Larry Gibbons
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Shack-Wacky Hype

24/2/2014

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Picture
A few days ago, I was snow blowing the long path to the tool shed, where I’ve been storing ?????.  I’d started clearing out the snow before the sun had even rubbed the sleepy dust out of its corona, so it was dark, and I was thankful for the headlamp on ????. You see, the weather person had called for rain. Which meant that when the temperature dropped, the rain-gorged snow would become as hard as a stale all-bran muffin.

You may notice the question marks in parts of this blog. That’s because I’m curious to see if you readers have been paying attention to my fourteen blogs. Feel free to leave a comment with the names represented by the question marks! I also think I’m doing this weird question mark thing because I’m feeling frisky. Because I’ve managed to compose fourteen blogs, this being my fifteenth. High five! Fourteen, about to become fifteen!!
Picture
So ???? was shining his light forth into the darkness, while the wind whipped snow back into my face, because it couldn’t figure out where the heck it was going. As ???? blew the snow into the air, more snow filled in the path behind me, and as I inhaled the sweet scent of snow blower fumes and mouse pee, I asked myself, “Is this hell or heaven? Did we make the right move when we up and left ???? to settle in the Cape Breton highlands? Where there are only two kinds of flies, black flies and snow flies? A place, where even when the day is sunny and bright and not a cloud hovers over my head, the snow gently falls from the sky, albeit at an angle, and alights upon my just cleared patch of home turf.” And I thought if I listened carefully, shut the snow blower off for a few friggen seconds, I might even hear the mountain winds blowing through the bare trees. And if I was really, really quiet, I might hear those tall, rounded, tree-covered mountains tee-heeing and having a great old time. For much of our snow is booted our way from the other side of those mountains.

In summary, and after a bit of time to think it over, I’ve decided that it’s not heaven but a hell of a lot of work. I’m reminded of the last verse of Cape Breton poet Aaron Schneider’s poem, “Life at Sea":


“We’ll stay with the storm,
run before it stoking
and steaming, while each day asks
what tied us to this frozen helm
horizon a great white wave?”
FYI, the snow blower is in the shop for repairs and I have to drive through a snowstorm to find out what the doctor has to say.
ski trails and mountains
Skiing on Snowy Ski Trails Beats Snow Blowing!
As I said, this is my fifteenth blog. Fifteen. Not a big deal for some bloggers, who seem to zip one off every day or two. When I first started writing this blog, I was given some advice. These are the two suggestions I remember. 

One fella said, “You have to watch that you don’t write yourself out.”  His fear being, I think, that writers could put so much of their writing energy and content into the blog, that they wouldn’t have much left for their other creative endeavours. His advice put a bit of a scare into me.

The second piece of advice sounded more daunting. It was that I should put the blog out fairly often. Once a week at least. So I could continually be in my readers’ faces, waving some new Larry tidbit.

Picture
Holy crap, Batman. I’m not even on facebook. I can see the value of facebook, but I’m not comfortable with it.

My emails are person specific. One email per person. All personally tailored, with a bit of gossip for this guy and gossip about the first guy to the second guy; each email hand-made with person-specific snoop and chatter. Very few of my emails are generic, mass produced or consumer friendly. So, as you can see, I wasn’t prepared to pump generic tidbits into the blogosphere.


I also worried that if I became too prolific, I might be disrespecting, neutering and trivializing my emotions, ideas and teeny bits of wisdom, by semi-obliviously tossing them into the mass ocean of talk, words and images. Which scream, blare, humour, whisper or sing from anything that has a screen or a speaker. Besides, I don’t think I have an unlimited amount of ideas, news and knowledge to feed into this hungry sea which often seems to have the memory of a goldfish.

Also, I have read in more than one book about writing, that you can talk a story away. Not run out of the ideas or feelings required to write in a blog, but yap away the creative power needed to write something complex and powerful.

