writers group: los angeles

David Milch's Lecture, 10/16/01

Without getting too highfalutin, that sequence of scenes is about mortality. The ways that, by our conduct in our past -- having failed to respect the moral imperatives of our mortality -- our lives sort of vector off into immorality or amorality or inconsequence, and then the kind of free-floating dread that we carry around with us -- which, if it were ever articulated, would be "I haven't lived the right life, and somehow, someday I'm going to be held accountable for that," and what a detective does is try to feed into that free-floating dread, try and put a name on it, and paint the guy into a corner so that he can manipulate him based on that. The detective then himself becomes culpable for a failure of respect of humanity, and in the turn in the scene, actually has induced the condition that he was simply trying to achieve for technical purpose; that is, he views the man simply as adjunctive to his purpose in the case.

When we write those scenes, we don't think about 'em that way. As we were talking about the last couple of weeks, our brains, as a species, are built in a particular fashion. That doubleness, which I've described as the sort of characteristic state of art of -- being both inside and outside a moment -- which we suggested is not only the characteristic of art but may be what defines our species as distinguished say from other species of hominids, which is the ability to signify, that is to detach the literal experience from -- (lights dim momentarily) that's good. I like that. I like that. It doesn't distract me. It's part of it. I'm allowed to wonder if I'm epileptic while I'm simultaneously … (audience laughter.)

Isn't that really the doubleness we're trying to describe? What I was saying that, to the extent that, as distinguished from Neanderthal or the others, is the species which can abstract and form signals for an experience rather than simply responding to a series of experiences. And to the extent that the artistic brain, the storytelling brain, the ability to be both inside and outside, facilitates that kind of signifying process. What I would suggest is … and to carry it one step further … in that the state of being that we enter into when we're telling that story gives us a a kind of feeling of exultation that is certainly atypical --- it is different from the usual way that we feel ourselves as human as we move through life.

And that to the extent that that state, that exulted state of being, makes us a little uneasy, makes it difficult for us to reconcile that feeling with our usual feeling about the way we life -- that doubleness is resolved in its healthiest resolution by a sense of the presence of the divine. That is, we renounced responsibility or really ownership of that feeling as being our own, and say, "Geez, I don't know what got into me. I don't know how that happened. It just comes to me." Now that's the secular version of it. And the other version of it is quite literally, "I took the sacrament." There's a third version, of course, which is the addictive version, which is, "Good dope today." Those are three different ways of reacting to that state of felt doubleness which I think is characteristic of how our brains work, our capacity to abstract from lived experience and to develop signals, signs, myths, symbols, or in an extreme form, say algebraic expressions of states of being.

The reason that I'm digressing to remind you of those previous discussions is that for me, as a writer, when I'm writing, I'm simply trying to get the voices right and to stay with the felt dramatic tension in the scene. But afterward, I get very anxious. I have tried to come to some sort of articulate understanding of how the process works as a way of accommodating my anxiety. To the extent then that there's a sort of second dimension of creativity in trying to pass that knowledge on, that's what I'm trying to do here. While I've tried to point out in earlier discussions it is absolutely unnecessary to understand intellectually how a scene works; in fact, it's counterproductive when you're actually creating.