L is for Landcape

Remedios Varo, who I think of as one part
Escher and one part Bosch, paints landscapes
that look to me like coming home to myself.
It's a nice place, really.

Each of us lives in two landscapes: the one that surrounds us, and the one that we surround. Inside us all, opening up somewhere into the alternate space behind the brain or breastbone, is a world populated with the things that make us tick, a cabinet of curiosities that is bigger on the inside, a mountain range or a single room with shadowy walls. We are each of us museums of our own being, collections of our own dreams and fears and memories and longing and concrete shards of experience in bright colors and dim lights and that one name somebody called us one time. Sometimes it's a frightening place, a realm of darkness and slimy corners; sometimes it's a land of light and magic such as Disney himself would murder for. Much like, well, our own experiences, things mingle within us; we're a box of many spices, and some of them are bitter, but oh, dear god, the pungency of some, the sweetness, the fragrance!

This will be a short post, because I'm already playing catchup today, and not much needs to be said. Listen. It's really very simple. I want to make a Museum that reflects the natural makeup of the worlds that unfold within us, with their strange chambers and nested rooms, their bright spots and dark chapels. Joy is partly joy because we don't have it all the time, because it is mingled with loss and longing and nostalgia. I want to build a place to wander through that feels like walking into the shape of your own soul. Even if my soul speaks a different language (old cities and kaleidoscopes where yours is zombies and futurescapes, dead roads or tawny mountains, biker bars, black glass), if I do it right, you'll still feel like coming home to a place you never knew you'd known, a house that belonged to you before you thought to question your memory, something you saw under the sky once when the stars were out. What's a Museum of Joy for? Why, to remind us that joy is a living thing, entwined with history and also with our own story, coming up through the roots and blooming on the cheeks of the fruit upon the branches. As long as there have been people there has been suffering, perhaps, but as long as there's been people there's been joy also. And I want to make you a place that is a mirror you can melt through like Alice on the mantlepiece, back into a world where things speak to you and are not mute but wise and living, watchful, full of meaning. I want you to remember what it feels like to play, absorbed in an imaginary place and time that all of us have been to but most of us forget. I want to put you back so close to wonder that you trip on it and when your face hits the earth all you think is oh, I'd forgotten how good the dirt smells after rain. Delight is a place. As Liz Lemon likes to say, I want to go to there. I'd like you to come too. What else is there to say?

K is For Klezmer & Kevin & Krazy Kat

via Toonpedia

Things that inspire me: cartoon music and musical cartoons. Why? Because they create zany, playful, wild, wonderful worlds that bring out the joyous & the imaginative in all of us. And, there to help the pursuit thereof, is also my wonderful K-initialed boyfriend, who I will avoid gushing about because there's no need to embarrass him on the internet, but whom I will take as an example of the awesome things that can happen when your significant other supports and encourages you in your weird and wacky dreams.

I've referred to Krazy Kat here before, but never with the appropriate adulation and enthusiasm due such a shaper of my dreams. And I don't think I've ever made the fuss I ought to make about Klezmer music, and my father's old radio show The King of Prague (don't bother googling it; as far as the internet's concerned it doesn't exist), and their effect on my sense of the bizarre and the joyful. So please, today, come enter a mildly lunatic and lunar landscape, full of beards and bricks, and learn a little about the Old Country of the my mind.

J is for Joseph and Jurassic

The amazing 17th-century Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher's
magnetic divination devices at the MJT.
Via Running Wolf Productions.

...as in Joseph Cornell and the Museum of Jurassic Technology, two major inspirations for me in my dream of the Museum of Joy. (Obviously J is also for Joy, but that's a cop-out post.) Both the man and the museum I'm invoking today are magically adept at putting enormous and fantastical worlds into very small spaces, thereby simultaneously expanding the universe and filling it with very cool stuff. I've written about them both before in my post on marvelous museums, but they deserve a revisit today because they've been so intensely influential. They're important enough to me that they serve as catalysts for the imagination: if I'm feeling stuck or dispirited, I just need to spend a little time in contemplation of one or the other and I feel refreshed, revitalized, and full of creative zip and zest. (Actually, there's a thing I forgot to put in my guide to fishing for inspiration -- casting your line into the wild aquariums of other people's awesome ideas!) (Is this metaphor getting out of hand? George Orwell would not approve.) So here, today, just a  quick and tantalizing sample of stuff from the minds of men who think they way I'd like about evocation, dream, wonder, and the weirdness of the world...

