What is it and what's the path name?

A rather lengthy and text-heavy email exchange on proposed EG outings that rapidly digressed into much headier matters.

from Drue Miller:

some of my thoughts on who we might be and what we might do as a group. Your comments and thrashings welcome...

things to do

activities we can partake of as a group that will enhance our understanding of experience:

 

• theater of all sorts (as spectators and possibly participants), particularly improv and experimental formats
• readings (works in progress and Wildcat Words at The Marsh, wordfuck at Cafe du Nord, various authors around town, open mics, etc.) also reading aloud to each other about specific topics (e.g., our favorite childhood stories, personal journal excerpts, the sickest/saddest/funniest/most hopeful story we found in the Sunday paper, a letter we'd like to write to someone significant in our lives, etc.)
• film and video (attend screenings of experimental and alternative formats, e.g., Low Res Film Festival, showings at Artists' Television Access, silent films accompanied by live musicians e.g., Club Foot Orchestra at the Castro, etc.) and also make our own (I really, really want to make the "What Is The Internet?" video)
• "static art" (i know i'll get in trouble for calling it this) - visit gallery and museum exhibits as a group, perhaps with a goal in mind (e.g., focus on the experience of viewing art in that space -- then look at art in a more public setting, e.g., outdoor sculpture, and contrast the presentations and how they affected our viewing).
• architecture/public art - go on organized tours (e.g., Mural Walks, architectural history walks, tours of Victorian homes, walking history of the Castro) and our own exploratory walks (e.g., wander through SOMA alleys and make up stories about the graffiti, pick different corners in the financial district and observe peoples' behavior at lunchtime vs. 5pm)
• dancing! we needs to get our sorry asses out on da floor somewhere. i learned a lot about Steve by watching him boogie down at the Box last year (for instance, he's quite the babe magnet :-) maybe attend some more formalized dance works as well (modern choreography), or all just tag along to Marsha's dance class some night and cheer her on.
• religious services. i've had a craving lately to go back to church just to see what the services are like (no, i'm not suffering a spiritual collapse). but i do think there's something to be learned about creating and participating in a "spiritual community." i'd especially like to go to different kinds of rituals and denominations - a high catholic mass (w/ confession, natch - let's see if i can make the priest swear under his breath), a whitebread protestant sermon, a fire-and-brimstone-rolling-on-the-floor-while-speaking-in-tongues baptist chastising, a pagan ceremony, a proper episcopalian eucharist, etc. (anybody know of a nice jewish wedding we could crash?) of course, some of you would have to help me control the giggles and outbursts i'm prone to when up against heavy religious dogma.
• funeral crashing - i know, it sounds sick, but i'm fascinated by our collective fascination with morbidity. it's another form of ritual, and what better place to learn about raw human emotions like despair and grief and survival? which have been conspicuously absent from much of our work...
• bris crashing - uh, nevermind...
• first biannual vivid experience group coed naked interactive multimedia slumber party (held once every 2 years) - with all the trimmings (design truth or dare! midnight server raids! crank IRC sessions! tp'ing the neighborhood! and slipping Maurice's hand into a pot of warm water after he's fallen asleep!) in the morning, Nathan's mom gets up real early to make breakfast for us all.

in all of these, i want to focus on how physical space affects our perceptions, and what sort of personal boundaries we draw.

...drue

 

From Jeff Davis:

I think they are all InCrEdiBly cool ideas and I'm personally hip to them all.

I think the list should also be expanded to things that we experience individually. (Like you alluded to with the story telling) I know that you want to focus on how physical space affects our perceptions, and what sort of personal boundaries we draw and that's very interesting in itself. I personally am most interested in how we experience things from more of an existential perspective.

I am really interested in what Zach, for example, experiences as he meditates in front of the wall for 16 hours. Wow! What the fuck...I can barely even sit still long enough to write this. Obviously there is something there -- important enough to inspire tatoos on the back of his head -- that he is experiencing or else he'd just play guitar or something and skip the whole thing. What is it and what's the path name? (ps -- why isn't zach involved in this?)

Most of the activities listed could be experienced passively, actively or interactively and I noticed that you pretty much covered experiential gamut. Very cool. I think that passivity isn't necessarily a bad thing, either. We learn alot about ourselves and our world through the stories of others. Something I plan to do over Holiday is to videotape my grandparents telling stories about their lives. What it was like growing up in the depression, WWII, bailing out of burning aircraft and laying in a field all night to be awakened with a pitchfork, a son in Vietnam, blah, blah, blah. They've got tons of stories that I'll never be able to experience and, if I don't capture them while I can, they'll only get diluted further through time. The flip-side to this is that I get to play an active role in keeping their stories "alive," so to speak.

Another very good point you mention that I think is crucial is the absence of what we typically refer to as negative experiences such as grief, suffering, etc. I myself am primarily drawn to what one might consider the darker side of experience (perhaps because I have had the least contact with it in my own personal life...no major personal death, abuse, trauma...whatever). I think we have a tendency to forget that these are incredibly powerful experiences. Feeling suicidal is more powerful, enlightening, and insightful than seeing a a documentary on it. I feel I have the most to learn and gain from these particular experiences.

