the inner ring

Permission

Sometimes you just need permission. Permission to try. Permission to fail.

A good friend of mine sent me a blog post by a well-respected, professional photographer who wrote about how artists — and those who flee from such a label — often feel they’re “faking it” because they witness all their own false starts, tentative steps, and outright failures along the way to the final works that actually see the light of day. His point: keep trying, keep working, keep creating.

Reading the post forced me to accept that it has been a long time since I’ve done much art simply because of an irrational fear of failure.

I’ve always loved and felt a great connection with a commercial VW released back in 2000. It features Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” as the soundtrack to a idyllic moonlit drive in a Cabrio convertible. If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend you press play below. (And if you’ve seen it a million times, I highly recommend you press play below.)

With that commercial as inspiration, I queued some Nick Drake and a bit of Mae in iTunes, dug out my conte crayons (which I haven’t really touched in years), and started sketching. It felt so good to work the crayon into the paper and rub my fingertips raw smearing and smudging and blending. The result was an interpretation of the Pink Moon commercial. (Yes, I took the artistic liberty of substituting a Jetta for the Cabrio. If you know me, can you blame me?)

I by no means consider this a masterpiece; it is simply a sketch done in an hour or two. But what a joyous hour or two it was. And that was the point. Not to produce a masterpiece. Not to talk myself out of even attempting something because I didn’t have the time, or the inspiration, or the talent. But to get lost in the process, the technique, the work, the creation.

The point was to give myself permission to fail so I could begin in the first place.

The more things change, the more they remain the same

The other day I went to renew my driver’s license. As I was filling out the form, I realized that not much had changed in the 5 years since my last license renewal. My address remains the same, I’m still the same height, I still require corrective lenses, I’m relatively the same weight (apparently I put on 4 pounds along the way), and I wear the same shirt.

That’s right, when I reviewed the digital photograph they took of me, I was surprised to see that I was wearing the exact same green polo shirt as my previous picture. Of course, my hairline has changed a bit, but even my picture appears the same.

I paused for a moment to think about all that has transpired in my life over the last 5 years and the many ways–small and large–that I am different than that 30-year-old version of myself. In the end, I came to the conclusion that I’m glad not all my life changes can be summed up on a driver’s license.

Not thinking = think no evil?

Frustrated today by the seemingly endless desire for some people to aggressively protect themselves from thoughts that may challenge their ideologically-confined worldview, I again turned to Billy Collins for humor and poignancy while attempting to understand this odd phenomenon of pursuing ignorance out of fear of what may result from considering something “different.”

“See No Evil”

No one expected all three of them
to sit there on their tree stumps forever,
their senses covered with their sinuous paws
so as to shut out the vile, nefarious world.

As it happened,
it was the one on the left
who was the first to desert his post,
uncupping his ears,
then loping off into the orbit of rumors and lies,
but also into the realm of symphonies,
the sound of water tumbling over rocks
and wind stirring the leafy domes of trees.

Then the monkey on the right lowered his hands
from his wide mouth and slipped away
in search of someone he could talk to,
some news he could spread,
maybe something to curse or shout about.

And that left the monkey in the middle
alone with his silent vigil,
shielding his eyes from depravity’s spectacle,
blind to the man whipping his horse,
the woman shaking her baby in the air,
but also unable to see
the russet sun on a rough shelf of rock
and apples in the grass at the base of a tree.

Sometimes, he wonders about the other two,
listens for the faint sounds of their breathing
up there on the mantel
alongside the clock and the candlesticks.

And some nights in the quiet house
he wishes he could break the silence with a question,

but he knows the one on his right
will not be able to hear,
and the one to his left,
according to their sacred oath–
the one they all took with one paw raised–
is forbidden forever to speak, even in reply.

– Billy Collins

From The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems. Random House, 2005.