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?