How to Slow Time, Part 53

Zowee. Feel like I am reporting from the Moon.

Why have I become a hermit? Do I get things done? Here I am back in the womb of my creative self, and what have I done in three weeks except chase money and entertain my friends? Gary, I'm off to Iceland in December to record some stories about geology and ecocide, since that island is the biggest disaster in human civilization, and I intend to make a CD people can listen to in their cars and feel like they've traveled to the Sun and back in just 72 minutes, and the cool thing is I want to weigh Iceland's icy infertility against the craters and cacti of New Mexico, where the very first bomb dropped and showed the end of existence to Teller, Oppenheimer et al., and probably helped drive all the water out of the Sierras there, and I want to make this CD historic audio-wise, collaborating with someone I never met who is also her own secret and who can make an orchestra out of her voice and put out a sound that wolves would shut up to listen to whether the Moon is full or not, and Gary is grooving along to my spin on 9th Street until he wonders if this project can make money, and I practically sneer as I say carefully but firmly, "Mo-ney? Who needs money?"

Isn't the idea to create a bedazzlement so people go home bedazzled and rattled to the point of creation?

Creation before pregnancy. Medieval divorce. Private plans. Family blessings. Performance. You rule in a universe of your own construction far away from my own blaze, and the magic of being Now includes the fuel strong enough to propel one of us into the other's orbit, however briefly; we can both play Mork and make up the Mindy part to suit our purposes, which is very cool. And then there are two publishing arenas, so the fusion of an idea splits again into two targets, yours and my own, and what will people think of me asking you why time hasn't reached its end if it has been infinitely existant? As Kant asked, Why hasn't everything that was going to happen already happened?

There must be a piece in our piece which captures the staggering speeds in which mundane lives are lived. Look, go to work, every day at nine sharp and take off Chirstmas to vacation with family and all of a sudden you're sixty years old and nothing you thought was going to happen has happened and who do you blame for that? Or you can stand ankle-deep in the Ganges and see 100 people quietly, patiently, waiting to die in the right place, at the right moment, touched by holy water, so they never have to come back, and the smells of burnt flesh and cowshit freeze time  in your mind and suffuse your blood with awe, that omnificent ingredient in the recipe to slow time. We must have the mundane routine habit stuck in a loop for 30 seconds, so the listener is prodded by our shock: Is this you? And a yipping three-legged coyote comes out of nowhere and swallows the hamster and its cage in two bites. Can you make that sound?

Thanks for the deep reflections. You have to write deeply, so the self you both admire and abhor is painted in textures and minerals designed to refract light into both possibility and spectacle. You are completely distinct, I can vouch even situated outside your universe. For me, here, the star is exploding, and darkness now has greater purpose for my attention. How long, I wonder? How far off? When can I touch, or be touched, by the things she makes? These notes back and forth are a sort of desert borealis; trapped electricity shimmers across the divide, and provides light of the purest kind, not to work by or to heal, but to inspire awe.

(from Anticipatience, correspondence with Mindy M.)