The Weekend Doings

So, this was a pretty full weekend. Friday morning, I saw a new client who has come in as an EMDR client, to work on a grief situation. There's some trickiness around money, but hopefully they'll stick.

Then, Heather going off to the chiropractor, I decided to get some surfing in. The surf report from Wise, the shop at the end of Fulton, said that it was marginally surfable, which pretty much proved true. I decided to not drive down to Sloat (the beaches are labeled by what street intersects them from the East--all are strung out along the Great Highway) and to try what I think is called Sunset Beach. The waves looked a bit choppy from the parking lot, and no one else was on them, but I figured to brave it anyway.

Suiting up, I tore my boot but since it's both relatively warm in the water now, and seemingly I'm acclimatizing to the fridgity, I went with it and it didn't prove to be a problem. It's a trek from the lot to the water (which makes for a lot of mud on the way back), but I'm getting used to the ritual. Suit up in the lot, trying not to let one's birthday suit show as the wind pulls at one's modesty towel, then schlep the board down across the sand and finally strap on the leash to your right leg before walking into the surf.

Now, the current can be a bitch out on Ocean Beach, pulling north or south depending on where the wind is blowing from, and therefore from where the waves are coming. You can be standing in the water and have to fight not to be pulled over by the force of the waves pushing along the beach. Rip tides haven't been a problem, but once in the water, the current can have you up or down the beach in no time.

But that day, it was fairly mellow, and I could get out past the breaking waves to the line where most were breaking. The problem was that the waves were big--maybe five feet, which is pretty damn big when you're laying on your stomach at the bottom of them--and were breaking quickly. So if you didn't position right, they'd either land right on you or break in front of you and knock you about with the stack of white water.

I persevered and caught a couple waves, and a chunk of whitewater, that allowed me a short ride and a quick dunk. Slowly, slowly, my body and mind are building a surfer, but the growth curve is slow because you only get a short amount of time to build said surfer each time you're out. You get to practice a lot of swimming and getting through the surf to the line, but the actual surfing part, not so much. Still, it's addictive, and being out alone in the waves is a welcome break to the sociality of my life.

One thing you learn is a real respect for the ocean and waves. That day, they were waves to make you pay attention, medium-serious waves that needed to be treated with respect. Extrapolating to larger waves, that's a long ways down the line for me (though I wouldn't mind finding some more classic waves to practice on). I ended up rather pooped from the swimming, and finding my biceps strained, just floated on the surf and let it gradually push me back to shore, doing a little prone surfing, getting a further hang of how to press into the board in order to catch more of the wave's energy. Eventually, I made it into shore in one piece and forgot to pick up a rock to mark the day's surfing (I've begun collecting a stone for each outing).

Usually, I've been surfing on Saturday morning, but having gone out three times this week, I was too sore, so just got up late and rousted Heather for our band workshop. We drove over to Fort Mason and worked on a couple songs off our setlist, with our funky group of rockers. There's Heather as the female voice (and I'm working on her to take up the maraccas), Rex on guitar and voice, Brian on guitar, Bill on bass, me on drums, and Bill2, our teacher and backup guitarist. In aggregate, the band is probably 30 years older than Cattleprod, the band from two years ago. We quickly threw out some names at the end of the session, and it seems like my idea from the morning's shower, the Estrogenics, is going to stick. Five guys and a chick: The Estrogenics. Yeah? I actually liked "The Enhancements" better, but there ya go, life in a democracy.

After that, we hit Guitar Center for a cord and maracas, then did a relatively rare Big Shopping at Rainbow, and headed home for a mellow-ish rest of the day. We spent an hour and a half working on Widgethouse--the name of our project to create a multi-purpose retreat center up near Petaluma--something we've agreed to do weekly. We skipped it last week, so it felt good to follow through with it. Then some work on finances, juggling the zero percent credit cards and shifting money around, like dodging sharks, and I read some more of Wilbur's book (again, jaw-droppingly profound) and then finished off David Caruso's tenure on NYPD Blue (yeah, the guy from CSI-Miami).

The Morning Story

So, I'm at work doing my usuals, dealing with cranky clients, and nicer clients, but lots of peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies. More so, what our work is at a psych unit like this, is holding the space for people who can't do so themselves, the psychic equivalent of what it would be like to be the skin on someone else's body. It takes a lot of effort sometime, and if you're feeling raw yourself, it can be a LOT of work.

