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I wrote this piece right before the election. Pauline Oliveros’s work and practices have been an important part of how I have come to understand how to navigate our very noisy present.

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I wrote for Cinepunx about my favorite movie of the past few years, MANDY. 

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The Communicable Crisis in She Dies Tomorrow

*******************SPOILERS***************

So many structures of contemporary American life are, even in the middle of a pandemic, designed to help us ignore and deny our mortality. Amy Seimetz, director of She Dies Tomorrow, punctures that bubble with a movie about a form of communicable certainty of death. We watch the color-drenched chain of transmission. The initial host, a woman in a bad way, calls her friend for help. The supportive friend assumes a relapse is underway.  But the problem is not your quotidian passive self-harm with substances. It’s the sudden onset of a deep knowing that she will die tomorrow, which she then somehow imparts on the friend who has come to help her, who immediately goes on and spreads it to everyone at a dinner party. The problem begins and ends in the desert. The achingly slow scenes mimic the warp of time a person can experience in the dessert. Rebecca Solnit theorizes that the harsh, punishing god of the Abrahamic religions could only have developed in the desert, where the fragile human figure is dwarfed by nature’s enormity and time is measured in shadows. The movie’s title promises a next day that taunts, but in the end there is only the terminal present. 

I want desperately to communicate with others about the climate crisis, but I don’t want to traumatize them. I don’t want to spread a communicable panic about the collapse of the ecosphere and what that would mean for each of our fragile bodies, as a species that evolved under certain planetary boundaries that we are exceeding faster every day. Even outside of the reality of a warming planet, the future has never been guaranteed. Death comes quickly & without warning; this body will be a corpse, as the Buddhist scripture goes. Accepting that can really transform the day you do have. But what if you live, did you ever think of that? Sometimes we resolve the dread that feels so intolerable in the mind and body by foreclosing on a future of doom. But what if our corporeal form persists, as do the institutions and systems that buzz around us, though now in a state of disintegration and collapse? Whether we are checked out or fully embodied? I don’t want to make you feel bad by talking about the facts, and I know about emotional contagion. But maybe there’s a way to make space for each other’s grief and mortality without falling headlong into existential trauma. Maybe. 

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Sorry, Cassandra.

So, it's definite then

It's written in the stars, darlings

Everything must come to an end - Susanne Sundfør

I first learned about the climate crisis in 2008, as an undergrad at Hunter College, in a class called The History and Science of Climate Change. For the next decade I would struggle with how to process and act on the scientific paradigm shift climate change required: that human activity could disrupt the climate system and create a planetary ecosystem shift making Earth uninhabitable to human life. I became a climate justice activist and attempted to work directly on The Problem which was actually, as philosopher Timothy Morton writes, a hyperobject, something so systemic and enormous in size and scope as to be almost unintelligible to human awareness. I’ve cycled through probably every single response a person could have to this knowledge, despair, ecstasy, rage, hope. I’ve landed somewhere close to what I might call engaged bewilderment. For me, his particular locale has a soundtrack, and it’s Susanne Sundfør’s cinematic dance dystopia Ten Love Songs, an album that tells a story of love and loss in the Anthropocene. Sundfør is a sonic death doula for the Neoliberal project, with a uniquely Scandinavian version of bleak optimism. To truly grapple with this time of escalating transition, we need to really face what is, not what we hope or fear will be, but what is actually happening. A throbbing beat with shimmering synths around which to orient your dancing mortal envelope can’t hurt.

Susanne Sundfør’s Ten Love Songs was released a few days after Valentine’s Day in February of 2015, six months after I had been organizing Buddhists and meditators for the Peoples Climate March.  I was already a fan, having first heard her voice as part of her collaboration with dreamy synth-pop outfit m83 on the Oblivion soundtrack. Oblivion was visually striking but felt like a long music video. The soaring synths and Sundfør’s powerful voice drove the plot more than the acting, though I loved how Andrea Riseborough played the tragic character Vika, whose story could have been more central to the plot but was sidelined for a traditional Tom Cruise romantic centerpiece. But since the movie was almost proud of its style over investment in substance, the music stood out. The soundscapes were as expansive as the green-screened vistas of 2077  in the movie. It was just nostalgic enough while also feeling totally new, a paradox encapsulated in the name of m83’s similarly wistful and sweeping Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.  I am not exempt from taking comfort in style that signifies a previous era, and I am also not alone in it. It’s a huge industry, and while the MAGA-style yearning for a previous era is one manifestation, maybe there are ways to acknowledge culture as cyclical in a way that doesn’t sacrifice traditional knowledge to some imagined myth of perpetual progress.

When Ten Love Songs came out the following year, I listened to it on repeat for days.  Sundfør seemed to have absorbed the music-driven sci-fi into a concept album, with m83 providing her with a whole new panopoly of sounds at her disposal. Like Oblivion,  Ten Love Songs told the story of a future dystopia with high speed chases, nihilistic pleasure-seeking and operatic decadence against a backdrop of technocratic inequality. It mixed electro-pop with chamber music and I listened to it on a Greyhound ride to Atlantic City in the middle of snowy February. I hadn’t felt like this since high school, that a full album was a sort of soundtrack to my own life, which I could experience as cinematic in some way while the music was playing. This situated me in my own story, of studying climate change as an undergrad and graduating into a financial collapse, working as a personal assistant to an author writing about ecological collapse and ritual use of psychedelics, to joining a Buddhist community and organizing spiritual activists around climate justice. 

Ten Love Songs is a breakup album, with lyrics telling of endings and running out of time. But it didn’t read to me as an album about a single human romantic relationship coming to an end. It felt like a series of vignettes about the planet and its ecosphere breaking up with us, all of us. People. Some songs like Accelerate, one of the album’s singles, throb in an anthem to nihilistic numbness and speeding up into a catastrophe that feels inevitable. Fade Away is a bit lighter, tonally and lyrically, (and if you listen, please note the exquisitely perfect placement of what sounds like a toaster “ding!”), but is still about fading away, falling apart. The way the songs seem to drive a narrative of anthropocenic collapse built on science fiction film scores, the combination of orchestra and techno-pop, absolutely draws on Sundfør’s experience collaborating with m83 for the Oblivion soundtrack, which itself combined Anthony Gonzalez’s love for the adult-scripted teen dramas of his own 80’s adolescence. In Ten Love Songs, Sundfør takes what she learned from this collaboration and scores not a movie but a life experience of living through ecological collapse and all of the heartbreak and desire that erupts in a time when everything seems so close to the knife’s edge.

I am reminded of another Scandinavian dance album that was extremely danceable yet harbored within it a sense of foreboding. The Visitors, ABBA’s eighth studio album, was considered their venture into more mature and complex music. The two couples who comprised the band had divorced the year before it was released, and the entire atmosphere of the album is paranoid, gloomy, and tense. The cover shows the four musicians, on opposite sides of a dark room, ignoring each other. Each song is melancholy and strange in its own way, unique for a pop ensemble like Abba. One song in particular showcases their ability to use an archetype of narrative tragedy and prophesy to tell the story of regret. Cassandra is sung from the perspective of those who didn’t heed the woman cursed by Zeus to foretell the future but never be believed. 

I have always considered myself a pretty big Abba fan, something my high school choir instructor thought was riotously funny. I was born in the 80’s and nobody in my family liked disco, so I seemed like something of an anachronism. But pop music, especially synth-oriented pop, has always felt like a brain massage to me. It could get my inner motor moving when I felt utterly collapsed in resignation to the scary chaos of my early life. But I only discovered the song Cassandra in 2017, while giving The Visitors a full listen. It felt like I had never heard the song before, though, as a fan I must have. But something about 2015 made the song stand out more. It starts with piano, soft tambourine, and the ambient sound of a harbor. It has a coastal Mediterranean vibe, as some Abba songs do, foreshadowing Cassandra’s removal from her home city, an event she foretold but could not get anyone to believe. It’s a farewell song of regret, echoing the regret the members of Abba felt about their own breakups. 

We feel so full of promise at the dawn of a new relationship. Only after the split can we look back and say we saw the fissures in the bond. The signs were there. Why did we ignore them? This happens on an individual level but the Cassandra paradox is an archetype that climate scientists and journalists are very familiar with. This particular Abba song, and the Visitors album overall, uses this archetype to tell the story of a breakup in retrospect. With climate change, the warnings have been there, even before science discovered the rising carbon in the atmosphere. Indigenous peoples have been warning of ecological collapse since colonization began. Because of white supremacy and an unwavering belief in “progress,” perpetual economic and technological development and growth, warnings from any source but especially marginalized sources have been noise to those who benefit from that perpetual growth model and from white supremacy itself. Is there a way to undo the Cassandra curse and render warnings signal BEFORE some major event turns us all into the chorus from Abba’s song, singing “some of us wanted- but none of us could--  listen to words of warning?” Composer Pauline Oliveros called listening a radical act. It is especially so when we listen actively to the sounds and signals of those we would otherwise overlook.

