There is something to creating music that means something. To anybody that knows me, there is a very deep-seated antipathy for what has come to be “Pop music.” Maybe it’s because what has become pop music is precisely the opposite of what pop music was when it was first invented in the 1960s—or maybe not. The Beatles were incredibly popular. Cream became incredibly popular—although it could be argued that they quitted their careers right at the point where they were verging on superstardom. CCR, Van Morrison, and even Bob Dylan all ran in the Something-or-other-Pop category: rock-pop, jazz/rock-pop, folk-pop, etc. That is a little difficult for this humble music listener to understand. A quick juxtaposition of top tens might prove something. The number one song from 1969 and 2007. According to one website (http://digitaldreamdoor.nutsie.com/pages/best_songs50-69.html), the top songs of 1969 were:
1. Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin
2. Proud Mary - Creedence Clearwater Revival
3. I Want You Back - Jackson 5
4. Honky Tonk Women - Rolling Stones
5. Bad Moon Rising - Creedence Clearwater Revival
6. Suite: Judy Blue Eyes - Crosby, Stills & Nash
7. Dazed And Confused - Led Zeppelin
8. Gimme Shelter - Rolling Stones
9. Come Together - Beatles
10. I Can't Get Next To You – Temptations
(Which is, I might add, a pretty imposing list.) According to Rolling Stone, the top songs of 2007 are as follows:
1 "Roc Boys" - Jay-Z
2 "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country"
Randy Newman
3 "Umbrella"
Rihanna
4 "D.A.N.C.E."
Justice
5 "Four Winds" - Bright Eyes
6 "Dough Is What I Got"
Lil Wayne
7 "Rehab"
Amy Winehouse
8 "Long Walk Home"
Bruce Springsteen
9 "Boyz" M.I.A.
10 "Int'l Player's Anthem"
UGK
I guess the big question that I have, is whether or not anybody could see forty years into the future and see the artists of that day and age listening to MIA and UGK and wanting to make music like that? I guess the big difference, for me, is a matter of longevity.
Lately, I have been studying temporality. When I first questioned time, it took the rudimentary form of asking “Who invented time? And why should I abide by it?” Well, it turns out that I invented time at (or around) the same time that I made the split from myself in the upsurge of the consciousness. Time, if looked at from a technical viewpoint, is a personal fiction. Yes, the days move and the world turns, and we can measure it, but from a more individualized standpoint: the past does not exist because we can’t go back in time, every time we try to catch hold of the present we are presented with the problem that it is constantly being driven into the realm of an infinitesimal instant and the best we can do is get pretty close, and as to the future, I have a maxim: “Only act, the future is unknowable.” But given the fact that it is a kind of personal fiction, it is still a supportive kind of fiction. We rely on our past to make decisions in the present that will hopefully make our future what we want it to be. The past is like a crutch supporting us in the present: our experiences, our knowledge, and our wisdom from all of these things is what makes us the person we are—as a matter of fact, existentialist theory would say that we are what we were and Post-Marxist theory would say that the decision in the present illustrate what we want (which is always about the future). Given all of this. What kind of structure is “Roc Boys” building for the future of music?
There is no real music for this particular piece of music. It is pure lyrics and mix mastering. Your average Joe Schmoe, sure, couldn’t put together a piece of music like this, but give just about anybody a mix board and you’ll come up with something. Meanwhile, some of your most accomplished guitarists couldn’t manage to play Whole Lotta Love. They might not’ve known music theory, but they could play the instrument. It was part of them. Maybe I’m way off base. Maybe the mixboard is the most complicated instrument in the world, and I’m sure it takes time to master, but can you imagine carrying it to Central Park and busking? It is the manifestation of the capitalistic machine grabbing hold of the music industry. You can’t take it outside these boundaries. If the machine can’t control your money, then what’s the point?
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Wandering Mindspace
(Written a couple of weeks ago, but the sister city to another piece at poeticmindofeli.blogspot.com)
Sometimes, all I want to do is drop my thoughts from an ocean-crossing jumbo jet and watch them plummet for a second, before opening up a parachute and gliding through the rest of their journey and landing safely—perhaps a couple of broken bones, but safely nonetheless. I thought this as I awakened from what one could ostensibly call sleeping, but really more like an alternate state of consciousness.
More and more and more there seems to be the sense that I’m wandering in awe through my days, as if there is nowhere and nothing more important that the steam streaming out of the little heating unit on the side of that building, nothing more important than continually putting one foot in front of the other, nothing more than the realization that with that as the focus, one is bound to get somewhere, anywhere, and certainly not nowhere. Am I a being that is present to itself in reflection only in terms of my situation and it’s ontological reality? Does a question like that make sense? Can it be applied to literature? What of Paul Morel? He is certainly most present to himself in reflection in terms of his situation (which could also kind of be called materialist) and it’s whats and hows. Thanks Lawrence for making it seems as though an Existential Post-Marxism might be possible from a phenomenological standpoint. If its reality is dependent on my looking at it, then look at it I shall, and we shall see. It’s one of those floating thought moments I think: perhaps something, perhaps nothing, and perhaps a hallucinated reality that is nonetheless reality.
My nose has been doing a great deal of leaking lately, and it looks as if I shall never be able to patch it up—there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I don’t feel like elucidating it because it seems self-apparent to me (and that’s something like a pun?).
The language has come back to me as a thing of fluidity. Precisely as I had hoped, although perhaps not as clearly as I had hoped, the study of language as it pertains to the learning of it as a second is reminding me of the fickle nature of the word. When the word is fickle, what of the paragraph? We are the meaning makers, and the best any text can do is try to illustrate things as clearly as possible—which is always a mind-numbing failure.
What, then, of meaning? Even the one book that is supposed to shed light a singular meaning (that of existence) is read and even translated in so many different ways that the meaning which it gives is always personal.
Sometimes we need help. Sometimes the words on the page don’t mean anything until somebody else helps us understand them. Rather, it would be more appropriate to say (in the spirit of attempting to get things just right) that somebody else helps us come to our own understanding of them. We are the unifiers. It comes together in the subject. Is this my song of myself? Do I celebrate myself and loathe myself in the same breath? Am I in anguish of my freedom? Of my power? Of my weakness? Of my inability to comprehend the comprehensible? Of my ability to comprehend the incomprehensible? How does one go about attempting to understand?
There once was a fellow who followed a road. He wandered as it wandered and only looked at intersections to see that the road he followed had the same name, but he wondered if there was not a road construction crew that he had at some point ordered to be just up ahead of him continually laying the path that he would wander. He moved through the world as if he weren’t in control, with the sense that perhaps he was in control. Controlling the next step he took seemed to control the way the road lolled and rolled among the hills. He could always retrace his steps, and sometimes he took his lunch under a tree that seemed to magically appear on the roadside, but always there was the sound of his stepping on a road that seemed to come from nowhere. He often met fellow travelers, and sometimes there roads ran parallel, enough that they could call to each other and interact, and sometimes their roads ran together for a while, but they were always building their own roads as well. The world was absolutely cluttered with roads. But his roads seemed to have a tendency for where there were no other roads: through the mountains, through long stretches of desert, through dense forests, through untamed countryside. He longed for his road to pass through places where no road had gone before, and as he longed for it, he realized that it was quite near a reality.
“By god,” he muttered to himself, “All I have to do is direct this next step, and it is as the butterflies wing, causing a tsunami of reality that I cannot know until in my present, this is the past and I can reflect on it.”
But he often wondered at the validity of his own claims. He often wondered if there was a culture of the self, if not in the sense of a governmental system, a history, an arts scene, a night life, an understanding about the things are done, then at least in the sense of a Petri dish culture—like the nascent stages of a possible life.
Possibility… anything is. I am. Therefore I think. I think about Wagner’s Ring Cycle and wonder how it is that there are moments when I have absolutely no idea what is going on or what is being said or what is inside it, and I find myself welling up as if this is the most important point in the work and I start madly conducting the aria in a fit of seeming importance: the language of music, dropping out of the sky and floating down the ground, gliding through the air, and landing with AK-47 cocked and at the ready to blow away any misunderstanding through its unmistakable sense of something or other. The unreal is leaking into the real.
Musical existence – something that is pervasively giving off that sense of something or other, that transcends language, that reaches high points anybody can understand bodily, without the slightest notion of transcendent meaning.
To build a road of musical existence, perhaps that is my goal where the unreal leaks into reality and gliding seems to emanate from its presence, when really what it’s doing is falling.
Perhaps cohesion is best left to those who desire cohesiveness. Even as a sentence is made up of parts—a noun, a verb, the etcetera—metaphorized existence could take the form a sentence, a statement: a thing, what the thing is doing, and everything to describe that thing and what it is doing. Adjectives and adverbs and prepositional phrases make up the bulk of the sentence, while the thing-in-itself and the existing for-itself are still the most important parts of the sentence because without them there is only the etcetera. There is no statement. No phrase. No longing to be made meaning of. Warmly.
The flowers on my apparently ugly wallpaper move sometimes, as if they were actually growing. I never think about how ugly the wallpaper is though, it is simply a “fact” that has been illuminated for me by just about everybody that comes into my humble little room. I believe the appropriate colors are: khaki background with light green vines and lavender and peach flowers. Apparently it jars on people’s delicate sense of aesthetics. But what is beauty? Cohesion? Building? Stepping? Flowers? Wandering? Music? Leaking? Gliding? Falling? Language? Words? How is one to know?
Sometimes, all I want to do is drop my thoughts from an ocean-crossing jumbo jet and watch them plummet for a second, before opening up a parachute and gliding through the rest of their journey and landing safely—perhaps a couple of broken bones, but safely nonetheless. I thought this as I awakened from what one could ostensibly call sleeping, but really more like an alternate state of consciousness.
More and more and more there seems to be the sense that I’m wandering in awe through my days, as if there is nowhere and nothing more important that the steam streaming out of the little heating unit on the side of that building, nothing more important than continually putting one foot in front of the other, nothing more than the realization that with that as the focus, one is bound to get somewhere, anywhere, and certainly not nowhere. Am I a being that is present to itself in reflection only in terms of my situation and it’s ontological reality? Does a question like that make sense? Can it be applied to literature? What of Paul Morel? He is certainly most present to himself in reflection in terms of his situation (which could also kind of be called materialist) and it’s whats and hows. Thanks Lawrence for making it seems as though an Existential Post-Marxism might be possible from a phenomenological standpoint. If its reality is dependent on my looking at it, then look at it I shall, and we shall see. It’s one of those floating thought moments I think: perhaps something, perhaps nothing, and perhaps a hallucinated reality that is nonetheless reality.
My nose has been doing a great deal of leaking lately, and it looks as if I shall never be able to patch it up—there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I don’t feel like elucidating it because it seems self-apparent to me (and that’s something like a pun?).
The language has come back to me as a thing of fluidity. Precisely as I had hoped, although perhaps not as clearly as I had hoped, the study of language as it pertains to the learning of it as a second is reminding me of the fickle nature of the word. When the word is fickle, what of the paragraph? We are the meaning makers, and the best any text can do is try to illustrate things as clearly as possible—which is always a mind-numbing failure.
What, then, of meaning? Even the one book that is supposed to shed light a singular meaning (that of existence) is read and even translated in so many different ways that the meaning which it gives is always personal.
Sometimes we need help. Sometimes the words on the page don’t mean anything until somebody else helps us understand them. Rather, it would be more appropriate to say (in the spirit of attempting to get things just right) that somebody else helps us come to our own understanding of them. We are the unifiers. It comes together in the subject. Is this my song of myself? Do I celebrate myself and loathe myself in the same breath? Am I in anguish of my freedom? Of my power? Of my weakness? Of my inability to comprehend the comprehensible? Of my ability to comprehend the incomprehensible? How does one go about attempting to understand?
There once was a fellow who followed a road. He wandered as it wandered and only looked at intersections to see that the road he followed had the same name, but he wondered if there was not a road construction crew that he had at some point ordered to be just up ahead of him continually laying the path that he would wander. He moved through the world as if he weren’t in control, with the sense that perhaps he was in control. Controlling the next step he took seemed to control the way the road lolled and rolled among the hills. He could always retrace his steps, and sometimes he took his lunch under a tree that seemed to magically appear on the roadside, but always there was the sound of his stepping on a road that seemed to come from nowhere. He often met fellow travelers, and sometimes there roads ran parallel, enough that they could call to each other and interact, and sometimes their roads ran together for a while, but they were always building their own roads as well. The world was absolutely cluttered with roads. But his roads seemed to have a tendency for where there were no other roads: through the mountains, through long stretches of desert, through dense forests, through untamed countryside. He longed for his road to pass through places where no road had gone before, and as he longed for it, he realized that it was quite near a reality.
“By god,” he muttered to himself, “All I have to do is direct this next step, and it is as the butterflies wing, causing a tsunami of reality that I cannot know until in my present, this is the past and I can reflect on it.”
But he often wondered at the validity of his own claims. He often wondered if there was a culture of the self, if not in the sense of a governmental system, a history, an arts scene, a night life, an understanding about the things are done, then at least in the sense of a Petri dish culture—like the nascent stages of a possible life.
Possibility… anything is. I am. Therefore I think. I think about Wagner’s Ring Cycle and wonder how it is that there are moments when I have absolutely no idea what is going on or what is being said or what is inside it, and I find myself welling up as if this is the most important point in the work and I start madly conducting the aria in a fit of seeming importance: the language of music, dropping out of the sky and floating down the ground, gliding through the air, and landing with AK-47 cocked and at the ready to blow away any misunderstanding through its unmistakable sense of something or other. The unreal is leaking into the real.
Musical existence – something that is pervasively giving off that sense of something or other, that transcends language, that reaches high points anybody can understand bodily, without the slightest notion of transcendent meaning.
To build a road of musical existence, perhaps that is my goal where the unreal leaks into reality and gliding seems to emanate from its presence, when really what it’s doing is falling.
Perhaps cohesion is best left to those who desire cohesiveness. Even as a sentence is made up of parts—a noun, a verb, the etcetera—metaphorized existence could take the form a sentence, a statement: a thing, what the thing is doing, and everything to describe that thing and what it is doing. Adjectives and adverbs and prepositional phrases make up the bulk of the sentence, while the thing-in-itself and the existing for-itself are still the most important parts of the sentence because without them there is only the etcetera. There is no statement. No phrase. No longing to be made meaning of. Warmly.
The flowers on my apparently ugly wallpaper move sometimes, as if they were actually growing. I never think about how ugly the wallpaper is though, it is simply a “fact” that has been illuminated for me by just about everybody that comes into my humble little room. I believe the appropriate colors are: khaki background with light green vines and lavender and peach flowers. Apparently it jars on people’s delicate sense of aesthetics. But what is beauty? Cohesion? Building? Stepping? Flowers? Wandering? Music? Leaking? Gliding? Falling? Language? Words? How is one to know?
Monday, December 1, 2008
You Can't Be Too Good
because the world just simply won’t allow it. You can be as awesome as you like—even if it is in your own mind. It is even possible to have everyone around you telling you how incredible you are (and I guess I’m thinking specifically about the celebrity circle there), but still manage to wind up feeling the next day as if God had unceremoniously scraped you off his hiking boot after looking down and saying, “Ewww….”
