Still Sundays
January 16th.
If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.
Artists and their obsessions. “Doubt requires more courage than conviction.” Love doesn’t make you feel insecure.
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It is almost six o’clock in the morning and New York City is still covered by the cloak of the dark night. All the clocks in my apartment are tick-tocking to a rhythm along with my noise of sipping tea. Music of a dark, cold morning that doesn’t have a sound other than the thoughts in your head.
I do wish I could hear this stillness every morning, frankly. Some mornings I do but it doesn’t stretch out as long as on a Sunday.
There is no need to pull the curtains aside given the mouth of frigid air rests desperately against the windows which are keeping my apartment warm.
January is half-way over, winter is not. Stillness is a coconut I can sip meanwhile until it is warm again.
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If as an artist you choose to not shut yourself from your audience you are constantly offered opinions (most of which you must ignore, even the ones that flatter). An artist’s only allegiance is to that sacred moment which gives rise to a crescendo that reverberates in time. That time can be now for one person, that time can be beyond a lifetime for many. Time matters only to the extent where a lasting alteration is engraved upon the viewer, listener, or reader; that is evidence of art and it is to that stillness the artist must return again and again.
But those who create are human after all, susceptible to the ears of their tender egos that grow fangs over certain comments.
This one man, having read a few of my fiction stories, said over a meeting, “It seems like you write about relationships a lot. I mean, it is great. Just an observation. Didn’t know if you knew.”
I wasn’t sure which sentence to spit out first from the grasp of fangs: bitter olive-thought “didn’t know if you knew” or the pit inside, “write about relationships a lot.”
This took me back to an interview I had read in the Summer 2010 issue of Glimmer Train Stories magazine. In it there is an excellent interview with Elizabeth Strout, author of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge.
“Do you think it’s true that writers often write about the same things over and over again—things they’ve become obsessed with their whole lives?”
[She replied,] “Absolutely. I’m a huge believer in obsessions. I think that they’re fabulous and I think that they’re too often kicked out of kids at a young age, and that we sort of get homogenized. I think obsessions should be encouraged as long as they’re not hurting the child, like shooting heroin or something. I think obsessions are really great because it’s passion and it’s essential, especially to a writer. You have to allow yourself to acknowledge those obsessions and compulsions and to go for it. There’s a huge pull on us to be more like each other, but we need to acknowledge our obsessions.”
I am obsessed with human relationships, love, and the tango between truth and lies. I will swallow the bitter-olive thought and spit out the pit: yes, I do know.
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A friend recently said, “I wish I had as much faith as you in some kind of ‘Supreme Divine’.” I replied, rather instinctively as if someone had asked my name, “Oh it’s pretty easy. Have as much doubt as me. I am proven otherwise with equal force.”
The more consciously I doubt, the deeper into the thrust of Now I am pulled. The rattling tin cans labeled foggy memories, scabby past, identity attachments, anxious future, I drag behind my bicycle of now with a string that would lead to freedom if snapped off and I am left with nothing but to ride the wind. Look mama! No hands!
And just when I doubt my faith in the fierce potency of doubt, I come across a book of mine that had been boxed and stored with other books at my parents’ farmhouse in California. It is a short play called “Doubt” by John Patrick Shanley, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It was also turned into a motion picture which starred Meryl Streep.
I share the following from the preface:
It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he’s on the verge of growth. […] Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present.
It is the most dangerous, important, and ongonig experience of life. The beginning of change is the moment of Doubt. It is that crucial moment when I renew my humanity or become a lie.
Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite—-it is a passionate exercise.
There is no last word. That’s the silence under the chatter of our time.
If ego is the opposite of faith then doubt is the opposite of love. Yes, indifference too, but definitely doubt. If ego hails, “I know so I don’t believe” to create that hole for some doubt against which the roar of synchronicity too good for random chance can be pegged, then love, if it is indeed the real thing, can silence any doubt.
I have never understood, “If you love someone/something set them/it free…” beyond an intellectual level. Now I do: you can only glide in freedom from immense security. It is no one’s duty to make one feel secure but I know without a doubt—okay maybe a little—-that love makes you feel secure despite many doubts.
It’s still cold. But it’s also Sunday and there is light out even if not that sunny and for that I am grateful.
~a.q.s.
Love this post. The timeliness of it is remarkable. My final google search last night was ‘quotes about dissent’. So many of them came back to the power and courage that is in doubt. Conversely, many of them dealt with the desire of those in power to quell that doubt, not with information, but with forced conformity.
This quote hit me the most in that regard, and ties back to what Elizabeth Strout was saying, more extremely perhaps, but individual thought silenced is… individual thought silenced:
“No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.” – Alan Bullock
Now – to look for a copy of “Doubt”.
