John J. Walsh IV

Since the first people drew on the walls of caves, art has been a collaborative effort. The creative talents of one has helped nourish the creative talents of another. One inspires two, two inspire ten, and in the end there is this vast community of people connected by a love and passion that drives them beyond reason. And it’s when people cherish that web of creativity that amazing things happen.

That is an (unedited) excerpt from one of my very first correspondences with artist Martin Abel. I was, at the time, trying to explain why I, a complete and total stranger, was so willing to assist him in his endeavor to help his then-girlfriend (now fiancée) Hannah return to Australia. At this point, I wasn’t even thinking of asking him to illustrate Of Sirens and Sand, because the project was honestly of a much smaller scale, as this was a mere few days after its extremely humble inception.

My primary aim was the butterfly effect of creative efforts, pushing forth influence in time, but as I look back now at this small chuck of text, I realize that I predicted my own future, in a way I hadn’t considered: a creative loop. Martin’s artwork had certainly been an influence on me, but after the ball got rolling on our friendship, I found myself in his shoes, with my writing influencing him. And so the cycle went, eventually turning into a maelstrom of ideas flowing freely between us. The lines I wrote were the ones Martin inked; the lines he drew became the ones I scrawled. This is an experience I emphatically wish upon every kind soul who wishes to create.

What this has fostered for us is an environment of constant sharing. He peers into my journals, and I into his sketchbooks. As such, I get to see those rough drawings that the (unfortunate) public will probably never get to see. This causes the occasional friendly battle between us, over ideas that I simply cannot bear to see him give the axe. “But I can’t even remember why I drew this!” he’ll say. “The knowledge of inspiration fades, but not the power of what it forged,” I’ll fire back. And so it goes. Sometimes I win this war, sometimes I do not. Ultimately, this is his artwork and his choice. I am, after all, just giving him private feedback, nothing more than my own opinion. However, it does make me think about the nature of this whole interpersonal creative process, and the path of creativity in general.

What I am really saying to Martin when we have this debate is this: Don’t give up on that particular piece, concept, or idea simply because you don’t understand where it currently fits into your scheme of things. Perhaps you aren’t the person who is supposed to figure it out.

When I bought his sketch “Message in a Bottle” from him in 2008, he didn’t even want to let the piece see the light of day, let alone be sold. Hannah (having returned to Australia) pretty much twisted his arm into doing so. The minute I saw the piece, I had to have it; I connected with it right away. When it arrived, I saw that its actual title, penciled at the top of the page, was “Rest Your Soul.” My mind was already at work. Shortly thereafter, I wrote a poem by the same name which eventually morphed into one of the major components of Of Sirens and Sand. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but that was a key point in the evolution of the book.

When I sent a copy of that poem back to Martin, it was only then that he began to understand what his sketch had meant, just as I had to see his sketch for me to begin to fully comprehend what the ideas in my own head were leading me toward. It took two of us to solve these particular mysteries. This experience is a major reason why I believe that you need to open yourself up to the very real possibility that your work will connect with someone else, even if you don’t understand yourself just how.

The other night, Martin and I got into this discussion once more. Looking to explain further why I thought he shouldn’t abandon a particular piece, I finally compared it to a rock:

Your work sits before you, a seemingly dull piece of stone. You look at it from every angle and fail to find any redeeming value. You are tempted to declare the endeavor a complete loss and throw the seemingly useless rock aside as so much creative garbage. But something, or someone, tells you to keep at it. You pick up the chisel and mallet, proceeding to work on the idea. You continue to chip away at it, until suddenly the thing bursts open, bright with glistening crystals. Somewhere, in the middle of what once seemed so dull and ordinary, there lies brilliant meaning. See what you would have lost if you had abandoned your efforts?

One can give the counter argument: But what if you get to the middle of the stone and find no geode awaits you? Is this a waste of time? I contend that it is not. I had several ideas which did not make the final cut of Of Sirens and Sand. However, many of those ideas that did were constructed of the remnants that came from chiseling away at those ideas that didn’t. (In fact, many of the ideas were from a wholly different project, a prior attempt at a one act play.) Breaking apart the big ideas into their components many times allowed me to discover small crystals that would fit into the picture I was composing. Sure, I hadn’t hit a mother lode, but these small concepts added up and sometimes lead me to put together pieces I would not have otherwise considered.

