Tag: creation

The Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Big Difference Between Writing and Publishing

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I think a lot of the world, myself included, have a fairly naïve perspective on what it means to “write” a book. Hell, I didn’t really have a clue what it all encompassed before I started these activities a few years ago. Like most people, I loved reading books and magazines, and I’m sure my thought process at some point was the same as everyone else who has ever curled up with a good volume: “This is awesome! I would love to be part of creating stories like this.”And thus begins the journey of many from infatuated fan to aspiring novelist, essayist, journalist, or creative memoirist. It’s a naïve position, one that, should it remain in that unenlightened state, might actually allow someone to continue to enjoy the writing process.

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

Writing is a creative, generative activity. 

For me, it’s akin to the growing and birthing of life. First there is nothing, in fact there are two nothings, like two separate ideas, that eventually come together. Maybe, “What if there was technology that could dramatically extend lifespans? And that was applied to a prisoner who was in prison for ‘life plus a thousand years’?”

And then out of that nothing there emerges something, and then that something takes on a form and grows and grows and grows, finally resembling a thing, a reality, something concrete and solid, beyond just imagination or ideation.

Eventually, you have a thing! Just like you have a baby child, or a newborn kitten, or a foal, or a baby giraffe, you can see that the thing is there and you can have some general idea where it’s going to go in the future.

You might not be able to completely predict, and you might not be able to control, but you can at least be there to provide it the right values, offer boundaries and corrections if it’s off track, and encourage it as it takes ever increasing risks to discover just what it is, and cheer it on as it finally reaches its final form.

Publishing, however, feels less like a generative process and more like a reductive one. 

Look, I get that there are developmental editors, and peer reviewers, and critiquers, and that’s not what I’m talking about. Those are more like the mentors and advisors that come into the story’s life during its young adulthood so that it doesn’t go off the rails, and it actually meets the goals it has for its own life and doesn’t completely disappoint its parents by doing something stupid, like getting addicted to pot or becoming a fan of the Cleveland Browns.

Instead, the publishing process that I’ve gone through, whether that’s via submitting stories to multiple journals or creating and publishing a book (which I’ve done thrice now!) feels more like you’re carving a finished product out of a big empty block of marble. Michelangelo’s quote about “removing everything that was not David” seems especially apt. When you’re publishing, you’re removing everything that is creative, and you’re basically inverting the pyramid of effort and emotional energy expenditure.

During submissions, you’re not being creative at all. It’s simply process, a decision tree that must be followed without any sort of thinking: Is this a market that takes my kind of story? My length of story? My aesthetic of story? Does this market pay what I want for the story? Is it open? Do I match the criteria for authors? Will it respond fairly reasonably?

When you’re working on publishing, yes, there can be some creativity, but substantially all your effort is devoid of that generative activity which gives me energy. Sure, you have some flexibility when decide on a cover design, but the vast majority is more rote activity: What size pages do you want? What font? Blank pages here and there? Header? Footer? Page numbers? Spacing of lines? Margins? Do you have an account set up with the publisher? Did you choose all the categories appropriately? Turn on all the right switches, and turn off all the others? Did you proofread every page? Double-check everything? Did you pay your invoices? Did you set up all your reminders?

I haven’t worked with an agent and traditional publisher, but I suspect the same kind of administrative headache saps your emotional energy: does this agent work with your genre? Are they accepting new clients? Did you send the right number of pages? Did you get formatting correctly? Did you sign all the dots and pieces correctly? Did you input the right account numbers? Did you set all the switches on the client portal right? Do you have the meetings on your calendar? Do you have all your accounting set up correctly? Fuckin’ accounting. Shit, man, I though this was about writing stories! Nobody wants to keep track of goddamn receipts, we got narrative arcs to tend to and emotional beats to ensure get appropriately spread throughout the second act.

Thus the end-to-end is heavily weighted towards the administrative, tedious stuff, and I suspect that what often happens is someone loves writing, does some of it, is willing to put in the effort to practice and get critiques and make it better and better and better, but when it comes to publishing eventually gets smacked in the face by the alternate reality. Hard. Like, brick wall at 80 miles an hour hard. And that’s when they quit.

I don’t blame them.

In my experience, it feels like writing the text itself is only about 25% of actually completing a book. 