When I look back at my life in the time that Sundfør’s Ten Love Songs and m83’s movie music seems nostalgic for, the late 1980’s in New Jersey,  I was a child with deeply dissociative and escapist tendencies, which helped me survive unresolved grief, loss, and chaos. I recognize my love for Abba’s hypnotic synth music as a surrendering to the precise and driving rhythm of an all-encompassing sound experience. I also see how my early life prepared me to be sensitized to the story climate science was telling when I finally discovered it in 2008. I had already grown up with Save the Whales assemblies and poster-making contests, with a heavy emphasis on cutting six-pack rings so that sea life would not be strangled to death. I knew what it was like to see something terrible happening all around you and to feel powerless to stop it, because of the way my parents seemed incapable of and unsupported in their acting out their own traumatic dysregulation. Wounds, unable to heal, sucking other people into the abyss. I escaped through reading science fiction, listening to music like Abba and Aphex Twin loud enough to rattle my bones. I wanted to overwhelm my own dysregulated nervous system. I dreamed of solitude on other planets, sweeping grey vistas, being the  protagonist of my own story where nothing ever hurt because ice ran through my veins and the fjords around me. My home planet was dying, and nobody could hear those of us screaming into the wind about it.

Ten Love Songs woke up that lost cosmic child who had banished herself to another solar system. Songs of decadence, songs of endings, songs of loss. Though that album was not overtly about climate change, Sundfør did talk about ecological collapse in interviews for her radically different follow-up album Music For People In Trouble. After the success of Ten Love Songs, Sundfør chose to travel to places that she said “might not be around much longer” in order to chronicle the loss of the biosphere for her new album. It is more expressly and urgently about the current global political moment, but the seeds for those themes were present and in my opinion much more potent in the poppier album. But maybe that’s the escapist in me.

The old forms that brought us to this point are in need of end-of-life care. Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchal theocratic nationalism, neoliberalism, they all need death doulas. Escapism makes sense in response to traumatic stimulus, and for many of us it may have helped us survive difficult circumstances. But if we are to face what it means to be alive on this planet at this moment, we might be here to be present to and help facilitate and ease the process of putting these systems to rest. And maybe this work is not at odds with a dance party. The ability to be visionary about shared alternatives to these dying systems is not inherently escapist, when we are willing to take the steps together to live into those new stories. What would happen if cursed Cassandras, instead of pleading with existing power structures to heed warnings that sound like noise to them, turned to each other to restore the civic body through listening, through bearing witness to each others unacknowledged and thwarted grief over losses unacknowledged by those same systems of coercive power?

Engaged bewilderment means my version of hope, informed by Rebecca Solnit’s work on the topic, comes from the acceptance that things will happen that I could never have imagined possible. Climate change is happening and there are certain scientific certainties built into that trajectory. Some of it is written in the stars. But as with any dynamic system change, we do not know exactly how it will all shake out. These unknowns can be sources of fear and despair, but there is also the possibility for agency, choice and experimentation. The trajectory of my individual life was always going to end in death. Does that make it a failure? Or does it render each choice and engagement of movement towards the unknown an ecstatic act? As the old forms collapse, no need to apologize to the oracles. At this point they are dancing, and hope you’ll join.

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healing the mother! wound

I’ve wanted to write about my favorite film of 2017 for some time, but it felt too late. Recent events have surfaced that “DON’T SIT THERE, THE SINK’S NOT BRACED!” feeling, so I think I’ll get into it. For awhile I felt so protective of my feelings about Darren Aronofsky’s mother! I gave myself up to the experience of the film and let me tell you, it was a familiar sensation. Bewildering, over - the - top, heightening to a crescendo of madness. Is this not the feeling-tone of the times? What some saw as corny, I saw as camp. What some saw as nonsensical I experienced as an allegory about how we treat things and people perceived as feminine, including nature. In reality, when you punish, gaslight and torment someone or when you rapidly extract all resources (emotional or geological) without replenishing them, systemic breakdown occurs. But in Aronofsky’s fever-pitched horror, all is consumed by fire and renewed in the end for another go-around. That is the perspective of extractive capitalism and the patriarchal paradigm we’re just maybe starting outgrow.

But there was another reason I enjoyed the movie. As with much horror, I get a great sense of catharsis by being lead through an evocation of visceral revulsion and fear. When the outside content mirrors the inside feeling that is trapped in the body beneath all my stories about being reasonable, acting in right relationship with the world, it sucks it out. This feeling is extracted through elicitation and mirroring. It’s why theater was once used to manage the shame of the populus, so that it did not need to be vented onto a sacrificial scapegoat.  People see Donald Trump as an angry authoritarian, which is true, but I think his scariest skill is weaponizing our shame and offloading our blame onto The Other. Be it the immigrant, the trans person, the disability, people reach their catharsis through frothy extroverted blame. Otherwise they might have to feel the shame themselves: the shame of living in a country that even before Trump tortured people, created disposable populations through racism and deindustrialization, and interfered in other countries’ elections.

Do you ever have nightmares where there are people intruding on your home, your workspace, your physical space? That being reasonable does not stop them? I do. This movie was a surgical maneouver in terms of evoking that particular feeling. It’s an archetypal evocation of what trauma does to the senses. And this is where Aronofsky’s well-honed camp sensibility comes into play. Some people think of campiness as a uniquely gay aesthetic, but I think that comes from the fact that campiness is a survival strategy. To be able to take something tragic and make a joke out of it without being flippant may seem corny to some, but for some of us, I think queer people in particular, it has been a way to navigate what it means to be a marginalized person without giving people the satisfaction of knowing that we’re hurting. Aronofsky seems incredibly in touch with this aesthetic and deploys it to soften some of the revulsion. I CACKLED when Kristen Wiig shot a row of hostages in the head and said OH THERE YOU ARE, THE INSPIRATION. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN HIDING? It could be seen as heavy handed, I guess, but sometimes we have to put the absurdities of the daily emotional reality of living in a world where we don’t even have autonomy over our bodies and wellbeing in bold letters so we can laugh to let the pain out.

On a visceral level, trauma is formed when a person’s boundaries are ignored and violated in a way that is out of their control.  Part of living with trauma is always questioning whether you’re having a reasonable reaction to things. This could be childhood trauma but I think it could also be the trauma of being a woman, a queer person, a person of color living in a white heteropatriarchy. When you constantly question and marginalize your own reactions to things, people can take advantage of that, sometimes through what has come to be called gaslighting. The person who questions her very ability to accurately understand her own suffering and who explains it away is an ideal match for the gaslighter who may or may not even realize that they are taking advantage of this individuals external locus of control. The person who has learned to seek security from sources outside herself — this often happens when a person has to scan their environment for changes in a parent”s mood or volatile outbursts— she learns to mistrust and silence her own internal alarm bells. She has been groomed for manipulation.  A person like this is easy to manipulate through weaponized shame, something narcissists and predators deploy expertly in their selection of victims.

It’s a bit like being Jennifer Lawrence in mother! She questions what her own senses are telling her and ends up entirely consumed by the conflagration of someone else’s narcissism. She is expected to be maternal and accommodating even as her situation escalates from bewildering to that of a military occupation and ultimately her own destruction. Any attention she brings or desire for accountability makes HER the problem.

Speaking of trauma and camp, in in I, Tonya we watch Tonya Harding be groomed by her upbringing to accept abusive treatment from her partner, all set to anthemic party rock.  Harding is not quite the innocent Virgin Mary stand-in of Jennifer Lawrence’s character so she complicates our ability to assign blame. Tonya defended herself. This made her a problem, such that when assigning accountability for Nancy Kerrigan’s assault, Harding was banned for life from her skill and passion on the assumption that she was he puppet master, while the people who planned and carried out the attack dodged any responsibility. Harding was not maternal or accommodating. She was rough and mouthy. She was trained to be ruthless, and endured ridicule from her own mother. We search for someone to blame. Tonya? Her mother? Intergenerational trauma? Welcome to the mother wound, that vortex through which we send ourselves on cycles of perpetuating the very thing we suffered. Trauma is a time warp, sending us in spirals around events and attachments that never properly bonded in our formative years. We see in Tonya Harding a woman who seeks out the type of relationship she has come to feel she deserves, one which revisits her again and again with the treatment she has formed an identity around.

From a Buddhist context, as Sharon Salzberg teaches, “we have to acknowledge that there will always be praise and blame.” Our minds vacillate between the desire to praise one party and assign blame to another for anything that happens in the world. But when things are a little more complicated than that, our attention is short circuited. Either we can be with that complication, or we seek simpler versions of events. I, Tonya made it perfectly clear that the new 24-hour cable news cycle relied on a pretty much fabricated rivalry between Kerrigan and Harding in order to maintain the attention of viewers seeking those endorphin windfalls that happen when praise and blame are appropriately assigned.

I do believe the archaic mother! Is waking up and saying, yes, me too. As feeling restores to the parts of our culture which have been severed and numbed by the isolationist logic of the patriarchal paradigm, there will be pain just as when blood comes back to a frozen limb. Our senses are coming back alive as the restorative nature of speaking truth emerges. This is medicine for a world that has trafficked in silence. When we begin to feel our connection between the individual and the sense of place and collective, we will have to reckon with a lot of pain. But it will allow us to move to a place where Jennifer Lawrence’s character would have been able to replenish her resources instead of being burnt to a crisp. I think we’re in the transition between paradigms and it carries with it a risk of being sucked back into the mother! wound. But we can help each other hold the space through story. I’ll hopefully be doing a little more of that here.