I is for Imagination

Alphonse Maria Mucha, Poetry, 1898.
Via the Alphonse Mucha Art Gallery

...and for its elusive cousin, Inspiration. I've been reading articles over on The Creative Mind, a fascinating blog about psychology & creativity, and been getting into gentle little comment arguments on a few of the posts, which all seem to be saying, repeatedly, that it's not helpful to think about the muse or divine gifts or whatever when approaching creativity -- that waiting for inspiration to strike holds us back, that genius is not some special thing granted to the lucky few, that frustration and problem-solving make for the eureka moment and not some kind of touch from above. The thing is, I agree with all of these statements (and the articles are fascinating) -- it's just that I also believe in the muse. Not to belabor a point here, but I've said in a  few posts now that something really vital happens if we treat the things that give us the most joy and delight - like, say, our creative abilities - as gifts and not something that belongs to us by right. Does that mean I think anyone who doesn't feel "naturally inspired" should go ahead and give up art? Hell no. Listen, I woke up this morning to the sound of someone revisiting their breakfast in the alley outside my window. While that might be inspiring to some, I don't do 'gritty street humor,' and I hate the sound of vomiting. (Also, I was waking up from a dream in which I had to perform an impromptu bellydance piece with my boyfriend, which might have been okay if a little weird except that someone in the audience had just turned into a bright green zombie and was stumbling around mumbling about being hungry, which made me really nervous.) I just mean that thinking that we own our talents is as crippling as thinking that we're not responsible for them at all. (After all, if our talents are all our own, when we don't feel inspired, it's our own damn fault. You know what's crippling? Guilt, shame, and a sense of horrible failure. If you believe in the muse, you can just call her a fickle wench and go have a beer.)

"'Our digestions, for example, running sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars -- the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.'" - G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

I said Inspiration is the  elusive cousin of Imagination. Actually, I take it back. Inspiration is a species of iridescent fish that swims in the great sea that is the imagination, and I think our job as creators of art is basically to go fishing. But please, leave your industrial trawler at home. You know how a fishing trip is supposed to go, right? You go out in your little boat, you bait your line, and, well, catching fish is not really the point, is it? Even if you're a fisherman by trade, there's a lot of waiting around and enjoying the view...and then, snap, zip, you reel in your catch. And here are five ways to ensure you have a fruitful fishing trip on the vast rainbow ocean of the imaginary.

G is for Gift

Imagine this door flung open with nothing
beyond it but the sea: that's the feeling of an
open heart. From The Intrigue of Passageways
(holy cow, it's got so many beautiful arches),
a profile of Sarka-Trager Photography

Gratitude and generosity are motivating forces in my life, and I believe staunchly that it is these two things, alongside compassion, that lead human beings most directly to a sense of joy. I'm not a practicing member of any religion, but I'm a  big sucker for a lot of modern Buddhist teaching; however, gratitude, generosity, and compassion are pretty much the tenets of most of the major spiritual leaders of, um, ever. The reason for this, if you ask me, is simple: that's the shit that makes life worth living. Period. And I don't mean gratitude in the sense of being self-abasingly thankful for every scarp that comes your way; I don't mean generous in the sense of giving away everything you have to the point of self-depletion; I don't mean some kind of gooey compassion that makes you excuse anybody's bad behavior. I'm not talking about going around pretending to be a saint, or expecting anybody to be a kinder, warmer, more giving, or more forgiving person than they really are. I'm talking about something a little easier and a lot more powerful: an approach to the world that treats the universe like a gift that we get to have. We don't deserve it, in the sense that we haven't done anything to earn it, but we don't not deserve it, either, in the sense that we're not unworthy of receiving it. This kind of gift is a very important one, no matter who you are, but if you consider yourself a creative person it might be most important of all.

It's also Easter today, and although I'm what would probably be best termed a Taoist secular Jew, I went with my boyfriend's mother to a Catholic mass this morning. I went a couple years ago, as well, and wept through the whole service because it was a beautiful spring day and I was having a deeply spiritual experience connecting the story of the Resurrection to the cycles of Nature and the human need to celebrate rebirth, etc etc, very pagan and whatnot. This year I wept through the whole service again, but had a different set of revelations -- and yes, they were about gifts.

F is for Family (and Food)

Awesome parents via DiscoveryNews

Because I managed to completely forget the alphabet, and also because I was excited about my post for H, the fact that both F and G come first somehow slipped my mind. Um, oops. But F is an easy one: it's for family and food, two things that are inseparably linked in my mind and also major elements of my experience of joy. Instead of gushing a bunch about my folks, though, what I'd like to do is make a quick list of the things my family gave me that I am really grateful for. See, even if you really can't stand your family, chances are that somewhere along the line you did receive some form of gift from them. Whether it's your tenacity, your sense of humor, your love of Star Trek, your beautiful eyes, your favorite book, your amazing singing voice, or your unique ability to drink everyone else at the bar under the table, I would be shocked if your parents - biological or no - didn't pass on to you something that makes up a part of your identity you are proud of or a pastime that gives you great pleasure.