It is a new year...
If you bemoan the fact that you have no stories left to tell, then you certainly will not see the stories that are at your feet... BUT who planted the idea in your head that everyone had a story to tell anyway? Isn't it true that there are certain people who flash through life like a meteorite, without rhyme or reason, and the rest of us try to figure them out for the rest of our lives? We use analysis, reason, philosophy, whatever we have at our disposal, to "make sense" of what they have done. Some things we classify as the cruel, and others as the beautiful, but in truth, the words we use to attempt to describe these things are woefully inadequate, and too late...
I have had nothing significant happen to me. I have not the soul to blind the world. I am a pedantic fool. I have great ambitions, I suppose, but there is little else within me to support those ambitions. I am a great believer in rationality, and systematic strategy. I attack everything in my world with that in mind. I have lived long enough to understand the folly of overreaching oneself. Wars are not won through reckless campaigns. It is only through pressure, over time, and pressure in the right places over time, that wins out. And by "wins out," there is always the realization that what we accomplish in life is only temporary, it is always only temporary...
***
The wings of the world spreading out towards the horizons. I will fly upon the winds of fortune... I keep repeating the words of the W.B. Yeats poem, like a mantra: "A lonely impulse of delight drove to this tumult in the clouds." I don't truly know what it means, for I have never had the courage to risk everything above an abyss. Again, I have always been pedantic. And I have always been practical. I invest in those around me. It is a safe bet. To invest in the dreams and whims of myself, well, that I have always seen as "speculative," in the most negative sense of the term...
Monday, January 1, 2018
Sunday, December 31, 2017
12/31/2017 (3)
what is the secret? How is it possible to maintain flow in a world of fundamental discontinuity? Someone is doing an airdrop. It is Willow, sending this year's resolutions (or revolutions, as she quipped). In any case, we are dealing with this issue right now. How do live. How do live, honoring a truth, and the flow of all things?
***
Memory is strange. It departs frequently. It is difficult to see it with any clarity. And if it is not seen, what is the proof that it even existed, that it even happened? How plastic (as an old classmate liked to say) it is. How malleable. I want the past, in order to feel the reality of it, to allow its reality to invest a reality within me. So that I can be real too.
I remember the pond in which Oyasama (Miki Nakayama) was said to have attempted to drown herself. Turtles. And the water black. Wondering what it was that motivated her to walk into the waters, and wondering what it was that motivated her to stop.
I am wishing, and regretting many things. Perhaps that is the danger and consequence of memory, how it can cause an irrevocable regret, an acute awareness of all one's errors. Maybe that is why it is simpler not to remember. It is simpler to just proceed onward, forgetting everything from before. Who is it that this is? What is the purpose and point?
What is it that I want? Out of this? I keep writing in order to hopefully delve into something significant. To find the truth of things. But maybe we are just layer upon layer of tragedy, hiding nothing? Like the onion. That is the secret of that poem. The truth of it.
What if people read this? Who cares? There is no significance to it all. Musubi, the dog, is panicking and is jumping in people's laps. He is terrified, and scared of all the noises, and he is trying to stop it by barking at it all. Maybe that is me as well. Anxious of it all, and making empty noises to try to convince myself that I could change the world. The world doesn't care, there is no posterity, there is no point. To despair is perhaps the hardest thing of all. To sit in the full knowledge that there is nothing I can do to change or stop anything. Why, the dog is asking, does the world not notice the end? Why doesn't the world panic?
I asked myself this when Donald Trump was elected president. It is as though no one cared that the most foul, evil person in history had attained the highest position of power in this land. And I realized that there was a whole contingency of the population that was ignorant, and/or evil (morally bankrupt). It is the way of things, it is the decline of our democracy that we are dragged down by our lowest common denominator, that we are so ignorant that we are malleable to the efforts of russians.
***
Memory is strange. It departs frequently. It is difficult to see it with any clarity. And if it is not seen, what is the proof that it even existed, that it even happened? How plastic (as an old classmate liked to say) it is. How malleable. I want the past, in order to feel the reality of it, to allow its reality to invest a reality within me. So that I can be real too.
I remember the pond in which Oyasama (Miki Nakayama) was said to have attempted to drown herself. Turtles. And the water black. Wondering what it was that motivated her to walk into the waters, and wondering what it was that motivated her to stop.
