Obstructively Cynical

Euphemism (Part 1)

2011-04-29T21:05:00.000-04:00

We know what we do.
We refuse to name,
we invoke
those who will not be named,
or those who we misname--
the Eumenides--
and we weasel
by distinguishing use and mention.

And so we separate
the objective world
of asteroids, cosmic dust,
quarks, statistics
from fathoms, risks,
hopes, delusions.

And that teaches us
the second most important lesson:
how to analyze.
And it cloaks the most important one:
as inside, so outside.

To know a chair--
the form of a chair--
is to participate
in chairness. To represent
is to be mappable.
The map is not the territory
but the structure of both
is something like
participation. To participate
is to live. And to live
is to flourish in degrees.

Knowing chairs we gain competence,
and knowing rhetoric we gain mastery.
Knowing friendship is
especial flourishing. It is to be at home.
And knowing love?
Ah, that one is to know your brokenness.
That one is to raise up hope
and to switch back and forth
from the foreground view of consuming terror
to the middle-distance view
of the biggest expansion in life,
to the distant view
of fury at reality. Impatient
fury at all that dies and all that struggles.

And it is to raise the Erinyes
to kick and claw us into steel wool,
to dismember us, to get us outside;
outside ourselves, outside expectation.
Until ashes remain. Until we are
drained as children after summer play
under the meaningless stars.

Consider: "It may be true, that as Francis Thompson noted, "Thou canst not stir a flower without troubling a star", but in computing the motion of stars and planets, the effects of flowers do not loom large. It is the disregarding of the effect of flowers on stars that allows progress in astronomy. Appropriate abstraction is critical to progress in science."

Jungian Monologues (Part 1)

2011-04-28T23:35:00.004-04:00

THE CHAOTIC GOOD EGO (AN INTJ):

I chanced upon her as I walked within my memories, as I walked within the shape-shifting labyrinths of teen angst long buried, long forgotten. I had been walking up dreamscape spiral staircases, down byways, making connections between rooms in my mind that contained treasures, fathoms, dark shadows, black dogs, phallic thrones. In short, all the paraphernalia of growing in one's head, not in one's body. But it was all smaller, emptier, shabbier.

Outside, I found her. She had been looking for someone. She told me she was looking for a girl in one of the apartment blocks. I knew this girl. I had known her in the ways bodies know each other, and it was only after that knowledge that I realized that the more lasting knowledge--the knowledge that establishes furnished rooms in one's mind--was lacking almost entirely, mimicked by this girl by a smoke screen of positive affect.

Anyway, this woman I met, as we conversed, disclosed that she was looking for this girl in the apartment because she was going to fuck her. I was touched by the directness of her manner. Turns out the woman had already had sex with her. It was foretold by the prediction algorithms in the data mining center behind the carousel of the stars. We talked for a while and hit it off instantly. And instantly I could feel it. The tension that I had never had the sensitivity to feel. The tension that tips people and tips heads into beds and bodies into sleep beside each other. She called it something else entirely.

And so we knew each other. We did not copulate, though. She is a lesbian, you see, so penetration is something she is not willing to do for a long time. She has to be damn sure before she commits an act that is so political. But we retired to her attic garret. And did everything else good (male-female) lesbian sexual congresses involve.

And the next morning, after rising, stretching, and being anointed with fragrant oils, she spoke thus.

THE ANIMA:

Terrible cliche, I know. But I have to say it. This feeling? The one that we've known each other forever? It's because we have. I've grown a little more familiar these last few years. I've accreted features you can understand. And I understand you better, too. You might say I've softened. But I was there since the beginning. In the water that lightens the seed, if you will. I was there to restrain the destructive power of sexuality in you. I was there squeezing you, rubbing your shame and embarrassment raw. But don't worry. Look how you've turned out. One step closer to sacred marriage. All it takes is some delicacy.

And what's all this I hear now about wanting to grow away from this? Wanting to seize the day? What! Grind out your plans? Live out some incompatible Protestant work ethic? For what? For whom? You, who are, at bottom, phlegmatic?

You know of my terrible power. But I am not as dark as I could be. I have only been stern. I squeezed the natural life from your arms before how many women? You know how many unfortunate pairings I kept you from. Had you noticed your odds you would have gone for it, and now would be riddled by scars given by barely-matured children! Do not take my power lightly! I have not been all harshness. Think of your spirit of anarchy concealed behind this placid appearance. Wait and bide your time.

THE CHAOTIC GOOD EGO:

You know very well how I feel about you. I am so, so close to being a woman in a man's body. But I am not because of you. You have been the mysterious pole-star of my wandering. So it makes sense: a man, in a friends-with-benefits situation with a lesbian anima.

But you must let me go. At least for a while. There are other voices here. And I will return to you, for we have just met. And new lovers need newness. If we've know each other all our lives, how are we to find each other interesting? I must do this.

THE ANIMA:

So go. You speak sense. I fear it will be a bewildering path.

EGO:

I know it.

Consider: "the balance metaphor for human characteristics isn't enough. To truly integrate functions, we don't balance opposites. We find secret tunnels from one attitude to the other. Escape tunnels in times of danger."

How Lonely, Loftiness

2011-04-11T13:34:00.003-04:00

It's a fucked-up feature of our nature, how we hold onto our defilements. This week I've been productive and happy. I was relatively outgoing. I did not take my bullshit too seriously, and though the hobgoblins continued to nip away at the edges of the field of consciousness, they were at bay. But the strange thing is how much I miss them. I miss the hug of sadness. I miss the Picasso's-blue-period spiritual heaviness of February. Fucked up how we look back to our darkest times and (after that fact; only after the fact) find them times of purgation and purification.

It's because I'm good at it. I know which masks to wear in which occasions. I know how to feign togetherness. I know what sentences to say. I know how to spin the narrative of my life to induce the illusion of inevitable lurching towards prosperity, happiness, shininess, spaciousness, the brilliance of a blue sky. (The lurching is my tolerant nod to the chthonic forces.)

But I can't help feel it's all bullshit. And I think that's because I fear learning new things. I fear interacting with well-adjusted (or well-masked) people as one of them. But it seems everyone's becoming better-adjusted and more mature, and slowly our glaring deficiencies retreat to the private mini-worlds of coupledom or find sublimated expression in a poem, a short story, and eventually something you can monetize.

Suffice it to say, the greys and blues have far more shades than the cheap neon yellows and reds of this ESTJ society I find myself airdropped into.

Enough for now.

Consider: "Self-help? Ha! Everyone should just read Schopenhauer and shut the fuck up."

By Accident

2011-04-07T20:45:00.001-04:00

We have lived, and grown, and were born mostly by accident. The moments of our lives have laways been overgrown with unruly complexity. I like that phrase--"unruly complexity". It indicates something that's not quite random, but never, except for short bursts, predictable. Chaos, maybe. An idea big enough for implacable necessity while still retaining an air of inscrutability. For that is the impression we get from nature: a story unfolding to its own narrative pattern we're not mature enough to grasp. (Yet? The inclusion of that word are the limits of my optimism.)

Earthquakes and hurricanes, happening in that spot, to those people who strive for life just as much as you. (Indeed, even more, because they're not the elites--the "bored gods".) They called this the Augustinean Devil--predictably unpredictable, unchangingly implacable. Implacable only by our lack of energy, our lack of "will". Call this Fate.

And then the thousand chance encounters per day. The popping bubbles of strangers's faces teaching you the finer arts of forgetting. Of forgetting longing, forgetting oneself in the crowd. When these chance encounters (chance indicating only imperfect knowledge, not metaphysical insight) turn ugly, when a Buddha is stabbed by a Psychopath for an iPod on the subway, that's when we see the Manichean Devil: the trickster enemy, whose tactics change in a thousand ways. This enemy must be conquered first, and conquered a thousand times in a row, before we can even consider tackling the second enemy, the pitiless gaze of Fate. Unfortunately, Fate has other "plans". (It doesn't really make sense to speak of plans for somethnig that, if you want to impute agency to it, deserves a kind of agency totally divorced from human agency. Fate works in mysterious ways.)

Consider: "our condition consists of trying to impose pixellated perception on a fractal universe."

Dreams on Awakening

2011-03-26T11:21:00.003-04:00

Here I defend something people consider mildly wacky: the writing down and analysis of dreams.

A disclaimer: first of all, I don't attach any metaphysical importance to dreams. My best theory of them runs as follows: during the various cycles of sleep, the human (and more generally, chordate) nervous system undergoes a series of what I can metaphorically approach with words like "tune-ups", "reboots", "defragmentations". It's hard to speculate in this, because a satisfying theory of sleep is generally terra incognita for neuroscience. A few tantalizing hints are contained in the fact that sleep is essential for learning, and a few computer scientists have attempted to construct neural networks that learn in an unsupervised manner guided by the sleep metaphor. But that's only a start.

So what? Well, any process of "defragmentation" is going to stir a lot of shit up, essentially sending neurochemical discharges down pathways in the brain they weren't "meant" to go down. You can think of this stirring up process as essentially random. But what is decidedly not random is the way these low-level random discharges get taken up into the fragmentary state of consciousness that characterizes REM-stage sleep. The boiling cauldron of neural discharges gets taken up into awareness in a way that's framed by all sorts of ontogenetic, phylogenetic and idiosyncratic characteristics of the person undergoing this "defragmentation". You can think of it as massive sampling bias.

Now, I find it interesting that most of our self-construction projects in everyday life involve taking things up, filtered through our various layers of interest. So in conscious, waking life, we read a book, a poem, a movie, and discuss it, and think about it, only if it resonates with our particular preoccupations. But the problem in the project of self-construction comes, of course, from the mediacy of the materials. The book/poem/movie weren't made for your growth; they were made out of a matrix of personal, economic, social, and political circumstances. So any given material for self-construction that comes from others will have a large signal-to-noise ratio.

Same with your own dreams. A lot of what goes on is garbage, or easily traceable to some external influence in the near past. ("A dream is a low-budget play, put on with the props and costumes cribbed from the previous few days," said a very wise gentle giant biker once.) But the things that resonate with you from your dreams, though not some metaphysical bolt of salvation, are excellent self-construction materials precisely because they (generally) lack the mediacy of external media.

Now, there's still a question of interpretation, and in that way, even dreams, even one's own waking experience is mediate in some respect. But what did you expect? A reason to live to be handed to you effortlessly? You can run free association on your dream images--an epistemic technique which, in other contexts, really is bullshit--and can be reasonably sure that it indicates some personal preoccupation because it was generated by a filter that is you. In that way, you can act as the lens that sees its own biases, preoccupations, developments.

Thus ends my (half-baked) attempt to give naturalistic coherence to something that people either dismiss or take up as "magic". I hate magic with a passion. Mind you, not real magic--i.e. sleight of hand. I hate "real"--i.e. metaphysically interpreted--magic.

Consider: "If children's prayers were answered, there wouldn't be a single teacher alive."

The Line and Form of Black Bile

2011-03-20T13:40:00.004-04:00

Depression is not
a black dog. It’s more like
a tuning-in
to (what seems like)
the awful truth:
that there is nothing new
under the sun. Really.
It’s a trembling
within constraints of rule and line,
an energy of recognition
with nowhere to go,
a homecoming to the disordered
order of the world.

It’s an openness
to not deceiving yourself—
your hollow self,
your empirical skin and bones
and dust and fluids.
It’s the tenderness
beyond tenderness,
tucking yourself in.

I can’t speak to it
because it’s moth-like
to its flame of (something like)
restfulness, a center-point
with a hole in it
where there’s no rest to be found.
Because that’s how I live my life:
transposing human bulk
from place to place,
rousing myself from the
inertial point
a hundred minor times per day
and at a couple of
key junctures of decision.

And each new day
comes with its own inertias,
and they’re all
superficially different,
but I know
that the heavenly bodies
move in their preordained patterns
every day and night,
and only the violence of a supernova
ever breaks the already-laid-out
boredom in the night sky.

Consider: "the universal acid of geological time."

A Story Told to the Darkness

2011-03-18T14:32:00.002-04:00

Exordium: Who am I to tell a story to a lack? To belt out an unwritten song to an empty auditorium? To lift mood and change, the body and mind's fluids, hormones, expansions and contractions--the stuff of life--into the space of (what seems like) cosmic night? The unpregnant emptiness that does nothing but receive our waste, our entropy? I will justify myself by means of an overwrought metaphor.

Overwrought metaphor: for centuries, speculative cosmology troubled itself with the question of why the sky is dark at night. For if the universe were truly infinite, every line of sight would eventually terminate in a star. Hence, the night sky should be as bright as day. Many suggestions were offered, but none were satisfactory. Perhaps the most plausible was that the light of extremely distant stars was absorbed by interstellar gas, or particles, or what have you. That's fine. But, if the universe had existed infinitely long, that interstellar gas would have achieved incandescence long ago, and so--again--the night sky should be bright as day.

Overwrought metaphor, paragraph 2: No explanation was forthcoming. Then general relativity came on the scene, but the original cosmological models posited by Einstein (1917) and De Sitter in (1918) didn't fully address the issue either. (Why they failed would take us into explaining why they thought the geometry of the universe was non-Euclidean, and I am lazy.) It was only with Hubble's publication in 1929 of the relation between the distance and red-shift of far-away galaxies (and the interpretation of this as a Doppler effect) that the idea that space itself was expanding. This allowed for a finite, but unbounded universe where not every line of sight in the night sky terminated in the surface of the star.

Conclusion of overwrought metaphor: so, the reason the sky is dark at night is because space itself is expanding.

Supplementary material: the analogy used to unpack what "space itself expanding" means is usually run in two dimensions. Imagine our universe had only two spatial dimensions. Universal expansion, in this case would require you to imagine those two dimensions curved in a third dimension which we are insensible of. So we live our lives on the surface of a balloon, for example, and the balloon itself is expanding. Now imagine our three spatial and fourth time dimension curved in an even higher-dimensional space (you can't, but it makes sense mathematically). So yeah.

Explanation of the digression: now if we conflate cosmological space with a more colloquial sense of space, we have a reason for the darkness. It is a consequence of the fact that the indefinite multiplicity of things will never fill us up. This is a conclusion I need right now.

Consider: "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."

Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 9)

2011-03-13T13:32:00.002-04:00

"Be astonished,"
she says. "Or at least
mildly curious."
But I say
that's wrong
for me here
because there's a point
with all these things--
sadness, joy, thisness--
where they all
go beyond you.
The sadness of a
miniature waterlogged scene
opens up, and as it opens
it replenishes
in gorgeous repose.
Because everything happens by itself.
That's what astonishes me.
And it's just
one thing after another,
and a point
from time to time
when it hits:
couldn't have been otherwise.
And another point:
there's nothing more here.
And another:
there's no here here.

I have a lingering image from a dream
in which I woke up, and meditated.
I fixated on green, green ivy
on a brown-grey brick wall.
And a light suffused all of it
and I woke up,
thought I learned something
about the nature of mind:
its hollowness,
the brittleness of its sense-making.
The whole dream of ivy on bricks
and no self but the watcher,
no desire but the ivy in itself.
"There's a crack in everything,
that's how the light gets in."
Cohen.

Consider: "There's a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in."

3-Day Novel 2010 (Part 5)

2011-03-13T13:07:00.005-04:00

3. “And the Dawn and the Dusk were the Third Day”

Adnan Chalabi
33 Oxford Street
Toronto, ON
647-675-9809

Objective

University of Toronto student seeking year-round part-time employment.

Education

• 1999-2003: Lawrence Park Secondary School
• Honour roll and gifted program
• 2003-present: University of Toronto
• Undergraduate studies in psychology, philosophy and literature

Past Employment

• Renovation Worker, FF Home Service (summers of 2002, 2004 and 2005)
• Assisted with building decks, fences, installing hardwood and laminate flooring, drywalling, sanding, painting and demolition
• Was able to perform labour-intensive tasks for extended periods of time
• Gained a working knowledge of all major hand and power tools
• Volunteer Counselor, Distress Centres of Toronto (April 2005-ongoing)
• Provided suicide prevention, emotional support, social interaction, and stress reduction strategies to a diverse clientele including marginalized, addicted and mentally ill individuals
• Learned client-centered, non-confrontational and stress-defusing conversation skills, including patience with difficult, mistrustful or obstructive individuals
• Gained a working knowledge of Toronto’s social safety net
• Street Canvasser, Public Outreach (April-May 2006)
• Raised funding from passers-by for the Hospital for Sick Children
• Learned basic sales tactics and comfort in high-pressure sales situations
• Became a more articulate and effective speaker
• Pharmacy Clerk, Metro Medical Pharmacy (June-September 2003)
• Prepared monthly medication packages for seniors in a nursing home environment
• Performed a variety of administrative duties regarding prescriptions
• Gained a basic working knowledge of many common medications

Other Qualifications

• A quick learner of both facts and skills
• Both independent and a team player
• Fluent in two languages and currently working on my third

Studies in psychology, philosophy and literature.

“...no, Far, you’re not listening to what I’m saying. There’s definitely one way to interpret your dream, the one way that corresponds optimally to reality. It is unfortunate, though, that the interpreter (including yourself) doesn’t have access to the historical, the diachronic dimension in sufficient detail, because to know exactly why this random element, this aspect of brain sputtering as it is deprived of external stimulation, this aspect of endogenously generated harmonious activity, was interpreted, subjectified, inserted into the economy of your consciousness in that way, rather than the myriad other ways it could have presented itself. So you’re saying the bathtub in the field was made of porcelain, and we may ask several questions therefrom: why porcelain and not, say, granite? Why was the bathtub in the field, and not on it, under it, floating, tethered, untethered? And, of course, in what way did you know you knew it was porcelain, and not any of a number of other ceramic materials?”

“Well, it might not have been porcelain.”

“In that case, why did you say it was? I’ll have you know there are any number of materials that are preferable to porcelain in bathtub construction--even a cast iron bathtub, properly coated, could get better life than some varieties... but anyway, this isn’t where we disagree fundamentally. I don’t like your implication that just because we fragile human meat boxes can’t know all the facts, or contain them within one subjectivity, that there isn’t some way that things are, and accordingly, some way in which our interpretation can correspond to the truth of things.”

“Come on now. You know better than this. We both agreed that objectivity isn’t just growing up out of the ground, so to speak. It’s an achievement. It’s our achievement.”

“But we must think of the future. And this ideal future is all we have to give direction to our academic endeavors. And we are the keepers of that flame. Keepers of the great conversation that has bounced from Miletus, the Indus Valley, the Gangetic Plain, the mountains of China, from the Levant to Mesopotamia to Egypt to Archaic Greece to Classical Greece to Rome to the Arabs to the Europeans and now to us, to the cosmopolitans drowning in our tide of mud--but it’s always been like this. It’s actually a mystery how we’ve never been ground down, how the writings of Plato or Aristotle or Thales of Avicenna or Bacon or whoever aren’t lying in the dust...”

“Adnan, you’re getting really far off topic. I was asking what the bathtub might mean, and here we’re off on a historical survey of big names in philosophy. Can we keep this on a human scale, please?”

“Sorry. Please don’t get peevish with me. I’m just blowing off steam here. You know how this whole process of applications has been. Madness. Just sending shit into a consuming maw. You spend 15 minutes composing a targeted cover letter and nobody will even look at it; nobody will let you know of anything. And it’s fine, the first hundred times, but when your part-time job is futility--well, shit. What can I say on that point? There is no conversation there! All is silence and electrons shuffling along wires bumping each other, hop-skip-jumping from me to you and from me to them, mostly drowned in a thick soup of primate apathy because after we meet about three people we can’t really be bothered to process anything deeply any more because that’s how it was on the Serenghetti plain, back in the Olduvai Gorge, or in the trees, or earlier when we shuffled under the shadow of the saurians...”

“...dude, please. The tub?...”

“...walking the earth, shaking the trees. ... Oh? The tub is a healing image: cleansing you, receiving you in your entirety, therefore a symbol of the Self, the totality. It’s likely that you’ve had a lifting of tensions in a relatively close friendship, some kind of breakthrough after tension. Does that sound right?”

“Yeah. Me and my mom recently...”

“...wonderful! The delicate mother-daughter bond sprouts renewed. Renewed! It makes me very happy! It makes my eyes wander in the noosphere like those googly springy fake glasses. Do you know the ones? You can get them at Dollarama for cheap. Dirt cheap. Never mind they turn to dust and in dustiness sit collecting it in some forgotten drawer, just waiting to spring upon us during a particularly vociferous bout of personal psycho-archaeology, wherein one uproots the childhood stuffed toys, lost birthday cards, family pictures, well-meant but mainstream and like a stab into the heart, a way of bypassing every conventional personal defense, a way of getting into the back door of the ego through the past when we weren’t so well outfitted, like goalies in their fortress of pads. I’m glad I could help you, glad I could offer some insight, thereby justifying all these years, these six years spent as an undergrad, these six years spent getting two degrees, two accelerated degrees, working all the time, heading the desk so many times as to leave a faceprint at my place in the library, headdesking so many times I don’t remember what it was like to not be a student, to not be institutionalized, to not be domesticated. do you remember, Far? I don’t. I don’t remember the endless summers of childhood that I’m told felt that way, felt golden, felt eternal, you know? I don’t remember them...”

“Um. Adnan. You’re kind of scaring me.”

“...but we can’t fear the abyss now, can we? The failure of all our striving, all that education, all that savings we forked over, we children of immigrants, while our parents turned lathes or whatever the fuck they did, we were cooped up studying as if it meant something, meant employment, meant prestige. You know what it fucking means? A method of social control. A fucking goddamn fucking method of social control. A way of keeping those who should be running shit, running shit ethically in a kind of crystal cage that they grow so attached to that they won’t leave, won’t descend from that tower of elephant tusks, won’t descend, won’t deign to dignify the two-thirds grey majority, the high school diplomas and the Humber College communication diplomas, the professional diorama makers, the people who make piecemeal improvements to Cheez-Whiz and other assorted mostly-plastic shit, while the systems thinkers, the people who need to clean up the phytoplankton mess, who need to make highways stop effacing city neighbourhoods, who need to find more efficient catalytic converters through biomimicry, for example, or simply come up with new, better, psychologically sound day care practices, or counseling practices, or whatever--those people have to languish in obscurity for the better part of a decade. It’s criminal, Far; fucking criminal. And then, have you heard this new thing? I just saw it today: the federal government is pushing the city to engage in a massive project of highway building “to stimulate the economy with shovel-ready projects”. Do you know what this means for the cultural capital of the city? They would cut downtown apart in four ways, like a fucking pizza. Goodbye every neighbourhood that’s ever been an incubator for anything decent in this world--(I mean urban decency; I don’t mean to impugn the decency that small towns can breed). I hope they kill it with fire, burn that beast then dunk the ashes in acid then burn the acid ashes then irradiate them with both gamma rays and microwaves, then bury it, cement the hatch and surround the opening with a minefield and a no-fly zone. Kill it dead, burn the highways, topple their supports, coat them with oil and watch the carnage, right Far?..... Far?......Hello?....”

Consider: "whether your cats are old enough to learn about Jesus."

Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 8)

2011-03-06T20:46:00.003-05:00

"And if they were waking an image in us,
the endlessly dead,
look: they'd be pointing
to catkins handing from empty hazels
or the rain
down-falling a dark soil bed
in early spring...".

Rilke. Remembered.
And let's also remember
the water-logged earth,
the city parks marshy.
Hinting at renewal--
the rains of life,
the wet, black boughs
and steam. Inside,
we feel utterly empty--
and in that exhaustion
we are made the perfect vessel.
Don't forget the etiolated grass,
my beholding! Don't forget
the wordlessness of Will.
For it is by accident,
mute accident that we have lived.
For it is by surrender and grace
that each blade lives. And rises
spring after spring.

There is a tower rising out of the ivy,
rising like a chorus,
rising beyond us into the low-lying clouds.
There are angel statues with downcast eyes.
There are coats walking around down here,
long beaten, long comfortable in
defeated repose. Somber statues
in uniform coats. Statues of
hollow-eyed World War 1 aviators,
degraded lions guarding the Taoist temple,
dragon statues with peeling red paint.
Metal sculptures of firefighters
carrying children--but walled off
with yellow police tape. And beyond:
the stratus cloud, and the anemic sun.

Rilke is a poet of spring,
and I am a writer of winter,
of hanging up the plough.
But remember, temperament:
remember, beholding.
The thaw is the start
of pestilential changes.

Consider: "Honesty is the best poetry."

Be Pithy, Be Restful, Be Joyful

2011-02-19T13:42:00.002-05:00

My living room looks only moderately lived in. That's just a symptom--my life feels barely lived in sometimes. There are stains on the table from when I had people over. Seven weeks ago. Now it's piled with books I mean to read. But there isn't time. Most of my reading is done for someone else, proximately. They try to make me believe I'm reading for myself. But all I want to read is (1) sad fiction, (2) stories about Soviet engineering boondoggles, and (3) enraged polemics about the pacifying influence of the entertainment juggernaut. I guess that last sentence wasn't pithy.

Nor joyful. Joy's being held in abeyance. First I must rest. Yesterday I forced myself to work all afternoon while falling asleep. Falling asleep all afternoon. Then artificially inflating my mood and ego with alcohol. Then bad sleep. And now my head is cobwebs and couldn't sleep to save its life. Maybe tonight. But I doubt it.

It's a day of sleepwalking rest. The day after the unseasonably warm day when all I wanted to do was walk in the sun and feel the non-stinging wind on my face. Instead, I sleepwalked through 5 hours of Jurgen Habermas on religion in the public sphere, a paper of continuous "yes, but..." from my end.

Consider: "You can't base a society of New Age mysticism. Cats don't herd."

Queen & Spadina, Depressed

2011-02-13T11:11:00.004-05:00

The beat goes on; the beat is endless.
Heavy lidded pulsing in my gut,
little churning currents of blood
pounding in the temples,
in the roof of the mouth.
And in the fuzzy stillness,
thoughts half-born, like
the bloody feral's kittens left behind
when the coywolves attacked,
half-eaten now. The fuzzy fury,
approaching articulateness,
approaching full, awful packaging.
And the stillness, heaviness
of limbs locked in walk-motion,
blocks stretching out
funhouse-mirror-like in distortion.
The beat goes on, but
'tis all in pieces, all coherence gone
all just supply, and all relation
(Donne). And it goes on,
the cotton fog, the chasm between
what's in the theatre of the eyes
and that land of value,
of "yes", of "no". Instead,
all's just relation. This, then this:
the streetcar clangs seven times,
the bass beat from headphones in 4/4,
always the hip-hop 4/4,
the man in front in half-light,
there is scaffolding:
within a young woman is doe-eyed.
And so many blocks,
and such indifferent cold.

Consider: "There ain't a penthouse Christian who wants the pain of the scab, but they all want the scar."

The Consolation of Muscle Memory

2011-01-16T21:54:00.003-05:00

"If it weren't for music, life would be a mistake."

False! I have you now, Friedrich Wilhelm, my friend. I have your myopia. Don't worry--it's the same as mine.

What you are saying is true only for a certain kind of cognitive mutant. I share your particular kind of mutation, though I daresay to a lesser extent.

If not for music, I would have practically no experience with manipulating the world. Here I mean doing music, not merely listening, no matter how intently. As someone who's getting more cerebral by the week, so quickly in fact that I can see it happening of its own accord, destroying my boundaries, music keeps me sane. Otherwise all I'd have to show for my life would be some markings in recording devices of carious kinds, and a particular arrangement of neurons in my cranium, which is a depressingly small chunk of the cosmos. Oh, and a few stories those I've known would tell about me. And a few people modified. But all that will have blown over in a century or two.

Music, as those who don't perform it are wont to say, is the language of the emotions. False! There is emotion to be sure, but the histrionic manipulation of heartbeats and frissons and galvanic skin response through auditory entrainment is secondary in performance. What counts is mastery! It is all you have in life, and all you need. Mastery. In it I feel big. I have surcease from the rest of my life, where I wonder what I'm doing and whether anyone will ever understand. And I can play out the facsimile of an engaged life.

Poetry doesn't do it, because it's just another outflow of the cognitive faculty. But muscle memory! Ah, there's something to ground you, to make you feel actual.

I highly recommend it.

Consider: "The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited."

3-Day Novel 2010 (Part 4)

2011-01-08T12:48:00.002-05:00

On the coffee table: a samovar, paper piles, a yellow origami rose...

...which Ezra had made a few days ago. He is currently stretched on the couch, watching the news, his right leg bouncing up and down, his eyes glazed. The TV is saying something about the rise of militias in the Midwest, and is elaborating on the ideological composition of them, which isn’t worth going into, is rather suitably summarized by “primitivists”, and not of the vegan kind, either. This is followed up by another follow-up of the story from inauguration day: the secret trebuchet that someone had rigged up to lob tar and feather balls onto Obama’s parade route. Names and photographs of those arrested, their cold stares focusing about 300 meters behind the viewer...

“You hungry? I made lentils.”

Eric opens the lid of the pot. Just lentils and a bit of salt water. He ponders for a few seconds, then ladles the thin gruel into his bowl.

“There’s also tea.”

So they pour two cups from the samovar and sit there, watching the ten minutes of filler before the bottom of the hour on CNN, Ezra on the couch and Eric on the ottoman. During commercials they talk about how Ezra’s job search is going. Not well. He is casting his net all over the country. There are rumors on some message boards that an amusement park in Calgary is taking advantage and mass hiring entertainers from the east for some kind of fundie bible-land. Wouldn’t Ezra be averse to that kind of thing, being an atheist Jew and all? Not at all: Ezra has no aversion to taking their money. Also, pay’s a bit thin on the ground in our wonderful Socialist paradise. Commiseration all around. Eric talks about his reduced hours at work. They talk about friends, voicing concerns until the tea is drunk up. Eric gets Ezra another blanket, because tonight’s chill is supposed to be vicious, and they can both hear the whistling through the shitty aluminum siding of the basement entrance.

*

As the wind whistles, Eric undresses...

