thank you notes 9/7

stranger things

                            September 7, 2016

                thank you notes 9/7

                        CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR STRANGER THINGS AND MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

i'm thankful i meditated again yesterday, twice. i'm thankful to remember how when i first started meditating, before i was on medication for my anxiety, i could never get into a rhythm of practice, because i would come to meditation in desperation while on the crest of a wave of panic, and sometimes it would help the first time i did it or the second time, a mysterious perceptible sensation in my temples, but that eventually i would meditate and have a panic attack while doing so and then would blame meditation for this and stop trying to meditate, even though meditation wasn't the cause of the panic attack, it was just an activity that put me in a space of closer intimacy with myself, where i could feel how i felt without the distractions of the world.
i'm thankful that last night, when some dark thoughts left over from work entered my mind during my meditation, I thought of the scene in stranger things where eleven is in the homemade sensory deprivation tank in the kiddie pool in the middle of the gym and she enters the dark mirror world where the monster lives and she's terrified, but she can hear, echoing in from the outside world, the voice of winona ryder's character, joyce, comforting her and telling her that she's okay and this voice eventually calms her down. 

i'm thankful to have thought of that during my meditation and tried to comfort myself in the same way and am thankful that it worked pretty well. i'm thankful for a technique i use sometimes when meditating, which is to repeatedly count on my breath to a single digit number (i usually use four). i'm thankful for the way that this technique is useful because it provides a mechanism by which you can catch yourself when your subconscious mind wanders to other things—you suddenly sense yourself saying "eleven" and realize that you've become distracted enough that your mind kept going past your boundary, that you've been past it for several breaths, sometimes for many breaths, without realizing, and you accept this and go back to the beginning and start looping again. i'm thankful for one, for two, for three, and for four.

i'm thankful to imagine the actress who played eleven in a remake of the passion of joan of arc. i'm thankful that we finished stranger things, which, in addition to aiding my meditation last night, was a joy and which made me think about the leftovers and midnight special. i'm thankful for the opportunity to think about something that, i think because of the constraints of narrative, science fiction can sometimes avoid representing, which is what the aftermath of an inexplicable mystical/spiritual experience feels like. i'm thankful, even though it's kind of cheesy and i have trouble imagining how a sequel could measure up, that stranger things handles this in the standard horror movie way (cf halloween), with will in the bathroom spitting out a larva from the mirror world and briefly experiencing, in a flash, its continued presence on the other side of our normal everyday world. 

i'm thankful to understand the limits of spielbergian drama but to sometimes find them frustrating—the other characters in this story had this experience which proved that there is another world that can be accessed from this world, that this is not all there is, that there are people (or at least a person) with the capacity to catch someone diving off a cliff before he hits the water and lift him back up to safety, and then they all just go back to having office parties and eating christmas dinner and cuddling on the couch? i'm thankful to consider that maybe this is an exaggerated and convenient example of the way that we all cope with trauma by burying it or distracting ourselves from it or otherwise finding ways to move forward with our normal lives

i'm thankful, though, for art where dealing with that kind of experience becomes the subject. i'm thankful for sarah connor in the terminator movies and for ripley in aliens. i'm thankful for the leftovers, which i loved but which became so grim during the first season that we haven't been able to yet motivate ourselves to watch the much-praised second season, the subject of which is how people accept or don't accept or or rail against or obsess about otherwise try to understand and make meaning from this inexplicable mystical experience that changes the(ir) world. 

i'm thankful for the movie midnight special, the end of which for me raises an even more interesting thought experiment variation on this theme: in the leftovers, there is tangible, lasting proof of the mystical experience (99% of the people in the world disappeared), whereas at the end of midnight special, the characters suddenly see a shining celestial alien world superimposed in the sky above them, a world of impossible towers and pyramids and cathedrals which has always been there and will seemingly always be there and which you can suddenly see, but then which disappears, leaving no trace of its existence for confirmation, just memories and the emptiness of air.

i'm thankful for this excerpt of louise glück's poem "aubade" from a recent issue of pome:

"Out of the stasis, facts, objects
blurred or knitted together: somewhere

time stirring, time
crying to be touched, to be
palpable,

the polished wood
shimmering with distinctions—

and then I was once more
a child in the presence of riches
and I didn't know what the riches were made of."

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