It is my belief that if something comes out of your mind, you should not discard it. Perhaps it doesn’t fit into the project at hand, but it fits somewhere, for someone. That sketch you did, just sitting in your car on a cliff overlooking the sea, the one that you didn’t believe amounted to anything, might just be what becomes the keystone of an entire imagined universe, or the start of an incredible friendship.

This subject has been on my mind a lot lately, ever since completing my first round of Dead Space. I was invited to play the game by David Boyd, and was subsequently delighted with one of the most incredible gaming experiences of my life. Granted, I am not what is traditionally defined as a gamer; I don’t even own a next-gen gaming system, which is why the aforementioned game of Dead Space was played at David’s house. I provide this information because I hope that it will help you, the reader, understand that this is not some fanatical general devotion that I harbor, by any stretch of the imagination. What I’m trying to say, in so many words, is that I hold no bias toward or against video games.

I suppose that the first step, given the title of this article, is to establish some rough assemblage of what a good definition of art is. Rather than resorting to simply tossing out a canned response from an online dictionary, let’s try to get at the root of it by dissecting that which is commonly referenced as art.

I’d imagine traditional art, in the form of drawings or paintings, is probably the first image that comes to mind when asked to think of what art is. At their core, these are excellent examples of individuals transferring their creative energies into physical form via pencil, pen, or brush. Some idea or experience rests in their minds that is compelled to force its way out into the world and be transferred in some manner into the mind of another. The same can be said of sculpture, music, dance, writing, acting, and film making, just to name a few recognized outlets. These recognized artists/creators use their individual or joint talents to bring forth into the world something they believe special and worth sharing.

Now, even in these established areas of art, things can go awry. If I draw a cruddy stick figure on a napkin, I doubt the majority of people would recognize it as art. If I stuck a bicycle in the middle of a parking lot and attempted to call it a sculpture, I’m not kidding anyone. So there are boundaries. I believe that good indicators are the amounts of genuine thought and skill that are put into the creation of the final product. You need to have both of these factors lined up for something to be considered art.

So, given the above, why should video games be considered as much art as any of the previously noted forms? Let’s break down the core basics of what goes into a video game:

• Characters/Environments - Someone has to design them. Established artists created these essential elements. Have you ever seen some of the concept art that goes into the creation of a video game’s world? Depending on the picture, without the knowledge of its ultimate purpose, you would have a hard time knowing it was for a game as opposed to a stand-alone piece of art. These are some seriously talented individuals.
• Music - There’s someone sitting down and composing these scores. In the early days it was simple, given the relatively primitive nature of gaming systems’ sound capabilities, but regardless, someone composed that music. There are games today that have scores which rival (if not surpass) those of movies.
• Story - What’s the point of a game if nothing happens? Perhaps games like the original Super Mario Bros. don’t have complicated plots, but there’s no denying that there’s storytelling involved in something along the lines of BioShock. In a game like that, you are basically looking at an honest-to-goodness script, no less so than for a Hollywood film.
• Programming - You can’t just take concept art, music, and a story and throw them into a game as if it were some sort of digital blender. There’s a whole team of programmers working to bring about the presentation of those elements. They build the invisible stage upon which everything else performs.

The first three I believe explain themselves. How are these elements any different from those involved in a traditional film? If the individuals that created these aspects of a game were to do so for a movie, their status as talented creative individuals wouldn’t lie in dispute. However, since they employed their talents toward a video game, their contributions are somehow seen as being inferior to those of their Hollywood counterparts. I say hogwash to that. The medium does not in any way diminish the quality of their work. Good design is good design. Good music is good music. Good writing is good writing. It’s as simple as that.

So were are left with the odd man out: programming. This is ultimately what separates video games from movies. (Especially now that CGI has become increasingly present in the latter.) Whereas a film is completely and solidly predefined by the time it reaches a viewer, a game comes with certain unknowns. Granted, players only have as many options available to them as they are given, but game developers must strike a balance between telling a player what to do (in one manner or another) and letting them have free reign. This is all part of the art of creating a game. The skill comes in letting a player make as many decisions as possible while still providing the desired experience.

