“Find a metaphor to live by.” says Ray Bradbury during an address to UCLA in 1968. My friend had sent me the talk as a means to quell the swirling doubts of my abilities to find work as a Writer. Not that I’ve been at it very long and for the most part, I do this - I write, I post, I sometimes share on the socials and then I move on.
I don’t do an amazing job of networking, in fact I have a non existent willingness to network. I’d prefer to complain or feel the oppressive, indiscriminate howl of “It’s hard to be a Writer/Musician/Artist” as unilaterally true. I know it’s both true and not true at the same time.
Anything of worth to us, they say, is worth the trouble. I could generate garbage, being a content writer for some click-bait modelled publication and likely make money. But I don’t do this to make money. I keep coming back to the blank page, or blank screen, with more and more willingness to say more and more things, following a fierce urge to be heard.
Martin Shaw, Stephen Jenkinson, Bayo Akomolafe, Charles Eisenstein, Sophie Strand, Terence McKenna, Ray Bradbury (though I know only that one lecture) all speak about what stories are and the importance of telling them:
“The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.” - Martin Shaw (Snowy Tower: Parzival and the Wet Black Branch of Language, source Goodreads)
“Your language will not fail you.” - Stephen Jenkinson (Several places, I have listened to too many interviews to track this down)
“One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.” - Charles Eisenstein (The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, source Goodreads)
“Civilization may not be a purely human story. It may be a fungal story and even just a yeast story.” - Sophie Strand (The Inner Lives of Fungi, source Lifeworld.Earth)
“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” - Terence McKenna (Unknown, source Goodreads)
These are all excellent quotes from thinkers who have deeply shaped my way of seeing the world. And while these have all influenced me, not necessarily the quote but the sentiment within, my latest shift around stories is spoken of further on and hinted at in the Sophie Strand quote. Bayo Akomolafe brings up an understanding central now to my way of seeing these matters, speaks more to my matured attachment to story or de-attachment from the written word as an end unto itself and movement into the more than sayable world; The world which is made more of the strange, the place of becoming-undoing with its transversal otherwise.
Where does the urge to write come from?
Words and stories, growing up, were my sanctuary.
There are all manner of oddities in how I relate, in how my emotions flair, in how I see the world. Yet as a participant in the myths of gods and in the heroes of fantasy or sci fi, I felt legitimate. I was valued as a reader or listener or watcher or player (in the case of Video Games), simply by being there. I wasn’t special and I wasn’t troubled.
And because of this exposure to so many stories or because of some innate capacity, I have a knack for the craft myself, at least in the outset. It’s sticking to a story that proves excruciating and laborious beyond my capacity to handle, thus far.
Ray Bradbury said he wanted to have on his tombstone, ‘A teller of tales.’ I could think of worse things to be on my own.
I love stories and I especially love metaphors.
These tiny worlds, which become doorways opening us up so our imagination flows into them and around them. It is living language of the kind that is rare in most academic disciplines and even in a lot of writing today.
A cliché is a metaphor turned to stone. The monomyth is a metaphorical journey turned to stone. I don’t have a problem with stone but I don’t think they would mind being equated with Time standing still. And Time, for bio-psycho-spiritual social beings, has to move and flux and expand and shrink and twist.
Metaphor is what we live by, we explain what reality is with metaphor, we explain who we are in metaphor, we talk about Love, about Work, about Community, about God, about the more than Human in metaphor. I find that the more alive a metaphor is the greater its willingness to accommodate the complex emergent strange worlds we inhabit. By alive I literally mean alive, the more life the metaphor contains the greater that accommodation. Machine metaphors run out of steam. (See what I did there?) Metaphor is not, however, a false approximation. A way of saying what something is by speaking of it in drag. I disagree with this. In the same vein I disagree that imagining something is somehow fabricating a non-reality. We are dancing with what we discuss, what we think about, in the choreography of language. There are of course other ways of arranging dance with them but this choreography of language I find fun and intimate and expressive. And imagining is not explicitly or exclusively bound in language in fact more often than not it is visceral and animate through forms seen somewhere by some faculty of the body (It’s not firm that we see these things in our head).
But metaphor is a flow of words into images and back again, more or less. A picture is worth a thousand words and sometimes a couple words is worth a populated street or an abundant forest of visions. Though I do have moments when the visions are chimeric forms where words only begin the scenes and end as an abattoir of the form, severing the strange that is more readily shared in dance, or in electric apparitions skimming the surface of an embryo, or in the cordyceps sprouting from the body of a silk worm.
But if I can say something a little uncomfortable, when words become visions and then the ‘real’ thing is witnessed, I’m usually a little disappointed. I have a more visceral experience of an inner space, or an outer space, that is made of words and images than I do in the world made of supposed consensus. Perhaps I’m getting a little sidelined here but I have felt for a long time a sense that I am blind in some regard. There is something missing from what I see or how I see. If I have to put a label on it, it is the joyous intra-action of lifeways that I don’t see. I have to trust that it is there. I have to language it first and then envision and after this simply trust that these relations of inseparability are present. But I don’t see them. I don’t feel them in my field of view. Perhaps it is another sensory organ that must find them but I lack the sensitivity of that organ to recognise such bonds.
Why do I write?
