Bertus' beautiful brain

Unfixed interview

Language. I burn it to stay warm.

-Bertus Meijer

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Unfixed recently added a new offering—interviews with authors and creatives!

Over the last ten months on Substack, I’ve been exposed to a wealth of brilliant writers that explore the messy complexity of the human experience through fiction, non-fiction, essay, and memoir. Reading their work has become an engrossing, educational, and often goosebump-inducing new pastime—from the profoundly attentive Death and Birds essays to a LGBTQ+ serialized novel that always leaves me teary, to weekly laugh-out-loud letters that celebrate and ruminate on mid-life—there is a wealth of wisdom to mine over here. Through this new offering, we will explore unfixed’s meaning and implication in different walks of life—illness, of course, but also relationships, family, aging, socio-economic challenges, trauma and climate change.

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Interviews aren’t supposed to be this fun. My conversation with Bertus felt more like hanging out in a sandbox with an old friend, making castles and then destroying them with just as much delight.

But describing my sandbox mate is a bit of a challenge, and I think he prefers it this way. Bertus Meijer is an imaginative, free-spirited, deeply intelligent polymath whose spanning creativity is born from the dynamic unknown. If I could summarize the gestalt of Bertus in one word it would be “freedom.” Freedom from conditioning, freedom from the known, freedom from boxes, labels, expectations and assumptions. In his essays, his mind simultaneously reaches beyond and pierces the present; renewing and surprising itself in a dynamic, improvisational dialog with its surroundings.

Because language itself is limited, perhaps a list of descriptives can at least point us in the general direction, as perfectly illustrated in Bertus’ self-description:

Outcast, savant, jack of all trades, self-taught, intuitive, ambidextrous, introvert, performer, non-academic, fool, writer, thinker, holistic, mystic...but then again if it can be named...

“…but then again, if it can be named…”

So with that challenge ahead of us, Bertus and I enter into a mind-bending, thrilling ride of a conversation—using words and “putting names” to the imagined that both he and I might prefer to leave in the visual and sensorial realms. Together we explore the challenge of language to convey and honor the creative impulse that precedes it, expressing one’s originality in a world that wants us to conform, the meaning and importance of living unfixed, and how creatives can learn to lean in and trust the playful unknown.

If you haven’t already, treat yourself to the wonder of Bertus’ illuminating and liberating body of work, including his serialized epic TCOTNK—a beautiful, imaginative adventure into living authentically, without cultural conditioning, finding one’s tribe and living within the aliveness of collective creativity.

Transcript of our conversation:

Kimberly

Bertus, what a treasure to connect with you today, all the way over in the Netherlands. Welcome. Yeah.

Bertus

Well, thank you. It's such an honour to have this conversation. I hardly ever get invited to an interview thing, but it's so nice to be talking and to have the time to go somewhere with a talk.

Kimberly

Yeah, well you have such a unique way of expressing yourself. So for those who aren't familiar with your work, I just want to kind of preface the Bertus that I've come to know and love through his writing. Everything kind of comes down to one word and to me it's freedom. You seem to be navigating your life with the mission statement. That's sort of the horrible expression for it, but the desire to live free of conditioning, free from the known, freedom from boxes, labels, expectations, assumptions, and you're doing this through a very creative life and not just through your writing. In fact, I think you and I both at certain points in our writing we've talked about like words aren't kind of our natural state. I actually feel like words can be very limiting and they don't always convey what I'm trying to say. So here we are, expressing ourselves in words through Substack and now in this conversation. I want to hear from you. First of all, what is your preferred method of communicating your deepest soul? And how have you learned to sort of...reconcile the limitations of words and actually use them to your advantage through your writing?

Bertus

Oh yeah, that's right to the heart of it for me. I don't feel freedom is that... Not the freedom... I didn't choose freedom. I needed to function. I need to be sort of separate and unattached to be... to be even like basically functioning, I think. That's why I sort of retreated from and tried to stay a certain level separate from the big thing that's going on. Otherwise, I would go under. I wouldn't be able to be. That's one thing. And yeah, words, words. You need them to do anything in this world, but it's definitely not my natural state. Normally, when I'm through the week, I work a lot with materials. I work alone mostly. I hardly speak, I don't need words for that. And also thinking about stuff, and I think we get right to the heart of it. For me, the theme should be today, this, how do you say that? This division that I feel is in the world between, I think, imagination, imagery, and words and they're sort of opposed to each other for me. I live in imagery, I live in pre-lingual, pre-word thinking normally. I see things how they are, or how they're connected to each other, how they're functioning. It's a visual thing. And if I have to explain that in words, I hardly am able to. It takes me a lot of time mostly, what I sort of get in an instant about a situation or some concoction or a machine or a material. And I have to explain that to someone who's very wordy, and needs words to get it. I get into trouble.

