Puppet

I have worlds of adventure and characters in my head, a vast pantheon of gods, scenarios, dramas and comedic twists, grand mythic ideas and layers and layers of words, cadence and imagery. Sometimes, it’s so much that it overwhelms and blurs my sense of what is and what I’ve imagined is. Naturally, this has always excited me to write fiction, to translate them to the page and to share in the storytelling and literary tradition.

So, I sit down. I create the situation for everyone to bounce around in. I paint the world as I’ve imagined it, and then I step back to watch.

The problem is that nobody does anything. So, I remember that I have to move them around a bit, because for some reason they can’t move on their own. I move them around. But then I’m reminded that I also have to lift their arms and legs and cause them to breathe and react. So, I do that. And they move around a bit and nothing much happens because they aren’t speaking to each other. I remember that I have to tell them exactly what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. So, I do this. And for a short time, they seem to do exactly what I expect them to do and do it pretty well. But the minute I stop poking my fingers into their minutia, they just stop where they are and wait.

Ultimately, it’s frustrating because I can’t understand why they can’t do a single thing on their own without me. I poke at them with twigs and dance their little limbs around, but they are merely constructions of my life-force. They are masks that serve as a limited interface to the rooms and rooms and rooms beyond them where we live together. All I want to do is interact with them, or at the worst breathe life into them once and watch as they do whatever it is that they are going to do. But they are clay shells and logos and grammar and show don’t tell and desire and barrier and blah, blah, blah, he said as he furrowed his brow and looked meaningfully at his shoe.

I’d make a terrible god.

I’m realizing that I don’t really like writing fiction, but that I’m compelled to try it because my pathways are clogged to overpopulation with visuals. And as much as I try it, I’m also beginning to accept that it’s always going to be a shadowy representation of the things I see in my head and the things I see in-between flows of synchronicity in the real world and the things I see when I go traveling. It’s like taking a picture of somewhere that truly moved you. How rare it is to take a snapshot that somehow conveys what you were feeling and sensing and how often it is to take a two-dimensional color window that barely illuminates the immensity of the moment.

Master photographers, perhaps they get closer more often. Master authors, perhaps they do too. But I am neither of those.

And yet, it’s this stubborn unwillingness to give up that causes me so much strife and gives me so much transformation at the same time. And what I’m learning through it all is that truly our perceptions, reactions, feelings about things, our pride and fear and desire, cause so much of our joy and our pain. It really is all in our heads. For me, frustration is the killer, because frustration has within it invalidity, anger and self-destruction. If there were ever a triad concocted to bring me to my knees, it would be that.

So, what I’ve done in myself is travel backward to a kinder time, before my divorce and before my father died, before the layoff and the moves and the grey hairs. I’ve dug through old chests and opened burlap bags, and luckily have kept copious offline and online journals since 1996 that have served as a kind of past message service from me to me, warning me, reminding me, giving me clues as to the Rosetta stone of balance. And what I found was that I was happiest when I knew nothing or thought I knew nothing. When I was willing to say that I had no idea what I was doing or even that I had no idea if I what I was doing would ever work, I was on fire personally, creatively and spiritually.

One my writing gods, John Cleaver talked in one of his books about the general learning cycle, which is comprised of several steps: unconscious ineptitude (you don’t know what you don’t know), conscious ineptitude (you know what you don’t know, what you have to work on), conscious mastery (you are doing it, but it is hard and requires effort that seems sometimes unnatural), and unconscious mastery (it’s reflex). I find it interesting that he describes conscious mastery as by far the hardest stage of all. You are almost there, you have little that you can learn, and you are trying to juggle it all and make it work while not giving up. And you know if you could just push through and suffer enough, that the last stage is reflex and relative ease. Perhaps, however, that’s the Holy Grail nobody ever reaches.

What I’m discovering about myself in relation to this is that I thrive on being in the conscious ineptitude stage. I usually grow bored of things if they ever reach the unconscious mastery stage and probably go to great lengths to prevent that from happening. Unconscious ineptitude only makes me eager for the next phase. And I hate being in the conscious mastery stage, which is where I’ve found myself in certain areas of my life or where my perceptions have placed me. But as much as I think this cycle is valid in most cases, I think it is prone to having holes punched in it if your desire is only to keep learning.

That’s where I’m heading now, returning to the routine I set for myself when I really didn’t know anything about any of my present pursuits and was happy in that knowledge of nothingness. And what I bring back with me is maturity, a full reckoning of knowing the things I don’t know and a willingness to pursue them. The release has been palpable. The desire to learn again is rising, to be engaged and involved and interlaced. The passion for spending an hour moving an arm or a leg, knowing that at any time these people might suddenly come to life or the world they live in might suddenly fill up and become self-turning, but not caring too much if that happens, is coming back. My interest in community and people is rebirthing. And most importantly, powerful demons of obsession and need that have grown unchecked for many years are finding their balance and through their recession are magically revealing the overriding fabric of me.

