coping – Brilliance In Sight Blog

Oblique Strategies (Over 100 Worthwhile Dilemmas) are a plane-Jane/ quirky deck of cards invented by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in the 1970s to encourage artists (in particular, musicians and composers) to break through writer’s block and to encourage “lateral thinking” (lateral thinking uses non-obvious, intuitive or creative, non-linear thinking to solve problems). Oracular guidance in general is really good at promoting “lateral thinking” and no more so than with this week’s cheeky advice from the Oblique Strategies deck. The card that popped out was, “Emphasize the Flaws” and it DEFINITELY didn’t mesh with my rattled, more-linear-than-usual mindset this week. Personally, this is a time of flaws ( aches and pains, house maintenance issues straight of a monopoly game and niggling things to take care of and work on) EMPHASIZING flaws has never been something I like to do. Fix them? Yes. Embrace them… not always. Being someone who always wants to improve, refine and better things, flaws are the “enemy.” And yet this guidance makes perfect sense. Sometimes we have to embrace or even emphasize and really delve into a flaw in order to work with it or find a creative solution to a problem. After all, isn’t a flaw just a matter of perception? A friend of mine from Austria uses some very peculiar grammar… in my eyes, her English isn’t flawed, it’s just full of character and my eyes dance over the mistakes in her non-Native language and I only see the meaning and intelligent heart that she has.

“Emphasize the Flaws” made me think of this wonderful T.E.D. Talk by artist Phil Hansen (click on this link or view it below) who develops a tremor in his hands from repetitive stippling in pointillism (having created a huge picture using only dots, I know the ravages such an activity could produce if someone did it all the time). In the talk, he describes how he stops trying to thwart the FLAW and embraces it and even emphasizes it to create a whole new result. If you have a few minutes, it’s definitely worth a view and it might transform how you view a “flaw”

This week, we’re guided to play up flaws, to discover the purpose or rerouting opportunity that a flaw or challenge brings. By focusing on it, instead of trying to mask, avoid or deny it might work out better than trying to hide it. Let flaws be something to inspire continued work and creativity instead of a stop sign. If you keep trying to hide, defeat and battle a flaw or challenge, you might continue to drain your energy away. A creative approach could allow you to embrace the “flaw” and transcend it.

The picture for this blog is not the card (they’re just typed up business cards)… it’s just the phrase from the card on a backdrop of snow-flakes that I took a picture of sitting prettily on my windshield one night. Snowflakes seem to be tiny, crystalline works of art in perfect hexagonal symmetry. But you know what? Sometimes those little, perfectly delicate, and astoundingly beautiful flakes get knocked around a little bit in the atmosphere and many snowflakes, believe it or not, are visibly IRREGULAR. Nothing perfect is perfect without a little tilt in our imagination, a take-away from our belief, the inspiration of our dreaming mind and nothing flawed is truly a flaw until we believe it is so. Are you holding life (or yourself) up to an image of perfection that is unnecessary? Things might be a heck of a lot more awesome than they seem to be if you give your lateral-thinking muscles an extra work out or two this week.

PS. One last thing occurs to me with this week’s guidance…. and that’s a wisdom that my grandma imparted and it might be a good reminder since March’s critical-thinking energies are flying high: if you’re really invested in criticizing another person… chances are you’re highlighting your OWN flaws, not theirs!

About this deck: Oblique Strategies (Over 100 Worthwhile Dilemmas) by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published in several editions since 1975. (also available online and on iPhone Android) — And yes, it’s that Brian Eno — the experimental musician, composure, producer, artist who has worked with Coldplay, Paul Simon, Grace Jones, David Bowie, David Byrne, U2, Talking Heads and many more. Peter Schmidt was an influential British painter/multi-media artist who was tremendously influential and worked with other musicians and artists.

(photo: Steve Rhodes/Flickr)

There’s really no “remembering” for me to do about Roger Ebert. Unlike members of my family and friends, who, in the journalism corp or in the capacity of meeting him at film festivals at Telluride or the Conference of World Affairs, had their own stories of meeting him in real life and about how he took the time to graciously share his experiences, advice or wit – mine was an imaginary relationship. Some teens had Wayne Gretzky, or Madonna as imaginary alliances against the bullies of the world, or as characters they’d somehow implausibly meet and collaborate with; I had Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. I was barely out of life’s gate when Ebert won his Pulitzer Prize, but as a budding film geek kid, I sat with Ebert and Siskel in the imaginary balcony on the TV Show “At The Movies” and sometimes bitterly argued with them, lending a third thumb to the debate. In real life I became a film reviewer in small student publications and I fantasized about how one day, Siskel and Ebert would (with glorious praise, of course!) review MY movie … the one I still to this day dream of making.

