A Letter

Dear Christmas~

I guess I officially don’t understand you. I mean, I think I understand, but I understand the sentiment holding you up even more.
Sometimes, aren’t you a giant excuse to remember the loved ones you forget about all year long? That’s actually sad, but what if you weren’t there?
No, I think we’re definitely better off with Christmas in our lives; however, I also think that the manner of Christmas ought to be redefined.
In Korea, Christmas amounts to a bank holiday, a day off from school, and little more than a nice lunch with the family feeling good about life.
In America, Christmas lasts almost two months (sometimes more), costs a crap load, and has become the time of year that businesses rely on to pull them out of the red.
Okay, seriously, there has to be some kind of balance we can reach—Chanukah seems like a nice balance: one week, candles, remembrance, a few gifts, okay.
But why does religion have to get all mixed up with you?
So many people go to church one day a year.
Oh, and, um, Jesus probably wasn’t born on December 25th, but it’s tradition isn’t it?
This is just something that I’m throwing out into the winds of possibility and might eventually regret: could you ever be about simple celebration of the beauty of being there and alive? Santa being the cartoonish representation of the giver of the free gift of existence?
You know, the more I think about it, you probably started as precisely that: a simple celebration in the heart of winter to remind humanity of the warmth that perpetually burns in the breast of all who are alive.
But Pagans and Christians all wish to have to their stamp on things and we wind up with the mind-bending reality of seeing the juxtaposition of a magic cartoon octogenarian master of breaking and entering and the birth of the son of god.
In what world would these two things normally be allowed to be together?
Or…
is it just me or do those two things suddenly make perfect sense?
Ah, there’s my cynicism coming back through again and I apologize because this was meant to be a serious epistle of thankfulness for your existence.
Once, a while ago, I went through a period of serious appreciation for everything around me, and I do mean everything: the pencil I was writing with, the couch I was sitting on, the door I walked through, everything and everybody received a certain amount of love energy from me.
I have since stopped this practice (although I’m not sure why), and what I want to say right now is that I appreciate the reality of you.
The fact that you are instead of aren’t is enough to win you some appreciation from the mind of this thought wondering wandering Ulysses of ideas.
I’m not sure if you’re meant to be celebrated with lights and presents or simple dinners or nothing or fruitcakes or family or friends or lovers, but I do know (from somewhere in my spiritual existence) that you are meant to be celebrated.
What would happen in a world where you were celebrated with everybody everywhere doing a rhythmic rock riot fist to Metallica’s Battery?
What would happenin a world where you were celebrated by everybody picking up the nearest text of intense philosophical inquiry and quietly searching into their existence?
Ah, you’ll once again have to excuse me, but I have this penchant for unanswerable questions.
There is beauty in you. I can see it. I think it’s hiding beneath the layers of meaning that various groups are attempting to ascribe to you, but you are a day like any other.
On any other day you could give gifts to your loved ones (and they might even mean more for their unexpectedness).
On any other day you could get the whole family together and have a loving family meal where you genuinely appreciate each other.
But this is what holidays are for, and what does that illustrate?
At some level I’m almost certain that, for the most part, we don’t want to spend time and money on our family and friends, but there is this one day every so often that tells us we ought to, and so we do.
The human character is essentially a super-selfish character with walls built up around itself to deflect the pulsing arrows of those who would call it out.
--No, I’m not. See what I give when I’m supposed to give?
There is none holy, no not one.
Do you know why I think that there is not one holy person in the world?
Because people aren’t holy, days are, and that’s why you are special: humans are spiritual, but they exist inside the holiness of days.
What’s unique about you is that almost every group of humans all over the planet has decided that you are an especially holy day.
Let me restate that in different words: every single day we can exist our spirituality is a holy day (making every single day of our life special and important and real), but some days are holier than others by virtue of… something-or-other.
A personal day is a personal holiday, a personal holy day in which something is more special than other days, and there is great beauty in that.
What’s in a day?
Only everything, by which I mean nothingness, by which I mean the foundation for building whatever you want it to be.
O, Holy Christmas, I hereby thank you for your existence and make a pact with you that I will celebrate my existence and the existence of the human characters around me and the existence of the planet and the existence of every pine needle that has fallen to the ground with a little bit more fervor than on other days.
You win.
I will probably not decorate a tree or my room or my house until I have children whose cries of “Daddy, why?!” need placating, but know that inside my heart there will be great joy in your holiness.
If there is indeed magic in you, and let’s just assume for the sake of argument that there is, could you send a little of it to all those I would say I love, all those I would say I like, and all those others I don’t know.
That’s a tall order, for sure, but let’s just say I believe in you.

Cheers
e

What a Week

I have been thinking a lot, lately, about how the mind can manipulate itself, and, knowing this, if it is then possible to turn the mind into a tool the likes of which has never been seen. There was a conversation in a Bundang bar last Wednesday about Sartre’s concept of Bad Faith. Well, I haven’t thought much about Bad Faith since reading Being and Nothingness, but given my current life plans, it seems surprisingly relevant.
The principles of Bad Faith I have been using to reprogram my brain have been working. My upbringing caused me to believe certain things that weren’t true. Perhaps they existed as facts somewhere, but as nuggets of truth, there was certainly no experience with them that told me these facts were truth, and, as of late, I have been lying to myself about certain skills I have in order to make them a reality.
The principle of bad faith is pretty simple and pretty obvious: you habitually, subconsciously or consciously lie to yourself in order to accomplish a goal. Somewhere inside, the self is perfectly aware that this is not currently a fact, but we start acting like something long before we actually are that thing. If you think about the world of business, most big businesses in the modern age want you to start acting like the role you want to take on long before you actually step into the role. It’s like you’re always a little bit ahead of yourself, when you’re actually a little bit behind yourself. The only difference between bad faith and actual faith is the fact that you know you are lying to yourself in bad faith; whereas, in faith (such as religious faith) you are either not aware that you’re lying to yourself or you have had some kind of experience that has made the facts into a truth—so that you ACTUALLY believe.
Religious faith and I have not gotten along in some time, and it’s only because I have had no experience with religion that smacked of truth. The world is a spiritual entity, but I’ll leave the religion for other people.
I have experienced the truth of bad faith. I am not a guitarist. Why, then, do I play guitar every day? I am not a writer. Why, then, do I write ever day? Because I am continually lying to myself and telling myself that I am exactly not the thing I am is because my sub-conscious knows that if I knew full well that I was a writer and everything was fine or that I am a very accomplished guitarist, then there would be no drive and no desire. Bad faith is essentially the key to the ignition of desire. What do you want? What do you really want? I mean to ask: what does your soul want? What does your being want more than anything.
Here’s something I’ve discovered, if you focus on something long enough, and work at something long enough, that thing perpetually gets closer and closer. Even if you never actually achieve it, the journey toward it is impossible with the bad faith necessary to drive your desire.
A conveyor belt comes to mind. That’s what I want. I want a conveyor belt. That’s essentially a metaphor, but that’s what I want. Constant motion, constant newness, and the feeling that things are impermanent, that’s what I’ve been telling myself for a week. It has been sitting in the back of my brain for years, but the fact is that I have never possessed the focus to work through all my layers of programming to make it so. Now, I have focused my entire being on achieving this goal.
Have you ever noticed that we usually get what we really, really want? This is because when our soul wants something, it will move time and space to do it. Clock time doesn’t exist, but time has reality in the form of a construct—we’ll leave the question of time’s actual existence for another post—and it’s reality is in the life of the mind. When we want, time does not matter, and changes to whatever we want it to be.
A long time ago I watched a movie that unexpectedly changed my life. The Butterfly Effect is about a man who can change time, but every time he does, his entire brain re-wires itself—which hurts. That is a logical metaphor for the reality of what Bad Faith does to the brain. When we wrap ourselves in layers of sub-conscious padding in order to accomplish some goal we’ve got in mind, we wind up uprooting the whole system that’s already in place, because when you deal with the consciousness, every slight change changes everything because the consciousness and the spirit are related.
So, here we are. It’s been probably one of the most difficult weeks of my life, in terms of spiritual/consciousness upheaval, which has also taken its toll on my body—funny how those two are always related. When the spirit and the body are exhausted, man can sleep his deepest sleep: most restlessness and insomnia are caused by the mind or the body not being sufficiently exhausted; however, when man has exhausted both the physical and mental/spiritual aspects of his existence, there is really no way not to sleep. That is something I have had to learn from experience.
What we do now is keep up the lie. The way forward for me lies in wrapping myself up in layers and layers of cushy subconsciousness in order to accomplish my deepest desire. It is actually pretty strange to watch myself making decisions and focusing on things that I have never focused on before, and finding that when I turn the power of being toward a desire, all thoughts flow toward it, and with flow comes change. Where are you sending your flow? I guess that’s the big question, isn’t it? What are you looking at constantly? Where do you find your mind wandering to all the time?
That is actually the how of change: simple focus. Focus implies inside itself that this is a fairly constantly thing, and the only difference between change that happens quickly and change that happens at the level of the soul is time. When we focus on something for a little while, we get a little bit accomplished. When we focus on things with the radiance of the being for a long time, we get a lot accomplished. Here we encounter an area that perhaps Hegel never considered in his considerations about quantity, because the fact of the matter is that how much you invest in something does affect that thing. The more time you invest, the more you get returned.
For one week I have been focused at a soul level. For one week I have, basically, managed to lay the groundwork for what will be habitual over time.
I have wandered down many, many paths in my lifetime, and I’m about to wander down another one.
Sun Tzu says in the Art of War (and I am at war with my consciousness): “There are five essentials for victory…know when to fight… know how to handle both superior and inferior forces… ensure your army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks… wait to take the enemy unprepared… and have military capacity (i.e. not interfered with by the sovereign). If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
Wandering onto the battlefield, I have done enough research to know myself, I have done enough research to know the enemy, and I have my eyes trained on what is necessary for victory. Will I win? Yes. Yes I will. There is not a “No” in my world now, and no “Maybe” about it. Victory.