For example: I enter a shop. I see a small, older woman in a tiny, cluttered room. She’s selling second-hand books and clay figurines made by her husband. The store is empty. She’s waiting for customers, sitting behind an old cash register and drinking coffee out of a small white styrofoam cup. It’s not hard to tell that her business isn’t doing well. The room looks shabby and dusty and she looks shabby and dusty, but also sad, lonely as hell and a little bit desperate. I can feel her melancholy. I also sense a story bubbling up in my mind. It begins to simmer. Empathy for her plight is stirring it up.

And I know that my muse, who lives under our trailer, can feel it too. Which means he’s probably working on the story while I’m doing whatever. Like when I’m frying eggs and boiling water or clearing snow off our laneway. I think I’ll write a blog about snow clearing some day. Ha!

So, let’s say I meet this woman, and then a little while later, I get together with some friends at a local pub, and while quaffing down a beer I tell them about this lonely woman I saw at this shop. I discuss a possible story. Leak out a few plot ideas. Blah, blah, blah. My friends might offer their opinions and the story becomes muddied, mutated and mangled before I have time to sit in my writing room and keyboard it out.

The next day or so, when I sit down to write this story, guess what? The story has been partially gutted. My emotions,  which were fresh and eager to be penned, have fizzled like a wet firecracker. Damn! 

I’m not saying the story has vanished. It might still be there, but the fire may have been partially talked away. And as I said in my last blog, a large part of fiction writing, at least for me, comes from the gut. It’s not really a rational process. 

Maybe it’s because when you leak out or pour out a story idea you partially encapsulate it or frame it. Nothing my creative muse hates more than a framed idea. Gutless, and when I invite my muse up to my writing/Black and Decker drill and saw/Sue’s files/our vacuum cleaner storage unit/office, to join in the writing project, well, he’s ticked off. 

“Hey dude, you’ve already blabbed that story out. So what do you want me to do? Warm it up and send it out as second-hand crap? Go pencil yourself.” 
Larry's Office
My Office
Anyway, as you may know, I spend a lot of my time in a little trailer in the forest. Trying my best to be hip with the hype and not go shack-wacky. Maybe I should say, worrying about getting with the program, but not often actually doing it. And I don’t really want to end up doing what Salinger did. He wrote his last works and then hid them away. I guess writing them was enough for him. Where was his marketing savvy? What was wrong with him?

Sidney Cox once wrote, “Do not try to write a poem until you want to.”

Diamond in the roughDiamond in the Rough
So, maybe writing too many self-promotional words in order to get my writing out there, or talking too much about what I want to create, can mute my desire to write.

I know that as with everything in life, when you create, you’re walking a fine line. Because the diamond in the rough is super hard and yet as fragile as a spider’s web. Choosing not to run as quickly as the hare might fail to get a writer so much into the world’s  hungry, obsessive gaze, but it might also be a way to save his or her writing self by keeping the flames hot.


Yeats wrote:  “But when I shut my door and light the candle, I invite a marmorean Muse, an art where no thought or emotion has come to mind because another man has thought or felt something different, for now there must be no reaction, action only, and the world must move my heart but to the heart’s discovery of itself, and I begin to dream of eyelids that do not quiver before the bayonet.”
Lake Ainslie
Snow-covered Lake Ainslie
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The Water Moves

5/12/2013

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William Carlos Williams in his poem, “The Well Disciplined Bargeman”, wrote:

“The shadow does not move. It is the water moves,
running out. A monolith of sand on a passing barge,
riding the swift water, makes that its fellow.

Standing upon the load, the well disciplined bargeman
rakes it carefully, smoothly on top with nicely squared
edges to conform to the barge outlines-ritually: sand.”

I’m not a poet nor am I always capable of understanding fully or even semi-fully what a poem means but this poem seems, in part, suitable to my present contemplations.

