Wild Fridays #34: Moonlight Musings

A Change of Scene

Dear friends, this is my last Friday post; after, amazingly, nearly nine years of them. But don’t worry, I’m not retiring from the team. I’ll be popping up to (hopefully) entertain and inspire you at other times, in other ways, with a bit more – much-needed – space between commitments. [This is not a result of Sanaa leaving us; we worked out the new system before she resigned. I like to think it may have given her the freedom to make that decision, knowing it wouldn’t now create burdens on the rest of us.]

The Value of Community

At this point I find myself reflecting on these years in which I went from a shy, awkward newcomer  – which I hope I managed to conceal fairly well – to a long-term member of this administrative team and this broader community.

I began, like everyone else, as one who enjoyed the prompts. Then the ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ spot became vacant, coinciding with my thought that many fine Aussie poets deserved wider recognition. Robb (our founder) let me give it a go. Gradually I included other poets (even dead ones, as in ‘The Living Dead’) and then other topics. 

Some poems I didn’t exactly wish I’d written, because I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the place they came from, but I was enthusiastic about them anyway and keen to share them, so the ‘Thought Provokers’ segment was born. Recently it occurred to me that things which interest me when I’m ‘Roving the Web’ would interest other writers too. ‘Words from Our Community’ came from a wish to acknowledge what wonderful poetry happens right here amongst ourselves.

Mutual understanding

Fellow team members have always been happy to let me rave on about anything I cared to. When I decided to do just that, airing my thoughts on various matters to do with poetry, or with writing in general, in the form of my so-called ‘Moonlight Musings’ (which tended to happen late at night) I was pleasantly surprised to find that those posts quickly became everyone’s favourites. When I was writing them, I often feared that no-one would find my ramblings the least bit interesting, but after all it became apparent that writers do very much share the same preoccupations. I guess that in itself is one aspect of the value of community, perhaps the greatest value. Who else can we talk to about all that stuff, and receive complete understanding, but others of our kind?

Discussion

I’ve run a number of writing workshops offline over the years, and still preside over a couple – though lately they’ve had to happen by video. I like to keep things fairly relaxed, with lots of laughter. (And sometimes tears, as people find their writing taking them to emotional places.) Writing happens at these events, and in between them. People find ways to improve particular pieces, and their writing in general grows and develops. Many go on to publication. Yet they all say that what they treasure most about our meetings are the conversations, which often range far and wide, and the friendships consequently formed.

It’s similar here, I think, in this loosely-structured yet close-knit online community. Over time we get to know each other – often quite quickly, but certainly over the long haul. Our writing reveals us to each other; it's not a place we can hide.

Revelation

But what is revealed; what is it we can’t hide? I think perhaps the soul. Aspects of our personalities don’t necessarily show. Well, some do – we know who loves their gardens or their God, who is appalled by a certain political figure, who adores cats and who prefers dogs, who’s in love and who is disenchanted … but we only know what details people choose to write. Behind all that, reading someone’s work repeatedly over time, we get a sense of the person beyond those details: the flavour of them, if you like.

Interaction

This sense of the person can happen to some extent with any writing one reads. It happens so much more in a community such as ours, based on interaction with each other: regularly reading and commenting on each other's work. Those who 'link and run' (which I understand happens in some online forums) would miss out on benefits to themselves and their writing – not only because, if they made a habit of it, people would probably stop reading them anyway, but also because there is so much to be gained by exposure to a variety of other writers. It adds to our repertoire and broadens our scope. (Even exposure to bad writing can be incredibly useful, lol. Not that we have any of that here, of course.) When I was running poetry workshops in prison many years ago, I made a point of bringing in a variety of guest poets to work with the participants.  They couldn't get that kind of exposure unless I provided it, and they told me they found it very valuable in expanding their range as poets. They said it opened up vistas. We are fortunate enough to have such vistas readily available. Don't underestimate what you do for others by linking your writing here!

