But what I love about the show is that you find things to care about in a wide range of different characters.

Some people will not know themselves. As the minister says at Hickok's funeral, he quotes Paul -- that was what I wanted to do that Roman show about, was the first guy they arrested was Saint Paul. But Paul says, "If the hand shall say, 'Because I am not the foot, I am not therefore the body of Christ,' is it not of the body?" In other words, because we misunderstand our natures, does that exclude us from the community of spirits? And the answer is no, it just means we misunderstand our natures. So many of these characters misunderstand their natures, but that does not prevent us from recognizing that they're of the body of Christ. My feeling about "Deadwood" is it's a single organism, and I think human society is the body of God, and in a lot of ways it's about the different parts of the body having a somewhat more confident sense of their identity over the course of time.

So, do you mean that the characters have more of a sense of their own identity?

A more confident sense of their identity as members of something larger than themselves. You see, for example, Merrick, played by Jeffrey Jones, who so likes being in company with others and who is so isolated, and he's trying to extract some reliable organizing principle. He says, "Gentlemen, after every meal, what is to keep us from walking together? Perhaps we could form a club. We'll call ourselves 'the Ambulators'!" And you know, the other guys just walk away from him.

But it's that impulse. If you go to any small town, you'll see in the center of town signs that advertise the weekly meeting of the Lion's Club and the Optimists and the Kiwanis. You know, a bowling team, a bridge club? All of those things express our impulse to recognize that our most confident and satisfied sense of our individuality is found in relating to something outside of us. You know, when they [the residents of Deadwood] have their first town meeting and someone by accident serves peaches, and from that time on, they have to have peaches, because they're not exactly sure what the fuck made it work, you know, and they don't want to louse things up. There's something so beautiful in the arbitrariness of all of our traditions and it speaks to our frailty and how tentative our understanding of ourselves is. I like that stuff.

So, how do you keep this really complicated organism alive? Did you know you'd have so many characters and that so many of them would have such major story lines?

No, I don't plan any of the episodes. They just sort of happened. I sit down each morning and the scenes sort of declare themselves. When you do research, you study and study and study. And then, if you're a storyteller, you try to put all of that in your preconscious, then you forget the research.

Do you write the show alone?

I have a pretty heavy hand. I work on pretty much every scene. First they [the other writers] do drafts, and then I work on them.

What kinds of characters do you enjoy writing the most? Do you favor certain characters?

No. You know, William James said that what every spiritual experience has in common is ego suppression at depth. That is, one loses one's sense of one's own separate identity, and experiences a kind of in-rush of either a sense of God or one's commonality with others. So when I write, I try to have no favorites. I try to be sort of a vessel of the character, and that's how I feel a part of the body of Christ. I feel that they're all part of a single thing, and they just exhibit their sameness differently, if that makes sense.

It does. Do you feel like you're channeling God or the spirits when you write?

Well, I think we all are vessels of God, you know. As Saint Paul says, if the hand doesn't know, that doesn't mean it's not part of the body, that just means it doesn't know. And that's why, when I'm able to be of service to the characters, I experience God's presence more acutely than I do when I'm not working. So I try to work as much as I can.

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