SHOOTING

So we got the space - our second try - got the folks assembled in the face of my reluctance to ask for help, three cameras, audio, storyboards, props. We fell apart on art direction, audio, and continuity. Mostly due to the fact that my management skills had been topped out, and even though I knew we needed some more help, I was maxed and couldn't ask.

It was an amazing experience, the acting. Trying to maintain, or even achieve, a mood, a motion, a look, a feeling, all in the midst of a bunch of technicians and bright lights and extras not sure what they're supposed to be doing. I'm in awe of good actors - I think it's a skill not many of us really understand. Good acting seems to be a weird combination of being in the moment, i.e. authentic, really be-ing - in a totally contrived narrative. Being totally honest and real in a made-up configuration.

Now to the editing, the logging of files, the looking at everything to get the moments of, forgive me, truth, and seeing if, in the midst of those hours of footage, there exists a 5-minute story, as we planned.

Ha - planning.

Remover of Obstacles

Matthias said yesterday, why don't you just do the first scene?

uh

DUH

yeah, that makes it not only easier, but POSSIBLE

thanks, I needed that.

So we'll do TOD in the cemetery at dawn, then over to The Bar for the fateful meeting with one Dorothy.

See ya there.

Location Joke Here

Got the first scene location nailed. The Coppertop Lounge, sadly no longer open but available for us to use. And they still have that copper topped bar.

Yeehaw. Feels more and more real all the time; because it is, I guess.

About halfway through the script, hardest writing I ever did.

Have to get out to the cemetery before dawn, find a spot where the light is good that time of day. Death, aka Tod, will be resting with his back against a gravestone as the sun rises. He'll then walk away into the fate which my story has in store.

Not altogether specious?

You can think that your inspiration is gone sometimes because part of you is fighting so hard to make something Not Happen. I smile softly feeling the desolation, knowing that the level of resistance is somehow tied to the potential of a project.

It's also interesting how these things kick in those middle-of-the-night thoughts that I usually assume everyone has but are so disturbing we don't want to talk about them, share them, look at them, accept them. I mean, it's disturbing to ask, what in thee hell (that's a kind of Southern Indiana "thee hell") is my life for? What has it all meant?

Maybe other people never wake up and wonder that, but I doubt it.

I have an ingrained sense of obligation that leads the question to a place many others say ain't no good, like, "What should I be doing?" It assumes a hierarchy, a system of posts and jobs and tasks like an army. I'm told that the should is my SuperEgo talking. Perhaps. I remain skeptical.

But I accept as possible something else that I've been told: our deepest desires reflect and manifest God's will. Yeah, possible, but there's so many layers on top of that "deepest" thing, and our minds are so devilishly clever in fooling themselves, arranging things the way we want them and saying, that's God's will (or the equivalent phraseology for the agnostic or non-theistic). I mean, there's a million people thinking that it's God's Will that they kill their neighbors and take their land, or kill gays, non-believers, or whatever. T'was Ever Thus. It's no kind of guideline at all. Sure, they would say as they light fire to a house, this is my deepest desire, and it's also God's will.

What are we left with when all our cogitations lead us to the same "this can not be known" area of town? We need another method of making decisions, coming to clarity, sensing things - other than that thinking process. I come from a family of lawyers, and I practiced holding forth about and arguing for things I didn't actually believe, just for the exercise. This kind of decision making just takes in, at one end of the mechanism (something like a large piece of farm equipment) our initial premises, and then goes on to spit out some kind of conclusion. But those premises are often unconscious, if not altogether specious. Something often masquerades as a premise, i.e. "I want to make the world a better place," while covering up some other agenda.

I can say this: regarding clarity, progress is slow. Just Keeeep Working. What else is there to do?

Obviously I'm talking about making a movie.

Well, OK, I WAS joking.

No, not a documentary. Maybe some documentary angles, a bit like my original model film, for lo these many years, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. But to get the feelings I want, a documentary format would be too cool, detached, historical. We have to have a sense that this is happening now, and not long ago. Biographical material might be presented in the doc format, but for the more present-time story-line, we're going for a kind of exalted mood, sensing and feeling a kind of relationship that never existed before.

And if something never existed before, it can be hard to see.

We're also crunching the shooting time down. Good God, could we get this done by Christmas? And then take a break?

Not likely. At least not the "break" part.

Shirley, you must be joking.

OK. Course setting done for now.

