Wonderfully mad.

It's been a while. Sorry. I have been somewhat busy -- notably with the wonderfully mad 48 Hour Filmmaking Competition last weekend. I know so many great crazy people here. Why did I want to leave, again?

(It's not till September, mind, but I've made my choice now. I'm going to be in California, that's as much as I've decided to say on this blog. Perhaps wonderfully mad people won't be so difficult to find over there, either.)

Speaking of wonderfully mad people, last night I had the absolute privilege of taking part in a public reading of an unfinished play written by a friend of mine. It's the first proper creative interaction I've had with her since I got back from the UK, actually. I walked into the auditorium where the reading was taking place and the first thing I noticed was the smell of incense. The second thing I noticed was that -- well, of course -- she'd had the sense to eschew the separation between stage and seats in favour of setting up cushions and a few benches on the stage itself. She had candles and nibbles, and a few friends along to help her out, and when she asked me how I was, I felt the uncomfortableness in my simple 'fine' (who is ever simply 'fine'?) -- but she said nothing of it and I knew I'd loosen up. It's been too long since I've entered one of her spaces, carefully and fearlessly imagined with absolute openness. She was playing the Beatles over the sound system while she set up and I had the odd urge to dance. The last character I played for her loved to dance. It was my character's central metaphor (she was a poetic type). I think my character would have liked to be a dancer, actually, but she worked in a craft shop, which she liked, too, because it was fun to play a small part in helping people make stuff. And yes, that's mostly just back-story which only made it to the stage in little things like having her knitting in one scene.

My playwright friend believes in a hundred things that ought to be anathema to my skeptical self. She believes in astral projection and yoga whatnot and in a sort of global consciousness and I don't know what else. If it wasn't her, maybe I'd say more often that I don't believe a word of it, maybe I'd make more firm statements like I do when my best friend from high school starts talking like she thinks Tarot cards could actually tell you something. But it is her. This is her space and I worship her space with its free-flying creativity. Cutting takes place elsewhere; this is where things grow. I just can't say 'Don't think that'.

She almost never asks anyone else to believe along with her. She asks people to imagine. I think she prefers imagination. She believes in the power of the mind to subtly influence the world, and for that purpose an imagined thing might even be stronger and more organic than a believed thing. And so, in her space, I leave behind the truth of the world and accept the truth of myself. This is subjective space. Objective space is important, too, but it can wait.