What is Competition?

The very first rule in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is:

“War is of vital importance to the state.”

What is of vital importance to understand here is that, dealt with metaphorically, this is probably one of the most shockingly accurate statements about humanity that has ever been uttered. War as a metaphor for the competition that is existence has recently come to mind as an accurate way to explain things.
It is, after all, a fundamental question. Any time you can ask the question “What,” followed by an “is” or an “are” or an “am,” you are dealing with a fundamental question. Ontological investigation of existence has a way of encompassing things and forcing one to describe honestly that which defies explanation. What am I? What are you? What is love? What is truthfulness? What is truth? What is an orange?
Bearing all that in mind, “What is competition?” Well, competition is one of the most fundamental realities of the human experience. Adam Smith understood this concept. The Buddhists have a concept wherein the simple recognition of a thing changes it. Even this, in its way, is a competitive stance. By recognizing a thing, we are already attempting to control it, and what is an attempt to control but a competition? When two similar stores open up, the competition can begin. They will lie to themselves and say that it’s all about the customer, but the reality is that it is about being better than the other guy, because if they are better than the other guy, the customers will come. The underlying principle of Sartre’s gaze is the competition. When I look at you, we are locked in a competition of who will be the subject and who will be the object.
There are necessarily at least three variables in every competition, which is one more than you might at first imagine: two competitors and a prize. In your standard athletic competition, there are two athletes and the prize is a medal or the title “Champion.” When it comes to economics, the two competitors are the stores, and the prize is the dollar. It is important to understand that the prize is always a thing, and never a person. When two men are competing for the love of a woman it’s not actually the woman they’re competing over, it’s her body. There is no competition on the level of the soul. A soul mate is one in which there is no competition.
One of the most rational explanations for the soul that I have ever come across says that there is only one soul, and that people are simple different manifestations of this soul. In other words, there is a soul-goo that surrounds existence, and the human creature is simple a little piece of the soul that has raised up in the manner of a wave that will eventually swell and then break, returning to the level from whence it came. There is no competition in that which is one. Consciousness pulls people away from this understanding of the soul and rips us into three pieces: consciousness, sub-consciousness, and spirit. The spirit is that piece of our consciousness that reminds us where we came from, and the other two are the challenge.
It is our challenge to defeat the consciousnesses and stay focused on the spirit; however, in the world of humans, there are very few people who would willingly stay focused on the spirit because the universal soul is too huge to understand. It is much easier to deal with other human beings on a personal level. To all those who would say that dealing with other human beings is very difficult, this is true; however, the universal soul/spirit is infinite, and that is impossible to understand—comprehending the infinite is an exercise in insanity.
So, we do battle, on a daily basis. We wage war constantly with the consciousnesses of other human beings. It IS possible to come to some kind of understanding about another human being, and largely because you are asking the metaphysical question, “Why?” These kinds of questions might involve a shorter or longer list of variables, but the number will eventually be reached that creates a consensus, and concessions will be made. Why did you do that? Money. Why did you do that? Money. Power. Why did you do that? Well, you see, the fact of the matter is that I was dealing with some childhood issues of radical sub-conscious flavoring, and they made me think that money and power were the essential creatures in the world. Whatever. Why can usually be answered. Why questions end when the book ends. Why are we here? To die. That’s when we find out. It’s kind of a bummer, but would you have it any other way? Really? Why questions are a competition with somebody (or perhaps your own consciousness) to find an answer.
I have been dealing with the world of ontology lately and foregoing the world of metaphysics in order to deal with the reality of the infinite, but I recently been called back to the world of competition and metaphysics. I was once told that there is no morality in ontology. “What is this thing?” only asks that you observe it honestly. There is no morality in observation—just like there is no morality in pure science. Morality is imposed people by various people and places and institutions and this is a fact. Law and rules and morality are a competition between the state and you (which the state usually wins), your parents and you (which, up to a certain point, the parents usually win), and other people and you (which, up to a certain point, is quite a stalemate). Dominance, victory, and power hang in the balance. All of these things are illusions.
What kind of power do we have to stave off death? None. What kind of victory lasts forever? Not a single one. What kind of dominance is anything more than lived-for-a-while? None. They are not eternal and infinite because they live in the life of the mind.
In order to deal with human beings even more effectively, I will take it upon myself—i.e. I will begin a competition with myself wherein I will battle my intellect and other people to win the prize of understanding—to investigate this thing called competition. As a part of the normal human experience, it is important to understand. Most religions or spiritual sects would have to agree that the normal human experience is full of suffering and crushing defeat—otherwise there would be no need for them, and this is due largely to the fact that people are all clinging to the illusions they hold so dear. It wrecks the head. The consciousness is repelled at the fact that it has no existence without the body. The body is seemingly endowed with consciousness. From whence? To whence? Nobody knows for certain. So we live in our world of illusion, and it is more comfortable, by and large, than reality. Even the suffering we endure as a result of constant competition is nothing compared to the incomprehensible reality of infinite existence. Space goes on forever. Forever. Forever. What a word that is. Can you imagine forever? No. No, I’m afraid you can’t. That hurts. Bugger it. Moving on. Can you imagine what it would be like to get in her pants? Yes. Yes I can. Okay, let’s go with the second one. I hereby enter myself back into the human competition for the sake of inquiry and understanding. My textbook is Sun Tzu’s art of war. Let’s find some things out.

Some Times

Some times are strange—note the intentional gap. Yes, I believe that there is power in some times.
I just realized that my hands are reflected upside down in the shiny part of the middle of my computer speakers, and visual oddities always make me do a double take. It’s absolutely stunning the power that seeing something can have.
Recently, I started edited a work that I wrote last year, and it’s funny to see it again. It’s very much a snap shot of a very strange time in a fellow’s life.
The thoughts fly so rapidly at times that it is simply absurd to try to lock them down. Answer this question for me: what do you do with all of your down time? When you have nothing to do, what do you do?
Would it be possible for somebody to convince you that if you simply focused on constantly being productive in the here and now that you would manage to get one helluva lot accomplished?
Would it take the example of an entire life?
Sobeit.
Maybe that’s my goal. What is possible in a life? The other day I read a story about Nikola Tesla that said he averaged two hours of sleep a day and lived until he was eighty-something years old. Granted, he was a bit of a freak, but do some math:
22 hours every day * 365 days a year * 65 years (for example) = 521950 hours
16 hours every day * 365 days a year * 65 years = 379600
Tesla essentially lived twice as much as other people. Who needs sleep? Oh, well, I suppose that if you’re okay with murmuring to yourself and not being able to control the physical self when the mental self takes over, then you’ll be fine.
There has to be some kind of balance, right? Maybe that’s what all that eight hours a night business is all about. I have found that six hours is more than enough for me on just about any given night. Eight hours sometimes makes me groggy. I know a lot of people that manage to sleep for ten or twelve hours, and I can only EVER manage that with aid of some kind.
Is it some kind of subliminal training we put ourselves through?
For the last couple of days, I have walked to work and found myself on the verge of tears. Usually there is a song playing on the iPod that I connect with something I can’t connect to at the moment, and all that disconnection brings tears. It means a time so profound some little while ago, and yet I think…