I’m not going to go into what that is, but I will say this. A great deal of what I’ve done since 1995 or 1996 was in some small way a plea for love, to be wanted and desired, to be respected and appreciated, to be personally powerful and defined as this thing or that thing, whether “poet” or “writer” or “singer” or “drummer” or otherwise. And though I still sometimes struggle with feelings of being unloved and invalid, though the echoes of my father’s life and the passive abuse he suffered and I witnessed and hated witnessing and then in turn repeated in my life, the silent world he held himself in remain, though I am alone again and wandering, those walls and those constructs have only created a world around me that forces me to move my own arms and legs in order to be true to the fiction.

The bigger thing for me is out there and has always been out there, from the first moment that I as a child carried around that long wooden staff, from the time I fed spiders water, from the time I first sat surrounded by fields of energy and lost myself in them. It’s never gone away, only been occluded by the manifestations of it, which I have constructed as simultaneous weapon, shield, and skeleton and held up in place of it as mask and diversion. It’s always been just beyond my fear of persecution for it and my sense that it alone could and would never be enough to define a life.

As she often said, it’s a process, not a revelation or a sudden change. It’s an intent and a choice, but it’s always a long, hard road.

I saw a billboard today for a product that I won’t mention, because I’d rather cut that part from the sign. It said, “Eat sushi. Get smoochy”. That’s exactly what I’m getting at. What a wonderfully simple and good sentiment, full of living and joy. That’s what I’ll be saying to myself in all those times when I put the chains on my own prison of freedom and forget what lies underneath.

William, lighten up. Eat sushi. Get smoochy.

Almost Blossoms and the Gluteus Glyph

There has always been a chair. This one is a circa 1960’s vintage, leather-black high-back, three position recliner that squeaks and protests each time I shift it into gear, that sticks to my skin in summertime, that robs my lumbar of elasticity. Sometimes, I imagine that if time travel ever becomes possible, it will be through the echoes of ass prints indelibly marked along a sequence of cocooning cushions and hell-sucking futon mattresses. One day I’ll hang a chart on the wall, like the classic evolution of man, from stick-backed, armless office seat to whatever gel-packed, gluteus-massaging, womb-thing is popular in 2040.

I’m in that chair now, looking out across badly patched, multicolored rooftops with half-missing shingles and old, red-brick chimneys. Filling the entire window on my right with promise are the visions of cherry blossoms. These have exploded into pink-whiteness, burst luscious and full of seduction, begun to breeze with a gentle, frond-like shimmer almost overnight. Each year, they all become fertile at the same instant, transforming skyscapes into gardens with a single-minded solidarity. They draw forth the sunlight from the clouds daily in ever-increasing amounts. “Come here, copper-head,” they coo like sirens, like round-earthy pagan women, like lithe sylphs, fox-masked tanukas with outstretched limbs.

But dotted amongst these days of spring-to-be are the last vestiges of winter and my continued winter soul. Long days of journeying internal landscapes and long spans of time without leaving my front door, take their toll. At the end of the season come the deep things at last, demons and truths and slime so very far down, hardly uncovered. In some cases, they are so new and so unthought-of before, that I lose myself in them for weeks, recasting the past, the present, and the future through their filters and looking for answers.

These are my internal journeys. They are the reason why when I sit down to write a blog after a few weeks of inactivity, I can’t think of a single adventure or external moment that I’ve had. All days blur together, weeks and weekends and evenings and mornings, and these are defined by rising tides of revelation and depression as I am consecutively enlightened and lost and enlightened again.

This chair keeps me held fast and grounded. Nag champa ash stains the seams. Cat hair clogs the arteries from where one of two little warm bodies sponge-drain the heat of my passing when the grey skies blacken and I walk the few yards down the hall to bed. Soon, I’ll dust it off, stuff my backpack with projects, and leave. But not yet.

Right now, I’m looking for the source of something that’s recently shown itself to me as the bearer of the heart of many recent issues. I’ve realized since I left Seattle in 1998, though I’ve certainly made many decisions and choices for myself and followed many paths that were mine and mine alone, I’ve increasingly lost discernment between things I want to do and things I have to do. Give me a task that has to be done, like organizing for a move, or preparing packages for shipment, or building somebody’s website, or picking somebody up at the airport, or cleaning the house and I’m up and motivated and full of purpose. Allow me to have three days of free choice to do anything I want to do, and I’ll most often lay on the floor and curl up or spend the afternoon playing some inane shockwave game.

I’ve written about this before, certainly, but it’s recently begun to take on more of a manifestation and depth for me, and it’s beginning to illustrate the purpose of being back here, fifteen minutes away from where I started some 6 years later. This is not a matter of having too much choice and not knowing what to do next. This is a matter of forgetting how to choose the things I want do to and not being able to tell the difference between them and things I have to do or feel for some reason I should do.

