Wondering Again

It would seem that the most common activity for me to engage in—for what seems like the last umpteen years of my existence—is the simple act of wondering.

I’ve been trying desperately lately to come up with some kind of delineation between thinking and reasoning that will account for the difference between them.

Inconspicuously, it would seem, lines tend to draw themselves where they oughtn’t to be, and onlookers begin wondering where exactly these demarcations come from.

Style and content are constantly connected while simultaneously being creatures of difference: contain them and they escape, free them and they only coagulate.

It is convenient to think that everything in the world exists in only the three shades of non-color, but that’s to do a disservice to combination and absence, isn’t it?

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian is a funny word to me—sitting up in that auspicious space along side such words as: wobbly, uvula, bovicide, and guttersnipe.

In Korea, when you’re teaching phonics, as funny as it is, you’re supposed to correct the children who are mispronouncing the words six as sex and fox as fuc*$.

Have you ever notice that when you finish reading a book your life is somehow changed, your perception has someway been altered, and something is different.

Considered at a different level, any kind of reading is practice in an art that is distinctly human: deciphering the meaning of symbols plopped onto a field.

Considered even further, reading material of a challenging bent is a taxing task for human reason, and it could be said that exercising reason is exercising humanity.

Considerate people are becoming fewer and farther between for inexplicable reasons, although I would have to blame the Enlightenment and Adam Smith.

It is at this point that I should also very much like to thank the Enlightenment thinkers and Adam for their contribution to the world of letters and understanding.

It is at this point that I ought to make very clear that all good ideas can be morphed into bad ideas: religion, Marxism, democracy, monarchy, anarchy, wisdom.

Dash-adding is a common-place element-in-the-closet for philosophers, bakers, chefs, people-of-repute, people-of-disrepute, and all those ne’er-do-wells.

Extricate yourself, please, for the love of god, from excessive, some would say ridiculous, superfluous comma usage, and I, who care, will be happy.

Complaining has never made anything better, she said to me. I responded back quickly that it certainly made me FEEL better, and that’s anything isn’t it? She responded that she supposed she had been casting a rather wide net using a ridiculous word such as anything that can mean everything, nothing, a car, a word, a meaning, a place, a noun, a verb, a book, a drink, a person, a trash can, a phone, a key, and anything else that you can put an ‘a’ in front of, but it was up to me to not take her out of context and understand which—which she was sure I did. What was there to say except, I’m sorry you feel ways about stuff: it can be a real drag when you’ve been given only two lines to say something exceptional. Of course this lead to an even greater misunderstanding of what I was actually attempting to mean versus what was conveyed, and this conversation (if it could be called such at this point) was well on its way to the resolution that perhaps it’s impossible to ever convey precisely what you mean when language is your only mode of transportation. What’s with all the talk about boats, she said as a loud thump on the wall made both of us jump nearly out of our skin—me thinking about what a phrase like “out of our skin” actually means and she thinking that somebody had obviously been killed with a blow to the head from a blunt object. Did you hear that? Of course I heard it, I said, I have a BS degree in Hearing and Auditory Sciences from Castiglia University in Firshampton Bay, New Cataractistica, just south of Bis. What the hell are you ever talking about? she rightfully queried. I’m not sure your over-active intelligence could sink so low as to appropriately grasp the simplicity of what I’m attempting to accomplish. You see… she cut me off with a wide-eyed stare and a finger raised to her lips when another epic-sounding thump bounced through the wall from our neighbors in 12C.
Death is the specter haunting US this evening, she said, I’m absolutely certain of it. How like us all, I pensively offered, but weren’t we attempting to have a conversation about something of great import before these rascals next to us decided to go about thrashing each other about and committed crimes that will inevitably lead to a lousy night of sleep for everybody involved. Why is that all you ever think about is sleep? It’s important for invigorated cogitations. When was the last time you considered help? Well, to seriously consider help, one must consider all the ontological ramifications of the question: what is help? Help means different things to different people, and it is entirely possible that what is helpful to Peter—which might well be the return of some lost goods, is not what is helpful to Paul—who is perfectly content with his lot in the whole ordeal. Yes, she said, I can see how that is wise, but I can also see that your inability to see without using your eyes is hampered by the plank of incomprehensibility. Pray, do you know the plank of incomprehensibility? she asked. I have made a very intimate acquaintance on more than one occasion with the aforementioned plank, and I should like you to know that it, she, he, we, they, you, and I have come to an understanding? And what, if I might inquire, is that? It’s where two people, in dispute, discuss matters to such an extent that there is an agreement, or, at the very least, an accord between them. Extraordinarily helpful, but you know what I meant. Did I? Do I? Don’t you? Don’t you what? No… don’t you? Wait… don’t you? or don’t I? If I had said don’t I that wouldn’t have made any sense. It is a question direct to you. I thought you were being ironic. No, just a bit silly. Have you learned anything? When it comes to antagonistic thumping, let it be known that death is absolutely certain, and sometimes dying is the most succulent activity the brain can engage in—apart from leaving prepositions at the end of the sentences they’re in.

