say. Thank you, Bob. It is difficult to organize thoughts that are coming randomly. In the last five or six hours of my consciousness, and I would imagine that previous to that time while I was sleeping, my mind, as most normal human beings mind’s, has moved through an incredible range of reflective topics. The mind is an absolutely fascinating, unbelievably powerful, deliciously comprehensive muscle. It can be developed, as any other muscle to perform unrealistic feats.
I just thought about how you always give me what I need. Previous to that I was contemplating the budding trees outside my window and wondering why they can’t be like that always—and if I would appreciate them if they were.
When we are young, the mind is so supple. I remember a brief period of my life where I wandered around the world ensuring that I appreciated things as much as I ought to, and I say “things” intentionally: the ostrich egg on my table, the eyeglass case full of insight, and the plastic bottle full of life-giving water. But this is a double-edged sword because sometimes we ascribe to dear a value on things that do not deserve them: our cars, our jobs, our careers, the merchandise we’re selling, our TVs, and our iPhones.
And it’s funny the way history can move so slowly sometimes, moving like the last drip of molasses from the spoon, and then turn around the next day and move like a heavy metal guitar solo. I think it moves just right when set to the rhythm of the blues. But I have come so far from the boy I was only four years ago, and I have come so far from the boy I was only two years ago. The tumultuous upheaval of history can make a body somewhat seasick. Bill Martin and Bob Avakian would disagree with Stephen Dedalus in that history is not a nightmare that they are trying to wake up from it’s something they’re trying to learn from. Or maybe waking up is learning: “I have a vision, too.”
It’s that kind of music that just makes you want to put yo’ head in yo’ hands, and cry.
I like fixing things. Today I fixed the broken leg of my coffee table that’s been wobbling for well on a couple of months. Then, in a spirit of DIY, I went over to the door that has been hanging off of its hinges for the last week and fixed that son of a bitch, too. I forgot that this was something I used to do for a living when I was in college. Paint, patch, fix, mow, repair, install, and entertain. That’s what I learned how to do while I was learning how to read.
Fuck that pronoun “you,” it just means too much. You, who? It means absolutely nothing out of context. And indefinite pronoun they call it. It’s nice having a you, no matter who you are.
My arms felt longer than usual again yesterday. This is always an odd phenomenon for me to experience. I just get up, stand up, and there at my sides hang the longest appendages I have ever seen. I can scratch that itch on the back of my knee with ZERO effort. I can touch the ten-foot ceiling above my head. I can reach out and touch somebody’s soul. They are mystical, you see. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I think it feels nice.
Decisions made in a rush can often be hard to keep to, if only because when you absolutely HAVE to make a decision, it is in the heat of the moment, and you are only doing what you feel is the best decision for that moment. The next moment you could realize that your previous decision was composed mostly of dogs bollocks and you immediately change strategies…difficult to stick by. I decided today that I would travel back to that place where I told everybody the truth all the time. My job makes me a liar. It forces my language to conceal as it reveals, and the true mark of professionalism is knowing what to conceal and when and how and what to reveal and when and how. Get some perspective.
I think I would choose to be a merman, even if it was against the will of god.
I’m just so happy when I see you happy. It’s kind of unsettling, and I think about the sublime. And I think about love, too. And I think about how terrifying beauty is so related to love is so related to Jimi.
To do what one wants, is not that the desire of most of humanity? You certainly don’t want to do what somebody else wants you to do, unless it’s helping you get where you’re going. We make decisions like that all the time. I don’t really want to do this, but I believe that it is moving me towards my ultimate goal, so I’m going to go with my intuition here and move in that direction. I just want to go with how I feel.
Like my only job here is to care for and covet you, dear.
The body has come back to me lately—funny how something like that can “come back”: my mangled right hand with the scar from twenty-seven stitches, the scar from skin grafting, and the thumb that you think is resting on top of the joint from that time you dislocated it wrestling in Oklahoma at the Junior Duals and never got it even looked at. I’ve lost a lot of weight…apparently. When I came to where I am, I wore a forty-four. When I got to where I’m at, I wear a thirty-six. I’ve lost eight inches off of my waist by doing next to nothing more than I usually do, eating healthier, and keeping my body’s well-being front of mind.
He said as he lit his cigarette. Front of mind: historical materialism. What am I to you? How are you? Would you?
I love those very brief moments in my life when the brain can rattle along its merry path unencumbered. There is an incredible freedom in it: skipping down a dirt trail through the mountains.
Maybe I’ll teach high school in Oregon, I thought to myself.
History is moving quickly now, and I’m strangely comfortable with its velocity.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
It's Hard to Know How to
feel. Right now I’m experiencing something that is disturbing me at a fundamental level. There is a sense inside me that I ought to be feeling a certain way, which is to say I think I feel pretty bad. Now, the disturbing part is that I’m sure I know if that’s the appropriate way to feel. It is a strange disconnect.
But it always begs further questions doesn’t it? Why do we feel in the first place? Is our emotional or psychological or intuitive feeling any different from a hand re-coiling from a flame, a tongue in the throes of jouissance from some delectable dish manufactured from loving hands, or eyes burning from looking at the sun? Can we separate the way we feel?
Perhaps brain-mapping can tell us things about what parts of our brains feel. As a matter of fact, I’m sure that somewhere, somebody has already strapped a willing test subject to a table, attached diodes to his head, and has screenshot after screenshot of how the brain feels. I guess I’m a generally distrusting person, and I’m sure that these brain mappings have some validity; however, the question for me is how we ought to feel, which is an entirely different thing…I think.
When I get spitting bacon grease on my lightly haired torso, I ought to feel a little sting. When we kill somebody brutally by bashing in their cranium with the broken leg of a coffee table, we ought to feel remorse. When we taste something foul, we ought to spit it out. And yet there are exceptions to every rule: people who cannot feel their skin, sociopaths, and people with no taste.