And the publishing is the other 75%. Which means that the vast majority of the work isn’t in the writing, it’s in the publishing. And therefore, it’s no wonder why I’ve spent so much of my time in the past years on writing for myself, and very little on publishing.

I’m fine with that. You know, it’s a maturation that I think all writers go through. And it’s an unspoken truism of the writing and publishing world that non-writers and non-publishers just don’t understand.

Maybe I should have joined those who quit while they’re still writing for themselves. Perhaps then I’d just be doing what I was doing for ten years, just drafting stories in my notebook and leaving them there, satisfied by my obeisance to the Muse and my cup filled with the knowledge that I’ve been honest to myself and my desires.

But I didn’t. And, through that, I’m glad I have persisted. There is value in publishing, certainly, and yet I’m not experienced enough in that to be able to fully flesh out all the value. I’m pretty sure it’s not a fair trade for all the administrative headaches, but I can’t be sure yet. Perhaps with a few more rounds to evaluate I’ll be able to create some greater objectivity.

Anyway.

I don’t really know how to finish off this exposition. Do I regret publishing? No. Do I wish it on others? Not on the unprepared, or those with weak stomachs who just want to enjoy the creative process or just appreciate the finished product.

This process exposes several undesirable elements that are quite easily glossed over in the pursuit of “Bestseller” status. If you’re fine holding your nose and putting up with them, you can get there. But if you’d rather remain indefinitely in the blissful ignorance of your youth, maybe better not to even try.

So that’s the major difference between writing and publishing. The WRITING is actual, real, exploratory development. It’s the storytelling that all of us fell in love with and which inspired us to pursue this kind of thing.

PUBLISHING is, to commandeer a phrase, the mind-killer. It’s the thing which, I would bet, turns more people off from actually putting their work out into the world than the creative process itself. It’s probably holding loads of us back, and, frankly, I don’t know how to solve the problem. Except by maybe, lowering our own standards and accepting that not everything we read is going to be superlative: it won’t be the newest, freshest, most intriguing, most-hyped, bestest anything. It won’t win awards. It won’t light a fire in our nether regions. It won’t move mountains, inspire thousands of ships, make us sit up and take notice, or even be worthy of commenting to our partner in the bed beside us.

But, still, it’s worth it. 

Because it’s someone’s creation. And therefore it’s worthy of reading, even if for no more reason than to validate the effort.

I’m Ecstatic That Terrible Movies Like Top Gun: Maverick Exist

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A few months ago I ranted (and quite eloquently so, if I do say so myself) about the several problems inherent in the May 2022 release of Top Gun: Maverick. From the plot to the characters to the fundamentally wrong story, I lambasted the whole entire project as being misguided and off-the-mark.

(I’m not the only one. Here’s “Everything wrong with Maverick in 23 minutes”.)

At the same time, I also wrote this:

Now – with all of that said – you’re probably going to think I’m about to say that Maverick shouldn’t have been made. That it was a waste of time and money. That it isn’t art. That it’s ridiculous, and nobody should go see it.

Unfortunately, if you bet like that, I’m taking your money. Because, in fact, while it may be terrible art, it is still art. And in the next installment, I’m going to tell you why I’m ecstatic that Maverick exists.

So, true to my word, here’s the complementary article – that while Maverick was bad, I’m still stoked that humanity made it. Here’s why.

Movies Are Art

And art is beautiful.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Pexels.com

Because art is the fullest expression of our humanity. As a species, we have advanced technologically and societally to the point where we no longer need to spend 95% of our waking hours on food cultivation (whether from hunting or gathering) and 95% of the remaining time on procreation. Way back when, like 50,000 years ago, there was no art, because there just wasn’t time for it. Who can make a sculpture when your fingers are bloody, or missing, from the thirteen hours you spent at the stone quarry? Who has energy to sing a song when you’re out of breath all day from chasing an antelope until it collapses and you drag it for six hours back to the hut to be processed? Who has mental capacity to think about something new when all you can do is shiver because the snow came so early that it froze everything and now all you can imagine is that you and your tribe are going to die very, very soon and very, very painfully?

Now, though, and by “now” I mean about the last five thousand years or so, we have become so damn efficient at what we do when we’re just getting by that we actually have enough time to spend it doing something else. And whatever we do in the excess time is, in fact, make art. Scott McCloud makes a great presentation of this in chapter 7 of Understanding Comics, and I encourage anyone to check it out.

