Many say talking to yourself is a form of insanity. Following this logic, can we say that every writer is a lunatic? In that to write is to make a leap of faith into the unknown abyss of self-hood.
Why?
I don't even know if anyone will read this but still I feel compelled to write it. Am I crazy? Talking gibberish to myself? Perhaps. To quote Billy Marshall Stoneking, "from the writer's perspective, audience is always an act of imagination."
I like to think that I am talking to the wall right now, rather than an absolute entity of nothingness. The wall is both soft and firm. Malleable yet resolute. It is both solemnity and tenderness. Both zen and chaos. Every one needs to talk to this wall sometimes and listen closely to its precious answer of silence.
The wretched creature of the 'artist' maybe has an even greater need than most, or at least has convinced themselves of this. From young, they are inflicted with the heavy desire to be heard. What do they want to say? They rarely know. It is definitely something. A hazy jumble of images and words, incoherent and frenetic.
Will any of these sorry species know when they have said what it is they want to say? Will they breathe a deep and contented sigh of relief at making their ultimate artistic statement. Probably not. And so they are left stammering into the void, teetering between enlightenment and insanity. This is where art lives. What do the birds say when they sing? Are they saying anything? Or are they just singing to sing. Maybe that is what I am doing now - speaking to hear the sound of my voice and affirm my being. Singing to sing. Living within that song.
"I think therefore I am." - Renee Descartes
I can't stop seeing the swaying leaves.
I think now of one of Jack Kerouac's alter egos, Ray Smith of The Dharma Bums, coming down from his Sierra Nevada mountain cabin, following his stint as a fire lookout in the cavernous valleys. The madness of life boiled away up there for him, leading to intense spiritual epiphanies amid the natural isolation.
Upon leaving the place that had become sacred to him, he wonders how to adequately acknowledge its importance. The only word that comes forth is... "Blah." Nothing more can be said. It is a perfect expression of unknowing.
We are living in the future. The news is constantly beamed into our brains 24-hours of the day. Everything is new and unpredictable. In a world that appears to be at a significant turning point, where everybody's base reaction would be to come together and have a long chat over a pint or a brew, we are instead more isolated than ever before. Thoughts that would usually get hung out to dry are left, sodden and squashed, in the mind.
People are lonely and confused. I am writing - attempting to escaping the confusion. Or something like that. Saying blah to the mountains. Striving to ascribe meaning and order to chaos.
I realise I am asking more questions than I am answering them and I forget where I started. Ah yes... why?
I'm hanging my thoughts out to dry - I suppose is my answer. To live within the hook of a question mark. Wallow in recorded confusion. Tether myself to my thoughts. I won't promise it will always make sense yet it will be honest.
I think Gary Snyder, Kerouac's muse within the Dharma Bums, somehow factors into the why of things too. He is a being tuned in to the distinct vibrations of the mountains. A zen master. A modern Bodhisattva. Somebody I would imagine to be well-equipped to deal with the enforced isolation of our times, having deliberately sought out isolation in the natural world, and made peace with himself there long before it was imposed on him.
Bodhisattva
[ boh-duh-suht-vuh ]
noun Buddhism.
a person who has attained prajna, or Enlightenment, but who postpones Nirvana in order to help others to attain Enlightenment: individual Bodhisattvas are the subjects of devotion in certain sects and are often represented in painting and sculpture.
I found myself in Snyder's shoes at the dawn of the lock-down imposition, coming down from a mountain, albeit in windy Wales rather than sunny California. The mountain in question was the astonishing yet treacherous Tryfan in the windswept Ogwen Valley, Snowdonia, and I was with my friends Arthur and Louis (pictured below, with a lilt in their step, after conquering the peak) .
Too many days prior to this had been spent watching news full of endless infection statistics and global death comparison charts and I had been consumed by an endless pit of information that I couldn't do anything with.
On top of this, my brain was full with images of dystopia as I wrote my dissertation which centred on an Orwellian metropolis. If I was ever short of inspiration, I could just turn on the news, which increasingly appeared to present a reality so disgusting it was beyond satire. And then I went up a mountain. The mountain did not care about my stress. It did not care that the human world was at a significant turning point.