In six months, we have a movie: a documentary about The New Death, and its fascinating CE. Chief Executrix, that is. Talkin' Dorothy Truth. My guess is we'll go for something 20-30 minutes long. Much constrained by lack of locations, actors, time, and money, and so on, we'll be trying all the guerilla video tricks in the book.

I would say roughly that the second half of the book will be the first part of the movie, and the second half of the movie will be devoted to Dorothy's reign as the new death, and what it all means and what it will be like to have a New Death, administered by a caring and hot (if you're over 70 years old) gal.

The movie I'm thinking of right now, for tonal qualities only, is parts of Being John Malkovich, the parts with the documentary feel, and the weird science parts. Will take a look at it tonight and see if there's anything in there to STEAL.

The expected post-partum feeling that came over me when I published the book is now gone, and we've got a new project on the line now. Pretty soon there will be scene notes, dialog ideas, notes, pix, and so on taped to the wall. This = FUN.

One of the keys to breaking open the idea has been getting ME out of the story. Distance, simplification, and fidelity to the real goal of the vid result. And I can do the VO and not get complications from referring to myself. I'm just a writer, man.

We Cannot Distinguish A Compulsion From A Call

Hillman"s The Dream and the Underworld: "Our modern word unconscious has become a catch-all, collecting into one clouded reservoir all fantasies of the deep, the lower, the baser, the heavier (depressed), and the darker. We have buried in the same monolithic tomb called The Unconscious the red and earthy body of the primeval Adam, the collective common man and woman, and the shades, and the phantoms, and ancestors. We cannot distinguish a compulsion from a call, an instinct from an image, a desirous demand from a movement of imagination. Looking into the night from the white light of the dayworld (where the term unconscious was fashioned) we cannot tell the red from the black. So we read dreams for all sorts of messages at once—somatic, personal, psychic, mantic, ancestral, practical, confusing instinctual and emotional life with the realm of death."

This is crucial, and involves much more than Hillman is talking about here, which is the proper interpretation, or use, of dreams.

No, this is about how we've taken several different worlds, or realms, or whatever you want to call them, and put them all together into one thing which we call the unconscious. But this is worse than, say, thinking that everything south of the Mexican border and on down to Tierra del Fuego is like Tijuana. No discrimination at all.

Now this wouldn't have interested me not too long ago, as it didn't seem to have any relevance to my life. But now things happen. Things that I cannot explain and can barely describe. They imply other realms. More than imply. But in my attempts to understand what happened, I came up against the situation that Hillman describes. What little I knew (and know) was nonetheless extremely confused since I was confusing different realms. Like getting a psychiatric evaluation when an engineering diagram is what is really needed.

We all use the tools we have in hand and are comfortable using, even if they aren't the right thing for the job. So it was—and is—with regard to my cross-realm adventures.

Echoes of the Future

I think I'll be doing this again. I got a clue, you know, when they say, "get a clue"? Like that. But it wasn't me; I just had the moment where it became blindingly obvious to even me that I was in dire need of a clue.

And then, walking home, there it was. A young woman who had been to one of the Death As A Salesman performances, walking down the street. She recognized my voice, I think, and asked, "hey, didn't you do that show?" She had emailed me to tell me how much she liked it. I remember things like that.

"That Death As A Salesman? Yeah, I did that."

Guess I'll be doing it again. As always, resistance is futile. We just like to think we have an option.

Is It Going To Storm?

I was in a funk on Sunday; it was one of my "I've failed at everything" moments. These are usually such terrifying moments, contemplating that possibility, that I change the internal subject as quickly as possible and fervently hope for the best. This time, I let the thought continue, and tried to confront it. What if I have squandered all that was given to me, made the wrong decisions time after time, missed opportunities too many times to count? What if I get the official letter, the Certificate of Complete Failure? Well it reminds me of something someone once said to my friend Jackson, who was having a very hard time; he'd been in prison, got sick there, anti-psychotics ravaging him, all kinds of problems. His uncle once told him, "Jackson, you're lucky, you've totally failed. No one expects anything of you any more." The thing is I'm not so worried about others' expectations as I am about my own. But I started to consider, what do I do if I get this letter, this Certificate? I'm a failure, my life didn't work out, but still here I am waking up every day. So far. So what do I do now? Do I change my plans now that I know none of them will work out? No. Just keep doing the same thing. But without the possibility of any kind of benefit, to me, others, or God. I'll just keep on doing the same thing, even tho....