It’s not an exact proportion, you understand. It’s not like a one-to-one correlation where for every one sociopath there is one person who feels what he ought to, but there are certainly enough of them out there that their level of aberration is at least somewhat suspect. Like they ought to be there. Filling out the an Aristotelian spectrum of sorts, where the two ends would be feeling wrong at the wrong time in the wrong way (either in excess or deficiency) and the mean would be feeling the right thing at the right time in the right way. But, as always, the difficulty here is having the right perspective on where the two ends are so you can have a somewhat vague idea where the mean might be.
Here’s the rub, as the bard once called it: with the conglomeration of events from the past fortnight—including but not limited to exhaustion, financial crises, knifings, shooting, emotional crises, and insomnia—I really ought to feel like I’m losing my mind. My ex-girlfriend’s stalker got stabbed in the kitchen of the restaurant he works at. True story. I have had zero dollars in my pocket and negative funds in the bank for longer than my stomach thinks advisable. A drunk man ran into the wall in front of my house as he was being chased by the police, got out of the car and started unloading a clip on the red-blue-flashing cars around him. It is STILL a not uncommon thing for me to be awake for more hours consecutively than can be contained in a day. Even when I get into bed I have to budget in an extra hour for the time it will take me to fall asleep—and pray to god that’s enough.
But I’m surprisingly comfortable in this place.
I feel most comfortable in a place where things are not making any sense. I feel most alive when I cannot control the future. I feel most at home when I don’t know where home is. I feel most in control when things are spiraling out of control. I feel most sane where it’s farthest away. It all feels most natural.
That’s why I guess it’s hard to know how to feel. I have to take into account how I feel about how I feel. I don’t know how to feel things in a normal way, but I have to trust in my feelings.
Acting. That’s what it is. We’re all acting—in a very stage way. The job of the thespian is to put as much of themselves into this character as they possible can in order for it to come off right. If they don’t invest enough of themselves, the character is rendered flat on the stage. If we don’t give enough of ourselves to the characters we’re playing, they are rendered flat in history. Curiously, thespians change characters sometimes three times in a year. I would argue we do the same in existence.
I have changed characters a couple of times at least, and I’m still looking for that starring role in existence. Consistently strive to be the magnificent man. Question where appropriate. Listen where appropriate. Direct where appropriate. Take direction when appropriate. I’m not sure the magnificent man knows how to feel. He seems inhuman. And we are human, all to human.
I’m not sure the magnificent man knows how to feel.
But it always begs further questions doesn’t it? Why do we feel in the first place? Is our emotional or psychological or intuitive feeling any different from a hand re-coiling from a flame, a tongue in the throes of jouissance from some delectable dish manufactured from loving hands, or eyes burning from looking at the sun? Can we separate the way we feel?
Perhaps brain-mapping can tell us things about what parts of our brains feel. As a matter of fact, I’m sure that somewhere, somebody has already strapped a willing test subject to a table, attached diodes to his head, and has screenshot after screenshot of how the brain feels. I guess I’m a generally distrusting person, and I’m sure that these brain mappings have some validity; however, the question for me is how we ought to feel, which is an entirely different thing…I think.
When I get spitting bacon grease on my lightly haired torso, I ought to feel a little sting. When we kill somebody brutally by bashing in their cranium with the broken leg of a coffee table, we ought to feel remorse. When we taste something foul, we ought to spit it out. And yet there are exceptions to every rule: people who cannot feel their skin, sociopaths, and people with no taste.
It’s not an exact proportion, you understand. It’s not like a one-to-one correlation where for every one sociopath there is one person who feels what he ought to, but there are certainly enough of them out there that their level of aberration is at least somewhat suspect. Like they ought to be there. Filling out the an Aristotelian spectrum of sorts, where the two ends would be feeling wrong at the wrong time in the wrong way (either in excess or deficiency) and the mean would be feeling the right thing at the right time in the right way. But, as always, the difficulty here is having the right perspective on where the two ends are so you can have a somewhat vague idea where the mean might be.
Here’s the rub, as the bard once called it: with the conglomeration of events from the past fortnight—including but not limited to exhaustion, financial crises, knifings, shooting, emotional crises, and insomnia—I really ought to feel like I’m losing my mind. My ex-girlfriend’s stalker got stabbed in the kitchen of the restaurant he works at. True story. I have had zero dollars in my pocket and negative funds in the bank for longer than my stomach thinks advisable. A drunk man ran into the wall in front of my house as he was being chased by the police, got out of the car and started unloading a clip on the red-blue-flashing cars around him. It is STILL a not uncommon thing for me to be awake for more hours consecutively than can be contained in a day. Even when I get into bed I have to budget in an extra hour for the time it will take me to fall asleep—and pray to god that’s enough.
But I’m surprisingly comfortable in this place.
I feel most comfortable in a place where things are not making any sense. I feel most alive when I cannot control the future. I feel most at home when I don’t know where home is. I feel most in control when things are spiraling out of control. I feel most sane where it’s farthest away. It all feels most natural.
That’s why I guess it’s hard to know how to feel. I have to take into account how I feel about how I feel. I don’t know how to feel things in a normal way, but I have to trust in my feelings.
Acting. That’s what it is. We’re all acting—in a very stage way. The job of the thespian is to put as much of themselves into this character as they possible can in order for it to come off right. If they don’t invest enough of themselves, the character is rendered flat on the stage. If we don’t give enough of ourselves to the characters we’re playing, they are rendered flat in history. Curiously, thespians change characters sometimes three times in a year. I would argue we do the same in existence.
I have changed characters a couple of times at least, and I’m still looking for that starring role in existence. Consistently strive to be the magnificent man. Question where appropriate. Listen where appropriate. Direct where appropriate. Take direction when appropriate. I’m not sure the magnificent man knows how to feel. He seems inhuman. And we are human, all to human.
I’m not sure the magnificent man knows how to feel.
Monday, April 7, 2008
The State of The...
