Outside Inside Me
I am, and have been for as long as I can remember, an Outsider.The term first started germinating in my mind when I read about Outside Art on Wikipedia. No, it's not art that people do on fences, in public places, or out-of-doors for virtue of those spaces being well ventilated. Outside Art of this type means the artist had no formal training and little input on their craft. Primarily the piece on Wikipedia refers to painters.
I first applied the term to myself in reference to how I design role playing games. Thanks to my mother,I've grown up with board games, card games, and puzzles, and added some influence from video games in more recent years on my own. Role playing games differ from these more mathematical types in a number of ways, one of the largest being the quantities and qualities of player input. When I learned about them in 2003, what set role playing games apart in my mind was the emphasis on stories told through the players.
That's the history, here's the Outsider part. When I had only played three or four different RPGs, at most six months into my involvement in the hobby, I was already designing my own. Not from the basis of other games, either. Of the first four (three of which are currently published), one used cards instead of dice, one was designed to be played inconspicuously in public, and one was about cookies. No other game that I knew about had any comparable qualities. (The fourth was also innovative, but in ways that are difficult to explain in lay terms).
To my friends, I was a prodigy of sorts. I didn't think outside the box, I defied the existence of the box. One cannot duplicate what one does not know.
Familiar as my past with role playing games may be, it is not the extent of my Outsider activities. We still have poetry and social life to tackle, and I'm limiting this essay to my top three.
At times I tell myself that I don't read more games written by other people because I have strong ideas about things, and I'll either dislike what I read, or wish that I had thought of it first. My relationship with poetry is similar, but more complex (although in ways that perhaps give insight to what my future with games may hold).
Periodically, I like to write poetry. When the dancing lights in my head have migrated to the particular part of my brain, I will write it as a woman possessed. Stream of consciousness, lyrical, and simple rhyme schemes are my major pursuits. Hardly ever revised, hardly ever good, hardly ever over 30 lines. I feel like I rarely ever get more than my head and shoulders under the water. As though an inner tube holds my middle, tight and afloat, rooted on the surface. I can't figure how to disengage it, can't figure how to fully plunge into the depths without getting hopelessly lost. Simply put, I dabble.
No matter if I'm in a writing (poetry) phase or not, I'm hardly ever in a reading-it phase. One possible reason that occurred to me recently is that I hold myself to standards too high. I unconsciously believe I should understand more of each poem than I do, have a longer attention span than I do, and hear the voice of the poet more clearly than I do. If I can't understand it in a prosaic form (much of Shakespeare's work I can grasp as intricate prose), or connect patterns in the rhymes every couple lines, I flounder hopelessly.
In this very specific moment, I suspect my earlier minds of having a one-dimensional view of poems on the page: it's all text. For any visceral sense to be engaged, I have to ramp up my involvement, either with my imagination or with my corporeal body.
Music attached to a poem is automatic aural involvement. It's a helping beat that gets me into the rhythm of the lines. In my mind, a poem without rhythm is just a bunch of words scattered on a page. Poetry read aloud is also easier to digest, if not understand. When I hear the words spoken by someone who can claim the poem, either as the author or an admirer, I can understand the steps and beats, and where the emphases land. Repetition is usually required to grasp all the meaning, but after hearing it once reading isn't so hard.
I'm comparing reading poetry to reading a science text book. Until you know enough of the jargon to jump right into a technical article, a well prepared television program on the same topic will be more accessible and fascinating. Poetry's jargon, however, is nonverbal, and demands more effort or intuition to be grokked. Too often when I read my logical mind takes open and ponders at the gaps and leaps and easy disassociations. My rational minds is distracted by these negative spaces and wonder's why they are good.
This all a long and winding path to explain why I am an Outsider in poetry, why I (historically), don't find writing inspiration from reading poems. I can take a good chunk of visual and non sequitur writing and doodle from it, or half listen to a song and finish ideas and phrases different than the lyricist does, and noodle off my own lines... but I have a difficult time sinking into text.
I'd like to. I'd like to swim so far and drink so deep, the flowing waters of Apollo's well. It may be a matter of devotion and concentration. If I set aside time to seek that muse, I could learn it's steps. But until that time comes (likely soon after I discover the philosopher's stone or invent a time machine), I will content myself to write poetry the same way that I pray: secretly, and as an Outsider.
Game design and poetry are my forms of Outsider Art, but past those two communities, I am not a butterfly leaping from one group of people to another, loved by all. To the contrary, I feel to be somewhat of an oddball, nearly regardless of the company. The past six years have seen schools, jobs, lovers, and homes come and go; half as many true friends have joined my life or stayed. It's not a bad life at all, just the one I live. In fact, I quite enjoy it. A drawing perhaps said it best, doodled while I was preparing to move cross-country with my new husband. The two headed tortoise represented our situation well: two minds, one home, with everything we needed always right with us.
I'm still that tortoise sometimes, always with a shell handy when I need to withdraw myself from the world and spend some time alone with my thoughts (and sometimes my thoughts and my husband), even when out in the world. True, everyone is that way to a point, needing refuge from the onslaughts of life. I can't explain how my aloofness is different from anyone else's, or how my outlook is unusual, or if my brain really sings in a uncommon key.
All I can say is that finding a true connection, even among other artists or thinkers or scholars or makers is rare for me. I reach out to the stars when the skies are clear, and I answer when I hear them calling. The winds are easier to feel and grasp when one is Outside.
These past words are what I sometimes call myself, not now I describe myself. No matter where I am or what I'm called, I hope there's one thing I always will be: Changing.