The Intern Milch Podcast

Guy converts the pain of the past to the future tense of joy.

Transcript

they have me to blame. Coleridge made a distinction between fancy and imagination, imaginative association is available to us as a shared experience, how the artist gains access to the imagination of his audience through the provision of and bringing to life of experiences, a fanciful association, and this is the burden of inauthenticity that those of us who work without outlines must bear, is a private association, for example hearing a song brings back a memory, there is nothing intrinsic in the music that would make anyone else have the same memory, it’s a paradox that the things in our experience which have disposed us to become artists, the sense of being outside looking in, inevitably are fanciful associations, the things that set us apart are hurtful, there is nothing inherent in being a son which would generate the associations I have with being a son, most of us try to solve this paradox by looking for experiences which will bring us back inside the temple, isn’t it fun when a seeming irrelevancy is then by the accumulation of subsequent associations made to make sense? that’s storytelling, every seeming digression, if you stand back far enough and if you have enough faith, is part of a single experience, gamblers and addicts have given themselves to an obsession and so the other aspects of their personalities have become a little derelict, my old man took me to the racetrack when I was five years old, he tells me Max will run my bets for me and collect, ‘I don’t want you betting more than five dollars a swear race and I don’t want you coming out here on your swear own’, OK dad, I don’t know what the swear he’s talking about, in the fullness of time, it becomes possible to understand that as a gesture of love, he had been deprived of the environment in which he grew up, fanciful to imaginative, we want to love the organizing forces in our lives, and will find a way to distort our apprehension of the world so as to idealise the organizing forces, a guy who’s good with a knife, you go a block before you know you are stabbed, that’s the people at the racetrack, they know how to do what they’re doing, the people who go there are driven by motivations that are absolutely secret to them, I win the Humanitas Award, which is presented by the Catholic Church, I can tell that Father Kaiser is a paedophile, I don’t know how, and I don’t know if he knows, but I can tell, I say that I’m going to use the prize-money to buy a racehorse, I win the Humanitas Award again ten years later, and by this time I’m sober, not just dry, but sober, I think I’m going to accuse Father Kaiser of being a paedophile, the next words which come from my lips are, ‘I’m grateful to have lived long enough to have discovered that the shadow in which I believed I would always move was cast by God’s protective hand’, and that was what Father Kaiser knew about me, which I didn’t know myself, a bird flying is accessible to more than one observer as an imaginative association with freedom, as writers, if we are not going to attempt to discover the principle of organization in our work, in some third-party’s expectation of what our organizing principle should be, then it is a mistake to disown fanciful associations, if pursued, as a means by which we get access to a more imaginative association, something in the fanciful, however private for us, is also compelling, most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, and the rest of us are incarcerated, stay with the fancy, make it accessible to others, anything which engenders a passionate connection is precious to us as a motor for engagement, don’t turn away from it, and see if it isn’t possible to accommodate, shame is a tremendous cloaker of imaginative association, a blow-job is not properly a subject for a story, by offending you I vitalize what is abstract and fanciful, the tactics of fictive persuasion are multiple and simultaneous, I am true to the report of the experience, and also aware of your being at the beginning of understanding of what I’m trying to tell you, the psyche protects itself unless it has a mechanism for the benign accommodation of what may be painful in recollection, no matter how talented you are, if you don’t rest transparently, if you try to impose a form based on a pre-conception about what the ‘other’ expects, you’re in despair, nothing keeps you from telling the right kind of story, except a lack of faith, anything you think about when you are not writing is false, the outline is an expression of despair, whatever comes to hand for the ego, ‘I’m not ready yet’, the ego will use to justify staying in whatever state it’s in, in the sense that something is abstracted, it becomes both more manageable and less meaningful, the toughest thing about being a parent is that, at a certain point, you have to let them go, you have to get to that point with your work, attempt to participate imaginatively in the creation of circumstances most congenial to the child realizing his or her deepest nature, then you get out of the way, it’s the selflessness of parenting, the selflessness of every kind of love, of art, if you are not resting transparently in the spirit which gives us rise, then all of our symbolic associations relate to commerce, what technology says is that, ‘I’m here for you; I’m always going to be here’, that is the way we are now encouraged to organize our behaviour, you have enough currency to have this technology, people stay indoors, the intent is to habituate, to addict, viewers to articles of commerce, don’t think about your place in history, nobody knows, a decent humility argues for shutting the swear up about what you’re going to go down in history for, and seeing what’s right in front of you, there is no intrinsic good; it’s what communities agree upon, don’t generalize unless you are resting transparently in the spirit which gives us rise, admit you don’t know the answer, we often find ourselves in a battle with the past because we’re afraid of the battles of the future, the ego tends to want to keep us doing whatever it is we’re doing, if you’re not writing, to not write, and if you’re writing, to keep writing, because ego, the sense of ‘I am’, simply wants you to continue with your idea of whatever your relation to reality is, the sense of the self is always after the fact, a response to your behaviour, it does not generate your behaviour, though you think it’s the other way around, everyone knows Moby Dick is a great great novel, my dirty secret is that I could never swear finish it, Coleridge used to say that when he would read his contemporaries and he was bored he’d say, ‘well I understand their ignorance’, but if he read Socrates and he was bored then he’d say, ‘I’m