Gun Shot

I am very drawn to language. Language–poetry and short stories–are very generative for me. In rehearsal I may read a poem and then improvise, or shift rapidly between writing and dancing as a way to find a sense of rhythm. Within dance, I think of narrative in a very generous and open way, not linear at all. To me, stories exist all the time in performance–the stories that are carried in the bodies onstage, of the overall experience of a work, the stories that audiences bring into the theater. Stories don’t just exist in books, they are the way we make sense of the world. I feel like dance is a way to bring attention to these stories in a nuanced sort of way.

The whole enterprise of writing for me is a spiritual enterprise. I’m at a point in my life where what’s become important is to discover a naked relationship between me and the greater self, or the true self. In the Bhagavad Gita, they call it the self. They mean, of course, the godhead. The entrapments of Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism—those are just entrapments—they’re like crusts that I need to shed to get to the real kernel of truth. I think Christ was doing that in the New Testament. It’s this naked relationship between me and the godhead, to become somehow united with the godhead that has become absolutely necessary. I’m on the path, I hope, through meditation and prayer, practicing a certain way of life, a certain way of writing. The whole enterprise of writing for me is spiritual. My soul is at stake. I have this secret wish: I write to be a perfect conduit for a greater voice and it means, of course, that I have to quit my own rational thought because real contact with the godhead defies rational thinking. It doesn’t make any sense in the world we live in, and yet it is the only refuge for me, not only because of my background, because my father believed it, but because it seems that any other refuge is willful foolishness. That’s why this idea of ‘nobodyhood’ is so important to me—if I can empty myself of my own willfulness, my own ideas, I’ll make room for a greater selfhood to abide in me.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.

Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the other person and that makes him and ourselves unfree.