"Know Thyself"... If You Can

I found this musing on Socrates' old advice today... It's surprisingly hard to "know thyself."  

From an article by Maria Popova at The Marginalian HERE :

“One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote in weighing the nature of genius. “In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.” And yet that inner knowing is the work of a lifetime, for our confusions are ample and our missteps constant amid a world that is constantly telling us who we are and who we ought to be — a world which, in the sobering words of E.E. Cummings, “is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.” 

The article goes on to say:

"Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers — creatures surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons."

As often, thanks to artist/writer Austin Kleon for bringing this to my attention!

(Following the chain of references starting from Kleon, through E. E. Cummings, led me eventually to this quote from Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney: “being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.”

"Know Thyself" but in Latin 

What's been going on?  Well, I've been crazy busy designing and drawing several shows and mentoring a talented group of early-career scenic designers.  I don't feel free to post those designs yet (I like audiences to be surprised), but two of them are seemingly very simple, mostly screens to play on with light and images, but one is Sherlock Holmes' famous 221B Baker Street apartment, and another is the musical Matilda.

Links to earlier blog posts on Matilda HERE and HERE from when I visited NYC, saw the show on Broadway, and was lucky enough to hear its Tony-winning set designer, Rob Howell, talk about it.

Thawing Out

 After being snowed-in iced-in for three days it was nice to walk around the block and watch the ice melting.  Our little creek is rushing along, pretending to be a mountain stream, really full of snow melt.

A worthy read from creator Austin Kleon https://austinkleon.com/2017/10/09/the-art-of-finding-what-you-didnt-know-you-were-looking-for/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email on the usefulness of not being TOO organized.  (well no one could accuse my studio of that!)

The rest of the day I spent reading 20 year old emails... surprisingly funny and moving.

Siege - Days 26 and 27 Eastertide

Happy Easter!

It's a perfect Easter morning here: overnight showers have stopped and blue sky peeks through fluffy white clouds, sunbeams make the new leaves glow impossibly green and sparkling wet.  The strange little flowers that have been returning from bulbs planted thirty years ago are blooming - they look a little alien - but the red-orange begonia looks homely and familiar.  The tomato plants are getting scary-tall!

It's Spring.  It's Easter.

Enjoyed a Quarantine-Easter brunch with dyed eggs (we were out of red food coloring so used beet juice for a pretty pink) plus just a few chocolate eggs.

What else has been happening?

Well, Kitchen Dog Theater put out a call for home videos for a project... letting our fans and theater family know what we've been doing in our unexpected off time.  Here at the DeVries Architecture, Theater, Design, and Video Studio we - eventually - pulled off our 30 seconds of cinematography.  (It would have been easier to have sketched my video by hand... as a series of storyboards maybe?  Seriously!)  But it's in the can.  A virtual can.

I don't think I want to become a vlogger.  But maybe Kitchen Dog's video will be as much fun as Tom Hanks' SNL quarantine video collage...

More satisfying than video...  Books!

Just read a very good, useful, even wise book on creative work: Keep Going by Austin Kleon.  I'd read a good review so ordered it (through Half Price Books, based here in Dallas), but I'll admit to feeling a little dubious when the mini-sized book dropped out of its mailing envelope.  Sorry, but its size and zippy graphics just screamed those gimmicky gift books you find by the checkout stand...  Fooled me!  Because this is full of good stuff: advice, observations, quotes, and (while recommending old books) this book is very of this moment .  Honestly, exactly the book I needed to find at this time.

I won't try to boil-down this already slim book for you - just read it - but tidbits?  One favorite quote:

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

Annie Dillard

And the unexpected image of Salvador Dali taking naps... but with a teaspoon in his hand so that the spoon's clattering fall would wake him in the midst of a dream-like state, the better to paint his dream-like surrealist paintings.