Bruce Wagner Writes Transgressive Novels About Tragedy & Transcendence

36:27What's motivating that behavior? And what is the truth of all of this? And is there an opportunity for transcendence within these doomed cycles, right? And how do you distinguish between artifice and reality? Yeah, you know, I think it was a kind of inoculation, my work, which turned out to be false. But I think I wanted to explore every forbidden place in myself. What you said earlier about all of us being interchangeable, I really wanted to embrace that. And in my work, I am as close to the saintly characters that appear as I am to the malevolent, homicidal, perverse characters who appear. The child killers, the pedophiles.

37:30I wanted to inhabit the places that, if there was a hesitation in a normal person, for me, there was almost a kind of rapture in locating a place that was so infernal that why hadn't I visited there before? So you can do that and you can do it forever. But what happens is I think ultimately without the spiritual aspect, you atrophy and you become a kind of curiosity to others and to oneself. And you become a fetishist. Right. But the transcendent peace is a function of shining a light on the infernal, you know, shame-inducing peace. Like, you can't have one without the other. If you're not willing to go towards the thing that scares you the most, that you are hiding from the world, then you are cutting yourself off from the possibility of that transcendent experience.

38:46Yeah. I had migraines for years. And I told myself that I had them because of my mother. She had migraines. And then I was addicted to prescription painkillers. And I later found out much later that they were rebound headaches. And these headaches would, you know, you'd wind up in the emergency room. I wasn't doing much drinking, but if I drank very little, the hangover was emergency room. I found doctors that would hook me up to Demerol and morphine and Dilaudid in their office. You know, they would leave you. The nurse would come in and check on you. I found doctors that would come to my apartment house and, you know, it sounds like you have ADHD.

39:40some Adderall and Vicodin extra strength and how many refills, you know, all of that. I think I was texting you from the hospital after my surgery telling you, you were like asking me what you're, I was like, I think I'm Dilaudid. And you were like. Yeah, Dilaudid never did it for me. It's so weird. We're like, how do you like your coffee? You know, some people hate Dilaudid. Others like, what? How could you hate Dilaudid? Yeah. Well, I like my coffee black. What? You know, it's just, it's the scent of addiction and the scent of opiates, you know. So at the end of a migraine, because the kind of migraines I had, pills don't work against at a certain point.

40:24You have to be given an injection, right? But you'd fall into this state, which I've heard epileptics talk about, which is called a post-ictal state, right? And it's a metaphor for me, after you descend to the lower depths, let's say in my creative work, a numbness overtakes me, you know, because what I have seen or what I have experienced is so ungodly, so to speak, that I am empty, you know. So it's an approximation, kind of synthetic, of inner silence or a kind of emptiness that has a spiritual aspect to it. Do you know? So it is a way, in other words, exploring the caverns of the worst of us, of our capabilities.

41:32There is, you come out on the other side and you're able again to look at the capabilities that involve transcendence and a deep silence. Do you think that that explains the massive popularity of true crime narratives that we see right now? True crime podcasts, Netflix, true crime, mini docs, mini series? There seems to have always been this obsession with that kind of thing. But because of technology, it is mushroomed. But I remember I was 14 and serial killers were the rage. Ed Kemper was up in Santa Cruz, you know, in his van picking up hitchhikers. He's the one that beheaded his mother that I think Brett used a line of Ed Kemper in American Psycho.

42:46American Psycho. And Kemper was like 6 '9", you know, and was in Manhunter. I mean, these people became kind of emblematic and iconic, but that was a serial killer rage, you know, which is still going on with the Ed Gein thing recently, Ryan Murphy's obsession with it. So I don't know. I think it's a component of human nature, much like horror films, but much more accessible to us than a horror film. There's less distance between the fantasy of a horror film and the imagining of someone next door or on your block. You drop out of high school, right? And you have this sort of journeyman phase, lots of different types of jobs, a lot of travel.

43:36You're up in Big Sur. You're on some level searching for something, I suppose. You find your way back to Los Angeles and at some point, I mean, this is later, but you end up meeting Carlos Castaneda and you end up becoming a student of his for like a decade. Yeah. Right? I mean, you were inner circle in this insular world. Yeah. What drew you to him and what was that all about? I had a friend from Beverly Hills, and we both dropped out of school around the same time. We decided one day that let's just become medical doctors, right? So I think we were 17 or 18. And you'd already dropped out of high school.

44:31We'd dropped out of high school. And we thought if we went to Santa Monica City College, there was a way you could get your whatever equivalent to the GED, something like that. And then you could continue. So we literally went to night school. And I didn't last long at all. And he went all the way through. He went to medical school. his parents bribed a medical school to get him in. And it was like$60 ,000, which was never repaid, right? And he wound up at SC, County General, and he was a surgical resident, but he was also a junkie, right? So he was doing speed during the day, and then he would shoot fentanyl at night.

45:36And he was my close, close friend. And, of course, I got a call that he had died. And I went to his apartment with his mother. And it was just littered with jack-in-the-box food and boxes. And it was horrendous to see the agony of a mother, you know. And I had my own agony. You know, I howled, you know. When someone is so close to you and you find yourself howling like an animal, you know, you really join the human race, you know. And he was also kind of a phone hacker. and he had a private phone installed. He paid for me to have a second line and he would do the little box that had noises that you could call places for free in Europe, you know.

46:37And later, the phone number, I got a copy of his autopsy report because I put it in a section of my first novel, The Weight of the Human Heart. And the phone number, if you took the zeros out of the phone number, it was his autopsy report number. Wow. Right. So I, to comfort myself, I don't know. I had started to read Castaneda. But there is a book that is, that touched me so deeply. And it was Journey to Ixlang. I went looking for him. And at that point, I was in my 30s, you know. And I had heard that Castaneda did occasional talks at bookstores in Santa Monica. One was called the Phoenix Bookstore.