I am wishing, and regretting many things. Perhaps that is the danger and consequence of memory, how it can cause an irrevocable regret, an acute awareness of all one's errors. Maybe that is why it is simpler not to remember. It is simpler to just proceed onward, forgetting everything from before. Who is it that this is? What is the purpose and point?
What is it that I want? Out of this? I keep writing in order to hopefully delve into something significant. To find the truth of things. But maybe we are just layer upon layer of tragedy, hiding nothing? Like the onion. That is the secret of that poem. The truth of it.
What if people read this? Who cares? There is no significance to it all. Musubi, the dog, is panicking and is jumping in people's laps. He is terrified, and scared of all the noises, and he is trying to stop it by barking at it all. Maybe that is me as well. Anxious of it all, and making empty noises to try to convince myself that I could change the world. The world doesn't care, there is no posterity, there is no point. To despair is perhaps the hardest thing of all. To sit in the full knowledge that there is nothing I can do to change or stop anything. Why, the dog is asking, does the world not notice the end? Why doesn't the world panic?
I asked myself this when Donald Trump was elected president. It is as though no one cared that the most foul, evil person in history had attained the highest position of power in this land. And I realized that there was a whole contingency of the population that was ignorant, and/or evil (morally bankrupt). It is the way of things, it is the decline of our democracy that we are dragged down by our lowest common denominator, that we are so ignorant that we are malleable to the efforts of russians.
12/31/2017 (2)
Selections. The voices, the songs playing on the speakers. Hearing it all, feeling the vibrations. Imbibing the environment. Wondering what is it that is the self? The self is just a resistance, a hesitation, an iteration. A pause. An air bubble in the flow. We are made of different stuff from our environment. That is the truth. If there were no difference, then we would not exist. But we ex-ist, and therefore, therein, lies the problem. We want to be one with others, with our environment, but we are always already different and separate. And we are working so hard to establish a continuity, a smoothness with regards to our reality. There is no one here to stay, to listen, to watch, to observe, the environment is always shifting and empty.
***
The drink beside me is melting. The vibrations of the environment are sundering the ties it has to itself. Water to water, in the form of ice. And wondering at that. And worrying, always worrying, that one loses something to say, or that the things you say will stray inevitably into a country of lost intentions. Worrying about that. Worrying about neglecting what needs to be seen. Worrying about becoming irrelevant. And the hope that one is contained and contains the truth, the implicit path.
***
My brother is built on conflict. He defines himself by defeating others. I hate that. Especially because, as I was attempting to establish myself, he would continually destroy my creations. He made me feel so fake and inauthentic; he made me feel diaphanous. I wanted to be solid, to feel myself, and he would tear through me and stomp on me as though I was nothing. And he and his fucking cronies would laugh at me, ignore me. I hate them, and I hate them until the end of time. What they did is unforgivable. And the fact that they speak to me now that I have become someone cannot erase the fact that they committed that sin to that which had such a questionable and ambiguous relationship to reality at the start.
***
Here is an irony. I commit the very same unforgivable sin that I convict my brother of. That is, I feel I have been infected by the very qualifications that were imposed upon me. I look upon Musubi, and other small creatures, as somehow not being worth the consideration or respect that I have; that there is a filter to reality that prevents them from being seen as "worthy." People are doing this ALL THE TIME. And it is partially a necessary defense mechanism. Because we cannot give everyone and everything the consideration it is due. It is impossible. So why mourn, why feel guilt?
I recall this. When I was the target of attractions by others, did I have any more sympathy for them than those I was infatuated with had for me? No. So there is no reason to feel resentment? It still hurt. The fact that fairness is an artificial construct imposed by willful spoiled brats (human beings) upon a reality that is fundamentally uncaring. I simply
***
The drink beside me is melting. The vibrations of the environment are sundering the ties it has to itself. Water to water, in the form of ice. And wondering at that. And worrying, always worrying, that one loses something to say, or that the things you say will stray inevitably into a country of lost intentions. Worrying about that. Worrying about neglecting what needs to be seen. Worrying about becoming irrelevant. And the hope that one is contained and contains the truth, the implicit path.
