Using Hypnosis to Get Real About My New Substack Journalism
*I enter in that little code that puts your first name in the subtitle and rub my hands together like a scheming fly over a pile of words*
Maybe it’s time I write something purely for Substack. Really get serious. Usually, when I write—well, I’m not sure how it all happens. It involves… a keyboard, so keys and all the shit that makes them click and depress and spring back up on their own like little robots, even when I use a pen or a pencil: these markings have to get on the computer screen somehow. And the somehow is keyboard keys, hands, wangling, I have to ignore the fingernails, my thumbs become sophisticated, the pinky seizes up, gesturing. One of my eyes goes out while the other penetrates the hand-space before me only vaguely.
But you know all about that! I’m just centering myself. I’m just breathing. Just making sure my two feet are on the ground—it’s what they do in hypnosis. At least that has been my experience. My old hypnotist... A Bedouin. He did snuff. An honest guy.
I remember the first time he hypnotized me, we were sitting in a crowded coffee shop near the Rio Grande, there were moms with their little strollers and kids everywhere, people were eating ice cream, blowing bubbles, the sun was going strong, desert sun (etc.). It was after the hypnosis. He started doing his snuff with a vengeance, his eyes were burning red and he looked like the devil in his white linen clothes, his black beard—but really it was the burning, snuffed out eyes.
Who knows, maybe in hypnotizing me he had suggested that I begin seeing him as a vaguely Lucifer-like figure. Different things endear you to different people. He probably started hypnotizing me long before he even brought up the possibility of doing so in conversation—but there’s nothing wrong with that. I also let myself be hypnotized long before the word explicitly passed before me.
He got kicked out of the coffee shop because the moms didn’t know what he was snorting so vigorously, there in everyone’s midst. And so we went and sat outside, a little out of view of the distressed ladies.
What I was going to say though is that when my friend hypnotized me (a remarkable feat with all the background noise, the hissing of the espresso machine, the music, the orders, the register beeping), and I was indeed hypnotized—that’s something interesting in itself which, who knows, maybe I could describe as if from the inside in some other piece—he began by commanding me to do things I was already doing. Even as it was happening, I thought “Ahhh, he’s getting the jump on me… he’s retconning the fact that I’m sitting there with my hands on my knees: ‘Now put your hands, palms facing down against your pant legs, your thighs… put them down, face your palms down and leave them there, on your knees.’ Yep, he’s getting the jump on the simplest things about me, but only right now, in the present, as I’m plainly already doing them.”
If you know anything about hypnosis, this awareness does not make it any less powerful. Meaning: my intimation of some kind of technique being employed upon me did nothing to halt or thwart the effectiveness of that technique. Not everything is about a nefarious intention to control and be controlled. That’s not what hypnosis is about. It’s more of an understanding, a friendly relinquishing of directional…—of directional Whatever, the coordinates of where one is “going.” You still have to walk there. All so to speak.
So, that is what I must do, as I was saying, when beginning to get really serious about my piece, written quite “for you”—nope. I don’t write for myself. What is the “myself” in such a writing? Is it, is he, anything I’ve ever written anything for before?
“ZANE. GET BACK TO WORK.”
This is what my boss says to me. At my job where I should be washing dishes. I have 500 wine glasses with lipstick all over their rims that need to be cleaned so that women—and men too—can wrap their wine-dripping lips around them and sip like little birds, yes, the wine, down, but vaporously, up and into their heads again. It almost reminds me of the snuff, whiffed up into the nasal caverns of my old friend’s burning head.
And thus I wonder again, as I sometimes do, whether or not I’m still maybe half-hypnotized. This was years ago, but one never knows.
