A digital scrapbook by the author of Steal Like An Artist and other bestsellers.
NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING…. Again, for emphasis — NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess—and, if you’re lucky, an educated guess.
You do not know what the fuck is going on.
Your job is to be absolutely certain that you have no idea what the fuck is going on.
And from that raw chaos, that raw uncertainty.. as a default state of being.
Learn how to feel.
How to move forward and act in the world
I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose—to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
It’s not the spirit of ignorance I feel loyal to, but the spirit of amateurism… The making of poems is so mysteriously tied up with not-knowing that in some sense the poet is a perpetual amateur, a stranger to the art, subject to ineptitude, failure, falsity, mediocrity, and repetitiveness.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
First book I read after the election.
How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing.
That passage reminds me of this passage from Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court:
You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.
Quick note about that cover above — it was done by Leo and Diane Dillon, who were an amazing husband-wife illustration duo. From Leo’s obit:
Their modus operandi, honed over time, involved an initial discussion — a negotiation, to hear them tell it — of their visions of the text. When these were more or less reconciled, one of them made preliminary sketches, which were passed to the other for coloring, then passed back for refinement… After sufficient back-and-forth, and sufficient spirited argument, the resulting image appeared, they often said, to have been the work of an unseen but very much present third party, whom they called “It.”
If you know the book and its themes of gender, that passage about their work process takes on even more meaning.
Really good read, will keep on my shelf for a re-read down the road.
Filed under: my reading year 2016
I wanted a perfect ending… Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.
“Wonder—is not precisely knowing…” by Emily Dickinson
Wonder—is not precisely Knowing
And not precisely Knowing not—
A beautiful but bleak condition
He has not lived who has not felt—
Suspense—is his maturer Sister—
Whether Adult Delight is Pain
Or of itself a new misgiving—
This is the Gnat that mangles men—
Filed under: not knowing
For me, the engine of writing is almost always ignorance. I write to figure out what I think.
The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how to behave when we don’t know what to do.
mutant-what-not
