-Alice Walker
Where does art go?
It goes to the pain
This is something I am feeling quite acutely right now
Where does art go?
it goes to the story
But it is not my story to tell.
I am merely witness to the burning of the world
I have been tempered by the fire in my own head
I have been mediated and medicated by the meditative monastic repetition of my job at a local bank where we are a microcosm of community. We are so many races.
I saw a black coworker crying at her desk. I had just been online reading about the latest killing of an innocent black person.
I don't know her very well but I know she's proud, and fierce, a dancer an athlete, an out lesbian with funny stories about her daughter and her girlfriend.
I went to the vigil downtown for Orlando. I sat at a table at our local Pride passing out pamphlets for those seeking shelter from domestic violence.
I wanted to invite her to go with me. But I couldn't step over the Elephant in the Room. I still feel like a freak and a geek, among so many people younger than me. I still cringe a little when I mispronounce their names. So I mourned with others in my city of freaks and merchants and artists carried rainbow flags, candles, prayed and praised the value of tolerance.
I came into work early. I saw her shoulders slumped, heard unmistakable crying. I thought of the images on my newsfeed last night, of all my white friends apologizing for their good days and July vacations. I asked are you ok? She said I'm fine.
I still felt that heavy plodding sensation in my gut. The Elephant was stepping on me, crushing me. That intuition and intimation that comes with the territory of being an empath. That implicit guilt that comes of being a white person in the world that black people live in today.
I sent her an IM ... it sucks what is happening in the world I just want you to know I care
I know that doesn't take away the pain.
It's like putting a band aid on a bullet hole. I have no illusion. But I sent it like I sent reiki to the homeless man I saw sleeping in the common in the pavilion.
There is a place where we go in art that is like a hidden drone camera into the soul stealing your humanity to capture a uniquely humane moment. It's our species most ancient and invasive technology.
The place that says not now, only weeks after Orlando....
The place that says I don't know you but you are fierce and I see you. Bleeding from a thousand small cuts a thousand micro-aggressions and gaslight invalidations because unlike me and most of my geeky witchy white privileged friends who innocently say "oh we're not racist" but benefit from this system you don't get to graduate from high school and leave the bullies behind.
The PTSD, the constant trauma, the energetic, physical and mental exhaustion of knowing the weight of hate is not something time can erase. The bullies are still there and they have guns, and laws, and the might of society behind them.
My husband and I are watching "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K Dick. It's a dystopian science fiction about an alternate history, an existential speculation of "what if." What if the Germans and Japanese won World War II and the United States was divided between the Nazi's and the Pacific Empire? A young woman in San Francisco has her world shattered one night when her sister is killed delivering a mysterious film depicting an alternate ending.... Suddenly she is fleeing for her life and everyone is after her. As we watch her world crumble we ask ourselves the questions who would we be in that America. Would we be resistance? Would we be cowards? Would we keep our heads down, go along to get along? The truth is we just don't know. The truth is that by the grace of circumstance, we've mostly been spared that knowledge.
I am reading the "Exegesis" of Philip K Dick, the visionary science fiction writer who envisioned such dire futures and also had a mysterious psychological and metaphysical awakening he spend thousands of hours and pages upon pages chronicling. His journals are rabbit holes of scientific and metaphysical exposition similar to the Red Book of Carl Jung only using the language of science fiction and fact rather than nascent spiritual and psychological terminology of the subconscious that Jung pioneered by writing himself sane, excavating his own dreams of blood and horror just before the world was plunged into World War.
Philip K Dick talks about future memory, about transmissions from mysterious beings, aliens, the Holy Spirit, Logos, the fire-in-the-head that kept him up all night recording his divine disordered downloads the madness genius watcher and observer and clairvoyant writer that he was.
Why was this series released now, in 2015? Are we skittering on the edge of fascism, of police state, of a class driven by fear and compliance, where the protesters are protested and the immediate media erased and re-written? Is this the right time for this message?
We've had robots used to quell riots why the hell have we not invented "phasers on stun"? Nonlethal stopping power we have this miracle nightmare technology why can't it serve humanity and not make us better killers?
I'm waking up to the reality that for those who don't come from white, suburban backgrounds, this dystopian future is already here. The jackboots are on the ground. But the good news is that most of the fighting back in my reality is digital. Armchair activists are flooding bloody images of the unjustly killed onto our Facebook walls, psychically staining our baby pictures and cat videos because the homeless bodies of poor nonwhite America littering the city park is not enough to make us put down our lattes and take notice. We are far too conditioned to keep our head down and keep walking. Just ask my friend Jason who after Occupy organized homeless people into squats only to see friends frozen to death in a Maine winter when the cops came to protect property already abandoned. The jackboots are on the ground for the criminally under-housed.
