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pearls

You know that scene, where the kid is scrawling ones and zeroes on different pieces of paper, and it looks like nonsense scribbling, and then the detective gets higher up and sees the tiled pieces of paper and its, like, a photorealistic eye made out of binary because the kid is getting alien transmissions? Famous scene, or maybe I dreamed it, I don't care. Look, its been a weird three months. Lots of crying against my will, I'm not a pretty cryer. I got some distance on my personal back catalogue of work and saw the eye staring back at me. I am hoping I'm wrong! I'm not a pretty cryer, this shit has to stop. I got a tele-therapist who was so lovely and encouraging and then disappeared, honestly I think he may have been murdered. I am hoping I'm wrong!

Through it all, I have been writing. And writing and writing and writing non-stop on a next book. I cannot tell you how desperately I have needed to, and enjoyed, writing this quite literally 500 page book. I know materially its just me clicking around on a keyboard, but in FACT it's been like going to see Morpheus for a couple hours a day in the dojo but instead of kicking my ass he just hugs me and says "you would have always been trapped in the ones and zeroes if you hadn't gotten them out on the paper."

Look. Art is medicine, and it is formed like a pearl. Some kinds of people, when they experience a trauma, they have to-- and I mean, THEY HAVE TO-- write a story about it. They cover the trauma up in something beautiful, until its soft and dreamy and the total opposite of the grit that happened, and they can live with it. What is miraculous about this medicine-- back to medicine analogy, stay with me-- is that people who cannot produce this medicine can also take what they have made, and ingest it, and personalize it, and have a catharsis that is JUST AS HEALING and sometimes MORE SO.

It is so beautiful we can do this for each other, that we can heal each other this way, that it is built in to us. The fact that we have trained ourselves to turn around and sell these pearls is an unfortunate condition of not living in sustainable Ewok villages out in the PNW with barter-trade economies, MY ESTABLISHED PREFERENCE... But the fact we make them at all is very special.