Ready for Autumn

Ready for Autumn

by Vania Smrkovski

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Contemplation on a bench in the park on a cool autumn day and she reflects on her life and her entrances her exits and her hours no maybe days no maybe months or even years in this very seat in this park in years past and she wonders how to measure her life.

Snow flowers sweat grass-stains dirt ground into her dress as her dress ground into her hips as her hips ground into him and she smiles, red-cheeked, at that steamy memory and she wonders how to measure her time here.

Grammar middle high college grad doctor mother wife retired diagnosed terminal and now she waits here on the bench in the park on this cool autumn day and she reflects on her lessons and she breathes and she smiles and she sees so many choices.

So many ways to measure her life.

Contemplation. As leaves fall upon the ground as leaves fall upon her bench as leaves fall upon her shoulders her lap her face and cover her eyes and they measure her in inches and then feet and then yards and she is covered by the autumn leaves and she waits for them to do their final act upon her.

Baby-blankets quilts backpacks rain-gear grunting man with garlic breath and whispers of love, and children on her breast as she sleeps, and knitted quilts and one day a shroud and she wonders if anyone will remember.

Will anyone remain to measure her life.

Contemplation with no urgency only peace only love only certainty of a life fully lived in this park in this world with her friends with her loves, as the leaves leave the trees till they're bare, and she knows she is ready she has given she can go she can go she can finally let go.

Hand on her shoulder warmth and firmness and calm and timeless and she turns, sees his face and she smiles.

And she smiles and closes her eyes and arises and takes his hand.

And she bids her park goodbye.

I Am Mighty

I Am Mighty:

by Vania Smrkovski

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

You try to weigh me down, but I am mighty, and I will dominate, and I will defeat you.

Yes! I am made up of chemicals, neurons, imbalances, experiences, scars, self-esteem, and

Yes! I know the words of my own doom by heart and hear their echo still, and

Yes! I still hear the words from the school yard, the school bus, from college, from work, from the darkest night in bed alone and weary and teary and afraid, but

You! Cannot defeat me and

You! Cannot break me and

You! Will not define me for

You! Are but what I make of you and

I! Will not be limited by the world you paint for me, you deamons of doubt and fear and anger and angst and self-loathing.

For while I cannot control the tidal flow of despair that you create in my mind and my soul,

I can still choose how to respond

And I will defeat you

And I will perservere

For even in the deepest pit of depression and despair, my tears will erode you, my fury will blow you down, and you must know that I am mightier than you can ever conceive.

________________________________________________________

Vania 3.0, it's happening.... The writing, the act itself, the inspiration, has come back to me.....

Allee Willis Blog � Blog Archive � Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – 1970’s Disco Suitcase Set & Pomplamoose

Allee Willis Blog � Blog Archive � Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – 1970’s Disco Suitcase Set & Pomplamoose

Being a fan of Pomplamoose, as I have been so eager to share on my profile before, I thought I would share this great blog by the writer of "September", who was so impressed with their remake of her song that she tracked them down and offered to collaborate on a record with them!

AWESOME!

It has happened at last. Officially single, ready to start anew.

Well, to be sure, I never really knew where I would be when I found myself in the summer of 2009 wondering if I had indeed reached the point of no hope. I put everything I could into my marriage, trying to really look at my part in our arguments, to see what I needed to improve, so that I could be sure I had ruled out everything before I finally gave up.

But I had lost hope, and while I didn't know where I was going, I knew that I was in the unique and wonderful position of having recently reconnected with friends from years past, and I found myself looking at the world of theatre for the first time in nearly 20 years.

And I felt just a little less afraid.

These last 8 or 9 months have been quite a journey, and now I have capped off the first chapter of what I have termed "Vania 3.0", the next great revision in my self-identity. The divorce was final as of yesterday. I can't quite celebrate. I do not hate my ex wife. Not even remotely. I still fervently hope that we will be able to develop a strong friendship again.

She is still my primary veterinarian for my cats, and we still get together once every couple of months to watch TV together. It's awkward, maybe more for me than for her, I don't know, but I met her when she was still freshly in the United States, a college student not quite ready for the real world, and I watched her grow into a strong, independent woman. Even if it turns out that we are not meant for each other, I still cherish those memories together.

But, I'm starting chapter 2 of my Vania 3.0 life, now. I've made major headway in the story analysis of my "Great American Existential Novel", developed characters, back story, potentially interesting plot developments. I've done three full stage productions, the last, Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, being the most challenging and fulfilling for me yet. And I might, just might, actually be seriously in a position to open up a dinner theatre here in my home town of Knoxville, TN.

And now I'm spending a great deal of my time wondering what I am going to do with my personal life. Do I just happily find a way to live on my own? Do I remain open for a new relationship one day? Do I just crassly find a way to get laid whenever I can? I'm not sure if I'm that kind of guy. For all that I still get urges (fairly often, truth be told), I just can't bring myself to just be happy banging a stranger. I do want to actually know the person I'm with. Call it a sense of propriety, maybe, or perhaps just call it a sense of insecurity -- maybe I just need someone I can trust enough before I make love with her.

