Gwenny June

by Richard Dorrance

  Chapter 50 – Anna’s Intuition

  Helstof knew something about computers, but she wasn’t a geek. So every few days she’d try something new with the music recording software, and it would go wrong. Then Richard and Anna would have to stop working and wait for Helstof to figure it out. When she couldn’t figure it out, she called Gale, who called her nephew, who was a geek.

  The writing was going ok. Richard had completed the story about a northern girl from New York City who meets a southern boy from Charleston. They fall in love, and all hell breaks loose. She drives around Charleston the way she does on the Van Wyck Expressway in Brooklyn, meaning like a maniac. He slumps down in his seat and prays. When he drives around SoHo, she sits in her seat, wondering if she’s going to enter menopause before they get where they’re going.

  Selgey and Bart fly around The Hall. Not like they used to, of course, during the big time, but they still have some chops. Sometimes they waltz up and down the aisles with each other, having fun, and when they do that, everything in The Hall stops and everyone watches. Even the admin person comes out of the office. The second time the admin person saw them do this waltzing thing, she decided she could sell tickets to it. The $50 tickets would be out in the audience seats, with Selgey and Bart cruising up and down the aisles. But she also would set up chairs on the stage, and those tickets would go for $100. This admin person had been in the ballet business in San Francisco for a long time, and she never had heard of any professional outfit seating people on the stage and having the dancers out among the seats. That was a new one.

  Peter and Pater had bought a video camera, and learned to use it. When Selgey and Bart would dance, which was almost every day, because they loved it, Peter or Pater would film them. Pater wanted to mount the camera up in the ceiling somewhere so it could film anywhere in the theater. The renovation that Henric had paid for included state of the art sound and video capabilities, but both Peter and Pater were afraid of going up on the catwalks above the stage. Maybe they could get Gale’s nephew the geek to do that.

  One morning Gwen stopped by, and it happened to be at a time when the recording system was down. Richard put on his headphones and played for himself, which left Anna with nothing to do, so she and Gwen sat on the edge of the stage.

  Anna said, “Can I talk with you about something?” Gwen nodded. “I know what happened in the Louvre with Catherine. And I know what you told me was important about that. You said intuition. Most people know about intuition, or think they do. But I’m not sure what most people think is what you and Catherine and Slev think. About intuition, I mean. What is it?”

  Gwen had been waiting for Anna to ask this for a long time. She said, “Intuition is not something mysterious. It like a lot of things; some people have more of it than others. You have a lot. That’s why Catherine did what she did with you in France. She was training you to use what you have.”

  “So what is it? I know what I think it is, but I want to hear you say what you think it is.”

  “Let me say again, it’s not something mysterious. Some people make it out to be, but it isn’t. There are psychologists who do hypnotism. Most people think hypnotism is mysterious, and that comes mostly from psychologists who pretend it’s something that only a few specially trained people can do. Meaning them. They earn money from doing it, so they want to make people think it’s something special. It’s not. It’s really just a relaxation technique.”

  Anna was following.

  “Intuition is the same kind of thing. Some people want to make themselves out to be special, so they talk about intuition as if it was special to the few. Everyone has it to some degree or other, but it’s like critical thinking. You have to train yourself to be good at it. You have to increase your awareness of it so you can use it. Same with intuition. People who have it in large doses should make an effort to use it well, because it’s a great tool for living a good life.”

  Gwen let herself down off the edge of the stage, said, “Let’s walk a little.

  Intuition is the best way to understand things. It’s a blend of thinking and feeling. That’s it, those two things together. It takes practice to do that, and understand how it works, and be aware of it when it’s happening.” Anna nodded. They turned at the top of the aisle, walked across the rear of the theater, then back down the other aisle towards the stage.

  “The religious people have been working on their philosophies for a couple of thousand years. One god, a dozen gods, a thousand gods. Some with white beards, some with eight arms. ‘Angels in the architecture,’ as Paul Simon sings. People really needed all that for a long time to make sense of their feelings, their lives. Then a couple hundred years ago a few English guys and a few French guys said, ‘hell no,’ we need to live using our thinking, our rational minds. And they worked out their philosophies about that.” Anna kept nodding, she knew what Gwen was talking about, the Enlightenment.

  “Now,” Gwen went on, “the biophysiologists and psychologists are learning about how the brain and nervous system work to make us conscious. They’re figuring out lots of stuff about how we develop as children and why we do what we do as adults. The good things and the bad things. I’m sure they think they will learn everything and know everything, but they won’t. The Enlightenment guys thought they had it figured, that thinking was the be all and end all. They were wrong. We’re emotional creatures at the base of things. We’re biological creatures, flesh and blood and nerves, so there's no way we can live well by relying only on thinking. The world is too complex, and we don’t work that way.

  “At the same time, we can’t go through life ‘living on nerves and feelings,’ as that other great songwriter says, Joni Mitchell. We can’t give in to our emotions. That would be crazy and devastating. Right?” She stopped walking and looked hard at Anna.

  “So the best way right now is to learn about and use intuition. The blend of thinking and feeling. It’s special. And you got it in spades.” Gwen hugged Anna. “That’s all. Nothing mysterious, but yes, important. Very important.”

  Richard let out a blast on his synthesizer as a test for Helstof, who was pretty sure she had gotten the software working again. She nodded. Richard looked out at the theater, found Anna, and motioned her up on the stage. Back to work. She smiled at Gwen, who headed for the office, checking that Peter and Pater were doing ok.