Creaking fingers

crawl across the keyboard. It feels almost as if there is a literal layer of rust surrounding my joints that needs to be worked off, scoured and cleaned before any kind of acceptable motion could occur. Clearly nothing good will come of this. My body is in revolt against my mind. “So much things to say,” it’s been said, but how can one say things if one is unable to create the words.

To struggle is sometimes more human than to celebrate.

Good aphorisms are like mountaintops, and the shortest walk between mountaintops would be a straight line…but for that one would need very long legs. My legs are short, but in my dreams they are long.

In my dreams my fingers don’t creak. They are well lubricated and consistently full of wisdom. In my dreams I don’t have arthritic hands. Older does not always equate to wiser. No matter how old my soul seems to be, wisdom comes hard, as if the wisdom of a new age leaps from mountain range to mountain range. Staring across great chasms of space is a difficult way to understand the world.

Great lives are like mountain ranges: most of life consists of the pass. “The son of the symbol-maker must die!” How true…

Be as dead to mankind as mankind is to you. I think I am incapable of originality. Or perhaps, more accurately, the originality has been sucked out of me. The only time I have any hope of originality is putting the pen on the page, but even then I am trapped. I am trapped by language. Put words together in a way that they have never been put together before. To you intrepid travelers in the world of the word, I bid you good luck. It is my guess, though, that perhaps you will find your fingers creaking with age and arthritis before you manage it. Even then, you might find your bowels rotting and a view of yourself from a spiritual plane having never written an original word in your life.

I move through phases, you see. Post-post Stucturalist Marxism Reactionismist. Modernism. Dadaism. Fascism. Leibowitzism. But youth is funny with its fickleness. SoactualizedamI that I can foregotraditionallanguage barriers like spaces and punctuation
Or
Even
Linebreaksinpages.

Un-something or other I something or other when I’m wandering somewhere around the illegitimate prince’s kingdom. The brain garbage seems to spew forth from cracks in the groaning joints:

But one must often work through the evil to harness the good. He who moves for right can come to no harm in a place where packs of wild dogs roam. We’re talking about killing gods here, because in a place where intent is the only rule, actions can be brutal.

Maybe a man can learn to decode the symbols of existence. What does it mean that almost all things work out mathematically, artistically, scientifically, historically, sociologically, statistically, and any other allys you can think of. Why does it work out? They all make a perfect kind of sense.

It’s not the past, as you may have believed, but the future. We are living in the future. It is easy to live in the past, for it is that which we understand. We moved through it, learned from it, and continue to learn from it. It is easy to live in the future, for it is that which we can plan for. We know what’s possible and think we can keep away harm. It is very difficult to live in the present. It moves around too much.

And yet it is in this time that our realities are at their most realistic real. Now! My fingers creak. Now! I feel the pain. Now! I move into the future. Now! I move into the past. Now! I seek a place of no pain. Now! I must be my most conscious. For there to be a future, I must make it through the present. To learn all I can from the past, I must live long enough to make a past.

“Slime monsters are eating my brain!” I cry. But pleasure works the same way.

We remember pleasures which give us something to look forward to. But can you enjoy the moment of pleasure that lasts only the moment? Can you enjoy the moments that will not happen again? Can you enjoy the moments that will never happen?

“A thousand attractive women want to have sex with me and pleasure me physically, financially, orally, and eternally.”

And maybe my fingers creak from all the scratching at doors to places I oughtn’t to be. The point of origin becomes the point of return.

Creak…

Welcome, My Pathetic

fallacy. It’s funny the way life gives us ample opportunity to understand its workings, and yet our ability to understand still falls short of the mark. The rain is coming down outside, falling in gentle sheets against the window. The sun has hidden its rays behind a wall of thunderhead clouds. People scamper to get out of the wet, and yet get pelted no matter what. Something in my head grays over, to match the grayness of the air. But it’s a busy grayness, not to be confused with fog. The rain is moving, the people are moving, the world is still moving: in a fog, all seems to stand still. This is locomotive grayness, a busy black-biled melancholia.

