Review of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
Sex, Violence, and Liberation in Narrative Traditions
and remember to check out the Absent Narrative at its new site!
Showing posts with label process. Show all posts
Showing posts with label process. Show all posts
1.08.2010
Migration (to the new site) -> -> ->
Thanks to everyone who's given me the wonderful feedback recently, both about this blog and the Unlimited Story Deck.
So I decided that today is the day to migrate everything over to the new site, on my own domain, so that I have a little more control over where everything is located and designed. Currently just the blog is up and running, but I'll be adding more content to the rest of the site (absentnarrative.com) as I have time this year.
I know it's a little obnoxious to jump sites, but The Absent Narrative blog is now here, so update your bookmarks and feeds accordingly if you want to keep following!
So I decided that today is the day to migrate everything over to the new site, on my own domain, so that I have a little more control over where everything is located and designed. Currently just the blog is up and running, but I'll be adding more content to the rest of the site (absentnarrative.com) as I have time this year.
I know it's a little obnoxious to jump sites, but The Absent Narrative blog is now here, so update your bookmarks and feeds accordingly if you want to keep following!
12.17.2009
The Unlimited Story Deck is now online!
I finally finished designing the website for my final project for my Narrative and Technology class, and the Unlimited Story Deck is now available online!On the site you'll find an introduction, rules, playtested stories and analyzes, and downloadable versions of all the cards (licensed under Creative Commons). I will be continuing to test out the limitations of the deck and revise it for a gamma version and eventual publication, so if anyone's still interested in trying it out, either download the Deck or get a hold of me to play it.
It's been one hell of a process banging my eyes off html code the last couple days and I am in much need of a break!
12.06.2009
A Yarn: The Burden of Proof (Unlimited Story #1)
[This is the first story generated by the now finished Unlimited Story Deck (beta version). The underlined words refer to the cards played.]
I was at the bar writing when I was approached by a girl who didn’t look old enough to get in, but she was dressed like a hipster, so maybe that’s the style of the week. We got into a debate about oppression, from parental to existential lacks of personal control, and I told her that a girl once told me that sometimes you have to wait, or ask, for help from outside the situation, like from a god in the machine of our world.
Who are you, the hip chick quarried, some outcast from the middle ages? No one believes in God anymore. Or maybe you’re just one of those androids who believes whatever they’ve been told enough times. I just smiled, and she for some reason followed, and later as we were walking toward the carnival through the milling crowds, a turn of fate showed her why.
The turn was that some eco-hackers had forced a viral attack on the nearby zoo’s computer system, hoping to liberate the animals; but they had accidentally released the creatures in a disastrous stampede! In order to escape the war-zone of terrified pedestrians we ducked into the closest café, but even there could not escape the TV’s blaring noise, advertising the doom and dying of the latest war. But just when all seemed hopeless, and she didn’t believe any help could come, out from a hidden lair beneath the kitchen hearth flew a whole mythic pantheon, turning all the rules of logic on their head as they saved the day!
Celebrating this miracle afterward with drinks and dancing back at the bar, the girl apologized for calling me names, and said that I must actually be some angelic messenger to have been so certain the gods would come. But what would really be convincing, she said, would be to next time catch it all on camera.
After just this one play, I am really pleased with how the deck works. The story, though randomly constrained, manages to convey the same kind of aesthetic, tone, pacing, etc. that I would usually put into a story of this length, but managed to be written in about a quarter of the time. Even more intriguing is that where I usually plot out the turn and ending hook of my flash stories, I was not able to here (since who knew what cards would later come up), and yet they happened to work with a fair amount of continuity. Part of this I suspect is foreshadowing: the otherwise arbitrary debate about oppression resolved through a deus ex machina became, as I constructed the tale, something of a goal or end state, the conflict to be resolved, which I continually kept in mind as I drew and played cards. Of course, with just one narrator, I knew what kinds of cards could possibly be played from my hand, and could group certain ones for later scenes or resolutions. At the same time though there were definitely several points when the story could have spiraled out of control; with so many ways of using any of the cards there is an over-determination of imaginative possibility. But I think that is only part of this deck's beauty: anything truly can happen!
Now to play it with more than one person...
I was at the bar writing when I was approached by a girl who didn’t look old enough to get in, but she was dressed like a hipster, so maybe that’s the style of the week. We got into a debate about oppression, from parental to existential lacks of personal control, and I told her that a girl once told me that sometimes you have to wait, or ask, for help from outside the situation, like from a god in the machine of our world.
Who are you, the hip chick quarried, some outcast from the middle ages? No one believes in God anymore. Or maybe you’re just one of those androids who believes whatever they’ve been told enough times. I just smiled, and she for some reason followed, and later as we were walking toward the carnival through the milling crowds, a turn of fate showed her why.
The turn was that some eco-hackers had forced a viral attack on the nearby zoo’s computer system, hoping to liberate the animals; but they had accidentally released the creatures in a disastrous stampede! In order to escape the war-zone of terrified pedestrians we ducked into the closest café, but even there could not escape the TV’s blaring noise, advertising the doom and dying of the latest war. But just when all seemed hopeless, and she didn’t believe any help could come, out from a hidden lair beneath the kitchen hearth flew a whole mythic pantheon, turning all the rules of logic on their head as they saved the day!
Celebrating this miracle afterward with drinks and dancing back at the bar, the girl apologized for calling me names, and said that I must actually be some angelic messenger to have been so certain the gods would come. But what would really be convincing, she said, would be to next time catch it all on camera.
After just this one play, I am really pleased with how the deck works. The story, though randomly constrained, manages to convey the same kind of aesthetic, tone, pacing, etc. that I would usually put into a story of this length, but managed to be written in about a quarter of the time. Even more intriguing is that where I usually plot out the turn and ending hook of my flash stories, I was not able to here (since who knew what cards would later come up), and yet they happened to work with a fair amount of continuity. Part of this I suspect is foreshadowing: the otherwise arbitrary debate about oppression resolved through a deus ex machina became, as I constructed the tale, something of a goal or end state, the conflict to be resolved, which I continually kept in mind as I drew and played cards. Of course, with just one narrator, I knew what kinds of cards could possibly be played from my hand, and could group certain ones for later scenes or resolutions. At the same time though there were definitely several points when the story could have spiraled out of control; with so many ways of using any of the cards there is an over-determination of imaginative possibility. But I think that is only part of this deck's beauty: anything truly can happen!
Now to play it with more than one person...
12.05.2009
Truth and the Transcendent Function
Still preparing to dive into "The Red Book," I reread Jung's essay, "The Transcendent Function," in which he describes the technique that he used for his process of self-experimentation, a method for consciously delving into the subconscious and uniting them, which was also the practice he recommended to patients in order to continue working on their subconscious materials after or outside of therapy.
The method is one of active imagining, and involves taking whatever emotional state one is in and allowing that mood to become more conscious, at the same time writing down associations of that state (in a controlled manner, in order to not go off into other areas of the subconscious), until the unconscious emotion is enriched and clarified. Or, if there is no particular emotion to focus on, one should remove critical attention and let inner images, voices, or movements emerge, taking similar associative or symbolic notes. Once this material has been collected, Jung suggests (here from his own experience, viz. the Red Book), to either subject it to creative formulation or analytical understanding, that is, to give the unconscious an aesthetic form or concrete meaning, depending on one's tendencies towards either art or logic. The important thing though, is not to get caught up in either the form or meaning alone, but to be able to go back and forth between the two, essentially creating an internal dialogue by which the antipathy between the unconscious and conscious minds is transcended.
I have personally had much success with such methods of active imagination, particularly through dreaming (which Jung claims was too difficult to generally recommend as a method) and elaboration as internal fiction, which over the years has put me into direct contact with many of the subconscious forces and symbols that hold play over my psychology. My intention in reading "The Red Book" slowly and through Jung's techniques is in order to return to another stage in my own psychic self-experimentations.
One of the more interesting things I've discovered through becoming more in tune with my subconscious is a decreasing need for such conscious graspings as truth, non-contradiction, and blunt logic (while at the same time being able, ideally, to apply these to a wider scope). As Jung so deftly puts it in this essay:
I encountered this kind of grasping in my Wisdom class the other day, discussing Berger's concept of the social construction of reality, which my teacher wanted to refute logically, at all costs. Granted, this teacher has applied logical arguments and the principle of truth = non-contradiction to everything we've read this semester, from Aristotle to Lao-tzu, and seems to find all of them lacking as logically consistent systems of wisdom, while I sit there baffled, wondering how logic will ever get you to wisdom, which for me seems at least equal parts belief. Now if this wasn't frustrating enough, the teacher's specific beef with Berger's theory (which I haven't read, so won't comment on myself), was that: to construct reality implies that reality has been made up or fabricated, and as a fiction it is thus false and a pack of lies of no value, etc. And that's the rub, the assumption that fiction necessarily equals falsehood, that things imagined can not convey truth or really effect the world, regardless of if the contents represent any historical, existent reality. Even the too-smart-for-his-britches philosophy major I usually disagree with was aghast, and despite our best arguments the teacher refused to listen to that his "truth" might be wrong.
It seems to me that this perspective is like someone only using the conscious part of their mind, ignoring or fending off the "demons of the irrational" subconscious instead of accepting them as equally a part of who we are, which they are, and if that boundary is transcended then we can begin to enjoy ourselves more fully in the world and more fully accept this world in all its irrational and boundless glory.
The method is one of active imagining, and involves taking whatever emotional state one is in and allowing that mood to become more conscious, at the same time writing down associations of that state (in a controlled manner, in order to not go off into other areas of the subconscious), until the unconscious emotion is enriched and clarified. Or, if there is no particular emotion to focus on, one should remove critical attention and let inner images, voices, or movements emerge, taking similar associative or symbolic notes. Once this material has been collected, Jung suggests (here from his own experience, viz. the Red Book), to either subject it to creative formulation or analytical understanding, that is, to give the unconscious an aesthetic form or concrete meaning, depending on one's tendencies towards either art or logic. The important thing though, is not to get caught up in either the form or meaning alone, but to be able to go back and forth between the two, essentially creating an internal dialogue by which the antipathy between the unconscious and conscious minds is transcended.
I have personally had much success with such methods of active imagination, particularly through dreaming (which Jung claims was too difficult to generally recommend as a method) and elaboration as internal fiction, which over the years has put me into direct contact with many of the subconscious forces and symbols that hold play over my psychology. My intention in reading "The Red Book" slowly and through Jung's techniques is in order to return to another stage in my own psychic self-experimentations.
One of the more interesting things I've discovered through becoming more in tune with my subconscious is a decreasing need for such conscious graspings as truth, non-contradiction, and blunt logic (while at the same time being able, ideally, to apply these to a wider scope). As Jung so deftly puts it in this essay:
"One of the greatest obstacles to psychological understanding is the inquisitive desire to know whether the psychological factor is "true" or "correct." If the description of it is not erroneous or false, then the factor is valid in itself and proves its validity by its very existence. One might just as well ask if the duck-billed platypus is a "true" or "correct" invention of the Creator's will. Equally childish is the prejudice against the role which mythological assumptions play in the life of the psyche. Since they are not "true," it is argued, they have no place in a scientific explanation. But mythologems exist, even though their statements do not coincide with our incommensurable idea of "truth."Of course, one runs into such grasping for truth and consistency almost everywhere you turn, spying every day yet another atheistic rebuttal of belief, such as this article from Alternet on demanding evidence from religious believers (which asks: “Why do you think God or the supernatural exists? What makes you think this is true? What evidence do you have for this belief?”), when the important thing about belief is that one believes without proof, to demand evidence or a truth behind beliefs is to entirely miss the point of believing (at least for me; I will never apologize or condone dogmatism of any flavor). And furthermore, as Jung seems to agree, the important thing is not whether the contents of our belief are true or false, but what those beliefs allow us to feel or do in the real world. The belief exists, and extends beyond truthiness.