Kimberly

What is that sense of the imagination and the visual aspect of that? Is that also a felt sense? Do you feel that in your body too?

Bertus

Yeah, because I said imagination, but imagination is always like pictured as very visual, as only visual, as pictures. But it's much more than that, I think. Imagination is a complete, I don't know, all the senses type of thing going on. It's sensual in that sense. But the heavy part is seeing, I think, is vision.

But vision is like in a cinema, is very much helped with sound and with feel and with texture. I don't know, if you imagine a cinema that's like full immersion, then you have imagination, I think.

Kimberly

Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, that's interesting because like one of the things that I find I have to do when I'm writing to find the words, because I sometimes feel like the words are actually coming from my cells and not from my brain, or if they are coming from my brain, they don't actually feel true. So I'll just and our beloved writer, Chloe Hope, also who writes Death and Birds, she also has this experience where it's like we almost have to close our eyes and just feel the words bubble up. And it takes a long time. It's like glacial to try to sometimes find the right expression coming. And I almost think that somehow like the cellular pace of our cognition is way slower than this type of cognition, if that makes sense.

Bertus

Yeah, definitely. I think that slowness is so weird because it's also ultra fast, lightning fast sometimes. Putting it into words can take days or you can sort of endlessly approach it, versus what you can get in an instant when it's alive for you.

Kimberly

So like when you're working with paints, because I know you're a magnificent painter, you're just an incredible visual creative altogether. But when I've seen some of your paintings, does that kind of come out very quickly?

Bertus

Yeah, sometimes it does. Yeah. And I feel that I'm still sort of finding out how it works, of course. I'm not sure. For me, it's like writing mode is sort of a form of channeling almost. It's not exactly that, but it feels like I'm going sort of into a state, and then I can speak or write and transform what comes up as feelings, emotions, or as images, as visions almost. And then from that I can translate it into words and then it makes sense to me. If it's just the words, then it's not enough.

Kimberly

This is so exciting. Okay, so you, okay, I'm going to go back for a second. On your about page, you very clearly specified this is not to be planned. There is no clear starting point, no end, not an even a path or a door yet. You said, “I have chosen a means unsuitable words, sentences, descriptions in a language not even mine, unqualified at all possible levels.” So to most this would send them running for the hills, right? I mean most people want to have some level of certainty in what they're going to be creating and also sharing with the world, but instead it seems like this opportunity to channel like you just described, this blank and uncertain canvas is really compelling to you. Can you tell me more about that?

Bertus

I think it's almost a default state for me. And of course I've learned through conditioning, through school and through society to be the other form. But I'd much rather be in my natural form in the... I don't know, there's no words for it.

It's a sort of a flow state, but it's not the kind of flow state that people describe as this high up thing that is where everything is perfect. It's flow in the sense of being connected to what you're doing, to what you have in your hands and what you... I don't know, the space and the feel of it and the right timing of it. And that's when I function at my best. But it's also very frustrating because you can't take it from there and communicate it to other people. There's just so few people that get this and I think that's why we have a connection. So I sort of feel this connection.

Kimberly

Mm-hmm. Yeah, the world wants literal, I think. I feel like there is sort of a no man's land for creatives like us that tend to, it's this compulsion to be in that creative place and connect with whatever elements there are that are colliding in that moment to connect and to be in a deep listening state. It's almost an ecstatic place to be in. But then we almost need the rest of the world to then interpret it for us. I found that some in some of my film projects, I'll have that long couple year process of creating something, put it out there, and then it will it will be other people watching it and having really smart insights about it. But I'm like, Oh yeah, that's exactly what I meant. Does that make sense?

