What is an MFA?
It’s a collection of letters. Okay, well, they represent the Master of Fine Arts. Which begs the question—I know we’re all thinking it—what are the unfine arts!
Would plumbing classify as an unfine art? I don’t know, friends, without indoor plumbing we’d all still be wandering the villages with our lanterns looking for reasonably snake-free pits to shit in. So, I’d probably label plumbing as the finest of the arts in that sense.1
Fine. MFA is a master of fine arts and let’s just decide together right now that in this scenario we mean to refer to the arts as writing, reading, scultping, drawing, painting, wooof…this is already getting too long. You know what, fuck the painters2, we just care about writing around here.
Okay, so the MFA in Writing, in, wait for it, creative writing (because ain’t nobody calling ad copy fine like that), is the name of the game here. And how does one master such a fine art as creative writing?3
(I hope you’re not reading the footnotes.4)
The apparently traditional way to acquire an MFA is to read a lot of books, write at least one of them, and talk about all your reading and writing in between5 to other people who are doing the same thing as you, apparently.
I have…some problems with this traditional way. One might even say I…take issues with the traditional way that run beyond the rational. And yet, I am also a creature of cultivated boredom, which is to say I try to actively feel bored with things that ought to not interest me so that I may feel excited by things that serve my life’s purpose.
At one point in my life, I used to think it served my life’s purpose to become a master of fine arts in creative writing. Indeed, it was my grandfather’s dying wish that I get a PhD in Literature.6
I would say I’m sad that this won’t be a reality, but then…it’s not the truth. Because I have felt spurred of late to become exactly the person I was always meant to be. I am now embracing my delusions running headlong into the waters of literary self-study and esotric mysticism while I work on my magnum opus.7
How am I doing this? I’ll tell you. But why should I tell you? Well, maybe there are things in your life that you’ve always wanted to do and be but those things were kept behind a certain cascade of checkpoints whereupon at each step you were required to qualify yourself in a certain way before proceeding onto the next one.
I used to think going to university would be a way to step into the world prepared with a deeper grasp of how to acquire true knowledge, instead I ended up realizing that a university experience can just as well be a way to keep entering concentric circles of nescience.
So, we’re going to stop spiralling, and the only way to stop spiralling is to spiral the other way, but this time, moving back out, up, and away, and truly the way out, up, and away is one that is within, through, and right here.
You might think I’m joking when I say that I’m on a path to confer upon myself a PhD in Literary Mysticism, but I promise you this is not the case. Why can’t I do it? Who has decided that only some institution which is nothing but a collection of papers on a wall can decide to add three letters after my name?
And I don’t want you to joke about it either. I mean, whatever it is you want to do and be8, just pick it up like a feral kitten and nurture it until it becomes your familiar.
How to do this? The easiest way is to give yourself homework. Let’s backtrack to my grandfather real quick. For much of his life, he was a schoolteacher and then a school principal. He loved all the kinds of poets and writers you might imagine a literary grandfather might love. He took me to the library almost every day. He helped me memorize poems. And…he gave me homework. Outside of what I got from school. He taught me cursive penmanship, taught me spelling, mental math, made me write little essays and then longer ones about books I read, assigned me presentations to give to him about things I was interested in but also things I thought I could never care about, and I suppose…I’m realizing now, he gave me a classic education to the best of his ability.9
Though this education was interrupted due to immigration and black magic,10 I do feel he laid the groundwork for me to become a fucking certified genius the kind of independent thinker I’m happy I am today, and also someone who feels confident in educating herself, beyond the confines of dusty institutions.
How do I give myself homework then, without my Whitman-bearded grandpa? It’s harder than just wanting to break apart old traditions and ways of learning and being. Homework has such a bad rep, but homework is a beautiful thing. Homework is the work that happens after the labour extended within an institution, it is in a way an extension of said institution but also its own secret thing, a time and place for you to draw conclusions and unearth findings that might never have arisen within the institution.
And living in society is a kind of institutional contract. As much as I’d like to think myself some wild rule-eschewing mystic, you probably won’t catch me wandering naked through the streets shouting some obscure Leonard Cohen lyric at the top of lungs.11
As we work and labor and raise our children and pay our mortgages and steal away specks of time for ourselves and buy our groceries and find the best ways to crack our eggs and bang out Substack bangers like this one that no one will probably read, we live and breathe this societal institutionalized contract.
But the homework we give ourselves is private, it is an investment in our inner life, an enrichment of every small thought we thought we’d lost in the day, a nourishing of our innermost selves, the part that lives beyond our bodies, beyond what we look like or where we’re from, what our names are, even, dare I say, what we think we’re interested in.