***
My brother is built on conflict. He defines himself by defeating others. I hate that. Especially because, as I was attempting to establish myself, he would continually destroy my creations. He made me feel so fake and inauthentic; he made me feel diaphanous. I wanted to be solid, to feel myself, and he would tear through me and stomp on me as though I was nothing. And he and his fucking cronies would laugh at me, ignore me. I hate them, and I hate them until the end of time. What they did is unforgivable. And the fact that they speak to me now that I have become someone cannot erase the fact that they committed that sin to that which had such a questionable and ambiguous relationship to reality at the start.
***
Here is an irony. I commit the very same unforgivable sin that I convict my brother of. That is, I feel I have been infected by the very qualifications that were imposed upon me. I look upon Musubi, and other small creatures, as somehow not being worth the consideration or respect that I have; that there is a filter to reality that prevents them from being seen as "worthy." People are doing this ALL THE TIME. And it is partially a necessary defense mechanism. Because we cannot give everyone and everything the consideration it is due. It is impossible. So why mourn, why feel guilt?
I recall this. When I was the target of attractions by others, did I have any more sympathy for them than those I was infatuated with had for me? No. So there is no reason to feel resentment? It still hurt. The fact that fairness is an artificial construct imposed by willful spoiled brats (human beings) upon a reality that is fundamentally uncaring. I simply
12/31/2017
A freshness. I am thinking about Shadow in Gaiman's "Monarch of the Glen." To chase each apparent thing. I was also thinking about the irony of my daughter's English class, and about the emphasis placed upon literary analysis. English class seems, all in all, to be a game of hide and seek. In fact, a lot of such classes, including Religion. There is an element of human behavior or consciousness or activity that is "implicit," that is, it is supposed to be "self-evident," or blind to its own machinations. The blindness is necessary. The blindness demonstrates that, in some sense, it is truer, or closer to the "source" (define source how you will, as inspiration, as God, as id, etc.). And then there are whole fields devoted to unpacking the "first act" of art/religion. It attempts to analyze the symbols, determine stylistic elements, etc. And this is the entire game of much of academia, at least in the first two discipline fields (arts and humanities)...
So, the game implicit in writing is this... You are trying to say something while pretending that you are saying nothing at all. You are trying to move to a known destination, while pretending that you are completely blind, or at the very least, that the landscape you are traversing is being revealed to you moment by moment, as the reader discovers it. And the target that the writer tries to achieve is an effect of "not having been tried before," that is, something innovative and new. But the problem with this is that, over the accrued history, everything has been tried before. And the things that have not been tried before probably have not been tried because they are not functional, viable as a narrative experiment. For the very narrative structure imposes forms and rules upon its subject. Not everything can be told in a story, unfortunately... It is a game of the right hand not knowing not what the left hand is doing, and vice versa, but then somehow working together and accomplishing something...
The problem of writing has thus been framed, or more specifically, the problem of the "blockage" has been thus framed as one involving a too active editor (the analytical portion of our minds) that squelches the life out of the "first" or implicit...
So, the game implicit in writing is this... You are trying to say something while pretending that you are saying nothing at all. You are trying to move to a known destination, while pretending that you are completely blind, or at the very least, that the landscape you are traversing is being revealed to you moment by moment, as the reader discovers it. And the target that the writer tries to achieve is an effect of "not having been tried before," that is, something innovative and new. But the problem with this is that, over the accrued history, everything has been tried before. And the things that have not been tried before probably have not been tried because they are not functional, viable as a narrative experiment. For the very narrative structure imposes forms and rules upon its subject. Not everything can be told in a story, unfortunately... It is a game of the right hand not knowing not what the left hand is doing, and vice versa, but then somehow working together and accomplishing something...
The problem of writing has thus been framed, or more specifically, the problem of the "blockage" has been thus framed as one involving a too active editor (the analytical portion of our minds) that squelches the life out of the "first" or implicit...
12/30/2017 (2)
my time is wasted by this incessant effort to rehash old things. These are not new questions. These are not new endeavors. It is always the same story, the same issue. I want to progress. I want to move beyond some of the issues of my past, of my lack of a theme.
