Composing Reality

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When I was a youngster, which means as long as I was living with my parents, my mother had a standard saying employed whenever we encountered one of life’s myriad wrinkles: “I wish I had a magic wand that I could wave and make everything all right.” Seems more than  little prescient, now that the virus has driven me to rereading all the Harry Potter books. However, Mom may not have realized it, but she really did have a magic wand.  Additionally, she bequeathed a belief in that wand to all of her children. The magic wand was a belief in, and a love of, the power of words.  

The clearest indication of that shared belief may rest in the fact that while we did have a television set back in those early days of the medium, I have few memories of our watching it. Perhaps early black and white versions of “Babes in Toyland” during Christmas. Maybe an occasional Cleveland Browns game in the Jim Brown era, late 1950s.  But nothing of a constant or repeating nature. A far more dominant memory is of a vacation with the entire family around a picnic table at a National Park, or under a tarp at Tower Hill Camp along Lake Michigan, - really, any vacation, anywhere with all of us in a shared space but each of us lost in our own book. That may sound like the current curse of a family sharing physical space but fully engaged with others via a digital screen. It was somehow quite different. Our noses may well have been buried in different books, but we were not texting, skypeing, zooming, or FaceTiming with others.  Our books were beloved fantasies, but reality - that which was solid - was peopled with, well, people. When we raised our eyes from the printed page there were real live faces surrounding us. 

A strange, and almost contradictory, extension of that history, is my personal love of?, addiction to?, obsession with?, the power of words.  For me, there is something dizzying about a blank page, an empty screen. It speaks of endless possibilities - perhaps of a chance to get it right, to make it clear.

That probably warrants an explanation. There is this space in my head, just beyond clear consciousness. It catches my attention in often unexpected ways. A unique blending of colors - in sunset, or among flowers in a roadside ditch. A phrase in the “always on” music that streams from my various devices. A pattern in the clouds, or the veins in a leaf. An arresting face, old, young or somewhere in between, at rest or frozen in some extreme.  Photos, paintings, tastes, movements. Anything. But suddenly there is this subtle buzz. A sharp inhalation. A realization that there is “something important going on here.”  Something I should remember. Something I should try to capture, to write about.  And that is the seduction of the blank page. The freedom to explore those possibilities, to bend words to give form and substance to those fleeting, hidden moments. To finally get it right.

The challenge is how to do that.  I think we can prepare to meet the challenge by attending to two major issues.  First, capture the moment, second master the vocabulary.  Let's pull them apart .

Capture the moment.

As I said these moments begging for expression often pop-up in unexpected ways, places and times. There was a time when I could say to myself, “Self, remember this.” And Self would oftentimes oblige. Sadly, Self is not what he used to be in this area, so I have brought some back-up on board. One bit of back-up is a 3.5 x 5.5 inch notebook with a little loop where you can clip on a pen. I call it Brain and, when I remember to bring along the pen, I can jot down in Brain those little moments that Self is wont to forget.  I do realize that it is mostly the case these days that we all now carry around in our pockets additional back-up in the form of portable audio and video recorders. And stopping to talk into my phone or snap a picture, sometimes works. But, for me, I often need to see the “something important is going on here ” moment as words on a page - little nudges that can bring me back to that important moment.  So in a moment of unabashed hucksterism let me recommend the software app called Evernote. The icon is a white circle background with a green portrait of an elephant head in the center. I believe that is not a political statement, but is rather a reference to the elephant’s prodigious memory.

My environment is pure Mac, but I see favorable reviews of Evernote from PC Magazine, so I assume that there is a PC version available.  Evernote lets you write long or short notes about whatever you are interested in saving. No big deal, I realize. But what is cool is that Evernote shares what you write across all your devices. So if I write a note on my phone, the note shows up on my laptop and my tablet as well, and so on amongst all the devices. You can, the app informs me, add pictures, voice recording, etc.  So there is, as usual these days, more power in the app than I need or use. But what is important to me is that it lets me capture those ephemeral moments in relatively painless, easily stored ways. And that, after all, is the primary objective - having something to step in, when Self and Brain are challenged, and help me remember that something important or interesting is skating around just beyond the edges of my consciousness, and I might want to think about that space bit more and perhaps write about it here on The Wall. Which takes us to the second major issue: 

Master the vocabulary.

