My Time as a Human

For this round, the only one I’ll remember, I live in a poet’s body. Despite my early aims towards science my brain spins wildly in all directions like an electron cloud, at any moment my point at best a probability. My feet long to feel the earth, and are cut for it, only to return again to draw new patterns of scars. My heart sends me lunging in odd directions until it finds something that will crack it. My stomach writhes and turns and my moving muscles burn as I try to walk it off through thin woods, over muddy waters, past bright green poison ivy. I should be at work right now. Some job, earning money, but instead I’m wrestling with my poet body, striving to find a hold that will keep me in check long enough to squeeze until a few sweaty drops of beauty fall onto a page or evaporate into waves that gently move eardrums and hearts. The struggle ends, little better than its start. I emerge hungry and exhausted and my society chides me for having wasted time, threatens not to feed me, and then places more bright lights and sharp stones in my path to send me off into the woods again.

Epilogue:

Returning up the path, I walk slowly at the center of a stream of joggers with their dog entourages. I’m sweeping a banana through the air, idly practicing knife fighting techniques learned while making a training video with an old Cuban man years ago. Somewhere at the tip of a still hidden grin, my philosopher’s sense of humor begins to twinkle faintly. Somewhere just behind me, the three law students that just ran past make jungle noises.

Also:

It’s easy to feel the great depth of life after falling into a dark well.
Don’t forget that, all along your journey, the sky above was infinitely vast.

When George Lucas set out to make Star Wars he was a young man with a dream. He wrote a story that excited him and shot a film about a fantastic world that absorbed him. Years later he continued the series with a film stuffed with farting aliens and racial stereotypes.

There are two ways to approach children’s material. You can write material that you think children will like, or you can write material from your own loves that, it just so happens, turns out to be what all humans love. The incredible thing that I discovered about the farting aliens is that kids do in fact enjoy that movie. So when George set out to make a movie that kids would like, he was successful. But my guess is that as those children grow older, the sweet memories of alien farts will grow foul and dissipate until they are no more. There isn’t much in that thin cloud to carry forward into adulthood. Meanwhile, there are adults well into their forties and fifties who are still captivated by the magic of the first Star Wars (Episode IV) film.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) never had any children of his own. Apparently he used to say, “You have ‘em; I’ll entertain ‘em.”¹. Audrey Geisel, his wife, said that he was even, “afraid of children to a degree”.² It was Geisel’s childlike imagination and his love of language and play that made his art something that reached all ages. He was writing what he himself enjoyed.

If adults aren’t as charmed by my children’s songs as their children, I’m not reaching deeply enough into my vault of imagination. I’m not tapping into the universal core that we humans share that makes us crave and delight in stories. From a practical standpoint, children insist on hearing the songs they love thousands of times, and so parents are the ones carefully selecting material least likely to encourage themselves to damage expensive stereo equipment. Thinking long term, this allows well written metaphors to have an effect on both children and the adults they become, as they carry the best stories of their youth with them. Their understanding and interpretations change and expand as the person evolves, continuing to encourage them for a lifetime.

I want to be the planter of seeds, not the forgotten cotton candy. I want to be the New Hope, not a Phantom Menace.

After storming out of my room, hitting me as she passed and slamming the front door behind her, my high school girlfriend went tearing off in her giant boat of a car. I was sure she’d forgotten her glasses again but it was a little late for that. She had found one of my short stories.

One of the hardest things about being a writer is dealing with the impact of my words on those around me. In order to produce anything meaningful I have to dredge up parts of myself that are the most intense and amplify them. Often this involves blowing things out of the proportion of my experience, like using a microscope to make that little part of myself big enough to share with everyone. While ideally this gives other people a chance to feel, consider, and compare it also gives those close to me a false impression of the intensity of an experience.