Things Written Outside Family Mart

in Busan, South Korea with a pitcher (1L) of beer, a bottle of soju and a bowl of ramyun noodles.
I have on my Waegukin hat right now. Whenever I am in an area that is saturated with us, I feel strangely ill at ease. I am still terrible at shopping. I am still not good at getting girls to sleep with me, but apparently I am talented. Or, at least I have been told so for a couple of mediums (read: writing and music). What do you do when you’re Paul Varjak?
I always want people to sit down and tell me their lives.
Busan would be a very different experience for me, I know that much, but why do I always run away from things that seem like they will mean something in the future?
A Filipino family has set up a convenience store outside of the convenience store, and the store is their van. They seem happy.
Set me straight. Buy me beers and set me straight.
I surprised the hell out of my friend last night be being American. Is it so hard to believe?
There are big things coming in the next short time. I feel them percolating, and soon it will be time to serve them up. The future is a blank slate. We defile with our created meanings. What will you? Just put the pen on the page and see what spews forth.
I am at the scene of previous exploits, wandering through significant memories. You remember when “that” happened? Of course you do. But always bear (bare) in mind the significance of the past tense.
Yesterday I walked for eight straight hours (including four hours of city walking and four hours on a couple of mountains), spent six hours in a spa for eight dollars, went to the beach, played a show that lasted almost two hours, got heroically drunk, played the after hours show, went to a bar where cute girls talk to you while you drink—one of them was dressed as a chicken, before retiring the day at my friend’s rooftop flat.
That’ll do it, hey? If for that one day, the weekend was full.
Hey, remember that time when you slept so softly next to me? It was here in this place that we touched something. What was it? Why do I have to be so intense? When will I learn how to have fun with relationships and words and meaning and all that the world would have me understand?
I wish I understood things. I wish I could concentrate on things for longer than five hours at a time. I wish the world would rotate backwards for just one day, long enough to fuck everybody up, and then return to normal. I wish the best minds of my generation had a voice to say what they see. I wish the minds of my generation weren’t blind. I wish the reality and pain of eternal separation from meaning on no man, but it’s what we are all stuck with. I wish I could see as a Korean sees. I wish life made sense—when it so clearly doesn’t (and that is its beauty). I wish I had some insight into what it is about society that seems to foster a sense of money. I wish anybody could understand why it is impossible to own money. The one thing that makes “ownership” possible—or is it?—can never be said to be something you own, only something you have. If it were consistently seen in this light, don’t you think that we’d understand more about life? It is all fleeting. You own nothing. You are given the care of it for a short time, and the only thing that really, truly matters is the actual care that you give to it: what kind of use you make of it, how you allow it to help humanity, and the utter, delicious, beautiful meaninglessness of it in the long run.
Don’t give me this crap about an after-life, and please don’t call it believe because believing is based on experience. Faith is what it is, but it CAN be totally groundless. Jesus arose from the grave. Lazarus arose from the grave. Did they come back from heaven? If Lazarus was a good man, and ostensibly in heaven, don’t you think he’d be mad if Jesus brought him back to earth? Perhaps heaven is the rest the mind can take when it’s dead, and the nutrients the body gives back to nature that breathed life into it.
It can be amazing what we will endure for the sake of endurance. She’s tall and thin, she’s short and fat, and all we want is to feel something, anything for a pure moment. Keep an eye out for what will come, it might take unexpected forms.
What do the Korean police do, exactly? Or, maybe a more appropriate question would be: what is it about the USA that keeps our boys in blue so busy?
The obvious answer is crime. What is that nature of this crime? Everything. What is it about the USA that makes the crime so rampant? The unwavering devotion to not giving a shit about fuck. Does the fact that the cops actually carry guns exacerbate the issue? Probably. Maybe. Causes and effects are necessarily related. The question is: how?
“What?” is a way of looking at the world honestly. “How?” is a way of making all the necessary connections that exist.
Which one can I bone?
If it were possible, could you break the back of the established guilt purveyors? They sell it as if it’s free, but don’t we all know the truth? You ought to feel guilty for this. Please feel guilty for that. Drink down the insignificant significance.
We’ll feed you until you defeat us.
Hahahaha!
(you never will)
Congestion is relative,
by which I mean, of course,
that relatives
can congest the most free-flowing
of folk.
Friends will do the same,
and things we can’t control—
by which I mean most of a life—
but the trick at this point is fully
to invest yourself in decongestants.
Clear the sinuses with a good book.
Free those nasal passages in writing.
Create your pain away.
Accept the things you can’t control.
Forever seek to control
absolutely nothing.
Remember life is really good if you
simply let it be, and follow purely
spiritual whims to
the ends they’ll carry
you to.