***
I am not "fun." I have no patience for irrational decisions, or things which throw a wrench in things. And this is why I likely cannot write something interesting. I am always too fixated on "making things right." Perhaps this is why I only like the beginnings of things, because everything is easy and "knows itself." To go beyond that, to take too many footsteps, brings me into a foreign country where you lose your way, and your motivations become muddled. It all becomes "messy." And there is guilt in that. An ugliness. Perhaps this too is how I live my life. I do not proceed haphazardly, to just "find out what would happen." I sometimes wish that I had lived my life that way, particularly with regards to relationships. There is so much regret in me. Even my wife perceives this "mood" within me...
***
Chaos. Perhaps it is in that that one comes to know oneself. That there is a force within oneself. That you could possibly trust in it, in the inconsistencies and lies of it... [I hate the way my cursor keeps shifting.] How could you see that, if you never trust that? Why am I always reluctant to trust in that? Why am I reluctant to trust in myself, in the myself that walks blind? Because experience has determined that it only gets me lost... what is the value of getting lost? To learn to trust in myself, to trust in getting lost...
***
A hope for me lies in allowing myself to
***
I am not "fun." I have no patience for irrational decisions, or things which throw a wrench in things. And this is why I likely cannot write something interesting. I am always too fixated on "making things right." Perhaps this is why I only like the beginnings of things, because everything is easy and "knows itself." To go beyond that, to take too many footsteps, brings me into a foreign country where you lose your way, and your motivations become muddled. It all becomes "messy." And there is guilt in that. An ugliness. Perhaps this too is how I live my life. I do not proceed haphazardly, to just "find out what would happen." I sometimes wish that I had lived my life that way, particularly with regards to relationships. There is so much regret in me. Even my wife perceives this "mood" within me...
***
Chaos. Perhaps it is in that that one comes to know oneself. That there is a force within oneself. That you could possibly trust in it, in the inconsistencies and lies of it... [I hate the way my cursor keeps shifting.] How could you see that, if you never trust that? Why am I always reluctant to trust in that? Why am I reluctant to trust in myself, in the myself that walks blind? Because experience has determined that it only gets me lost... what is the value of getting lost? To learn to trust in myself, to trust in getting lost...
***
A hope for me lies in allowing myself to
Saturday, December 30, 2017
12/30/2017
What is the point of most of what we do? It is for the attention of others. There is very little that has an implicit value; that is, there is little that is an end in and of itself. What is the purpose of writing, for example? Is it that there is a message within that comes out fully formed, like a newborn child? I don't think so. Everything that is written is written for someone. But to whom? And why? And if it is written for someone else, doesn't that distort the meaning of it? That is, isn't there supposed to be a blindness, a sort of unselfconsciousness of art, of literature? I am struggling with this. There is nothing natural about conversations for me. To me, the other is still the other. And the issue of bridging to the other has still become one that is inscrutable to me...
***
There is a vibration within me, but it comes from outside, always from the outside. I cannot find the vibration that is me. The feeling that is me. The memory or the song that is me. There is nothing to bind to, reliably. There are only the bangings and clangings of the outside world, impinging upon me. And though I complain about those distractions, there is the sense, the fear, that without those outside impingements, there would be nothing. Not a silence that is still, but a silence that drowns, that obscures. That is my fear, that life is untethered, that it is not connected to the outside world, and therefore is meaningless and irrational and irrelevant, a drowning thing, swimming in directionless circles, getting more and more lost in solipsism. I want to hear my song, I want to hear it so I can return to it, and rest in the narratives that it sings...
***
Help me to find me. Help me to find my song. Then help me to find my voice. Things happen in that sequence. I am not to...
***
There is a vibration within me, but it comes from outside, always from the outside. I cannot find the vibration that is me. The feeling that is me. The memory or the song that is me. There is nothing to bind to, reliably. There are only the bangings and clangings of the outside world, impinging upon me. And though I complain about those distractions, there is the sense, the fear, that without those outside impingements, there would be nothing. Not a silence that is still, but a silence that drowns, that obscures. That is my fear, that life is untethered, that it is not connected to the outside world, and therefore is meaningless and irrational and irrelevant, a drowning thing, swimming in directionless circles, getting more and more lost in solipsism. I want to hear my song, I want to hear it so I can return to it, and rest in the narratives that it sings...