A shared passion

Writing is, as we know, an essentially solitary activity in the actual doing – just oneself, alone with the words. A strange compulsion,  really, to first find the words and then get them as near as we can to perfect. When we’re lucky they come easily, as if given to us, but often we wrestle with them. We have to at least get a first draft down before we can begin to share them with anyone else. And we’re lucky if our nearest and dearest understand either the impulse or the result. Even when they like what we write, can they comprehend the passion for writing itself, why we do it even if it’s unlikely to make us rich or famous – why we not only do it but give it so much of our time and focus? If you’re married to another writer, as I had the good fortune to be – or probably to any kind of artist – that helps. Or if there's someone in your birth family (my Dad scribbled a bit). But otherwise, I don’t like the chances.

A community of writers with whom we interact repeatedly over time not only fills a need but starts to feel like a group of friends, or even a family. I think it’s greatly to be cherished. The fact that we learn from each other – can’t help doing so through our interactions – is a bonus. Then, too, in this international community the wide diversity of backgrounds, interests, lifestyles, and approaches to writing enriches us all.

And the fact that I’ve stayed up much too late – again! – chasing after the Muse? Well I guess that’s a price I’m happy to pay.

 Material shared here is presented for study and review. Poems, photos, and other writings and images remain the property of the copyright owners, usually the authors. (Older poems may be out of copyright). For the photo of the map-reader, found on Unsplash, I thank Leio McLaren.

Wild Fridays #18: Moonlight Musings

The Importance of Narrative

Today I'm turning you over to Caitlin Johnstone, who, at her website CAITLINJOHNSTONE.COM, describes herself as, 'Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerilla poet. Utopia prepper.'  

I learn she's also an Aussie, from Melbourne. Not that I needed telling; only an Aussie would use the word 'Bogan', let alone proudly apply it to herself. [What's a Bogan? Think 'Kath & Kim' – no, NOT the deservedly one-season-only American version which completely missed the mark, turning a wicked satire into a fairly pointless sitcom. Well ... perhaps you'd have to be an Aussie....]

But never mind that; it's a side issue. She takes a world view – albeit she says, in her Wikispooks bio, 'I place emphasis on the United States, because that’s where the largest amount of power appears to be centralised.'

The important things about her in regard to this post are how well she knows her material, how well she writes, and – even more important to this community – what she has to say in this piece, specifically. It's all about the power of words and how they shape our lives. Not least by manipulating us. You have very likely had some of the same thoughts she articulates, but this is a particularly well-thought-out reminder.

Her own political position is clear enough. But the central tenets of the article are beyond that. I think we all know by now there's 'fake news' and worse out there, even if we disagree about who's guilty of it. That it exists at all is the point.

Also, she reminds us what we can do about it. We, as poets and storytellers – who can be manipulated like anyone else, and who are prone to the same fears and despairs as others when we wake up to that fact – can use all the encouragement we can get. As an excellent prose writer and author herself, not to mention a 'guerilla poet', she's well qualified to give it.

Here's the piece. As always, I'd love to hear your views and responses in the comments below.

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We Are Ruled By Wizards

Bending reality is as simple as bending people’s perception of reality.

Throughout history, the mythology of civilizations around the world has been full of tales of men and women who mastered a mysterious, esoteric art which enabled them to use language in a way that bends reality to their will. They’ve been called wizards, witches, magicians, sorcerers, warlocks or enchanters, and the utterances they speak have been known as spells, magic, incantations, conjurations or enchantments, but the theme is always more or less the same: a member of a small elite group with the ability to voice special utterances which shape reality according to their will in a way that transcends the mundane mechanics of this world.

People have long held a general intuition that language holds a power far beyond what ordinary mortals use it for, especially since the advent of the written word which was long mysterious to all but the most elite classes in a given society. This intuition has been spot on, though perhaps not exactly in the way that ancient mythologies have envisioned.

When I say “Bending reality is as simple as bending people’s perception of reality,” I’m not making some sort of mystical or otherworldly claim; I’m just making a factual observation about the influence that narrative control has over events big and small which transpire in our world. Many people whose brains lack a healthy empathy center–i.e. sociopaths, psychopaths and other narcissists–already understand this on some level.