It’s not really raining though. As a matter of fact, the sun is warming my front porch up with its gentle rays and I watch people linger as they stroll—lingering together in the sunlight. Puffy clouds do their best to take up space in the sky, but their efforts are futile, so forceful is the gentle power of the sun—acting like a benevolent ruler, responding with kindness instead of aggression, wisdom instead of war, empathy instead of ignorance. You get to see all the colors in the world when the sunlight hits the street just right, and the air is comfortable enough to feel like you’re swimming in a luxurious lake in the middle of summer.

What’s interesting here is that they are both equally valid; meanwhile, they are both equally false. Their validity and truthfulness arise from their contemplation of a feeling. As a description of a metaphorically rainy mind, the first is completely valid, and if you are so happy the sun would be out even if it were raining, the second makes perfect sense. And yet, their falseness rings with the plain fact that I am sitting in my room and I have very thick curtains covering the window and I have no idea what the weather is outside. Fact and fiction are rolled into one.

It’s an unreal reality. This is probably one of the greatest mysteries of existence. The reality of our existence is, for the most part, undeniable, and the unreality of our experiences, of our emotions and the depth of effect these seem to have is almost incomprehensible. Do we know what love feels like? Yes and no. Do we know pain? Yes and no. Would we argue against the nos? Yes, but I know my defintion, and he knows his, and she hers, and she hers, and ad infinitum. I know my pain and you know yours. They are the same categorically, but different in reality. Unreal reality.

What’s funny is what lies beneath: a seeming universality of type of definition. Details differentiate specificity, but global concerns congeal. Studying history reveals universality of types. In the present we understand mainly the current moment, and its truth is based largely on feel. Future truth is best aided by the education of others to respect the past, present, and future, and search for understanding of the seemingly universal. The pathetic fallacy of me? My own sympathetic myth? My own empathetic erroneous belief? Love is out there begging to be understood…so real. But it’s possible to say that love is not real. Love is an idea about a feeling…a rather preposterous quagmire.

But bugger all that…I guess I’m an old romantic asshole at heart…and I really like the sunshine.

Learning to Read

me. I think it’s fair to assume that we all would like to think that if there is anybody who knows us as well as ourselves, then we haven’t met them…and that would be really awkward. In fact, whether we realize it or not, we all tend to think of ourselves as a tiny Atlas holding our world. This is probably because it is (by and large) a fairly well regulated truth that it all comes back to the “I”—survive and reproduce is all that comes standard. All that being said, it is rather unsettling when we shift the weight of our world from the back, set it on the ground, and take a long hard look at it. As it turns out, we have to learn to read our world (especially if we haven’t seen it in a while).

I can see a little bit of beauty in it. Walnut trees are growing up big and strong. The scent of massive fields of grass fills my lungs with the delicious flavor of dirt. The pungent sound of music fills the atmosphere with a measured beat. And if I hold it just right, it spins so nicely.

But there is pain. Ocean-like bodies of tears cover the surface. Deep crags criss-cross its surface tearing trails of uncomfortable time across the land. In true pathetic fallacy fashion, thunderheads crop up at the head of cold fronts and send life scampering for cover from the coming storm.

Scarier than the pain, and more blissful than the pleasure, is the fact that I have only recently seen these things and accepted them for what they are. You see, when you carry your world on your back, you wind up making it a burden and it starts to weigh you down. When you place your world in front of you and learn to read in Braille, you learn to read you. Right now I’m trying to touch the whole surface and read in every language I have.

When I say things, they mean two things: what I meant and what is conveyed. Sometimes I mean more than one thing, and what comes of the significance of adding a third layer?

I am reading between the lines of my world that I am a somewhat confusing character. Not overly complicated, you understand, but somewhat confusing nonetheless. Confusing because, perhaps, I am confused, and one of the most confusing things on the face of my planet is the nature of love. I have pondered and cogitated and wandered into fields of memory in pursuit of the idea of love, and as I delve deeper into its unexplored regions, I find the more I learn the more confused I get—sometimes I feel dyslexic.

Adore.

In the last four weeks I’ve added bulk to my oceans, taken cover from the storms, and ripped the surface of my planet apart. But I’ve seen the sun, climbed the walnut trees, filled my lungs with the flavor of dirt, and listened to the music on the winds. My world is going through a massive shift. A changeover. They now say ice ages can come on strong and fast, and violent atmospheric shifts can happen overnight.