Bertus

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good point that you're making. This is about the creative part of being in the world. If you wanna do new stuff, you just don't know what's ahead. And if you choose security, if you choose a plan, if you choose the image that you want to make, the painting that you wanna put on there before you start painting, then it's not creative in that sense. That's sort of a bit of renewal of course in every action. You can't repeat the same thing twice ever. But choosing to try something new, to try and find a way forward, needs to be unplanned, to not know ahead of what is coming beforehand.

Kimberly

Is it safe to say that you feel safe in that place of unknown?

Bertus

You're definitely right. The other way around for me, I feel unsafe in the other, in the language world. I feel it's a false world for me. I feel language is basically lies. In the sense that it's a representation of the thing that I'm really concerned about. And it seems that most of the people at the moment don't get that, that they see language really as the thing itself. They don't discern between the word for apple and the apple itself.

Kimberly

So why in the world would you start a Substack then and share, you know, you've got a serialized fiction, just this is so interesting to me that you've embarked on this journey.

Bertus

Because it's also a great tool. It's wonderful. It's the same thing with a painting. A painting is not the thing. It's never the end result for me. If a painting is done, I just start the next one. I don't care about the thing that's done. But it's still nice to make it. I think it forms me back. Writing helps me so much to find what it means and what it what the value of it is and why I do the things I do. But it's not the important bit, it's just a byproduct.

Kimberly

When you read your words, so for example, in your serialized fiction, and I'm going to just say TCOTNK, because do you actually enunciate that in your head when you say that, or do you say TCOTNK as well?

Bertus

I sort of started doing that, but I'm still...I hate abbreviations actually. People use them so much in language now. Like a sentence with four or five of them. You completely lose me. But I also didn't want to give away the title of the picture book that these letters stand for. So that's why I chose that.

Kimberly

You know, I don't even know what they stand for.

Bertus

No, you haven't arrived there yet. No, it's in season two somewhere, I don't know, at the end, Michelangelo finds out what the letters are about.

Kimberly

Wow, so when you read chapters from this book that you've written, do you feel the truth of what you've created or do you feel a little bit like it's sidestepping from the actual process because you said just moments ago that words are lies. So I wanna know how you relate to what you've written.

Bertus

For one thing, this book I written the first four seasons almost five years ago now, like four to five years ago. And the last season I did from a bit more than a year ago, like two years ago almost, like that's more recent. So it's a bit, I've moved on in the meantime, yes. And I sometimes read and, I would have done differently now but I still feel, yeah, I still like it. It's like playing a record that you recorded back then and you think, hmm, that's okay. That's how it feels. And, but making music, that's where my emphasis lies and not what I recorded back then. But it is part of it. And I like it because it's now being read. Sort of for the first time. Substack is so great with that. And it's not a lot of readers, but it's... it's a few good readers that really pay attention and give me feedback. And I learn so much from that. And it's so wonderful that you feel it landing with people, arriving in them and doing the thing that I hoped it would do.

Kimberly

Yeah, the readers I found on Substack are they're deliberate. They really are there because they want to engage with the content. It's not just a like scrolling thing at all. It really it's a deep kind of entering into communion with the reader, which is just fabulous. And you have in TCOTNK, it's this beautiful imaginative adventure to me, about living authentically, without cultural conditioning, finding one's tribe and aliveness. It reminds me, after college, I lived in some intentional communities in Europe, and it kind of reminds me a little bit of the people that gathered in those places. And you spoke about feeling in your youth incompatible with the world, sort of, and we'll touch on this with the idea of being unfixed too.

Tell me a little bit more about that and how the writing of TCOTNK became kind of a way to express some of that for yourself.

Bertus

Yeah, I have to really force myself not to name the title. TCOTNK, yes. But it's just one of the stories. It's just one of a long row. I've been writing since my teenage years, I think. I don't know, I've got 17 or 18 books sort of stacked away. Some unfinished, but a lot of them finished. And a lot of them also like, no, not good enough anymore. But they were at the time a great tool to... it's a sort of escapism I think. I go into a world of my own and I try to find out how it works and how it could function and how it's different from the actual world.

