Merry Christmas!

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the ladder — a blogborygmus

I invented the word “blogborygmus”
in order to combat perfectionism.

Inspired by the real word “borborygmus” — rumbling of the stomach –, a blogborygmus is a mix of doodles and words that I most often scribble before falling asleep at night, the result of which usually goes straight to the garbage the next morning.

But having recently become a born-again-bum, I’ve decided to let go of my Inner Critic and post my late night rumblings of the mind — my brain gas — on my blogs, both English and French, for all to see.

Thus, I created the new blog post category: blogborygmi (plural of blogborygmus). The first brain gas to have honoured this category was oh what a beautiful day!

The above blogborygmus oozed out of me last Friday.
I call it the ladder.
Duh.

Cerebration is the enemy of
originality in art.
Martin Ritt

In her book The Artist’s Way — A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self — this is what Julia Cameron has to say about perfectionism:

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop — an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.

Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,” Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”

The perfectionist fixes one line of a poem over and over — until no lines are right. The perfectionist redraws the chin line on a portrait until the paper tears. The perfectionist writes so many versions of scene one that she never gets to the rest of the play. The perfectionist writes, paints, creates with one eye on her audience. Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results.

The perfectionist has married the logic side of the brain. The critic reigns supreme in the perfectionist’s creative household. A brilliant descriptive prose passage is critiqued with a white-glove approach: “Mmm. What about this comma? Is this how you spell…?”

For the perfectionist, there are no first drafts, rough sketches, warm-up exercises. Every draft is meant to be final, perfect, set in stone.

Midway through a project, the perfectionist decides to read it all over, outiline it, see where it’s going.

And where is it going?
Nowhere, very fast.

The perfectionist is never satisfied. The perfectionist never says, “This is pretty good. I think I’ll just keep going.”

To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist calls this humility. In reality, it is egotism. It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue.

Perfectionism is not a quest of the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough — that we should try again.

No. We should not.

“A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places,” said Paul Gardner. A book is never finished. But at a certain point you stop writing it and go on to the next thing. A film is never cut perfectly, but at a certain point you let go and call it done. That is a normal part of creativity — letting go. We always do the best that we can by the light we have to see by.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’ll strive for the lowest trash. No. But posting my blogborygmi will help me let go of “trying” and get me used to just “doing.” And who knows… I may even discover subconscious messages in my brain gas emissions.

How about you?
Are you possessed by
the perfectionist devil?

meme me, meme you, meme us all

My first meme…
Yippee!

I was tagged by the very charming Rob Lee who was himself tagged by the also very charming Bob Goyetche — two guys I had the great pleasure of meeting at PodCamp Montréal back in September.

Here are the rules for this particular meme:

• go to the sixth page of your Flickr photostream
• pick the sixth picture there
• post it to your blog
• tag six other bloggers

Well, if you go to my Flickr, you’ll see that I only have one page*. So I decided to pick photo number twelve, which is two times six (deep… very deep):

It’s my darling Daisy — I wrote about her in a blog post, Daisy Decides To Die – Act 1.

Which reminds me I never posted Act 2, so here it is in a nutshell: the next day, I took my Daisy Mae to the vet where she was put to sleep. Yes, Daisy died in my arms. And yes, I still miss her a lot. But I know she’s having a ball playing in “The Other Dimension” with the rest of our dearly departed little friends.

Now comes the time to tag six blogger friends (seven — added an extra one for luck) who, I hope, will remain my friends even though I tagged them (Goyetche writes that Internet memes have “kinda become the chain letters of the modern age” — eek!).

They are, in alphabetical order:

David Kemper (The DIGITAL Archive)

Jean-Philippe Murray (Lapin Blanc)

Ange Recchia (Buzzing With Ange)

Marilyn Robertson (From The Water’s Edge)

Kcrystina Stephen (Freshly Handmade Jewelry & Accessories)

Renée Wathelet (En direct des iles)

Gord Young (Gord’s Gold)

I’m inviting you to visit their blogs and leave a comment — tell ‘em I sent ya

* Note to people in the Future: My Flickr probably has more pages now, so try to imagine only one page.