As an example, I would like to use the manner in which music is presented in Dead Space. As events happen, the score alters to reflect these changes. The simplest instance of this is the basic interaction with the game’s monsters. There are haunting notes when they stalk you, loud horns while they are attacking, and an elegant transition into the ambient music when you finally kill them. The music remains completely seamless during all of these changes. Never once do you hear one sound file stopping while another begins. To your ears, it is as if the composer knew precisely when and how long your battle would be waged. But he couldn’t have known. I could have killed the creature with two blasts of a plasma cutter or been out of ammunition and had to run, extending the length of the skirmish to well over a minute. Somewhere between the composer’s music and my ears, there is the invisible, yet genius, work of a programmer. Someone (and if I ever find out who, I will write them a love letter) put amazing amounts of effort into designing a sound engine that could dynamically compose the final music you hear as you play. It takes the beautiful compositions that would otherwise be straight sheet music and rearranges them to match the player’s experience, on the fly. Can you even begin to fathom the amount of skill it takes to do that? This is not just some no-talent hack pressing a few buttons on a computer keyboard. This is someone with real skill, putting genuine thought into the final product. One would have to understand the nature of music, be aware of the experience of it, and then (on top of all that) also have the knowledge to pull off the intended result by writing lines of code. I don’t know about you, but that’s an artist to me.

And so all these elements come together to form what we call a video game. Perhaps it is trash. There certainly are horrible games out there, a complete waste of the discs upon which they are stored. But there are also equally bad movies. That’s just the nature of art. However, there are amazing games out there. I defy anyone to come away from BioShock and not contemplate the question of where humanity sits in the shadow of industry. Sure games like this are few and far between, but so are films. And that is ultimately my bottom line: Video games are an art form, which can be executed in any countless number of ways, with varying degrees of quality. They hold the same potential for intrinsic value as any painting, film, or play. All it takes is the desire to see the possibilities. Where some see a blank canvas, another sees a sweeping landscape. Where one sees a video game console, some see an experience ready to come to life.

As I wrote before, yesterday I finished the revised draft of my book Of Sirens and Sand and sent it off to author Marcus Alexander Hart. While a small handful of individuals have read early versions of the stories in various orders, he was the first to receive a polished manuscript with no real prior knowledge of the details contained within.

Tonight he responded with an email that pointed out a few typos; informed me of the historical battle between that and who; gave a good, solid suggestion for one story; and put tears of joy in my eyes. (More on that later.) What follows is an excerpt, and what I can honestly say is my very first review.

I read your book today. I have to admit, for the first few pages I was a little worried. I thought your prose was overwrought and your dialogue unnatural and arch. After all of the work you put into it, I was afraid to have to tell you what I thought of it.

Then I realized, it’s not you. It’s me.

You don’t write like I do. You don’t hammer words together to satisfy the textbook mechanics of storytelling while sometimes managing to be clever. You use a lyrical kind of prose so baroque that it becomes poetry. This is not a collection of stories. This is a painting of the sea rendered in words. You don’t write like an author. You write like an artist.

Once I stopped trying to shoehorn your artwork into my template the whole thing became strikingly beautiful in its execution. The characters and the stories don’t stack up like bricks into a wall of story. They flow together like trickles of rainwater pouring through tendrils of fog, emerging and mixing and falling away into a sort of lucid dream that lets you know secrets as you need to know them. You’ve managed to deftly paint beauty through the Captain’s longing and horror through the old man’s fear—opposite ends of the spectrum rendered with equal skill and passion.

You have done a wonderful thing here, John Walsh. This is going to be a fantastic book. I’ve already read it twice.

You should be proud of yourself. I’m proud of you.

Without my having breathed a word about the intentions behind the book, he understood them, perfectly. Each and every endeavor I set out to accomplish met with unqualified success. That alone was reason to rejoice, but I had another.

First, a little back story.

Early in his published career, Ray Bradbury met with Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) at the latter’s behest. After they sat down, Huxley leaned forward and asked, “Mr. Bradbury, do you know what you are?” Bradbury replied that he did not. “You’re a poet.”

Up to that point, Bradbury had attempted writing poetry since high school, but had (by his own admission) failed miserably. So he wrote short stories instead. And yet, here was a famous, well-renowned author telling him that he had succeeded at publishing poetry, when he didn’t even think that he had ever tried.

Thus went the day that Ray Bradbury discovered he was unknowingly a poet. Because of that meeting, he came to recognize his preferred style as prose poetry, and has since shared that realization with a great many people, myself included.

This is relevant to the subject at hand because the impetus for Of Sirens and Sand was the maddening frustration of my own artistic shortcomings. I grew up with the sea somehow in my blood, but believed myself, merely a writer, incapable of capturing it the way an artist could with a brush.

Yet, now, here is one of my favorite writers, telling me that I am an artist. To borrow Bradbury’s response to Huxley, “I didn’t know that.”

