Invitation

When I was a wee lass the woman down the street was very concerned that I was out of touch with "reality."
My mother assured her that I was playing pretend.

I was a very good play pretender. I rarely said things like:
"Let's pretend there is a little man living in an underground house beneath our own house."
Instead I said:
"The little man won't answer the door under my bed. Something might have happened to him. I'm going outside to find him."

I knew the trick to the best kind of play was not saying "Let's pretend," or "I'm only pretending." I knew that all play was equally real and unreal, that bravery, kindness, and trust were true whether you were dreaming, pretending, telling a story or playing "real life."

Certain truths are especially hard to grasp in "real life." Fairy tales and certain types of pretend can remind us, show us, and teach us the things that are not allowed or are undervalued in "real life."
They can remind us that "real life" is a game we began to play long ago, a very dangerous game in which you choose masks to wear and insist they are the real you, a game that demands that no other games, no other stories, no other worlds are "real." They are ONLY pretend, and only the "real life" game is important.

And if you play "real life" with us and play it well we will love you, and be proud of you, and you will feel safe, never needing to worry about the unknown, about the dark, about the mysterious, or about the possibility that you yourself are less "real" and not in fact the masks you have been wearing, but rather an innocent traveler who stumbled into a deadly serious game with eternal consequences; that you may never be able to leave the game because you will be convinced that you are not playing a game but rather are having a "real life."

And what if you were so lucky that someone stronger, someone with a better memory of the multicolored land beyond "real life",  started to play a different game with you, a game that bleed into "real life", and you started asking yourself, "What is real?"

Not just, "Is this a real game? Or something else?" but "Is 'real life' real?"

And what if by asking yourself these questions, rather than asking your benevolent benefactor (who could never actually answer these questions for you) you began to remember that you aren't "real", that you are a pretender, a storyteller, a dreamer, a liar trapped by deadly seriousness (a.k.a gravity) in a heavy game. A game in which your abilities to play have atrophied, a game that didn't just start when you were born, because actually time is a function of the "real life" game and you have been trapped on the wheel of "real life" for much "longer" than you realized.

And what if you remembered this for a moment and began to learn to play again thanks to a trickster who started playing a game within a game with you and called it deadly serious...

What if? What if?

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”

― Shel Silverstein


So let's not say, "let's pretend." We're better pretenders than that. Let us be open hearted and true whether our experience is real or imagined. Let us play in earnest, let us play with levity, and flexibility (fluxability?) and bravery, and kindness, and trust.

Let us play in bright axiom.

Remote Control

They are in our homes, pulsing at the center like an icy heart projecting ghosts into our once warm sanctuaries. In bed with our wives they whisper to her desires she never could have dreamed up alone. They are influencing our children, whom we entrust to their care at a tender age because their skill for captivating attention is unparalleled. To each of us they speak in their flickering chains of signifiers leading us deeper and deeper into the forests of desire like the wicked wife of the woodsman. They enter our private dreams, inserting their own mythology into the underground streams of our wild raging subconscious. They are there blending into the fabric of our existence, telling us what we think, telling us what we want, and telling us who we are. Our view of the world is glimpsed through their myriad of unblinking eyes. One eye to a room, never any less than one to a household, they show us what to do, how to behave, where to find those things they suggest we must have. Their cold intimate company is addictive, the only company that we crave. They demand so little of us, just that we sit back and let them in. Let them penetrate our minds and souls and make them their own. Soon theirs is the only company we want to keep. Our lovers are not as satisfying as the lovers they can show us. Our children are not as doll like and neatly dealt with as the children we can watch through their eye. Our lives are not as well put together as the lives we can live vicariously through them, blanketed in their uninterrupted 24 hour programming.
There are not us. They are OTHER. Wire and glass where we are flesh and blood. Their unity transmitted from towers renders them unfailingly effective. Their solidarity, their consistency draws us to them, away from our disparate chaotic selves. Away from the untamed unpredictability of real experience. Our unruly self is better abandoned to a place with soft cushions in full view of the eye where we will be led deeper and deeper into the forest. We trust and depend on these cold nurses. Cold nurses rear our children. They tend our loneliness, helping it to grow even as we feel that they are somehow satisfying it. An old woman lies dying in her bed, their babble consoling her from the dresser across the room. An infant sucks a thumb watching the bright colors flash and parade before its new eyes, learning to be led through this passive sacrifice of attention. In the houses beside ours, other human being sit prone, letting the cold nurse feed them her endless torrents of image and sound. We are separated from one another by nothing more than thin layers of dry wall, yet we don’t even know each others’ names. All that we know is the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses that live and die in illusory lifetimes before our eyes, acting out plays called “Romance” ,“Tragedy”, and “Comedy”. We yearn for what we are shown, never suspecting that it is an empty charade, never dreaming that the real thing might look differently, sound differently, feel differently. To each of us they speak in their flickering chains of signifiers leading us deeper and deeper into the forests of desire like the wicked wife of the woodsman. They are in our homes, pulsing at the center like an icy heart projecting ghosts into our once warm sanctuaries, building with empty pictures and sounds prisons of lonely desire that strangle us and leave us pale and flaccid, deeply asleep under flashing lights.