StrangeJournal.com

My wife, my mom (who was up for the weekend) and I watched King Kong this weekend. It was a surprisingly good movie, with a number of contemporary themes. The first thing I was struck by was the shot of Times Square early in the film dominated by the Chevrolet logo. In movie advertising even in 1933. The more thematic note that I noticed was how meta-contextual the movie was, much like Michel Gondry’s Be Kind, Rewind it’s a movie about making movies. Early in the movie Kong’s protagonist Carl Denham complains that people say if his films had a romantic touch they’d double their gross. I was surprised at straightforward the dialogue and themes were in that regard.

The two things that dated the film were racial depictions and the special effects. The non-white characters are treated mercilessly. The Chinaman on the boat wasn’t played by an Asian actor and his accent is absurd. The native villagers on Kong’s island aren’t treated any better. The special effects are as laughable in their own way. The fur on King Kong’s body moves continually from being touched by the modelers. The full size version of his face is comical, and the fact that none of the characters can’t even appear to interact with any of the beasts unless they’re stop-motion animated themselves makes Clash of the Titans look positively cutting edge.

There was one thing that really impressed me about the special effects though, and that was the cognitive leap that it took to put those beasts on the screen. I know that I’m stretching things when I compare the makers of King Kong to the artists of the Renaissance, but I don’t think it’s entirely inappropriate. What both parties did was revolutionize the conception of proportion. Renaissance artists captured realistic horizons and added illusory distance to what is literally a flat board. Early special effects gurus, whose names I am sadly ignorant of, realized that their own flat board, in this case a screen, could fool the eye in other ways that merely showing motion where there was none. They realized that the movie audience has no objective sense of proportion within the frame of the film, and that the screen could be exploited to make very small things appear large if they were filmed very closely. Thus was born Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World.

It seems obvious now, the use of a camera on toys to make things look large. I also realize there are a number of technical hurdles that had to be overcome in order to make even the rudimentary special effects of King Kong the least bit believable, but I think that basic cognitive leap isn’t as easy at it seems looking back on it, and I think the people who made the leap and then made the movie absolutely obliterated the boundaries of what was possible in film because of it.

The next day the three of us went to Costco and I was reminded again of the power of proportion. I hadn’t been to a Costco in years, since it was called Price Club, actually. I was SO excited to go. Not for the samples (I didn’t have one the entire time I was there), but just to experience the gigantic warehouse of everything. I’ll tell you that normally I’m overwhelmed by variety. One of the few things in life that threatens me with a nervous breakdown is the bead store. I don’t mean one specific bead store, I mean every bead store on the planet. I don’t even know how there can be bead stores. How can you fill a whole store with absolutely minuscule beads? All different materials, colors, shapes and sizes? What happens when they end up in the wrong box? How in the world do you know where it goes? How can I ever know which bead is the right one when I can’t even SEE all of the beads, even if I worked at it eight hours a day for a month. I just couldn’t! It’s freaking me out just writing about it.

So why am I not freaked out by Costco, whose giant warehouse is crawling with people (the Costco in Richmond is a study in diversity. I heard at least three non-English languages there) and so full of different things that I could never, ever see them all, even if you gave me a month of Sundays, and even then it wouldn’t ever work because by the time I got done counting, everything behind me would have changed because people would have bought it all and they would have brought in more? I think the answer is proportion. Costco, for me, is like being in a bead store where I’ve been shrunk to the size of the beads. The size of the store is proportionate to the amount of material it contains. There is a harmony between what they sell and how they present it. The bead store to me is a study in disproportion. How in the world can these tiny cramped stores sell thousands of varieties of beads and expect to stay in business? Bead stores are a public menace. I bet mental illness would disappear if we stopped selling beads as a society. Probably poverty too.

Costco, on the other hand, is a wonderful place, full of surprises and affordable quality goods. It takes a lot of discipline to shop there. We dropped $200 dollars without even trying. On the other hand, we won’t have to buy toilet cleaner for three years, so that’s taken care of. That might be another reason that I like shopping at Costco; it makes me feel safe. I don’t have to worry about running out. Where at the bead store I don’t feel like I’ll ever be able to make a decision, because it’s JUST NOT POSSIBLE to look at every bead, at Costco I can go in knowing what I need and have that need taken care of for a LONG time, which makes me feel assured. Costco helps me feel like I’m not constantly in need of things and that once I take care of it there, it’s really taken care of and my attention can be positively focused on other things, like plotting the downfall of bead stores everywhere.

