Forget everything you think you know sit down and write. Set aside all the rules and open yourself to the possibility of a new experience. Before we try to master integrating theme in the arc of your pivotal character, or understand the principles of a second act turning point in narrative-genre-writing –- unfuck yourself.
Unfuck yourself from all the rules you’ve been spoon-fed since the bell first rang to signify the end of first period in first grade English. Because — those rules have been set up to not only influence and control how you express yourself, define what is acceptable, but also limit your freedom.
How?
Public school systems implemented the bell to prep young Americans for the factory bell their life will soon be governed by.
True. Fact. Look it up.
Back in the indsutrial era, the NYC public school system knew it had to prep the hungry masses for a life of compliance if they wanted to extort them for maximum gain and avoid the inconveinence of shelling out a living wage.
These were contentious times and labor movements needed to be canablizied and demonized or the whole thing would collapse. It became clear, that “hearts and minds” needed to be won at an early age. The bell was chosen for its ability to establish and build recall. It was set up to ring every fifty minutes to condition us to obey the shift whistle, think a certain way, and comply.
To be good little boys and girls.
Fifty minutes was chosen as the ideal length for sustained call back. Quickly, the bell became a welcome interruption to lessons and every school kid’s best friend as they personified it with the power to herald freedom. Thus, children everywhere began to associate its ring-a-ding-ding with the pleasure circuits in their developing minds.
We grew to love the bell like we may one day love the shift whistle.
But it was simply a means for control. I know this is a perilous argument as the crazies of our day wage their own battle against public schools to limit freedom and dull the rebellious urge. Do not mistake me, I believe in public education and am the product of it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t examine its origins, even if we must hold our nose.
Everything about education as it was originally designed was to help us make friends with a construct. We were induced. As in - hypnotized.
True freedom to explore and tinker with knowledge was reserved for those who could enroll in elite systems of learning that were steeped in classist and racist ideology, and therefore limited to a certain type of individual who was white as shit and came from “a good family.”
Historically, the rest of us were given just enough to serve the levels of society that were open to us and maybe strive for a little higher. Depending upon how far you’d like to go down the rabbit hole on why it is so important to free the intuitive writer within - I’ll also reference the way “the church” held onto Latin as simply a language that no one could really read or write, and therefore, control knowledge as power… for like centuries. As we tithed and bowed and hoped. Their power grew from our dependence.
As you can see —-
This method of choke hold on expression solidified by early public school models ain’t new. Our voices have been cut at the throat and damaged by an unconscious cultural inheritance we mostly operate unaware of. We have been dulled.
It robs us of one of the primary tools that make us human and sets us apart from the rest of the animal world.
Yikes, right? Tack on the various digital era barnacles, binary nonsense, search word optimization, break down in a shared sense of truth, and voila; you see that we are, indeed, fuckered. So, it is pivotal to unfuck ourselves.
But unfuck ourselves from what?
Well, everything. But lets start with language.
We were taught from a certain age that we had to conform to a language that is fraught with contradiction (and in constant flux) in order to be understood. We learned what a sentence is. How never to begin one with but. But good writing never obeys to anything other than its own unity. And most writers, by nature, have a perilous relationship with rules and probably were not very good students. It’s easy to see why.
What we learned and all we learned about our primary means of expression was how to win an argument.
And in our time, rhetoric has been weaponized, allowed to reign because it was left unchecked. As a result, meaning has been lost because rhetoric is based on evidence. But evidence has lost its value by the constant erosion of truth and because of that — critical thinking flounders which was the principle the whole foundation of learning was built upon!
It is yet another crisis our time must face. Perhaps the most pivotal one, because it has to do with meaning, truth, and our relationship to language which endorses or indicts all the factors of every other subsequent crisis we face.
Ring-a-ding-ding.
Think on it. These systems of how to think, and more importantly, what is acceptable in how we communicate what we feel and think, has been cemented into every aspect of our lives since generations before we were born.
What saddens me is that most of us don’t know what our primal voice even is because it has been entrophied after being fermented in pedagogy, dogma, trends in education, and so many other cultural norms, that many of us wouldn’t recognize ourselves unedited. Unless we scream. Howl. Yahoo. Or simply keen.
But lets get back to the bell.
The architects of the system that brought its ring of freedom to us intended to simply get us to fall in line. They needed us to be good factory workers, then corporate workers, with just enough knowledge to think independently and work without supervision, but not too independently as to yearn for something more. As I alluded to, New York Public Schools in the 1870s didn’t invent this concept – they just cherry-picked what they liked from English public school models.
And the crown jewel of the English public school model was the five paragraph essay.
As you can imagine by reading this — I was never good at it. Not that I couldn’t write. That’s never been a problem. I just was constitutionally incapable of complying to a five paragraph model. Not just because I was a rebel. It was much deeper than that. I couldn’t help but see endless possibility. I was inquisitive by nature, and for some reason, understood things through the uncertainty principle, even before I knew what it was. Most importantly, I celebrated doubt as the cutting edge of anything of value in the exploration of language. And suffered C minus essays for it.
Compliance is hard on contrarians.
I just couldn’t: tell them what I would say — list three arguments in favor of why I was saying it — and then tell them what I said in a concluding paragraph. It always felt false, and not very probing.
Years later, I learned I was not stupid. My brain just moved incongruous to my pen. I would have to break one or the other, as one does a wild mare. Then. I would be able to get somewhere. But first— I had to learn to unfuck myself from the bell that rings with overtones from the Euclidean compromise of expression.
So, what exactly am I talking about?
—I am talking about breaking the social contract.
And what contract is that?
—The one where we have agreed to fuck ourselves in order to make sense to each other. Serious. Where has that agreement gotten us? Look out the window and see where truth stands today. It does not stand on common ground, that is for sure. Look what language has eroded to from our pursuit of forming and winning arguments.
So, as the Talking Heads advise – let us — Stop Making Sense.
Instead, lets make a fucking mess. Make sound. Primal sound. Make enough to awaken the ancestors. Spin sizzy as a dervish. Get lost and then find. Be among poets, eat locusts and honey. Forget everything you think you know and write. Write as if your life depended on it. Because it does.
We used to make invocations. So, before we start this together – make a little invocation to yourself. One you know you will not share with anyone. Because they will lock you up. And then — Howl like Ginsberg till you can’t make any more sound and are exhausted. Rage at the page. Be inconsiderate. Get to know the shadow. Only then can you ever learn which rules to bend, and which to break. Only then will the beginner’s mind begin to guide you. Trust me. It will. In the meantime —- Write on.
For details on how to enlist me in composing a story-portrait for you or one of your loved ones, or where to engage with my seminars, please mosey over to the site and drop a line.
Love this post! Thanks for the knowledge of the bells. All makes sense. Enjoying your posts! Wrote this in a poem a few weeks ago, been thinking about rules a lot.
I say, fuck poetry rules
that exist—
keep your
carefully curated
list of
dead artist references
whilst staring out
the window of
your breakfast nook
at said bird, flower or tree
which only you know
the scientific name of-—
sipping
a cup of tea
pinky finger
raised at the
right angle
or nursing a
hangover with
black coffee.
Yikes! Please forgive the spelling in e-mail- there was so much esoteric junk I was trying to lay clear,, my poor brain got spun and I mucked up a few - hopefully, better now!