Navigation

Onward Through The Fog

Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld: “

Admittedly, the dream-ego and the waking-ego have a special “twin” relationship; they are shadows of each other, as Hades is the brother of Zeus. But the “I” in the dream is no secret stage director (Schopenhauer) who wrote the play he acts in, no self-portrait photographer taking his own snapshot from below, nor are the wants fulfilled in a dream the ego’s wishes. The dream is not “mine,” but the psyche’s, and the dream-ego merely plays one of the roles in the theater, subjected to what the “others” want, subject to the necessities staged by the dream."

A secret stage director would be nice.

There's a point in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow where Slothrop, the protagonist, realizes that, much worse than the paranoia he's been suffering, there is no one watching, that he's alone Out Here.

Two Books—Two Books—Two Books in One!

Stylistically speaking at least. It appears that in tone, Subject to Verification is two books. A warm familiar tone in the first, or memoirish part, and a more contrived and theatrical tone that is a toned-down version of what I did on stage—a distinctly cooler voice.

So what I'm hearing via feedback and my own examination is that I should rewrite the second half but in the tone of the first. Warm, brother/sisterly.

The exciting thing is that part of working out these voices would be in the movie, which is starting to show itself bit by bit.

I want to do this again. Road Trip!

no workshop

I don't have to.

But I do have to keep on working on other things.

It Must Be Made

Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld: “The experience of the underworld is overwhelming and must be made. This style of the underworld experience is overwhelming, it comes as a violation, dragging one out of life and into the Kingdom that the Orphic hymn to Pluto describes as 'void of day.'”

I think we just don't get it. Even if we make a study of it—death, our own—with a strong intention to prepare. As Heraclitus said in the previous post. It's not what we expect, because almost everything we do here (in life), by inclination, training, and genetics, is not done there (in death or dreams). It's a different system, a different sense of I...

I had a dream last night. These days I don't remember very much of them. But I do remember this: that I didn't really have a grasp on who or where or what I was. The question didn't arise; I was just wandering around anxious, looking for something I'll never find. I never, in the dream, asked myself: am I dreaming? Why are things so foggy? I didn't have a full rich sense of self that I do during the day. I was just a shadow. And I didn't have the notion that I was just a shadow. I didn't know what was going on.

I think it's because as all the ancients said, over and over: the soul is (mostly) asleep during life. And what we think and feel with during our lives is not available in the dreams or the afterlife/underworld. It's not just 'void of day' - it's void of everything we normally think of as us and ours. We can do something about this, one hopes. It's all about building a soul, building someone who is still there in the place that is 'void of day.'

What's This Movie Look Like?

Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld: “What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld, all is stripped away, and life is upside down. we are further then the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it. Again, we can follow Heraclitus: ‘when men die there awaits them what they neither expect nor even imagine.’”

I'm making a movie out of my book and previous performances.

Missed Our Connection

Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld:

"..the pervading, though masked, depression in our civilization is partly a response of the soul to its lost underworld. (this work) nonetheless performs the chief function of religion: connecting the individual by means of practical ritual with the realm of death.”

_________________________________

Religions are plainly not doing their job if this is in any way true. What Hillman is saying by implication, and what I’m saying explicitly, is that, for whatever reason, we’ve lost our relation to the realm of death, the realm of the dead. We've lost those who once lived and are now on the other side, (seemingly) far away. And that this loss is the cause of depression—and insanity, and Koyaanisqatsi—that we now live in.

The name “Hades” was rarely spoken in the olden days; the Lord of Death was one of those whose name must not be uttered. Instead a euphemism was often employed: “Pluto”. Pluto is the god of riches, wealth. Like in “plutocrat.” The Underworld, the land of the dead is a place of riches and wealth, that is information, knowledge, ways to do things; the shamans of old knew this and went there to do their tasks.

Why has this realm been walled-off, No Entrance, No Tresspassing? Theories abound.
Qui bono? Who benefits from it? Are we talking about benefits that redound to the human realm, by which we can only mean people who are incredibly short-sighted, or, are we in William S. Burrough’s “Nova Mob” world, where non-human criminal gangs come to Earth, use it up, and then flee the old “shithouse” just before it collapses onto itself? Or are we just stupid? Too stupid to survive? I do not know the answers to these questions.

LOST

Signed up to do a workshop and I find I don't want to do it. I should be working on a movie instead. Will have to report in on this.

