The New Innocence and Writing Without Fear

 

“The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being.” – Joseph Campbell

There is a band called Praxis – they are honestly a supergroup – Buckethead, Brain, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell are the main players, along with Bill Laswell and a number of other musicians. All of these guys are really amazing musicians – Bootsy and Buckethead in particular are once-in-a-generation Mozart-level geniuses at their individual crafts of bass and guitar respectively. They do mainly instrumental work and in this work influences from jazz and classical and funk to death metal can be heard.

All their stuff is pretty good, but there’s a couple of tunes that are real standouts. One of these is a piece called “The Interworld and the New Innocence.” I first heard it close to thirty years ago and it still makes the hair on my arms stand up; an analysis of it is really not totally necessary here, but it is an unearthly combination of longing and undeniable drive that I find incredibly beautiful.

Perhaps in part because the song is so good, but I think also for other reasons, the phrase “The New Innocence” stuck in my head the first time I heard it and would not leave. I wondered about it. What did it mean? Why did it resonate so strongly with me?

When I began to write again, my path to the art was beset by fear; I often feel isolated and like the people around me do not understand me, and I often feel as though I cannot make myself understood; in social situations, especially, the words simply don’t come fast enough. Many of the most compelling experiences of my life involve situations and behaviors that have negative social currency or behavior I am not especially proud of – addiction, homelessness, involuntary institutional commitment – dishonesty, violence, dysfunction, sorrow – in short, though I feel I have lived a full and interesting life, it involves experiences that societies at large and people in general want very little truck with. It's made me extremely self-conscious and in many ways I often find myself frightened to be authentic with the people I am surrounded by socially, save for a select few who I treasure. It is very easy for me to carry this fear over into my writing.

Why is that? I think there are several reasons. One very obvious one is that our writing is judged and we are judged by it almost right away, as soon as we enter the school system. Is this paper deserving of an A? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is a failure and we get the dreaded scarlet F. I think this teaches us to judge ourselves as well and this is, in large part, where it begins. Or at least probably where it began for me. I came to think of writing as a way to win approval or disapproval. Columbine hadn’t happened yet, or I probably would have wound up in even more trouble, but some of my poetry, stories, and artwork in high school landed me in sessions with the school principal or counselor, who expressed “concern” over my “disturbing” artistic efforts, though of course most of my peers thought it was awesome shit.

The thing about writing with fear is that it introduces the kind of self-censorship that encourages an author to hide things. Inevitably, those things are all the universal ones – that is, all the important true and human ones.

I remember hearing a quote from Cormac McCarthy, something to the effect that drinking is an occupational hazard of writing. Note that McCarthy was known as a teetotaler. This made sense to me almost immediately when I heard it. In my younger days, I relied on alcohol to lower my inhibition to the point where I felt I could write without fear.  I took a very long break from writing.  At some point I realized what a shit carnival I was making of my life and these days I do not drink, but I’ve had to relearn how to approach the page without feeling self-conscious and frightened of judgement, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I am trying to push through those feelings and get to the heart of human experience in spite of them. Why? Not because it is therapeutic; it isn’t. At least not for me. Writing in this way makes me feel horribly vulnerable and exposed and open to ridicule. As if my whole ass is being presented purely for the purpose of people pointing out what a weird shape it is and what the ugliest bits are. So why do it?

For me, I think it is because it is the only way I have to get at those human things in my writing.

So these days, when I find I am thinking about writing something and feel like “people will think you are weird,” or “you’ll be rejected because of this,” or “people will associate you with this thing which is fucked up,” I know that's the thing I have to write.

I have come to think of this approach to writing as “The New Innocence,” which is really just a pretentious way to say that I am trying to write without fear of rejection or ridicule. There is an incredible and paradoxical power in innocence, I find. One of my old martial arts teachers had this saying that the only thing more dangerous than a black belt was a white belt. The Zen mind really is the beginner’s mind, open to all things without judgement. White belts might do something incredible simply because they don’t know NOT to do it or that they cannot do it. Again, thinking back to very early training, at one point my instructor had me practice sidekicks for a bit while he worked with some other students. I went ahead and did what I was told, and at one point I threw a kick that made the whole leg of the gi stiffen and there was a loud “pop!” and my instructor looked around and finally turned to me and asked incredulously “was that you?” I nodded and he said something like “I could tell from the sound that what you did just then was perfect execution. What you did just then, you want to do every time.” Of course, once I was told that, I couldn’t make it happen again for the life of me!

What is the power of innocence? The power of innocence is absolute authenticity. The real things in us that cannot be denied or argued with. It is the eternal, the expression of our humanity. When we are authentic, we own ourselves as human beings with all the beauty and ugliness inherent to our condition. It is so fascinating to me that the core of us is at once so soft and harder than diamond!

Society at large doesn’t really have a place for that kind of authenticity. And that’s ok. I’m not sure we are capable of the kind of total authenticity I am talking about with more than a few people at a time – it’s exhausting! At least for me. But one place we can be that way (if we allow ourselves) is on the page, and when we are, I think it can transform what otherwise might be a completely mundane experience or topic into something more than the sum of its parts, into something eternal and universal that I think other human beings cannot help but recognize.

I’m not certain how to end this little essay, but I want to talk about what I think is possibly the greatest lesson my mother ever taught me, because I think there is a connection here somewhere. That lesson is simply this:

When you love someone else, genuinely love them, you are never diminished by the experience. It my not be reciprocated. It may be painful. It may make you feel small and weak. But you are never truly rendered small or weak thereby. It is only ever an experience which ennobles one’s soul.

I said earlier that the experience of writing without fear makes me feel vulnerable, like my body is on display to be lampooned and ridiculed, but that’s not exactly right. It’s much, much closer to the feeling of saying “I love you” for the first time to someone you are not certain will say it back. Someone who might instead say "Yeah, you're fun to fuck," or "You make me laugh," or the worst, "I like you too."  I think in its own way, trying to write without fear is like saying “I love you” to the whole world.