”[G]iving story too much power blinds us to the actions of the world around us in the ways we too are convened, adopted, oriented, moved, appellated, enlisted, and governed by things without name and plot. These queer absences and ghostly gaps haunt the totalizing containment of story, pulling it down to earth from its gilded perch in the sky. In other words, stories are made up of and subsidized by the spoken and the unthinkable, the present and the absent, the corporeal and the spectral.”
Bayo Akomolafe
So I write to know a better world than I can see or feel or hear or touch. Better here meaning alive, agentially active, not centered around my narcissism where I turn the world into mirrors, as Vanessa Andreotti describes of the Narcissus myth. I don’t want to see me in everything I see. I want to see what I have been told in Myth and Story that is there to see. But I only see most of this in those stories and myths. I don’t want to be a heroic figure, I want to wear the character of the heroic or of the Love soaked or of the challenge defeater or of the gods, knowing and experiencing the world from their body-mind worlding complexes.
Story and Myth rescues me from the suffering of my own lot. But not to that end, but because it is so. Suffering is not the encapsulating form of existence but a mode of being and the other side or the innards of it is available not as a prize but as the way it is because that’s the way it is. A heading for its own sake not for the relief of this burden of suffering.
This is where the above quote from Bayo comes in. If I am to inhabit the world, not isolate into bodies of text, then I must not be before myself in the eternalised struggle to spook our way out of the line of sight of suffering. Since I am not mostly Human, mostly Human cannot be the entire arrangement of this craft. Making stories with virus, soil, humus, stardust, ectoplasm, etheric angels, martian rocks, telescopes, furniture, reflections of the moon upon Yucatan lakes, and also the living metaphor of eco-psycho-social languaging; That’s the play and work from hereon.
But the scanning light that accords me most direction is this piece from Terence McKenna,
“In a way, it’s the poets who have failed us, because they have not provided a song or sung a vision that we could all move in concert to. So now we are in the absurd position of being able to do anything, and what we are doing is fouling our own nest and pushing ourselves toward planetary toxification and extinction. This is because the poets, the artists, have not articulated a moral vision. The moral vision must come from the unconscious.”
Terence McKenna, Opening the Doors of Creativity
In my recent post, Poets Hold Mass, I quibble with the notion that the songs have not been provided. Problematising further would be around the notions of a moral vision and of the place of the unconscious being where a kind of village minded intra-active animating pulse would emerge.
I love Terence’s words and work, his branching bard-like noetics first introduced me to the possibilities of language employed, not in service of the status quo, but in a playful escape artist kind of role. His willingness to hear the psychedelics who were his main mentor and to grapple with the translation of their messages into the expansive worlding he presents in his lectures and talks, made an enormous impact on me. However, his willingness to persist with the notion of a ‘psychedelic’, sacrements revealing the mind, limits what he says mainly to the skull of Humans. In the course of writing this I came across ‘anterradelic’ or making visible the beyond Human, which moves that discussion into the Post-humanities. This is for a future piece.
“God dies and is reborn in new shapes. Find those new shapes.”
Ray Bradbury
Who do I write for?
I write to honour my influences. I am blessed to be born in an era with availability to information about and the emergence of individuals and groups who are playing and working as offerings to these new shapes of God. Certain speakers and writers have so profoundly altered my way of seeing the world that I can’t help but turn to the page or screen and riff on their teachings and ideas. I compost what I learn and spread the food for the small across the garden beds of these posts. Sometimes I steep the ideas in my liquid mind and emerge with facultated organisms that exist above and below; This is always quite exciting.
Next I write to entertain my friends and family. I have been supremely lucky that my immediate family and people I met early in my life are not only still in my life but are so encouraging of this outlet I chose/was chosen by, that in my moments of doubt I need only turn to them and tumble the bundle of kindling I have gathered in my wanderings they beam with Love and say, “What a find! Bring more!”
There was a particularly fruitful period of time, some years ago now, just after finding an enormous group of loving people which followed three large changes in my life; Admitting to my family that I had been sexually abused as a child, ending an abusive relationship, and deciding that I was either going to kill myself or let 5 dried grams of mushrooms and a gram of MDMA convince me otherwise (Which they did). Just an aside on that, something that these compounds reminded me, which I didn’t know I had forgotten, was how to laugh. Not that I needed to laugh but actually the physiological capacity to laugh.
During this era, besides the parties and falling in Love several times over, I was writing multiple pages a day of Poetry and Prose. I would read many of these to my friends, new and old, to which they would always encourage me. I owe my sense of obligation to this craft to these Loving misfits.
And lastly, I write to you. You might be my family or a friend, or one of these to be, but I don’t speak from here as Ryan Dickinson, I speak as a spore filled fruiting fungal body, dusting you with the potential of new worlds. New worlds that are more beautiful, that are more alive, that are less stultified by the lithifying stories of Modernity. One of the reasons that metaphors so interest me is that I can shift my own or another’s cognitive damming with a torrential metaphor. I can flood the surrounding lands of those desertifying mindscapes and regenerate them, for a time, with a pulse of new life. From there, if I or you are willing, we can mulch and compost and prune and toss seeds and begin the good work of summoning rain again and again until we become not a gardener of pioneer species but a child among old growth, moved to awe by the inheritance we both receive and have gifted. This is the temporality shifting, life animating, beauty engendering power of story and myth and metaphor. I am honoured to tend these landscapes.
Ryan Dickinson