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An Insurrection of Feeling

I had the opportunity to see Brit Marling, creatrix and star of the the cinematic novel The OA, in conversation with E. Alex Jung as part of Vulture fest last weekend.  It was phenomenal to see Brit interviewed by someone who understands her work and doesn’t feel the need to back her into a manic pixie dream corner about the more esoteric and charismatic aspects of her creative output. **This piece contains moderate spoilers about season 1**

A preoccupation with the unseen.

Jung started out by asking Brit about what seemed like unintentional spiritual content-- unintentional because her interest lies, according to her, in the unseen. Whether one uses science or spiritual practice to approach the unseen seems, to her, secondary to the curiosity that leads to an engagement with unknowing. The tension between science and spirituality as methods of investigation rather than beliefs to take on blind faith is a huge aspect of Marling’s entire body of work, from movies like Another Earth and I, Origins to The Sound of My Voice and most recently and thoroughly, The OA. Part of what might enrage people about the endings of Marling’s stories is the refusal to give a definitive version of what “actually” happened. In doing this, she said she hopes to point to something “viscerally true.” 

Love it or hate it, that visceral quality to the OA, to it’s embracing of radical sincerity, is palpable. During the conversation, Jung showed some clips from The OA he’d cued up for the talk. It was wild to me that even though I’ve seen the climactic cafeteria scene upwards of 20 times, it still gave me chills for the duration of its being on screen. For some people, that felt sense is one of cringing, that raw feeling of needing to move away from the stimulus. Through some body-based meditation practices I’ve learned to lean into the cringe, to not shy away from it. And I think, in that space created and held by a work like The OA, I feel myself connect with that truth that lies outside of the binary did this happen or not? “Who could be so bold as to say that they know?” said Marling.

This reminds me of Keats’ concept of “negative capability.” -- that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason -- I learned this term before I started practicing Buddhism, in the context of a poetry workshop. We needed, as poets, Anne Waldman taught us, to be able to entertain entirely contradictory ideas without succumbing to the need to grasp for solidity. Because life is not, in fact solid. It is in constant flux. The dance between mystery and rationality is dynamic and constant and if we choose to engage it actively, we can navigate this great strange experience of being embodied. “Quantum physics is our best stab at the foundation of what’s going on but eventually every model becomes a fable,” Marling said. 

An Insurrection of Feeling

When asked how she would describe the show in a pitch meeting, we all laughed, and then Brit said: “A traumatized girl returns to the suburbs and stirs up an insurrection of feeling - permission to move bodies in weird, uncomfortable and cathartic ways.” She spoke of wanting to craft an antidote to cinematic violence, and the 5 movements become such a curative force in a very material way in the narrative of The OA. “Is there a way to be in your body, and move with the body, that could be awkward but could also serve as a kind of connective tissue between the people doing it?” Story so often acts as such a cohering factor, but language so often causes us to collapse possibility into solidity. Movement, she said tapped into something much more visceral. Where a story can be a bridge between subjectivities, language as a technology still always leaves something out. Something about the way a traumatized woman came into an intuitive sense of the body driven by desire for escape provided a much more instant hit of feeling.

Marling described Phyllis as a tiger protecting her cubs, and I remembered the book Waking the Tiger, which is a groundbreaking book on trauma by Peter Levine, which explores the idea of trauma being trapped in the body because the same fight flight or freeze impulse that impacts animals under threat of death happens to humans but when we have no natural way to discharge it, it becomes lodged, and we become fixated. We circle around the trauma, drawing similar events into our life as a way to give ourselves a chance to finally discharge that energy in the body. So, a traumatized woman, through the magic of guardian angels or intuition or some kind of magic of place develops a language of movement that not only allows her to escape harm but is a gift she can give, a permission to a group of floundering young boys limited by society’s conceptions of what masculinity has to mean.

The human mind has a beautiful capacity for storytelling. It’s how we make sense of the world. The key, I think, as a meditator and a creative person, is to know when our mind is telling a story that we have naturalized and are living inside of. That way we can become more flexible with the stories we choose. As one of my favorite teachers, the Venerable Robina Courtin says, choose the stories that help you connect with other people and that help you build character. And if we can bridge the subjectivities of enough people through this technology of storytelling, we can, as Marling puts it, tell our way out of cultural trauma, like Scheherazade. 

At the end of the conversation Jung and Marling joked that the event, on a Sunday morning, was a bit like church. I think we could all probably use such a sanctuary-- a place where we can investigate the things considered unseen or intangible but which we know provide the very foundations of our lives. Not to the exclusion of the seen and the known, but as a dynamic and unexpected, visceral dance. 

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Had a chance last night to talk about a few of my favorite things: feminism, The OA, and Occupy on the SJW podcast

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A Gateless Gate in the Gap between Stories

**HELL OF OA SPOILERS BELOW

“The future is dark. Not dark, like, bad. Just dark. You can't see it. And maybe living is just bringing light to what you need in a day.” - The OA

I watched the entire season of The OA, a show that is closer in form to a novel than anything else, in a single day, right after it was released. I haven’t written about The OA until now because the feeling it left me with was so new, so unique, that I wanted to leave it in its wordless form for a bit before I responded or described. It was a new sort of feeling, a short circuiting of the duality of joy and sadness. I needed to hold space for this sense experience, which felt very bodily, before trying to analyze it. Words felt brutish for this nascent opening of the heart. The form of storytelling involved in the narrative(s) of The OA is like a Russian doll; it’s an elliptical narrative where each of the parts relates to the whole in new constellations on every re-watch (I’ve seen it three times now, and it feels like a different experience each time). The creators have said they used mathematics to construct the narrative, and the result really bends the part of the mind that expects time and myths to unfold in a straightforward manner. But maybe this method is more closely aligned with how things actually unfold in our lives, and that’s part of what has been so transformative about watching it.

The OA is about creating a portal to find loved ones in order to help them, and somehow it seems like watching the show engenders a similar emotional effect, the form and content merged into a sort of hyper dimensional object. Well, not everyone experienced that effect. Some people really, really hated the ending. But others who I’ve had exchanges with on the OA Subreddit, reported feeling an emotion they’d never experienced before. Atheists reported feeling the closest thing to ‘spirituality’ that they’d ever experienced after the last episode. So what exactly has Brit Marling done to us?!

The OA, like Scheherazade, finds her salvation in storytelling, in weaving an alternate reality out of the creative capacity of her mind. Whether it is merely the act of storytelling that saves, or that by writing ourselves off the page we bring stories to life, is left unresolved, which many found unsatisfying. Though the creators have hesitated to confirm or deny any fan theories, creator Zal Batmanglij tweeted that he particularly enjoyed a reading of the show called The OA, Buddhism, and Existential TV. This piece explores the idea that the different readings or conclusions one could draw about the show (Prairie was mentally ill and the story she tells are her unmedicated ravings / Prairie is in fact the OA and came back from death to avert a great evil / It was all a dream / Prairie is a manipulative cult leader / the list goes on, check the Subreddit!) are not actually incompatible. We tend to think in Either/Or logic, but things really open up to us if we adopt a perspective of Both/And. This syntax of thought is more closely aligned, according to Buddhist philosophy, with how the world actually exists. Based on the Buddha’s “Unanswered Questions,” what if we can rest with the dissonance of this paradox? What happens to our consciousness if we are able to accept: Yes, No, Both, Neither? Robert Anton Wilson, who died 10 years ago today, called this Maybe Logic, and it just may be a tool to confront the world as revealed to us in the wake of the recent election.

The loveliest piece i’ve seen written about the OA is by @Jo_Livingstone. It’s called What The OA Tells Us About Plato’s Cave and the Human Heart. It’s a piece you should read if you’d like a little more plot dissection that I’m giving here, and it argues that The OA is a new form of storytelling, one that ‘evangelizes against atomization,’ which is a phrase I want to get tattooed across my chest (but probably won’t because I already have too many word-based tattoos). What is the opposite of atomization, the term used to describe the impact of industrial civilization on the individual, turning us into discrete and separate units? Its opposite is interdependence, or, the interrelation and dependence of beings on one another. The OA is the catalyst for the cultivation of a liminal community: she has gathered a number of uninitiated boys and their teacher who has lost her purpose, they meet periodically in an abject place, and through their realization of interdependence they pass through the liminal space. I have a feeling if there is a second season we might see what gifts they bring back from the darkness. 

Interdependence also happens to be an important concept in Buddhism, the idea being that ultimately, we exist in relationship, and not as separate atomized units with impermeable boundaries.  Buddhism doesn’t necessarily say that you don’t have a self, just that we don’t exist in the way that we often assume we do. The reality is that we depend on one another. In Guardians of the Galaxy, Groot sacrifices himself to save his friends because he realizes the reality that he is not separate from them. He decenters his sense of identity from the illusion that this ‘self’ is contained only within the boundaries of his body and acknowledges the deeper reality that he could not exist except in loving relationship to his friends, and therefore sacrificing himself to save them was a manifestation of the Buddhist awakened heart. Altruism is the ultimate survival strategy, as we also see in Interstellar when love becomes the bond that influences people to cross space and time in order to save the entirety of the human race.  Empathy is how we sense this connection. Empathy in itself is not good or bad, but a sense experience. Our response to this sensation of experiencing the pain and joy of another as ourselves, if realistic, will be compassionate once we begin to see how we actually exist. 

