Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Yom Kippur Reflections
One of the many things I like about the synagogue where I attend High Holiday Services is the fact that the rabbi opens services by giving us permission to let our attention lag. That's right, if we find ourselves getting bored during prayers and find ourselves daydreaming, reading ahead through the prayer book, even dozing off, we have our rabbi's blessing.
The idea here is not to indulge the ever-diminishing attention spans of a contemporary congregation, but in fact to give our minds some valuable time to pause and breathe between moments of pious contemplation.
During one of these moments, I happened to read through some of the anecdotes printed in my book, and I came across one that I found particularly inspiring. A prophet goes to the city of Sodom to try to get its citizens to change their evil ways. Predictably, he has no success. Still, he keeps preaching. A child goes up to the prophet and asks why he bothers, since there's no sign he'll ever succeed and getting the Sodomites to reform themselves. "At first I did it to try to get others to change their ways," says the prophet. "Now, I do it so that I don't change my ways."
This story is the perfect analogy for being an artist at a time when the arts are hurting, not just for money, but also for passionate and discerning audiences. Why write, paint, act, dance, compose, on and on, when there is so little hope of being read or watched or listened to? In order to preserve one's soul from getting sucked into the vapid wasteland otherwise known as our contemporary culture. Every minute I'm working on a book, story, or essay is a minute I'm not spending answering the latest Facebook poll, researching the lives of John and Kate (whoever they are), or downloading some useless "app" for my iPhone. Every precious minute I'm sitting quietly reading a book, I'm not checking email, watching TV, or doing some other activity that feeds my candylike craving for instant gratification, but leaves my soul to starve.
posted by aaron hamburger at 3:25 PM
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Friday, September 04, 2009
Leaving Umbria
I've been living next to a castle in Umbria for a month, but now my time here is drawing to a close. For the most part it's been a wonderful remove from daily life, though thanks to the Internet, I haven't found it possible to be totally removed.
Aside from a few pounds, I've gained the chance to take a deep breath and hit the "reset" button in my life. As a writer, I find that sometimes it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of editing words or sentences, or the latest ups and downs that are the inevitable condition of an artistic career.
So what's it all about? What's it really all about? Here's my latest guess.
When I was a kid, I used to go down to the basement and act out stories, performed by my stuffed animals. Today, I do the same thing, though generally without the stuffed animals. As a kid, I didn't worry about whether I'd sell my stories, whether they'd be favorably reviewed, or in what quantities they'd be sold. These are the illusions that come with adulthood, because you feel that as an adult, you don't have the right to play. In fact, you do have a right to play, just not the right to expect that anyone else cares.
And so as I move forward with my writing, the one thing I want to focus on is preserving as much as possible that sense of play. We play not only because it amuses us but also because it defines us, shapes our experience, transforms life's inexplicability and randomness into bite-sized morsels of order and beauty.
We know all this without having it taught to us when we're kids. Now as adults, we have to learn it all over again.
posted by aaron hamburger at 4:24 AM
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