Today, I woke from a series of dreams about misery without relief. Seems like they were stories of both other's suffering (an Indian peasant?) and of a birds eye view of suffering per se. I'd watched a string of cop shows last night (NYPD Blue, Milch's early drama), where the detectives are constantly having to negotiate with profound suffering, usually by hardening to it, or shuffling it off in dark humor. So the pump was primed for my dreams.

I've been reading Wilber's "Integral Spirituality," an astounding book that essentially lays out a system of seeing reality as a prism of perspectives, without any primary perspective, that reality is actually the simultaneous coordination of 8 primordial perspectives that cannot be reduced to each other. Reality, in his model, is the arising of all these perspectives at the same time.

So, then waking, I did my usually morning meditation, and saw into how this "suffering without relief" is a particular perspective, one way of framing or narrating the world, a particular story which is true as far as it goes, but not the primary story.

But when I came up from sitting, what was left was this story which was struggling for primacy, not wanting to be held by anything larger, insistent that it was the base story that all others led to. Curious. It seems to be something that has been emerging for perhaps the last year or two, like undigested gristle. And I've been noticing how the tenor of my time at the half-way house has also changed during this time, where the suffering of people here has become harder to hold. Perhaps as I've gotten more sensitive, or more embodied, it pushes me towards this early perspective/story which inherently denies other perspective/stories.

It's trick, holding stories that then bite you because being held itself is an insult. Being held, the story then converts into it's basic experience, being pain and contraction, which the story is there to suppress or avoid. So it doesn't want to be seen for what it is, while at the same time, secretly, every contraction yearns for release.

Milch, Fancy, and Imagination

I am on a BIG David Milch jag. I've downloaded hours and hours from a new blog I stumbled on (here), the bulk of which is Milch talking to a Writers Guild of America crowd right after the strike started at the end of last year. It's like listening to the English professor I never found in college, an erudite man with a deep life history who can find the humanity and numinous in the worst piles of crap.

Milch started as a literature professor at Yale, and a very active junkie, until getting hired to write for Hill Street Blues. He then co-created NYPD Blue, and then a couple short lived projects until he did Deadwood for 3 seasons, and then John From Cincinnati for 1 season, both with HBO. (I've written about both shows, below.)

In the WGA lectures, a central theme--and remember that he's talking with fellow writers--is the difference between fancy and imagination. He defines "fancy" as arbitrary and idiosyncratic connections of two events or objects, his example being, "When I think of the Del Shannon song 'Runaway,' I think of the first time I got a blow job from a white girl." His fanciful connection is not going to be shared by anyone but him, or a precious few anyway. Whereas imagination is the deep structure of meaning, the "natural" associations that will be shared by most people (whether in a cultural unit or more broadly would be a whole different lecture).

He say that authentic writing is the act of keeping company with the fanciful long enough that it yields up its imaginal meaning, and that the act of writing is the mind resting transparent in the ground that gave it rise, from which imagination can occur.

All his raw and beautiful stories in these lectures are about these two points: fancy vs. imagination, and the method of purifying the former into the latter. He makes huge digressions in this discourse, with rank profanity and lurid stories, but manages to bring it all together in exquisite summations and proofs, as it were, of St. Paul's revelation on the road to Damascus, that God's love is available to all people. That, Milch says, is what writers write about: the availability of God's love, with very very good examples.

Milch really points me to the fundaments of writing which were never explained or demonstrated in my romantic gropings through my undergraduate English degree, that is, what makes writing authentic, an act of service rather than a self-serving act.

I think James and I both floundered on this point, in our longings to be writers, in that neither of us knew how to surrender and serve, though both of us longed to find out how. We could feel it in other's writing, but could not figure out how to get into their company. So our attempts were contracted, limited, and thin--and therefore frustrating of the basic want of communion. If we'd been content with our own egos, or the slavish gratifications of others desires, then maybe we could have moved ahead. But I think both of us maddened from the inability to surrender, and both went in other directions in our lives. I still rarely read a novel, and the last one I started, "Divisidero" by Ondatje is so small and careful that I couldn't bear to continue it.

What has gripped my literary heart has been Milch's dramas. I'm watching the 3rd season of Deadwood again, and each episode leaves me...emptied. As my friend Michael said of John From Cincinnati (Milch's last show, last year), about the central character John's efforts towards all the other characters, "He's going to redeem every fucking one of them, isn't he?" Same for Milch, as he keeps giving very very good examples of what St. Paul got converted by, on some dusty road: God's love is for all the creatures, available always and freely.