I’ve been practicing astral travel lately, and I don’t think it’s going well. So far it been nothing like hitting a perfect tee shot straight down the fairway or finally capturing the likeness of someone in a drawing. It’s more like stumbling through the dark garage in search of the clubs or trying to get the pencil to work in a world without friction. I don’t even know if I’m doing it right.

The hardest part for me is that I’m not sure that astral travel is possible. I’m sure that’s a huge barrier for me. How can I do it if I don’t believe it’s possible. How can Neo make The Jump if he doesn’t know it’s even possible to jump that far? He can’t. He fell. I can’t. I sit there imagining. I think the comparison to Neo is apt, not because I’m The One, but because what was the Matrix if not astral travel? It was the manifestation of beingness in a totally separate world. It certainly wasn’t pure astral travel, but my suspicion is that the mystics in that world didn’t need to jack in, they could just ghost the net on their own.

The other reason the comparison is apt is because Neo didn’t get it right away. He got it quickly, but only after experiencing it with Morpheus. Sure, he caught on quickly, but it took practice. That’s what I feel I’m doing, practicing. I’ve sat every day for the past week, often twice a day and committed five minutes to astral travel at the end of each meditation. Each time I’ve tried speaking a secret word to Niki, but nothing has yet manifested in that realm. I’ve traveled to DC to visit my brother, Alaska to visit my nieces, and today I hovered over a 200 foot waterfall in south Asia before becoming a cloud and floating over the jungle. I’ve “done” all of that, and like the quote connote, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all just in my head.

And if it is all in my head, I’m okay with that. There has been one real effect: my dreaming has exploded. I have never considered myself a dreamer, but in the last week I’ve had vivid and intense dreams, and I believe it’s related directly to the astral travel I’ve been practicing, since dreaming and astral travel are so intimately linked. But beyond that, I don’t really feel as though I’ve left my body. I don’t really feel as though I’ve actually traveled anywhere. There’s no real proof, which makes it difficult for me to talk about with people, since the only thing they have to go on is my word, and I don’t believe my word is good for much. It’s why I prefer emails to phone calls; if something goes wrong an email is proof that I did what I was supposed, a phone call isn’t.

But I’m beginning to believe that for me the process of learning to astral travel is a lot like the process for building the bridge across Niagra Falls. In January of 1848 a kite flying competition was held at Niagara Falls to see who could be the first person to fly a kite over the rapids. That person was a 15 year old boy named Homan Walsh. Once his kite was across the falls “a stronger line was attached to the kite string. A rope followed, and eventually a cable consisting of thirty-six strands of number 10 wire.”¹ Slowly but surely from a kite string that could be cut by scissors a suspension bridge was built.

So I believe it goes for astral travel. Right now I’m at kite string. The thinnest bit of my being, my imagination, is venturing outward. The experience is thin, translucent, barely-there, but it’s an experience. It’s mostly inside my head, but not completely. And as I become more comfortable, as I become more trusting, as I become more skilled the more likely I am to escape the mortal confines and truly fly free of my body.

I went to the city today to meet a friend for a late lunch. It was hard to get out of the house. My spirit is suffering from inertia, so getting moving is a metaphysical challenge. I put on my boots in the hopes that they would dissuade anyone from fucking with me; I wasn’t in the mood.

I packed my bag and walked the two blocks to BART, realizing it was colder inside the apartment than it was outside in the sun. At the station I put enough to get me to Powell Street and back and leave fifteen even on the card. It feels good to have a nice round number on the BART card when I finish a trip. It’s a smooth thing I can give myself. A small perfection that soothes me.

When the train stops a third time after its travel through the long dark and loud tunnel (a sound I often imagine is the screaming of the people who died in the making of passageway) I am just beginning to read about Atu III The Empress, a card that I am numerologically bound to. Her Hebrew letter is Dalet, which means “the door.” It isn’t significant other than it’s where I stopped reading.

Surface-side I call my friend, whom I haven’t seen in a year, and he’s taller than I remember him being, but we were sitting most of the weekend, playing spades until late. Something about the cast of his face reminds me of my grandfather, but I do not tell him this as there is no way for it not to sound as though I am calling him old, though the similarity has nothing to do with their ages, and something more to do with the way his nose sits on his face. He walks me to his office on the fifth floor of an old, tall, elegant building. The halls are clean and smooth, marble; the heels of my boots announce our coming and our going.

