Weeks 49-50: I'll Show You the Life of the Mind

Episode 32 – Weeks 49-50:  I’ll Show You the Life of the Mind

In which the podcaster gives a bad review, takes you on a walk to nowhere, and advocates ecstasy as a form of resistance.

LINKS & INFO

Also sprach Zarathustra, tone poem by Richard Strauss  

Barton Fink, 1991 film by the Coen Brothers

Coen Brothers 

Equus, a play by Peter Shaeffer

Surrealism  

Exquisite corpse   

Influx Blinklists (chapbook)  

Blinklists as text art

Mammal (Roof Books, 2023)  

San Francisco International Arts Festival 

Dandelion Dance Theater  

Carla Lucero  

Flower Moon  

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST

EPISODE 32 – WEEKS 49-50: I’ll Show You the Life of the Mind

[OPEN WITH 2001’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”]

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 32, the penultimate episode covering Weeks 49 and 50 of “My 12-Month Video Fast”.

Let me start by saying that I decided to use the music you’ve just heard to intro this episode some weeks ago, along with its theme but well before I considered what the specific content might be. It is popularly known as the opening fanfare in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, playing as we watch the alignment of the earth, moon, and sun, which gains significance later in the film. It is also (and originally) the opening section from Richard Strauss’ tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, based on /Free-drick Neet-cha/ Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel of the same title. In both the book and the composition that section is called “Sunrise”. Though I’ll mention the music again shortly, this information will really come into play at the end of the episode. Okay, so: to it.

I wrapped up the previous episode by asking you on a walk, into an open field, say, surrounded by trees – you choose which – perhaps a meadow once cleared for pasture, now gone to seed and reclaimed by staunch grasses, wildflowers, grasshoppers and dragonflies. I’d suggested that we take in some fresh air with clear minds, freed as one can from dogma, ideology, taught thought, preconception, to see what new paths, what new reconfigurations of the world we could find.

Which slides us neatly into the theme of this episode, touched on here and there previously, which is…New Ideas and How to Find Them, by which I do not mean old ideas, however reenvisioned, reimagined, remixed, or wrung through, (though we might stumble across a few), but essentially fresh, out of the blue (or whichever color you prefer), brand new thinky-thinks.

[CRIT VOICE: They don’t exist…]

[MOI: You don’t exist.]

[CRIT VOICE: Oh noooooooooo…]

I’ve been writing about this for a long time – and just to mention, I’ll be discussing the art and medium of writing through this episode, but my comments could just as well apply to visual arts, film, music, discourse, mathematics – anywhere there’s language to access; and I invite you to apply my remarks as needed. Anyway, just to illustrate, here’s a sonnet that I wrote in my early 20s about sitting down to write… [CRIT VOICE: Oh god no…] [MOI: Shhhhh.] Yes, it’s the work of a young, pre-internet mammal, but I’m going to read it anyway. It’s called

INVOCATION

 I cannot reach, I cannot run or grasp 
my vision straight. I am alone. The night
seethes across fields, fleeting half-seen asp
of dark, of wind, of dreams with which I fight
to will the preternatural image right,
to bend the monolith of all men’s mind.
I grip my pen for fear it drop, I grind
my eyes so tightly shut that pains of light
jolt through the sockets, I grimace, swallow,
and smear a blotch of ink. Thought must be gone
as a breeze over grass, as Kubrick’s dawn
strikes chord, I gasp, my body is hollow, 
my spine coils hot, I fill unto the verge
euphoric with words I cry release and surge:

It’s a somewhat awkward student’s sonnet, with a messed-up rhyme scheme and pentameter that skips blithely into tetrameter at will. And I always thought the mention of the opening music from 2001: A Space Odyssey was a bit too pop, if on theme; but since we just listened to it, this seemed like the perfect place to read it. The use of form, by the way, illustrates one method to transform your ideas into new language (if not entirely new thoughts) as the formal restrictions force you to use words and phrases you wouldn’t normally employ – one of the better reasons to use form, I think. Its rigidity makes you more flexible. And it’s worth pointing out that any specific piece of art or writing is unique by merit of its singular combination of parts within its medium, and might therefore be argued as new thought through its own particular nuance. But mostly I just wanted to read about trying to come up with something new to start an episode about trying to come up with something new.