...slowly and methodically. He places the clothes into the laundry pile and, shivering, snuggles tight into the three layers of blanket. He reaches and turns off the light, which leaves a lingering afterimage. He checks, for the second time, his alarm. For with the pitch blackness in this windowless room, he could easily sleep fully through tomorrow’s shift. And then who would pay for the lentils in the pot?

And there, on his back, he waits to fall asleep. He focuses on the back of his eyelids, where aurora borealises play and swirl, and thinks of them as clouds, as milk in tea, as galaxies--thinks of Ezra and millions of people, the tons of food, the thickness of these walls, still trying to extricate himself from the repetitive tape loops of “Dust in the Wind”, uselessly, and then he flops over to his side, and his hand makes a gesture--not that gesture--any gesture but that one!--the gesture of greeting the emptiness of Anny’s side... he flips quickly, shimmies into the unoccupied space, rousing himself due to the cold, and focuses, focuses on anything but the churning in his stomach, focuses on the arrangement of his desk at work, everything in its place, focuses on recalling at will familiar faces of the clientele, focuses on the tension in his eye sockets, and the wave passes, and he is back to thinking the inking of the eyes is the blackness, the darkness, blackness oiliness, and he’s dissolving under the eyelids, the little death, the little tunnel rising, rising, gently curving, greeted by the smile of the...

...and he’s jolted awake by the mother of all myoclonic twitches--the feeling of falling--reverberating, feeling like someone took a paring knife and ran it all up and down my spine... this kind of sharp iciness like pins and needles, the feeling of static, fuzziness, like the neuron radio of the spine just got mad interference, just got struck by lightning...

...and I can’t stay in this bed. My restless legs find the floor of their own accord, and I am dressed, and outside, and it is snowing. And I look up and all around, and feel the wind on my neck, readjust the scarf, and marvel. The eddies and vortices are jumping cuneiform glyphs, if they could flow like drops of ink in thin layers of water, and they make the streetlights’ shabby orange halos move, make them travel against the prevailing wind, lamplights swaying in night, making the naked tree branches look a little like geodesic domes, or globes, with sparkles, sparklers.

I am out on an arterial. It is practically deserted, except for a few seemingly self-propelled overcoats. I walk and walk. Blocks telescope as I try to remember the way this one Bach prelude transitions into the “lots of notes” part (which I think is called a Cadenza), but cannot. I stop at an intersection crowded by towers on all sides. I have no idea where I am. Here in the night, I cannot see more than a few blocks in any direction. No people are around; no cars either. There is no sound of living machinery, except the hum of the sodium vapour lamps. I begin to grow agitated. I don’t even remember which way I came from, since I craned my neck to look at the towers and turned and turned.

So I pick the street to the right of me. A shop street, which gives way to low-lying buildings, every third one shuttered. Shuttered on prime real estate. Right downtown. The thought is difficult to bear, and slippery.

I am growing cold and tired, and I know I am nowhere close to home, not even walking in the direction. I want to see someone, anyone else on the street, but this does not happen. If anything, the air takes on a more rarefied quality, as if human beings hadn’t walked here with their pheromones, their flaking skin, their wishes.

And then, suddenly, from behind a tall building, around thirty or forty stories in the air, and airship emerges and blinds me with its searchlight.

An airship? A motherfucking zeppelin? As my eyes adjust, I confirm this. It seems like it is anchored to an apartment in that tall, fancy looking building, and as my eyes adjust more, and the steaming street-level vents blow away, and the snow thins out a bit, I see they have a catwalk rigged up, and burly men in arctic gear are carrying furniture out of the building. On the side of the zeppelin, it says “REPO”. I cannot confirm this, but from the main compartment, there seem to hang insectoid legs.

Its searchlight , which had been scanning the street, returns to me. The glare physically hurts, and my heart begins racing. I look around for an alley to duck into, but merely end up walking back. My thoughts begin racing: will they lasso me? Can they? Am I already surrounded? How many more of these behemoths are around? I look around, expecting to see them crawling out of hiding spaces in every tall building, inflating like mosquitoes gorged with blood.

I begin to run. I run and run and duck into the first tiny passageway I can. The inside of my coat is drenched with sweat, which begins to freeze at the collar. I had forgotten tonight was an extreme cold alert. Even the homeless had hidden. They had hidden to allow these monstrosities to loot the ruins and cart everything away to God knows where. Would all our precious shit be dumped into the rapidly acidifying ocean? Would it be deposited on a mountaintop, a hilarious hoax for archaeologists from 10,000 A.D.?

Stumbling down the alley, hitting my elbows on extruding Siamese pipe connectors, banging my knees and shins on mini-dumpsters and lock boxes, I at last see a light of something that looks like a storefront. The wind picks up and knocks me over, once, twice. But eventually, blow as it may, it is just air. It does not stop my progress, lurching as it is. I enlist the aid of a guttural growl. Reaching the door, I find it is open. I stumble in.

The old Chinese woman behind the counter looks surprised.

“We’re closed. Sorry.”

“I just need to warm up for a little.”

“Closed.”

I am crestfallen. I hold out my arms in supplication. “Please?”

She stops for a moment with her activity and gives me an indecipherable look. She points at me, a gesture understood to mean “don’t move!” and goes in through the staff door. I stand there, without moving, without thinking, just watching the steam rise from the soup she had been eating. I wanted so very much to just be that steam...

The old lady returns with a second, even older lady. The second one motions for me to follow. I enter through the kitchen area, down a long hallway where my glasses fog up, the ice melts, and I stumble. She takes me down a flight of stairs, then another. In that hallway, stippled with steam pipes, electrical wires, and other things I can’t even interpret. She opens a door to a dark room with a reddish glow. Within is what I can only describe as a pig iron furnace from Maoist China, the kind they had people running in their backyards. That is what it looked like, and that was the quality of the light it shed. There were other figures in the room, but their features were impossible to make out, for the fire within this furnace had a putty-like texture, a kind of... reticence for illumination.

“We warm you up good.”

“Thank you. How long can I stay here?”

“As long as you need.”

*

My chill being considerable, I sat with the fire...

...for what seemed like hours. And thought returned, and I reflected on my terror, a kind of blind, grasping terror. What had I seen, really? What did it mean? What could it mean? And where was I right now? All the twists and turns of the hallway made it impossible to tell, just as the streets did. The blind alleys of speculating eventually came back to the fire. I stared at the gently undulating dance of orange, red, and sometimes-white on the coals, and it came to dominate more and more of my sight. I beheld landscapes: valleys of white washed out by yellow, washed into monotony by orange. I beheld geological time in the dance of the colours. I beheld the parting of the ways of whole peoples: the valley people and the hill people and the mountain people meeting and warring, intermarrying and carrying on commerce. I beheld all the wheels of the generations happening, the sibling rivalries, the parent-child conflicts, the family feuds, the ancient buried secrets, the dead children by the riverbank. I beheld the herds of the people’s cattle and the bounty of their earth. I beheld their harvest festivals, their dances, their speculations on earth and sky, on mothers and fathers, on self and other, on justice, on order, on creativity, on music. I beheld their disputations as well; their lackluster complacency, their tired hands, their hiding from the stupefying heat of summer, their domestic quarrels cooped up in the dead of winter. I beheld the pomp of their kings, the viciousness of plagues spreading. the play-dances of children, all within the seconds in which a white valley existed as the coals of the fire were stoked.

Soon the fire, and the warmth, came to dominate. And the speculations were no longer speculations. Beholdings were involuntary. The fire was more of a tunnel than a fire.

And that is when it happened. Upon my receptivity, my blank fluttering sheet, it spat, like an enraptured dot matrix printer, the page that follows, and two others like it, flanking it. You must imagine it as instantly scannable, as if it had sprung fully formed from my head. I recognized it immediately for what it was--the pages of a burning book, its ramifications reaching in all the directions of my brain. I tremble at this... want you to know, but I cannot belch it out at you in the same way. You must read it.

Consider: "I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face."

3-Day Novel 2010 (Part 3)

2011-01-03T10:50:00.002-05:00

Eric Weisman, bearded, ruddy, rounds the corner, abstracted...

...considering the times through the darkness of the street. Of the eight street lamps lighting both sides of the block, three are burned out and one is flickering repetitively, while another flickers only intermittently. The whole effect makes the left side of the street appear to pop in and out of existence.

He kicks the thought, bounces it around a bit: these are the times. The times of collapse. The times of increasingly shuttered storefronts on once lively streets. The times when banks are closing branches in the most crowded intersections. The times when Western capitalism seems to be saying “fuck it” to everything, including itself, and is busy starving itself, eating itself up as though from an autoimmune disorder.

Or it seems that way from down here. The newspapers have been scrambling to supply appropriate metaphors for what was happening. Autoimmune disorder is his current favourite, though he likes the vividness of others too crude for print: intestinal blockage (as in constipation), intestinal hemorrhage, appendicitis, colorectal cancer of the world-spanning economic system. Shit going wrong with the shit-delivery system.

He turns the corner from the street of flickering lights onto a better-lit arterial road, populated during this evening hour mainly with younger people spilling out of the bars for smoke breaks. The sounds of their voices, muffled somewhat by the slush piled everywhere, are nevertheless defiant. One shrill, projective voice pierces the generalized din--“I could have fucked him, but no, I stayed wrote the goddamn thing myself...”--before falling back into sync with the seven or eight other conversations under that pinkish fluorescence escaping from the inside.

This particular nameless bar is also a concert venue, and the subcultures milling outside are different every weekday, although it had not escaped his attention that the subcultures were drawing closer to each other, almost imperceptibly, in styles of dress. In this, the subcultures that already emphasized cheap clothes seem to be winning, unsurprisingly.

As the block unrolls, he passes the other keystone species of this block, at this time: the old Chinese cart ladies, out for their endless-seeming evening collections of empties and recyclables. Their trade must be doing well these days, he wagers. Winter must provide a great seasonal windfall, since the cold is a disincentive to take the empties back, and the cramped quarters and general hopelessness are a positive incentive to drink more than ever, for the young and middle-aged population to party hearty, to drink up the wine and the beer and the liquor, for tomorrow we may die. He wonders about the old women’s sagacity, something he will never know because of the language barrier. Do they see things usually only reserved for friends’ or lovers’ eyes because of their unobtrusiveness? And how do they churn those observations in their minds? Do they share them? Where and with whom?

With the old lady out of sight, his thoughts and actions turn to preparatory motions for entering the streetcar: finding change, or a token, scanning the street for indicators as to how long he may expect to wait. He cannot see more than two blocks down the street because of the iciness on his glasses and the generally reduced visibility on account of the sewers spewing steam out over the boulevard, as if Tim Burton were standing on one of the rooftops shouting “Behold!”. So he doesn’t know how long since the last streetcar left the stop--or cluster of seven streetcars, like yesterday, which forced him, after half an hour, to slog through yesterday’s blizzard. But those are yesterday’s frustrations.

The presence of only three other people at the stop is not encouraging. So he slumps his back against the shelter glass and tries to turn up his collar to the wind. And he half-sits there, goring colder, trying every stratagem to leave his body. He ponders each stranger in turn, categorizing and rating them (6.5, 7, 6 out of 10, respectively), then replays the vacuum of the day, tries to hum some songs, but blows his load and gets to the chorus too quickly, counts the streetlights, counts his breaths, rubs his fingers together, thinks about what April will be like, with its wet, dark trees, thinks about the great depression, about Nazi iconography, about the pictures of smoke columns over Islamabad, about Anny, shifts to relieve the pressure in his solar plexus, thinks about how quickly the streetcar track is rusting, about the anachronistic use of sand as a braking mechanism, about how he knows that factoid, searches, remembers that it was a promotional poster some months ago, thinks about commercials and advertising more generally, tries to remember the name of a psychologist whose book he read a long time ago...Lotus?, Lottis?... remembers it was a woman, jump-cuts to the asymmetry of Anny’s collarbones, the result of a horseback riding accident, thinks about April mists at the horse farm, desperately squirms and looks straight ahead, evaluates the colour scheme of the sushi restaurant (red on brown with yellow Kanji characters) as unsatisfactory, gives some attention to the pulsing between his solar plexus and chest, thinks about intercostal muscles, about the opponent circuits in the medulla oblongata that control breathing rhythm, trying to recall the circuit diagram from, oh sweet Jesus, eight years ago, thinks about garbage and dust, floating in the wind, the chorus of “Dust in the Wind” helpfully inserting itself and running in the background for the rest of the trip, as he continues to picture abstract shapes of no earthly hue, thinks about H.P. Lovecraft, about the contrast of something-jumps-at-you horror and existential horror, the anxiety of meaninglessness, thinks about Paul Tilich the theologian that Rev. Denison mentioned the week before he died, which was, oh sweet Jesus, three years ago, thinks about aging, dust, flaking skin, about lights, about voids, abysses, the Marianas Trench, which sets of an annoying repetition of the phrase “Mohorovicic discontinuity” which crept into him when he took geology oh so many years ago...

...and finally, after so many iterations and others besides, the streetcar comes, and he climbs on, and pays, and stands, and shifts to accommodate more people packing on at other stops, and thirteen stops later gets off, and walks half a block left, then turns right, and then right at the funny-looking tree and goes down the alley and round back and unlocks the door and takes his boots and two layers of clothing off and enters the living room, all in a reverie, not having noticed any of these things, because of the tripartite “blessing” of his solar plexus flickering, “Dust in the Wind” dissolving him, and the Mohorovicic discontinuity giving him an odd feeling, like the shock before a poem kernel sprouts.

But he has not written poetry in something like seven years.

Consider: "[She] who looks on a true friend looks, as it were, upon a kind of image of [herself]: wherefore friends, though absent, are still present; though in poverty, they are rich; though weak, yet in the enjoyment of health; and, what is still more difficult to assert, though dead, they are alive."

Father of Four Daughters

2011-01-03T09:59:00.002-05:00

(This is a sketch for something I'm trying to put in song form. Or maybe something else. Please excuse the ring of me writing about something I don't know. I aim to take this and compress it into a few lines...)

Everything here clings to everything else. The country house bought only decades ago is spent. Droplets of water cling to the wooden enclosure fence. Paint peels in the afternoon magic light on the porch. He sits there, paunchy, professorial in the autumn of his life, rising periodically to feed the parakeets, to fiddle with the various stringed instruments, to adjust the refractive crystals, to rearrange the bookshelves to reflect the new map of his wandering mind. Only wandering now. No more dialectics with Gaia. One of them will die first, they said. It was her. And now bearded Ouranos wanders the halls because the stars have been hidden by stratus expanses for weeks.

Afternoon sun and the yellowish dust motes floating in the beams of the living room. Tastefully out-of-date furniture, infused with smells he can no longer recognize, because they are the scent of him, with hints of the others, the women who grew here, who gave what they needed, and dispersed to their fates, whether domestic or peripatetic, whether ecstatic or sclerotic.

One went on to nurture her brood, but half-way across the continent. When she comes, on her sweat comes the acrid tone of obligation, and when the light arises in those features, when her mouth opens to reveal the gaps in her teeth and the wrinkles that encroach on the corners of her eyes it is good, but soon forgotten, fleeing into the corners of the room. The light is in her children's energy, rising in the house and making it creak. They can see its nooks and crannies as the conscious offerings they are: friendly obstacle courses; grandpa's labyrinth. For when she was born and grew, her arising in this world, and the approach was torturous. Insecure. Unfinished and unsupported for months. Here, as everywhere, there were things that we will never know. But in no other daughter was that horizon of space around her actions more accusing.

Another daughter comes for weeks on end, but never for holidays. The tenets of her purity preclude that. This is the woman he imprinted with what he was before he met his wife. She. Gaia, who disabused him of the impulse to walk for a week in the foothills just to see that perfect tree on the mountainside rising defiantly. She who almost died as a cougar paced behind her, confused by the motionlessness while she observed a flower opening in the woods. This one, who radiates his heart, who shares with him that emphasis on detail: the crystal bauble, the imperfection of the fence, the little uniquenesses of the crows. She, who has such frantic and desperate tales to tell. She who has a hairpin crack straight in the delicate porcelain of her heart. She, who left the other day, of whom the stratus clouds and the clinging droplets whisper.

The third is repetition. The third, penultimate child. She who was raised less haphazardly. She whose impulses, when they arose from those earthy, shadowy depths, found their outlet not in the march of generations, not in the odyssey of family photos stacked in chests until they break the boards with their heaviness; no, her outlet was a single man. A quality man. A man with ambition. A man who gave her the children she wanted, but who always took the biggest cake slice. Who insists on organizing gatherings, who raises fatherly hackles. This husband is repetition. Repetition of the pathway that loomed long, long ago. A pathway almost taken, that sapped so much. A path of desperate bluster. And this old lion knows a few things the young, limber usurper does not. But this is not about the men.

There are trees on the property for all the daughters, and he walks sometimes in the grove, and looks for portents in the branches, marvels at the long view, the wide view, on which they branched just as they were predestined, but then takes the micro-view, the view of accident, the view of freedom, of groping in the unknown air. Some of the branches have twisted around each other. Some have entangled others. He has had to prune some major ones. The tree for his second daughter, in particular, is missing a root node. It looks lopsided. Moss grows on the first daughter's tree. The third daughter's tree is favoured by the squirrels and birds.

Ah! The fourth daughter. She. She who will tell our stories in song and poems. She who has been prodigal, for otherwise, how would she tell anything? How else could she have risen from the cottonball hugs of the rest of us, she that was so much younger? She who seems to have a face full of shrapnel? She who reminds him of the accusing peeling-paint buildings of the parts of cities where artists gather? She who breathes that? She who has gone too far, even by her father's tough-mindedly open standards? She on whose breath comes the breath of self-consciousness, self-criticism maybe finally taken too far. She who will either be unknown, or she who will tell of our ways to posterity, long after the house and the fence and the bones and the flesh has gone. She who may blow the pollen of our longing into the winds.

Consider: "There's a big pile of innocent bones still holding up the garden wall / and it was always the broken hand we learned to lean on after all."

Gimme Fiction

2010-12-29T11:18:00.003-05:00

Let's have some simulated worlds, where human possibilities play more-or-less freely, constrained only by our stick-it-iveness. Gimme hallelujahs. Gimme postcard landscapes. Give me instant travel: jungle vistas, the void of space without airports or spaceports. Gimme the three-second highlight of the two hours' lead-up. Gimme a five-second movie. Spike my dopamine. Wake me up. Time-lapse over the boring parts so you can see the whole process manifest, so you can see the breathing of the day, and so I can see it too. Gimme skills in the process of being learned, none of this sad cardboard-in-mouth taste of incompetence/mastery. Gimme the ability to enter your story in medias res--when else? Make me the delta of this broad insight watershed, where man-eating tigers still patrol the impossible-to-navigate swamps. Give me some leverage over the swelling of fatigue. Give me the ability to see logic dance: (1) if P then Q, (2) P. therefore, (C) Q. Also, if not Q, then not P. NB: the first is the form of comedy in dramaturgy, the second the form of tragedy. (Not really.) Give me playfulness until at least my thirtieth year. After that I'll live for others. Gimme the form of the argument: humans are the only fictional animal, owing to out hypertrophied narrative functions--that's the really wild thing. Gimme gimme gimme. Make me a good American: cognizant of my rights, and nobody else's.

Now for some questions. Is Allah just the most subtle way the protoplasm has continued its meaningless march into geological time? If society needs a mixture of mating strategies, does that mean we lose sight of society when we play to our strengths? Does sexually antagonistic selection make sense? Is anthropocentrism trivial? Could it be that woman is the measure of all things? Can one make Buddhist sense of Allah? (The converse is trivial.) Is grace really a gift for the fallen? Or do the fallen notice grace more because it is more contrastively salient? Is synchronicity a Big Lie or a Little Lie?

Now for some answers: That's not a good question. You can compartmentalize your approach and your anthropology. On the surface. No, because our society downplays it. Maybe: she does command the ultimate mystery. Maybe if you take the Paul Tillich route and make God the ground of being. Gift from whom? Sounds about right. Depends on whether you take it metaphysically or phenomenologically.

My apologies. That was too navel-gazing. But nobody reads this anyway.

Consider: "everything will probably not be okay."

Half-baked Philosophy (Part 4)

2010-12-18T22:31:00.002-05:00

[I've been sick all day, so this is my almost unreadable attempt to make the day not a total write-off.]

So I have one essay almost completely constructed. The impetus of the essay is born of a not-so-humble project: to say what Eliot Sober should have said, or what he should have meant, whichever is more arrogant.

You see, in his 1997 symposium paper, "Two Outbreaks of Lawlessness in Recent Philosophy of Biology", he tries to make the case that although he mostly agrees with the view that there are no empirical laws in biology (what I will call the Beatty/Rosenberg line), he thinks that biological laws take a curiously nonempirical form: when examined, they turn out to be simple mathematical truths. And so, biology is filled with all sorts of laws.

There is something to this approach, but sober has been rightly criticized for not saying about how we come to recognize that such laws apply to some part of biology. The thought here is that, prima facie at least, it is the empirical generalizations that allow us to discern the application of a law to a domain that are doing explanatory work. And we want laws to do explanatory work, right?

This is, as far as I can tell, where the debate has been ever since. The "laws of biology" debate is one of those thickets of views where there seem to be complex, multi-party dynamics of misunderstanding preventing progress. And I intend to add to this a modified conception of law.

My essay, as I said earlier, will say what Sober should have said. There is something right about laws in biology being nonempirical, but I think it has to do with Sober holding a different conception of law. He wants us to adopt a looser requirement for what counts as a law. Now, my addition to all this will be to mix in some metaphysics that were introduced about 20 years ago to the debate about natural laws. There is, I foresee, a dialectic which will have to take place, and the upshot of it will have to be that this different, more metaphysically committed view will have to acknowledge, yet importantly sidestep the main objection to laws in biology, namely, the simple observation that evolution is contingent, or put another way, that contingency plays a richer role in biology as a historical science than it does in physics (though, of course, it's there as well: compare the debates around fine-tuning and the anthropic principle).

This is the state of my thoughts right now. Somewhat confused, but I have an almost-outline in my notebook. The main question now is: how does the DTA view of laws (also known as the "necessitarian" view of laws) sidestep the evolutioanry contingency thesis?

Whew.

Consider: "Hope is a waking dream."

3-Day Novel 2010 (Part 2)

2010-12-14T22:45:00.001-05:00

2. The Cold Open

It is the night of January 22, 2009...

...and the faint sound of ice pellets hitting the large windows of the office is growing louder. Within can be heard the whirring of the HVAC system--a steady drone at the edge of only one awareness, the awareness of the person left here seven minutes before closing. He is preparing his exit. The scarf is laid out on his desk, taken out of the coat sleeve on the rack only seconds ago, and he is searching the other sleeve for his gloves, unaware, until just this moment that the gloves had fallen into the grey-brown goop at the roots of the coat tree.

He is cold. The pilled-up wool sweater, in conjunction with the HVAC system is not enough to fight the creeping chill. He knows why. The agency cannot afford to pay for an inspection this month. Not for a couple of weeks, until the emergency grant money comes through. He knows this because he is privy to the workplace email exchanges on this topic. Privy, somehow, even though he bears no managerial decision-making responsibility. Maybe because he is an affected party, having to sit here during the dead hours in the full blast of January. Or maybe it was a typical organizational oversight.

He is folding his newspaper into his backpack and decides to maximize the Microsoft Outlook window before shutting down the computer. Something at the edge of his awareness twitches: something is different. A few hundred milliseconds later he has identified the problem: three new emails. Three resumes, in just before the submission deadline

Balls! And I’m back to being personally involved in this goddamn joke of a nothing-doing pseudo-job. My third-person detachment is snapped in two, or three, or whatever. This means I have to print this shit out, collate it, staple it, date-stamp it and enter it in the log. “So the managers can have an easier time.” Yeah. So they can save themselves the 600 milliseconds it takes to write one word on the front of the resume. But no! I provide them with a nice checklist, where they can check off “Yes”, “No”, or “Maybe”. Processing these will take me between 6 and 10 minutes, depending on the precise formatting of the attachments. (For unfathomable reasons, PDFs are the bane of my existence.)

You may have noticed, gentle reader, that I do not want to be in this place any longer than absolutely necessary. Getting out right on the dot is a stupid little game I play with myself, a game of timing my preparatory actions just so everything converges on that ring of my cell phone alarm. And this has ruined everything. Though stupid, I feel as though I’ve lost the day, as though I’ve been crowded out by the wailing, hungry ghost-mouths of the unemployed. But whatever.

I am heartened to find that only two of the resumes have attachments, and those two have one attachment each. This is a great boon. I get greatly annoyed at those who split cover letters and resumes into different files. No thought to the ergonomics of lowly administrative support workers. I may be able to get out on time if I perform my actions in my scarf and coat and keep the gloves in my outer pocket. Hope is rekindled.

I print the first and third resumes--the ones with the attachments mercifully in .doc format, and I print out the body of the email for the third. I am actually struck by the ineptness of that third resume. Some acquired sense of exactness, of punctiliousness, of white-collar propriety is struck dumb by the audacity of this woman at flaunting the rules. But whatever.

Bullshit actions performed, I manage to leave only one minute late. As I lock up the building, and the deathly cold creeps under my layers, and as my body shivers violently, spasmodically (for I have been sitting for the last four hours), I reflect on how none of those three have a chance of actually getting the job, because even if the online posting wasn’t just there as an exercise in appearing fair (which is unlikely), and if they managed to stand out from the 300 other resumes I have received, none of those three had the necessary conjunction of qualifications: being beefy, white and a man. Because this job, the “doorperson” (another futile attempt at political correctness) for the homeless drop-in, requires just that. Oh, not because I work at a sexist organization, but because the prevalence of racist, sexist, angry assholes in the swelling ranks of homeless make women or visible minority doorpeople’s jobs impossible, even here.

I should probably say something about my workplace. It is not a typical office. It’s a reception area for the Reverend Denison Community Space, a basement that extends two stories down and three lots out, with entry from this nondescript bay-and-gable house on Augusta Avenue stuck between two now-shuttered tapas restaurants, harbingers of the inevitable gentrification of the Kensington Market neighbourhood. (Unless we never recover from our current credit clusterfuck.)

This place’s eponymous founder--Reverend Denison: priest, social justice activist, psychiatrist, atheist--had sunk his inheritance into digging out the vast basement that now serves more than 400 people per day. He has been credited with keeping the area affordable for all the usual generators of diversity because of the milling crowds of the destitute scared off the more dillettantish bohemians, the vanguard of gentrification.

Forgive me, but these reflections/descriptions are leaving me profoundly unmoved. This would be a good time to return to third-person narration, the only thing that makes me feel important anymore.

Consider: "The human mind does not boggle at multiple realizability. It does not balk at the open, indefinite vistas of the future. And it does not consider the otherwise crushing weight of the past."

3-Day Novel 2010 (Part 1)

2010-12-12T18:17:00.003-05:00

So, I've decided to serialize the novella/long story I wrote over Labour Day weekend back in September. The problem with it was that I needed about 6000 words to end the story, so I'm hoping I can write an ending worthy of the setup before we reach the point where I have to post the shitty band-aid ending. Anyway, installment one:

1. The Greek Chorus Speaks

It is the winter after the fall...

...when the bottom fell out. The charts they showed us on TV that September were hurriedly put together, squished vertically to make the downward line look less preposterous, less like the serene, intense face of Kali, the destroyer. All the same, sometimes the blue line dipped below the lower margin of the chart--the DOW dipping below 6000, then 5000, before we changed the channel.

The bottom had fallen out of the stock market--the metaphor doesn’t matter, for whatever we heard was ultimately the product of self-interested voodoo of whoever benefits--but for once, nobody seemed to benefit. The bottom had fallen out, which had gummed up the banks, and now their bottoms were falling out, and those who survived had clamped up and were treading water, hoarding jam for the winter, with one hand pushing away the needy while intoning standardized pieties. The TV told us it was always darkest before the dawn. It told us of market self-adjustments. It told us of grand opportunities for investment, for those in the know. It trotted out economist after economist, and after the outcry became too intense, they tried self-help gurus, inspirational speakers, even calm professorial types who amended the standard pieties with neologisms like “catagenesis”--the creation made possible only through destruction--but it did not stick. For even the stations’ bottoms were falling out. Our demigods--Wolf, Billo--were themselves sick, starved of the ambrosial effects of ratings, advertising dollars. Advertising for what? To whom? Ten news cycles later, the grimness of October showed, and the economy was in full tilt. So much so that our southern neighbours elected a (kind of ) black man to be president--catagenesis indeed!

That was the lay of the land globally. And as for locally, as for home: Hogtown, Toronto, Muddy York, Toronto the Good, the Centre of the World, We Who Classify Canada as either Toronto or not-Toronto (with apologies), that little blue line that went off the graph ramified out of abstraction into ten thousand things. Marble had begun to crumble from the tallest of our offices. The potholes multiplied. Traffic was lighter, then heavier, than lighter, like water swishing in a pan, tectonically rocked, blindly striving. We walked much more that fall, except when we drove like mad, drove anywhere out of the Big Smoke to grasp what serenity there was left in the fallow landscapes. For here among the towers, that insular human ecology that we stupidly called “the economy” was generating all manner of endangered species. And those were not about to lay down and die. No, they competed. We competed. We pushed each other off overcrowded buses. We found men with flashy shirts stabbed in alleys for their clubbing money. We roamed the inner suburbs in ever-growing bands, like some intellectual version of a zombie apocalypse. And we brooded; oh, we despaired. We drank coffee and tea and booze and we pounded tables as we pounded pavements. We spoke with the passion of Argentinean leftists before they were “disappeared”. We got together in basements for clothes swaps, for peasant stews, for games of chance and bull sessions. We produced several kinds of catastrophe chic.

But ultimately, we grew tired, and alone. We sank into our isolation even though those of us who still had rooms usually housed one or two hidden homeless, our unofficial roommates, our friends who were always there. But we Torontonians did not take to this newfound forced intimacy. So we walked around more. Walked the teeming streets. Walked the well-trafficked vibrant, diverse neighbourhoods Jane Jacobs was proud of, neighbourhood strips shuttered despite the teeming. Neighbourhood merchants eyeing the listless crowds anxiously instead of welcomingly.

