More Hermes for My Zeus
Cycles within cycles within cycles. The pandemic cycle. The seasons. The political cycle. The academic calendar. A week. A day. And then, the personal: the ups and downs of my mood, hunger, tiredness, energy, inspiration. The hope of progress battles with, succumbs to, the cyclical reality. Within all these gears of various sizes, I’ve inserted the Corona Lectures: writing, revising, requesting quotations, recording, finding images, editing the video, releasing it, starting over. And with this I’ve noticed a cycle of my own attention, sometimes lagging behind the phase I’m in—regretting not reshooting after a flubbed word or line, excited to see a response to a just-posted lecture, realizing I could’ve lit something better—other times surging ahead—anticipating the next lecture, the possibility of finally nailing one, imagining new iterations, making promises to myself I’ll break in three week’s time. Even every once in a while finding my attention focused right where it belongs, on what I’m doing now.
It would’ve been nice to say that on the first day of autumn my attention is focused right where it belongs, as the equinox feels to me like the solar equivalent of that point of balance between looking back and looking forward. But it would not be true. I can’t wait for the pandemic to run its course. I look forward with dread and excitement to this election and the two months that follow it. I find the rhythm of the semester harder than ever before to get myself in sync with. And as I wait to finish my current lecture, Part II of “The Simple Machine Underwater,” I find myself evaluating the project so far and looking ahead to the next lecture—everywhere but here, focusing on this lecture I’m creating, which I hope to release by the end of the month.
It feels like it’s time for an evolution. Without renouncing my most recent lectures, I can identify too much control exerted over them by my will. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m growing accustomed to the form. Perhaps I manipulated it more than I realized. Maybe the project was mistakenly conceived. Whatever the cause, the effect is a product that isn’t wild enough, doesn’t storm out of the containers I—seemingly by instinct—put it in, fails to approach the uncanny. I’ve theorized a most likely arbitrary connection between frustration and serendipity—that the more I was willing to be frustrated in my efforts at controlling the direction of the piece, the more I was creating space for a potential synchronicity. This is something I’ve experienced listening to the music of someone like Steve Reich.
As I’ve created more lectures, the sense of frustration has waned and the ego has had too much freedom to run the show. I’m hoping to reinvigorate the contest between ego and chance, between will and that which evades will’s demands, to invite more of the trickster to the occasion, to bring more Hermes into my Zeus. Next month we’ll see the results.
