PREFACE to the Book

Graduate School and Life When I descended into my new South Park studio I began an entirely new journey, which was in fact more like a thousand journeys between heaven and hell during which I rarely if ever stopped en route to check out the beautiful and troubled world between. Both terrible and wonderful things happened down in that dingy studio, and of the wonderful there were many projects born, so much so that I am still working them toward completion as I tack amongst them, adding a little to this one, a little to that one, and sometimes bringing another brainchild into the family. In the studio, I began to transcribe these journals from the UBC trip onto my computer so that I could work them more easily into a blog. It didn't take long to discover that the blog was a much larger project than I anticipated. This is true in a number of ways. For one, the journals were sloppily written, many events were out of order or written about variously as in the moment, about moments that came before, about speculations, reflections, etc, and often these three were all switching back and forth between one another. This is primarily because I wrote almost everything in the course of the actual events and not, for example, at a cafe or house at the end of the night. I am mentioning these things now to shed light on something critical. When I started writing the blog it was with the conviction that it would directly and greatly serve my thesis. Much time has passed since then, and as I write the narrative story to a close almost exactly three years after I started graduate school I do so with one overriding conviction: Anarchist Repertoire must serve the world. If it serves the world it cannot serve the thesis. In order to serve the world it must sacrifice the thesis. To do this it must act as the alter upon which the thesis gets sacrificed as well as, simultaneously, the executioner who brings down the sword. The heaven and hell I mentioned above indicate a wicked and confounding war within. But as the war raged and my life exploded into millions of unrecoverable pieces Anarchist Repertoire gave birth to a creature that has risen up and has towered over my life like a great monster until finally bringing it's great fists crashing down. I have been closing my eyes. Cringing. Waiting for a miracle. Waiting for this creature to do what I started out to do but have not been able to do with it hovering over my life- finish my thesis. But when I realized my eyes were closed I opened them to find all was eerily silent; beside me lay the thesis, completely in ruins, and the war was over. Now what? What have I done!? If my life was so irreparably broken as that great creature rose above me how is it that, as I sacrifice the one thing that has been at the core of my life-that has defined me in terms of what I am doing in life, served as a reference and focal point about who I am time and time again-I sit here in front of my computer alive in one piece and what's more-despite the concerns that might arise in thinking about what I will tell my friends and family, or how I will feel about paying off 40,000 in loans when I didn't even get the degree, or how I will ever explain why I was up in Nova Scotia for two years or what ever happened to that- I write about this with great peace? The the answer is that without graduate school, none of these events and thoughts would have come to pass, in which case I don't know how I would have ever been so broken, confused, forlorn, sidetracked, etc. And without being broken, I could not have been healed. The answer is that the war within begins with a fight over who you are and ends with who you are not: the Stranger. It appears that strangers are capable of anything. That they can help or hurt. But strangers are capable of neither rescuing nor killing for strangers do not exist. In this way we do not know them for we cannot know something that does not exist. But in so far as we believe in them they become real in our worlds. Brief overview of applying to grad school, previous project, and hint at what happened when you got there. I will be conducting 15 interviews blah blah blah..." mocking school Central organizing theme escape from authority in hitch-hiking and freight trains. And I had to place my field work somewhere so I looked to: Anarchic Meta-Geographies And I had to show how I was going to approach it and with whom I was in communication: Methodology and Literature And there were academics treating the new social movements in a way I related to: The Radical Imagination Experience/Ritual to Theatre. Pirates... My initial obsession was about Strangers from couch-surfing but then I got hurt: Child's Play DEEP PLAY must start with play. Play starts with the child. Play is meaningful to children. What we do often seems meaningless to them. What they do seems meaningless to us from a practical stand point of “what” they are actually doing when they play. But what they are doing when they play is meaning-making. See, they are MAKING it up. Children feel very seriously about play, we just fail to see how serious the things they do are because we think in terms of outcome or productivity. Play is not a cause and effect thing but stands outside of that world. Play is a process without beginning or end. Children know intuitively that “we are what we pretend to be”. At best we can grasp “we are what we think we are”. Both are the same, but the second one is easier to misconstrue. As adults, we must make meaning out of what we pretend to be that runs contrary to what people think we are. Training play in childhood is not for surviving in those roles they pretend, such as a mom or firefighter, it is to grasp the world we collide with when living in one we create. Playing mom and growing up to be a mom; that is just boring. Being a parent is not boring but what a waste it would be to think the purpose of playing mom at 6 years old was training for being a mom later on. NOT necessary. But it IS training and we must look at what it is good for; what we can retroactively harness from all the training we did. Child’s play is real play. But play grows up and real play in and adult is not going to look like children playing. Gown up play is not child play if it is merely about seeking pleasure or having fun because children are not seeking pleasurable experiences in their life for they are full time players. They have an instinct to have fun and seek pleasure as a fish in the boat needs water. It’s the oxygen of their true spirit. As adults we must force them to do other things, not because it’s not possible for them to have it their way, that logic misses a deeper purpose, but because they are not equipped to consciously navigate the world as full time players, in a system that refuses their reality. To live like a child, truly, means failing to understand the degree to which people do not accept this or why there is nothing childlike in your play as an adult unless you engage the world as a playground. Recess wasn’t the proper place to play, it was a training ground for playing out in the world. This