Here are, then, a few ways to give yourself homework & master any art (fine or unfine):
Read starting from a place of desire but allow those roots to grow unwieldy, for it is then they yield the best results. Which is to say, let your mind wander within the controlled space of another’s thoughts. And see what springs within your own mind as you do so. I firmly believe all roads lead back to the Supreme (however you conceive of this is fine by me even if it’s a celestial leviathan turd in the sea), and so, all thoughts and branches of thoughts, and thoughts of others, lead back to the Self, and this is where true mastery lives and wishes to return to.
Write to the ones who call for you. I mean, they may not literally be calling for you, indeed they likely aren’t. But through their words or just their mere being, there are people out in this vast world of ours, that speak to us like the voice of God in the morning waking us up with a kiss and a glass of water. Write to them, if they’re alive.12 Pray to them, if they’re dead.
Make meaning where perhaps you thought once there was none. In the Bhagavad-gita, there comes a point— a little past the middle—whereupon, after having described the manifestation of reality in a myriad of ways, Krishna appears to indicate to a bewildered Arjuna that the world, as a matter of fact, simply arises by chance! Oh! How astounding. The Supreme Soul declaring that all of this creation is an act of happenstance. How is an already confused, overwhelmed, exhausted Arjuna to find reprieve in such a thing, and indeed a thing that seems to go against much of the logic of what’s been spoken thus far. But oh, look, isn’t there beauty inherent when things that never happen…happen? And why can’t a thing of chance be also, simultaneously, a thing of blistering, flustering beauty? Is your life destined to be lost to the abyss of time? ARE YOU NOBODY! I AM NOBODY TOO! We shall perish in oblivion, maybe no one will remember our names even a week after we die. HOW JOYFUL, HOW WONDERFUL. Dare to make meaning in a world that says there is none. Strive to see the beauty in…it could be, it might be, it is, and maybe it is also not.
Practically speaking, that translates to, in my opinion, allowing some magic into your life everyday. For me, lately, this has looked as simple as lighting a St. Michael blessed candle and writing an affirmation. That is part of my homework.
And lastly, how to give your homework to master almost any art: know in your deepest hearts that knowledge is endless, as is the journey to acquiring it, and while being endless, it is also inexplicably inherent within us already. Which is to say, give yourself the homework of stillness. If you’ve gone through a period of time where you’ve only been stuffing your senses with stimuli even if it is divine blissful stimuli, turn on a timer and see how still and quiet and dark you can sit, and every day, try to increase that number, or every week, or every month. It is in silence we might hope to hear from the universe what grades we have received on our homework. I’ll end on Rilke who says: “Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.”
PSYCHE, I’LL END ON URSULA K. LE GUIN:
Only in silence the word, Only in dark the light, Only in dying life: Bright the hawk’s flight On the empty sky.
K,
Farewell travellers, journey on!13
(Stop doing the thing Shannan).
(Shannan, they won’t get that you’re being sarcastic or silly or whatever and someone is going to take that exact thing you said out of context and quote you in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, Shannan, you’re decidedly unimportant so it doesn’t matter.)
(Well, to really find out you first need to sign away 3 years of your life to me and pledge much of your supposed writing hours to provide for me very lowly paid labor that consists of teaching people younger than you how to write a sentence despite knowing full well every single rich fucker in there is using chat gpt—
Stop.
And try really hard not to: a) get pissed off at your professors who are usually worse writers than the weird kid in your cohort and b) get in bed with your professors (it’s a metaphor, is it tho)
Oh yes Indian families are that dramatic
that I may or may not instruct my husband to burn in a fire on my own dying bed
friends we are assuming a predisposition towards the light here, which is to say this advice is not for those with inclinations towards, for example, murder
amid the rabid fighting dogs that were my parents
long story for another post (maybe)
not yet anyway
by the way, this is how I met my husband—a story for another time, though
you might be feeling cheated at this point because the title of this post promised a very different kind of post then what you got, which is in an indication likely of the fact that i sometimes try to think about what would be a good way to get people to open an email or a substack post but then i actually start writing that substack post and my very ridiculously antidisestablishmentarianistic inner self takes over and then the actual content of what im writing just becomes something entirely unlike what will “sell” but you know this is just as well (which is of course what people like me who can’t write stuff that sells well have to say to make themselves feel better)
I wish I met (read) you when I was trying for 11 bewildering years (…11!) to finish my masters 🥲
Autodidacts rise up 🙌