After listening to a reading of Mark Sebanc’s article on the Logos in Tolkien on Mars Hill Audio, I set to some reseach on the author. Alongside a brief interview, I found a blog of his centered around his sci-fi series which he coauthors with a friend. With promo and process blogs, Sebanc also includes some personal notes on the work of writing. I enjoyed this post on the “ten commandments of writing” from John C. Wright. Here are rules one and seven which I found helpful.

1. In order to be a writer, you must write.

2. If your manuscript is good or bad, send out your manuscript again. Genius does not count. Only persistence counts. The world will not recognize your genius until after you are dead. But the world can recognize your persistence now.

To reinterpret into Austin Kleon’s (Kleonees) jargon:

1. Forget the noun, do the verb
2. There is no genius, there is social genius that abides thru the persistance of individuals in community.

I stumbled on an Andy Anderson skate video on Chris Hannah’s blog. Andy lives the “dirtbag” lifestyle of a skater and makes a wonderful observation on what it means to rest (emphasis mine):

…There’s a skill to relaxing, finding peace…It’s funny how relaxing is so tied into being lazy because it doesn’t neccesarily mean you’re being lazy. Part of my work is relaxing. Becasue relaxing is taking control of yourself¹ and accepting that you’re not controlling anything else.

Hearing Anderson talk about the the work of relaxing, I couldn’t help but think of what it means to stop…that is “sabbath.” Then, when he went on to talk about control and “accepting that you’re not controlling anything else,” something occured to me. “Control and surrender” is a sabbatic balance.

Brian Eno, Austin Kleon, and Alan Jacobs²—all speak of the creative process flourishing via the slow growth of control and surrender. Here’s Eno:

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part. I want to rethink surrender as an active verb…It’s not just you being escapist; it’s an active choice. I’m not saying we’ve got to stop being such controlling beings. I’m not saying we’ve got to be back-to-the-earth hippies. I’m saying something more complex.

At another point, Eno pictures surrender as a dynamic ship flexible enough to move through rough waters without breaking. This dynamism of “surrender as an active verb” ripens what it means to stop and rest. Without control, surrender would acquiesce to abstraction stripped of it’s particularity. Without surrender, control would absolutize into tyranny.

Shabbat begets the weaving of shalom. Control and surrender is the sabbath balance. Let’s re-create and weave peace bringing love its due worth.

David Lynch (via Rob Walker and Austin Kleon) uses these three metaphors for a thought:

Fish: “I believe that if you sit quietly, like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas. The real, you know, beautiful, big ones swim kinda deep down there so you have to be very quiet, and you know, wait for them to come along.”

Flash: “If you catch an idea, you know, any idea, it wasn’t there and then it’s there! It might just be a small fragment…but you gotta write that idea down right away. And as you’re writing, sometimes it’s amazing how much comes out, you know, from that one flash…And in your mind the idea is seen and felt and it explodes like it’s got electricity and light connected to it.”

The explosion is an agrarian one, like the moment germination errupts from inside the dark walls of a…

Seed: So, you get an idea and it is like a seed. And…it explodes…And it has all the images and the feeling. And it’s like in an instant you know the idea, in an instant [a flash]…Then, the thing is translating that to some medium.

Lynch talks of waiting for the ideas like fish and cathing the big ones that live deep takes the most time. The poet Ted Hughes talks about ideas like both foxes and fishes. Ideas are critters to be actively waited for and sniffed out. A practice that, Hughes says, requires surrender:

And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don’t somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can’t fish.

Lately, I've been obsessed with the Lone Bellow's latest album, "Half Moon Light." Alongside Bob Dylan's latest and "Easy Rider: The best of the Mercury recordings" by Johnny Cash, New York's finest country-folk band has my heart and ears. A favorite track titled "Wonder" asks,

"Should I let go of the wonder? Let go of the wonder? I'll find it out beyond the trees."

The question is a good one because it seems to be asking two things at the same time.

1. What can I keep from the childlike (not childish) awe from before now, when all I got from growing up was getting old?
2. How am I holding on to an imagined person, place, or thing that isn't leading me to hope and love? Is it best for me to let that go? If so, where will I find the strength to do so? What do I hold on to instead?

Thinking about wonder and seeing that Austin Kleon was recently asked by the Corita Art Center to speak about Sister Corita Kent in a conversation about her influence on his own work, reminded me of her great collage using Wonder Bread branding (image above). In that collage Sister Kent incorporates a hearty quote from Camus. The tiny script in her collage reads:

Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, received, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works everyday negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all.

—Camus

“Push and Pull” are Chris Dixon’s simplifying patterns of the internet named for the action that users enact on the tool. “Push and pull” classifies how we lay claim and opt-into the digital world.

This participation with the internet reminds me of what ends up shaking out over time and what Austin Kleon calls “Stock and Flow.” In fact, Dixon categorizes push and pull as stock and flow, respectively, under the category of “Content Durability.” To help us understand content durability here are Robin Sloans’ defenitions of flow and stock:

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.

Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.