10.27.2009

Rob Wigsten, In memoriam

This is the text I read yesterday at Rob Wigsten's Memorial Service.  I will be writing more about Rob, and what he means to me; but for today, I wanted to get this post up.

One of the amazing little surprises I've had recently has been the number of people who've been drawn to this site by my simple mention of Rob, in the post I made just after his death.  It's another of the many ways Rob continues to help me.  I can see him shrug if I had the chance to tell him about it, or about the number of people at his service, the sheer size and quality of the community that had this man at its core.  I know I'll have much more to say.  For now, here's this.  I'll be adding links to sites that are planned to honor him.  I'm honored by my connection with him, and the way that seems to be continuing in this virtual world…



To write is to attempt to put words between ourselves and our own mortality.  It is to affirm again and again that we have something to say, something worth hearing, and something worth keeping.  Something that might outlast us and continue to reside in people’s minds, in people’s hearts, even after we are gone.

Rob taught me that.  Not in so many words, although he did use so many words!
That’s part of the point.  Rob liked to talk.  There I said it!  But he talked because, for him, life was interesting, full of import.  He burst with life and had to share it.  He did share his life through an outpouring of words.

This was a key understanding for me.  To learn to love Rob, I – I think each of us has had to come to grips with this in our own way.  Many people who talk a lot, do so out of ego.  They like to hear their own voice, they don’t care a whit about what others may think or feel so long as they have a stage.  Rob wasn’t like that.  Not at all.

His exuberance might carry him along in an extended monologue, but at the slightest hint his listener might feel excluded, he would apologize and he would listen – really listen – at least until he could no longer contain his exuberance and off he’d go again!
There was something similar about his temper.  Yes, Rob had a temper!  But underlying his quick anger was a genuine and deeply felt humility.  He wasn’t one to hold a grudge, and he was the first to laugh at himself, at his own foibles.  Beneath his anger was an instinct for justice, an impatience with pretense and hypocrisy.

I can’t think of Rob, talk of Rob, without remembering the first time we met.  Some of you know the story.  There aren’t many people I can say I can picture precisely how I first saw them?  For me there are very few and Rob was one.

We didn’t meet exactly, Rob marched into my life one day.  His big, old, ratty truck, with Emma riding shotgun, pulled into my driveway and there he was!  Everything I came to love about Rob was there in that first exchange.  His decisive action, his generosity, his open nature, his expectation that if he extended his hand in friendship it would be reciprocated in-kind, or to-the-devil with you!

I needed a friend then, don’t we all?  He didn’t know he was there to give me so much, he was just being Rob, looking for someone to have an adventure with.  He had a cause, a burning desire to achieve something excellent.

We think of Rob as impulsive, but with this boat model project we shared he was patient, methodical and long-sighted.  We took a year to prepare, and he accomplished his mission.  He was always so proud of what we had done, and how his adversaries had been so thoroughly flummoxed that they had changed all their rules to defend their self-righteousness; giving Rob and me another victory, one we laughed over year after year.

Not enough years.  How could they have been enough.  Four years ago, I remember that day distinctly as well, Rob told us he was ill.  He seemed to be taking it better than I did.  The crisp, wintry air, my young friend, his young wife, his young family.  How would any of us manage?

Over these last years Rob showed us.  He faced his condition head-on.  He worked steadily to stay as well as he could for as long as he could.  He dealt with all that life sent his way and prepared for his family, pushing ahead the renovation of their home, dealing with the aftermath of his mother’s death, seeing his girls through those critical years of transition from childhood to becoming young women.

Was it enough?  We all miss him, but I dare say I don’t feel cheated at this loss.

Instead, I feel honored, and lucky, to have had the time together we did share.  Grateful for the lessons in living, and dying, Rob has given me.

Rob wanted to write.  He did write some, just before and after he got sick.  It’s too bad he didn’t get to pursue it.  But then, he did fulfill that goal of writing I mentioned at the start.  He used words, and they wedged themselves firmly between him and his mortality.  He won’t be forgotten.  His words, and the spirit behind them, live on in our hearts, in our memories, in the way we will all go forward in our own lives, and hopefully, as we approach and face our own deaths.

I’m sad that Rob’s gone, but mostly I’m grateful I knew him.  I think we all share that gratitude.  It’s what I hope we all take with us as the best, most lasting, truest memorial for our friend, Rob Wigsten.

