At work, I am aware of all the currents in the fractal. My rebellious side still sees, reflexively contracts -- but it's not driving any more. It's just data.
Eugenio Barba says we create theatre from our wounds. I think we create everything from our wounds.
When we start to heal -- although Eugenio would perhaps say some wounds are always with us -- we can create different things. The wounds don't leave; but the other can also be embraced. We get the resonance between our wounds and our glory; life and death, the mortal and the divine. We create wholly. The metaphor starts to approach reality.
Lear was a cranky willful arrogant man who wanted to determine publicly which daughter loved him best. This was not an act of love. Out of this -- "All things contain their end in their beginning," says Lyon -- came his howling on the heath.
This is why the great playwrights, if they start writing at 20, don't start creating their masterworks till they're 40. Why the great theatre directors don't start making the truly sundering works till after 20 years of work. And why masters like Eugenio or Leonid, who have 40 years of practice, are so incredibly rare, and so vitally to be treasured. Eugenio's latest piece,
Andersen's Dream, is about death as if death is not important and is real, all at once. A lightness that does not deny; white figures in the snow, in white cotton-lace dresses and summer suits, having a barbecue.
I am trying a new way of working. Everything Peter suggests or Joshua says, I do. I lie down, take off my skin, and let ivy grow all through me. Connect to the ecosystem instead of severing from it.
I still use my own wisdom; I do not go blind. But I don't reflexively rebel and isolate.
I am now on a different path from my father's.
I took both my iron swords to work Friday. To feel their weight as I walked through the halls. To remind myself that my projects are as real as these swords. To feel that where I work -- in software Games -- I am surrounded by people capable of grasping the entire metaphor. Of perhaps grasping me.
I love the minds where I work. They are muscular, nourishing, fast, skillful.
I worked a bootcamp of all physicists once. Their minds were patient, deep, all-connective. Systems-dancers. What was striking was the quality of their listening and reflection. The physicists would let you speak, uninterrupted & unrushed, for hours. Then, after an unhurried pause, they would check to see if they had understood the entire thought you had laid out. They were not impatient to say their own idea. They were absorbed in completely understanding your proposition. It didn't matter whose idea it was. It only mattered that the whole system got better understood.
They were experts at not perturbing the system. They knew how, at a certain complexity, things need to be laid out purely and completely. Network architects know this; and games-AI programmers. All the guys who work at night. For years, all my writing was at night -- psychic space, no disturbance to delicate complexity.
I remember one guy's Alignment that bootcamp, the thing he craved to make him whole, was Deep Thinking -- to create even more time & space for thought.
We used to have a guy, Kevin McCarthy, whose Gift lay at the opposite end of the spectrum. His Gift was Quickness. He had a huge capacity for action/input/stimulus in the present moment. He could handle 12 windows open at once on his screen, all active, all imperative, and be talking.
What if there are as many Gifts as there are humans? Now I see how important the internet is; it lets each person leverage their Gift.
"We designed the internet to be unbreakable, even in war," said Ken Harrenstien. "It wasn't till more than 20 years later, in Desert Storm, that it first got tested. It passed," he said. I don't think it was the design alone, though; it was how robustly the internet has grown to become everyone's ecosystem.
The internet is a shared vision. Everyone thinks of it as "My internet." In war we bomb cathedrals; I wonder if, finally, we have built something no one would bomb because we all need it too much. I wonder if the internet is Danny Hillis's 12,000-year clock. Rome's roads survived.
I once drove past a corner lot in Grass Valley, California which was being turned into a strip-mall. The guys who had just cut down every other tree on the lot, were having their lunch in the shade of the remaining tree. How do we honor the truth of Ecclesiastes's cycles, and short-term thinking, and scarcity, and economy -- and preserve our planet?
I do two ultra-slow-mo Suzuki practices -- slow-tens, which are slow-mo walks; and shakuhachis, which are slow-motion cycles of getting up from laying limp on the floor, moving -- typically walk & walk back, but often I slow-mo dance instead -- then returning to the floor.
I used the swords for Suzuki work, one in each hand. I felt them as extensions of my arms, as my bones. Feeling how they extend power; are power. I used them in slow-mo Shiva sculpture-walks. Then I used them swiftly, iron cutting air like fast encircling fish as I spun. Then I melted, using them as fluid -- as water, my longings, my dress, my hair, my breasts, stroking my cheek, kissing my lips, slow on my tongue.
Using swords in a completely soft way felt magnificent.
A sword IS a metaphor. I can be iron-soft at work. Everywhere. All the way iron, all the way soft.
I'm about to switch metaphors. There's something about rosebushes and gardens and forest ecosystems that better approximates my complexity.
Like Leonid Anisimov says, "Look to Nature." And, "Look on the most high and most beautiful, as long and as often as you can." Even in yourself, I would add.