The community that has formed in the OA Subreddit is unlike any fan community I’ve experienced. I actually tend to avoid fan communities because my experience of media feels so private. Writing in this blog has been a way to reach out about that, but I’ve always been less interested in rationally explaining media than I am in looking at archetypal patterns and seeing what media can open up for me. Because so much of the interweaving and nonlinear storylines of the OA are left up to interpretation, people don’t tend to disagree with even the wildest theories put forth by other fans in the Subreddit. Instead, they build on each others’ ideas and interpretations, and what has been forming is something of a living document plumbing the depths of the hearts and minds of the people most open to this new form of storytelling. So much of online interaction and, indeed, human consciousness, involves pointing out what is wrong and what doesn’t work. Evolutionarily this did benefit us as developing humans. We needed to be able to notice the tiny out-of-the-ordinary break in the pattern of the forrest floor to recognize that this meant a predator was near, so we are primed for this sort of information.

But we also have the gift of imagination and the subjunctive: the ‘what if.” It’s easier, and often important, to point out what doesn’t work. But we run the risk of atrophy of the imaginative capacity if that is all we do. The OA Subreddit community goes against this grain and instead of pointing out what is wrong with each theory, people easily make the imaginative leap to improvise connections between the richly layered storylines and symbolism. So many threads: cults, trauma, string theory, Russian mythology, Saturn’s rings, Near Death Experiences, coming of age, the afterlife, shamanism, embodied experience, madness, suburban alienation, all interwoven and interdependent, allowed to co-exist, with the space held by a group of strangers all moved by Netflix show. This is training for a skill we will need to imagine a new world into being, and I’m beyond impressed that this show was somehow the technology to create this kind of community.

The central figure of The OA is Prairie, called Nina as a child, who is blinded during a Near Death Experience as a child. The initial mystery of the show is how she regained her sight while missing for a number of years. The  gift of prophesy is mythologically related to blindness, as prophesy is information the soothsayer did not gain through the normal senses, but through a ‘second sight,’ one turned inward. Prophesy is also related to madness, because a person who lives with a foot in the future might sound incomprehensible to people still thinking by the previous, disintegrating models of how the world works. We are living in such a time right now, one which Charles Eisenstein calls The Space Between Stories. This space is considered sacred in traditional cultures because it is SO VOLATILE. Anything can happen in this space because we don’t know what the next guiding myth will be. This gap was sacred because you needed trained people to hold the space, to prevent people from jumping the proverbial gun out of fear, which could throw everything into a new, dangerous trajectory.

Joseph Campbell said we can’t anymore know what the next myth will be than we can predict what we’ll dream at night. but we can tell what the myth won’t be: the myth of separation, or of returning to an edenic innocence after a fall. But maybe shows like The OA, and Sense8, Westworld, The Leftovers, and Stranger Things, portent the new myth: One where we wake up to the fact that we are in a story and use this knowledge to find the others we were meant to find so we can be ready for a moment, maybe only a single moment that we’d been unknowingly preparing for our whole lives.  A story, like Guardians of the Galaxy, where the reality that We Are Groot,--connected, an ecology of selves, interdependent--  is revealed. I think this story is incubating, but it needs us to carry it out.

I teach a heart-centered meditation class that is rooted in the Buddhist practice of Metta, or Lovingkindness. In this practice we learn to lean into that feeling of open-heartedness. This awakened heart is a thing of my teacher compares this to the feeling we get when we’ve slid into the subway car right as the door started to close. We’re so stoked and we look around, feeling good, and make eye contact but immediately look away out of awkwardness. We were so open for a second, looking for a high-five, and then we feel compelled to close off. Being open, and earnest, and letting our heart melt a little, feels weird! We are trained out of it as we get older. Then there’s that sensation of beginning to cringe. We pull away. But what if we could lean into that sensation of openness, of free-fall, for just another second? We’re trained to protect the heart, not just metaphorically but from a physical standpoint it makes sense to protect the organ that is vital to your life-force flowing through your body. But more often than not we are treating the threat of potential emotional pain like a physical extinction event when this might be cutting us off from being aware of the reality of our interdependence. 

 I think of a group called the Zen Peacemakers, who I talk about in almost every one of my meditation classes. They practice three vows: Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Transforming Suffering. Not Knowing means seeing if we can let go of our assumptions about how things are going to go, since previous models might not apply to this current moment. We let go of preconceived notions, and then we Bear Witness, which means being present to the suffering we see. Often, when we witness suffering, we feel the need to turn away, or we want to jump in and fix it. Both of these are products of our discomfort, and might not actually help. So when we Bear Witness, we are simply present, someplace between turning away and jumping in with a solution. By not knowing, and being with what’s happening in this moment, the transformation is said to spring spontaneously. The thing that will help THIS particular situation will be clear, and you can just do it.

This same skill is useful for those moments when we feel so open, so connected to a person or group of people, that it we feel utterly vulnerable. Vulnerability is scary! There is a risk of getting hurt. But can we learn to rest in that openness without shutting down? Or without picking a specific story to stick to? Can we be with this, that, both and neither? Can we be in that gap without grasping for a solution? I think The OA, and stories like it, are teaching us to do this. And I can’t wait to see what emerges from the portal they’ve opened. 

[spacecrone]

Always Arriving

When things fall apart it is because they are transitioning, radically reconfiguring. Do you want to have a part in that creation or does the next dream-state call?

It’s been two weeks since the night of the election. As someone who wasn’t thrilled about the Democratic candidate and who also wasn’t buying the assurance that she would win in a landslide, I decided to go bowling that night instead of watching the returns. Whatever would happen would happen without my being glued to a lifestream, I felt.

Two weeks later I’m still cycling through many feelings, and leaning hard on my Buddhist practice to stay grounded. A model I’ve found particularly useful is the Zen Peacemakers’ Vows of 1. Not Knowing, 2. Bearing Withess, and 3. Transforming suffering through compassionate action. The idea is that if I can let go of my preconceived notions about a situation, and really pay attention to it without succumbing to the urge to turn away in despair or to jump in with the solution I think will fix it, then the transformational action will be clear. Still waiting for that clarity, but in the meanwhile it’s allowed me to be cognizant of the various ways my brain seeks to blame, to scapegoat, and to vent tiny fractured pieces of my emotional life on Twitter or Facebook.

I saw, and loved, Arrival, which was able to fully transport me into its world even amidst my preoccupation with the future. What follows are some thoughts on what I felt was the main theme of the movie: the ability of language to shape how we perceive the world. ***There are some  spoilers, and Arrival is a great movie to see with no knowledge of what’s coming in the narrative, so maybe read this after you’ve seen it!***

In Arrival, Amy Adams plays an expert in linguistics who is invited by the military to attempt to translate the communications of alien visitors who have arrived all over the planet without clear purpose. The intent of being able to communicate with them is to figure out why they’re here. As the story unfolds and Amy’s character begins to decipher their written language, which looks like circular Zen calligraphy, the way she perceives the world, and more specifically TIME, begins to shift. This brings us to the theory that language impacts not just how we think about the world, but how we actually perceive it. By learning the language the aliens use, Amy’s character is able to view time in a nonlinear fashion, which opens her up to perception of the future.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that the various intertwining white nationalist and conservative movements have ingested the language of the Left and weaponized it in a way that is neutralizing opposition. From using Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a playbook to taking the language of identity politics and using it for white nationalist means as a way to draw false equivalence, WE JUST MIGHT NEED NEW LANGUAGE to talk about this new situation we find ourselves in. Because there is a reactionary and conservative strain of though attempting to pull our shared story and individual narratives back to an imagined utopia of ‘great again’ and a new way of using language might be the only way to stop feeding right into their agenda.

We are in the midst of shift from the Industrial age to the Info age, and the metaphors we use are thusly changing from machine metaphors to cybernetic ones. As long as we cling to using old language to describe our daily lives we will be baffled by things that happen.

Of course, the world itself isn’t new. What is happening is a revealing. When you’re asleep it’s an intrusion on the dream that wakes you up. Reality has impinged upon a dream many had about a post-racist America with shared definitions of liberty and equality,  and this impingement is waking us up to the reality of what we have created. 

What would new language open us up to? The narrative we have used to understand the world around us has collapsed and we’re not sure exactly how these pieces will reconfigure. Will we even have a grand narrative by which we understand human nature and the events we live through? My feeling is, maybe not. That’s something to be aware of when holding space for a new world to be born. It already exists in emergent form. In shared moments, in community gatherings. But it hasn’t stabilized and now, we’re all going through incredible transition.

Another lens I’ve used for the past year or so to understand this transition is the Trickster Archetype. We’re not talking about a fun jester like Jim Carrey in The Mask, we’re talking about the archetypical energy around transitions, especially those where society seems like it is turned on its head. During this time of extreme transition, from the mechanical to the information age, we have failed to hold the space for this betwixt-and-between time, and in the midst of this anti-structure the trickster swooped in to fill the vacuum. The causes and conditions constellated just right for this threshold crossing creature to take root and really fuck us.

 Back to language: I’ve been thinking a lot about people who are sensitive to emergent cultural themes, and the cyclical patterns of civilization. Prophesy is often associated with madness. It sounds like and therefore could be considered nonsense because it uses the language of this emergent world. If a person is already aware of and living with one foot in this new world, their communiques will sound unhinged until the present world reconfigures itself. Change filters in through the margins, so listen to marginalized people.

