The Matter Is The Matter. The mind can go anywhere, would certainly like to, but it's harnessed to a slow moving blob of physicality. Imprisoned by flesh, or feeling so, the mind constructs consoling phrases like, The Matter Is The Matter. When did I come up with that one? As far as I know, that was my first "mantra."

I should point out here that I've adopted and adapted the term "mantra" from its original usage—"a Hindu or Buddhist mystical formula or incantation"—to serve as my own inner shorthand for something like "words to live by." I'm not sure how else to characterize these mantras. They are too negative to be affirmations, too conscious to be chants. Call them code words which encapsulate something I think important to keep in mind.

The Matter Is The Matter. Were it not for Matter, Mind would be utterly unconstrained. One wouldn't have to make choices. Everything all the time is available to the mind, as the mind knows very well. But the mind being the mind, it has its reasonable side. It consoles but does not delude itself. The Matter Is The Matter, and often there are matters more immediate than those the mind has in mind. So Mind marks its place in a fantasy epic featuring a familiar but enhanced version of the organic matter which houses it ("Shakespeare in Love with Me"), and tends to the real material needs of a decidedly unenhanced physical creature.

The Matter Is The Matter. Zelda gets a "straight" job and promises herself that with the rent secured and a bit of pocket money for the niceties of life, her creative spirit will flourish. Take care of the matter, relieve the mind of material worries, and although time will be more limited, mind will be more free.

The Matter Is The Matter. This mantra got me through some tough times after college, the big move from Boston to Albuquerque, a job that felt like too much of a chore. Whenever I felt like I was going crazy, because nothing could be just the way I wanted it to be fast enough, I would assure myself that there was nothing the matter with my mind, it was the matter; and making myself do what had to be done was a good thing and was buying me freedom—even though it felt like just the opposite.

Ah, the illusions of youth! Now I know that everything can't be exactly the way I want it to be ever, and that's my mind's fault! Perfection is a uniquely mental construct. Only in our minds can anything be perfect; and notice how even there, in our thoughts, we keep revising our ideals. We have a conception of perfection but an inability to pin down the specs. Where is there a blueprint? If each of us has a different and changing perception of perfection, surely the cause is hopeless.

These mantras cycle through. I "invoke" my "mantra" to remind me of something I once had worked out in my mind. The whole inner dialogue and reasoning process becomes distilled to a single phrase with which I might call back a certain bit of elusive understanding. Spent mantras reside in me like an index of past thoughts and emotional states. I can measure my progress by them, or return to them for a refresher course in my life's lessons. The Matter Is The Matter still has meaning for me, though I only kept it in active use for a short time. The matter most inescapably is the matter, and more so when the mind frets over it. Soon it dawned on me that if one is to fortify oneself with an aphorism or affirmation, there should be nothing "the matter" about it. That is, I shouldn't be constantly reminding myself that there's something the matter. So at some point I replaced The Matter Is The Matter with a new mantra, Just Do The Work.

Just Do The Work. Wow. Today it sounds like a hard dictum; but Just Do The Work served me well for many years, I would say a decade or more. It worked, and there was nothing the matter with it. Just Do The Work became ingrained in me. Every word was loaded with significance. I wrote: I know that when I say "work" I am speaking of something that I love, that redeems all, that is life itself. "Do" is really the operative idea here, as opposed to fret, fuss, wish and all the other so-called verbs that amount to "not doing." "Just do" instructs me to "do" without letting all that other stuff get in the way.

Yes, this mantra carried me through the entire remainder of my term in the establishment work force. Let's call it my responsible period. I held a good part-time job and performed it well, while assiduously advancing my creative projects in my "free" time. I knew this could not go on forever, I did not intend for it to. But I had no idea how hard it would be to extricate myself from the system I had created. I got very mixed up about the word "work" because it had become so entangled with something else called a "job," and also with a set of mundane domestic activities I called "chores." In short, there was nothing comforting or inspirational about Just Do The Work once I discovered that there was a lot of work I just plain didn't feel like doing!

And then the mantras began to stumble over each other. I dismembered Just Do The Work so as to take a good hard look at this concept of "work" and what I was doing to it and it to me. At the place called work I had learned to use some desktop publishing software that was based on grids. Once you defined a grid size against which to structure the page layout, every image or block of text "snapped to" the nearest horizontal and vertical, allowing for precision alignment of even the smallest elements. As graphics tools went, I thought this was brilliant. But the concept of "snapping to grid" held uncomfortably personal overtones. My grid was clock, datebook and calendar, and I "snapped to" automatically, robotically—and increasingly against my own will. I decided I no longer wanted to snap to grid; I would put my energy into Getting Off The Grid instead.

