Weekly Zephyr #3: June 15, 2017

Beatrice Wood, "A Nickelette, or Unsophisticated Mary" manuscript & painting, 1918

Serious question: How do you play a clear, true note on the instrument of yourself?

To make a gesture or say something unadorned and sincere and genuinely expressive, to say it or do it exactly how you mean it, to get the thing out into the world in a form as close as possible to the thing you perceived inside that prompted the expression, to do it how you do it and not how somebody you think is great does it, or how someone you want to attract might possibly think is sexy, or how your mom or dad wanted you to do it, or how it's done these days as far as you can tell. How sad and sort of dumb that this has become a miracle. Forces conspire against it but still. Look at dogs or birds or cheetahs or small enough children or the rare great artist or sage or, hey, sociopath. They're working it.

For me it's a miracle. Maybe you play note after note after note and you're making a whole sound that you and everybody else recognizes as you. You're either very lucky, very strong, or you've worked hard to become the second thing. Or option D that I don't know about.

I tried to learn to play the flute in 3rd grade for a couple of weeks. Jesus Christ. Frustrated eight-year-old blowing across and over and into and just all wrong in relation to that hole. No note. The blowing sound, that was it. Diagonally. Nothing. Straight down, a little over. Nothing. Flat across. In. Nothing. Fuck you, flute!

I know there's no "how". It's not a "how" thing. It's a life's work. I know. I'm just thinking about it.

 Just working out how to do this newsletter, is what prompted all this. I want to try and foreclose on any possible eventual canned vibe. I don't want this to be a fixed space or even one where I'm pretending like I know exactly what I'm doing. Keeping this a place a possibility hole on purpose. * ​Apropos of that, you can reply to these emails in just the way you'd reply to any old email and tell me things. You can make a request, you can say hello/introduce yourself, you can show me something cool. * Apropos of THAT, last year I got very excited about the idea of starting an advice column and I was about to do it but then the election happened and we all plunged into darkness and I felt, uh, less qualified. So I'm not going to be giving advice. But I'm happy to think out loud about things in order that we might all feel less alone. If something is plaguing you, perhaps you can whisper it to me and it can plague us all together in a companionable way.

  It might be the Tao that I'm thinking about up top, come to think of it.

Here's a man who was named Ken Russell —a teacher I not quite/sort of/essentially had— writing about the Tao Te Ching.  (I didn't quite have/but did have him as a teacher in that I took meditation classes taught by his students for a couple of years, but I didn't stay with it long enough to start having class with the big man himself.)   The Way of Seeing was his thing. So good. Straightforward and practical and do-able. Still one of the best things I ever spent time on.  Best bit = learning to distinguish thoughts from feelings. I learned that we're always conflating the two and unnecessarily fucking ourselves up with that. When you say, "I feel like" and then follow that up with something elaborate, you're talking about a thought that started riding on a feeling. And if the elaborate thing gets you riled up, the thought probably got stuck to the feeling.

WHAT ELSE, NOW

This book:

                  I bought this at the best bookstore, The Elliott Bay Book Company, and fell in love with the first paragraph hard and fast. Flipped through, glanced at a couple of pages, same immediate love. A funny phenomenon happens when I fall in love with a book that quickly; synesthesia kicks in. If I look at a paragraph and it pleases my brain fast enough, every letter "a" will have a subtle red glow and I won't even need to know any more. I'm buying it. Open a book, no synesthesia, I'll have to flip around in it like normal.

Here's that paragraph:

GODDAMN IT I CAME TO THIS NEWSLETTER HOPING SOMEONE WOULD TELL ME A RIDICULOUS TRUE STORY AND NOBODY HAS DONE THAT what's this "The Crack-Up—And Future—of Downtown's Kookiest Fashion Collective" oh, that's better.            (nothing else is down here, just a bonfire)