Humans are storytelling creatures; everything about our understanding of the world is made up of narratives that are made of language. “My name’s Alice and I was born in Detroit” is a narrative. “The universe is 13.772 billion years old” is a narrative. “If I drink that bottle of bleach I’ll probably die” is a narrative.

Narratives don’t need to be based on any objective fact at all. “I can fly by flapping my arms” is a narrative. “God says you should mail me ten percent of your income” is a narrative. “You live in a free democracy and everything you read in The New York Times is an accurate representation of reality” is a narrative.

Ordinary people use language and narratives to understand and connect with each other, so they tend to favor narratives that are true. People who lack healthy empathy centers have no interest in understanding or connecting beyond the extent to which it can get them what they want, so they’ll happily use lies, half-truths, distortions and lies by omission to obtain power, control, money, sex, or whatever it is they’re after. They have a completely different relationship with language and narrative than people with healthy empathy centers, and they learn to exploit that difference.

Anyone who has escaped from a relationship with a manipulator will have an experiential understanding of what I’m talking about here. You start off under the mistaken impression that the abusive partner uses language the same way you do, so you keep trying to use it to form an understanding and connection, but it’s like your words just get turned around and twisted and used against you in a way you can’t really keep up with. You are fed narratives about yourself which have no bearing on reality: “You’re crazy”, “You’re not remembering things correctly”, “You’re dishonest”, “I’m not abusing you, you’re abusing me”, etc. You are fed narratives about your abuser which have no bearing on reality: “I’m the only one who’ll ever love you”, “I’m too nice, that’s my problem”, “I’m the real victim here”, etc.

When you escape from such a relationship it’s common to have to spend months or years afterward sorting out fact from fiction, reality from narrative distortion. Depending on the skill of the manipulator and how long you were with them, they may have inserted some very disorienting beliefs deep inside your consciousness in order to control you, and they can take a lot of work to uproot.

Large-scale manipulation of entire populations works more or less the same way small-scale manipulation of individuals does, and unlike abusive partners who have to more or less figure out their infernal art on their own, there’s been a concerted collaborative effort to refine the science of propaganda for well over a century.

Our world is set up in a way that rewards sociopathy with wealth and power, which means adept manipulators tend to rise to the top in business, government, and media. This is no accident: while ordinary healthy people were concerning themselves with learning the truth and forming connections, those in our world with no interest in such things have been engineering power structures to reward a lack of empathy. People who are willing to manipulate narratives toward their advantage without regard for truth or justice rise above those who aren’t in such systems.

We now therefore find ourselves ruled by those who use language not to connect and understand, but to bend reality according to their will. We are ruled, in a sense, by wizards.

Vast troves of treasure are poured into controlling the dominant narratives in our society as they relate to those in power and what they want to achieve. The government is your friend. The news man is trustworthy. You live in a democracy and your countrymen can influence government policy and behavior by voting. That bad guy in that other country needs to be taken out. Those people telling you we’re lying are Russian propaganda and need to be censored.

The spells are cast, and before you know it the bombers are deployed, the sanctions are implemented, the dissident is censored, the journalist is jailed, the political leader has been installed, the consent has been manufactured. Reality has been bent by simply using language to bend people’s perception of reality.

The more powerful the government, the more skillful the wizards. Chomsky once said that “Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media.” Narrative spells are cooked up by wizards in opaque intelligence agencies and uncritically regurgitated in anonymously sourced news reports, and before you know it Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, Russia is attacking American democracy and China cooked up the coronavirus in a Wuhan laboratory, and as always please know that the status quo is normal and is totally working great for everyone.

The good news is that this kind of word magic is not only accessible to esoteric masters reciting incantations from the pages of a dusty grimoire (which interestingly has the same etymological root as the word “grammar”). Anyone who understands malleable nature of narrative is capable of fighting back against the enchantments which pull the wool over the eyes of the rank-and-file public day in and day out, and can advance narratives that are based on facts and reality rather than lies and distortions.

