On inhabiting a dream

Welcome to Mind Body Spirit Teeth. Your monthly source of resonance.

Resonance

We are nowadays pressured to appear as if everything is already at some state of achieved. To be satisfied with the scaffolding of a dream, rather than inhabiting. The popularized "law of assumption" escapes the uncomfortable dialogue we can have with our desires, that tells us that inhabiting our dream, becoming rather than assuming, requires our assumptions to change. Acting as if is helpfully provisional, like trying on clothes in a fitting room, a small enclosed space.

The core practice of inhabiting is to allow assumptions to change as desire leads us into the world. Because desire is an emotional tension between what and how – where what is becoming, and how is control: to live fixated only in the realm of control is to become very little, because very little is all we control.

It began on a bench

August was my 20th anniversary of life as an expat. The summer day in 2006 I landed in Prague with my then wife, we spent several hours greased with jetlag frying on a bench below the eye and shoulders of St. Ludmila, encamped with everything we owned in suitcases and backpacks, and waited for our Couchsurfing host to pick us up after her shift.

Our plan was to stay for a year. My wife had scholarship money. I taught English. Assisted by our host and her boyfriend, we found a place. We met people. We joined bands. We got divorced. I had found a university where I could continue my undergrad in English. The following summer, I decided not to board my return-flight to Texas because I would be unable to afford coming back – to what I, we, had started; and what I wouldn't know how to finish.

Poetically, my last flat in Prague was across the street from a cemetery: Olšanské hřbitovy. The end of what became a nearly 15-year era, a version of myself I would leave in that flat, carrying with me forever the Bohemian, obsidian edge of the Czech sense of humor.

In 2021, I moved to Amsterdam where I have lived since.

Five cigarettes

"Miku Is Missing", my novel in progress, started as a memoir of my life in Prague. Which is absurd if you've read the synopsis on my website. Originally, the working title was "Five Cigarettes", a story organized around the themes of love, music, sex, death, and rebirth; which it still is. But after a year of drafting I abandoned the ridiculous "true fiction" account of my life in favor of something more literary, of life, than literal. The reason in summary – not that you asked – comes down to serving you, the reader, not from virtue per se, but taste, avoiding self-indulgence in favor of dialogue. The personal stories are fun and hot and weird, yet their conveyance in draft has been more joyfully aligned as a literary dark-romance, wildly animated as such while keeping the spirit of playful horror that characterizes those stories, because some things you just can't make up.

I had recalled a dream I'd once had. About a club in Prague connected to a perfume cult. Where a lap dance could get you kidnapped. Then dismembered. Used for chemical components to make ritualistic scents.

And I thought: Okay, close enough.

The project is heating up again as summer winds down. I have moved a plot sketch from Notion to a private repo in GitHub. I want to experiment with drafting for specific narrative layers, in a sequence, for example starting with the imported sketch as the "plot layer", then working on the "story layer", connecting the beats, then the "character layer" to make each character believably coherent, and believably incoherent. And probably a couple of other layers, anyway the final layer before seeking a developmental editor I have planned is a "shits and giggles" layer – where I take everything that's messed up and make it just a little more messed up. For shits and giggles.

Anyway, to celebrate a first draft maybe for a short while I’ll make the repo public with an epub file, or you can compile a PDF, a pre-print version to say thanks for being here early in the game: the novel, and this newsletter and my website, are expressions of me learning to inhabit a dream I started building a long time ago.

My love language

My two favorite phrasal verbs are fuck around and find out. The purpose of a dream is not originality, but authenticity. Living the what – the desire – authentically, the how unfolds organically, and we may be surprised how quickly we outgrow our assumptions.

That’s the vibe for this month’s playlist. Enjoy:

MBST2609 • roadvas Rays Of Sunshine • Pye Corne... PREVIEW   ​

See you next month.