Revolution. It occurred to me the other day that it is possible there might be some misunderstanding of this word revolution. Its two definitions are related, you know. The one I think I am guilty of bending most of my thought toward is the violent upheaval and movement of people: 1917, 1789, 1618, 1776. I think it is precisely because there are more of these revolutions of the people than there are of the sun. In almost any part of the world, at almost any given time, no matter how tiny or internationally insignificant the country, a revolution is being led against the ruling imperialists. I think that if the matter were looked into, there has been a revolution somewhere in the world every year, at least once a year. It’s funny, but there are very few revolutions that happen in the same year. Interesting. Sometimes revolutions LAST for more than a year, but generally speaking there are not more than one in every year. Some years there are no revolutions. I feel like the mean here (in a very Aristotelian sense) is one per year.
Something else happens once a year. The earth revolves around the sun—the celestial nature of revolution. Recently, I have begun to think that the revolution has to be less about movement within the revolutionary track, but movement from the inside out. Our tendency is to think that when we perform some kind of revolutionary act, we are moving things along, but that has a very static definition to me in that evolution is not within the realm of circulation. It is rather more wave-like. We’ll try a couple of things, oh, nope, we’ll take a step back, re-evaluate, try a couple more things, and, BAM!, we got us a keeper. Waves. Not teleology.
And I guess that’s the nut, right there. An unfortunate amount of thought by revolutionaries in the modern age is bent toward the idea that what they are doing, they are doing as a very final form. What this creates is the idea that this revolution means to put itself on an entirely different track from the last regime. Now, the unfortunate problem with this is, of course, that they are wrong. There is only one historical track. It moves around and around, unceasingly. I guess this is where historical dialectical materialism really comes to the fore and lets us know that the reason for its importance lies in the fact that its only purpose is to use the things we cannot change to throw the state of history into an entirely new track: communism.
There is no denying the slightly utopian aspect of communism; however, for those who understand it, sacrifice is actually built right in to the structure, and with the world community working together to make everybody better, it is difficult to say that this is not the ideal. If it were possible, we ought to have it. If it were possible.
I feel I’ve diverted every so slightly…and yet not. At any rate, I’m beginning to think of climate change. When does the earth’s climate change? It changes most drastically when we are nearer or farther from the sun in our revolution. That, generally, creates pretty drastic climate changes for the entire world—the equatorial regions excepted—and produces an extraordinarily wide variety of environmental changes. And good god the variety of storms they produce (I guess that’s a pretty good metaphor for what the mini-revolutions are like: storms of various strengths: April shower, thunderstorm, tropical storm, hurricane, tornado, etc).
What communism is talking about is impossible, and that is unfortunate. It is talking about permanent, variable climate change. How can something be permanent and variable? It has to exist in two states, first of all, like the world and the people on it. The world, for all intents and purposes, is permanent. We could kill the goddamn thing, and it would still continue on its maniacal track around the sun. It would just be a big dead universal weight, but it would continue. And yes, the sun will eventually explode, but it will take far longer for it to happen than anybody can imagine. I mean we can put a number on it, life five billion years, but that means earth is currently halfway through its life expectancy. I guess when the universe gives birth, its offspring have a ten million year life expectancy, and that’s comforting in a lot of ways.
At any rate, this permanent variability and its ability to exist simultaneously in two seemingly contradictory states is the key to communism: it takes history, the present, and the future into all accounts it needs to settle. It would move all the world a permanently variable position one step closer to perfection.
Revolution, therefore, is not movement within the realm of history, but movement outside of history. Being completely unprecedented. There are unprecedented people who have had this revolutionary effect on history. The ideas are permanently ingrained, the state of them are variable. It is kind of problematic in that we have seen how an individual can step outside of history and affect all times (PPF) because we have also seen how it would be beyond impossible that an entire world of people could take the same track. (Camel through the eye of a needle, anyone?) Groups can break the bonds of history, somewhat, but the harsh reality of things is that to move the entire world to a state of mind where everything needs to be done for the good of everybody else is impossible and impractical.
It is rather disheartening to think that the best we can do is throw pebbles at the revolutionary track of history once we’ve stepped outside it, but I guess the goal is to build your strength so that you can throw boulders at it in the hopes that it will create such a block that the flow will be permanently and variably carving new tracks of history. But we do have to step outside in order to aim.
I plan to have an effect on history. I am in the middle of a revolution right now. All my will is bent on breaking the cycle and stepping outside. I guess I’m not even worried about the idea that I am twenty-four years old and have no reason to believe I will be successful in my quest. It is with an eye to the past and an eye to the future while taking the present into account that I make my way through my existence. I am practicing right now. I am working on being permanently variable. I am working on being X: everything and nothing, what you want and what you don’t want, anger inducing and pacifying. I’m practicing for the big games. And every revolution there is a new season, a new opportunity to win the championship, a new opportunity to throw boulders into the ditch carved by inappropriate understood historical revolution.
Something else happens once a year. The earth revolves around the sun—the celestial nature of revolution. Recently, I have begun to think that the revolution has to be less about movement within the revolutionary track, but movement from the inside out. Our tendency is to think that when we perform some kind of revolutionary act, we are moving things along, but that has a very static definition to me in that evolution is not within the realm of circulation. It is rather more wave-like. We’ll try a couple of things, oh, nope, we’ll take a step back, re-evaluate, try a couple more things, and, BAM!, we got us a keeper. Waves. Not teleology.
And I guess that’s the nut, right there. An unfortunate amount of thought by revolutionaries in the modern age is bent toward the idea that what they are doing, they are doing as a very final form. What this creates is the idea that this revolution means to put itself on an entirely different track from the last regime. Now, the unfortunate problem with this is, of course, that they are wrong. There is only one historical track. It moves around and around, unceasingly. I guess this is where historical dialectical materialism really comes to the fore and lets us know that the reason for its importance lies in the fact that its only purpose is to use the things we cannot change to throw the state of history into an entirely new track: communism.
