Tale of Gnomes.

The dream involved a tiny village that resembled Kopenhagen that was inpopulated by dwarfish gnome – like people. The parallels to Kierkegaard’s life are not lost on me one bit, nor the significance of this village’s location. It was at the center of a building whose interior re-

sembled the corridors of a college campus: Specifically, the one in Escondido. Wherein I  had my film writing class. ‘Creative’ writing. (I.A.L.)

THESE corridors were in the shape of a ring that encircled the enclosed village. This leaves me to

suspect THAT the deep blue sky, I think turquoise when I first appeared, was faux – merely the product of a cleverly crafted set.

I have re-told this story so many times all ready (once to Anthony,

once to Zac and Mike, once to Blake and Blake’s girl (was it ‘Shelley’?),

and once to Scott.) that I might all most be tempted to forget my self and thus to forget how many times it was that I have told this story. But that the reasoning may be circular no longer bothers me; that I hope to escape Utilitarianism is my entire

thesis. What concerns me NOW is my own mental well-being. And my spiritual well-being beyond that.

I came to that village, as I re-

call, with two companions: A close friend of the same gender who appeared, at least in de-

meanour, to be akin to a family member. The other was my dog.

(Pumpkin. My  innocence. My love.)

At first I trusted the gnomes.

I should remember my discipline in spontaneous action. At times like these it can only be the mark of Highest Culture to surrender the flow of the piece

to write to you, Alanna. But is it too soon? I do not imagine that I burden you with these relatable cares. That you might once have shot down my plaints is a distant past; the movie is over. I feel that I OWE you these reflections. That you might grow. But per chance it would be best to adhere to a ‘selfish’ path, if only for some time, that it might serve the altruism I shall gain when you return. It simply drives me mad, though. Do you not feel the same? Even that idiom – to ‘gain an altruism’ –

appears blatantly Utilitarian to a

jeering crowd. Though they them-

selves so unabashedly and un-

blushingly push their Utilitarianism!

But then I found a beautiful maiden: A damsel in distress!

I think that she was bound up in the captains quarters of what once had been a sailing vessel and what now had been trans-

muted into a restaurant and/or meeting hall of some sort. She was hiding from the gnomes and plotting her escape. She co-*

rroborated my suspicions that the gnomes meant not well.

In FACT: They were man-

*<3                                         eaters.

You have figured it out by now.

Professor Cess-mat rejected my scrypt. He took one look at it,

flipped through it, lecturing me upon how it was (though not WHY,

or very feebly and unbelievably)

that Format (Cess-mat, four-mat,

floor-mat) accounted for one third of the class. That ass. He is pre-

cisely the patriarchal ‘white liberal’ man that he preaches against; that he would generalise upon all who bear a kinship of appearance to him only evidences his own narcissism (do believe me: It is exhausting to write this, if only so at the moment that I say

‘exhausting’) and now that I have made that parenthetical digression I forget the next clause. We labored to make our escape.

We had to play along and to pretend that we had not yet caught on to the gnomes, so that the gnomes would not have ‘caught on’ to us. I must confess that I do not re-

member yet if it was I just remembered: He was no less guilty of it for admitting to it,

but MORE so. that the girl followed us around or re-

mained in a mobile hiding.

Camus warns that when we have ac-

Knowledged a situation as Absurd there is the temptation to take a ‘leap into Absurdity’: To sell out, to deny the absurdity of things. Suicide is an example of such faulty coping mechanisms. I am reminded of a Story told by Tyrone, the Palomar custodian at the San Marcos campus, about a student he knew at Berkeley who got into an argument with a professor. The professor gave the young man a ‘C’.

The dispute was intellectual. The student took up the issue with the clock tower. He appealed to the ground.

Now they have bars on that tower.

So yeah. Suicide is not the answer.

Remember that if nothing else; it is the sole resin I write these with such desperation and unrest.

Were I so easily seduced

By format and

structure you would not be

Reading this

now.

Art must be a form of revealing.

I explained to Anthony that this was not ‘contrarian’; it was simply post-structuralist.

If I am contrarian at present it

Is only as a preventative measure.

Lance was right: Some people are in life for what they can ‘get out of it’. But others want to understand it. Still others wish to ‘over-stand it’. My break-down began really when he first told me that it needed to be formatted. You might recall. At that moment my Fate was sealed, for I Could Not Corrupt my Work. We snuck under cover of twi-light up to the gates. I had my dog, if not at my side, then in my arms.