Because yeah, incompatible, I don't know. It's so difficult to…I found out in school, I'm not suited to be in a classroom and listen to somebody else telling me what to think and what to remember and how to do stuff. I wanna find out on my own, even if it takes like 10 times longer, I rather do that. I'm just not able. Because I think mainstream schooling is incompatible with me. It's not me that's incompatible anymore. I don't feel that anymore. I think a lot of society now is a certain way and it's a very narrow certain way. And a lot of people don't fit into that model. And it's... We're now outraged by Western schooling and education turning people, children into Christians, turning them from their own language, old languages into the language whatever probably English but also Dutch, taking away their cultural habits and we're now outraged by that. I think in a hundred years we will be outraged by how the education system has functioned until now because it's too narrow, it's not enough. I think that the imaginary way of thinking, or the imaginal I think it's called, but that other way of thinking is so important for renewal in society it's pushed away. It's ignored. It's it's not taken seriously. It's they try to co-opt it try to make it into a language form and it's I think that's one of the big things for me that's wrong with society. I Ran into that from a very early age late primary school, it starts disagreeing with me.

Kimberly

You could feel it. You knew that it was disagreeing with you. How did you survive it? I mean, you obviously were able to retain the innocence and the purity of your own creative expression through all those years. Whereas I think many people out there that are encountering that incompatibility, they end up kind of dimming their light. How did you survive it?

Bertus

By taking that freedom, I think, by being rebellious as a teenager, like taking it. Like wow, going into music helps, like playing the drums loud. I was a sort of, in the beginning stage, an aggressive drummer in the sense that I did like heavy metal and hard rock type of music. It didn't agree with me totally, but I was like, I wanted to be heard and I didn't have the means, so playing the drums is a good way to be heard.

Kimberly

So you actually stayed in school through those years and you just kind of knew that it wasn't for you and you, you know, bought your time through it.

Bertus

Yeah, in Holland you have this division of higher education, lower education. I started at the higher end of it, but I wasn't interested and then was sent back to the lower part of it, the easier part for me so that I could do like on the side. I didn't have to do much for it, but I hardly...I increasingly didn't go to school. I was a dropout. I didn't go to class and I just did other things that I wanted to do.

Kimberly

…You and all the other brilliant humans on this planet. It's like you guys look at this educational system and go, this is just a waste of my time. It also, I'm thinking about the, there's an essay that you wrote called The Carpenter and the Talking Tree. And I wanna bring that up because, well, you talk about how the real job of the carpenter is to listen to the wood and allow what you describe as the spheres or her soul voice to interact with you. And I feel like maybe what we're skirting around in this discussion about education is we're not really taught to listen. We are just empty buckets in school and they are there to, the teachers are there to fill us up with information. But it sounds like to me you went out into the world to really listen and that your work comes from that surrendered place. Am I accurate in saying that?

Bertus

It... You say brilliant, but I... don't feel even close to that description. I felt very inadequate and very, very stupid most of my life, like a sub. I didn't believe I was able to go to university. I wasn't smart enough for that. I now know I'm nearing 60. I sort of...I could have done it easily, no problem. Because now I'm sort of talking to people, I learn to talk, I learn to express myself slowly, more and more, and I find out that no, that's smart. That they're sort of okay, I can handle that. And I'm not brilliant either, I find very brilliant people that are way out there and so incredibly smart. I don't feel like that, but I feel smart enough to open my mouth now to say but this is not okay I feel it's not okay. I feel so angry inside about this like there's so many so many people silenced and pushed aside or forced into a form that they are not naturally in and I think that that's where a lot of the problems come from in modern society because it's just honoring one type of being in the world. And I think we're slowly getting it, but yeah.

Kimberly

We're starting to sort of the discussion around neurodivergence and understanding, you know, the spectrum of autism. And I think it's starting, but I do, it does break my heart when I think about like the young Bertus walking through the world feeling not intelligent, you know, because your intelligence is vast. It just didn't fit with what the world was expecting it to be. And I read, I myself, I mean, I'll read people's essays on Substack and I'm like, ah, I can't even understand half of this. I feel stupid. I feel like my intelligence comes from a much more embodied place than an analytical place. If anyone tried to get me to analyze something, I would, you know, go run for the hills because that's just frightening to me. But I do think that there is, with time, we start to see the way that it does work in the world, the way that your intelligence does invoke and communicate and evoke. So are you you're feeling that now through your writing and the conversations that you've been having through the feedback that you're getting and you're also do you feel that more just in your daily life too that you're in your intelligence and wisdom is in the right place now or is being nurtured?