You can be a wizard too. You can use language to influence the world by pushing back against the narratives spouted by the establishment spellcasters.

The better you understand the nature of narrative and its all-pervading role in our consciousness and our society, the better a wizard you can be. Pay attention not just to the large-scale narratives believed by masses of people, but the small-scale narratives believed by yourself as well. Find out what subtle stories you’ve been holding onto even in the darkest recesses of your subconscious mind which have been bending your perception of reality in a way which does not benefit you. If you want to master narrative wizardry, you must first attain mastery over its role in your own operating system.

Put truth first always, in all ways. Set the intention to use your healthy empathy center to connect, to understand, and to be honest: with those to whom you speak, and with yourself.

The more lucid you become in this way, the more potent your linguistic magic will grow. Narrative control is too important to be left to the manipulators, propagandists, liars and sociopaths.

See through the illusion. Shine truth on the lies.

You’re a wizard, Harry.

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Material shared here is presented for study and review. Poems, photos, and other writings and images remain the property of the copyright owners, usually the authors.

All Caitlin Johnstone's writing is freely available for people to share further in any way they like, without it constituting copyright infringement, as stated at her website.

Wild Fridays #4: Moonlight Musings

 

More of a vent than a musing, this time: 

Potted Homilies

‘I’m so sick of homilies masquerading as poetry!’ I said to my friend as we browsed in a bookshop recently.

[Whilst a homily is usually thought of as having religious connotations, as in a sermon ... not necessarily. The most succinct and also general definition I can find is the Cambridge Dictionary’s: ‘A piece of spoken or written advice about how someone should behave.’]

And why should poetry not moralise or advise? No reason at all, so long as it does so in poetry! What I suddenly noticed that I’m very tired of is when the precepts are set as verse – and sold in whole books of! – but are just prosy statements chopped up into lines and stanzas. 

I didn’t think it was going to bug me so much that I’d want to vent about it here, so I didn’t save any examples of what I mean. But just think of some old platitude and you’ll get the idea. (‘Home is where the heart is.’ ‘It never rains but it pours.’) And then chop it into lines which ignore any poetic possibilities for the pauses. E.g. (making it up on the spot):
Never step / into the same / river twice.
If she / doesn’t love you / find someone / who does.
Don’t look / over / your shoulder.

(Hmmm, didn’t require much effort, I must say, to come up with those little gems.)

On the shelves I was looking at were volumes of this kind of thing in amongst the likes of Marianne Moore, Pablo Neruda, Frank O’Hara, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde....

‘Quick, look at this. Just the first verse,’ I said to my friend, thrusting a page of Marianne Moore under her nose. We both gasped with relief at how good it was.  Wonderful language – creating wonderful pictures in our heads and tinglings in our spines!

We became reluctant to open volumes by contemporaries whose names we didn’t know! But I’m glad to say we did find some real poetry amongst them too.

So how did those other things get to be on the same shelves? And how did they even get published? I was so quick to put them back on the shelves, I didn’t look to see who the publishers were. The books were very nicely produced though, very professional-looking. Perhaps the publishers, whoever they are, take these writers on because they know such books will sell – to some non-discerning buyers.

Yet why not put them in the Self Help section instead? Perhaps because the ideas are not very original, and they wouldn’t sell unless dressed up as verse? Labelled poetry, it seems, they do sell. Otherwise they wouldn’t keep being published, you’d think. I actually saw a series by one author, which suggests that people must even be willing to buy successive volumes.

 











Digital too

On Instagram a few weeks ago I saw some ads for a new young woman poet who was said to be taking Instagram by storm, posting micropoetry that everyone was going crazy for. I watched her interviewed on YouTube. She was full of confidence, and the belief she’s providing a service. Well maybe she is, and good luck to her – only, PLEASE, Ms X, don’t call your little bites of potted precepts poetry! (I looked her up. I read them. They just aren’t.)