There is no denying the slightly utopian aspect of communism; however, for those who understand it, sacrifice is actually built right in to the structure, and with the world community working together to make everybody better, it is difficult to say that this is not the ideal. If it were possible, we ought to have it. If it were possible.
I feel I’ve diverted every so slightly…and yet not. At any rate, I’m beginning to think of climate change. When does the earth’s climate change? It changes most drastically when we are nearer or farther from the sun in our revolution. That, generally, creates pretty drastic climate changes for the entire world—the equatorial regions excepted—and produces an extraordinarily wide variety of environmental changes. And good god the variety of storms they produce (I guess that’s a pretty good metaphor for what the mini-revolutions are like: storms of various strengths: April shower, thunderstorm, tropical storm, hurricane, tornado, etc).
What communism is talking about is impossible, and that is unfortunate. It is talking about permanent, variable climate change. How can something be permanent and variable? It has to exist in two states, first of all, like the world and the people on it. The world, for all intents and purposes, is permanent. We could kill the goddamn thing, and it would still continue on its maniacal track around the sun. It would just be a big dead universal weight, but it would continue. And yes, the sun will eventually explode, but it will take far longer for it to happen than anybody can imagine. I mean we can put a number on it, life five billion years, but that means earth is currently halfway through its life expectancy. I guess when the universe gives birth, its offspring have a ten million year life expectancy, and that’s comforting in a lot of ways.
At any rate, this permanent variability and its ability to exist simultaneously in two seemingly contradictory states is the key to communism: it takes history, the present, and the future into all accounts it needs to settle. It would move all the world a permanently variable position one step closer to perfection.
Revolution, therefore, is not movement within the realm of history, but movement outside of history. Being completely unprecedented. There are unprecedented people who have had this revolutionary effect on history. The ideas are permanently ingrained, the state of them are variable. It is kind of problematic in that we have seen how an individual can step outside of history and affect all times (PPF) because we have also seen how it would be beyond impossible that an entire world of people could take the same track. (Camel through the eye of a needle, anyone?) Groups can break the bonds of history, somewhat, but the harsh reality of things is that to move the entire world to a state of mind where everything needs to be done for the good of everybody else is impossible and impractical.
It is rather disheartening to think that the best we can do is throw pebbles at the revolutionary track of history once we’ve stepped outside it, but I guess the goal is to build your strength so that you can throw boulders at it in the hopes that it will create such a block that the flow will be permanently and variably carving new tracks of history. But we do have to step outside in order to aim.
I plan to have an effect on history. I am in the middle of a revolution right now. All my will is bent on breaking the cycle and stepping outside. I guess I’m not even worried about the idea that I am twenty-four years old and have no reason to believe I will be successful in my quest. It is with an eye to the past and an eye to the future while taking the present into account that I make my way through my existence. I am practicing right now. I am working on being permanently variable. I am working on being X: everything and nothing, what you want and what you don’t want, anger inducing and pacifying. I’m practicing for the big games. And every revolution there is a new season, a new opportunity to win the championship, a new opportunity to throw boulders into the ditch carved by inappropriate understood historical revolution.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
I've had a rough...
Week. You know the ones…where absolutely everything that could possibly go wrong—both the things you could’ve foreseen and the things you couldn’t—does in fact go wrong, and sets into a chain of events that affects the rest of the week.
It starts with exhaustion, grossly unimaginable exhaustion to be precise. A lot of times this starts with a few missed hours of sleep combined with the physical exertion of work. I’m a workin’ boy, and I work hard. When I have the opportunity to attempt to break my body, I am for some reason driven toward the opportunity because I am and always have been curious about the amount of wear and tear the body can actually take. I used to be a wrestler, and over the course of wrestling practices where you lose pounds of water weight while doing an anaerobic activity that requires you to have most of your muscles flexed most of the time for a sustained time you learn that the body can take abuses that you could not have imagined. There are very distinct memories lurking in the back of my head about lying on the wrestling mat after practice and very literally not being able to move for about twenty minutes before dragging myself to the shower. Our physical forms can take beatings that we could not have imagined.
After the exhaustion comes the act. There is always one specific act that lets us know, in no uncertain terms, that we have moved into a subconscious locomotion through the day. In a lot of ways it’s a safety net. I used to call it survival mode: When you have been so broke you don’t know where the food is going to come from, you learn a certain way to survive that you can drop into whenever things look bleak, when you have been so broken that you wonder how much more you can take you can enter into it, and when you have been too tired to control your own life you can let the subconscious take over. But the problem with the subconscious is, of course, hubris. The part of us that is concerned only with us is consequently unconcerned with anything else. We think we’ve got everything figured out, something happens that reminds us we are human, and we glance back over our shoulder to make sure survival mode is behind us if we fall. At that moment, when you are looking to see the safety, you are simultaneously expecting to fall into it. It’s like you take a hit, and then, for human nature fight or flight reasons, the next time something even looks like it’s about to fall on you, you retreat. You’ve been here before. You’ve taken a hit like that. You know how bad it hurts. And you run to survive. There is nothing dishonest or weak in the act, it is human nature to ensure that the self will, at the very least, come through this thing on the other end in tact—physically at any rate—and there is not a whole helluva lot anybody can do about it.
After the catalytic act, comes the domino effect. A series of events start into motion that bob and weave and elevate and plummet and terminate somewhere unsettlingly out of sight. For some reason I am imagining a man walking along a sidewalk, and off to his left, periodically, and off to his right, periodically, there is a single row of dominoes. He sees that these single lines of dominoes run off into the distance a ways and that they start making strange turns and contortions and he knows that at the end of some of these rows of dominoes terminate by sending the last domino flying onto an extremely sensitive weight sensitive trigger that destroys the world. Some of them don’t. Most of them don’t. But some of them do, and so our friend walks very gently.
And sometimes the breeze from the motion of his legs starts a series that he didn’t realize he had started until it’s too late.