Creating meaning. People can’t take away the things that mean to you. Did you know that? You, yes you. The reason most academic papers say to shy away from the pronoun “you” when writing is that it becomes to personal almost immediately. The consciousness, the psyche, is so absolutely terrified of being addressed directly (and believe me when I say this happens much less frequently than you probably realize) and seen for what it is (nothingness), that it is jarring to find that word in print. It is even more jarring when the you is connected to something that makes you feel. Have you ever been hurt? Have you ever been loved and left? Do you remember the one you loved? Today, I had one of the moments where I ran into a thing you wouldn’t believe. You are simply reading along, and all of a sudden, you stumble across yourself in between the lines on page. You were an asshole at that time and you know it. There is no going back to change it, but every time you go there it brings the tears to your eyes. Can you believe the things you did? Can you believe the things you said? It brings tears to your eyes now as you think about it. You have to believe that you made all the right decisions, because, essentially, you did. Who’s to say you didn’t? You did what you had to do. There is a certainty you know who you are. Or are you the one who felt the searing pain of dislocation? Were you the one who felt like your arms were being ripped out of your sides and your legs were being ripped off of your body? Were you the one whose time was suddenly wasted? You still loved. You still felt. The carpet was pulled out from under you and you were left naked and alone in the depths of psychological despair. You re-live the pain of every smile you thought was so genuine, but now feels so genuinely false. You re-live the hurt of every joyous moment in their arms when you go back into your memory. You tell yourself that wasn’t what you want. You put a gigantic psychological band-aid on and move into the world a new person. You were to many scars as it is. Why can’t you ever pull yourself out of the past? Why can’t you stop the perpetual onslaught of the bleakness of the future? There is weariness in your gait. There comes a time when you probably ought to stop asking questions and start answering them, but that time is difficult to assess. Do you know what’s going on right now? I, which is to say, the author, am subjecting my sub-conscious to an evacuation. I don’t even actually know what this is about, but the fingers are furious at something and they fly more quickly than I can keep up with. Yet, I still know when I end sentences in prepositions. …-the Fuck? We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the dessert, when you came to mind, and I played your song. Who are you? Do you even know? And we’re back to questions again. Sometimes I have intense delusions about people coming back to my work after years and years and years and having to collate and bind all of these words into some kind of manageable whole. Blogging is very much like masturbation. But what if it actually winds up meaning something. I know for a damned sight that if I were to go back through these bastards I would probably have some kind of mental shock that would ruin my system for at least a week. The overload would be palpable. I have hereby written almost one thousand one hundred words in almost exactly twenty-five minutes. I’m officially too lazy to do the math on that. But it comes down the fact that some times are meant for disposal, and what better way to dispose of oneself than to create meaning, because that is something I have done here. Whether or not it’s a decent meaning or an important meaning or a loving meaning or a worthless meaning is secondary to the fact that it is meaning. Does it mean to you? Perhaps, perhaps not. Some times are not for you. Some times are reserved for me and me alone. You know, I only started these words because I needed some time to charge up the iPod for the journey I plan to take to Home Plus so I can return a sheet that is the incorrect size and buy: water, gin, and olives—I have grown beyond the need for vermouth. Just chill the goddamned gin and serve it to me in a cocktail glass please. In another random note, I’ve been learning some Korean lately—which is important when you understand that Korea is my current residence—and I can officially say, “Hello. My name is Eli” in Korean. Oh, it’s the small battles that are sometimes the biggest. Oh, to be there and alive in that corner of time in the world. Could you ask for anything more? Welcome to the world of my in-sink-er-ator. This time it’s for you to make meaning from.

Fantasy Letters to Famous People

Volume I:
Brandon Boyd

Dear Brandon~

As we have not ever met, I hope you don’t mind the familiarity of the first name greeting, but I have recently gotten the premonition that we will eventually meet under seemingly happenstance. The whys and wherefores of the meeting are not exactly important, but the fact of the matter is that I think we have something to say to each other. What that thing is I can’t say, but I feel as though you have something to say to me that can only be said face to face, and I feel that there is some piece of wisdom that I can impart to you. We will only know it when it happens.

Does it seem strange to feel so certain? Perhaps it ought to, but I also feel as though it doesn’t matter if the premonition ever comes to fruition, because, in a way, I am meeting you here in these words.

I remember my late teens and early twenties being something of an “All-Incubus-all-the-time” kind of ridiculousness. There was something that made me gravitate towards the pain in SCIENCE, the activity in Make Yourself, and the dawn in Morning View. That has been my journey, too.

I also want you to know that while this volume of words is addressed to you specifically, it by no means means to exclude the band. You see, what I didn’t understand at the time, and something I understand only slightly more now, is the organic nature of the music and the words. Mike and Jose and Brandon form the core of something that manages to speak. Oh, there are a lot of people that don’t like your band. Hell, there are a lot of people that don’t like everything… it’s a bit like cancer: you can get it from everything these days.

The danger is suddenly very apparent that this is wandering into one of those pointless hero-worship fan letters written by a fourteen year old girl, which is by no means the intention. What I think you all have come to understand in your lives is that it is possible to develop the human character. The arc of your musical accomplishments and undertakings is something that smacks of in development. There are methods to develop the mind—and I would imagine that you are all great students of not only your instruments, but your minds and characters.

Do you read a lot? I read a ton: Aristotle, Joyce, Proust, Tzu, Zizek, Epictetus, Sartre, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, and Rudolf Steiner all have a place on the spectrum of things that matter to me. It’s not about taking their words and believing them, it’s about applying them to the character. One of the things Rudolf Steiner believed was that the soul or the spirit existed outside the body (as opposed to inside it). Just think about the potential ramifications of something like that. Don't judge it. Let it be. But think about it. There are so many things, but what do they mean? It’s important to give up ever actually finding out. There is no answer.

The answer would ruin it. The answer would fuck everything up. Without questions there can be no development. It’s the question that was put into place. Whether you believe in god or Buddha or Jesus as the son of god or Shiva or Zeus, the function of god is to provide people, not with an answer as is so widely assumed, but with the question. There is a very famous line from a very famous book that says that if there were no god it would be necessary to invent him. (In an unrelated note, if you’ve never read “The Brothers Karamazov,” it’s worth the time and effort.) It would be necessary to invent him precisely because of the fact that people need to have the question. What I see in the music of the band is precisely this type of development that comes from asking the right questions.

One of my many personal aphorisms is that I learned to read in High School, in college I learned to ask questions, and while studying more intently at grad school, I learned how to ask good questions. To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember a whole lot about EXACTLY what I learned, and this is probably because I have never had a brain for facts. My focus is simple truth. Facts feed the brain. Truth feeds the soul. And there are far fewer truths than there are facts, but I find the sustenance of truth to surpass the sweetness of facts. Facts are the fat group on the food pyramid. Maybe it’s because their illusion as fact is built into them. They are a fact because we want to believe in it. It is a fact that there are twelve inches in one foot, but only on earth does that fact matter even one iota, and there is a lot of universe out there. Facts are a might arbitrary to me. I don’t even think I could tell you one truth. I feel them. I know them when I see them. But I couldn’t tell you one. There are things I think I know, but one of those things I think I know is that there is always wiggle room in the things we think we know.

All that’s left is the understanding that the total development of the human character ought to be our only focus. We don’t even really know for sure what is possible in the human character (and I suddenly feel like I should explain that when I use the term “character” I mean the mental (cognitive), emotional, and spiritual aspects of humans), but I feel instinctively that if we only spend our life doing it, we’ll come to understand nothing—which I think ought to be the goal. When we understand, we stop questioning, don’t we?

I would like to sit and play a writing game with you, I would like to play guitar with Mike, I would like to drum circle with Jose, and I would like to sit and break bread with you all. One of the other things I think I know is that things tend to happen exactly as they’re supposed to, and really shouldn’t happen any other way. To fight the universe is to lose a fight.

It was nice to have met you. I’m currently teaching English in Korea. If you’re ever in the area, look me up.

Peace
Love &
Gonzo

Eli

Documentation

Things written recently:

“I am re-entering the USA. I am less than thirty minutes from American soil, and my heart is racing.

New York City… goddamnit. I’m back. For a week.

Claire on Wednesday.
Patrick on Thrusday.
I think I will take Caroline her Pee-Wee.
We are very done.

I can see it.

I’m shaking right now. Why?

I don’t think I want to be here. I’m pretty sure that American is not my home anymore. The world between my ears and the joy in my heart are officially my new permanent residences. Just as my job is now (quite simply) a writer, my home is (quite simply) wherever the words are that I am.

Good-bye to angst-ridden questions of where I ought to live. Wherever I find myself, that’s where I’m supposed to be.

Funny that I make that already clear distinction right now. Keep in mind that one can never know the future.

Do your year in Korea again. You must, must, must.

What now? What comes next?

Last night at the Ramble Inn, they brought out a guitar. Why is it that when I start to play, the people are happy, or (as it happened at the Jisan Valley Rock Festival) wind up sitting behind you on the hill, clapping for you, and sitting through an entire impromptu set only leaving when you stop playing?

Ah… stupid question. Change: “What is it about my performance?”

Perhaps there is something there isn’t there? The key, now, is to find a way to make a living out of it. On the road? On Tour? You can do it my boy. You can do it. Rock and Roll!”

Written after Seeing You

Seeing you well
makes my heart
quake.
Can you ever know,
really, what you
meant.

You and I, we were
not meant to
be,
and yet we, yes we,
were something to
mean

that for which forever
was built to
stand.

What does that mean?

We, as in us, isn’t
a thing we can make
real,
and yet we, as a
thing that cannot
be,
some ways manages
to mean more
universally.

You were perfect for me at that time;
and I would be a fool to resent it.


Isn’t this what you wanted, really.
Cautious leap of faith into skills.
“Would that it were a home
instead of a house,” one might say.
Interlocutor reply,
“But a house IS a home,”
“Explain yourself,”
and the like.
Thusly to the breach, we fly!
A well-flung phrase,
a thrust of wit,
and the game dances itself
across its own hardwood floor.
Who thought these things?
Who thought into him?
All pieces of game,
all the smackings of might,
suffer a neophyte learner
to sink ever more and ever more
into my being with
__________________________.

It Feels So Good

to write. Bob Dylan coming softly through the speakers, a cat napping gently in the early hours of a London morning, and me interrupting it with the sounds of keyboard clicks and thoughts manifesting themselves. I am extremely comfortable here.

I have been in London for five days now, and, somehow, I’ve already managed to find a kind of equilibrium with the world around me that reveals itself in the smile of an existence hell-bent on fully existing.

I’ve been watching the wheel of time as it moves here. You see, I’m visiting friends, but that’s not exactly accurate. I’m visiting a part of my heart? No. I’m visiting a part of myself that is external to me. That’s probably closest, but the exactitude I’m looking for doesn’t actually exist. The reality of my situation is thus: after leaving Korea, I am staying at a girl’s house that I met in Australia. She is married. She is married to a friend of mine that I met in high school. She is Italian and studying to be a doctor in London. My friend has just entered a biodynamic farming school under the tutelage of students of the Rudolf Steiner Anthroposophy. They met in New York City when she came to visit me. I watched them fall in love.