I encountered this kind of grasping in my Wisdom class the other day, discussing Berger's concept of the social construction of reality, which my teacher wanted to refute logically, at all costs. Granted, this teacher has applied logical arguments and the principle of truth = non-contradiction to everything we've read this semester, from Aristotle to Lao-tzu, and seems to find all of them lacking as logically consistent systems of wisdom, while I sit there baffled, wondering how logic will ever get you to wisdom, which for me seems at least equal parts belief. Now if this wasn't frustrating enough, the teacher's specific beef with Berger's theory (which I haven't read, so won't comment on myself), was that: to construct reality implies that reality has been made up or fabricated, and as a fiction it is thus false and a pack of lies of no value, etc. And that's the rub, the assumption that fiction necessarily equals falsehood, that things imagined can not convey truth or really effect the world, regardless of if the contents represent any historical, existent reality. Even the too-smart-for-his-britches philosophy major I usually disagree with was aghast, and despite our best arguments the teacher refused to listen to that his "truth" might be wrong.
It seems to me that this perspective is like someone only using the conscious part of their mind, ignoring or fending off the "demons of the irrational" subconscious instead of accepting them as equally a part of who we are, which they are, and if that boundary is transcended then we can begin to enjoy ourselves more fully in the world and more fully accept this world in all its irrational and boundless glory.
11.30.2009
The Unlimited Story Deck – Artist’s Statement
“I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are all the characters going to fall off of?” -Laurie AndersonAs a storyteller and theorist on the role that narratives play in our lives, I am concerned with how we produce stories, particularly in our contemporary, hyper-mediated age. We are exposed to narratives everywhere we turn, from the news and movies, to the expression of our memories and daily experiences. Despite this overwhelming abundance of narrative forms, it seems that people often take in stories passively, and do not think about how each of us are continually narrating the world around us. The uncertainty over the future of print media and the Internet’s allowance of the production of rapid and potentially low-quality narratives point to a pressing need to encourage people to continue to learn and enjoy the art of good storytelling. To this end I have created a game and technology, called the Unlimited Story Deck, which can be used to highlight the ways in which we construct narratives, both individually and as communities, and encourage people to tell and enjoy telling new and quality narratives.
There is a myth that that the authorial process is a challenging, mystical, and solitary craft. On the contrary though, everyone is telling stories all the time; the ability to form narrative connections between diverse concepts in our lives may be one of our most rudimentary abilities. Scott McCloud, in his Understanding Comics, suggests that we make such intuitive narrative connections when making sense between the panels of comics . We recognize patterns and desire causal or associational relationships between the contents of our experience, regardless of what those contents are or the contexts and mediums in which they are encountered, just as in comics we don’t need to be told how to interpret the variously arranged and disjointed panels. The Unlimited Story Deck works by presenting its users with a variety of such juxtaposed concepts, from which we can recognize and express our narrative connections.
But what are these contents or concepts we recognize and construct narratives from? The Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander believed that all reality was constructed from one underlying substance that he called the Unlimited, essentially a storehouse or database of all potential qualities that could be intermixed and expressed in the world . While this was subsequently disproved as a valid physical theory of the Universe, it may serve as a metaphor for the field of storytelling, in that all narrative realities are constructed from the intermixing and expressing of the unlimited storehouse of conceptualized language. Specifically, we find in stories concepts for characters, settings, events, objects, and dynamics, which are intermixed and expressed in a variety of ways. Each card of the Unlimited Story Deck presents one of these types of storytelling concepts, which can be played in a variety of ways to construct narratives.
While one of my aims is to see how we tell stories outside of expected forms or mediums, (otherwise how might they be novel), it seems we can tell stories from concepts because they are familiar or recognizable from our experience; we know the associations and trappings and how they might be used. There are through the wealth of human narratives certain types of stories that are told again and again, and which anyone who has ever read a book or watched a movie might immediately recognize. Like Anaximander’s Unlimited, one imagines a database of all available narrative types, a technology that Heidegger would call a “standing-reserve” of concepts , which reveal these concepts for us to use in story creation. For the Unlimited Story Deck I have collected such recognizable types of content, which should allow its users to more readily and enjoyably create narratives. Though the form of a deck is limited, physically by the need to shuffle the cards, the permutations of narrative connections between any of these concepts is as unlimited as the human imagination.
While I believe our ability to form narrative connections is intuitive, telling stories still takes work. As media theorist Espen Aarseth suggests, texts are machines for the production of narrative meaning that require the input of a human user to make them operate . Even traditional narrative forms like the novel require some amount of feedback and interpretation from the reader to make sense of a story. On the other hand, this ergodic feedback can be fun, when viewed as games that encourage us to enjoy the act of problem solving or narrative resolution . While it does not present the kinds of goals typical of games, the Unlimited Story Deck is intended to induce the same kind of fun when played by randomly generating concepts that we have to express as narratives, and as such stands in a tradition of storytelling and card games that require interaction to form narrative connections.
Aarseth notes that one of the oldest books, the Chinese I Ching, makes use of discrete nonlinear/random methods for being read, producing 4096 possible distinct readings from the permutations of its symbols . A similar and more direct antecedent is the divinatory system of the Tarot, which presents its users with randomly drawn cards that each contain a concept or archetype from which a reading is constructed. Some important aspects of the Tarot to note are that 1). The archetypes are drawn from familiar or basic situations in human life, 2). Provide open guidelines for the spatio-temporal arrangement and reading of the cards, and 3). Ask the reader to consider the cards and their constructed narrative as a representation of the reader and their personal associations to the cards’ contents.
This last point becomes important when considering another antecedent: that of role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. Though many actions in RPGs are decided through the chance of dice rolls, this kind of game’s fun comes primarily through the story that the players and game master construct and express from the randomness of events and charts of possible outcomes. The players are encouraged towards this act of narrative construction because they identify themselves with the characters in the story. While the Unlimited Story Deck could be used in a similar, self-representational way, it seems that this identification between reader and character may be an integral part of how we interpret stories: by imagining ourselves into the situations and relationships presented these become real for us. Many of the cards in this deck have thus been addressed to the user to encourage their involvement in the stories that can be constructed.
A last few antecedent forms to consider include collectible card games, such as Magic: The Gathering, where players place cards on the table that each represent different characters or forces operating on each other. While this may look the most like the Ultimate Story Deck, collectible card games don’t generally encourage narrative creation and have very particular constraints of game play and goal-situations. Another card game worth mentioning though is Fluxx, where the cards played change the rules and end-situations of the game. This is closer to the player relationship to the cards played in the Ultimate Story Deck, but once again without the use of narratives. Lastly is the card game 1000 Blank White Cards (which I have yet to play, and so can’t speak freely about how it operates), essentially blank cards drawn on by the players to make up the game as it goes along. The Ultimate Story Deck seems very similar to this, but with a preset range of cards and a focus on narration somewhat more similar to the Surrealist storytelling game Exquisite Corpse, where a narrative is made up by people passing around sentences to be finished or continued.
This project is still unfinished, the cards are being designed and should hopefully be done next week in time to start play-testing how the Deck works. More details forthcoming.
1. Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerrenial, 1994) 62-4
2. Philip Wheelwright [Ed.] The Presocratics (New York: Macmillan, 1985) 53
3. Martin Heidegger. The Question Concerning Technology. Basic Writings. David Farrell Krell [Ed.] 322
4. Espen Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University) 20-1
5. Raph Koster. A Theory of Fun for Game Design (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041203/koster_01.shtml, 11.30.09)
6. Aarseth 9
11.26.2009
Process and the Past
Despite the need to be working on various school and personal creative projects right now I find myself in the middle of a process of going back through past writings and making them more interconnected and available, in short a bit of personal house cleaning, which seems necessary for several reasons. Primarily I have just gotten out of a long term relationship and am realizing that, as happens when ones' life gets intimately wrapped up in that of another, there are many perspectives and interests that I've neglected over the last several years, that need to be dug out and tied back in to my current projects and perspectives before I can begin fully working on those things from a fuller and more integrated place.
Some things I've noticed while doing this: obviously the recognition of neglected perspectives, including poetic, occult, revolutionary, metaphysical, oneiric, and process-oriented views of the world, which have shaped much of my current stance despite getting brief or invisible coverage in my thoughts of late.
Secondly I noticed that I was apt in the past to spill out great amounts of personal drama and woe on the Internet, which more recently I've learned not to do. We all go through emotional turmoil at times, but don't necessarily need to present that publicly. This is not though just a choosing not to present these facets of my life, but a recognition that I and my writing have actually matured, so that these emotional contents do not press on me with the same amount of ferocious necessity that they once did; I can separate what I want to say from all the chaos that surrounds the thoughts and words. On the other hand, what is missing from more academic framings of thought is that ideas are always intimately bound up in our experience. To not discuss personal narratives and the experiential engagement with our ideas, that is, how we live out our thoughts in our real lives, is to present a too small and flattened view of what reality is. Our lives, despite our ideals and intentions, are messy, upsetting, and influence everything that goes on in our heads, and recognizing our fears and doubts and questions along side the theories and fictions is ultimately a more true representation of reality, but one that needs to find balance between discretion and disclosure.
It seems necessary to recognize these things in light of the words inscribed above the Delphic Oracle: know thyself. From time to time, life takes hold and we forget who we fully are, and must return to the process and the past in order to find out again, and again, and move forward from the present in full knowledge and being.
Some things I've noticed while doing this: obviously the recognition of neglected perspectives, including poetic, occult, revolutionary, metaphysical, oneiric, and process-oriented views of the world, which have shaped much of my current stance despite getting brief or invisible coverage in my thoughts of late.
Secondly I noticed that I was apt in the past to spill out great amounts of personal drama and woe on the Internet, which more recently I've learned not to do. We all go through emotional turmoil at times, but don't necessarily need to present that publicly. This is not though just a choosing not to present these facets of my life, but a recognition that I and my writing have actually matured, so that these emotional contents do not press on me with the same amount of ferocious necessity that they once did; I can separate what I want to say from all the chaos that surrounds the thoughts and words. On the other hand, what is missing from more academic framings of thought is that ideas are always intimately bound up in our experience. To not discuss personal narratives and the experiential engagement with our ideas, that is, how we live out our thoughts in our real lives, is to present a too small and flattened view of what reality is. Our lives, despite our ideals and intentions, are messy, upsetting, and influence everything that goes on in our heads, and recognizing our fears and doubts and questions along side the theories and fictions is ultimately a more true representation of reality, but one that needs to find balance between discretion and disclosure.
It seems necessary to recognize these things in light of the words inscribed above the Delphic Oracle: know thyself. From time to time, life takes hold and we forget who we fully are, and must return to the process and the past in order to find out again, and again, and move forward from the present in full knowledge and being.
11.22.2009
The Artist's Mind/ the Public Eye
Last night I went out to reading held by the local Six Gallery Press, as I haven't been getting out of the house much lately and needed that creative inspiration. There I ran into my friend, the gentle giant Jessica Fenlon, who as always was gushing with her creative process. We stood on the corner talking about that moment when one is writing or making art, and everything starts to come together, not just in the work, but literally as if the contents of the art suddenly spilled over into reality with a great a-ha (such epiphanic moments being for me one of the strongest reasons to and for which to create, somewhat like the faulty pattern recognition of apophenia, except as artists, who else decides what patterns are real?)
What was actually more inspiring than the reading was afterward finding Jessica's website, drawclose, which, besides having some of her rather fantastic and surreal videos, made me realize that I have far too many creative outlets that a). I've been terribly neglecting of late, and b). aren't as represented on the interwebs as they could be. At least not in one cohesive place. I realize I should probably bite it and get a domain name at some point, but for now I've taken the trouble to make the links to my various writings more visible in the sidebar here, as well as update a ton of artwork from the past 8 years to my flickr account, in particular making new sets for Collages, Inklings, and photographs of Modern Ruins. The next step will be figuring out the best way to host music so that I can put up recordings somewhere.
