Welcome to the New World

This month began like the last few, with everything tainted by the pandemic. It’s still a thing. Here in Las Vegas, the Strip with its many casinos, is only just opening. Still no news about the resurrection of Showbiz. 

The fact that I am needing to write about it a third month in a row, is testament to how many days we have spent in lockdown. I spoke to my brother, from another family, Hamish McCormick, of Carnival Cinema fame, the other day. After publishing an online blog/magazine for several years, he finally took the step to create an unbelievably good-looking, content rich, paper, real-life, in-your-hands magazine, of culture, music, circus and showmanship. The magazine is called Fluke, and was launched to the world during the Adelaide Fringe Festival, possibly the largest gathering of our tribe of circus, comedy, carnival, physical theatre, dance, music and general good times in Australia. The festival goes for a month and finished on the 15th of March, 2020. By that stage we were in full lockdown here in Las Vegas. 

Hamish got that magazine out just before the pandemic hit. Which is interesting since the next issue, which will come out later in the year, will be about a wholly different world. For our industry this is a watershed moment. It will be a “before and after the pandemic” delineation. (“I remember in the days before the pandemic we used to…”) 

A performing arts and culture magazine, like Fluke, will now naturally become about all the creative ways circus folks, performing artists and other practitioners of the Craft of Showmanship will re-bounce and rebuild and integrate performance in this changed world. The virus has come to stay and, for the foreseeable future, it will be our working environment. An asteroid hit the circus, and now we’ll see which carnival creatures will re-emerge from the rubble.

The month began with the world being broken by “just” the Pandemic, but then, here in the United States, came the killing of George Floyd by the police. Infuriating and revolting. Captured in terrifying detail. With all the tension already built up from being locked down, and the ongoing racial injustices, the world was a tinderbox. Protests ignited all over America and then the world.

Trevor Noah eloquently pointed out in a video that this was the moment the societal contract was torn up. The agreement we all implicitly sign, about what we can expect from society and what society can expect from us. We’ll abide by the law if the law protects us. Living by this unspoken contract is an important part of what makes a free society possible. The contract has been broken for a very long time and this awful video became the butterfly wings that sparked a worldwide, righteous storm. 

I have not got much to add, other than that I am sorry. I am as flawed as anyone. As guilty as the rest. Black Lives Matter. Black freedom of expression, and dignity matters and it is high time to readdress that societal contract. I hope when we are finished straightening out the ripped pieces, and taping it back together with all the improvements that are needed, it will be a contract worthy of everyone’s signatures.

The world has become a like a bad TV show. A show of many seasons, like any old realistic drama, then, all of a sudden, mid-season, it’s changed genre, and introduced a deadly virus pandemic, only to become about a fascist police state murdering innocent people. It is now a dystopian, sci fi, horror show. We would not accept writing like this in our TV viewing. That kind of genre swapping is considered horrible writing. But what is so riveting is that it is also reality TV, reality social media, the authenticity of the drama results in an experience of real horror. For the deep feeling of real horror comes from feeling like your reality is being undermined, your reality liquifying beneath your feet. We have lost our solid ground. When you’re dealing with water, with ocean, no amount of force can flatten the waves of a storm. The chaos is flooding out into the street.

Swaying Foundations

Turning back to my personal hobbyhorse of Showmanship, it seems a pale and unimportant horse in light of what is going on in the world. Inside my quarantined lockdown bubble, and the bubble of my own stormy brain, the Show still goes on and remains the lens through which I view the world. So, for the next section of this month’s blog: come with me into a poetic and philosophical wilderness of a different, more internal geography than the chaotic liquidity of the one beyond our doorsteps.

Without Crowds gathering for good times, my worlds have been completely shaken. A Crowd is an essential part, not just of what a Showman does, but also of who the Showman is. Crowds form one of the fundamental pillars of Showmanship. Crowd, Showman, Show, neither of these can be properly understood except in direct relationship with each other. So, in a sense, when Crowds disappear, the Showman disappears as well.

Without an audience watching, there isn’t really a Show happening. Even if the Showman runs through his material in an empty room, the Showman’s Show becomes nothing but a rehearsal, a run-through of the material. It is the Crowd that gives the Show meaning. Only under the watchful eye of the Crowd is the material presented transfigured into a show. 

Since, as of the middle of June 2020, there’s still no timeline for when it will be legal for Crowds to gather to watch shows, it seems strangely pointless to even rehearse. This is the core of my particular existential crisis. Who I am is completely entangled with groups of strangers. Crowds, in the outer world, enables me to make a living, and Crowds, in a more inner, philosophical sense, gives my life meaning, as a follower of Way of the Showman.