In later years I kept up on Ebert’s reviews and prolific writing, paying special attention to the marvelous writing he did following surgeries to battle thyroid and salivary cancer. Without remembering what his last meal or words were, these things ended long before he did when he lost the ability to eat, drink and speak in 2006. Instead of giving up or hiding his disfigurement, he wrote cookbooks. And even though he lacked a jaw and took nourishment through a tube, he enjoyed eating out with friends because it was the conversation he still cherished and said that if he could have one more meal, it would be a crispy steak burger from Steak ‘n Shake.

He wrote prose about remembering root-beer during his surgical recovery which reminded me of my own father taking me for tiny mugs.

“For nights I would wake up already focused on that small but heavy glass mug with the ice sliding from it, and the first sip of root beer. I took that sip over and over. The ice slid down across my fingers again and again. But never again.”

Yesterday, a day after hearing about the return of Ebert’s cancer and his planned ‘Leave of Presence’ I sat down to a meal with the family and my dad pushed a newspaper clipping across the table about this semi-retirement and featuring Ebert’s sweet,smiling face . As I ate and looked at him on the newsprint, I was full of twisting and uncomfortable thoughts. I said sadly, “I think it will go fast… he won’t get to do all the things he wanted.” and yet the article reassured, hopefully, that he’d beaten cancer in the past and maybe he could again. I even fantasized about finding his contact agent and writing him a heart felt letter of appreciation… would he hear me amidst all the other well wishers?

We all know someone in ill-health, or, knowingly or unknowingly more plans than lifespan. Maybe even ourselves. I didn’t want to think of these things. I didn’t want to face the discrepancy between what we think should happen and what we cannot control.

To be sure, Roger Ebert still had big plans outlined in that last blog post where he explained what Leave of Presence meant;

“….I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What’s more, I’ll be able at last to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review”

He promised to throw himself into the re-launch of the new and improved Rogerebert.com, he planned to host ‘EBERTFEST’ film festival later this month at his Alma Mater University of Illinois in Urbana Campaign, and aimed to work on reviving the “At The Movies” TV series, collaborate with Martin Scorsese on a bio-drama about his life, he wrote,

“And gamers beware, I am even thinking about a movie version of a video game or mobile app. Once completed, you can engage me in debate on whether you think it is art.”

It was almost as if, pushing against the force of time and death, Ebert was asserting his purpose… affirming the things that sustained him through the hard times, because in the act of writing he could comprehend and experience his own wholeness and life. This identity and perspective is something all artists can understand. He told Esquire magazine in 2010,

“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was, All is well. I am as I should be.”

I think that our Ego-Self hides the tender mortality of our days from us… we never know when it will end or how much time we have left and yet sometimes part of us knows that hidden amongst the cushions of “big plans” that we have goodbyes and endings as surely as we had beginnings. Part of us, no matter how much we fear letting go or the unknown, is ready.

In his last blog-post Ebert wrote,

“However you came to know me, I’m glad you did and thank you for being the best readers any film critic could ask for…”

signing out,

“So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.”

Just a few hours after reading the newspaper clipping I learned Ebert had stepped out of one world and into another on his way home. Wife Chaz wrote,

“He was happy and radiating satisfaction over the outpouring of responses to his blog about his 46th year as a film critic. But he was also getting tired of his fight with cancer, and said if this takes him, he has lived a great and full life. We were getting ready to go home today for hospice care, when he looked at us, smiled, and passed away. No struggle, no pain, just a quiet, dignified transition”

And so his “Leave of Presence” begins… a life where we are without Ebert and yet left with his prodigious contributions and his powerful presence in the form of memes left for the ages. In an essay for Salon.com he wrote of dying,

“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.”

“What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.”

It’s true. Ebert (as with Gene Siskel who passed before him in 1999) will live on in “two thumbs up” and in innumerable memories of people who knew him in real life or in the imagination of his fans, through the lens of celebrity.

Roger wasn’t sure of an afterlife and believed that he would possibly cease to exist – that nothing “absolutely nothing” would happen. The one thing he did believe, is something I can agree on whole-heartedly in the face of all the discomfort and fear over death and loss of control…

“I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

As Ebert did with the memory of root-beer, when eating and drinking had been taken away from him, we will remember again and again all the things our loved ones did, their writing, their contributions… treasuring and reliving them again and again…

but never again.