On the other hand, I am also reaching a point of frustration with the easy and public mediation of the Internet, which happens every couple of years, when I get too caught up in the public representations and analyzes and begin neglecting the creative process all together. It seems to me that we live in an age where everyone is creating (or at least "producing content") all the time, and is equally making that content available, all the time, except what is lost is the ability to step back, to edit, to build larger projects. Or, is lost the necessary silence, the magical space created when no one knows where or who you are or what you are doing, when out of the public eye the artist's mind is the total sphere of attention, and anything becomes possible. It is only when you disappear into the work that the epiphany truly starts to happen. And it won't if you're too busy telling people about it to let the threads weave and build up to something more than the just this.
What was actually more inspiring than the reading was afterward finding Jessica's website, drawclose, which, besides having some of her rather fantastic and surreal videos, made me realize that I have far too many creative outlets that a). I've been terribly neglecting of late, and b). aren't as represented on the interwebs as they could be. At least not in one cohesive place. I realize I should probably bite it and get a domain name at some point, but for now I've taken the trouble to make the links to my various writings more visible in the sidebar here, as well as update a ton of artwork from the past 8 years to my flickr account, in particular making new sets for Collages, Inklings, and photographs of Modern Ruins. The next step will be figuring out the best way to host music so that I can put up recordings somewhere.
On the other hand, I am also reaching a point of frustration with the easy and public mediation of the Internet, which happens every couple of years, when I get too caught up in the public representations and analyzes and begin neglecting the creative process all together. It seems to me that we live in an age where everyone is creating (or at least "producing content") all the time, and is equally making that content available, all the time, except what is lost is the ability to step back, to edit, to build larger projects. Or, is lost the necessary silence, the magical space created when no one knows where or who you are or what you are doing, when out of the public eye the artist's mind is the total sphere of attention, and anything becomes possible. It is only when you disappear into the work that the epiphany truly starts to happen. And it won't if you're too busy telling people about it to let the threads weave and build up to something more than the just this.
9.16.2009
Faith and the Pattern
Over the past year I have been going through an extreme crisis of faith. Due to a number of physical, emotional, and psychic challenges I found myself last winter in a state of disillusionment, that everything I had previously held to be good, desirable, possible, and expected in the world may not have been the case at all, a state close to feeling jaded, except that the crisis is precisely in trying to find some reason to carry on, to still believe: in love, the power of the human spirit, self-growth, god, some point to life as we know it, or at least a deeper understanding. But the closer I looked at any of these things the further they seemed to recede, from view, from understanding, so I was left wondering if they really existed. In centuries of the human quest for the truth and goodness we are still no closer to truth it seems, and people can be as ignorant, violent, and uncaring as they always have been, if not more so, which is rather disheartening to someone who feels they have spent their life searching for and hoping to bring these positive qualities into being. More recently I have summed up my quandary in asking, what is the point of self-growth, of struggling to improve how one is in the world, when the work is hard and there seems to be no real “reward” no incentive from society to do so (though that I take this as a valid question shows at least some will towards growing). How can I spend roughly the same amount of time writing on my novel as watching a TV show, and find the same amount of satisfaction in both? And sometimes more in the casual, indulgent activities, because they are easier? This is baffling to me. I believe that everything is real, even those things we can only imagine, but nevertheless there seems to be a primacy to the everyday, to those things, which when we pick ourselves off the floor or put down our books we still have to deal with, of which we can sigh and say, well maybe this is it. But is it? Ultimately everything is real, but some things are more real than others. Worrying about money or physical pain unfortunately feel to be some of the most real there is.
The problem, I know, is one of perspective. To say, this is it, is to presuppose that we know everything there is to know about life, enough to cast some judgment on it, when really we can know nothing with any such certainty. I am aware that the mystery of the Universe is far deeper than we can fathom. Not even the scientific method can say what is really true, either point at a position or velocity of a particle but not both, or how and why they are entangled and add up to all this. Any other human effort to value one mode of the world over another is based on subjective claims, of perception, of intuition, of faith. On some level even an atheist claims, I believe God doesn’t exist, because it is a statement that can’t be proven one way or another. For centuries scientists laughed at the notion of atoms, of forces and fields, because they couldn’t be seen, only to find that maybe they really are there, and though still unseen may be more real than this, but just as inexplicable and mystic as when the ancient Greeks first made up the story. How can I know this is just it, when my intuitions, the evidence my senses have gathered over a lifetime of searching, have suggested otherwise, if but to say, maybe it’s too hard to keep looking, no one else is really looking, not everywhere at once, and the whole edifice of Western knowledge is constructed on the basis of looking only at the visible and provable, and when confronted with a reality greater than that which can be known, it crumbles, is shown to be a charade based on the misapplication of ancient dialectical devices and assumptions: that dialectics can really tell us anything about anything, for when you point at or name something it always creates the thing it is not, and the thing neither of those are, ad nauseum, the way a proton pulled from an atomic nucleus mysteriously creates another proton in its place. This is beautiful and mysterious, but then you still have to go to work, or patch up an argument with your beloved. And there is no place to escape from that reality to, no one to turn to in our need outside this predicament. No matter what your perspective is on the world/Universe, or what you believe is our place and purpose in it, we are still within that system, like an existential Goedel’s Theorem, constrained by our physical senses and abilities and ways of knowing, and still have to find some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some small joy, and maybe the courage to choose to act as decent human beings, for ourselves and others, if we have any strength and calmness left over.
But how, and why? Because most days I feel full of rage, time slipping through the eye of it and feeling there is something more I could be doing that is the thing I really am meant to be doing, except I only have a vague, limited notion of what that is and no one has stepped down from on high to let me in on the secret plan for the Universe and my role in it. I feel a lot like the character John Locke from the show Lost, who, unlike the more reason-based characters trying to escape from the Island,, has an intuitive faith that he can and is meant to solve the labyrinthine puzzle and mystery that surrounds the place, following his gut, connecting scraps of information, seeking ever deeper in the mystery, and yet still plagued by doubts, hoping someone will tell him where to look next, constrained like the original philosopher Locke to the empiricism of believing what he can see, yet unable to explain that he has seen things beyond what most people would ever believe could be real. I relate to this and wonder how many others can. I think of my neighbor, watching sports on his big-screened TV, driving his motorcycle noisily up and down our street. He seems totally fulfilled in this, as far as I can see. There is not a question or even a need for a question of is this it.
The Presocratics (who I am studying in a class on the historical roots of science in mythology), were the first to systematically ask the questions, what is really real, can and do things change, can and what do we know? These ontological and epistemological questions are the foundation of any philosophy or metaphysics, and without before realizing that, they have also been my pivotal questions (along with that bugaboo, are we free/active agents). In answer to what is really real, they posit everything from water, to air, to numbers as the foundational substance of reality, or there is Anaximander, who believed it was the Apeiron, the unlimited storehouse of potential qualities of all things as the one underlying substance. My teacher, a younger grad student, laughed, this all seems absurd or primitive in light of our current scientific conceptions of reality, and the class all nodded. Except for me it doesn’t. For me the idea of some fount, of imagination or possibility, seems more intuitively true than the random motion of subatomic particles. In fact, it is an idea recorded in a number of different spiritual traditions: the Theosophic Akashic Records, the Sufi Scriptorum, the Hebraic Book of Life, even the Platonic Forms as an underlying reality. Is this really so absurd then, or are they all wrong? And more confounding, it is something that I have experienced, with my own senses (admittedly under a mystical trance state), but without knowing of it beforehand or expecting anything of the sort. But how could I explain this in class, in the face of the entire academic apparatus that is not about my experiences but recorded “facts?” These are two entirely different views of reality, like the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, both of which are mistaken for Truth, when they can never be anything more than descriptions, stories, metaphors for processes we can never really know anything about. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” (reading in my class on Narrative and Technlogy), does a good job of framing this problem, n the context of a metaphysical detective story: we can either romantically-intuitively appreciate the surface aesthetic of things, or logically seek out the structures beneath them. But not both, though that is exactly what it seems we must do. That ability and desire however were lost centuries ago, when Aristotle argued down the Sophists in the forum, paving the way for Dialectical Materialism. And the world has been a cold calculating place since, lit by moments of decadence and revelry, but with no real new understanding or wisdom, meaning or faith to guide us out of this spiritual morass.
To what can we turn then, if not to our own experiences and the way we choose to pick them up in our daily lives (this division between events and our intentions or them being my definitions of fate and destiny). Are we just trapped on this island in space or do we choose to explore what being here could mean? When the stars that guided the ancients (both in sea travel and in mythic timekeeping) now begin to fade, there are still the stars in our hearts, which is the meaning of that word desire. As Crowley said, each and every one of us is a star. For most of my life I have been a proponent of a magical worldview, most clearly as spelled out in Bill Whitcomb’s Axioms, the first three of which are that reality is created from our worldviews that can be changed, that we reaffirm or change our worldviews through attention, and that seemingly disconnected events can strike us as being intricately connected, what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, but I call constellations of meaning, because meaning does not exist in events but in our interpretation of the relationships between them in relation to the patterns of our worldviews. Though I have actively sought out such constellations of meaning, in the last several years they have grown few and far between, a feeling I keep expressing as that always before the pattern of meanings suggested where to look next, except recently they haven’t, and everywhere has felt like a dead end, not at all that personal Eureka moment I recall first feeling reading James Joyce’s description of that Eureka moment in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and I’ve chased after ever since. Perhaps I have stopped looking in as active or connected a manner. Or perhaps, as I fear, that though I’ve looked and connected, the net of my looking wasn’t wide enough, and the pattern or destiny I found meaningful for myself in following certain dreams and ideas is too small, is not interrelated to Reality as a whole, as was the case with the Apeiron in class. Am I crazy for having experienced something no one else has, or are they for not even considering that such things could be? So that I lost faith with any of it being meaningful. And lastly, I have been afraid, for to connect our own meanings to any larger collective meaning takes work, and forces us to confront ourselves in wholly new ways, and precisely where our old maps no longer fit the territory of actual existence.
I have come to recognize recently that my novel, and indeed my task as a creative being, is an attempt to create such interconnected maps of our experience of Reality, a daunting and seemingly impossible task (though less impossible due to our current information technologies), yet one I am driven to through whatever genetic or spiritual reasons. To this end I have to start experiencing again the world, the larger world, as synchronistically connected, however those mechanisms work, but from scratch. Because if my patterns before are what I expected to find, but clearly didn’t, then I have to forgo faith in my expectations and recreate a new pattern from nothing, from everything, but not with the certainty in thinking that Descates had in his doubting of all. And in this letting go was confronted yesterday with a number of synchronicities if not answering than at least pointing to ways out of my current crisis. I wrote a letter to my beloved discussing love in terms of encouraging another’s and our own self-growth, an idea from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” and immediately after in my Wisdom class in which we are reading that book, I had to write a letter as if to a distant friend on that very subject, allowing me to better clarify my questions. Then, finishing “Zen and the Art of…” came upon a summation passage equating Pirsig’s concept of Quality (as that missing from the Western dialectical tradition) to the Presocratic Ariste, excellence or heroic virtue, virtue already being a term personally loaded with positive meaning of acting right in the world, here defined not as virtue for others but of the self, improvement and growth into what one can most be, a joy in the process that I had forgotten, also connected to the Buddhist Dharma (further constellated in relation to the mystery in Lost as well as the self-mythologizing of Kerouac). All of which left me with a big Yes! And further constellated into this essay, which before I started writing I found a blog on synchronicities, cementing the point.