ignorant of his understanding,’ I was prepared to confess it was my problem with Moby Dick, it starts out with them looking for the whale, and I’m with them, it’s the premise, then they get involved with the construction of the whaling ship, I’m willing to give them that, then the rigging, the building of the harpoon, the skeleton of the whale, the blubber of the whale, I don’t care… the tactics of fictive persuasion, how you tell a story, to bring home the felt emotional isolation, the fanciful, a distancing, the chapters in Moby Dick that are unreadable, as something offputting, Ahab is compelled to go after the whale, it’s arbitrary, it’s fanciful, all of my wisdom as a Captain is in the service of a monomania… the impossibility of getting through Moby Dick, try as you will you cannot control the whale, by exhausting certain of the other ways of experiencing life other than imagination, the text has brought you to a felt relation with monomania, that’s the only way to understand Ahab’s experience, by eroding all the other ways, you only understand what fancy is as an organizing principle is through despair, private association which assumes a separateness from the world of experience, the willingness to give offence, is in fact, at the rhetorical level the willingness to create alienation which is one version of despair, and the only thing that allows you to persevere is faith, the content of any work tests and validates the implicit assumptions of its form which announce themselves in the very first moment of the work, I have to erode the fanciful in order to get to the imaginative, if you act in faith you’re going to get there, given my experiences it’s important for me to suppress as much as possible the act of preparation which I associate fancifully with evil, part of my method has to be to minimize the dominion of that fanciful association or I’m never going to work, under certain circumstances you’re capable of anything, Mr. Warren wrote, ‘what is love? one name for it is knowledge’, killing birds in order to paint them is not sin for the artist, or at least cannot be refined of its fanciful connection and recognized as love, don’t extrapolate from your sense of isolation a world view, leave that to God, don’t catastrophize, an outline is OK, do whatever it takes to get you to the work, if the idea produces getting you to work, then it’s a valuable idea, the nightmare logic of network programming is you give a black guy a position of authority but don’t give him any story, and to me that seemed like a fanciful way to neutralize the problem of race, and that’s why he’s called Lieutenant Fancy in NYPD Blue, the pain of the past in its pastness is converted to the future tense of joy, the act of sharing is the process by which painful recollection is converted to joy, following our father’s death my brother resigned as a surgeon and retrained as a hospice physician in order to better care for the dying, and that process was one by which the pain of the past was converted to future joy, I will walk with you into whatever darkness awaits us all, there’s a wonderful humility in that, and a kind of joy, by that act my brother has put my father at rest, and in a sense my dad made possible in his passing the comfort of many thousands of strangers, the future continues to reinterpret the meaning of the past, so that if one stopped the story at the moment of my dad’s passing it would have a completely different meaning, it’s the business of art to sink its roots deep and identify how the fanciful interpretation of experience can be removed, so it becomes the imaginative experience of joy, there is no such thing as a pure motive or a perfect outline, history is never tidy, if you’re in fear and don’t trust yourself to reveal that a story set in a gold camp in 1877 is a contemporary story, the scenes will gradually erode what is fanciful and seemingly inaccessible about that premise, a story set in 1877 is really the same story as The Roman Empire, that’s when the spirit has allowed you to rest transparently, visions come to prepared spirits, don’t stay in fear, create the ability to receive the spirit, the father on his deathbed hands over his betting system to his son, and says, ‘but don’t give it to your swear brother’, laughter is the release of fear that the thing survived, all that we now know of life and that a baby doesn’t know, the sadness, sorrow and sense of separateness, and we’re glad the baby doesn’t know and is happy, all that we know has been survived, the other version is ‘but don’t tell your fucking brother’, the pettiness of life goes on even in that extremity, we are human, there is a gesture of love, the impulse in those who have suffered the trauma of loss or violation to attempt to understand the experience by binding it to less traumatic, but more familiar, ways of explaining their relationship to outside forces which control them, a cop understands that part of their role is to help a victim begin to grieve and survive, ‘oh, you don’t understand; you won’t solve this; are you going to rob me too?’, except instead of talking about the horrible experience that has just taken place, for which there is no prior grid of understanding, you dislocate it and put it on the cop, the job of the expanding premise is to accommodate what is fanciful and gradually turn it into an imaginative connection, you never go wrong associating any fundamental theme with whores, the way to deal with a political topic is never to say the word ‘politics’, so what you’re doing is telling a story of Western culture which has so given over its soul to materialism that it will serve as a ditch for the semen of every other culture and embrace the illusion that it’s spying on them, to the extent that we’ve lived with our noses pressed up against the invisible shield that surrounds the walled city, we tend to internalize a lot of stuff, one of which is the Gospel of ‘meeting cute’, that you build up a premise where two seemingly very different people meet in a cute way and find out that they’ve got a lot in common, if we’re on to our habits of mind, we internalize and go to the familiar, and so complicate the premise as a way to try to anticipate objections from the network as you imagine the pitch session, swear ‘em, how do you train yourself to not be in fear? what’s at the heart of the premise? two guys become friends, just let them make friends, so what engages the viewers’ imagination is how two guys hit it off, the rest can come in later, we have all different kind of stakes in remembering things a certain way, there is something other than what you think is going on in your recollection, what extraordinary and various creatures we are, and with what tenacity we try to live, the predisposition to transfer dysfunction from one environment to another…