47:30And I would go and like probably hundreds of other people would say, I mean, we never know, we don't know, et cetera. So it was a very convoluted series of experiences. I wrote an adaptation of that book, Force Majeure, for Oliver Stone, right? Like Oliver Stone was given it. We sold 1 ,000 copies of it out of BookSoup, right? Myself and a guy named Cotty Chubb desktop published. And it was like a slim, it was four short stories called Force Majeure, the Bud Wiggin stories. Ed Pressman, the producer who died recently, gave copies of the book out for Christmas. Oliver got one, loved it, optioned it.

48:15And I wrote script, and Oliver's film company was called Ixlan, right? And Janet Yang, I think who's now the president of the academy, worked for Oliver at that time. And I learned through her that Castaneda taught classes called tensegrity of certain physical movements that had been taught him by Don Juan. And I said, boy, I'd love to go to that. And she said at a certain point, well, it's invitation only, but I'm having a brunch at my house and he's going to be there. So I was sort of in shock about that. And I went there. Sort of a reclusive character. Like after, what was it, like 1968 or whenever, when that book came out.

49:03He was always. But he was living in Los Angeles. Yeah, he was always, not reclusive, but he occasionally would meet. Hollywood amused him, right? And so he would take meetings, which of course nothing ever came up. Fellini wanted to make a movie from one of his books. So he was not accessible in any way, in short. So I went and I met him. And at this brunch were Florinda Donner-Grau and Tysha Abelar, two women that also had gone to UCLA and were also students of Don Juan Matus, right? And had written books. Sorcerer's Crossing for Tysha, Being and Dreaming for Florinda. Then I didn't hear from anyone, you know.

49:58I had an interaction with Castaneda, who was hilarious to me in a contemporary way. You know, the person I compared him to was Orson Welles, who I met when I was driving a limousine. And Orson Welles was so fucking funny and so contemporary in his references. And Castaneda was like that too, which was startling to me. Very sardonic, almost gave the appearance of being gregarious, right? Yeah, you would expect someone of that, you know, kind of guru-like stature to hover above those things that us mortals think about and talk about. Yeah, the whole thing was a shock to my system. Then I didn't hear from anyone.

50:43And I had a dream about the Twin Towers, not in New York, but in Century City, right? Those two office buildings, those silver towers. And that was where I was going to meet Carlos Castaneda, right? I mean, that's almost out of one of your books. Yeah, I mean. I mean, for people that don't know, like that's where CAA is now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, actually this was pre-CAA. So these were these. I mean, this is back then before that. But yes, you know, hopefully everything is out of my books. The first AA meeting that I went to was in the basement of one of those towers. Wow. Yeah.

51:29The basement. Yeah, there was a windowless conference room on the ground. Because you know there's that subterranean wall there, like down there. Anyway, go on. I don't want to interrupt you. It's just like a church basement, showbiz church basement. So I was failing at selling myself to the movies, right? This is pre-Wild Palms. Yes, this is pre-Wild Palms. And I had an agent, it was an agency called Triad. And they did what all good agents do, is when you have a loser client in film, you shuttle him to the television arm, right? So there, they said, you should speak with Tracy Kramer. Now, Tracy Kramer was familiar to me because I went to middle school with him, elementary school with him in Beverly Hills.

52:23and he represented people like Roseanne Barr and the Judds. I mean, a disparate group of clients. And I looked up at a certain point. We're having a friendly conversation, getting to know each other again. And I see all of the books of Castaneda on his top shelf. And I said, what the fuck? And he said that he was a huge fan of Carlos Castaneda, and as was someone at the agency. The agency had a director as a client that wanted to meet Castaneda and set up a meeting. And Tracy came early and Castaneda was on time and they sat next to each other. And Tracy was so, he knew the work cold and Castaneda thought he was the director that wanted to meet him, right?

53:32And because Castaneda is so unorthodox, at the end of the event, he said, I want you to be my book agent. And Tracy was not a book agent. He was a television agent. And Tracy became his book agent and still is for the estate. And so that was a strange opening. And then Tracy told me that he goes to these tensegrity classes. And at that point, I was married to Rebecca de Mornay, and we were invited through Tracy. So that was the dream, the person that was in the towers. And it was easy to get thrown off that particular carousel of Castaneda. Many of the men that came into his orbit were in competition with him, And it was challenging on many different levels.

54:33And then people would write books and promulgate all kinds of gossipy, trolling terrors about Castaneda, which were manifestly untrue. It was something that was, the scent was so strong for me of his lineage, the Yaqui Indian lineage of sorcery, that I held on. You know, I held on. And I spoke with Leonard Cohen about this at a later date of the, you know, the slander and the insults that were hurled his way. And Leonard had this phrase that encapsulated it all. He called it the revenge of the practitioners. right uh you know when castaneda um died florinda and taisha and there were other women who i knew very well um were they murdered all this stuff well when when he died i was there at the house and there were paparazzi there were people going through the trash bins why would those women have wanted to stay you know so there's this conflated this mystery about what happened and was it salon there was some long article yeah that yeah that sort of there's a few people that are are obsessed and um but that is instructive because um it is our nature putting me as one of those people to dissemble and annihilate um beauty or transcendence You know, from early on, he was accused of writing fiction.

56:26He's actually Margaret Mead. There were two professors that really came after him almost with a vengeance, the revenge of the practitioners and the academics. And those two professors wound up suing each other for slander. I mean, we are, as Castaneda used to say, the naked ape is ill. And the permutations of that illness are endless and the stuff of my own fiction. But again, to simply catalog it isn't enough. To put a reductive, inelegant spin on Castaneda's core idea or philosophy or premise, It's essentially that we're all living in a description of the world and we're all a victim of our perception, where we locate our perception.