But the question remains, as much as I live this and find it necessary to my life, it seems mainly like a metaphysical thought experiment, and still does not connect back to the mundane, having to work sleep, relate to other people, go the bathroom, let alone all the wars and environmental degradation and illness at large in the world. Years ago I had a chance to sit in on a Zen retreat and told the Monk that it felt like I was in a dream from which I couldn’t wake up. He said, all our ideas, knowledge, stories, expectations, these are the dream, when Reality is just this. But now I realize that what I really meant was that that just this is what feels dreamlike, or actually worse, nightmarish, when the stories and ideas would be much more wonderful if they were that primarily real. I may find joy in contemplating quantum entanglement or synchronicity, but I see my friends struggling daily to find jobs or housing, getting robbed, sick, or mentally ill, and I wonder, why is that more real? Why am I not satisfied with it, except for perhaps being raised with some religious notion of an afterlife that has crushed me on idealism and hope for more? I understand that I am in a way very privileged to be able to even ask these questions. I have a steady job, a home, friends and family and fairly good health, I was raised with an education of intelligence, creativity, and faith, and questioning. Many do not have this, or if they did they got bogged down in the tribulations of the everyday, or just don’t care. I doubt for instance that my neighbor, if he were to take time away from his TV and motortoys, would he feel inclined to ask any of this? The meaning of his everyday life and material possessions seems to be enough for him (if they really are). Does he not want to spiritually grow, or is that process different for each person? Who can answer any of this? I on the other hand do not feel like I have a choice; even at my poorest and most downtrodden I have always felt the urge and made the time to ask these questions. I suspect that, being raised to have a capacity and willingness towards belief, but always questioning the presumed things one might believe in, it is like this large, too large hole that no material thing and few non-material things have ever come close to filling, or even fitting into, that leaves me with this internal tension, a spiritual angst like a spring about to burst, that might only find ease with ordering the whole reality in myself, and then what of everything out of reality? And then what of still having to live, and share this with others? It is as if, what are these questions for if they cannot be interconnected and applied in our daily lives, for everyone’s lives? What god is a map or pattern if other people can’t follow it somewhere they want to go? That I do not know, and only raises further questions. As Rilke put it, the pattern grows more intricate and subtle & being swept along is no longer enough.
The problem, I know, is one of perspective. To say, this is it, is to presuppose that we know everything there is to know about life, enough to cast some judgment on it, when really we can know nothing with any such certainty. I am aware that the mystery of the Universe is far deeper than we can fathom. Not even the scientific method can say what is really true, either point at a position or velocity of a particle but not both, or how and why they are entangled and add up to all this. Any other human effort to value one mode of the world over another is based on subjective claims, of perception, of intuition, of faith. On some level even an atheist claims, I believe God doesn’t exist, because it is a statement that can’t be proven one way or another. For centuries scientists laughed at the notion of atoms, of forces and fields, because they couldn’t be seen, only to find that maybe they really are there, and though still unseen may be more real than this, but just as inexplicable and mystic as when the ancient Greeks first made up the story. How can I know this is just it, when my intuitions, the evidence my senses have gathered over a lifetime of searching, have suggested otherwise, if but to say, maybe it’s too hard to keep looking, no one else is really looking, not everywhere at once, and the whole edifice of Western knowledge is constructed on the basis of looking only at the visible and provable, and when confronted with a reality greater than that which can be known, it crumbles, is shown to be a charade based on the misapplication of ancient dialectical devices and assumptions: that dialectics can really tell us anything about anything, for when you point at or name something it always creates the thing it is not, and the thing neither of those are, ad nauseum, the way a proton pulled from an atomic nucleus mysteriously creates another proton in its place. This is beautiful and mysterious, but then you still have to go to work, or patch up an argument with your beloved. And there is no place to escape from that reality to, no one to turn to in our need outside this predicament. No matter what your perspective is on the world/Universe, or what you believe is our place and purpose in it, we are still within that system, like an existential Goedel’s Theorem, constrained by our physical senses and abilities and ways of knowing, and still have to find some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some small joy, and maybe the courage to choose to act as decent human beings, for ourselves and others, if we have any strength and calmness left over.
But how, and why? Because most days I feel full of rage, time slipping through the eye of it and feeling there is something more I could be doing that is the thing I really am meant to be doing, except I only have a vague, limited notion of what that is and no one has stepped down from on high to let me in on the secret plan for the Universe and my role in it. I feel a lot like the character John Locke from the show Lost, who, unlike the more reason-based characters trying to escape from the Island,, has an intuitive faith that he can and is meant to solve the labyrinthine puzzle and mystery that surrounds the place, following his gut, connecting scraps of information, seeking ever deeper in the mystery, and yet still plagued by doubts, hoping someone will tell him where to look next, constrained like the original philosopher Locke to the empiricism of believing what he can see, yet unable to explain that he has seen things beyond what most people would ever believe could be real. I relate to this and wonder how many others can. I think of my neighbor, watching sports on his big-screened TV, driving his motorcycle noisily up and down our street. He seems totally fulfilled in this, as far as I can see. There is not a question or even a need for a question of is this it.
The Presocratics (who I am studying in a class on the historical roots of science in mythology), were the first to systematically ask the questions, what is really real, can and do things change, can and what do we know? These ontological and epistemological questions are the foundation of any philosophy or metaphysics, and without before realizing that, they have also been my pivotal questions (along with that bugaboo, are we free/active agents). In answer to what is really real, they posit everything from water, to air, to numbers as the foundational substance of reality, or there is Anaximander, who believed it was the Apeiron, the unlimited storehouse of potential qualities of all things as the one underlying substance. My teacher, a younger grad student, laughed, this all seems absurd or primitive in light of our current scientific conceptions of reality, and the class all nodded. Except for me it doesn’t. For me the idea of some fount, of imagination or possibility, seems more intuitively true than the random motion of subatomic particles. In fact, it is an idea recorded in a number of different spiritual traditions: the Theosophic Akashic Records, the Sufi Scriptorum, the Hebraic Book of Life, even the Platonic Forms as an underlying reality. Is this really so absurd then, or are they all wrong? And more confounding, it is something that I have experienced, with my own senses (admittedly under a mystical trance state), but without knowing of it beforehand or expecting anything of the sort. But how could I explain this in class, in the face of the entire academic apparatus that is not about my experiences but recorded “facts?” These are two entirely different views of reality, like the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, both of which are mistaken for Truth, when they can never be anything more than descriptions, stories, metaphors for processes we can never really know anything about. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” (reading in my class on Narrative and Technlogy), does a good job of framing this problem, n the context of a metaphysical detective story: we can either romantically-intuitively appreciate the surface aesthetic of things, or logically seek out the structures beneath them. But not both, though that is exactly what it seems we must do. That ability and desire however were lost centuries ago, when Aristotle argued down the Sophists in the forum, paving the way for Dialectical Materialism. And the world has been a cold calculating place since, lit by moments of decadence and revelry, but with no real new understanding or wisdom, meaning or faith to guide us out of this spiritual morass.
To what can we turn then, if not to our own experiences and the way we choose to pick them up in our daily lives (this division between events and our intentions or them being my definitions of fate and destiny). Are we just trapped on this island in space or do we choose to explore what being here could mean? When the stars that guided the ancients (both in sea travel and in mythic timekeeping) now begin to fade, there are still the stars in our hearts, which is the meaning of that word desire. As Crowley said, each and every one of us is a star. For most of my life I have been a proponent of a magical worldview, most clearly as spelled out in Bill Whitcomb’s Axioms, the first three of which are that reality is created from our worldviews that can be changed, that we reaffirm or change our worldviews through attention, and that seemingly disconnected events can strike us as being intricately connected, what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, but I call constellations of meaning, because meaning does not exist in events but in our interpretation of the relationships between them in relation to the patterns of our worldviews. Though I have actively sought out such constellations of meaning, in the last several years they have grown few and far between, a feeling I keep expressing as that always before the pattern of meanings suggested where to look next, except recently they haven’t, and everywhere has felt like a dead end, not at all that personal Eureka moment I recall first feeling reading James Joyce’s description of that Eureka moment in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and I’ve chased after ever since. Perhaps I have stopped looking in as active or connected a manner. Or perhaps, as I fear, that though I’ve looked and connected, the net of my looking wasn’t wide enough, and the pattern or destiny I found meaningful for myself in following certain dreams and ideas is too small, is not interrelated to Reality as a whole, as was the case with the Apeiron in class. Am I crazy for having experienced something no one else has, or are they for not even considering that such things could be? So that I lost faith with any of it being meaningful. And lastly, I have been afraid, for to connect our own meanings to any larger collective meaning takes work, and forces us to confront ourselves in wholly new ways, and precisely where our old maps no longer fit the territory of actual existence.
I have come to recognize recently that my novel, and indeed my task as a creative being, is an attempt to create such interconnected maps of our experience of Reality, a daunting and seemingly impossible task (though less impossible due to our current information technologies), yet one I am driven to through whatever genetic or spiritual reasons. To this end I have to start experiencing again the world, the larger world, as synchronistically connected, however those mechanisms work, but from scratch. Because if my patterns before are what I expected to find, but clearly didn’t, then I have to forgo faith in my expectations and recreate a new pattern from nothing, from everything, but not with the certainty in thinking that Descates had in his doubting of all. And in this letting go was confronted yesterday with a number of synchronicities if not answering than at least pointing to ways out of my current crisis. I wrote a letter to my beloved discussing love in terms of encouraging another’s and our own self-growth, an idea from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” and immediately after in my Wisdom class in which we are reading that book, I had to write a letter as if to a distant friend on that very subject, allowing me to better clarify my questions. Then, finishing “Zen and the Art of…” came upon a summation passage equating Pirsig’s concept of Quality (as that missing from the Western dialectical tradition) to the Presocratic Ariste, excellence or heroic virtue, virtue already being a term personally loaded with positive meaning of acting right in the world, here defined not as virtue for others but of the self, improvement and growth into what one can most be, a joy in the process that I had forgotten, also connected to the Buddhist Dharma (further constellated in relation to the mystery in Lost as well as the self-mythologizing of Kerouac). All of which left me with a big Yes! And further constellated into this essay, which before I started writing I found a blog on synchronicities, cementing the point.
But the question remains, as much as I live this and find it necessary to my life, it seems mainly like a metaphysical thought experiment, and still does not connect back to the mundane, having to work sleep, relate to other people, go the bathroom, let alone all the wars and environmental degradation and illness at large in the world. Years ago I had a chance to sit in on a Zen retreat and told the Monk that it felt like I was in a dream from which I couldn’t wake up. He said, all our ideas, knowledge, stories, expectations, these are the dream, when Reality is just this. But now I realize that what I really meant was that that just this is what feels dreamlike, or actually worse, nightmarish, when the stories and ideas would be much more wonderful if they were that primarily real. I may find joy in contemplating quantum entanglement or synchronicity, but I see my friends struggling daily to find jobs or housing, getting robbed, sick, or mentally ill, and I wonder, why is that more real? Why am I not satisfied with it, except for perhaps being raised with some religious notion of an afterlife that has crushed me on idealism and hope for more? I understand that I am in a way very privileged to be able to even ask these questions. I have a steady job, a home, friends and family and fairly good health, I was raised with an education of intelligence, creativity, and faith, and questioning. Many do not have this, or if they did they got bogged down in the tribulations of the everyday, or just don’t care. I doubt for instance that my neighbor, if he were to take time away from his TV and motortoys, would he feel inclined to ask any of this? The meaning of his everyday life and material possessions seems to be enough for him (if they really are). Does he not want to spiritually grow, or is that process different for each person? Who can answer any of this? I on the other hand do not feel like I have a choice; even at my poorest and most downtrodden I have always felt the urge and made the time to ask these questions. I suspect that, being raised to have a capacity and willingness towards belief, but always questioning the presumed things one might believe in, it is like this large, too large hole that no material thing and few non-material things have ever come close to filling, or even fitting into, that leaves me with this internal tension, a spiritual angst like a spring about to burst, that might only find ease with ordering the whole reality in myself, and then what of everything out of reality? And then what of still having to live, and share this with others? It is as if, what are these questions for if they cannot be interconnected and applied in our daily lives, for everyone’s lives? What god is a map or pattern if other people can’t follow it somewhere they want to go? That I do not know, and only raises further questions. As Rilke put it, the pattern grows more intricate and subtle & being swept along is no longer enough.
