This is going to be a bit disjointed. Good. If it amuses you, pretend it’s the drugs talking, despite there being none.
I’m in Santa Cruz, in a small cottage style hotel within earshot of the Pacific. Unfortunately, mostly within eyeshot of the parking lot, but it’s about time my ears got going. I have been so deaf. Close the eyes. I hear sea, birds, and many frogs. Have you seen Hitchcock’s The Birds? That gives you the exact place*.
What am I doing here? Which is a different question to why am I here? I am here to carry the remains of Stacy Glasier in a little space capsule back up out of the gravity well**, to the real world where she started. That’s the way the narrative has to go, win or lose, the protagonist has to cycle back for the wisdom to take hold in the world. We were going to have a ceremony at this end involving many sea lions, but there was no need really. The fable is already told: they did not live happily ever after.
Which comes back to what am I doing here? Supposedly writing my idiot thesis so that other Titled Idiots can award me the honour of cloning more of them. I have spent years working at my Idiot status, but I guess The Birds*** have grown sick of this entire BS and decided to launch me on this space mission to learn something. They are screaming their heads off. It’s driving me nuts; I don’t understand what they want.
Much of what I am writing is about The Spiritual. That was the term used 100 years ago by Kandinsky and Schoenberg and all the crew for the rules of the metaphysical space that energized their art. In my Idiot thesis I’ve managed to carry that idea through a set of transformations, through ‘the apparatus world’ of the early video synthesizer artists, through ‘the platform’ of the early computer people and connect it to ‘cyberspace’ and ‘big data’ and now ‘virtual reality’ which has slunk back out of its hole. By the time I link it to ‘creative practice’ it’s a mummified corpse. That’s what I’m supposed to be writing right now, an incantation to imprison an idea.
Instead tonight I’m writing this.
The analytical mind has wrapped reality around its own shape. The allusive and intuitive mind is dismissed. This makes perfect sense. Fuck perfect sense. In the continental philosophy of the last century, the practitioners played like kittens with sense and nonsense. The academy, unable to exorcise them, murdered their play into a hard stupid rule set. How many times at university did I get told “Deleuze says that…” “Foucault says that…”. May as well be “Mao says that…”.
That’s what the Titled Idiots do to inspiration, they assassinate it. I don’t want to be like this. But I just can’t seem to break out of it. For about six months now I’ve gone insane trying to work out what I’m doing. What I am doing here?
Down at the water there is a shop that sells little glass globes with painted splats down the bottom. Most of them are rubbish. One was important and I needed it. My grandmother owned a glass globe, actually three in a stack, like a snowman. Inside there was coloured cloth coiled up in a bouquet. As I remember it, surely it was the most beautiful thing in the world. When was it made? Where did it come from? This little globe will never match it, but holding it I can see a connection – no, seriously – see a line stretching between them. And that’s an inkling of The Spiritual, far more useful than any of the bullshit that fits into a thesis. Somehow I put that under the heading of research.
Because things properly connect in ‘strange ways’. If I think of all the odd little ideas that inspire my work they do not come from “Deleuze says that” or from collaborating with a weapons specialist on a video mural. Reality of the sort that is natural and humane seems far more reliant on intuitive mind-soup than any Idiot Metric.
But it’s also soup. By which I mean:
I read a lot of Jung because I teach storytelling, that’s my job. Jung is all about the life story, the characters and chapters by which you measure your journey. Jung is full of the most amazing bullshit, really. They all were – Freud, Adler, Reich et al., partly because they were all nature and not enough culture. For Jung movies are drawn from the narrative faculty of the brain, instead of the obvious alternative of the brain drawing narrative from the movies. (People who watched Black and White TV mainly reported dreaming in Black and White. Clue train arriving at Jung Station.)
Like all of them Jung went through a ‘creative illness’. He kept a diary, the so-called red book. It was supposed to remain private, but because Jung thought he was Jesus Come Again of course it was eventually published. For Jung it was perfect. For everyone else it was a total crock. But at least I can look at that, and the creative illness of others and have a guide for something that is long overdue.
Here I am in Monterey. It has been a very long time since ‘gentle people with flowers in their hair’. No one is eight miles high. But if you wanted to apprentice yourself to a good dose of mind soup, then is this not the place? Of course a good whack of well made LSD might help, but it’s been a fair while since Sandoz made the real stuff. My old man used to use it in psychotherapy, wish he’d left some in a drawer, along with the glass spheres.
I go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Maybe the answer is here, but more likely I will make some space for the birds to nest and tell me what to do next.
*The Birds was inspired by an event on August 18, 1961 at Capitola. Another reason to visit.
** The gravity well is the effort it takes to get your spacecraft up to the orbit. From there, it’s comparatively smooth sailing. If you live in Australia, you’re well aware of the long long flight required to get anywhere else. Once you’re there – it’s no problem.
*** I have to again explain that ‘The Birds’ come to me every now and then and fill my head with ideas. They make no effort to clarify what the instructions are, they just pour some thoughts in there and shake-not-stir the cocktail. It’s always been this way and if I could catch them I would wring their little necks.
Sometimes I have a fever and get sick when the birds come. It got diagnosed once as encephalitis. Sensibly it’s a nickname for some back-end process going on that’s imperfectly connected to my so-called consciousness. It computes and delivers large-scale solutions to back of mind queries whenever it feels like it.