I’m not sure about karma. There seems to be something to it, and I suppose that’s where we can leave it off. What I am almost absolutely certain about is balance and the power of the human will to exert some kind of control over their universe—and I want to emphasize that THEIR. How does one go about explaining a bodily understanding like that? Everything moves in circles? Karmic principles dictate? The Middle Way? Almost every culture in almost every part of the world has some sense of the harmony that can be achieved by human beings simply being aware of the power they have over their own reality. Based on the information I have researched, the amount of water saved by one human being doing their best to conserve water in every way is in no way going to help out with our current international water crisis because the amount of water saved is too insignificant; however, it can have an effect on the local environment, and with enough individual efforts pooled together, enough environments could be salvaged, and suddenly the impossible is merely the improbable.
A lot of life is about imagination. Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that can understand something like possibility. My old professor used to hate this word, but they have somehow managed to be imbued with possibility. As a matter of fact, this is generally the problem that most human beings run into: they understand possibility, so they spend most of their lives being something they aren’t and not being what they are because they are so little focused on reality. It’s not a problem in the technical sense of, “You’ve got problems buddy, no doubt at all about that,” but more like a problem in that it creates conflict in the essential nature of the human character. Sartre likes to use the example of a waiter in a café. The man is very busy being a waiter (which is something he’s not) and very busy not being himself (a struggling artist or some such), so that at the end of the day, we spend most of our lives involved in an act that we are fully conscious of, but about which we can really do nothing about, and don’t really want to do anything about because it is through this fissure that we accomplish things, where the possible becomes reality, and a new possibility opens up.
It’s a matter of reality, see?
We cannot know what’s real because it is impossible.
Like always doing anything.
It’s not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t.
The past is subjective at best,
And can only be referred to as my past or his past or
Something along those lines,
But by days end we see how impossible the past is.
The present does not exist as
We think it does. Focusing on the moments you can
Control is probably one of the
Best ways to go about existing, but there is no way to
Grasp the moment in your hand
Because by the time you think you got it, it’s vanished.
The future is unknowable—
An old personal adage with the simple qualifier at
The beginning of “only act”—
And can only be slowly worked and moved toward.
So with an un-objective past
An elusive, at best, present,
And an unknown future, how
Are we supposed to know
What’s real?
The problem is the same all over the place. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and we are fully conscious that we have no idea what is going on inside us, while at the same time being fully conscious that we know what’s going on inside us is probably most closely related to turmoil of one kind or another. So, we sometimes set ourselves up for the self-flagellation that sometimes happens. We do things (perhaps subconsciously, but still in the consciousness) that we know, at some point down the road, we’re going to have to pay for, and we accept them wholeheartedly because we know there is a balance. It works the other way, too. Sometimes you work really, really hard. Sometimes you work to the point of pain. Sports might be a good metaphor here, in that you will work until your body is yelling at you, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Why are you doing this to us!” but you just keep right on going, and it learns to take the pain, because the glory you will receive through the competition is worth it. Pain now for pleasure later or pleasure now for pain later—it’s like the quintessential text of anything. Only a fool would make the claim that you can enjoy a life of pleasure forever.
What’s important is to remember that no matter how many father-figures you lose or many hours overtime you’re working that you’re not getting paid for or how many times your schedule changes or how many times you spill Jameson on your computer or how many times the world plays magician and has you looking at its left hand while taking a huge swing at you with its right or how many times your internet unexpectedly goes out or how many times you are so confused with the nature of your own existence that you cry and cry and cry and cry, you’ll hit a balance. You might only hit it like a miler hits the line after the first lap, but you’ll hit it, and “that’s life. That’s what all the people say. Ridin’ high in April, shot down in May. But I ain’t gonna let it change my tune. When I’m back on top in June.” I just hope it doesn’t take that long to get back on top.
I’m not sure about karma. There seems to be something to it, and I suppose that’s where we can leave it off. What I am almost absolutely certain about is balance and the power of the human will to exert some kind of control over their universe—and I want to emphasize that THEIR. How does one go about explaining a bodily understanding like that? Everything moves in circles? Karmic principles dictate? The Middle Way? Almost every culture in almost every part of the world has some sense of the harmony that can be achieved by human beings simply being aware of the power they have over their own reality. Based on the information I have researched, the amount of water saved by one human being doing their best to conserve water in every way is in no way going to help out with our current international water crisis because the amount of water saved is too insignificant; however, it can have an effect on the local environment, and with enough individual efforts pooled together, enough environments could be salvaged, and suddenly the impossible is merely the improbable.
A lot of life is about imagination. Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that can understand something like possibility. My old professor used to hate this word, but they have somehow managed to be imbued with possibility. As a matter of fact, this is generally the problem that most human beings run into: they understand possibility, so they spend most of their lives being something they aren’t and not being what they are because they are so little focused on reality. It’s not a problem in the technical sense of, “You’ve got problems buddy, no doubt at all about that,” but more like a problem in that it creates conflict in the essential nature of the human character. Sartre likes to use the example of a waiter in a café. The man is very busy being a waiter (which is something he’s not) and very busy not being himself (a struggling artist or some such), so that at the end of the day, we spend most of our lives involved in an act that we are fully conscious of, but about which we can really do nothing about, and don’t really want to do anything about because it is through this fissure that we accomplish things, where the possible becomes reality, and a new possibility opens up.
It’s a matter of reality, see?
We cannot know what’s real because it is impossible.
Like always doing anything.
It’s not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t.
The past is subjective at best,
And can only be referred to as my past or his past or
Something along those lines,
But by days end we see how impossible the past is.
The present does not exist as
We think it does. Focusing on the moments you can
Control is probably one of the
Best ways to go about existing, but there is no way to
Grasp the moment in your hand
Because by the time you think you got it, it’s vanished.
The future is unknowable—
An old personal adage with the simple qualifier at
The beginning of “only act”—
And can only be slowly worked and moved toward.
So with an un-objective past
An elusive, at best, present,
And an unknown future, how
Are we supposed to know
What’s real?
The problem is the same all over the place. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and we are fully conscious that we have no idea what is going on inside us, while at the same time being fully conscious that we know what’s going on inside us is probably most closely related to turmoil of one kind or another. So, we sometimes set ourselves up for the self-flagellation that sometimes happens. We do things (perhaps subconsciously, but still in the consciousness) that we know, at some point down the road, we’re going to have to pay for, and we accept them wholeheartedly because we know there is a balance. It works the other way, too. Sometimes you work really, really hard. Sometimes you work to the point of pain. Sports might be a good metaphor here, in that you will work until your body is yelling at you, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Why are you doing this to us!” but you just keep right on going, and it learns to take the pain, because the glory you will receive through the competition is worth it. Pain now for pleasure later or pleasure now for pain later—it’s like the quintessential text of anything. Only a fool would make the claim that you can enjoy a life of pleasure forever.
What’s important is to remember that no matter how many father-figures you lose or many hours overtime you’re working that you’re not getting paid for or how many times your schedule changes or how many times you spill Jameson on your computer or how many times the world plays magician and has you looking at its left hand while taking a huge swing at you with its right or how many times your internet unexpectedly goes out or how many times you are so confused with the nature of your own existence that you cry and cry and cry and cry, you’ll hit a balance. You might only hit it like a miler hits the line after the first lap, but you’ll hit it, and “that’s life. That’s what all the people say. Ridin’ high in April, shot down in May. But I ain’t gonna let it change my tune. When I’m back on top in June.” I just hope it doesn’t take that long to get back on top.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Mixing Colors
Painting is a funny sort of pastime. You learn things that you might not normally think about in terms of color. At it’s most basic, you’ve got red, yellow, blue, black and white. All colors can technically be formed from the combination of these colors. Where it gets really tricky is the amounts of each to throw into the mix in order to reach the desired hue. Where it gets even trickier is any time you add black and white. White is a lightening agent. Add white to red, and the red becomes a lighter shade of red. Add black, and it becomes darker. But what happens when you add too much black—which is not an uncommon occurrence because black is a surprisingly strong absence of color? You add white. But then, taking a step back, is it really grey which is responsible for hues? Granted, you might be able to reach the hue you’re looking for by just adding white, but this is extraordinarily rare, and one is generally left to deal with the color that results.
This is, however, why grayscale work is so important to the artist. It teaches them to deal with tone values, and if this were extrapolated on every so slightly, this is precisely what makes art what it is: the perfect tone. Joyce struggled with this. What’s the right tone for this episode? Your good chef is concerned with the not only the color tones on the plate, but the tongue tones as well. Jean-Paul Belmondo struggled with just the right tone of voice. Every artist is concerned with tone, and the best way to learn about it is an intense investigation into the grayscale.
However, there is an unfortunate point that some artists reach where their only interest is in grayscale, and they forget that the whole point of learning grayscale is so that one can make the leap into full color where the entire world of possibility opens up before their eyes. Grayscale teaches tonal understanding and makes tones possible, but it is, after all, a tool for moving comfortably into the world of infinite possibility. In a way, it could be said that grayscale is learning time.
Currently, I am reading four books—an old habit picked up from years of being in literature classes: Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” Beop Jeong’s “May All Beings Be Happy,” D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers,” and Voltaire’s “Candide” (and related texts), and I have noticed something that I never noticed when I was actually in school and studying books simultaneously. They are all individually crammed with information, but they are all coming together at some point in my head so that overarching "truths" can be reached.
Sartre is teaching me ontological awareness (and I want to point out that my mantra “actions reveal sub-conscious desires” has been somewhat amended by the understanding that our physical actions are a manifestation of ontological choices of what and how to be, where choice is a metaphysical action based on why we think we ought to do these things), the fact that to “non-” something is not the opposite of what it is we’re “non”-ing (where being and non-being are not opposites, action and non-action are not opposites, and knowing and non-knowing are not opposites because to non-be something means simply that you are not in that state, but it is possible, and for opposites this is never possible), and that a question is composed of three non-beings: the non-being of knowledge in man (otherwise why would you ask), the non-being of a possibly negative response (even in a question like, “Where is Paul?” the answer could be, “I don’t know”), and the third non-being of the limitation of truth. These three are non-beings because they are not currently in the state of being: there is no current state of knowledge, there is no current state of positivity or negativity—which opens up both possibilities, and there is no current state of limited truth.
From Beop Jeong I’m learning to live ever so fully from moment to moment, that the past is a thing to picked at when needed, the future is a thing to be understood as possible but untouchable, that possessions can own us as much as we own them, that words are the home of being, that life was intended for existence, and I am learning to ask “Who am I?” again and again and again.
D.H. Lawrence is teaching me just how far into the human psyche we can delve and what it is possible to learn about ourselves as we look back into ourselves from a position of understanding. I’m learning that love and hate can exist for the same character in the same paragraph, in the same breath, in the same sentence, and that it is sometimes uncomfortable to be that close, but that it is, in its way the same reality we all experience very day.
Voltaire is teaching me how to teach and learn through story telling. Candide’s travels and woes in this, the best of all possible worlds, reminds me that to cling to the things which we once thought beyond question can be only the mark of Emerson’s hobgoblin.
But, in the same breath, a moment to moment psychological existence where learning is key and “there is nothing to prevent consciousness from making a wholly new choice of its way of being” kind of makes sense.
In this moment, “Sons and Lovers,” “Candide,” “May All Beings Be Happy,” and “Being and Nothingness” are the gray which is tempering the hue of my understanding of my existence and my reality, which I am, in turn, attempting to live in hypercolor.
(For the record, I only just realized that Candide means pure or “white”—the existence of all colors simultaneously, beings being happy might be most happy in a nothingness where a bildungsroman can illustrate he psychological nature of a being who arose from nothingness. Two bildungromans, two books with being in the title, and all chosen randomly. Life’s funny like that…)
So maybe the best of all possible worlds is one lived with an understanding of grayscale, but focused on color. And maybe, when color gets to be too much, and you start to lose the plot, retreat back to the basics, but never forget that at the end of the day it’s always about mixing.
This is, however, why grayscale work is so important to the artist. It teaches them to deal with tone values, and if this were extrapolated on every so slightly, this is precisely what makes art what it is: the perfect tone. Joyce struggled with this. What’s the right tone for this episode? Your good chef is concerned with the not only the color tones on the plate, but the tongue tones as well. Jean-Paul Belmondo struggled with just the right tone of voice. Every artist is concerned with tone, and the best way to learn about it is an intense investigation into the grayscale.
However, there is an unfortunate point that some artists reach where their only interest is in grayscale, and they forget that the whole point of learning grayscale is so that one can make the leap into full color where the entire world of possibility opens up before their eyes. Grayscale teaches tonal understanding and makes tones possible, but it is, after all, a tool for moving comfortably into the world of infinite possibility. In a way, it could be said that grayscale is learning time.
Currently, I am reading four books—an old habit picked up from years of being in literature classes: Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” Beop Jeong’s “May All Beings Be Happy,” D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers,” and Voltaire’s “Candide” (and related texts), and I have noticed something that I never noticed when I was actually in school and studying books simultaneously. They are all individually crammed with information, but they are all coming together at some point in my head so that overarching "truths" can be reached.
Sartre is teaching me ontological awareness (and I want to point out that my mantra “actions reveal sub-conscious desires” has been somewhat amended by the understanding that our physical actions are a manifestation of ontological choices of what and how to be, where choice is a metaphysical action based on why we think we ought to do these things), the fact that to “non-” something is not the opposite of what it is we’re “non”-ing (where being and non-being are not opposites, action and non-action are not opposites, and knowing and non-knowing are not opposites because to non-be something means simply that you are not in that state, but it is possible, and for opposites this is never possible), and that a question is composed of three non-beings: the non-being of knowledge in man (otherwise why would you ask), the non-being of a possibly negative response (even in a question like, “Where is Paul?” the answer could be, “I don’t know”), and the third non-being of the limitation of truth. These three are non-beings because they are not currently in the state of being: there is no current state of knowledge, there is no current state of positivity or negativity—which opens up both possibilities, and there is no current state of limited truth.
From Beop Jeong I’m learning to live ever so fully from moment to moment, that the past is a thing to picked at when needed, the future is a thing to be understood as possible but untouchable, that possessions can own us as much as we own them, that words are the home of being, that life was intended for existence, and I am learning to ask “Who am I?” again and again and again.
D.H. Lawrence is teaching me just how far into the human psyche we can delve and what it is possible to learn about ourselves as we look back into ourselves from a position of understanding. I’m learning that love and hate can exist for the same character in the same paragraph, in the same breath, in the same sentence, and that it is sometimes uncomfortable to be that close, but that it is, in its way the same reality we all experience very day.
Voltaire is teaching me how to teach and learn through story telling. Candide’s travels and woes in this, the best of all possible worlds, reminds me that to cling to the things which we once thought beyond question can be only the mark of Emerson’s hobgoblin.
But, in the same breath, a moment to moment psychological existence where learning is key and “there is nothing to prevent consciousness from making a wholly new choice of its way of being” kind of makes sense.
In this moment, “Sons and Lovers,” “Candide,” “May All Beings Be Happy,” and “Being and Nothingness” are the gray which is tempering the hue of my understanding of my existence and my reality, which I am, in turn, attempting to live in hypercolor.
