Notes From The wUnderground 2

DAY 9

July 25, 2016

My how our little wUnderground Filmmaker has grown up.

The truth is; living on film sets, or fully immersed in my various creative missions is absolutely nothing new. I’ve been doing it for well over twenty-five years – since directing my very first 16mm film, lo those many years ago.

Usually for matters of security – when someone needed to keep an eye on the gear overnight because we didn’t have the people power for loading and unloading every day. Or because I really had no where else to live at the time. Or conversely, was building the set where I did actually live at the time because… A gender non-specific guy’s gotta do what a gender non-specific guys gotta do to achieve the seemingly impossible.

I mention this by way of confession: That I’m not here actually taxing my psyche, or pushing my body beyond any reasonable limits.

The truth to the myth is that I have done that in and to my life already – To the bone and far beyond the average bear. I am the Triple Crown winner of Extreme DIY Filmmaking, I am the People’s Champion of Extreme DIY Filmmaking, The GodGrrlKingBeyond of Immersive Expression and I’ve got the psychic scars to prove it.

And while it may seem a bit absurd, now in hindsight, it can really be a tao of sorts. A Creative Tao for those of us that walk with death. Meaning: For those of us whomest feel the unshakeable paradox of life; as both infinite in scope and inescapably fleeting. Unforgivably brief. Unrelenting in its absolute sensations. Because life can be quite the fcking sensationalist.

Armed with this paradox on a meta-cellular level, life becomes a smorgasbord palette of moment to moment existence – A tidal force of micro-lives lived and love affairs had with countless moments in time. And so we turn to this vast palette of the human condition with child-like glee. And if not glee, then determination. The determination found in the explorer cutting their way through undiscovered country. Or that of the Librarian; duty-called to catalogue all of our collected knowledge. Every thought cast in ink. Every word, every letter and pigment and pulp bound tight in its own secret history, guarded diligently by oath-sworn librarians and their cadres of ghostwriting silverfish.

It is that kind of determination fueling the so-called artist: To taste it all. Not because we want to taste it all, but because we do taste it all. And what we make and break in our various mediums is the byproduct of the tasting – not its engine.

And the Chicken and the Egg clap their hands dancing and laughing, knowing that because we ARE tasting it all, we are driven to taste it ALL. All of the librarians letters and every step of every explorer, and every shade of gray, and every star in the sky, and every slurp of soup, and game of tag, and broken toe, and belly laugh, and burning rage, and falling tear, and whiplash grin before death, to be suckled and chewed into pulp and savored and swallowed through the skin – No experience too big or small – until the stomach of creation stretches beyond that long-sought limit of Self and finally bursts. Bursts in a great explosion of fire and fluids, unleashing the great freedom and grand design of it all in some chakradelic tidal wave crashed against the shores of the final frontier.

Yes.

I know.

It sounds exhausting.

Because it is fcking exhausting.

In fact it can kill you.

And has killed very-very-many-lots of us, both young and old, both quick and slow.

But it’s a thing.

It’s an Eyes Wide Life Lived Wide Open In a World Gone Insane.

And that my creative comrades in arms, is the true definition of extreme.

And any half-devoted Motherfcker of Love will tell you, that there is a price to be paid for these adventures of inner space. Paid by each and every one of us, and all of us that came before, and all of us still to come. And you can ask any half-devoted Bytches-of-Boom, and they will each and all be able to regale you with tales of their salvation through self-destruction.

Because it’s a thing. A real thing.

And a real fcking slippery slope of a thing to be blunt: The line between Destruction of Self and Self Destruction.

The Former – a necessary component and by product of tasting it all; stripping ourselves down to the most primary quantum action of existence and then writing the Poem of Yes Motherfck from that exquisite moment of pure self. The Unspeakable Self. That Unspeakable Self that exists before any descriptive mechanism has shaded the Wide Open World.

The Latter – An often unfortunate and always dangerous set of steps taken, that are too often mistaken for the Wide Open World itself, when they are simply costly exercises to get one there.

I have lived with feet planted deeply in both phenomenon, so I know of what I speak here.

This?

This immersion?

This is not an exercise in self-immolation. This isn’t a tele-novella of creative martyrdom wrought with epic scenes of sleep-deprivation and various other sundries of self-denial.

This is a new kind of tao for me. One of self-creation, not self-destruction. Where the exercises of tearing shit down are now replaced with the challenges of Creating The Multiple Heavens of Me On Earth.

It is the thigh-slapping hair-pulling Tao of Yes Motherfck.

And is am are be this because we can.

So…

To Those About To Live We Salute You

Pope