Screw the Debates, Riff on Yeats

by William Skink

Like the millions and millions of people who can’t not watch a train-wreck, I tuned in tonight to watch the showdown. How would Donald respond to #pussygrabbinggate? How would Hillary respond to the rape survivors she stepped on along her rise to wealth and power staring her down as her rapist hubby and wall street-wed daughter sat in the audience?

I don’t really want to talk about all that, though. I recently snagged a six CD set of Robert Anton Wilson talking about his work and it’s reminded me how subjectively any one of us views the world through our own, very limited, “reality tunnel”. It was a perfectly timed shift in perspective I’ve been taking long drives just to listen to.

We are are the meta-programmers we’ve been waiting for!

Hillary tonight accurately claimed Donald lives in an alternative reality. I agree, but not in the pejorative sense that experiencing an alternative reality is bad. It’s actually the standard way for every human soul to exist.

Bob (Robert Anton Wilson) describes one of the little games he played with students to show them how the reality each one of us creates in the process of filtering the vast amount of data flooding our nervous systems is completely subjective. He simply asks individual students to describe the hallway they took to enter the classroom they currently occupy. Bob claims in all his years doing workshops and lectures and trainings on guerrilla ontology the descriptions of the relative hallway always varied, sometimes wildly so.

Listening to Bob has been helpful as I navigate my own subjective hallway, stitching together sound and images as the first building blocks of a larger structure. I talked to a friend a few days ago who knows the musical material pretty well, due to our cathartic rocking out we squeeze in whenever possible (we both have kids), and he gave me some encouragement that I’m improving my use of Pro Tools and Final Cut.

The larger structure is a story that will exist as fiction, but draws from experiences that I have had and have been trying to tell, in some form, for the better part of the last 15 years.

While I’ll keep putting out a few more music videos, the next little project I am considering is a short documentary about my connection to a brutal murder that occurred under the Reserve Street bridge, and how that experience impacted the reality tunnel I use to see the world.

For now, here is my latest video: Riff on Yeats. Enjoy!