I suppose we all tend to remember the “good old days,” and bemoan the predations of the modern world upon time-honored traditions, beliefs and values. Often those backward glances are distorted by the rose-colored mists of memory. It has taken more than several trips down memory lane to confirm for me that Kraft macaroni and cheese never really did taste good. 

Still sometimes recall gets it right, so trust me on this one: when it comes to building a rich vocabulary, texting really is evil.  I realize that it has its place - like passing important information to a friend when the person you are trying to contact is actually using their phone to talk to someone.  And yes, I do know that one can now send a SMS message of 918 characters - that will, however, be broken up into fragments if you exceed 160 characters. Is that supposed to make me feel better? Remember, we are talking characters - punctuation marks, spaces, etc., are all characters and each one counts against the “allowed” number of characters! OMG! LOL! Emojis- yet another step away from the written word - seem to get counted rather randomly. The point is this - trying to make a message as short as possible encourages one to limit, as opposed to build, your vocabulary. The old way was better. 

Ah, yes. You may - or may not - remember it: the daily or, depending on your school or grade, weekly vocabulary test.  You sat at your desk. Ruled paper at the ready. Numbers 1 through 15 on the first 15 lines. The teacher began: 

1. Discover: To find something new or previously unknown. Discover.
   
2. Fragment: A piece of something larger. Fragment.
   

They would pause after each word, gazing around the room until each face reflected completion or despair, and then pronounce the next word.  So it would go until you had written each of the words, or at least your best effort at spelling it. You handed in your paper, or, more embarrassing, swap papers with the kid across the aisle, to be checked.  Vocabulary tests were - in hindsight - great. If any of you have in your family, age appropriate children aching for another “stay home, wash your hands” activity, this would be a lovely time to implement vocabulary tests. There is however a better way - and that is, of course, Mom’s magic wand; reading.

Reading not only builds a broad vocabulary, it also demonstrates the affinity that certain words have for each other, and the affinity of word clusters for emotions and locations and phenomena.  And since the task of an author is to sculpt art from the synthesis of a magical moment, vocabulary, and emotional affinity - what better addiction for a writer than reading?  Books let us wander through lands and languages, genders and genres, eras and ideas, vernacular and idiom, etching the best words onto our linguistic palettes ready to be liberated in service to our own compositions, our own attempts to define and better understand reality. To capture in depth those unique ephemeral moments that Self, Brain, and Evernote have sketched for us.

And since I find myself here in the company of a delightful word “palette,” I should point out that “learning your colors” should expand far beyond the simple color wheel or the mnemonical friend of the rainbow, Roy G. Biv. Just as we should treasure each new member of our linguistic vocabulary, we need to cherish each burst of color that life allows us. We were walking down one of Florence’s winding streets - eyes already overwhelmed with Titian, Michelangelo, Fra Angelico and the gang, when this window peeked out from a storefront no more than 8 or 10 feet wide:

Oh, my. A thesaurus for the eyes. I am a bit overfond of bold, pure colors - and these were Olympic quality versions of the same. But seeing fingerprints and tool marks etching trails in the geometric divisions somehow emphasized the tantalizing notion that each color could clamber out of its brilliant little corral and blithely co-mingle with its previously pristine neighbor, turning this magic square of 42 glittering displays into a physical reality that software geeks would come to call “millions of colors." 

So, just as we build our verbal vocabulary by reading whatever we can get our hands on, taking vocabulary tests, and yes, doing crossword puzzles, we can build our visual vocabulary by paying similar attention to color - wherever we can find it. From nature's painting of sunrise and sunset, to the commercial rainbows of the color swatches in the paint sections at Home Depot, Lowes, Sherman-Williams, et. al. Stop. Attend. Build your visual vocabulary.  Buy some sketchbooks and the set of markers the catches your eye. Now doodle. In color. You don’t have to draw something. Just doodle. Some “thing” may emerge, or not. It really doesn’t matter. Again we are just building vocabulary.

The whole idea here is that when those “something important is going on here” moments flit across the landscape of your consciousness you are not caught with an empty quiver. You reach in and words and colors pour out ready to compose reality; to capture the moment, perhaps enhance it, polish it, refine it, share it. Or maybe to just relive it to lighten a quiet evening or a rainy afternoon.

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