Metaphysical

masturbation. Rather more specifically: the self-pleasure of investigating and attempting to define the things beyond the physical world. A book sits atop a stack of other books on my desk. It is a specific book: Marxism and the Call of the Future by Bob Avakian and Bill Martin. It can be described: conversations on ethics, history, and politics. It has weight. It has length and breadth. It is a slightly burnt orange cover with a red dot in the center, covered by a painting: suprematist composition #56 by Kazimir Malevich. It is 314 pages. It is a series of planned conversations between the two authors. It was printed by the Open Court Publishing Company of Chicago and La Salle, Illinois. It’s about the new bend to Neo-Marxist critical theory based mostly on Mao. The Library of Congress categorizes it as being about: socialism, socialist ethics, revolutions, and history. But the question is: what does it mean?

The blessing and the curse of metaphysical inquiry is that it is individual as well as universal. Contained within the physical realm are laws by which all “things” must abide: the law of falling bodies, inertia, the law of conservation of mass, the law of conversation of energy, and a whole host of others. Outside the physical realm, things are both individual and universal. It becomes each individual’s personal journey to attempt to define the meaning of his or her own existence. This is a slightly different take on “What is the meaning of life?” because it takes the focus off of meaning and places on the attempt to define—effectively making it active, where it had been passive before.

It seems almost inconsequential, doesn’t it? What is the difference after all between asking somebody what the meaning of life is, and attempting to define the meaning of life? Did you see it? Did you catch the subtle shift? When that particular question (“What is the meaning of life?”) is asked, the questioner is immediately asking their interlocutor for and outsiders perspective on the definition of “what it means to be me.” Let’s say Bill and Dave are chatting away, sitting at a high-top, somewhere off of 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, and Dave says to Bill, “What’s the meaning of life?” While what Bill says will no doubt be of some interest, may even involve caring or loving, and might be extremely witty, it will not the meaning of life. It is the meaning of HIS life.

That is where metaphysics turns the screw and gets unique, because while it is an individual’s meaning of his life, it is a universal question, and that’s where the ATTEMPT to define really comes into play. While some of what Bill says might be amalgamated into the collective knowledge about existence that Dave has, it is the asking of the question that is even more important, because it is his action in attempt to understand the universal question. One of the things that Avakian and Martin observe is that one of the most misunderstood aspect of Neo-Marxist theory is the revolution is not the answer, it is the question, and answers are to be found in the aftermath. Things suck. How about a revolution? Now, what did we learn from our revolution. The revolution, as an active entity, is the quest to find meaning (asking the question) without being passively told what meaning might be (listening to the answer).

By no means does this privilege one to the other. Oftentimes the answer is incredibly helpful for the understanding of existence, and anytime answers are excavated from somebody else’s experience, there is much value. However, one cannot find answers, one cannot get answers, one cannot inch closer to understanding without the inquiry.

If I ask more questions I will be doing nothing more than sifting through more rocks in search of the elusive fossil. The more I sift, the more I will find.

Sift on unceasingly.

The Big Book of

humanity. I’ve been studying a lot lately, and one of my favorite textbooks is humanity. Pages and pages of text are flung at me daily, from all directions: the subway crazy, the lovers lost in their interlocked hands, the emotional shopper, and children with no social filter are all pages in the big book of humanity.

But what of the book itself? I think there are a lot of people who would imagine that the big book of humanity is gilded and under glass somewhere, being viewed by a stream of reverent onlookers, forever preserved for future generations to gaze at in awe. To be sure, it seems to me that this is the most common view currently circulating among the human element of the planet. And it’s true, to some extent. Humanity ought to be held in reverence, if only because the gift of an emotional spectrum and the gift of ambulation afford us constantly new and almost inconceivable experiences.

