December 10

. . .

Serenity is not something I am naturally inclined toward. Unless I spend a lot of time alone. Especially in the woods. Then it creeps in the back window, or the back door of my tent. But around other human beings, serenity doesn’t seem to know where I live. That must be why the Toaist hermit poets live in the remote mountains of south China. It keeps the dilettantes away. The paths to their hermitages are steep and rocky. It is more fun to sign up for a two-day yoga meditation workshop in Santa Monica and hang out with (other) cool chicks.

We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them.
- Thoreau

Complexity and serenity are not good companions. That applies on a variety of levels.

...a point strongly pressed, if my memory serves, by George Bernard Shaw. He one said that as he grew older, he became less and less interested in theory, more and more interested in information. . . Nothing is so hard to come by as a new and interesting fact. Nothing is so easy on the feet as a generalization. I now pick up magazines and leaf through them looking for articles that are rich with facts; I don't much care what they are. Evocative and deeply percipient theory I avoid. It leaves me cold unless I am the author of it myself.

In the case of economics there are no important propositions that cannot, in fact, be stated in plain language. . . Complexity and obscurity have great professional value; they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. . . They exclude outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

Additionally, and especially in the social sciences, much unclear writing is based on unclear or incomplete thought. It is possible with safety to be technically obscure about something you haven't thought out. It is impossible to be wholly clear on something you don't understand; clarity exposes flaws in thought. The person who undertakes to make difficult matters clear is infringing on the sovereign right of numerous economists, sociologists and political scientists to make bad writing the disguise for sloppy, imprecise or incomplete thought.
-Writing, Typing, Alcohol and Coca Cola, by John K. Galbraith from a speech at Harvard as it appeared in the Nieman Reports

Complexity when it comes to spiritual matters is the friend of the priest, the church, the book author. If it’s simple, you don’t need an expert, a guide. If all you have to do to find enlightenment is spend a lot of time alone, perhaps we seek out spiritual gurus to avoid solitude, to avoid a confrontation with ourselves, to avoid our inner world. It is like the art student nude models I used to paint. They don’t go to art school to learn how to paint. If they really wanted to do that, they’d spend a lot of time alone in a room drawing and painting. But that wouldn’t be fun. They go to art school to hang out with other artists, or at least hang out with other people who also don’t want to spend a lot of time alone in a room. Art students are fun. Artists can be a pain in the ass.

At least in my case, I need simplicity in order to follow a spiritual practice. If there are a lot of rules, I look for ways to break them. To paraphrase Galbraith, deeply percipient spiritual theory leaves me cold unless I am the author of it myself.

So what am I trying to do? What is the objective? Why do I live the way I do, alone in the woods? Why do I make my living as an artist? Definitely not to make money. I live this way in hopes of finding serenity. And sometimes it finds me.

I need a few words, a few simple thoughts, to guide me at forks in the path. I could take the path that is well-travelled or the one that is overgrown.

Which path will add to the serenity in my life, and which will detract from it?

Focus on that question, and many complexities, years of wasted effort and frustration, can be avoided.

. . .

Author’s Notes: Before I get emails asking me what I have against cool chicks, nothing. This is Archibald’s journal. Not mine. He’s kind of a curmudgeon. I, on the other hand, am a cool guy. I actually like the cool yoga chicks in Santa Monica with their sassy haircuts.

As far as Heron Dance goes, changes are afoot. I’ve created a monster. I’m going to simplify things. Simplifying things though is proving a little complicated. I’m hoping to get the changes in place in time to announce later today. If not tomorrow.

The objective: simplify, simplify, simplify.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on the thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.
- Thoreau, Walden