The title of this episode (as I’m sure you’ve noticed) is “I’ll Show You the Life of the Mind”. That’s taken from the 1991 Coen Brothers film Barton Fink. Though I’m a big fan of some of their films (Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?), this is not one of them. Maybe I take the film’s theme of writer’s block personally, but mostly I just find it painful to watch, both for its content and the techniques they use to portray it. I’m also not quite sure that writer’s block is as acute a malady as its reputation trumpets. I mean, I guess to some extent it’s a valid phenomenon, and I know that the word-brain is not always at peak (what is?) – we all have days when we could use a bit more air in the tires or hex in the cortex. I do think it’s more prone to happen, and at length, when you’re trying to write about a specific topic and can’t find your way into it. You can definitely psych yourself out and get caught in idea loops or rigid perspectives. There are lots of ways to get past or around (or under) such barriers, but in like fashion you can get stuck trying to find the right one. So yeah, I’ll buy that, but I think of it less as “writer’s block” and more of a conceptual morass. More on some of those techniques in a bit, but when I’m writing for myself and find myself morassed, I don’t usually have an issue with setting the piece aside for a day or a few (or ten years) until it feels ripe, and just move on to another piece or project or entirely different medium. Of course we can’t always do that. And in fact I’ve been writing to theme right darn here every couple weeks for almost a year.

The titular character Barton Fink, though, has been hit with a doozy (and sorry but this is about to become a spoiler minefield). After garnering Broadway acclaim for a play presumably based on his coming of age in 1930s New York, he’s recruited by Hollywood (darkly satired) to “write for the pictures,” and is assigned a formulaic wrestling movie that’s well beyond his ken. We then spend a lot of time staring at mostly blank sheets of typing paper in a gorgeous old Underwood to ominous symphonic chords. A lot. The thing is, this film sure as heck portrays writer’s block but makes little effort to enlighten us as to what it is and where it comes from beyond depicting Fink as self-absorbed. Sure it’s punctuated by scenes with ludicrous and generally offensive Hollywood caricatures, but we always end up back in Barton’s dim hotel room with peeling wallpaper, a mosquito, and that…blank…page. And I’m sorry to have to say this and I’ve heard that many would beg to differ, but 1 hour 40 minutes out of two hours is an awful lot of not much happening – and I don’t mean Jim Jarmusch not-happening, I mean staring at the wall not-happening. And yes I did rewatch it for this writing so those wounds are fresh.

All it takes is Fink waking up next to a murdered person to get him inspired. Ooo-kay. And he does write the screenplay, but we’re given no indication if it’s connected to this experience or any idea of its content – the plot here feels as disconnected as Barton. Then John Goodman’s congenial everyman suddenly takes a demonic turn, running down the endless hotel hallway blowing away two cops with a sawed-off and booming like only Goodman can boom, “I’ll show you the life of the mind!...” over and over while the walls burst into flame around him as he passes. Once he’s made his inscrutable point (to the cops) (and us), he goes back to being his “normal” self. And there you have it – the creative moment as unexpected and inexplicable.

Really?

Is it really magic that comes out of nowhere (or bursts from the unseen depths of the heart or mind) as this scene suggests? It certainly doesn’t come from Fink’s process of (mostly) figuratively banging his head against the wall trying to write on a topic he neither knows nor cares a whit about. It is a good way to drive yourself crazy though. Notice that he does start writing after something kicks him in the head hard enough (figuratively) to make him stop thinking about it. Then he writes like a Beat on Benzedrine – though it is implied that the “wrestling” screenplay he completes is just a rehash of the play about his “personal pain” that brought him to Hollywood in the first place. Yet we’re never given a sense of what that might be, nor the “real pain” of the “common man” which Fink idealistically prattles on about.

But whatever – it’s just a satire, existential pantomime or nihilistic and cynical A.F., that never moves beyond the superficiality it parodies. I mean, I don’t need Bergman (whom I generally find somewhat narcotic), but I just don’t see it as a particularly nuanced film, and remain mystified as to why it won the Palme D’or at Cannes. (It also won Best Director and Best Actor, and I will say they all seemed to do an extraordinary job and each of the actors is terrific and is in fact the main reason to watch the film, much of a struggle as it can be.)

