today was a pretty uneventful day. i woke up feeling alright. it felt as though i had dreamed, and dreamed a lot, but i couldn't quite remember what i had dreamed about. i felt that there were echoes of williams college in my head, but beyond that, i couldn't trace the thread back through the maze, as it were. maybe some of it had to do with the fact that i'd recalled a lot of faces clearly the other day, some names too, even. i don't know what the significance of any of that was, those images and sounds, because none of them related to any particular vignettes or narrative memories... they were just impressions of people who i once used to know- or rather, didn't know, and never really cared to know better. just empty echoes. eggshells.
in any case, i tried to move on to my routines, in between checking out my plants... with regards to the plants. i don't know if i'd mentioned it, but i found a lot of caterpillars on my cabbages, chewing tiny holes in the leaves. when i examined the undersides of all of the leaves, i found more and more caterpillars of various sizes. and when i tried to open up the very heart of the cabbage, i noticed all of these tiny green nodules- no doubt, more caterpillar eggs. so i doused the entire cabbage in the aquaponics water, and watched with some relief as the eggs fell away and sank into the grow bed, perhaps to drain to the fish below, where they would be breathed in as some kind of hors'douevre (sp?).
my life, i realize, is extremely boring. but that's okay, for the most part. i just work on stuff. i just try to improve myself. i know it seems so- constructivist (don't know if i'm using that term correctly). but, i don't know... i think i only experience life when i'm with people. in myself, i, for the most part, could care less. things only "turn on" if others are excited by it. i usually don't "feel" much of anything if i were alone. it reminds me of santa monica. it may have been a beautiful place, full of opportunities and experiences, but it was frankly wasted on me. i just felt incredibly alone there. it makes me feel alone and sad just thinking about it... about, for example, walking to the beach in the darkness, dressed in my blue monk pants and a semi-long beige overcoat, feeling clean (because i'd just showered BEFORE this outing), and then doing a taijiquan form in the sand, with the lights all orange from the lamps, surrounded by no one in particular to see me... moments like that, repeated ad nauseum. no one to see me.
it still seems interesting to me, a particular quirk of mine. i don't exist in and of myself. i think, almost from the beginning, that i was opportunistic in using the attentions of others to create a self "for myself." because outside of that attention, i literally (i know, not using that correctly) did not exist. i don't know how to explain what that means. it means that i wasn't a person, i was barely even a shell, with no opinions or memories or thoughts. that's what it means to be a non-person. someone who doesn't care about much of anything. but i guess deep down there is this despair or something. a feeling of drowning. of disappearing. like you are in darkness, complete darkness, and your edges and skin are getting erased and blurred out... until no one even sees you any more.
like a fish. in a forgotten fish tank.
you have no feelings. no one feels sorry for you, because you can't emote, and you don't particularly count.
(i periodically take the dead fish out of my aquaponics tank, and dump the corpse out into the field in back of my yard. no burial, no nothing. they fall like leaden lumps, or crash through the california grass... buried amidst all of those waxy, razored leaves, sweating and drying out to the sun... maybe stinking and getting eaten by mongooses or cats. yes, no one mourns them, least of all me. why?)
in buddhism, nothing has a "self." nothing exists in itself. everything is in relation to everything else. so in a sense, what i experience is buddhistic, and my quest for this identity or narrative "in itself" is completely in vain. but there must exist something, right? someone beneath all of this? who experiences it all and could tell the story of me? because if not, i am just a temporary collection of fragments, like leaves floating on a river, that gather in an apparent pattern, but which, in the very next moment, shifts and scatters...
if i have no self, how can i tell a story?
the attention of others, the embrace of the web of relations, creates me. i am a fly which did not exist before i entrapped myself in a web. i vibrate in struggles, against the stickiness that holds me fast, and in so doing, become "real," recognized. whether by spiders or other insects...
*****
look at me, look me in the eye. just long enough for me to feel seen. i guess that's the premise of my whole life.
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