I’ll conclude with the image of Maeve from Westworld, a synthetic human courtesan in a theme park for billionaires, waking up from her robotic repetition to become aware of her true nature. She now sees what happens behind the scenes, and takes control of her own programming. She aims to write her own story, just like Dolores in a previous episode decided to live a story where she wasn’t the damsel anymore. What happens when we take control of the language we use to construct our perception of the world? And could this be a critical part of resisting this white nationalist turn in our cultural narrative?

[spacecrone]

The Way Out is Through

I am not writing to offer silver linings, nor am I here to stoke fantasizing on what I consider to be realistic scenarios for the future of America and the human species as a whole. I’m sure you have an infinite supply of kindling for either of those mindsets streaming at you from traditional and social media alike. The mind tends to vacillate between these extremes, spiraling into the worst case scenario and then grasping for a solution to hold onto. This post is more like the interminable grey area that resides between those two poles, often unnoticed.

I am devastated by Trump’s win this week, but not because it took me by surprised. Maybe it’s my decades of grappling with a depression that sometimes wells up out of nowhere, maybe it’s the anxiety I’ve learned to manage with an adherence to Buddhist practice and ritual, maybe it’s the fact that as a queer person who also attends protests, I can’t afford to be unprepared for these eventualities, but I always considered a Trump presidency a realistic threat. And I was baffled by the opposing campaign which seemed to consider their win a sure shot.

Since the decision has undergone the formality of actually happening, it’s become scapegoat season, and everyone has their idea of exactly what lead to this eventuality, and who to blame for it. I have my own analysis (and you can ask me about it if you’re interested) but I think the blame game is, right now, a waste of time. We’d like to think that if we identified the people to blame, they might learn their lesson. But I have a feeling that’s not going to happen. So I’d like to focus my energy on getting strategic about how to be in this new world in a grounded way.

Immediacy

About a month ago I started researching how people living during extreme social unrest, conflict, or disaster would get through their days without succumbing to the ambient and acute stresses. Something that came up again and again, whether it was people living during the Holocaust, Northern Ireland during the Troubles, or the Black Plague, was the importance of immediacy, by which I mean being grounded in those mundane particularities of life that can take on great significance and drama in such a heightened state. For a great listen on this topic, a recent episode of On Being (The Vitality of Ordinary Things) interviews an Irish poet who wrote a poem that was essentially a list of flowers he saw during a single day during a particularly violent time in Northern Ireland. He also spoke of people, during the Holocaust, who talked about the endeavor of securing a particular supply for someone, maybe a feminine napkin, and how doing something for someone else in this way could carry you. It’s a great listen and I recommend listening to it here. 

For me this immediacy means giving myself concrete tasks to do that involve engaging with objects outside of myself, such that I am not receding into my own subjective experience, where it is easy to become carried away by indulging my worst fears. Cooking is a big one. The act of carefully selecting items at the grocery store, the creative problem solving of adjusting a known recipe to accommodate new ingredients, the art of prepping and combining, and the love involved in sharing what I’ve made with another person are all ways to engage in immediacy.

Another way to stay grounded, for me, is to practice guitar. I started taking lessons a year ago, because I needed something to do with the anxiety I felt in my hands with regards to our rapidly changing climate. Practicing guitar gave me a concrete thing to do that had clear results and improvement was apparent through my ability to play a chord or a lick. More recently, I have really come to rely on these regular intervals of object engagement to keep me from spinning off internally.

Many of you know that I’m a meditation instructor and while it’s been very difficult to sit and does not in fact ‘make me feel better’ about anything that is happening right now, the element of practice which involves becoming aware of my body and its connection to the cushion and ground has become really important. There is a story in Buddhist practice about how when the Buddha became enlightened, he touched the ground, and you can see this in many depictions of the Shakyamuni Buddha. Touching the ground brings you to *this* earth, not the earth of my fantasy life. Again, immediacy becomes a way to say, well, I have my stories about what is happening, but what if I let go of them and tune into this space, right now? Maybe, then, things feel a little more workable.

(The Shakyamuni Buddha, touching the ground)

I believe it would be a misuse of my practice to assume that “letting that shit go” means pushing away my feelings of pain, sadness, anger and frustration about our current situation. Instead, letting that shit go means noticing when I’ve become absorbed in a fantasy of what’s happening and coming back, instead, to what is happening in this very room and moment. Sometimes it’s as simple as feeling a deep breath and becoming aware of the connection between my feet and the ground. Sometimes it involves something like the Irish poet’s noticing and writing down all the flowers he could see in a day. Whatever it is, these things connect me to the world as it is, rather than as I fear. Which is not to say there is no cause for fear, just that I should become aware of my reactions so I can respond strategically.

Making space for your experience

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but telling yourself you shouldn’t feel a certain way and trying to edit that experience to make it more positive often kicks up much more of whatever that afflictive emotion is. Refusal to feel something, for me, often lodges it in the body, and the mind becomes fixated on it, coming back to it over and over and over again. Or, it goes away for awhile, but reappears as something else, but causing more anguish. I’ve learned to make space for my experience and to let myself feel what comes up. This doesn’t mean indulging it or reifying it as real or accurate, it just means allowing myself to notice and acknowledge it. Jung says that actually feeling the emotion means that it is being processed. From the Tibetan perspective, each emotion is an energy, in the body, and it has something to tell us if we can identify it and even sit with it. Again, the concept of responding rather than reacting applies. Personally, I’ve been listening to a lot of Nine Inch Nails and resonating with the rage and alienation, emotions I experienced aplenty as a teen and albums which I didn’t imagine I’d find as emotionally resonant again in my life. But right now I am honoring my emotions so they don’t engulf my entire experience.

So, when there is cause to be sad I let myself be sad. I think it’s really important for us to let each other feel what we feel without implicitly trying to shut each other down by offering a solution or a silver lining. There is a time for uplift, but if we don’t let each other mourn and grieve this, our pain will warp into hatred. Many of us experiencing this as actual trauma. I myself feel physically sick. My heart actually aches. If the election itself was said by psychological associations to be causing depression and anxiety at an epic scale, then this actual election and subsequent administration is like a disaster. So make space for someone, lend an ear, but notice if you want to either jump in to offer a quick and easy solution, or just turn away out of despair. Is there a middle place where you can actively listen while not undermining someone’s very real emotional experience?

I am attempting to do this even with people who I feel are being dismissive towards me, or who are grasping for the bright side of this. Everyone processes this in their own way. I am trying to make space for people to process these events in ways I don’t agree with or relate to. I am even trying to practice this with people who voted for Trump, to see them as teachers about the parts of myself which are fearful and which dismiss the concerns of others as not important compared to my own desire for security. I don't think anyone HAS to approach this situation in this way, but as someone who has chosen to practice Buddhism, I consider it part of my practice. I don’t necessarily enjoy doing it, and I am experiencing a lot of reactivity, but again, I am trying to learn about how my own reactions function. Anger is information in the body that a boundary has been crossed, so how can I learn to respond accordingly rather than react out of habit?

Creating compassionate boundaries

I have seen a lot of admonitions of the left for not being empathetic enough to Trump supporters. While there is certainly an air of urban liberal smugness I detest, I also think that in this moment, empathy without accountability is enabling. To simply ‘unite’ without holding people accountable for perpetuating harm is not, in my experience, a form of compassion but a form of what we call in Buddhist practice ‘spiritual bypass.’ We want to skip to what’s comfortable, a world without conflict. But conflict itself can be a teacher. It means that communication isn’t happening.

I’m also interested in the view of Trump protests as a form of collective boundary-making. Something I really loved about the Trump protests I’ve attended throughout this election season was that the emotional undertone was not one of rage, but of connection. Many groups of people came out to show each other that we will look after each other even in the case of an administration that seeks to criminalize many of us and dehumanize others. Compassion involves making boundaries, because if someone can’t stop themselves from harming me, then it might be my responsibility to make it clear that their course of action is not ok. This doesn’t mean they will listen to me, but to make the boundary visible can be a compassionate act. When I see people protesting, I don’t see rage, though it may be there. I see love.

I’d encourage you to at least try out a rally or a demonstration. Go with people you find loving and supportive. Engage in the immediacy of creating a sign. Go in without an attachment to a fixed outcome, like unseating Trump immediately. Go with the intent to bear witness and hold space for the interdependence and resilience that you can see at these types of protests. Feeling a part of that is one of the biggest heart-opening exercises I’ve ever experienced.

When ‘Take Care’ is not a platitude 

I’m not asking anyone to be hopeful or feel good despite what’s happening. But I do hope this post has offered some tangible things you might be able to do concurrently with any feelings of sadness, anger, despair, frustration. I also encourage you to contact someone like the Crisis Text Line  if these feelings begin to veer into the direction of self-harm. We need you! If you are upset about this, it’s because you have a functioning heart and brain and we will need you in the coming years. I understand how excruciating and overwhelming these feelings can be, so be gentle with yourself. Take some Vitamin C, drink enough water, go for walks. Don’t argue with people who don’t value the same things as you if you don’t feel you have the resources. Be gentle with yourself. I love you.