Bertus

It's moved in the right direction, let's say that. I'm still having trouble connecting in a nearer sense, like directly to people around me. It's very, very difficult. And the nice thing about Substack is that there are so many people on there. So the more rare type that I easily connect with is on there. I gained a lot of self-confidence through a course I did. It was called Surviving the Future. It's an American school that does that. And it's like, I think it's twice a year that you can do that. It's an eight week, nine week course of people coming together, discussing what the state of the world is, like for real, like economics and climate and all kinds of stuff. But it's very confronting, but you get to meet like 40, 50 people that are getting it and feeling the same feelings of unrest and of we have to sort of change the things that we are doing. And that helped me a lot writing on that as a forum on that, you're being asked to write like a weekly essay. This was I did I did it twice two and three years ago. And it helped me so much to find confidence in opening my mouth and trying to voice this. And this is what I tried like every week and I and every week I feel like haven't yet been able to say it out loud, what I really wanna say.

Kimberly

I feel like I understand you. Maybe that's just because our brains have sort of a little meld. But when I read your essays, there's this sort of almost an exhale of, oh, someone gets it. And I know I'm not the only one. I know you talk about the idea of being unfixed. And you said it's a good description of how you long to be in this world. Um, but we live in a world that's always trying to fix us. And I'm, I'm putting this in the context of what we're talking about around, like we think differently and the world wants us to think like it does. Is that how you see the fixing show up in your world?

Bertus

Yeah, it's a big one, this one. I always get annoyed when people say hunter-gatherer, because I think they're two separate people. There's hunters and there's gatherers. I'm a gatherer, I think. And you have settlers, like after the hunter-gatherer, you got people who got settled. And I think being unfixed is refusing to settle, like a nomad style, but you don't have to be gypsy to be that in the world. But I think this being unattached to or having a profession that you do the same thing like your whole life but move from thing to thing you could call it polymath or you could call it like but it this wider way of being in the world that's what I feel is unfixed.

And it's unfixed also in the sense of being unattached not fixed to but also in the sense, in the spiritual sense, I believe that things are as they are. And you can be annoyed about it, how they are, and be angry about it, but they are as they are. It doesn't say anything about how they could be, how they are changing, or the direction in which the things are changing. But the first thing for me is accepting how they are as they are. That's also being like accepting that you're limited, that you have flaws, that you have handicaps, that your reach is going there and not any further, that you mess up, fuck up stuff, and that you don't get it right. But it's okay, because that's done. If you knew beforehand that you would fuck up, you probably wouldn't. I always say that when you play the piano, you're always as good as at that moment. You can long to be better than you are at the moment, but the only thing you can do as a performer on a piano is being the pianist that you are at that moment. You can never outperform yourself. You can only underperform, I think, being doubtful about your quality. But the only thing is be there and do the thing that you do, and that's the maximum that you can do. So that's what being unfixed, accepting for me is too.

Kimberly

That is such a beautiful description of unfixed. I want to transcribe that and print it out and put it on my wall. It was just exquisite because you touched on all the layers of it. You know, it's the fixing, the unfixing from our identity or the need to have it be fixed within time so that, you know, we can listen to the tree and hear and interact with the spheres of the world and allow ourselves to be part of that creative process, but it also is that humanity of our brokenness and to recognize that in a way, I'm listening to you, it makes me think that the ultimate unfixed is just the present moment. Because it does, it's unfixed from the future and it's unfixed from the past. It's just the present. And in that present is, I've never had, I've never put this together! This is so cool that you just did this. But it really is just, it's the present moment. And the freedom that comes from allowing that place to not be a limitation because I feel like that's where people come in and go, oh, what do you mean I don't have a defined identity or what do you mean I'm broken? You know, that somehow this is a limitation, but I actually think it's the opposite.

Bertus

There's two things I want to say about this. One thing I just recently heard two physicists talking about the moment. And I always thought about the moment as a point, a thing with no substance. It's like it has no length. But they actually say it isn't true, because the actual moment is quite thick. It has a certain width, like going back and forth. They discovered that it is not unsubstantial. It is not yet history, it is not yet future, but it has a certain, a certain, I don't know, bandwidth. And I love that idea, because that's what I feel, that's how I really feel it in my body. Like, yeah, that's right. It goes like a bit in front of me in time, whatever time is, and also there's a sort of a tail. And there's plenty of room in there. There's a certain space in there. I love that.

