today, in the late afternoon/evening, i had a massive headache as i was sitting in the yard, weeding.  i eventually had to take some ibuprofen and lie in the tub, trying to follow the threads of pain and make everything go vague.  there were waves of nausea (as there always is, particularly after i take any medication for the headache), and bouts of hypersalivation, but fortunately, the medication stayed down.  i went to the couch in the "artroom," and just lay there, waiting for the pain to "go vague."  i didn't eat dinner, and didn't move from the couch until now.

i suppose i eventually slid into a dream, though i can't remember the origin of it.  i was a high school teacher.  i had, it seemed, a lot of assistance.  there was an elderly, wise man who seemed to be my educational assistant, or second in command, it seems.  there was also nana, or irene, my mother-in-law, who stopped by.  the kids themselves seemed pretty compliant, but with kids, particularly that age, it can be a touch-and-go sort of thing.  in fact, sometimes students represent a sort of shifting, mercurial mirror, detecting any insecurity in you and reflecting it back at you...  in any case, i wanted to get across some idea about force and democracy (or something?).  i was using an image about the spanish civil way (which was TOTALLY fabricated; i know absolutely nothing about it!).  in this image, i spoke about some sort of 3-petaled flower, reminiscent of an- get this, iris, or what i conceive of an iris, with purple "petals" ringing a yellow heart.  i have always thought of an iris as a particularly ferocious looking flower, with the petals resembling a tripartite fang arrangement.  in any case, i told the kids that, during the spanish civil war, there was a choice given to the general populace, and the way that they made that choice was buy cooking the petals of this flower in oil, as in tempura, and picking a petal and eating it, designating their vote (kind of reminiscent of the "she loves me, she loves me not" ritual).  ultimately, this process yielded no clarity to the situation, and a war broke out, one which killed not only several people, but ultimately, the whole spirit of a nation...

prior to a recess session, the class was broken inexplicably into 3 groups.  i lectured one (with the whole spanish civil war nonsense), while the other two were meeting in school committees or something.  they were being particularly loud (and one group was being pretty obnoxious), so i had to take recess away from one of them...  during recess, i had the opportunity to speak to one group of bright young kids.  they seemed genuinely interested in me as their teacher (again, the feeling of the fleeting, mercurial interest of kids), and asked me questions about where i was from, etc.  one boy seemed so self-assured and confident, talking about how he had come from africa by way of ...  and in my head, i had an image of st. augustine or something...

***

lately, i have been feeling - i don't know.  i never write, because i have nothing to say.  my day drags between doing little patch-up jobs, and falling into the swamp that is minecraft.  i ostensibly say i am researching using minecraft for my students, but it is a compulsion to order an environment that drags me in.  it is the same as with every video game that i have ever been addicted to; it is all, for me, about imposing my will upon an easier environment.  a more compliant environment...

i notice that i am addicted to the beginning of things.  it is because we all meet the other with innocence at that point: the beginning of stories, the beginning of classrooms at the start of the year, the beginnings of games.  you have a sort of simplicity about you, your past, the ugliness of it, has neither caught up with you nor with the other.  everything is relatively clean.  i suppose that that is why i keep starting things up again and again.  i love, i need, that cleanliness...

but life is complex.  life is dirty.  eventually, everything catches up with you.  i know this for a fact.  it is for this reason that i am skeptical, or perhaps, there is in me an insufferable skeptic.  i look upon all beginnings, within me and without me, with an acid eye.  i am suspicious of the narratives of others, of their motives, etc.  i cannot take people or myself at face value.  as a result, very little begins- we are in a stalemate, a spanish civil war...  and sacrificing a flower, while a pretty method, will hardly yield any victory for one side or the other- and in the end, force, and a grievous sacrifice, must be made.

i want the force of some feeling to compel me to write, but all i have are pretty irises to fill my head with nonsense.  there is no feeling within me, or rather, no feeling that is not tied up within some brutal stalemate.  for example, there is a lot i could write about members of my family.  a lot that is caustic, about hypocrisy, etc.  that is, perhaps, what is most interesting about me.  but i can't.  i have to protect the "good name" of certain people.  so instead, i tend to fabricate other narratives, about people or places that never existed, and try to find the words, try to invent something of interest.  something of interest.

on radiolab, one saturday, it was implied that our idea of the soul or of the self is entirely narratival, and that who we are, or rather, who we think we are, is entirely a process of fabrication, of lying, in order to conceive of an idea of who we are that we can present to the world and to ourselves.   i have always felt this as an implicit truth, even if i never voiced it directly... that the most confident people in the world are the biggest liars...  and it is not a unique insight.  i recall kierkegaard speaking of the hero and the one who loves and writes about the hero; two very different lives and loves.  there is, in the hero, a certain blindness (we could say, a lack of awareness about the fabricated nature of the narrative s/he generates), a certain faith.  and there is in the recounter of the hero, a distinct lack of this blindness; rather, a hungry eye that seeks to account for everything, but cannot account for that very lack, the blindness, the lie, that can by its very nature not be understood, but only experienced.

life as experience.  existentialism.