Meanwhile, knowing that a relationship happens pretty much despite anything I do, I am just content finding my home is indeed my home. My salvation, my protection. I can tuck away all the corners that lead to the outside world and rest in the cocoon that is my condo, feed my kittens, cook a meal and lay back and read, or watch some TiVo'd programs, or just close my eyes, pick up my recorder and dictate some thoughts on my book.

So here's to you, my ex-wife, my friends who knew me as Vania 1.0, or Vania 2.0. I hope you'll be able to tag along as I enter chapter 2 and take part in the story that is my life.

It's only now starting to get really interesting....

Vania

The Gardener: a peek into the story

I hereby provide you an email I sent to a friend describing who this Gardener is and why she (? he?) is important in the story. Most of this will not make sense.

So be it.

________________________________________________

Sandy,

Hey, thanks for the offer of help....

I know very little about gardening, so at this point I am doing a character study. I want to understand it well enough to build a character. I want to understand enough about its history to hopefully build on that knowledge.

The character is a god, of sorts, and a mortal character as well. I'm not sure how much even she/he knows of the dual nature. But the Gardener has been building, harvesting, nurturing for aeons. The garden he tends is as much heavenly, ethereal. They are the stuff of forces, wind, gravity, electricity, but they are also attraction, between people, inspiration, focus.

While I do want to study our own many mythologies for my stories, I plan to kind of tear them like you might make confetti out of paper. Reattach them as with tape, or water for papier mache.

The Gardener is interested in particular in a peculiar thing he/she has encountered. Its original form is lost to us, but upon the discovery of "DNA" in our mortal world, its reality changed and it became highly complex DNA, strands distributed throughout our reality, sometimes in people, many of whom are remarkable, known to history as saints, artists, philosophers, kings, but many of whom are animals, plants and even rock.

These strands were once part of one original god-like being, one of a handful at the time of the creation before creations, the creation that created the canvas upon which our Judeo-Christian god painted the light upon the darkness.

The Gardener doesn't understand everything -- in fact what the Gardener thinks she knows is mostly myth, misinformation, legends, deception, but she understands that, like mating different Orchids, one can create something new and unique, and so she serves the purpose of the story by heralding the first transformation I need for my main character.

In my stories, Sandy, I plan to follow a mortal, an ordinary divorce who moves to a small town to rebuild his life, as he faces the confusion and certain descent into madness as he discovers he is more than a mere mortal, but is -- what? Divine? Even that word is so Judeo-Christian as to be meaningless. But definitely made of subtler stuff than what can be understood is his world of physics, psychology, is, is not, either/or, mass, meaning.

So the Gardener is only representative of the next level of reality, but a reality that is just as false as our own, and once the first book is done and our hero has discovered a truer sense of himself, he will only come to discover that there are many layers to the skin that covers his eyes.

I want the Gardener to be as rich a character as I can make him or her. I want to know legend and history. I want to know what callouses form where, and how the clock is set differently each day and each season.


I hope this gives you a better sense of what I need......

Ankle Deep in the Black Bog of Writer's Block

Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune is just about over. It's been a terrific run, and I feel like I've learned a lot as an actor. I am hoping for this last weekend to be the best yet.

One more weekend to go, and I no longer have any huge commitments after hours. Well, having just about wrapped up this latest 2-month excuse not to really do anything with writing, the thought of the massive project has been getting ever so insidiously under my skin again. At the recommendation of a friend, I purchased a book called "No Plot? No Problem!", just for the sake of having the topic of writing part of my evening regimen.

The real problem is that, while the act of writing itself is important, I still find myself going back to the notion that I have a very specific story that I want to tell -- I am simply not yet at the point of writing the tale. It's that simple. I could sit down and write fifteen short stories in a week's time and it wouldn't give me one iota of a sense of satisfaction because they simply would not be stories that I want to write.

So I am recommitted to giving this process of story outlining and back-story development a go. I have printed out every single note I have on the topic, in my Google Documents & Spreadsheets collection, in my Google Notes collection, in the LiveScribe notes I've been collecting, on my over-sized sheets of notepaper that I bought last December along with lots of permanent markers and lots of stick'um so I can post them on my wall, and over the next few weeks, as Frankie and Johnny closes and I am able to commit more time, I will cut these notes up into little scraps of thoughts and paste them on my wall in my office at home and pray that a sensible pattern emerges.

See, I am exploring something very peculiar. It doesn't even have a fully fleshed out story, yet. It's an exploration into the very notion of identity and reality. The story presumes a set of physical laws that would have an impact on so much of our notion of what is a person, what is a moment in time, what is "real".

Meanwhile, I will take a break from theatre work. At least a couple of months. These little hermit-moments don't tend to last too long. The writer's block has made it difficult for me to stay on task and sort through my thoughts. I'm still trying to enlist the aid of some of my creative friends, but they either complain irritated that they can't grasp what I'm trying to do, as if the fact that I can't either isn't relevant, as if I'm trying to show off for them, or they focus on irrelevancies or try to advise me to "just write", ignoring everything I've been saying all along.