(For the record, I only just realized that Candide means pure or “white”—the existence of all colors simultaneously, beings being happy might be most happy in a nothingness where a bildungsroman can illustrate he psychological nature of a being who arose from nothingness. Two bildungromans, two books with being in the title, and all chosen randomly. Life’s funny like that…)
So maybe the best of all possible worlds is one lived with an understanding of grayscale, but focused on color. And maybe, when color gets to be too much, and you start to lose the plot, retreat back to the basics, but never forget that at the end of the day it’s always about mixing.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Mountain Songsanri
Today I went hiking. This is something I do frequently; however, today I went hiking with two older Korean gentlemen--one is 56, the other retired from his work at Nestle two years ago. I wrote some things like how I love being "struck by the leaves of fall," and "Nothing bad happened today... nothing"--although I did fall, twist my ankle, bang my knee and nearly lose my glasses in thousands of leaves--"I find that the best places to BE are usually the hardest to get to," "I am sitting in a tiny car with three older Koreans. I have taken to describing Teacher Bone as 'ancient': old AND respected. To put it at its most simple: I am humbled in his/their presence. It makes me proud. We are on our way to a mountain called (and here I asked teacher bone to write down the name of the mountain and he wrote a few things for me): 'Mt. Sokri (we later found out it was Songsanri). On top of that mountain is called Mun Jang Dae which is so popular in beauty scenery.' There is a buddhist monastery on top of the Mt. Sokri (I later realized it was at the base), and a long time ago, Bone Teacher's father was there--whether for a visit or for a long time is not known, and I could ask, but I think we're just going to let it linger in delicious obscurity for the time being. For now, we are doing. We're doing the damn thing, as it were, and we're being as respectful as possible of the beauty of nature. 'Go be whatever you want to do,'" and "Just me and two ancient Korean men. I fell... Teacher Bone had gone on ahead. Emo's husband found my glasses (Emo is the cook at our school, and her husband--who was only referred to as "Senior" all day because of his elder status--had been up Mt. Songsanri a number of times and wanted to guide us). What if. It just goes to show you, no matter how slow and careful you are, you still might find you tumbling down a million rocks. Going up is more secure, somehow you have gravity on your side." I saw millions of rocks today. LIterally, millions, and they were all roughly big enough for one person to carry with a certain amount of strain. But, there's really no way to explain what happened today, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, then I actually wrote twenty thousand words already today. But for now, I guess I'll put the burden on the reader here and ask for a then thousand word essay on:
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Story of My Life
“In an effort to bring Korean and Western cultures together, today at the Korea Herald English Academy we are celebrating Halloween.”
Let’s just say that I’m not a super huge on Halloween.
I find myself green almost yearly, because I am a large man—think of things like The Jolly Green Giant, Shrek, the Incredible Hulk, and Frankenstein—and that is admittedly an overstatement in that for the last couple of years I have found myself green for various reasons to celebrate Halloween.
Well, my director is a special lady, and for the last two weeks she’s been asking me what I was going to be for the Halloween party and what color I want to be painted—even though I told her many times, “I don’t know” and “I really don’t want to be painted anything.” Her response was generally something like, “Whole teachers need painted.”
I eventually landed on the deliciously ambiguous Rock Star because I knew I would be carrying around my guitar all day anyway, and it just seemed to fit (Halloween is not all about blood and gore and ghouls, it’s about being whatever you want to do). The night before the party I found myself in need of some accessories. Okay, in total fairness, I hadn’t done any planning and preparation for this costume because that is not how I operate. There are people out there in the world that can spend the entire month of October planning their costumes, and to them I tip my hat. Some people I’ve talked to are talking about what they want to be next year the day after Halloween, and it’s a thing and it happens; however, I am not one of these people. I get very wrapped up in what I’m doing, and planning a costume moves to the background.
The deep background.
I am, after all, very wrapped up in doing whatever it is I’m doing.
But circumstances sometimes make decisions for us, and the fact of the matter was that I needed a costume before tomorrow.
Home Plus is like Wal-Mart… full stop. Surely there will be something in Home Plus in the men’s department or something I can use.
(My idea was to get a vest and some suspenders and call it good.)
In Korea, space (like in New York City) is at a premium, so places that would normally take up a square mile (like a Wal-Mart Supercenter) in Kansas City or some such place, builds up as opposed to out. Fair enough. I had never been to the third floor of Home Plus. I live on the ground floor where the food is. The second floor is electronics and toys and children’s things and there’s really no call for me to be there either.
So, I traveled up the inclined moving walkway (NOT an escalator, an inclined moving walkway) to the third floor and wandered around looking for the men’s department or the accessories or something. It took me about fourteen seconds to realize that something was odd. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
(As a bit of an aside, I don’t DO clothes shopping. It makes me nervous. I get all jittery and my hands start shaking and I get flush and my temperature rises and I absolutely must have someone there with me, reassuring me that everything is going to be okay.)
There was definitely something odd. No signs for Men’s and Women’s departments. That’s what it was.
Everything, and I’m sure the fashion minded of you out there can appreciate this, was sorted by designer (or maybe more appropriately, brand name).
Litmus is the only brand that I can remember off hand, but walking around Home Plus’s enigmatic third floor was a lesson in fashion. It made perfect sense, rationally and whatnot, but it gets a little bit more complicated.
Korea is a very metrosexual country. The reason Home Plus’s third floor is delineated in this particular manner is because everybody cares so much. To be perfectly honest, most of the children (male or female) in my Hagwon (Private English Academy in Korea) are very involved with fashion and the way they look and the presentation they are making to the public. All of which is fair enough. But in order to be truly fashion forward, there can be no color discrimination. One of the most popular colors of the Nintendo DS in Korea is pink. Boys, girls, whatever, pink is just a color. I think it’s kind of cool. I didn’t grow up in a world like that, but every boy has their pink shirts and their purples shirts, and they’re all just colors, and color adds color to life.
But when things are sorted by their designers and there is really no color out of bounds for either gender, what happens?
I couldn’t tell which racks were men’s clothes and which racks where women’s clothes, and obviously you can just go thumbing through them and figure it out, but given my already tremulous state in regards to the entire experience of shopping, I did what any self-respecting man would do. I ran away.
Yes sirree, I bolted out of there as quickly as my tired legs could get me out and hurriedly got back to my apartment to make myself a drink and calm down.
This did still leave a small problem in that I had no costume. I can be kind of resourceful sometimes, and I decided to go shirtless and draw tattoos on myself. They were brilliant, if I do say so myself.
When I got to school, the director said, “Ah, let me paint you.”
And that’s the story of how I wound up being a green Zombie Rock Star for Halloween at the Korea Herald English Academy in Ochang, South Korea and playing ABBA songs on the guitar for dozens of children and learning that You Are My Sunshine is kind of a scary song—look at the lyrics.
Let’s just say that I’m not a super huge on Halloween.
I find myself green almost yearly, because I am a large man—think of things like The Jolly Green Giant, Shrek, the Incredible Hulk, and Frankenstein—and that is admittedly an overstatement in that for the last couple of years I have found myself green for various reasons to celebrate Halloween.
Well, my director is a special lady, and for the last two weeks she’s been asking me what I was going to be for the Halloween party and what color I want to be painted—even though I told her many times, “I don’t know” and “I really don’t want to be painted anything.” Her response was generally something like, “Whole teachers need painted.”
I eventually landed on the deliciously ambiguous Rock Star because I knew I would be carrying around my guitar all day anyway, and it just seemed to fit (Halloween is not all about blood and gore and ghouls, it’s about being whatever you want to do). The night before the party I found myself in need of some accessories. Okay, in total fairness, I hadn’t done any planning and preparation for this costume because that is not how I operate. There are people out there in the world that can spend the entire month of October planning their costumes, and to them I tip my hat. Some people I’ve talked to are talking about what they want to be next year the day after Halloween, and it’s a thing and it happens; however, I am not one of these people. I get very wrapped up in what I’m doing, and planning a costume moves to the background.
The deep background.
I am, after all, very wrapped up in doing whatever it is I’m doing.
But circumstances sometimes make decisions for us, and the fact of the matter was that I needed a costume before tomorrow.
Home Plus is like Wal-Mart… full stop. Surely there will be something in Home Plus in the men’s department or something I can use.
(My idea was to get a vest and some suspenders and call it good.)
In Korea, space (like in New York City) is at a premium, so places that would normally take up a square mile (like a Wal-Mart Supercenter) in Kansas City or some such place, builds up as opposed to out. Fair enough. I had never been to the third floor of Home Plus. I live on the ground floor where the food is. The second floor is electronics and toys and children’s things and there’s really no call for me to be there either.
So, I traveled up the inclined moving walkway (NOT an escalator, an inclined moving walkway) to the third floor and wandered around looking for the men’s department or the accessories or something. It took me about fourteen seconds to realize that something was odd. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
(As a bit of an aside, I don’t DO clothes shopping. It makes me nervous. I get all jittery and my hands start shaking and I get flush and my temperature rises and I absolutely must have someone there with me, reassuring me that everything is going to be okay.)
There was definitely something odd. No signs for Men’s and Women’s departments. That’s what it was.
Everything, and I’m sure the fashion minded of you out there can appreciate this, was sorted by designer (or maybe more appropriately, brand name).
Litmus is the only brand that I can remember off hand, but walking around Home Plus’s enigmatic third floor was a lesson in fashion. It made perfect sense, rationally and whatnot, but it gets a little bit more complicated.
Korea is a very metrosexual country. The reason Home Plus’s third floor is delineated in this particular manner is because everybody cares so much. To be perfectly honest, most of the children (male or female) in my Hagwon (Private English Academy in Korea) are very involved with fashion and the way they look and the presentation they are making to the public. All of which is fair enough. But in order to be truly fashion forward, there can be no color discrimination. One of the most popular colors of the Nintendo DS in Korea is pink. Boys, girls, whatever, pink is just a color. I think it’s kind of cool. I didn’t grow up in a world like that, but every boy has their pink shirts and their purples shirts, and they’re all just colors, and color adds color to life.
But when things are sorted by their designers and there is really no color out of bounds for either gender, what happens?
I couldn’t tell which racks were men’s clothes and which racks where women’s clothes, and obviously you can just go thumbing through them and figure it out, but given my already tremulous state in regards to the entire experience of shopping, I did what any self-respecting man would do. I ran away.
Yes sirree, I bolted out of there as quickly as my tired legs could get me out and hurriedly got back to my apartment to make myself a drink and calm down.
This did still leave a small problem in that I had no costume. I can be kind of resourceful sometimes, and I decided to go shirtless and draw tattoos on myself. They were brilliant, if I do say so myself.
When I got to school, the director said, “Ah, let me paint you.”
And that’s the story of how I wound up being a green Zombie Rock Star for Halloween at the Korea Herald English Academy in Ochang, South Korea and playing ABBA songs on the guitar for dozens of children and learning that You Are My Sunshine is kind of a scary song—look at the lyrics.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
I stare at a bowlful of grape husks and seeds, and think to myself, gently but earnestly, that re-location involves a lot of learning, and one of the most important things to learn is how to eat. The first time you receive a big bunch of these grapes from your co-worker who, in his turn, received them from his brother who received them from the earth after much toil and labor, you just start popping them in your mouth because you LOVE grapes—and this is a point worth emphasizing: YOU LOVE GRAPES! Well, you realize pretty quickly that these are grapes that have an interesting flavor, and you accept it is an inevitability because you are, after all, living in an entirely new country, and their grapes are bound to taste different—otherwise why would we have so many flavors of wine. It’s not a bad flavor, it’s just got this interesting combination of bitter and sweet that you just can’t quite suss. Obviously, this does not stop you from consuming the entire gigantic bunch, even though you also realize they contain seeds—but you’re a plucky chap and grape seeds have never even slowed you down. You don’t even spit ‘em out: “Here they come intestines... have fun!”
That’s one bunch down, but you’ve got another bunch in your refrigerator because Koreans never give anything in singles, always twos or threes: two for reserves and three for love. Well, because they were given to you inside your first week, there certainly isn’t three bunches, but you ponder what to do with this other bunch, knowing you will eat it eventually because it is the only food in your refrigerator at the moment, but at the same time being absolutely certain that you’re missing something. Something just isn’t right here.
When you arrive at your place of employment, a bowl of soup is placed in front of you, and you look down and realize that in the red chili base there are potatoes—which kind of makes your heart flutter—and the only real other “ingredient” is fish… in its entirety. Tools are kind of at a premium (from a westerners standpoint) in Korea. You get chopsticks and a spoon, and you wonder briefly how they expect you to eat a smallish fish that was tossed whole into soup with no real tools to bone it or remove the head that is kind of smirking at you because it seems to know your dilemma. Looking around, nobody else seems to have a problem with it and they just pick the meat off and drop the bones onto a pile of toilet paper—the cure-all paper in Korea, used for drying hands, it’s general purpose, and apparently for the piling up of fish bones. The teacher you gave you the grapes comes in, sits down, and says, “Oh! My favorite. I know how to eat this one.”
The next day, the other bunch of grapes is reduced to the stem and bag it came in. They’re good. They’re very good, but you’re still curious.
Time passes, and after a week, same said teacher invites you to eat duck in his abode two floors above you. Duck is delicious and spicy and perfect with a bowl of rice. Sitting with his family and watching CSI: Miami—which might be an entirely different entry—a bowl of grapes is placed on the table, and an empty bowl. Sweet. Grapes for dessert shall never be sneered at in your world. You go at them, but you haven’t watched TV in two weeks, so even a show with as many obvious shortcomings as CSI: Miami is somewhat interesting—sorry to those who may enjoy that sort of thing. You realize when you look down that there is only one difference between your teacher friends experience with the grapes and your own: his grape husks are in the bowl with his seeds.
Jackpot.
Well, being who they are, Koreans give. You are given another bunch of grapes before you leave—along with an apple because it’s always in twos and very rarely does it matter whether the two things are the same item.
Finding yourself peckish of a morning, your body cries out when you open the admittedly barren refrigerator because you espy a bunch of grapes. “Grab a bowl,” you tell yourself, and have a go.
That slightly bitter taste was because you were ignorant of the process. The meat of these grapes is sweet and fantastic and worth the effort of removing the slightly leathery skin—it would be the skin that needs to be removed wouldn’t it… something meaningful there—and spitting the seeds. You’ve just learned, after only three tries, how to eat.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Funny Thing About Anorexia
Well, today I'm feeling too much. I've been awake for half an hour and I'm afraid I'm bawling. When I woke up with morning, the first thing that hit me was an article from the New Yorker that a dear friend sent me about just home important this election year really is, and then I watched a video of a man who took his quadriplegic son on the Iron Man Triathalon, and finally, there's just so much in the world and so many words and I'm still shaking.
So, in an effort to allay the whatever it is, i think i'll try on some humor.
First of all, let me tell you that the pieces of literature which are chosen to help teach young Korean kids to read are interesting, if only for their subject matter, and it's probably a good thing that full comprehension is not really possible.
The most recent article we're reading is about diets and anorexia. I swear to god, and these Korean kids are barely into middle school. How do you explain anorexia in English to a child that age that actually speaks English, much less a child who only barely has a concept of the English language. (Admittedly, you need a degree in psychology to even come close to understanding it anyway... it's well beyond my ken, at any rate.)
