Becoming.

In 2006, a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to replied and here is his response ...

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana. 

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow. 

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Thanks, J.R. 

Beyond.

In a lifetime of walking in the woods, plains, gullies, mountains I have found that the body has no more vulnerable sense than being lost.  I don’t mean dangerously lost where my life was in peril but totally misdirected knowing there was a lifesaving log nine miles to the north.  If you’re already tired you don’t want to walk nine miles, much of it in the dark.  If you run into a tree it doesn’t move.  I usually have a compass, also the sun or moon or stars.  It’s happened often enough that I don’t feel panic.  I feel absolutely vulnerable and recognize it’s the best state of mind for a writer whether in the woods or the studio.  Your mind feels a rush of images and ideas.  You have acquired humility by accident.

Feeling bright-eyed, confident, and arrogant doesn’t do this job unless you’re writing the memoir of a narcissist.  You are far better off being lost in your work and writing over your head.  You don’t know where you are as a point of view unless you go beyond yourself.  It has been said that there is an intense similarity in people’s biographies.  It’s our dreams and visions that separate us.  You don’t want to be writing unless you’re giving your life to it.  You should make a practice of avoiding all affiliations that might distract you. After fifty-five years of marriage it might occur to you it was the best idea of a lifetime.  The sanity of a good marriage will enable you to get your work done.

Jim Harrison, from “Passacaglia for Staying Lost, an Epilogue,” (The Ancient Minstrel)

Russell Chatham.

I had to find my own way.

Proportion.

There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.

Edgar Allan Poe

Own.

I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

Henry David Thoreau

Different.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

- Henry David Thoreau

Graphic.

At TED 2011, Sunni Brown encouraged doodling everywhere – classrooms and meeting rooms included. “The doodle … engages all four learning modalities simultaneously, with the possibility of an emotional experience,” she says in her classic talk.  Yes, it’s proven that doodling helps you remember things more efficiently.

Graphic notetaking is the doodle, evolved and tamed. 

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