A hollow mind, afraid to feel
The feelings that it must conceal
For if they were to be revealed
Then that would make them really real

 

And all the children bark and beg
The products of a hollow egg
With undeveloped arms and legs
And cotton balls inside their heads

 

And all the rest just sit around
Praying they will not be found
Their ship came in, but ran aground
And all the souls within it drowned

 

Because no one sails here alone
No one sails here alone
They might die very far from home
But no one sails here…. alone.

Well, I guess that’s that.

I imagine that I am gliding slowly though life like I’m in the Tunnel of Love, but this tunnel is cool and dim and utterly silent except for the sound of the water lapping at the sides of the passage. There is a sense of total stillness, and my mind is very full and completely empty at the same time. And there is a feeling of a deep and terrible stillness that brings with it a sense of rising awe and dread in equal measure.

It’s another one of my recurring images. Or maybe I should call them visions. That’s not really the right term either – it’s not like the transcendental visions of a mystic at all, and I have no sense of leaving reality – but I honestly don’t know what to call them.

Flashes of intuition, sort of. But not in the sense of a sudden strong emotional message along with a sense of certain knowledge. I’ve had those too, this isn’t that. It’s a lot more like when I get story ideas in a sudden flash of inspiration, and in that flash the entire thing crystallizes, and all I have to do then is unpack and execute it.

I can totally understand why pre-Freudian people thought things like that must involve some kind of supernatural entity. From the naturalistic point of view where the conscious mind is assumed to be the entire mind, what other conclusion can one come to when something far too dense and complex for your conscious mind to create suddenly appears in one’s consciousness, fully formed?

Anyhow, back to the tunnel. I used to think it had something to do with my depression. Like it was a representation of what depression was like. And maybe at some point that was true. The silence, the tunnel walls, the way I go forward at the same rate without anything changing just like I went through time when I was depressed without anything really changing in my life. It makes sense.

But now, I think it means something else. I think this state of deep stillness represents the kind of state of mind I have to be in when I want to send my deepest thoughts and feelings  out into the world. As if I am setting each bundle of deep darkness on its own little toy boat and then carefully placing them in the water of the tunnel, and watching as they float away, never to return.

If so, then despite the awe and dread, this is actually a very good frame of mind. It’s one where I can access and deal with my stuff. Perhaps my soul needs to be so very still in order to sneak these emotions past the barricade of anxiety and the endless mental agitation that usually keeps the demons down. Perhaps the dread comes from that great grand-daddy of all psychological fears in the Western world : the fear of that which we repress COMING OUT against our will. Perhaps the awe comes from a sense of what might happen if it did.

Something like that could change everything. Everything.

If I am right about this state of mind being the birthing mode for all the dead babies inside me, that would certainly explain the attack of poetry I had at the beginning of this entry. I am not normally someone who is comfortable just letting his emotions flow out onto the page like that, with no attempt made to make them make sense to others. Normally, I am too worried about connecting with and pleasing people.

It would help me if I got over that some, to be honest. Worry instead about getting what is in me out and to heck whether it makes sense to others. That’s supposed to be what this blog is about, and for the most part, that’s what it is.

But it’s still a pretty left-brained and linear process. It’s the product of my verbal mind, which is very powerful and which knows many lovely and clever tricks, but when it comes to expressing what is deep inside me, it’s quite inefficient and indirect.

Poetry gets the job done faster and deeper, but at the cost of comprehensibility. I mean, I’m not James Joyce.  I can’t just write things in a totally subjective mode and then push it out into the world and say “Deal with it!”.

At least, not yet.

I do think about from time to time, though. What it would be like to just open a text file and write and write without giving myself any time to think about it so that I can’t censor myself or worry about how it will be received. I have done it before in my life, but back then, I lacked the self-awareness to do anything more than just drain off the surface level of my overflowing mental energies.

If I did it now, it would be with the specific intention of going as deep as I possibly could so I could stick my psychic sump pump into the really dark and nasty stuff that lies at the bottom of my sick polluted soul, and pump that shit out of me and onto the page where I can lock it away forever.

Consider it a psychological septic system sucking.  Or detox for the soul. Other people can do that via some psychological construct of divine intervention, or by going on some kind of mystical journey via meditation and asceticism.