It’s doubly sad when there is so much good poetry on Instagram – much of it written by you, dear readers. Where are our hordes of admirers, as opposed to the discerning few?

Is it, perhaps, the nature of real poetry that it doesn't appeal to the lowest common denominator?

Disclaimers

I know that members of this community quite often write in ways meant to be uplifting, or reassuring, or sharing what spiritual insights or pieces of wisdom we may have acquired. Some of us like to express particular religious points of view or share our personal epiphanies. None of that is what I’m objecting to. We all write poetry! OK, some of us also write stories some of the time – and they too are thoughtfully crafted. In verse or prose, we do our preaching (when/if we do) with some elegance and wit.

Surely, if a message is important, it deserves to be said as well as one can. Even if it’s not deeply significant but instead light-hearted and ephemeral, I think half the fun is in making something which readers will enjoy.

Neither am I talking about beginner poets who are still learning their craft, or refining it. We’ve all been there. (Perhaps we always are.) In a community like this, we see each other develop as we keep on writing. The thing is, we do develop; we do care about the words, about the way we say things. We’ve understood that if what we say matters, how we say it is vital for it to reach and move people.

I’m not referring to matters of style, either. Again, this community is a fine example of how many different styles and approaches are encompassed in contemporary poetry. We have Robin (Old Egg)’s apparently simple ditties of love and romance, meticulously yet unobtrusively crafted; Susie’s sharply succinct word-plays; Rajani’s philosophical questionings couched in superb language and apt metaphors; Sanaa’s lush sensuality and delight in the sumptuous music of words; Kim’s and Joel’s different and equally enthralling recreations of the natural world in their personal environments.... We have people using all manner of forms and techniques. When we write our prose stories, too, we give attention to the way we write them. (I was recently told that one of mine was ‘melodious’. I was thrilled – having paid much attention to its sound and rhythm.)

Why do readers keep accepting that other stuff? It’s not even that it’s bad advice, as a rule. On the contrary, most of it reiterates current insights into behaviour, which have become popular because they do contain some truth (if little depth). Fine – but why do publishers, readers, and the authors themselves accept it as poetry?

The Instagram sensation makes her posts look pretty with flowers and fancy calligraphy, but that doesn’t disguise the banality of her words. Yet people must be lapping them up. Is it the greeting card school of poetry? No – such verses at least rhyme and have metre. Perhaps it is BECAUSE they don't require much from the reader, who can then move rapidly to the next momentary distraction from life.

Or has nothing really changed?  Was it ever thus? Is it simply that we never get to see the bad poetry of earlier eras because it hasn’t lasted?

Hard to imagine, isn’t it (for us) that someone would crave fame as a poet, with so little understanding of the necessary work required? Even harder to imagine they’d want to churn out so-called poems with none of the qualities of poetry! But it seems the poetasters have always been around.

['Poetaster' is an old word, invented for a reason. ‘A derogatory term applied to bad or inferior poets. Specifically, poetaster has implications of unwarranted pretensions to artistic value. The word was coined in Latin by Erasmus in 1521.’ – Wikipedia.]

It’s alarming to think the words of the current ones may last a lot longer, due to being digitally preserved!

This whole issue was annoying me so much that I needed to let off steam. Thanks for your indulgence! But now what? (I might even say, ‘So what?’) We can’t legislate against bad taste, or even ignorance.

The only thing we can do, I suppose, is continue to write our own words as well as we possibly can, and share them as widely as we may. E.g. blogging; spoken word performances; videos; journals and anthologies, digital or paper ... yes, all the things we already do. Hopefully the market for good poetry, even if smaller, will last longer.

If you have any suggestions – or just opinions – I’d love you to share your thoughts. Please use the comments.)
 

Material shared in this post is presented for study and review. Poems, photos, and other writings and images remain the property of the copyright owners, usually the authors. The moon photo is my own. The bookshelf photo is a free download from Pixabay, in the Public Domain (didn't think to take any of my own in the bookshop).