Well, part of the unit is an article about Nicole Richie, one of the Olsen twins and Lindsay Lohan and that they have all admitted to a battle with anorexia (one quick note here: that might be the only time ever that those names appear in this blog--never say never I guess). The article says something to the effect of: Skinny celebrities are setting dangerous trends. The skinny American celebrities have all confessed to having suffered from anorexia.... etc.
Well, one of the Comprehension Questions was:
What do the skinny celebrities suffer from?
One of my kids put this down and goes, "Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!" and I had to work very hard to keep a straight face and tell him that while his answer was not technically correct, it was in a sense... and also very funny.
His answer:
The United States.
So, in an effort to allay the whatever it is, i think i'll try on some humor.
First of all, let me tell you that the pieces of literature which are chosen to help teach young Korean kids to read are interesting, if only for their subject matter, and it's probably a good thing that full comprehension is not really possible.
The most recent article we're reading is about diets and anorexia. I swear to god, and these Korean kids are barely into middle school. How do you explain anorexia in English to a child that age that actually speaks English, much less a child who only barely has a concept of the English language. (Admittedly, you need a degree in psychology to even come close to understanding it anyway... it's well beyond my ken, at any rate.)
Well, part of the unit is an article about Nicole Richie, one of the Olsen twins and Lindsay Lohan and that they have all admitted to a battle with anorexia (one quick note here: that might be the only time ever that those names appear in this blog--never say never I guess). The article says something to the effect of: Skinny celebrities are setting dangerous trends. The skinny American celebrities have all confessed to having suffered from anorexia.... etc.
Well, one of the Comprehension Questions was:
What do the skinny celebrities suffer from?
One of my kids put this down and goes, "Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!" and I had to work very hard to keep a straight face and tell him that while his answer was not technically correct, it was in a sense... and also very funny.
His answer:
The United States.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Life is an Opportunity
My Korean friend Bon made me think about that. We were talking of things, and he showed me a poem that you can’t even Google by a guy who’s name I can’t even remember. It’s called “Right This Moment,” and the first line is “Do not let this moment escape.” It goes on to say, “Do not spend this moment in vain. These moments pile up and become an entire life… You have to be joyful in the living of life.” How does a moment manage to capture the things I have wanted to tell people for so long? The fleeting arguments about who is right or wrong or stressing out over bullshit is quite simply a waste of time. Let it wash over your skin as the sea when you swim and do not think, only feel. The Korean translation of the English word “nature” is: “It has what it is.”
Ladies and gentlemen, there are things in life that require stability and consistency and constancy and so many other –ys, but unless you are involved in those things specifically, there is absolutely no reason to get caught up in them. Life is volatile no matter what you’re doing. I guess I don’t know where I’m going with this, and perhaps it doesn’t even really matter, because in this moment my fingers feel just so right wandering over their well-warn paths across the keyboard. Writing is a brain-out moment for me. There really is no thinking. It is just feeling and the feeling of the fingers flying and the brain on auto-pilot is like being on a drug. Don’t think, just be. When I am writing, there is nothing but the writing. It’s a little bit like daydreaming, except it’s more like actual dreaming when you’re awake. Something that feels so right is the quintessential sublime, and I’m beginning to think that the reason I so often feel like my religion would best be described as naturism is because there is so much of the sublime in nature, and there is a horrifying preciousness to it. It’s scary to sit and write and be only barely conscious of the fact that the brain is managing to work very hard.
One of the things I think I am most proud of is the ability to say that I do not miss the man or boy I used to be. (BTW: the smiths’ “There is a light that never goes out” just came up on random in iTunes, and I feel like it is so appropriate that it needs to be thrown in here…right this moment.) I appreciate what I used to be. When I was a child, the world I was in just didn’t seem to fit, but if it hadn’t been for that, I would not be what I am, and there’s something slightly unsettling about what I would be, or …
As much as I would like to finish this post, I have to go hiking with teacher Bone right this moment.
Ladies and gentlemen, there are things in life that require stability and consistency and constancy and so many other –ys, but unless you are involved in those things specifically, there is absolutely no reason to get caught up in them. Life is volatile no matter what you’re doing. I guess I don’t know where I’m going with this, and perhaps it doesn’t even really matter, because in this moment my fingers feel just so right wandering over their well-warn paths across the keyboard. Writing is a brain-out moment for me. There really is no thinking. It is just feeling and the feeling of the fingers flying and the brain on auto-pilot is like being on a drug. Don’t think, just be. When I am writing, there is nothing but the writing. It’s a little bit like daydreaming, except it’s more like actual dreaming when you’re awake. Something that feels so right is the quintessential sublime, and I’m beginning to think that the reason I so often feel like my religion would best be described as naturism is because there is so much of the sublime in nature, and there is a horrifying preciousness to it. It’s scary to sit and write and be only barely conscious of the fact that the brain is managing to work very hard.
One of the things I think I am most proud of is the ability to say that I do not miss the man or boy I used to be. (BTW: the smiths’ “There is a light that never goes out” just came up on random in iTunes, and I feel like it is so appropriate that it needs to be thrown in here…right this moment.) I appreciate what I used to be. When I was a child, the world I was in just didn’t seem to fit, but if it hadn’t been for that, I would not be what I am, and there’s something slightly unsettling about what I would be, or …
As much as I would like to finish this post, I have to go hiking with teacher Bone right this moment.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
The Rules Are Changing.
Change is an absolutely essential part of our being. If we didn’t change from the time we were children, where would we be? I think that the physical changes we go through are some kind of manifestation, or symptom if you will, of the change going on inside our heads—or maybe the change that ought to be going on inside our heads.
Most of ancient Greek thought, or at least my understanding of it—which is admittedly only limited, deals with the goal of life and being pretty sure that the goal of life is happiness. I think they are right, because everything we do, we do because we want something (and we’re leaving motives entirely out of the equation for the time being): we wash the windshield at the gas station because we want a clean windshield, we do the piled-up dishes because we want the dishes cleaned, we believe because we want to believe. Physical reactions reveal (at their most basic) some kind of desire, and (at their most complex) subconscious desires. For example, you might be cleaning the windshield because you want a clean windshield, but you might be cleaning the windshield because somewhere inside you, you realize that this is mom’s car and you’ve been riding it like a bucking bronco and the good guy thing to do is give it back to her in better condition than she gave it to you, and so you find yourself scrubbing the windshield. You might be doing the dishes because you want clean dishes, but you also might be doing them because you know how hard your spouse works and you haven’t done this little chore for him/her in a long time because he/she is usually the one that does them and so you find yourself doing the dishes. You might be believing because you want to believe, but, then again, you might be believing because there is something unfulfilled in you about how your own father raised you and you look to another father—“Our father’s are our models for God” (a quote which is best-known from the movie Fight Club—based on a book by Chuck Palahniuk who once did a reading with one of my professor’s from St. John’s University and Irvine Welsh)—and so you find yourself believing.
I guess the key difference between actions that we are performing to fulfill conscious desires are actions that we move through, and actions that we are performing to fulfill subconscious desires are actions that we find ourselves doing—which is a pretty huge difference. I find myself moving to Korea pretty soon. I certainly want something, but what is it? And, for that matter, why want it?
One of the things that has just simply struck me as I sit click clickety click clicking away here is that by accepting the subconscious as a reality, I am opening myself to a belief—however it might manifest itself—in some kind of pschyoanalysis (although I think it’s more like cultural criticism through an understanding of a cultural unconscious which is probably more Jungian than Freudian in its origin). At any rate, I guess I give the brain enough credit to, first of all, be able to keep some things from us.
All you really have to do is look at the processes of the body. You don’t have to think about how you’re defecating, and you don’t have to think about how to keep your heart pumping, and you don’t have to think about how to keep your legs moving, they really just continue to do their thing. The subconscious desires controlling all of those things can be accessed, though if you think about all the mystics out there that can control their heart rate or stretch their ligaments and tendons beyond all comprehension. It is a much taller order to get in touch with the subconscious. Given all that then, the unconscious sort of sits out their as this thing we can only ever poke at, and the best we can do is attempt to study it through culture and art—which is probably why these things are so important.
I find myself going to Korea for reasons I can’t comprehend. It’s what I want to do, and I know that much, but I guess I don’t know why it’s what I want. For those of you who have been introduced to it, I have that classic “go complex” common among young men in relationships and escaped prisoners. At the end of “The Trial and Death of Socrates,” that “dirty” old man gives a speech about what we’ll call his “No Complex,” where he has a voice inside his head that never tells him yes, but clearly calls out no to him when something defies logic or when something contradicts virtue. I guess you could say that I have an alternate consonant complex, and my unfortunate issue is that I don’t have nearly so good a reason to go…usually.
Subconscious, psychoanalysis, and cultural theory aside, when you experience déjà vu in the matrix, it means they’ve changed something, and I’m experiencing the kind of déjà vu of mind that reminds me of times of incredible change and growth in my life. Anytime there is extensive change and growth, the rules change. When there is a revolution, there is sudden change—no matter who wins—and the rules are irrevocably altered. When there is pain, there is sudden change, and the rules of your life are mutated to avoid that kind of pain again at all costs. When there is pleasure, there is change, and the rules of your life are altered to how much of that pleasure is acceptable without being excessive. Anytime the rules (or perhaps we could say laws) are disambiguated, change becomes the rule.
All that being said, the rules of this page are going to change in response to the action I am undertaking. The format will change to a word I’ve been toying around with: travelblog. It might even be updated more frequently than it currently is (let’s say maybe once or twice a week as opposed to once every two weeks) and will start to contain elements other than simply the thoughts as transcribed thru words on the page. It might start to contain pictures, drawings, paintings, elements of the written Korean language, and anything else that I find interesting in my travels. The world has started to present itself to me in pictures as well as words and I’m thinking about attempting to convey those pictures somehow—even though my formal physical art training is…what’s that physics word…negligible.
But here we go, I suppose. I’ve been fascinated by eagles lately, and hawks, and all large birds of prey I suppose. The eagle and the hawk are, for all intents and purposes, the top of the food chain, and yet it is entirely possible for us to take a gun out there and knock a couple out of the sky without a problem. It’s kind of a perspective readjustment, and it still doesn’t manage to make the soaring hawk any less beautiful than it is when it’s hunting and maintaining its own food chain. I guess we’re moving into a place where I will be maintaining my own food chain, with the full knowledge that something else is out there controlling the predator population. Once I was a hunter, and I feel like the season is opening again.
Most of ancient Greek thought, or at least my understanding of it—which is admittedly only limited, deals with the goal of life and being pretty sure that the goal of life is happiness. I think they are right, because everything we do, we do because we want something (and we’re leaving motives entirely out of the equation for the time being): we wash the windshield at the gas station because we want a clean windshield, we do the piled-up dishes because we want the dishes cleaned, we believe because we want to believe. Physical reactions reveal (at their most basic) some kind of desire, and (at their most complex) subconscious desires. For example, you might be cleaning the windshield because you want a clean windshield, but you might be cleaning the windshield because somewhere inside you, you realize that this is mom’s car and you’ve been riding it like a bucking bronco and the good guy thing to do is give it back to her in better condition than she gave it to you, and so you find yourself scrubbing the windshield. You might be doing the dishes because you want clean dishes, but you also might be doing them because you know how hard your spouse works and you haven’t done this little chore for him/her in a long time because he/she is usually the one that does them and so you find yourself doing the dishes. You might be believing because you want to believe, but, then again, you might be believing because there is something unfulfilled in you about how your own father raised you and you look to another father—“Our father’s are our models for God” (a quote which is best-known from the movie Fight Club—based on a book by Chuck Palahniuk who once did a reading with one of my professor’s from St. John’s University and Irvine Welsh)—and so you find yourself believing.
I guess the key difference between actions that we are performing to fulfill conscious desires are actions that we move through, and actions that we are performing to fulfill subconscious desires are actions that we find ourselves doing—which is a pretty huge difference. I find myself moving to Korea pretty soon. I certainly want something, but what is it? And, for that matter, why want it?
One of the things that has just simply struck me as I sit click clickety click clicking away here is that by accepting the subconscious as a reality, I am opening myself to a belief—however it might manifest itself—in some kind of pschyoanalysis (although I think it’s more like cultural criticism through an understanding of a cultural unconscious which is probably more Jungian than Freudian in its origin). At any rate, I guess I give the brain enough credit to, first of all, be able to keep some things from us.
All you really have to do is look at the processes of the body. You don’t have to think about how you’re defecating, and you don’t have to think about how to keep your heart pumping, and you don’t have to think about how to keep your legs moving, they really just continue to do their thing. The subconscious desires controlling all of those things can be accessed, though if you think about all the mystics out there that can control their heart rate or stretch their ligaments and tendons beyond all comprehension. It is a much taller order to get in touch with the subconscious. Given all that then, the unconscious sort of sits out their as this thing we can only ever poke at, and the best we can do is attempt to study it through culture and art—which is probably why these things are so important.
I find myself going to Korea for reasons I can’t comprehend. It’s what I want to do, and I know that much, but I guess I don’t know why it’s what I want. For those of you who have been introduced to it, I have that classic “go complex” common among young men in relationships and escaped prisoners. At the end of “The Trial and Death of Socrates,” that “dirty” old man gives a speech about what we’ll call his “No Complex,” where he has a voice inside his head that never tells him yes, but clearly calls out no to him when something defies logic or when something contradicts virtue. I guess you could say that I have an alternate consonant complex, and my unfortunate issue is that I don’t have nearly so good a reason to go…usually.
Subconscious, psychoanalysis, and cultural theory aside, when you experience déjà vu in the matrix, it means they’ve changed something, and I’m experiencing the kind of déjà vu of mind that reminds me of times of incredible change and growth in my life. Anytime there is extensive change and growth, the rules change. When there is a revolution, there is sudden change—no matter who wins—and the rules are irrevocably altered. When there is pain, there is sudden change, and the rules of your life are mutated to avoid that kind of pain again at all costs. When there is pleasure, there is change, and the rules of your life are altered to how much of that pleasure is acceptable without being excessive. Anytime the rules (or perhaps we could say laws) are disambiguated, change becomes the rule.
All that being said, the rules of this page are going to change in response to the action I am undertaking. The format will change to a word I’ve been toying around with: travelblog. It might even be updated more frequently than it currently is (let’s say maybe once or twice a week as opposed to once every two weeks) and will start to contain elements other than simply the thoughts as transcribed thru words on the page. It might start to contain pictures, drawings, paintings, elements of the written Korean language, and anything else that I find interesting in my travels. The world has started to present itself to me in pictures as well as words and I’m thinking about attempting to convey those pictures somehow—even though my formal physical art training is…what’s that physics word…negligible.
But here we go, I suppose. I’ve been fascinated by eagles lately, and hawks, and all large birds of prey I suppose. The eagle and the hawk are, for all intents and purposes, the top of the food chain, and yet it is entirely possible for us to take a gun out there and knock a couple out of the sky without a problem. It’s kind of a perspective readjustment, and it still doesn’t manage to make the soaring hawk any less beautiful than it is when it’s hunting and maintaining its own food chain. I guess we’re moving into a place where I will be maintaining my own food chain, with the full knowledge that something else is out there controlling the predator population. Once I was a hunter, and I feel like the season is opening again.