10.09.2009

Drawing Distinctions,

The following is an address to be given at the first session of a class at a school that, as far as I know, does not yet exist.  Nor do I know who the students might be, or their circumstances.  What I do know is that I’d like to be there, at the front of that room, confronting their eager or timid faces, with the prospect of a long series of sessions to follow, and more after that.

As with anyone else, it’s dangerous for me to tie my sense of self to a single occupation or type of activity.  I’ve trained as a painter, worked as a designer in disparate fields, and I’ve become a writer.  While these activities have, to a certain extent been sequential, serial points of focus; they are all aspects of me, parts of me that I have no wish to permanently renounce while I pursue others.  If there’s anything I’m happy to renounce it’s my previous reluctance to pursue them all in whatever avenues present themselves.

In that light, listen to what I would say to this inaugural class on that inaugural day…





Drawing Distinctions,
Learn to Draw, Learn to Think!

a hypothetical address to the first class…


We tend to think of drawing as what artists do, or as a means of self-expression.  We cannot afford such a limited view of such an important activity any longer.  When an artists draws, or a designer, when any of us doodles, or scratches out a map or a simple chart; we’re thinking.  We are making decisions, we are positing assumptions, and making judgments.
 
In a world in which we need, more and more, to deal with whole systems, to leave behind outmoded, linear thinking; we need to adopt habits and methods that promote seeing things whole, even as we deal with details; deal with the fine grain while not losing sight of the big picture.  How is the part integrated into the whole, not statically, but within a living, breathing, dynamic engagement with our surroundings?

Drawing is an ideal medium for approaching, learning, and practicing these habits of mind, and of the body, developing a set of practices that can unlock our potential. 

My proposal,
Drawing for the Rest of Us!

We all learn to read and write.  We don’t just reserve these lessons for those who intend to be novelists, poets or journalists!  Why do we admit such a narrow view on learning to draw?  Why do we, even for ourselves, see this crude assumption that drawing is for artists, or for those interested in dabbling into their “feelings?”  This is not to disparage any of these groups or activities, without the so-called professions into which these kinds of basic human talents and skills have been shoe-horned for so long, we might have lost the accumulated practice and wisdom of millennia within the short span of the last few centuries.  We owe the profession of art much for this, but we need to bring such basic human practices as drawing, molding, sculpting, and return them to wider use.
 
Even as an aspiring artist, if one is true to those aspirations, true to all that this can mean, it has been essential to begin by putting aside notions of preciosity and talent while exploring the foundations of the practices of eye, hand and mind behind the universe of activities that fall under the simple term drawing.  Even more so, and hopefully more easily since we begin without the baggage of expectation of an aspirant intended for a great career,  we need to put such vanity out of the way right from the start.  We are here to learn to draw, not show off.  We’re here to celebrate humility in front of one of the greatest humblers there is, a blank sheet and a stick of charcoal!

Drawing, the italian word desegno from which our word design descends, points at the direct connection between drawing and distinction.  Not distinction as a call to empty cultural superiority, but distinction as the fundamental human act of choosing this instead of that.  This sense is best captured in english when we say, “Drawing a distinction.”  That is what we do when we draw.  It relates back to that primordial act symbolized in Genesis, separating light from dark!  We touch the paper with our stick and that’s what we do.  We wipe with the back of our hand, a rag, an eraser; that’s what we’re doing, separating light from dark.  Before moving on to the whole gamut of actions and their imports, this is our fundamental action when we draw.

This truth, if we allow ourselves to absorb it, and let it inform our actions, presents us with the underlying power of drawing.  By taking the ephemeral mental processes of looking, deciding, acting, responding, and repeating this array over, and over, from first, this line of attack, then that one, from within the heat of a passionate engagement, then again from a cool place of detachment and hard-won outside views – what used to be called an “objective” view before we realized there was no such thing. – By letting us experience this full panoply of what it means to see, think and act; and placing the output of this range of present moments upon a surface, preserving the tracks of our actions and placing them where we can see them, learn from them, and potentially even communicate with them; this is the true miracle of drawing.  This is the purpose behind  this program, the reason we are here in this project.

This is a call for a sweeping change in how things are done, but one that only requires that we gather with a few scraps of paper, sticks of carbon, and an open attitude of mind.  We can recapture what was long the case, beginning when humans first raised a stick and drew it across the sand, took a lump of colored earth and dragged it across a rock-face, or pulling a slender, blackened reed from out of a dead fire, ran it delicately across a skin.  We can take joy, certainly, for that is one of our greatest treasures, but even when the output doesn’t “look like much,” even when we are struggling, and the tracks we leave are clotted, apparently confused; we can take ownership of this grand connection between our minds, our bodies and the reality that surrounds and infuses us.  We can do so with confidence that although our means are meager, they are up to the task.  The results are to be formed within each of us, will continue to inform and inspire how we live our lives despite what may happen to the artifacts we’ve produced to get there.

