If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
Warning: movie spoilers ahead.
The final scene in Dennis Hopper’s 1990 neo-noir film “The Hot Spot” is a jarring experience for the viewer who’s just spent two hours investing in Harry Madox, a chronic drifter. It’s the kind of moment that really sums up the zeitgeist we’re facing as we go deeper into February.
Since rejoining Twitter/X in late January, I’ve been discussing how the year is basically kicking off with a lot of fresh energy and a new macro cycle.
The glitchy quality of life lately sums up the trend ahead:
Continued dissolution of what we’ve taken for granted.
So, it felt fitting to watch a story about a guy who basically has had everything unravel for him, and who arrives in small town Texas, hoping for a dose of order—only finding that the smaller and more local he goes, the more fragmented and complicated things get.
It's a lot like life right now: people a niching down into smaller, more micro tribes, and yet instead of clarifying reality, it adds to the perplexity. I responded to one guy’s thoughts on this with the following tweet, and many seemed to resonate with the feeling:
Harry feels the same in his own life. Quick on his feet, he manages to land a job selling used cars for a man named Harshaw. He confesses to his coworker Gloria Harper (played by Jennifer Connelly) that his life has been “one series of floozies after another—I kind of forget how to treat a real lady.”
Gloria represents for him what he hopes the small town can be: a pure and unspoiled place of escape. Indeed, as the two begin to bond, their regular hangout becomes a secluded swimming hole that Gloria knows the way to.
But Harry gets pulled deeper into the town’s underbelly. He begins an affair with Dolly, who is his employer;s wife, and discovers that she’s also sleeping with a blackmailing lowlife who took photographs of Gloria’s lesbian encounters.
So much for that redemptive promise of unspoiled purity.
Through twists and turns—and lots of crime—it eventually seems that Harry will come out on the other side a changed man. He vindicates Gloria, saving her from a cycle of abuse by bringing her blackmailer to justice. He proposes they leave town and go to the Caribbean together for a real escape, a real fresh start, after their employer dies from a heart attack. Gloria agrees. It’s not set up as a happy ending, but it feels like the two characters will get a new lease on life.
But that’s changed when Dolly calls the two over to her house. She explains to naïve Gloria that she knew about the blackmail, because Harry told her. All the hush money that Gloria was taking from the company register to pay her blackmailer—that debt would be forgiven. (Funny how I watched this before Biden announced his student loan forgiveness plan this week.)
But Gloria is heartbroken that Harry broke her trust by revealing her secret. Of course, he didn’t in actuality—Dolly is lying about this because she wants to coerce Harry into eloping with her, under threat of revealing HIS crimes to the public.
Plans for the Caribbean are cancelled. In the final scene, we see Harry and Dolly riding along the Texas highway, in her pink convertible. Harry says, “I found my level.”
Talk about expecting the unexpected. I think a lot of us right now are expecting neat endings to certain stories or sectors of our life, and finding that the chips fall in ways that we didn’t anticipate. It messes with our sense of purity, redemption and how things should neatly tie together.
Instead, it’s shoved in our face that we’ve been in motion on a certain trajectory, and no matter how many twists, turns or detours we take—somehow we still get dropped back into unfamiliar territory.
No matter how hard Harry tried to conjure up order around the chaos, in the end he was thrust back out into the wilderness, just like we see him at the beginning, wandering the deserts of the American West.
It’s a full circle, and in some Zen way, there’s order in that—but only in the sense that one closure opens the way for more unraveling.
This will seem frustrating to many people, no doubt. Right now ,probably the biggest trend I see is a forcing of solutions. People on Twitter/social media niche down into ever-smaller versions of tribes they identify with, vilifying others (“I’m the tight-laced version of right wing Twitter, not the hippy version”).
Likewise, legacy brands like Target aim to find solutions with automated technologies like self-checkout, only to find that, at untimely moments, they’ve created a bottleneck during surge hours—placing customer service chaos on their plate. Meanwhile, they’ve got a frustrated labor force on their hands, too, who are organizing and sharing stories through social media. (I’ve been saying since the beginning of the year that a major service industry flashpoint around quality control is due for April.)
Those of us out here just trying to live our lives are squeezed on both ends as well, just like Target, just like Harry Madox. We try to carve our way through online groups, finding ourselves embroiled in meta-discussions that don’t seem to have real world stakes or applications—it’s all a big swamp of social chaos and trying to differentiate ourselves with increasingly contrived signifiers. Offline is no respite either: third spaces (anything besides work or home) have been decimated by the pandemic, not in any dramatic way, but in a subtly corrosive way.
I wrote on Twitter:
It’s the same with Harry. This little hyper-local node of Texas feels like an oasis (literally, given the swimming hole he escapes to with Gloria, escaping the heat, escaping his life). But it’s a milieu of constant social friction under neat appearances, where allegiances are constantly shifting, leading to internal psychological fractionation: for example, Harry saves a man trapped in a fire after committing arson for money, but he will avenge the innocent by spilling blood.
It's the kind of nuance that’s true to the human experience, which is what makes the film so raw. Harry won’t kill in order to advance himself, but he will if he feels a threat to the cosmic web he inhabits.