Classes

I startled myself today with the realization that I’m pretty sure I have never left university. What I mean is that the habits I developed in university have stayed with me since then, possibly more than any other time in my life.

Normally, especially with the way most university students go about living, this might not be the healthiest or most advantageous form of living on the face of the planet, but my particular manifestation of it has some interesting quirks. The imbibing of intoxicating chemicals is still around, but in a far, far, far… um, far diminished form. That’s what university is about isn’t it: let’s drink until we can’t feel feelings any more five nights (and sometimes days) a week. Ah, well, you grow up eventually, and a couple of post-work relaxation beverages covers your needs with maybe a heavy night on the weekend for fun.

There is also still the tendency to keep late hours. This is not anything new for me really because I have been a chronic insomniac since I was in middle school; however, what I learned about myself in university is that if I exhaust myself absolutely thoroughly in both a mental and a physical way, sleep will come. As I thought it was very important to study before playing, and there was usually a lot of wrestling practice before studying, this actually worked out pretty well for me. I would be exhausted from working that day (I worked two part-time jobs), going to classes, going to wrestling practice, and spending a few hours in the library, so sleep was never too far away from me.

Those heady days are reminiscences of my undergraduate work, and it struck me as if all of a sudden that my graduate days were pretty similar. I was working a part-time overnight job in Manhattan (a labor intensive affair that actually caused me to lose thirty pounds), while being a full-time Master’s student in Queens, and juggling all of that with a girlfriend. There was always travel, work, reading, studying, writing, late nights, and at this point I was starting my guitar studies as well.

All of which brings me to Korea. The place that I find myself now (which is to say South Korea) has been very good to me. If you have ever had any desire whatsoever to teach English as a second language, Korea comes highly recommended. Korea can be everything you want it to be, whatever you want it to be, and everything you don’t want it to be. It’s that last one that you have to watch out for, but what will happen in that case is a personal growth and development that is beyond comprehension—you will be different. At any rate, Korea has been very good to me.

Last year, I was in almost complete hermitage. I was in the process of writing a book, and it took up most of my year; however, in order to cull enough fodder for the book from the year, I had to go out and do interesting things (climbing mountains, mudfests, wandering into unknown cities, trying all sorts of new food, and generally finding myself in the most out-of-the-way places that a foreigner could find him or herself), and this took up a lot of time. Beyond that, I was furiously reading and developing my understanding of myself and human beings: from Buddhist readings to philosophy to history to novels to classics and everything in between. Finally, there was a load of guitar practice that happened every week.