And the other thing I wanna share. I have three kids and they're the oldest two are adults now two daughters and a son of 13 almost 14. And when the when the oldest was born, we discovered like after two three years that her hearing wasn't okay. So, so she failed the tests hearing test. And we slowly discovered it wasn't good at all, we resisted a lot. So, we sort of, we were in denial for a long time. But we discovered that they had increasing hearing loss. And first with my oldest daughter, then the next one was like two years younger than that. And she had the same, we saw it earlier. She failed the tests.

And she was even worse than the oldest one because she didn't start talking. She sort of, I don't know, she started talking and then from one day to the next, she stopped. She went silent. And I want to share this with you because I think it's connected to you. She hit her head. She was like, I think four, five, something like that. And she hit her head in the playground. And that was the moment that she fell silent. And we sort of felt, she's not hearing anymore. But right connected to that was her being very dizzy. She was on the ground, not able to stand up. Well like two or three days after that fall she was on the couch and not able to do anything. And I sort of feel it very much connected to your condition that you describe in that.

Because we found out slowly, slowly with pushing doctors and trying to find out what's happening. And the doctor said it isn't connected. Dizziness is separate. We said, but the hearing loss is going up and down. A week it's quite okay and the next week it's really bad. It wasn't possible, they said. And then we started pushing. We pushed higher up for a second opinion and a third opinion.

In the end we came to a university hospital where a professor asked us like two or three questions. He said, I know, I know what it is. So it's an enlarged vestibular conduction, I think. So there's a sort of genetic flow in there that sort of messes up your hearing slowly. And what I wanted to share about that is for me, it was a very confronting thing as a musician to find out that your kids probably won't be able to hear music the rest of their life. Like it was a big thing for me and I took me like, I don't know, I stopped playing for 10 years after that. I couldn't make music. I couldn't enjoy it if I knew like what. Slowly sort of losing that. It all turned out like wonderful in the end. They got a hearing implant by now and they got it because they were hearing when they were born in the first years their hearing centers in the brain were very good very well developed. Yeah, yeah so they they're perfect candidates for a cochlear implant so they're functioning wonderfully now but for me it was discovering that being handicapped like that, having no ears, is in no way giving me an incomplete child. They were full children for me. And it's always presented that you have less than a full person if you're handicapped. And it's not true. For me it's the most important thing about being a unfixed.

Kimberly

Did you see the film Sound of Noise? Oh, Bertus, write it down. You have to see The Sound of Noise because it's exactly about this. And he's a musician, the protagonist. He ends up losing his hearing and he goes to a center where a lot of individuals are sort of learning to navigate the world through vibration and other ways and he ends up getting an implant and you'll see the sort of the relationships that he has at that center that he's developed and the conflicts that develop because he tries to go back to the world of the hearing. And it does a beautiful job not judging one way or the other but it just portrays these two worlds, two different perfectly whole worlds that are, you know, seemingly incompatible because it's like, oh, you would want to hear, right, if you could. But in this, they do a wonderful job at portraying that that's not necessarily always the case.

Bertus

Yeah, that's very why I wanted to share this, because that's how I feel. It really taught me like that. And also for myself, it's not a flaw that I have. It's a different way of looking at the world, but we all have like these crazy limits on our getting what is going on around us. So that's okay. And we see a lot of compensation also. They get different things. They get a different set of information about the world. And it's very important to take that seriously.

Kimberly

Yes, yes. One of the things too that I've also learned along the way living with this neurological dizziness that I live with is and working with so many other people that have chronic conditions or terminal conditions, it in a way it equips us to live in this world with a more responsive heart. If that makes sense, I feel like when we're, when we're butting up against control, which I think many of us, when we come into the world, we think, well, sure, we can control everything. And then when we fall to our knees and realize we can't, which is, you know, some people maybe always will go to their deathbeds thinking that they always can control. But those of us that realize we can't, something else cracks open in that place. And I feel like living unfixed really equips us to serve from that place of that shared humanity. I don't know the fragility, the tenderness, the vulnerability, I mean, the innocence.

Bertus

Yeah, fragility is such an important word in this. I think this is crazy, that we're strong and we only have to fight harder to get even stronger. It's not understanding what life is about. I think you really don't get it if you look at it that way. And you only get it if you get hit by the train. And then you see like, wow, the strength and the force of life is in a different place than being hard or being resistant against change. It's not about holding on. It's not about lengthening. It's not... it can be very short and very significant.