The sheer number of things that had to come together to make this thing even a remote possibility numbs my mind, but here I am inside it and writing about it, which feels good, and I’m simply enjoying the reality of being inside something that smacks of significance. These things don’t just happen. These things are uncommon. As a matter of fact, as I was explicating my theory that it feels like we are all moving towards something even greater (she and he and I and another and his significant other), she said to me, “But you also make that decision.” Hell yes we do. Somewhere along the line you have to look at your situation, realize it’s unique, and seek to find a way to perpetuate the uniqueness almost indefinitely. This is difficult thing to do, especially when you understand the nature of time and space, because all things change and pass away. Nothing is truly static. However, there has to be a way to incorporate that reality into the nature of the thing that you’re trying to develop, and when it is genuinely incorporated, what’s to stop you from metaphorically ruling the world? (Even if it is only your small chunk of the world.)

Ah, well, we’re wandering into spaces that can’t be comprehended right there and it’s probably best if we reign everything in and start talking about the whats and hows of the present, huh?

I am unemployed again, and feeling like the universe is waiting for something, somewhere, to send me to the most appropriate place. I have discovered that in my life there is only so much control I can exert over my reality. At one level this seems like a bit of a bummer because everybody wants to believe that they can control their reality; however, the fact of the matter is that because man is a social being, there is only so much control that he can exert over his reality. He can desire. He can yearn. But, most of the time, he will always find himself at the whims of others. Even your super-wealthy aristocrats are reliant on those they would oppress. Without the lower classes, your quantity of money would be worthless. That’s a bit abstract, to be sure, but any time you’re dealing with money you’re dealing with metaphorical value, never actual value.

I wonder if anybody has ever considered that money is a little bit like language? Surely somewhere along the line has looked at money and decided that this bit of money is sufficient to describe my desire to purchase this object, much as this word is sufficient to describe this thing or this desire. Money would have to be a derivative of language. It has the same structure.

Speaking of structures (and I fully realize that this post is bordering on SUPER-random, but we’re dealing with consciousness diarrhea right now), I have been thinking about how the generally three-fold structure of existence that I have heretofore acknowledged might have a fourth-fold. All right, it comes from Heidegger, and that’s as it may be, but when we look at it objectively without the hullabaloo surrounding him, he might be onto something really important. The structure of human reality as I have previously said it to be is generally something in the realm of the mind and the body and the spirit. These are just terms and you can just as easily substitute consciousness, physicality, and spirit. I found that I generally found that I would then have to mention that consciousness is then split into the general consciousness of sensual awareness and the sub-conscious of body and mind processes that we don’t “think” about. Heidegger cleared this up for me with his development of the four-fold: earth and sky and mortals and divinities. Mortals would be the physical. This is our body. We die. That’s a part of it all. The earth and the sky are the two levels of consciousness. We are always on the earth. We are always inside a world of sensual awareness. However, we are also always under the sky, and this is something we forget. In other words, we are always inside the world of consciousness, but we are also under the rule of a sub-consciousness that is there but generally forgotten about. The divinities would be the world of the spiritual that is clearly undeniable in existence.

I will say it clearly, right here, right now:

I don’t like religion. Attempting to regulate something so organic is akin to the travesty that is Genetic Engineering in plants. I know that cloning and genetic engineering is abhorrent to most of the religious community, but when I look at what they’re doing to the spirit, it’s largely the same but in a different realm, engineering something to fit around something they can’t understand, when they ought to allow themselves to not understand.

All that being said, I see the spirit of the universe in almost everything when you take the time to notice it. The other day, walking around a farm, I saw a patch of five flowers that had sprouted up out of the ground. It wasn’t a garden. It was surrounded by grass all over the place, but there were these five flowers that decided they would grow right there and bugger all those that told them otherwise. That meant something to me. That seemed to wreak of the spiritual. Today, I’m going to walk the south bank of the Thames and visit the Globe Theatre, a spiritual quest for me to be sure.

I’ve Never Been Good

with good-byes. I find myself, now, at yet another crossroads where I must begin again on another road. Words that mean the world to me:

This spring, I am going to set off on the road again.
I have been staying here about as long as I am meant to,
so now I think it is time to find a new place to reside.
When ascetics stay in one place for a long time,
they begin to languish, stuck in a mire of sloth and inertia.
I want to embark on a new path, like an eternal beginner,
clumsily starting all over again from the beginning.

--Beop Jeong

While it is nearly Autumn, I find that it is time for me to be somewhere else.

It has been an absolutely incredible year. The places I’ve gone, the things I’ve done, the people I’ve met and all the other things “I” have been granted the opportunity to experience seems to somehow pale in comparison with the knowledge that I DID these things.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that for the last year, what I am most proud of, is the fact that I attempted as completely as possible to embody the idea of genuine action. Human beings are about the only creatures on the planet that can make conscious decisions without being entirely hampered with those… instincts. We have language. That, in itself, allows for jobs and occupations. We have money. For all of its metaphorical reality, it allows us leisure time—which is why Aristotle says that the truly good life involves having at least some money. The issue that, I believe, most people run into is the ontological use of this time: what am I to do with it?

The most common medication for free time is television. I don’t like television. Full stop. You see, it’s not that I don’t like it because of its “mindless entertainment” value. It’s not even that it can be used as a kind of hegemonic indoctrination tool—although this aspect is quite terrifying. It is precisely that what we have worked so hard for, and by that I mean what the pinnacle of humanity has been striving for (i.e. leisure time that sets us outside the realm of animalism) has come to nothing more than staring at a box of moving pictures.

This all smacks of time. Time can be a blessing or a curse. When we are at our leisure, time is a blessing. When we are at our work, it is a curse. Time is precious. I’m through asking why time is or who invented (although I would say that “I” make time). I’m through with all of that. That fact of the matter is that time IS, and our only real task is to ensure that this gift is used appropriately.

So, when I see that humanity is slowly trending toward sedentary mindless submission to hegemony, it makes me feel good that while people are watching their favorite shows in their dark houses illuminated only by the TV screen, I have been out amongst the world, wondering at the way the light manages to make it through the tops of the trees, throwing myself in giant puddles of mud, wandering through clouds at the top of mountains, listening to Korea reggae bands at an abandoned ski resort, visiting forty meter tall Buddhas carved on the side of a mountain, eating pajeon and drinking mokoley, bathing in one of the largest bath houses in the world, eating that raw fish that was so disgusting when I was a child, watching sunrises and sunsets thirty-six hours apart, memorizing books, writing books, and, generally, just doing.

It is ironic that I, as a writer, put very little stock in people’s words—and this applies probably most rigidly to my own words. I find that action will always eclipse what people say. For example, for my last weekend in Korea, I decided to go somewhere I had never been before. There’s a city called Taean, a not-too-large city on the west coast of Korea. South of Taean, there’s a city called Anmyeon-do, which is essentially a hole in the ground. South of Anmyeon-do, in the middle of I don’t even know where is where I was. My friends said they were coming with me. I left earlier than them because I was meeting the girl I’ve been seeing, and they were going to come later.

They said they were coming. Getting to where I was from where they were was a huge mission. It took me almost five hours, and they were leaving almost five hours after I did. They came. They did what they said they were going to do. I celebrated my last weekend in Korea with the people that actually cared enough to do something real with me. I’ve been to so many going away parties that it actually makes me sick. Oh, they’re always fun affairs to attend, but they’re also usually always too superficial for my taste. What I had on the beach, eating barbecued shellfish with the people I cared about most in Korea meant more to me than almost anything. But that’s always been my style I suppose. I would trade depth for superficiality any day of the week.

What am I saying good-bye, too? I find myself not knowing the answer to this question. I know I’m saying good-bye to my current place, and the people as I have known them will change immensely by the time I get back. I’m saying good-bye to the comfort of the known and once again traveling into the breach of the unknown. Where things are up in the air and I am at a loss for understanding, somehow feels like the place most appropriate for my existence.

I don’t know. I will maintain that until I pass out of this realm. Who’s to say about life? Who’s to say about time? I will certainly not be the one so arrogant as to proclaim that can know. Knowing now the things than can happen in one year, in one day, in one hour, and in one minute of an existence genuinely lived moves us ever closer to the complete acceptance of ignorance… in a good way.

So, good-bye to whatever it is that I need to say good-bye to, and hello to the beginning of what’s next. Ah, conclusions, they’re always so inconclusive, huh?

Language.