I quit the office job and I declared my life a No Boundaries zone. Every edge would be erased, the walls leveled—no divisions, no comparisons, no compartments, no deals. No Boundaries. I would dismantle the entire edifice of my ego brick by brick until I had made sufficient space for Thinking My Own Thoughts, a mini-mantra which surfaced as an expression of perhaps my deepest and longest-held desire, All I have ever wanted is the time to think my own thoughts.

Time. When I began thinking about thinking my own thoughts, they turned immediately to time, to the boundaries imposed by time, especially in conjunction with matter. The matter was the matter all over again and so was time. I was thinking about time, about what time is and how we perceive it, about time and society, time and money, about—Time and Temperature. Time and Temperature became a catchphrase for my quest to examine human consciousness, my own in particular, and how I had come into the grip of such a stern set of boundaries in the first place. Sometimes I considered the phrase and thought of the Grid—a graph, really—and wondered at this impulse to build a box around ourselves simply for the sake of knowing where we are. But where would we be otherwise? I soon began contemplating the subjective side of Time and Temperature. Make that a stand-in for Thoughts and Feelings, and The Grid grows a dimension, becomes more open-ended, much harder to navigate. Nature creeps in. I wanted to find what was natural in myself.

As I began to write my way off the grid and out of bounds, and (sometimes, fleetingly) succeeded, I discovered (rediscovered) something I called Beautifulism....

Beautifulism is all of art and all of religion, without the boundaries. It's a way to be and a way to want things to be that is its own reward. Doing anything with a beautiful feeling or a desire to experience beauty or to share beauty is truly its own reward. Beauty makes matter not be the matter. Beauty makes work not be work. Beauty makes boundaries not be boundaries. Beauty makes time not be troubling.

But Beautifulism is a philosophy, not a mantra (a way of living, not a tool for living). If I must chant to it, I do so with something like, Just Do A Thing or, Do A Thing All The Way. I've been trying those out but I haven't settled on a new mantra at this point. The old Be Here Now or Everything Is Everything serve as well as any.

I am here now thinking my own thoughts, and to do so all the way it is helpful to write, and to write for an audience that is not familiar with my personal shorthand. The process of translation, narration and annotation of my words to myself itself becomes a "mystical formula or incantation." What magic will be made here? What gods will be summoned? What demons expelled? As I write, all is dictated by my consciousness; but as you read, all is determined by yours.

Write Or Die. Now there's another one. I hadn't thought of it as a mantra, but what else could I call it? I have had some extraordinarily painful moments thinking my own thoughts, not to mention feeling my own feelings. (I never had to wish for the time to feel my own feelings, since I am never not feeling them.) When this happens a sort of paralysis overcomes me. I am in a very deep hole and the thoughts alone can't save me—after all, it is the thoughts spinning around and around the same bit that have drilled out the great depression. Then it is Write Or Die time. I must dig myself out with the point of a pen, climb the magic keyboard to freedom.

Some folks write all the bad stuff out and then tear the pages up or burn them (a simple Delete would hardly be satisfactory). I save every scrap, scribble and file. Writing Or Dying is about as close as I get to an unedited voice of my interior dialogue. These outpourings to no one flood right over ego and inner censor. They are me at my me-est, not my pretend best. I preserve them in defiance of all the pretend things and pretend ideas that populate our existence. Yes, I perceive that there is more and more pretense and pretending going on and I especially dislike it in myself.

Write Or Die. Write or let the pretend world overtake me; write or deny reality; write or surrender reason; write or give up on myself and the world.

Write Or Die started at the computer. It evolved from emergency triage to preventative care. I found that writing regularly became a form of mental hygiene, a way to stave off the crises. That is, until my passion for pounding the keys, combined with other obsessively practiced activities, brought on a bout of carpal tunnel syndrome. My right wrist was shot. No typing, no writing. Now what would I do? Crashing hard into the realization of my physical frailties, the impossible demands I put on myself, I had more on my mind than ever. Write Or Die.

Without a hand to write with, I was dying!