When the piece (song, story, etc) discusses an intense emotion of the past, this often also produces the dreaded, “what?! I thought you were over that! How can you keep bringing that up?!” Make that emotion about a past girlfriend and, well… But those stories, about girlfriends and brief affairs and women who might have been are some of the most intense experiences I have. When looking for material this is the garden with the strongest tasting fruits and which continues to grow and produce more over time.

Writing fiction or poetry, in particular, tends to turn idle thoughts and expand them in sweeping “what if” experiments. Here’s where I get into the most trouble. Now I’m talking about things I would never do or thoughts I rarely, if ever, have and yet treating them with the full conviction of real experience. If someone can’t truly get their head around the idea of creative fiction, I’m doomed. While there are loose threads to reality in that I have experienced anger I do not, in fact, want to murder anyone in their sleep. Just because I try to get myself inside the head of someone racist, violent or crazy doesn’t mean that I’ve become them, or that I’ve secretly been them all along.

When Laura, my high school girlfriend, ran out on me she’d found a story about a romance. Her assumption was that I must be dreaming up another relationship because ours wasn’t good enough for me. I was frustrated then about her inability to understand what I was doing, but I sometimes wonder now if she just hadn’t yet spent enough time in other people’s heads, or dreaming, to understand how what I wrote could be something other than the truth of me. Maybe it’s not something someone can be convinced of unless they’ve experienced it themselves.

There was no way I could leave San Francisco without having some kind of a supervegan meal and so we found a religious commune of sorts full of beaming people serving dahl with zing and chick peas with zang. Dicky got into a healthy rant about the fact that we are all Monkeys and I gleefully fed it with my own philosophies on the subject. Yes, we are all monkeys chewing on bananas, but once we have food we discover that throwing feces at one another, making scads of money and talking about nuances of artistic expression are all equally valuable pursuits.

Maslow’s Hierarchy keeps coming up lately, perhaps because whenever I talk about my recent trip to India where I was surrounded by people with real needs, the Americans around me uncomfortably check their fussing about music or complaint about modern art. I keep trying to point out that just because some people don’t have the luxury of spare time and energy to devote to philosophy doesn’t make its pursuit any less legitimate. It’s what we do. We’re monkeys.

Something that always astounds me about air travel is that, well, we call it “air travel”. We forget something amazing… it’s flight! I look out the window and suddenly we’re rushing along the ground at incredible speed, and then there is a jerk and we are pulled up into the air! We’re flying! Beside me a guy in a business suit is trying to get coffee and a hipster is futsing with an iPod. Can’t they see that we’re experiencing something incredible?! This is a moment humans have dreamed of for thousands of years! They jealously watched birds overhead and dreamed, planned, and fell off of countless cliffs in desperate attempts to join them. Now we complain about peanut allergies and turbulence.

Of course, once I got over the fact that I was in a two ton tin can floating over the earth, I had time to study Go and the chance to meet a cool actress in the seat next to me. I really appreciated her deliberate approach to her craft and we talked about the similarities between the mental states required for writing and acting. When I write fiction, I often have the experience best described by Ray Bradbury. He would go to sleep thinking about his characters, and when he woke up they would all be talking in his head and he would write down what they said.

While I don’t always have this immediate an experience, stories and characters always take on a life of their own. The better I get to know them and their stories and voices, the more they take over and tell me what they will and will not do. The story wanders off in new directions and I have to be open to where it wants to go, and to craft it into a coherent tale once I’ve felt it out. In many ways this process involves becoming (in the method acting sense) these characters for a while. It also requires the very immediate, open, empty mind of the improv actor who responds immediately to each new idea or change as it occurs. Because each new fact that is revealed changes the context of the story, it can’t be written out in any one actor’s head beyond the current moment. (This stems from the “yes and” rule of improv.)

And so I’ve returned to Austin, another flying, philosophizing monkey typing furiously in the dark in hope that other monkeys will nod or spit out some kind of emotional response to my analysis of my experience. There are certainly worse things I could be doing with my time.