Might have to go back on the road, to work on it. Amazing. Odd requirements for the job. Must have own tools, those thing I can understand. Some of the others, not so much.

some links

WordXWord Festival

The Ferrin Gallery

Bill Wright and Joseph Wilk - photos from WordXWord

Burrow

home from reading and introducing the book at the Ferrin Gallery and the WordXWordfestival.com event in Pittsfield. Hope to return next year with something substantial developed from the book.

McCarren Air Port was more bardo-like than ever today. Long drive up the hill, backed-up traffic on 80, now home. Of course I barely recognize the place. I ate some homemade sauerkraut. I am not an enemy of the people. Goodnight.

At Home In The Dark

Hillman: “So, to reach the fully subjective, a dream-worker must reach into the last pocket of objectivity, the dream-ego, its behaviors and its feelings, keeping them within the image. The job becomes one of subjecting the ego to the dream, dissolving it in the dream, by showing that everything done and felt and said by the ego reflects its situation in the image, i.e., that this ego is wholly imaginal. Not an easy job, for the ego is archetypically an upperworld phenomenon, strong in its heroic attitudes until, by learning how to dream, it becomes an imaginal ego.

An imaginal ego is at home in the dark, moving among images as one of them. Often there are inklings of this ego in those dreams where we are quite comfortable with absurdities and horrors that would shock the daylight out of waking consciousness."

The ego is archetypically an upperworld phenomenon. When we tell someone over coffee or in an email about a dream we had last night, we don't put the we or the I in quotation marks. We say "I" did this, or this happened to "me" without ever examining whether or not the "I" that seemed to dream is the same as the I who's drinking coffee and ruminating. Since that upperworld I - as has been said a million times - is not the stable and almost-concrete entity we're built to assume, it's clear that it isn't the same as the dreaming I. But that's a simplicity that masks a genuine issue: *Who is that dreamer?"* We lead ourselves to think it's the same person we are in the morning, out of habit or ease, who knows. But it is - we are - different. And Hillman is saying that instead of dragging that consciousness and its dream into the daylight, "we" should dive down into that underworld and look around.

"I" once had a dream where a teacher was in my house, second floor. He starts down the stairs. I follow. He turns and says, "Don't get too close to me." And yet I follow, into what PK Dick called the Tombworld. Cold, unmoving, grey, static, entropy done. And then I lost him.

The man woke up in darkness and shouted "Who?"

More from James Hillman's "The Dream and the Underworld":

“Public performance on a stage, perhaps because it puts us into the underworld of theater, also constellates the curious interplay between life-soul and image-soul*. The almost depersonalization of stage fright makes one feel deserted by one’s soul. All that one memorized and trained for has suddenly vanished. It is as if another soul must play the role, and this moment of going on stage is like a rite de passage, a transition into death."

*'This “dual pluralism” of soul refers on the one hand to a life-soul that is multiple, having various associations with body parts and emotions, and so is also called “body-soul”, “breath soul”, and “ego-soul.” On the other hand, there is a free-soul or psyche-soul, which is equivalent with and manifests as a “shadow-soul,” “death-soul,” “image-soul,” and “dream-soul.”'

_______________________

Oh yeah. I can relate. I laughed when I read that "deserted by one's soul..." on stage. Yes, such a feeling it is. But maybe it's into the void created by this terrible desertion (not just by the raw fear, though; preparation would be a big part of this) that another —soul?— can come. When a show goes right, one definitely gets the feeling that it isn't or wasn't you. I've heard and read this so many times that it's a truism. There must be something there.

Another way of putting it: If you're too much your daylight self, then there's no room for anything else. And when your daylight self is up on stage, going through the motions, it's terrible for everyone. It's a weird situation where the audience and the performer all know, pretty much right off the bat, that the show is going to bomb. And yet, some social agreement means that we'll endure it; we won't shrug our shoulders and say, "Aw, this isn't gonna work. Why don't you go home? That's where I'm headed." I remember one show, when, after telling a few jokes that fell silently into the void, I knew that it was going to be a very very long 90 minutes up there. Everyone knew. I felt sorry for all of us.

It stands to reason you better know what you're doing if you're inviting - even unwittingly - someone or something else in to actually "do the show." I think good intentions are the best protection. Besides a good sense of humor.