Whether you’re writing novels, playing in the garage band, assembling radio-controlled drones and racing them in the Tuesday night league, or participating in Twitch streams of Magic: the Gathering, all of these are, by the definition that I support, artistic endeavors, because they are beyond the boundaries traditionally recognized of survival and reproduction.

The fact that we can make art means we have achieved.

We have arrived. We are there. We have overcome the persistent, perpetual barriers to survival and procreation that have plagued and continue to plague every other species in this planet’s existence. Barriers like drought, unpredictable hurricanes or tornadoes or typhoons, flooding, excess or insufficient snowfall, earthquakes and landslides, excessive predation, insufficient food supply without ready alternatives, and so on. In the past (again, before maybe five or ten thousand years ago), virtually any of those would have been catastrophic enough to wipe out a whole tribe without warning.

But now, those problems are essentially solved. We have wonderful modern creations like vaccines, hydroponic farms, interstate and international travel, and indoor plumbing. INDOOR PLUBMING! Do you know how magical it is that you can have a healthy poop and never actually have to see it again? Amazing.

Sure, we have problems. Of course we’re dramatically altering our climate by our actions, and you’d be a motherloving idiot to think that our children and grandchildren aren’t going to be paying for our sins and those of the three generations immediately before us.

 But the fact is, we now can do things like predict when the next famine is going to come, where the water supply is going to be sufficient or insufficient, what the hurricane season is going to be like, and how long all of these disruptions will last. More importantly, because we can see these challenges coming, we have learned to prepare for them. Remember the story of Joseph in the Bible? Yeah, he made the people of Egypt set aside their extra grain for years before the famine came, despite lots of skepticism and vitriol at the fact that he was depriving the people at the time. When he was proven right, the society flourished because all their neighbors, who were suffering for lack of foresight, came begging.

That kind of opportunity to save for the future only comes about when there’s an actual excess available to store for later. And that excess production capacity means that we not only can save for the future, at some point we’ll realize that we’ve probably saved enough that any more will just be wasting, and it’s time to turn our attentions elsewhere. Such as producing art.

It’s no surprise then that the growth of art, culture, and civilization are directly coincident with the improvement of humanity’s sustainability and resilience against the threats of external forces aligned against us.

So, yes, I’m proud of humanity. I’m proud of how far we’ve come. I am proud that the last thirty thousand generations have sacrificed and worked so hard to provide our recent generations the opportunity that arises from abundant production, so that we can spend however many thousands of our hours scripting, shooting, editing, and distributing artistic endeavors like Top Gun: Maverick. I’m proud of the achievement that humanity has made in overcoming the sustainability gap that so many before us had to suffer through.

And for that work and sacrifice I thank them immensely. I believe our artistic endeavors justify and validate the hard work that they have offered up. And so (paraphrasing a well-known phrase), while I may disagree with the premise and execution of making this particular movie, I am emphatically supportive of the efforts to do so.

Art Creates Community

Community means to have things “in common”, or shared. We share place, and foods, and time, often religion, and most especially values. Just look at how much alignment there is about how great this movie is, despite the small minority who dissent.

This movie has created a shared sense of community that had been in decline for years before the COVID-19 pandemic, and was virtually disintegrated during those two years of “isolation”, whether self-imposed or state-imposed.

Compare streaming a movie at home or renting a DVD/Blu-Ray and watching with your family. Sure, you’re seeing the same scenes in the same order. But you’re not experiencing the same thing that the rest of the audience is.

In contrast, whether you’re at a theater for film, watching a stage play or musical, or listening to the symphony, you’re experiencing it in communion with hundreds or thousands of your fellow homo sapiens. In addition, if you’re at a live performance, there’s the artists who have to look you in the eye (figuratively) and perform. They are there with you, creating with you, experiencing with you, and you have that shared, common, communal understanding of time, place, emotion, and sensibility.

Watching Maverick in theaters brought back that sense that there is something, many things, out beyond the barriers of our own living room. When you’re at home you have so many other distractions – the cat jumps on your lap, the Tinder notification goes off, the peanut butter jar is calling your name. Each of these breaks your concentration and, by extension, your experience of the story. You get out of the flow state, that resonant parallelism that comes from doing the same thing as others are at the same time that they are doing it.

That parallelism seems to satisfy some kind of ingrained need within humans to be around other humans.