And Anthony asked, after having been so contrarian as to call me a contrarian,

(do keep in mind that this was the kid who

would leap over fences just to prove a point; please do not fall in Love with him for that) what it was that I had to GAIN by ‘not’ (gain by not. What a phrase. Gain by nought. [sic and naughty.] Gain by night? Gain by knight!) formatting it. And it even pains me to inscribe it NOW as a possibility!  It simply could never have OCCURRED to me to do such as thing! Tony had the gall to imply that I was an egoist.

But GAIN was nowhere on my mind!

I had no estimations for an ideal ‘future’; at present I all ready knew that I could edit the piece no further.

But the girl was some where LAGGING behind. We had to make our escape swiftly. It was not by a firm sense of necessity but with a scattered trepidation that we passed into the air-lock that was the security entrance. Its white tile reminds me of the air-locks of some In-N-Out restaurants, and its bleak over-HEAD lighting reminds me, most palpably, of the narrow corridors that had so fascinated me with my photographic eye the night that I met Alanna.

The alternative to leaping is PROTEST. This was Camus’ solution. He based an entire book upon it: The Rebel. Format is so dubious and criminally arbitrary and privileged

that it is impossible to delude my self that it would have made any ‘difference’, nor that I might even have FOUND it! Every thing is Structure; the Universe its self is geometrical; how was this NEWS to physicists only so RECENTLY?

I still do not know if the damsel escaped. I barely Know if my male cohort had escaped! What seems without doubt though was that I got out with my dog. Yet how far did we get? How far into the darkness did we penetrate? It was not the darkness that bothered us. Only the people we were running from.

Form is substance. Substance is form. I had no way of KNOWING that the ‘format’ would decide a third of my grade. You have seen the Absurdity by now, even if it was at this point in the reasoning that Tony expressed his im-

patience more explicitly.

I could only INTUIT that the professor would be entirely arbitrary, dismissive, and dogmatic, out of only Resentiment for my talent. How could a professor expect me to trust a ‘syllabus’, a set of mere words and numbers in a LIST, as any sort of guarantee? How could he try to fool me by insisting that he needed to create a ‘level playing field’ for the students?

Kierkegaard versus the People of Kopenhagen would have been a stirring court case trial to witness. The Public On Trial.

Was it not OBVIOUS? Did he think I had not READ Kierkegaard?!? That I did not remember how it was that Lisa Cecere nearly lost her job when She told JAKE, in the wake of his Traumatic Episode, that she had to be ‘fair to the other students’? How dare this cess-

mat educator dispossess his self of his own responsibility – to facilitate CREATIVE writing – by pre-

tending that he did not create the rules? It is such a blatant cession of responsibility to the MASS! And it was so typically Utilitarian! I spoke with him for a bit after the fact. An awkward silence, electric with energy, hung betwixt us as we stood outside the campus building upon the cement strip be-

twixt the corridor and the parking lot. And so I ventured to give birth from the pregnant pause.

I mentioned Derrida’s entire analysis of how typically Utilitarian Americans are, and that cinema is haunted by this problem. And the

cock-sucker called Derrida a LANGUAGE theorist! I guess that makes Cesmat a Languish Theorist. As though we do not all have to answer to the challenge that reality is made of Language! Both Ali and T.

McKenna insisted upon this;

what in hell is Cesmat playing at dismissing him as Kresten once had?!? And to think that either of these men had once implied that I was LAZY!!

And of course then I mentioned Joyce (it had really been before then), and all he could produce

was that Joyce was an ex-patriate from  in from France! As though I had fore-

gotten what Deleuze had said about intellectuals. Watch out. The Sith have sent their best-researched Nazi to shut us down. We must have

And it was DELEUZE then that I mentioned as a FILM THEORIST!

And Cesmat could only grapple at the word ‘theorist’, as though to dis-

miss it as ‘less than fact’. Well:

Apparently he thinks he knows better than Deleuze. But that is but a theory.

I hate telling people what to do. I hate being told what to do. Cesmat wanted me to surrender my own sense

of autonomy and RESPONSIBILITY for my script, for the role of writer as unadulterated prophet,

in service to the same system that destroyed Orson Welles’ work, as well as that passionate painting of the Native that had found its home in the San Diego State class room before that P.C. Fascist removed it.

We tried to return, for the girl, I think. Since the dog was under my supervision,

the operation was cumbersome.