Aeschylus says

“Death is the only God who loves not gifts and cares not for sacrifices or libation, who has no altars and receives no hymns.” He/She doesn't need anything. Admirable. Has one gift for you: the cure for all diseases.

The shadow of the black dog watches with some kind of interest but no attachment to any outcome.

Excerpts Two

More from Hillman:


“Our culture is singular for its ignorance of death. The great art and celebrations of many other cultures—ancient Egyptian and Etruscan, the Greek of Eleusis, Tibetan [we can add Mayans]—honor the underworld. We have no ancestor cult, although we are pathetically nostalgic. We keep no relics, though collect antiques. We rarely see dead human beings, though watch a hundred imitations each week on the television tube. The animals we eat are put out of sight. We have no myths of the -nekiya- [calling up ghosts or a visit to the underworld], yet our popular heroes in films and music are shady underworld characters."

I have this sense that I can't quite manifest or articulate (so bear with me) that our world is so unbalanced and crazy for this very reason: we push aside the very idea of death. I see our country's willingness to bomb Other People Far Away as a way of (attempting to) "outsource" our own death. We can find Other People to most everything for us that we don't want to do - why not the dying, too? And then we can continue the dream - for that's what it is.

Excerpts

from James Hillman's "The Dream and the Underworld."

“This simultaneity of the underworld with the daily world is imaged by Hades coinciding indistinguishably with Zeus, or identical with Zeus chthonios. The brotherhood of Zeus and Hades says that the upper and lower worlds are the same; only the perspectives differ. There is only one and the same universe, coexistent and synchronous, but one brother’s view sees it from above and through light, the other from below and into its darkness. Hades' realm is contiguous with life; touching it at all points, just below it, its shadow brother giving to life its depth and psyche.”

Fantastic. So exciting to find some of the same ideas coming in from other, unexpected places. Like Greek mythology. I should amend: unexpected to me, since I know nothing of it except some childish memories and some movies. It all seemed silly. This doesn't. This is getting to the core of our existence.

What it doesn't get to is our reluctance - which may be a modern phenomenon, I don't know - to confront this reality, and more importantly, to live with it. To be in both Zeus' and Hades' realm simultaneously. Now that's what I call living.

First Reading

At the WordXWord Festival, right after the great poetry slam at Shawn's Barbershop...

you learn a lot about how it sounds when you read in public for the first time. it's different than practicing, or reading for some friends. you can feel the response to your words in an almost physical way... especially when the energy wanes. those words are falling flat, not justifying their existence. the ideal is that your listener hungers for every next word, and you can feel it when it happens and you can feel it when it doesn't. the latter is highly motivating. cut, cut, practice. do it more, as much as you can. Ok then. What's next?

Books Arrive (30 minutes before the signing). Kind of exciting.

beauty and decay

This is a warehouse for the Paul Richards furniture store in Pittsfield MA. Of course I cranked up the saturation a bit, but it really is red and it really stands out. Housatonic River flows by.

I don't have much more to say. There it is.

book is real

the proof arrived.

now we can get on the road again. wonder if this ol buick will start.

FTP

That's File Transfer Protocol. Sending the book over the airwaves to a printer in southern California right now. It's like Magic!

pre-flight

That's what they call it, like your printing project is an airplane, and you need to check it all out, over and under, before you press SEND. We got the color proofs back, the ones that had the correct CMYK settings, and they look great. Can't wait—but of course I'll have to—for the books to arrive!

Max Khan has been really helpful in getting this thing in.

changes

It's always something, one more word. The exact opposite of painting, where it's work for awhile, and then it's DONE. Sometimes there's a bit of back and forth about how far is too far in terms of working a painting, but it's not a big deal.

But a book, the thing is never done, it just gets to the day of PRESS and then you're done. Until the next printing, at least.

I like it this kind of work, but too much of it would be deadly. It's too closed in, boxed in by words, paper, screen. Sanity depends in part upon working with your hands. Like painting or cooking or music or digging or washing and cleaning. My favorites because of the instant feedback.

I can't wait to see the finished book.

dream

I dreamed that I had the printed book in my hands last night. I liked it. A milestone passed. Wonder what's next.

The book page

The book's home page

To Press

First proof file I sent was of no value, because I did not convert the files to CMYK before sending. So we're waiting for the final proof on color. Then to press.

About the title. Subject to verification means that I promise to get back to everyone about my experiences in the afterlife after I die. If I'm wrong, that is. If you don't hear anything, it's just as I said.