Me, all I got is my words and my mind.

Guess they will have to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just watched the episode in the title, and I feel compelled to discuss it because it was amazing and dealt with subject matter both highly relevant and of deep interest to me.

Those don’t always line up.

The episode takes place in a world where everyone has these augmented reality implants in their eyes that let theme see people’s ratings. Ratings are an overall score out of five, and anyone and everyone can rate you at any time for any social interaction.

So of course, society is now all about one’s rating. It’s more or less a digital value of your social status, or rather, how popular you are.

Superficially, this encourages people to be really nice to one another. In fact, once I figured out the premise near the beginning of the episode, I thought, “Well this doesn’t seem too bad. At least people are being nice, whether they mean it or not. That’s something. ”

That’s before I knew that the whole society was rigged around that score. Stores have minimal rating requirements and high scoring people get special discounts and can buy products nobody else can. The protagonist’s workplace has a minimum score of 2.5 and if you fall below it, you can’t even enter the building.

That made the true nature of the program evident : it was a brilliant use of modern rating systems (which are EVERYWHERE online) as a way to explore social injustice in a very potent and fascinating way.

Because one can hardly conceive of a system that would fit better into people’s intellectually (and spiritually lazy tendency to believe the world is just and those who are not benefiting from it deserve whatever happens to them.

After all, if someone has a low rating, it’s because people have down voted them, and that means they must have been unpleasant, rude, unethical, or otherwise bad. If they weren’t a bad person, why did people rate them so poorly? Even if a few people gave the person a low rating for unjust reasons, surely they are outweighed by everyone else voting honestly. I mean, why would they lie?

It’s even “fair”, in the sense that a low rated person can always start being super nice to everyone and raise their rating. In theory. In practice, of course, the rating means that people have already judged you before you open your mouth and will interpret everything you can and do based on that judgment.

But again, the rating does not actually reflect whether someone is a good person, only whether people like them. As someone who was at the very bottom of the totem pole all through school, I can vividly attest to the fact that people can dislike you for all kinds of reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with who you are as a person and everything to do with surface appearances and other superficial things, like your level of conformity, your trendiness, your wardrobe choices, whether or not they like the sort of person they think you are, whether or not they like people with glasses, and so forth and so on ad. infinitum ad. nauseum. 

I am sure that in the society depicted in the episode in question, there is a great deal more bullying than now because the bullies would be empowered by the idea that you deserve to get abused because you have a low rating. ^[1]

It’s a brilliant conceit for a science fiction anthology show, and it was brilliantly executed. I won’t bother to explain the plot, but it’s good. It examined the issue thoroughly without ever once seeming slow and pedantic. ^[2] The production was gorgeous. It didn’t feel like television at all. It was more like a one hour movie. And the actress who played the lead, Bryce Dallas Howard ^[3], really got into her role and nailed the character’s tragic arc from popular to very much not so.

Interestingly, one of the episode’s writers is Rashida Jones, aka Angie Tribeca. I looked up the writers partially because of a feeling that I should probably take an interest in that sort of thing if I am to be a TV writer some day (and I am), but mostly because I had a very strong intuition that a woman wrote it or co-wrote it, and I was right.

The basis of my intuition on this matter was that the entire concept of popularity seems, in this era at least, to mean a lot more to the ladies than it does to the gents. It’s not that men don’t care, of course. It’s just that the patriarchal cultural programming we all receive tells women that being liked is the most important thing in the world, and tells men that they are not allowed to care about that.

Men are supposed to all be rugged individuals who don’t give a fuck what others think, and most of them try to be exactly like that because they want to be popular with the chicks,

I do think the basic conceit would not work exactly the way it was depicted in the show. People can like or dislike one another for a lot of reasons, plus people would feel bad about rating people really low,  and so, in the fine grain, most people would probably be between 3 and 4. Middle of the bell curve.

But a certain amount of simplification is always needed for effective storytelling, especially when dealing with the kind of complex ideas that makes for good science fiction.

And my gosh was that good science fiction.

In fact, I wish I had wrote it myself. It’s exactly the sort of smart, modern, intelligent television I would love to write.

Six months to go!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.