Luckily, I did have a hand to write with—my left. At first I wrote so slowly with it that a thousand thoughts died right there on the tip of the pen; I couldn't hold them in my head long enough to get the words formed on the page. I joked that I could compose the entire history of civilization in my head in the time it took me to write one sentence left-handed. Of course I couldn't. Part of the problem was that my thoughts really seemed to run differently when I put my left hand in charge of writing them down. I had no patience for narrating the events of the day, documenting conversations, being specific and logical about any subject. So many words! And what did they really amount to in those same old tired combinations?

Writing with my left hand, I directed my thoughts to some of my very favorite subjects—dreams, perception, magic, art, time and consciousness, to name a few. I often wrote at bedtime and would end my entries with a kind of meditation on dreaming, in hopes of aiding memory of dreams and encouraging a state of lucid dreaming. Frequently I would write about dreaming in my Time and Temperature journal before bed, and on waking write down an actual dream in a separate dream journal. The waking and sleeping selves, like the right and left hands, were in dialogue.

I suppose I should interrupt myself to give a short explanation of the brain and handedness. I doubt it will clarify anything except, maybe, why the subject so intrigues me.

Consider: The human brain (the front of it) is divided into two hemispheres, left and right. In just about all right-handed people, the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for movement of the right side of the body and the right hemisphere of the brain operates the left side of the body. We are called right-handed because we write with the right hand, and we do so because the left hemisphere which operates the right hand is also responsible for language and logical, linear thought.

About ten percent of the population is left-handed, and of those about a third have brain functions which are exactly flipped—their right hemisphere houses the language centers, it operates the left hand, so it is the left hand that wants to write. For a small percentage of left-handers, right-handers, and folks who are ambidextrous, brain functions are not so strictly divided by hemisphere. But for about two-thirds of all left-handers, left and right hemisphere functions are just the same as for right-handers. I once read that 99% of these folks are visual artists, and their left hand is dominant because they are thinking more in pictures (which reside in the right hemi­sphere that controls the left side of the body) than in words.

Are you with me?

The dual nature of vision is more obvious-we have two eyes, right? And each of our eyes has two sides, a right and a left, so that each side of the brain can get input from each eye. The right hemisphere takes half an image from each eye (that would be the left half) and the left hemisphere does the same (that would be the right half), and on top of that the visual image gets flipped upside down in the course of transmission to the visual cortex at the back of the brain. The old conception of this process was that of an image projected by the eyes, upside-down, to the visual cortex, for the brain to "look at." Imagine: The lobes of the brain "look down" to the base of the brain (just like having "eyes in the back of your head") and "see" what is there, which is upside-down and backwards to our accustomed orientation.

In reality, there is never a static image in the brain, the brain is not a file cabinet for pictures. Light stimulates receptors in the eyes which transmit signals along neural pathways for the brain to process. My point is, vision happens not in the eyes but in the brain.

Now, can thinking happen in the hand?

That's what Gertrude Stein suggested to me. Her style of writing, which many find impossible to read, is a great experiment in language and thought. I think she was less interested in being read than in writing. A writer has to be this way some of the time or nothing original comes out. Stein was an original and the originality is all there in her writing because she didn't edit herself. She practiced Writing While Thinking, transcribing her thoughts in real time, not alternating between thinking and writing. That's where the thought is so in danger of being edited, in that place where nothing appears to be happening, when the pen is poised. In the stillness, a tremendous overhaul of the pure sentiment is taking place because the mind can't bear to spit it out naked and raw.

The trick to Writing While Thinking is to keep the pen moving, and the trick to that is to overcome the fear of writing nonsense. Gradually the mind and hand become synchronized, and the words begin to have an aware quality. With practice I was able to relax enough to create sentences, and eventually ideas. I had posed a number of questions to myself, and I contemplated them as I imagined Einstein might have performed his Thought Experiments. At the same time I was performing an actual experiment on myself in left-brain and right-brain thought.

Writing While Thinking became my longhand equivalent of Writing Or Dying. It was a good approach to practicing with the left hand. And when I did so much of that my left hand hurt me, I turned it over to my healing right hand. There's that saying: The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Well, I was able to get them together a little bit. Looking back at the journals it's not always easy to tell which hand was doing the work. Thinking really does happen in the mind, after all, and we're all one in here—aren't we, girls?

Well, that was one of the things I was thinking about....