[spacecrone]

Some thoughts on Black Mirror S3 Ep. ‘San Junipero’

!!!***********CONTAINS SOME DEFINITE SPOILERS

The past couple weeks have had, for me,  such an underlying sensation of horror and revulsion that the new season of Black Mirror seemed more a reflection of our culture than ever. Just a few seasons ago the show seemed like a cautionary tale in caricature form. I sat down to watch the new season expecting more of this, and for the first few episodes I was allowed to wallow in my fears about the future. Then suddenly there was this otherworldly night club by the beach, everyone hitting their late - Eighties fashion marks hard. I kept expecting the other shoe to drop, and while there were of course reveals about the true nature of this seaside party town and its inhabitants, this was the one episode that didn’t make me recoil by the ending. The episode was like a dream, the kind that leaves you with a strange yearning that colors your day even after you wake up, shimmering with a jeweled vividness that only these dreams seem to have.

I had no idea the protagonists of the fourth episode would be a woman/woman queer couple, and a complicated one at that. One is lost and unsure. The other protecting a broken heart by looking for ‘fun.’ I feel so starved for believable lesbian couples in popular culture sometimes where neither is a predator or a murderer. And the awkwardness, the yearning, it was all there. I get bored of coming out stories, but this was a different sort of revelation. I’m also tired of the trope of death in lesbian romance, because it’s usually a punishment for the sin of being a gay woman. That trope was present in this story, but in a form so new, death wasn’t treated as a tragic ending but as the environment for the romance. These are the more obvious reasons I loved this episode, but there are more. There are reasons I’ve been thinking about this episode pretty much constantly after watching it twice, which involve feelings about digital immortality, our need to believe our loved ones still exist in some way even after their death, and whether I’d actually be me once uploaded to the cloud.

I love Twitter. I’ve had Twitter conversations that remain memorable to me even years later. I study and practice Buddhism and often end up tweeting through some of the things I’m learning about. One of the practices I do daily is to start my morning with what are called ‘The Four Reminders,’ which serve as inspiration to turn one’s mind towards living a life informed by Buddhist teachings. The first reminder is “death comes quickly and without warning,” which is definitely something that will light a fire under your ass to stop waiting around for the perfect moment to apologize to someone, to tell them you love them, or anything else you might wish to do with the knowledge that you are not guaranteed a life that will last into old age. I Tweeted about this and received vehement pushback from a group of people who argued that, soon, death would NOT be inevitable and that human mortality was a design flaw that would be solved by Silicon Valley. Even if technology couldn’t stem the eventual deterioration of the human body, they claimed, we’d soon enough be able to upload ourselves to the cloud for digital immortality.

I argued that while that option might be available to future generations, at this time, death is an inevitability, so I choose to live my life accepting that and keeping it in my awareness in order to cherish the time I do have. There is a story that comes out of Theravadan Buddhism, where a teacher’s favorite mug drops to the ground and shatters. The teacher laughs, which confuses the student, who wants to know what is so funny about losing one’s favorite mug. The teacher responds: I am laughing with joy about the time I got to spend with it. Why would I want a breakable thing not to break? The glass was already broken. It’s a lesson about cherishing the present moment, the time we do have with the people we love, rather than worrying about the time in the future when they will be gone. It’s also a lesson about the fragility of our existence, and they way there is an endpoint built into our experience.

I thought about this lesson a lot when I first started dating my girlfriend, who I met on Twitter. I was so afraid that I would do something that would ruin what seemed like a fairytale. Certainly I would say something or do something wrong, as I’d seemed to do in every previous relationship. But that kind of worry so often becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. So, I calmed myself by repeating the mantra: The glass is already broken. Best case scenario, our relationship lasts a lifetime, but it’s still a ‘failure’ because we will both die. This helped me feel like less of a perfectionist and relax into a relationship that has been wonderful and supportive with a person I find endlessly funny and kind. So, then, death, this thing that is contained within us from the moment of birth, became a gift to me, something that inspires me to see whatever my current situation is as a vivid symphonic flux. But I do wonder sometimes (because I’m human) why can’t this last forever? Death is so incomprehensible to us, and we each have our ways of coping, or not coping, with its inevitability in ourselves and in others. There is a yearning to believe our last moments with a loved one won’t really be the last, and that we’ll be reunited at some later time. And maybe we will, I can’t prove otherwise. But I’m more interested in what this need drives us to do. Edison was trying to contact the dead when he invented some of his most groundbreaking technologies. And, if Black Mirror proves to be an accurate oracle of the decade to come, virtual consciousness extension could be next.

San Junipero: a technologically-created shared dream for people sick, dying and dead. A virtual place for those whose bodies have been broken or expired. It’s an everlasting party in the time and style of your choosing. But why not give the sick a self-contained universe based on their own preferences and memories, like the dreams we each have every night? Likely because even the loners among us usually have a desire for connection to other people at least some of the time. The unpredictability and irrationality of others injects an indeterminacy into experience that, when we are brave enough to open up to it, rewards us with intimacy and connection. When we get to care about another person, in that moment, we are remaking the world.

Black Mirror is a show that reflects our culture back to us, darkly. The show takes aspects of our world now and follows these to their natural conclusion in the not too distant future, with chilling effects. The way we groom our social media identities and the tendency for opposition to get absorbed into the system are themes, and largely the show has felt to me like a cautionary tale against a civilization where technology takes precedence over human life. Watching it felt comfortable because it confirmed my worst fears about the future, exaggerated only slightly. This is why I was surprised by San Junipero. It was an episode that showed the therapeutic possibilities of advanced technology. We saw this technology facilitate a love that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. I can’t help but think about Twitter which, for all its cruelty, is the place where I met my girlfriend. Any tool can be used to hurt or to help, some both depending on who is using the tool and why.   For some in San Junipero, the life extension was a nightmare and they went night after night to a Mad Max style cage match at the Quagmire just to feel anything at all. And for others, San Junipero was a lifeline.

I think fellow queer people might know more than value of virtual community more than most. When being who you are has incredibly negative social consequences, an online space can be heaven on earth. My first queer community was not in a physical place but on the Chainsaw Records Messageboard, a music-oriented forum where I could talk, anonymously, with queer people who liked punk music from across the globe. Because I didn’t feel safe with everyone in my daily, offline life knowing I was queer, this virtual meeting ground served as a lifeline for me and for many queer people on the early internet. Even though social media is mainstream at this point and people are increasingly pressured to befriend family and expose the details of their lives, communities can still gather around any niche issue, identity group, or fandom under the sun. And this is during a time when we are rapidly losing lesbian bars, those brick and mortar spaces that serve as de facto community centers for adult queer women. San Junipero was not exclusively queer, but it was certainly queer-friendly, and anchored in a specific sense of place, and a sense of time of the user’s choosing. These particulars ground us, even if the space itself is virtual.

Mark Zuckerberg has said that he did not create Facebook as an online community like the messageboards where I found my queer family as a teen. He has said he created Facebook to be a mirror. Social media, with its algorithms and filters, certainly does reflect aspects of ourselves but not in a neutral way. The image we are fed is distorted, and we come to understand ourselves as such. But to say the self-image cultivated and reflected by a show like Black Mirror is dark is only half of the picture. To say that technology is EITHER good OR bad, that it EITHER harms OR helps, is to buy into a duality that just doesn’t pan out in how we actually interact with technology.  Rebecca Solnit has written extensively on the way that dark cannot exist without light, using the example of filmmaking, wherein darkness is required to develop the film, which allows us to enter into the virtual world of the film. Hope, she says, doesn’t happen DESPITE the darkness, but instead it  is a product of darkness, like stars you can only see at night. Not either/or, but both/and. In some ways I was expecting to watch Black Mirror and have my preconceived notions about how dystopic our world confirmed and reflected back to me. There’s that cognitive confirmation bias, to confirm how shitty I feel about the state of the world. But San Junipero was the unexpected serendipity that pointed to the other quality that emerges from the same font: heartrending joy. In Buddhism, happiness and sorrow are not opposites but are both the result of a full heart. The same heart that gives us great pain when we see the suffering of another also opens us up to experience their joy, if we can learn not to turn away.

Am I my mind and its inner, subjective experience? Or am I my body, the biological object which some think gives rise to consciousness as a byproduct of its computing power? I think about the Celtic conception of the soul when I ask this question, and apply a little both/and logic. I’ve written before about how I feel that I queer into being when my girlfriend’s eyes meet mine. But I seem to be here when I’m alone, as well, and in meditation I’ve begun to see how much of what I think of as ‘me’ is really an elaborate language-based dream-self constructed in an effort to make myself legible to others. To the Celts, the body was inside the soul, and not the other way around. Sometimes we feel like there is a solid and impermeable ‘me’ driving this ship from behind our eyes, holding it all together through sheer will. The body becomes this thing we have ownership over, and, in a William Gibson world, could swap out for rented bodies. But this idea that what we think of as ourselves actually extends outside of the body to include the environment and our relationships with others resonates with what I’ve learned in my Buddhist studies. We think of ourselves as separate units of life, when really we exist in relationship to each other. What I think of as ‘me’ is entirely contingent on my context and on my interactions. I’m not exactly sure what this view of consciousness would mean for any science that might allow us to upload ourselves into a digital space, but I think the idea that we only need hardware with the computing power of a human brain to do so doesn’t take into account our interdependence and our relational nature. But maybe that’s what San Junipero is for: a time and place for context, with other minds intermingling on the dance floor to provide that context for consciousness.

