Yet Untitled 058 - Marbles and Pocket Lint
Playing with less, but still playing
Dearest Yet Untitler,
There was this extreme cartoon show I used to watch as a kid called The Ren and Stimpy Show that featured a slow-on-the-uptake cat called Stimpy and a highly neurotic chihuahua called Ren. In one of the episodes, Stimpy gets sucked into his own bellybutton 🙈 and goes on what can’t be called anything but a psychedelic drug trip. I revisited this episode on YouTube, because the germ of this our here instalment led me there. I hit the psychedelia somewhere around 2:30 on the timeline:
The parent in me cannot compute how this show was put before the eyes of pre-teens. Perhaps it slipped through the cracks between regulation while the cement of good sense was still solidifying (if it ever was!), but, shock aside, I seem to remember thinking that Stimpy’s bellybutton trip needed a backdrop of skies lined with clouds made of lint.
This thought was the seed for our current instalment. Let me tell you why.
‘Yet Untitled’ has been an exercise in adapting creativity to different circumstances. Most weeks, the thing that changes most is the quantum of available time. Perhaps this is better rephrased to ‘available attention’.
Lately, while my attention has been sucked into something’s bellybutton, I’ve played with the dregs of what was left. Let me tell you - while this scarcity of attention can be stressful, it’s actually been fun. The way I see it - at least the situation had its edges defined i.e. “bub, these are all - the only - marbles you get to play with.”
I remember what that felt like. And I remember that I did just fine with even those many marbles.
So…
…coming back to the fact that all my marbles were occupied elsewhere, I found myself picking at crumbs, finding pockets of thought - the kind that usually become a YU instalment if they collide with enough marbles. Since there weren’t enough marbles but lots of pockets (and like in bellybuttons, lint can also be found in pockets) I thought I’d give you just those pockets, along with all their lint.
What is lint other than the fabric of pockets mixed with the crumbs of everything that the pockets have carried?
The voices in our heads
Once, on a hill excursion from school, I was struggling. I wasn’t built for hauling loaded rucksacks over rocks back then. I suffered.
There was a temple on the top of the hill the at we were climbing. To distract myself from my discomfort, I made this temple my focus, internally turning the walk into a pilgrimage in my head. I found myself moving faster, forgetting my tiredness. After I gained some confidence, unfortunately, I told what I was feeling to my friends - and they let me have it. They laughed and scoffed at me for hearing voices calling me up the hill. But the truth is that I made it up the hill before most of them.
It’s been a week of little voices telling me things, and I’ve been listening.
It’s also been a week of little voices telling things to the others around me. When they’ve been acting on their basis, I’ve respected it. I have not scoffed as my friends had scoffed.
By the way, I did make it up the hill quicker than most of them.
Looking at Textures
This past week, I’ve been on a location hunts for a show I’m directing. It’s involved departing from my familiar city orbits and venturing into other parts of the city’s body.
While looking for film locations, you get to see places in their rawness, before they are dressed for the camera. In this state, the places’ flaws hang out and my eyes catch these flaws as textures, which I love photographing. That’s the reason behind the small gallery above.
While I’ve been on this location reconnaissance, I’ve been listening to Arlo Park’s new album “My Soft Machine”. In fact, I’m listening to it now while I write this sentence. My ears say - Parks is the new queen of melody. She renders her poetry in ways that linger into my sleep, playing in a loop seemingly all through the night, fading in and out as I drift in and out of sleep.
Looking at textures and how I’m drawn to them, I thought of Parks’ album title, which references a Joanna Hogg film called The Souvenir in which a character explains in an early scene why we watch films –
‘We don’t want to see life as it is played out, we want to see life as it is experienced in this soft machine.’
My own soft machine sees something comforting in these textures. This feels reason enough to share them with you.
Making prayers stronger
I find the concept of prayer fascinating. What is it? A gathering up of the will? An act to connect to something larger than oneself? I think it’s a combination of both. The impulse to go beyond oneself, I feel, lifts a prayer over and above the level of desire alone.
But then again, I do see prayer inseparable from desire. Even if the desire may be altruistic, it’s still desire. Desiring to see the end of someone else’s problems is desire too.
Over the years, I have found prayer to be many things. I have found prayer only for myself to be weaker than when it includes others than myself. I have also found that a prayer for myself can also be quite quickly reconfigured into a prayer for many, including myself.
Asking the question - ‘who all would benefit if this prayer was answered?’ and then thinking deeply about a chain of benefit that would follow, I feel, makes the engine generating the prayer fire on more cylinders than before. I feel that it also makes a stronger case for life’s mechanics to move in a way that the prayer is answered.
This has been a week of thinking about and acting on prayer in this way.
And it’s been electric.
It’s late. That’s about all I have for you this week, dear Yet Untitler - after digging deep into my pockets.
The marbles are on the other side of the line now.
Your move.
Lots of love
V
Yes Prayer is the Ultimate
An Anwer to Our Everything 🙏