That hallway scene tho! Two minutes of pure creative fireworks that probably made people vote for the whole thing. If it were as substantive as it is illustrative, I might agree, but it still begs the question:

Where do these ideas come from?

How are they generated?

What makes the unthought, thought?

Okay, that was three questions. I don’t think creative ideas come out of nowhere, as the transformation of Goodman’s character seems to illustrate, and which the film, as I’ve just suggested, tries to substantiate. Because they did come from somewhere – in this case from the writers, from the Coen Brothers, but we’re not likely to learn what spurred them. And here’s the looney tunes part – they might not know either. Sure, that fiery scene might come from a childhood memory or a deep need to reenact Angel Heart, and I supposed I could call and ask them (though I seem to have lost their number), but ultimately, in most cases, it’s just a mystery. In the play Equus, which I referenced in the previous episode “The H-Word”, poor Dr. Dysart the psychiatrist is trying to figure out what caused a teen to commit a heinous act of violence – the root causes, as it were. He notes to himself,

• A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs – it sucks – it strokes its eyes over the whole uncountable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all – just those particular moments of experience and no others – I don’t know. And nor does anyone else.

Which is, I think, a great place to start with the creative process: not knowing. What?

There’s even a hint about this in Barton Fink – he can’t write until he wakes up next to a bloody corpse, the shock of which drives everything from his mind, all that muck that was bogging him down. So how do you chase away your thoughts without waking up next to a bloody corpse? One way that I’ve found effective – and I’m sure many of you are familiar – is rapid freewriting. Now freewriting, for those unfamiliar, is simply writing without a specific topic. How do you do that? You just start writing without knowing what you’re going to write about – you should try hard not to, at least – and see what comes out. Sound scary? Good, then do it. Rapid freewriting, at least that’s what I call it, takes that one step further. You write at a good pace, kind of fast if you can, about nothing in particular, and you’re not allowed to pause. At all. You keep the pen moving or the keyboard clacking – even if you have to write over and over again, “I can’t think of anything” or “This is stupid” – you do so until you break that loop and keep going – at the same pace. You’re also not allowed to stop until a timer goes off. Some say ten minutes is a nice length, but I say fifteen, just for starters. It might be hard on your hands if you write too fast, but that’s where the pace comes in, a doable pace with no pausing. And it’s best for your creative juicy-juice to make it a daily practice – or praxis, the fundamental things you do to be a better writer – and make it longer until you can do thirty or forty-five minutes or more. In undergrad I had a period when I’d do it for an hour a day, and yep, I found new ideas there, I did.

And what comes out, leaks out, runnels onto the page when you rapid freewrite? All kinds of stuff. Usually what’s top of mind comes out first – stuff that’s on your mind, that you’re worrying about or planning, what you had for breakfast or want for lunch or need at the grocery store or what you happen to be looking at – all kinds of clutter. Don’t worry, nobody else has to see it. And why should you write this down? Because it’s there. And why should you care about it? You often don’t – and that’s the point – you can’t care about what comes out. Finding it awkward or embarrassing? Good, keep doing it. You can always burn it or eat it or hide it in your attic. What you’re really doing is getting this stuff out of your head so it’s no longer banging around in there. That it’s on a page or a screen is incidental. And after a while, which is why you want to do it for a while, other stuff starts coming out – who knows what – seemingly random memories or images, maybe dreamlike passages (of maybe John Goodman charging at you down a burning hallway with a sawed-off shotgun screaming), or who knows, there’s no specific pattern or pathway into this – maybe you start writing a song or a story or designing a new house…. At one point I noticed that when I had been reading Shakespeare plays I’d sometimes write in pentameter, which he used frequently, and I had no idea I was doing that. 

So these ideas aren’t coming out of nowhere – you’re just digging or stirring up your brain, or mind, your brine, you’re stirring the brine of your locus to find what you don’t know is in there. Is it the subconscious? Maybe, but what the fuck is that? There’s Dr. Dysart’s observation again, and I think if you asked any scientist today why you’re accessing the specific words and images you are, if they’re honest I think they’d say, I dunno. I’d say that I don’t give a shit where they come from or what you call it as long as it happens. And it does.

