
I had a freshman English teacher in college, I shan't name him, who was in many ways the epitome of Bob Newhart's "buttoned down mind." He rarely smiled, seemed to have no sense of humor, had us reading boring novels by obscure authors and deferred embarrassingly to his favorites in the class. I tried my best to respect that man. He was the teacher assigned to our class and therefore deserved my attention and as much honor as I could give him, which wasn't much.
The biggest problem I had with him was his habit of easily categorizing all of his students. If he made up his mind that one was brilliant then he would praise everything that one said, even if it was ignorant. If he decided that one was stupid then nothing that one said would receive any respect.
But it was even worse when he got to labeling us and putting us in neat little philosophical boxes: this one was an idealist, that one was a pragmatist, the other one was an empiricist, the one over there was a liberal, the one in front a conservative, and so on. And we were expected henceforth to follow whatever ethical, intellectual line we were assigned by him. It was as if he felt obliged to describe ourselves to us in simple, clearly defined terms, like photographs hanging on a wall, and to declare his findings loudly to the class.
I finally locked horns with him one day when I turned in a paper on the subject of opera. I was a music major. He was a music lover, or so he said. I made certain statements in the paper with which he disagreed. It didn't matter to him that I had plenty of research to explain my statements, and he wasn't going to concern himself with the quality of my writing, he just set out to tell me I was wrong because he considered himself a better musicologist than I. In the process he missed the whole theme of my paper. He had made up his mind early on that I was of substandard intelligence and that therefore I couldn't do well at any writing project. But that I happened to step on the sensitive toe of his belief in himself as a superior scholar of opera, just made matters worse. I classified him as a jerk.
It would have been impossible, I think, for the two of us to ever become friends, but now, older and with more experience in my bag, I can admit that there was probably more to the man than just "jerk" and I hope that he is considering that there is more to other people than he wants to find.
It is vitally important to our emotional survival that we kick down the sides of the box that others want to tuck us into and claim a rangy and complex individuality for ourselves. There is more to every human being than meets the opinion of others. And it is equally important that we don't prepare a box for anyone else.
No one has authority over another person's identity.
DB
Saturday night is a lonely time.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Whimsical Weighting 12/06/08
The reader's own life "outside" the story, changes the story.
David Wallace
*******************
Now that I'm writing stories I can see the truth of this statement, but only because my stories are serialized. I can read from emails and comments how readers are variously affected by the tale as it unfolds. I can sense one person's reaction to a certain character as compared with someone else's reaction to the same character. I can read how people are taking sides on certain issues as they arise. In fact, I can even appreciate and incorporate suggestions as to how the story should progress. I'll bet any serial writer has experienced the same energy from his readers.
The title of my main journal is Vagabond Journeys. One reason is that I have always thought of life as a journey, at least my life is. Whether it was hitchhiking across the country, following trails up and down the mountains of the Northeast, going from one theatre to another, walking along the sidewalks of New York City as if I was treading on the ledges of the universe or even going from one room to another, it has always been a journey to me.
This is the way I write. I have a beginning and I have a destination. I know how the story is going to end. Getting from the beginning to the end is the journey. That's where the creative work is done. Characters are introduced along the way as they are needed, some stay, some don't. Some are mentioned before they appear. But in every case readers will let me know how important they think those characters are.
The long story I'm writing now, Brian and Christine, is not about a plane crash, a small town in Utah, a major motion picture, an orphanage or the terrors that are coming. It's about a very unlikely relationship between two people. The last character to appear in this story has already been mentioned. I always appreciate the comments I get because I want the readers to be involved with the lives of all the characters, and to go along with me on this journey, and perhaps even point out some sign posts along the way.
My thanks to you.
DB
http://db-vagabondtales.blogspot.com/
David Wallace
*******************
Now that I'm writing stories I can see the truth of this statement, but only because my stories are serialized. I can read from emails and comments how readers are variously affected by the tale as it unfolds. I can sense one person's reaction to a certain character as compared with someone else's reaction to the same character. I can read how people are taking sides on certain issues as they arise. In fact, I can even appreciate and incorporate suggestions as to how the story should progress. I'll bet any serial writer has experienced the same energy from his readers.
The title of my main journal is Vagabond Journeys. One reason is that I have always thought of life as a journey, at least my life is. Whether it was hitchhiking across the country, following trails up and down the mountains of the Northeast, going from one theatre to another, walking along the sidewalks of New York City as if I was treading on the ledges of the universe or even going from one room to another, it has always been a journey to me.
This is the way I write. I have a beginning and I have a destination. I know how the story is going to end. Getting from the beginning to the end is the journey. That's where the creative work is done. Characters are introduced along the way as they are needed, some stay, some don't. Some are mentioned before they appear. But in every case readers will let me know how important they think those characters are.
The long story I'm writing now, Brian and Christine, is not about a plane crash, a small town in Utah, a major motion picture, an orphanage or the terrors that are coming. It's about a very unlikely relationship between two people. The last character to appear in this story has already been mentioned. I always appreciate the comments I get because I want the readers to be involved with the lives of all the characters, and to go along with me on this journey, and perhaps even point out some sign posts along the way.
My thanks to you.
DB
http://db-vagabondtales.blogspot.com/
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