So I, armed with this freshly-acquired revelation, began to weep tears of joy. Ray Bradbury has been guiding me for seventeen years, be it through his work, words, or personal advice. The man has shown me the path, promised that great things lie ahead.

He was right.

Thank you, Marcus, for your exceedingly kind words. I shall cherish them always.

Since September of 2008, I have lived with a swirling maelstrom of ideas occupying the better part of my brain. It has led me to incredible places, introduced me to amazing friends. My life has changed drastically in that span of time. I cannot comprehend how to explain everything to that younger version of myself who is blissfully unaware, writing in his notebook, enjoying his grandparents’ company nineteen months ago, standing at the precipice of it all, not knowing that he is about to take a diving leap off a cliff and build his wings on the way down.

I have been laid off, moved, dislocated a kneecap, been in a wheelchair, and narrowly avoided surgery in this span of time. I’ve been broke at certain points, barely able to make ends meet. And yet, here I stand. The constant through it all has been this book, this small collection of short writings, which has guided me through life to someplace grand and wondrous. Perhaps I didn’t bring forth the next great American novel, or even a novel at all, but I still did something I’ve always dreamt of doing: writing.

I built an entire universe within the confines of my head, and then proceeded to pour its contents onto the page. I don’t need a publisher’s permission to do that. Hell, I don’t need anyone’s permission. I refuse to judge the success of my life on the grounds of what other people did, or might expect me to do. I wrote for myself; the rest of the world is inconsequential.

But, as fate would have it, someone else saw and believed in the same world I did. He now forges in lead that which I founded in laid ink, the Mugnaini to my Bradbury. This book gave me Martin Abel, and there is no truer a friend for which I could have asked. And, having done such, there is no possibility of failure, for success is already mine. The criteria by which I scrutinize myself having thus been met, I can look forward to and enjoy whatever the future holds for that which I’ve decided to create.

Currently, the revised (second) draft of Of Sirens and Sand rests in the hands (read: email inbox) of one of my favorite authors, Marcus Alexander Hart. I’ve the good fortune of calling the man a friend, but that does not mitigate the fact that I hold him and his writing in extremely high regard. Though he asked kindly to read the first (rough) draft of the book, I had to refuse. I wanted so desperately to call the project good and done, but part of me could not deny that there was still some growing to do. So, I spent several more months working, writing, and delving deeper into the world through whose window I had but glanced.

What developed was a stronger, more mature story, one of which I could be insanely proud. Though there would undoubtedly be many edits in its future, the body was strong, and it begged of me to let it cross over into this universe. And so the draft was saved, compiled, and sent out into the world. I’m simultaneously nervous and excited. I’ve wondered what this day would feel like for a very long time, and I still don’t entirely comprehend it.

I suppose that someday I’ll have to look back at my past self, sitting here in front of the computer writing this blog entry, and explain it as best I can. Perhaps I’ll hand myself a beautiful, illustrated book with my name printed across the front and a hand-written message inside: This is all because of you. Thank you for dreaming it possible.

After a solid day’s worth of work, this new site is officially online! I’ve ported the few short pieces I had on my LiveJournal over to this new site and tagged them with the same name: The Captain’s Journal. Those particular writings come sporadically, but there will be more in the future.

Now that I have this site created, I can cross a major to-do off my list and focus more clearly on finishing up Of Sirens and Sand. I’m very much looking forward to completing this labor of love.

More news and writing soon!

The cold future shot through my shivering synapses, repulsed by the very thoughts they conjured. But still, the darkness remained, in spite of the dazzling lights they forced upon me. With horror and eternal sadness, I saw it.

All the world around me, so shiny, bright, shimmering and new, hustled and bustled and ran their own right way, leaving me there, quietly, with the last book on earth. No one else stood by its side, held it in its final moments, as the last drop of ink faded from its tattered pages of dust. I was alone in my cerebral contemplation, my meditation of memory, holding so tightly onto that tactile smell of physical knowledge. I wept. And all I could pray was that the ideas once contained within would somehow survive intact, that nothing would be lost. But lost, something was. Perhaps someday, someone will put the pieces together and remember far beyond the years of their time to that point where something was real. Maybe they will understand, as I do now, what was lost, discarded, left to rot or, worse, be burned. And they, too, shall weep, having never known a book’s perfect embrace.