But I don’t think you need to begin with “nothing” or “not knowing” as I suggested earlier, just because I prefer it myself. There are lots of other techniques for shifting perspectives or preconceived ways of viewing things. The surrealists, for instance, used juxtaposition quite effectively by placing two (or more) objects or actions or situations in proximity, that in one’s general experience would not meet (ants and clocks, an eye made of sky, etc.). This functions to break down the “assigned” meanings to everything involved and allows us to view them, if not entirely detached from their cultural and semantic baggage, from a somewhat fresh perspective. Perhaps inspired by this, in undergrad I wrote a series of compositions I called “blinklists,” which were, in effect, numbered lists of paired words that were presumably unrelated. I would start with the number and a random word, “blink” my mind, then attempt to write a second word that had no connection with the first. Examples are “pastel undertow”, “intolerable quart”, “starchy synapse”, “imposter celery”, etc. This was maybe the closest I’ve come to toying with the deconstructive approaches found in language poetry. It culminated in an “epic” in outline form called “The Passions of Don Quixote”, after which I got bored with the process and moved on. 

That form did however evolve into a type of text art in which I fill an art board or similar size paper with single words of many colors; each of the words comes from a central theme, and after writing one down I go back to the theme, choose a different color, and bounce off it in a different direction. The result is a large, many-colored collection of words which is actually a poem in which you can read the words in any order. Maybe some new ideas in there as well! This is similar by the way to freewriting from a prompt or theme, say to generate ideas for a project (Barton!) or to locate memories by starting each line with “I remember…” You don’t need to refrain from pausing in this kind of exercise (who said it was a rule!), though it’s a good idea to push yourself to do it as long as you can. Just don’t write down only the best ideas and don’t scratch anything out, because you never know what little tangent will lead to what. If you’re curious about the blinklists by the way you can see examples of both types on my website at richardloranger.com. The original type of list is in a chapbook called Influx Blinklists, a pdf of which can be found on the Books and Chapbooks page; and jpegs of a few of the big colored pieces are on the Visual & Text Art page. I’ve put links to both in the episode notes.

Small sidebar to mention another technique for breaking old habits and perspectives in your creative work is to write with materials you wouldn’t normally use – different color pens, art materials, a manual typewriter – or to write in unusual places or spaces – underneath your kitchen table, on your roof or at the edge of a cliff (be careful!), in one of your closets (don’t lock yourself in!), in the middle of a crowded train station during rush hour. I guarantee you’ll write (or draw, or sing, or think) differently than you otherwise would.

And then of course there’s co-laboration because – guess what – everyone’s brain is different! Although it’s good to have a writing partner to scribble alongside, if you haven’t already, try writing something with them. Like the freewrites, you don’t have to love the result (though you might!), you just have to do it. How? You decide. Try writing every other line or stanza or paragraph and see what happens. The Surrealists also invented a version of this called an Exquisite Corpse in which you fold the page over except for the ends of a couple of lines (if you’re drawing) or the last line of writing, so the next person can’t see what’s come before. That one also works in groups but can be done with two as well. And of course there are pretty much as many ways to collaborate as there are brains – so blend your brine with another mind or two and taste the new! (Haha, that sounded like a jingle.) Do stuff together!

Those are just a few ways to break through the expected and the trained, so try them or find your own (or take a workshop with me). Just keep in mind that the idea is to take a stroll out past the familiar and dwell there for as long as you need – or until it becomes familiar.

So let’s go back to our walk that we started in the last episode, our meander to take in some air and seek out honesty, humanity, and humility as tools for moving forward. Here’s one place that they come into play (or come in to play), when you’re stirring that brine for new thoughts, or thoughts so old they might as well be new, or, if useful, recombined thoughts that might be verging on new. Honesty in this case might equate with fearlessness, of not being afraid of what you find. Say you write down something about yourself that you didn’t know or didn’t want to know, something you find disturbing. Remember, you’re not writing for others here; this is for your elucidation. It’s your praxis. Clearly it wanted to come out, so take note, get over it, and move on. It’ll grow you. Humanity comes into play by following your basic nature, your instinct on where you need to go. And it’s essential that you trust it, because it shows you what you are and what you want to be. Treat it with trust and honesty and it’ll be your guide. And finally (or not), humility reminds you that whoever or whatever you are, you have limits – not to stop you from going further, but to allow you to get as far as you can. You can always go further later.

