I can hear you honey coming my way, I
remember how you used to speak my name
I saw you walking long the river to my garden
Your hair shone like the milky way
Lamplight glowed down in St. Germain
Day is gone and we’re only getting started
I hear the music like I always have
won’t force you none, though I’m moving fast
what’s done is done
what’s past is past
You are the angel
breathing in my dream, you can
Call me goblin
Call me the creep
You know who I am
You know I never sleep
How much longer shall we dance this dance, we’ve been
waltzing all along the Cumberland
you’ve called my name
and baby I’m your man
I saw you rise as the desert sun
I was born, we were one
heard ‘em say we were old
and today we are young
I hear you walking through my secret garden
the music through you and calling my name
the world’s changed
and I don’t feel the same
But I can sing and you know I can dance
I’m making way through this cold and damp
day’s breaking, as I take your hand
Let me lie back in sweet surrender
Let me honor, cherish and defend her
I lost my track again but I know I can remember
Is this life lady, and life only?
Well your beauty took me
honey, it stoned me
I think I’ve been here baby
Yea I know how you told me
Throw open your desk
toss it upside down and
listen to Schumann, break
down the walls of every room, sell everything you own and over the new flames from within
begin to create
a brand new art form
Then when the sounds of the violin cease
open the window
and listen
to the distant
sounds of the city
in the cool
morning
breeze
I was thinking about the Headspace app, and how for me, it was the real introduction to mediation. It’s a great app for the beginner, and it does a wonderful job at making something long-considered esoteric more approachable and welcoming.
I started using it in early Spring 2016 and I continued meditating consistently for the next 2-3 years.
The experience taught me how to better handle my thoughts by adding some context and theory to what I probably already knew intrinsically—the simple idea that thoughts come and go and that there is no need to attach ourselves to them unless they are useful.
Simple enough, theoretically, though not necessarily easy to grasp.
The problem I ran into was that I got preoccupied with the notion of how I thought it should be. That is, how mediation should be and how I should be having started the practice.
This of course only led to more thinking, which inhibited me and had me second-guessing myself on matters I’d already more or less settled. How I approach my creativity, chief among them, but really a broad range of matters from how I relate to people to my morning routines, from how I dress and to my taste in music
Those hiccups might seem unfortunate, but maybe they were necessary in order to stand on more solid ground further on up the road.
I’m beginning to see how that sort of thing happens from time to time.
I am not exactly a conventional musician, you know…
I couldn’t tell you anything about theory.
I can’t even read music. No,
I’m just like this wild man of the woods
born of the swamp, singing
if not screaming to the heavens
and sometimes to my people
and I’m gonna use whatever
I have on me to be able to do it.
Now that we’ve been in this lockdown for nearly two months I find myself wanting to get back to another world, one that I manifest through sheer will and can fully inhabit, maybe even share with others. I’m kidding, sort of. I’m just a humble writer with a humble new magazine. But I can understand the impulse.
It was the guiding impulse of Walt Disney’s life and career, according to biographer Neal Gabler, author of Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.
Inscribed in it’s opening pages is an excerpt from William Blake–one of our favorite poets–whose words hint as to where the rest of the book is going.
I must create a system
or be enslaved by another man’s;
I will not reason and compare:
my business is to create.
William Blake
“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
I don’t mean to spoil the ending, but Disney succeeded. I’m sure you knew it by looking at everything today that bears his name. Disney, the man who launched a groundbreaking animation studio that revolutionized motion pictures. Disney, who created a theme park that continues to dramatically influence American culture, for better or worse.
A sympathetic view might say that his creative legacy and the force of his imagination inspired the imagination and creativity in countless generations to come all around the world, while critics might insist that the legacy of his films, the parks and merchandise only glorify some childlike escapism, a tacky sentimentality and gross materialism.
I can’t lend much to the discussion either way, one that most people might have anticipated before even reading the book. How a person connects to the films and theme parks is their own business. I only finished the book with a renewed perspective on a man far more complicated than I realized.
What I never expected to learn was how many times he failed. How ridden with obstacles, and miseries and all sorts of horrible anxieties that long road became, the road to his own utopia, the road that ultimately never ended.
Throughout the book I found myself revisiting one question in particular. One that I think is essential in understanding the nature of success itself, specifically in this country. To what degree did his achievements rest on the ingenuity of other people?
It’s the gray area of his life and career that proved the most compelling for me. The relationship between the big idea and the details. The back-and-forth from which, it turns out, most of his problems arose.
I wondered if he ever missed the old days when he started in mixed animation and live-action shorts, and only needed a small crew and a couple of friends to stand in front of the camera.
