ELECTRICITY

Powerful. Genius. Crazy painful life. Powerful beautiful life. Genius madness love. Timeless goldness. I’ve been around the bend, through the desert. Maybe I’m still there, I’m not sure yet. I’m not sure if the mirage is an oasis or the oasis is a mirror. I have been very, very angry. So angry I’m not sure you’d appreciate the electricity – perhaps . . . because I know you have been angry too. I know we have all been “raging”, as one ” rages in the small spaces of their bricks.” I have been hating and frustrating and piercing through some descending shroud of darkness that has befallen my reality: the fallow time of winter encourages it, and yes it is perhaps nature, the nature that we are all manifestations of. I am wary of manipulating nature. I am wary of the responses of the rats that run the subways at night, the rats I watch while waiting for the trains, the rats who race – literally – with pieces of baguette in their mouths while the screeching subways scrape onwards and through the sooty dark pylons of stations. The animal with its food, food as big as its body, is listening, listening so loudly – and as the train comes into the hole (”which way is it coming? from where?” the rat thinks. “From above!? No!” In the words of Dorothy Parker: “What fresh hell is this!!”)  the little rat bounces along, alone, towards some kind, any kind, of safety. Food. Safety.

Meanwhile, we humans stand leaning against our concrete pillars in the cold wet subways while the trains scrape like banshees along the dark and sinister tracks, killing screeching rats, and we do not bat an eyelid. Don’t show them your emotion, ohh no – never!  This is normal. This is natural. This metal on metal noise is completely usual, get used to it. The animal on the tracks with its adrenaline filled body and the ears pricked and the fear taken, and running, is not separate from our animal natures. The animal inside us has been tamed and caged and we have tamed and caged it. We built the cage, we medicated the emotion, we left the caverns, we created the circus, we disdain and disown the circus, we hate the rats, we hate the garbage, we frown upon the rain and “Keep off the Grass” (if there even was any) and WALK and DON’T WALK. Safety?  CAGE.

Soon we will be the only “nature” left in New York. In the wintertime, this is what it feels like. The trees are barren and cloistered by concrete, like shackles around their middles. The puddles that collect in their roots are filled with trash and frozen over, like scabs full of madness. What have we done? Why am I so angry? Would you like to know? I can’t even begin to explain it. I’m angry because I am sad. As our friend Elissa Down told my sister recently, “anger is the next level of emotion up from the rock bottom of sadness.” Many people might think, what do you have to be sad about? Why are you sad? Life is beautiful. Yes, it is. It’s excruciating sometimes. Waking up is the most beautiful and saddest thing when the dream has gone. When the adulthood is ripe. When time is exfoliating the soul and youth is vanishing and the world is pressing on. I don’t really mind about that. I just need to be able to express WHO I AM, and WHAT IT’S ABOUT, and where it’s all coming from.

The following is all from a book written by the brilliantly wise William Bridges, called The Way of Transition. It’s the only book that speaks properly to me right now, and which makes sense of the world around me, as well as many threads of what my family and friends are going through too. You will see why:

“To understand thing we must have been once in them and then have come out of them; so that first there must be captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by disillusion, enthusiasm followed by disappointment. He who is still under the spell and he who has never felt the spell are equally incompetent”
–Amiel

“Taking our cue from the machinery and the data that dominate our world, we usually view knowledge as something that accumulates piecemeal over time. You start out with a little, and then you gradually pick up more and more. It’s like possessions: they pile up over time. But passive accumulation isn’t the way that you learn the most important things that you should know about the world. The way you do that is much more the way that Amiel describes in the quotation above. First you are immersed in the knowledge, then you get distance from it (and you even deny it), and then you return to a new relation with it.

That is the kind of knowledge that he experience of transition leads to. First you know, and then you let go of what you know – or thought that you knew, because the disenchantment process makes the old “reality” seem very unreal. Then, during the neutral zone phase of transition, you no long experience the old reality and may feel that you lack a reality now or that your reality is confused or crazy. But that state also passes, and you return to your life again. Yet it isn’t the same life – it’s a new, transformed life. It’s you-but-not-the-old-you [...]