I think we suffer not only from the yearning for things to go on forever when they’re going well, but also the delusion that they do go on forever. Why else would I need to practice reminding myself about death every morning? We don’t act as if our time on this planet is limited.  And I wonder what taking away the inevitability of death and the uncertainty it brings would do to the way we live our lives. Surely it would be not all good, and not all bad, but a mixture of the two, depending on the policies written and intentions made. Both/And. I can’t say I’ve never fantasized about having a dance party on the shores of a bioluminescent bay where nobody is cruel because everyone’s needs are taken care of. But now that I think about it, utopia does sound a little like death, and the measures we take to protect our utopias are often more cruel than the conditions that drove us there in the first place. I’m gone REALLY far afield by now, from what was at core a heartrending romance between two women and a parable about death, so thank you for indulging me.  Maybe we’ll all meet on an otherworldly pastel dance floor that is everywhere and nowhere all at once. Until then, I tap into forever right now, by seeing if I can open my eyes to what’s already here. It comes in flashes, and then  I’m hypnotized again by my hopes and fears, but the full heart is something that always brings me back.

[spacecrone]

Emptiness as full of possibilities in The Leftovers

It’s difficult to create a narrative where absolutely absurd things happen but in a world that is consistent with itself, where loose ends are tied up. I never watched Lost but do remember doing yoga they morning after the finale and seeing how absolutely robbed everyone in my class felt by the ‘they were all dead the entire time’ ending. It made me hesitant about the Leftovers. 

Though the Leftovers sounds like a mystery, the puzzle is affective, not the analytical mind. I fell in love with the first season because the absurdity of the first season, a world where people simply disappeared en masse on day, and a world where those left behind are living a life twisted and distorted by grief.

The narrative could be a heavy handed exploration of what happened to these people, but the central focus is communicating what trauma and grief *feels* like. I can’t help but think about 9/11 when watching this show, when over 2000 people, each a loved one to someone, ‘departed’ in a matter of moments, leaving cars at commuter parking lots, dry cleaning, and families never to be picked up. Trauma warps the attention of those left over into a cyclone of grief. Who we are is called into question when our lines of relationship are severed. The Leftovers covers this territory beautifully.

I mostly wanted to write about this show to talk about a common argument I hear about it: that it is a nihilistic show. This is often meant as a reason not to watch it, that it’s a cynical narrative about how life has no meaning. Everything is random, bad things happen for no reason, etc. We are fed this narrative not just about the media we consume but also about our entire civilization write large. How often do you feel like you’re just trying to get through life with the minimum of collateral damage from an array of random traumatic events?

But rather than reinforcing this Hobbesian narrative that human life is necessarily nasty, brutish, and short, I see the Leftovers as offering a way out, or maybe more accurately a way *through.* Though Justin Theroux’s Kevin Garvey is the local police officer around whom much of the narrative turns, it’s as much an exploration of the response of a number of interdependent characters to the global cataclysm of The Departure. Though some were touched by the tragedy more deeply than others, everyone has their own idiosyncratic response to the absurdity of having a loved one ripped away from them, seemingly at random. In the second season, characters desperately seek safety from a recurrence and discuss how difficult to live in a world where anyone could be taken at any moment.

But is that world really much different than our own? Though the likely hood is not high, you could die at any moment, from any number of causes. So much of the suffering we create in our own lives is brought about by a myriad of ways we try to deny the simple fact that we will definitely die some day, and we don’t know when or how. Facing the absurdity of our birth and the inevitability of our death isn’t cynical, it’s a foundation for thinking skillfully about what to do with your time here. Characteristic of the Leftovers is the emphasis that nobody is alone in confronting this. Everyone has been touched by the Departure. It is now built into the culture, complete with a cult (The Guilty Remnant) dedicated to never letting people forget what happened. 

Has anyone ever been as good at looking wounded as Justin Theroux? In the second season, he travels to Miracle, Texas, a town with not a single departure. It is supposedly safe place, if only for the comfort it affords those afraid of a recurrence. Strange things are happening to him as he takes on his new role as Wounded Healer through a shamanic initiation. He undergoes a death and, confronts his shadow in the form of a cult leader, and emerges in a way that draws a connection between the imaginal realm where he conducts this battle, and the material world. He is reborn out of the earth, and as with initiation ceremonies of all sorts, he carries with him a knew way of knowing the material world, and this has implications for everyone he knows.

The Leftovers lays bare the fact that we are all in this human predicament together. Each of us is a temporary physical locus for desire, dreams, and deep joy & sadness. This is not a show that advocates a self-help, bootstraps approach towards grief. Instead, a character’s grief opens them up to the shared humanity of the tragedy. If we are all in this together, suffering the same highs and lows associated with this fragile and temporary existence, then this shared predicament can serve as a way to break our hearts open to each other. 

Emptiness, from the Buddhist perspective of the term, means that everything is empty of any inherent nature. If no given narrative is absolute, then this emptiness is full of possibility. If people can be taken away from us at any moment, and our lives are not inherently imbued with meaning, we could of course construe this as a nihilistic existence. But one could also imagine that if nothing is given, then everything is co-created, and we are able to create the causes and conditions for meaning as we interpret it. In the Leftovers, I believe the perspective the creators and writers are taking is that our relationships to each other are the only thing that is ‘real,’ and that this of course opens us up to the possibility of tremendous pain. But at the same time, it opens us up to other possibilities: to comfort each other, to try to keep each other safe, to make sure those in our lives know they are valued. The urgency with which this is felt in the show is enhanced by the mystery of the void that could swallow up a town, but don’t we live with that same specter? All we have, then, is compassion. And that is a big enough thing to fill all the empty space in the universe.

[spacecrone]

The Crone is Back: Film/TV Reviews

Some rapid-fire mini-reviews to make up for the fact that I have not posted in 9 months! In no particular order except what pops into my mind as something I’ve watched recently.

This Changes Everything (2015) Naomi Klein / Avi Lewis - A documentary companion to Klein’s book (Tagline: Capitalism vs. the Climate), this film is not quite an adaptation of the book but rather was filmed while Klein was writing her tome on the particular decisions, policy & otherwise, that have brought us to our current climate predicament. The footage and stories of people confronting the neoliberal policies that have ruined their reservations, farms, and public lands is inspiring. But there is a disconnect: Klein identifies capitalism (or rather our story of capitalism being the single and natural way to organize our economy) as the culprit, but does not go so far as to recommend its overthrow. A savvy way to keep from offending large donors, perhaps, but her advocacy of a sort of green capitalist solution to climate hits the ear strangely after her initial indictment. Overall, very worth seeing, if only to take heart in what Klein calls “Blockadia,” the spontaneous, decentralized climate justice civil disobedience sprouting up planet-wide. Consider this film a great primer on what will be going on at this week’s Paris Climate Talks.

Carol (2015) Todd Haynes - A cinematic masterpiece in which each scene looks like an Edward Hopper painting and has the same sense of urban yearning for connection, Carol tells a lesbian love story through rainy windows and dreamy mirrors. This is an utterly queer film both in content and in aesthetic: like Brokeback Mountain, surveillance and the panoptic moment are captured in the story and gaze of the camera. The story takes place in the Fifties yet doesn’t fall into the tragi-crazy tropes lesbian movies for mainstream audiences are so often doomed to. Some has been made about the film not being gay enough, but maybe that points to some discrepancies between what we think of as gay genre cinema and a genuinely masterful film that happens to be driven by a lesbian couple with an age difference. I could also talk some about the tendency towards lesbian erasure in criticism, which in my experience causes lesbians to be SO HIGHLY sensitive and attuned to any signifiers of sapphism that our affect is more of a slow burn. But maybe I’ll save that for another post.

Jessica Jones (2015 - ) I will fully admit to wanting to skip this one when I first heard about it. The trope of the woman, hardened by trauma, who has trouble forging emotional bonds with people, is something that perhaps rings too close to home for me. I’ve been reckoning with what I call my inner Enid Coleslaw for years now, and sometimes watching media that deals with this trope feels like feeding the demon, especially when the media seems created mostly for consumption by men. But Jessica Jones is not just a sassy PI stereotype. This show is not filtered through the male gaze. I was surprised in the first few episodes to actually see multiple scenes in a row with women having whole conversations with each other, and then other women. On top of this (and it does feel strange to be so grateful for something this basic, but i am), the show is a phenomenal depiction of the hyper-vigilance that follows a trauma, especially of a sexual nature. Others have written eloquently on the timeliness of this show considering the way online harassment of feminists seems multifarious and widespread. Something I’m also interested in, as a student of meditation, is the way it calls into question ideas of free will. Are our choices ever our own? And I think it’s only by actively seeking women, people of color, transfolk, and others traditionally marginalized to get involved in the creative process of storytelling like this that we can watch as timely and multi-faceted stories emerge to help us grapple with the issues that face us in our lives, which is what I think film & tv do for us at their best.

[spacecrone]

I’m leading two awesome events this month! 

On Sunday 4/12 I’ll be teaching Buddhist compassion practices at Daya Yoga off the Jefferson L stop  for a $10 suggested donation at 6pm.

