the
Chasing the dragon
I remember the first poem I ever wrote. Both the poem itself and the circumstances of its writing.
It was in grade 3 or grade 4, it was spring, we had a supply teacher that day. She assigned us all a task, to write a poem or other work about spring.
So I did. But I didn't. A poem came shooting out of nowhere, just there.
spring is the time of year
when we look at things which we hold dear
our country friends and dear old earth
all blooming with new birth
ah beautiful is the spring
created by god the king
flowers birds bees and trees
all these things he sees
It was trite, maudlin, derivative. It invoked a nationalism I would come to repudiate and a diety that I didn't believe in even then. But it rhymed! It was actually a poem! And it had just come.
It was my first experience of the muse, my first taste of channeling creative works from beyond my conscious identity, and I was hooked.
Like an opium addict, I would chase that dragon my entire life. I am chasing her as I write this. I will be chasing her on my death bed.
In fact, I think I was already chasing her the day I was born.
I remember my birth. To be accurate, I remember what I think was my birth. But who can say? How much sense of 'self' has developed by the time we are born? How much sense of self can there be when we have no language to describe and understand anything? Is there even a functioning 'mind' to experience the transition from one world to another?
I have no answers to these questions.
But I have 'memories'. Memories of a profound almost indecipherable peace. A floatingness. Warmth. Comfort. And somewhere in there was the sense of a task to be done, a purpose, a function to fill. A job to do.
Then a sudden jolting, a pushing, squeezing, almost a pummeling, a cacaphony of physical sensation. A sense of bright light. Then blackness.
Was it my physical birth? Was there sufficient awareness there to even have an experience, never mind process, understand and retain it? Our main stream understanding of human mental development would suggest the answer is no.
Yet that memory has persisted and I have never lost that sense of a purpose. Of a function. Major parts of my life have been an effort to find, understand and live by that purpose, fulfill that function.
As trite as it was, I found the start of my function in that first poem that spring day.
(really)
getting to know the muse
Of course, most addictions take time to develop. By grade 8, I had writing in my sights as a long-term activity. The media was in my sights as well. I founded a mimeographed newsletter for my class, The BLAB. (I think it stood for 'Brawn Little All Brains' but may have been 'Brains Little All Brawn'.)
In high school the chase got serious. I started keeping a creative notebook where I wrote poetry as well as recorded dreams and my thoughts about the world and my life. Not necessarily in that order. I created a trademark for myself as a writer ('brgoramu') using the first two letters of my four names. All of my published poetry would first appear under that trademark.
Media technology entered my life interests and my writing. I was loaned a little manual typewriter, the old kind where pressing a key causes a metal bar to hit the roller but with paper and ink ribbon smooshed between them to create a letter. (You needed strong fingers to use it. Don't believe me? Ask Google.) Started using the typewriter to write stories and type up the poems written in my notebooks.
Got interested in film production, wrote and directed my first 'film' as a Super 8 spectacular for a school assignment. (It was a public service announcement style short questioning the criminalization of cannabis. It featured a friend being busted by a real cop. Neither of us had ever touched cannabis, never mind inhaled.) I founded a film club, started a politics club. I was a busy boy or so it sounds now.
the best laid plans
By grade 13, my plan was to get into the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. It was one of the first such programs in Canada, and already highly respected for its graduates. Admission was by submitted portfolio, so I typed up my work and sent it in.
I was rejected. Rather brutally I thought at the time.
The rejection provoked a profound period of ennui, uncertainty and vacillation. A lot of drama queen histrionics. I would show them! It was all useless. They were wrong! I'd never be a writer. The future I'd dreamed would not happen.
I spent more than a year in that space. Not knowing what I wanted to do, I went to a program at the University of Waterloo called Integrated Studies. It was a 'free school' where the student determined what s/he wanted to learn and how s/he would go about learning it. The program had resource people who would work with students to help them define their interests and their path.
One of those resource people was a graduate of the Radio and Television Arts program at the (then) Ryerson Polytechnical Insitute. He and I became friendly and he helped me source video equipment to use on a couple of projects. And talked about the RTA program at Ryerson. I think I'd heard of the program but never considered it because Ryerson was just a 'polytechnical'. I'd wanted a university.