The worst part about these particular series of events is that you wind up standing static on the path just watching and waiting for the destruction to come. This is an unusual turn of the screw in that survival in this situation is reliant on how still you can stand because if you take off running after the chain you’ve started, you’ll start others you won’t know about and then you’re truly up the proverbially creek in a state of paddlelessness. In a lot of ways it’s like the Taoist principle of non-action wherein the act is in not acting. Non-acting does not mean that you are not “doing” something. It means, rather, that you have made the decision to not act and are then acting on the decision. Choosing to wait it could be called. Wait it out. Be patient. A groan of tedium escapes me. It is an unflinching act of non-action.
Waiting takes it toll on us, then we take a breath that isn’t quite as terrified as the last one, and we start thinking we’re going to be okay. We start looking around at the other lines of dominoes and see that they are still standing. We glance to the long line of fallen dominoes and begin to think it reached its end and we made it through. We start to take tentative steps again. Gently, delicately, we move a leg and place it in the direction we were moving along the path. When nothing happens, we move the other leg. After a while we are walking again. It’s not a brisk walk yet, but our locomotion has become regular and our eyes are starting to not jump from side to side in fear and panic that we’ll have to stop again soon. We start to focus on the path again. We start watching where we’re walking more than we’re watching the wake of our walk. We’re only a little bit worse for the wear, and pretty soon we are walking at a descent rate with just enough focus on where we’re going and just enough focus on where we’ve been to keep progress moving.
This is where we want to be. When we start getting too hubristic, we start running and the potential for disaster increases. When we are not confident enough we move to slowly to get everything accomplished that we want to, and potential destinations of growth are not reached. Move and change and grow and develop at a steady rate. If you are moving too slowly, atrophy sets in and you will never be able to accomplish everything you are capable of accomplishing. If you move too fast, you outgrow the joints that connect you because there is too much stress and pressure put on them that they cannot handle (no matter how much abuse they can take)—we tend to decelerate as fast as we accelerate. For some reason Britney Spears and boy bands and one-hit wonders are coming to mind. To blow one’s load in a couple of years seems like a huge waste of our existence.
I guess my whole project, my oeuvre if you will, is a testament to the steady gait and faith in the long run. Very rarely do I see progress in a day. So I walk along, minimizing disaster and maximizing efficiency, balancing speed and accuracy, and staying out of survival mode as much as possible but being glad I know it’s there.
It starts with exhaustion, grossly unimaginable exhaustion to be precise. A lot of times this starts with a few missed hours of sleep combined with the physical exertion of work. I’m a workin’ boy, and I work hard. When I have the opportunity to attempt to break my body, I am for some reason driven toward the opportunity because I am and always have been curious about the amount of wear and tear the body can actually take. I used to be a wrestler, and over the course of wrestling practices where you lose pounds of water weight while doing an anaerobic activity that requires you to have most of your muscles flexed most of the time for a sustained time you learn that the body can take abuses that you could not have imagined. There are very distinct memories lurking in the back of my head about lying on the wrestling mat after practice and very literally not being able to move for about twenty minutes before dragging myself to the shower. Our physical forms can take beatings that we could not have imagined.
After the exhaustion comes the act. There is always one specific act that lets us know, in no uncertain terms, that we have moved into a subconscious locomotion through the day. In a lot of ways it’s a safety net. I used to call it survival mode: When you have been so broke you don’t know where the food is going to come from, you learn a certain way to survive that you can drop into whenever things look bleak, when you have been so broken that you wonder how much more you can take you can enter into it, and when you have been too tired to control your own life you can let the subconscious take over. But the problem with the subconscious is, of course, hubris. The part of us that is concerned only with us is consequently unconcerned with anything else. We think we’ve got everything figured out, something happens that reminds us we are human, and we glance back over our shoulder to make sure survival mode is behind us if we fall. At that moment, when you are looking to see the safety, you are simultaneously expecting to fall into it. It’s like you take a hit, and then, for human nature fight or flight reasons, the next time something even looks like it’s about to fall on you, you retreat. You’ve been here before. You’ve taken a hit like that. You know how bad it hurts. And you run to survive. There is nothing dishonest or weak in the act, it is human nature to ensure that the self will, at the very least, come through this thing on the other end in tact—physically at any rate—and there is not a whole helluva lot anybody can do about it.
After the catalytic act, comes the domino effect. A series of events start into motion that bob and weave and elevate and plummet and terminate somewhere unsettlingly out of sight. For some reason I am imagining a man walking along a sidewalk, and off to his left, periodically, and off to his right, periodically, there is a single row of dominoes. He sees that these single lines of dominoes run off into the distance a ways and that they start making strange turns and contortions and he knows that at the end of some of these rows of dominoes terminate by sending the last domino flying onto an extremely sensitive weight sensitive trigger that destroys the world. Some of them don’t. Most of them don’t. But some of them do, and so our friend walks very gently.
And sometimes the breeze from the motion of his legs starts a series that he didn’t realize he had started until it’s too late.
The worst part about these particular series of events is that you wind up standing static on the path just watching and waiting for the destruction to come. This is an unusual turn of the screw in that survival in this situation is reliant on how still you can stand because if you take off running after the chain you’ve started, you’ll start others you won’t know about and then you’re truly up the proverbially creek in a state of paddlelessness. In a lot of ways it’s like the Taoist principle of non-action wherein the act is in not acting. Non-acting does not mean that you are not “doing” something. It means, rather, that you have made the decision to not act and are then acting on the decision. Choosing to wait it could be called. Wait it out. Be patient. A groan of tedium escapes me. It is an unflinching act of non-action.