Why would I be doing dishes right now, though? Jesus, I’m going sideways every second I try to think about how to really begin a piece. Oh! It was because I was going to tell you: A boss, like the one that has told me just now to get back to washing the lips off of those snuff glasses, YELLING at me, has never said anything to me like:
“ZANE. GET BACK TO WRITING THAT ESSAY. 1680 PEOPLE ARE WAITING FOR IT. THEY’RE ALL OUT THEIR AT TABLES RUNNING LOW ON THE LAST ESSAY, AND HERE YOU ARE, DICKING AROUND WITH BELIPSTICKED WINE GLASSES—5000 OF THEM?!?!”
Such a thing has never happened to me. This is, from what I have heard—for example, on my girlfriend’s radio that she always leaves on by accident, with the volume turned down really low so that I have to get as low as possible, with my ear pressed down as if to listen to the ants marching through our kitchen—how other writers have to go about accomplishing what they do, writing wise. When they go home after a long day, filling their orders for essays and short stories, even whole novels, they sit back with their computers and say, nearly wheezing it out, because nobody is around to hear them, “Yes, now I can write something for myself, at last. Here I go.”
I’m lucky! I write—but this text is a kind of odd exception—neither for anyone in particular nor probably for myself. Normally, it’s only a kind of half-half-hypnosis. Or maybe it’s old-style ‘mesmerism.’ I’ll read something and my hands get all agitated. I’ll read on a little further and then I get that feeling like I have to immediately shit, a sick, urgent feeling, such as one gets before talking to a woman or going on stage in front of 10 million people whom one cannot really see but only hear breathing, and I’ll write a few things down. It almost always works the feeling out. The 10 million people turn out to have only been stars, winking darkly like teeth, or flowers in a weird field, the woman ends up being a real princess, like out of a fairy tale, and the urgent feeling of shitting sickness wraps up into the pure, shining image of a scale that has been not only balanced perfectly down to the iota but also perfectly annihilated. Melted down into a thin pool of tin, basically.
If that is what one calls “writing for oneself,” then I guess I have never thought about how strange that is, truly. What’s relieving to me now, however, is that I don’t have to think about it—not right now—any more than that, because I’m writing this specifically for Substack. As I said at the beginning, I’m getting down to business. I’m getting real serious about this writing for Substack shit. I even skipped a lot of important life-type events this morning to do this.
To really for once communicate with you.
For example.
I missed my daughter’s wedding.
I lost my daughter in the war.
I taught myself calculus. I invented an alternative style of calculus that involves color hex codes.
I voted.
Wait!
Those are all things I did (and did not do) yesterday. And what’s more—I don’t have and have never yet even had a daughter… I couldn’t vote if I tried… not even if they gave me a sticker… not even if the sticker was edible, like the ones they put on the tomatoes that give you the diarrhea parasite, or lettuce or whatever...
It’s at such moments, such sad, sad moments, that I think: You know what, it’s OK. I’m already running a little beyond my sweet spot of 1200 words (every REAL. wRITeR has [HAD, if they are perished] a “SWEET SPOT”. Hegel wrote at an 800 {or a 400?} -word clip. Nietzsche was about 1600 on average, believe it or not, even with all the epigrams), so I’ll basically stop now and begin again, perfectly afresh, quite later, but (now I’m not writing to you anymore, unless you are my old hypnotist, who I think might read my stuff, or maybe he just opens the emails a few times, looks at the title and deletes the thing, which I could hardly blame him for) I do think that another session of the hypnosis which I briefly alluded to before might be good for me. I could use it as a kind of tool to help me, I don’t know, choose the amount of words I have loaded into the proverbial magazine of my literary rifle before I lean out of the bell tower (the crow’s nest of the mind) and start blasting… maybe I really will start writing at a new clip {how exciting}. Almost 1400 words. This makes 1393, not including everything beyond the numeral 1393 which brings it (now) just over the threshold into an uneven 1410. But I am already well over 1600.
{I switched some words here and there in a weak moment of mendacious falsity, so the above numbers are all but fictitious. Everything else here has been only the purest, most rigorous kind of Internet journalism possibly imaginable. — Zane Rougier Perdue}
loved reading this zane