This might be a good time to point out that the counterpoint or opposite of humility, if you will, is ego. That’s where our old ob-stacle h-u-b-r-i-s comes in, the great stumblerump. You accomplish something (doesn’t matter what – art, social constructs, a birthday party) because you’re confident in your skills, not because it’s you doing it. Ego comes into play when you’re lacking confidence but don’t want to admit it, when you have insecurity – the opposite of confidence. To cinch this into a more woven and, hopefully, utilitarian knot, I’ve always thought that the best creative efforts come from a place of confidence in one’s skills coupled with humility, not being discouraged when you reach your limits; and the worst come from a place of ego (the opposite of humility), thinking the work is good because I made it, coupled with insecurity (the opposite of confidence), secretly knowing that’s not how it works and refusing to acknowledge you have limits. The thing is, we’ve all got all of those churning around, so I try to keep an eye on the prevailing currents and contain them as I can when they become counter-productive. 

But there’s one thing (at least) that I’ve left out so far in this discussion, that’s really fundamental to the creative experience, and that’s the sense that a creator sometimes has of channeling the inspiration, the ideas, the work, rather than generating it themselves. This isn’t a constant experience or phenomenon, but it is reported frequently by artists and makers of all kinds. “I felt like it wasn’t me making it.” “I felt imbued.” “The muse was working through me.” And I know that feeling very well. One time I dreamt I was eating the most delicious potato salad that was unlike any I’d had before, and by that evening I’d figured out the recipe and made it. It’s one of my best dishes. No kidding. More along the lines of our discussion, you might recall long, long ago I mentioned in Episode 2, “Meet the Joneses”, that during sheltering I wrote a 450-page novel for seven months straight almost uncontrollably. I didn’t plan to write it; though the idea had gestated for a few years, I still didn’t know where much of it was coming from; and much of the time I felt like I was riding a wild horse. The characters would make a discovery that I didn’t know was there more than a few moments before, that would carry the plot forward another hundred pages. Plot twists surprised me again and again. At one point I found myself writing a scene in which a character slowly becomes less and less visible, then winks out of existence. Didn’t see that coming either. All this to say, that sense of channeling definitely feels real – and like I said earlier about where ideas come from, after hours of freewriting or similar praxis, after hours or days or months or years of digging the mind and stirring the brine, I don’t care what the channeling is or where it comes from or what you call it, because it comes regardless.

I do though have my own tentative conception of how that works, and I’ll tell you, but I don’t expect you to embrace it, since it’s based on my own metaphysic or whatnot. Nor is it my place to tell you what or how to think – that’s your job. But in the spirit of taking that walk, and all those H-words, these are my thoughts on the matter, at least at the moment. My constant listeners certainly recall that I see the human body as a locus, discerned as we know it by the senses, while each of us extends beyond it, is unbound, has no actual “I” and mingles with everything else – that beyond our bodies we mix, we blend, we attract, we repel, we interact – we know and experience each other and much more in further, more intimate ways. So I can easily see some kind of shared mind, much like the ancient Greeks and Romans had the anima mundi or “world soul”; Jung had the collective unconscious; Emerson the Over-Soul. It just makes sense to me that way – it feels right. So when we excavate beyond our own clutter, we might tap into a further lode.  And sometimes what we tap into might be powerful. But it might not always or necessarily be an active “tapping” by “us”. If you keep yourself flexible and primed and open in ways like we’ve discussed here – think of it like working a muscle or maybe dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, but whatever it is, you work it, girl (c’mon now, it only hurts for a minute), of course it gets easier to flex; and sometimes, with enough practice it just spasms open on its own or in response to something unsensed, like a pupil, like a birth canal, like a chakra. Sometimes way open, tapping into thoughts, ideas, images from who knows where that don’t seem bidden by your own agency. They seem to come from nowhere, sometimes in a torrent.