4.15.2008
Synchronicity of the Fantastic
As I noted before, I've been doing a lot of research recently on the aesthetics and techniques of using the fantastic in literature, and as often happens when I'm doing a lot of research on the right subject that I need to be studying for my life, there is a moment when synchronicity takes over and it seems as if the universe is just throwing the right texts at me.
In the most recent issue of Writer's Chronicle was a rather interesting piece about the function of and methods for workshopping Magical Realist literature. While I have a deep place in my heart for the writing's of authors like Marquez, I have already realized that Magical Realism isn't what I personally am going for in my writing. As a genre it has a specific place in time as part of the post-colonization of South American literature, and as such writers trying to emulate that genre are only going to be able to do just that (though of course one can always learn from what works, and for me, anything that calls into question the mundanity of reality is certainly worthwhile to learn from). Secondly however, Magical Realism is characterized by the acceptance of magical events within the everyday reality of the story. Not like fantasy where the magical is common to a separate, created universe, but a magic that borders on and is inherent to our own. This unfortunately takes away from these supernatural events a prime quality, and one that is central to its use in fantastic literature, of being able to affect the characters in a story and readers of it. That is, those things that are magical or uncommon to our world have the possibility of moving people to fear or wonder, and call into question the reality in which they live as opposed to confirm it.
There also happened to be in the Writer's Chronicle an article on the work of Italo Calvino, who I've only barely read (a rough stab at "Invisible Cities" a couple years ago), but who the article painted as being primarily concerned with the question of the use of myth and the fantastic in literature. And so the next day while browsing the used bookstores of North Oakland I came across a collection of Calvino's essays "On the Uses of Literature," which is full of aesthetic musings that strike rather close to my own heart on writing, that it does after all have the power, and responsibility, to change the world. Among one essay on the fantastic as a literary form (which mentioned the name of Todorov, whom every source I turn to these days refers to), Calvino gave some examples of what for him is fantastic literature, and note that for Calvino, the most exemplary library is that which embraces works on the periphery of the established cannons of literature.
And who should Calvino name but that master of the fantastic possibilities of childhood, and one of my own favorite little-known authors, Bruno Schulz. I discovered Schulz myself after watching the short films of the Brother's Quay, whose own aesthetic of twitching dolls and dark constructed spaces is a pinnacle of the aesthetic of dreams, particularly their short "The Street of Crocodiles," based on Schulz's story of the same name. Recently we watched The Brother's Quay's latest full length work, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes," which could be summed up as a kind of tale in which Felisberto, "a pianist, is invited to lonely country houses where wealthy maniacs set up complicated charades in which women and dolls change places." This quote also happens to be a description from Calvino of the work of Felisberto Hernandez, a Uruguayan fantasist who influenced Marquez, Calvino, Julio Cortazar (another current under-appreciated favorite), and it presumably also the Brother's Quay. At least I now know who to put next on my reading list, though also to follow Borge's influences, and those of many American fantastic writers, I should also be looking into the stories of G.K. Chesterton.
In the most recent issue of Writer's Chronicle was a rather interesting piece about the function of and methods for workshopping Magical Realist literature. While I have a deep place in my heart for the writing's of authors like Marquez, I have already realized that Magical Realism isn't what I personally am going for in my writing. As a genre it has a specific place in time as part of the post-colonization of South American literature, and as such writers trying to emulate that genre are only going to be able to do just that (though of course one can always learn from what works, and for me, anything that calls into question the mundanity of reality is certainly worthwhile to learn from). Secondly however, Magical Realism is characterized by the acceptance of magical events within the everyday reality of the story. Not like fantasy where the magical is common to a separate, created universe, but a magic that borders on and is inherent to our own. This unfortunately takes away from these supernatural events a prime quality, and one that is central to its use in fantastic literature, of being able to affect the characters in a story and readers of it. That is, those things that are magical or uncommon to our world have the possibility of moving people to fear or wonder, and call into question the reality in which they live as opposed to confirm it.
There also happened to be in the Writer's Chronicle an article on the work of Italo Calvino, who I've only barely read (a rough stab at "Invisible Cities" a couple years ago), but who the article painted as being primarily concerned with the question of the use of myth and the fantastic in literature. And so the next day while browsing the used bookstores of North Oakland I came across a collection of Calvino's essays "On the Uses of Literature," which is full of aesthetic musings that strike rather close to my own heart on writing, that it does after all have the power, and responsibility, to change the world. Among one essay on the fantastic as a literary form (which mentioned the name of Todorov, whom every source I turn to these days refers to), Calvino gave some examples of what for him is fantastic literature, and note that for Calvino, the most exemplary library is that which embraces works on the periphery of the established cannons of literature.
And who should Calvino name but that master of the fantastic possibilities of childhood, and one of my own favorite little-known authors, Bruno Schulz. I discovered Schulz myself after watching the short films of the Brother's Quay, whose own aesthetic of twitching dolls and dark constructed spaces is a pinnacle of the aesthetic of dreams, particularly their short "The Street of Crocodiles," based on Schulz's story of the same name. Recently we watched The Brother's Quay's latest full length work, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes," which could be summed up as a kind of tale in which Felisberto, "a pianist, is invited to lonely country houses where wealthy maniacs set up complicated charades in which women and dolls change places." This quote also happens to be a description from Calvino of the work of Felisberto Hernandez, a Uruguayan fantasist who influenced Marquez, Calvino, Julio Cortazar (another current under-appreciated favorite), and it presumably also the Brother's Quay. At least I now know who to put next on my reading list, though also to follow Borge's influences, and those of many American fantastic writers, I should also be looking into the stories of G.K. Chesterton.
2.22.2007
flash of momentum
It's been awhile again. life takes hold and suddenly i forget that the internet ever existed. let's see... i got into school, starting august 23, and realized just how much work i have to get done on my own projects before i won't have time to work on them. so i've been writing, for 3-6 hours a day, typing up every single dream i ever had, and then deconstructing all the symbolism; places, characters, objects, actions, shades of ligth and color, impedences and other strange psychological effects, so that i can begin seeing exactly what my psyche contains and how to put it all back together into this novel. beyond that continuing madcap research, deconstructing the occult symbolism in jodorowsky's "holy mountain" for a friend's disertation, inventing new techniques, recording more of my past, playing music, being in love. every day shows me so much, i am learning at such an incredible rate, about how i work, what things mean to me, what it means to be in love again, to be a friend and son... and i'm not even in school yet. suffice to say that it is hard to find time or desire to post here, since the work i'm doing is very different than that which is just updates of my life for other people.
perhaps you'll hear from me later...
perhaps you'll hear from me later...
10.09.2006
infornography
Reading more PK Dick before work i came on several passages of relevance to the dream novel. it seems Dick was also familiar and concerned with mythological themes and their application to his life (as i imagine every writer must be to some degree). but as the inexplicableness of his transcendent experience took hold of him this was the only place he could turn to make heads or tails out of whatever had actually happened, which could otherwise be considered madness; much the way i am doing with my dream visions. indeed there are many parallels, of most note that when he had looked deep into the void he was shown he found in the heart of it and himself a beautiful and all knowing woman, his anima; whom he associated with the goddess Sophia, who in xtian mythology Christ promised would come to those who embraced the light through the dark night of their souls (i will have to find this reference, probably in the Gnostic texts), as the Glory figure came to me when i was struggling with the end of my internal world and disintegration of the self.
Dick also said he found that void to be God, the awareness in all things behind their apparent, separated, realities, who was both more real and ineffable. the way that in my San Pedro trip I found what i could only call God in the hollow behind all things, yet could only describe it as a comfortable absence that was aware of the entirety of existence. Dick remarked that no one else (in his knowledge) had had this experience in the past 200 years, and i wonder that i should also come to a similar place, even down to the anamnesia of the Record, and if this kind of awakening is becoming more common. especially as the ages of consciousness expanding drugs and information make connectivity and the concept of omniscience more obvious and essential to modern life. one could probably make an argument for the exteriorization of the sub- or unconscious, where it was latent or hidden before. as the pantheon of gods (cross-cultural) could be seen as a finer-grained pattern of ourselves, our hopes and fears, desires and other subtle energies (which it has been postulated they were created to represent in the first place, for lack of better terminology or understanding of our inner workings), so too could the gods be seen as a rough-hewn emanation from some deeper, lighter source or pattern that runs beneath and shapes all things. the matrix metaphor points to this condition, but as this matrix is but matter or mother (Ma’at), it is more related to the veil of maya, the ground of appearances, Dick’s black iron prison; and not to whatever energy or awareness lies formless behind the forms.
in talking with sophie about her process of coming out of her darkness (the shamanistic rebirth or psychological individuation process), she mentioned having to find a “positive energy” to rely on, though she was understandably hesitant to call it God, as AA usually tells its participants to turn to. i suggested there was nothing in the energy itself which is positive, that it is our perception and use of it which casts it in either that dark or light. one could argue it is that same energy (or our refusal of it) that drives people to drink or madness, and the acceptance of something larger than themselves to trust in which leads them back to a sense of peace or heightened presence in themselves and the world. i suppose it is many things for many people, that some find it necessary to couch this energy in terms of myth or religion in order to match their own peculiar symbolism of the world, but that ultimately it doesn’t matter what you call it, as it is inexpressible outside of metaphor and imagination. of course, that the energy is chargeless (for lack of a better word to describe its dual positivity/ negativity), means that many choose consciously to embrace its dark face, the madness of the world of forms, the secret longings and highs and powers of sex and violence which currently seem to be driving our world. but these are just as much a “path to god” as the more ascetic, pure paths, as evidenced by the tradition of tantra, in which instead of drawing the senses away from the world in order to find what is beneath them, one purposely overloads the senses until they reach a breaking point, and find the still emptiness that resides in the chaos. our culture is currently in such a process of overloading itself with information and images (infornography).
i suppose the distinction is that like breeds like, and that increasing the amount of sensory stimuli or violence in the world only creates more of a maze to extricate ourselves from later. certainly in the early days of disentangling my dreams i found myself relying heavily on metaphors and symbolism to explain my experiences, only to find that they were creating that much more of a labyrinth between me and reality. this continued until i asked the zen master Chong Hae what this dream was i could not wake up from, and he said it was all the theories and images we put on top of reality in order to avoid just having it be reality itself. as Dick tells it in an amusing argument with God, each time he came up with some other theory besides having met God, he fell into an infinite regress of thesis/ antithesis, at which God would butt in saying, “i am this infinity, and i will play this game until you die or accept it” at which Dick would say “but maybe…” and fall into another infinite regress, ad nauseum.
