| << Tim Robbins on journalism and public discourse | 2003 > April | The Real War - On American Democracy >> |
Sunday, 20 April 2003
Thread synchronization ::
This is exceedingly long-winded and cross-referential... perhaps it will make no sense to anyone but me or the most patient and imaginative reader... but the story seems to want to be told, (mostly) chronologically...
Last Monday I (much belatedly) returned an email to a friend whose list of coincidences had inspired me to start keeping track of my own, and had written at a coincidental time last September.
I had a Sarah McLachlan tune stuck in my head for much of last week, “Possession,” from Fumbling Towards Ecstasy: “... into the sea of waking dreams ...”
Sometime in the middle of the week, the iPod chose the SplatterCell track, “Wake Up and Smell the Corpses,” from Oah.
Thursday night I got to a section of The Holographic Universe discussing synchronicities, before going to sleep around 9 pm. I awoke at 3:45 am. After lying awake for a few minutes, I heard the distinct sound of an alarm clock going off, as if it were right next to me. But it was not my alarm clock. The sound was not in the air. I realized I was not going to fall back asleep, and stumbled over to the computer. After another couple of minutes, a friend IM’d me. It was an odd hour for both of us to be awake, but she said she’d had a feeling I’d be on. I mentioned the phantom alarm clock, “I guess it was my wakeup call.” My friend typed, “when I woke up I was thinking about ‘wake up call’,” a radio show, then asked if I’d seen Waking Life. I replied that I had, and had also gotten the DVD for Christmas but not yet watched it.
Friday night I watched Waking Life. (Warning: spoilers follow.) The next morning I reflected on a few of the scenes that had stuck with me. There was the man driving around a deserted city with loudspeakers mounted on his car, delivering an angry diatribe about the state of the world. That resonated with a bit I’d bookmarked in The Holographic Universe:
If you want to become aware of your own frozen vertices of thought, Shainberg [in Vortices of Thought in the Implicate Order] recommends you pay close attention to the way you behave in conversation. When people with set beliefs converse with others, they try to justify their identities by espousing and defending their opinions ... they show little interest in allowing any real conversational interaction to take place.
(Hmn, what do you make of this? ;-)
There was the woman with whom the dreamer had his first lucid conversation, whose hair continuously spiraled into larger strands from smaller threads.
There was the film director talking about The Holy Moment, how every moment is holy.
There was a woman reflecting on her life, saying she missed the people, that “looking back, the only thing that mattered was connecting with people.”
And there was the next-to-last scene, where the guy playing pinball describes how Philip K. Dick wrote a sci-fi story, then four years later met a woman whose life situation he’d described in his book, right down to her name, her husband’s name, and the name of a detective. Then a priest later told him that the story also paralleled the book of Acts. (Speaking of synchronicities.) He described a dream where he’d met his childhood dog and a woman Yeats (?) had known, then realized they were both sickly corpses, that he was in the land of the dead. Wake up and smell the corpses. And then there was the pinball-player’s final distillation, that life consisted of only one essential moment in which the demi-urge is calling us; when we say no to it, we create the illusion of time, which only ends when we say Yes to it. What you want, wants you.
Saturday I saw some patriotic bumper stickers and found myself mildly annoyed at their superficiality. It reminded me of how I’d been annoyed by the patriotic music from ghetto blasters when I visited NYC last fall. I played with ideas for a bumper sticker that expressed my feelings about people who want to reduce their beliefs to bumper stickers. I couldn’t think of anything at all concise.
While web-surfing this morning, I came across a weblog with a picture of Yoko Ono’s famous Y E S installation.
On Highway 17 to Santa Cruz this afternoon, I saw the bumper sticker I’d wished for: “Don’t believe everything you think.”
A few minutes later, the iPod picked Robby Aceto’s “Black Roses,” from Code. What is that song about? I finally recognized and remembered the spot where I had punched in and replaced Robby’s piano playing with my own, and the lyrics began to resonate in a new way. Wake up and smell the black roses? The corpses?
I was having coffee with a friend in downtown Santa Cruz. The distinct sound of Indonesian gamelan music faded in and approached. I looked for its source and saw two people wearing rabbit head masks, a woman wearing bunny ears, and the Mad Hatter. I laughed, thinking, “only in Santa Cruz.” Then the Mad Hatter offered Easter chocolate to me and my friend. My eyes met his, and we had a brief, smiling Holy Moment.
I saw another “Don’t believe everything you think” bumper sticker.
Starting the car when leaving Santa Cruz, the iPod resumed weak’s “Walk Away.” (David Torn is the creator of SplatterCell, produced Robby’s CD, and had weak play on one of his CD’s.) “... Like nothing matters ...”
I contemplated World Entertainment War’s “Apathy and Ignorance”: “I don’t know and I don’t care.” Both “bad,” right? Superficially yes... but, “I don’t know” seems better than thinking I know something I don’t... and “I don’t care” is better than caring too much about myself. “Like nothing matters.”
When I got home, I had an email from my friend who used to keep track of coincidences. He’d fallen out of the habit and found that the less he paid attention, the fewer coincidences he’d notice and remember. “If I don’t write it down within a day of it happening, it slips away—just like dreams...”
My friend E suggested that “Don’t believe anything you think” was a better bumper sticker and I concurred. Referring to a recent problem I’d created for myself, he suggested, “don’t make more of it than what it was.”
References:
Mind over matter (26 April 2003)
Who Cares About the Truth? (11 September 2004)
| << Tim Robbins on journalism and public discourse | 2003 > April | The Real War - On American Democracy >> |