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?