Our society is not very sensitive to the knowledge that comes from seeing the tricks over and over again, for it is created over time by a dynamic and maturing relation between the knower and the known, rather than being just there to be acquired as rationalistic knowledge is. Do we discount such knowledge because we fail to appreciate the importance of the transition process, or do we fail to understand the transition process because we have forgotten the importance of such knowledge? I don’t know. But I do know that the two difficulties go together.

I know that we avoid endings whenever possible, and we steer clear whenever we can of the neutral-zone emptiness. Endings feel like failure to us, and at a deeper level they awaken in us the fear of death. So we use the busyness and structure and status of work and family life to hide ending it from view. Only when life makes death an unavoidable fact do most of us overcome this aversion, but by then the resonance of that grand event is so great that the little-deaths of endings are often drowned out in the mighty music of the final scene.”

(That is partially why I am angry – this American “pretending” that everything is fine and “just keep going”)

“All those transition points in a traditional person’s lifetime were treated as practice sessions for the ultimate ending that they would finally encounter. Death is a shocking new experience in our society. It is no wonder that we use what I earlier called “the additive fallacy”, to avoid endings, believe in doing so that if we just keep adding and adding to what we have, we’ll end up with something new and will avoid the need to make any endings.

“But it is not just endings that we fear. The aloneness and emptiness that are often felt in the neutral zone are just about as fearful for many modern people as endings are, for they reawaken in us all our childhood fears of abandonment. And since most modern people no longer know the natural world well, the idea that we need a fallow time or a time of gestation isn’t natural to us any longer. Whenever we can’t see that anything is happening – and you usually can’t in the neutral zone – we doubt that anything can “really” be going on. And the chaos, that state of pure energy that is experienced either as a jumble or as a time of empty nothingness, makes us feel out of control and a little crazy.

“We fail to see that real new beginnings, the kind that revitalize and inaugurate a new order of things, come out of that chaotic neutral zone. Instead, we try to make a fresh start by an act of will, putting together a plan that lays out a whole sequence of actions that we will take to transform ourselves or our worlds. When the plans don’t work as we expect them to, we shake our heads sadly and conclude that either the plans themselves were defective or there was a problem with how the plans were implemented. The idea that we failed because we tried to make a change do the work of a transition doesn’t occur to us [...]”

(The forced hand of humans altering the course of nature. This is what also angers me. Genetically modified food is again Bigger-faster-Better-More (see below) and everything associated with aggrandizing societal gain, has raped and destroyed and pain-planted our planet. Our humans too)

“In the modern world, very few individuals or organizations understand the need to relinquish periodically all that they have depended upon for their meaning and security and to explore the neutral zone in depth, in order to discover there the thread leading to a new life.

“And here it is that the old clearly do have an advantage over the young – or would, if they weren’t often so ignorant of the way of transition. I think, though, that I am stating the case too harshly. For what the old lack is an affirmation of the wisdom that many of them in fact, do possess from living through a lifetime of transitions. So we have a secret cadre-in-waiting, a group of people whose experience has taught them, individually, what once whole generations were taught by their wise ones. To recognize this wisdom will benefit its carriers and the society at large.”

“Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time… I grow more intense as I age”
– Florida Scott-Maxwell.

When the author was married in the seventies he writes that, “We all talked a lot about growth ” and how “everyone was self-consciously trying to grow. In once sense that was just California at that particular time, but Americans in general have always admired growth. We admire the fastest growing companies and the cities that grew the most in the past decade. Magazines list the national economies that are growing the fastest, ranking them in descending order of growth speed. Bigger is better, and bigger-faster is better still. Even the doubters become believers when the growth in question involves their own assets.

