Silent Light & the Foo

I hold the belief that we ourselves manifest the world from time to time. This belief shares kinship with the "be careful what you wish for" adage... but is not quite as straightforward as drawing a direct line from an internal desire to it's object counterpart in the real world. It suggests instead that... at least on our most brave and reckless days.... we fling the contents of our skulls and hearts into the world and the "universe" (whatever that means) collects that conscious intensity and mirrors it back to us via material representation. Or, maybe a better/simpler explanation, is that when you have, for example, William T. Vollmann on the brain you seem to find reference to William T. Vollmann everywhere you go.

Vollmann does play a role in this story as a topic of a first question asked "after all this time". Although, I wouldn't say he overtly represents the central confluence of coincidence and creative sensitivity that rippled 'round the magnetic Cap Hill corners and haunts last night. Last night... and maybe all month, to be honest... those places - and people - that ever pull you back (& you can't help but project wilfull intention here) to reveal new layers of personal oblivion were engaging in full on tug-o-war. And... instead of bracing against it... maintaining the equilibrium... pressing on into my self-contained (yet altogether entropic) future... I - for once - forgave myself my failures and self-conscious uncertainty & stopped momentarily to listen to the universal chouchoutement from a voice that has been savoured in the past both in hearing from and never hearing from again.

I turned up at Silent Light in part from this article . I think the refined melancholy of Mudede's voice that both elevated the freedom and reckless abandon of unabashed selfish generative energy and then destroyed it with the swift flick of time's inevitable whipcrack was the energy that set everything in motion. It was after this I also saw a vague and beautiful review of the film he had written. Later in the day, after yet another voice affirmed the existance of the film, I took it upon myself to find out why it had surfaced so forcefully. I walked through the rain for a long way before hopping a bus, finally, to make it to the film on time. Silent Light is slow and silky and lingers/dwells/wallows in an intensely beautiful tangle of emotions that have been wrapping around and strangling my own throat from time to time of late. So... that was big manifestation #1.

Running into the Fjahma in his black hood and that rich dark sensitivity to all that vulnerable human luminescence as I walked away from that film - THAT film- however, was completely arresting. And, it infused a nuance first suggested by the Mudede article, to the 2 hour emotional meditation to which I had just been made privy. I selfishly begged stories off the storyteller well into the night trying to infer from his offerings how those two emotional threads might be fused together.

At the end of it all, I found myself suddenly with a long run/walk home, having missed the last bus on my particular route. A cold dark self-contained entropic migration... but one accompanied by the strange sense that "peace" may in fact be the strongest force binding all the misunderstandings and hurt and passions and loves that dance about time together. For, in the end, all there is left to do is put one step in front of the other... and breathe.