At some point that year, I happened to read a newspaper article on the latest North American television ratings. In those days, the biggest American network sitcoms and dramas had audiences measured in the 30 to 40 millions as I recall. Huge numbers. But tucked near the end of the article, there was a one-line note that a documentary on Italian Communism had been viewed by 3 millon people.
I was struck by that figure. Three million people had watched a television documentary on Italian Communism! Now that I saw was a powerful medium. Not powerful as in hitting those huge numbers, but powerful in hitting small numbers in ways that matter. I wanted to learn and use that power in meaningful ways.
I applied and was accepted into the Radio and Television Arts program at Ryerson for the next academic year.
(Turned out, I was accepted into the first year that Ryerson became a university able to grant degrees, in my case a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Radio and Television. Funny how things can turn out.)
a circuitous path
Mind you, I had not given up on writing, on chasing the dragon. I saw television as a forum where I would practice and develop this skill. While my life goal was still to be a writer, my 'career' goal became to write and direct informational television programs. And I eventually achieved that, though the route was circuitous and onerous, even tortuous at times. *
(By the way. that route took me to Winnipeg for a year of writing local television commercials, to Toronto then Edmonton then China as a television news cameraman/editor, then to Australia where I worked as a freelance video cameraman/editor, producer/director and writer. It finally dropped me back in Edmonton where I worked nine years as an educational television producer/director and writer for the then ACCESS Network.)
(When and where the songs started.)
Poetry itself had remained a large focus in university and in the early years of my television career. I started submitting to poetry magazines and anthologies, going to poetry readings. Started getting published. A few poems here. Several poems there.
Began doing my own readings. Pretty small things generally, but I was a featured poet at Toronto's Harbourfront Literary Series! (Yeah, you're right, that was before Harbourfront became a really big literary festival. Yeah it was a cold Tuesday in February and yeah I happened to know the artistic director. But it was a reading damn it! At Harbourfront!)
A couple of writing friends and I founded a small poetry magazine in Edmonton and organized readings there. I was also writing short stories and magazine articles, while writing/producing a number of freelance videos.
I really liked the poems I was 'writing' and generally found their content deeply personal and meaningful. I loved the feeling of the poems, how their words would roll around in my mouth, in my mind. The thoughts they revealed and thoughts they provoked. The way I could use them to understand my own life. Communicate inchoate feelings.
It was a powerful medium in its own right, the winnowed essence of all writing. The foundation.
I also liked how my poetry was developing. The unformed writing that had been rejected by UBC was shifting, becoming spare, dense, filled with imagery and precisely-chosen words. It was 'modern' poetry, bereft of rhyme, stripped of forced poetic rhythm, aimed at achieving the greatest impact in the fewest words.
Aimed at beauty. Like all poetry at all times.
But even then, a part of me had to admit, poetry was just the door to the muse, a way to let her flood my brain with inspiration, repeat that first intoxicating experience. I came to see that I craved the moment of inspiration, the sudden caress of the muse, as much as the poem that resulted.
Worse, I was as hooked on the 'otherness' of the inspiration as on the inspiration itself. Who? what? was the creative intelligence I could feel in that moment of inspiration? Where was this stuff coming from? And why? I needed as much as wanted to know.
I was not alone. The muse as a source of inspiration goes back to the beginnings of civilization (and probably before that). The early Greeks wrote about 'her', the Romans too, they even had different muses for different arts. 'She' was a common figure in classical art and statuary, a common character in paintings throughout the medieval and renaissance periods.
Through all those eras, numerous poets, writers, sculptors, painters etc have credited their muse as the 'come from dark' source of their work. Something beyond them. Something 'other'. Something ineffable.
At the same time, they've bemoaned her fickleness, her demanding ways, her utter indifference to the well-being of her servants.
So I was in good, long-standing company.
In the modern world of course, the muse is more likely seen as an aspect of the personal unconscious than a diety or supernatural figure. Which is pretty much how I saw it. Chasing the muse was chasing myself, trying to bring my unconscious into a working creative partnership with my conscious self. I tried many ways to bring about that partnership. Meditation. Journaling. Psychedelics. Dream analysis.
Herding cats would have been more successful. If not more fun. The unconscious only comes out and plays when it wants.
Or when it knows the last thing you want to do is play.
In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig proposes that a direct perception of Quality — yes with the capital Q — is a first step, literally the leading edge in our apprehension, our perception of the world. That direct perception of Quality he argues precedes concept, precedes categorization, precedes thinking. Other writers have proposed the direct perception of Beauty as fulfilling a similar role.