Kimberly

I love this line that you wrote, “Language. I burn it to stay warm.” I love that line. Can you tell me what this means to you?

Bertus

Yeah, wow. It comes after a quote of a U2 song, like the lines of Bono. And then I sort of alter a bit there. But it's fuel. That's how I feel it. And it's a tool that you can use. And tools you can, to a certain extent, you're allowed to abuse them. Because that's why they're tools. But abuse is... I don't know. Intensely use them. And burning, if you see it like fuel, you honor the words by burning them. And you say, it's okay that I burn them. Because the new words will grow after this. There's a sort of a cycle going on. And it takes words off of the throne for me, like being all-important and taking this role of being the truth, of being the fact. But the fact is not in the word at all for me. The fact is the thing that is out there where the words are coming from. And wow, it's so important for me to remind myself at least. I think that's what I mean with... Like a rock guitarist, he burns his guitar like that.

Kimberly

It's like the ultimate sand painting where you put all of this energy into something and then the actual warmth, the actual lasting warmth that comes is in the burning of it, the cleaning of the canvas so that you can renew and start again. That's such a beautiful thing for our listeners on Substack to contemplate because we are language is everything as we're writing and even myself I have my memoir and I copy it and I double copy it and I make sure it's saved in multiple places because I'm scared to death that anything is lost you know even drafts of it and eventually though I think the ultimate creative process with this is to let it go and to let it, you know, live in its own way and, and allow it to dissolve in and create a blank canvas for new creations to emerge. Cause if we hold on too long, then we're just stuck in that box forever and ever.

Bertus

I love the Tibetan monks that built the big mandalas with sand. They built the cosmology, the whole structure of the system. I don't know, beliefs. But they built the whole thing and it's very important, it's very intricate, it's very deep and symbolic. It's a lot of things put a lot of effort into it and then they sort of move it to the river and let it flow away. So they forced themselves to rebuild it over and over again and not hold on to the thing. I think that's, for me, that's very important because what I notice in myself in being different, I remember the process. I don't remember the outcome. I don't remember the answer. I don't remember, so….what the words were, I remember the process. So if you ask me to do the same joke again, it won't work. Same story again, won't work. I get into trouble. I can’t do it. Like only improvising, only, only like, for me that's one of the pieces I wrote, the meaning of life is that the important bit is done improvisational. Like you have to do it in the moment and you are sort of supported by this, by the memories and by the habits, by the skills and by the... but it's not the other way around I think.

Kimberly

Yeah. Oh, I celebrate that so much. I feel just a buzzing when you talk that way because the, yes, the improvisation is where the freedom is. And then, and going back to what we talked about earlier, it's where the safety is. If someone handed me a script and said memorize all of this, oh, I would be scared or analyze this. And then, you know, that to me is death. But to be in the improvisation feels like, well, all we have to do is really listen because and respond, listen and respond, listen and respond, listen and respond.

I think a lot of people don't feel safe there. They don't feel safe in that place of improvisation, the unknown, the blank canvas, uncertainty. What would you offer to those people right now and how to trust, how to access that trust for that place?

Bertus

I've tried in many ways to find practical forms for that. And I tried that in my workshops on art. I think art is the best way to... And art is such a horrible word. I hate the word, actually. Because I don't like art at all. Especially not the kind that hangs in museums and stuff. For me, art is the thing that you do that doesn't have a real function. But it's just for enjoyment, just for the fun of it, for the beauty of it.

But art is as an activity, as a thing to do, if you're able to do something without planning ahead, and it can be very, very small, like a small sketch, like a doodle even, just a 20 second thing that you do, without planning ahead, just do something without knowing beforehand what you're gonna make. There's the key, I think. And if you start doing that, and it can be anything, I think you discovered it yourself, like in the felting process. Just start making stuff, and you have a vague idea of where it's going, but it's taking you somewhere else while you do it. But if you even make that smaller, and I think that's a very important thing to do for everyone, and it can be cooking it can be with a pen and pencil or a brush or a bit of clay or a bit of wood whatever if you start making something and see what comes out just let it come to you just take a sharp knife and a bit of wood and start carving and see what happens then you sort of open up to this trust again I think and trusting what is coming what is around the bend is the essence of it. It is scary, I know. There's a big, big fear on not knowing what will happen in an hour. People are crazy planners at the moment. Everybody needs to know exactly the right time, where they are next Tuesday, 10 to 2. It needs to be planned ahead, otherwise they get a panic attack. And in practice they change the appointment like three or four times and in the end it just happens when it happens. And I'm not against planning at all. Planning is a very helpful tool. But if we start using planning as a fear, I'd say fear controller to push down the fear, it's not a good thing, then you're in trouble.