Dick also said he found that void to be God, the awareness in all things behind their apparent, separated, realities, who was both more real and ineffable. the way that in my San Pedro trip I found what i could only call God in the hollow behind all things, yet could only describe it as a comfortable absence that was aware of the entirety of existence. Dick remarked that no one else (in his knowledge) had had this experience in the past 200 years, and i wonder that i should also come to a similar place, even down to the anamnesia of the Record, and if this kind of awakening is becoming more common. especially as the ages of consciousness expanding drugs and information make connectivity and the concept of omniscience more obvious and essential to modern life. one could probably make an argument for the exteriorization of the sub- or unconscious, where it was latent or hidden before. as the pantheon of gods (cross-cultural) could be seen as a finer-grained pattern of ourselves, our hopes and fears, desires and other subtle energies (which it has been postulated they were created to represent in the first place, for lack of better terminology or understanding of our inner workings), so too could the gods be seen as a rough-hewn emanation from some deeper, lighter source or pattern that runs beneath and shapes all things. the matrix metaphor points to this condition, but as this matrix is but matter or mother (Ma’at), it is more related to the veil of maya, the ground of appearances, Dick’s black iron prison; and not to whatever energy or awareness lies formless behind the forms.
in talking with sophie about her process of coming out of her darkness (the shamanistic rebirth or psychological individuation process), she mentioned having to find a “positive energy” to rely on, though she was understandably hesitant to call it God, as AA usually tells its participants to turn to. i suggested there was nothing in the energy itself which is positive, that it is our perception and use of it which casts it in either that dark or light. one could argue it is that same energy (or our refusal of it) that drives people to drink or madness, and the acceptance of something larger than themselves to trust in which leads them back to a sense of peace or heightened presence in themselves and the world. i suppose it is many things for many people, that some find it necessary to couch this energy in terms of myth or religion in order to match their own peculiar symbolism of the world, but that ultimately it doesn’t matter what you call it, as it is inexpressible outside of metaphor and imagination. of course, that the energy is chargeless (for lack of a better word to describe its dual positivity/ negativity), means that many choose consciously to embrace its dark face, the madness of the world of forms, the secret longings and highs and powers of sex and violence which currently seem to be driving our world. but these are just as much a “path to god” as the more ascetic, pure paths, as evidenced by the tradition of tantra, in which instead of drawing the senses away from the world in order to find what is beneath them, one purposely overloads the senses until they reach a breaking point, and find the still emptiness that resides in the chaos. our culture is currently in such a process of overloading itself with information and images (infornography).
i suppose the distinction is that like breeds like, and that increasing the amount of sensory stimuli or violence in the world only creates more of a maze to extricate ourselves from later. certainly in the early days of disentangling my dreams i found myself relying heavily on metaphors and symbolism to explain my experiences, only to find that they were creating that much more of a labyrinth between me and reality. this continued until i asked the zen master Chong Hae what this dream was i could not wake up from, and he said it was all the theories and images we put on top of reality in order to avoid just having it be reality itself. as Dick tells it in an amusing argument with God, each time he came up with some other theory besides having met God, he fell into an infinite regress of thesis/ antithesis, at which God would butt in saying, “i am this infinity, and i will play this game until you die or accept it” at which Dick would say “but maybe…” and fall into another infinite regress, ad nauseum.
10.08.2006
cryptomorphology: hidden in the forms
Of course, it’s right when i should be sleeping, that i’m struck with the compulsion to write. which i haven’t felt for days, like the hesitant gearing up of some infernal machine. you’d think i’d be brain dead by now, not sleeping, and waking up still drunk from last night’s birthday festivities. but no. the muses work the night shift. after a slow afternoon working on the hero’s journey notes, i finished huysman’s “against nature” and can finally leave the Decadence aside for a little, and figured i’d take the rest of the evening off. but then i needed to start researching Gnosticism, particularly the emanation of the aeon Sophia from the Pleroma (fullness) of the inexpressible; who in being born without her male twin (syzygy), gave stillbirth to the demiurge, that blind god who created our material world and in not being able to see the greater light cried out that he was indeed the only god. i don’t know where that came from, why i needed to find that info. like a paranoia or obsession, the process of creating a world becomes the object of a focused attention into which everything falls pray. like a black hole, except with an other side. and the strangest quick references latch on as crucial building blocks for the creative task.
so then i picked up a copy of Philip K. Dick’s exegesis, and began reading his account of the mystical experience/ psychotic breakdown that haunted the later years of his life. with the cats prowling at the door and the stillness and buzzing of electronic devices in the room and infinitely tired i started to get those edges of movement in my vision, tinges of other worlds made only more possible by PKD’s surreal yet straightforward narrative of having dead friends and scholars or some alien intelligence speaking greek in his dreams and all around grooming his life. interesting also as a side note, he was born a twin, though his sister Jane C. died a year later. i think the point that struck me was he also related this force to being Sophia (in that the voices were all couched in Gnostic terms), who in that mythology was said to come into the world of forms/ darkness and rescue the shards of light that had gotten trapped here. which Dick went on to relate to Osiris’s dismemberment and subsequent rescue by Isis (another wisdom goddess, on the darker magical side of knowledge).
i had that dream. several years ago after the year long dream storyline of the world ending and civilization crumbling and everyone i know getting put in prison camps, i was coming out of my dark and dreamt one night that my twin brother took me down into a basement laboratory where he chained me to a monolith-machine and proceeded to extract my consciousness from my physical being, so that i was aware as if i was everything around me (foreshadowing my actual experience of this on 8-23-2003). but then he couldn’t get me back into my self and had to find someone who i would recognize and return to my body for. who he found in the glory-sophia figure i had been following around in my unconscious but hadn’t caught yet. he convinced her to come back to the basement and on seeing her i fell back into my body and woke up on a beach, drenched and naked and remembering everything i had been aware of while i was everything.
it could boggle me that i had this dream experience without any prior knowledge of the deeper archetypal occurrences of similar plot-lines, that it is a theme (or mytheme, a term i came on tonight to) inherent in the psyche. placed in the context of the crumbling dream world, and that i was also fighting off a schizophrenic breakdown my twin was going through at the time, this event stands as probably the crucial moment in the whole dream story. and comparing it to other hanged man myths (odin on yggdrassil, Buddha on the immovable spot, christ on the calvary mount…) certainly sets its significance to the myth i’m unraveling in my head.
so i got all jittery, and walked upstairs still catching glimpses out of the corners of my eyes, and suddenly felt like something was following me into the bathroom. and i realized that it’s been a couple years since i’ve felt that, and that that feeling of being stalked or haunted is one i lived under for most of my life. time always looking over your shoulder making you remember this could be it. a healthy dose of paranoia to balance out the pronoia of finding what i was looking for in the texts. probably that gimp death i dreamed the other night finally catching up to his normal place behind my left shoulder. i suppose it means i need to get started on this task soon. not for fear that the work or inspiration will dissipate, for i suspect it is much bigger and longer lasting than i am, but that i might in the mean time. at least, not till after i get a good night’s sleep.
so then i picked up a copy of Philip K. Dick’s exegesis, and began reading his account of the mystical experience/ psychotic breakdown that haunted the later years of his life. with the cats prowling at the door and the stillness and buzzing of electronic devices in the room and infinitely tired i started to get those edges of movement in my vision, tinges of other worlds made only more possible by PKD’s surreal yet straightforward narrative of having dead friends and scholars or some alien intelligence speaking greek in his dreams and all around grooming his life. interesting also as a side note, he was born a twin, though his sister Jane C. died a year later. i think the point that struck me was he also related this force to being Sophia (in that the voices were all couched in Gnostic terms), who in that mythology was said to come into the world of forms/ darkness and rescue the shards of light that had gotten trapped here. which Dick went on to relate to Osiris’s dismemberment and subsequent rescue by Isis (another wisdom goddess, on the darker magical side of knowledge).
i had that dream. several years ago after the year long dream storyline of the world ending and civilization crumbling and everyone i know getting put in prison camps, i was coming out of my dark and dreamt one night that my twin brother took me down into a basement laboratory where he chained me to a monolith-machine and proceeded to extract my consciousness from my physical being, so that i was aware as if i was everything around me (foreshadowing my actual experience of this on 8-23-2003). but then he couldn’t get me back into my self and had to find someone who i would recognize and return to my body for. who he found in the glory-sophia figure i had been following around in my unconscious but hadn’t caught yet. he convinced her to come back to the basement and on seeing her i fell back into my body and woke up on a beach, drenched and naked and remembering everything i had been aware of while i was everything.
it could boggle me that i had this dream experience without any prior knowledge of the deeper archetypal occurrences of similar plot-lines, that it is a theme (or mytheme, a term i came on tonight to) inherent in the psyche. placed in the context of the crumbling dream world, and that i was also fighting off a schizophrenic breakdown my twin was going through at the time, this event stands as probably the crucial moment in the whole dream story. and comparing it to other hanged man myths (odin on yggdrassil, Buddha on the immovable spot, christ on the calvary mount…) certainly sets its significance to the myth i’m unraveling in my head.
so i got all jittery, and walked upstairs still catching glimpses out of the corners of my eyes, and suddenly felt like something was following me into the bathroom. and i realized that it’s been a couple years since i’ve felt that, and that that feeling of being stalked or haunted is one i lived under for most of my life. time always looking over your shoulder making you remember this could be it. a healthy dose of paranoia to balance out the pronoia of finding what i was looking for in the texts. probably that gimp death i dreamed the other night finally catching up to his normal place behind my left shoulder. i suppose it means i need to get started on this task soon. not for fear that the work or inspiration will dissipate, for i suspect it is much bigger and longer lasting than i am, but that i might in the mean time. at least, not till after i get a good night’s sleep.
9.23.2006
strapped to a gearwork nightmare
Continuing research on 'the aesthetic', Alberto and i finally found the collection of Brothers Quay short films at the Dreaming Ant. what words can i give to this? sheer genius, the stuff dreams are made of... intricate machines filled with strange tinketry, dirty mirrors, living dolls missing half their heads, objects that have a life of their own, moving in a jittery buzz like mechanical bees, the little gremlins engineering the contents of our nightmarish sleep. each vignette seems utterly familiar, yet inexplicable. as soon as you almost understand what's going on the lights drop to that dream blue, the camera fades, blinks, fuzzes out, and the mind slips off comprehension. sheer genius, mastercraftsmanship, perhaps they sold their souls to the dark side...
one of the shorts, more explicit than the rest, was a historical lesson on the artistic technique of anamorphosis, used mostly in the 16th century, the couching of one image in another image so that it is only perceivable from an unconventional vantage point, full figures popping out of landscapes when looked at from the side. mesmerizing, and i begin to wonder how it is possible to achieve this effect linguistically, not just some code or cryptology concealing information in the letters and words themselves, but in the images, and themes. an enhanced symbolism where what is said is really a veiled allusion to something much deeper, that you would almost have to put your eyes parallel to the page to read... much the way that dreams function in the subconscious.
walking back at two in the morning, i was confronted by the surreality of sirens, flashing red and blue lights, a mass of ambulances and cop cars on the corner of liberty, a body being dragged in the light rain. flickering streetlamps. i shuddered. last month after watching Holy Mountain w/ alberto i witnessed a man sprawled out on the sidewalk near the hospital, one shoe off and the sock laying withered on the bricks and two security guards moving the van he was laying behind. and now this. it turns out a man was shot at the ATM last night, three times in the head. i can't help but think it is some reminder from the universe that though i am trying to be patient with this work, shit does happen. and two blocks from home. or that the act of creation on one person's part balances out with destruction and violence down the street. i am reminded of alberto's horror several years ago, in realizing that everything we do has an intimate affect on the world around us, every negative thought, every moment of doubt and disturbed anger ripples out like we're tapped into (or trapped in) some plane of crumbling energies. all the more reason to create, to sing, to smile at strangers, to live...
one of the shorts, more explicit than the rest, was a historical lesson on the artistic technique of anamorphosis, used mostly in the 16th century, the couching of one image in another image so that it is only perceivable from an unconventional vantage point, full figures popping out of landscapes when looked at from the side. mesmerizing, and i begin to wonder how it is possible to achieve this effect linguistically, not just some code or cryptology concealing information in the letters and words themselves, but in the images, and themes. an enhanced symbolism where what is said is really a veiled allusion to something much deeper, that you would almost have to put your eyes parallel to the page to read... much the way that dreams function in the subconscious.
walking back at two in the morning, i was confronted by the surreality of sirens, flashing red and blue lights, a mass of ambulances and cop cars on the corner of liberty, a body being dragged in the light rain. flickering streetlamps. i shuddered. last month after watching Holy Mountain w/ alberto i witnessed a man sprawled out on the sidewalk near the hospital, one shoe off and the sock laying withered on the bricks and two security guards moving the van he was laying behind. and now this. it turns out a man was shot at the ATM last night, three times in the head. i can't help but think it is some reminder from the universe that though i am trying to be patient with this work, shit does happen. and two blocks from home. or that the act of creation on one person's part balances out with destruction and violence down the street. i am reminded of alberto's horror several years ago, in realizing that everything we do has an intimate affect on the world around us, every negative thought, every moment of doubt and disturbed anger ripples out like we're tapped into (or trapped in) some plane of crumbling energies. all the more reason to create, to sing, to smile at strangers, to live...