I thought it was an interesting argument the first few times I read it. But wasn't sure of its applicability. Over time however I've come to see the touch of the muse — the moment of inspiration itself — as not so much a 'do this do that' instruction but as a direct perception of the Beauty or the Quality that can come to be. Whether you're a writer, musician, or any kind of visual artist, it's that direct perception of possibility that drives the push to make it real. **
Possibility is the gift of the muse. The artist's task is to make that an actuality.
Pity the muse is so damn fickle.
* (If only I had a serious yet sonorous narrator to complete this felonius assault on homologuous language.)
** And not just for the 'artistic' types listed. People in many fields, from scientists to engineers to software developers, describe their own come from dark muse, their own source of the inspiration that drives their work.
not-so
the farthest point
While my career goal was to write and direct informational television, most of the first several years was spent in television news as a cameraman/editor. I enjoyed shooting and editing in their own right, and was good at it. I had the good fortune to get on with CTV National News in their Alberta Bureau, and then get posted to China as the first-ever cameraman in that country's first-ever foreign television news bureau.
But I always saw my work in tv news as about building the background technical skills I would need when I transitioned into writing and directing. That change started when I moved to Australia in 1980, became a father and started freelancing in video production, using my shooting and cutting skills to open doors into writing and directing.
To that point there'd been little conflict between my professional work and my personal writing. They were quite separate activities, though my news experience did give rise to several poems.
But moving into professional writing changed that. Now my work often demanded the same creative energies I was using in my poetry and short stories.
Yeah. The muse. But. . .
. . . there was only so much to go around. She was still fickle. She was still cruel and cared not a whit that this was part of how I made my living, supported my family. That I had a deadline, a budget, clients. She was indifferent.
But still intoxicating. She would dole out program concepts, bits of script, production ideas. Often just the barest guidance, just the outline of what she was thinking. Even so, the moment of inspiration — when I saw the Beauty of what a new show could be — was still my desire.
Like a moth to flame.
My poetry writing began to die in Australia though it would take a few years to reach rigor mortis. I could feel it happening. The competition with my paid writing meant I struggled more to write my personal poems and stories. I pushed myself to bring them out, to reconnect with my poetry muse. But it was like watching somebody walk away across the flat Canadian prairie. She kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller until she dissolved into the heat haze.
It wasn't just the muse and the competition with my paid writing. In China and then Australia, my poetry had become more spare but still dense, more packed with imagery and metaphor, even more focused on achieving pure poetic beauty.
It was an intense way to write. There was no such thing as a spare word or a spare phrase or even a spare idea in the style that was emerging. Even short poems were taking weeks rather than days as I struggled to polish them down to shining bedrock.
It was hard work.
Still it wasn't just the muse, the paid work and the challenging style that killed my poetry. Sure they all got their knives into the corpse, but it was Brutus in the chapel with a spiritual crisis delivered the final slash.
Towards the end of my time in China, I was shooting a series of CTV documentaries called Our Man in China. One of them was on the film and theatre industries, and for that we interviewed a director from Shanghai named Huang Zuolin.
Huang ZuolinHuang was in his 70s then and still working. He had studied and worked in Europe during the ??s and knew people like Laurence Olivier. He'd returned to China and become well known in Shanghai theatre.
It was an impressive resume but — in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that Mao Zedong unleashed against his political enemies in 1966 — it was suspect. Foreign influences! Bourgeois tendencies! Lacking political fervour!
Huang and his wife were targeted by Red Guards, Mao's shock troops. They were arrested and sentenced to 10 years in a re-education through labour camp. They saw each other every day in that camp, but they were not allowed to talk. To touch. His wife lost almost all of her voice.
I had read about the Cultural Revolution before I went to China, so I knew the social chaos Mao had used to ransack the country. From that reading I thought China had had the societal equivalent of a nervous breakdown or psychotic episode. Like Uganda before it. Cambodia. Germany.
And I had read the testimonies of individuals caught up in that maelstrom. Their descriptions of frenzied crowds and brutal inhumanity. Dunce caps and prison camps. Child turned against parent.
Huang described his own experiences in a quiet voice while his wife looked on. The 'charges' alleged on public dazibao (literally "big character posters", these were a traditional form of public communication in China). The 'evidence'. Being paraded through the streets as a frenzied mob kicked and spat at them. The 'sentence'. The years in prison camp. Malnuitrition. Random violence. The cruel separation from his wife. How she had lost her voice.