Movement—the movement that occurs along the emotional spectrum and the movement that occurs in the physical plane—makes me think of the big book of humanity as a little more careworn. When I visualize it, the first thing I see is a paperback book with a cover that has been torn a little bit in the corner, folded at another, and dimpled as if it had been shot with a BB gun. My book is a pirated copy I picked up from other people and their notes are in the margins, their bookmarks are strewn about the inside, and their hand turned down corners where particularly moving passages could be found. How I came into possession of it remains a mystery, but it is one of my dearest possessions.

Some of the pages fall out, you know. Some fall, and as I reach to recollect them, I read over them and am reminded of history, of emotions I once felt, and of the people I have learned from. (Yes, that is a dangling preposition, but in the book of humanity the grammar rules are suspended in the interest of individual expression.) Some fall and get lost in the river of life my skiff is floating on, never to be seen again—and there is page after page of highly uninteresting material…it isn’t all fascinating…and some of it can be dismissed without a further thought. Laundry day is a good example. All, or at least most, of the pages involved in collecting all the dirty clothes you have, throwing them into a pile, going to the Laundromat (or the laundry room) and running the washer are fairly unimportant—no offense to people who love their laundry rituals. Those pages can be largely dismissed, but the page where a person is introduced into the story that is five foot tall, portly, and elbowing you in the solar plexus to get at the next dryer is nearly indispensable because the big book of humanity is about (duh!) people.

I don’t know how it is with most people, but I do not read about most of the people I care about every day. Sorry, I just calls ‘em like I sees ‘em, and I don’t see a lot of the people I care about every day, so I don’t read about them. I’m reminded when one of their pages falls into my lap to call them and recall all they’ve done for me because I do genuinely care for them and love them (and would do anything for them), but I don’t read about them daily.

The human condition is, at its most basic: survive and reproduce. These are the two processes that are hardwired into us. Thus, the two most common characters in the book are the self and the significant other. Significantly passionate pages are almost supple, as if the pages are freshly pressed. Others are stained with tears or sweat or blood. What is most important to me, however, is that they are consecutive and consistently stimulating. I read of her daily, and she teaches me something in the smallest of her movements.

And then sometimes I look down as I’m reading and see the ink is still wet. So I step back and I suddenly feel the weight of a pen in my hand. Don’t get me wrong: we are not the authors of our own books because of most of what’s written therein is plagiarized; however, what we glean from people is ours, like notes in the margin.

And every once in a great while an original idea crops up from nowhere, and that’s what the blank pages at the back of the book are for.

Precisely what you think

it’s not. I labored under the delusion, for a long time, that things were precisely as I perceived them to be. At some basic level it seems like this is an all too human response; the things I see, feel touch, and hear have to be as I perceive them because I am the center of my own universe. (And let’s be Real here for a second, and say that all humans are built with two basic mechanisms: survive and reproduce, and that the survival mechanism makes us inherently the centers of our own universe. It cannot be otherwise.) Something happened along my way that forced me to begin understanding the idea that things are generally misconstrued in our heads until they become a completely different argument.

Slavoj Zizek’s explanation of the Freudian Joke “The Borrowed Kettle”:

“The title refers to another kettle – the one in the joke evoked by the Freud to illustrate the strange logic of dreams: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms per negationem what it endeavours to deny – that I returned a broken kettle to you” (Zizek 1).

As consciousnesses we WANT to believe any of the first three, if only because they are the most ego-stroking in this particularly heinous situation: the blame is placed on the circumstances in other words. What we fail to realize in this turnaround is that while we are investigating the circumstances, the circumstances are busy revealing the truth, and the truth is rarely what you thought it was.

For an example:

Last night, as he left work, feeling awful about the extremely long day he’d had (meeting at 7:30 am—which meant I had to get up 5am—for two hours, followed by actual work work for the next 10 hours) and the summer cold he was developing. As per usual, he called his girlfriend who had gone to a friend’s birthday party. One thing was inordinately clear right away: she was preposterously drunk. They had decided earlier that he was just going to go home to his house and they would meet up the next day. Now she was begging him to come to her neck of the woods. He is resistant, but in the end as most men do, he acquiesces.

Five minutes after his arrival on the scene, it becomes shockingly apparent how drunk his girlfriend is when she vomits into her friend’s toilet.