Remember, humanity is a communal species. We are not polar bears, who do their own thing and spend loads and loads of time alone. We are more akin to lions, where we do some of our own thing, but the greater majority of time and energy is spent with others. Live artistic performances are one of the greatest ways that humans have developed to execute on that inclination.

And we need it! See above, where we have become so efficient at food production and sustenance that we no longer depend on the assistance of others just to get through the winter. We used to, and so our epigenetics have instilled within us a bio-logical pressure to seek out other humans and share our experiences with them as they share with us. It’s almost as if there is an internal spring which is continually creating a desire to be around others that, if we don’t give vent to that desire, builds up a pressure within each of us that is only released when we actually get near others and perform some kind of activity at the same time.

Why else do so many people congregate at music festivals? It’s not for the music, or the sex, both of which can be easily had at home. It’s because of the community, the shared experience, that is created when they come together.

And so, coming as it did after about two years of constrained options to relieve that pressure for community, Top Gun: Maverick became something of a perfect opportunity to allow a large portion of humanity to finally get back to that community, that “bigger-than-just-me” feel that we had been missing for so long, even if we didn’t have the words to express our deficiency.

I’m Excited We Have a Culture That Allows My Dissent

There are several places where movies are made, but they must conform to the “party lines”, if you will. The most prominent example will be China, where the endings of popular Hollywood movies are changed in order to produce a different message.

Censors have altered the ending of the recent animated film Minions: The Rise of Gru for its domestic release in China, social media users across the country noticed over the weekend. …

According to posts and screenshots from the movie shared on Weibo, a platform similar to Twitter, censors tacked on an addendum in which Wild Knuckles, a main character in the heist film, was caught by police and served 20 years in jail.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/chinese-censors-change-ending-latest-minions-movie-rcna44345

And that’s not the only one. Imagine any book published, movie produced, or play performed in any totalitarian regime (North Korea, Azerbaijan, and Venezuela come to mind) that is critical of the government. Wouldn’t happen. Or, imagine that the movie which sings the government’s praises is criticized and called “terrible”, as I’m doing here. That, too, might go unpunished for, oh, say about three minutes. And then I’d be removed from the breeding pool and offered a Darwin Award for my troubles.

Having no freedom to make what you wish to make, to tell the story you wish to tell, must be incredibly depressing. Even more, having your story changed to fit some external narrative must feel like you’ve been corrupted, or commandeered, or somehow conscripted into sending a message that you didn’t intend.

It must feel like choking on your own opinion. You just want so badly to say something, and then someone else comes along and dictates what you must say, and totally perverts your artistic integrity.

The same holds for opinion about stories published and the messages therein. We (in the free world), much more than in any totalitarian society, have the opportunity to express our dissents without fear of reprisal.

We are not living in Orwell’s 1984, and I hope we never get there.

In that world, people are no longer masters of their own body, either via actions or speech. They are monitored, controlled, and re-educated for acting against the official lines. You think anyone there would be allowed to make a review calling Maverick “terrible”? Me neither.

We live in a world (in the general “west”), where I can express my thoughts freely. I am allowed to be one of the very small minority (fewer than 2% of the ratings on IMDB are 5 or lower) of viewers who think Maverick is a poor movie.

And the fact that I can do so, that I can write an essay titled “Top Gun: Maverick is terrible,” and this follow-up, without fear of reprise, without fear of losing some kind of social credit that I need simply in order to survive, is another level of amazing.

This is along the lines of the excess production we have created, mentioned in my first point above. We have created such a wondrous place that I hope we never, ever, ever forget or take for granted the freedoms and opportunities we have.

This is a wonderful world. Let us live like it is.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. I’m excited that we the have the capacity to make art, I’m happy that we can share it with others, and I’m thrilled that we don’t all have to have the same viewpoint. Maverick helped illuminate all of these, and gave me the framework to codify my thoughts on the subject.

For all of that, I’m grateful. In fact, you might say, I’m ecstatic that Maverick exists.

Photo by Diva Plavalaguna on Pexels.com

Writing Practice – 9/5/2018

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Heart & Soul, p 201

“While most young men dream of becoming a professional athlete, Herschel Turner dreamed of becoming an artist.”