I’m not sure who else on the planet is stuck in the mode of being a perpetual student, but I find that my days are happiest when I spend them studying for most of the day, working hard, and playing hard whenever I get a chance. My days are like a personal university that I am putting myself through, and there is even a kind of schedule and what you could call classes.

Music A: The learning and memorization of works of music by other artists.
Music B: The creation of original music.
Literature: The examination of a work of classic literature (right now it’s “The Story of
My Life” by Giacomo Casanova).
Philosophy: David Hume’s “A Treatise of Human Nature”
Creative Writing: Currently working on a short story to be submitted to a journal and poetry is a consistent activity
Languages: I study Korean three times a week in an attempt to see how the acquisition of a second language affects the way a person thinks

The more I consider it, the more I feel like I’m in training, but it’s for something that I’m not sure will ever happen. The other day I read: “You bank on your pursuits to give you happiness, thus confusing means with ends.” Banking on pursuits will bring you only sadness, while pursuing will see you only consistently advancing. It’s difficult because we don’t know what we’re really striving for—the future being as unknowable as it is—but we know we’re working towards something. I feel like this needs a little bit of a further explication, and what I mean is that there is now way to say exactly how our goals will manifest themselves. Let’s say your goal is simply to be the CEO of a business. If that’s your only goal, you might wake up and find one day that you have achieved your goal: you are the CEO of a business dedicated to midget porn. Your goal, technically, has been achieved. You worked toward achieving it, and you did, but you couldn’t have known at the outset (unless you had said to yourself “I want to be the CEO of a business that is dedicated to midget porn”) what the manifestation of it would be.

I have always wanted to be a traveler, and I have traveled a lot. The vagueness of the goal hasopened up avenues and vistas that I had never thought possible, but it also manages to surprise me on a daily basis, and there is something to be said for stability. Everybody, on every day of their life, is training to be the person they will become. What you are doing consistently, every day, is determining the kind of person that you are going to become in the future. You will not decide to be a champion bike rider on Monday and win the Tour de France the next Friday. It is the same in existence. What kind of existence do you want to have? What are you doing today to develop the kind of person that you want to be in the future? Look at what you’re doing regularly, and understand that this is probably what you’re going to do until you make a radical decision to change your training regimen. It’s as easy as recognition, but you have to really see, and remember that slow is the way of nature.

