Wrappings, Voices, and Angles
By: Mfa Ciis
Tags: Interdisciplinary, Fiction Writing, Autocosmology, MFA, Writers Life

A Master of Fine Arts Approach to Writing Auto-Cosmology

Written by MFA@ CIIS candidate Robert Steven Portlock about his two-year journey of integrating visual art and writing on a cosmological scale.

“First I lived stories unspeakable. Later I told all in one place without giving anything away. Always keep ’em guessing, I used to say.” — Bob Portlock

How Sexy Ed is wrapping up:

My two-year project is a full-length novel called Sexy Ed: a Real Dei and Dee Plethon.

I’ve written a few hundred pages of my manuscript, and will be wrapping up this project in the next few weeks. It’s my Spring gift to my Self and all my relations. I just thought it was the bodhisattva thing to do.

The book is largely memoir and mostly made up. It has gelled into a quivering creature of flesh spined upon a story arc reaching across timelines of real history and composite characters from my private imagination. So it’s complex. I’ve had to work at making it less complicated and seemingly seamless.

*collage gratefully credits Jerry Schatzberg’s photo of Bob holding a picture and combustible material around the other time this Bob was being born.

Bob is one that got tired of searching the sages so became Senex himself, only to discover reality IS fantasy in a series of songs. He gainfully relates how Music was always important to the ancients, as we’re assured by no one less than the mercurial Marsilio Ficino. When Bob sings, no one knows what he’s talking about. Here he’s so much older then. He’s younger than that now.

What my process has been like:

At first I called it “autobiography”, or “memoir”. Then I realized it carried fantastic elements and themes of vastation, so I had to dig.

Vastation is a psychological clearing away of life’s debris in order to prepare space anew for future living. The idea involves a sweeping panorama across desolate landscape distilled to T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland, where at the end of a life, new life begins carta blanca, blank slate: cleaned of any tainting ideology or stigma, laying claim to one’s immortal existence.

Since I draw heavily on Greek mythology and monster imagery from throughout history, I wanted to include some fantastic elements. I have learned this steers the work far from memoir and now I am calling the genre Auto-Cosmology. When I discussed this with Joseph Campbell in the 1980’s he told me I was developing my “personal mythology” in archetypal fashion. Meaning, I suppose, I was joining my tale to the universal tale of all humanity.

What I’m thinking about regarding the work:

Though permeated with love and highlighted with joys and laughter, the last two years of my life has felt like pouring hot glass into my brain in the form of lived memories emoting to get out into a frozen shape, simulating the experience of forming a Murano-fired glass snifter, the kind you can drop on pavement that will bounce back into its master’s hand. I bought mine in Venice on the Canal from a Murano Master for continuous drafts of heady liqueur, and value still its dark blue hue.

“He decided he likes to write books he likes to read. Since he’s read most of the best, he bides his time the way they did.” –Polyandes Theattican

It’s also an auto-fictional cautionary tale steeped in themes of abandonment, hope, existential education connecting adolescence with an adult interpretation of comparative religion (Hebrew, Greek, Mormon), and ancient Greek, Byzantine, and Italian renaissance history all explained through a lens of simulation-game theory. That’s a mouthful to read. I offer a book-length explanation.

Like any artist preparing a project, I’ve used a collection of material using a multi-faceted, multi-pronged approached.

My spare time is spent honing my auto-didactic acquisition methods. I read everything:

➢ Systems Analysis of patterned components

➢ Quantum mechanisms

➢ Neurology

➢ Psychology, Myth, and Comparative Religion

➢ Diversity of Cultural Values

➢ Cultural Transmission of Cultural Values in a Pluralistic World

➢ Education: Formal, Informal, and Advanced

➢ Commentary on the Laws: Consideration of Shamanic, Platonic, and Hermetic philosophies

So my writing reflects the reading I enjoy. I work like any craftsperson, in tedium. I patiently cook my ideas, mixing them in a deliberately invisible way.

It’s survived a gauntlet of several workshop-siftings including the Kingston Writers Workshop at the British Council in Athens, Greece; California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, California; and Dayton Writers Workshop in Yellow Springs, nestled amid the snaking mounds of Winesburg, Ohio. The hateful thing about teasers like this is the long anticipation of surprise during such time of cholera.

Original Art of Bob Portlock

To contact Bob about this work, you can email him at bportlock@mymail.ciis.edu.

To see more work form MFA@CIIS candidates and alumni, follow MFA@CIIS on instagram and continue reading this blog!