Fled the Powers that Be, Got Unstuck in Time, and Made it to Cloudland
One of life's weirdest challenges occurred when quantum physicist Dean Rickles recently interviewed me without asking any questions. The resulting string of answers comes across as utterly surreal to my own eye — like joining a conversation in progress without there being an actual conversation to provide any context. This wasn't some form of channeling, or psychic intuition, or stream-of-consciousness improvisation. I didn't even consider imaginary questions but rather simply began answering. Dr. Rickles' interviews typically last two hours, but I finished communicating what I didn't know I had to say in a blessedly brief fifteen minutes. The result seems to be a rather personal portrait of what it's like for a free mind to seek being creative, and what it's like to experience a distorted sense of time passing. It's all too true that a sort of time sickness has long plagued me and affected my creativity. So here's a transcript and video of my questionless answers to a quantum physicist.
If you're feeling experimental, let's try making this an actualconversation by testing the Sheldrakian morphic field, to see if thegroup mind might elevate whatever we discuss. Off the top of myhead, as the field enlivens, let's touch upon the uncannyexperience of distorted time, whether ideas might come from thefuture, what happens when independent scholars follow madwhims, how much control an artist actually has over a creativework, how creativity might become cancerous, what our curiouslystrong affinities might be all about, and what time actually is.Let's find out if viewer thoughts seem to break through along theway.
Is it possible that academia deliberately warps one's experienceof time? An academic year begins in the autumn, so a collegeyearbook sports two dates to cover twelve months. There are 12to 15 hours in a season or semester, as that's how classroom timeis calculated. A lecture hour itself is 50 minutes. Don't even askabout summer or winter breaks, when Bardo-like "intersessions"speed and cram an entire season into 1 to 4 weeks. Yearbookillustrations classically depict freshmen as babies and seniors aselders, as if an entire lifespan covers the four years of a bachelor'sdegree. My tenure as an untenured college teacher untethered mefrom a metronomic experience of time. Perhaps it's no wonderthat in order to create music now for Neons Gone Mad, Iincorporate samples of clockwork as percussion so as not to fallinto a jazzy chaos. What's certain is that with only academia toblame, since psychedelics have never been in the equation, Imetabolize an hour as I remember metabolizing an entire day inmy childhood. Waiting a day or more for someone's sluggishresponse is excruciating, as if an entire week has gone by. I'lllook back at what feels for all the world like an old email andmarvel, "That was only yesterday?" With hours like days, onedoes get a tremendous amount of work done, though at the cost ofprofound fatigue and disorientation. You'd think one would feelahead of the game with such acceleration, yet inexplicably I nowfeel precisely 20 years behind. So while Zeno's Paradox may havebeen debunked, it's yet possible to live it, racing faster and fasterto halfway points of halfway points and progressing to the illusionof stasis as the horizon appears fixed. That's uncomfortable, toput it mildly, and note that I never even mentioned theexacerbations of Daylight Saving Time. Fleeing academia intowhat it calls "the real world" didn't reset the body clock.
As Dr. Charles Stang says, one can't always be certain about theoverall vision of one's work, and one seems to be playing catch-up.That's quite a thing to ponder, catching up to one's own enterprise.It's like the apocryphal Ledru-Rollin quotation, "I must find outwhere they are going so I can lead them." And so one wonderswhether our creative projects are, as Dr. Michael Eldred posits,actually from the future. When we flatter ourselves over havingnew ideas, are we merely remembering what already exists in thefuture? People speak of putting "the cart before the horse" as ifthat's doing something backward, but what if it's a more accuratemetaphor of reality, as Dr. Eric Wargo suggests? I seriously dohave to muse over why, for example, the idea to write a dictionaryof one-letter words first popped into my head, why I spent yearsfollowing through with it, and how such a thing could actually nowexist in hardcover by the top-three publisher HarperCollins. Everystage of the linear path is frankly ludicrous, but playing thefilmstrip of life backwards, reverse-engineering a pre-existentbook, feels like a tidier explanation. Interestingly, the hundreds ofbooks I've written have presented themselves to my so-calledimagination not as jotted notes or typescript drafts but as finishedproducts, in that I envision formally laid-out pages and even createmy books in Photoshop as opposed to word processing software,composing and arranging the presentation simultaneously, as ifreconstructing a finished work from mental snapshots of thefuture.
B. Dave Walters assures people that they don’t have to believeevery thought that pops into their heads, and while it's comfortingadvice, I'm afraid I do tend to follow and manifest my whims.That's a perk of being an independent scholar, but it has left abody of work that appears "quirky" at best, spanning severalcollege textbooks on human diversity for McGraw-Hill and adictionary of magic words for Weiser Books, to works about sheetghosts, identifying unicorns by sound, reading the palms ofcrosswalk signal hands, the secrets of chicken whispering, fengshui for seance parlors, writing numbers in cursive, tracing one'sgenealogy to mythical ancestors, and pencil-based witchcraft.Some of these whimsies have come close to breaking into themainstream. My exploration of Books of the Dead throughouthistory was commissioned by Wooden Books but ended up beingself-released (at no fault of the book, mind you), and The YoungWizard's Hexopedia was commissioned and even titled by QuirkBooks, who for mystifying reasons dropped the magic 8-ball andallowed me to release it independently. Works like How to Be YourOwn Cat have been mini hits in independent bookstores likeQuimby's in New York and Chicago. Mixing serious and humorouspublications perhaps comes with some risks, as so many lines areblurred. Yet being independent is freeing, and frankly I takeseeming absurdity as seriously as anything else. Dr. RaymondMoody has studied how nonsense passages, such as those madefamous by Lewis Carrol, trigger altered states of consciousness ina psychomanteum chamber. It's possible that all of my works havethat basic purpose, to open the mind to some mysterious realm. Ifthe overall impression is one of being at least a touch unhinged, Iembrace that as Salvador Dalí did, as a deliberate artistic tool.
