Integral Education: The CIIS Blog

Sustaining an Artist’s Life at CIIS

By Cindy Shearer, faculty member and program director of the Department of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry, and Brynn Saito, program coordinator

“Burn your boats, but not your bridges,” said director and writer, Ellen Sebastian Chang at last weekend’s panel discussion on sustaining a life as a working artist.  Which we took as a reminder that being artist is a long-term assignment—not something you take on quickly or easily or lightly. You must “burn your boats” and drift towards the whorl of risk, inspiration, and dreaming, while simultaneously keeping your connections in tact. Take care of what bridges you to friends, networks, and fellow artists.  Tend to the things that will sustain you.  Or, as another panelist, writer Thaisa Frank, put it: “Every artist needs someone in the world who wishes them well.”

The MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts and the MFA in Writing and Consciousness at CIIS provide an opportunity for emerging and working artists to burn their boats and nurture their bridges—and even build new ones.  That is, the two-year Master of Fine Arts programs provide students with protected time, which tethers them to artmaking, and allows them to develop a professional-level body of work, and a vision for thriving as an artist in the world. Finding or sustaining a job, looking for venues to support art projects, and juggling family or financial responsibilities often fully occupy artists. Many rarely have a place where they can concentrate on their own creative work, talk deeply with other artists or find new mentors and ways of engaging their art. The MFAs at CIIS create these opportunities.

An artists’ life is a hybrid life: more often than not, the artist assumes multiple roles as she builds a life for herself.  During their two years of study, MFA students at CIIS identify possible careers and develop an MFA project and portfolio that act as companion pieces—illustrating how they will map and engage the world both during their time at CIIS, and beyond.  Students also develop the frameworks for articulating the values that guide their art, the heritages that influence it and the purposes they have for it. We believe artists who are aware of all the contexts that inform their work—and can articulate them well—not only create authentic and deeply-felt work; they are also able to use these frameworks to establish or enhance their professional practices (such as teaching, grant-writing, leading workshops, or consulting).

When you graduate from CIIS, you and your cohort members will exit together as a community of artists with valuable connections to our MFA faculty—all of whom are working artists—and local Bay Area guest artists and mentors.  Drawing on these connections will help your art to become vital—and you’ll become more fully aware of the bridges that will lead to creating and sustaining an artists’ life.   

Singing the Body Electric: The Living Structures of Art

By Kris Brandenburger, writer, mechanic, and faculty member in the Department of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry and the Bachelor of Arts Completion Program

There is something about seeing the works of places and things that seems revealing, inviting, as if I am seeing the emotional, not just the structural, truth of things, the “lineaments of desire” as Durrell put it.  As if seeing the tendons of place will hold me there.  I elide showing and revealing, so that I have the sense of the living structure revealing its innards to me.  I feel this.  Because I have helped build houses, I know their resistance to “finish work”.  It is as if the structural elements want to be seen for their ability to hold everything still, to be appreciated for their sturdiness of purpose.  When I see how wood joints are made, I imagine that there is a similar bond possible between people, and I remember to hold it as at least possible, if not obvious.  I imagine that if I can just understand those joints, then I will understand how to be a bonded person, that I will be recognizable as a girl or a woman or a human being, or...fill in the blank.  When I see the tubular frame of a racecar and know that some of the tubes are used to duct the water and oil, the life-fluids of the car, I believe that I know without confusion what makes that car able to function as itself, as its integrated and unique self.  Whether this is literally true isn’t nearly as important as the truth I imagine.

I wonder how much of my own liking for the industrial arts and the architecture of exposure also has to do with being an incubator baby--was my very mechanical/medical environment so early my formative notion of home, and did it somehow couple with the watery and fluid womb, so that in me a houseboat--perhaps made of metal--became my preferred, my ideal, home?   I think so.  I have not gone back to look at an incubator, but I have retained a sense of compact personal space and expression that is not at odds with the little box I started in. 

And last night I dreamt about electrical windings, 1931 Alfa Romeo 8C 2500 starter field windings to be exact.  The dream consisted of seeing the windings in relation to one another, in place.  It is not that the specific solution to a current problem at work showed itself, but the necessity of place itself was what was important.  I know that the solution is right there, there where those windings live, in their housing. In the dream for the first time in all these years of working with these things the language of place became so clear.  So I will work with that sense, try to be at home with where those windings live.  At any rate, my dream was like a cave drawing of me at my workbench loving the windings and my tactile relationship with them.  There is definitely something to Whitman’s singing the body electric. 