Trying Very Hard

Right now my brain is a bit muddled. It is in the process of attempting to connect the dots between Giacomo Casanova, David Hume, Epictetus, quasi-miracles, Frank McCourt, and teaching phonics. The most obvious connection is that I’m dealing with all of these things on an incredibly regular basis currently. But there is always some way in which the things most seemingly unconnected can be connected.
All right, I fully understand that there is danger in attempting to make connections between the unconnected. This is, as a matter of fact, South Park’s bread and butter: what kind of ridiculous non sequitur crap is going on in the world at the moment. A beaver dam collapsed, people are stranded on their roofs, and it’s obvious that the REAL cause of the problem is global warming.
Epictetus warns us that we should consistently call things by their right names:
“When we name things correctly, we comprehend them correctly, without adding information or judgments that aren’t there. Does someone bathe quickly? Don’t’ say he bathes poorly, but quickly. Name the situation as it is; don’t filter it through your judgments. Does someone drink a lot of wine? Don’t say she’s a drunk, but that she drinks a lot. Unless you possess a comprehensive understanding of her life, how do you know if she is a drunk? … Give your assent only to what is actually true.”
This has actually been a big theme of my time here in Korea: what is the right name for something. I remember the first time I looked at a 5000Won note and said in my head, “Sweet, I still have oh-cheon-won.” The fact of the matter is that it is not five thousand won. It is oh-cheon-won. That seems like a really minor example, but the effect is astounding. Korea is actually ripe with madness for calling things by their correct names. My Korean Made Easy book has this to say:
“In Korea, people are addressed by titles based on age and position, which are complex even for Koreans! … So now you may understand the reason Koreans almost always exchange business cards upon first meeting—these cards contain each person’s appropriate title.”
This idea of calling things by their right names is a rampant issue in modern society. For example, I recently was presented with the argument from a farmer that large-scale, factory farming is more efficient and therefore more sustainable. Here we are presented with exactly the kind of non sequitur that ought to be avoided: efficiency and sustainability are exclusive terms. One does not imply the other, and they are only barely even related. What he meant to say was that large-scale, factory farming is more efficient that small-scale, organic farming at producing large amounts of product because that’s what efficiency actually implies.
Extending this idea into the world of literature, I have been recently reading over Giacomo Casanova’s conversations with Voltaire that he recounts in “The Story of My Life,” and when your life is constantly running between languages, you are placed in the very difficult position of ensuring that you are consistently being accurate in your naming of things. More than once in the text he refers to times when he is embarrassed in France by his inappropriate turns of phrase or inaccurate verbiage due to his Venetian heritabe, and being in Korea—with its multitudes of titles and ambiguousness in accuracy for determining those titles—has made me feel his pain very acutely.
The most obvious arena for this discussion is in philosophy, language theory, and the discussion of what words actually mean. What is an idea? What is a thought? Defining the simplest terms is sometimes the highest goal of philosophy. Hume is attempting to differentiate between things like belief and THE IDEA of a belief. What’s the difference? Is it significant? What if it is? More importantly, he’s trying to figure out what the difference is between cause and effect, and THE IDEA of cause and effect. Imagine if you will that not every existent thing has to have a cause prior to it.
This really messed me up today. Think about it for a second in terms of your own life. Your existence right now is not determined by some previous cause. Even if you were to say that you were caused by your mom and dad having sex you could fall into error very easily. That sex was merely the canvas on which your existence was to be painted. That would be like saying that the canvas Leondardo purchased caused the painting of the Mona Lisa. The reality is that the effect of their sex was the man ejaculating into the woman. That’s it.
This question has been messing with me lately as well: what of the spirit? Reading Rudolph Steiner a while ago gave me the messed up idea that the spirit is outside the body, wrapping it like a glove. At first, this idea made a lot of sense because I believe wholeheartedly in the Joni Mitchell-an “touching of souls,” but it also seemed strange that the spirit would simply exist outside the self. What I have come to think in the last few weeks is that the spirit permeates the self and extends beyond it. Yes, it does exist outside of the self, but it also manages to saturate the body with its essence. I have recently come to really hate the idea of the spirit being inside me: how can I share something that is doomed to remain inside me. No. I like this idea of a saturating, permeating, extending spirit that can touch people.
Frank McCourt is an Irish-American who taught in New York City for thirty years. Teaching is one of the most honorable professions that any human being can engage in, but I want to qualify this statement by saying that it is a profession that should never be entered into lightly. What is education? To call it by it’s right name would be to say that it is the foundation of the human character. It is everything. One of my students today said, in the course of a grammar lesson about “used to”: People used to think that food was really important, but now we know that money is more important than food.” She didn’t learn that from experience, she learned that from the education she achieved. (In a bit of a side note, I went ballistic, but they couldn’t even imagine a world in which there were no supermarkets from which to purchase food.) The question Mr. McCourt seems to be posing is: what is education?
To be honest, I leave it up to my phonics kids. They teach me almost more than Hume and Epictetus and Casanova together. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent twenty minutes of your life trying to teach six-year-olds the difference between pup and pop. The Korean word for rice is pronounced pop, and, even at six years old, these kids have been saying pop for the bulk of their life. After twenty minutes of repeating the pronunciation of pup for them, they still didn’t get it. Imagine the power of the mind that allows for this kind of thing. At six years old the mind is already very powerfully trained. Imagine the kind of training it has received, and how much experience it has, at calling things by the names it’s been taught to call things. The final question is, what if all that education, all that time being taught what to call something, is fallacious, and you wind up calling something by its wrong name anyway? “To live outside the law you must be honest.”