Or in many other ways – if that channeling even has definable ways. One time I thought of (or it sent me) a gorgeous first line for a poem: “A naked tree can tell us everything.” Intriguing and pentameter. I thought it might be the start of a sonnet, then spent years trying to figure out the rest of it. But each attempt fizzled out, or should I say Finked out – tried too hard and turned out some truly bland stuff (probably sitting in a fucking folder for somebody to find – yikes). Then ten years later – BOOM, the rest of it comes out, all at once, and it was a sonnet and said exactly what I thought it would say. I am not shitting you. And yeah, maybe my brain was piecing it together all that time, but if it was, I had no inkling of it. And what about all that bland stuff? But maybe it was getting put together somewhere else, a little further out, with a little help from…trees, perhaps? It’s called “Sun Sonnet” and I’ve actually already read it here in Episode 17, “Tree”, right after the mediation at 31:25. You can find it there if you’re curious.

Another time in the middle of the night I was either awakened by words or they wouldn’t let me sleep, at any rate I was quite in-between and I had to write these phrases down. I had a partner at the time so I couldn’t turn on the light or didn’t want to wake myself any further – I was connected and wanted to stay right there – so I grabbed an 8 ½ by 11 pad I had next to the bed and started scribbling unconnected phrases in the dark. I’d done this before but not quite so dramatically because they kept coming and I kept scrawling large in every direction and guessing when to flip the page for 20-30 minutes or more, ten pages filled with them. I knew they weren’t in any particular order but I also knew they were all from the same poem, somehow, like glimpses of different sections I hadn’t yet seen. Spent about a week putting it together and that channel stayed open though not quite so messy, six pages of sculpted words that demanded they get written called “The Violence of Publication” (which I also knew in that dark night). Don’t worry, I’m not going to subject you to it right now [CRIT VOICE: Whew!], and not surprisingly most publications didn’t want to touch it, but it’s supposed to be included in a rad journal later this year out of L.A. called Insurgent Imagination 2. Woo-hoo.

I’ve got one more example of this phenomenon worth noting before I wrap all this up in a bow of light. This one is relevant not just because of an inspired moment (which it has), but also because the theme of the poem is changing the way we see things, which is kinda what I’ve been talking about (ahem) for the better part of an hour, or year, or forever. I’m going to go into a little more detail with this explication and I’m hoping you’ll stick with me.

Around the time that I finished “Sun Sonnet”, I had a big burst of poetry come out, like eight or ten good ones over the course of a week or two. Man-o-schewitz was that a soaker. Amidst this I wrote one of my fave poems ever (though “Sun Sonnet” is up there). I’ve already told you the theme; it’s called “It may not be light”, which is also the first line. In it I depict a shift in the way one might look at life – both the concept and the understanding of what life might be. There are a couple of lines that describe how we might think of or envision life in a traditional sense, as in what we’ve been taught; the tone is fairly critical and the imagery and language a bit complex, but here it is as originally written:

                                                     …Life for instance — 
what small things live the machines 

 
[implying that life forms as we see them are really machines that are “lived”? “lived in”? by some things smaller…anyway,]

what small things live the machines we stare at ceaselessly
harking nuclei [like in cells], clanking clocks, as avatars…
 

[…so there the nuclei exemplify the machines that we’re mistaking for life.] 

Now that sounds like I’d planned the whole thing out, but really it just came out all at once and I liked it as is. Actually though those lines are pretty confusing, with an image central to the meaning that should be clearer. I just didn’t see that at the time. What are these “small things”? Are they life forms or smaller machines, and what are they doing? Not sure I knew, but I left it at that for a long time, until it appeared in my recent book Mammal (from Roof Books). After the manuscript was approved, they gave me a couple of months to do any edits I wanted, and one of the last changes I made was to that line. (O m’ darlin.) I tinkered with it (or Finked with it) for weeks and finally settled on replacing those “small things” (whatever they were) with “prana”, the Hindu word for “life force”. Not ideal as that’s not a readily familiar word to a lot of folks, but, I felt, really the best I could do, tacitly acknowledging my limits. So the line became, “what prana spans the machines we stare at ceaselessly,” and so it was printed in 2023. Then this past week, while I was making notes for this episode, I found myself writing at the bottom of the page, “what prana animates the gears” – out of nowhere. I hadn’t read or recited or really looked much at that poem in some time, and it certainly wasn’t on my mind, but there, suddenly, was maybe the best phrasing for the line. Because prana doesn’t exactly “span,” but it does animate, and “prana animates” has a really nice lyrical ripple to it. And now rather than “machines,” we stare at gears, another punchy phrase that also makes much more sense illustrating parts of the clocks in the ensuing line. Finally this poem is, to my mind, finished. And my publisher is going to kill me. 