When the sight had returned to my eyes, I put forth what would become my decree:

We are beings of flesh, that feel and have texture about us. And so the ink suits us; it is natural and an extension of who we are. And so, I will always desire the tangible, the physical, the great time-wastes of that which was done wholly by hand. As for the mechanical ones, leave them to their digital worlds of efficiency and false-perfection, all contained on and confined to the point of a pin. Give me that which takes up space, breathes, lives, marks its presence in the universe, for those are my artistic brethren, the truest children of our creation. Can these cybernetic fools hold dearly in their arms these prized silicon conceptions? Or must they settle for mere postcards of a far-off visage, where they can only imagine the fruits of their fevered inceptions?

Certainly, I can admire some aspects of their journey into the electronic realm, but my heart cannot go with them. Digital has its time and place. But the roots are here in the physical and the inked, and to tear them out is to abandon something wonderful.

Medicine can improve a man’s body, but it will never replace his soul. Neither should technology carve out the heart of what the book rightfully is. And it is more bound in paper than they’ll ever understand.

Katharine and I meandered our way down the length of the pier, taking in the sights and sounds that engulfed us. The waves gently slapped against the pillars beneath us as the wooden boards creaked and groaned under our feet. The smell of salt air was invigorating, fresh and foreign to our city-bound lungs. The gulls cawed overhead, annoyed at the influx of humans upon their scavenger territory. We too watched the people, though with no disdain. I took in their faces, each one unique and with its own story. All these people looked so unordinary and interesting to me, each one standing out and catching my eye. I comment to Katharine that they look like characters, each worthy of their own written tome.

At a certain point, near the end of the pier, I stand waiting for Katharine to return. I continue watching all the faces that pass by me, appreciating each one. But there is one that particularly stands out to me. It’s a man most likely in his mid-fifties, grey hair and beard, walking with a cane. He stops and stands across the width of the pier from me, looks at me with his steely eyes. I notice that around and in his eyes he strikes me as remarkably similar to Anthony Hopkins, with the rest of his face being almost pure Ernest Hemingway. But it is not these celebrity likenesses that draw me to him.

It’s the fact that I’ve met this man before.

He was the captain from my poem “Rest Your Soul,” come back from his watery grave to pay a visit. He spoke no words to me; merely returned my gaze with his weathered eyes. I’ve no idea how he leapt from the depths of my imagination onto that pier, but there he was, flesh and blood before me. For what purpose, I cannot purport to know, but I can only fathom that he wished to let me know that he does, indeed, live on forever, both at sea bottom and in the words I’ve written.

Eventually he vanished into the crowd of endless possible faces, his mission accomplished. I cannot speak for his half of the encounter, but I can say that I treasure mine.

I walk into this place that has lain at the outskirts of my life for the better part of twenty-plus years, its inner workings unknown to me for this entire stretch of time. Somehow, as I pass through its door, I know that there is something to be discovered here amongst the racks of the vintage and the aging. Its interior space is a vomitorium for eras of fashion long since gone, and its eclectic nature is both bizarre and comforting in the same moment. It is an escape from the world outside, so completely against the grain of blind forward locomotion in its daydreamy stare over the shoulder of time.

She weaves her way amongst the cogwheel floor racks, her pendulum hips swinging between the gear teeth sleeves. Her Alien 3 / Sigourney Weaver haircut betrays the classic, lithe beauty that would otherwise lie beneath a bobbing bowl of dark hair. But it works for her, and does not diminish any of her features. As she walks across the store, I take her in: The gentle forward slope of her figure, the soft hourglass frame that her light blue top and jeans hug. She smiles with a cheerfulness that comes from working in this bubble, away from the world. Her eyes shine softly as she dresses the window-display mannequins, extending outside hints of the joy that lies within her retail home.

Music plays on the speakers overhead as she works. City and Colour’s “Comin’ Home” fills the store and my ears, this picture-perfect soundtrack the score for her hypnotic movements, for this small window through which our paths have crossed.

But the time comes to leave, and I bid farewell, to both this small universe within a universe and the woman who gives it heart. The door shuts and I look back through the glass as she helps the next customer. I have visited this world, but I am not part of it. And though it still calls to me, I know that I am merely a passerby, looking through a window into a world in which I do not belong.

I’m bringing this main site online, and while there is still much work to be done, you can at least get a feel for the basic structure and design. At first you will see the content that is currently spread across the digital landscape brought into one location, but soon after there will be many new and exciting additions. That’s the plan, anyway.  Stay tuned for more!