In a Way, the feeling is similar to an earthquake. When something as fundamental as the solidity of the ground you stand on shifts, rocks or violently shakes, the emotional impact can be substantial, triggering a feeling of real horror. I am lucky to never have been more than mildly shaken by one of these formidable geological events.

After having your foundations have been shaken, the world continues, life resumes, but the experience lingers on, sometimes permanently. A thing you trusted, a thing so foundational you took for granted, to the point of not ever really being conscious of it, can no longer be trusted. 

What was solid, is now liquid. What can you trust if not your foundations? It calls for re-evaluation. A re-imagining of your foundations. It’s a psychological, philosophical, and practical call to arms. When the world turns to water, what can you do?

Imagination

What I have been doing for the last month has been to retreat into the imagination. It started with me reading a very interesting book, which I highly recommend, called “The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination,” by Gary Lachman. In this book, Lachman makes a wonderful case for the imagination not just as something frivolous and fanciful, but as a whole other way of understanding the world. He beautifully traces the idea of this “lost knowledge” through a plethora of interesting people like Goethe, Kathleen Raine, Owen Barfield, William Blake, Carl Jung, Samuel Coleridge and many more.

The basic idea he presents is that there is more than one way to learn about the world. Science is an excellent, and the paramount, method for getting exact knowledge about the world around us. There is, however, a whole world inside us, with emotions, thoughts and powerful desires to do things in the world, which can benefit from being looked at in a different way than by focusing on what can be measured and weighed. All-in-all, the scientific method is but a few hundred years old yet, in this time, it has almost completely taken over as our only way of interacting with the world. Hence making the way we connected with the world from when we lived in caves up until the rise of scientific investigation, which is hundreds of thousands of years, a lost knowledge.

Here I will be the first to admit that as soon as you make a case for anything which can’t be correlated with something correspondent in the world, there is a very real possibility that you have just made something up. If you then start treating this imaginative knowledge as the same kind of truths we arrive at in the outer world, a whole new world of problems might arise. That said, even though there are limitations to the knowledge of the imagination, there are also limitations to the knowledge of science.

To me, the different kinds of knowledge can be used to learn different kinds of truths. Reading Lachman’s book made me think of one creator and thinker not included  therein. I have mentioned him before in my essay “Clown Truth.” I am thinking of Werner Herzog, the German film maker. He has his own idea of two kinds of truth. He calls them “the accountants truth,” which is clear facts of the kind found in the phone directory, and “ecstatic truth.” Herzog is most interested in the second kind when he creates his art. As the first kind does not speak much important truth to humanity, as he sees it. Random bits of facts might be good knowledge, but wisdom comes from connecting the facts in a meaningful way. 

Herzog and Lachman does not shy away from placing human beings at the centre of this meaning. Hertzog’s ecstatic truth is a human experience. Herzog has a beautiful dichotomy in his work where he at once presents the world in an almost Lovecraftian way, uncaring of humanity. The universe exists and it is vast, empty, cold, and oblivious to us in an almost menacing and hostile way. Herzog says the uncaring world is filled with misery, but not a misery maliciously aimed at humanity in particular. To him, human beings are insignificant in the greater scope. Yet, the unflinching depth of the kinds of questions he asks his interview subjects in his documentaries are about profound emotions, about soul, the meaning of existence, poetry, hope and dreams. To me Herzog’s work embodies a coming together of explorations of both the outer and the inner, always seeking a poetic, ecstatic truth in the cold facts of the accountant’s truth.

An artist Lachman does write about is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet of “Ancient Mariner” fame. Coleridge distinguished between two kinds of imaginary thinking. One he called fancy, which he thought of as combining elements that already existed in your consciousness, like how you can puzzle together random things, like in a collage. For instance: a dog with arms made from strangler vines is a kind of fancy. Each of the elements exist in the world and only their combination creates any kind of novelty. 

The other kind of creative human power he called imagination, which he again separated into two kinds. The primary type of imagination is the one which is shared by all humanity, and it is what allows us to unconsciously understand the structure of the world. It is the faculty which ties together the many varied sensory impressions we get, into concepts we can understand. It is this primary kind of imagination which ties together the many perceptions like the fluttering greens above, the brown lines crisscrossing the green, and the thick rough vertical column, into the concept of a tree in our minds. So, it is through this kind of imagination we know the world.