Tryfan's silent indifference formed the perfect sounding board for my erratic thoughts. As we progressed in the climb, there remained only enough head-space for thinking about where to place my hands and feet so as not to plummet thousands of feet to a grisly death. I've never felt more alive.
Fast forward two hours and we were exhausted and sodden. The three of us scrambled through muddy marshes on our descent, relief welling up inside of us as the ground flattened and we could walk again. Drenched rats so tired that we no longer cared about keeping clean boots.
We made large cumbersome strides, careening across the muddy grass, giddy with adrenaline and accomplishment. We flew! Having reached the summit of the mythical Tryfan, anything seemed possible! The sky sagged purple. A vast still lake greeted us at the foot of the mountain. The buses had stopped running and it appeared we were stranded, the wind started to whip at our backs carrying with it a biting rain, yet we were kings with nothing in our way.
Eventually we found a hostel - a beacon of hope in the cold impressionable darkness. The receptionist reluctantly called us a taxi, citing the 'plague' when he asked us to wait out in the elements. Along the way, as we drove out of the sublime darkening valley, the driver told us that it was the last day of pubs and restaurants being open before everything locked down. Reality flooded back. I remembered the world and its woes. We made colourful plans to have one last big feast when we got back to Bangor, and fill our grumbling stomachs to treat ourselves after the climb. In the end, we merely took pizzas out of the freezer, ate, then fell into a deep dreamless sleep, ready to awaken into a new world.
A damn fine cup of coffee...
For the first time in many of our lives, the 9-to-5 routine has been completely thrown upside down. We are in uncharted territory and it is okay to not know what is going on anymore. When we were in the meat of the lock down, the days were long and repetitive. The same walls. The same porridge. The same cup of coffee. Everything the same. It is slightly different these days but now the peculiar novelty of the 'new normal' looms over us. Part of the offsetting comfort of full lock-down was that it was a finite period. Now we are told we must adjust to the 'new normal' for the foreseeable, whatever that means. The horizon is shrouded in mist.
Back when we were stuck inside, I escaped the monotony by travelling to the absurd, sinister, and yet tender world of Twin Peaks. After long days of lock-down, this became the perfect remedy to my boredom. It was a world so contained within itself, so different to anything else. It was a world full of magic, intrigue and the uncanny, all the while reassuring with its cast of recurring faces all with their dependable mannerisms and quirks. Whatever weirdness or depravity ensued, you could rely on F.B.I Agent Dale Cooper calmly contemplating the unravelling mystery over a hot cup of Joe, while Sheriff Truman and co look on, chomping on their donuts, bemused but fully along for the ride.
I only watched Twin Peaks in the past few months and already its protagonist, 'Coop', is one of my most beloved fictional characters. With a temperament like his, nothing is insurmountable. I would even go as far as to say if you were to task him with inventing a Covid 19 vaccine, he would come awfully close.
Another show I was sucked into in lock-down was the magnificent Midnight Gospel. It was psychedelic and yet lucid. Wacky and yet soulful. Scattered yet composed. It was a show that made me both laugh and cry - one of the most imaginative, human offerings of television in my recent memory. Midnight Gospel boldly re-imagined the boundaries of its medium, in its unique discordant pairing between dialogue and visual action allowing viewers to tune in to the show on various levels. I am extremely thankful to Duncan Trussell for bringing Midnight Gospel into this dimension. I could write for pages and pages about my love for this show and at some point, on this page, I will. For now though, I will return attempting to answer 'why'?
That brings me onto my next point. Podcasts! Listening to podcasts has been a big part of my lock down. Namely, the Duncan Trussell Family Hour, while Marc Maron's WTF receives also an honourable mention. Trussell, the creator of Netflix sensation, The Midnight Gospel, has kept me virtual company throughout this strange summer. Often the soundtrack to my evening cooking, he kept my mind stimulated and active in long days of nothingness. Shortly after the lockdown began, there was an exodus in my student house with people scattering in the breeze to their respective corners of the country/globe and everything suddenly grew quieter. I plastered over the cracks of silence with Trussell's profound ramblings.