An-yeong-ha-se-yo: Korean Hello. In what was a super-unexpected moment last night, I learned the value of speaking a new language and the difficulty in acquiring that ability. To be perfectly honest, I was on a date with a Korean woman in which one of the rules was, “What you say goes.”
At one point, she said to me: “All right. From now on, I say that you can only speak Korean, and I can only speak in English.”
This semi-ridiculous request is possible only in light of the fact that I have acquired some Korean language skills and sometimes respond to her in Korean.
What I hadn’t realized before this time was that my skills were pretty much limited to the ability to say hello, read a menu, order food, beer and soju, ask how much something was, answer yes or no, and ask somebody “Really?” or "Are you okay?"
The truly coincidental nature of this encounter is that I had just spent the last two hours working on English pronunciation and conversation with a pair of high school students. From a purely technical standpoint, there are four sections to language acquisition: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I have long considered reading and writing to be the two most integral aspects of language acquisition. This is because when you read, especially out loud, you are reading, speaking and listening. Then, when you start writing, you are officially practicing all four aspects.
The reality is that all four aspects have a certain personality that MUST be respected.
Reading. When I read a menu. I understand what it is I’m ordering. This has been an extremely valuable skill to acquire. Korean food is delicious, and it’s even more delicious when you have some idea of what it is you’re ordering. When I read out loud for a Korean person, I have to repeat things three times because my pronunciation is terrible.
Writing. I can write in Korean characters. As a matter of fact, I can create Korean phonetic equivalents for most English words, and this is extremely valuable for teaching when a student can’t quite understand how to pronounce a word. I could not write a Korean sentence to save my life. I could copy one out of a book, but I couldn’t create one of my own volition.
Listening. I pick up bits and pieces of conversations. This is a naturally occurring phenomenon any time you are immersed in a new language. I know when my Korean teachers are talking about me. I know when they’re talking about the food. In other words, I know what they’re talking about, but I have no idea what they’re SAYING. The cook at my school knows zero English, and she’ll just jabber away to me in Korean, and I know WHAT she’s talking about, but I couldn’t respond to her if I tried.
Speaking. The clang of a shop bell means 안녕. Reading out loud, speaking the words off the menu to order food. Talking to the attendant at the bus station and getting tickets to Oksan. Saying yes or no to the students. I can’t create a Korean sentence. It’s hopeless.

What I’m really getting at here is that the creation of the language is the key to understanding it—and by “it” I mean the language itself. Whether in the context of reading, where your reading out loud is a creation of language audibly. Or when you are writing and creating language that means something above and beyond the simple ability to write the letters or phonemes. Or when you can actively listen and respond. Listening and responding are connected in the same way that the earth and the sky are: you are always on the earth and under the sky (only on very rare occasions is this not the case… which is why climbing a mountain is such a worthy endeavor). Having a conversation and seriously being able to communicate with the language, creating meaning, is the key.
When I come back to Korea for my next contract, acquiring Korean is going to be of the utmost importance. Koreans don’t HAVE to speak English in Korea. If I’m living in Korea, it is rude of me to EXPECT it. The contract I will have with myself is that I will, by the end of next year be able to sustain a conversation in Korean. It’s printed now, and it will come to pass.

The Way of

nature. The incredible power of nature was recently re-thrust upon me.
I have been aware of the immense power of the natural for quite some time. As a matter of fact, I remember the first time its immensity was thrust upon me—I was in New Zealand, lost in the bush, surrounded by mountains, and crying because I didn’t know which way to go. Once you have been humbled by nature, even just once, you recognize it, forever afterwards, as the predominant power on the planet.
For example, so much talk these days is revolving around the greenhouse effect and what we’re doing to “destroy” the planet. Nobody seems to think about the fact that all we’re doing is creating an environment that is inhospitable to human life. The planet heats up a few degrees, the polar ice caps melt, there is massive flooding, and the end result is simply that the planet takes a blow.
We cannot stop the earth from rotating. We cannot stop the earth from revolving around the sun. This is the bigger nature that we forget about, I think. In our hubris and naiveté we believe that what we have built is the best part of nature, but the fact of the matter is that almost everything humans have built defies nature. Wal-Mart strikes me as one of the most absolutely nature defying edifices in the world. Convenient or not, it seems slightly unnatural that you can go to a building and get fruits, vegetables, frozen fruits, frozen vegetables, canned fruits, canned vegetables, dried fruits, aerosol cans full of things that smell like fruits, fruit of the loom underwear, fruit decorated wastebaskets, orange hunting vests, berry vine seeds.
Granted, I’m taking a somewhat super-naturalistic point of view in terms of nature. In other words, I’m thinking about it in terms of what I have seen and experienced while spending days in the mountains where it can sometimes be a mission to find the next stream and collect some water. And let me tell you that if you don’t have food with you, finding food in nature can be a painstaking task if you don’t know what you’re doing.
All our most revered structures will collapse one day: the stock market, the government, society, and, eventually, mankind. That is the way of nature when you attempt to control it. It is slow, patient, and willing to take a lot of punishment, but, in the end, it will always manage to overcome.
Futures are perpetually unknowable… this is a fact it isn’t even worth debating any more. So, it is entirely possible that we were meant to develop like this. It is entirely possible that nature pushed us in this direction so that we would destroy ourselves. Perhaps the great wheel of existence saw that this particular creature was pushing the boundaries of goodness and needed to be flexed in a direction that would eventually put it out of the world’s misery. I guess I am thinking here of an enormous tree that looks so strong from the outside, but inside is little more than a hollow, ready to be pushed over by a strong wind.
There are only two options these days: fight the fight against the unfathomable structures of humanity and attempt to get people to turn away from their greed-mongering, stuff accumulation, and (to be frank) comforts—which seems a little bit like attempting to hold the ocean back with a spoon—or suck it all up, squirt it into a drying purulent vein, and pray that the end isn’t too painful. Has it gone too far? Do we still think we can conquer nature? When was the last time you climbed a mountain? What good are guns and bombs against the methodical march of rivers and magma?

Everything Looks

huge. And we’re talking here about very nearly gargantuan. There is at least one reason I can cite directly for this, and this is the fact that last weekend, while wandering around in the ocean at the Boryeong Mud Festival in South Korea, a large wave smacked me in the face and in my idiocy I hadn’t taken my glasses off. Well, these things happen.
It should probably be pointed out, here, that I have terrible eyesight. To be technical, my eyes are something like a -8.00—whatever that means. All I know for sure is that without assistance, I literally cannot see one foot in front of my face. Well, the first task was naturally to rectify this whole “inability to see” situation that I had managed to get myself into, and, let me tell you, there was a note of the frantic at first when I remembered that glasses can oftentimes take a little while to get sorted out… days in fact. My last pair, with its Transitions ability, super scratch-resistant coating, and high density lens material had taken a week to construct. As I said to my friend: “They were just super-sweet glasses, man.”
“And now your super-sweet glasses are in the ocean in South Korea.”
Touché, salesman.
At any rate, I then remembered that my life revolves around reading, writing, and teaching. These are three things for which sight is pretty necessary, and tears were almost starting to well up at the thought that I wouldn’t be able to read a book for a week, but the brain does magical things when it’s pushed: contacts. Duh. Optical shops always keep a steady supply of contacts on hand, and it’s as easy as going to one and telling them my prescription (this is a handy little number to memorize by the way).
To make a long story short, we succeeded in finding me some contacts.
I haven’t worn contacts in a while (somewhere between five and ten years—which is pretty significant considering my age), and when I put in these contacts, everything looked enormous. I had a copy of a collection of Martin Heidegger’s works with me, and as I looked at it, I could’ve sworn it wasn’t that big when I had put it into my bag. I looked at my hands, and my friend said, “Oh, don’t even look at the mitts… they might scare you.” And, indeed, they were abnormally large. My shoes, my thighs, my backpack, and my feet had all taken on this extraordinarily massive aspect. Not that this ought to be unusual, because I AM a big man, but, at the same time, this was messing with my mind. When I got home, I looked at my little 13” Macbook, and I could’ve sworn it was just as big as my friends 19” whatever it is.
At first, I thought this was simply some kind of optical illusion involving the proximity of the lens to the eye, and, indeed, this is probably the "being" definition, but what of the "nothingness" definition? Does that question even have a place here?
You see, I am leaving my current situation in Korea very soon. I have done a lot of research. I have almost finished writing a book. And my life is taking on an air of mounting madness. There is madness all around me. My best Korean friend is leaving. His wife and daughter are AWOL. The other Korean teacher at my school is leaving. I get the very distinct feeling of rats leaving a sinking ship. After all this time and all this research and all these happenings and all these adventures I have had: it seems like everything is so significant. Combine that with my belief in the fact that every moment in our life is so significant, and everything being so seemingly huge is probably not too far off the mark, eh? We’re dealing here with the world of my existence being huge (through the miracle of optics) and the world of my reality being huge (through the madness of a life lived in an almost pure spontaneity). What does it all mean?

It Is Possible to Say

too much. The thunder outside my window just said plenty. As a matter of fact it startled me. This is why almost every major eastern religion is very big on silence. The other day I made a note to myself that silence is always pregnant. What I mean to say by this is that silence is always, always, always in the state of “about to give birth to sound.” Sound is created out of silence.
This is striking, though, for a number of reasons. Silence is never possible, or, at least, it isn’t sustainable. The only place, technically, that silence can ever occur is inside a vacuum, and human beings cannot survive there. And yet, it is the goal precisely because it is unattainable. Would the sound of gently falling rain (and all that white noise in general) be so soothing if it weren’t for the fact that most of the time there weren’t those sounds? Doubtful, mon cher, very doubtful.
It works the same way in communication and words and language. This is where the beauty of poetry derives its nature from, and why wordiness can be boring. Poetry is the art of saying as much as possible in as little space as possible. That definition might garner some arguers, but I’d stand by it. Even if you take the great epic poems like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, and just about any other, the space that these things are covering is truly beyond comprehension.
The terseness of William Carlos Williams, is perhaps a good juxtaposition:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel

barrow
glazed with rain

water
beside the white
chickens.