So here’s the final version of the poem, which is only about a minute long (meaning, haha, it’ll only hurt for a minute).

It may not be light

 that we’re looking for, you know,
or looking at for that matter. How do we see
what we need to see? Life for instance— 
what prana animates the gears we stare at ceaselessly
harking nuclei, clanking clocks, as avatars
while the living slip through sight unhumanized and bold,
and we know nothing that we cannot frankly be.
Oh the humility, sheer gut-strung lack
that if we’re lucky, if we strip our lovelorn minds,
lets us see the underglow at last— 
bottoms-up, whirling, world inside-out,
every little thing a thing no more but
thankfully preciously flux gaunt and clarified
as honey catapulting through our pores.

Sorry about that, Roof Books. I was imbued.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve made it through this entire episode so far without once mentioning politics – which is very much on purpose and oops I just did. But ya know, the ability to step out of yourself, or your perspectives, to shift or reset or find a new way of dealing with oppression or a new form of resistance or a new way forward – to utilize “flux gaunt and clarified,” if you will, as a tool for invention – that’s resistance in and of itself, not to mention a stepping stone to new strategies. And do you know what word describes that state, of being outside of yourself or your body, if just for a minute? Ecstasy. (No, not that kind.) That’s literally what it means – to be out (“ex”) of stasis. To be on the move. And to live in an ecstatic state, to be looser, less trappable, less controllable, more present and prescient and decisive, that is big-time resistance.

And it may open more than just new ideas and perspectives. It may open harmonies and alignments and serendipity – and synchronicity. It might coax open the crown chakra, letting you come and go at will, and it might flirt with satori, those moments of sudden enlightenment which the Buddhists say you cannot seek, though you might live in such a way that they seek you (kind of related to our topic today). Which leads me to one last little tidbit, the last story, the last shiny tale I have to tell you in this episode and possibly in the podcast itself. Beyond that titch of inspiration I’ve already mentioned, I need to tell you what happened this week.

So Wednesday, May 7 was a sucky day. Despite making some progress on a job, I was stuck in this electric ball of anxiety that I’ve been in off and on for months over financial insecurity/terror and the usual existential dread. Went out that evening with my friend Mary Mackey, who has taken me to dinner every month or two for a couple of years because she knows I can’t afford to myself and because she’s a fucking saint. Also we have terrific conversation. I chose Thai food this time so we went to a yummy place on Solano Avenue in Albany, CA (just north of Berkeley); had some lively convo with Mary and her friend Alan, which cheered me up and relieved the anxiety for the moment. Thank you two! On my way home from Mary’s (‘bout a 20 minute drive), I called my friend Graham in Los Angeles (my screenwriting partner) just to check in. He asks what I’m up to. 

“Driving home from dinner with a friend,” I said (exact words). 

Then he inexplicably says, “I know a great Chinese place on Solano.”

“Why did you just say that?” I ask.

“I don’t know, why?”

“Because I didn’t tell you we had Thai food on Solano.”

“You didn’t? Oh my god you didn’t.”

The thing is, there are thousands of streets in the SF Bay Area with good restaurants, and quite a few more good restaurants themselves, and he had no way of knowing where I’d eaten. Even if that’s not what he intended, it was a pretty amazing coincidence (or whatever it was). 

We both said, “Whoa,” of course, and discussed it for much of my drive home, during which I came across a nice family of deer coming out of the Albany hills.

Got home and parked in one of the only two open spots on the block, coincidentally the one I’d been in just before. When I’d left a few hours earlier, all sucky and frazzled, I was startled walking to my car by some neighbors who were talking in their car just behind mine – one of those things where you don’t see someone and then they’re right next to you. I waved hi and pulled out, and they pulled out right behind me. Returning from that mini-flashback (and from dinner): I pulled back into that same spot, and before I could get out of my car those same neighbors pulled in right behind me. I said hello and noted the coincidence of our timing. 

“How funny,” said Arthur, proffering a fist bump. “Where did you go?”