57:24And the sorcery, to use your word, is really breaking free of that. Yes? Yeah. What was the wisdom that you gleaned from this decade-long tutelage? Well, the acknowledgement of the effect of conditioning or the social order was extravagantly clear and simple. But as it was presented, the two realities, the ordinary reality was called the tonal or the first attention. This is the ordinary reality, consensus reality, right? And then there existed something called the Nawal, which was the second attention, non-ordinary reality. Which is also the word you use to describe him. Yeah. Sort of a stand-in for guru or sensei.

58:16Well, yeah. I mean, we called him the Nawal. And there were no rules in that world. There were no altars. Or if there were, I would glance them in a closet that one of the women had. And they were rocks. They looked like solar systems. But there were no flowers. There were no guru-isms. We talked about scent earlier. It was a very dramatic and dense world of mythology that appealed to my being. He spoke of sentient beings, and that was the first time I'd heard that phrase. and was transgressive in the sense that He was, his only desire was to be an agent of liberation. Do you know? So the way he described what sorcerers saw, that they could see energy as it flowed in the universe, that everything came through an assemblage point, which was located outside the luminous egg of human beings, which is how sorcerers see them about here.

59:59And the assemblage point would move. It moved during drug use, it moved during madness, and it moved during sleep. So this idea of lucid dreaming became all the rage, you know. And Carlos Castaneda had been told by Don Juan Matos, his teacher, to find your hands. This is the first step while dreaming, right? And this would allow you to scale the heights of lucid dreaming so eventually you'll be able to do wonders. And Castaneda then told me that that was something to distract the mind, which is the ultimate saboteur. It wasn't an exercise in discipline that would allow one to lucid dream. What would allow one to do lucid dreaming was the temporary eclipse of the mind, which wants to control everything.

1:01:06He really felt the mind was the fifth column, that it was the saboteur. You know, so this idea, these notions for me were stunning, you know, when he spoke of the eagle, you know. And Don Juan Matos, his teacher, said that he hated that they called it the eagle. But we are so bereft when it comes to description or expression that they call it the eagle because it resembled to someone at some time an eagle. That there was this energetic creature that devoured the awareness of people as they died. That you could give that eagle a semblance of all of your experiences of awareness. A stand-in, so to speak.

1:01:55Because you had done an act which Castaneda called the recapitulation. Where you had, in great detail, fastidious detail, re-experienced all of those moments of your life. from birth, ultimately you work backwards, you know. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. There is this gap I think we all experience, the gap between having something to offer on the one hand and actually getting out into the world on the other hand. And what lives in that gap isn't usually talent or vision, It's the operational stuff, the website, the payments, the logistics, and the friction of not knowing how to figure any of that stuff out.

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1:05:14basically that is on some level sort of a meditation practice where you do this inventory of all these people and then you sit with the memory of that person and you go down the list recapitulating that narrative and that history to liberate yourself from from your past yeah you would start with the sexual encounters because those had the most kick and and you work your way back to your parents and this would mean everyone i met at the studio today etc and it was that detailed and it could take years for many people but all of these things sound like um embellishments of of cultism which is fine because um it doesn't matter what they sound like because it would be like someone saying, I don't like rose musk.

1:06:07I like something with pepper in it in terms of a cologne or perfume. It's meaningless. Castaneda's most misquoted sentences regarding the path of the heart, right? You should always take the path of heart. And that became almost a greeting card decades ago. But what they would remove from that, because it sounded too nihilistic, was all paths lead nowhere. So this - But yet you still, the warrior path is you still have to choose. And it's the warrior path because you choose knowing that it leads nowhere. It was impeccable. You know, he would say that he talked about the figures. They're called chakmules in South America.

1:07:00You'll have a figure in Mexico with a disc on its abdomen looking this way. And the mirror figure will be one in the Yucatan looking back. and Castaneda would say that anthropologists who are like you know, accomitations, right would say that these were discs involved in a sporting you know, event and he would say, no, these are discs that facilitated dreaming because a weight here would facilitate dreaming and then he would describe the gaze that it was the reunion with the double. We spend our entire lives trying to reunite with infinity and our double. And it was so poignant to me. So if you look at Castaneda and I think you look at my work, there's something that one can see how I would be so deeply moved by that world, the world, the revelation of the second attention, right?

1:08:21And all of the mysteries of the first attention, which Don Juan Matus said is almost more complex, this consensus reality, this ordinary reality can be more complex than the non-ordinary reality. So like my experiences with the mushroom, and I did no psychedelics at all while I was with him. He was completely opposed to that. Very strict with diet in terms of what he felt one should take into the body. And yet very popular with the psychonaut community. Oh, yeah. I mean, for good reason. You know, he was the person that opened the door, the doors of perception in that way for a generation. But for me, it was the poignance of that world that what he often referred to as ontological sadness of man, you know, of man, the amoeba.

1:09:24And this is kind of what the Buddhists are talking about in that third realm of suffering where one experiences an almost existential or ontological sadness. These are all things that were described in the Yaki Indian lineage of sorcery. And it felt familial to me, do you know? And not dysfunctionally familial. but magnificently familial, you know. There's how that sensibility seeps into the words that end up on the pages of your books, but it also informs the process of bringing life to those words, right? Like how do you transcend the Maya, you know, of the complications of our social construct in order to inhabit that more dreamlike state where you can become a cipher.

1:10:24for the thoughts that congeal into ideas, characters, plot lines, etc. Yeah, I think I've spent a lifetime getting out of the way of Bruce Wagner, you know. And at this point, because the craft is not an issue, it's easier for me. It comes with a price tag. You know, I don't like writing books. There's a certain aspect of them. I like the perfume of the experience. But if you ask me to go into a lab and spend two years doing that, it's appalling to me. So I can kind of leapfrog that. But it's easier for me to come to a kind of silence now. Um, and, and it's easier for me to feel nothing. In other words, no shame or guilt when I cannot, uh, when I'm not writing, you know, I'm, I'm relatively happy until I'm not, you know, which means I then have the flu of, um, of being called to do something else, you know, and it literally is a flu for me.