Watching him through my lens, Huang was dignified and reflective. "No," he said, "he was not angry." He'd come to terms with it, put it to the side.
Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman's only English language film The Serpent's Egg takes place in 1920s Berlin, a time and place of intense anger and despair. The economy is struggling with inflation, with paying reparations from the first world war. Scapegoats are being sought. Anti-semitism is rising.
Throughout, the title seems to have nothing to do with the emerging story. Until the very end. The central antagonist has a large serpent's egg sitting on his desk. He points at it, says the thing about serpent eggs is that they are translucent and that you can see "the serpent growing within".
It's a powerful even brilliant moment. Like a supercooled solution suddenly crystalizing — Germany's Nazi future, the death camps, the aggression, the social madness — the monster growing within that egg can be seen all too clearly from our time.
Huang Zuolin's interview was my serpent's egg moment, though I didn't understand it at the time. We went on with our shooting. Went on with our lives. I moved to Australia. Started freelancing.
Started a poem about Huang Zuolin, well not so much about him as about human inhumanity, the madness that can overtake societies, the false promise of revolutionary fervour. I could feel the poem's weight, its import. Had that sense of Beauty that hooks me to the mistress's wheel.
I
for huang zuolin
who burned
not the buddha’s unwavering
flame
perfecting the saigon monk
not the empty fire against flags
in teheran
but, the most basic,
time
ripping ten years off your life
as though insignia
a peoples’ court could strip &
patch with barb wire
But I got entangled in the barbed wire of my own writing style. Trying to achieve that perfection of word, concept and emotion. The poem only came grudgingly. Months became a year. Two years. The first verse finished. It was bloody good. The second verse. Just as strong. The third verse tight and dense.
II
rising to loudspeakers orders
cold slabs of sun
bayonets
fixing mao’s red dawn
but this was not the evil
your wife
caught in the same net
not two feet away
but too far
with a guard stepped
between
orders
as the illness turned
inward, eating her voice
the guard’s desert face
choking
the words you could have given
mouth to mouth
but no order could stop
the pain made flesh
the vein dazibao
of protest
your prison diary
III
who can translate it?
are there lessons here
we hadn’t learned already?
that gulag, auschwitz
pnomn pnenh
never taught us?
or did we turn
afraid of the space
between
orders
But the fourth verse would not come. I could sense it, could feel the resolution of the poem. But there was something missing, an idea or phrase that would be the poem's serpent egg, the crystallization.
But it would not come. The muse was on holiday. Or just being a dick.
(I would encounter similar problems with songs many years later. All lyrics complete except one small bit, one image, one turn of phrase. Usually a fulcrum or crystallization point. Some songs would stay incomplete for months. I eventually got used to the pattern, even got philosophical about it. But it drove me nuts trying to finish this poem.)
I finally figured out what I was missing. Religion. As equally the cause of social madness as any political ideology. Often the same kind of rigid judgemental inhumanity underneath. It had been hinted at in the first stanza's "not the buddha's unwavering flame" but hadn't developed. Now it did and the poem completed.
IV
there is no revolution can
justify
no fire in darkness to lead
past this betrayal
no phoenix in the ash
no urn to discard with homage
and be free
of that charred voice
nothing. even language deserts
us to the taunting
dazibao
we are just dust
empty of breath
The whole last verse is a rejection of all the justifications humans proffer for their inhumanity to others. The last two lines an utter repudiation of god. In writing them, I was at the "farthest point / point away from love" as the first karosong Transformation would put it several years later.
It was the aphelion of my spiritual journey when my path turned back towards the light. (Long story only partly told in the on channeling screen of the karosongs archive.)
Post-script
For Huang Zuolin was the last complete poem I would write for many many years. It includes a Preface to set the poem's historical and political context, and introduce the term dazibao.
I consider it the single best poem I've ever written.
A sequel to Huang Zuolin did start with all the hallmarks of the muse's influence. But it petered out and has never completed.
brief
Television
Writing for informational television is a complex challenge. To be good, a writer has to master several distinct 'languages' — the language of the camera, delivered in shots; the vernacular of editing, spoken in cuts and disssolves and pacing; the dialect of sound articulated with dialogue, effects and music; the jargon of whatever topic you happen to be writing about.