Monday, September 8, 2008
I've Seen Some Interesting
stuff. And, strangely enough perhaps, I have seen them in the middle of Iowa, in places you might never hear about, but I have managed to see some of the most awe inspiring events of my relatively short existence in a town east of Indianola (a few thousand, a private college, the Hy-Vee and the Wal-Mart are the places to be any night of the week, and you can probably name the five bars in town and their typical patrons, and it has the old town square still in tact…a lovely place in its way) east of Ackworth (populations runs around eighty-five out here—which is only really five miles outside of Indianola, but what’s a suburb of Indianola going to be like, really) east of Sandyville (running a startling sixty-one—or some such preposterousness—and containing one of the largest dead car lots in all of Iowa—or so they say) and south of Beech (the most impressive point in this town in the church or school or used to be a church or used to be a school and is now a church or used to be a church and is now a school with an impressively blue roof—you can’t really make these things up: a Sandyville-sized town with an impressive building with an impressive roof) is a little nook of heaven that most people don’t have the faintest idea about: Lower Beech.
We’ll get to Lower Beech in a second, but first I want to say that all these other tiny towns along the way ooze beauty in a way that not many other things can. When I stay at my former professors farmhouse in Ackworth, I am adding more than one percent to the population. Furthermore, on the dirt road out to the previously mentioned farmhouse, I saw smoke. Lots and lots of smoke. Let me be clear on how much smoke I saw: I thought a house (the thought crept into mind that perhaps it was the farmhouse itself) was literally engulfed in flames. As I crossed the Middle River Bridge, I began to realize that it was just at the top of the hill and “my” farmhouse was safe, but it still begged the question: What the? Rounding the bend I saw that it was actually three of the most massive piles of branches, brush and wood items that I had ever seen. These things were twenty-five to thirty feet tall and running twenty yards at the base, and they were BLAZING! The flames were probably up fifty or sixty feet in the air, and the smoke billowing off of them could’ve choked God. Driving slowly by to take in this sight that few will ever have the opportunity to see, I see that the fire department is at the house and they are standing with a couple of guys who are standing around having a couple of beers and watching the fire. I’m pretty sure the fire department guys came out just to be sure things didn’t get out of hand, but otherwise a pretty standard burn pile.
I wonder about Sandyville. Where did it come from? Why is there a house on the edge (yes, on the outskirts of Sandyville) that has no basement—and we know because a friend of ours looked into buying it that it has no basement? Why are there so many dead cars in Sandyville? At what point did somebody say, “Yes, bring me your broken down coupes and Caddies and pickup trucks and I’ll lay ‘em to rest for you?” Why is the speed limit going through Sandyville forty miles per hour for less than half a mile when it picks back up to the Iowa highway ninety-two standard speed limit of fifty-five? So many questions, and I think that the existence of a Sandyville makes me one happy fat kid, for reasons I can’t possibly begin to explain or understand.
Beech and it’s blue temple. We have driven through Beech a couple of times. There is a corn silo on the corner to the road that leads to Beech—and, alternatively, Lower Beech—where a right turn (to the East) brings you to a road that makes a square around the town, where you can see the sights (big blue roof, families that love living in Beech, and the banker’s house which is twice as big as everybody else’s house). As you exit you think to yourself, “Having lived in a city and lived in the country, there is only one reason why you would choose to live either place: personal desire. They want to live here about as much as others want to live in a big city. I get it. Sometimes it’s all I want.”
But we’re concerned mostly with south of Beech about a mile and a half to a gate to the east. Don’t drive too fast in the fog, because you’ll miss it. [Funny story actually, it was foggy two mornings ago and I was meeting a co-worker our at Lower Beech, and he’s probably been out there more than I have (which is a lot), and he said he drove right past it. Not as funny as I thought in a haha kind of way, more funny that this Lower Beech veteran could manage to miss the turn he’s practiced for so long].
Anyway, there is a red metal gate across the driveway—classic farm-style—that used to be a metal rod attached to steel cables. Unlock it or remove the bolt with a ratchet if your key is not working properly and drive up the quarter-mile driveway to what we could probably call a small clearing. There are crops on either side of you. Last year it was corn, but they’ve planted soy beans this year to help the soil out—even though corn is a more profitable crop, and these are some kind of hulkified beans because they’re growing like three or four feet tall and it’s kind of incredible.
Let’s pretend for just a second that it is incredibly early. For those of you who are not early risers, let’s say that it’s a quarter to seven and you’ve already had your coffee and you’re doing okay, aware of your surroundings if nothing else. There’s a bend in the freshly mowed path—about four mowers-width—and the sun is just coming up over the horizon and you look up, your hands full of tools and gasoline and a lunch for the day, and you stop. You stop because in a field of grass in front of your eyes are no less than ten thousand spider webs. They stretch on forever. Some are massive and almost hurt your eyes as the sun picks up the morning dew on them. Others are very small and less intricately designed but more like a canopy so nothing can get up from below them and nothing can fall to the ground from above them. In a couple of them sits the proverbial artist waiting for a meal. It always comes. You realize very quickly that there is no way to fully appreciate or describe it without actually seeing it. People that hate spiders would probably be awe-struck at the sheer beauty of the sight—or at least lets hope that their sense of what’s beautiful is finely tuned enough to negate whatever negative feelings they may have toward our arachnid brethren.
I had a pretty long day out there by myself in what we lovingly call The Lake House (a.k.a the pond shack) replacing all the screening. This is no small task and requires ladders, spline, a splining tool, a cordless drill, a hammer, a giant flat-head screwdriver, a box knife, rolls of screening, a hammer and nails. There are twelve separate sections, each requiring various flexibility for nuances introduced by the builder (this was an, ahem, non-contract job, and kind of slapped together so everything is a different size). But it’s been nice, hard work. It feels good working with my hands again. But it’s time to close up shop for the day and after cleaning up as much as possible (knowing that you’re going to be back tomorrow to finish the job), you walk back up the trail, and out of a tree that has been providing shade for a car on what was only a modestly warm day comes a hawk, big as life and screeching to let you know it’s going and hopes you do the same. Startled but amazed at the size of this bird. Eyes wide open, as the saying goes.
You gotta wanna watch, it has been said. Sometimes there are things in this world, beautiful things that slip under the radar because of some kind of preposterous prejudice. I would almost wager that most of the beautiful things in this world are overlooked at one time or another because of some kind of preposterous prejudice. But I guess that amounts to irrational beauty hating, and that thought is kind of a bummer.
“I can’t go out tonight, my girl will kick me out.”
“Kick you out nothing. This is Ireland! Kick her in the teeth.”
--J.P. Donleavy
The sublime is all around me I guess.
We’ll get to Lower Beech in a second, but first I want to say that all these other tiny towns along the way ooze beauty in a way that not many other things can. When I stay at my former professors farmhouse in Ackworth, I am adding more than one percent to the population. Furthermore, on the dirt road out to the previously mentioned farmhouse, I saw smoke. Lots and lots of smoke. Let me be clear on how much smoke I saw: I thought a house (the thought crept into mind that perhaps it was the farmhouse itself) was literally engulfed in flames. As I crossed the Middle River Bridge, I began to realize that it was just at the top of the hill and “my” farmhouse was safe, but it still begged the question: What the? Rounding the bend I saw that it was actually three of the most massive piles of branches, brush and wood items that I had ever seen. These things were twenty-five to thirty feet tall and running twenty yards at the base, and they were BLAZING! The flames were probably up fifty or sixty feet in the air, and the smoke billowing off of them could’ve choked God. Driving slowly by to take in this sight that few will ever have the opportunity to see, I see that the fire department is at the house and they are standing with a couple of guys who are standing around having a couple of beers and watching the fire. I’m pretty sure the fire department guys came out just to be sure things didn’t get out of hand, but otherwise a pretty standard burn pile.
I wonder about Sandyville. Where did it come from? Why is there a house on the edge (yes, on the outskirts of Sandyville) that has no basement—and we know because a friend of ours looked into buying it that it has no basement? Why are there so many dead cars in Sandyville? At what point did somebody say, “Yes, bring me your broken down coupes and Caddies and pickup trucks and I’ll lay ‘em to rest for you?” Why is the speed limit going through Sandyville forty miles per hour for less than half a mile when it picks back up to the Iowa highway ninety-two standard speed limit of fifty-five? So many questions, and I think that the existence of a Sandyville makes me one happy fat kid, for reasons I can’t possibly begin to explain or understand.
Beech and it’s blue temple. We have driven through Beech a couple of times. There is a corn silo on the corner to the road that leads to Beech—and, alternatively, Lower Beech—where a right turn (to the East) brings you to a road that makes a square around the town, where you can see the sights (big blue roof, families that love living in Beech, and the banker’s house which is twice as big as everybody else’s house). As you exit you think to yourself, “Having lived in a city and lived in the country, there is only one reason why you would choose to live either place: personal desire. They want to live here about as much as others want to live in a big city. I get it. Sometimes it’s all I want.”
But we’re concerned mostly with south of Beech about a mile and a half to a gate to the east. Don’t drive too fast in the fog, because you’ll miss it. [Funny story actually, it was foggy two mornings ago and I was meeting a co-worker our at Lower Beech, and he’s probably been out there more than I have (which is a lot), and he said he drove right past it. Not as funny as I thought in a haha kind of way, more funny that this Lower Beech veteran could manage to miss the turn he’s practiced for so long].
Anyway, there is a red metal gate across the driveway—classic farm-style—that used to be a metal rod attached to steel cables. Unlock it or remove the bolt with a ratchet if your key is not working properly and drive up the quarter-mile driveway to what we could probably call a small clearing. There are crops on either side of you. Last year it was corn, but they’ve planted soy beans this year to help the soil out—even though corn is a more profitable crop, and these are some kind of hulkified beans because they’re growing like three or four feet tall and it’s kind of incredible.
Let’s pretend for just a second that it is incredibly early. For those of you who are not early risers, let’s say that it’s a quarter to seven and you’ve already had your coffee and you’re doing okay, aware of your surroundings if nothing else. There’s a bend in the freshly mowed path—about four mowers-width—and the sun is just coming up over the horizon and you look up, your hands full of tools and gasoline and a lunch for the day, and you stop. You stop because in a field of grass in front of your eyes are no less than ten thousand spider webs. They stretch on forever. Some are massive and almost hurt your eyes as the sun picks up the morning dew on them. Others are very small and less intricately designed but more like a canopy so nothing can get up from below them and nothing can fall to the ground from above them. In a couple of them sits the proverbial artist waiting for a meal. It always comes. You realize very quickly that there is no way to fully appreciate or describe it without actually seeing it. People that hate spiders would probably be awe-struck at the sheer beauty of the sight—or at least lets hope that their sense of what’s beautiful is finely tuned enough to negate whatever negative feelings they may have toward our arachnid brethren.
I had a pretty long day out there by myself in what we lovingly call The Lake House (a.k.a the pond shack) replacing all the screening. This is no small task and requires ladders, spline, a splining tool, a cordless drill, a hammer, a giant flat-head screwdriver, a box knife, rolls of screening, a hammer and nails. There are twelve separate sections, each requiring various flexibility for nuances introduced by the builder (this was an, ahem, non-contract job, and kind of slapped together so everything is a different size). But it’s been nice, hard work. It feels good working with my hands again. But it’s time to close up shop for the day and after cleaning up as much as possible (knowing that you’re going to be back tomorrow to finish the job), you walk back up the trail, and out of a tree that has been providing shade for a car on what was only a modestly warm day comes a hawk, big as life and screeching to let you know it’s going and hopes you do the same. Startled but amazed at the size of this bird. Eyes wide open, as the saying goes.
You gotta wanna watch, it has been said. Sometimes there are things in this world, beautiful things that slip under the radar because of some kind of preposterous prejudice. I would almost wager that most of the beautiful things in this world are overlooked at one time or another because of some kind of preposterous prejudice. But I guess that amounts to irrational beauty hating, and that thought is kind of a bummer.
“I can’t go out tonight, my girl will kick me out.”
“Kick you out nothing. This is Ireland! Kick her in the teeth.”
--J.P. Donleavy
The sublime is all around me I guess.
Friday, August 15, 2008
There’s Just So
Much. It can be difficult to cope with. I guess that’s why I write about it. In any given week, there are so many things (and I use ambiguity for a reason here) that can happen. If one were of the appropriate skill level, they could take all the action around the world and comprehend it, but I don’t think that’s possible. Stephen Hawking be damned, nobody could understand the strings affecting the day-to-day. Come close…maybe, but full comprehension? Not a chance.
And Michael Phelps has seven gold medals.
And suddenly you’re on your way to Korea.
And without warning you owe Cablevision a thousand dollars.
And then you find the depths of your father’s irrationality.
And you have the worst sunburn of your life on the bottom half of your thighs.
And you are scared.
And the weight of history suddenly becomes too much to bear.
So many ands. To be blessed and cursed in the same moment, simultaneously in fact. How does one begin to pretend to see the sublime? The ability to ask questions is a big one, I think, having recently discovered that there are indeed people in the world for whom the questioning of information is an unused faculty.
“Kobe’s thirty-five and he’s been playing for like sixteen years.”
“Actually, according to Wikipedia he’s thirty and been playing for twelve years.”
“The days of spouting quote-unquote facts are over. Prepare to be checked.”
But then there is a feeling that washes over the epidermis, and thoughts flash through your mind about how perhaps you are precisely where you wanted you to be. You’ve been asking these questions of people for so long, and now you are asking it of yourself, even though you’ve already answered it. It’s time for the next question: “What do you plan to do about it? How do you plan to achieve this goal?” Good questions. I’ll get back to you sometime soon, I swear. I just need some time to think. A little quiet time with me and my psychosis to tighten things up a little bit.
“You know that I only live when I am near you… I have said that before, but I don’t think I ever came so near meaning it.”
--Kate Chopin, The Awakening, Chpt. XXXIV
Everybody has to find you. That’s the big quest isn’t it? Your love. He had it right all those years ago when he said, “Follow your bliss,” didn’t he? The words speak to me as nothing else ever has, and I am reminded each time they beg me to play with them, that it is love I have for the act of writing. It is a doing worth doing. There are so many doings worth doing, though, it’s about finding the right doing to do. The capacity of the human character to do is incredible, and it is possible that we haven’t even come close to understanding the peak just yet. Human technology. Athletes, academics, salt-of-the-earth: they are all human technology. Proof positive of evolution. The only real difference is that in this new era where we understand things like evolution, we can begin to see it happening on a very miniature scale. It took the human form almost five million years to figure out how to walk standing completely straight. We can see humanity develop under our eyes, and the funny thing is that it is moving in ALL different directions. A very wise professor once told me that that quality comes from quantity. He was by no means saying that a book or story is better because it’s longer, he was saying that the more material and more variety you have to work with, the better the end product is going to be—and anybody who has ever written a paper they are actually proud of would probably agree with me. The more material you have to work with, the more you can take out without feeling bad, the more you can develop into a recognizable mound, the more you can build a mountain range.
Cheap wine gives me headaches. Bummer.
On russet floors, by waters idle,
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveler’s joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own.