1:11:46It's just disgusting. I really disgusting. How does it come to you? Well, you know, I'll start to dance around something, but I'm dancing around something almost by habit, which is repellent to me, you know, because back in the day, I had that overachieving aspect that men often have, you know, what's the next quarry, you know, what am I hunting next? And that carried over into my creative life, you know, where it's almost preopic, prolific ambition, you know. And that faded, even though I remained prolific, but not with vanity attached to it because, you know, no one was waiting for the next Bruce Wagner novel.

1:12:36Do you know what I mean? I mean, I went from someone that was inordinately reviewed, you know, Michi Kakutani for one book on a Wednesday and then Jay McInerney on the Sunday for the New York Times to someone that has a degree of invisibility now. You know, I'm not saying this out of self-pity, but whose books are ignored in a sense, you know. I should say, and I'm going to interrupt you, just so the audience is acclimated. I just pulled up some of the blurbs that you've gotten. I mean, it's pretty insane, the people that have incredible things to say about your writing from Salman Rushdie to John Updike.

1:13:21I mean, Brad Easton Ellis, I think he's the best prose writer working now. I really do. John Waters, Dead Stars is the cruelest book ever written. You know, it's just like John Updike. Wagner writes like a wizard. You know, his prose rise and coruscates. You know, like just it goes on and on and on. Like you are revered among the literary set, irrespective of what the New York Times bestseller list has to say. Oh, no, no, no. No, it's actually, I think more what I mean, Rich, is that I come from a time as a writer where writers were, they weren't deified as they were in Europe, but they were figures of great celebrity.

1:14:07And I remember as a boy watching with astonishment Truman Capote or Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer on these lively talk shows insulting each other and saying brilliant things. Norman Mailer in an argument with someone and saying, you're sweeping the food off the table with logical niceties. And to my 12-year-old ears, daddy, you know what I mean? I found my new dad. Why doesn't daddy talk like that instead of drunkenly making sexual innuendos to me? Do you know what I mean? Oh, my God. But it was a different time. And it was a time where books were sold. So the caveat for my so-called invisibility is that I'm working as a consigliere editor at Arcade Books.

1:15:02And I know close hand that the state of publishing and book reading is dismal, is dismal. You know, there are, of course, always anomalies and always will be. But many writers who are reviewed in these really antique things like the New York Times or even the New Yorker sell 100 copies. You know, Brett and I were talking about this the other day. There was an article recently that he read. There was an agent, maybe it was Morgan Entrican, saying that back in the day, if he got a writer on PBS or the cover of the New York Times Book Review, those would move 6 ,000 to 7 ,000 copies. Yeah. De rigueur.

1:16:05Now, three to four copies. That's crazy. It is crazy. So these things have an ebb and flow to it. But, you know, I'm - But the ebb is pretty insane, right? I mean, for decades now, it has been in decline. I think because kind of what I do, I'm steeped in the nonfiction world. That seems relatively healthy. It's fiction. It's novels. What is our cultural relationship to this art form? And has it been lost? Is it retrievable? I mean, this is something I talked about when I had James Fry here. You know, I'm not old enough to remember, you know, some of those earlier memories that you have about the rock star status of, you know, people like Capote, but I am old enough to remember how sexy it was when Brett and McInery, you know, were hanging out at Odeon.

1:16:59And like, you know, this was, I mean, it was aspirational what these people were doing and the lifestyles that they were living. And it was a time when things like magazines mattered and the budgets that these great writers, you know, had to do long form work in these publications that were voraciously read. Like this has gone the way of the dodo and I don't see it coming back. And yet we can't let this art form die. It is the lifeblood of what makes us feel connected to being human. But I don't know where we stand right now with respect. Like, when was the last, you know, huge novel that came out?

1:17:41I mean, the closest thing I can remember is perhaps something, you know, Jonathan Franzen has done. But has there been anything in recent memory that has had the monoculture impact that not too long ago a great novel that would come along almost quarterly would do? Yeah, you know, I would have to look. George Saunders did a book called Lincoln and the Bardo. But I don't know that the numbers are deceptive. In other words, you think you've heard so much about a certain book that it must have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And then you investigate and it's 3 ,500 copies. Yeah, because we don't have a monoculture anymore.

1:18:2420 million people aren't watching an episode of Gilligan's Island anymore. We don't live in that world. Tina Louise was at my bar mitzvah, by the way. I'm dead serious. At the Friars Club in Beverly Hills. I can talk to you for five hours. I just want you to drop every name and every person you've ever met because you've literally met everyone. It's insane. One quick thing before I start. I can drop names. We can just do a three-minute. No questions, just names. And what is one's identity? In other words, as a writer, I never wrote for a reader, ever. I wrote for television and imagining what the audience would be.

1:19:07And sometimes when I was a hack screenwriter, I did that for movies. But books were inviolable for me. Never wrote for anyone but myself, right? So you get to this idea of identity. And is it a sad or terrible thing that books will disappear? You look at the transgressive, you ask the transgressive question, you know. One thing that, you know, that I've amused myself by is all the talk about AI, you know. Because I'm someone that believes that AI, in some iteration, whether it's near or distant future, will be able to write a book by Bruce Wagner, that if I would read it now, and some senility was around the corner, or even not, that I would say this is something that I must have written or wish I had written.

