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132,000
In the future, the entire world will be stitched together into one giant sprawling airport.
I’ve been listening really closely to a lot of music lately, and getting heavy into some poetry and “Literature”. Tom Petty’s Wildflowers is amazing. As is his She’s The One. Just finished Kerouac’s Subterraneans and started in on a book of romantic letters between him and Joyce Johnson from the late 1950’s. Subterraneans I found to be nauseatingly familiar, as is Kerouac’s style in general. I mean just the obsessive self-analysis and endless self-inflicted torture of words gone bad. Specific passages in that book moved me. One quote of Mardou’s that I really liked:
“Men are so crazy, they want the essence, the woman is the essence, there it is right in there hands but they rush off erecting big abstract constructions.”
I guess one of the things I’ve taken away from my closeness to these various pieces of art lately has been that great art doesn’t really give you The Answer™ so much as it takes you through the emotional process of moving towards the answer. I guess it’s just honesty. And it’s recognizing beauty in both the depths and the heights.
I feel like by now I have mostly gotten clear of the darkest parts of my own “emotional storm” (as I knock on wood), and the weird part is I think I kind of miss it. I’ve experienced this before in life, particularly in relationships: the intense period of almost death-like anguish which just roils your insides and makes you not want to leave the empty silence of your bedroom. These past three weeks since I left California have been mostly that, with the exception of a few small luminous intervals.
Now that this part of the process is behind me though, I kind of long for it. You get addicted to the intensity. The passion of up and down. The violence of moment-to-moment living. When you’re not in the throes of that, what do you have? I’ve never been one for simple routine and I haven’t had one for about four or five months - since she walked into my life. And what was that routine anyway? What made it worthwhile to maintain at the time? I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I guess I don’t really want to remember because to do so would be to let go of something I have gained in the midst of all my other losses.
Luckily next week I embark upon a sailing adventure. I don’t know anything about sailing, have never done it before, hate boats & being on the water, can’t swim because of old childhood fears and there you have it. But a three week trip up the coast from Santa Barbara to Seattle has fallen into my lap and it’s not the kind of thing you just pass up because you’re afraid. I try not to let fear rule me. I mean, it does. But I try not to let it…
This morning I dreamt of a blog post. Or rather the dream was delivered like a blog post to me. It seemed extremely coherent and beautiful at the time. But all I can remember now is images of six pointed stars swirling and the number 132,000 repeating itself again and again. I wished I could have captured it and retransmitted that signal out to the world. But it often seems like in life all you can really do is capture only a trace of that memory and pass along that diminished and distorted version. And maybe that’s what great art really is: the tragedy of losing the intensity of the moment and the creation of new moments in an attempt to get back there again.
I will stop trying to force the Hand of God. He doesn’t owe me anything. But how am I supposed to put on a musical without a Muse? Just tell me that much and I will go away quietly. It’s not really the story I had in mind either. But it’s what came out when I tried to open my mouth and live. We can re-write it, can’t we?
June 25th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Runes for this post
June 25th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
It’s born-born, young Lord so raise your swords
June 26th, 2007 at 3:06 am
This post caused me to muse: I think the secret of a great and beautiful musical is the Bloodsexdeath™ component. Without it, there can be no beauty.
I mean, take a great song from a great musical; Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. Now imagine it being sung by Barney the Dinosaur or Teletubbies in the midst of the 90s to children with rich parents at home: It would be completely trite crap, now wouldn’t it? But now take the original, sung by a wayward nun in the midst of Nazi germany, a woman without a place in a world where 11 million PeopleWithoutPlaces™ were being killed in concentration camps. She is using what little power she has to cheer up children God has given her to care for in the midst of the “storm” unfolding outside. In this context, surrounded by shadows and horrors, its one of the most beautiful moments in any musical. Think about it.
The point is that within the context of The Musical, badness is the necessary backdrop to highlight the goodness in simple things, like the song sung to children in the midst of the storm.
(Of course the opposite also applies. If you want to highlight horror, you need to take a bunch of young couples, put them in a house with many resources, and give them the dionysian pleasures of sex and booze. Within the context of these pleasures, with their whole lives ahead of them, the guy in the hockey mask truly looks scary; precisely because they have *everything to lose*. But try pitting Freddy Kreuger against Cool Hand Luke, and you don’t really have much of a movie, now do you?)
Do a search on google images for ‘drama’. What do you see? Two masks, intimately connected, one smiling and one frowning. These two elements are nailed to each other, crucified to each other back to back in drama: Every story has these elements, every writer must use both; the horrible as the backdrop of the beautiful, the beautiful as the backdrop of the horrible, and every other combination of dualities you can imagine. Please though, don’t seek any existential meaning from this fact, because there is there is NONE. We are not the disciples of Janus.The whole thing is merely a device, something that is used. And however its used, the goal is always the same: Illumination. The illumination may allow you to see the sacrifice of Christ in a nanny singing to children during a storm, or the Devil in a piece of sports equipment. But its always illumination, and this goal is singular, not dual.
So cheer up and eat your plate of Bloodsexdeath™. Its good for you.
June 26th, 2007 at 3:55 am
Yeah. Damn. Good. Shit.
I’ve also realized lately that I lived as much of the musical as I’d written before I went down there and it went basically the same as how I’d left it in the open-ended version, with all the same problems and subplots and unresolved components. I knew what I was doing though all along: that the only way I could find how that story needed to go was to actually live through it. Otherwise it wouldn’t have worked™.
Catharsis only works when you’re swung back and forth violently from extremes
June 26th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
This is sort of what Coruscant in Revenge of the Sith looks like. I took an aviation class a long time ago and I recognized the look of the maps when I saw the movie.
Lots of lava on Mustafar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafar
June 26th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
So they found, allegedly, the remains of the only female pharoh.
http://news.africast.com/africastv/article.php?newsID=62289
I wonder what this might herald…
June 26th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
It heralds the election of Hilary Clinton as Pharoahdent…um, President.
23 Skidoo!
June 27th, 2007 at 7:20 am
That thought came to mind for me as well…
June 28th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
These are the best examples I could find but they don’t do justice to the blue on blue maps of America I had.
http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/...arningresources/carto_corner/map9.jpg
http://www.alexisparkinn.com/Iowa%20City%20sectional%20map.jpg
http://w3sli.wcape.gov.za/surveys/IMAGES/AEROWESTERNCAPE.jpg
I agree on the Hilary thing. The female Pharaoh is old news. Bill did preside over the Seven Fat Years we had recently.