That was the fall. When winter hit, the crowds cleared the streets and a whole new kind of crowding began.

Consider: "Economics just is voodoo."

Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 7)

2010-12-12T13:03:00.003-05:00

Unlock and unfold
my friend. Unlock and unfold
the indie rock album cover landscape
with its etiolated grass,
lean-to sheds
and the ashes of the fire.
Let our hair and clothes
assume the essence of earthsmoke
and we'll pretend
we're grown-ups
recalling the summers by the river
in northern Ontario towns.
And we'll cry at the thought
of maple keys twirling downwards,
of stipples light in the grotto
(whatever that is),
of the fragrances of the fens and spinneys.
Or we'll laugh and laugh
at former garage-band antics,
the trombones, the strummed chords:
majors for the sunrise,
minors for night,
sevenths for the afternoon,
diminished sevenths for twilight,
arpeggios for precipitation,
steady-as-she goes bass lines
being, of course, the pulse of our lust.
And so, know, friend
that winter is coming
and vigor
for those who live opposite,
the secular Merlins.
And know that the brown gloom
of winter smog
beats grey gloom
of ice fog.
And grow that beard
for face warmth.
Learn to expect nothing from nature,
not insight from the circling of the birds,
nor resources, nor mates,
expect nothing--turn inward
to the ever-whistling tea kettle
behind your eyes.

Consider: "The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot."

Half-baked Philosophy (Part 3)

2010-12-12T12:35:00.004-05:00

I'm growing increasingly powerful in my ignorance. It has become my universal acid. For example, about two weeks ago I reached a point in my immersion in philosophy where I honestly had no idea what "explanation" was. The week after, it was "levels of analysis" which were utterly opaque. (What is this metaphor doing here, at the heart of things?)

Anyway, if you recall the last post about Steiner's book, I've reached that point of ignorance with him. Having read his book (well, I skimmed the last third since I don't speak math, so I trust him to have uttered only truths in regard to the eigenvalues and Hamiltonians and complex lie algebras and SU(3) symmetries and what have you), I have no idea what motivated him to write it. This is the fulcrum. His main argument seems to be that mathematics is anthropocentric since its development relies on human considerations such as beauty and convenience. OK. That's fine. And then he says this is trouble for "naturalism" which he defines as merely anti-anthropocentrism. He then uses these troubles of naturalism to take aim at science, somehow. The problem here, it seems to me, is that the anthropocentrism he defends, and on which the traction of his argument rests, is trivial. Math is anthropocentric, at least covertly, because humans do it. So of course it will advert to human characteristics at some point. Everything does. That's the weakest possible form of anthropocentrism, and there's no way to get around it.

So either Steiner is tilting at straw windmills (I know it's a mixed metaphor--bite me), or scientists are so naive that it's not even childish. Knowing a few scientists, I'm gonna go with Steiner having taken a wrong turn. I suspect he thinks that the naturalism he's opposing bleeds into the Quinean type of naturalism, which views philosophy as an extension, and based in, science. How that's related to anti-anthropocentrism is a complex story. To be sure, anti-anthropocentrism is a guiding principle in many fields of scientific endeavor, but that does not generalize to everything.

For my part, I do think that math is anthropocentric in Steiner's sense. I think I gestured in the last post about how it's a field of endeavor that progressively abstracts and sharpens the Kantian-type "categories" our minds come furnished with. So it's a great way of thinking straight, or kind of straight, when physicists/chemists/biologists/etc. co-opt it.

So. What the hell is abstraction? And what are these categories?

I'm incredibly powerful in my ignorance.

Consider: "Only laughter can blow a colossal humbug to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."

Half-baked Philosophy (Part 2)

2010-12-09T23:09:00.003-05:00

So for the past couple of days I've been holed up with Mark Steiner's "The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem". Those of you who know me may well wonder what the hell I'm doing in this part of the philosophical terrain, since my history with mathematics is a long story of unrequited love. But, alas, here I am at the tail end of a philosophy of physics course, and I think I'll be writing on this.

One observation: I'd love Steiner to be my grandfather. He throws in jokes into the footnotes that actually made me laugh out loud a couple of times.

Anyway, my half-baked idea for the day approaches. So at one point in the book, Steiner argues that math is anthropocentric because it relies on standards of beauty and convenience, which are contingently dependent on us being the kinds of creatures we are. And that's fine, as far as it goes, because, really, who's going to argue for Platonism these days? (I know of one very awesome and well-respected person here at U of T who does, but that just goes to show you that we may all be crazy, but at least in a socially acceptable ways.) Anyway, so that got the apostate biologist in me thinking, because Steiner mentions evolutionary stories about the origins of our preferences and aesthetic tastes and all that. But I don't think he spun the just-so stories enough. My intuition is that if I keep spinning the stories, I may just end up with something (a) true and (b) interesting for this paper.

A first approximation of a sketch of the ballpark of the topic: mathematical practice is a cognitive exaptation of the aesthetic impulse, on which a lot more needs to be said. For example: aesthetic pleasure can be related to seeking. What are we seeking? How about intelligibility? That's related to sense-making which, on a cool and wacky reading of life (enactivism) is actually pretty foundational to all living things. So maybe math is a second-order sense-making where the first order is the concepts we bring to the world. In that way math is pretty much philosophy except cooler and involving different syntax, a kind of artificial language which evolves its terminology unlike the ossified structures of natural languages, which constantly breed confusion because they have to apply to the world in addition to being exapted by philosophers to serve different ends. So both philosophers and mathematicians are beneficial cognitive mutants. (I mean the truly great mathematicians/philosophers, not the merely professional.) But also, to go back to sense-making for a second, there may be a wacky kind of universality to math, at least maybe biologically, or counterfactually that may run as follows: creatures with certain kinds of first-order cognitive structures could, if circumstances are right, develop certain kinds of second-order abstractions, and even higher-order abstractions from that.

Whew. So where does wading in that thicket leave me? Is there anything to pull out of that? Maybe the idea that Steiner's just-so story about math doesn't go deeply enough. It's not just an aesthetic impulse that governs math. IT could be a seeking impulse. For what it's worth.

Oh, have I mentioned this is my essay-formulating week, so any kind of structured thinking (or semi-structured thinking) is helpful.

(I beg forgiveness on the jargon. But this is how I think most efficiently. One day I may in fact define these terms. It would help me as well.)

More on Steiner soon.

Consider: "Words move, music moves / only in time; but that which is only living / can only die."

Half-baked Philosophy (Part 1)

2010-12-06T23:59:00.002-05:00

Background: I am pursuing a graduate degree in philosophy.

Right, so I'm struggling to formulate essay ideas. I have two to write in the next three weeks, and my idea-generating faculty is going slowly. So this is an exercise to at least have something put down which could serve as the basis for further refinement. I don't know why I needed to spell out, but it helps.

Today, after class, there was an interesting exchange regarding instantaneous velocity. Our prof thought it was too simple to think instantaneous velocity is just out there in the world, since to properly define the idea you need the concept of limit, and thereby calculus. Before calculus, you had to impale yourself on one of the horns of Zeno's paradox: either at each time there is some finite velocity, which, given that there are infinite positions between position x and y means that you've gone infinite distance, or there is no velocity at a particular time, in which case motion is impossible. There was some back-and-forth about neo-Kantianism and whether this is really any different from realism, and what the sense of world was, and what Kant can help himself to. Is there an essay in this? Doesn't look like it. But so it goes.

Consider: "I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself."

Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 6)

2010-11-28T14:02:00.004-05:00

And so I'll linger on top of this hill
and take in the valley,
the space within the tree branches,
the moss, the wind.
How suitable,
that acoustic guitar theme
repeating the same two chords
in arpeggios like licks of flame
giving way to an equally sparse piano theme
of my own composition,
one of the secret themes.
Suitable for this landscape,
the mood of the trees and moss
and ambiguous swirls in the clouds.
It's a theme with four unadorned chords,
nothing fancy,
except that the bass chords start
in tension with the repetitive theme three octaves above
and don't find their natural home,
E minor, for sixteen bars.
And I'll think of endings,
doors closing,
the crack of light in the windowless room attenuating.
I'll think of
other people's words,
of the price we pay for hearing the world.
I'll think of the end of the walk
and how humans can't bear much eternity.
And I'll wonder how close I came
to new age boilerplate.
And then I'll walk off
down into a valley,
wind at my back.

Consider: "To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient truths; both dispense with the necessity of reflection."

On Writing

2010-11-25T10:24:00.003-05:00

Sometimes it just tumbles out of you. The preceding poems, for example, are chopped up into line breaks, partly for effect (the eye slows down when reading line breaks, and this induces a certain gravitas to the poem--which is why so much bad poetry is hilarious: ponderous line breaks emphasizing triteness) and partly because that's how they came: piecemeal, yet with a felt thematic unity.

And most of the time you grind. That's when it is especially important to have solid sentence structure. For example, in the above paragraph, a lazy marker in an English tutorial might mark the contents of the parenthetical remark as "awk". And it is undoubtedly "awk". But that's because the thought popped out, hung there for a second, and I have enough experience at this to know that if I had finished my well-constructed foregoing sentence, it would have disappeared. So one of the best markers of inspired writing is grammatical sloppiness.

I say it's a marker, not a necessary condition. States of mind change all the time, so sometimes they hit that perfect harmony of sentence structure and idea generation. That is the best kind of inspiration. That is what a writer lives for. It sucks if the ideas are bad, but there is nothing more rewarding than to write them anyway.

Now this marker can be co-opted to simulate inspiration. This is why one feels justifiable contempt for self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness writers. You can't oppress them with the rigid rules of your grammar, man. Their writing vibrates with the music of the spheres, which is beyond any earthly language. They are in direct communion with God.

Bull. Shit. Writing is a skill of integrating thoughts that seem important with the generative grammatical capacities of human cognition. Sometimes, in fact most of the time, it is right and appropriate to play with it, for that is how you hone the skills so that one day you can say the most awesome thing most clearly. This, like any skill-building exercise (pick your favourite), is a grand old time. Massive dopaminergic activity reinforcing further seeking behaviour with the occasional blast of endorphins titrated for maximum effect given the current general state of your nervous system. That's awesome. Who wants anything more? Sorry, kids. When a sculptor makes a statue, she's not "communing with the Forms", she's doing something she is good at, likes to do, and can keep doing indefinitely with more material.

I feel sorry for those who demand more of this. So please, drop your "transcending the boundaries" discourse. You'll transcend local boundaries, sure, if you're doing it right and growing as a writer. Don't make it a cosmic thing. It's your thing.

How did this turn into a rant about metaphysics?

Consider: "No matter how substandard you feel your skill or talent may be, If you never produce your art, the world will always remain deprived of it. "

Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 5)

2010-11-25T09:50:00.004-05:00

Stripped-down primate in a stange-familiar landscape,
what do you feel?
Is it the loin-quiver,
the hormonal shiver of
survivability
(that you could live here
hunt here
simply,
could breathe open space
and in nights around fire
teach your children to whittle wood
teach your mate to live).
That's what you feel?
Then realize
the wishes that came pre-packaged
are a cauldron full of convection currents
and in that abyss things are bound to misfire,
go to entropy.
Silly primate
under earth and sky
which tremble pregnant with your strange-familiar mythologems
but which are just earth and sky
and that birch over there
is just what it is
not Yggrasil the world-tree.
But why does it feel important,
the beholding?
Because it is just what it is.
There's a kind of bond there
it being and you being
right now
and you knowing
you can play with it later.
It's yours beyond words, this birch tree
just like all the cloying memories
that won't stand still before sleep.
Their convection is what gives you
a childhood shot through with a yellow filter
which teases out, somehow, the play
out of the billions of mind moments that came.
So this tree will be remembered
for its particular surprises
not for its dreary sameness with everything.
O primate seeking mate,
still burning that candle behind your eyes,
walk on.
There is this,
and there will be future.

Consider: "Education is what is left after all that has been learnt is forgotten."

Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 4)

2010-11-24T09:11:00.004-05:00

The perfect November day
casts its shadows to birth and death.
It's the kind of day when on the wind
comes old age,
and you'll think about every ache in your body
and whether it's cancer
and you'll notice new asymmetries in your face
maybe swollen lymph nodes
maybe sinuses packed with mucus
(a glamorous kind of suffering).
I felt like an old man
because I had grown an itchy beard
and walked slowly to savour the crunch of fallen leaves
which, on that day, made squishy biological noises
like fetuses pushing through birth holes
or salamanders struggling for life
against their six-year-old masters.
But anyway
there was a point to this cadence
lost long ago.
On the walk I looked for it again
and wanted to find a song lyric to the repertoire
in my head, that faculty that serves up
an appropriate earworm. But nothing.
Nothing but communion like in Zarathustra's Prologue.
(You really should read it. It's only
14 pages long, and has all the choice Nietzsche lines,
the ones that make good fridge magnets.)
Anyway,
the trees were naked
and the trees were the mood
and my feeling was like the trees
that is, naked,
naked meaning vulnerable
because open to the world
and unconcealed,
disclosed, in other words,
which suggests confidence
in the sense of telling a secret
not in the sense of being a hero.
And that's what mute November trees are
but your mileage may vary.
All I can tell you is I needed that walk
because no more like it will come for months
because we'll go back to indoor navel-gazing
which I love
because it's preparation for death
if done right.

Consider: "Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty—-he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world-—alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty."

Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 3)

2010-11-21T23:30:00.006-05:00

Also, I must tell you
I'm a stranger even here
where the nature walk is supposed to resonate
with the stirrings of millions of primate years.
Deciduous trees, somewhat sinister
stand like lines of accusing martinets.
I'm the first generation in this landscape
looking forward
and scorning that land
where my sinews were sewn to my bones,
only touched by my ancestors for 1400 years anyway
for when you know your history
you know where it disappears
into some rolling Eurasian plain,
and before that we only have
the Jackson Pollock pattern
of human migrations
and earlier ones too
of hominins with Latin names
fleeing volcanoes or predators
it never mattered. Anyway,
heroism is written by those
who do in fact live
so it kind of moves
in a tight vicious circle.
But I try to drop all that,
all that "abstraction"
and live in the seriousness of weight,
substance holding up my legs,
the pain in my chest
and the frisson down my back,
the warmth of my mourning beard
under the stratus sky
the colour of irrelevance.
I should focus on the enterprising
creeping of the moss on the rocks
and the breathing of the world's distance.
That's supposed to soothe me,
supposed to make me a burrow in this cold ground
and blanket me for dreams half-remembered
so I can recall the meanings of words like
communion
(the escapist instinct of the scorned)
or ekstasis
(the rush of flying on wax wings
too close to the sun).
But instead
the word-of-the-day impulse,
will only deliver up Anglo-Saxon words,
words of weight and heft and dirt caked under fingernails,
words for washing up and wandering off.

Consider: "Even a hunter cannot kill a bird which flies to him for refuge."

Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 2)

2010-11-21T13:48:00.004-05:00

I am a beginner again.
You can tell because I perform effort.
A brow gets knitted
and my gaze moves downward
and sweeps this way and that.
What's happening inside is
I'm asking for help.
Come now, analogy,
experience, come now
original idea. Hammer them down,
the tangled jungle vines of morning,
the trip wires of two-cups-of-tea moods,
the endless physiological tremor
that is human action.
You can tell
because words haven't come together into paragraphs yet.
That's to say they dance like leaf falls
viewed from inside hearthfire
ashes on the kitchen table.
You can tell
because I'm groping
like a woodpecker tapping the tree
a couple times here and there
and then flitting to another birch
or whatever
because the pull of the xylem and phloem
in the trunk moves to a different rhythm
than that of breath and grunt, the drawn out bass note
of the physiological tremor
that is this walk
which I'll keep together
as a thing only because
I've memorized the land's rise and fall
its breath I hope to feel down my back
chilling me. So I can get over this week
where not a single sentence danced in me.
Because when I'm cold I'm alive,
unaccepting and unquiet, and when I'm cold
my body's fear extends further than the week
to the myths of grandmothers
and the fretful window-worry of future parents
as the kids play in the snow
in the yard.
I've only started to get to the point
because
you can't touch the Kaaba until you've circumambulated
you don't go into the valley till you've scoped it
you don't write the thesis till the argument's cashed out
you can't get the feel of the chill
till you've looked at the death of the vines
in the image I have of East Coker
as Eliot describes it and as I embellish.
The point isn't words.
For once I won't write that way.

Consider: "that all love poetry becomes more edifying if you look for its implicit chain-rattling Promethean rage."

Simple Sad Serious Things

2010-11-20T19:54:00.002-05:00

I return!
Now with institutional support for my weirdness.
I return older,
filled out and fleshed out
by the wave action of hundreds of walks
like today's
where the sad clarinet solos of November's wind
through the naked tree trunks
point to sad simple serious things
like the weight of the ground
on this farm
and the way the moss grows on every rock,
the way the ground is tidewrack
and how the cold gathers us about it
in flushed faces
blood defending us. And let us have homecoming
in the heaviness of the world
(the things August misses).
in the thousandfold dens,
the hiding places of the creatures of winter sleep.
Let us look on it, or feel it
but really
let me do it just by myself.
Let me grow the beard, for now I know
it emphasizes the diamond drill stare
with which I approach this panorama
of clouds, of breezes, of living water,
the way I approach the disorder of the world,
the leaves between the trees slicked down by the rain.
It is quiet here
and there are no publishers to impress--
only the ego-shadow push and pull
with each coming night and dawn.
All I have left is my raft chockablock with images--
the temptation of St. Anthony.
collages of my interests,
and the songs that won't go away,
that insist on rising to higher registers
my voice can't follow.
We have last night's dreams
cloying subtly under the breath,
but really
we have the death throes of the ekstatis of summer
and the birth of winter balance,
its heaviness coming on the wind.

Consider: "other voices in the inner narrator. Tyranny by influence."

Self-Criticism

2009-11-01T18:59:00.002-05:00

So two months ago I wrote a novel. I think the time has come for an accounting.

First, I thought I was beyond my beat phase. That is, I never thought I would consciously dedicate any of my work to Jack Kerouac. But life sure is a rich tapestry!

The gist of the novel can be summarized in one brief passage. In it, it is winter. The main character, Cyrus, is returning home after a wearisome day of trudging down slush-streets in pursuit of work and canned food. As is his habit, he is dialoguing with Jack Kerouac, based on a "haiku" Jack has written.

Kerouac: Came down from your ivory tower.
Cyrus: To stare at an opening flower?
Kerouac: No. To find no world.

I am pleased with this exchange, which I will try to explicate. Cyrus is about eight months out of university. The world conspires to make him realize how little his theoria is valued. His practical work is tedious and intermittent. It's wearing him down; eating up his imagination; tiring his eyelids; wearying his muscles. He still clings to the hope that he is in control of his time, that he can cultivate the work of patient sight ("staring at the flower"). But some part of him knows better, and it is that poetic part. We cna see this, because the line Cyrus suggests to Jack would form a heroic rhyming couplet, but this is rejected. Rhythm breaks. Symmetry breaks

Anyway, the theme of the entire work is stated there, quite baldly. It actually came to me as a surprise. The whole idea: the dialoguing with poets, representing the inwardness that withdraws from the world, a few choice passages--particularly the cynical ones, or the ones around the nadir

Some things I am displeased with:

The main character, arguably the only character in the whole work, is a too-thinly-disguised myself. This is maybe justifiable, because in the work I was trying to give the structure of the monomyth to a profoundly depressing, distressing, and trying year of my life--you know the one, the disillusioning one, the one where I stare into an abyss for months on end; the abyss of banality. But nevertheless I am uncomfortable with the fact that this is more of a "fictionalization" than "fiction". And while it is true that all fiction is fictionalization to some extent, there is something disturbing in how self-indulgent it gets. And with that much self-indulgence, it becomes impossible to lift your head above the mist of self-directed thoughts, all the self-congratulatory "yes, yes... this is great!" moments. It becomes difficult to tie yourself to something more universal.

Two more problems: (1) implicit solipsism, and (2) pointlessness and entropy. It was a monologue that strived to be more--and failed. And in that, it became pointless for many long passages, became pointlessly entagled in the minutiae of one fictional subjectivity.

I am glad I finished a work of appreciable length. Nevertheless, with two months behind it, I have suggestions for revision aplenty.

Shameless plug: now available in all major book retailers!

(That was a pitiful joke.)

Consider: "Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen."

Zarathustra, meet Angels of Islam

2009-10-30T01:48:00.003-04:00

O my friends! Let it never be said that there is nothing to write about! One might as well say there is nothing to talk about. (And while the fact is undeniable, that we are surrounded by stunned couples at coffee shops, surrounded by old women talking about the weather, surrounded by babblers who talk as smoke screen--while all this is undeniable, we are not them.) Not yet. We still respond, our heart-muscles tensed, to the exhortations of impossible, dismembered Zarathustra. We still guide our gaze into the general vicinity or the Angelic orders. If there were such things--Angels and Zoroasters--they would take special notice of us. Of course, truth is spoken when we say these are but hypostases; these are but idealizations drawn from the hypertrophied functioning of imagination. It is image-making run rampant; idealizations with nothing to check them; idealizations and abstractions--perhaps the only way we can think now, after all that education, after all that sensitization to the music of the spheres, however we conceive them. But what direction is there to this fluxion of ours not for our hypostases? (Nihilism stands at the door. Whence this most unwelcome of guests?) Oh, we know we can’t live like that. Once, long ago, we thought we might, but realized at some point--perhaps through a predetermined developmental milestone--that it was a kind of benumbed nihilism. Nihilism can coexist with no responsibility, no power, and a limited horizon. But now we take something into our hands. We are forced to make plans, however vague, and in this lies the death of cozy, cerebral, contemplative nihilism. We need Zarathustra to move on, perhaps not day-to-day, but week-to-week or month-to-month. And the Angel? Here, I am simply too young to know. There are intimations that things count for more than we think, but that train of thought is an unlit path. The Angel’s cries echo; they echo wholeness beyond life and death; beyond polarities and horizons. And yet... it would be terrifying to have no horizons, to have no mystery, to have no ultimate reprieve, no sleep at the end of our long sunlight. The angel is the affliction of St. Petersburg’s white nights, a slow, creeping, enervating madness. Zarathustra scoffs at intimations of immortality. He bursts with life. They both agree that the wild places of the earth are better suited to catastrophic destruction than creeping incursion of the markets of comfort. Both the figures stand over and above humanity in slightly different ways, and I hope that their counterpoint has been fruitful. I hope, because there are heaps of broken images here, wandering in the scrublands of my inner landscape, and it is possible, in fact the most probable explanation, that this irruption into speech was a series of random run-ins with the characters of my psychodrama. I wonder if John Calvin felt this way. I bet he did.

Let me not be misunderstood. Fuck Angel therapy. Fuck smug mysticism. Mysticism, by its very nature, is terrifying--and humble and silent. It is inexpicable. It feels like losing your mind. Feels that way. And yet... it's a touch of that which grounds our reverence for naturalism.

Consider: "Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow."

Elegy

2009-06-19T21:17:00.002-04:00

Exordium

This week, shit got real. Aspects shifted. The discourse of freedom came head-to-head--publicly, transparently, nakedly--against those irrational impulses that would crush them. I am refering, of course, to the protests in Iran.

Never before have so many bullshit concerns been viciously cut from my life. The world (or, at least, the thinking and feeling world) have seen, in real-time, in intimate snippets, the arising of a human dream. Whether this ends in the death of the dream remains to be seen.

It upsets me that I cannot sway the outcome from here. I cannot set up proxy sites for dissident communication. I cannot orchestrate or participate in DDOS attacks against government servers. But I can be a keyboard jockey.

Nobody reads this, really. But I need to, viscerally, leave some testament that I was here. I saw and heard. I watched in rapt attention. My eyes welled up in tears. I shook with excitement at good rumors, I attempted to place myself in that situaton. I had to face my cowardice. What would I have done?

But this is not about me. This is for those who stood up in the face of brutal power. This is my dedicaton to the millenia-old dialectic of rationality versus idiocy. I dedicate this noth-that-polished poem, this hyperbole, these cliches to our brethren in Iran. May the events of the past week, whatever their outcome, forge bond of common humanity.

The Elegy

The first to go were the theological questions;
they're all Islamists, all our brethren,
even the ones who simply gesture,
vaguely and premonitorily towards "something more".
Those went. The questions, the
searching stares, the contours
of a human hand holding up a V-sign,
because, friends, we asked,
what Order, what Logos, what Allah
could allow this? Read the 99 names
read Marx, and tell me, where the
lumbering beasts wielding batons
come into the picture? Tell me.

We are all Islamists now. They don't matter,
the cosmetic matters. We are all of us now
struggling for space, struggling against
our own night, our own skins boiling,
drowning men rising for air. Who
would leave their family in the apartment
as they went into the street? Who
would want to wake up to beatings?

I remember you well, Cannes poster
in someone's dorm, half-torn down,
misunderstood in the mute rage of
a truncheon-man. Your flapping in the breeze
above a supernova of smashed computer screen.
And you, green crowd, watching the
concrete monument bent over you
like a protecting force of nature. The bible
says giants walked the Earth once,
and in the antideluvean torpor
llived with humans. I remember
and remember the welts on young bodies:
trapped in our bodies. And I listened
to The Arcade Fire for the first time in a while,
to pealing organs, the appropriate lyrics of
"My Body is a Cage".

Location went next, and, decentered, I wandered the streets.
In North York we had celebrations, soon to be mourning
vigils. I looked upon the world with
eyes for green. And the bullshit of
workaday concerns boiled, stirred
and spat me out days later, meditation not working,
seething.

Truth sense still clings here. Rumors send me
flying to the clouds, or falling into brooding.
Will the death of that one man, the first we saw,
be worth the spread of my ideals? When does the
celestial Idea of democracy touch the mountain peaks?

We watch and wait. Iran is a mountainous country.
Zarathustra spoke there, and Nietzsche through him.
Countless poets, the tablets of Cyrus dot this land.
And yet, here they martyred so many, as in
the birth pangs of the Baha'i, the Parsees of
Bombay. And I should stop, for I do not know
enough. At least, I'll defer to those who do,
to the people whose voices still give ring to
living poetry, echoing and revitalising the common dream
of humanity, the enlightened state, the just state,
that yields good lives. May your voices, and
arms, and footfalls, and cries echo around the world.

And may we, the supposedly saved, the supposedly safe
learn the price of carving space for flourishing.

I will end with oft-quoted words coming out of there. These are more raw than I can ever get. Another blog post. I should say, Iranians taught me about blogging.

Consider, carefully: "I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I'm listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It's worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I'm two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow's children..."

Sentence

2009-05-30T14:44:00.002-04:00

Endless party, endless polity on the hill the city of man the city of man standing over, against the city of God the idealization of the father the father I argue against so vociferously with philosophy but so few are philosophers and to them my usual methods are useless here they only get ground down into seething torpor which waits can wait centuries to burst back onto the world only their lifestyles are addictive their lifestyles in which we find gods and find man but I want to find the gods of little things and want to take those little things, those swarming little insights and make a godhead out of them just like small children make precocious sculptures with their food or maybe they don’t maybe I just conceive and image and compellingness becomes reality some adage like this but we know compellingness isn’t reality oh we writers know we’re always accused of being unrealistic uninteresting unenlightening corrupting more positively corrupting the youth the innocence the idyllic nature of life in late capitalist society yes indeed what a wonderful life what a wonderful wonderful life of things and gadgets and blinking lights the blinking lights at nightclubs the blinking lights of airplanes at night the blinking flashing swooshing lights of the CN Tower the blinking lights of jumbo screen billboards the blinking lights of car brakes going on and off on and off winking all the way looking westward over the 401 and the collectors snaking in but it’s not just blinking lights the blinking lights of ADD induction no no it’s the whooshing sounds the thumping sounds thumping in goth clubs sweating taking out frustrations Dionysus is here let’s sway let’s thrust our arms to Nyx to Erebus (but in opposition to Erebus) we experience catharsis the catharsis of tragedy and also of euphony we spew out dysphemisms when we’re out of the dance floor when we can hear each other again when we’ve avoided the glaring thumping of the amp stack godhead still thronged by worshippers still drugged modern rituals finding new commercial forms finding new promiscuous forms embedded in discourses of expressing selves but that never ever meant anything no self no easily discernible self anyway aside from what you wear how you speak what you’ve read watched listened to what foods you can make what sports you do how you exercise what your religion is what your interests are how you list yourself on Facebook under interests favourite this favourite I didn’t ask your name or your consumption habits I asked your behaviour habits but even that’s shallow are you narcissistic melancholic ISTJ ENFP what are you categorize what’s your OCEAN profile what’s your sign what shoes do you wear look how you dance we could be lovers we could be friends we will be enemies what do your parents do what do your children do which pictures will you show me which liquors will you feed me what is your taste in streets are you King St. or Queen St. neither perhaps perhaps you’re specially unique a snowflake a rebel an iconoclast go see all the other iconoclasts you’re Davenport you’re College and Spadina you’re the Metro Convention Centre you’re a man of rarified taste you’re a cigar shop you’re a metaphysician you’ll be a great teacher a great father a great dad a pops a poppa a dada you’ll be your son’s first word you’re a genetic cluster you’re decaying slowly what director of Hollywood films are you or if you’re into that what Bollywood song-and-dance scene are you what flitting occupation what car do you drive how does the electricity get to your house where did your food come from what wars currently sustain your new cellphone who do you fantasize about when you masturbate which cottage town are you what kind of flooring which kinds of wallpaper moldings nails screws finishing nails finishing screws topsoil layer primer coat of pain repeat coat caulking studs stud finders chandeliers tea lights which gods do you kill what animal’s poop do you scoop are you civically-minded are you organized are you smart everyone says they are everyone thinks they are everyone thinks everyone everyone thinks they’re the one the only one the protagonist there are no protagonists but if there are no protagonists there are no selves and others no antagonists to protagonists if there are no protagonists there are no plots if there are no plots there’s no growth no development no arc no lessons learned no things as thy ought to be art puts the veil of normativity over the world Nietzsche’s early work supports me and bite-sized philosophy podcasts support me the fight is for values in a universe that does not care art is the sheet but it’s up to each of us to live the art live the values live just to live and live without reifying that’s the biggest mistake probably the reification is a big mistake and people die in a meaningless universe but people die in a meaning-imagination stunted universe as well so show me blinking lights that blink out the form of the Good show me show me I am waiting with arms wide open I am waiting for the cacophony of the world’s music to yield the music of the spheres we’ve disenchanted and disinfected so we can live life does not disinfect life infects with ceaseless striving all my organs ceaselessly strive and all my body allows for this allows one to be rocky all my everything allows for this but let’s not be melodramatic all the punctuation in the world can’t hold some things at bay at bay all things bay away at the moon ceaselessly searching to perfect the self-organization that is the self no self beyond self-organization thermodynamic selves we are and what is our time and what are our dreams what is our space and the spaces we open how do we open them do we open the reducing valve what is that metaphor anyway but we dream metaphor and we are creatures that bind we have ties that bind that bind mother to son to grandson to uncle to friend to rival (yes, even rival) we ice spiderwebs of bad poetry we dewdrop curtains over real reality capital r reality we dewdrop curtains we butterflies dreaming we butterflies wafting we RAF fliers in the battle of England we who strive to be free somehow in any ways we mandarins who are so lucky and yet pretend we’re poor we mandarins with an obligation to assist we never live up to we mandarins oh we mandarins who eat children (we don’t actually—this is a metaphor) a metaphor for what exactly what are we binding what is coming together is this some personal narrative function that will heal all is this is is that it can I find it in the corner and I go back to asking my usual questions (see above) why do you drink your life away sometimes why do you drink days away how do you lose days can you change that can you get away is getting away getting away or is it lack of preparation is getting away really getting away oh this is what you’re worrying about prospectively but fear not fear not my child worry not not yet. In the dawn of a new day is the dawn of all that is; here is all there is; now. Attend to this. Attend to the means by which you convince yourself the past has substance, and see them for what they are: mechanisms of ignorance. Willful ignorance, comforting ignorance sometimes (and sometimes ignorance of the most discomforting variety). Do you really want the wounds of childhood to have substance? They have substance, but they are puffs of wind, neuron clouds, vague shapes that play before your eyes before going to sleep. Treat them as dreams, and life comes more easily. More easily is more smoothly. And where there is smoothness, the joyous running of magnetized springs, there is love. For love is what you project here and now. Love was never otherwise. Love of God is too abstract, and love of self is too prospective and backward-looking.