Many of the decisions I made since driving I-90 across the mountains to Spokane in 1998 involved either compromise or obligation, short-term sacrifice for long-term outcomes that never came to pass, or temporarily-assumed responsibility that never transformed or released. And that’s the mode I’ve been in for a long time.

So much in my life is finally closed as of the first part of 2004, with only future decisions and present-living to be made. And as I’ve been picking up the pieces of old projects and ideas, I’ve discovered that through a span of five years, it is possible and very likely to change what you want. This is somewhat of an inconvenience. Since those projects lived and existed and were never fulfilled in their time, they’ve become a benchmark of success to me, things I think deserve to be fulfilled and explored. And so, they have left the realm of “want to do” and entered the realm of “should do”. What’s more, they’ve become signifiers of reclaiming my past and my past mistakes, as if by completing them, all the ‘wasted time’ would suddenly be erased and I’d be “back on track”.

What I’ve been doing as I launch myself back into creative and spiritual projects again is to return, naturally, to those old ideas and dedicate myself to them. But in that, I find I’m continuing to make decisions that are in the “have to” camp or the “should” camp. And since those decisions are creatively and spiritually-based, they have a tinge of heaviness and obligation rather than the more healthy, free-flowing give-and-take of desire, inspiration, and joy-hearted investment. Hence, the elements of a self-conflict are assembled and the catalyst sparked.

When I stop and return to the present moment, I take stock. I ask myself questions about what I am doing, what I want to do, and what I used to want to do. And one-by-one, almost all the projects of the past are shown to be “shoulds” and not “want tos”, or at the very least, if the manner of them is still valid, the substance of them is not. This causes a certain amount of identity-fucking, to be blunt, because those things I thought were strong “want tos” before were the things I liked to use to define myself to myself. Without that definition, I an prone to some rudderless wandering and searching and feelings of loss. And highlighted in that is the simple fact that some of those previous “want tos” were long-standing support beams and motivations that in turn led to related choices and “want tos” in a tightly-wound web.

Through this, I see one of the big differences in a child playing and an adult playing. The child, if you ask him or her why he or she is doing a thing, just shrugs. They are happy with what they are doing, and that’s enough. If in the next five minutes, the activity loses it’s heart-pull, the child moves on to something else. We as adults, on the other hand, think we have to defeat death and be solid creatures. Even if the reason is “It’s important for me to play”, adults usually know why they are doing a thing and what they want that thing to lead to and how that in some way relates to their life work or path. Personally, I’m not too sure that this is the true soul of happiness and creativity, of divinity or dharma, the encapsulation of a carefree moment or the freedom of non-constraint and the real experience of the experience.

It seems to have a vulture quality about it that makes me weary.

For me, it all began to fall apart in late 1997, even as I started Walkabout, and though I took my own path from there, though I learned much and would never regret a moment, I can see now that my big heart, my sometimes imbalanced tendency to serve, my occasional feelings of invalidity, my need to be needed and appreciated, took me down a road that effectively severed my hands from my body.

There was one time in the past that I thought of all these things and tried to lodge them into my heart, one recent time when it was clear. This was in-between the mess of direction and expression of late 1998 and 1999 and my move to West Virginia in early 2000, on a beach in San Francisco, alone in the late summer sun, after the eclipse.

So, from that point and the clarity therein, I’m going to have to figure this all out. I’m going to have to teach myself how to make those “want to” decisions again, release my roles of responsibility and obligation, and heal much of scarring, fear and anger that has happened between my controlling, decision-making self and my source of flow. And I’m going to have to go on a journey that is, for me, the hardest spiritual/magickal trek I’ve ever gone on, a retrieval of something that’s partially in hiding. It involves revealing it through the remembrance of what it once was and what it gave me, an open listening to what it wants to be now, and a walking back with it, all the while being very mindful of my choices along the way. Wolf, if you are out there, I need you.

All of this naturally comes back to the chair, and if it didn’t, for the sake of the story, I’d make sure it did somehow. This time, though, it really does. Because my first step is to connect with a long, long series of very vivid memories that revolve around chairs and windows. When you work at home, those two things are the most common items in your memory, what you sat on and what you looked out on. I’m sure all artists or writers or designers can relate to that. Once you sit down and gather your little fetishes around you, whatever they are, you are back in the same place, linked to all the other times you sat down and also somewhat apart from every other time in your life. It’s there that the history of your exploration is focused and all the good and bad habits are encountered again as well.

With that, I decided to restructure my creative routine to exactly what it was in 1996 before even the first move, and I’ve found that it instantly broke a chain of severe attachment to the homespace and outcome-production and created an old-feeling desire to explore that I somewhat remember. It’s a very good first step. But there are so, so many more to go.

It’s important for me to realize this time, though, that my answers are past the front door and away from the ass-indentation, with my laptop, moleskine, battery charger, sketchbooks, camera and fodder in tow. As soon as the cherry blossoms can draw the sun close enough to throw their white arms around him and hold him in place, I hope to be on the road. That’s the first pure and undeniable “want to” I’ve had in a long time.