The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

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David Milch's Active Imagination

When former Yale Professor, former heroin addict, former alcoholic and Emmy winner writer/producer David Milch creates a script, he eschews period punctuation in scene directions. Milch prefers the double dash – for its employment suggests the infinite possibilities of a pause in the moment where great things can happen feverishly and invisibly off the page in the vacuum created by the indiscernible Em-dash. A period bespeaks a prosaic finality that the ephemeral creativity of David Milch cannot bear and even in a colloquial telephone interview the double dash is always there – pausing – waiting – jockeying just beyond the ether of a cross country conversation.

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