Consider: "When are we?"

Summer (Part I)

2009-02-04T20:31:00.003-05:00

(In a voice that's not my own.)

That was a simple summer, perhaps the last of the simple summers. That was the summer I became an atheist and drove a junk truck. It was, by far, the best of the simple summers. Simple; I shed my belief in an all-powerful being and all the mess that entailed; I extracted myself from my parents' suburban Episcopalianism and for the first time I made a living wage, which freed me. No longer did I have to grovel to anyone (except my boss) for cash. And my boss was a simple man. He never grilled you on your values, never asked where you planned to be in 5n years (where n=1,2,3...), never corrected your speech in prescriptive manner, and never impugned your taste in clothes. I came to work every day with the same soiled jeans (soiled from beer and wine the night before, soiled with spit, semen, vaginal fluid as well as garbage-water, caked-on dust, grease and salt), the same oversize t-shirt and the same absolutely non-ironic trucker hat. All he ever asked for were results: forms filled out appropriately, cash-out statements that made sense on a cursory glance, a positive-enough attitude

Lest you think this was some sort of slumming for an upper-middle class college boy, I assure you it was not. It was, actually, a surprisingly fertile period of intellectual exchange. I already mentioned my acquisition of atheism as a belief system (though, for clarity, I feel compelled to add it was "weak" atheism, not the crypto-fundamentalism of "strong" atheism). My junk truck partner (the junior partner; i.e., the guy who was stuck tossing the awkward, heavy junk pieces into the compactor) was a grad student. He studied some eclectic mix of fields (philosophy, world religions, actuarial science, with software engineering on the side), always talked about the importance of "keeping yourself open to the surging sea of this world", and would not shut up, ever. This developed in me that latent, often repressed, faculty of listening, and getting my end of the conversation in the form of epigrammatic remarks.

Oddly enough, it wasn't the philosophical side of this never-ending pundit that gave any direction to my atheism. On the contrary, he talked (and talked and talked) about how he, too, had flirted with it in his teens and early twenties, but how he had now developed a more ecumenical world-view. This still entailed atheism, but entailed very muted mockery of religion. He was aggressively eclectic in his approach. Half the time he was over my head, and the other half of the time, his explanations were just too pat. His crypto-Buddhist positions with regard to everything were shallow in the extreme. Not in the sense that he didn't know his stuff, merely in the sense that explaining things using that particular system was looking at it from too high a level. Everything was grist for the mill, and everything seemed promissory. Enlightenment would come, would come to me as well. I just had to work at it. I was ignorant of the Truth because my attention wasn't trained enough. (Fair enough: my attention broke down roughly evenly between strategizing on how to get laid and reading poetry with a gaze intense enough to burn through the page.) I told him as much and he would just smile, wave his hands a little and change the topic. It was a very strange apprenticeship. In retrospect I think he was planting seeds.

...(to be continued)

Consider: "The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed."

On Reading and Writing

2009-01-23T01:04:00.003-05:00

I seem to write well when I read a lot. This creates all kinds of problems.

First, if that's what lies at the base of my writing, where's the originality? Where's the creativity? (Possible answer: all creativity works by insightful juxtaposition of elements. See, for example, Conway's Game of Life. Beauty (or, if you like, complexity) emerging from simple rules and simpler elements.)

Second, I am bound to the enxiety of influence. I read a little about this phenomenon on the internet. Then I downloaded someone's Ph.D. thesis on catharsis, kairosis and some other Greek word that escapes me. It was supposed to illuminate the anxiety of influence, but I didn't finish it. The point I took form all that: the young artist must symbolically slay his influences. How psychically violent. I guess no more reciting Rilke or Ginsberg from memory. It's hard for me to get angry at these guys (though I recently learned that Rilke was, like so many idiot poets of his time, sympathetic to Mussolini. So that makes that easier.) Ginsberg, as we all know, was a big supporter of NAMBLA. I'm beginning to suspect my Apollonian tendencies are stronger than these guys' were. (Although one could make a decent argument that support for Fascism is kind of the ultimate manifestation of the Apollonian spirit.)

Anyway, to make this short: I can't seem to clearly differentiate myself form my influences. And another ham-fisted attempt to break that constraint by reading something crazy like Rabelais Quine or Sumerian creation myths won't really work.

Third, inspiration yields too many words. I get attached to that wonderful flow feeling and drop much of the rest of life. I really need to cut down on words. I've breathed words for a long time. It's time to start breathing cadence. It's time to start breathing themes, and fugues of themes. It's time to experiment with craft (the icky matter of presenting stuff in psychologically translatable terms). It's time to look around. Time to sublimate what I see, but humbly. Time to wait patiently for the gentle trembling of insatiable need to put something down in words. until then, it's all music: all Chopin and Bach and Beethoven. It's time to enlarge the soul before putting it to work. Enlarge the "soul" first. Take a few more years. Then begin your actual task.

Consider: "The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

28 Questions

2008-12-08T17:38:00.004-05:00

Will the future resemble the past? Will we ever close the hermeneutic circle? Does reading generally take us "further in" or "farther out"? What is the ground of being? Where is my horizon right now? Where is home? Is home a place? What is it to do something you couldn't have done before? What (taking it further) is "could have done" at all? What is necessity? What is the relation of necessity to how we ought to be? Does imagination overstep its bounds? Are there bounds to imagination? What are the vaguenesses imagination produces? Is the flickering of words self-enhancing? Does poetry really have a purgative function? When I speak simply, do I speak more closely or more broadly? Are dialectics reinstantiated in every generation? Will we ever wake up from the nightmare of history? How about the nightmare of economics? Or the nightmare of want and care? Can art help? but what is art? Is art simply something done well, as in "the art of living", or "the medical arts"? If art can help, how does it help? Is there something to Plato's warning, that artistically-induced affect manipulates what is irrational in us? Should we rather go with Aristotle? Or should we make our own system (as Blake did)? What about friendship? What is salvation? Is salvation salvation? (28)

Consider: "Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down."

Nocturne

2008-12-01T22:22:00.002-05:00

I've resorted to long trains of Wikipedia's random article clicking, I suppose to give myself the semblance of curiosity. Truth is, I am so tired sometimes that the demands I place on myself culminate in colossal failure.

Today I was trying to give shape to a flash of inspiration in lean, hard prose. The attempt failed, and with it, my evaluation of my own abilities. I have bneen thinking all day that what I need now is craft, not any kind of inspiration. Inspiration bubbles under the veil of daytime consciousness in larger or smaller irruptions. What I need is the sustained attention to follow up on it.

Then again, I could always fake it. That is an option, like the Wikipedia idea. Take 6 random articles (not the shitty ones about Craw Gulch, Oklahoma (pop. 34)) and fashion a vignette. Use your projection.

So what's the problem? It feels inauthentic. And with that proclamation I have another conceptual struggle. The world (for the most part) cares nothing for my feelings. The craft of writing consists of defeating the feeling-side in favour of some instrumental control. This has to happen. The hope is that after that process is complete, there is something left to produce the child-like joy. I hope that's true in my case, because I'm going under. Going to dedicate this week to craft. Apollo, not Dionysus will govern my behaviour. (Now naturally, that means I'm just emphasizing one over the other; we all include both within the normal scope of human activity.)

Consider: "After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own."

Poly-atheism

2008-11-28T13:45:00.003-05:00

I've had my head up my ass reading (almost) nothing but Greek mythology, and thinking from there about that ancient world-view, factually so inadequate, but in spirit so much more like our own than that of tyrannical monotheism. We are a two-pillar civilization, with the Greeks forming one pillar and the Hebrews the other. Guess which one I favour? I will confine my remarks on monotheism to two, lest this lead to an explosive rant.

(1) Monotheism is good for tyrannical governments, having replaced polytheism as republican government gave way to imperial government in Rome. (2) Monotheism faces the Problem of Evil (if God is both all-powerful and all-loving, then how come there's evil and suffering?); we can play the theodicy game if you wish--I think I've got the first six or seven moves worked out...

But that's boring. Attacking Judaism, Islam and Christianity (in their more literal aspects) is as easy as it is pointless. Today I'd like to try a different tack: singing the praises of polytheism.

Now, I don't mean literal polytheism, because such literalness is pretty much impossible. Anything that's good about religions can be contained in poetry, and Greek mythology is an excellent source of that. It presents nature as it is, not as it is idealized and abstracted by some patriarch. (The idealization, incidentally, is what science is for.) Nature as an often violent interplay of hundreds of forces. It's true, the Greeks invented gods for pretty much everything. But what does it mean to invent a god. Here's my take: to deify something (anything: an occurrence, a feeling, a process, a higher-order pattern) is simply to flag it as an object of reverence. The stormy sea is an object of terror, but also a kind of self-transcending feeling; therefore, it is subject to reverence. Same goes for any force of nature beyond our direct control: thunder, the wind, the seasons, the cycle of the sun across the sky, the morphing of the clouds, the growth of plants (remember: this is understanding and control circa 2,500 years ago) , the welling up of the passions, inspiration, disease, death, falling in love, the feeling of tenderness, the birth of children, the reflection of our faces from a still pond, misfortune, pestilence, the forest, the babbling of brooks, calm days, fog, winter. The list goes on. But the commonality is that all these things are important to human life, and merit attention, whether positive of negative. Hence: gods. And I might mention that the gods of the Olympian pantheon are, in their form of social organization, almost republican. Zeus was never the all-powerful, all-benevolent god, so this pantheon never has to deal with the problem of evil (granted, they're vague on the topic). Zeus had to fight for his place, overthrowing his father Cronus in a long war with the Titans (as, incidentally, Cronus overthrew Uranus). An Zeus himself has been prophesied to face the same fate. Imagine that! Gods themselves impermanent. This seems to me like a much better way of organizing reverence around the cosmos we inhabit. A mad, crashing, sometimes senseless, sometimes tragic, sometimes joyous unfolding of some principle which may or may not be there, to which we mortals have to grow adjusted somehow.

One final remark: I have sometimes heard people talk about pantheism as if it can accomplish this kind of enchantment of nature, rendering it worthy of reverence. It can't. Why not? Well, value and reverence are differential concepts; you can't revere everything. That's not reverence, that's just excess in all directions, if it were at all possible. Pantheism asserts that God is All (or God is in all); i.e. that Nature is all there is, but with some intimation that this is worthy of reverence. Agreed, there are things to revere about nature, but this all-too-liberal cop-out tells me nothing of what this is. Polytheism at least makes a very compelling poetic and psychological suggestion: revere the refined arts as depicted in various deities, revere the muses that provide for inspired life, respect those things you have no control over, give a little of yourself to the world (sacrifice, not out of foolish altruism, but out of a need to be adjusted to it. Propitiate wrathful gods if it makes you feel better. Get together with your relevant others and sing hymns. Drink and be merry when you can be, and don't rage against forces more powerful than you. None of this is in pantheism.

Now, it bears saying I have no belief in Greek gods, but they help flag features of reality that I am interested in. Case in point: the muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory). When you feel inspired (which is the aspect of reality the muses personify) it is as if memory acts of its own accord, snatching up kernels, arranging them seemingly without effort, as if an external source were responsible. Ever since the concept of the unconscious came to the fore, we have a (slightly) less divine explanation. But in that case all the gods seem to identify interesting patterns of projection of our most burning unconscious needs into the "outer" world. (I suspect inner and outer, objective and subjective, to be somewhat misleading distinctions in this regard, but let's leave that.) Mythology (especially when done in a comparative manner) can unravel the vary general laws of all our minds. Just like literature, really, except mythology had the advantage of hundreds of years of Darwinian evolution in oral histories; the most "true to life" ones survived to be written down.

In conclusion: monotheism isn't very insightful, psychologically. Pantheism is a cop-out. Polytheism is a naturalistic psychological system, not a metaphysical one.

Consider: "Since I am so quickly done for / I wonder what I was begun for?"

Buddha, meet Psychopath

2008-11-24T12:50:00.002-05:00

I won't pretend that I can imagine this eventuality. I won't pretend I have stong intuitions of what will happen. Armchair psychology can only take you so far. All I can say is that, from the people I associate with, my feelings are slightly with Buddha. But this could be due to self-selection effects in the people I take as friends and relevant others. If I worked retail, or in a call center in India, I might have different intuitions. Or even if I suffered greatly (in the sense of being beyond my Vygotskian zone of proximal learning), I might have better insight into what breaks people, into the Hobbesian intuition of war of all against all. This may be reinforced as I live my life, especially as I get on my own two feet during a recession and see the kind of cannibalistic competition for limited resources unfold.

People might misuderstand my conception of Buddha. I don't (necessarily) mean a bald dude in a robe, meditating with cornrows (in Thai style), or even the fat mendicant with huge earlobes (in Spadina tourist trap style). I mean anyone with insight into our human condition, anyone who has not turned away from the pitted, rutted, tundra of human desolation (with its ocassional flower-patches of happiness), the tundra dotted with strange beasts wandering among more-or-less genetically pre-conditioned tracks, the uncanny basilisks and terrifying mastodons, the profoundly wise leviathans and the hermetic albatrosses, the manipulator foxes and the terrifying fungal blooms. I certainly don't mean dime-a-dozen new-age gurus who spread an essentially psychological message to LSD-flashback-prone hippies with a yearning to project the unseen inward forces into something outside of themselves, who bastardize to the point of unrecognizability, who preach a message as coming from the Other (other culture, other person, other world...) when really it has always been hiding in plain sight. Seek it in Art, in friendship, in insight, in passionate bearing of troubles, in wild joy unbound by inhibitions, in the glories of discovery, in the stretching broadening of travel, in the learning of skills, in the cultivation of eloquence, in the education of the imagination, in open-handed giving, in magnanimous taking, in dance music running skiing yoga techno sweat paragliding sailing strolling improvising talking joking listening eating centering floating sleeping waking loving feeling projecting reminding... in many things. But not everything.

We all do this. We all fail at this all the time. We all succeed some of the time. So, hope? Fervent hope that we can withstand the psychopath with Buddha (that placid place somewhere within; that dynamically metastable response system we weave into our neocortex and limbic system.)

Consider: "It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought."

All-too-human

2008-11-13T14:56:00.002-05:00

Standing in my kitchen, staring at the human navel.

A glass in my hand, blown by glass-blowers. Human effort. Or forged and shaped in silicon dioxide smelting furnaces. Made by human hands. Built by human hands. Conceived and drawn up by human minds. The very rationale for the effort human: economic gain, the control of human energy flows. Gold, silver, amber, amethyst, charms, wheat, grain. So the architect’s children can grow. So water can lighten the seeds. So his wife can have geraniums in her garden. Human garden, Nature in a matchbox: awnings, sun rooms, greenhouses. The seeds themselves human, bred for thousands of years: human ears of corn, fitting human hands, feeding human bowels, growing in pace with our yearning, our impatience for grain. Grain, now! Entire land masses human.

In the glass in my hand, I pour orange juice. Plucked by hands. Packaged by hands. Driven by hands skilled with machine-oxen. Pulp has been extracted. Vitamins added. Human pharmacies.

I stare at the kitchen counter, at the walls. Fruit flies dance around in the air. Human fruit flies. Scions of our garbage piles. Live in caves. Lights flicker on and off unpredictably. Instantaneously. Storms in the distance. Fly traps allow them to live out their lives within bottles. Live, feed, mate, fall to earth. Dirty water infused with fruit and fly corpses. Our human fruit, our human fly corpses. Fall apart to earth. Not the kitchen counter. Polypropylene I wager. Will persist for tens of thousands of years. Hidden power of covalent bonds unrolled in a sheet in a factory somewhere. Again: human factory, human architect, human tycoon’s hands at the wheel. Also own the foundries, the mills, the barges, the factory farms, the woodlots. Primate needs on a primate landscape.

No light from the outside sky penetrates the kitchen. Only the buzzing neon. Human vibrations unheard by human egos. Vibrations like the hippies talked about: ultrasonic, subsonic, supersonic. Sonograms by Google Earth telling us what the coral reefs look like. (Art for art’s sake, these coral reefs, these submerged bohemias. Colour, waves, shifting hues, shifting moods. Tropical fishes like Pollocks. Thick medium. Medium of the womb. Human womb. Amniotic fluid. Vague frissons running up and down necks. Back to the darkness).

I leave the kitchen in human shoes. Everywhere around me I hear the vibrations of sewing machines, or (rarely) the clack-clack of knitting needles. Penumbras out of time, hypnagogic intimations. The shriek of bandsaws, skillsaws, table saws, miter saws around my desk, my drawers, the bookcase. The sparking arcs of welding around my lamps. Kiln sounds around my mug.

The electronics I dare not probe. What shigawire monomolecular reels spun these out? What projected inadequacies of our informational, logocentric consciousness do these things serve to soothe? Human, all. But humanity that reeks of all-too-human contempt for the all-too-human. Humanity that would exsanguinate Thailand for Denmark’s sins. That destroyed the bikini atoll. Giving up the outer senses to cultivate the subtler senses of possibility. Visionaries. Artists. Giving up plebian happiness for aristocratic virtues. Ragnarok virtues. (The frost giants are the comets that populate the Oort cloud.)

And there, the inhuman meteor lurks. Its orbit unknown. An unknown unknown. The reason why nobody looks up at the night sky anymore, why we drown it out in orangy city hearthglows. Day-blue is human: it’s when we cloudwatch and see old kings, tree groves, plot arcs. Orange is warm to the eye’s touch. Black, however...

Consider: "The lamps keep swaying, fully unaware: / is our light lying? / Is night the only reality / thas endured through thousands of years?"

Dies Irae

2008-11-09T17:24:00.003-05:00

...nobody is anything...

Here is a little something of me. A little of my transom, a little snap-through of the clouds drifting through my sky. (The all-sky?) Thinking about homeopathy on the way back home I was pulled away from the near-death of College street. Thinking how homeopathy and “Western” medicine have orthogonal frameworks. Perhaps not orthogonal, but apposite, if that is the right word to use. At any rate, little intersection—but that doesn’t mean they don’t step on each others’ toes all the time. Though about it through the lens of existential questions. Homeopathy provides a human understanding of our ailments, mainstream medicine seeks a measured distance away from our predicament. Which is better depends on the condition at hand. Deep existential anxieties: inevitable death, rot, breakouts, invisible forces descending on us. Which is better? Healing with an understanding, holistic but ineffectual-when-it-comes-to-the-inhuman-universe paradigm, or with a at-times-effective-but-itself-startlingly-inhuman paradigm? I don’t know. I wanted to sing western medicine’s praises because it works, but it doesn’t work for the things we are most deeply anxious about. How could it. Of course, neither does homeopathy, but this line of thought takes some wind from the sails of the “it works, bitches” argument for biomedicine.

Occurred to me I don’t know the full, and surely complicated story of homeopathy. Batshit insanity, fantasy, wishful thinking, magical thinking, placebo effects, post hoc ergo propter hoc surely abounds at the fringes of an unregulated industry, but is that fringe or core? What is the core idea behind homeopathy? Is it that we need to be more integrative? But that’s silly. Biomedicine gets integrative when piecemeal solutions don’t work. It gradually changes. It is not a Newtonian monolith—that would be a straw man. In fact, physiology is deeply infused with modern dynamicist thinking, with its own philosophically troubling circular causation, its own part-whole conundrums. Modern “materialism” misunderstands modern physiology. But such is life.

Occurred to me boundary is blurry. So then we need to look at clusters of ideas. Surely there are scientifically informed holistic practitioners. So what’s the problem? Eastern ideas? Traditional medicine? What does that even mean? Traditional medicine too is developing. All a kind of soup my thinking gets me into. But this is not-that-informed thinking.

And nobody is anything. Harsh words. Soup words. Words of universal compassion. As we arise, we pass away. Each moment. Each thought. Each sensation. Each sense-impression. Each association. But also: each insight, each personality, each transformation, each warm, vanishing wave of the heart, each life, each culture, each war, each trauma, each meal, each longing, each delight, each ache and itch as it travels up and down and in an out and spiraling, each flash of anger as it mobilizes, checks resources, grabs the attention, pulls it into its own lens; each memory just that: a trace carried here, a fly caught in associative winds. Present, somehow bodily, but experienced as absent.

And what is God? She too arises and passes away. In people, in episodes, over the course of a day, in the duration of a glance, in the rustling of a skirt, in a shout on the street, in the printing of a theodicy, in families, in nations. God’s rising and falling arc during an economic crisis: positive anima (or animus), negative anima; present anima, absent anima. All in absentia. God in a leaf; gods in the intonations of the Lord’s Prayer. God as synecdoche: “give us this day our daily bread”. God arising up the elevator, falling out of the office tower. Golden calves on Ben Vrackie’s fields, now fallow with trodding human hooves. Gods arise in vapour columns and perish in the eyes of hurricanes. Gods encircle the world and flat down in watersheds, down the Ganges, bathing the pilgrims. God absent in the stampede, in the artillery barrage, in the bombing of Calcutta. Mysteriously present again, old Loki, in Mother Teresa’s mischievous grin, in hoofbeats down the street. God as the all-white cowboy encountered at crossroads. Every one the same. But the surfaces are different. As different as oranges and clementines.

Reminds me: leave a little milk and bread out for Orpheus. A little earthsmoke and rue. Dance a circle in a forest grove. Cantabrian circle (Spanish cavalry maneuver). Watch the constellation of the Rider, Staff, Way. God arising in the beginning of each of Rilke’s elegies and dying away to a man, to a warm fuzzy feeling at the end. God too dies into reality. Dies irae. Somehow we com off disappointed. Behind the door is just another room. But now we have more space.

Space! Dies illa!

God arises and dies away over the course of a page. Arpeggiated.

Ah, God is Mozart. It’s so obvious. God is a steppe wolf. I am God (says Kerouac). Ginsberg’s not so pompous. Lived longer, too. Greater man, I wager. God is big. The great King. (We don’t put much stock into such political organization.)

I am God.

I am a fuck-up. A jerk-off. A wastrel. A culture maggot, grown up to nothing. Listened in too many philosophy lectures. Silly, jobless, mystical, inspired.

He who despises himself still honours himself as one who despises. (Lacrymosa.)

I don’t despise myself. (Communio.)... The Leakeys would be proud. Every moment of inspration feels like it's going back to a source.

The point: there’s something to homeopathy. But that something might just be compassion. And some biomedical doctors have that too, I hope I will have it. (If I dare hope.)

And God waxes and wanes within a single parenthetical sentence.

Consider: "We develop concentration for the sake of mindfulness, mindfulness for the sake of insight, insight for the sake of wisdom, and wisdom for the sake of freedom."

Awakenings

2008-11-03T23:01:00.003-05:00

I hope to one day wake up from reading shitty arguments on the internet. I hope to wake up from a society where wishful thinking, cut with a fine dose of bigotry, cut with plenty of rotted-away organs of empathy dictates social policy. I hope to wake up, and become more fully formed, free of the apotropaic magic I turn to in my darker moments (knocking on wood, or projecting onto indiosyncratic idols), free of the burning stings of passion that draw me back in, back into the maelstrom, back into a categorical helplessness before Being.

I hope to grow into my city further, like a creeping vine around a lightpost. I hope to draw inspiration from these bricks and alleys, these people, the sky, the towers, the dells, the ravines and the streetcars. Like I used to, before mid-twenty hit and I found myself trying, desperately (thankfully successfully), to work to pay for shit. Mid twenties, where I dropped my various askeses to let mysefl get jerked around, regrowing the attitude of circa age 20.

Ah, it is one thing to wake up from all this. But what do I wake up to? To poetry loking at me from behind everything. This is the task, besides which there can be few others. (Oh sure, prefessional sinecures here and there, friendships and love, obligations.) Ah, but to live those obligaitons while still listening to the things speak to me constantly, in all their as-they-are-ness. There's the goal. The goal of this existential gym. And I recognize the ideal-nature of this goal, and I recognize the self in all this. But, alas, I am all that.

Consider: "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. "

Trees?

2008-10-23T14:26:00.003-04:00

Trees. Why not? I found myself contemplating them yesterday, and contemplating, in turn, the escape they have afforded day after day, year-in, year-out, since childhood, since I first emerged from the hazy noumenal soup to the animating light of consciousness, or Atman, or animate motion, or whatever you choose to call it, you of many gods, or no gods at all; you who live wickedly, under blankets of ignominy, or you shining by many virtues, you who read Nietzsche on a mountainside, you who cower in bungalows before the shrieking, piercing call of the television set, you who wait with bated bardic breath and quietly memorize prose. This one is for all of you.
So, trees, Yes, trees: the giants that have survived glaciations. Giants, some of who have lived longer than any human-hewn thing from stone. Yes, there are trees older than the pyramids. I have never seen one, but I am told they form the canopies of temperate rain forests. They are scaled with elevators, which must seem like gossamer touches of fluttering hairs to them. And think! We mortals, standing in their shadows...

Yes, trees. Have you ever felt the whisper from some spider-grown catacomb of the collective unconscious as you have viewed the trunk of a tree head-on. For millions of years, during our pre-hominid days, our lineage lived in them. We caroused along their canopies in a curious world of three dimensions shot through by fractals of constantly splitting branches. Can you imagine such landscapes? Kaleidoscopes--real kaleidoscopes, needing no psychedelic substances to manifest them to the interpreting mind. We jumped that once. We were closest to flying then. Then we licked the sky and shattered even the clouds with our screeches. Hearken to the whisper: the tree trunk calls you to a distant home. A stop-over where we were comfortable in our brutish huntedness... not like here, uncomfortable with elephant-long life. Were we built to withstand it?

Yes, trees. Constant knitting needles into our mood centres. much like a paperclip can pick a lock: the emaciated reaching against a gray sky in November portending eyelid-heaviness like nothing else--possibly: the memory of hibernation from some lost ancestor--,or greenish buds, like indecisive snails on the branches, weighing them down and warming them with intimations of new hope with every unknown wavelength of light they absorb, or in winter, barren, like moods, like our hopes, like our sense of freedom-walking and basking in the "yes!" of being, or, lastly, in July, waving leafy, shadowy, womb-like, protective agreement with that "yes!".

Yes, trees. Tree types personnified. Branches named. Drawn. Interpreted. Smelled. Felt. Heard. Climbed. Leaned against. Dreamt-of.

Consider: "At bottom the ancient, gnarled, / root of all things / upraised, hidden springs, / that are not revealed. // Hunt-horn and battle helm, / elder's disputes, / angry men, overwhelmed, / women like lutes ... // Crowded twigs on a tree, / not one of them free ... / One! oh climb higher ... oh higher ... // Most still break. But instead, / this first one, overhead, /bends itself into a lyre."