Coleridge’s secondary imagination was the domain of the poet. It is the kind of imagination which is specific to the artist and which, as he describes it, dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates, in order to recreate. In this way the poet engages in a conversation with the phenomena of the world by studying them each in their own right, stripping them back, squinting in the process, and gleaning a new understanding. 

It is similar to the way, in a deep human conversation, two people can share their impressions and opinions on a topic, and then, if both are open to it, they can reach a new and enriched understanding of the topic. Like the initial part of the conversation is the planting of a seed, and the second part is the development of the plant. Nurtured in just the right way it might even flower. If you open yourself in the right way the conversation, with a person, or with the world, can go beyond a simple piecing together of ideas and opinions and become a discerning discovery of the topic as it imaginally unfolds like a thing in itself. 

This is an attempt at sketching out this other kind of imagination. I have found this concept very interesting. It’s a big topic, and we will get back to it in the future. It is something which I am only just awakening to, and it feels like a fertile idea space for inspiration.

Poetry

This last month I have also been reading poetry. I have been reading David Whyte, a particular favourite of mine, but closer to home, my ancestral home,  I’ve been listening to recordings made by Kolbein Falkeid. He is a poet from my hometown in Norway, a small coastal town which, as the saying goes, was built with herring bones. This refers to the herring which used to migrate up along the West coast of Norway and the fishing industry which sprung up with it, which quite literally placed the city of Haugesund on the map, spectacularly placed as it is, at the heart of the Fjordland. 

One of the things that’s special about poets is that they aren’t afraid of deep conversations, conversations not just with people but with places, with the frontiers of geographies both inner and outer. Armed with, according to Coleridge, their very own kind of imagination. Poets, at least the good ones, let themselves sink into the reality which lies beneath the surface appearances. I say good poetry, as there is also a lot of bad poetry. I am reminded of a line about the reason why there exists so much bad poetry from a Charles Bukowski’s poem:

there'll always be money and whores and drunkards

down to the last bomb,

but as God said,

crossing his legs,

I see where I have made plenty of poets

but not so very much

poetry.

There’s even a myth from the Norse Mythology explaining where all this endless bad poetry comes from, but that will be something for another time. 

Kolbein Falkeid has a lot of good poetry. I discovered an incredible poem about some beach toys left behind by a child. Hearing him recite it shook my foundations, in a poetic way. In its weaving together of images of sand, sea, sleep, children, and forgotten toys becoming like little fires we can warm ourselves by as our childhood sails away to distant horizons. The poem reveals a deeper truth, something which is so very much alive and connected. Something so deep and direct I can’t defend myself against it. A glimpse of a different aspect of reality comes alive between the words, in the swirls and waves of its different strands of meaning which splash against the beach frontier of my mind. 

The poem is in Norwegian and I will not even attempt at translation. But I trust that you, dear reader, have the imaginative power to sense the kind of shift of consciousness a meeting with poetic or ecstatic truth can have. Leaving it unsaid, and merely imagined, can sometimes get closer to the truth than a shallow synopsis. 

Kolbein Falkeid often uses the imagery of coasts, ocean, boats, and fishermen in his poetry. This is such an immense part of the appearances for those living with the roiling chaos of the North sea at their literal doorsteps. 

Those who know me well, knows that I am most un-Viking like. I get fiercely sea sick, so, although many of my friends and colleagues makes a good living on cruise ships, there is no way I can make a good living on a cruise ship. Cruise ship life would be nauseating and vomit-inducing living for me. (Eitherway, who knows what will become of the cruise ship living now…)

The poetry of nautical imagery though, has revealed a different, imaginal sea, where perhaps I would not feel so sick with the swelling of the waves. The nautical foundations of Falkeid’s poetry has become medicine, a motion-sickness tablet, to calm my inner nausea and the feeling of sea sickness in a this new liquid reality we all find ourselves in. It’s calmed my churning stomach enough for me to rediscover my Way imaginatively transformed. Not by a fanciful, making-shit-up kind of imagination, but the kind of imagination that connects me to world, and lets me participate more fully in it. 

The pressure of the pandemic’s reality-earthquake has allowed me to re-imagine the Way of the Showman, not as a path to walk, but rather as a guiding star I can set my course by. In the transformation I go from treading water to swimming, in my new liquid reality.

The situation of losing one’s Way is a dark night of the soul. I worry about whether shows will restart, whether I’ll be able to continue to stay in America, and be able to pay the bills. In that dark place I forgot one thing about stars, and that is they only come out at night. They’re always there, but you can only see them when it gets dark, and the darker it gets, the more stars you can see. We all could do well to use this dark time to pick out our guiding star to set our course onward.