“But there is another kind of growth, which is much harder to measure. Fewer people admire it or seek it out today. It doesn’t involve expansion, simply the mysterious process of maturing. It’s goal is not to increase in size (or intelligence or sophistication or experience or skill), but simply ripening. We cross the barriers to this kind of growth by breaching or surmounting them, the way we do when we are bent on growth as increase. We overcome the barriers to growth as development when we are able to view our problems as signals that it is time to let go of the way in which we have been seeing and doing things and initiate a developmental transition.

“The barriers to this kind of growth are overcome whenever we stop viewing our flaws and problems as things to be solved or removed, and start viewing them as signals. What the problems are, really, are old solutions that have outlived their usefulness. From that point of view, whenever we do away with a problem instead of listening to its message, we trigger a whole string of events that lands us in trouble. [...] The problem, the flaw, the inferior element is not only not bad, but is the very thing that has the power to rescue the person who, without it, is not whole and cannot develop and mature.”

“We neither get better or worse as we get older, but more like ourselves” – Robert Anthony

“Every culture has it’s own favored image of movement through space. Ours is the straight line, the shortest distance from A to B. Getting close to B – “getting there,” wherever there is – is what we like to call “making progress.” Further is better – further ahead, further up, further down, further in, further out. Far out, we say. Far out! The typical journey of American history has been a one way trip. From the Old World to the New World, from the seaboard colonies to the western frontier, or from the farm to the city. Americans have always been looking for something that is out or over “there” – or else fleeing from something that is “here.” Either way i has been a one-way trip to some destination where things will be better, where you can escape from your past and start over again. Americans lives often have a two-dimensional quality, like the maps on which their travels can be traced.

“But other cultures, including most of those that have produced the spiritual treasures of humankind, have seen movement differently. Not from here to there, but here to there and back again. The natural figure is circular. As the Tao Te Ching says, “Going on means going far,/Going far means returning.” The great journeys are pilgrimages to a sacred place, and then after the journey has done its transformative work, pilgrimages return back home again. No matter how enormous the discoveries are, they are meant to be brought back into everyday life. As the Zen saying puts it, “After enlightenment, the laundry.” Although, of course, it’s not the same laundry any more.”

“It is gravity that causes water to flow, draws it away from its spherical form and makes it follow a more or less linear and determined course. Yet water continually strives to return to its spherical form. It finds many ways of maintaining a rhythmical balance between the spherical form natural to it and the pull of earthly gravity… What causes water to follow such a winding course (as a meander)? Its endeavour to complete the circle is here only partially successful, as it cannot flow back uphill to its starting point. RIght at the beginning of its circulatory movement it is drawn downhill and in following this downward pull it swings alternatively from side to side.” – Theodor Schwenk

Recently I have been questioning everything, the way I’ve been brought up, the epidemics of depression as well as “positivity” in our Western World, the stories I’ve been led to believe and the meandering journey I’ve been going on. I loved this next passage, in relation to my belief that endless “enlightenment” is actually unhealthy, and that there needs to be a place in this world, especially as it becomes more populated and more crowded and more constructed (I am wary of using “civilized” . . .because I would disagree that more construction = more civilized) and as we feel more and more hemmed in, “raging in the small spaces of our bricks.” It’s imperative that places like Paper Castle create habitats for freedom of expression, freedom of human emotion – the real stuff in life, the water, the way, the fear and anger and pain and joy and sorrow and celebration. It is imperative.

“We weren’t following any book or instructions (”The Way to Make a Successful Transition” ). To have planned how to deal with that chapter of our lives according to some set of steps would have turned a meaningful experience into a mechanistic one in which we managed the situation instead of really experiencing it. Trying to be loving and supportive and conscious by means of technique robs your life and your relationship of the richness that comes from the build-up of unmediated experience. The whole whopping mess of joy and pain that living provides anyone who will stay open to it. One of the pitfalls of the enlightened outlook is that it gets selective. It opts for joy, it opts for sexual fulfillment, it opts for self-expression and openness and communication and sensitivity. In doing so, it cleans up the compost pile by sorting out all the weeds and the manure.”