Finding the DTFH was a magical discovery in itself. The weird and wonderful Midnight Gospel, so far-out and seemingly removed from our 'reality', was in fact now 'real' to me in a sense, after finding the podcast that its bizarre dialogue had been based on. No longer did I have to wait for a 'season 2' of Midnight Gospel, for there were hundreds of hours of conversation to delve into. I could travel further down the wormhole of this world.
Trussell is a skilled talker. His genuine warmth and tenderness is almost disarming to his guests at times. He welcomes them into his world, inviting openness earnestly, periodically chiming in with the odd "woooow" as they recount their stories to him. He is fully engaged in the conversation, not just superficially, but on an intrinsic empathetic level. All the great interviewers are not just good at talking but great listeners, hearing both the said and the unsaid, listening to the gaps of silence and respecting them, yet uttering into the void when it beckons - listening to it. For that is what we all want, especially now, to have the yammering of our soul truly heard. Perhaps, this is why podcasts are undergoing such a boom right now even as other forms of entertainment struggle in the pandemic climate.
Marc Maron can arguably be seen as a podcast pioneer, in terms of taking the medium to the phenomenon status it holds now. Particularly powerful was his recent public battle with grief, as he lost his girlfriend, indie film director Lynn Shelton, and talked out his pain weekly on his podcast. He was not merely 'moaning', but checking in with himself and his listeners who have likely experienced similar moments in their own lives, demonstrating the healing power of talking about your feelings and providing a strong example for men to be emotional.
Maron and Trussell do what they know how to, as stand-up comedians, in order to make sense of life, they talk. Often the talk is rambling and chaotic but it is human and honest. I like to imagine the tangled ball of wool inside their minds unfurling and relaxing. To sift through the confusion of my world, I thought I'd turn to what I know - which is to write. So I created 'this', whatever 'this' is. To unscramble, loosen, ease the rough, and move smoothly - hence 'Smooth Moves'.
Signing out
Again, I'm not going to promise to make sense out of anything that's going on in this pivotal time we find ourselves in, in the year of 2020. Yet, I will make 'something' out of it. I suppose that somewhat answers the 'why' of things. Who knows where we will all be a year from now, or whether I will have the patience to doggedly continue with this blog you are reading now, yet lets hope for a renaissance in the dusk of these pandemic times. A beautiful calm after the vicious storm that forced us inside but gave us time to think, time to contemplate. Let us step outside again with art buzzing at our fingertips, our hearts matured by the silence blossoming with wisdom. Here's another New Yorker article, discussing the potential of a post-pandemic renaissance, whereby once the door is opened in comes the "fresh air of common sense."
I hope we don't enter into a 'The Machine Stops' kinda world ( I'll come back to this in a future post) . If you want to know what I mean by that, read how E.M. Forster predicted our socially-distanced world here. I hope I will be back reading poems before you in a crowded rusting pub very soon, as we bask in the vibrating warmth of our collected imaginations, drunk with glee and reverence for the human spirit. In the meantime, you can hear me read you a poem from my suburban garden:
Or you can read a poem where I rant about God in the inaugural issue of Cape Magazine, published by my good pals - Aaron and Briony. On top of all this, I highly recommend you check out how some of my Young Identity friends have been adapting as artists amid the pandemic climate, in the Homemakers series - a series of commissions from HOME challenging artists to redefine 'live performance' for an audience stuck indoors.
Before signing off, I'll leave you with this. Another close friend - great rapper and poet - Saf Elsenossi and the rest of the Future 20 collective, in collaboration with Ivan Morison of Studio Morison, present an imagining of an alternate utopian future virtual reality in the LAST PLACE ON EARTH.
I'll sign off now, but I'll be back with more ramblings and reviews soon. Twin Peaks and The Midnight Gospel will have dedicated reviews, I'll delve into the rest of my favourite lockdown entertainment, and much more! Keep your eyes on this page over the coming weeks and months. We'll boldly sail into the foggy horizon together, constantly imagining each other into existence. We'll madly leap into the unknowable void, alone but unified in essence. Take it easy folks and remember... spread love, not Covid.
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