Everybody there was sympathetic to the scene of a boyfriend coming home from a long day of work to a staggeringly drunk girlfriend that he must now care for. He even thinks to himself for a while, “Why the hell am I here? I should be home right now,” very egocentrically.

If only he could see the real meaning of his being there: without him there, she would have to walk home in that state (forty-five minutes of cute, drunk, white girl walking home by herself). Perhaps the world looked all around and said, “Him. He is the only one who can ensure that this girl gets home safely.” Perhaps his girlfriend knew, at some level, what she was really looking for in his coming over. And perhaps he even wanted to go over and party a little bit himself. What all of these circumstances are endeavoring to deny is that a potentially very bad situation was completely avoided with a simple gesture.

To those who would say, “She could’ve just slept at her friends house.” Well, yes and no. Yes, because she could’ve passed out right there on the futon and been fine; however, no, because she had to get up and be at work at 9 in the morning (on Monday). How many people want to get up an extra forty-five minutes earlier on Monday, probably with a blinding hangover, walk—in the extremely hungover state—forty-five minutes uphill in order to get home so you can start getting ready for work? I can’t imagine anybody WANTING to do that when you could stagger home drunk, barely remember the walk, SET YOUR ALARM, wake up thirty minutes before you go, do the quick-ready, and be out the door before you can say “Robert’s your father’s brother.”

Then again, I could be simply justifying her actions to myself in a vain attempt to justify to slight discomfort I endured (and it was truly only slight: I did get two jameson’s on ice in me in the few minutes I was at the party). Perhaps it’s precisely what I think it’s not.

At any rate, I think the idea that things are exactly what we think they aren’t keeps things all fluxed up, and that’s what keep my existence enjoyable.

And I remain...

unbroken. It has been well established that words and I have a sort of tenuous understanding with each other: I use them to attempt to make meaning and they do their best to convey it—though my meanings are generally all over the place and theirs are as well. They are my favorite bother. But when a specific word begins to haunt me, I have to ask myself, “Why?”

A specific work that has plagued me for quite some time now is a simple one: unbroken. I’ve found it crop up in song lyrics, poems and short stories that I have written. “Unbroken, he lay on his bed in a heap.”
“Don’t you worry about me,
my heart remains unbroken.”
“Time’s unbroken tail swings gently
in the wind while makeshift
ladders are built to touch the
sky”

Sublime: painful beauty: two seemingly contradictory ideas. Unbroken has much of the same duality in that I see it as a celebration of proximity to brokenness without actually submitting. Essentially, the idea is that being unbroken is a good thing: the vase in her boudoir remains unbroken. Hooray! But it lives in the perilous state of being so delicate it could become broken at any time. Perhaps it is best described as being a fearful celebration.

Perhaps an example:

I have to go to work tonight. This is nothing unusual. Almost everybody has to go to work. Something slightly unusual about my particular situation is that I work overnight. It’s not incredibly unusual, but I feel pretty comfortable far fewer people work between 9pm and 6am than between 6am and 9pm. Further complications to my situation: this will be my ninth straight day of being at my place of employment. To be fair, there are those who work constantly, but once again I feel like somewhere between 5 and 6 days of work in a row is “the norm.” Another complication: the life of an overnight manager is a difficult one on regular human sleep patterns (read: 16 hours of sleep in the last 120 hours of wakefulness). Fairness must once again intercede and I must admit that I normally get around four hours of sleep in any 24-hour period, but this last run has been especially hectic and afforded me even less opportunity for repose and I choose to use it as my best example. Finally, my shifts are often 12 hours or longer of physical, manual labor.

I’m tired, I’m sore, my head hurts most of the time, and I’m losing weight because I don’t usually have time to eat—the worst possible reason for losing weight is one where it’s not because you don’t want to eat, but because you can’t eat.

And yet, through the worst of it, I come home, pour myself a stiff drink of bottom shelf vodka (the one that’s between 6 and 8 dollars…you know the one I mean…), sink into the creases of my couch, and strum the guitar and wail away like a coyote until the neighbors and my roommates hate me. I wail away because I sit there an unbroken man: celebrating my teetering position on the precipice—if only because I haven’t fallen in yet.