--Housman
To steal somebody’s attention is a precious thing to take. You’d better be able to give a pretty damned good reason for it when you’re called up to answer for the things you’ve done in this world, and if it’s done for good reasons that turn out good, then sobeit it probably needed to happen. But if it was done for selfish reasons, or even if it turned out badly with the correct motives—which means that the stealer was probably unaware of the nature of their victim—there will be hell to pay. Maybe that’s what worries me. “Well I got that ol’ travelin’ bone, and I feel I got to move…”
Disjointed is funny thing to understand fully. Fuzzy connections looming up through the time fog: executioner’s singing, Orpheus’s emerging, models for writing, powers in their imagining, vanity’s fairing, new world’s braving, and in fuzzy relief they connect, but only to the one disjointed enough to make it make sense. This will be true because I will it so.
Can you see me? I can see you. I bet you’re sitting at your computer right now. I bet you’re a little bit confused. I bet by now you might even be shaking your head. You’ve gotten this far and you can’t see me yet. See me sitting in my basement domicile pecking away at my tiny computer, next to the ancient lamp acquired from my boss in Des Moines. Hear the ceiling fan whirring gently (it’s only set on medium). Taste the awful, cheap Livingston making me feel lower. Smell the smell of stale cigarettes on my fingers as I lean too close to the screen in an effort to make sure I’m seeing things as well as I ought to see them. See this morning’s coffee cup. Hear the Incubus come through the tiny speakers. See the books on my shelf. Taste the cool, circulated air-conditioned air. Feel the goatee with me now. Feel the closeness of my breath in the words. Feel the closeness of me in action.
And Michael Phelps has seven gold medals.
And suddenly you’re on your way to Korea.
And without warning you owe Cablevision a thousand dollars.
And then you find the depths of your father’s irrationality.
And you have the worst sunburn of your life on the bottom half of your thighs.
And you are scared.
And the weight of history suddenly becomes too much to bear.
So many ands. To be blessed and cursed in the same moment, simultaneously in fact. How does one begin to pretend to see the sublime? The ability to ask questions is a big one, I think, having recently discovered that there are indeed people in the world for whom the questioning of information is an unused faculty.
“Kobe’s thirty-five and he’s been playing for like sixteen years.”
“Actually, according to Wikipedia he’s thirty and been playing for twelve years.”
“The days of spouting quote-unquote facts are over. Prepare to be checked.”
But then there is a feeling that washes over the epidermis, and thoughts flash through your mind about how perhaps you are precisely where you wanted you to be. You’ve been asking these questions of people for so long, and now you are asking it of yourself, even though you’ve already answered it. It’s time for the next question: “What do you plan to do about it? How do you plan to achieve this goal?” Good questions. I’ll get back to you sometime soon, I swear. I just need some time to think. A little quiet time with me and my psychosis to tighten things up a little bit.
“You know that I only live when I am near you… I have said that before, but I don’t think I ever came so near meaning it.”
--Kate Chopin, The Awakening, Chpt. XXXIV
Everybody has to find you. That’s the big quest isn’t it? Your love. He had it right all those years ago when he said, “Follow your bliss,” didn’t he? The words speak to me as nothing else ever has, and I am reminded each time they beg me to play with them, that it is love I have for the act of writing. It is a doing worth doing. There are so many doings worth doing, though, it’s about finding the right doing to do. The capacity of the human character to do is incredible, and it is possible that we haven’t even come close to understanding the peak just yet. Human technology. Athletes, academics, salt-of-the-earth: they are all human technology. Proof positive of evolution. The only real difference is that in this new era where we understand things like evolution, we can begin to see it happening on a very miniature scale. It took the human form almost five million years to figure out how to walk standing completely straight. We can see humanity develop under our eyes, and the funny thing is that it is moving in ALL different directions. A very wise professor once told me that that quality comes from quantity. He was by no means saying that a book or story is better because it’s longer, he was saying that the more material and more variety you have to work with, the better the end product is going to be—and anybody who has ever written a paper they are actually proud of would probably agree with me. The more material you have to work with, the more you can take out without feeling bad, the more you can develop into a recognizable mound, the more you can build a mountain range.
Cheap wine gives me headaches. Bummer.
On russet floors, by waters idle,
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveler’s joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own.
--Housman
To steal somebody’s attention is a precious thing to take. You’d better be able to give a pretty damned good reason for it when you’re called up to answer for the things you’ve done in this world, and if it’s done for good reasons that turn out good, then sobeit it probably needed to happen. But if it was done for selfish reasons, or even if it turned out badly with the correct motives—which means that the stealer was probably unaware of the nature of their victim—there will be hell to pay. Maybe that’s what worries me. “Well I got that ol’ travelin’ bone, and I feel I got to move…”
Disjointed is funny thing to understand fully. Fuzzy connections looming up through the time fog: executioner’s singing, Orpheus’s emerging, models for writing, powers in their imagining, vanity’s fairing, new world’s braving, and in fuzzy relief they connect, but only to the one disjointed enough to make it make sense. This will be true because I will it so.
Can you see me? I can see you. I bet you’re sitting at your computer right now. I bet you’re a little bit confused. I bet by now you might even be shaking your head. You’ve gotten this far and you can’t see me yet. See me sitting in my basement domicile pecking away at my tiny computer, next to the ancient lamp acquired from my boss in Des Moines. Hear the ceiling fan whirring gently (it’s only set on medium). Taste the awful, cheap Livingston making me feel lower. Smell the smell of stale cigarettes on my fingers as I lean too close to the screen in an effort to make sure I’m seeing things as well as I ought to see them. See this morning’s coffee cup. Hear the Incubus come through the tiny speakers. See the books on my shelf. Taste the cool, circulated air-conditioned air. Feel the goatee with me now. Feel the closeness of my breath in the words. Feel the closeness of me in action.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
I'm Doing All I
know. I am living in a fairly messed up world right now. There has to be something I’m missing, a key of sorts, because I cannot imagine why there is nothing out there for me. I have considered the fact that perhaps I am over-qualified for most positions I am applying for, but what kind of place is it that does not want somebody they know will be able to do the job? That has to illustrate something, right?
But all I really want to do sometimes is cry myself to sleep because of my apparent inability to find employment—although it is not for a lack of effort. So much time spent filling out applications and submitting them and re-working my resume and writing cover letters and investigating who’s hiring, and yet not a single nibble on the end of my job-fishing line, so here I sit, doing just about all I know how to do: write. Even that is questionable, I suppose, as I have never had anything technically published.
Let’s run down a list of occupations I have had—as I have been working since I was about fourteen. I started my working career with a paper route I worked with my mother. She drove the van, but I rolled the papers and stuffed them in their blue plastic bags and delivered them to the doors of people who would probably not even read them. I got a job at the grocery store across the street which ended badly and I don’t really want to talk about it. Let’s just say that youthful exuberance was too much for me to handle at the time. After that, I got a job at Maggie Moo’s Ice Cream and Treaterie as an ice cream technologist serving specially mixed ice cream to the masses. From there I graduated, literally from high school, and obtained a position as a construction laborer for a dodgy construction outfit. Then I went off to school and obtained a position as a janitor in the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s student union. That summer I came home and managed to land a job at Target where I worked as an overnight merchandise processing agent for the time when the Target at 169 and Barry Rd was still new. I changed schools at that point and moved to Iowa where I worked in the mailroom of the school and sorted, delivered, and distributed the mail for the campus and the post office. After a while, it became very apparent that this was not nearly enough (5.25/hr) to fund my college experience with, and I got a second job—both of which I retained for my entire career at Simpson—with a wealthy older gentleman who needed strapping young fellows to maintain his yard and his house and his land. This was truly a landmark position for me because, as I like to say, if you could –ing it, I did it: mowing, cutting down of trees, removing said trees, painting, patching, fixing, building, conversating, driving, planting, dusting, organizing. I did it all, and I got pretty good at it—I even started cutting down trees with a chainsaw sans shoesus. Then I went to New Zealand where I was studying to be a teacher. I found out I could work up to fifteen hours a week to help fund my stay in the country, and I hooked up with Adecco and worked in a plastics factory as a quality control agent, an astro-turf laying agent, a grocery store merchandiser and re-fixturer, and I was basically interning to be an educator. Upon returning to Simpson I re-acquired my pair of jobs and worked them until I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English. I was planning to move to New York City and pursue a graduate degree, which I did, but there was an awkward couple of months in which I was living back at home with my mother and father and needed a job, so I became a substitute teacher in the Park Hill School District. A couple of months there and then it was off to New York City where I acquired a job on the overnight merchandise processing team of one of Fortune’s Top 100 Companies to Work For: The Container Store. I graduated from St. John’s University with a Master’s Degree in English and then got promoted to Full-Time at TCS. Three months after my promotion, my supervisor was fired, the other full-timer quit, and I was left to run the operation. They can say what they want, and titles aside, I was the overnight supervisor for six months, managing values and attitudes, ensuring efficiencies were met, communicating, and insisting on TCS core cultural values as the way to get that truck processed.
It occurs to me that I have screwed up a lot of these jobs. Something in me revolts when it starts to sit wrong. I am a bad, bad man sometimes. I get flighty because I have very definite thoughts about oppression, and sometimes all I really want to do is sit in my room and play my guitar for hours, or sit at my computer and type and type and type and let the click clickety click click click of the keyboard help me find zen, or read and read and read until I think my brain is going to overflow. “Gilgamesh went abroad in the world, but he met with none who could withstand his arms till he came to Uruk.”
“Rage: sing, goddess, achilles’ rage, black and murderous, that cost the Greeks incalculable pain, pitched countless souls of heroes into Hades’ dark, and left their bodies to rot as feasts for dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.”
“Paul stood in the bookshop facing a shelf of books.”
“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making there moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs catch an uptown A train.”
“I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
“ “The Bottoms” succeededc to “Hell Row.” “
“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
“While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.”
“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.””
“I’ve been called Bone all my life, but my name’s Ruth Anee.”
“It is customary for those who wish to gain the favour of a prince to endeavour to do so by offering him gifts of those things which they hold most precious, or in which they know him to take especial delight.”
“A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.”
“A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.”
But what good does it do me? I think I’m going to go fishing, but if you want to know about Post-Marxist Critical Theory or the importance of Hunter S. Thompson or Joyce’s Hamlet theory imbedded in Ulysses or how to play guitar or how to shade a drawing (I can only work in gray-scale right now, but I’m working into color) or how to tie a fisherman’s knot or how to fillet a fish or what it means to make a good business decision or how to string a guitar or how to roll a perfect cigarette or what Skip James and Robert Johnson meant to the world of music or why Led Zeppelin is so important or why I can’t get enough of Jeff Buckley or what the difference is between Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson or the appropriate way to style a conversation in a piece of fiction or what is meant by Zoom in reference to writing or how to make biscuits from scratch or how to make your own pasta sauce (and your own pasta for that matter) or how to play cribbage successfully or how to average three-hundred and fifty points in Scrabble or how to make a “Perfect Manhattan” or what it means to bruise the gin (and what gin’s made of for that matter) or what’s meant by Kia Ora in Kiwiland or what Surfer’s Paradise, Australia is like or how Fiji is one of the most beautiful places on the planet the philosophical understanding of the sublime or what I mean when I say “The Act reveals the subconscious desire” or how religion and spirituality differ or what Whitman is doing in Leaves of Grass or the appropriate way to create a pyramid introduction or the appropriate things to check before starting up a chainsaw or how to check the fluids in your car or what it’s like to wrestle in Bulgaria under the care of what can only be described as the Bulgarian Mafia or why I know that Les Paul still plays every week in New York City at the Iridium Jazz Club or the difference between an objective and a goal or what is meant by the perfect balance of speed and accuracy or why it is important to not be paying more in rent than in payroll or how to make a Red Devil or if you want go swimming or if you want to go hunting or if you want to sit around and talk or if you want, then maybe you could give me a call.
Or maybe a job.
In New York City they do a lot of painting in the subway, and they always put up very helpful signs that let you know when the paint is wet that say (you guessed it): “Wet Paint.”
I used to take two of those signs and create an alternate message for people to ponder:
We In Pain.
But all I really want to do sometimes is cry myself to sleep because of my apparent inability to find employment—although it is not for a lack of effort. So much time spent filling out applications and submitting them and re-working my resume and writing cover letters and investigating who’s hiring, and yet not a single nibble on the end of my job-fishing line, so here I sit, doing just about all I know how to do: write. Even that is questionable, I suppose, as I have never had anything technically published.
Let’s run down a list of occupations I have had—as I have been working since I was about fourteen. I started my working career with a paper route I worked with my mother. She drove the van, but I rolled the papers and stuffed them in their blue plastic bags and delivered them to the doors of people who would probably not even read them. I got a job at the grocery store across the street which ended badly and I don’t really want to talk about it. Let’s just say that youthful exuberance was too much for me to handle at the time. After that, I got a job at Maggie Moo’s Ice Cream and Treaterie as an ice cream technologist serving specially mixed ice cream to the masses. From there I graduated, literally from high school, and obtained a position as a construction laborer for a dodgy construction outfit. Then I went off to school and obtained a position as a janitor in the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s student union. That summer I came home and managed to land a job at Target where I worked as an overnight merchandise processing agent for the time when the Target at 169 and Barry Rd was still new. I changed schools at that point and moved to Iowa where I worked in the mailroom of the school and sorted, delivered, and distributed the mail for the campus and the post office. After a while, it became very apparent that this was not nearly enough (5.25/hr) to fund my college experience with, and I got a second job—both of which I retained for my entire career at Simpson—with a wealthy older gentleman who needed strapping young fellows to maintain his yard and his house and his land. This was truly a landmark position for me because, as I like to say, if you could –ing it, I did it: mowing, cutting down of trees, removing said trees, painting, patching, fixing, building, conversating, driving, planting, dusting, organizing. I did it all, and I got pretty good at it—I even started cutting down trees with a chainsaw sans shoesus. Then I went to New Zealand where I was studying to be a teacher. I found out I could work up to fifteen hours a week to help fund my stay in the country, and I hooked up with Adecco and worked in a plastics factory as a quality control agent, an astro-turf laying agent, a grocery store merchandiser and re-fixturer, and I was basically interning to be an educator. Upon returning to Simpson I re-acquired my pair of jobs and worked them until I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English. I was planning to move to New York City and pursue a graduate degree, which I did, but there was an awkward couple of months in which I was living back at home with my mother and father and needed a job, so I became a substitute teacher in the Park Hill School District. A couple of months there and then it was off to New York City where I acquired a job on the overnight merchandise processing team of one of Fortune’s Top 100 Companies to Work For: The Container Store. I graduated from St. John’s University with a Master’s Degree in English and then got promoted to Full-Time at TCS. Three months after my promotion, my supervisor was fired, the other full-timer quit, and I was left to run the operation. They can say what they want, and titles aside, I was the overnight supervisor for six months, managing values and attitudes, ensuring efficiencies were met, communicating, and insisting on TCS core cultural values as the way to get that truck processed.
It occurs to me that I have screwed up a lot of these jobs. Something in me revolts when it starts to sit wrong. I am a bad, bad man sometimes. I get flighty because I have very definite thoughts about oppression, and sometimes all I really want to do is sit in my room and play my guitar for hours, or sit at my computer and type and type and type and let the click clickety click click click of the keyboard help me find zen, or read and read and read until I think my brain is going to overflow. “Gilgamesh went abroad in the world, but he met with none who could withstand his arms till he came to Uruk.”