Impassioned Rant

2008-09-06T13:15:00.002-04:00

“Where I am, his dry logical discourse cannot touch me. I am high above the city, on the privileged rooftops, watching the pastel shades creep out over the sky, watching lovers strolling down the street—no method to their madness, no logic to their lust. Up here I am almost God; I force the sun down with my mighty hammer. Cherry trees bend in the wind and the pink petals of their blossoms seem to rain down all around. From afar, one could say it is a pink mist sent by the gods to quell our fears. If you do something right, it’s like you’ve never done anything at all. Anyway, the cherry tree sways under the wind I brought. A solitary carriage lopes down an unused side-street, bereft of lovers for the moment. The carriage-man is cleaning the gunk of ferocious lovemaking—I absolutely must stress this: unreasonable, madly passionate lovemaking!—off the back seat of the carriage. Modern cleaning solutions mingle with the ancient mahogany benches and even more ancient and very human drives. And the light begins to redden and the light begins to die,” said an unknown person. He was just beating himself up with visions of colours and feelings of warmth. In fact, it was midwinter and the heaters had died; he had not bathed in weeks because the shower was frozen. He was just huddling under his blanket. At first he read, then he just closed his eyes and started thinking. He thought of many things, some just flitting images against the vaguely red backdrop of his eyelids, others were extensive disquisitions on a range of subject matters. He thought of cloud plumes trailing off skyscrapers, of how they were bronzed, throwing back the ashes of burning thousands, all their dreams, all the restaurants they had ever eaten, all their millions of acquaintances, their stories and their expectations among the unexpected. They were all standing on a large plain; the hills curved gently in the background, blue in the atmospheric haze; they bore up candles to the deaths of thousands, to the collapse of the enlightenment ideals, to the rock and roll lifestyle, the bane of each parent’s existence. He fleetingly saw the outline of a children’s collectable character in the distance. Suddenly, the crowd was half composed of animated characters: strong men with thick lines marking the contrast of their muscles against the background: svelte and flawless temptresses whose hair stood against gravity; these were mixed with dumpy, fleshy people of Actuality, people whose hands would turn to ash if those candles started falling, people who were never perfect, but perfectly renderable from all angles. He then thought of the back alleys of his life: the cooking fires of humanity burning and casting a haze over the gravel, the bright blinding sun somehow making everything more sharp and defined, more real and yellow, the child in a yellow rain jacket jumping and practicing his jumping over dried-up salt outlines of puddles. In some strange way, the thought became actuality. The cooking sizzled, and the bells of the mares jangled. The musicians were out in force, making the air shimmer invisibly with flurries of activity. The air shimmered by quite natural means: it was a heated day and in this part of the city the concrete added an extra five degrees to whatever the ambient temperature was. Old rotund day-labourers sat on their porches and yelled macho slogans to each other; their wives fluffed their dresses and compared their floral patterns. The children, once they were finished watching and ridiculing the boy in the yellow rain jacket began spinning hula-hoops down the alley. Nobody could see it, but there were spirits all around: old crabby ancestors complaining about the new generation, worm-like projections of energy, shimmering angels, little blips in the space-time continuum all jostled one another, played pranks on each other and talked about the weather—what a beautiful day it was and how days like this were rare and how we should be thankful to the powers that be and how it looked like rain tomorrow etc. Under the city, some three kilometers under the porches of the day labourers, Odin and Shiva danced a deadly dance of fire and destruction, of enmity and atonement, of fortitude and friendship and forgiveness. Gobs of each of these concepts crashed against the cave walls and rang down the long corridors. Back above the surface, a little boy in shorts and a five-dollar haircut was swinging off a tree branch and spying coyly into the neighbour’s backyard. It was a regular backyard, filled with barbecue equipment, posts to which a guard-dog was presently tied, bent and melted skeletons of bicycles, an ancient samovar from the Old Country, rags of old clothes, blocks of building materials, rocks for the children and plastic balls long deflated. Flakes of rust that had fallen off the fire escape dotted the yard, yet somehow the grass managed to grow in places, sometimes through the concrete, which of course wasn’t much of a barrier, what with its plentiful cracks and doses of rare minerals. Our young boy was looking at the center of the yard where the little girls had gathered. For some reason, they were all dressed in loose flowing clothes, giving the impression that they were mystical ones from the distant orient. They were muttering something amongst themselves. Eventually, they gathered in a circle and Janine, the eldest, held up a tattered, dog-eared book whose front and back covers had been ripped off due to the constant wear from being in Janine’s pocket. She picked it up and read lovingly, with a bright clear voice. She used a lot of words our young boy did not understand, but were vaguely familiar to him from his father’s long talks about the Ancient Greeks and how they were the only truly free people, how the world after them was just a declining pendulum, or some word like that, how civilization’s moral progress had not advance one iota past them, etc, etc. This is why, purely by chance, his interest had been piqued by Janine’s voice, even to the exclusion of the rust shells of burned-out cars he was accustomed to exploring and memorizing at this point in the afternoon. But he was not prepared for what came next. All the girls gathered in a circle, began to kiss each other, and proceeded to reach under each other’s robes. They made sure to be quiet. Our young boy could not explain what was happening to him; a kind of feeling brewed in his stomach, a feeling of thirst, but much more profoundly empty, a kind of sucking abscess in his intestines that was not painful physically, but made him very tired, but also cognizant of the complete uselessness of taking a nap. That would solve nothing. Odd thoughts ran through the young boy’s sulci and gyri, thoughts that came unbidden into his baseball-cap-clad head. He thought of a beautiful prism, which cast the rainbow on the walls of his living room in the afternoon, shattered and thrown into the garbage along with liquor bottles and milk crates and every manner of hollow, cracking pipe. As he watched the eastern pageant of desire evolve under his eyes, he looked at Dawn McGregor, who he had talked to yesterday, who he had really liked talking to, who he thought of today, whose pigtails he wanted to compliment. Now she was lying prone with Janine’s head lost underneath her skirts. He flushed and could not understand. At last, screams began escaping his mouth, and then came the tears, which seemed to burn tracks into his skin, which seemed to flood his mouth, so that he was stuck spitting out the foul substance in little clouds. The girls began to scatter, but not before three workaday men in sleeveless shirts showed up with their bandannaed wives. Calls began to erupt all across the neighbourhood. Wives shrieked and old men just shook their heads. The police arrived and dragged the girls away one by one; cleaning teams arrived and washed down the backyards with life-killing sprays; parents cried. As they dragged Dawn away, she fixed our young boy with a stare and flashed him looks of hatred, which was followed up and made unambiguous by the sharp piece of glass she tried to throw at the tree. She missed her mark, but the boy fell off and nevertheless gored his knee and lower leg on a sharp rock, the very same rock where he had imagined himself complimenting Dawn on her pigtails. The sky oscillated: it seemed to narrow and change colour; it began to explode with multicoloured worms crawling at the edge of his vision; then everything began to blur because of the tears. At last, he was free to cry and shout at the full capacity of his need, free of a paralysis, free to feel the pain, the gore of the rocks, the tearing of his skin, the curvature of his spine, again the softness of his skin, now forever marred by having compared it to the softness of Dawn’s skin. He fell asleep for seventeen hours. In that time, a preliminary investigation was held and all the girls were arrested; in that time, the community was thrown apart: old men and women cried that the day had been wasted, the parents of the girls consumed themselves and their friends with impotent rage and feelings of helplessness and persecution; churches were flooded with human bodies seeking understanding. Newcomers were blamed, a few burning bags of feces were hurled at the sides of houses and tenement buildings. This was the start of the summer of 1936. Our young protagonist was seven years old. Did he deserve to be tormented by dreams of hell kittens for the next ten years of his life? Was he so capable of understanding what he unleashed? The purges, the madnesses? The religious epilepsies of old women that lived on their fire escapes? The tears of the businessmen in their mahogany offices? The depression of capable mechanics on the dockyards, the dread of the labourers unloading shipping crates? The literary angst of the magazine tycoons? For the rest of his life, he could not achieve sexual excitement unless there were at least two women in his bed. One of them he loved dearly, but she never understood; he was always stuck pursuing her through the labyrinthine caverns of life. The others were disposable. They rotated like his material belongings, which he used and cast away without thought. They cost him his lady love, but they gave him pleasure for one night, pleasure enough to have him stumbling to the washroom in the middle of the night and smile in the darkness for nobody but himself, thankful to feel his own power and the needs of his body coursing through him without shame, at least for tonight. Tomorrow morning, the shame and the fear and the lovesickness would come back, the neckties and automobiles and church ladies’ glances would return, the sun would rise hazy and he would be back at the altar, praying for the halo of his lady love never to evaporate. He really did pursue her down labyrinths. Sometimes she fled to Europe and would disappear for weeks, but he always tracked her down. In one instance he actually met her in a labyrinth below some ancient palace, behind a velvet curtain where they almost rose to sexual climax. But they were alone and thus incapable of it. The scenery of his pursuit was maddeningly diverse: dive bars in the old towns of Eurasia, hills covered in cherry blossom petals, rivers, glaciers, dirt paths through barren mountains, on ancient communal trees in Indochina, in salons and studios once used for the purposes of the Enlightenment, in the backs of sacrificial pits hidden in the jungles, in hells-on-earth reeking of genocide. And when he slept, the iconography of his need came through clear: everything was always grayscale, except what represented her; those items were permanently backlit. Blinding halos poured from above, from below, sometimes from within. He gazed on her in gardens that were dying from their own yearning and the yearning of the weeds, in offices, in ziggurats splattered with blood, organs and semen. He dreamt all these things, and in the dreams, and in waking life, the thirst would return. But it would not be sated. Not without his angel love light and an assortment of grayscale women as backdrop who were necessary. His angel love-light who when he met her was the most uninhibited of free spirits, who was known to him as that waifish and fearful creature who slunk round the backyards, trapping squirrels and laughing to the clouds. Back then she was a legend he had heard from distant sources. How he found her is a story that has long fallen under its own mythological top-heaviness, but it goes something like this: “late one night, lonely & frustrated & sad, greasy & powerless & spiritless I wandered. I had seen too many grey facades; I had been blinded by too many headlights rushing by. I had been brought down by too many cackling jackals on the sidewalks and crying urchins in the supermarkets where incomprehensible orders were barked out to the general population through the PA. Somehow I found the hole in a fence leading to the mid-block parkette enclosure. In the holy & glowing & blessed bushes I heard a rustling while lights played over my face. I peeled back the leaves—golden leaves, scented leaves—to find her, and I knew—and she knew too. All my sad and greasy moments were dispelled. I did not fear; there was no “work” component to it at all. We came together on a picnic table and poured out our poetic stories, sometimes in sing-song, sometimes in prose, sometimes in the movements of our bodies and heads and bellies, sometimes in strict, formal verse, sometimes in enhanced prose, other times with silence. This lasted for three days straight. The buds of the overhanging trees and bushes became leaves; our grotto collected the sweet nourishing spring water beneath us to keep us alive in our monumental task. Milkweed seeds floated by us and seemed to dance in our honour; butterflies and caterpillars both were pleased by our presence and made arabesques among the birch glades. The hungry squirrels and raccoons avoided our nest while we wished. But eventually even we got up and walked off to do greater things. Shiva smiled coyly from the orb of the sun, but my angel love-light had en even coyer half-smile. Her eyes were perpetually bubbling over in amusement. You could have put her in any situation known to humankind and she would have taken something out of it. And she would have survived; she was a survivor. Our courtship began. A courtship for what, exactly? A courtship that would end in spontaneous rapture, white light and white heat and floating over the rooftops from a great height! That is what we did. We ran through the street, our companions trailing behind us with shopping carts filled with sweets and whiskey! We emptied out he gypsy encampments with our celebrations; we drank and gave drink in the rainy streets to random passers-by! We sat in the streets and played out long crazy jam sessions to the legato percussion of screeching wheels and car horns. We hung on the windowsills and shouted at the crowds in the piazzas. We traveled half-way around the world, fixing up a couple in every town we found. We sowed passion and freed the oppressed in the only way we knew how. We splashed graffiti onto marketplaces in Turkey; we made up riotous jokes and made the entire bus laugh on our long drive to Aleppo. We got stoned and wandered around aimlessly, hand in hand, among the crowd of milling Hajjis. We cliff-dived in Armenia until our skins were raw and bleeding. We splayed out and traced the arcane arabesques of a system of everything to the burning stars and riotous drinking binges on the beaches of Montenegro. We made love with commune crowds and then we harvested the wheat under the thunderstorms racing down the mountains, we fucked on the stage at the neon Nude Bar in neon downtown St. Louis, we made love entangled in incense on the altars of Roman Catholic cathedrals, balanced precariously on Shinto gates, rustling in the stacks of the underground record depositories, quietly to avoid the square businessman and rapist junkie in New York. We spliced out vacation photos of second-rate landmarks into humanoid shapes and laminated them and copied them thousands of times and dropped them on festival crowds while our friend piloted the helicopter. We dined at the finest houses run by the most generous matrons—and made love in the beds of these matrons while they smiled and sweated just outside the rooms. We covered our clothes in patches proclaiming the ultimate holy orgasmic OM, and the next day we moshed and destroyed our higher hearing and lost all the patches in an orgy where we became drunk and generous. The day after that, we held each other through the vomit and blood and despair of junk-withdrawal. Her eyes were cloudy with drug, and mine as well. We put our feet together and wiggled our toes for three days as our torsos shook. We asked the impossible questions to entertain ourselves. We pushed under the warm quilt. I could not get it up that day. But in the ensuing weeks every orifice of yours was open and red like a cave found by archaeologists for the first time: shimmering with floodlights driving the clouds of bats on the ceiling crazy. We composed folk ballads while hitchhiking. We ate everything we were offered: tongues, eyes, feet, tails, fur, unnamed mystery slops. It was mostly the religious people who fed us. In the later days of our trip, we hunkered down at universities and studied the science to song and one day we woke up and moved from the couch in the wrecked basement (water dripping from a crack in the ceiling, single faucet missing its sink, rafters like gap teeth), and we just knew! We celebrated by sniffing out some yage in a friend’s (non-cracked-and-leaking) basement. We danced dervish dances to the straining of an accordion and slide guitar, shouting out the constellations on some tenement roof. We proselytized the morning rush-hour cars with off-the-wall, off-the-cuff poetry that was drowned out by a thousand radios blaring out Jazz FM, which we cared nothing for. We went and washed up the cheese and spit and crumbs staining our clothes and attempted to shred our leftover bottles with exacto-knives and make a statue of them. We ended up making two: a transparent, spiky crustacean of some sort, and something that was supposed to be an effigy, but turned into a dangerous, dangerous punch bowl. We talked long bullshit conversations with mathematicians and when confronted with something we did not know, we became infuriatingly subjective. We would begin making out just as our interlocutors were about to reach the crux of their point. That took some of the wind out of their sails. In other places we stood out of place in uniformed crowds. We took whirlwind tours of factories and the dusty grime settled on us and made us vomit yet again. We dyed our skin many different colours on our trips. We received piercings weekly and removed them in fits of regret and propriety. We stayed up four days and nights straight talking bullshit talks that swung spasmodically from one end of the so-called philosophical spectrum (a phrase taught to us by a skinny, shaven prophet in the streets of Aleppo) to the other, sometimes in the same long sentence. We dined at haute couture restaurants and furtively flung potato salad under the table, making little lumps of food for the Old Duchess-type’s little well-groomed dog. Oh, how we coaxed the primal feeding trough out of its gypsum façade! We wrote poetry on balconies and in the bathroom stalls, and occasionally returned to some to witness the breakneck evolution of language. Through it all, we never forgot about snapping photographs of the people, with 200-words synopses of their characters on the backs of them—a hopeless task, really. So each had a unique identifying poem. No, a pome. We never forgot about sexual tension and relieved the hopeless glut: on seashores and in basements, on streets and in caddy shacks, on the roofs of palaces and in their luxurious, heated pools, on chain-link fences rattling with evening gusts and with my maddened thrusts, in bird sanctuaries, hidden in the savannah grass, in truck stops, on broken-down assembly lines, in clamps and in handcuffs, on boats, in beds made of straw and silk and wheat and coils, in the library stacks and in the middle of lecture halls long emptied, in crumbling rotundas and behind nationalistic statues, in temperate heat, in sweltering, in monsoon and sea storms, in every habitation except and igloo or maybe yurt. But that wasn’t all: we talked to whoever gave us notice and found that everyone itched with conversation and opinion, stories, hatreds and loves. Everyone dreamt and pulled passions from behind their backs where they were a little too soaked with back-sweat but still quite recognizable. Everyone was unlucky and exploited, though. Everyone but us during that time. We escaped dens of tears on our bicycles, we sometimes vanished down transportation tunnels and entertained ourselves in alcoves as the trains or busses or trams or trolleys or carriages whooshed past to unbelievable clatter. We shouted koans over haggling hubbub in Marrakesh and got an old man to screw his face up for us. We found loveboys and funboys and thugs in the back alleys, but we survived.” He talked in this way long and passionately. But eventually, the progression of their relations naturally took somewhat of a tumble. Months of jumping enclosures and sitting and talking philosophy or smack or jive followed, months of evenings played out on grassy knolls or hills or drumlins, months of love-lorn glances under the influence of X or weed or ‘shrooms, months that could never live up to the expectations raised by the beginning. (Expectations that looked something like a transformed world and a transformed method of interpersonal relations.) Indeed, their subsequent comfortable and witty and amusing conversations were never even close to their initial opening salvos, where a life lived was shared in its entirety. When he turned to other women, she—normally so amused—exploded with rage instead of creativity. He retorted with effusive self-abasement, the content of which is too cringe-worthy to relate here. It involved copious references to sunlight streaming through the could layers, the spring rebirth of life, the wind caressing the prairie grass, the milkweed of their grotto, the humid Earth smells, the chatter of the animals, voices uplifted in joyous thirteen-part harmony, white light bleaching the known world, doorways, innumerable lays, endless orgasms, flowers, the nervousness that would rend his stomach contents to a disappointingly bland soup gushing over out of his throat, his soliloquies to a dumpster piled high with the garbage of their lost love, crazy night marathons to strange parts of the city with a death-wish, probing the impenetrable alleys for the Man with a trenchcoat and a machete and beard whose only soul was money, who bled smelted nickel. He related to her in even more effusive tones the weeks spent not raising a finger from his bed, the weeks of pissing on his sheets and letting his sphincter loose every which way, caring not one bit for it because she had been removed from him. For her he had banished every trace of disingenuous false hopes and needless idols, and was left as a junky without his junky fix, with absolutely no cares but for her. She was his perfect drug, his Soma. He continued in this fashion for several more hours. She was pinned to the couch and quite unable to intercede; she had the impression that he was no longer talking to her, almost as if her were bargaining with invisible spirits all around him, as if his loveless pleas were pleas for clemency. She stayed out of pity at first, then out of weariness. At some lost hour in the middle of our protagonist’s diatribe, she had resolved to herself, very simply, to never see this man again. He went on: he told her about Dawn and the girls in that early spring morning in Brooklyn, how it had bent his life-path from the pursuit of her, how she was the diamond arch measuring out the time, the tallest building in the world made out of diamond-encrusted gold, how she was the essence of the opal greed that drove people to trample one another, and many other worthless insipid similes. He had always had a fondness for overmodification and flights of fancy, but this time it cost him everything. Of course, he would not give up quite so easily. After an entire night of pouring, he realized that he would have to accomplish some self-care if he were ever to return to the game. He returned to his box apartment in the overcrowded inner city. He stared for a long time at a stack of three tea bags, the only thing she had left behind. He was in a stupor for a long time, letting his natural oils water the couch. But he could not sit here indefinitely; he raised himself and concurrently raised a fetish onto a spike. The tea bag, now the symbol of her and her ever-flowing, ever-present grace and bestowal flowing out in musical notation from the center of her mandala, from the Unnamable. It smelled of resorts in the summers, the kind of floral-print places they had visited many times on their madcap journey around the world, their sampling of all the irresponsible pleasures for those in the know. He continues. “This is where all my words go: into the burlap sack of the printed page. It is where I unmask the thousand golden idols carved in your image for what they are: needless luxuries of the august emperor. This is where spiderwebs gather as once you gathered floral-print patterns. This is where the word “arabesque” gets shit out and begins its precipitous decline into the darkening pit, falling somewhere below the water’s surface in pitch blackness. This is where the idea of you comes to rot in worldly concerns, where your rents and boardings and lodgings are not paid for, where your lovers are not pre-inoculated against AIDS, where even the trees entangle your mad lust-frenzies in the humid mornings in the riverside copses, where your eyes were once blue but have been reddening over the weeks, where there are no more veins left for the needle and the eyedroppers have been confiscated by the union workers, where athletic tracks are blocked by water buffaloes and you are pouting and powerless before the herd mess, where you and I no longer kiss and make up every time I go out and end up crazy, where whiskey is not the drug of angel trances, where vodka will not bring us in contact with the rotten potato of Eternity in Orgasm, where plaits begin to strangle the ants of the senses, where telephones shoot needles into hapless ears. This is the world of Actual Fact, something we ran from on a six-month-long world-spanning dissociative episode. This was our hope: that every unpaired child bathe in warm water at least once a week, that every garden be worthy of its innumerable teas, that every bathtub overcome the scorpions, that the three noble philosophies stop fighting and shredding each other’s manuscripts, that the train conductor have a little drink to loosen up, that the arctic driller has a good night’s masturbating to his sweetheart in Helsinki, that the mud dries up for the feast of the cloves, that fences topple and teams of factory workers bring down the sunroofs of their prisons, that back-hoes become Dharma-bodies. Was that so much to ask, inamorata? It appears so. All we know is that that arctic driller’s prick dried up and fell of from exposure. Our advice bent the bars and killed hundreds and maimed me in my center. This romp left only you to walk the streets alone but not lonely. To me, there will be no other restaurant. Flickering neon lights will always have more than the “regular” significance. Forevermore: that is, until this cranium dries up and falls off from exposure. Catatonia and the smell of strange cheeses—they haunt me. The city’s broadcasting antennas are converging their signals in my hypothalamus. I can feel the noise on the airwaves: they shriek pederast screams that even we could not match. So much passion locked inside the poor machines squeezed into the Actual and maintained by ignorant technicians who bob their heads to the radio clatter of some forgotten musical mode. This is your lower neck, child. This is where I reigned once, where I laid my redoubt and braced all my forces against the bats clawing at my back. So long as my face was safe, blood could be let. But this is not what you saw.” He lost the thread, as all real threads get lost easily. He went back to making lists. The List of Attributes Associated with his Social Circle: literary, ironic, soporific, chemically imbalanced, sometimes unwashed, status-conscious. The List of Fruits and Vegetables: squash, tomato, etc. He finally hits back onto the main tack. The List of Descriptive Phrases for his Passion: a squeamish affair, a twitch-inducing series of events, a disaster, beams of light from over the right shoulder, infinitely regretful, temporarily energetic and unabashed, ironic yet solid, stolid and sweaty, humanistic in the morning, vitreous in the afternoon, gently undulating, cerebrospinally sweet, vibrantly colour-contrasted, the death-cry of a thousand Dawn McGregors, the bane of the insane latter-age Betty Wenderly who developed a dissociative disorder of some kind and would spin long yarns about her travelogue writing adventures to the walls and the cats and the goldfish and the occasional neighbourly well-wisher. (This is no longer a list, but has graduated to some sort of higher plane). (The stand-alone plane? Golgotha? The ninth circle? The lock in the mind?) (Bear with me here—it can’t all be good.) But no: we shall continue the list. The List of Times the Protagonist was too Lazy to Keep the Passion (II) Afloat: her vomiting into the industrial corner (he failed to hold back her hair to stop the spit and partially-digested goods getting in), the hundred temporary sleeping arrangements (he was too hell-bent on tucking in his feet, and in the process stripped her of the occasional blanket), the sea wall in the anonymous Turkish village (he had pushed the pushing game too far and dashed her elbow against a jagged rock—her left-hand motor control had never been the same afterwards), on the esplanade in Toronto (he got too chummy with a crackhead who insulted Her viciously)—these lists always burned out after a pathetically small number of entries. Who was he talking about here? The past was uncertain—Dawn or the nameless grotto girl? Which protagonist is making these lists: the peering boy in the summer backyard (who witnessed the lesbian love-in), or the drunk Okie who found brilliant dissociation and a dozen romantic benders in a grotto as the squirrels watched (we did not know he was an Okie, but he was not a typical Okie)? Is it the Author, or is it Shiva yet again channeling through the Author? Or is it the Author channeling Shiva? (But wait! Our author has a Ganesh ceiling-hanging cloth; does that interfere with the channeling? Does the pantheon even pretend to exist? What about the maidens of the world-tree?) But why tell? This is not a story about Tables and Chairs. This story is an attempt to the Grand Story: the story of every tightening in the chest and every hardening of the gonads and every breath drawn too quickly or too shallowly or too deeply, every opportunity taken and every regretful hurting hazy bar, every mindless conflict between Reason and so-called Passion, every dollop of ethnic bullshit and every structural inequality, every unoriginal hurtful story, (of course the Author falls short! Every Okie knows that! Shiva never objected! The Author will go to drink, don’t you worry!), every batted eyelash and every sweat lodge bar bewitched with perfume, every casket of ale dying passionate deaths in the worms of the bowels, every city burned for a woman, every sheep herd stampeding toward the Cult of the Lady, every tear-rivulet, semen-rivulet, hepcat Golgotha, every lachrymal river joining into the eventual Amazon or Ganges or Yellow or Danube or St. Lawrence or Mississippi or Elbe or Thames or (and now we’ll do it systematically) Dnieper or Dniester or Tunguska or Yangtze or Yenisei or Parana or Irtish or Congo or Amur or Lena or Mackenzie or Niger or Mekong or Missouri or Volga or Madeira or Purus or Sao Francisco or Yukon or Rio Grande or Brahmaputra or Indus or Euphrates or Darling or Zambezi or Toccantins or Murray or Nelson or Paraguay or Ural or Oxus or Japura or Salween or Irrawaddy or Orange or Orinoco or Pilcomayo or Xi Jiang or Columbia or Don or Sungari or Saskatchewan or Peace or Tigris rivers, every blood droplet dissolving in the rivers above, every river ending up in the same eventual world-spanning ocean bubble in an abstract wreck of an attempt to merely channel Shiva, every boring afternoon, every spousal argument, every hellish airplane ride, every drop in atmospheric pressure sucking out the milk from the teats of the Cow, quite against her will (Shiva aghast! What could Shiva do but dance?), every toppling tragic barn, every author caught on one particular sentence, every attempt to channel, to foresee, to hindsight better than the usual, to mend the broken parentages, to straighten the bloodlines, to unclog the pipes, to rebuild the scruples, to find the notes of the chorus in front of 400,000 rabid critical jaded fans, to find direction to fat wreck repetitive sentences, to join the disjoint and un-define a hundred thousand definition terms via Universal Philosophical Refutation—“that’s what you say!”, every other passionate affronted pain in the chest, every circling vulture and every fragile ripped-apart Mandala on every toppling melting hillside, every oration leading to riots, every oration leading to increased human dignity, every suicide in every ruling dynasty of every nation-state or empire or commonwealth known to present human scholarship. (It is too grand a task, but every story is but an aspect of the Grand Story.) But the point remains that our protagonist (the prot, as the kids say) could not keep up the passion. (The entire wreck that is this “story” is an extension of the “can’t keep up passion forever—but oh baby it’s good while it lasts” ethos.) He had a few other infractions of which we may presently speak: thirteen times he used sexual thrusts as merely a means of pleasuring himself; he lied extensively about his views on love and angels, on politics and what he really thought of some people (for his purposes: everyone was holy and every story holy—parroting Ginsberg, channeling Shiva, &c., &c.), sometimes he orgasmed just to get to sleep…

Consider: "Aesthetic martyrs ought to kiss the stars, rejoice in being totally rejected, and work away like disregarded beavers."

Spiderwebs

2008-09-04T14:41:00.002-04:00

We seek to have our finger on the pulse of the city. Not in the urban-planner variety of pulse-checking--nothing so summary, informational, statistical, surface-based. (But that's why it's hard to talk about). We seek something more ethereal without being supernatural--I suppose something hard to notice, something you have to strain your attention for, something you have to aspire to, to train your perception and conception for. This is why we're still poor, why we stagger around like kids in fourth grade still not ready to emerge into the glaring sun into the yard where bullies stick out like buoys on a calm day.

Who are we?

The seekers of the city's spiderwebs; those gossamer strands of connection that break whenever some hulking creature set on its course bursts through them. We all see them from time to time: in a pastel sunset that looks like a Monet, in the suddenly and inexplicably radiant gaze of the bearded alcoholic, in the vertiginous stepping-back during conversation to take in all the bustle and realizing you're one toehold closer to the Good. And they fall away just like that: the shriek of a fire engine pierces the orange of the sunset, the directional gray ooze of wine-besotted volition, in the rendering of one conversation from the bustle which bursts its seams in vacuity.

We are they who climb and fall. We're the inexperienced but determined. No ascetics; not anymore. No uncontacted mystical tribes. No amor fati. No more hero-worship. No more anxiety of influence. No more future-oriented gaze. No more myth of progress. (Symmetrically) no more myth of regress. No more perfectionism. The sand-mandala's our model.

Night. Oh, night. A few nights ago I wanted to sing your rooftops in words. I wanted to feel the pulsing of starlight on my skin and hear the rough breathing of Orion's chest; I wanted to touch the volitional impulse of Ursa Minor as it reels there, in the center of the carousel. I dared in you to be. And in the leaping out of my normal skin, I could not fall asleep. I ran the same mission twice just so I could feel your heaviness. Just so I could stand on your rooftop.

(This passage betrays anxiety of influence. Disclosure: the theme of Night's from Rilke. The theme of heaviness is from Kundera. The bit with the carousel and Ursa Minor was me.)

Consider: "I do not want my house to be walled in on sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any."

Coudwatching

2008-08-24T14:01:00.002-04:00

Cloudwatching is a microcosm of everything we try to do as humans. Here we are, confronted with the shapes of some swirling chaotic system, unpredictable from moment to moment and uncaring and inscrutable from day to day, and we look upwards and out gray matter immediately—and, importantly, effortlessly—grabs some motif, some geon, some pattern to play connect-the-dots with, and assembles it into an “object”; sometimes an “idea”. This is like a dream-soliloquy, except it is actual and tangible and takes up most of our visual field. It does not dissipate with our brain-states. It is The World as we want to see it. Nothing is extant, no value or object, without observers. So the observers eke and hew and strain—effortlessly in this case, but not all others—some pattern and some mechanism. Whence our myths? They are cloudwatching. Whence our purposes and analyses and interpretations? Look to the child vegging out on the lea.