The idiom that ties it all together is narration, the spoken voice. Seemingly the easiest of all these tongues. I mean we all talk so how hard can it be to write a little narration?
Bloody hard in fact.
I was good at pulling all these languages together, and very good at writing narration. That's not a brag. When you write for a major part of your living, you learn to be realistic about your skills. And it's not just my opinion. My television writing was honoured with the Edgar Dale Award for "excellence and creativity in informational screenwriting with distinguished visual and literary qualities" at the 1993 Columbus International Film and Video Festival.
(If you're not familiar with the Columbus Festival, it's one of the most important competitions for informational and educational television in North America, and the Edgar Dale is one of its most prestigious honours.)
Again, not a brag, but to set a context. Three years before, in summer 1990, I had suffered a nervous breakdown and creative burnout. The songs had started 18 months before that, and they'd been a factor in the burnout. But the biggest factor was my ongoing struggle with the muse compounded by the same drive to perfection that had offed my poetry.
This time it was Brutus in the cubicle with an x-acto knife.
The thing about writing for the voice is that it starts on a different, even antithetical medium — paper or its screen equivalent in a word processor. I say antithetical because text on paper or on a screen triggers a tangle of expectations, rules and habits that have little to do with the voice. Working from inside that tangle, it's easy to end up with writing that looks good to the eye, might even have got a B+ in high school English. But your narrator will hate you for it and will struggle to deliver it in the recording session.
And you'll lose your audience. Pretty much guaranteed. *
The only way out of this trap is to work in the actual medium you're writing for. Speech. Everything you write has to be read out loud as you work. Sure, you still have to type the words on a piece of paper or screen, but the writing process itself has to happen in your thoughts and in your voice. That's how you 'hear' that a sentence isn't working, that a phrase stumbles when spoken. That's how you hear the pacing and the flow of the words. That's how you know your timing and length.
Is that enough to be an informational television writer? Not at all. It's just the necessary first step.
Next, you have to learn how to talk.
Huh? you say.
Exactly. We do not speak the way we write for the page. Imagine standing next to someone having a conversation. Do you talk in full, gramatically correct sentences? Paragraphs with topic, supporting and concluding sentences? No. We drop phrases. Words. Throw in interjections. Wander off on side tracks. Circle back to amplify a point. And we quirk an eyebrow every now and then to see if we're being understood.
Good narration builds on those conversational patterns. Not to replicate ordinary speech — that would be boring — but to create a 'super' conversational form. Think of it as akin to the different politeness levels of the Japanese language, which change the patterns of conversational speech to fit different social situations.
Narration is conversation adapted to a one-way medium where we can't quirk an eye or ask "ya still with me?"
That's what makes writing narration so bloody hard. It's the language we use everyday. But not.
None of this understanding was in the broadcast writing courses I took in university. Those were pretty perfunctory with lots of specific advice: "keep it short", "use declarative sentences", "don't use big words". Very utilitarian. Sometimes. Not that useful if your topic is, say, simulating design wave energies under cyclonic conditions for breakwater construction. Or managing the frozen foods department in your neighbourhood grocery.
Nor did the muse sit me down with a powerpoint one day to explain it all. She hinted, sometimes. Nudged me, sometimes. Smacked me up the head if I was being particularly thick. Many times.
The instructional technique was learning by discovery, and the muse knew exactly the teasing carrot to keep me pushing into my harness — inspiration, that glimpse of perfection I was so addicted to.
But once the muse had blessed me with that vision of perfection, she usually dicked off and left me on my own to work out how to achieve it.
Like my poetry, it was an intense way to write. Having seen perfection, that's what I had to achieve. Or as close to it as I could manage. My scripts struggled to define and then use that 'super conversational' style, at the same time they were fumbling with the different visual and aural 'languages' that also had to be marshalled and mastered.
I couldn't cope. I burned out.
* I say 'pretty much guaranteed' because there are narrators who can deliver any script, no matter how badly written. I was fortunate to work with two such voice talents in my career.
Post-script
I didn't go to Columbus, Ohio to accept the Edgar Dale Award. Various reasons including money and turmoil in my life as I had just separated from my first wife Leanne.
I wish I had gone to it. Or at least got the t-shirt. It was the apex of my television career. By the time my life had found a new equilibrium, I had left educational television for the emerging world of computer-based learning, first on CD-ROM and then on the web.