Annie – I am in awe of how your words/phrases/thoughts hold onto me creating wee vignettes that linger on a beautiful Still Sunday…
…Ellyn….
I share your perplexity about letting go of those we love, I didn’t understand it.
Perhaps being a parent helped me with this, not that one needs to be a parent to learn the lesson, but certainly one learns others don’t belong to you.
I do believe this is one of life’s hardest lessons, the idea that letting go of those we love, is in fact love in action.
Oh the selflessness of true love, puts all other loves in the shade.
you don’t need me to comment on this one any more than i need to comment. ’tis enough for both of us that i was here, and that i know.
just a little.
*hugs*
@Lynne – yes, that is rather timely. thanks for stopping by and I appreciate sharing the quote and your (also very timely) thoughts. : ) ~a.
@poplore – yes, very much more than enough. gratitude, poplore. ~a.
@Catherine White – Dear Catherine, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing your thoughts here. : ) Just to clarify, which I never do on here, I meant “letting go” in the context that it is not really that hard when you are secure in the essence of that ‘true selfless love’. : ) And yes, a parent would or should know best.
Thanks,
~a.
@Ellyn – Ellyn, Thanks so much for reading and sharing. It is always a pleasure to connect stillness from your end to mine. ~a.
@annie – i enjoyed this immensely. Thank you annie
I loved this statement…
I am obsessed with human relationships, love, and the tango between truth and lies. I will swallow the bitter-olive thought and spit out the pit: yes, I do know.
obsessed..passion..whatever word we choice it is a force to be follow..and love… ah love and the dance it is wonderful….and I’m always up for throwing my heart at the world and yelling “catch” and seeing what happens…even if it is just me picking it up and dusting it off, because truly it is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all.
Standing in the wee hours this morning I watched the edge of the sun burning the night away, held in that twilight the moment does last longer when we don’t have to rush.
have a fabulous sunday
Einstein’s attributed with some pithy comments, one of my favorites being, “The last state a human experiences before learning something new is confusion.” Confusion is a kind of doubt, I suppose. Since I read that quote the first time, I’ve fallen in love with that sense of confusion; of doubt. It always makes me smile now, even when there isn’t any real payoff, just the anticipation.
Even when I don’t get to have my Still Sunday until Sunday night, still, I appreciate it just the same.
Beautiful weaving of words into sentences, mirroring feelings and emotions. “Love makes you feel secure despite many doubts.” It’s very interesting to study behavior of people who claim to be ‘In love mutually’….it’s never fifty fifty..one person will be always having more intense emotional attachment than other…it’s just that which person feels more secure with themselves in life in other aspects of life ,outside the love -relationship-capsule.
Ads/media define love as giving flowers, chocolates, diamonds, resort holidays and cruises as love defining gestures and despite that people claim not to be loved enough or still have affairs. No one has the power to make you feel happy or assure you that you are being adequately loved. It’s all about how secure you feel about yourself…in other words how much you value and care about yourself.
someone recently told me in person that they wanted to leave a comment on a post of mine, but that they didn’t because they could not express themselves as well as I had, they felt.
i could not understand this, all we need to do to find the right words is to pause, understand what we feel, and then explain it.
yet I understood my friend clearly now as I began to comment on this post.
that, and also this comment now exists despite initial doubt. love indeed annie,
all-ways.
You are wonderful to share that experience here and that despite the initial doubt, if we bring ourselves to the moment, something indeed happens. Thank you for that example.
I’m still trying to figure out how one could write (fiction and much non-fiction) *without* being obsessed by human relationships! 🙂 Even Robinson Crusoe has his Friday, the lonely “Castaway” his lost love, and Ellison’s “Invisible Man” has the people who do not know him, who fail to see him.
As for doubt and the ‘courage of one’s convictions,’ I am reminded of some words from philosopher and translator Walter Kaufmann, whose lectures I was lucky enough to attend as a student. Prefacing his book “Critique of Religion and Philosophy,” he lamented the formalism dominating academic philosophy at that time and called for a return to substantive questions, beyond merely “protesting their convictions after hours. As yet few philosophers have found the courage for an attack on their convictions.” Kaufmann also writes:
“Discussion of views one rejects is important for yet another reason. If one simply ignores alternative suggestions, any outline of one’s views becomes dogmatic and tedious. Polemic recaptures the excitement of the search for truth. There are those who consider mere correctness trite. Polemic may remind them of the difficulty of achieving correctness and of the high adventure of the search for truth.”
Doubt is this polemic taken inside oneself, and it is risky, often painful, but deeply alive. When a writer such as you, Annie, dares to show us the “tango between truth and lies” in relationships or within a character’s mental world, the search for personal and interpersonal truth feels like high adventure indeed.
Absolutely wonderful.
I love that you come here to write about humans and relationships and connection…
I love that you shed light on us as humans and our connection to each other.