(Earlier Bridges talks about our chemically created fertilisers being robbed of the organic matter that mulches new plants and nurtures growth so well. The decay of lost dreams, lost hopes, lost lives, dead matter, is the mess that provides the nourishment for new growth. The other thing about this society, and particularly America I’ve noticed, is the obsession with cleanliness and killing germs and staying chock full of vitamins. The fear of “sickness” and “germs” is a curse unto itself, a self-destructive fear that perpetuates its own demons. I hate it. Give me bugs and dirt and germs any day. Strengthen my immune system. I love you dirt!)

“All of us wish we knew exactly what to do, but if such a book of answers actually existed, we would find ourselves faced with an even more serious problem. The book would make you and me unnecessary, because then the world would have no need for the unique person that each one of us is. It is only in living out the unique way of your individual life and following the meandering journey that you have been on since you were born, that you and I make the choices that are right for each of us. Without the necessity of living your way through the situations with which the world confronts you, you’d have no life of your own. For there isn’t a bright, fresh-off-the-rack life hanging in the closet, waiting to be taken down and worn like a new coat.

“That is why we are here: to go on our own personal meandering journeys and to be shaped by them. If that were unnecessary, we wouldn’t be here, living the lives that we are living. How that all adds to the great pattern universal reality, I don’t have a clue. But that it does add up is clear. Any particular acre of earth is inhabited by a particular group of creatures, each of which is busy living out his or her own particular journey. The interrelated paths of those journeys would look like an introduction-to-geometry diagram by comparison. What we call “reality” is nothing more, or less, than journeying going on at every level from the subatomic, to the personal to the galactic.”

I feel a little better now. I hope you do too.

NB: All of the above comes from the Transitions book, pages 192 – 209. All of the italics are Bridges italics. I have not changed a word.

PS. (While I was writing and sharing this I was bombarded with images of spiders, from somewhere beyond my conscious mind. I just researched what spiders symbolize, because I remember when I was creating an epic screenplay with my friend Blake, that we were surrounded by spiders, harmless ones, but they encroached on our living quarters like pilgrims.)

“Spider’s body is made like the number 8, consisting of two lobe like parts connected at the waist and eight legs. Spider is the symbol for the infinite possibilities of creation. Spider weaves the webs of fate for those who get caught in her web and become her dinner. Spider gives you the power to create! Create! Create!

The web of fate represents the wheel of life, which does not include any alternatives or solutions. It is typically human to get caught in the polarity of good or bad fortune without realizing that we can change it at any time. If we are not decisive enough about changing our lots in life, we may end up being consumed by our fears and limitations.

Also don’t become too involved in the weaving of your life plans to notice opportunity at the outskirts of your web. The most important message from Spider is that you are an infinite being who will continue to weave the patterns of life and living throughout time. Do not fail to see the expansiveness of the eternal plan. You weave your own web.

Spider silk is a fibrous protein secreted as a fluid which transforms from liquid to solid as the spider draws it out with its legs, becoming elastic and stronger as it is stretched. The liquid could be viewed as emotion and an example of how our emotions combine and repeat within ourselves individually and as a species. A spider web grows stronger as it is stretched. It is only through the experience of life that we grow stronger. When we are emotionally balanced, we understand the importance of being flexible, not being rigid and unyielding to thoughts, actions and emotions and that all things change.

Web weaving spiders typically eat their web every day or so, then rebuild their web all over again. Spider encourages us to examine what we are creating, to be unafraid to cast off old ways, to consume the experience of our journey, then to begin the cycle anew with a fresh outlook. With great patience, spider waits knowing the cycle of creation will provide what it needs. Many spiders rely on a sense of touch, being able to feel vibrations on the web or ground. From this we can learn how important our sense of touch and vibration are. We can feel the vibrations of emotion from others. In learning to pay attention to them, we empower ourselves to better understand any interaction.”

PPS. How amazing are First Aid Kit? These girls are fantastic and beautifully REAL. I’ve been following them for a while. Evolving and awakening. A “female Lennon and McCartney” for sure. I am enamoured.