Waiting takes it toll on us, then we take a breath that isn’t quite as terrified as the last one, and we start thinking we’re going to be okay. We start looking around at the other lines of dominoes and see that they are still standing. We glance to the long line of fallen dominoes and begin to think it reached its end and we made it through. We start to take tentative steps again. Gently, delicately, we move a leg and place it in the direction we were moving along the path. When nothing happens, we move the other leg. After a while we are walking again. It’s not a brisk walk yet, but our locomotion has become regular and our eyes are starting to not jump from side to side in fear and panic that we’ll have to stop again soon. We start to focus on the path again. We start watching where we’re walking more than we’re watching the wake of our walk. We’re only a little bit worse for the wear, and pretty soon we are walking at a descent rate with just enough focus on where we’re going and just enough focus on where we’ve been to keep progress moving.
This is where we want to be. When we start getting too hubristic, we start running and the potential for disaster increases. When we are not confident enough we move to slowly to get everything accomplished that we want to, and potential destinations of growth are not reached. Move and change and grow and develop at a steady rate. If you are moving too slowly, atrophy sets in and you will never be able to accomplish everything you are capable of accomplishing. If you move too fast, you outgrow the joints that connect you because there is too much stress and pressure put on them that they cannot handle (no matter how much abuse they can take)—we tend to decelerate as fast as we accelerate. For some reason Britney Spears and boy bands and one-hit wonders are coming to mind. To blow one’s load in a couple of years seems like a huge waste of our existence.
I guess my whole project, my oeuvre if you will, is a testament to the steady gait and faith in the long run. Very rarely do I see progress in a day. So I walk along, minimizing disaster and maximizing efficiency, balancing speed and accuracy, and staying out of survival mode as much as possible but being glad I know it’s there.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Something Is Very
wrong. My body is telling me so. My very corporal reality is suddenly shoved, full force, into my face and I am made to inhale its noxious stink. The biggest bummer about being a human is, after all, our physical presence: the life of the body versus the life of the mind.
It’s very early morning now. I went to bed a scant couple of hours ago, but my body—as a result of illness—has awakened me. I tend to get more work done in the quiet hours of morning than any other time of the day, and I would venture to guess that this is because mornings are always reflective for me. It is at once rejuvenation and decay. Wherever the idea came from that “a new day is here” is a positive thing, I can’t say; however, the way I understand it: the sun awakens life, life happens every day, and every day has its own life. It is a birth in a way, but it is also (and at arguably a more personal level), we are all taking one tiny step closer to the end.
Where does that leave us? It’s a question in my mind that goes back to the question of what is innate in humanity. Are the good of humanity and the continuation of the species more important than the continuation of the individual? Is that built in? Can we say that it really all goes back to the biological necessity of growth happening as a result of decay? Topsoil is millions and millions of years of decay, and rot, and…fertilizer. The decay of the past feeds the present that grows to decay for the future.
Somewhere along the line, though, I think we figured this out. We figured out that one thing we absolutely can do nothing about is the ending of our personal existence. This basically split the camp into two distinct factions. First, the group saying, “Well, it’s clear that everybody dies, and that’s not good enough. Surely there’s more. We enjoy living so much that we’ll sacrifice the life we know for a life we are going to hope into existence.” Let’s call them the eternity team. How this works is that we are beings with a soul that we can know exists, and that we can use to talk to the higher being that is in control of our souls and what happens to them in the end. Free will aside, your god of choice is in control because he (or she) laid down the rules for you to live by. If you don’t live by his or her rules, then you lose the game. That’s control. At any rate, if you do play by the rules, your soul (which is apparently connected to your singular conscious self) will be moved to a place where time does not exist—at least in an earthly, logical, rational sense.
The other group would be saying, “Well, it’s clear that everybody dies, and that’s not good enough. I guess we’ll have to take the time we can be aware of and attempt to truly do something with it. Let’s call them the present team. It is an active acceptance of our present reality as the one we can choose to know completely about. Our bodies are holding us down. They are a constant reminder to us that one day we will not be able to actively accept the present reality, but the mind can make it’s mark. It’s the only way to ensure that your time on this world was not ill spent: actively engage in life. Enjoy the physical pleasures of the body while you can. You won’t be able to in a little while. Question daily why you are doing what you’re doing. You won’t be able to question soon. Invent the wildest adventures to go on. You won’t be capable of adventure soon. Make your mind your mark that sparks decay for growth. Break down with questions, and suddenly we’re back to the Greeks.
Which brings up another question: is our decay also our growth? Or, alternatively, is our growth our decay? We clearly haven’t gotten much past the questions of the ancients. Socrates, Plato, Lao Tzu, Socrates. These men were all asking similar, if not more difficult, questions over two thousand years ago. It is almost as if we were locked in a considerable struggle to retain the life of the mind. Some would say that based on how we still study these seminal texts in quest of questions that we are only trying to keep pace with the Greeks, but that their understanding of existence was far advanced from ours. Yet, we look around at ourselves, our fifty-six inch flat panel high definition television sets, our iPhones, our word processing programs, our music, our art, our buildings, our telecommunication networks, our indestructible materials, our destructive materials, our stand-up MRI chambers, our Green automobiles, our organic food, our food production techniques, our war making techniques, our Vitamin Water, our Emergen-C, and we call it progress.
We are simultaneously growing and decaying?
I think I’ve managed to confuse myself.
Maybe the best we can do is manage to confuse ourselves every day, develop the mind a little bit, and balance out the decay that happens in that day. Balance, and we’re back to the way of the Tao.
Since the world points up beauty as such,
There is ugliness too,
If goodness is taken as goodness,
Wickedness enters as well.
For is and is-not come together;
Hard and easy are complementary;
Long and short are relative;
High and low are comparative;
Pitch and sound make harmony;
Before and after are a sequence. -- The Way of Life, Lao-tzu
Growth and decay are married. The principle of non-action has nothing to do with not doing anything. It’s more about not making mental decision pre-emptively and developing the mind to be capable of making the right decision. The way of the Tao is active non-action. That’s what’s wrong I guess: I don’t get it, but I get it. I’m not supposed to get it am I? That’s good because I don’t get it. But it sucks because I don’t get it.