1:20:14You know, it would be like that feeling I had when I read Lincoln and the Bardo by Saunders. You know, I'd never been a reader of Saunders. And maybe it was because Bardo was in the title. I don't know. I just decided to read it. And it was so stunning and lovely to me that it's one of the few books I thought, oh, I should have written this book. Do you know what I mean? And that's what's coming. I can see that is what's coming. And all of the major spiritual disciplines speak of the erasure of self, the destructivity of the self. Do you know what I mean? So here it is. Yeah. You know, what's your fucking problem?

1:21:00Do you know what I mean? That's being a little flip about it. I get that. But identity, I am a writer. You know, Castaneda said early on, he said, don't be Mr. Hollywood and be careful. And he would joke about himself wandering the quad at UCLA with, this is the teachings of Don and what? You know, as an older man and an occasional student interested or knowledgeable of his legendary status, he would make those kind of jokes. So how much of one's vanity and one's reflexive, habitual vanity from the past when one was a young Turk, do you know what I mean, is involved in the toxicity of these kind of ideas?

1:21:50You know, if books will die, everything is going to die. Everything is going to vanish. This idea of legacy, it's an absurdity. Legacy for what? To whom? For anyone, it's an absurdity. And yet, you know, we're still possessed, you know. You know, the fires were a great lesson in that, you know, that decimated our city in the Palisades and Altadena. After the initial shock of it, and it doesn't matter what the politics were or who was told to stand down or why they were told to stand down, the lesson of impermanence arrives at most inconvenient times. There's the idea of impermanence, the reality of impermanence.

1:22:43There is the suffering that we experience by our clutch to our various identities. And you as a writer, with respect to the sort of declining appetite of the novel or whatever, you know, we consider to be high art literature these days, there's your role as a participant in that ecosystem. Where do I stand in the pecking order and, you know, how am I perceived by the public and all of that, which obviously is a vehicle for suffering ultimately. But then there's just the notion of is humanity better off with this art form or not, right? Like acknowledging the impermanence of it. Is there not room to kind of despair for what humanity will be deprived of if this art form slides into obscurity?

1:23:35There's so much room to despair, Rich. Yeah. Well, speaking of which, I mean, I think that you – had you said that you weren't sure you were going to write another novel until the fires happened. And then you literally write this book in like a month out of, was it despair? Was it anger? What motivated that, that like burst of creativity to, you know, get your ideas down on what was happening almost in real time. Yeah. You know, I mean, amputation is the book we're talking about. It's your latest book. I saw that episode you did with James Fry. And One phrase stuck out to me, which was the furnace of rage.

1:24:12I'm a fire sign, right? So it was perfect. I'm an Aries, so fire is where I live. I live in the furnace. And my desire was to write, to create a work of art about what had happened. Not a polemic, because I don't do that. I feel that when the moment an artist has politics, it's the death of his art or her art. That's me, how I approach things. Because this notion that you can change the course of human nature by a book, you know. Leonardo da Vinci famously wanted to change the route of the Arno River. And it was an abysmal failure, you know. So this idea that you can change the course of human nature or that your book will make a difference is a vanity that is the architect of which is the self, you know, the fifth columnist, you know, the saboteur.

1:25:24So for me, the most transgressive thing is to stay absorbed and riveted by and impassioned by the follies and the sanctities of human nature. So that book surprised me that I wrote it at all because I was disgusted, to use that word again, with writing. Leave me alone. But then I had the idea that I tricked my brain by saying that this will be a short book, which I think it's about 200 pages. It's probably the shortest book I've written. And so there was a light at the end of the tunnel after a moment, which doesn't happen in many cases for a year or two, you know. And that was helpful to me, Rich, because I knew that I wasn't going to spend the next 18 months in a literal hell, you know.

1:26:41And then the book to me is very comic in many ways and ghoulish in others. But for me right now, I would say amputation is very close to me. and as close to me as a book, these two novellas, The Met Gala and Tales of Saints and Seekers, I had read many years ago a collection of short stories by Henry James. And it was called, I don't think it was his title, but it was the editor's title of this collection of short stories. It was called Tales of Writers and Artists, right? And the book was wonderful. You know, I'm a qualified fan of Henry James. Just the sheer weight, the gravitas of his obsession with language and the Bach-like way that he engages in construction got me, you know.

1:27:54So I scribbled down on a piece of paper and I can drop some really good names. All right. Okay. So Gavin DeBecker is a very close friend of mine. This was maybe 30 years ago. He was good friends with George and Olivia Harrison, right? and we were both in London at the same time and he invited me to that house, that famous castle-like house. I'm forgetting the name of it, where George Harrison lived. In London. No, outside of London. Outside of London. And he had passed away by then and I spent just a lovely day there

1:28:45and I came across... Something I, I guess I stayed overnight and I had written on a piece of paper that had the Dark Horse logo of his record company or whatever that was. And I'd written down Tales of Saints and Seekers, right? And that is the second novella of the Met Gala. It's the Tales of Saints and Seekers. And it came to me as a surprise, but nothing is forgotten in this novel. strange entity of the sentient being and the sentient being who is as an artistic bent, somehow this was sunk into my cells that one day I would write something like that. And by then, I was a devoted and obsessive fan of Idris Shah, who had written maybe 20 volumes of parables, Sufi parables, that were like novels in themselves.

1:29:50They would be two pages, four pages, six pages. And that was the birth of saints and seekers. So I felt that with amputation, I myself, the transgressive part of me, after it went to the fire in that post-ictal state that I called about earlier, had to find not meaning, but acceptance or acquiescence. Not acquiescence in the pejorative sense that we might think of it. You know, Castanetti is that word a lot, acquiescence. For me, it has always been, and particularly in those experiences with psilocybin, when you're in position on the floor, not in submission, but in acquiescence. to the divine, to infinity, to the unknown.