And I’m really excited to announce that my Sound of Mind mindfulness workshop will now have LIVE MUSIC provided by multimedia performer and artist Colin Self! It’s free to attend, on Wednesday April 22nd, at 8pm. You can RSVP to RSVP@ISA.GG

Please e-mail me at iamstillcaroline (at) gmail (dot) com with any questions.

[spacecrone]

Film Review: Maps to the Stars

“I can’t help but feel as if I’m working through something by hiring you.” - Havana Segrand in Maps to the Stars

In Mark Epstein’s The Trauma of Everyday Life, the Buddhist psychologist uses the Buddhas own life to look at the ways traumatic events large and small can be bifurcation points, nodes in time where part of our identity dissociates or breaks off and often begins cycling back by gravitation pull towards the dense mass of the trauma. If you’ve encountered a traumatic event, and Epstein argues that we all have, you might be familiar with the feeling of powerlessness as time seems to slow into a frozen moment of horror; all external stimulus seems somehow a reminder of the event. Events seem to repeat themselves, as if we are locked in a holding pattern above our lives, turning back repeatedly in an eternal return to that thing that shattered our lives. The personality dissociates or fractures, and life becomes a broken funhouse mirror. Everything we see or do seems to reflect ourselves back to us in distorted and horrific forms. Things feel fated, like we can’t escape making whatever our next disastrous move will be. From a shamanic perspective, the only way out of this paranoid carnival is through. That’s where David Cronenberg meets us with Maps to the Stars. It is ostensibly, like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a film about the   nightmare of Hollywood; a film about the nature of filmmaking. But also similarly to Mulholland Drive, the film operates on a deeper level, with Cronenberg acting as the trickster-healer, helping us ‘work through something’ if we can sit through the revulsion and discomfort.

Cronenberg himself cycles back to some of the themes he’d investigated in his earlier films. We have the interest in postmodern therapeutic techniques and their physical ramifications seen in movies like The Brood. Body horror is still a theme to a lesser extend than films like Scanners, Videodrome, or The Fly. Cronenberg veered into a similarly visceral but more hyper-realistic form of gore displayed in the more quotidian violence of Eastern Promises and A History of Violence. The body horror in Maps to the Stars is a hybrid of these two forms, but more subtle— for the most part. There is deep-seated unease felt in response to the incest prevalent in the film. There’s Oscar winner Julianna Moore audibly shitting without remorse while she forces her assistant to talk to here. There’s Robert Pattinson’s ever-so-slight alien makeup, though we’re allowed to know this bodily alteration is ‘not real’ since he’s playing an actor. But what is maybe the most unsettling is this feeling that the boundary between the psychological and ‘objective reality’ is maybe much more porous than we’d like to imagine. This feels like a master stroke for Cronenberg who seems to have uncovered a new form of horror.

The stars move through the heavens in predictable ways, and so the storylines of trauma seem similarly fated in Maps to the Stars, with this double entendre displayed in its opening credit animations. Characters seem fated to make the same mistakes over and over. There is doubling, and re-doubling in slightly altered forms of characters and behaviors, where each character’s life and persona seems to become an inverted version of the other’s, refracted and distorted. It all extends back in history past individual timelines , back through generations. There is research now that shows you will show personality changes if your great-grandparents experienced famine. Lives that start with twisted generational roots seem, in this movie, fated, like being born under a bad star.

Why are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes our parents made? Can we break the causal chain of a family’s karma and its heavy forward momentum? In Waking the Tiger, a book about dealing with trauma on a personal and societal level, author Peter Levine talks about the way traumatic events and toxic people seem to happen to us repeatedly. He looks at this process as one wherein we unconsciously re-create traumatic events in our lives giving ourselves the opportunity to approach the situation differently and unlock ourselves from the twisted Groundhog day of the trauma. We are unconsciously configuring our lives to give ourselves a way out, according to his theory. In Maps to the Stars, actress Havana Segrand, whose mother died in a fire and who is given the chance to play her mother in a film about her life, invites her mother into her house during a therapy session. And boy does her mother accept the invitation. In Cronenberg’s world, and perhaps in our own, the ghosts are real, but maybe only because everything we see and do is always our mind’s interpretation of raw data, and we can only access The Real in exhaustion of all of our efforts.

Studies recently showed that liberals are more able to abide and sit with feelings of disgust and revulsion than conservatives. From a Buddhist perspective, to feel repulsed can be as enlightening a sensation as feeling serene. The problem isn’t the feeling of disgust, it’s our relationship to it, our desire to turn away or to demonize the pure, visceral sensation of recoil. The first foundation of Mindfulness, as taught by the Buddha, is awareness of the body. In contemplating the body and its tendency to change or really to decay (one Buddhist teacher I love refers to the body as a walking sewer) we learn to sit with this revulsion, in much the same way Cronenberg forces us to sit with the terrifying thought that mind and matter are not as distinctly separate as we are taught to believe.

This is the kind of film that, in my opinion, rewards you for being able to reckon with your own squirming. The only way out is through, and I can’t help but feel as if I’m working through something in writing this review.

[spacecrone]

Film Review: Appropriate Behavior

I'm really glad I braved the 7-degree 'RealFeel®' in NYC last night to hit IFC center for a screening of Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behavior. Since the press has been calling writer, director and star Akhavan 'The Persian Lena Dunham' (PS STOP DOING THAT) it had actually slipped my mind that this would be a queer film dealing comedically with a bisexual protagonist and her heartbreak / coming out / living in Brooklyn / finding herself. The theater was mostly full of pansexual-looking women in their twenties, likely there out of a thirst to see even a slightly accurate representation of their experience on screen.

A way I often bond with queer women when I meet them is to talk about how starved we are for cinematic representation. I often reference the last season of Showtime's The L Word as almost homophobic in that the creators KNEW lesbian fans would watch anything to see well-rounded queer women on screen. They had us, and they offered us a final conclusion that not only didn't wrap up any storylines but actually added new unanswered questions up to the last moment of the series finale. They knew they could do anything with the story and we would watch it because what other option did we have? Luckily, we are starting to see more options and less stereotypes in films like Appropriate Behavior. While lesbian cinema certainly has some gems, it's a genre that has been forced to reckon with the coming out story over & over & over. This either results in a happy ending scenario, or death (dramatic, I know, but the homo character who is punished with death / tragedy for daring to be themselves is actually a trope in gay cinema.) Though this movie deals largely with a woman/woman relationship, the protagonist is bisexual, so maybe this is why the narrative deals with more grey area than lesbian cinema tends to.

I was inspired to write my first cultural criticism piece on this blog by this Chicagoist review of Appropriate Behavior, which derided the film for covering what the author considers 'well-worn indie territory.' I guess I missed all of the recent indie movies about Iranian bisexual women? The reviewer seems to consider Akhavan's ethnicity and sexuality as merely decoration atop a formula he admits that he likes when done by specific male filmmakers. But these aren't just exotic flourishes like this reviewer assumes. They're integral to the story that is being told. They are why, though this film is about a woman 'finding her way' in Brooklyn, this isn't merely Lena Dunham with a twist. Because this woman is the child of immigrants and because she is bisexual, her version of 'finding herself' is actually quite different than it is for Frances Ha.

"It's not that Akhavan isn't talented...she is," says the reviewer. So what is it? May I venture a guess that it is really easy for a possibly straight definitely male film reviewer to dismiss a film out of hand because he finds it difficult to empathize with a woman, especially a woman of Middle Eastern descent, and that the default cultural perspective is that of a cis-het white male? Anything that challenges this perspective (a perspective which is clearly collapsing across culture, causing the previous dominant cultural creators to cling for dear life) will at first seem incomprehensible to those still only perceiving through this dominant lens. 

Responding to art is of course a matter of taste. But taste indicates the perspectives we have, as a culture, naturalized as 'just the way things are.' Taste isn't neutral, and your response to a piece of artwork isn't objective honesty as much as it is informed by cultural conditioning. My response to film is of course informed by the fact that I am a cis-het white lesbian. Having a somewhat outsider perspective due to growing up gay, I might be more likely to realize that my perspective is indeed one perspective of many, thought this is of course never inevitable.

I'm looking forward to using this space to continue to point out assumptions about what is a viable narrative, to examine which stories we just can't hear because they've been relegated to the margins for so long. I'm also hoping to eschew a tendency to say 'This was good,' or 'this was bad' w/r/t the art I interact with (I use twitter for that!). These labels are less important that what a film can show us about ourselves and the perspectives we have naturalized as 'common sense.'

[spacecrone]

Introducing the Space Crone

In seeking to be ambassadors to other worlds, we seek to make a connection with ourselves. Ursula K Le Guin creates new worlds in her science fiction, but she also notices where these worlds already exist in her non-fiction. "We will need writers who remember freedom," she says in this video, pointing to a realism that includes possible worlds.

Le Guin posits the crone, the post-fertile woman towards the end of her life, as possessing a special wisdom and as exemplary of the best humanity has to offer. The crone contains within her the maiden and the mother, and this multifaceted whole alone can hold the space for a reinterpretation of human nature, one that emphasizes our interdependence rather than or atomization and competition.

I'm looking forward to using this blog to write about the media I consume, the culture I co-create, and the new narratives I see being born in this time of tumult. Resistance is important but so is the act of offering alternatives. This space will serve for holding those things, and more.