In the quiet hours of the morning a great violence is being done to my head. It is growing and decaying simultaneously. It is confused and learning to study its confusion.
It’s very early morning now. I went to bed a scant couple of hours ago, but my body—as a result of illness—has awakened me. I tend to get more work done in the quiet hours of morning than any other time of the day, and I would venture to guess that this is because mornings are always reflective for me. It is at once rejuvenation and decay. Wherever the idea came from that “a new day is here” is a positive thing, I can’t say; however, the way I understand it: the sun awakens life, life happens every day, and every day has its own life. It is a birth in a way, but it is also (and at arguably a more personal level), we are all taking one tiny step closer to the end.
Where does that leave us? It’s a question in my mind that goes back to the question of what is innate in humanity. Are the good of humanity and the continuation of the species more important than the continuation of the individual? Is that built in? Can we say that it really all goes back to the biological necessity of growth happening as a result of decay? Topsoil is millions and millions of years of decay, and rot, and…fertilizer. The decay of the past feeds the present that grows to decay for the future.
Somewhere along the line, though, I think we figured this out. We figured out that one thing we absolutely can do nothing about is the ending of our personal existence. This basically split the camp into two distinct factions. First, the group saying, “Well, it’s clear that everybody dies, and that’s not good enough. Surely there’s more. We enjoy living so much that we’ll sacrifice the life we know for a life we are going to hope into existence.” Let’s call them the eternity team. How this works is that we are beings with a soul that we can know exists, and that we can use to talk to the higher being that is in control of our souls and what happens to them in the end. Free will aside, your god of choice is in control because he (or she) laid down the rules for you to live by. If you don’t live by his or her rules, then you lose the game. That’s control. At any rate, if you do play by the rules, your soul (which is apparently connected to your singular conscious self) will be moved to a place where time does not exist—at least in an earthly, logical, rational sense.
The other group would be saying, “Well, it’s clear that everybody dies, and that’s not good enough. I guess we’ll have to take the time we can be aware of and attempt to truly do something with it. Let’s call them the present team. It is an active acceptance of our present reality as the one we can choose to know completely about. Our bodies are holding us down. They are a constant reminder to us that one day we will not be able to actively accept the present reality, but the mind can make it’s mark. It’s the only way to ensure that your time on this world was not ill spent: actively engage in life. Enjoy the physical pleasures of the body while you can. You won’t be able to in a little while. Question daily why you are doing what you’re doing. You won’t be able to question soon. Invent the wildest adventures to go on. You won’t be capable of adventure soon. Make your mind your mark that sparks decay for growth. Break down with questions, and suddenly we’re back to the Greeks.
Which brings up another question: is our decay also our growth? Or, alternatively, is our growth our decay? We clearly haven’t gotten much past the questions of the ancients. Socrates, Plato, Lao Tzu, Socrates. These men were all asking similar, if not more difficult, questions over two thousand years ago. It is almost as if we were locked in a considerable struggle to retain the life of the mind. Some would say that based on how we still study these seminal texts in quest of questions that we are only trying to keep pace with the Greeks, but that their understanding of existence was far advanced from ours. Yet, we look around at ourselves, our fifty-six inch flat panel high definition television sets, our iPhones, our word processing programs, our music, our art, our buildings, our telecommunication networks, our indestructible materials, our destructive materials, our stand-up MRI chambers, our Green automobiles, our organic food, our food production techniques, our war making techniques, our Vitamin Water, our Emergen-C, and we call it progress.
We are simultaneously growing and decaying?
I think I’ve managed to confuse myself.
Maybe the best we can do is manage to confuse ourselves every day, develop the mind a little bit, and balance out the decay that happens in that day. Balance, and we’re back to the way of the Tao.
Since the world points up beauty as such,
There is ugliness too,
If goodness is taken as goodness,
Wickedness enters as well.
For is and is-not come together;
Hard and easy are complementary;
Long and short are relative;
High and low are comparative;
Pitch and sound make harmony;
Before and after are a sequence. -- The Way of Life, Lao-tzu
Growth and decay are married. The principle of non-action has nothing to do with not doing anything. It’s more about not making mental decision pre-emptively and developing the mind to be capable of making the right decision. The way of the Tao is active non-action. That’s what’s wrong I guess: I don’t get it, but I get it. I’m not supposed to get it am I? That’s good because I don’t get it. But it sucks because I don’t get it.
In the quiet hours of the morning a great violence is being done to my head. It is growing and decaying simultaneously. It is confused and learning to study its confusion.
Friday, February 8, 2008
What's It Mean To Be
Free? Damn I hate questions. The questions answered with a simple “Yes” or “No,” unfortunately, do me absolutely no good—those are the questions we tend to gloss over anyway. There is very little to be gained from a question with a dichotomous answer. Even if one were to think in terms of mathematics, it is not so much that x=y, but WHY x=y that matters. Qualifications, I think it is, that drive a good question. Think of them as proofs, reasons, the becauses, the whatevers, and it is still all of these things that help us understand what a questions means.
To live as we please, pursuit of happiness and whatnot, is that freedom? Is freedom the same as being free? Can an absolute price be placed on freedom? Can freedom be determined by how much sass and backtalk we give to the authorities? Is he who’s free, he who can unfalteringly, unwaveringly stand behind his principles? Does freedom come at a price, or is the price already paid? Why is it that the people who oftentimes claim to be most free, most often fall into line with their pre-labeled identities? What is determined by freedom?
It frustrates me sometimes to ponder the intricacies of questions like these, if only because my head gets locked into abstractions and endless chains of referendums that send me spiraling into unconscionable depths of human pondering. We all have minds of imbalance, ranging from the hyper sexual nature of some to the hyper violent of others and the hyper narcissistic of most others. Perhaps it is precisely the thing we think allows this kind of thing that most hampers its most intense expressions.