The thing is this: when in the midst of silence, I and I alone pull out the meaning. What does Williams mean by that “so much depends upon” business anyway? It doesn’t really matter what he meant by it. His silence on the meaning is the license to subjectify. Or what is the real significance of Homer’s Catologue of Ships in The Iliad. Art is a thing thinging. Silence is nothingness nothing.
(Sometimes I get playful with the language, and I’m well aware of my excesses in this department.)
I want to know what it is possible to NOT say, and the more I experiment, the more I come to find that you can NOT say almost more than you can say. This is art. What is a painting but a two-dimensional representation of something else? Ah, but it means. What does it mean? Barely matters. It’s not saying anything technically. And yet it is by its simple presence. Just like me. Just like you. We are all things thinging.
I’m working on brevity these days. Stopping the word flow just when it’s necessary. Otherwise I wind up waking up to way too much watered-down matter. It is the rainy season in Korea, and I suppose you CAN have too much of a good thing, but, so far, the falling rain saying things to me hasn’t yet grown old.

A Few Notes from My Reality

Today I went for a run, and I decided that instead of heading in the direction I normally head in, I’d go the opposite way and run it in the other direction. The spirit of adventure will always lead to discovery, and I discovered that the opposite direction to what I had been going was at least a third again more difficult than my traditional route. It is important to know that I live about halfway up what would probably be most appropriately described as a foothill, the first part of my run is always downhill, and it concludes with running uphill. Normally I head east first, turn to the north, make a left and head west, and finish it off with a southwardly sprint the last fifty or a hundred meters up to my apartment. It turns out that the “westward ho!” portion of my run—which is the longest uphill portion of my traditional run—is the shortest portion of what I think is about three 3k (let’s call it 1). So, today, I ran 1k downhill, then proceeded to run for almost 2k uphill. I learned something. I learned that sometimes, when you choose a different path, it might wind up being more difficult; however, you’ll never know unless you take it.
This has been something of a theme for my reality. I have a tendency to find paths and wander down them fully understanding that there is a possibility it might be more difficult, but, simultaneously, finding it very difficult to care. Shying away from difficulty has never been my style. My style, as a matter of fact, would probably be best characterized as somewhat reckless, but only to a point.


Today, I managed to get one quarter of the way through memorizing Pablo Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,” and all I keep thinking is that the more I dive into these poems and wrap my head around them, the deeper my understanding becomes. Only the other day did the realization that this work was doing more than it claimed to do cross the threshold of my mind. It is mapping the arc of a relationship. The first poem is like love at first sight: body of woman, white hills, white thighs, you look like a world lying in surrender. Over the course of the next nineteen poems, the passion transforms itself into something else, until, by the twentieth poem, when he knows it’s over, he writes: tonight I can write the saddest lines—all of which is followed (after the "official" ending of the relationship) by the "Song of Despair." Now, I am an English major by trade, and I probably should’ve picked that up long before this, but I had never actually sat down read them all through before. I used to just open it up to whatever I felt like and read it because they were all so beautiful, but now that I understand his project, I read it with new eyes.
The eventual failure of all romantic concepts of love is ever-present in the work, and that is the reason for despair. The other day, I was talking to my Korean co-teacher and she said that she married her husband fifteen years ago and it was great. They loved each other and it was incredible. Now, after fifteen years, two children, and the effects of time there is no love left. Those were her exact words: “there is no love left… only duty.” That is what becomes of love. It turns into habit and duty. It is my job to be with this person. Romance and passion will always, always fade. It is our lot to deal with this reality.


Habit has been an interesting topic of conversation lately. Tonight, during the course of teaching my adult students how to speak English, I gave them the topic: tell me three bad habits you have and three ways to change or stop them. I gave them mine to begin with: forgetfulness, going, and not listening to doctor’s directions. As to the first one, my methods for changing or stopping it were: practice (like my memorization of Neruda’s book), mnemonic devices, and playing memory games (which is a little like practice, but not quite AS focused). To stop going would be very difficult for me. I find myself every day, as I mentioned, wandering down new paths, but I gave them these three methods to attempt a change: watch more TV (I have what would best be described as a near-passionate-hatred for the thing because people get into the habit of watching too much of it and they have to be there for their shows or whatever… I don’t understand it), sleep more (I have a tendency to sleep for six to eight hours no matter what or when—even if I’ve had a heavy night of “socializing” the night before and all logic would point to sleeping forever… I’ll be up in six hours and doing work), and (as my student suggested) get married. As for listening to doctor’s advice: get married (the same student suggested it), almost die more frequently (that’d sort me out), and have children (for obvious reasons). What is really interesting to me is that when it was their turn, they could give me their bad habits, but they all said that it was impossible to break them. That was almost the saddest thing I’d ever heard. When a revolution of the mind and body is not possible, is there life? Or, are you just living out of habit? The thought actually terrified me: the life lived purely out of habit.


I recently committed Facebook suicide. For those who’ve been in a coma for the last 5 years, Facebook is an “online social networking utility” that allows you to stay connected to all your friends, all over the world, simply by joining and finding them. From personal experience, it is a pretty incredible thing. I have lived in some fairly out of the way places and done some fairly out-of-the-way things, and it was always nice to log in to Facebook and find my friends and see what they were up to. Through a friend I found out that I couldn’t quit Facebook (and their are political reasons that we won't go into right now). This always rubs me the wrong way—like when I was running an overnight crew for a big company and it seemed as if I couldn’t quit… until I did. Tell me I can’t do something, and I’m at least going to attempt to do it, right? It has more to do with the challenge than anything else.
Anyway, the fact that you can only “de-activate” your account (like pushing pause) but never quit the thing aside, there was also the curiosity that started to well up in me about what life would be like without Facebook. I have been on Facebook since my university days in 2004 when the thing was brand new. When I mentioned on my Facebook account that I was quitting, I got one response that said, “That’s just stupid. I don’t believe you.” Some people can’t imagine their world without Facebook. I CAN imagine it, and I wanted to see what life would be like without it. It’s been a week now, and I’ve noticed a serious lack of clutter in my email inbox (they send you notifications about almost anything unless you do the work of requesting them not to), about an hour of my day back every day, a day less cluttered with sifting through people's ridiculous "status updates," and a feeling of freedom that I think I had been missing. It’s too easy is the problem. Nobody wants to do the work that’s required for actually maintaining a friendship relationship. But if you’re up for it… send me an email: elijtaylor@gmail.com. Or, better yet, send me an actual address and I'll write you a letter.

Radical Subjectivity

Okay, I have realized it: I have a “type” of movie that I like. It has nothing to do with comedy or drama or sports or anything of that nature. I like movies (and books, and articles, and stories) about radical subjectivity.
Case and point: three of my favorite movies are: Themroc, Can Dialectics Break Bricks, and Pierrot le Fou. For those who are not familiar with these three films, allow me to explain what I mean.

Themroc is a fascinating little French film in which the only really distinguishable word in the entire film is yelled by the main character at the beginning: “Themroc! Themroc!” The rest of the film's meaning is conveyed in that classic writer's way of “showing” not “telling”—probably one of the reasons I am drawn to it. The story, as such, is about a man who has had enough of not owning the means of his own production, quits his job, and becomes a radical subject. He affects others as they realize their own subjectivity. The film ends on two high notes. The next to last scene, Themroc comes down from the world he has created for himself because he’s hungry, and he comes back with two police officers which he and the family across the way (people his radical subjectivity has affected) roast on spits and eat—a delicious metaphor for “the revolution” if I do say so myself… teehee. Then, the police have had enough. They haven’t been able to get him down, and finally they send up a bricklayer to block off the world of the Radical Subjectivity. Themroc brings the bricklayer into his world (with a couple of the women who have wanted a taste of his radical subjectivity) and the movie ends in a fairly wild orgy. In short… Themroc. Watch it.

Can Dialectics Break Bricks is a bit more radically in your face with the propaganda, but once that’s waded through, you’re left with an absolutely brilliant film. The film itself is a Korean tae-kwon-do film; however, some French guys decided to detourn (http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm) the film and give it a slightly different angle. The humor comes from the classic karate movie aspect in which there is the good dojo (in this case the dialecticians) and the bad dojo (in this case the bureaucrats... “The bureaucrats are coming! The bureaucrats are coming!”) In short, it is a hilarious little movie about how the weaker, poorer, dialecticians overcome the bureaucrats. The real twist is that there is a “radical subject” amongst everybody who sits outside the dialecticians because he understand that the only way to truly get through what they’re trying to work through is by confronting it face to face—he actually has a meeting with the bureaucrats and says, “Let’s talk about it!” whereas the “dialecticians” only want to talk amongst themselves. It is essentially the post-Marxist understanding that it is only through confrontation of the issues in a non-violent way that a start can be made. Violence might have its place, but only as a final resort when the bureaucrats are tired of being made fun of and defeated by the words. Awesome. Awesome. “Dialectician” is one of my all-time favorite characters in film.

Pierrot le Fou is a little bit different, if only because it’s a love story. Now, the question might be asked, “How can a love story about two people be about radical subjectivity?” The answer is, of course, that love is a subjective phenomenon. This subject has been taken up numerous times over the course of this blog and need not be re-hashed here, but, needless to say, understand that love is a very personal, subjective type of situation and you’ll understand fully what I mean. Pierrot is the French “stock-character” of a sad clown whose love is bound to leave him for the happy clown. Pierrot is the name applied to the main character (whose name is Ferdinand) by his love. He hates the name. He leaves his wife and children for his love. They live a completely unconventional life: after stealing a car, Ferdinand is playing with the steering, explaining that they could go anywhere, but never really going that far, and his love says, “Look at him, forced to stay between the lines.” At this point, Ferdinand says, “Really,” and proceeds to jump the curb and drive the car into the ocean. They get out and walk along the beach as if nothing happened. He eventually kills himself, after shooting his love, by painting his face blue and wrapping dynamite around his head.