I am part of the problem. I am one of the "sensitives". One of them who would have been rounded up into a death camp, permanently institutionalized possibly burned at the stake in another age. One of those creepily aware clairvoyant writers diagnosed with psychosis at sixteen because I was self-aware enough to refuse to write my auto-biography with names and dates and boring details about my life but instead submitted an audio-tape analysis of my own novels and how each character was an aspect of my personality or those of people who were closest to me. I didn't know my creative departure would send me a one-way ticket to the school psychologist and I would be pathologized for the rest of my life with an alphabet soup of diagnoses.
My salvation is my own chronicle, my own Anais-esque diaries of exegesis and apology, my own neurotic rabbit holes of mythological, magickal erotic, transformational and romantic obsession. By the grace of reiki, a phenomenally supportive husband, wonderful communities, my spiritual tribemates online and in real time, and my entry into a double-income household homeowner minority I am doing well enough not to be medicated any more. I live in a lovely neighborhood and walk to work every day. I am not left alone long enough to chew off my own leg in the trap of obsessive self-analysis, like perhaps those genius neurotics were. But I have been watching and observing. Taking notes.
I was sold a bill of goods. I was driven to the edge of madness by the insanity of corporate America and escaped the medical straight-jacket when I quit my old job, but I was told that the price of this was I had to keep my head down, on the narrow track keep my blinders on, not let passion, disruption or rage take the reins of my fragile psyche. Told not to watch the news or pay attention to what might ignite the already faulty wiring of the fire in my head. I understand as many of us do that there is an energetic and emotional power to the magic mirror of media. I understand that we are emotionally overcharged, even those of us who don't believe in anything beyond the limits of the physical body, would scoff at the concept of a universal mind or cosmic consciousness.
Yet in this country another time young people saw kids killed in Vietnam on television in their living rooms and it mobilized them to carry signs and face down the police and stop a war. They said"The revolution will be televised"
"First you See Video. Then you Eat Video. Then you Be Video"
I wish I could remember what dystopian pulp short story that was from, back in the days before the hum of the modem launched the noosphere, when I was just girl with a hungry head reading Iassac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.
It used to be just a few freaks and geeks were exploring the trans-corporeal frontiers of cyberspace.
Now we are all living in our own reality show. We are turned off by the commercialism of mainstream TV that was the lifeline of our predecessors but tuned in to an endless incestuous soap opera of consensual reality.
We see black people bleeding
We see our friend’s newborn babies
We hear one person's cry for help, one person's whining about the IT department, and one person revealing deep secrets to strangers that they can't tell their family.
We change our names to tell the truth.
We say what we feel and inadvertently hurt people we love who don't want to know this side of us.
We see people using the power of the mass media to speak the truth to power. We have lost the illusion of an impartial press so we are pressing "SEND" or "SHARE" and pushing the electronic emotional current through the stratosphere of our collective consciousness.
These are the equivalent of the sign-carriers. Because getting up close to power gets you arrested, but unlike the 60's getting arrested these days may get you dead. Especially if you are poor and non-white.
And I have to say I'm sorry when I thought that I could thrust some peacenik flower in the gun barrel you face every day some affectation of affirmation as the panacea to all ills simply because it helped me get through my day. I have to say I was buying into an addiction a distraction that says if I don't see it is not happening and if I see it, it will hurt me and my job is to stay sane and keep buying things keep the clockwork turning generating the matrix of the ELEPHANT that is the WALL that we keep building around ourselves.
The infamous WALL. Laughing at the bloated cartoon of the racist. Just as offensive as a lawn jockey that was commonplace only a hundred years ago and now obscene.
That wall is the elephant looming up that thing that keeps us trapped in ego in fear that makes us dive down into rabbit holes of religion and video and consume positive fantasy to erase the bloody reality that someone has left on our electronic doorstep and offended our vision of MANIFESTING the perfect self-delusion of all inclusive world peace. That wall is the crushing shame in the gut when we think of all the things we have, the shadow side of gratitude the empty pit that says.... for my portion, who gets less of a place at the table? That makes me deflect my own shame at not doing not being not caring enough and say put down your Don Quixote armor old man just breathe, just twist your body into bliss take a walk take a drink take a break from your constant vigilance.
But the art. the art that is real always goes to the pain. Of "life as it is" while imaging "life as it should be."
So I apologize to my artist activist friends when I have said you have to think of yourself, you have to put down your sword and stop tilting these windmills these giants these Elephants that you have been working so desperately to reveal to your room. That have been crushing the black writers in the energetic neighborhood you live in, bloodying the stories you swim in, the words and the worlds you consume. For years now.