He takes me to lunch across the street in the mall; a restaurant called Out the Door, which he explains is owned by the same people that own a series of restaurants whose titles involve the word ‘door.’ I wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t said it a second time; door. Atu III, The empress, dalet, door, Out the Door. I didn’t dismiss it, but neither did I embrace it. I let it, whatever it was, shimmering coincidence, settle over me without holding it or shooing it away, some strange insect, significant of nothing more than its presence.

We at Asian inspired California cuisine. He had porridge that reminded him of his mother’s, but wasn’t as good as his own. He let me taste it and it was nothing like I imagined gruel being. It was more like porridge, warm and infused with the essence of lemon that reminded me of sunlight. I had the beef bavette with a glass of zinfandel, both of which were fabulous, but which, like two good friends you introduce, did not belong with each other.

We talked over the table about addiction, whether it was real or not; which led us to whether we can really ever be alone, and I decided that he was right: we can’t ever be alone. We can be lonely, we can be isolated, but we can never be alone. He talked about addiction as the product of Western dualistic thought, the product of a belief that we can be and are essentially alone, which set of echoes of existentialism in my head, and evoked all the anguish of Dostoevsky and Kafka from my senior year of high school and all the time they had taken to prove that we were all alone.

I can’t say that I understood everything we said over our Asian fusion. I can’t say that I hung on to every idea that passed between us, or that he did. It was a conversation outside of expectation, one that sprung up like a weed, and like a weed went in directions we certainly hadn’t anticipated. We discussed nothing, and joked after the meal about how we barely knew each other. “Those stories,” I said, “will have to wait until next year.”

The shimmering insect perched on my shoulder never metamorphosed into some silky butterfly of understanding. There was no explosion of insight into the other world. It was a satisfying meal with an interesting friend; nothing more, nothing less. What I took away, I suppose, was this: any tool we use for transformation must be something that lies outside of ourselves and therefore likely outside of what we trust. What we trust was not always what we trusted; it was once something that lay outside of what we understood and believed in. Any process that takes something from one state to another must necessarily be both things or contain pieces of both things, and is therefore a thing unto itself, separate from the things it connects, a necessary hypocrisy if those things it connects believe themselves to be mutually exclusive.

This process doesn’t have to be scary, but it usually is. I’ve fought hard to become what I am today, and dislike the idea that in order to become something new I must let go of what I’ve fought so hard to achieve. I’m afraid of the idea that if I give myself to God (Good orderly direction, if you prefer; the universe, if you prefer) that I will no longer be myself. My hope is that in doing so I will become the person I’ve always wanted to be, but then I will not be able to take credit for my achievements, it will have been the act of something greater, not in the sense that God chose me and brought me through the ranks but functions through a series of coincidences and introductions. And then it dawns on me that what I am I already owe God for, and whatever I become will be God’s doing as well.

The idea that I often rely on that I have somehow made it this far on my own is in itself is another manifestation of the idea that I am alone, a person working in a vacuum, somehow responsible for the things that I have achieved. It is an illusion. I was never alone. I had my parents, my teachers, my friends, all of whom have contributed to the shape I call my self. What difference, then, that I have trusted my parents, teachers and friends, but not God? Perhaps because I cannot hold God to account for its actions? There are no reprisals should God go awry with me, if I don’t get what I want. What I want. The phrase echoes childishly through me, and I cringe in recognition of my entitlement. What I want. What I want. What I want. It is an end, and that is another illusion that is a piece of my foundation. What I want, as though it might be delivered into my hand, shiny, warm and perfect. What I want implies that it is gettable, that once achieved the game is over. It is a static desire, and a short-sighted one, implying that I know what I want in the first place. And I don’t.

If I did, I would be working for it, driving as hard as possible for it in order to achieve it, with the help of God or without it. What I really want is to know what I want. And ultimately it’s up to me to decide that. That decision is one of the thing that God can’t do. It would appear then that I am exercising the one muscle I have that God cannot flex in order to prove that God won’t give me what I want. It’s a childish game I play, proving that I am my own person by rejecting the one gift I’ve been given; proving that I am different by refusing to play. This isn’t a complete evaluation of who I am, and not a totally damning statement about my character. I often engage, and I enjoy playing, but existentially (that word again) if I had to define myself, the word would be “No.”

