Psychic Telephone · 55
Joanie
Not sure what Psychic Telephone is all about? Check out our first and second posts for an introduction to the project. And read our first post about Joanie here.
These things Joanie experiences, with her mental health, her intuitive and spiritual paths, she doesn’t think that—she doesn’t deal well with facts, or truths. She deals well with like, everything is purely subjective all the time. As a writer, she knows telling the truth is important. But facts and truths don’t play much of a role in her life as a human being. Well, obviously they do. But they don’t matter to her as much.
She thinks anyone who says they’re psychic is fucking looney tunes, you know? But she also thinks sometimes looney tunes is true, and sometimes looney tunes is fact. She doesn’t know what to tell you. There’s always room for something fuzzy about it, this fuzz around the whole thing. The fuzz on a tennis ball is like three millimeters, this very small amount. But that actually—it sometimes makes it impossible to tell when a ball is in or out. If it hits the line, if it doesn’t hit the line. There’s always something fuzzy.
And what she would say is, as part of her theater and comedy training, she has studied a lot of clowning, different clown traditions. And there’s a type of French poetic clowning, post-1960s, that’s derivative of Jacques Lecoq’s work. Not like a birthday or circus clown. Sort of like the Cirque du Soleil clowns, but without the commercialism. And a lot of the training has to do with removing the layers of armor that we build up from the time we’re children in order to not be hurt by the world. Say when you were in first or second grade, you found something that blew your mind, the coolest thing ever—a little dinosaur figurine. And you couldn’t wait to share it with everyone, you were so excited. So you put it in your pocket and you got on the bus. A dinosaur in your pocket!
Then one of your friends, or all of your friends, said, That’s dumb. That’s stupid. That’s for babies. Nobody likes plastic dinosaurs. And in that moment you went, Nobody likes little plastic dinosaurs. Of course it’s stupid, it’s for babies. And part of you shattered. And another part built a castle and a wall and a moat and a drawbridge, and all of this armor around your heart that said, This is never going to happen to me again. And as we go through our lives, we build more and more walls, more and more armor.
So a lot of the clown training, she says, is chipping away at that armor so that you become your truest, most childlike self, who can love the thing you love whether anybody cares or not. The training hammers that into your head. She often asks her students, young writers and artists, What were you doing when you were four, five years old? When you were playing in the backyard, before the world hurt you so bad? What was the thing you were doing, that you loved? She tells them to figure that out, and figure out what that looks like now, as an adult. And show us that.
And what Joanie was doing at that age, what brought her the most joy, was having conversations with her imaginary friends. And she thinks it’s not helpful to say these imaginary friends are all make-believe. She has worked her entire adult life to remove those police from her brain. The process of receiving and transmitting information as a medium has no space for doubt. Or for grown-up uncertainty. Just as in her acting, her comedy, her teaching. It’s all just trying to live outwardly and concretely as her childlike self. And when she does that, there’s no room for the outside world to ask her whether a thing is true, or fact, or real or not real. Because what she does know is that the things she does, things that result from inhabiting her truest, most childlike self—they change people’s lives. Concretely.