Thursday morning, the Middle River was showing more than her whiskers. She was three times her normal width and many times her roaring ferocity. The cute purring little kitty I call ‘Cuddles’, was in a temper and had turned into a wild tiger on steroids, looking to terrorize the jungle.

raging Middle River
"Cuddles" Morphs into a Tiger
The previous night we had been unable to look outside to see how high and tumultuous the river was, because at 11:00 pm, our power zapped out. So we couldn’t turn on the outdoor light to check the river’s progress from the comfort of inside. I did, however, venture out once or twice to check on ‘Cuddles’ before we went to bed. She didn’t seem too, too high at that time and gauging from how much snow had been on the ground, how hard it was raining, what the weather report had been, my ignorance of how much snow remained on the hovering mountains, and my state of being rather exhausted from whatever the day had entailed, I decided not to get myself tied up into worry knots.

When the lights went out, we scrambled for our lantern and flashlights, while the wind shrieked and rubbed its invisible bulk along the walls of our tiny 45-foot trailer. The walls shook and our windows rattled as the rain dribbled down our hot stovepipe and splashed in a hissy fit onto our wood stove.

At one point, we were trying to figure out which batteries were the new ones after we mistakenly mixed them in with the old ones. One of us trying to hold the flashlight steady while the other tried to sort the batteries out. To add to the drama, we were both worried that the large trees near our trailer might find it beyond their endurance to stand straight and true and instead throw up their branches in surrender, and flatten our trailer. Turning us into a can of sorry sardines.


The next day, when I reached into the top shelf of the cupboard for a box of macaroni and cheese, I found the box was soaked. Damn it, I should have waterproofed the roof when I’d had the chance. I’m hoping that most of the moisture we get this winter will be coloured white. Although I suspect that this leakage occurred because the rain was driven in by a certain kind of smart bomb sneaky wind.

This morning, I walked around the property. Saw that our landscape had been permanently changed. Learned that we had lost more acreage. Discovered new rocks and piles of both dead and still alive branches littered over our land.
tree snatched by Middle RiverBirch Departed
The saddest discovery was to see that the once tall, proud, birch tree, who had stood strong and proud against many a flood and wind, had finally succumbed to Cuddle’s force. Her massive trunk and limbs lying in the river while her roots and the soil they clung to withstood the frantic mob of waves. Some of the water jumping over the downed tree and the rest swinging to the left and turning our walking trail into another part of the river. There were other downed trees too, and it looked like the river had skinned off some grass and vegetation from the river bank. Ah, the power of the river.


Trail turned into River
Our Trail Became a River
Do you know what occurred to me when I saw the aftermath of the wild river’s rampage? I realized that the watery culprits that had caused all this damage hadn’t stayed around to gloat or ponder. No way. Those waters rushed onward and onward until they were pouring their molasses coloured plunder into the salty waters of Bras d’Or Lake. No looking behind.

And then I thought that, like shadows, we had slept in our bed while the river stormed by. Bargemen, “raking our lives carefully, smooth on top with nicely squared edges to conform to the barge’s outlines.”

I think I, like many writers, am aware of the drama that fills life to overflowing. Like the river rushing to the ocean. A maelstrom of creativity. And I sometimes wonder how much creativity I could stand to be immersed in. Because so many stories pass us by while we, like shadows, sleep in our beds or remain firmly raking sand on the barge.

What if the person at the door, who is trying to persuade me to join her religion, managed to persuade me? What mad, surging emotions would I find myself involved in if I joined this strange religion? What stories would I be able to write? Would the new experience leave my creativity lying in a pile of tossed, sorry manuscripts along the shoreline of life’s river or would I be creating more genuine heartfelt treasures?

The way I see it, we are sometimes going to be on the particular barge we chose or was given to us and we are sometimes going to be in the river. Whether we desire it or not. Besides, at certain key junctures in our lives, we have to be part of the creative/spiritual river if we want to be genuine. Roaring by the shore and not stopping to make sure everything is neat and tidy.

Isn’t creating fun?

“Sometimes the river becomes
a river in the mind
or of the mind
or in and of the mind...”


                                  from “The Mind Hesitant”
                                      by William Carlos Williams 

Middle River Power
Power Incarnate
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