Even the Beatles weren’t free. For all their wealth and money and fame, they were locked into a mode wherein they were only allowed to produce sometimes incomprehensible music for the masses. That kind of pressure produces results, it is true; however, it is not the kind of results that come from complete freedom. It is the results of adrenaline and the expectation to produce. One of the greatest things that ever happened was the break-up of the Beatles. Some of the greatest acts of freedom are the unfathomable acts of superhuman beings imposing their free will on the unwilling.
Do you see how difficult it can get? When a great act of freedom is also a great act of evil, it does not cease to be a great act, it only has that qualifier “evil”—I guess the same could go for a great act of selfishness. It is in this equation that we see how greatness is not altogether equivalent to good and bad, and thus all other associated with a generally determined qualifier of “good” or “bad” are called into question.
Is freedom really preferable to having somebody’s will imposed upon us? When we allow the human mind to sink to the depths of it’s depravity—which is at some level sanctioned by the term freedom—then we are asking to have the most heinous acts occur. Think of television. The most heinous acts are perpetrated on the minds of your average American by exposing it to the imposed will of some television executive trying to make his (or her) mark on the world. And it is by the same token that the imposed will of one is also their illustration of their better handle on freedom than you. They can do whatever the hell they want, and throw explosions at your face until you understand explosions, before you realize that the will you think of as your own is, in fact, not.
What are you doing? Are you actively involved in imposing your will, or are you passively accepting the will of others? We wind up doing a little bit of giving and taking I suppose. We accept the will of some—most often our parents I think—and impose our will on others, but even that seems to be an incredible cop out. “Yeah, I impossible my will on that SOB the other day,” but the next day there’s nothing to do but cry at my unwilling but unconditional surrender to some other’s will. The moment you lose everything, is the moment you gain something?
There is no such thing as passive freedom. One cannot sit idly on the sidelines of the freedom game and wait passively for the coach to give him the nod. When you have no friends you are free to do what you will with your time. When you have friends you are free to do what you will with their time. It seems slightly incongruous, doesn’t it, that freedom is possible in any situation. It is occurring to me that freedom is a complete farce and possible in any situation one can imagine—yes, even in captivity, incarceration, or all other forms of detention. Freedom is malleable, you see.
Birds fly because of their instinct to forage and gather food, a mate, and young. They are slaves to their desires. Extinguish desires may well be the route to a genuine experience of the world. Then again, to desire is perhaps the most natural thing on the planet. We desire to eat. We desire to love. We desire to copulate. We desire. Those who don’t desire spend their days desiring to not desire. Language has the ability to mean everything and nothing all at once.
Is it possible to say something and nothing?
To live as we please, pursuit of happiness and whatnot, is that freedom? Is freedom the same as being free? Can an absolute price be placed on freedom? Can freedom be determined by how much sass and backtalk we give to the authorities? Is he who’s free, he who can unfalteringly, unwaveringly stand behind his principles? Does freedom come at a price, or is the price already paid? Why is it that the people who oftentimes claim to be most free, most often fall into line with their pre-labeled identities? What is determined by freedom?
It frustrates me sometimes to ponder the intricacies of questions like these, if only because my head gets locked into abstractions and endless chains of referendums that send me spiraling into unconscionable depths of human pondering. We all have minds of imbalance, ranging from the hyper sexual nature of some to the hyper violent of others and the hyper narcissistic of most others. Perhaps it is precisely the thing we think allows this kind of thing that most hampers its most intense expressions.
Even the Beatles weren’t free. For all their wealth and money and fame, they were locked into a mode wherein they were only allowed to produce sometimes incomprehensible music for the masses. That kind of pressure produces results, it is true; however, it is not the kind of results that come from complete freedom. It is the results of adrenaline and the expectation to produce. One of the greatest things that ever happened was the break-up of the Beatles. Some of the greatest acts of freedom are the unfathomable acts of superhuman beings imposing their free will on the unwilling.
Do you see how difficult it can get? When a great act of freedom is also a great act of evil, it does not cease to be a great act, it only has that qualifier “evil”—I guess the same could go for a great act of selfishness. It is in this equation that we see how greatness is not altogether equivalent to good and bad, and thus all other associated with a generally determined qualifier of “good” or “bad” are called into question.
Is freedom really preferable to having somebody’s will imposed upon us? When we allow the human mind to sink to the depths of it’s depravity—which is at some level sanctioned by the term freedom—then we are asking to have the most heinous acts occur. Think of television. The most heinous acts are perpetrated on the minds of your average American by exposing it to the imposed will of some television executive trying to make his (or her) mark on the world. And it is by the same token that the imposed will of one is also their illustration of their better handle on freedom than you. They can do whatever the hell they want, and throw explosions at your face until you understand explosions, before you realize that the will you think of as your own is, in fact, not.
What are you doing? Are you actively involved in imposing your will, or are you passively accepting the will of others? We wind up doing a little bit of giving and taking I suppose. We accept the will of some—most often our parents I think—and impose our will on others, but even that seems to be an incredible cop out. “Yeah, I impossible my will on that SOB the other day,” but the next day there’s nothing to do but cry at my unwilling but unconditional surrender to some other’s will. The moment you lose everything, is the moment you gain something?
There is no such thing as passive freedom. One cannot sit idly on the sidelines of the freedom game and wait passively for the coach to give him the nod. When you have no friends you are free to do what you will with your time. When you have friends you are free to do what you will with their time. It seems slightly incongruous, doesn’t it, that freedom is possible in any situation. It is occurring to me that freedom is a complete farce and possible in any situation one can imagine—yes, even in captivity, incarceration, or all other forms of detention. Freedom is malleable, you see.
Birds fly because of their instinct to forage and gather food, a mate, and young. They are slaves to their desires. Extinguish desires may well be the route to a genuine experience of the world. Then again, to desire is perhaps the most natural thing on the planet. We desire to eat. We desire to love. We desire to copulate. We desire. Those who don’t desire spend their days desiring to not desire. Language has the ability to mean everything and nothing all at once.
Is it possible to say something and nothing?
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