We should definately include more fucked up things in the list: let's stalk people, get arrested, live on the streets, swim the psychotropic drugstream, team hitch-hiking races -- solving puzzles finding hidden shit along the way, challenges: you each have 24 hours to... Live a little dangerously.

As you know, I have become quite fascinated by my friend's investigation into the lives of erotic dancers/strippers and people living in hotels. Shit like that is a world away from where I'm at personally and I can't really go there. I can move into the hotel for a week and hang out with the strippers and do bad drugs with them but empathy is the best I could hope for because I think their experience is actually the culmination of their experiences (raped by parents at 13, thrown out of the house on 18th birthday, years of low self-esteem, manipulative and abusive relationships, drug addictions, suicide attempts, etc.).

Personally, I don't need to go over the edge if I can hang off the edge. So I would, in fact, move into the hotel for a week and hang out with the strippers and do bad drugs with them. I know somewhere down there in the middle of all the shit I can see glimpses of the full picture but that's all I can hope for (that's part of the existential dilemma. I can attempt to approach you but I can't be you. I am, to varying degrees, trapped in my own existence.)

My primary trepidation is that we wind up bogged down in false, contrived or otherwise superficial experiences(that's what television is for). I just don't want to wind up living these experiences vicariously through art or entertainment. An arm-chair traveler, so to speak. This in no way should be interpreted as me not being interested in any of the experiences. Nay, quite the opposite. But I think it's important to keep things in perspective. There is a difference between being entertained and experiencing something on a level has deeper meaning or sheds light onto some of questions we have about experience and why it is we are doing this and what it is we hope to understand.

I think just about anything we experience (with the exception of AOL, which is a total and complete non-experience...although it does effectively mimic the labotomization experience) can be the basis for further discussion, story telling and interaction and I'm psyched to check the shit out from every level. See ya there...

-jEFF

 

From Zachary Smith

hi,

wow! it looks like you folks are having all the fun. hell, i wanna have some experiences to.

re. sitting - dogen said, "to follow the way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self and to forget the self is to be enlightened by all things." my teacher paul haller said, "zen is the cult of intimacy with things as they are." are you getting the picture?

when i sit, particularly (but not necessarily) when i sit for extended periods i gradually inch closer and closer to the heart of my internal process or stream of consciousness. my breath, of it's own accord fills my chest and then releases itself. the blood pumps its way from my heart out to the very extremities of my body and returns. my bones and muscles shift, cramp, and release. thoughts and emotional states of all descriptions arise and pass away. sometimes they arise like whirlwinds and carry me away sometimes they pass like clouds, somtimes like fish in an infinitely deep, crystal-clear pond. it is almost always painful - often excruciatingly so and on a number of levels.

and then... without warning, something shifts. are those birds twittering in the trees outside or thoughts twittering in my semantic net? what are birds anyway? pieces of time whirl into existence like eddies in a stream and then disappear leaving only the slightest trace that they ever existed. a concept or idee fixee that has been a major cornerstone of my world view for as long as i can remember unexpectedly dissolves leaving nothing but emptiness and a deep sense of relief. it is not just "my internal process" anymore. the boundaries that separate me from things as they are become permeable, contingent. the myriad things advance and confirm.

for me it all boils down to a willingess to stand up (or sit down) in the middle of your own life and wholeheartedly engage with and authenticate whatever experience comes your way. that's the habit i am trying to cultivate in zen practice. why? don't know. i have a few standard things i say about this when people ask me but they don't seem very profound right now. perhaps it is just that the alternative seems to have failed me so utterly and caused so much suffering.

"what is it and what's the path name" is absolutely the best web-speak distillation of zen i have ever seen. very cool.

as long as i'm blathering away here (feel free to discard this message wihout reading it if you find it exasperatingly long-winded) i wanted to say something about the story-telling thing. there is this great theory of consciousness that basically says our subjective experience is a narrative cobbled together in real time out of the mini-narratives told by our sensory hardware and the commentaries and associations interjected by memory. my personal experience, and that of buddhist authors over the course of the last 2000 years, confirms this in a big way. i think we are predisposed by our very natures to repond to narrative and to do the kind of identification, forward-association and predictive exploration of narrative consequences that make the experience of reading or watching a movie so involving. what i am interested in is how this works. what is it that makes us enfold a narrative stream into our own stream of consciousness and attach it's semiotic fields to our own? i have, in particular, had some (extremely pleasurable) experiences around reading out loud recently. sir dennis eccles once said that if you want to observe the most complex process in the universe playing itself out before your eyes then just watch a parent reading out loud to her child. so... what is it, and what's the path name?

Return to the Experience.

 

Home | Search | Feedback | Projects + Vision | vividians
Form + Function | PR | Culture Shock | Vivid Travel Network