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