9.13.2006
god is the absent narrative: notes on formation
memory is a narrative. for memory to be constructed,
a degree of forgetting is necessary; the idea of a negative narrative.
a narrative is a measuring of time.
we function within the illusion that we have moved forward in time.
all narrative is ritualistic.
the ritual has a beginning, a middle and an ending.
in the absence of ritual, there is no culture.
the basis of all culture consists of stories.. i.e. myth.
the basis of our idea of myth: muthos: stories, neither true nor false, neither realistic nor logical.
dreams are neither true nor false (and not necessarily realistic or logical).
"our own myths we call reality."
"in my beginning is my end."
a degree of forgetting is necessary; the idea of a negative narrative.
a narrative is a measuring of time.
we function within the illusion that we have moved forward in time.
all narrative is ritualistic.
the ritual has a beginning, a middle and an ending.
in the absence of ritual, there is no culture.
the basis of all culture consists of stories.. i.e. myth.
the basis of our idea of myth: muthos: stories, neither true nor false, neither realistic nor logical.
dreams are neither true nor false (and not necessarily realistic or logical).
"our own myths we call reality."
"in my beginning is my end."
9.11.2006
correspondences
from an intro to baudelaire (by enid starkie)
"the hidden relation between things here below and in the world above he called correspondences. everything in this world is merely the symbol of a hieroglyphic language and he claimed that it was the function of the artist to decipher the hidden writing of nature and interpret the mysteries of the universe. he considered that only poets who had reached a high degree of spirituality were capable of understanding and interpreting these mysteries. beauty was not for him, material beauty alone. beauty was essentially a spiritual reality and he was convinced that art was the greatest and perhaps the only means of effecting beauty in this world... beauty for him did not lie in the subject itself but in what the artist brought to it. beauty was the flame of the fire, the radiance of the energy, generated by the spiritual shock he received when he was moved and this spiritual shock could come from aspects hitherto considered ugly. he did not see beauty in ugliness, he only said that from ugliness he could distill beauty. from the fire kindled within him the poet forged beauty and the intensity of the fire depended on his spiritual nature. the more spiritual the poet the greater the intensity of heat generated. poetry for him was not mere composition and to be a poet meant to be capable of spiritual growth."
"the hidden relation between things here below and in the world above he called correspondences. everything in this world is merely the symbol of a hieroglyphic language and he claimed that it was the function of the artist to decipher the hidden writing of nature and interpret the mysteries of the universe. he considered that only poets who had reached a high degree of spirituality were capable of understanding and interpreting these mysteries. beauty was not for him, material beauty alone. beauty was essentially a spiritual reality and he was convinced that art was the greatest and perhaps the only means of effecting beauty in this world... beauty for him did not lie in the subject itself but in what the artist brought to it. beauty was the flame of the fire, the radiance of the energy, generated by the spiritual shock he received when he was moved and this spiritual shock could come from aspects hitherto considered ugly. he did not see beauty in ugliness, he only said that from ugliness he could distill beauty. from the fire kindled within him the poet forged beauty and the intensity of the fire depended on his spiritual nature. the more spiritual the poet the greater the intensity of heat generated. poetry for him was not mere composition and to be a poet meant to be capable of spiritual growth."
8.22.2006
action breeds action: on establishing a healthy practice
something it’s taken me almost 26 long years to learn and i’m still only beginning to realize it: the more you do the more you are able to do. power builds by use. will, focus, practice, patience, compassion, communication, these energies are a muscle, you have to exercise them in order to make them grow stronger. Like a corollary to the first law of thermodynamics, a body in motion will remain in motion. as soon as you rest, you loose all drive and ability to act.
i noticed this first at work, where on slow busy days i get a lot more done. there is no time to sit down and i go from task to task in a continual flow. but as soon as there is a lull in orders and i sit down, smoke a cigarette, read the paper, play pinball, i loose all momentum, and getting back into the kitchen is near impossible. the same goes for writing, the moment you stop working on a poem, a story, it dies, and the longer you wait between working the harder it is. you must keep going, you can not stop loving it and living it or entropy takes hold, the flatline fading of the couch and the doldrums. of dying daily. you must keep exercising your muscles or you will rot where you stand.
and more, finding this kind of practice, anything you choose to do regularly builds that flow of energy, your will to act. i’ve heard several writers and artists talk about running or biking regularly in order to build a healthy practice for something, anything, to get the blood moving and apply that to their primary task. recently i have found myself creatively slowed down and realize i have a poor practice of it of late. this past week i’ve had to watch the dog and chickens and gardens while my housemates are on tour, and this regular activity is already allowing me to focus in on having to perform my tasks on a more regular basis (even if these creatures are taking up a lot of the time i would like to spend on my crafts). this is like the path of karma yoga, of doing one’s daily tasks without looking forward to the reward of them being done, of building a healthy practice out of doing the dishes, going to work, watching your children, whatever it is you are required to do on a regular basis. the key point being that it’s regular (though not necessarily clockwork) and part of one’s flow of doing.
because it is a flow, a font. you have to be open to it and let action well up and pour through you, and it will carry you along through everything you want to do. drinking won’t, tv and video games won’t. the internet won’t (unless it’s part of a practice of research or networking). Remember, you are what you choose to pay attention to. of course, it helps if you have specific and limited paths to practice. one can’t build focus towards any one thing by spreading thin towards everything. i would recommend no more than one practice from each discipline (unless you choose to focus on multiple from one discipline). physical- running, biking, yoga, martial arts, etc. mental- research, essays, conversations, crosswords or other logic puzzles, math, etc.. creative – poetry, fiction, visual arts, music, dance, photography. the day to day – work, pets, children, cooking, etc. emotional- all your various relationships. spiritual- church, personal rituals, exploration (external or internal)… you probably get the point. the benefit of a multi-disciplinarian practice being that it allows one to exercise the numerous modes of being that make up a complete human and thus allows one to grow in totality and not just specialized in one direction at disadvantage to the others. keep in mind we are multifaceted and easily atrophy, and if you maintain good practices across the board than when the situation arises you should be capable of doing anything.
i noticed this first at work, where on slow busy days i get a lot more done. there is no time to sit down and i go from task to task in a continual flow. but as soon as there is a lull in orders and i sit down, smoke a cigarette, read the paper, play pinball, i loose all momentum, and getting back into the kitchen is near impossible. the same goes for writing, the moment you stop working on a poem, a story, it dies, and the longer you wait between working the harder it is. you must keep going, you can not stop loving it and living it or entropy takes hold, the flatline fading of the couch and the doldrums. of dying daily. you must keep exercising your muscles or you will rot where you stand.
and more, finding this kind of practice, anything you choose to do regularly builds that flow of energy, your will to act. i’ve heard several writers and artists talk about running or biking regularly in order to build a healthy practice for something, anything, to get the blood moving and apply that to their primary task. recently i have found myself creatively slowed down and realize i have a poor practice of it of late. this past week i’ve had to watch the dog and chickens and gardens while my housemates are on tour, and this regular activity is already allowing me to focus in on having to perform my tasks on a more regular basis (even if these creatures are taking up a lot of the time i would like to spend on my crafts). this is like the path of karma yoga, of doing one’s daily tasks without looking forward to the reward of them being done, of building a healthy practice out of doing the dishes, going to work, watching your children, whatever it is you are required to do on a regular basis. the key point being that it’s regular (though not necessarily clockwork) and part of one’s flow of doing.
because it is a flow, a font. you have to be open to it and let action well up and pour through you, and it will carry you along through everything you want to do. drinking won’t, tv and video games won’t. the internet won’t (unless it’s part of a practice of research or networking). Remember, you are what you choose to pay attention to. of course, it helps if you have specific and limited paths to practice. one can’t build focus towards any one thing by spreading thin towards everything. i would recommend no more than one practice from each discipline (unless you choose to focus on multiple from one discipline). physical- running, biking, yoga, martial arts, etc. mental- research, essays, conversations, crosswords or other logic puzzles, math, etc.. creative – poetry, fiction, visual arts, music, dance, photography. the day to day – work, pets, children, cooking, etc. emotional- all your various relationships. spiritual- church, personal rituals, exploration (external or internal)… you probably get the point. the benefit of a multi-disciplinarian practice being that it allows one to exercise the numerous modes of being that make up a complete human and thus allows one to grow in totality and not just specialized in one direction at disadvantage to the others. keep in mind we are multifaceted and easily atrophy, and if you maintain good practices across the board than when the situation arises you should be capable of doing anything.
8.14.2006
Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)
Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)
"freedom depends on the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera
• Memory is accreted (like a seashell, armor, crystal) in our bodies and blood*, taking on a recognizable pattern, a body and meaning that can be called a life. when we are young and have no memory we have no such psychic detritus carried around us, but as we age we can't help picking up memories, symbols, songs, and attaching them to ourselves as sort of an addendum to that central self
• Thus we can say of an object, idea, person, moment, that it “gathers world” (ie: accrues meaning), which though often psychic or imaginative in nature can be displayed in a physical manner (wrinkles, collections of junk, crumbling, etc…)
• World itself could be considered an artifact of time, the shell or record (imprint) left behind by the movement of light/ life, in the way vinyl is a physical imprint of the sound waves of a song.
• Memory is not a recollection in the past, but a reconstruction in the present of what one images the past was like, and like dreams, may not bare any factual resemblance to what actually happened.+
• The longer ago something occurred, the less factual or clear the memory becomes. it is much easier to remember yesterday as it happened than last year, or childhood. as memory recedes it turns into myth (ie: its meaning takes on larger and metaphorical proportions turning the contents of our lives into a cohesive story instead of a disjointed series of circumstances).
• Memory is aided by symbolic, emotional, or physical cues (mnemonic triggers) in which the present reflects or replays some similar aspect of the past. music is an excellent example of this, hearing the first strains of a song related to your first relationship can years later still bring tears to your eyes.
• Object-bound (codified) memory is called history, imagination-based memory is called dream, or in the collective, myth. history is no more factual than myth, as both are perspectives relating event to meaning. and as myth is an amalgamation of countless archetypified memories, so is history a collective story we build around ourselves (in the world) in order to give ourselves a sense of time
• Media (writing, recordings, photographs, etc.) act as External Memory Devices, in that they take on the burden of memory into a physical object, thus removing any dreamlike/ mythic qualities of the memory. the current proliferation of EMDs marks a transition from myth to history, as well as the view of World from mind (“God”) to one large medium (artifact, the husk or corpse of “God”)
• While memory remains in imagination (subjective), it is fluid, malleable, and can take on whatever perspective or meaning the rememberer chooses. in a process similar to Dreaming Back, “bad” memories, moments of failure, anger, regret, can be re-remembered in a different light, one that allows the rememberer to get over or move past certain negatively ingrained perspectives or hang ups, thus altering where they stand in the present, as well as what they can make of their future.
• When a memory calcifies into history (becomes objective/ objectified), it is no longer fluid and can no longer be re-remembered in a different angle (unless of course the process of objectification is one of re-remembering), as it is no longer in the world itself. this also means that the memory is no longer personal, and belongs to the collective store of memory, the Record, and thus available to anyone as a memory of their own life. this is particularly true in ages of hyper-information, like this one, where the contents of individuals’ daily lives are offered up and become more readily available to strangers than ones own childhood. an example is a song coming on he jukebox and everyone singing along, even if they do not know the words or hadn’t heard the song before. what this means in terms of collective myth remains to be seen.