He wanted me to PRESUME upon his authority and upon the

authority of THAT system! Even though he had the nerve to use the names of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung! And he wanted me to become Utilitarian. Not only would I have become a clone trooper marching in the crowd: A clone of my professor, echoing ‘I do not make the rules’, that olde cliché. He wanted me to take HIS order by giving OTHERS orders! THAT was what it mean to FORMAT.

As though I could Not TRUST directors and cinematographers to interpret my work according to their own imaginations! It DOES

take a village to raise a brain-

child, you know. And I had thought that tiny, cozy, un-

intimidating village of GNOMES to have been the place.

Anthony’s criticisms mean little.

He could only ask what it was that I had to GAIN by ‘not conforming’. Why not ask the obverse? what to gain by con-

forming? There is no Mass.

There is no ‘way it’s done’ at work here. There is no format.

There is only the relationship with the professor, and Tony’s indirect relationship to it. YOUR

indirect relationship to them both!

The relationship of course. Not the people.

But how could I so insult my teacher by attempting to flatter him at the expense of my authenticity? Surely HE would read my work care fully,

labouring to understand it, if it is his intent to learn from his students.

The LEAST that he could do is to live up to the name of Jung that he so casually drops and not to interfere in the name of his ‘own bourgeois ideas about what is ‘normal’.’ (von Franz, Jungian Analyst. Though less anal than Freud.) I mean: What?

Does he want me to go through life

and have a mental break-down every time that I must commit the written word to print? If Derrida is ‘MERELY’ a language theorist, then what relation does PAPER have to Computers?? I might have begun typing this letter directly to phone long ago,

but NO! Writing is not a daring POKE into a miss-

understood and volatile abyss!

It is a BUSINESS! Spirits do not Guide us through this treacherous jungle! Only CRITICS who chop down the trees

we are so eager to write upon!

And he would have me re-print it all,

wasting the hide of those once glorious trees, just on the OFF chance that I would stumble upon the ghost of FORMAT! HIS ghost! The Cesmat Format.

Obviously, I expected better of him. It could not have been much to ex-

pect. Very RARELY must he have a student whose avant-garde Stabs so wound him and whose wounds are so worth nursing. And I KNOW that mine are worthit. [sick.] I really poured my heart directly into that screen play. How could he regard it as

but one of a number? Had I not demonstrated my COMPETENCE enough that I might ALTER if not Transcend the dualistic illusion of a Norm?? Do under-

stand, and over stand: I would not tell you this if not that I KNEW that you feel my plight and HOPE that this might help you.

There was nothing ever to ‘gain’. We approached this day with Fear and

Trembling. For we had seen our SELVES and had the courage to clothe them.

So the same reason that I refused to besmirch my piece with crude instructions and belaboured descriptions and directions was the reason it did not even occur to me to think of ‘gain’. Whether it is to tell the camera man what to do or to be told how to write (and here the one cannot be extricated from the other), the temptation is the same:

Utilitarianism!!!

Deleuze said that what is original never follows a TREND.

HE ALL so said that writing is pure.

Talking is seductive. As much as I would

love to seduce you, it is well that I took the pains to write this.

Let us keep writing pure and not fall into dogmatism. That my own frustrations sound dogmatic is only to serve the utilitarian purpose that I might re-

member the next thing,

moment by moment, that I wish to berate. And that Utilitarianism is a ghost I shall exorcise soon. With push-ups curls and a fresh run per chance. I have not run for a while. I pray that this will be help full to you.

Remember: Do not take the Leap.

I could have told my self that next time I shall Know better,

that he’s the boss. I could have submitted to an impersonal social order. But every one Knows the Emperor wears no clothes. This class was between me and the professor, and he did not hold up his end of the relationship. I wrote. He did not read. What did he think I came to school for? To kiss his ass? No. To LEARN. And not to ‘learn format’. There is no such thing as an ‘unstructured piece’. What is learning if it has been learnt before? Do I look five?

Creativity is all ways NEW, and as Campbell said we enter the wood where there is no path.

The dictation of the time has no proper dominion over our personal eternity, and so Campbell was not a mere man of his time. Circular as that is it probably saved my life. I hope it saves yours.

Karl and I once came to the joint conclusion that Schools are no longer academic institutions and think-tanks. They are trade-

schools. And that is very, VERY dangerous. I hope to find you again.

To deliver you from the gnomes. [Dm.