Day 21 - 21st Jan

BERLIN IN A HURRY

Berlin in a Hurry

That's where Jacko suspended his baby. That's where Hitler

Did something on a balcony.

Come on, let's go.

The pipes are all above ground
And different colours.
Yippee.

Let's get amongst it
Without getting into it.
A big metal dragon
In the club
Shoots out fire
But it's on the hour,
Every hour.
Big Ben in drag.

Come on, let's go.
I get the gist,
I got the Craigslist
And the Cliff Notes.
I got the brief,
And the proof sheet,
And the memo,
And the ping,
And the ding,
And the ting-a-ling.
I got the abstract;
It was intact,
Despite the luggage handlers
Just horsing it onto the conveyor belt
And up into a furnace.
I have quite a bit to read,
It would seem.

Listen more quickly,
Because stupefied
That's the way of it.
Just start talking until you find your way.

We all feel it at times,
Inutterably alone.
But you are not to bring this up
Or be seen as a party pooper.

But can you not have a party,
Surely a party,
Where people acknowledge they feel alone,
And in doing so, we are as one?

The land of run clubs,
Of brekky radio,
Of fitting in or fucking off,
Is a field
Full of stones,
Rocks, and boulders,
And gritty soil.

Bend to your work, lift the rocks,
Pair up if you have to,
Eeyore and Tigger.

The field is on a slope.
Toss them over the low fence on the south side;
They rolled down from the top paddock.

Watch them bounce and clunder down the hill,
Smash into the forest,
Rush past a sapling or two.

And when the field is cleared, and you are flushed again with good sense and hard work,
Lay down the concrete slab of sadness

A long and drawn-out story.
Jesus.
Do we have to listen to Eeyore?
Who invited him?

I know, I know.
It offends.
Can it not be a snappy, happy one?
That is stilts.
Throw it up—
She'll be right.
A better view on this plot,
But no end of dramas.
All the dramas, please.

Because as you watch the concrete set,
You can then actually forget
The ghost-soaked bloodied rocks
Far under the slope.
They will sleep still.
Won't disturb your grandkids
When they come to visit.

They look up and see your slab as a shark does the hull of a boat.
Substantial. Not for me.
Yippee.

And then.
And then.
Climbing up from the low field,
Coming down from the top paddock,
Come the guests.

All of them alone,
Together in this abode.

————-

This poem is absolutely not my best.
But this test of writing in a very circumscribed amount of time (10 minutes) is excellent and expedient training for just blowing past that initial way resistance shows up.

Resistance is diabolical, preternatural—
A force of nature as real as gravity.

Gravity is so powerful you simply don't think about it. You know it.

You embody an understanding of gravity before you actually intellectually appreciate it.

There are developmental tests that ratify this chronology. For example, when babies are placed over a transparent floor with a drop, they will stop and freeze before the drop.

This makes obvious evolutionary sense.

Evolution, as a process, has selected for a deep prioritisation of the baby's capacity to look after itself from a gravitational perspective.

You have no ancestors who were babies without this capacity. At some stage, your cavewoman predecessor, shortly after waking up from a microsleep, was horrified to find her baby not in the cave, retrieved it from the edge of a cliff it hadn't crawled off.

So this is, at this point, basically hardware.

What is interesting is if you have small children, you see how they will post-hoc backfill an intellectual understanding of such things.

My four-year-old son is asking a lot of questions about why things fall over, understanding the centre of gravity as he builds blocks and rides bikes. And all he is really doing is giving himself a language to talk about a force he has felt since birth, just like all who have come before him.

It is only because I am consciously articulating the phenomenon that it becomes apparent how deeply it influences my life. Without an awareness of this, I would have died many times over.

Analogous to this is Steven Pressfield's concept of resistance.

Like gravity, it is absolutely the water you swim in, and when you set yourself exercises to write something in minutes, it is a very artificial and contrived situation which highlights and isolates the variable of resistance.

For me, it shows up as stupefaction.

My mind will go absolutely blank.
If it weren’t for the clock, I would simply tell myself, "I don't have any ideas right now." But if you push through, last the initial shit-for-brains feeling, it's crazy how quickly they come. However, I will forget tomorrow again. As I said, resistance is preternatural.

It is subtle but all-powerful. No different to gravity.

Julia Cameron talks about how your artist is an inner child. My actual child is revivifying gravity for me as a force of nature. My inner artist child is similarly revivifying my cellular knowing of resistance.

It is not some big, visible monster but rather a sophisticated, incredibly deep, and subtle deterrent force that stops people before they even start. Many of my clients take quite some time to even realize just how blocked they really are.

It avoids leveraging conscious pain because that would give you something to oppose. It's diabolically effective.

You turn your mind to creation, and you are instantly at sea, with no seawall to push off against. You flounder. You tell yourself ‘im not the artsy one in the family'. It is more powerful because it is so axiomatic. But a handful of front crawl strokes in, and you can be cruising. You can see how stuck you really felt and how fluid you actually were. Pushing past this resistance shows you how big your treasure trove of creativity is. Resistance may be powerful but creativity is infinite.

Another metaphor to understand how resistance functions societally would be to appreciate the mechanisms of power in any fascist state.

It is not the show trials, horrors of war, or draconian punishments of individuals. While scary and awful, they are not the primary oppressors of the human spirit.

The lion's share of oppression, once the state is up and running, comes from the grinding, evil attrition of the spirit by petty and pointless bureaucracy, obfuscation, and misinformation. Resistance has a fascist grip on many blocked creatives. They often have been diagnosed with informational porcessing issues.

This may sound spooky, but I think some unknown quotient of "informational processing" challenges people face cannot be understood and managed by mainstream materialist psychology or psychiatry. I would posit some part of it may just plain old resistance.

I have sent adult clients for neuropsychological evaluations for ADHD, autism, IQ testing, dyslexia, and dysgraphia. I often work alongside mainstream clinicians qualified to perform these costly tests. I respect their necessary work. Yet one factor, amorphous and so not appropriate for referral or assessment, is the degree to which this might be caused by resistance.

When clients become creatively unblocked, I have found it can modulate their capacity to process and retrieve information.

Resistance I believe has the capacity to scramble normal cognitive mechanisms. While this is a nuanced topic, I do encourage clients exploring psychosocial or practical informational processing issues to engage in artistic expression just before completing tasks like emails or proposals. It isn't a case of either or, but both and. They can make their own mind up about why they struggle to come up with coherent thoughts and ideas.

When people engage in creativity, their capacity to process information across the board seems to change. I have no science to back this up. It is simply an observation - but the difference is often significant.

——

This poem found its way, but the back end needed a lot of work. I must ship it today.

The lesson is that most of life does indeed need to be composed of the getting and the doing.

This aligns with the Australian culture of not overthinking things (a largely healthy attitude). But while this might be a good modal strategy, every now and then, fall back on art.

plain old craft if unexamined, risks becoming grift.

There is an art to saying more than you need to, reading around something, and taking your time.

Unabridged.

Sometimes, the winds of real change are long-winded.