1:30:46The troika that Castaneda talked about, which was another thing that I was possessed by to this moment, was the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. Being wired the way we are, we like to think, Well, the unknown is not, you know, there is nothing unknowable. There's either the known or the unknown. The unknowable brings in the most important aspect of this, which is the ultimate mysteries that we must abide by, whether we acknowledge them or not. Well, it's an assault on the ego that demands of us humility. Yeah. More than acquiescence, a deeper surrender and acceptance. And in thinking about amputation and trying to find acceptance in what you were seeing happening right before your very eyes, like, how do I make sense of this?

1:31:48How do I manage my unbalanced emotions that are arising around this? And investing that in characters who can't get out of their own way and behave badly is a way of making peace with it, I suppose. I mean, for me, yes, it's very funny. It has all of these comedic aspects to it, but it's deeply despairing to me also because the fire was a second chance for humanity to find a way to come together in the midst of a cataclysm to cooperate for the greater good. And yet, once again, we can't get out of our own cycles and our egoic tendencies to serve each other in the way that we are actually capable of.

1:32:42That fire, I knew long-term residents of the Palisades, and you didn't have to be a long-term resident to turn on the television and see people sneaking back into their neighborhoods on bicycles. And you saw no fire trucks at all. And what they pushed was that the winds, the winds, untrue. And there was a press conference. It was almost like out of Hunger Games that you saw Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass in the street. Behind them in the background, like a Hollywood movie, was the Chase Manhattan building on fire. And that would later take the Methodist Church. What happened was criminal. And the information is coming out.

1:33:24But we are also in this time now where day is night and night is day. You have the people that believe day is night and you have the people that insist that night is day. It's not really a function of AI, but, you know, Gavin has spoken about this before in our conversations, which is the one thing he likes about the kind of topical sex buzz of AI is that it makes people rethink or think more about the nature of reality. For me, again, whether what happened was criminal or why were the local fire trucks on the beach and the firemen were having enchiladas and said they had been told to stand down, all of those things were – The empty reservoir.

1:34:26Yeah, all of that lost its significance for me because then otherwise you venture into some kind of impotent activism or you become someone that rages against the machine, you know what I mean? And I don't want to rage against the machine. I want to show the workings of a sacred machine, which then dissolves into the ether where we're all going. In your books, including Amputation, you're always weaving real people into these narratives with your imagined characters. In Amputation, there's Stephen Colbert, there's Karen Bass, there's Timothee Chalamet's body double. Elizabeth Finch. Yeah, it makes it very fun to read, this mashing up of the world we recognize with the world of Bruce Wagner's imagination.

1:35:28And I know people ask you all the time, does this ever create drama in your life or legal consequences? I mean, when you decide, like, I'm going to pin Stephen Colbert under a tree and, you know, I'm just going to go on and on and on about his Catholicism and obsession with Tolkien. And, you know, and then to have him emerge and, you know, we see his interactions with his wife and all of this. Like, obviously, this is a fictionalized, you know, sort of extreme version of this person that we all have a relationship through a screen. but does any of that ever come back to revisit you or bite you?

1:36:05Do you, do you end up running into these people in the real world? And like, if you were to go on Colbert show or you were to bump into him somewhere, like, what is he going to say to you and what are you going to say to him? There is no chance of me going on. I don't think so. No, I have encountered people that, that had issues, but nothing major. I've also mostly encountered people that were thrilled that they were mentioned. Yeah, I'm sure people are campaigning to be a character in your book. Yeah, but the key thing is that I didn't go after Colbert. And in fact, Michael Douglas, during his cancer treatment, was a major character in Dead Stars.

1:36:55I really came to have great sympathy and respect for Colbert in writing this book. So I never have an idea in my mind that I'm going to roast X, Y, or Z, not that you were implying that. And I inhabit Stephen Colbert. And, you know, one thing that initially drew me to him was he makes these appearances as kind of the lay Catholic saint where he talks all about love, you know, the importance of love, etc. And yet his show had turned political. Many felt to its detriment over the past few years. and he was saying the most vile things about people. So I was trying to, how can I square the Stephen Colbert who's constantly being honored and for being the good Catholic or Christian with this entertainer, Stephen Colbert, who seems to have crossed the line from being someone that is comedic comedic, into someone that is vitriolic, you know.

1:38:14And it was very interesting to me because I learned, you know, one of the people that he really had it out for was Robert Kennedy Jr. And what was interesting to me is I read, I learned for the first time that Stephen Colbert had a terrible tragedy in his life when he was, I think, 14. he had two older brothers and his father. The father was taking the two older brothers to look at colleges because they were of that age. And the plane went down, Eastern Airlines, killed all three of them. He also had an enormous family of siblings. And I think it turned out to be just the same amount that Bobby Kennedy Jr.

1:39:04had. So in the book, these two men, they're like brothers in essence for me. They both had fathers and loved ones that died tragically and violently. They both had substance issues, addiction issues. Colbert has spoken very forthrightly about not anywhere on the level of RFK Jr., but of having issues with, I think, with benzos, Klonopin, and both have a religiosity about them, Catholic. So I wanted to explore that. And there was something very touching about him hallucinating that he was Frodo, in essence, you know, which is a book that saved him during one of the things that saved him during that terrible tragedy.

1:39:55I could not imagine what it would be like to go through that. And so I grew very close to Colbert toward the end. And he doesn't return to his show, which is kind of what's happening now, but not due to injury, a different kind of injury, one would say, a political injury. Really, my fantasy when I have it, which is not often, is that he is stunned by what he reads at how real and respectful that it is. Yeah. There's an empathy. As you're hoisting people on their petards, you are empathizing with their situation because there is the fatalism piece in that. They are only who they only can be. You know, we are all only the person that we could be.