He would read books on Matisse and Magritte. He practiced cubism, sculpture, and 3-dimensional art. He painted wide swaths of canvas with daring colors, red and blue and green and orange, sometimes merging them into a dun-colored masterpiece that seemed almost indistinguishable from those hanging in the Guggenheim.

Herschel painted, sculpted, or cast into bronze by instinct. He’d seen all the others and determined to do it better, more simply, more provocatively, than they had. Just why anyone ever actually bough his shit was still remained a mystery to him. He even tried to throw them off with obsequious artist’s statements like

“This piece transcends the boundaries of language and meaning, reaching beyond context into meta-context and sub-comprehension. It is as if my feline inner nature were awakened by the transcendence of participation in the birth of this piece, and the reality has been shattered by its convergence into the conscious plane. Really, it is a sight to behold, one of the Nine Wonders of the Modern World, alongside Barack Obama, the gyroscope, and the theory of the electroweak force. Humanity is worse off for its participation in such drivel.”

And yet he was called a revolutionary. A genius. A man out of his own time. For us, as art critics, we could not see the value in what he’d been doing. But maybe that was because we were too close to the subject, to steeped in mythology and folklore of what had gone before to truly be able to step back and accept it for what it was, art, ART, art that moved people. That challenged them, that made their hearts melt or yearn or burn, and so they had to have his pieces, critical analysis be damned. I wish we could have seen IT. I wish we could have opened our minds, our eyes, just once, to see with that naive, childlike vision, to take in something just as it was, just as it made us feel, not what we thought it meant or with an eye to judge how well the execution outpaced the idea of the thing. OH, to be simple once more. To have that bland, blank stare of childhood, when you can simply like something, and you don’t have to have a reason. I miss those days.

Writing Practice – 6/1/2018

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Pen is running dry…

I like to watch the progress of the ink level in the barrel as I go along. Slow and steady it is, but it keeps going. The more I write, the less I have left to go until it’s all gone. Like footsteps, paradoxically, the more I write, the more evidence there is that I was here. The more pen on the page, means less pen ink in the tube.

I wonder if the people who made this pen thought about how it would be used. For grocery lists or for calculus homework. For taking notes in a quarterly divisional meeting at a large multi-national corporation, or for making doodles on the side of a notepad while waiting for the doctor.

The possibilities inside this pen are endless. There are whole worlds, whole universes, to be set free. Inside this plastic cylinder are dragons and demons and fairies and magic. Inside are robots and hyper drives and a new ansible and a Crucible. Inside are epic poems and haikus. Inside is a resignation letter from the President, alongside and mingling with the phone number scrawled on the back of my hand at that bar last week.

These things are all in there. They’re all potentials. misspellings and transgressions, sleights of hands and phurns of trase. Malapropism. Aproprisms. Run-on sentences. Adverbs. The month of September, and how it smells like sheep ready for shearing, how it feels like the ground is turning its own nose up at the change of seasons. Inside is a butterfly, dancing merrily on the edge of my shoulder, its delicate leg somehow caught in the uneven weave of my shirt, fluttering and flapping to try and escape, yet still entwined with me, so that I have time to take out my camera and snap a selfie, two, three, four, five, before I watch if finally leave, and take off and leave me wanting more once again.

It is a desert, and Antarctica, and Pluto, and Polaris, and protons, and Protease, and protein, and prescriptions and purses and pennywhistles and Pennywise, all in one. It is the large infinitely large and the small infinitely small together – mashed, waiting, uncertain as to whether it will manifest on the paper as power or pusillanimousness. The possibilities are infinite, a regular [unclear] Pen of the word, an infinite universe of quantum potentialities which do not coalesce condense collapse into one until I set pen to paper and become, in this world, the almighty.

Writing Practice – 3/27/2018

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(Today’ s writing practice session did not begin with a prompt. I simply started to write.)

To start a writing practice session, I always do two things, though not always in the same order. I review the Rules for Writing Practice – keep your hand moving, don’t think, don’t get logical, lose control, go for the jugular. And I imagine myself inside my own brain, a flat bottom and a half-oblong dome above me, grey, and I have a paint roller in my hand. I dip it into a bucket of white paint and use that to cover the inside of my a brain with whiteness, blankness, cleanness, renewal, readiness for the experience of writing. Once all of the surface has been covered, strip, strip, along the bottom – working my way from the middle, next, next, next, out to the edge, along a Mohawk strip on the top, next, next, clear around to the curve to the edge, when it meets the floor, painting, covering, all in white a canvas, in preparation.