Kimberly

And you don't allow for that, the delight, that innocent delight that comes from what you talked about with just the interaction with it. I'm imagining somebody just holding a lump of clay and feeling the textures and hearing the birds chirping and allowing, you know, the motion of your muscles to kind of move the way that feels good because, oh, it feels good when I do that. And then I feel like as children do, that becomes a playful place, a safe place and a playful place. And maybe the more that we do that, and unfortunately it's not taught in school, but the more that even as adults we do that, whether it's writing or whatever, there maybe is a rebirthing of play that comes too from that safety.

Bertus

I was really struck by one of the videos on the Unfixed channel and on the YouTube channel. I can't remember which one it was, where everybody states it was about six years, seven years, roughly the point that fear started popping up, the problems began. I think it's the same point as where you stop being a child, playful, and stop trusting whatever happens is okay, happen. I think schooling plays a big role in cutting that off. And it needs to be cut off, probably. I think from a newborn and a child growing up, at some point you need to lose the trust and find it back again. But other people lose the trust and never find it back again. And I think it should be a short round of a few years and you're halfway your teenage years, you slowly gain that trust again and somewhere, and I don't know, seven, eight, nine years, ten years, you have a period that you lose that or get detached from this childish trust, this childish belief in that things work out into a new sort of adult trust and that you're able to participate in something that will work out. We don't get that. It's taken from us and it's kept from us after this point at school. And it's replaced by planning and certainty and linear stuff and answers.

Kimberly

Yep, it's like learning, it's like a musician learning the scales, but then never letting them go once they're there, you know, it's just, it's kind of where I was with music. It's like, I learned all my scales, I did Suzuki, I did all that stuff, but I never went beyond. I just was like, okay, now I read the notes and now I play. And it's just, well, what a way to kill the creative spirit, you know? Like never want to play the piano again. But I would imagine, you know, any true musician would say, that's just the starting point. The rest is, oh man, you missed the meal.

So, Burtis, okay, How can we help you? Is there any way, anything you want readers to focus on or, you know, how can we support you in your own Substack and in your endeavors in life?

Bertus

Well become subscribers of course. What I find amazing is that so few people respond in the sense of like. Like has a bad name a bit from Facebook and from Instagram and stuff but on Substack liking a piece that you've read is a very good thing to do I think. I always try to even if I don't really like the piece or agree with it, I give a like because I read it. I got a bunch of trouble of reading it. Please, please push that button. And it helps to be more in the picture, I think. And I love people who comment, who say something about it, and I'd always try to respond or try to give something back for that in some sense. But I don't know. I'm sort of, I'm now, I'm eight or nine months I think on Substack. I feel like I'm just beginning, just getting the hang of it. What I really love about Substack is it gives the possibility of being a writer, being creative in a broader sense even. You can do other things in writing on Substack and get paid for it. I got now 12 or 13 paying subscribers and some of them are really like full members. I find that amazing. I can't believe it. And it's not a full income, of course, but it does it great.

Kimberly

It's a way to feel validated in your creative expression. And it truly is, it's like that whether it's a like or whether it's a comment or whether it's a paid subscription, all of that goes towards this validation of this other world that we're creating over here on Substack where we can all of, we're all misfits in a way. And in some way we belong together in our own little misfits community on Substack. So, and we find each other too, you know? It's like, we find each other. So I think also sharing, like those pieces that you wrote on color just recently, the examination of color. Wow, that was just fabulous. Truly, I know I wrote it made me wanna do cartwheels around the yard. And I just like, I wanna read them again and again to renew my appreciation and understanding of color. So for those who are listening, just read Bertus and share and partake in the joy of innocence and wild imagination and intelligence of this beautiful man.

Bertus

Well, what else would I want? Like, wow, thank you. It was such a good talk, I loved it.

Kimberly

Yeah, thank you, Bertus! Take care.

Bertus

Yeah, you too. Bye bye.