We were wrong and we were right me and my crazy new age tribe. We are energetically creating the matrix but we are all waking up and to be awake is a privilege and a terrible burden, it means we don't get to change the channel to eliminate "negativity"
We must learn to co-exist with the elephant to not let it crush us to live with this gift and curse every day to listen keep listening to listen to ourselves listening to each other listening to poets listening to prophets, listening live witnesses while reading our inner oracles written in our breathing bodies and souls.
I woke up this morning after a late night of terror reflection and the distortion and magnificence of art. I had to prepare myself for the business of the day. I looked at myself in the mirror.
I saw what was really there, the stranger that was my body to the fire in my head. Start where you are, that's what the Buddhists say, like Pema Chondron. For god's sake breathe. I saw the lines in my tired, worn, sad face. And I heard a voice.
My higher self? The voice said yes.... it is all there... but you knew this truth all of your holy books all of your prophets the light rises and the shadow with it.
We do not get a free pass. Magick always has a price and that price is life and that price is living with this exquisite awareness of ecstasy and terror dancing with that fire.
Understanding that we are only beginning to know the truths of our emotional bodies, that people in warfare reduced to base survival and traumatized do horrible things. That patriotism and duty are thin bandages we wrap across atrocity to keep ourselves sane. Everyone in a battle has some kind of lasting scars, just as those who have grown up in unjust regimes. Why don't they train all cops in trauma therapy and mindfulness, so they can bring those skills of humanity into the very real battleground they face every day. Why don't they honor the warrior not by worshiping the weapon but honoring the human toll it takes to step into the reality of the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice.
We are just waking up as a species just understanding the complex ballet of body mind and soul we have enough humanity and enough technology to search for the seat of consciousness to break beyond ourselves to truly see the other as a mirror of ourselves.
In the story the quest is to find the film that makes a better future. To break the back of fascism with the triumph of the right history,
We can start by really listening to our own prophets. Philip K. Dick and George Orwell, and H. G. Wells. Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein and, yes, even H.P. Lovecraft. Really reading and viewing our own beloved genre not for the space opera CGI and heroic psychodrama but for the keen observation of human nature and society that these geniuses revealed by using the powerful sociological critique and revelation that fiction has always provided.
We do not have to choose between Eloi or Morlock. We cannot be all love and light and we do not need to demonize each other because we are the other. We are the alien angels and monsters hovering overhead. We are geeks the chosen people of the new revelation of the endless open source god game of consensual creation.
I have seen some remarkable things among my friends. Souls who can be self-aware and compassionate. People who came from privilege who escaped bad marriages and job dissatisfaction with yoga, addicts who found mindfulness through recovery. We have been relentless romantic seekers who fall in love with everything we have been to the inner rooms of our souls and begun the spiral out into the world. We are dancing furiously against the fear and against the urge of addiction raging with ecstasy and feeling the burn of compassion for this life fire in which we all burn. We know there is no escape from our own story except to re-write it and we are no longer in love with defending our love-ability. We relish the breakdown of our inner prisons, whether we have been to the ashram or the asylum We know that the crazy is not to be found there but that being aware in this complicated world if you do not have your tribe if you do not own your soul and question your ego will bring it down.
I see them shouting for justice I see them shining with connection white faces and dark faces but this is no Obama campaign this is no United Colors of Capitalism this is no kumbaya moment this is the collective furious dance of the dialectic that we are all and none of the above infinitely connected to source and terrified of our own voices in a dark room. We are the Source of light. We are the empty darkness.
Encompassing so much, we don't have to silence the screaming of the world for our own peace, choke the poetry of justice for our own serenity.
Art goes to the pain, Art born from the union of the Universe and the human, but art translates, transforms, transmutes the poison it is the ultimate wall breaker it is the elephant illustrator the emperor has no clothes the emperor is dreaming the butterfly. It masters the matrix and decodes reality.
We are what we eat and we need a balanced diet of reality and fantasy, of prophets and iconoclasts, of god and the devil, of chocolate and kale and capitalism and socialism they say mongrel breeds are healthier and that the future skin will be some lovely shade of gold if we don't burn it all away in the conflagration of our illusions.
So start right now. Take down the wall confront the ugly American within the shadow of the egalitarian citizen of a Star Trek idealism.
That's the only way to stop the juggernaut. not to wish it away but to look it straight in the face that is yours and mine and here and now.
The Elephant is in the room. But it doesn't have to be the wall to house our fragile reality
It doesn't have to stop our soul from rising with the gravity of guilt.
And it gets smaller when it gets a chance to be admitted into existence. We get bigger and we get stronger and more human for our coexisting with the pain that is the root of our human search for wholeness and soul.
As within, so without. It's the way we are wired to grow.
No comments:
Post a Comment