Then I am ready to write. To burn through to first thoughts. To offer myself to my Muse, wherever he is that day, if He will choose to show up or not, if he will deign to stoop down and place a soft, reassuring touch on my shoulder, if he will whisper, warm, tickling breath in my ear, “Yes, go, get that, follow that thought, chase it, don’t let it escape, pursue, continue, persist, never, ever, ever let go, find it, fight it, kill it, master it, turn it, transform it, tame it, succumb it to your power, to your authority, to your will, do not relent, do not release, do not avoid when the subject turns delicate, or embarrassing, or insecure, for you are to know that you are the one in control, you are the one from whom all these blessings flow, you are the god in this world, this world you have created, this universe at the tip of your pen, you are the Alpha and the Omega, what you bring about here shall live in mythology and archaeology and your subjects’ anthropologies for as long as they exist, for you are a deity far above all others, you have the power to build up, to tear down, to keep, to preserve, to destroy, to eliminate, to mould and fashion and to remake and to evolve, you are the thing in this world that all other things are subject to, and so therefore with such great authority comes great responsibility, an awareness of self, an introspection of your power, your ability, your authority, and your standing in this world, that world, that experience, you have power and authority, yes, so choose wisely, choose judiciously, make with circumspection and introspection and valor and virtue, for what you make, what you destroy, what you build and what you tear down become your legacy, your history, to the universe above you, the god who sits judging you for your godhood shall weigh your actions, your perseverance, your perversity or magnanimity and he, she it, they too shall judge, with the same measure as which you used to judge, so take care, be wise, be well, and do good work.”

Love is (4 of 10)

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Love is the separation of duty from voluntary action. Love is choice. Love is looking at another and saying “I choose you.” Not just “I do this because I must” or “Because I cannot see any other way to live my life right now.” Love is “I make time for you.” Love is “I give up for you.” Love is sacrifice. Love is voluntarism in action. Love is discipline, and care and concern. Love is truth and justice at once. Love is to see the good and seek out the bad. To observe, not ignore. not to justify, either, those things which are wrong – but to admit the wrongness – to realize the wrongness – to acknowledge the deficiency and to wait for it. Love is to send one’s heart into the abyss, not knowing whether it will return, but whether or not it does is not the issue. The issue is the sending out – the excessing – the exuding – the extruding – of the things which once held us back and yet now free us to greater exploration of self.

Love is inspiration. Love is adoration. Love is trepidation and apprehension. Love is to hope and fear; to hope for good, to fear that same good. For how unlikely is it that both the good and the bad do not come together? For so much good that there is, must not there also be bad, poor, miscontent, malcontent, to balance it out?

Love is balance. Love is peace. Love is trust and it is distrust and it is jealousy and it is protection and it is determination and it is absolution of the wrongs and penance for the sights. Love is trust; love is jealously. Love is to see your lover in the arms of another and want to end your own life at the thought of missing out on that touch. Love is determination. Perspiration. Inspiration and to believe that there will be better to come, because of love, despite love, in response to love, as a result of love. As a result of fear. As a result of impropriety and reconciliation, as a result of recognition and reparations.

Love is there. It is here. It fills and drains. It empties itself of all thought. It consumes, it subsumes, it burdens and relieves from all burden. Love is these things and more. And nothing at all. Love shall keep us alive. And it shall kill us – take us – eliminate us – remove us – it makes us. Love is degenerative, destructive. Supportive and stringent and supplicant. Love is the way we relate to the non-animals, the un-beasts of this world. The lower forms – the ox and ass and centipede and lichen – they react to the world. Stimulus – response. Action – reaction. They are not loving creatures. They cannot determine that separation between must and can. I can do this for you. I must do that for some other reason. Only one is love. The other may be devotion. It may be duty. It may be appreciation. But it is not love. Love is a choice – an all-encompassing, an enforcing, an engaging, an enraging choice. Love is a choice, and one which we will do well not to take lightly. For those who disregard love’s strength find themselves burdened – struck down – incapacitated under the weight. The weight of a hundred elephants standing end to end, pressing down on your chest. Suffocating, sterilizing, purifying. Beware – beware of love – give it not lightly. Receive it not lightly. Do both at your own peril.