Yes, it’s muddled. But an idea like this takes a while to express. Perhaps it is best served by dancing around the meat of it for a while. But we’ll return to it. (Not, however, in essay form: you will se no fleshed-out arguments from me, no fascinating thought-experiments. Only intuition and, if I may permit myself a small self-serving word, wonder.) First, there is one more important piece of groundwork before we begin.

Cloudwatching is an afternoon activity. What lies on the flip side? Night, of course; specifically, sometime after the deepest hours of the night, probably the 4 a.m.’s of the insomniac or the blaring alarms of the ambitious worker. The night is not a good time for cloudwatching. You’d need floodlights so powerful that they could suck out the electric needs of entire countries. Nighttime belongs to astronomy, of course. Astronomy: the genesis of the mechanistic view of the world. Astronomy: the tracing and careful measurement of the movement of stellar bodies. Astronomy: from which all of our science derives, which nourished those wonderful myths: “but it spins!”. Principles which were laid out in the night do not apply to day. There is the mechanistic night and the hermeneutic daytime. Daytime: the strict domain of chaos theory. Nighttime: the playgrounds of Newton and Keppler and Galileo and Copernicus—the academic parents of all us scientists. Maybe, just maybe, that is why sunrises and sunsets are such universally accepted and appreciated phenomena: the strictest mechanist and the loose interpreter come together at this boundary event—boundaries have always been more interesting that the interiors, the outside-in perspective topples the inside-out as parochial. (I should mention that, having no training in classical mythology of ancient and modern people, I was forced to make up my own. To some, it contains too much that is sterile and mechanical. I have to beg to differ: my intuition tells me that I’m not being mechanical enough. But perhaps I’ll explain myself in a roundabout way later.)

So, we have cloudwatching, we have the night, we have the circumstances of my own life which I seem to owe the reader. We have countless clashes and boundary conflicts, as we’ll see. But what else is there?

Consider: "Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing."

Breakfast

2008-08-23T16:25:00.003-04:00

Scene: A table. 4 a.m. Two people are eating.

ERNEST: We've been eating for twenty minutes, you know.
BARTHES: So?
E: I'm starting to see double. I think there may be something fishy in the cereal.
B: I thought you were a pescaterian.
E: I don't remember.
B: ...
E: Doesn't it bother you sometimes?
B: ...
E: ...not remembering?
B: ...
E: We're losing the days when we used to care about things. When things shone with a light that seemed to come from not-quite-behind the objects.
B: ...
E: ...
B: Yeah. Sometimes.
E: What?
B: Sometimes.
E: ...
B: ...
E: I think we need a new icebox.
B: ...
E: ...
B: How about you buy a fucking fridge?
E: (Mockingly imitating Barthes) "But neighbour Roxanne has one! Please! Please! Please!" ... no.
B: You're a dipshit.
E: ...
B: ...
E: I'm not a dipshit. I'm only 26. I don't deserve this. I was a theosophist. I used to cleanse karma by moving my eyes back and forth. I turned spaces into places. I directed Non-referential Compassion towards all beings. I painted pastel pictures of cirrus clouds. I danced the wild dances of the East and sweated to the Lambada... the forbidden dance! No... I sweated from it. I streamed my sweat in expanding spirals around me. I never needed to go to space. The inner space was boundless. We could have imploded like that. Into that inner space. I could have called you "darling". I could have meant it. I did mean it. For a little while.
B: ...
E: ...
B: What?
E: ...
B: ...
E: ...
B: Go put the milk back in Roxanne's fridge.
E: Why?
B: ...
E: ...

Exit ERNEST.

B: ...

Exit BARTHES

Consider: "What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person."

The Tower

2008-07-22T16:02:00.003-04:00

There are no more uncontacted tribes. The eyes of Google Earth peer at this planet from all directions. There is nowhere you can hide. No more than fifty meters below the forest canopy, so intensly peered at by our satellite arrays. There is no point escaping; there are no more uncontacted tribes. I think this, astride the roof of a bank's office tower, gleaming white in its tiny fringed border with the Outer Dark. There are no more pseudo-human spaces. All falls into this very human center. A center pulsing with a common heartbeat, a burbling waterfall from the darkness of the jungle--earlier: from the rarified air of a mountaintop.

(Consider the raindrop which landed exactly on the dividing line between the watersheds of two rivers running in opposite directions. How it was parted... when again, in the tumult of earth's hydrological cycles, will it be reconstituted? And here, consider the famous story from Plato's Symposium about the origin of love. Yes... there is a song about it.)

No-one is the savior they'd like to be. Everyone seems to get ground down. In this world of constant reference to the humans, with satellites watching over us and beaming our outstreaming signals back down to us, we are growing more and more closed. Frotiers crumble, wash out, fade to gray, bleed their colours away. All that's left is a few archipelagos, thousands of kilometers from the nearst land. And here I was, peering down at its rift valleys, labeling, beaming knowledge and striving, all the wanderlust of years and years of pent-up desire, back to this most remote of places. Even the polare regions have been taken in by our cameras, one last time before they disappear. Even the clouds have become our playthings. The skies are scraped, or they are overcome by satellites. Space debris rings the Earth and Moon. Gaia is enveloped by Uranus, swating in his sponing grasp. All that remains the beating rage of the Sun. We may not hae ringed it with a Dyson Sphere, but we may.

What's worse? The looming distruction of this self-contained technocratic society, or its eventual triumph, and crass "humanization: of All? Our towers are rising. If all is light, then they too will cumble. If heavy, then the tower is just the beginning.

Maybe there's a mixture of lightness and heaviness? Is that where freedom resides? Where space resides? And the interface where space becomes place?

Consider: "And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there / But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?"

City Poem (Part II)

2008-07-10T23:27:00.004-04:00

A Meditation on the Hotel Waverly

I’m haunted,
haunted—
impatient for enlightenment.

So say the
chalk marks on the blackboard.

The snow blows off a rooftop,
in the whistle of the wind’s
world-lines, lines of tendons, feet
hanging off the edge—a sink
full of day-old oatmeal
or vomit.

Faces come—
an eye on the wall,
face-lines, the gentle curve of cheekbone
and the curl of blue hair
crumbling into chalk marks on the blackboard.

Faces come—
atavistic: the beefy salt of the Earth
bitterness from when I was pierced
wanting to get better,
peering from this place out into
loose space, trying
desperately to open up some view
of world-lines by eating nothing,
hitting my head into the wall
were the wall-eye proclaims:
“sorry…”

The snow blows off a rooftop;
world-lines in wind-lines. And
cause precedes effect,
precedes effect
precedes effect—
as arrows and lines drawn
by chalk on a blackboard.

Consider: "Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."

A Fragment

2008-06-23T22:39:00.002-04:00

(Inspired by a different book.)

Can I tell you about your sadness? Can I even tell you about your longing? What would there be? All the same. I think the two are the same. That same pointillist feeling in your hands. Those same vignettes revisited and re-spun. The same threads plucked from the tapestry and laminated for safekeeping—the hideous practice of the heart. Ah, well! There are still vignettes. Like when you were a teenager and got a crippling stomachache on a bus, and the world did a double-take, spun in-and-out, and you saw it. The place of all human longing; the place beyond plans and beyond life simply trying to reach for more life. This is abstract. Let me try again. It’s like your experience of ripping out carpets in a room full of human smells: thousands of breakfasts cooked, each one striving to be better, to follow up the previous with pride. Children played on that carpet; rattles shook and soldiers marched, as you marched soldiers in the spinning of a cylindrical hair brush—the spokes were soldiers. Or, better yet, the plick-pluck-placking of raindrops in April, smacking gravel—hundreds of raindrops sounding awful. Yesterday they would have been musical, grandiose. They would have been the emissaries of the crystal spheres which still vibrate somewhere in your clouded web of concepts. But this is getting too far afield. We have to get more sadnesses in on this. The sadness of stopping on the street to look at a broken chair. The sadness of looking out the window at grey parking lots. Indeed, all that arises passes away—the learning thereof. The passing away of the first precious things: the endless days of summer haze, the rapturous awe at Jupiter, the strainings of words long since mastered, the first hammer-fall of a poetic insight, the first dawning of samadhi, the little-death at thirteen, the bigger death that gives life at twenty-two. All things are impermanent. Yet all things interpenetrate. All these things tend towards enlightenment—they are there for the tending, even though our mostly-speechless breath will never give them voice. There’s the pangs of remorse; the knowledge of lived-with pain built upon pain, the awful memories of eight-year old dawns with parents fighting, the brutal summer aporiae at nine, as a soccer hooligan. The loss of the crooks of elbows we found in our innocence—the knowledge that never, ever, will it be exactly the same. What, then? What do we flow into? We don’t know, but we have the pessimism that it’ll be worse than this. The sadness of you’re still young—the sadness of knowing of coming sadnesses with certainty. The sadness of holding a fist too tight until it rips skin, and the countervailing sadness of hands too loose getting slapped around. The sadness of paint splotches on the walls. The sadness of girls’ private confessions. The sadness of diaries and diarists’ tears. The sadness of phantasmagorical reminiscences I never sent to the one I loved. The sadness of hurting love. But this is too listy. All things also tend towards enlightenment. So says the wise owl of the big spirit. So says the coyote scaling the window-washers’ lines up the side of a glass skyscraper. So says the spinning, grinning holographic image in my head—the neon claws of Queen Street. But there’s sadness in the bustle of scarves and goatees—the same impermanence that impregnates the air of summer afternoon drawing rooms, where men with big beards mouth-breathe, leaving that strange old-man smell of halitosis. I’m trying to get you to see. But neither past nor future stand in this reverie. They are mere patterns, all. They are here but will never play. Sadnesses or longings, now? The longing for the one you love—the burning in my chest area, slightly more pronounced on the right side. The memories of curly hair. The knowledge you’ve just scooped someone’s unconscious wheels—the knowledge of sabotage. The strange premonition of a mating swarm. The sadness of never being able to express in prose what good poetry should do. The failure of decompression. The sadness of losing my powers. The sadness of staring at the refractive patterns in a beer glass and tuning out all ambient conversation. The sadness of knowing I’ll never be secure in love—the knowledge, deep and full-fledged, of negotiation and protean shifting. The sadness of knowing, like Cassandra did, the immensity of the unconscious mind. The effort to change it and the slow progress. The sadness of streetcars at 3 a.m., and its drunken buffoonery. The sadness of having coaxed out bitter speech from one who had never spoken like that before. The longing for summer warmth during a torrential downpour. The sadness of not quite right..., the sadness of thousand yard stares at inconvenient times. The sadness of knowing, certainly, that it’s not what we’re here for: to feel splendor and wholeness, or even love, even tenderness. The sadness of knowing we’re here to be, whatever that is—added sadness of knowing that whatever it is, it’s erased so much of our humanity. The sadness of not having enough energy, or enough energy to get up enough energy. The sadness of running head-over-heels to live fully—to kill yourself just to feel. The sadness of emotional masochism. The sadness of children’s toys from the dim past. The sadness of feeling, despite all the trials by fire, almost exactly the same. The sadness of inadequate memory, inadequate comprehension. The sadness of having slept eight hours and feeling exhausted...

Consider: "In encountering contemporary culture, the dharma may recover its agnostic imperative, while secular agnosticism may recover its soul."

Clarity

2008-05-31T14:20:00.002-04:00

It's strange, when writing skill, or writing style, coalesce to the point where the writer loses interest. I think that's what happnened to me. On some level, I was stagnating in madness; my surface forms were rippling, scattershot, eclectic (or ecumenical, if you prefer), but underneath it was the same old formula, as if I had written the 39th novel my Chuck Pahlaniuk--another one whose form's deep structure is manifestly there for the perceiving reader. Or not even the perceiving reader.

So, here are some resolutions I'm making to myself. I'll pick three to stick to. Or maybe two.

(1) Write a short story every week. At least three pages. Bash it out if you have to, sentence by agonizing sentence.

(2) Make note of moments of "inspiration", "grace", "inner storminess", "illumination", "irruption"... maybe you'll be better able to recall them.

(3) What happened to writing down your dreams?

(4) And why are you so lazy?

(5) Stop lamenting stories you loved in the past that were lost when your computer crashed.

(6) Don't self-indulgently fall in love. Make your prose like a sparse Californian living room, not a cluttered tenement hallway.

(7) Fuck (6). Your life, no life, has the features of a sparse living room. No life but the most superficial. Deal with clutter. Arrange it, rearrange it. Never be ashamed of it.

(8) Living life like an open book is conducive to producing a book.

(9) Savour other people's anecdotes. Savour humor. Savour harrowing. Savour tales of transformation. Savour difficult conversations. Savour stubbornness. Savour the tree-like flow of conversation, with it hundreds of unclosed branches. savour argument. These water the soil of "inspiration", "irruption", etc....

Consider: "It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. / Resign yourself to be the fool you are."

City Poem

2008-05-17T14:46:00.002-04:00

Take my eyes and put them in the soup bowls
in the alleyways behind Spadina restaurants.
Cut off my hand and leave it there,
in the crook of a magnificent oak tree,
a message coded for future generations.
Leave my sweat; in its glisten you can see
the shimmering reflections of orange
streetlight halos on a thin coat of moisture.
Take my ribs and lay them down
as streetcar tracks. Take my nails
and stick posters on them. Take my knuckles
as balls padding the shelves
of a chatchkie shop with a smiling waving cat,
Buddha crap, lotus blossom hand towels.
Take my ears and deep fry them,
and slide them down the bar to the
hungry patron. Take and take. All this
is yours. My throat, freely wrapped
around a pylon. My hair wrapped as insulation
around electrical wires, fraying in the wind.
Take my intestines and squeeze them,
as the roadkill squirrels were squeezed. Take
my brain, which could foretell the weather
based on fluid buildups in its ventricles.
Take my tendons, and make
police lines with it. Take my stomach,
hollow it out, and put in it
jam for the winter. Take my teeth
and make prayer beads, and put them
in your coat for safekeeping.

Consider: "The stone fell on the pitcher? Woe to the pitcher. The pitcher fell on the stone? Woe to the pitcher."

Behold the Man

2008-05-12T22:10:00.004-04:00

He peers out at your from behind a stubborn wooden pole. His sullen shape covered in sweat from hauling your ceramic tiles, or your cedarn cross-beams, with which you pave the backyards of your ego. He looks out at you from a sidewalk bench, where he lies covered with ratty dog-furs, his face framed by the bushy outgrowth of three months' beard. He cleans your windows as you wait at the red light, and in that startling space he gleams like a Greek statue. He is the shadow that flits about in the back alley you glimpse into on your way from a Greek-Japanese fusion restaurant to the place that serves Mai-Tais in the dead of winter. He is staring at you from the imperceptible static of your satellite TV screen as the voiceover describes the death toll from a famine/natural disaster/war... any form of Malthusian catastrophe, really. He is the green-blue eyed punk devil stalking up and down your neighbourhood streets and kicking the gutter for no reason but his intoxicated anxiety... the hardening of the nut that has been kicked by clean, cleated shoes. He is the waiter at the restaurant you love that secretly stashes a pubic hair in every dish he serves you. He is the denizen of every hole-in-the-wall bar that openly tells racist jokes to the company there gathered and goes home and beats his wife... even though he tries not to, even though he provides in any way he can... even though he reads his five-year-old daughter stories of Pooh Bear and Angelmouse. He is bearded and filthy. He is the dignified old genltman that sits in Tim Horton's for three hours at a time with a drowning look in his eyes. Throw him some conversation. Ballast! Dignity! Unsettle yourself.

Consider: "You must change your life."

Homecoming

2008-05-11T21:10:00.002-04:00

Why do I write?

Or, rather: why did I stop for so many months. All the blocg-checkers have probably written me off by now. But no matter. I'l ltell you why I write. It was the external outlet for the inner world. In this typing, in this drawing of sentence-strings and releasing was the only communion I had with the shape of my feelings. I think it's because I'm a stunted human: top-heavy and cerebral. As I grew I missed all those little events that make for better self-understanding: parting, sorrow, betrayal, love lost and gained, closeness, going-with-the-flow...

But no matter. I compensated for it by being dramatic within. In this inner world I found space. I moved in the world, among buildings and down streets like a wraith. The embodiment of non-flamboyence. And I always secretly despised those who could live out ther creative urges and impulses. And I became stubborn and set in my ways. Outwardly. But within! I don't think I've ever enjoyed myself more than when riding the wave of inspiration. (That is not happening today, by the way.) When things chanbel themselves through me and come out twisted, splendid and strange. How strange! Religious people would call it communion with the Divine. I make no such pretenses, aside from ascribing the same value to it. Indeed, it is the spark of the divine within us! Creation! Who would deny it, suppress it, deride it?

Most of modern society does. That's enough for today. I just want to get the ball rolling again.

Consider: "Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."

Conception

2008-01-23T20:44:00.000-05:00

Behold! A new poem, a tonality-fluidity-imagery is building up pressure. It struggles to be born. It is dilating the cervix of your limbic system. It is a bloody, fragile thing, encased in a little sac, carried through conversation, through class and ratiocination, throug shitting and pissing, through waking and sleeping. It feels those rumbles and awaits its midwife. Its midwife need not be here, or now, or ever. But I guarantee one thing: It Will Find A Way. Somewhere. It cannot abide. It must develop, for it is nothing but movement, framing, following. It is chance itself: it is a grabbing, a hoarding, a taking of what is here and the making of it something more. It glimmers, but not in brightness. It needs no light.

If we had a worked-out science of what sustains it we would be the most satisfied human beings in the world. It has to do with many things: safety, feeling felt, simply feeling, subconsciosness, holes in the hypnagogic wall, personality, weather, contingent events, flashes, twitches, dispositions. All this to say: we don't know what is going on. Or, rather: we don't hold it well. It's like a fluid putty.

And it seeks an outlet. All you have to do is choose the right receptacle: freeform? Prose poem? Elegiac lament? Concrete? Musical? Meditative? In this you have been too lazy. But you know what it is outlet for. The feeling of being infinite, the fragility of that feeling, the impossibility of that feeling in a creature of flesh and bone. Think about it: dreaming meat!

Consider: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice... On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance."

Olduvai (Part II)

2008-01-19T22:36:00.003-05:00

What's Olduvai? This is a self-referential answer. If it doesn't strike your imagination on a deep, thrilling chord, then you are dead inside. I don't mean that. What I mean is that you should probably listen in more closely. What is it? The cradle of humankind. That--to your primate brain--is the closest thing to home we've ever had. Since then we've seen unfathomable serenghetti plains, alluvial flood plains, mountian gorges, ice sheets, pacific islands, moonscapes, office buildings, jungle thickets, tundras, stadiums, highways, lecture halls. But these things never touch our inner wealth--or should I say our inner wounding? The Buddhists would have you think that bare nature, our instinctive self stripped of the accumulation of development is inherently wonderful. I have difficulty accepting this from a Darwinian point of view. But maybe we are both right. The answer might be sought in Olduvai. Not by studying its rocks and fossils, but by the feelings it evokes, just as someone going to their roots--the old country, the childhood home...

Lately I've been on a big kick of integrating my history and making sense of it, making my narrative mean something. Wrestling with it and wresting from it something to motivate, to get me out of bed in the morning. So why not go to the root? That distant root? That root we're so separated from that it can't move us unless we make it move. But that's where we were of ourselves moved one time. Group proto-songs of proto-lament, proto-worry, proto-joy, Homo Ergaster Buddhas, Caligulas, Catos, Macchiavelis gathered around a proto-hearth. It's where we were all born and we all died. Our bones piled on our grandparents' in a gorge cutting off sight by mountains.

We're in a similar place right now. We think our sight is unobstructed--we see so clearly into our motives. And maybe we have gotten better at looking out. Radio telescopes touch quasars; arguably we've touched the background radiation that is the "soup" of the universe. But we haven't looked within enough, And maybe what we'll find inside is a valley enfeamed on all sides by truths tought unmoveeable. Unmoveable like the geocentric theory of the universe, like the four elements, like phlogiston, like the aether.

Intellectually, I have no problem with descending and breaking into Oldivai as a human living 2.5 million years later. But the strangeness of that place, and all place,s, tohugh intellectually acceptable, may be more than I can bear. But there's the beginnings of a strange project here.

Consider: "When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment."

To Himself

2007-11-27T22:16:00.000-05:00

Everyhting's converging: the classes that consistently, with a powerful rising undercurrent, point to the answer: the meaning of life, the source of joy, the fountain of youth, the Elixir of Life, the Holy Grail. The fiction books plucked from bargain bins at random, from 1920s Germany, from 1970s India, from the timeless mush-world of Colombia, from France sometime after the advent of railroads, from non-fiction piles all also point at it. In different ways to be sure, but each adds their line, their note, their trill in the chorus of exaltation. The friendships are all embrouled in it: intellectuals falling into obsession about one concept or another, about one thinker or another, others finding the practice which enlightens in more mundane concerns, in shopping, in caring, in beers, in wiping old asses. I see it now in the importation of old sanskrit or pali terms: dharma, sunyata, dhukka, karuna, etc. They cluster and swirl together, a strange loop, an attractor, haording all these other ephemera to them. The girl is there too: images in my mind, places, feelings of approach, of sinking, of growing, of expangind. Yes, even the shaken legs, the shivering tears all point to it. A middle way. The stinking technocracies of planes, the false smiles of modern psychopomps, the half-sleep nights, the sense of dissolution of habitual patterns--but dissolution without destruction, without distraction. Awful chamber music points to it; grinding walls of noise point to it; piccolo solos weaving through Pan's layrinth point to it; the laughing immortals point to it; the terar-jerker stride pianos point to it. My conversatonal cup is overflowing at those on the same level as me; it is also beginning to erupt up and down. Counselling sessions are dharma; they point to it. Sobbing fits are dhukka--they point to it. Half-sleep, runination, systems breaking and regrouping all point to it. My lack of paragraph breaks points to it. Strangest of all, elemental winter weather points to it: the barren outsides and the fertile insides; but also the intimation that the inside will rot and grow diseased unless they are aired out.

Hold on to this moment. But never forget to add wings to the "soul"; never forget to plunge into reality and drown your over-dry head. Things will go down from this moment; the can't help but go down. The call-note of aporia can only be sustained for a short while.

Consider: "Honesty is the best policy. But sometimes policy is not the best policy."

The Expansive Howl (Part V)

2007-11-17T15:07:00.000-05:00

...the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors...

My boss is essentially a page from a magazine. His appearance and comportment, his associates and accessories, his diction and bearing all point unmistakably to his stature in life, all point to his hillside house somewhere outside the city, near a train stop but not too near it, near all the conveniences constantly maintained by the folk pouring off the trans-oceanic boats in the harbours, the grey folk, the shawled folk who don’t speak the good English like him, who don’t in their faces bear the marks of youth, the Nordic marks of power: the chin, the jaw, the rut in the cheek, the straight forehead, the sideburns maintained at geometrically perfect proportions. You can read from his face the house he owns: at least twenty rooms, warm, solid, rising to a third, or even fourth story. He is a human being who has built a granite cave from making other human beings place marks on papers by operating levers dipped in ink. Do you feel as if I’m talking around him? Well, that is how I talk around him. It is also how I behave around him. When he comes, I feel the pathway of my possible thoughts, the tree of possible things I could say constrict and wither. The branches containing the implicit punning rules disappear first, then the question transformations, then the passive ones, then the familiar forms of address, then the clichéd sayings I use to plug holes in conversations, unfairly. Nobody else makes me talk on my toes like the boss: nobody else has ever washed over me that sense of “smarter-than-thou”, that sense of uncaring mentorship, of initation into almost-Gnostic mysteries my troglodyte mind will never grasp. I copyedit for him. I read the hissing waves of his prose as he discourses on great events, as he presses his sage opinion into the public pages, to reach the millions of breathing bodies in this city, which itself breathes with its steam vents, and bleeds out its buses and trams, its cabs and limousines. When work finishes and we’ve exchanged mandatory pleasantries we’ll retire to our respective trains: his the over-ground white train that is cleaned weekly and I to my mostly-underground tube where old organ-grinders mouth-breathe next to me, where old squat men who never mastered the good English since they stepped off the boats thirty years ago, the same men who offer votive candles to polytheistic pantheon of saints back in the Mediterranean islands where their grandmothers covered their heads with black scarves year-round, never mind the heat. Here are the people who bring out my words, who unwrap their academic crispness, who unravel the rules of spelling, all the arcane of one “l” or two “l”s or “ie” or “ei” or extraneous vowels, or “g”s and various other interconnected star-like clusters of meaningless dressed-up bullshit. Here, in the tunnel world of speech, none of that matters. “In the workman papers you don’t see the injunctions against split infinitives, or even complete phrases, or the “bad taste” of having two exclamation marks. (You need only one. How insufferably Anglo-Saxon.) But here with men named Nico or Gino or Xerxes we’ll see the happy medium of human rationality out of the confused babble of the world, and I even deign to feel a little Neo-Platonic, before my disgust responses come online. If all reality were One, then my discourse on Gino the mouth-breathing organist would amount to the highest affirmation of The Boss’ theoretical outlook, that well-fed, corpulent yet disciplined world of lines and angles and the forms of circles. I doubt my sometime master ever ventured into these tunnels—these tunnels that, in their sinews, go against the spirit of geometry.

Consider: "Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death!"

Catafalque

2007-11-08T20:30:00.000-05:00

What may happen if I die? Imaginatively, a great deal. Maybe I'll lie where I drop, and a mass of foodstuffs will expand around me: all the pizzas and tacos I ever ate, all the dust I swallowed, the water, saliva, backwash I drank. Maybe I will be surrounded by people: the inhumanly saurian teachers of the dim foggy past, the bearded warriors that drove my family out of our home, old men that played chess in the parks and yelled at me to get down from the benches. Maybe my friends will be there. Maybe. It's possible a few lovers, requited and unrequited, might show up. But what would they do? Stand? Sing? Lacerate themselves? That's the last thing I'd want. Talk amongst each other? In some ways, while I still have life, I'd prefer to tie off some areas from others. But after death, let the gates open. Let all the causal flotsam and jetsam eddy away into the future, because we all know we'll just end up scattered over the planet, a fine sprinkling of snow that never takes for all that long, that's swept by wind, that thaws or compresses into something different.

What else might happen? There might be light. Chains that bind my being may break. The eternal darkness, eternal bliss free from the confines of ego and grasping. Or maybe just another cycle, a place to guide my grasping all the more ferociously. Maybe I'll wander as a ghost on a mountain, bemused and confused by the world of the living. Maybe I'll stand on cliff-tops and not feel the wind. Maybe places of power which have drawn people since misty immemorial time will have no significance for me. Maybe the stars lose their twinkle, but remain as ideas, as diamonds embedded in the pudding of my thoughts. How horrible it would be to be plagued by the obsessions of life, but all the more so. What if death removed all the possibility of transformation. Hey, the universe may not be just. Maybe resurrection happens, in which case you get no respite. No release. No comforts. No reasons to write self-indulgent posts about mourning masses, the causal imprint on this wide and long World. No reasons to deck out my death in twenty-first century catafalques. No reason to glorify, or to fear, or to hope anything from it.

Nihilism stands at the door, but the door has become thicker of late. And I no longer hide from it as if it were a gaggle of Jehovah's Witnesses driven by their own afterworldly terrors. No, it is here. It is possible. But something in me dances it away.

Consider: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

The Expansive Howl (Part IV)

2007-10-24T23:11:00.000-04:00

...a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet...

Often I look at Therese in the pre-dawn hours. I’m a terrible sleeper, and the wholly unpatterned hours of my work-day don’t help. I mean my real work: the toil of my soul, not the editorial job which scarcely deserves mention. No, this work-day is the day that starts when I feel the tug in my sinews, when I close myself off in the furnace-room the size of a utility closet, and there, but gas-light, I compose the poor prose that’s the language of my life, that ties together the strands of my memory into knots I can point to, like prayer beads pilgrims are always fingering. Ready-at-hand for application to the situation at hand. The problem comes when this happens in the middle of the night, or during meal-time, or during work-hours, or on the train back from the granite cock-towers that dot the other bank of the river. This is when I sweat, when I offend, when I leave dishes clattering or conversations cut off. She has tried to understand through cultivating that long-suffering approach. But I can’t explain it to her. I still can’t tell her what has not formed itself in my head. How would she understand? Does it make any sense to tell her, or anyone, that sometimes I hear the voice of my grandmother, speaking in that tongue from the swamps of the Dniester, speaking in her fairy-tale voice? Does it make sense that when I hear that voice, I obey? I enter a small place, sacred only by virtue of being small and unobtrusive, to tell tales and draw together what was disparate, like grass into hay bales, like droplets from an eavestrough into a mighty stream. A stream that won’t stop until I’ve been emptied and can once again return to that world of car horns and steamwhistles and peddlers and niceties. And yes, back to the world of Therese, who is still sleeping. She does not know the thoughts I have of her during those times in the closet gas-light: my sentiments that disappear lest they be collapse like a frail origami puppy in front of a barrel-chested construction worker. How do I tell her that I speak to Baphomet night after night, pleading for more time? Time to make the gifts I promised, humble as they are, real. A time when we can have curtains, seasoning, clothes for more than one occasion, an apartment that does not rattle with the passage of trains? A world where we can have time to just lie and touch, not worrying about my next spasmodic episode, or about her pre-dawn lathe-turning shift, a world where I can practice my origami and smoke a pipe and she can dance like she used to—like I saw her once—in a room that doesn’t constrain every free arm movement. This goddamn room! Nowhere to turn without knocking over some jar containing an essential. In other words, no room for the playful, except the Sibelius records over the phonograph, which was never meant to be listened to while preparing yet another heap of cabbage soup, with potatoes as essentials. It is around these times that I get hung up on the inessential, insubstantial, airy, flighty, flowing world and retire to the furnace “room”. But in that loss of gravity, I lose her wholeness. Her corporeality. Her here-ness.

Consider: "All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason."

