No Gravity or Spending Less Time Under my Binky

Thursday, May 6, 2004 08:09 AM

I often return to our Chicago Stage, where I recited "The Gypsy Played His Violin, Fiddling Furiously" at the top of my lungs. O., who was next in my wing, reported to me that I had sung it. I wasn't aware of that. I was aware of a buzz in my voice, I was aware of my next line, I was aware of the Detroit people egging me on, and I was aware of the assistants who were being held at bay by my singing. I had the theory, if they came too close, I wasn't generating enough sound to keep them away. I was also aware of a stinging cloud of 'mind-stuff', a cloud I will call my suppression blanket.

As Fritz Perl of Easlen taught, we can talk to our suppression and our worries as easily as we can talk to ordinary people. Bellowing out the poem, I had lifted this blanket for a few minutes. Most of my action, my communication, my enrollment and registration, my invitation and the sweetness of my life gets lost in that blanket.

Suppression Blanket is too kind a term: I'll call it my Binky for the rest of the course. To get this course, the Binky has got to go to the closet !

When I sat down in the back row of chairs and drank water, I had the feeling I experience when I give blood or recover from a marathon run (I haven't run one since 1994), and I began to hallucinate G. It truly was G., yet she was much more tangible to me since the binky hadn't descended yet. (I am so busted. G. is everywhere. Even in Cyberspace ! But being busted by G. is better than being bound in my binky ! When you get busted by G., you go to freedom, not jail.)

When I am my word, I am absolute and autonomous, and the muttering of the world is silenced. And so much of my head is filled with remembered, even revered muttering. Thou shalt get seven hours of sleep each night. That's muttering. Thou shalt dump any course that doesn't produce monetary results in one week's time. Another muttering sentence foisted upon my memory. Play your cards right, and your life will work out. More muttering under the stinging, stinky binky ! Be my word, not my shoe size (maybe I can call my list !)

The key is to keep regenerating the five minutes starting from the stage until I returned again to my seminar chair. That is what we can provide to one another in this course: permanent and ongoing release, and then out - rageous action in the clearing.

Wilbo