***
Help me to find me. Help me to find my song. Then help me to find my voice. Things happen in that sequence. I am not to...
Saturday, November 11, 2017
11/11/2017
LIFE IN THE TRENCHES
KAPPA-HEAD
“Let’s begin by talking about your brother.”
Dr. Cyprus’s voice is calm but firm. Randy feels his mind settle around the psychologist’s statement, like solute molecules upon the surface of a seed crystal. He feels his body settle into the yielding cushions of the couch. His eyes train on a corner of the ceiling, and follow the edges of its square motif gradually across the room.
“My brother,” Randy begins, but pauses at the croak of his voice, and the hollow silence it leaves. He clears the dry phlegm in his throat, and tries again. “My brother, well, where can I start? He’s always just been there. There’s- there’s no beginning to him, as far as I’m concerned.”
Dr. Cyprus is nodding, or at least that’s what Randy imagines from his vantage point on the couch. In past face-to-face consultations, Dr. Cyprus would always give a slight shake of his head whenever Randy spoke, perhaps as an acknowledgement that he was listening to, and responding to, what he was saying. It was always a slight shake, with no real change in the angle of the neck. It reminded him of the vibrations of a car antennae, disturbed into slight oscillation by the wind.
“Tell me the first memory that pops into your mind when you think about your brother,” he says, after a moment of silence.
At first Randy frowns and sighs at the seeming impossibility of the request. Wasn’t he clear that there were too many tangled memories to even begin? But without warning, images do begin to surface, and then out of those, one image floats to the top. And before he even realizes it, he is recounting a memory that has imposed itself upon his consciousness.
“I am at the beach,” he says, closing his eyes. “I must be two or three years old. There’s a wind blowing, and I can feel the sand sting my skin and sometimes go into my eyes. I look up, higher up on the shore, and I can see my parents and my brother sitting there. They are looking at me, with this- this happy, expectant look on their face- like they are waiting for the punchline to a joke. I think I am smiling too, in response to them- I’ve always been so stupid- so naive. Anyway, a wave suddenly comes crashing down on me, and for what seems like forever, I am tumbling over and over in a roaring darkness, with salt water in my eyes, my ears, my nose, my throat.”
Randy pauses. The memory of the ocean is real for him in that moment, and he feels disoriented, queasy even. He has to flutter his eyes open to train upon the ceiling in order to restore his equilibrium, and his sense of the present. After a few deep breaths, he closes his eyes and continues.
“When I come to- the world outside seems too bright and too loud. Beyond the sound of the air, the wind- I can see my parents, my brother, and they are laughing, laughing. I am on my hands and knees, and everything beneath me is soupy and white. And then, I see a couple of things at the same time, and it’s almost as though they are all in sync- my parents, my brother, with that same expectant look- and the soup beneath me starting to suck me backwards, like the sea is inhaling me in. I feel scared, I know what’s coming- and I reach a hand out towards my family, my brother on the shore.”
Randy again pauses. He can feel his heart racing. He almost expects a wall of water to crash down upon him, lying vulnerable upon the couch.
“So what happened next?” Dr. Cyprus’s voice maintains that strange equilibrium between disinterest and concern.
“Well, of course, I got pounded again. The wave fell, I felt myself tumbling over and over in the water. And I swallowed the sea.” Randy is about to stop talking, but there is a fragment of the memory that he did not expect. He finds himself stuttering out the next words, like someone tripping over things in the dark. “I was still in the water. Still in the darkness. And I called out- for help. For anyone to help. For anything to help. And- and that’s when-”
When Randy doesn’t proceed after a few seconds, Dr. Cyprus prompts him. “And that’s when what?”
Randy shakes his head, his hands out in front of him, fingers splayed like a fence. “No, that can’t be true,” he whispers, half to himself. “It can’t be.”
“What can’t be?”
“I-” Randy shakes his head again, this time with greater ferocity. “No.”
Dr. Cyprus inhales a long inhale. It sounds like the hiss before a gas explosion. Randy doesn’t hear the psychologist exhale. Instead, Dr. Cypress begins to speak, in that same measured voice. “You’re in a safe space,” he says. “You can tell me what happened.”
It’s clear that
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