Lisa Golightly, Still Listening

A span of time dominated by the feeling that you're trying to know something on an existential level, and you don't even know what it is you're trying to know, you just know that there's something you need to know that you don't.

   restlessness + confusion but URGENCY      

You grab this vague assignment afresh each day

and squeeze all the air around you with your searcher tentacles and you clench your perceiver muscles, wherever they are, and try to will knowledge of this lost knowledge into your brain            YOU ARE WORKING ON IT

NOTHING IS HAPPENING AND YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT ISN'T

BUT YOU ARE DAMN WELL DOING IT

There's a scene in the 1996 Kids in the Hall movie BRAIN CANDY*

*pharmaceuticals

where the pharmaceutical company is having a meeting and the CEO gives the team an elaborate assignment and then two minutes later asks his point person where they are with that, and his point person (played by Dave Foley) is all,  "You mean that thing you just asked us to do right now? Oh, we're on top of that, Don."

I THINK THIS IS THE VOID

THE VOID THEY SPEAK OF, YOU KNOW

            THE VOID

   When THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE came out, back in the early 90s, I was obsessed. Saw it in the theater oodles of times. This was soon after I'd fallen out of college in a total emotional collapse, and I was in the void. Irene Jacob was so wistful and beautiful and the movie was thick with mystery/longing and I kept watching it and watching it, like maybe it would help something pop.          

you've seen it, right ten times at least, correct right? yes?        and the music!

          nothing popped I'm still waiting

This is something I did today and I recommend it.

A lot of you are probably hep to Morning Pages. The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron, the thing where you pick up a pen and write any old damn thing longhand quickly without stopping, on pages, three of them, in the morning. I think it's a great practice, meditation via writing, and I've done it at many different points in my life—usually turning points of some kind.   I picked it up again today. Nice, sturdy, wire-ringed notebook, smooth pen. First few lines: digging the process. Vowing to make these pages legible this time around somehow. Clenching that pen to control those letter shapes and pretty soon: ouch, that grip, but okay, keep going, it's worth it. You want to be able to hang on to whatever you write in case there's a useful insight, and you can't hang on to it if you can't read it.  Then: God, do people really WRITE like this? To READ later? OW my HAND.

So what if I sit up, because I'm hunching and I don't like that, so, straight up, and what if I write loose, like really loose, like open it up, wide circle-y writing, and that's legibility gone but that's okay, and so that's the future gone, revisiting-wise, but that's okay, and this is the point in Morning Pages where I start to get sleepy because I'm hitting resistance, so what if I close my eyes? Legibility's gone already, I stopped fighting my hand, so why should I fight my eyes? And I close my eyes and they feel good like that and I'm not sleepy anymore and I'm looping around in what technically is still writing since I am intending words in those circle-y things, and when I sneak a look the lines of writing are angling down and leaving gaps or overlapping each other but that doesn't even matter. Something is unwinding and releasing internally—I mean in both a physical and a psychological way—as I loop around and there's a freedom feeling, like surfing, or sailing.

I briefly think about doing all my three pages on one page right on top of each other to save paper but I try it for a line and it feels wrong. Lesson learned. I mean, try it, you might like it, but I hate it.

Without going into specifics, something excellent and surprising did unfold. I learned something about myself and there was a healing deal. I don't want to be more specific because I don't want to set up any expectations for what might happen if you do it  BUT

Morning pages with your eyes closed and a loose hand. If you do that kind of thing, yes, ma'am.

                  Goodbye! Happy 19th of April. I leave you with this now:  

                 it's who you think it is if you think it's Prince     and if there's a better idea for a spirit guide for the void than a Prince who's not } yet, no, there isn't