Quoth The Raven [Nevermore]: The Writer as a Listening Thief

By Randall Babtkis, writer, poet, and professor in the Department of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry

I love to steal lines. But even a good mimic is grounded in his/her own set of fingerprints. With my clumsy thumbs, I end up leaving prints on everything I touch. When I hear an interesting sentence being spoken and set out to put that sentence down to remember it, my retelling will be embellished with smudges of ink or fine pencil erasures (my filters), hybrid metaphors and new cadences (my poetry), plus some bit of esoteric parody thrown in (my humor). Before I am through with the rehash, my marks, my ink blots, are what is seen as “me” behind the quote.

Who made the discovery of the sentence overheard? The wild love I felt for a sentence is contaminated with my life, my choices. Without me, it could even be consigned to forgotten lore – the bust of Pallas stuck in the Poe poem. With me, Pallas may be conflated with my own ignorance. Intrinsically the original combines with the replication –  forged into the germ of something new. Occasionally it is only a kind of self-torture of ego, spilling out of the human soul.

What seems useful in the appropriation, is that I am starting from selective scratch. What exactly was it that excited me enough to want to repeat a line I read or overheard? Is it an impulse to interpret the countless signs and boost personal meaning along the way? Is it to keep me warm and not obsolete?

Even when I expect a collaboration with my “source” material, the single, unique, effect of someone else's words in my watery mouth leaves one asymmetry to remind me of myself alone: the ear attached to the side of my head.

The ear has both a peculiar and familiar contour, a diameter and length that is archetypal and genuine, maverick and in some “Poe” sense, precursed. There is enough originality in the ear, with its earprint. And with rudimentary authenticity, the ear picks up its own melancholy note.

Yet who can claim divine inspiration from that ear process, alone? As I am writing this line, another line floats up from a conversation on a deck on the hillside just below where I sit:

She is very dead.

Though my fingers bang out the words, I can't make sense of it at first. Was that my own thought, or did I really hear the neighbor's voice. I am forced to try to re-imagine a conversation which has nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe or the interrogation going on in my head. Who is the neighbor talking about, as she washes the words down with a bottle of white wine? She did not say it, but I almost hear her shout the name: Lenore.

Bend toward the parade of languages that surround you in your moment here on earth. The outside air drags itself in. Whether by mathematical formula or by ambush and cunning, repeat those sounds that float across this small universe and join the sense those sounds make in your own head. Your ear is already breaking these into new sentences. And when those are fine enough, they come with a loud crack. It is the noise of such polyrhythms, of blood pumping and foreign translation and knitting and intellectual achievement – though those never exactly belong together.

The sounds you make are distinct. They may be interacted with and even loved, since they are the sound(s) of creation.

Try it. Write something down that you just heard.

A Question of Sole: A Meditation on Movement

by Anne Bluethenthal, Professor in the Department of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry and Artistic Director of ABD Productions

Think of the soles of your feet opening to the floor.
I can’t feel that at all.
OK, then. Think about the palms of your hands.
That’s easier. I can feel that. But my feet—they are just… so far away!
Really? Far away from what?
From me!

Where do we locate our identity, (I wonder obsessively)?

When exactly did we reduce ourselves to a mere part? 
What fragment of me speaks, moves, dances, writes? What would it be to live a day identified with the soles of my feet? Would my words sound different? Would they resonate more deeply? Would my friends and colleagues look at me as though I was suddenly not myself? Or not visible at all?

Are we so broken that we not only forget our connection to earth and other beings, but even to that wholeness that exists within the boundaries of our own skin?

I think it may be nothing less than revolutionary to yield our dominant fragments—head, shoulders, chest—to the less accessible, or marginalized parts—pelvis, back, feet. Our western culture of aspiration has us pulled up out of ourselves, out of the ground, out of our centers. And there we are, beautiful vertical beings reduced to eyeballs and mouths, while our lower parts are somewhere in an alternate universe miles away, carrying their infinite wisdom with them.

I need all the information I can get. And I don’t fancy walking through life as an isolated brain. So, I need to cultivate foot consciousness, if for no other reason than to remember literally and metaphorically that there is ground beneath me.

Further, I have a hard time with boundaries, which should make this foot meditation a simple matter for me. And yet, I have to remind myself constantly that I am the totality; that my art does not spring instantly from neural activity, but is being cultivated in every move I make – conscious or unconscious; is influenced by every book, image, food, conversation, sonata, news story, and foot-fall I ingest or perpetrate on my way to the studio.

This issue of sole is a personal one, emerging from a determination to liberate myself from the calcification of habit. The practice of sole opening keeps me from locking down into the most available piece of myself and therefore forgetting, or sleeping. I suspect foot consciousness might in fact be a welcomed antidote to sleep-walking. At least it’s working for me. My sole opening practice settles me right down into the present moment even while the habit of a lifetime wants to pull me out of my skin and into the future.