“I had dinner with a friend at a Thai restaurant in Albany. You?”

“We just picked up some Thai food,” he said laughing.

“Whoa,” I said. “You and I, my friend, are in alignment,” and proffered a bump myself. I neglected to tell him how hazardous it might be to be in alignment with me. (Hehehe.)

Went up to my apartment feeling more elated than I had in a long while – that was two (or three?) co-inky-dinks within thirty minutes – and slept very well. The next morning I woke to an email offering me a substantial naming gig, one of the largest I’ve ever gotten, actually a series of projects that will run till the end of the year and pull me, if not completely out of destitution, at least back up to the brink. I accepted the job, then sat back and said, “Whoa!”

But it doesn’t quite end there.

Recognizing that this series of happenstance had pretty much broken the cycle of anxiety and depression I’d been in, at least for a while, and that I was in an exceptionally good mood, I went to a performance with a friend on Thursday night, part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. I’d been to a few events (mostly free ones) and took a gamble on this one, which sounded good but you never know. It was billed as something like mixed performance, dance, movement, music, song, poetry and spoken word all wrapped in a healing ceremony – and it wasn’t just good, it blew me away – I’ve seen and taken part in lots of stuff like that, and hadn’t seen anything so good in years. This one was less “Whoa” and more “Wheeee!” At the end they asked everyone to get up and dance with them – which can really not work sometimes – and found myself skipping around like a skippy person, holding hands with all kinds of people and singing. Afterward I went up to the director (it was Dandelion Dance Theater, btw), and said, “That was amazing. Can I perform with you?” (Because I’m not busy enough…) I told him a little about myself and he said yes and we’ll talk soon. So I might just have joined a performance troupe (or not).

On Friday (yes I’m telling you a lot but we’re almost there), I went to the festival again to see recent works by Latina Classical composers. (It’s a great festival – link in the notes.) Beautiful sounds and I had a chat with Carla Lucero, who said she had an opera premiering in October in Merida, Mexico. 

“How funny,” I said. “My sister and her husband are moving there this month.”

Whereupon she got quite excited, saying, “How wonderful! You’ll have to put us in touch!” and so on. So now my sister and her husband are going to see an opera in October in their new town of Merida, and will know the composer.

Saturday I ran an event all afternoon which went well.

Sunday I ran nothing at all except from nap to nap.

Monday, similar, except a meeting to firm up that big job. Then Monday evening I called my friend Tammy Melody Gomez in Fort Worth (I interviewed her in Episode 22, “How Artists Survive in America - Part 2”), just to check in. We talked for about an hour, and both were surprised to report how many positive things were happening in our immediate circles, despite the horrors of the year. I noted that there was so much negative energy being vomited all over the place, that positive energy might not know quite where to go, and it might be one of our tasks as resistors to soak it up and spread it around. About halfway through I mentioned how the moon had been keeping me from sleeping (it was the full Flower Moon that evening), and she mentioned she’d taken a walk the night before by the river just to look at it. Then on to other things. As we were winding down the call, I was moving through my front room pulling down the blinds. Tammy said, “Well, I’m off to sleep, and maybe you should have a look at the moon.” I was stepping up to the front window, and just as she said it, like that millisecond, that moon, huge and bright and lusty, came through the window and smacked me right in the eye. At least that’s what it felt like. “Whoa!” I said. “Do you know what just happened?”

Curious thing – I didn’t tell Tammy about those earlier coincidences at all, just about the performances I’d seen. But that channel was still open and she was definitely part of it, and here’s how I know: because Tammy said “Moon,” and at the start of it all Graham had said, “Solano,” which is the word for a hot wind in Spain, and comes from, as you can see, “sol,” meaning “sun”.

So it seems we have an alignment of heavenly bodies: Sun … and Moon.

Apparently my selection of music some weeks ago had more to it than I first thought.

Here we go.

[PLAY “Thus Spake Zarathustra” UNDERNEATH?]

This has been Episode 32, covering Weeks 49 and 50 of My 12-Month Video Fast. 

Two weeks from today, on Saturday, May 31, I’ll post the final episode of the cast. I think I’ll leave you to guess what that one might be about.

As always, thank you for listening! And please, show yourself the life of the mind.