We lean to draw the same way we learn to live, by example, by a give-and-take, both within ourselves and between us, looking to those who came before, while also quietly looking within to see how our natures respond, and what they tell us we require.  This is learning stripped bare.  This is learning that could be done in pantomime, although it can be fed by a fountain of words, read, spoken, written.  It’s a learning that draws from all we know and recasts how we see and how we think and how we act.  Look at it this way, then can you see why we need to take this back from the specialists?

We each begin where we find ourselves, and we are, in-the-end, the only arbiters of our ultimate progress.  There is great freedom here, but as with any freedom that is fully embraced, there is great responsibility, although again it is directed towards ourselves.  We do not look to impress, we do not look to collect, or to acquire, we look to learn and develop.  Great things only come when people take on such tasks, accept such responsibilities and take seriously their desire to strive, while putting their interior rewards ahead of any outward trappings.

We will be cavalier with the physical output, but not contemptuous of it.  We learn from what we’ve drawn, what the other has drawn, but beyond their ability to communicate something felt and thought and acted upon, the sheets themselves have no inherent value.  They are also ephemeral.  Newsprint and charcoal are cheap, they embody our humility, give us the opportunity to be profligate when we need to, but they fade and die easily like flowers once picked.  They can be collected and pressed dry in a folder, but they will wither away no matter what we do.  But in our minds, especially as we develop our abilities to see and retain what we see, they will live on, also in our hands, our arms, our bodies.  The physical memories, the traces in our nerves and muscles and sinews of the actions we’ve taken to make them will stay with us.  They will build up within us, and maybe some of us will find the need and the opportunity to work in more permanent mediums outside these walls.

We will begin with ourselves, a stick of charcoal and a sheet of paper.  Later we will add props, things arrayed in space to be captured on a surface.  Later we might move on to what’s been called, “Life Classes,”  an apt term for facing a living body and attempting to capture something from its physical existence and wrestle it onto a sheet.  While this might imply a progression, in the most meaningful sense it isn’t one.  In the end, you are back where you started, you and a marker and a sheet of white.  At every point along the way, there is a dynamic, a tension between what is added, complexity, and what is a given, the constant need to return to the basics, to practice, be mindful, and act as though for the first time.

You may have inklings of what this implies, what is in store, but no preconception will prepare you for the power and wonder of the first time you make a leap and discover something new, something hard and intractable, but something true about yourself, about your situation, about the world.  You will find in these moments great satisfaction, as well as a sense of strength, an ability that has grown in you that will call out for wider application.  You will also, I hope if you are to really learn from any of this, learn a deep humility.  This humility will come from your increasing awareness of both how difficult it is to wrestle with reality, and how little overt control you have over the outcome of your troubles.  The slippery qualities of inspiration, the accidents that conspire to bring about your greatest achievements, achievements that you participate in, but can never own.

We’re forever striving for great things here, but forever caught up in the realities of imperfect attention, distraction, and the intractability of physical things.  It’s just like life.  It’s just like life too in that we choose to give it meaning beyond the mere physicality.  It differs from life in two ways.  It does not matter, outside of the meaning we give to it.  This might be strictly true of life, but that truth is hidden behind layers of instinct and habit that present us with such levels of fear and dread at the mere contemplation of such a thing.  It’s also different in that it is outside of us.  In life we are trapped, it often seems, within our subjectivity, with few means to step outside, to learn from other views.  Through our simple acts of decision, and the practices of drawing, we create an opportunity to work in a laboratory of life, where we can externalize what we choose to, what we are capable of discerning, of delineating, and then hold it in our hands, look at it, share it with others, and communicate our perceptions about it in ways that can be incredibly concrete, while remaining ineffable, retaining their mystery.  These “either AND or ’s”  are the deepest potentials inherent in drawing.  They provide the medium for the value within the practice, and they provide the medium for retaining and communicating these lessons to others.