I believe a lot of us will be facing some hard decisions in the next couple weeks, left like Harry infinitely puzzling over what’s right versus wrong. It’ll be easy to get lost in all the smoke and mirrors, and just sit catatonically, like Harry locked in his hotel room. But on the other hand, we may feel pained by taking direct action with unthinking impulse.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: it’s the kind of motto that makes for good film noir, but when it comes to life in 2024, it’s not so fun or easy.
So what’s the strategy here? Let’s dive in.
Transcendent Flaws
There is something painful about being on the bleeding edge of the frontier, knowing that the landscape is changing every step forward.
But in that pain there is reward—a confirmation that you’re only backtracking in order to close loops on things that propel you forward.
Ultimately, Harry’s time in Texas isn’t just a detour, even though at one level, the storyline plays out like that. What I mean is, he doesn’t end up settling down there and marrying Gloria, the small-town girl—as the viewer is led to believe at first.
The town is like a portal, a wormhole, a vortex, an accelerator. Harry is like a pinball racing through intricate tracks, until he achieves enough escape velocity—and when he is propelled out, he’s not the same man as the one who entered.
Similarly, there are many detours ahead for us in the next couple weeks. Things could feel quite sloppy and messy.
We could be faced with jagged, nonlinear diversions that don’t make sense at the time but later, as the intensity increases, we become aware of a grand design that is bigger than us.
There’s a kind of redemption and faith in this, even though it might inspire fear and even a big dose of pessimism.
There’s also a kind of confidence that we’re moving forward into something truly new, not some illusory newness.
Although some people could fall down some rabbit holes for things that seem “too good to be true” or end up wearing some rose-colored glasses for a moment before reality slaps them off harshly.
Don’t take it too hard, though, if it happens to you.
I do think the ending for “The Hot Spot” feels controversial, but the core idea is “right.” Which is why it took an artist like Hopper to reach into the ether and grab something other than a typical Hollywood ending. It left an impression on me, and I know I’ll be watching the film again soon to simmer in the philosophy it espouses:
Essentially, the idea is that human consciousness can feel fragile and unstable when we become peripherally aware of variables we sought to suppress or believed were out of the realm of possibility.
Harry didn’t want to believe that he was capable of both tender peace and mortal violence. Furthermore, he didn’t want to believe a small town could seem so pure and simple on the face of it, but be eaten through with vice and urgent desires.
In the same way, our impulses to act and “solve” our problems through direct confrontation with life may suddenly be met with a meekness within ourselves to retract, reflect, return to old habits.
But eventually I think many of us will resolve these inner contradictions, leading to an awareness of external abundance.
We will realize there are new, undeniable variables—and even grand opportunities—that have escaped our notice because we didn’t believe they were possible.
Harry is pulled deeper into chaos, but his character arc is one of self trust, allowing him to manifest an ending that is associated with freedom. He is eventually delivered back into wide open horizons, by virtue of divine forgiveness, but also because he chose to risk an adventure. Sure, his understanding of that adventure was flawed: he thought small town Texas was his journey’s last stop.
But that flaw is precisely what sets the stage for his ultimate transcendent release.
These flaws, these flirtations with mess and chaos, these attempts that meet with failure, are the seeds of forgiveness—they aid us in manifesting freedom and expansion.
Like Harry, we can allow them to sink into the periphery, not because he or we are amoral actors in the world—but because we eventually learn to trust that our initiatory power is nothing to be ashamed of. We don’t have to judge our gut instinct as “not good enough” because it makes us look weird, like a mysterious stranger still figuring things out.
We know that what we activate in the world can then be allowed to drift aside to the periphery, because our fingerprints are now on it. The divine can take over and return these things to us in polished form, in due appointed time. We become masters of decisive action by becoming apprentices in the art of peripheral awareness.
It’s not giving up. It’s not even letting go, per se. Just a little stir of the soup here and there, but then it’s back to folding laundry or taking out the trash. Harry is always tidying up little loose ends, and gradually, by cosmic multiplication, he’s tying up big loose ends, like Gloria’s trauma and his own.
Some of you may feel like you’re about to come out on the other end of a chapter, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and that you’re riding the momentum of something greater than you—perhaps a wave you kicked off months or years ago, but which gained speed and intensity when you looked away and mindlessly attended to other tasks or habits.
Those fantasies that you set for yourself, of how life could be different for yourself, are gradually coming to fruition, because you allowed them to sink into the periphery, not forcing their conclusion.
Perhaps just not in the way you planned, but late February into early March should show you that the things you thought were dead and gone and over.
They are coming up for review, ready to push you into an era where you can see them crystallizing in your material world.
It may feel like a detour at first. But ultimately, you’ll know in your gut that you planted a belief long ago, and even if you had forgotten it, well—it hasn’t forgotten you.
As Victor Hugo said: “There is nothing more potent than an idea whose time has come.”
If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
Great stuff, Paul. This one resonated more than any in a long time
Brilliant as always Paul!
Had mi tearing up a bit at the end and I agree fully with the sense of velocity that we´re experiencing. There's a big change coming up, not only on a global scale, but more importantly... A personal one. I look forward to your next observation of the ever lasting movement of life.
If you could dive deeper on this topic via twitter (X) or any other space, pff... Amazing!