Yes, I know that "just write" is important. I'm not discounting the idea that the act of writing, in and of itself, sets the creative juices flowing. I've already been down that road and the motivation simply isn't there to continue. The reason for this is that the real problem I am trying to solve, this puzzle of how to tell a story about a god who doesn't even know what is real, isn't yet ready to be written.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity | Video on TED.com

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity | Video on TED.com

This one is a keeper. What an amazing discussion about the creative process. A totally non-scientific, non-rational process that is so intrinsically entwined into the ego, that tests ones faith, self-confidence.

In my own writing, I found one day years ago that I was suddenly unable to write any more. Where I had once written because poems and stories settled into my mind with a demand to be heard and recorded by me, the humble artist, I was suddenly faced with a daily barrage of tired, repetitive and very hollow sentiments. I struggled with this for a while as I entered a depressive stage in my life and talked with a friend who worked creatively every day in his career as a producer/filmmaker/writer.

He told me something that stays with me to this day: "At first, we write because we are inspired. As years pass, we are inspired because we write."

Elizabeth Gilbert shares her very similar experience as a writer of a hugely successful and lauded work of art, and the humbling experience of trying to continue in the creative process with the dread of never being able to achieve that success ever again. And in the process, she describes the historical relationship we humans have had with the creative process, where we have variously ascribed the causative agent of creativity to external muses (or "geniuses") and when we instead suddenly began to anoint the artist him/herself with the label of genius.

I know that I, as an agnostic man with a respect for the rational process of looking at my world objectively, have tended to over-intellectualize things, and yet I have always had a reverence for the experience of the divine, even when my rational brain demanded I define it, codify it, ferment it, engrave it, emboss it and seal it forever as a measurable quality that can be understood and displayed. But this experience of the divine does not need to be defined, and in fact must defy attempts at vivisection and inspection. The divine is ineffable because it is beautiful, irresistible, ephemeral, and indefinable.

As Gilbert suggests, there is something lost when we put the onus of the creative process squarely on the shoulders of the artist. A foreboding sense of responsibility, dread, where the artist has no where to turn but toward the mirror for her solutions.

Clinically, it could easily be argued that the brain is not engineered to be creative under such circumstances. The abstract, creative portion of the brain whithers under analysis and ceases to in fact exist under such prodding and poking. The artist becomes crippled under the weight of unending analysis and dithering. The creative brain can only survive when it is allowed to believe in something that is not rational or even internally consistent.

In my efforts as a resurrected writer, I have been trying to build myself an altar, a shrine, a sacred space in my home. A place where I can put my rational brain aside for a while, where I can hang my ego on a coat hook at the entrance and become a supplicant to the process. To survive past the years of regular visits by my muse, I have to nurture a space, a garden in which to attract more muses, more genii (the "genius", get it?), and allow them the opportunity to thrive. As she describes the site of a dancer who suddenly appears to be touched by the divine in his dance, the trick comes the next morning when the dancer wakes up and discovers it is Tuesday at 11AM and he is mortal and is no longer a glimpse of God. In a like vein, I need to remember that I am not a writer, an actor or an artist of any sort at all so much as I am a gardener, a shepherd, who maintains a plot of creatively fertile soil and hopes the seeds he plants will one day flower and thrive.

It is not a failure. It is not a failure. It is not a failure.

Okay, if I keep repeating that it's not a failure, then clearly I'm fighting the feeling that I've failed.

Argh! So much for Vania 3.0, right?

Acting, and poor life decision making, has managed to keep me from tackling this. Or maybe they are simply filling in the gap that is left from the writer's block. Or likely, there is some mixture of the two extremes.

Needless to say, no more journaling has been done. The writing desk is covered in bills and pillows and blankets (from my niece's Christmas visit) and I've been consumed this month with memorizing lines for my role in a two person play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (http://www.theatreknoxville.com), opening February 12th and playing through March 7. Now, granted this is definitely consuming a lot of my available time. And I have positioned myself otherwise well by taking part in the Tennessee Stage Company's New Play Festival, where I get to read parts in new, unproduced plays, and study and critique where they fail.

But no writing is issuing forth. When I sit down and prepare, I freeze. Nothing comes forth. I have a writing notebook that I carry with me, and I do indeed take notes in it. I bought $200 worth of easel and over-sized board room pads and pens and tape so I could cover my wall with story ideas. They are mostly empty. I have three large sheets of paper that say list the topic of the ideas I have in mind for that sheet. And there they have been for a few weeks now.

I started making progress on a short story, but ideas just weren't coming. No good ideas, anyway.

I came up with a new notion that I am going to try. A game. Pick a story that fits closest to one of the stories I have in my head, and use it as a guide, a template. A starting point.

The Great American Existential Novel is there!

Sigh.