Visual Diary #34

Recent reads + hats on beds, Yamamba and uber-chunky knits

Hello reader,

What gives? What goes on? Are you letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves? Are you leaning into your cosmic smallness? I’m about to have a break where I plan to get a chunk of novel written. It goes so slowly, partly because I keep getting ideas for ‘earlier on’ that seem urgent but when I integrate them of course it changes everything. Writing is time travel. Writing is repair. Writing is the long con and the first person you have to con is yourself.

This episode of This Jungian Life on adolescence and the shadow opened something up for me, reminding me why I write about this life stage, and giving helpful framing for character motivation. I might break down these ideas in another post, but there was a lot on how adolescence is when you become a myth-maker (Dan McAdams), and how if a young person can’t fulfill their innate need to be mythic (or at least to go “beyond their parent’s door”) they feel shame/guilt - something is off or wrong. My whole teen age was me pretending I didn’t feel like something was off or wrong. The podcast led me to this poem by Khalil Gilbran, and - oof! - this line: “For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”

In other news I will be enthusiastically teaching Archetypes & Imagery in Storytelling alongside the excellent Susie Thatcher at RMIT next semester. This was my dream subject when I did the course (then called Myth & Symbol, taught by Kirsty Elliot - who brought us Ovid and Bunuel); this is my 3rd year teaching it.

Related: I was excited to read Karen Comer’s new YA novel Once Upon Tomorrow, which engages narratively with a lot of the subjects we cover in the course: Jung, fairytales, AI and authenticity (our virtual interconnected world), matrescence, stewardship and things passed down - she discusses the book with Dani Vee here.

I’ve also been reading old favourites. I read Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut & The Laughing Man (J.D Salinger from For Esme with Love and Squalor). I want to write short stories again! It’s been a long time. What if my craft is flabby - with story expanding horizontally instead of vertically? Re: the novel-in-progress, all I can do is keep going and hope that it becomes what it’s meant to be in the end. Re: short stories, I guess this day-dreaming of other exciting writing is part of my process.

Anyway, waffling now so will stop. Wherever you are I hope your reality is kind to you. If you get anything from any of this please share, heart, subscribe etc so that I don’t feel like I am writing from the bottom of a great hole in the universe somewhere.

Here are this week’s pictures.

Watched Drugstore Cowboy with W. He deemed it just okay, but did concede that the soundtrack is great. The soundtrack IS great (see Psychotic Reaction by The Count Five) I have a copy of it on CD. I also have a copy of the source material, the novel by jailbird/raconteur James Fogle. I bought it in Toronto at the turn of the century. In his author photo he is behind bars. Drugstore Cowboy is dreamy and funny and squalid and philosophical. It follows Bob (Matt Dillon in sartorial seventies splendor), his wife Diane (Kelly Lynch), 2IC Rick (James LeGros - oh indie king!) and sweet doomed Nadine (Heather Graham) - they’re a team of drug-fiends who live their life searching for the ultimate haul. They break into drugstores and pilfer all the meds, dreaming of dilaudid. Bob has rituals and superstitions, like, don’t mention dogs and no hats on beds - the picture above is Nadine’s defiance that spins the story into another dimension. The book is a whole world.

“A lot of people don’t realise, Bob told himself, just how lucky they are to be able to go on from day to day, feeling reasonably good. Oh, they may have a bout of the flu now and then or they may have to deal with depression when everything goes wrong. But there’s just no way the discomforts the average citizen has to put up with can compare to the problems the addict has to contend with daily. Bob often wondered how the fat cats who control narcotics laws would feel if they woke up tomorrow and found themselves to be black, with little or no education or training and with a strong suspicion that nothing good was ever going to happen to them …”

Drugstore Cowboy was published after the film started winning awards - at the time James Fogle had spent thirty-five of his fifty-three years in prison. This little video was posted by Daniel Yost, sportswriter-turned-filmmaker, who co-wrote the screenplay (and many more with Fogle) and continues to champion his work.

For one night I stayed in a yurt on a mountain. At night the neighbouring mountain was lit with the yellow lights of distant houses, and the silver light of stars. The spooky hills. The lonesome train, and sometimes hoons and then nothing until maybe five in the morning when the birds started up. I was reading Ruth Ozeki’s amazing A Tale for a Time Being and was up to the part where Nao goes to stay with Old Jiko in the temple and calls her a Yamamba - a mountain witch/hag - and it felt like #lifegoal.

For your pleasure & edification: here is a mountain witch poem by Chimako Tada

Annnd in said yurt I watched Bugonia which I deemed just okay. SPOILER What I loved the most about it was the ending where the higher species are wearing extreme chunky knitwear and have long static-y hair (the better to communicate with), and well, I like Emma Stone in pretty much anything, but that outfit was the biz!

Autumn leaves and winter is upon us.