I remember a time in church, this was before I was in high school, I think, that the church was doing a funding drive to buy a building of some sort. Perhaps to fund the sanctuary, since we met in what was essentially a carpeted gym, the one I would use later on Tuesday nights for basketball and volleyball before youth group. Our church was always buying and selling real estate, though to no real purpose that I could divine. The crux of this funding drive was a card that was handed out in the Sunday morning program. The card had a simple phrase on the front “No God.” It’s not a phrase you expect to see handed out in church on Sunday morning, and it wasn’t meant to be immediately understood. The pastor soon explained: the card was part of the funding drive. It represented a personal decision to every person in the church. He instructed each parishioner to take out a pen or pencil and circle one, and only one, of those words on the front. Either “no” or “God.” It was up to us to decide. If we chose “God” we should flip over the card and give what we could to help the church buy the new building. If we chose no…well, he hoped we wouldn’t.

I remember the angst that the choice put me through. I knew that I should choose God, but I didn’t want to part with any of the money that I got for allowance. I remember choosing God, and coming up with a complex financial plan that wouldn’t take too much of my allowance, but would look good on a monthly basis. The plan was quickly forgotten, and my hard earned funds invested in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures rather than a new building for the church. I don’t believe I’m the only one who made a pledge and then forgot about it. Later that year, when the building fund came up short the pastor made a point of reminding us what we’d pledged, that we’d circled “God” but hadn’t lived up to our decision, and I remember feeling bad that I hadn’t contributed my share. Sitting here now, I can’t honestly remember if we ended up reaching our goal or not.

Where does that leave me today? Trying to circle God more often than I circle No. I think I might even go so far as to say that for all intents and purposes God might be the same as saying yes. I know that I and my friends define ourselves by our tastes, and taste can essentially be boiled down to a binary of yes and no. My agglomeration of yeses and no’s in what I consume defines who I am. It’s what I eat, what I buy, what I read, what I watch, what I listen to, what I participate in and what I don’t eat, buy, read, watch, listen to and participate in. I’m under the illusion that somehow those things are what I am. So who am I if I say yes to everything? My personality will erode. I will no longer be discernable from the mass. I will lose control. I will disappear.

And that’s what it’s about: control. It’s about the illusion of control that provides a modicum of comfort in this overwhelming time. Not just in my life, but in our history. Perhaps human history has always been overwhelming for those experiencing it. Maybe that’s just the way we live, but life has always been out of our control, life has always been out of my control and yet we and I have managed to survive, likely through no actions of our own. So how can I relinquish the illusion of control? I can I give myself up to the totally unpredictable will of God? I don’t know, but I’m trying to find out.

03.06.08

The new apartment is still unfamiliar. All its distance are wrong. Moving from room to room takes effort, thought, concentration; I am constantly met with unexpected challenges to my progress and my orientation. There are weird moments of déjà vu. It’s due partly to the fact that the new apartment is in the same building as the last one, just down the hall, in fact. The walls are the same white. The floor the same brown. My feet keep expecting carpet when I walk in the bedroom and are surprised by the hard, cool expanse of wood.

The carpet beneath the bed in the old apartment was to dampen the noise from the garage below us. It didn’t work, though. The horrid mechanical sound of the manual garage door being lifted tore through the apartment whenever its occupant came home. The carpet came standard with the apartment, as did the curtains that went over the Venetian blinds. Those were to keep out the yellow, unyielding light from streetlight not two feet from the window, and they worked better than the carpet, but did nothing to keep out the noise from the traffic. We’ve moved back in the building; we’re off the street now and the sound of traffic is only occasional, no longer constant. And we’re out from beneath the lumbering, nocturnal giants with the cage containing an unknown but poorly behaved animal.

It’s worse that we’re still half in boxes. The closet door won’t shut because the saxophone case is in the way. But I’ve thrown it shut at least five times, thinking it will close, cringing with the carom of the solid door against the black plastic case. Moving around the apartment is hard. My body doesn’t know the rhythms yet, hasn’t written the distances into its wiring. I’m colliding with door jambs when I take corners too early or too late and stumbling into the wall when I realize I’m going the wrong way and readjust midstream.

Moving in the dark is harder. The bedroom is identical to our last one, but we’ve moved the bed, so I wake up backwards. When I stumble into the hall for the toilet I reach for the front door instead of the bathroom, since the apartment layout is reversed. I’m horrified that I might open the front door some night and stand there naked and blinking just as some nocturnal neighbor crests the first set of stairs. It would be an awkward moment, but not one likely to haunt me; no one really talks to each other in our building. The managers didn’t even know we were moving.

It’s not home yet, and it probably won’t ever be. I may feel rested here, but I’ll never feel planted. The new room is nice, and gives us more room to breathe and a chance to get out from under one another. Eventually I will learn the steps and begin to dance with the new place. Find the bathroom blindly without fear of public nudity. Until then I’ll try to enjoy the stumbling awkwardness of this new relationship.