His talent was more in coming up with ideas, and less about the smaller details on how to realize them. Of course those details played the most decisive role in getting the task done, and so naturally a far greater deal of credit is owed to those with whom he surrounded himself.
Still, the more heads in the room, the more problems arose; and it wasn’t long before he suffered one of the most devastating disappointments in his career following the studio’s loss of it’s first original character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the rights for which were lost during a contract dispute with Universal Studios.
Walt standing in front of the Animation Building, the creative hub of the studio.
It’s worth noting that, shortly thereafter, Disney and chief animator Ub Iwerks created a new character that launched Disney and his studio to international fame and served as the creative foundation from which everything would follow.
Yet from that point on, he had a harder time trusting people, which only grew following the labor strike in the early 1940s, shortly after the success of Snow White and the subsequent financial losses incurred from Pinocchio and Fantasia, cemented as classics today despite nearly bankrupting the studio at the time.
It survived but was never the same. For a brief moment before the strike, the studio had served as the closest thing to Walt’s very own creative utopia, a community of visionaries operating at the intersection of art and technology, constructing worlds that broadened the public imagination and provided a psychological, emotional, even transcendent experience for anyone willing, if not just for the artist themselves.
Following years of creative stagnancy, Disneyland was the first project to resurrect that old vision. As he once did with the animation studio, he could regard it as a perpetual work in progress, something that was both a creation in itself and a workshop for continued ideas.
Creation was the guiding impulse of his life; and so by that measure, on a core level at least, Disney was an artist, first and foremost. While the scope of his creative vision is arguably unparalleled, his greatest successes seem equally linked to his ability to manage and lead other creative people in seeing that vision realized.
Walt introducing EPCOT for a promotional film
Shortly after the park’s completion and enormous success, he started planning a second and far more ambitious project that would serve as the apotheosis of his creative energies.
Where Disneyland had become the quintessential amusement park, this would serve as the quintessential city. The Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow. Unlike the theme park and most of the innovations bearing his name, EPCOT would form a fuller synthesis between his own imagination and the real world, an environmentally sustainable community, free of pollution where people would actually be able to live and work harmoniously.
It would break down the long-standing walls between the fantasy worlds he helped create and reality, and challenge the long-standing critique that he was more preoccupied with escaping our world, rather than changing it.
Walt’s own sketch of the EPCOT project
An artist can stay true to their vision and hope others relate to it, but of course they have little control over that in the end. Disney learned as much through frequent creative disappointments that likely sobered his own perspective on the matter.
He passed away before EPCOT was ever approved, and today what stands in its place is a much smaller version of what he envisioned, a theme park only hinting at the community he had in mind.
One might dream ’till the cows come home, but when it comes to the big ones, it takes communicating to others, appreciating and counting on them to help make it happen. Recognizing the stake one person has in the other.
We could guess how well Disney understood that in the end. My guess is that he knew it, and that through every failure and subsequent success, he was always working on it.
I also think it’s no small thing how EPCOT as he saw it, represents that idea more directly than anything else he ever put to paper.
It’s a near-complete circle, unfinished at the bottom where the shape begins and ends, as though painted in one swift, smooth brushstroke, left barely disconnected by the painter without any second thought.I’ve seen it a lot over the past year, as I’ve consistently thought about projects still unfinished, not quite realized.
‘This Is It’ by Thich Nhat Hanh
Last night I was thinking about sketching.The first drawing, the rough outline for what’s to come.The more I think about it, the more I learn to appreciate it; and the more I realize that conception, for better or worse, has always appealed to me more than completion.
That end result has always been less exciting to me, which I guess is ironic. Here I am pursuing something and yet—maybe subconsciously—I’m not even in a big hurry to get it.Maybe it’s a weakness, but it’s one that I embrace.
There’s nothing like that initial moment where something comes right out from my head and onto the page.The sketch is raw, still in motion and only just being born.It’s breathing and you can feel the pulse, as Jude likes to say.
Meanwhile when something is complete, it’s complete.Done.It’ll be hung up on a wall, put on record, published in a printing house and maybe admired and talked about for ages to come, or it might be forgotten no sooner than it arrived, but either way it’s finished.
It might take on a life of it’s own after you and that’s a beautiful thing, but even so, it’s a life that’s separate from you.The sense of finality isn’t always comfortable, but probably necessary.
There are only a few things that ever seem to remain constant in my life, anyway. Like the people I’m lucky to call friends and family, and certain fundamental understandings of life and the universe.
In my beginning is my end…
In my end is my beginning
-T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
A friend once told me the only thing consistent in life is change.The sketch, at best, reflects that fundamental truth. It’s still in flux, still being made.It’s future unknown.
Quinby & Co. 