“Rage: sing, goddess, achilles’ rage, black and murderous, that cost the Greeks incalculable pain, pitched countless souls of heroes into Hades’ dark, and left their bodies to rot as feasts for dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.”
“Paul stood in the bookshop facing a shelf of books.”
“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making there moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs catch an uptown A train.”
“I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
“ “The Bottoms” succeededc to “Hell Row.” “
“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
“While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.”
“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.””
“I’ve been called Bone all my life, but my name’s Ruth Anee.”
“It is customary for those who wish to gain the favour of a prince to endeavour to do so by offering him gifts of those things which they hold most precious, or in which they know him to take especial delight.”
“A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.”
“A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.”
But what good does it do me? I think I’m going to go fishing, but if you want to know about Post-Marxist Critical Theory or the importance of Hunter S. Thompson or Joyce’s Hamlet theory imbedded in Ulysses or how to play guitar or how to shade a drawing (I can only work in gray-scale right now, but I’m working into color) or how to tie a fisherman’s knot or how to fillet a fish or what it means to make a good business decision or how to string a guitar or how to roll a perfect cigarette or what Skip James and Robert Johnson meant to the world of music or why Led Zeppelin is so important or why I can’t get enough of Jeff Buckley or what the difference is between Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson or the appropriate way to style a conversation in a piece of fiction or what is meant by Zoom in reference to writing or how to make biscuits from scratch or how to make your own pasta sauce (and your own pasta for that matter) or how to play cribbage successfully or how to average three-hundred and fifty points in Scrabble or how to make a “Perfect Manhattan” or what it means to bruise the gin (and what gin’s made of for that matter) or what’s meant by Kia Ora in Kiwiland or what Surfer’s Paradise, Australia is like or how Fiji is one of the most beautiful places on the planet the philosophical understanding of the sublime or what I mean when I say “The Act reveals the subconscious desire” or how religion and spirituality differ or what Whitman is doing in Leaves of Grass or the appropriate way to create a pyramid introduction or the appropriate things to check before starting up a chainsaw or how to check the fluids in your car or what it’s like to wrestle in Bulgaria under the care of what can only be described as the Bulgarian Mafia or why I know that Les Paul still plays every week in New York City at the Iridium Jazz Club or the difference between an objective and a goal or what is meant by the perfect balance of speed and accuracy or why it is important to not be paying more in rent than in payroll or how to make a Red Devil or if you want go swimming or if you want to go hunting or if you want to sit around and talk or if you want, then maybe you could give me a call.
Or maybe a job.
In New York City they do a lot of painting in the subway, and they always put up very helpful signs that let you know when the paint is wet that say (you guessed it): “Wet Paint.”
I used to take two of those signs and create an alternate message for people to ponder:
We In Pain.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Psychotropics
Yes.
And maybe it was so good
because I knew how hard
I'd worked for it to be real.
A time investment well spent.
Why is this one here and not there?
And maybe it was so good
because I knew how hard
I'd worked for it to be real.
A time investment well spent.
Why is this one here and not there?
Monday, July 28, 2008
To Blog Somewhere
New. Well, this is the first time I have had a chance to sit at my computer and write as I used to do. Location is an incredibly important part of any writer’s ability to do what he or she does: what was Walden but the perfect environment for Thoreau, what is Starbuck’s but the perfect environment for people writing on their laptops, and what would Hunter S. Thompson be without his amphetamine-crazed glancings around a room full of booze and drugs and news clippings. It’s always difficult to say how a new environment will influence the way one writes, but I guess we’re back to the old experimentation stage—which can oftentimes be awfully sublime…something I’m very interested in.
So, from the wild confines of the freedom of New York City, to the uncomfortable independence of Kansas City, the land of my birth, I manage to make my way. Funny that. But funny also that I have now lived a full third of my life away from this city and I feel at once as if I belong and I don’t.
There are no lowball glasses in my parents house. I’m not sure how to feel in a world without pint glasses, lowball glasses, martini glasses, and general alcohol paraphernalia. That sounds bad, I guess, but the reality is that these are just things you have around the house. How does one explain it? It is not as if there is binging every night on cheap booze and passing out with your head spinning a little bit as was so common during the college years, this is a more respectful relationship with alcohol. You know what it can, and what it can’t, do, and doing is just so important. When it comes to most things in this world, it is simply the doing of them that matters, the particulars of the performance are most generally of little consequence.
“I played The Garden.”
“Oh. How’d it go?”
No. That conversation doesn’t happen, and even if it does, it would be fatuously ended by a brief, “Oh, you know, pretty good.”
It doesn’t matter how it went. It doesn’t matter when your pants are on inside out when you are sitting in the comfort of your own home. It just doesn’t. It’s true. It doesn’t matter if you stand on a chair swinging your Johnson (yes, that’s a Johnson) around like some kind of weird puppet show starring an earthworm and a couple of clumps of dirt because you are in your home, and it doesn’t really matter how weird you are when you’re alone.
You do get into a sticky area there, though, because it is entirely possible that weirdness is a sign of mental instability—or at least the baseline of some kind of social deficiency. You’re missing something when ALL you want to do is stand on a chair swinging your downstairs around in the shape of a cross saying E nomini patri, et Fili e spiritu sancti, or you’ve got something extra, and either way, you’re dealing with some deviation from the norm.
Things seem to mean so much, yeah? Or is that just me? Sunsetwatching could be the name of my religion. Every sunset means that what just happened is in the log books and cannot be undone, while it simultaneously means that a brand new day is on the way. I watched a friend of mine this evening as he fed his three-month-old baby girl, and realized that the fathering, mothering, caretaking, growing, developing, loving, and feeding another human being can be a spiritual experience. I would imagine that it develops a part of our soul that can be developed in no other way, and that is why it is such a significant event. Your life is forever changed in that moment. I am, obviously, excluding those folks that don’t care, because they honest aren’t worth thinking about. If you can’t understand the effect you can and will have on that person’s life, you probably shouldn’t have one to begin with. There is a possibility that it will force that part of the soul to develop, but that seems like an incredible crapshoot. If you go into it with the wrong attitude you will be a bad parent, and a bad parent is nothing more than a parent who can be apathetic to their offspring. Love them, hate them, show them the spectrum, but don’t do nothing.
Jesus, what was all that about. Maybe I’m just taking notes for when (and I’m gonna throw a big IF in here) that happens in my life. This suddenly seems to be the most overtly journal-type entry I’ve ever made, but we’re back to history at that point, and it can be extremely lucrative to have those bits of history to look back on and say, “O, I totally remember that frame of mind.” Which is important, because my frame of mind is like something out of an experimental novel by an unknown author.
But we’re working back to equilibrium, now. The fingers are once again dancing across the stages of the keyboard and putting words together to form sentences and sentences together to form some kind of meaning, as all words mean something when put into the context of other words. It can’t help but mean something, right? The only thing that can mean something is something done, and doing things usually takes the form of revolution. Daily revolution, a guide to keeping life interesting in twelve easy chapters. The future is unknowable, keep your head up. The bill may be a factor, as you have no money to pay for it, but you can’t really be all that worried about it, they plan on this kind of thing happening. As a matter of fact, they hope it will. They are so far removed from it that they couldn’t care less. Your couple of hundred bucks on the bill is really only a big deal to you because you feel like you owe somebody something and that that means something, but the reality is that you owe a couple of hundred bucks to a corporation that only barely cares about your interaction with it because they’ll get what’s theirs one way or another. From you or another source. You’re not putting them out of business.
Good god what a lot of drivel this has turned out to be, but I suppose that there are days when the brain absolutely has to just flush itself of the insanity that is wildly racing through it. I wish I dreamt more. Three of the people I love most in the world dream multiple times a week. I get, at MOST, one a month, and usually more like one a year—obviously these are the dreams that I remember even vaguely. I dreamt consistently one time. They were scary and I’d rather not be there. Am I running away from my dreams to pursue them in reality?
So, from the wild confines of the freedom of New York City, to the uncomfortable independence of Kansas City, the land of my birth, I manage to make my way. Funny that. But funny also that I have now lived a full third of my life away from this city and I feel at once as if I belong and I don’t.
There are no lowball glasses in my parents house. I’m not sure how to feel in a world without pint glasses, lowball glasses, martini glasses, and general alcohol paraphernalia. That sounds bad, I guess, but the reality is that these are just things you have around the house. How does one explain it? It is not as if there is binging every night on cheap booze and passing out with your head spinning a little bit as was so common during the college years, this is a more respectful relationship with alcohol. You know what it can, and what it can’t, do, and doing is just so important. When it comes to most things in this world, it is simply the doing of them that matters, the particulars of the performance are most generally of little consequence.
“I played The Garden.”
“Oh. How’d it go?”
No. That conversation doesn’t happen, and even if it does, it would be fatuously ended by a brief, “Oh, you know, pretty good.”
It doesn’t matter how it went. It doesn’t matter when your pants are on inside out when you are sitting in the comfort of your own home. It just doesn’t. It’s true. It doesn’t matter if you stand on a chair swinging your Johnson (yes, that’s a Johnson) around like some kind of weird puppet show starring an earthworm and a couple of clumps of dirt because you are in your home, and it doesn’t really matter how weird you are when you’re alone.
You do get into a sticky area there, though, because it is entirely possible that weirdness is a sign of mental instability—or at least the baseline of some kind of social deficiency. You’re missing something when ALL you want to do is stand on a chair swinging your downstairs around in the shape of a cross saying E nomini patri, et Fili e spiritu sancti, or you’ve got something extra, and either way, you’re dealing with some deviation from the norm.
Things seem to mean so much, yeah? Or is that just me? Sunsetwatching could be the name of my religion. Every sunset means that what just happened is in the log books and cannot be undone, while it simultaneously means that a brand new day is on the way. I watched a friend of mine this evening as he fed his three-month-old baby girl, and realized that the fathering, mothering, caretaking, growing, developing, loving, and feeding another human being can be a spiritual experience. I would imagine that it develops a part of our soul that can be developed in no other way, and that is why it is such a significant event. Your life is forever changed in that moment. I am, obviously, excluding those folks that don’t care, because they honest aren’t worth thinking about. If you can’t understand the effect you can and will have on that person’s life, you probably shouldn’t have one to begin with. There is a possibility that it will force that part of the soul to develop, but that seems like an incredible crapshoot. If you go into it with the wrong attitude you will be a bad parent, and a bad parent is nothing more than a parent who can be apathetic to their offspring. Love them, hate them, show them the spectrum, but don’t do nothing.
Jesus, what was all that about. Maybe I’m just taking notes for when (and I’m gonna throw a big IF in here) that happens in my life. This suddenly seems to be the most overtly journal-type entry I’ve ever made, but we’re back to history at that point, and it can be extremely lucrative to have those bits of history to look back on and say, “O, I totally remember that frame of mind.” Which is important, because my frame of mind is like something out of an experimental novel by an unknown author.
But we’re working back to equilibrium, now. The fingers are once again dancing across the stages of the keyboard and putting words together to form sentences and sentences together to form some kind of meaning, as all words mean something when put into the context of other words. It can’t help but mean something, right? The only thing that can mean something is something done, and doing things usually takes the form of revolution. Daily revolution, a guide to keeping life interesting in twelve easy chapters. The future is unknowable, keep your head up. The bill may be a factor, as you have no money to pay for it, but you can’t really be all that worried about it, they plan on this kind of thing happening. As a matter of fact, they hope it will. They are so far removed from it that they couldn’t care less. Your couple of hundred bucks on the bill is really only a big deal to you because you feel like you owe somebody something and that that means something, but the reality is that you owe a couple of hundred bucks to a corporation that only barely cares about your interaction with it because they’ll get what’s theirs one way or another. From you or another source. You’re not putting them out of business.
Good god what a lot of drivel this has turned out to be, but I suppose that there are days when the brain absolutely has to just flush itself of the insanity that is wildly racing through it. I wish I dreamt more. Three of the people I love most in the world dream multiple times a week. I get, at MOST, one a month, and usually more like one a year—obviously these are the dreams that I remember even vaguely. I dreamt consistently one time. They were scary and I’d rather not be there. Am I running away from my dreams to pursue them in reality?
Monday, July 7, 2008
Through Movement and
change. We’re going to do this very free form style and just sort of roll with what comes up, because I’m seeing the physics of movement as applicable to the metaphorical, spiritual and metaphysical movement of bodies. Motion in the physical world can be calculated using one of a number of equations involving consistent variables: distance traveled, initial position, initial velocity, final position, final velocity, time between initial and current states, and constant acceleration (where most bodies fall under the acceleration of gravity). The reason that there are so many equations involving motion is because it depends on the knowns to determine which equation is most appropriate to solve for the unknowns.
Calibrating instruments in an effort for maximum accuracy, the instruments of my trade are the pen and ink, pencil and lead, computer and keys, the body and brain and all of them need constant maintenance for optimal efficiency. Complicated notions of erratic motion can be solved with a little bit of hard work and the appropriate equation—but beware of using the inappropriate equation as this can lead to inaccurate answers. You have to ask the most appropriate question, you see, in order to get the most appropriate answer. I’m moving! I’m moving! I’m moving! But what, ye gods, will be my final velocity in comparison to my initial velocity and how far will I go, how fast will I travel there, and where the hell am I, and where will I be.
For example, let’s say we have one of those high bounce balls that you get from the machine outside the grocery store for twenty-five cents (I guess there about fifty cents now, but anyway…). We want to know the distance traveled by this ball as it bounces, but all we know is the initial velocity and how long it bounced. Not a problem. Let’s take: vf=vi + aΔt, where the final velocity is found by taking the sum of the initial velocity and the product of the acceleration and the time. If we’re dealing with a dropped ball, and it bounced for two seconds, then the final velocity would be 2m/s (our known from the beginning) + g (gravity, 9.8 m/s2) * 3 seconds which gives us 2 m/s + 29.4 m/s = 31.4m/s as the final velocity. Then we just plug that guy and all our other knowns into the equation d=1/2(vi+vf)Δt. The distance traveled is then 1/2(31.4+2)3 = 50.1 meters.
I have come so far from the boy I was in my youth—my mantra, it seems, along with “the act reveals the subconscious desire” and “only act, the future is unknowable”…I guess I’m working on a collection of aphorisms, but I feel like it’s important for a man to have at least one aphorism attached to his name, but to return—and the distance traveled has been so great it is nearly impossible to calculate. Although I know I feel like I have lately been traveling at a much greater velocity than any time previous and now I know that this is mainly as a result of the way my life is being lived, which is to say fast and hard. If production is the distance is the outcome of the equation, then I guess I have to feel pretty good about what I have accomplished and am going to accomplish. The pace of existence is largely determined by our circadian rhythms and how our day is structured to help us complete any variety and number of tasks. A simple map can tell us how far we are traveling, and a speedometer can tell us how fast we’re going at any given time, and a clock will tell us how long, but what of acceleration. Is acceleration desire? Put the metal to the pedal to the other metal, Bender, and get us out of here! It’s funny that the one general constant in the physical world is a true variable in the metaphysical based on what we want and illustrated through the way we act.