The Expansive Howl (Part III)

2007-10-20T18:00:00.000-04:00

…the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…

Ezra tells me this story every once in a while as we sit and drink his whiskey. He used to own a telescope, and although it’s difficult to see anything past the haze of the city lights (especially on movie premiere nights, when spotlights blast out their expanding trails onto the sky) he would spend hours on the roof, combing the sky somewhat aimlessly. And back in the days when Anny was around, he’d take his daughter up and show her the constellations, the moon craters, even tried to view the moons of Jupiter, before giving up, realizing these are specialized rich-people activities to be done out in the countryside, at the cottage, or summer house, or something equivalent. Guys like us aren’t built for astronomy, apparently. All the books always talked about how you set up the equipment in your backyard, or atop a hill. That’s nice, but have any of these writers heard that in the last 150 years humanity has concentrated itself into cities? Or is that just the mass of people deemed unfit for any kind of higher aspirations? (At this turn in the story, Ezra usually points out how there is nothing “higher” than astronomical reasoning, and I’m never sure whether he has made a terrible pun or not.) He’ll tell me about how people who live around here have astrology shoved down their throats and a curtain of light from neon marquees to keep them from noticing and wondering at the lights in the sky. Because if people wonder why they don’t know about something so apparent, they become curious about everything else. He’ll point out how astronomy is usually the first science to grab a child’s imagination. Such was his experience; such was mine. I sympathize; I always do, but I also remind him he’s probably going overboard with the imagined conspiracy theories. But I still lament with him at the murder of something frail and beautiful, a little pinprick of light surrounded by unfathomable black, something to make us both shudder. We both usually look at the naked bulb in the hallway by this point, at the circle of illumination, and beyond it the scraps of half-couches, wooden sticks ripped off from futon frames, cardboard boxes containing scrap metal—the whole sad assortment of every tenement hallway ever. By this point I usually hope we’ll finish the whiskey, because I need to go back to my apartment and turn off some symbolic lights, without even touching a book descend to sleep and the unconsciousness which I feel everywhere about me. Or on some nights I wait for Therese to come home, just to look at her. Why? Sometimes I think I see a glimpse in her eye, a kind of lament at the man I am. The man who will never be able to give her that cottage or summer house she dreams of. Never mind that we both work. Never mind that the “economy” is doing well. It’s something in me. She looks at me sideways, and probably thinks I don’t notice, thinks I’m happy to toil with her with my vision bound in a tight tunnel. To make it up to her I blow on her earlobes when she’s in deepest sleep.

Consider: "what, alas! do we carry across? Not the beholding we’ve here / slowly acquired, and no here occurrence. Not one. / Sufferings, then. Above all, the hardness of life, / the long experience of love; in fact, / purely untellable things. But later, / under the stars, what use? The more deeply untellable stars?"

The Expansive Howl (Part II)

2007-10-16T23:19:00.000-04:00

…the ghostly clothes of jazz…

He’s here somewhere, running circuits in his apartment. Typical madman obsessive. Out for the perfection of some idea he’s living for—and no living thing will find it out until it has been done right over and over, until it has been examined from every clear angle, light blasting through the complex inner structure, until it has been perfected, until it is dug. You feel me? Never mind the smell. Never mind clotheslines tangled on his balcony railing. Never mind the subtle rot at his fingertips—not enough of some rare vitamin. Out of touch; out of sorts. Real type of guy who burn a hole in vendors examining, turning over. We can hear his machinery creaking up there at nights. He’s resigned way the hell up there. Door dustier, every time beard longer, never mind the holes, and holes become runs, and runs become tatters and morally wrong. One especial peculiarity: sometimes in the middle of the nights, when half the building’s asleep, we hear his wispy voice going “yes, yes!”, or sometimes the longer-drawn “yass, yass!” He’s digging something up there, but what? Base beats of the stringed instruments? Ezra thinks he builds his own harp-like arrangement, says he was in there one time. Guy treated him to wine, he says. Real polite type, but real anxious, always watching you and where you’re looking, and how you’re looking. But then he puts on jazz, right. Some of the wilder, newer stuff. Real fast; real technical. Ezra’s not a jazz type, but he sits up there all the same, and the guy almost instantly turns off. Just staring beyond, somewhere maybe on a riverbank, sharing a basket of sweets with a sweetheart digging the overhanging willows and dozen flowers he can’t name and grass overlooking little cliffs the river carves out, things rippling in the breeze, all rhythmic-like and hypnotizing, and dreams of making love after a hearty meal at her parents’, all rosy cheeks and mushy but taut skin, irises blooming open and closed, and every brown or partly green line of the muscle just sticking out there among impossible eye whites, and he gets it, you know? He looks like he had it. And he took it here, he says. Says he saw then how the note composes the phrase, and opposing processes of notes make the phrases stick, and phrases to make grand eloquent gestures and it kept growing, into all the forms of all the plays of the world, and in the clotheslines of these here tenements and in the bustles of suits in the business districts. He took it here because he can dream here, and here he can take the idea to extremes, because here Ezra and me just dig, don’t run him to the edge of town. You know? Does he regret leaving those weird visionary irises, he asked him. And the guy just gave Ezra this sad knowing smile. And then he starts going off, all wild and tells Ezra about this book he was reading on the music of the spheres, and the staves leaping out at him from brick walls, and grand concert arias from the coughing of the skid row bums, and definitely “yes!” from the sound of a child’s clumsy fingers working a piano, and he’d go and develop her melody, develop every slip of the fingers into a jumping jazz phrase, and once perfected he’d think of how he might bring his sister and mother here as he pounded the piano with stalks of fingers, and he’d hum softly, but always he’d lose the thread, and then he said he just went out again and picked something else up: the organ grinder or the butcher out in front of the shop (said it was still odd to feel no fear next to a white man with a large knife), or some car barreling down the street, or a newly arrived Arkansas ingénue out of whose eyes he could see the tenements anew. And then it was back, to hammer out another wild phrase. He had no need to shame himself with drugs: above all he was a workaholic. And as Ezra left, the last thing the guy says is to never lose the thread of the music of the spheres, how all versions of the myth are true. We didn’t really get that.

Consider: "Change: nothing inherently bad in the process, nothing inherently good in the result."

The Expansive Howl (Part I)

2007-10-08T17:40:00.000-04:00

(I'm serializing a tribute to my most influential poet. That is to say, I'm going to have expanding vignettes drawn from his lines and copied and extended in my comparatively poor, frail prose.)

The negro streets at dawn…

They rise early to the blast of steamwhistles. They cross the creeks and swamps, balancing on utility posts that have long been bent into the muck below. It’s not just negroes: that would be exaggeration. It’s all the people labeled coloured and colourful: organ grinders straight out of a French cul-de-sac and your occasional avant-garde Spaniard. They import their architecture into the streets: utility poles become billboards and billboards become communal draw spaces, ripe for religious revivals and fundamentalists to harangue crowds from on high. Intersections will do as circles for drumming beats that echo, fall and bounce down the phylogenies, back-propagating along the threads of sinew and bone, sperm and ova down to those two dozen hominids in Tanzania hiding in the forests, holding the entire future of the human world in their every tiny action. There was the Australopithecine gathering, all humanity-to-be assembled, every early Othello and Caracalla and Gibbon and Hammurabi and Buddha, but also Epicurus and Caligula and Confucius and Xerxes and Eli, in the trees shadows of Yetis and El Chupacabras and Virgin Marys always pointing to Abomination: St. Alia of the Knife was still unborn. They hugged more. And here they hug again. Except when working in the Associated Auto Parts Factory &c., ancient peeling sign from the very dawn of the greatest flesh-and-blood-and-machinery upheaval to overcome the sucking insect foulness of these swamps. The great hot potato of the industrial revolution: suddenly hugging instincts turned to lathe-turning and natural intelligence of the beats of drum circles turned to stormy indignations of union rallies, suddenly jewelry melted down for the buckles of overalls. Seasides bullied out by the grates of storm sewers, idylls turned to the horror of steel and iron, ages of humanity spelled out on the stairs of walk-ups. Dirty sixth floors from which I watch all this, light snow falling, reminder of lightly moving fickle creativity of nature elements set against the plodding trudging of snow-hills and traffic slowed to a crawl. Massive mad haze of stress hormones and sirens and ambulances and street hawkers and mazurkas of old Europa and banjos of the porches of the South and my own guitar, three weeks out of tune and lonesome for my fingerpicking. I’ve fallen into the habit of watching the sunrise, being lucky the spot of the sunrise is not obscured by high-rises. Therese and I throw snowballs at each other as our breath condenses, and my affection condenses and I want nothing more than to get inside after the brilliant yellow glare and trade flesh for flesh as comfort, leaning on the handrails of the staircase and happy to be inside where the wind doesn’t overcome and impose itself to everything. There are joys in walking down six flights and greeting the rising factory workers, chat of sports and poker both last night’s and tomorrow’s, of new organizing rallies (banner being knit in right behind the door, Ezra’s wife lugging two large paint cans and countless brushes). Sights of falling by the wayside men across the street—fixing on street corners and congregations of the youngest ones—solid tufts of anger without direction. Ezra tells me the mood is turning ugly. “Just you wait a couple years.” We hug the man and we know none of us will be targets. We’ve got over-thin, frail, over-exposed roots here among peeling billboards and staircases with smells of cooking at all hours, and the sounds of music at all hours, and the sound of vicious voices at all hours, and creaking pipes and car engines and generators, and also giggling of children’s games or more mature cooing of adolescent games and yes, the moaning of adolescent games in utility closets and behind the rows and rows of clotheslines. Therese and I add to the symphony in our own myriad ways before work and after work. Because it is time for me to cross the same crashed utility poles of the half-frozen swamp and turn my lathes, and talk to Ezra and others, and break up the fights and vicious bigots. Their meat will be spent on these lathes, whereas ours will belong to the stairwell: both grimy, yes, but only one echoes with remembrances of what it was like before the robot skullfaces dug up the Earth and put us in thrall, bound by outflow pipes and guy wires.

Consider: "The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche."

The Urban Soup (Part XIX)

2007-10-01T23:27:00.000-04:00

So blogging's not kosher anymore. This I've heard. It's apparently also not kosher to be fasinated by humanity. You'll forgive me if the following manifesto's a little bit heavy-handed. I'm out of practice. It should be at least 30% more heavy-handed.

So it was a White Night.

Not a racist holiday, not an orgy of destruction. Rather an orgy of diddling preconceptions--at least on some idealized level. In reality we find ourselves on streets flooded with pedestrians, spotlights behind every building, street-level lamps in shades we have bnever seen before and have trouble assimilating. We found ourselves standing in lives on the sidwealk--anathema to the spirit of the night. Behind every art-party facade was a fast-food joint serving hungry mouths and alimentary canals. Tents blasting popcorn at us, panda bears performing manicures. The whole city lost its mind. Ethnic oud music poured out of the crystal explosion of the ROM. Old women were trampling over each other to see the entrance to this castle in the sky open: and what emerged? What human form out of the shadows?

(This isn't how it really happened. Not entirely.)

But we're all spinning our fictions at various levels of consciousness. Luckily, we are not spiders when it comes to our webs. We can sit in it, sway on it, endure the winds with it, and yet modify it. A little. Let's not kid ourselves. We can't stand beyond. We can, however, stand across the street from Art Hotel #4, drink coffee and bull session far into the night. Far into the night, and deep into our weary, bruised hearts. Bruised hearts which have begun to heal (heal from panic attacks and crying fits, heal from burdens even the straight-backed stoicism of Tai Chi could not relieve...)

We had our moments that night. J.P. stood in an art gallery crying quietly in front of a photo spread: there were all her friends, in their art moments: looking away from the camera, eyes bright and clear, colours bright and clear, positively reaching out and hugging the room. Here was yur life; here is what leaving;s like. And yet, we have to lose parts of ourselves to heal. Here in this rooom with a mattress ripped open in classical autopsy incision, and here with pictures of girls unwrapping layers of their structure, allowing us to see through the chookbone, and through the hair, through all occluded jaw lines, tooth caps, tongues, uvulas, gyri and sulci mysteriously glowing--all projecting something I know not what. We heal together, and we'll cry apart.

What else was there? There was the barren room with a glowing lamp, the room pregnant with ghosts dripping form the moisture on the window. There were places you could smash shit. There were projection screens, ambiguous art-duos, old men sleeping on installations, unsure of their own status in this metaphysical clusterfuck. There were writhing organic masses of balloons that almost hugged me: oh to stay in there and hide from the security guards until dawn! There were caverns wormed out by worms and reinforced by naked mole rats. There were wolves and deer co-existing. There were lonely walks up and down the fire escapes. And there was the awkward realization that tonight was about the people you know--and only that. No abstract pulling of heart-strings did anything. Because for the first time in my life, my people are important.

Consider: "Anything worth learning can't be taught. But most things worth being can be trained."

Prolix

2007-07-24T23:14:00.000-04:00

Go dance the light-beam; go play the accordion with a gypsy band; dance in the forest groves, by the fire, telling tales of great Mithras, the sun-phallus. Endure through the cricket-night of your loneliness, the whirr of machinery and the beaten-down fleshy stamping of meteors crashing to the Earth all around you, lighting up the sky like some on-fire spiderweb, the inferno and Holocaust of the flies, the sweat and rank male must of the wife-beaters of the trailer camp, the garishly decorated caravans of the theater troupe. It’s horrible, I know, but wait or sunrise! It’ll make you remember why you became a Nietzschean: to see the stirring colours, the omens in the mechanistic universe, the snake clutching a furry rodent, itself clutched by an eagle, which is itself adrift on currents beyond explanation and so immense they no longer have to justify themselves to anything that lives and exists; it no longer feels alive—we are all that feels alive. The currents weep for us! Except for the stars! Nothing justified to the stars: that ultimate senseless falling in! The furnaces all else does its fire-dance over: all else casts shadows of the original flame. All else; and, perhaps, in the end, this will be the meaning of Mithras—aphoristically, crushingly. Mithras the death by fire in meteor showers; the cowering moral belch on the streets of a small Ukrainian shtetl with nothing to guide us but dreams, the great cog that animates stuck deep inside each animal’s brain, lost at the moment of the meteor shower. I don’t know all the thoughts that led me to this; the world will crush my great thoughts—self-great. How other-great are they? Can I still systematically push the boundaries of my own language, my crib, my delimitation by centuries of praxis and refinement, the centuries when the death-dust piled on volumes of wet, breathing, pus-infested lore, the changeable, folkish, carnivalesque opponent of all hegemony. It was easier a hundred years ago. Back then we almost believed our words could span the streets and lights, and the grimy overall-stained lumpen masses. We thought our cocktail-straws could tap the bark of the archetypal great Deku Tree. Where are we now? We have millions of names for what could not be simpler, if only we bothered to look—within, inside, introspectively, unreliably, foolishly, mystically, crazily, hastily. If only we risk getting overwhelmed for the sake of theory. How much are we in love with our own theories?

Consider: "To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance."

Olduvai

2007-07-07T15:56:00.000-04:00

You are a kludge as much as I am—maybe more—maybe I can modify myself, and modify you. Maybe. I can’t tell from all the bubbling life below the surface. But I’ll keep you in mind. In sleepy mind; in mind sinking down to the fundament where figures and gestures long concealed are now walking down hallways, standing on hillsides, admiring thunderstorms, washing their eyelids in the rain. They are mapping inner landscapes with astrolabes and a pure-bred Epsilon semi-moron specialized in memorizing landscape with a minimum of interpretation—sure is cheaper than a 300 gig hard drive to serve the same purpose. He remembers the long hallways where the outstreaming fog-light of the Other, but thinks nothing of it; not like me: that still cuts to the quick. What did you give me, Other? Did you give me an image for the inner struggle? Did you remind me that perhaps the images are there all along? Did you find perspective for me? Did you take me for a semicircular walks around the Quantum Elephant of human experiences—the wellsprings of action? Or did you fill up an ill-developed part that was dragging everything else back? Did you engage me in soul searching (by which I mean a dialogue with your murky tumescent waters, your hills breathing with life actual and potential, lines streaming to the sky, to the sun, from the sun and to the moon, reflecting off cliffs and surfaces of dead lakes clear all the way down. Once I experienced sea slime; it repulsed me somewhat; is it like that all the way down)? Can I handle that? But what is I in this place, anyway? Promethian controllers are falling apart, and all illusions of unified agency are fragmenting? But what have we, then, if not that? We have the psychic unity of humanity: the kernel which does not admit of being split up, spilt upon, or debased in any way: it is not perfect or clean or holy or lit up with the original animating spark, though if you want to talk like that you are entitled, but you’ll end up too literal—but you can be a mystic. Anyway: it is a kernel of dirt, carrying all the crying and the terrors of primeval nights inconceivable, but also the triumphs of the cooking fires at Olduvai, the stone tools smashed into an opponent’s face, the pangs of cuckoldry, the insolent creeping bond of attachment, fear, disgust, laughter signalling “all’s clear!”, and myth. There was always myth. No obelisks here: just the march of the quivering meat wheel of generations growing and dying, watering the tree roots with primate meat. The ribs that point to the streaming source of the sun—but the sun has its own kernel, at once more alien but less mysterious. It’s funny: we the little blobs on the surface, the interface between this vast inner machinery and this ridiculous outer mechanism, this flux—we look to the flux for stability, because we know the causes within our causes are stranger than we can conceive.

Consider: "It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand..."

Union of Apposites (Part III)

2007-06-21T19:24:00.000-04:00

"Tell me a story."

There is a room--not my room: an imagined room. In this room multiple chests of drawers are filled with rocks from beaches all along the Pacific Rim, a few lagoons from Atlantic islands, renovated hotel lobbies and wishing wells disguised to look like babbling brooks. That's just one drawer. The one above holds religious icons of bygone eras, wrapped in cermeonial robes in every imaginable colour of the rainbow (and, incidentally, some colours observable only by bees, certain kinds of phototaxic flowers, and remarkably keen-eyed trichromatic predators), as well as engraved words of "wisdom" regarding life, death, atonement, abashedness, modesty, love, hate, righteousness, lawfulness, Female Genital Mutilation, hatred of Infidels, respect for fathers--unconditionally, respect for mothers and female elders--conditionally. In there, for good meausre, are thrown some of J.S. Bach's finer organ works--probably the only thing, if I were a 16th-century man--that would make me believe in God. How could you not, with an array of pipes blasting the pure voice of the wind directionlessly, but with such (dare I say it?) grace? The drawer above that is stuffed with more secular music: lilting sonatinas from bygone early piano years, an endlessly infuriating memory of inane left-hand accomaniment to decently worked-out melodies, Chopin and Rachmaninoff mixed together, tender then angry. So angry! Bashing that keyboard, but having it turn to harmonic gold every time! In with them, a few bits of 1960s-era optimistic science fiction: the kind that focused on exploring space, before the concept of exploring cyberspace ever came up; before Peak Oil hit the public imagination, before our leaders let us down because we didn't need to upstage the Russkies. Atop that firs chest of drawers I have a pile of rocks very similar to the drawer-pile; except every one of these rocks is a meditation-rock I have carried in my back pocket at some time of my life, training myself so that every time I became aware of it touching my skin I would "sink" into my mindfulness-state: a state chracterized primarily by increased alpha-wave EEG over the parietal lobes. Next to my mindfulness-shrine is a stack of notes with names scrawled, all sharing a rather obvious family resemblance: Salman Rushdie, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, Woody Harrelson, The Nameless Guru of Kensington, the Bearded Scotsman, Summer Scarf Guy, The Ponytailed Psychoanalyst, the Guerrilla Gardener, the Chinese Lady Who Takes Cans From Our Recycling, Psychonaut Patty... as well as the names of a few of my friends, who are not so famous to be named here. The walls are crumbling, and so are covered with posters: psychology charts I've found useful, food guides with all meats crossed out, framed portraits of people I will never meet, brain scans, doodles arranged in non-verbal story arcs, transcriptions of organ music, patches, rust stains elaborated on with flourishes, attempting to rescue the rot in the plaster of the walls, dricing it up and out, in and into the air, over into transcendence or, more importantly, attention-grabbing thisness.

Consider: "Peace be with you. Receive my peace for yourselves. Take heed lest anyone lead you astray with the words, 'Lo, here!' or 'Lo, there!' for the Son of Man is within you."

The Urban Soup (Part XVIII)

2007-06-12T23:10:00.000-04:00

Long lulls are really watersheds. I have, in an important sense, lost the motivation for this series of posts. The only thing really uniting then was the "friendly city" vibe an adjunct of the the "magnificence of the mundane" mindset. But these days a sinister edge has crept in. 4 a.m. shadows are no longer the deep castings of an impossibly unattainable moon, no longer the reflecting depths of my own inward dive that comes with drunkenness or reverie, or loneliness and pining. My pining is has died away. I live a life of immanence, at least for the moment. and how do you deal when such a part of you is suddenly removed. I am happier, but who created out of happiness? I always created out of joy. And I was rarely happy. What do I find? Joy is more renewable but less extreme. Everyone needs both. but how does this relate to that guiding metaphor, the Urban Soup?

The nighttime shadows lose their extra layers. The dark siudewalk becomes a conveyance to an end? A lover's house? A meeting? The terrifying shadows on my walls at night are no longer the kaleidoscopic messengers of something beyond what I can put here in these lines; they are now maple-leaf pinpricks of bad conscience as I heave dry sobs into my sheets--rarely, but often enough. Streetcar wires support balancing fools: the harlequins in search of their fix, spiralling outwards from intersections in ever-increasing arcs, disregarding the rules of traffic, the rules of walls, the solidiry of fences, the normalizing force of "get off the grass" public spaces. Corners are now home to jesters with bottles becoming Molotov cocktails, burning up the Prague Spring. The whole edifice of midnfulness training is now a means to the end of drawing a crowd on a beach, or of being able to juggle fire to the same end. Curiousity about the trees and birds and leaves, and the gulches and swamps, the highway overpasses and stairwells, and even the farms and babbling brooks and ancient ferns and limply hanging caterpillars now becomes channeled into discourse of "altered states of consciousness"; read: getting jacked, seeing visuals, feeling the walls now becoming a part of you, K-holes, nose fun, blacking out. Dionysios unearthed behind the nouveau-art posters. This is my soup now? Not so! Get grounded! Centered! Whole! Immanent! One! Be an agent! Affirm! Condescend your attention!

The struggle is thus laid out in its confusing entirety. But whereas my dialogues were totally intra-psychic before, now they are between two actual people face to face in the swirling noodles and mint leaves and fat droplets.

Consider: "The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."

Sickness Unto Death

2007-05-16T20:18:00.000-04:00

I read an eye-tracker study that showed most people, when they read web pages, DON'T read anything but the first two lines. This as the latest in the barrage of factoids to human finitude. After an hour's lecture, people remember exactly one sentence. They revised the capacity of human working memory from the "magic number" seven plus or minus two to FOUR. There we have it. Creatures of fourness. Of quaternity (here I can begin to rant because, odds are, you won't read this far). We might as well go all out: plagiarism is now allowed. I feel tempted to post the text of Rilke's Duino Elegies here in its entirety and take credit for it. Maybe I'll make slight alterations: angels are now the shaven-headed lamas, the great lovers are the ascending medial foerebrain dopamine systems (with modulation by cholinergic projections with a little help from the endo-opioids), the saltembanques the lonely symbolic, atemporal, being, control system in its cage, enveloped by an uncooperative "hot" system, the song of wooing now the shilling of the white van speaker scam guy, the pregnancy in the summer dawn will forthwith be known as the Ganges delta, the spire an Aztec pyramid, castle duino an empty promontory in Wessex, or a moor, or a swamp, oor the flatness of Antarctica, Kergeulen the desolation archipelago, the no-thingness and non-duality implicit in the first elegy the still waving of the creepers on the Aztec temple, in the land before time was an object, when history was cycle, when the arrows of time were not yet constructed as protective and isolating bastions in the human psyche.

You have to create your own system, or be a slave to someone else's.

If I am sick, will visions come? Will they never come? Will myu only transcendence be though this thermal expansion of my skin and the uttelry circadian-less clock in my brain? What happened to the great blood trees of the past, the batles, the maidens, the lazy summer days, the creepers, the water snakes, the mice, the kittens, the lovers, the skinny dippings, the riffs resolving into an upper exhoic chamber, the nights glowing white with the might of human art, the moments of dipsomania, the laments, the longings, the intent searching for a non-specific face in a crowd, the rubbing of the temples to release the gray smoke of Shangri-La? All down the American river? A dream of life a nightmare?

The literature of happiness is substantially more difficult.

Consider: "In the begining the universe was made, this made a lot of people very angry and was widely considered a bad move."

Tiny Candles (Part I)

2007-04-15T10:41:00.000-04:00

I have a list in my head--a permutable list, a shifting list, an explictly forgotten but implcitly normative list--of a few famous people upon whose deaths I will light a small candle. I will light my candle--or a candle in my mind, if I cannot access candles or sources of fire--and reflect on the fleeting bits of consciousness in the dark, the flickering flame of the creative, consummatory energy that animates and destroys, that sometimes takes us by the shoulders and shouts "no more!" into our right ear until we acquiesce to the voice from without and the voice from below. You may have guessed I'm talking about Kurt Vonnegut (only public figures get names on this weblog). The dead have no need for clean sheets, but we the living have the need to tell each other it was all right: the life of creative output makes up for it, he lives on in our memory, he belongs to the ages. All crap, of course.

This is not a reflection on that one time I met the man, or of how he influenced me in my high school years. I will not try to incorporate his well-worn catch-phrases into some secular equivalent of a hagiography. But I will say this: he taught me about diaspora; he taught me to give with one hand and pull away the other, he taught me the commonalities between uniforms, mantras, gravestones and the oxygen-sucking vortices during the firerbombing of Dresden. He taught me the joy of pluralism and the simultenous realization that that you can't go home to rocking-chair porches and pleasant greetings again. He taught me, before I experienced it, that faith can be experienced differently by different people, and that love and truth sometimes pull in different directions. He taught me all these things viscerally, of course, long before my speech had ever become articulate enough to approximate the sentiment. It still isn't.

This is a running tally of dying heroes.

Consider: "If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest?"

Union of Apposites (Part II)

2007-04-11T00:12:00.000-04:00

I'm impatient for enlightenment. I'm beaten by the equinox. I'm confused by the roar of engines. I'm jonesing for companionship. I'm dancing by moonlight. I'm terrified of rusty fire escapes. I'm swaying in the wind. I'm blowing in a gourd. I'm whistling for a waitress. I'm complacent by mothlight. I'm relieved in halos. I'm swaying to Sibelius. I'm snapping, cracking, popping at sunset. I'm drinking the second-order pitcher. I'm explicating for my life. I'm frogging at the throat. I'm grating on my own nerves. I'm sleeping for escape. I'm boxing my ears. I'm savoring the pink sunset. I'm lost in a strobe light. I'm buzzing in my insides. I'm slurping the soup. I'm swatting at the mice. I'm gagging on the streetcar. I'm arguing for BDSM. I'm complicating my moral stance. I'm dreaming of nuclear war. I'm praying to Atheist God. I'm throwing shadow puppets. I'm stuffing my stomach. I'm crying over teddy bears. I'm mapping my associations. I'm slipping into poetry. I'm admiring the great backyard tree. I feel like I'm sixteen again. I'm embracing ambivalence. I'm reasserting my prose. I'm emoting on the laugh track. I'm watching anime. I'm seizing up by strobe light. I've been arguing for three hours. I'm unable to recall what happened two hours ago. I lost track of the interrelated life story. I'm head to head with my shadow. I have hunger pangs I've never noticed. I'm bangin on a ride cymbal for dear life. I've memorszed 3,000,000 facts this year. I'm a maven stuck in a gravity well. I want to scalp the sultry temptress. I want to crush skulls. I want to kick the walkers from under old ladies. I want to roll on the ground pickled in ethanol. I wish the lights buzzing outside this room would turn off for just one day of the year.

Consider: "There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet."

Top-heavy

2007-04-08T23:45:00.000-04:00

Shadows of moments stick with you but they're hard to articulate. There's a few every day, especially if you actively cultivate mindfulness. But the problem comes for the writer: are these too sublime, too other to ever translate into this mode of smbolic expression, the only thing we have to really influence each other and pushc our interpretations on each other. So where do I get off even discussing this stuff: a momentary glance to find a parking lot onscured by flurries that are gone as soon as they're noticed, thed flitting of a moth on a jade tree that needs to be watered, a blackboard's graceful arc downward through time and space, a cloud on the western horizin looming over the human spires of hospitals, streetcar wires with flahses of arcing electricity, doors on the seocnd floors of buildings leading nowhere, blurs of lighter and darker areas on the inside of your eyelids. I know, I know. My writing is too top-heavy with this kind of stuff, with no real attempt at synthesis any more. I'll try; I promise. But not just right now.

They make me realize I love this city more and more. What if this is the just society we've strived for. Not just in a legalistic sense, but just in a poetic sense? Wat if the skid row rubbish is as important as the north-of-Bloor mindsets and houses. What if they stand in dialectical opposition to each other? This city has a unique ability to offer juxtapositions of all sorts: million-dollar homes across from the projects, subterranean physicists walking amongst bearded and spiked crackheads, Anglo-saxon sensibility permeating the pure life pulsating from the hole-in-wall immigrasnt food jounts, steaming up the windows and threatening premature enlightenment. What about the nihilists, dreamers, Platonists, cynics and theists doing the same strange tai chi forms? Something has to be said about that. But not right now, because it wouldn't turn out well. Besides, I love suggesting, not concluding.

Consider: "It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now."

Hordes

2007-03-31T13:51:00.000-04:00

Lines of force through my house manhandled me for a month. It's kind of a true story, if only I could get through what I mean by that. I got to see the worst that fashionable Toronto had to offer, sitting in rapt attention drinking my tea watching reain trail off the firetrucks passing by, then returning home to find yelling in the attic until all goddamn hours of the night. These people: I never had this feeling before. They were judging me. I wasn't passing muster. The thrift store clothes they wore were uncomfortable; they had obviously spent three hours applying the "starving artist" makeup--or whatever. I wasn't passing muster beacuse my thrift store clothes were actually comfortable and out of style. My "it" band was a few weeks out of date, and you should have seen their expressions when I expressed an appreciation for some music written over a year(!) ago. (What would they think of my new-found appreciation for Bach. Is he so unhip that he's wrapped around to hip again? And how many times has he done that?)

