TGU on continuity and willpower

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday, May 8, 2011

“If you are going to be a writer, you must write every day,” Miss Beaumont told young Michael Ventura. I wish I’d had someone to give me that advice at a comparable age – but – would I have taken it?

9:20 AM. I’m sort of blank, at the moment, so I hope you have an idea for the morning’s entertainment. I didn’t post yesterday’s conversations with Papa, short though they were, because they seemed too personal. Well, and I don’t want to discuss in public the plot ideas he and I were discussing. But I suppose I could post a little bit from last night.

You could – or you could discuss something here. Or you could begin or continue some actual writing project. Or – you could continue reading Hemingway by Lynn, or could do nothing much. It’s a matter of consciousness, of intensity of consciousness. Of focus.

Let’s talk about that, then. What you are calling intensity of consciousness I think I would describe as willpower.

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2001 — retrieving a hijacker

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

The news about the killing of bin Laden (if that’s what happened) reminded me that I, like many of my friends,  had  gone retrieving lost souls in those dark days of mid-September, 2011. But mine came complete with an unexpected twist.

Good thing I wrote about it then, because I found, trying to recount the story to a friend, that I couldn’t remember any of the detail. Here is the story, retrieved (so to speak) from my journal of the time, and edited for clarity.

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Falling in love, according to TGU

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, May 6, 2011

6 AM. Beginning to feel a little overwhelmed by the things I need to learn (Word 2010, for instance, and Windows 7, and all the associated things) and of the material I need to get a handle on, like all my prep sessions, etc. in notebooks. Yet with the feeling of overwhelm comes a feeling of waking up, like “this has been waiting for me to notice.”

All right, so where are we? As so often, I have the sense that you – whoever you are! – has an agenda that is being pursued, no less than Seth did, though much less obviously, and leaving me to do the work of phrasing, etc., more.

You will remember that the question of whether guidance was directive or not started this series of questions. Yes there is always an agenda, no it doesn’t necessarily get pursued in any particular order.

The initial thought, that you thought would have no part of this transcript, is actually part of it. In organization is the beginning of action, sometimes. It is true, sometimes action begins by one plunging right in, but even there it will be noted that more preparation went on behind the scenes, or rather, more or less unnoticed, though conscious, than is commonly realized.

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Why it’s hard to change after we die

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Thursday, May 5, 2011

8 AM. Well, guys, it occurs to me that what you are giving me applies to interpersonal relationships in the body, no less. We all deal with a certain combination of factors that we elicit, and someone else dealing with that person elicits a slightly different combination – or even a radically different combination. If I and a woman are in love, I may never experience the sharp side of her tongue that others experience all too often – until suddenly I do, and the honeymoon is over.

The analogy is close enough to be instructive, provided that you realize that she herself is not dealing with an unchanging unit. People in bodies, especially – but out of bodies, too – tend to think themselves exceptions to rules that govern everyone else. Or rather, they don’t think of the rules when thinking of themselves. It isn’t that they consciously decide “I’m different.” Rather, they never put themselves into a context in which “they” themselves disappear and reappear, according to mood and circumstance, like illusions on celluloid.

Good to see that we don’t become any more perfect on the other side. That’s a tendency I had, and many others still have – to think, once out of the body, perfection.

No, but it’s more like, once out of the body, what you are is a hell of a lot harder to change than when in the body.

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Which you?

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

7:30 AM. All right, guys. A brief encounter Monday leads to the question of where the idea came from, to suddenly realize that The Sun Also Rises meant something totally different from what I or anyone I had ever read thought it meant. I asked Hemingway and he said ask you. So–?

He said your problem is with definitions. That could be said to be the problem in general, for in definitions is encapsulated your view of the world, even if various definitions contradict each other. What you know depends upon what you allow yourself to experience.

And that uses definitions as the gatekeepers.

What you’ve just said isn’t wrong, exactly, but it might be more helpfully phrased. Let’s start again, beginning with the question at hand, which hopefully will keep us grounded.

Continue reading Which you?

Hemingway on the sun also rising

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Monday, May 2, 2011

11:30 AM. So, Papa, the thought that came to me a few minutes ago, did you inspire it, or if not where did it come from? The thought is, you named the book “The Sun Also Rises” – and I don’t know that I ever really absorbed the implications of the title.

Thank you. It certainly has taken long enough for that to penetrate. I would have thought it so obvious as to need no comment, but 90 years on – or nearly enough – apparently it still isn’t obvious to people.

I feel like you want me to say “none of the critics ever noticed,” and it makes me nervous lest Hemingway scholars might be able to say, “not only did they notice, but the real Hemingway knew they noticed.”

Well, it’s understandable, but I don’t see what you can do about it. If you’re going to go exploring, you’re going to have to take some risks.

I suppose so. And so –?

I don’t remember anybody ever, anywhere, seeing the title in its proper light. They all saw Gertrude’s comments, and somehow they read right by the quotation beneath hers, reading it as “vanity of vanities” rather than as, “this too shall pass away.”

It also rises, meaning the war was the end of something but something else was going to take its place?

You can’t confine symbols to one meaning, you should know that. It also contrasted Spain’s continuity with France’s dis-continuity, and with the West in general. Nobody would have to tell the Spanish that the sun also rises; it’s only the degenerate sophisticates who get stuck in a moment as though the world was created that morning and would go on in that condition forever.

So you were painting a moment. Shooting a photograph.

All my work was photographs.

Whose idea was it, then, this morning? Mine? Mine by way of you? Or what?

You don’t have the right definitions to talk about it. Ask your guys, some time. They do good theory.

All right. Tell me, is there any reason I couldn’t do the book on you and the myth? Starting now, I mean?

You’d need to give some thought to the predominant emotion, or feeling, you want to convey. Get that firmly in mind and the rest is exposition.

And I need to do that.

It’s the only way it will be yours and not borrowed.

Okay.