writing

my reply to a post on the "Writing the Extraordinary" MLA class I'm taking - Erik Davis is leading the class. this week we're reading & discussing fever induced writing. one of the class members posted a quote from "Black Elk Speaks, the account of an Sioux "holy man." In this context "holy man" meant that the person experienced vivid hallucinations caused by severe childhood fevers."

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thanks for this. I love the quote you highlighted "Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world."

love the idea of the shadow world. I was thinking about this often whilst walking home from the train a few months ago - when the light was perfect for casting shadows. I kept thinking what if the shadows were from another me in another time. and we were all held together by my body, but could pivot between one or the other. sort of like those handheld viewfinders where you pull the lever and it advances the frame of the circular card film. but it would rotate in multiple dimensions. then I went to a sound art performance and one of the performers was casting amazing shadows on the "digital noise" screens behind him. I was filming it but framed it so his "this-world body" was to the edge and it was his shadows who were creating the ambient sounds from the guitar. and I was doing a video project where we had to make one based on previous video - a chained video project - and mine was on shadow out of time like the hp lovecraft book (from Erik's previous class)

I like that Crazy Horse's shadow world is a higher resolution that ours. "everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world" - we see things visually quite clearly and defined. yet we see shadows (from the other worlds?:) as blurred and generally in monochrome / greyish / darkish tones. if the other world's shadows are so vivid (for us) then think how vivid their reality must be. (our dreamworld?)

(& I just did a drag & drop typo - and one became eon - & I just re-read my blog post for the shadow out of time video and saw the mention of plato & remembering across aeons of time - another synchronicity)

also I went to the readings of David Eagleman's writings on tales of the afterlife as part of the sydney Vivid festival last year (curated by Brian Eno) - some of these readings seemed to be along the shadow world line too. (they were all really inspiring, and it was presented as people sitting at old fashioned school desks on stage reading out their (his) stories on what they (he) thought was the afterlife.

the guys at Sticky sent an invitation to join the We Make Zines NING group today. We Make Zines is a online community for zine makers and zine readers. the discussions are all about the zines and issues involved with making them & distributing them. this year I want to try this - maybe take some thoughts / notes from my little notebooks and make a zine. or some thoughts from this blog - though even the blog is mostly project listings, not my own thoughts. maybe time for a shift.. am I too old to make a zine?? hopefully not.. I want to (if I ever get round to it) put some of the info & interviews from brisbane dance parties archive site into a zine (hopefully a collection of them) too - then possibly a book later on. I like reading the zines from the Sticky subscription - they seem to be from a range of people - different ages & backgrounds. I like the letter ones - reminds me of the letter writing I used to do whilst growing up. these days I manage a few postcards to friends whilst overseas - it's nice getting messages in the mail, and I think the kids love them. I wondered about a video zine too - maybe stored on USB memory sticks or dvds. I posted a 'video zines' message to the artists in the cloud group - sounds like people are interested to try it out too.

Philip K Dick said in his paper "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" that "two certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics that fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated those two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it that surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?"

great questions and ones which I'm sure many people have wondered.