I was talking to a friend of mine last night, and he told me that he and his wife had planned to move to England in a year and half and volunteer—he spent a year in Wales after university helping disabled people (he has some kind of certificate). Right now, both he and his wife have stable jobs, but neither is really doing what they want to do. They have no kids. They are simply going through the motions, so they decided.

I just found out that my cousin, a former executive in a very small publishing firm, has decided to give up his position in order to go make cheese from the milk of goats... in Poland. I want to simply write that sentence again: I just found out that my cousin, a former executive in a very small publishing firm, has decided to give up his position in order to go make cheese from the milk of goats… in Poland.

I just found out that my best friend, who has been attempting to get a visa to go live with his wife in England—they met in New York City through me: I met her in Australia and went to high school with him—has recently had his visa application approved and will be moving to jolly old England in a couple of months (he had twice attempted to assault the gates of the home of queueing and crumpets but had been unsuccessful).

I, myself, will be heading back to the USA after a year in Korea only to come back to Korea (Busan) while I pay of some debts that accumulated over years of spendthriftiness, after which time I plan to join the Peace Corps and either spend two years in the South Pacific learning how to farm or in South America learning the same, and after that I plan to volunteer to go teach English in Africa—I will be then have been on six of the seven continents… DAMN YOU ANTARCTICA!

The crux of this whole argument, and the thing that most people don’t understand (REALLY understand), is that, while your dreams might not include traveling the globe and doing whatever wherever: you can do anything. YOU CAN DO ANYTHING! Good god almighty how empowering is that?
(One minor note here, if you have children, please think of them first… the next generation needs to be protected.)
But if you have no children, and you’re unhappy, then freakin' Go somewhere else. Do something else. Be someone else. Stop whining. The only one stopping you is you.

Vibes

Sometimes I feel the universe at an unnatural level, or maybe I’m just projecting. Lately I’ve been attempting to distinguish between what is meant by existence and reality. There are probably many definitions, but the way I tend to distinguish them is to say that existence is based on presence or occurrence of something in a particular place or a situation and reality is more of a psychological state (I suppose I’m borrowing from Lacan here). In other words, that which exists is that which takes up space in the perceptible world or is subject to being experienced by the five senses: touch, smell, see, taste, and hear. In this sense, we could say that a book exists, my body exists, that awful smell coming from the sewer, and that dog I hear across the park all exist. Sight is a huge one here, because the things we are able to see with our own eyes make a big impression on us. Combine that sight with touch, and we’re talking about something with a lot of “existence”—especially in this definition of the term. That which is real, then, would be anything that we could say to be “feeling”—emotions, pain, etc. Love would be the most poignant example of something that is real. Love is real, it is undeniable, and it must be dealt with in your world.
It gets a little bit sticky here, because when I say something like, “God doesn’t exist,” I am by no means saying that God isn’t real. I’m saying that he doesn’t have an existence in the sense that I can go up and touch him. When, in the case of, say, a book, its existence is verifiable tactilely. In the same turn, it is possible to say that God is real. God exists as a psychological state that can be “felt.” Love is the same way. You can touch the manifestation of love (i.e. the object of your love as he/she is spooning with you), but there is no way to touch “love.” What does love look like? What does it smell like? What does it taste like? The problem with existence is that it changes for everybody, and this is because everybody’s existence is individual. You might think that reality is the same; however, the interesting thing about it is that because the structures of consciousness do not change from human to human, the real can “feel” more real than anything in existence. This is why love and religion are so powerful.
Most of the time when we experience something that is “real” (most prominently love and religion), what we are experiencing is the structures of consciousness taking over. In part, this is why it is such a wonderfully diverse experience: everything we experience that is associated with the experience is sent from the sensuous experience with the world (the existence) and it then passes through consciousness where it takes on hues that perhaps weren’t there technically, colors seem to pop up out of nowhere. Sunsets are suddenly more beautiful because they are experienced with this “other.” Lazy mornings in bed are all the more perfect. Church services are all the more meaningful. These are all forms of worship in the consciousness. Then, after consciousness, it is reflected into the sub-consciousness where it takes on even further signification. In a way, it’s like a game of telephone that the mind plays with itself. There’s the immediate significance of being there with the person, the sensuous experience. Then, there’s the conscious experience that amplifies (or diminishes) it. Next, there’s the sub-conscious chewing of it into a cud where the original is almost completely lost, but there is the lasting ball of something-or-other that leaves the delicious taste in our mouth. Finally, the reflected reflection is reflected once again into the spirit, where it is something that is felt in terms of the universal. This is where the experience that was so immediate becomes something beyond significant, it becomes a part of the fabric of who I am. It becomes me. That’s the power of the real in terms of the mind. It takes the immediate, the present, and anchors it in the self so that it is a kind of perpetual present, because I am that moment.
It is very tempting to set existence and reality at odds with one another. It is very tempting to say that you should attempt to be inside more than you should be inside the other, that you should trust one more than you should trust the other. On the one hand, the “present” of existence is entirely verifiable because of its sensuousness. I can pick up this coffee cup. I can hear my feet crunching on the trail as I walk. I can touch the bark of this tree. I can see the sun shining on the lake. I can smell the garlic and onions cooking in the pan. I can taste the flavor explosion in my mouth. These are the delicious experiences that make up my existence. The real, on the other hand, being nothing more than a psychological state, is unverifiable from a sensory perspective. But how many stories are there of people “feeling” god moving them in a particular direction, in the present, that changed their entire life? How many people experience the reality of present love that changes their life?
The thing about it all is that the mind is kind of in control of everything. All right, I should amend that statement and say that the brain is in control of everything. There is no way to fight the structures of the consciousness. We all have them. They are observable and have been observable for a very long time. In a way, you could call them a fact of life. Love is real. God is real. While they are still individually determined in terms of the “how” these things are experience, their possibility of reality is consistent. Perhaps that’s the difference: reality also contains the realm of possibility, whereas existence does not.
I have been told that I will never be able to love and that I have never been “in love.” From a personal perspective, I think this is perhaps a bit harsh to yours truly. As a matter of fact, I would say that love has been one of the driving forces of my entire existence; however, this is neither here nor there because love is a personal experience of the conscious experience of being with another person. What I mean to say is that perhaps why it might sometimes seem that my love is something other than love is because it exists in this realm of incredible possibility. Reality is not static. Reality is infused with the flavor of possibility, of nutty eternity, of mad infinity, and it only follows that love, at least in my experience of it, ought to be infused with the same flavors.
(For some reason I feel it necessary here to clarify that this eternity and infinity is not the same as “’til death do us part.” That is a lifetime. I’m talking about the possibilities of experience the reality of existence now.)
We’re combining the head the heart I suppose. We ARE both of them anyway.
It is entirely possible that, in this life I am leading, and with these views I’m holding, I will wind up cold and alone and stranded in solitude. I ask too much. I know.
It has also been my experience that there are certain things to compromise: the color of a room, when to go out, what to have for dinner, etc, etc, all the things that don’t actually matter in other words. When it comes to the state of the existence and the reality of possibility, it best not to compromise. Be now, with the understanding that rapid change is always possible. I never know what tomorrow brings. It is a blessing and curse. It is a consistent adventure, but it is also quite scary. My mom said to me yesterday, “Nothing you do surprises me anymore.” Across the world? Have fun. You did what? Wow. Who knows? In the infinite, eternal, present existence exists the reality of possibility.

