Readers,
The past couple essays took me away from my fictional worldbuilding. I had stuff in my head and heart that needed to be free. I’m back to the task at hand.
—C
We know you, they know me
Extrasensory, synchronicity
A star fall, a phone call
It joins all, synchronicity
—The Police, Synchronicity I
In the first few days of the birth of EVERYTHING, it became clear that I was dreaming insanely big. The vision was something far beyond my capabilities. The emerging story(ies) and worldbuilding alone bent my brain.
Dude. You’re nuts. Setting yourself up for instant failure.
COVID was raging, our politics an inferno, and the consequences of climate chaos accelerating.
Well, “rational minds” have uberfucked things with their vision…so why not dream the ridiculous and impossible? Fuck it.
So I wrote a short manifesto, imagined as a television series, since much of this vast fictional world has come to me as visual scenes:
VISION
This TV series is about convergence and emergence, a tale about our inescapable enmeshment—it fosters emotional intelligence, empathy, and deep alertness. It recruits dreamers, pioneers, and philosophers of Story. Its creators and collaborators know humanity is ready, hungry for growth individually and collectively.
It is a hybrid-mashup of styles and motifs and genres and media that subverts and transforms storytelling. It propels us to frontiers of thought. It beckons us into conversation. It does not pander, refuses tired tropes and shallow archetypes. It challenges us to embrace our neglected and denied possibility. It holds space. It cultivates. It also disturbs, shatters.
It is an intimate interweaving of myth and philosophy and spirituality and science and music and literature and live action and various animation techniques.
There are many story threads…some connect…though not always linearly. There is a main story arc and characters, but ultimately this is a story about everything so there are unlimited converging storylines to explore.
Talk about hubris. It scared me.
But I kept pecking away at it. There were spurts. Mostly the feeling of being way out of my depths keeps my progress glacial. Much is still left to be explored and built.
From the start, I wanted whatever insane thing this is that I am creating to eventually be a collaborative endeavor. I want to be surrounded by others who value working together to manifest works that break through the cyclical stasis permeating the world.
Others bring perspective, possibility, insight, skills, that surpass the individual. Ego is tamed by respect and equity. It also creates a spirit of camaraderie. Something I yearn for deeply.
I want to run away from my isolation and inexperience and doubt. I want to join a circus of creativity.
Maybe it will happen eventually. Maybe not. I have a hand-written note taped to my refrigerator to remind me to not overthink or abandon the quest. I think it’s a solid credo for life in general:
In this world we are told that will is supreme. We are taught to scheme, to pursue, to achieve, to seize, to force. It works, but it also creates conflict and disconnection. Everything becomes an obstacle to be overcome. Others become a rival or a means of our ambition. Interactions and relationships become calculated and conditional in obvious and subtle ways. The behavior becomes ambient—a pervasive background normality no one notices.
Our human bonds suffer and wither. Our relationship to the self becomes adversarial, abusive. A dark sense of lack overlays the human condition. We court destruction.
What is possible, doable, acceptable, allowable, narrows to a blade’s edge, enclosing upon itself. Within, we become cycles within cycles of insatiable domination and desire.
I am tired of it. Sick to the bones of it. I am soul-weary. Battle-torn.
But I don’t need to rest, recover and carry on. I don’t need reinvention or rehabilitation. I don’t need resilience or to redouble my efforts. I need something this world, its gods, its leaders, its dogmas and institutions, its recursive salves and salvations cannot, will not, ever provide.
But where does one find the undiscovered? Where is the world that remains unimagined, unmanifested? Where are the others resolutely done with this world, who yearn for that which does not exist in either mind or matter?
There are no handholds for force or will in the liminal. I have to let go of expectation and rationalization, hope and faith, and accept the simple truth that there can be no response without a call. I have to just keep showing up to the altar of the unknown, light the incenses of welcoming, sing the hymns of chance and opportunity, stretch out my open hand into the the space between what is and what might be…and let that be enough.
But…
Do any of us? Look around. What do current and ongoing events tell us about our ability to understand why we believe a thing, do a thing, and what the ultimate outcome will be?
It sure looks like we haven’t a clue. It’s like we are all just floating on a long accumulation of random thinkings and doings while believing we’ve mastered free will and human destiny.
Now that’s some hubris.
The Terrible Joy of Not Knowing What I’m Doing
There’s nothing like taking a big swing at the unknown. No refined skill, no applicable experience, qualifications, or education, no wise mentors, no inside connections. WHAT AM I EVEN SWINGING AT? WHY?
Whee!
There’s a betrayal of self-trust, a trap in seeking knowledge and approval from others, especially when there’s a fee involved. There’s a dismissal of intuition, of innate capability, a subservience to manufactured authority.
No. I already have everything I need. No matter how amateurish and paved with failure the process is, I just have to allow myself to become. Stop seeking. Show up for yourself. Do your weird dance in the corner. All things in their own time. What will be, will be.
That’s my plan.
Thanks for reading. We’ll get back to describing and sketching out of the different facets of the hyperverse of EVERYTHING in coming posts. Stay tuned.