https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1_NcNZFVws
Category: Art
Please Stand By…
…still working…
Writing: Impetus
It’s hypnotic. Illogic. You may recall genetic components – a sentiment, experience, curiosity or sensation…the fabrication begins its own spells. That plane where you drift from expression or fractaling inquiry toward Medium. When plot is played out and the voices keep talking. Or some other member begs a word.
You are no longer quite “author.” When it begins I’m usually puzzled or amazed. A vague and shifty core obsesses and eludes me. I ponder awhile, do research, spawn a dialogue or few with available others…but eventually turn to writing. A word inscribed in secret not only leads to more, but ricochets through spacetime like a pinball. The versions of the brain call out over the callosum: “Felt anything like this before? Have we had an experience that resonates?” / and / “Say – it seems I’m in the midst of something – check it out! Any words in your concordance for such as this?” To and fro – attemps to signify and symbolize, reify, rectify, making truce with our immersion.
The “language drill.” As it burrows metaphor, it fragments and splinters dust around the edges. Retrieving as it leads. Recalling through invention. I use my handwriting to find out. To find out. Searching something, spelunking expeditions, a nettling curiosity blind-feeling hunches and perceptions. Pulling them towards words in attempts to trick them into trap. Building tunnels, margins, stairwells to aim the lights at. As if broad enough term-corrals might lasso and then spiral, slowly cinching it round, whatever “it” is.
But whoa then, hold on! Once a breadcrumb trail’s discerned, it forges. Makes its rhinoceric way in accrual and erasure. Constructing as you follow, conundrum’d and deleting. A word – and sources cling like filaments. None of them accurate and all informing. History, culture – traditions. Intimate pain and joy. Perception, conception and query. Discovering bewilderment. Creating the unsaid.
Victim and perpetrator both, you, author, artist, song. Skewing and distorting in equal measures. Changing as you change it. This is the making. The being-made. Creator and created both. The artist in her medium.
There is no “having done.” Failure or not, it virals and contaminates. The path is incompletion. “The Artist’s Way…” Never through, until it’s through with you, coincident with a life.
Who do we say that we are?
And then there’s this…This will destroy you
Memory + expected future = obscure present, distorted present, non?-present?
And then there’s this…
Should you be able to manage it…
11 minutes of solitude, today…
if you have nice noise-reducing headphones – even better!
if you can find a spot by the sea, by a slow-moving river,
some room in the home unlikely to be entered
a porch, in view of trees,
door shut, lying on bed…
car seat back parked remotely, inviolately…
anywhere
you might be able to be immersed
for 11 minutes
alone
with this
and allow
and for no reason pause before the 8.44 mark.
Revisiting Aspects of Writing
to see if there might be some positive resonances yet….
Aspects of Writing.
(please click image or title to link)
Promise
“Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it.”
-Virginia Woolf-
+
2 Books that generate promise…
(click covers for summaries)
Groundlessness
I seem to be unable to stop digging in and reflecting on When Things Fall Apart. My memories range over its engagements with this book, most of the circumstances blurred and dissipate, but not the wisdom of the text. I was trying to explain to my teens the odd euphoria that follows suicidal determination – what neuroscience knows as “shut-down.” As the body begins to burn, or be ripped apart by fangs, riddled with bullets or smashed into bits…pain ceases to be useful to the organism and it is flooded with endorphins…a kind of blissed-out euphoria like a systemic morphine drip. “There is definitely something tender and throbbing about groundlessness,” Pema says.
But the idea isn’t shut-down. The idea is more like a drowning compression without a bottom…a fall…a float…if fear – flight; if anxiety – distract; if anguish – addictive comfort; all these options for moving away, slipping out, attempt at relief, escape, a concretization of experience, rather than its flow. It’s now-ness. This drowning compression without bottom – what if we BE THERE? What if we sit in it, and breathe. The groundlessness, bottomlessness, suddenly becomes some space. A little room…there’s opening. We don’t know what to do, don’t know where to go, don’t know how this happened, don’t know why we did. “Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all...Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.”
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”
– all quotations Pema Chodron
“Leaning into the sharp points”
painting by Holly Suzanne
“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth” – Pema Chodron
I modeled for the painting above. It is propped beside the bed as I write. A large painting, and heavy, maybe 4.5 feet long and 3.5 feet tall, loaded with layers of paint. She called it “Praying Man,” but I wasn’t praying – the way it turned out I felt like a longshoreman, a hauler, tensed with the energy of pulling things out from the deeps. I see why she called it that.
We’re reorganizing the house, and in that process I notice what’s gone, and discover things forgotten. Today it was When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, “heart advice for difficult times.” I’ve depended on this one before. It’s written with the situation in mind in which a human feels there is nowhere to escape. Suffering floods in weights that compress one toward no option. Chodron says that “No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear…the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, or distract ourselves…but by all means make it go away.” “We don’t need that kind of encouragement, because dissociating from fear is what we do naturally.” “Cheating ourselves of the present moment” according to Chodron.
Instead, she suggests, “we could step into uncharted territory and relax with the groundlessness of our situation…by inviting in what we usually avoid…adopting a fearlessly compassionate attitude toward our own pain and that of others.” I am taking this on as the work of the “praying man.” The longshoreman and hauler, reeling hand over hand over heart over hurt into the tumult of the pain of being. “…getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye – not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and thinking…having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.” The traditions align. “He who saves his life will lose it.” The terror that drives the boundaries, isolates the organism. Protectiveness cuts the supply chain. Security stanches generative flow.
What happens when we stay? Nailed to the present misery. Chodron suggests that when we move into rather than away from our life-threatening pain a kind of catharsis can occur – an acceptance that we are “precious beyond measure – wise AND foolish, rich AND poor, good AND bad…and totally unfathomable.”
another painting by Holly Suzanne, emptied of me
“The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought. That’s what we’re going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what we thought. I can say that with great confidence. Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion – not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage. These are code words for things we don’t know in our minds, but any of us could experience them. These are words that point to what life really is when we let things fall apart and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.”
Preying Man then, hunched over and hauling it out, rhythmically breathing into the present, a turbulent pain fueled by fear…searching into what I usually avoid. Hopefully not so much as a way to solve problems, but an undoing of native ways of seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting and thinking…along with the courage to die.
-all quotations Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
What David Said…
-David Foster Wallace interview
On how I miss my therapist.
Please take the time to watch the video.
All my Words are Silent 