It rings true that the act of reading is a form of necromancy inwhich the ghostly voice of a distant author lives again in one'shead. So, too, does authorship feel like channeling. My ego is fartoo embryonic to claim most any of the ideas that manifestthrough me. The concept of the Greek Muses sparking creativebreakthroughs is appealing. Feeling in control of creative projectswould be a novel experience — it's more like going along for theride. On a couple of occasions working as a songwriter andremixer, a collaborator was ultimately disappointed in how myrecording veered off expectations, as when he wanted Rudy Valléeand got a jazzy blues treatment. It was fair for him to expect that Iwas at the helm, but the music simply developed as it seemed to"wish." There was no intention to go off script much less to letdown a client. Belatedly, it seems time to include a formaldisclaimer for future collaborations.
Less mysterious than the origin of a creative spark might be whythat spark tends to trigger a wildfire. In full disclosure, outside ofthe textbooks, my book sales haven't warranted and certainlyhaven't funded the hundreds of publications that followed. Whyhave I kept on writing, with so few accolades not to mentionroyalties? Nor have viewership numbers of my horror-comedy tvseries Grave Mood Rings encouraged me to produce over 200episodes and counting. It's a distressing question, in thatcreativity can seem to take on a cancerous quality. A musicianfriend has fallen into that situation to a profoundly greater degree,seemingly never satisfied by the number or frequency of his albumreleases and now relying on material to be generated by what Icall the Dreaded Two-Letter Acronym to churn out releases fasterand faster. Productivity took precedence over content. Could thisbe tied to some sort of evil Muse? Perhaps someone like thebiblical angel Abaddon who rules over the bottomless pit? It'suncomfortable to consider the drive to create to be a sickness.Perhaps a paraphrase of Dalí is in order: "The only differencebetween me and one possessed by Abaddon is that I am notpossessed by Abaddon." An advisor of mine, who is more thansomething of a mystic, assures me that the work I do is not for thepresent but for the future, that in fact I do have a sizablereadership and viewership in the future and on higher dimensionsof reality. Finding consolation in such a perspective has been aprocess, but I embrace it because, since I can't know for sure,why not default to optimism? My nature abhors a vacuum, and Iwish my work to be seen and heard. As Dr. David Temperley hasnoted, "Why would the great composers have bothered to createsuch elaborate mental structures if they thought that thesestructures would never be shared by listeners?" Hence myperplexity over Emily Dickinson, my 21st cousin 6 times removed,who locked her poems into little drawers.
Perhaps a mad creative drive is tangled within a fear of death.Leave enough evidence of yourself and surely something willendure as an insurance policy for future readers, viewers, andlisteners to serve as mediums for one's departed spirit?
Possibly a comfort for those conspiring with Abaddon, there's theintriguing idea in esoteric philosophy that one incarnates as afacet of an Oversoul and that an Oversoul manifests as hundredsor thousands of seemingly separate lives — not as in reincarnationbut rather multiple lives at once. That implies that an author, forexample, might encounter works by one or more of his parallelincarnations. The idea is that if one resonates strongly with abook, a piece of music, a painting, or what have you, the reasonfor the strong attraction is that it's a communication from anotherpart of you via an additional facet of the same Oversoul. What arather mind-blowing thing to consider, that all of one's favoriteauthors, musicians, or other artists might technically be oneselfon a higher plane! It seems a tidy explanation for otherwisebaffling affinities, and it's a lovely thought that we might learn andgrow from the wisdom of discrete instances of our greater selves.
While searching the literature for things that third parties mighthave somehow written on my behalf, I collect bullet lists ofwisdom nuggets. Though the nature of Time remains somewhatmysterious, I've encountered a card deck's worth of things thatTime is not. Let's quickly see if any of these sound true, and I'llsave my personal favorites for the end.
Time is not an academic curiosity an endless corridor on our side young itself nor like mittens snapped to your coat.
Time is not creative noisy a linear coordinate the neutral wallpaper of reality nor the cask under the faucet.
Time is not a cock. (That might be a typo.)
Time is not money change what we measure corrected gradually nor when you get up.
Time is not self-interpreting the passage of nature itself a freestanding substance an independent realm a bird or a bug.
Time is not the problem the framework of existence an arrow the enemy of eternity nor is it mad or sane.
Time is not an illusion a brute fact autonomous the one that's passing nor an orphaned mechanism.
Time is not a prison punishment an eternal continuum under our control nor is it enough.
Time is not expensive self-sustaining a river an empty box nor meaningless drift.
Time is not yet ripe of the essence the intersection of science and religion rightly construed nor what you've been told.
Time is not based on philosophical reflection not a yardstick but a life not what we think it is not available for rent to outside organizations nor to be exceeded without further authorization.