***

stalemates.  acidic skepticism.  the compulsion of routine.  all these are signs of a dead or dying heart.  an old man am i.  my ties to the world are compulsions, not genuine love.  i think there is a love within me that could be construed as genuine, but it rarely expresses itself as such.  i am only lucky that, like my dream class, those around me ARE loving.  but they rarely-

-there's the rub.  i say the class is mercurial, but a mirror; yet it is only in the negative sense, i.e. as in the loss of control in its awful brooding potentiality.  but it is never a mirror when there are forces of love, of attention, of insight.  i can never believe that positive things stick to me...  maybe partially because of the buddhistic notion that dissolves all good things (i.e., that all good things must die, that change is an immutable law of the world)...  that all good things, by their very nature, are fleeting and must die.  is it that all good things implicitly carry the lie of permanence?

***

i pray to god for a wellspring in my soul.  for a blindness.  if not, i will turn into an old and dusty sage before i can say-

on radiolab today (a show which i have come to despise, due to a past terrible interview with a hmong survivor), the theme was how the soul or self was nothing more than a story told by the brain to allow it to believe in itself as some unchanging entity.  it mentioned, among other things, that what makes human beings unique was the ability to manipulate adjectivals, to mix or match them, as it were, in order to create new and unrealistic combinations and their related mental images...  the implication being that, beyond this sort of "magic show", there really is nothing there.

***

i have distinct fears, most often in my dreams...  the fear of losing control.  not of losing control, as in the control of one self over another, wilder self...  but the fear of actually losing the self.  of being possessed by another, or of forgetting oneself.  the feeling of waking to progressively reduced levels of consciousness, and finding more and more of oneself being taken away.  the feeling of charly in the novel by that name, of falling into a room of darkness, the "return trip" of the platonic voyage out of the cave.  it is the fear of fading into a dream.  it is the fear of allowing all responsibilities to slide.  for, if the self is a narratival entity, then what makes a story real/believable are the consequences and responsibilities of the characters.  if they do not have responsibilities, and if there are no consequences for the characters when they fail at their responsibilities, then -

they might as well not exist.

***

in one dream, i felt as though each choice i made were countermanded by another, a male, a controlling element.  i felt my will, my very desperation, being sucked away by this other.  as i woke from the dream, i wondered at the recent incidents of the women, abducted from their lives to become slaves and worse for a monster.  at the terrible feeling of becoming something so very reduced.  of becoming nothing other than the extension of someone else's will.  and i vowed, as in the famous zen saying, that if i saw the buddha on the road, then i would kill him.

i remember how, periodically, my grandmother would take me to see some monk lady in nuuanu to have her "remove" spirits from me, lost spirits who would cling to me, and attempt to influence my life. as if i needed that narratival excuse for my apathy, my lack of conviction of things...  the "parasite excuse" is so convenient, after all...

***

to wake, and to feel that all that one has struggled with has not addressed the relevant issue.  the true issue.  and that one has basically been wasting one's time.

that is the feeling that i seek to erase.

funeral dream

i had a dream in which i ended up at a dojo that trained in mixed martial arts or something.  there was a monk in charge of the dojo, and his name was Tenzin something.  he was an assistant to the dalai lama, and, in fact, the dalai lama was supposed to live in some of the adjoining rooms.  i was a novice at the dojo, just trying things out for the first time.  for some reason, although everyone else was wearing full sparring gear, i was in robes, and i had to clip (paperclip) the bottom of my robes so that they wouldn't trip me or impair me as i was doing some of the basic techniques.  in any case, the tenzin came up to me at one point (perhaps it was when i was clipping the robes) and asked if i had practiced on both sides equally.  it was a minor interaction, but in that moment, i could feel the tremendous kindness and wisdom of the tenzin.  i remember considering how my "practice" (i.e. spirituality) was going at that point...  not good.  i thought about my writing, and how it was similarly unbalanced...  i made a simple vow to continue.  there was some idea i had about how part of practice was just sort of unloading the self-generated rhetoric of the ego, and it was necessary to break through this in order to come to the truth.  in fact, i had made some sort of similar insight earlier today when i was talking to my wife about the stages of development in writing...

children started to flock into the dojo, and i realized that the dojo space doubled as some sort of afterschool program for children...

***

i believe before that sequence, i was eating a dinner/lunch with my teacher, dr. quach, who was visiting from the mainland, and who had hired what looks like a hangar base to hold this special dinner...

***