• With this vast store of memories to draw on, it would seem the artist should have no end of themes and experiences to draw on, effectively being bale to take on any life that is presented to them. However, art that is drawn from one’s own emotions and experiences rings the most true, as it has been lived, and the artist must be wary of assuming experiences that have no relation to their own. yet there is a balance to be found in taking the historicized memories and already written works of art of the collective and running them through one’s own experiences to create art that is both true and able to touch upon those deepest and most common themes of being human: love, death, family, struggle, the search for place and meaning. this could now be said to be the task of the modern artist, to take these themes that are available in the collective memory and return them to the fluidity of the subjective, where they are once again able to be reshaped or re-dreamed into whatever form imaginable or desirable, and thus to recreate the lost sense of myth in our culture. as Joseph Campbell put it: “dreams are private myths, and myths are collective dreams.”
• * memory and the body– one talks about having intellectual memories, emotional memories, muscle memory (the learning of physical tasks to a subconscious level). really, this separation of memories is a misnomer, as mind and emotion exist nowhere but in the body. there is only physical memory, the storing of tensions in muscle, the decay of skin cells with age, the patterning of genes, which can be read on a variety of different levels. take for example accounts of a person doing yoga for the first time, or receiving a strenuous massage. memories stored in the muscle tension are released and they have a flashback to that memory, effectively reliving the primary experience. however, most of us are not nearly so attuned to our bodies as to have such visceral remembrances.
• + time and memory– the trichotomy of past/ present/ future is also a misnomer, and the perception of time as a linear flow is an illusion, although sometimes a convenient one. Really all we live in is the present, and any perceptions of past or future are but imaginative extrapolations of this one current moment. a kind of subjunctive pattern recognition in which we can assert a sense of causality and desire in order to effectively plan our next action, and feel not so lost in the chaos of sensory data. as World accrues meaning, like seashells or thorns buried in the skin, so does times (our sense of eventuality or continuation) leave shards or ripples of itself in the periphery of our experiencing. these objects of memory are interpreted as a “coming from” that “goes somewhere,” and give us a reason and context for our present. it is also possible to remember the future, interpreting the present pattern in a manner that points to what will happen (prophecy).
"freedom depends on the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera
• Memory is accreted (like a seashell, armor, crystal) in our bodies and blood*, taking on a recognizable pattern, a body and meaning that can be called a life. when we are young and have no memory we have no such psychic detritus carried around us, but as we age we can't help picking up memories, symbols, songs, and attaching them to ourselves as sort of an addendum to that central self
• Thus we can say of an object, idea, person, moment, that it “gathers world” (ie: accrues meaning), which though often psychic or imaginative in nature can be displayed in a physical manner (wrinkles, collections of junk, crumbling, etc…)
• World itself could be considered an artifact of time, the shell or record (imprint) left behind by the movement of light/ life, in the way vinyl is a physical imprint of the sound waves of a song.
• Memory is not a recollection in the past, but a reconstruction in the present of what one images the past was like, and like dreams, may not bare any factual resemblance to what actually happened.+
• The longer ago something occurred, the less factual or clear the memory becomes. it is much easier to remember yesterday as it happened than last year, or childhood. as memory recedes it turns into myth (ie: its meaning takes on larger and metaphorical proportions turning the contents of our lives into a cohesive story instead of a disjointed series of circumstances).
• Memory is aided by symbolic, emotional, or physical cues (mnemonic triggers) in which the present reflects or replays some similar aspect of the past. music is an excellent example of this, hearing the first strains of a song related to your first relationship can years later still bring tears to your eyes.
• Object-bound (codified) memory is called history, imagination-based memory is called dream, or in the collective, myth. history is no more factual than myth, as both are perspectives relating event to meaning. and as myth is an amalgamation of countless archetypified memories, so is history a collective story we build around ourselves (in the world) in order to give ourselves a sense of time
• Media (writing, recordings, photographs, etc.) act as External Memory Devices, in that they take on the burden of memory into a physical object, thus removing any dreamlike/ mythic qualities of the memory. the current proliferation of EMDs marks a transition from myth to history, as well as the view of World from mind (“God”) to one large medium (artifact, the husk or corpse of “God”)
• While memory remains in imagination (subjective), it is fluid, malleable, and can take on whatever perspective or meaning the rememberer chooses. in a process similar to Dreaming Back, “bad” memories, moments of failure, anger, regret, can be re-remembered in a different light, one that allows the rememberer to get over or move past certain negatively ingrained perspectives or hang ups, thus altering where they stand in the present, as well as what they can make of their future.
• When a memory calcifies into history (becomes objective/ objectified), it is no longer fluid and can no longer be re-remembered in a different angle (unless of course the process of objectification is one of re-remembering), as it is no longer in the world itself. this also means that the memory is no longer personal, and belongs to the collective store of memory, the Record, and thus available to anyone as a memory of their own life. this is particularly true in ages of hyper-information, like this one, where the contents of individuals’ daily lives are offered up and become more readily available to strangers than ones own childhood. an example is a song coming on he jukebox and everyone singing along, even if they do not know the words or hadn’t heard the song before. what this means in terms of collective myth remains to be seen.
• With this vast store of memories to draw on, it would seem the artist should have no end of themes and experiences to draw on, effectively being bale to take on any life that is presented to them. However, art that is drawn from one’s own emotions and experiences rings the most true, as it has been lived, and the artist must be wary of assuming experiences that have no relation to their own. yet there is a balance to be found in taking the historicized memories and already written works of art of the collective and running them through one’s own experiences to create art that is both true and able to touch upon those deepest and most common themes of being human: love, death, family, struggle, the search for place and meaning. this could now be said to be the task of the modern artist, to take these themes that are available in the collective memory and return them to the fluidity of the subjective, where they are once again able to be reshaped or re-dreamed into whatever form imaginable or desirable, and thus to recreate the lost sense of myth in our culture. as Joseph Campbell put it: “dreams are private myths, and myths are collective dreams.”
• * memory and the body– one talks about having intellectual memories, emotional memories, muscle memory (the learning of physical tasks to a subconscious level). really, this separation of memories is a misnomer, as mind and emotion exist nowhere but in the body. there is only physical memory, the storing of tensions in muscle, the decay of skin cells with age, the patterning of genes, which can be read on a variety of different levels. take for example accounts of a person doing yoga for the first time, or receiving a strenuous massage. memories stored in the muscle tension are released and they have a flashback to that memory, effectively reliving the primary experience. however, most of us are not nearly so attuned to our bodies as to have such visceral remembrances.
• + time and memory– the trichotomy of past/ present/ future is also a misnomer, and the perception of time as a linear flow is an illusion, although sometimes a convenient one. Really all we live in is the present, and any perceptions of past or future are but imaginative extrapolations of this one current moment. a kind of subjunctive pattern recognition in which we can assert a sense of causality and desire in order to effectively plan our next action, and feel not so lost in the chaos of sensory data. as World accrues meaning, like seashells or thorns buried in the skin, so does times (our sense of eventuality or continuation) leave shards or ripples of itself in the periphery of our experiencing. these objects of memory are interpreted as a “coming from” that “goes somewhere,” and give us a reason and context for our present. it is also possible to remember the future, interpreting the present pattern in a manner that points to what will happen (prophecy).
8.11.2006
notes on days
spinning along the tightrope shadows of telephone wires
and the constellation crunch of fall's first fallen,
though the days lay dogged and panting still
the underlying heat subsides into the liner notes
of stolen LPs pouring over star maps at the bar,
charting the course of cool breezes from dream
to rust in the trajectory of meteor showers and silence
and long walks in harvest moon hoodies
hanging from the eaves of the hospital
with a stack of hotcakes.
and the constellation crunch of fall's first fallen,
though the days lay dogged and panting still
the underlying heat subsides into the liner notes
of stolen LPs pouring over star maps at the bar,
charting the course of cool breezes from dream
to rust in the trajectory of meteor showers and silence
and long walks in harvest moon hoodies
hanging from the eaves of the hospital
with a stack of hotcakes.
8.08.2006
landscapes as large as insomnia
A couple weeks ago several of us started a writer's group so we could get feedback on work in progress and talk about our craft. also including furious rounds of exquisite corpse and writing exercises as homework between meetings. this last week we decided to each write a poem of sixteen lines, edit it down to eight, then four then two lines, a process of, as i see it, learning to refine the essential or necessary metaphors of the piece.
the problem being that for days i have been feeling unable to write. not writer's block, there are still too many themes and images welling up to be written, but just sort of a dauntingness of knowing how. not to mention working way too much and sleeping way too little and the always frustrations of figuring out the logistics of living, and the full moon and in the trough of my bimonthly manic cycles. and spending whatever free time and energy i have writing long letters and doing way too much research on Yeats' complex and strange symbol system (which is another story entirely and too close to home for casual thought).
finally last night i went to armand's, where i go after work occasionally to get a drink and write, and just started in on a piece about my grandmother's funeral that i hadn't been able to touch yet and probably needs a lot more work if not the rest of my life to consider in full. but much too long to be the 16 line homework assignment. but relieving, and like turning on the tap again.
so tonight after reading octavio paz's magnificent piece "sun stone" i just figured, it didn't matter what i wrote, as long as i went at it, and came up with the following bit of train of thought that while much much too short (it is a theme of all themes i could expand indefinitely in any direction), the process of culling it down was highly highly illuminating as far as seeing how metaphors are constructed from disparate images.
16.
i call on the names of all:
candle light, tabletop, train tunnel,
terror touched in a stranger’s face
and turned to smile (we’re really not so strange)
call on sublime sunsets
over rose petaled oceans
and lightning storms, days of travel,
the crumbling chessboard of roads and fences
this third smoke, that man’s beret,
the glare and howl of the television,
every drink shared between friends
and every toast thrown at the wall in rage
i call on you the names of all:
histories and communiqués and fading,
every memory lost and rewritten
on the silent stone of this world
8.
i call on the names of all:
the light that turns the stranger
from a tunnel of terror to smile,
across the storms of road and rose
i call on you the names of all:
the everyday glare shared like toast
with the memories of history smoking
on the silent stone of this world
4.
i call on the names of all:
daylight shared with strangers’ smiles
to toast the tunnel of memory smoking
on the silent rose of this world
2.
i call on shared sunlight smiles
to toast the tunneled rose of time
the problem being that for days i have been feeling unable to write. not writer's block, there are still too many themes and images welling up to be written, but just sort of a dauntingness of knowing how. not to mention working way too much and sleeping way too little and the always frustrations of figuring out the logistics of living, and the full moon and in the trough of my bimonthly manic cycles. and spending whatever free time and energy i have writing long letters and doing way too much research on Yeats' complex and strange symbol system (which is another story entirely and too close to home for casual thought).
finally last night i went to armand's, where i go after work occasionally to get a drink and write, and just started in on a piece about my grandmother's funeral that i hadn't been able to touch yet and probably needs a lot more work if not the rest of my life to consider in full. but much too long to be the 16 line homework assignment. but relieving, and like turning on the tap again.
so tonight after reading octavio paz's magnificent piece "sun stone" i just figured, it didn't matter what i wrote, as long as i went at it, and came up with the following bit of train of thought that while much much too short (it is a theme of all themes i could expand indefinitely in any direction), the process of culling it down was highly highly illuminating as far as seeing how metaphors are constructed from disparate images.
16.
i call on the names of all:
candle light, tabletop, train tunnel,
terror touched in a stranger’s face
and turned to smile (we’re really not so strange)
call on sublime sunsets
over rose petaled oceans
and lightning storms, days of travel,
the crumbling chessboard of roads and fences
this third smoke, that man’s beret,
the glare and howl of the television,
every drink shared between friends
and every toast thrown at the wall in rage
i call on you the names of all:
histories and communiqués and fading,
every memory lost and rewritten
on the silent stone of this world
8.
i call on the names of all:
the light that turns the stranger
from a tunnel of terror to smile,
across the storms of road and rose
i call on you the names of all:
the everyday glare shared like toast
with the memories of history smoking
on the silent stone of this world
4.
i call on the names of all:
daylight shared with strangers’ smiles
to toast the tunnel of memory smoking
on the silent rose of this world
2.
i call on shared sunlight smiles
to toast the tunneled rose of time
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