The details of the trip are as complicated as possible, and for good reason. Stage one: flight to base. It will be an early morning red-eye that we board bleary-eyed from the ingestion of chemical lubricants and then will be promptly missed as a result of lubricant-induced slumber. Stage two: procure automotive transport unit and use it to cross twelve-hundred miles in one revolution of the earth around the sun—and we all know how I feel about revolution—during which it will be an all out burn down the interstate of youth to it’s termination/initiation point. Stage three: old business. When the automotive transport unit comes to a stop at the destination, the clock is already well under-way, and time is running thinner and thinner, and there are so many things to do. Stage four: wander back to base. The idea here is that the only truly appropriate way to understand how far we really travel is to take control of the means.
I moved to New York City two and one-half years ago from Kansas City, Missouri. In nine days I am moving back to Kansas City. There were hiccups in the process, given the expenses of a moving van, but it turns out the cheapest way we can find to get everything back effectively is to fly to Kansas City, rent a car, drive it back to New York City, load it up, and drive it back. The plan, right now, and there are those saying of best laid and mice and men, is that we’ll burn out to the coast, spend a couple of days, and then meander our way back. In a way it’s like a grand metaphor for what happened here in the city. When one gets to New York City it is an all-out sprint, and while one is here the race is consistently moving. The only way to bust out is to take control of the race and make your way at your own pace. When mental and physical capacities are running rapidly at all times with barely any pause, it is only a short time before you run out of gas or throw a rod or step on some glass or otherwise need to reach equilibrium.
Movement is a change. You cannot run away from your problems. This is true. Your problems will be with you wherever you are, but by moving you are changing… something. You can never know what that change will mean. You cannot know how far it will take you. You cannot know the future. But by changing the meaning of one variable, the entire equation changes and the outcomes are all different. It’s kind of like mathematical randomness, because change makes anything possible in math, and anything means that any random point will be the result of the new trajectory. When desiring something new, it is important to change something, otherwise there will never be anything new (you would, after all, simply be recycling the same old equation with the same old plug-ins), and that is counterproductive to the desire (i.e. change). Changing something illustrates the desire for change.
Here we are then, changing things, altering trajectories, and feeling more in control of the previously erratic. It’s a revolution of the mind, of the body, and of the spirit. Maybe I’ll grow my hair out again, I thought…
Calibrating instruments in an effort for maximum accuracy, the instruments of my trade are the pen and ink, pencil and lead, computer and keys, the body and brain and all of them need constant maintenance for optimal efficiency. Complicated notions of erratic motion can be solved with a little bit of hard work and the appropriate equation—but beware of using the inappropriate equation as this can lead to inaccurate answers. You have to ask the most appropriate question, you see, in order to get the most appropriate answer. I’m moving! I’m moving! I’m moving! But what, ye gods, will be my final velocity in comparison to my initial velocity and how far will I go, how fast will I travel there, and where the hell am I, and where will I be.
For example, let’s say we have one of those high bounce balls that you get from the machine outside the grocery store for twenty-five cents (I guess there about fifty cents now, but anyway…). We want to know the distance traveled by this ball as it bounces, but all we know is the initial velocity and how long it bounced. Not a problem. Let’s take: vf=vi + aΔt, where the final velocity is found by taking the sum of the initial velocity and the product of the acceleration and the time. If we’re dealing with a dropped ball, and it bounced for two seconds, then the final velocity would be 2m/s (our known from the beginning) + g (gravity, 9.8 m/s2) * 3 seconds which gives us 2 m/s + 29.4 m/s = 31.4m/s as the final velocity. Then we just plug that guy and all our other knowns into the equation d=1/2(vi+vf)Δt. The distance traveled is then 1/2(31.4+2)3 = 50.1 meters.
I have come so far from the boy I was in my youth—my mantra, it seems, along with “the act reveals the subconscious desire” and “only act, the future is unknowable”…I guess I’m working on a collection of aphorisms, but I feel like it’s important for a man to have at least one aphorism attached to his name, but to return—and the distance traveled has been so great it is nearly impossible to calculate. Although I know I feel like I have lately been traveling at a much greater velocity than any time previous and now I know that this is mainly as a result of the way my life is being lived, which is to say fast and hard. If production is the distance is the outcome of the equation, then I guess I have to feel pretty good about what I have accomplished and am going to accomplish. The pace of existence is largely determined by our circadian rhythms and how our day is structured to help us complete any variety and number of tasks. A simple map can tell us how far we are traveling, and a speedometer can tell us how fast we’re going at any given time, and a clock will tell us how long, but what of acceleration. Is acceleration desire? Put the metal to the pedal to the other metal, Bender, and get us out of here! It’s funny that the one general constant in the physical world is a true variable in the metaphysical based on what we want and illustrated through the way we act.
The details of the trip are as complicated as possible, and for good reason. Stage one: flight to base. It will be an early morning red-eye that we board bleary-eyed from the ingestion of chemical lubricants and then will be promptly missed as a result of lubricant-induced slumber. Stage two: procure automotive transport unit and use it to cross twelve-hundred miles in one revolution of the earth around the sun—and we all know how I feel about revolution—during which it will be an all out burn down the interstate of youth to it’s termination/initiation point. Stage three: old business. When the automotive transport unit comes to a stop at the destination, the clock is already well under-way, and time is running thinner and thinner, and there are so many things to do. Stage four: wander back to base. The idea here is that the only truly appropriate way to understand how far we really travel is to take control of the means.
I moved to New York City two and one-half years ago from Kansas City, Missouri. In nine days I am moving back to Kansas City. There were hiccups in the process, given the expenses of a moving van, but it turns out the cheapest way we can find to get everything back effectively is to fly to Kansas City, rent a car, drive it back to New York City, load it up, and drive it back. The plan, right now, and there are those saying of best laid and mice and men, is that we’ll burn out to the coast, spend a couple of days, and then meander our way back. In a way it’s like a grand metaphor for what happened here in the city. When one gets to New York City it is an all-out sprint, and while one is here the race is consistently moving. The only way to bust out is to take control of the race and make your way at your own pace. When mental and physical capacities are running rapidly at all times with barely any pause, it is only a short time before you run out of gas or throw a rod or step on some glass or otherwise need to reach equilibrium.
Movement is a change. You cannot run away from your problems. This is true. Your problems will be with you wherever you are, but by moving you are changing… something. You can never know what that change will mean. You cannot know how far it will take you. You cannot know the future. But by changing the meaning of one variable, the entire equation changes and the outcomes are all different. It’s kind of like mathematical randomness, because change makes anything possible in math, and anything means that any random point will be the result of the new trajectory. When desiring something new, it is important to change something, otherwise there will never be anything new (you would, after all, simply be recycling the same old equation with the same old plug-ins), and that is counterproductive to the desire (i.e. change). Changing something illustrates the desire for change.
Here we are then, changing things, altering trajectories, and feeling more in control of the previously erratic. It’s a revolution of the mind, of the body, and of the spirit. Maybe I’ll grow my hair out again, I thought…
Thursday, June 26, 2008
What's It All
mean? That’s like the big daddy of them all, isn’t it? But it seems like a real impossibility as the meaning of life is never revealed during life…or maybe it is, but only very rarely.
There are those that would say that the meaning of life is love. I have to admire these people because love is an extremely admirable, if incomprehensibly complex, emotion to base one’s existence on—I guess I’m thinking of the super-powerful flower in gun barrel image. To be sure, if love is what it is all about, then that is an incredible design from the almighty; however, large-scale love has never really worked. The closest we could probably come is peaceful co-existence. Yes, if everybody loved everybody the world would be a better place, but we are asking entire chunks of the world to unburden themselves of the weight of history, which is a mighty difficult task. I think the closest that this relationship could come to the meaning of it all is a love—hate thing, and while the ironic gap is pretty fitting, it only really accounts for part of something.
By this I mean that it is only a part of what the brain can do. The amydgala is small neural cluster in the brain that processes a lot of our negative emotions and the positive emotions are sort of strewn about—an interesting phenomenon in itself. What happens when we make decisions is that these sections of the brain seem to light up and duke it out letting us know how we ought to feel and therefore helping us make decisions. But I think the key here is that these are sections of the brain. The brain is more complex than love?
I don’t think anybody would forego derivatives for the whole unless you absolutely had to—thanks math—and for this reason there is good reason to believe that the first principle ruling each and every individual resides in the brain, and not somewhere specific either. The brain is as complex as life is, and is, arguably, what makes us capable of life or, more specifically, living.
The body is an amazing thing. Have you ever fasted? It’s a funny sort of thing that affects the body, and we feel it. To fast has been a part of almost every major religious or spiritual history, and for good reason because it makes us very aware of the needs of the body. I am still a big proponent of the two biological imperatives: survive and reproduce. From a purely biological standpoint, these two, fairly simple things are all that we need to survive. They are not the meaning of life because these are once again one section of imperatives. We also need to emote and cogitate and decide and do the things that make these two imperatives possible, and meaning should not be something you have to do. You find meaning, but you don’t technically have to go out looking for it—implied of course by find.
I’ve just had a disturbing thought that how I came into the world is how I’m going to go out of it: as a newborn I had colic and cried incessantly.
But if he head back into the depths of the brain, we find something else interesting going on there, and that is that something we would normally consider a positive emotion, empathy, in that it is a positive thing to be able to understand what someone is feeling, actually flares up some parts of the brain that deal with pain: pleasure and pain, a classic battle.
From this one battleground we can absolutely determine that pleasure and pain are not the meaning either because these are once again two separate feelings (opposites), and meaning does not really have an opposite. Meaning and meaninglessness would probably be the closest, but meaninglessness is determined by meaning, unlike pleasure being determined by pain in that it is entirely possible to understand the one without the other, but meaninglessness means nothing without meaning.
So, what are we getting from this? The brain, the intellect, and the question. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might say, “would you deny even spirituality?” Spirituality is a mysterious feeling, but we have already determined that feelings are derivatives of the brain’s functions and that we would not forego first principles for derivatives. Spirituality is different from love in that its mysteries involve asking the question, “What happens when the one we love is absent from our physical presence and we attribute all this power and grandeur and meaning to him or her or it?” But that’s about it. If you have ever been in a long-distance relationship, you have been close to this kind of thing. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend it. It is extremely challenging, and you learn one helluva lot about yourself in the process, but I guess it’s not everything now is it?
I am beginning to think that we are overlooking the most relevant part of the question we asked at the very beginning: the fact that it is a question: a question implies an answer. Now, let’s be very clear and say that there are some questions that are more difficult to answer than others, let’s just say for kicks we were asked to discuss theoretical physics or what Joyce was really getting at. These are nearly impossible questions to answer, but by asking them we are implying that it is worthy of investigation and the closer we get to the answer of these truly difficult questions is one step closer to understanding more about ourselves.
If the one thing we can grant is that the act reveals desire, and that we generally act for what we want, and further, that the act is a question because the future is unknowable, then the boiled down first principle of the thing seems to be saying something like act with the understanding you are questioning because that’s what you can do. You don’t have to, but you can. The more you actively question, the more you are revealing you want to question in general. You are always better for having acted (I am not advocating irrational, premature actions, but even these have the potential to make us better if we learn from them).
But even an action is a question that has no words right away. Sometimes we don’t know what question we are asking until we have the benefit of hindsight, so maybe it’s the question undefined that defines us. We can investigate everything, can’t we?
There are those that would say that the meaning of life is love. I have to admire these people because love is an extremely admirable, if incomprehensibly complex, emotion to base one’s existence on—I guess I’m thinking of the super-powerful flower in gun barrel image. To be sure, if love is what it is all about, then that is an incredible design from the almighty; however, large-scale love has never really worked. The closest we could probably come is peaceful co-existence. Yes, if everybody loved everybody the world would be a better place, but we are asking entire chunks of the world to unburden themselves of the weight of history, which is a mighty difficult task. I think the closest that this relationship could come to the meaning of it all is a love—hate thing, and while the ironic gap is pretty fitting, it only really accounts for part of something.
By this I mean that it is only a part of what the brain can do. The amydgala is small neural cluster in the brain that processes a lot of our negative emotions and the positive emotions are sort of strewn about—an interesting phenomenon in itself. What happens when we make decisions is that these sections of the brain seem to light up and duke it out letting us know how we ought to feel and therefore helping us make decisions. But I think the key here is that these are sections of the brain. The brain is more complex than love?
I don’t think anybody would forego derivatives for the whole unless you absolutely had to—thanks math—and for this reason there is good reason to believe that the first principle ruling each and every individual resides in the brain, and not somewhere specific either. The brain is as complex as life is, and is, arguably, what makes us capable of life or, more specifically, living.
The body is an amazing thing. Have you ever fasted? It’s a funny sort of thing that affects the body, and we feel it. To fast has been a part of almost every major religious or spiritual history, and for good reason because it makes us very aware of the needs of the body. I am still a big proponent of the two biological imperatives: survive and reproduce. From a purely biological standpoint, these two, fairly simple things are all that we need to survive. They are not the meaning of life because these are once again one section of imperatives. We also need to emote and cogitate and decide and do the things that make these two imperatives possible, and meaning should not be something you have to do. You find meaning, but you don’t technically have to go out looking for it—implied of course by find.
I’ve just had a disturbing thought that how I came into the world is how I’m going to go out of it: as a newborn I had colic and cried incessantly.
But if he head back into the depths of the brain, we find something else interesting going on there, and that is that something we would normally consider a positive emotion, empathy, in that it is a positive thing to be able to understand what someone is feeling, actually flares up some parts of the brain that deal with pain: pleasure and pain, a classic battle.
From this one battleground we can absolutely determine that pleasure and pain are not the meaning either because these are once again two separate feelings (opposites), and meaning does not really have an opposite. Meaning and meaninglessness would probably be the closest, but meaninglessness is determined by meaning, unlike pleasure being determined by pain in that it is entirely possible to understand the one without the other, but meaninglessness means nothing without meaning.
So, what are we getting from this? The brain, the intellect, and the question. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might say, “would you deny even spirituality?” Spirituality is a mysterious feeling, but we have already determined that feelings are derivatives of the brain’s functions and that we would not forego first principles for derivatives. Spirituality is different from love in that its mysteries involve asking the question, “What happens when the one we love is absent from our physical presence and we attribute all this power and grandeur and meaning to him or her or it?” But that’s about it. If you have ever been in a long-distance relationship, you have been close to this kind of thing. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend it. It is extremely challenging, and you learn one helluva lot about yourself in the process, but I guess it’s not everything now is it?
I am beginning to think that we are overlooking the most relevant part of the question we asked at the very beginning: the fact that it is a question: a question implies an answer. Now, let’s be very clear and say that there are some questions that are more difficult to answer than others, let’s just say for kicks we were asked to discuss theoretical physics or what Joyce was really getting at. These are nearly impossible questions to answer, but by asking them we are implying that it is worthy of investigation and the closer we get to the answer of these truly difficult questions is one step closer to understanding more about ourselves.
If the one thing we can grant is that the act reveals desire, and that we generally act for what we want, and further, that the act is a question because the future is unknowable, then the boiled down first principle of the thing seems to be saying something like act with the understanding you are questioning because that’s what you can do. You don’t have to, but you can. The more you actively question, the more you are revealing you want to question in general. You are always better for having acted (I am not advocating irrational, premature actions, but even these have the potential to make us better if we learn from them).
But even an action is a question that has no words right away. Sometimes we don’t know what question we are asking until we have the benefit of hindsight, so maybe it’s the question undefined that defines us. We can investigate everything, can’t we?
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