While we hold these promises in front of us, we need to strip ourselves of much that we seem to hold dear.  Along with that amour propre, that wish to be satisfied with ourselves, and to impress, that is tied up into our notions of ego, and pride; we will be stripping away assumptions, stripping away the very habit of resting comfortably within a cocoon of assumptions as we hide away from the realities around us.  To be perfectly clear, one of the first and most basic assumptions we will be dispelling is that you “know how to see.”  This will be followed in quick succession by the assumptions that you “know what you mean,” and that you “mean what you say – or in this case what you’ve drawn.”  Wrap all of that in the dissolution of your assumptions to know “Why, you do what you do,” and you’ll see that the so called “practical” difficulties of learning to draw are really nothing!

Awe, wonder, fear, dread, confusion and moments of joyful transcendance!  These are what we’ll be experiencing here as we proceed.  And at this point, perhaps it’s time to  begin to do just that!…

10.04.2009

Squidoo

In my last post I used Seth Godin as a fall guy, the bearer of “bad news.”  My views are in a dynamic tension with his, but he cannot be discounted lightly.  In this short post, I’d like to lay out why I’ve joined his latest venture by creating my own presence on Squidoo.  As with most, all?, successful web ventures,  Squidoo has a cute name, and a simple concept, well articulated and well established.  It provides a platform for “user-generated content” where people can build their presence on the web.  This all seems safely, innocuously, so web 2.0!  Trendy and light….  But it uses its internal parameters as a learning tool.  It subtly, and at times blatantly, leads us to appreciate an underlying ethos.

That ethos is powerful, and refreshing.  Fundamentally, it celebrates passion, asking us  to do things because they are meaningful to us instead of merely acting out of narrow perceptions of self-interest.  It’s a bold concept, one that has been behind everything I’ve tried to do, and one that is best entered into in an environment where the stakes are apparently low. 

I had a similar idea, although not so sparely put, in Designer & Client, when I posited that imagining, and then creating, a pleasure boat was an activity outside of normal questions of necessity and expedience.  That if this concept were embraced, and the process appreciated to its potential, it could bring about transformative change.  “Go through deciding, designing, building and sailing a boat with no other purpose than to satisfy yourself, and you will change, for the better.”  That could have been the title….

The intervening years have pushed even small, humble pleasure boats out of the reach of many, and few of those who can still afford it are looking for enlightenment in the process.  What had been a quixotic exercise is now?…

Squidoo brings these ideas into a field that has much wider scope in our day.  Many people around the world have internet access.  Everyone has something they care about, something that matters to them, deeply, for whatever reason, or no articulated reason.  With Squidoo, they all have a place where they can showcase their passion and share it with a wider world.

Many tend to see the desire to forge a web presence as a narcissistic urge, a desire to say, “Look at ME!” and have the world take notice.  This is a cynical view, I fear.  Cynical because it ignores our fundamental need to connect, and feared because for so many, this stream of electrons seems the most viable conduit to making viable connections. 

This is a basic human need, human drive.  We cannot live in isolation, in a world where our cares, the things and people we care about most, are ignored.  We are more and more isolated, atomized, surrounded by strangers in our everyday circles within the real, not virtual world.  Ideally, we would not need to bend this basic drive to fit down the thin reed of an internet connection, but there we have it.  Realities are ignored at our peril.  Denial only hurts the one hiding from facts on the ground.

That brings up another positive, laudable initiative behind Squidoo.  A refreshing overturning of what marketing has meant for a century, that outgrowth of Nazi social science more damaging ultimately than rocketry, less obviously deadly, but much more pernicious.  Seth is part of a movement looking at the changes new media have brought, searching out what these changes mean to the dynamics of broad-scale communication.  The era of scarce media and pushed messages is winding down, crumbling not only due to the availability of cheap internet, but wider forces, the kinds of things I fill most of my posts with.

Without restating their case here, imperfectly, I want to stress the kernel I find so laudable.  Seth maintains, insists even, that economic value can be found – I’d like to hope can ultimately only be found – by doing what you are compelled by your inner passions to do, communicating whatever that is with all the authenticity you can muster.  Muster, not fake, “Effective advertising is all about sincerity kid,”  you can just imagine a character on MadMen saying, “Learn to fake that, and you’re got it made, buster!”

I’ve written on this before, authenticity, authority.  What I like about Squidoo is that it is a tool to practice authenticity, and develop a true authority, developing a voice of your own that carries a truth in it.  One might start by creating a fan page for some celebrity, fully immersed in pop culture’s destructive web, and proceed step by step towards discovering for oneself what is good about having a passion, how it gets better as one hones the what of it, the how, and arrives at a why.