1:40:47You are who you are because of your father and these series of events. And only you can do what you do, but you can't do otherwise. Yeah. There's a peace in that, I suppose. Yeah. And, you know, knowing that we don't know what's coming, we just had that horror of Rob Reiner and his wife and their son, you know. I know a handful of people who have fallen, tripped over something or fainted and fallen, and are quadriplegics now. Now, some, I would say most, have accepted what has happened to them, at least outwardly, with incredible grace, which is a movement from one dream into the next dream. So these are people that have achieved a kind of enlightenment, because I've heard enlightenment defined as when a glorious or wonderful thing happens or a tragic and terrible thing happens, one remains indifferent.

1:42:10It doesn't mean one doesn't feel a sense of joy or a sense of rage or depression, but ultimately one sees that it is all we're living in a story. So you've gone from one dream to the next, from one story to the other. The most poignant thing was Hanif Qureshi is a writer who did My Beautiful Laundrette, and The Buddha of the Suburbs was a novel he wrote. A wonderful writer. I never met him, but he was in Italy some years ago on vacation with his girlfriend, and he fainted and fell and suddenly was in hospital in Italy for months, quadriplegic. Finally, with great difficulty, logistical difficulty, he moved back to London where he lives now.

1:43:07and I joined the website that he had created where you could give a little bit of money or whatever you could afford and I was sent a book by him and instead of signed, there was a thumbprint and that for me was so deeply moving You know, this grand signature that we have, or this contempt for those that ask us to sign a book, or I know a writer who won't sign galleys because they're going to resell those. He may be true. All of these ideas we have that the self promotes, endless self-promotion. these books we write the ability of our hands it seems like there's a an epidemic of parkinson's now everyone i know has parkinson's one has lewy body dementia it's like this tactile thing that we reveled in the piano the typewriter the computer everything is going to go away you know And I don't say that grimly, you know, and I hope it's not taken that way because I really am enthralled by this life and the beauty and mystery of it.

1:44:38But I'm forever cognizant, because it's my nature, I suppose, of the darkness of it. And sometimes I can do that with more grace than other times, you know. But these things, something moved me so terribly. Maybe this was from the liberation in the palm of one's hand. There were three ways that a Buddhist can die or an advanced being can die. One is like a child. One is like a beggar. And the other is like a lion, right? To die like a child means to have no awareness that the end or even the beginning was near. To die like a beggar is to have an awareness, but not to care. To die as a lion, well, the lion dies in solitude.

1:45:42He exits and dies in solitude. So these things, just hearing simple things like that, parables like that, they sustain me, these moments of poetry and beauty. That's why Castaneda's work meant so much to me. There was such poetry to it, such agonizing tenderness to it. And people think of Castaneda and it's the drugs, the preparation of the drugs. But of course, he's fading in terms of people's knowledge or memory of him, of his work. It'll be rediscovered, which it's still, his books sell quite well all over the world now and still have. But I don't think there's much consciousness about him for younger people now.

1:46:42And perhaps that will change. But that to me is what sustains me. It is language, just the existence of it, the necklace of language, the chains of language. And what language is capable of. You know, language is capable, as we are, of all sentient beings are, of great trauma and terror and binding and control, but of transcendence. And when you get a whiff of transcendence from language. And fiction is truly the vehicle to truth. I mean, everything is fiction, but the novelist's eye is our way of glimpsing a greater truth that we can't find in nonfiction. and I think when I think of your work Bruce I think the comedy and the tragedy of this dance that we're doing on the mortal plane where we're striving to be noticed and we're trying to accomplish things and we're so invested in you know our individuation but fundamentally what's motivating all of that is is is is this pain because really all we want to do is be accepted, we want to belong, and we want to experience love.

1:48:12And all of that is available to us if we can get out of our way and realize that the greater kind of consciousness beyond our brain's insistence on individuating it is available. And that is the transcendence that you're talking about. That's the journey home that we're all on. The journey to Ixlan, if I may, I was researching a book once. It was the Buddhist book called Still Holding. And around that time, there was an Alaskan Airlines plane that went down. And if you look at, I know so many people, the writer Susan Orlean was just talking about it, the Black Box book, which has been a couple of volumes.

1:49:03Oh, yeah, we talked about that. And I just heard her talk about it a few days ago. And the Black Box book is a transcript of plane crashes. And some of them, everyone dies, the commercial aircraft, private aircraft. And some half of them die, some three die, you know, and it's from wind shear, it's from mechanical failure, et cetera. So this Alaskan Airlines plane went down. what happened was there was a problem that could not be solved so they spent two or three hours in the air but they had an engineer on at the air tower at the place they were going to be landing and he knew he finally knew that there was nothing that could be done and all he said was we'll see you on landing and he knew it was a lie and the pilots knew it was a lie.

1:50:05But everyone on that plane were fixated on Oakland or wherever it was that they were returning. And I imagined that to be a flying Dutchman, you know. And the Journey to Ixlan, that title was so evocative for me for that reason. Castaneda was told by one of the Nawals in the book that Hollywood is your ixlan, because Castaneda went to Hollywood High and grew up around there. Hollywood is your ixlan. You will always be returning, but you will never arrive, you know? Wow. Yeah. So this flying Dutchman, you know, where is it that we are returning, you know? Are we returning to the social order, or are we returning whence we came, which is infinity, that reunion with the double that we were talking about.

1:51:05And where are you at right now personally with all of this as you are reflecting on getting older and a kind of more tactile connection that that creates with your own mortality? There's only one thing I'm really worried about from the moment I wake up and the moment I put my head on the pillow and it's book sales, what are my book sales? No, you know, it's an interesting time for me, 71, you know. You find that group of people that was, are you young? You know, the delusional group of people where you certainly don't feel old, so to speak, but the diagnoses are starting to drop like, you hear them like dominoes of others, you know.