Head and Heart

Some questions were never meant to be answered. “Why are we here?” springs to mind rapidly. That question is predicated on the assumption that you can know. You can’t know why, and it is pure arrogance to assume that you can know the answer to a question that goes so far back in history that there will never be any documentation. I should point out that this is from the technical, “proper” standpoint of “Why” as a question dealing with history. Any time you ask “Why,” you are asking a question of history. “Why did you do that?” Why did you do that thing that happened in the past? “Why are you going that?” What result are you hoping to gain from what you’re doing? “Why are you here?” What series of events led you to be where you are? Given that we can never properly know the scope and sequence of events that led to the present, it’s a preposterous question. Given the possibilities and probabilities of all that CAN happen in the future, it is a preposterous question. Questions like these can be interesting to explore, and they can lead to some fascinating self-discovery; however, it should also be noted that asking these questions is a little bit like trying to tear down K2 one rock at a time, single-handed. You could work for five consecutive lifetimes and not get any closer.
My personal preference, when it comes to these kinds of questions, is “What are you doing?” I love the present continuous tense. It is now, and it is perpetual. It forces you to take a look at what you are doing and to describe it as it is, honestly. It’s kind of like something I read about Buddhism (I think it was Zen, specifically) not too long ago:
“If you’re peeling potatoes, most of your major religions will try to remind you of everything external about where the potatoes came from and where you came from and where your praise ought to go. In Buddhism, just peel the potatoes.”
That’s what you’re doing. In a way, none of that other stuff matters. You see, where the potatoes came from doesn’t matter because the potatoes are there now. You bought them or grew them or whatever, and whatever the situation, they are there now. It doesn’t matter where the potatoes are going because you could trip and fall and send them flying into the trash can—where they would probably stay—and who can say it’s never happened to them? Don’t worry about it. Just peel the damned potatoes and appreciate being there at the time you’re doing it. Finished. It might make you smile when you realize what a distinct privilege it is to be there and alive and peeling those potatoes in that corner time in that corner of space in the world. Be where you are, not where you could be or where you were.
Well, I’ve managed to get pretty sidetracked by these abstractions here, but let’s get down to brass tacks: there are questions that aren’t meant to be answered and can never be answered (see above), and there are questions which are meant to be answered but can’t ever be answered, and there are questions are never meant to be answered but can, and there are questions which are meant to be answered and can be answered.
As it regards the second category of question, the biggest one is: what happens when we die? We are all meant to answer this question, but it will cost us our life, and can therefore never be answered in a technical sense. We can only answer it when we take the steps necessary to answer it, which ends in our inability to answer it. That’s kind of a bummer. All I’m going to say about the possibilities of an after-life is this: you can have faith and you can believe and I’m not going to stop you because you can never KNOW—and let’s just make double clear here that I’m talking about knowing in the head sense, not the heart sense.
Questions of the never meant to be answered but can be answered generally fall into the realm of tragedy. You should never know what a Holocaust looks like, but we’ve seen it. You aren’t supposed to know what it feels like to kill somebody, but you can. There’s something in this, an object petit a that I’m missing (or rather that could be developed), but here, now, we’re going to move on to…
Question that you are meant to know the answer to and questions that you can know the answer to. These are generally questions about overcoming fear. These are the questions where heart knowledge pushes one to brain knowledge. You feel something, but you don’t know it in your head. You feel it, but you haven’t experienced it. One of the greatest questions for this is: “What do you do when that which you want looks at you and says, ‘I want you, too’?”
You feel like you’re meant to know. You feel like you can know. The only thing standing in your way is the obstacle of the self, of the fear that is inherent in following feeling. Emotion is not knowledge. Experience is knowledge. Emotion is hope. The problem is that emotion is real. I AM this feeling. This is the inherent problem with love. We feel it. We experience it, but it never “exists”—in the sense that we can feel it physically (and don’t confuse feeling physically with the ephemeral touch of another… because that is sensory perception feeling and different). Love is Real. Love doesn’t exist. It’s kind of like God.
“What does love feel like?” is a question best left to poets who can write:
“Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows

and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.”
That’s what love “feels” like, but you can’t touch it.
The key here is freedom. Most people are actually afraid of their freedom. You are free to do anything. “Don’t tell people that!” You are. I’m not even sorry to say it. You are completely free to do whatever you want. Should you do whatever you want is a different question. Can you do whatever you want? Yes. That’s kind of a scary idea for people.
“What about my job? What about my career? What will people think? What do I do with X? What about this? What about that?”
Those are all valid questions, but they can all be dismissed with the doing. That’s freedom. Your job and your career? If it’s really what you want to do, then you’re fine. If not, then why are you there? Screw ‘em. Why punish yourself for the rest of your life because THEY expect you to be there. People will think what they will. They always have and they always will. Screw ‘em. Let ‘em think what they want, for they see only in part, but when in comes to YOUR life, YOU see in full. Your things and possessions, as almost every religion will tell you, are holding you back anyway. You can’t run away from your problems, let’s get that straight, but you can sure as hell get far enough away that they are not oppressing. Fear. Fear. Fear. Sometimes what it boils down to is a fear to truly live. How did those voices of experience get to where they are? Experience. Why take somebody’s word for it when you can KNOW. When you can BE it. When you can DO it. When you can GO. Respect is due to those whose theory matches their experience: they know in mind and soul. You failed? It’ll be hard. It might be the hardest thing you’ve ever experienced. But now you KNOW, head and heart.

The Importance of Being Tuesday

As a soft Korean rain falls outside my window, I reflect on my day. You see, today is Tuesday. Normally, I suppose Tuesday doesn’t mean all that much. To be sure, Tuesday generally, simply, hangs around as one of those extra appendage days of the week. It certainly doesn’t have the reproachful aura of a Monday. It certainly isn’t somewhat positive like that Hump-Day Wednesday business. Thursday has a strange aura because it is so close to the weekend, and if you went to a college where there were classes on Monday/Wednesday/Friday and different classes on Tuesday/Thursday, you would probably even say that Thursday was the start of the weekend. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are too obvious to even touch, which leaves Tuesday in a really awkward place.
One regular day (“what kind of days are regular” is the obvious question to ask here) just over one month ago on a Monday, I was walking to work and pondering this exact question of what each day of the week “means.” What I came up with, in brief, is explained about, and I decided to do something about that Tuesday business.
I am by nature a very spiritual person. To be sure, my grandfather, my father, and at least one uncle are ordained ministers in Church—mainly Southern Baptist (or just Baptist). At any rate, you can probably imagine that I spent many, many days of my formative years in and around dealing with spirituality—although from a purely technical standpoint it is important to say here that what I was actually working through was Religion. At any rate, I have a lot of history with Spirit.
Recently, as a matter of fact, I finished reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and I highly recommend it to anyone with the slightest bit of interest in matters of religion and faith and spirituality. Just before Augustine, I finished Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and the world of spirituality was swimming around my head. Finally, as I am currently residing in Asia, I have been investigating the eastern traditions of spirituality, too—a focused reading of the Tao Teh Ching and a long study of a book called May All Beings Be Happy by a Seon Buddhist monk named Beop Jeong. With all of these various traditions of spirit running around my head, I decided to take Tuesday and see what happens, what kind of importance it gains, when we invest it with some spirituality. Being an at least fairly diligent ontologist, the question was: how?
That’s when it struck me that there is something that really combines everything. There is something out there that has history and roots in every major religion. There is something out there that goes beyond religion and touches on humanity itself. There is a spiritual experience out there that every individual experiences every day whether they realize it or not. Have you guessed what it is?
Food. Nourishment. Fasting.
I have long had a very intimate relationship with food. I was once asked what my three favorite foods were, and my response was:
1) Super fresh. As in, I just got these from my garden out back. I grew them, and now I’m going to eat them. This food is intensely good to me. I just had some shellfish at a beach in South Korea where they had basically just pulled everything out of the water that morning. It… was… incredible.
2) Handmade/homemade. It might take a little bit longer to make, and I can guarantee you it will, but I will always prefer something that has been loved for a few extra minutes to something instant. The last time I had Mexican food was in Korea and we couldn’t find any tortillas, so I made them from scratch (I haven’t had the opportunity to it in a while, but my skills were still there), and the mouth can taste love.
3) Anything with good people and good drinks. It is entirely possible to eat anything, including food that might taste horrible, but if you are with the right people and the right bottle of wine, the beauty and spirituality of the experience come out. The other night I had the opportunity to make dinner and share a bottle of wine with somebody I care about, and there is almost nothing else that I would rather eat than those moments spent together.
So, I already have a spiritual association with food. Add to this the fact that I am incredibly adventurous with food and you’ll see how deep the spirituality goes. “Oh, people eat this, huh? Well, gimme some, let’s see.”
The other day I was sitting with a friend of mine at the shellfish feast I mentioned earlier, and she said to me something like, “I really prefer to have food I know,” when it struck me that I would almost PREFER to have food that I have never eaten before. If you know you’ll like something, there is no adventure. If you don’t know, you can turn it into a spiritual adventure.
Finally, the reality of the human experience is such that without food or nourishment for a long period of time, we would die. Food is necessary. You could almost say that we are food. I am by no means advocating that old saying, “You are what you eat”—although there may be a nugget of truth in there—what I am saying is that we exist in the perpetual need for food. That need IS who we are.
And so, Tuesday’s are fasting days. It is too difficult to fast on the weekends. I am a fairly weak person when it comes to food, and I very often find myself out with some of my very favorite people every weekend enjoying number three mentioned above. I know myself at least well enough to know that attempting to fast on the weekend was right out. Monday already has enough going for it—or against it as… as you will. Wednesdays I go into town and play the guitar and get to be with my people. Thursday was up in the air. Friday… well, Friday might as well be the weekend, eh? Essentially, the deciding factor was eenie-meenie-minie-moe, catch a tiger by its toe, if it hollers make him pay, fifty dollars every day, my momma told me to pick the very best one and you are it. Tuesday it was.
I have been fasting every Tuesday for a month with absolutely no religious intent. I fully understand that this is perhaps nothing new, and it is certainly not new from a religious standpoint. However, I have already been able (even in the relatively short time of this experiment) to observe some interesting things. First, I always appreciate food much more on Wednesday than I did on Monday. To look down at the bowls of soup and rice before me at family meal on Wednesday MEANS more than it did on Monday, and I’m working on a way to make it mean the same thing both days. Second, I’m not really all that hungry on Wednesday morning. I’ve become very aware of the fact of the habit of eating, and how the body gets used to doing eating at certain times. In this place and at this time, I am not much of a breakfast guy, and my body has gotten used to only having a cup of coffee, so the need isn’t really there when I wake up. Third, it is simply a will power workout. When you realize that you CAN say no to food for an entire day, you realize that you can do other things. Your brain is shocked into the realization that there is nothing to stop it from making an entirely new decision in its way of being. At least… that’s how I experience it.