Spontaneity


Today the word came up in a correspondence, and so it is on my mind. What is it? For one thing it has a full five beats whereas "gauche" and "flip" don't even have two. "Witty," or "witless," are an improvement, as either works equally well in conjunction with charm. Don't leave them unchaperoned though or they'll stain the couch. Three syllables struggles out of the mire as a "socialite." As all the lights of society come on, mon ami, you are shining with a joi d' vivre. Four is just extraverted. Throw all this in a pot, salt to taste, and out comes spontaneity? I don't think so. It's too affected. But I hear five beats to the bar.

There is something about approaching sixty that makes me want to stop a certain kind of behavior, which had to do with wanting to create what I thought was a good impression, but which I suspect was more creating the impression of being good. As age comes, different layers of the shadow come into view, and more and more of what was discarded as a social liability, or a quality of the fleshpots across the border, has to be accepted as shadow. The impression of goodness is conformity in a suit and tie.

Shadow is by definition unconscious. That means I don't know about it except in other people. So what I am and accept as my public image is ego. What I have discarded, and so have forgotten as myself, is shadow. There is even deeper shadow where the savage sleeps on the alter tended by Goodboy.

Jesse Goodboy is a character I used to do years ago, when Jim and I were doing some radio comedy. He is a Presidential candidate whose slogan is, "I'd just as soon kill you as look at you." The running gag was that the reporter, whose name was "Rico Tacuda," would eventually piss Goodboy off and have to try to escape with his life.

The thing I love about doing Jesse, is that he can do or say anything he damned pleases because, as he proclaims right up front, he'd just as soon kill you as look at you. To me, the combination of that professed total disregard for other people and a kind of country music good old boy morality frees a lot of shadow energy. It's the character who is hidden when I'm being nice, politically correct, and a healer.

And if Mirror Dog strikes one of us dead and saves the other, which will he save? Jesse, of course, because my ego energy is well used, but Jesse has reserve tanks and mudflaps that read, "Shit Happens." He has a framed picture of Jerry Reed, and under it a quote: "He who expecteth nothing shall not be deceived."

What makes spontaneity different from impulsiveness, is that there is a feeling of gifting in spontaneity. Just behaving without any governors isn't spontaneous. What it feels like to me is that spontaneous action or decision has so much emotional intelligence it blows right past the old men at the border, checking everybody's papers and stamping their passports.

The most interesting thing about spontaneity to me is that it's connected to a special kind of intelligence which I first recognized after reading, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," in which Pirsig went on a quest for an elusive quality and then got all introverted on discovering it was the lady in the pond. But the quest is always like that. Something drives you to get information and to search for some answer to a riddle you'll be asked, with getting it right the difference between life and death.

That is why when the witch asks the traveler, "Did you start this journey voluntarily or involuntarily," he replies, "Fix me some food and shut the fuck up. I'm a hero on a journey." Ask Pirsig. He found out the hard way.

The special intelligence is conceived of by Pirsig as "Quality." He discovers that prior to Plato's Socratic dialogues "truth" was not primary. "Good," or quality, was primary, and truth was relative. Of course it didn't go away as central to everybody. Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son, tells him that no man rises in society who does not possess the "graces," and that these are more important than high intellect. He gives the example of Lord Marlborough, who, he writes, wasn't exceptional except for his familiarity with the graces, but rose above others on their strength. The graces come from this center of quality in the emotional resonance.

Spontaneity without the graces is just poor impulse control.

After Plato goodness became relative, and truth was central. Moving truth from this central position is moving out of a patriarchal frame and into a matriarchal, frame, because the origin of the emotional resonance Pirsig describes as "quality," is centered in the sexuality. (Sexuality is connected into the instinctual body and can be used for direct communication as well as for reproduction and entertainment.)

The first time I heard that I was a young journalist doing an article about a man who had moved into town advertising himself as a psychic. I wasn't exactly out to discredit him, but he'd have to show me something pretty convincing to make me think he wasn't a charlatan. He didn't even try. I asked him where the psychic energy was from, and he said it's from the sexual chakra. He didn't elaborate, but I was curious about why that might be so. I thought he was probably some kind of pervert.

Now here I am saying the same thing, having, spontaneously, found the pervert in my shadow.

But I seriously think it is in the sexual energy. It makes perfect sense that you would be able to tune in to somebody if you already knew the frequency. I began to be convinced that objects can contain a person's frequency when I had a red Toyota pickup. If somebody was trying to break in that truck I would see it by remote viewing if I was asleep. If I was awake it would be a feeling. That truck was connected to me like a horse to his cowboy.

And when I sold it, I sold it to my friend Diane. She took it to Hawaii. She took out the seats and cleaned up all the grease, until it was like a new truck. She was like that. She never had to say she loved me because her gestures were definite. We were spontaneous together. She would get into a character, or I would, or both of us would together, and the energy radiated out and into the walls until the house was sentient.

The power of spontaneity is that it is not ruled by anything. Reason and emotion are getting it on together. It isn't scripted. George Bush scripts everything so tightly, for appearances, that people are screened to make sure they'll clap when the applause sign goes up. Resistance isn't tolerated. This is the opposite of spontaneity. Contrast it with somebody like John Kennedy, who had no more need for protection from hecklers than Paula Poundstone. As the audience becomes indignant she salivates with anticipation and waves them back: "I can handle this."

Kennedy was asked a question to the effect of, should old Mrs. Murphy who has a rooming house in Chicago have to rent to somebody she doesn't want skulking around her house. Kennedy said, and I think I recall it exactly, "That depends entirely on whether Mrs. Murphy has a substantial impact on interstate commerce." This kind of spontaneity has a pearlescent center, and anybody who governs without that center drains the energy out of the people.

Kennedy impressed an image in my mind of what a man could be like, if he had a center he wasn't afraid of or ashamed of. Of course he got killed in Dallas as surely as did Snakeskin in Mississippi.

I'm just going to borrow the pearlescent center of a Russian story, maybe from Chekov but I'm not sure.

A schoolteacher in this Russian village was always dressed in his overcoat. He is described as being all covered up, and when he comes around people sort of tighten up and begin to inhibit themselves. Nobody thought much about it because they weren't really conscious of his effect, experiencing instead their own deficiency. One day he died, and the entire village spontaneously erupted into a street dance celebration.

I'm going to spontaneously stop right here, completely ignoring spontaneous amputation and spontaneous combustion in favor or a confusing, illogical, but totally spontaneous positivism.

Posted: Tue - November 27, 2007 at 06:43 PM