1:52:08And when will that domino or shoe drop for oneself? Well, irrelevant because you can have that fall, you know, as a 28-year-old. You can have that glioblastoma, you know, as a 14-year-old. You can have that murder in bed, you know, as a 50 or 60 or 80-year-old, you know. All of it's inconsequential, and all of it just subscribes to this need for the self to believe that it has a measure of control. If I do this, this won't happen. Or that could not happen to me because it did not happen to my mother or father. It's all a fantasy construction that keeps us upright in many ways, depending upon our disposition and our mood.

1:53:02So my mood is labile. It's like that second mode of suffering the Buddhists talk about where I can be ecstatic and morose within a 10-minute period. Do you know what I mean? Hypomanic or hypodepressed. And then I'll have a seizure of concern and worry that will evaporate the next day. You know, it's kind of madness. It's kind of mad that we've lasted as long as we've lasted without being straightjacketed and sedated.

1:53:47When you were talking to Brett, the subject of David Lynch came up and Brett asked you something like, what do you make of the outpouring of love and support? Like you said, you were talking about legacy a few minutes ago, like legacy, who care, whatever. But we did see such an incredible cultural moment of reverence for this man and this artist. And I think he asked you, what do you make of that? And I was reflecting on that. And I think a big part of it is that his refusal to compromise and his incredible fidelity to like what moved him and his insistence upon ensuring that everything he did was a perfect reflection of his intention is inspiring.

1:54:44And I think it's rare. And I think when I think part of what makes it so inspiring is because we're also familiar with the compromises that we make every single day. And when we see somebody, whether an artist or otherwise, refuse that, I mean, that is transgressive in its own right. And when I think of your work, I see the same in you, Bruce. You are insistent upon your art being your way. And you've had your own travails with compromises that you were confronted with and then refused to make. And I think that that is deeply inspiring and it definitely inspires me. You are an example of an artist fully expressed to me.

1:55:37Well, I appreciate that.

1:55:43I wanted to mention that something that has always been on my mind, this is not the segment where the guest blows smoke at Rich Roll. But when I – I was not very aware of you when I met you. I think it was a year and a half or two years ago at an event for Phil Stutz. Right. Was it that long ago? I don't know. The relationship with time. I don't think it was that long. No, I don't know. Maybe a year. Maybe nine months ago. Was it nine months ago? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. We could find out. Anyway, Jamie would know. Yeah, but what I learned in a thumbnail about your journey, right, that is what Castaneda would call intent, right?

1:56:26Because what we're talking about essentially is transformation, right? And if you get past fear, you know, that first enemy, you know, you have clarity, right? And for me, learning about what you had done and the kind of superhuman intent that it entailed, it meant a lot to me, you know, because it was something that was impossible, you know. So I say that in terms of any artistic endeavor. It's not just fiction because it's any endeavor of deep and uncompromising transformation becomes an artistic act, you know. So that, to me, was something that made me go and get your book because I wanted to see the documents.

1:57:29Do you know what I mean? But by itself, even as an abstract, that kind of transformation is unusual. It's anomalous. and it made me, it still makes me wonder about the mechanics of that, which of course they're unknown, right? Unknowable. So that to me, you know, I suppose what I'm trying to say is I don't have this high opinion of art anymore, you know? It's simply the way I express myself, and I like the scent or expression of other artists. But there's art in everything. I remember in one of Castaneda's books, one of the late books, at one point he talks about Don Juan Matus, his teacher, telling him to make a book of memorable events, to keep a log, a journal of memorable events.

1:58:40and Castaneda says, what do you mean, graduation or the death of a parent? He said, no, no, no, no, something that is far less dramatic, something that has a subtlety to it and does not pay homage to the social order. And he reminded Castaneda of a story he told him, which was Castaneda was on Hollywood Boulevard and heard a cheap trumpet being played and the tune stuck in his head. And Don Juan said, the haunting sound of that cheap trumpet will be what you hear when you leave this world. So I experienced one of those events. I was with my goddaughter who was about four. And I was very nervous because her mother, who I knew very well, said, you take her to the farmer's market.

1:59:39You'll be fine in LA, right? And she had to pee. So of course I was like, what the fuck do I do now? So I hovered, I asked a woman to bring her in and, you know, all that. And all I could think was, you know, she's going to, I'm going to have to call my, her mother in about 20 minutes and say, we can't find her. She can't have gone far. You know, all of this sort of thing. She comes out, and we go to the old section of the farmer's market, and it was Christmastime, and there were tables of cheap ornaments, right? Cheap Christmas ornaments. I'm not even sure who set them up or why they allowed them to be set up, but then it was kind of neighborhood-y and folks-y.

2:00:27And some ancient Beverly Hills part of me was saying, I wish she could be seeing something that was more expensive. You know, I'd get something for her. And she was staring at these cheap ornaments. And she said, how beautiful. It destroyed me. It destroyed me. So there's a memorable event, you know. So this idea of art is fading away from me. And what's left is the utter poignance and sadness of walking this tough planet, you know, this tough, fierce, beautiful planet, you know. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. It's good to talk to you. um i'm really happy to talk to you and i wish uh i had your your your intent and your your looks i wish i had your way with words uh will you be my mentor we'll do that swap i'll be lindsey lohan you'll be lindsey lohan we'll both be lindsey lohan we already are right there you go until next time.

2:01:51Thanks, Bruce. Thank you, Rich. Peace.

2:01:56All right, everybody, that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. I really do hope that you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit today's episode page at richroll.com where you will find the entire podcast archive as well as my books, Finding Ultra, The Voicing Change series, and The Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is free, actually. All you got to do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review or drop a comment.

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2:03:08The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. content management by Shana Savoy copywriting by Ben Pryor and of course our theme music as always was created all the way back in 2012 by my step sons Tyler and Trapper Pyatt along with their cousin Harry Mathis appreciate the love love the support and I'll see you back here soon peace plants

2:03:47Thank you.