is where depth comes in. The deep. “Game we’re playing is life”. If we took children seriously they’d be mocking the world. They play with our serious objects and mock us. We must do likewise. Play is fun because it is not in the world we support. Why do we support a world that is not about fun? Our fun must be dangerous. To live by this conviction, understand that to live “irresponsibly, intentionally, with conviction and purpose, is an incredibly difficult accomplishment. It comes down to either the hero or the coward. It means risking everything. What is freedom? How can we possibly be free if, once reaching adulthood, cannot choose to be the pirate, or hobo, or wanderer, and cannot do so because such roles are seen as occupied only by people who do it out of ill necessity. People who just can’t seem to take on proper roles and gravitate toward certain zones and spaces that we can’t seem to get rid of or control. And that’s a clue! The first pirates and bohemians and hobos carved those spaces out with great sacrifices. Resisting adults in pursuit of autonomy. Pirates, like children, could be wicked, but being one doesn’t make you so. Being a politician is a different story. Halloween. We dress up as characters. Archetypes. We only allow to exist or be acceptable in our imaginary time. But people once played pirate full time. And hobo. The value of being one evades us. We might be mocking or disgracing them except they exist to mock us so the joke is on us once again. And yet we do insult them in neglecting the huge sacrifices they made for us and that I will talk more about in the radical imagination. People wouldn’t like it if we played our grandfathers during World War 2 on Halloween, acting silly about something so grave. But then again, soldiers don’t seem like much fun. Pirates were fun. We know because of literature and because we have preserved them in our imaginary. In doing so we have failed to convey convincingly that the pirate is bad and does not belong in this world. We love the pirate we just want to keep them where we are safe, not from them but from ourselves. The pirate captured our imagination because they were real, for one, but also because they mocked the rulers of our world. They defied them all the way to the gallows (citation). They mocked our way of life insisting we were the ones playing at some stupid game. When they stood face to face we were both playing a game only theirs was dangerous to our own as it seemed to possess to much of that thing they call “romance” as opposed to our “reality”, and the pirates all risked everything knowing it would spell game over sooner than later. They played for keeps. If we recognize that virtual divide then a pirate does not get carried away with their imagination. They get carried away with reality. We are the ones who got carried away with imagination and started getting serious to the point of ruining the game for everyone. Playing house is not only not fun anymore, it’s scary. But the divide of romance versus reality is inside as well as out, and we might fail to grasp that meaning-making is our responsibility-that meaning is made by challenging the divide and that challenging it is what we trained for when we played as children. You must live to play, but playing cannot just mock their world, it must mock your own. For you share with them the conviction that fiction and fact, imagination and materiality, romance and reality, are two separate things. You cannot help it for this complicity is your original sin. Transgression is your religion. Deep Play is your ritual. The Stranger is your priest. Risk is your baptism. Transcendence is your reward. I was pulled off of the train in Quebec: Transgression: From anarchic meta-geographies to liminal zones (romance and reality, serious business and play, the mocking...) The Stranger Deep Play, Immediatism, and a bit of Flow (p 20, Turner- liminal and flow) Meaning-Making with Freight Trains When I look at the trains I see so many things I could never describe them all. One thing I see is the hijacking of imagination and the mass creation of Strangers. When I look at the Stranger I see how the differences, or Difference, that breath(s) and sustain(s) life as a single existence in which Story and Life are one, is/are subject to the greatest hates and warred against by the greatest fears and a hyphen falls like a sword splitting what is more undefinable than "one" into two", leaving us at our best guess with Story-Life. It has something to do with talking about playing, and children, and the value of playing, and imagination, and telling stories... about life, and the self-evident value in the creation of self-evidently valuable meaning in the creation of making meaning by doing so! These Trains Carry Seeds of Destruction Story-Life: Putting the Pieces Together Story: All characters serve to support and illuminate one who shows what is possible and more, that without their sacrifice there is no story. They are all aspects of one person. It’s not about winning the girl or capturing the criminal. It’s about a good story. You must not live to be recognized or famous, or safe and logical, you must live for story more and more each day as long as you live and story is shit without meaning. Meaning-making in stories is not possible without risk and risk is not real unless the audience is certain that the protagonists world will completely change by taking it. Creating your character arc means more than surprising the world, it means surprising yourself. The greatest dreams you have may be the ones you never dare to do. The greatest tragedy is you look deep within and discover that fear is what holds you back. The greatest shame, I think, is recognizing this fear and being kidded by others or kidding yourself that it's not a matter of fear but logic. A logic that boils down to your dreams not being fit for this reality. If you see that fear is what holds you back, fear of the unknown, of uncertain success, of potential death or loss of property or friends or a "future", then you apply the paradigm and know there are only two decisions to choose from and they determine whether your life is a story or that your story is merely a matter of living life. You must chose between being a hero or a coward. The hero requires risking everything for something uncertain. The coward requires risking everything also, for setting out for the uncertain is the only way that you can MAKE meaning. Otherwise life remains merely meaningful. A child gets building blocks for a gift. They find this gift to be meaningful, but when they begin to build they make meaning. Deep inside you know that you would take your chances for the dream if you knew you could come right back to where you are if things got dangerous; if you could type in a password so that your character could come right back after game over. This is how we live. To work. To home. Knowing both will be there. The car. The money. The people you know. The people you don't know. But a door opens from time to time and you know it's true; "If you turn back there is only what might have been".