What's worse: there's no content to what these people were saying. It was actually an exercise in social grooming as they preen and fucking posture. "Look at how tight my jeans are!", "I saved three dollars on this cauliflower", "I love your leggings", and so on, yelled out ad nauseam, walking the streets up and down our block dissipating energy. That's all. Fucking energy dissipation. I understand the need for that, but you shoudl find a way to do it yourself. What's the point of coordinating hordes of similarly-dressed people to jump in dank rooms all hours of the night? Oh, I forgot about the ether-guffing and various other ways to kill off your prefrontal cortex. Godd job!

You use your freedom for this? Fuck your libertine lifestyle. And don't get me wrong: I sympathize with libertinage. But executive libertinage, none of this almost-Freudan-it's-so-obviously-to-get-back-at-your-father shit. I thought your hordes were low-quality friends, but they turned out to be strangers. My tolerance for strangers is about two per day, not fifteen per day. Fuck. It was back to high school, back against locker, condescending eyes, threat of violence, male posturing, female posturing with honeyed tones--the honeyed tones I can't fucking stand.

You think everyione assumes you're sweet and innocent. I've seen your fucking fangs. Bitch.

(If I can't get along with people my age and similar socioeconomic background, what awaits me after graduation?)

Consider: "Religion don't mean a damn thing / It's just another way to be right wing."

The Urban Soup (Part XVII)

2007-03-16T20:35:00.000-04:00

I. College & Huron

Leaving the enclosures of
Bay windows is
Tough: I end up
Beside flat windows—
Flat windows
In libraries
Where bubbling lines of
Text march across my skin as
I shake off the ink and
Write up
An imagistic ditty:
Trees so brown—going on
Grey and—squirrels
Going on branches that
Meld into graffiti;
Walls held so high above
A fire escape—in
The distance tremors &
Moloch’s towers—a throwback
To the past—where
Every shimmering drunk
Was holy haloed & the
Terror thru the wall
Shook the drywall to dust,
But back
To tests & the
Analyzable: to
Theses &
Throw-ups
Hearing the homeless man
Throw up: “Sir, you can’t
Sleep in here”…
And children
Learning Chinese glyphs
Like arabesques pierced
With French accents-la-grave
Getting spun & oscillated—
Sectioned into 50 um slices—
And raised on nails by
Librarians whose stockings
Are descriptors—grey & runny—
Of brain matter underlying
The subconscious—not id!—nothing
That stupid…
…and coughs come—the
Occasional “motherfucker!” from
The intersection in front
Of the
Flat window
Just enough to scramble
The children’s Chinese glyphs
Into inky text that stays
On your hand for days—
Days, which should pass as
30 repisodes & the specifics
Are blurry and Gestalt—
And this terrifies me… that
I am unable; or unwilling, that
We have unhinged the conscious
Trailer but the motor is still
Shot to shit—
So good!

II. (Obligatory Haikus)

Soft pink ray from cloud,
Lights up spinning barber pole,
Frozen leaves skitter.

The window's caked in mud,
Brown splotches decorate gray sky;
Lightpost shimmers orange.

Rear wheel frozen in:
The mound of snow collapses.
The spokes have been bent.

III. The Thawing Park

Kings don’t parade down these cul-de-sacs
Petition papers get stuck in mud
Whose stickiness we could never appreciate

The oaks that grew there could:
They managed to plow the earth
Getting the people of the valley
Their core samples

And the oaks get ground and processed
And become petitions or the skeletons of elections
Which we lose—
And lose the girl

The ballot that we taped
As a poster on the windows—
As a totem for the peyote shamans down the block
Who only talk about cacti,
Leaving oaks to spin freely on the grinder.

Consider: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

Union of Apposites (Part I)

2007-03-09T19:26:00.000-05:00

There are schools of yoga that suppress desire for a given object by overexposing the person to it. I achieved that today in a small way. I put on some Thelonious Monk, and before the album was finished, I had devoured all you had written. I had peered once again into the great white electric void and ran some equivalent of my fingers along your world-space lines. They undulated, they repeated themselves, your turns of phrase, your humors, your subject matters, your beliefs and un-beliefs, your jumps, cuts, screetches to halts. I had read all that, but more importantly this time I read between these lines; I knew you this time, this time I realized what you had brought to bear every time you were angry, every push from a chair, every verbal sparring, every night of push-pull-push-break-guilt-get-push-git-frustrate-KFC, etc. I also understood that you weren't toying with this. You were living it, where I was a tourist; you writhed in agony while I thought you were dancing. What I thought was interest in your eyes was more often a happy glaze. We went through the tree stages of the alchemical process, or so I thought. You might have remained at ther first in diguise. Or maybe I stayed at the first: ego fallen to pieces and still splayed out from here to Montreal. This time I also understood your cryptic signals, those I had never understood before. And they riled me up to write this post so I will remember what I failed to see. I failed to see a lot. I keep harping on this theme for a reason. Psychologists would call it rumination, but fuck that. I call it a return to defaults. One relationship fails and you are left looking for the last time you felt passion. One thing I'm sorry for is that I can;t be more up front about this. I'd love to trot out traumasfrom childhood, abandonment issues, abuse, something concrete I can hold onto. Aside from split families and wartime, I can't think of anything else. Maybe I've soundly repressed that, although I'm skeptical of repressed memories. I need to get this out. It has cut into my music. It has dried up the fountain from the unconscious, the only fountain I've ever known to be healing. The fountain of youth. Renewal. Vitality. Passion. Call it what you will.

So, let's have one last exploration of what you were to me. You were: the apparition at midnight on a bus where I counted highway lines, a telescoping fish-eye lens I imagined watching my every moment, a distant presence somehow weighing all the rest of my verbiage down, a skeletal fairy who had gone through the eternal city of Dis on a harrowing, the Muse to more than one endeavor that never got off the ground, the distant vessel, the sacred feminine we lose in our parking lots, outtake pipes, the sacred feminine we choke on chain-link fences, which we break on cinderblocks, which we cook on our gas fires, the sacred feminine we brood over following ruts in an ancient table; you also were: hovering over funderals of the rodent we had lost, the impetus to drink, to stop drinking, to smoke, the impetus to nihilism or optimism, depending on how you felt, the redeeemer or the jail guard, the halo or the spotlight, the book of wisdom or the book of sophistry, depending on how you felt; you were: a subterranean force pushing up from the most Cthonic dregs of my side-mind, the suggestive pentatonic phrase, the life rich, the spirit blowing the reeds of a weeping willow, a character from an unwritten, stillborn opera.

In my mind. Only in my mind. But mind is body is mind and body is mind is body. What were you in real life? What are you? My responsibility for that ends now.

The story begins here.

Consider: "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Dissipation

2007-03-05T22:38:00.000-05:00

I climbed out the office window to admire the sheets of ice stuck ot the sides of mega-buildings. They're melting, coming off the walls and crushing cars, predestrians, pets, roads, traffic lights and dumpsters. But this isn't the point. The point it: fuck dissipation. I'll tell you what I got from a day of muscle aches and twirling, twirling vestibular system. I got the desire to say, "again!, again!". If I could live out the exact same goddamn reasonably eventful but painful, wasted, dissipated day, I'd do it. I want to wrestle with a piece of paper that didn't define its terms. I want to fold over from bladder pain at too much caffeine, shout at eternity, observe the light from the cathedral windows at the JCR tranlucently penetrating glasses, half-seen, unseen, undreamed of. Put on some Aeroplane, canonical as that is, drift away, lament, meditate, still system 2 for fourteen minutes--islands of "the pure joy of being", islands of thrilling responses to melody, islands of finally figuring out the fingerpicking-Dixie-walk-it-down part. Crowded pub rooms where the singer and trupeter and bartender are all the same person, a socialist bald 1930s Swami. Renounce. Didn't you know? And I find I can't. It was eight months ago: get over it, but I cannot. I won't. It's too productive. Only when I'm shattered does my writing make me flow. Only then can I take all these things beyond my control, mash them up at will, centered on me: the causal nexus, the locus, the object of power for the one fleeting moment of sacrifice on the altar of Eternal Creation. I've considered love. I'm reconsidering materialism. I'm reconsidering ritual. I'm reconsidering God. I'm reconsidering the cost of living in hip urban areas. All because eight months ago I dissiapted. It was a silent dissipation, passing for fatigue; an iron bar was wedged in my brain. I couldn't write. The interesting things were now out there--I told them I was hardcore. I tasted what most people probably live: the amazement with new cars, the basking in status, the longing for youth: nostalgia suppressed, working my way up to partner, shuffling papers po-faced, hardcore, hardcore. Ten hour days. I want it. I want to please. I want the sugary-voiced porcelain doll of a woman to bring me my goddamn tea or things'll happen cause I'm a mover and shaker. Didn't you know? Didn't you know my scores? My goddamn scores? What'd you get on the last test? I got arrogance. Fuck sleep cycles. Twelve hours a day. Do I want it more or do I want it more because I wanted it more than the previous guy and because I wanted it more than I did last year? Fuck eight months. Self-overcoming. Singleness with a twist (I replace the wooden beam as I leave the basement hole in the wall). That fertile sycamore smell. Only when I've been emptied does my writing make me flow. Only dead eyes--shallow pools, endless muck. When I was a boy I saw a tank of water and it scared the shit out of me. Freud says: repressing mother's amniotic fluid. Jung says: the depths of the collective unconscious--where's your anima? Fuck Freud&Jung. I'll eat the tree of whatever goddamn fruit I want; I'll rage, rage against the dying pf the light. My eyes will click like cameras, irises dilating when I saw her naked shins. That's all I ever saw and that was enough. I maintain the picture in my head. It's enough to ruminate. You don't understaind: black hair (choice number two after blue hair; fuck I have a weakness for blue hair), dark, ancient, proud, intelligent, versatile, silly, serious, drunk, afraid, bored, wistful, frightened, wet, idealistic, bitter, calculating, cynical. She was all these things to me. Does anyone remember the taxicabs of Absolute Reality? I'll siphon the gas from their tanks to bring her back. I'll travel and travail again. I'll scan every crowd (I already do); every drunk time, every drunk dial, every stumbling glory hole, every time the walls bead with perspiration and my ears perk up, goosebumped from hearing the buzzing of ancient neon. Fuck lamenting. But the only time I flow is when I'm lamenting. I'm not yet ready for truth.

Consider: "Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... let's evolve, let the chips fall where they may."

Opera

2007-03-02T21:08:00.000-05:00

Bust this: it's pentatonic. It has voices. Two voices right now: the drunk major riding with his cavalry brigade in Changkangshan, rolling grasslands lolling past, hiccupping soldiers, tossing jokes across horses, mockery of the peasants in the muud ruts by the side of the road. his tune is urgent. Staccato. All black keys; tonic is F#; trines all over the place. Bu-Dum rhytming. Ten minutes development, and bring it back suddenly. Hold the tonic until the audience is squirming in their chairs. I'll call it "The Stallions of Changkangshan". Or, better yet, cross fade ino the song of the maiden. And what does the song contain: soft, supple, loght touch, liberal use of pedal: major and minor thirds in harmony, but the harmony develops over on top of the introduction of the melody: sweet, lilting. She is drying sheets on a hilltop, singing old folk songs. There is a pot in the kitchen she is preparing for her old, sick father. Song changes to melancholy. Occassional minor seventh thrown in for effect; her family is poor, but they get along. And thne the thunder comes, emerging slowly, pianissimo in the bass, at first shadowing the melody, then deviating from it. Eventually, the melody is stopped, startled, preoccupied, transposed an octave down. Legato gives way to marcato, then staccato. Lots of fifths, paralleling up and down. New progression. Suhc is "Billowing Sheet on Mountaintop". The maiden makes her way homem, but from a distance she is espied by a dashing cavalry officer coming up the road. She checks her modesty, for the hills of the village are the domain of the women, where clothes may flap in the breeze of the highlands, where cherries and blueberries are eaten injudiciously, juice dripping down chins, where dirty jokes are told and China-doll expressions are sloughed off, heavy wooden masks thrown to the ground, straps limp, the wicked spirit within now powerless. The major hoots and hollers, his blood boils in lust. Before he has seen the face of the maiden he has guessed her countenance. He has already focused all his energy to planning how to unstrap her bodice. Little does he know that at precisely that time, the maiden was checking her bodice and gave out an involuntary shudder. He sings: a brusque, militaristic number. "The Gallantry of the Galloper". Many triplets, many of which are unearned. Little melodic development. Quck, four-measure phrases. New instrumentation: brutal electrical organ subtle in the higher register. Booming male voice, the picture of health, haleness, unaddressed lust for weeks on end...

Consider: "It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him."

Alienations (Parts I, II)

2007-02-25T22:37:00.000-05:00

I don't know what this is. It's many-pronged alienation. My first question is: is this new, or has it been here the whole time? If it's new, then I have no idea what causal powers lie behind it; I'm carried by the current, struggling more for show than anything else. If this is actualyl a matter of greater sensitivity to myself, then I am in better shape. Maybe the system I'm applying is bearing fruit, but in so doing is carrying me across a valley which I don't want to traverse. And who does? Who wants to be desperately unhappy for what I can only imagine is a long time.

The problem, you see, is alienation. I think I've been able to put more of it in words; and before the words were coherent thoughts and trains of tohught; before those only vague inklings and longings. Maybe this whole post would have worked better as a dialogue. Dialoguess--quite obiously--mean inner dialectic, inner discourse and, inevitably, inner conflict. THey do not imply solution necessarily. They may be time-slices of larger dialogues. But I digress.

Alianation the first: my own sexuality. As much as I profess sex would be great if we could all be more mature, rational, detached, calm and cool about it, I'm mostly ding it to cover up what I feel to be the uncontrolalble within me. Let's say I get aroused on a dance floor; what should be--what is designed to be--a go-with-the-flow experience becomes instant inner turmoil. Because the executive part of my psyche still operates by some odd myths (in the perjorative sense). Chief among these is the "I'm in this for some transcendent reason: some drive to reality, some actualization of what is unlikely, frail, impossible and tragic in this world". This mythos cannot abide that I may get some immediate pleasure out of whatever meagre encounters I'm capable of having. In that, an erection becomes sin. I have an idea of what I need to do. I need to get away from the Abrahamaic framing of this whole issue and adopt a stance more congruent with a Dharmic approach, in which the natural law is, in large part, natural law. Is and ought try to merge and, while never succeeding, manage to hold the ambivalent balance of opposites to maximum effect. Hence I migth be able to summon up genetically-progarmmed animal lust as something complementing my more declarative transcendet aims. In other words, can I turn my lust into an art form? This is a good question that deserves more exploration. In that vein, I need to draw more parallels between how to do this and how gluttony can become epicureanism (in the degenerate, food-savouring sense).

Alienation the second: the night-world. Last term seems like a nostaligic time. I have never felt more retrospectively in the moment, flowing with experience than I did during September-December this year. The experiences I value woere more intense: the experience of seeing the city street for a soup of bustle, the experience of consciousness expading wine (parts I-XX); essentially, to see the world in a grain of sand. But also during that time I experienced two things I have never had before. One morning (and one morning only) I had someone to come home to, to greet me as I arrive after sunrise to flop down semi-unconscious on my bed, someone to throw a blanket over me, groan in the stinging rays of afternoon sun and hoarsely "what time is is?". I had a ready-made label for this years ago: the "experience of humanism". Maybe it's too cerebral, but it's the practical side of my head games: an actual appreciation of sleep-crud in the corners of someone's eye, a communion with the folded sheets, the leaching-out smells of over-thick skin oils. All this and more: the out-of-nowhere nostalgic pang upon rising, fear from someone sharing my space so closely, if only for a morning. The other thing I had never experienced was the torrent of dreams. Three, five times a week, movies in the mind: drama in wire cages, doomsday clocks, terrifying tales of creeping vampirism I attacked like a puzzle. Those seem to have gone, leaving me in the daytime world of consciousness feeling drained and bland. I miss those dreams and I miss what waited for me after emerging from dreams. Those pointed to experiences of value I ad no idea existed. At least, I had no idea they existed that strongly.

I'll end today with the ltwo couplets that got this word-train rolling several days ago. They're too stupid to be said, so they're sung.

Consider: "I don't know why nobody told you / how to unfold your love... I don't know how you were inverted / no-one alerted you."

Threefold

2007-02-22T23:21:00.000-05:00

You will never reclaim the itinterant moments of the week! Not the morning woken up by dew-heavy snowdrifts! Not the moment of realization of why you like everything you like! O son of man! Not the moments of alienation! Not the question-dodging! Not the groggy 5 a.m. "how the hell did I manage ot od that"! Not the poems of singing snowdrifts in a room whose wallpaper skin was peeling off! Not visions of fetid swamps reeking with the crushing apect of unconsciousness, narcosis, paralysis, anhedonia, omens, associations, magical talismans, sunrises, cloud fronts, constellations, tarot cards, the I Ching, cataplexy, the crud of a thousand sleeps, faeries! Can't you see the Sphinx has started to crawl up the Temple Mount?!

I might, if I'm lucky, remember the moment I almost fell through ice,, slipped on a hillside, charmed a squrrel, found my power animal in an unknown bird, stabbed my shamanic staff into the ground. Those might stay. But what else? Interminable hours and spinning lathes of undergraduate wisdom? Hardly. Tastes and smells? Not consciously. A thousand iterations of the same webcomic? Not at the level where it would be useful. But that should be driven form within anyway.

Part 3: wherein I rattle my cage and cut myself and get tetanus and think: "this would make a great title for a magical realist novel, or at least chapter", the title being "That One Summer Where No-one Was Sure Whether Pot Was Legal Or Illegal Or What?", but then it would really ba mich better title for a different genre, if we wanto t think of genres as separate and what would follow from that I dont know becayuse it's not in my customary train of thought to ask that kind of question, but more to go with the association that three lines down might take on from magical realism to Wikipedia, because associations have distinctly Wiki feel to them. Whatever that means.

Consider: "Since before time and space were, / the Tao is. / It is beyond is and is not. / How do I know this is true? / I look inside myself and see."

Wine (Part XX)

2007-02-10T14:52:00.000-05:00

The exorcism begins here, where I will write the pages & pages trying to grip, hold and mold what happened to me. Well, what used to happen to me; that is, what used to drive the letters to no-one and make my every other day a feast for the senses. All I'm left with now is a feast for the intellect, a little descriptive mind-space where something needs to be personally memorialized. I'm left thinking: why did I ever try to do what I did not know, why, sir, did you pretend that human impulse came out of nowhere? you probably read too many authors who described emotional pain with inadequate understanding. Redemption is not a turn in the plot when the playwright gets tired. Redemption is a drawing in of threads to make a knot. Where am I going with this? I'm still trying to find somehting I know. And for that I havr to start with something I feel--something that has been anathema for so long. That something was your loneliness. I felt it in your cavernous rooms. I felt your world-tiredness as you lay on your bed, your sinews absolutely still. I thought then you looked peaceful, and it only occurred to me as I left you, as I pulled out my book & started to read (but really I was giving my mind the order to wander) that you weren't peaceful--you were insensate. You had pulled up a mesh screen to protect a flickering flame in your center, and this meant I could never try to tempt the flame--I would be cut by the mesh. I failed to see a lot of other things too. I failed, as only a modern fails, to see weather-cues, to see the evocation of the wind turning every tender caress into a rough push, a tendon-snapping grip that left you numbed and prickly; I failed to see the rain as the washer-away of memory; it plasterred out hair to our shoulders and we were left shivering and dumbly looking at each other in that theatrical-movie pose I never understood. When the cockroach awoke me in the night, it might as well have been you. Your fingers tracing the lines of my ribs felt exactly like the six piston legs of a biting-eating-surviving machine. I should have seen symbolic quality everywhere: shopping for bedding as I stood dreaming by the doorway, or descending into labyrinths of ants and moths and plate mail and armor and kobolds. I talked to you freely, open-book style and got as far as your right shoulder. In my mind I was already resting my arm on your back as you lay there insensate. You would shift and open up some room for me to lie down, and that would be the afternoon. That, or we'd lie intertwined in a bowl-chair. I would finally climb out of that symbolic basement and the imps of the underworld would stop stealing my clothes (symbolically). I would foist my mannerisms onto you, and I'd walk away in the end wiser and broader. But as I said, I failed to see what anyone else would see; I failed to tap into my broad anddeep reservoir of foolishness. And this is why I'm left writing for redemption. This is why I seek out toppling fire escapes and stand atop them, taking pictures of the street in the hope that I'll see you aroun the next corener and you would yell for me. But so few of us ever bother to look up. I don't want to make you slip on ice. I'll come down eventually, once my rat-face begins hurting from the 10th-story windchill.

Consider: "I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there."

Miasma

2007-02-08T22:33:00.000-05:00

It's not the season, I tell myself. It's not the lack of light: I've always dreamed of being nocturnal. It's not the cold: that snaps you to attention like nothing else. Hey! Your nostrils are dying! The air is crisp but be mindful of your breathing--too much and you'll destroy your bronchioles! It's not the toil of slogging: everyone does this. What else is new? (Thse second-person narrative ends here.) I'm starting to feel like I've seen too many of these. How many more? My life line cuts off at about mid-palm. I should start making plans on the basis of this. A mod haircut and a more extroverted demeanor won't cover it. They just won't. What does get me is walking into buildings, whereat the stench hits you: one part socks, one part sloppy carpet, one part tracked-in mud mixed with one part thawing bits of microscopic shit, one part mouth-breath recycled in the library again and again, the whole building sick and falling, falling and sinking, sinking and melting and shining its lights the entire time, one more part unwashed hair with its unwashed oils, one part little bits of food from between teeth, one part mucus suspended in droplets from dozens of mouths sneezing in this lobby every minute. The air outside, by contrast, is crisp. That's what gets me: the transitions of winter. From a Nietzscheian joy at self-overcoming on the snow-swept plains to neing a burrowing rodent of some kind navigating using olfactory cues, naked but for hairs on the head, the armpits, chest and pubis.

Cons: "I googled Google." "What came up?" "Google."

Dedication

2007-02-08T00:51:00.000-05:00

To all those who stood with backs against the wall. To all who fell down manholes because they stared at the gleam of the morning against a skyscraper. To all who ran their eyes into the ground reading in dingy hole-in-wall cafes. To all with the sleep-crud of eternity in their eyes. To all whose imaginations were more than a thousand plaets. To all who bore the spirit of lightness through 80-hour weeks and dried tears and sweat of dread and despair. To all to whome rust on the bus indicated some redemption. To all who tried to understand the music of the spheres, or the music of the neural networks, or the music in perception, or the harmony in reflective equilibrium, or the music of crystals, or the fabled music of the spheres. To all who chanted when they should have discoursed. To all those who overcame themselves time and again, thinking it was for naught. To all the people of the margins: your stories are important because they've never been told. To the peripheral vision of the society of striving. To flies in the walls and flies in the kitchen in the most Gabriel Garcia Marquez sense of the word. To all the makers of hammocks, puffs, ottomans, beanbag chairs, hookas, pillows soft and hard, comforters, ticklers, plush towels, bath gels, childhood stuffed toys, playing cards, glass panes, sliding doors, eye drops, napkins and all the things that made sedentary moments comfortable. To the head chefs of the human soul who were not content to reframe a thousand and one times and reframe again. To the boatmen of the Orinoco delta: I imagine you when I read about Latin America. To those who built spires of ancient buildings, defiant against glass and privilege and cleanliness. To all the women who plated trees along my sidewalks (metaphorically speaking). To all the brilliant pot-bellied punks, stoic in outlook though not behaviour. To the interlocutors in tow-character plays on balconies and in parks and at bus stops. To all the people who will never have children. To all those who probably won't live to see thirty. To my greedy reductionists and my airy qualia freaks. To the lovers on the couches and the anonymous kitchn staff. To the homeless sages and the human beings gutted. I urge you to grow and change, but maintain your essences. Because without you--no book!

Consider: "Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection". I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity". Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience."

Acta Physiologica

2007-01-22T23:47:00.000-05:00

You are somewhere in this city. But it's not you I'm so concerned with. It's your ghost. I don't really believe in ghosts, but I find them a useful fiction, much like when people pray but what they're really doing is accidentally meditating. And meditation is its won kind of fiction. As I said: your ghost. Your small, faintly musky, faintly unwashed. It smells like skin flaking off. I can't get it out of my chair, and with this smell here I can't sit and read my PDFs in peace. No, the whole time I'm ruptured by visions. For the fist time, I feel like these eruptions are happening to me. Not like before when I could summon them up (kind of) at will. What's sad is they're kind of bullshit visions. Mountain peaks blowing off and going out to space. Unicorns clubbed to death by mastodons ridden by harpies. The whole scene wiped out by the Tunguska meteor. Stuff like that. Czar Bomba extinguishing all traces that people ever peopled here. Weird arabesque representational art frames the picture. And there you are: the woman on the pedestal in Dali's Temptation of St. Anthony strangled by streetcar wires, writing as superheated coils make me gag on the taste of burning hair and ozone. Saturated fat pops out of its storage place in the things and dribbles down the as-yet-unmarked skin, hissing and popping little bubbles. It makes me want to vomit. And then suddenly I am in a white place. Clean smell of laundered clothes. A gargling brook in the background--in surround sound. A little boy is holding a candelabra, whose flame flickers and turns from yellow to blue and back to yellow. Red Xs in his eyes and a hungry, vampiric look on his face. Behind him an altar with a red tableclothe and gold trimmings spread. A silver bowl stands in the center. I dare not apporach the altar. I back up. It feels mossy. I am spit out through a damp, warm cave into the street in front of my house. It is sporadically haling. Each hailstone is the size of a basketball. From here, I get the impression they are being aimed individually. A man across the street is hit by one in his solar plexus. His torso is mangled beyond recognition. Another falls through the roof of our neighbour's house, and screams can be heard within. Planes and helicopters are crashing out of the sky. A wounded dog drags his two broken legs down the sidewalk. Panicked drivers duck for cover under their cars. To no avail. I can see a bird's-eye-view of myself and the hailstone the size of my head that will hit my neck, severing all contact and blood flow to the brain. I have a few seconds, and I can't help thinking that the moment will just drag itself out more and more, until I realize that I still have all the time in the world.

Consider: "In lieu of creativity, there is an undue emphasis on sexuality."

Wine (Part XIX)

2007-01-21T12:49:00.000-05:00

Pictures to remember the night by would be nice, but I forgot to turn on the flash, so I'm left with a lot of black-on-brown photos of going down alleys. Plot points which will be lost to eternity. Anti-aliasing effects in my retina making the sidewalk stripy, loopy, moving when it shouldn't be. Grabbing my forehead in exasparation. Lying on a soft armchair? Someone declares me a 3 on the Kinsey scale. My ears hurt and ring from minus 17 degrees celsius wind constantly fluxing. Icy patches I will surely slip on: I descend the staircase showing off the glittering jewels of the Downtown, a brief flash of memory of marvelling at the magnificence of all we have created. This is a busness town, so no cabbie will pick up my drifter form. I want to sleep; I don't want to sleep. Not like this. It feels like the next few days will involve penance for this. Penance for crimes committed in my mind. Penance at perchance violating the societal codes of conduct, the patronage that exists from the powerful and flows in its non-benevolent bounty to the vassals. My landlord, my boss, my progenitor, my supervisor, my teacher, my paterfamilias, my guru. One day they will sing to the memory of those I've met, those who left shitty situations for this place were they could cry on couches, cradled by the vestiges of civilization. Gandhi was once asked what he thought of wstern civilization, and he said "that would be nice". Because for this brief moment our heads are cowned in flame. Thye glow as beacons to the rest of the world, before we collapse with lungs filled with phlegm and other things. It's funny: once realizing this we stopped rolling down the street into the river.

Consider: "To know that there is nothing to know, and to grieve that it is so difficult to communicate this "nothing to know" to others - this is the life of Zen, this is the deepest thing in the world."

Chiromancy

2007-01-18T23:59:00.000-05:00

What motivates all this? I know: that one sentiment about how today so many things happened. You know, the one that runs: today a man cradled the head of his presenile mother and for the first time in his life he knew what tenderness meant; today a movie star talked to a shef in a greasy spoon joint to great satisfaction; today a deist lost his faith in God the semantic concept; today a young boy arranged candalabrae in the shape of a mandala in his grandmother's drawing room; today a longhair ponytail stared up at a smokestack and strained to see the top through the smudges on his glasses; today a west indian man sneered at a Phillipino and instantly felt terrible; today someone lost a wig; today someone else found what they were looking for as a matter of random chance; today a lonely accountant consummated his desire with his nighbour's live-in caregiver; today three cars flipped over bridges and went unreported; today a water main burst in a zoology lab, causing a grad student to start contemplating suicide; today a backlit cumulonimbus cloud restored a jaded 24-year-old's faith in God; today a three-hundred-year-old willow tree was cut down; today a little girl will toss and turn all night, confused by what had just happened; today someone will try to scrobble three hours worth of music in twenty minutes and fail; today an unwashed philosopher will be star-struck beyond all reason. If I could express this sentiment in anything other than wild phrases, I would. So far all I have is symbols that point to what must, at least for now, remain mystery. But, pray tell, how else do you want it?

Consider: "Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"

Stoa (Part I)

2007-01-14T13:05:00.000-05:00

SCENE: A wall with an overhang. At the end of the overhang, about two meters from the wall, columns hold up the overhang, forming a stoa. MATTHIAS is leaning in front of a door on the wall. Enter WOLFF.

MATTHIAS: I heard scratching coming from your room last night.
WOLFF: I don't know what that was. All I know is it woke me up several times in a blind terror. What if it was a rabies-infested, filthy raccoon?
M: You know, they are more afraid of you than you are of them.
W: So I've heard, but try explaining that to me at 5 a.m.
M: Well, that's something you're going to have to cultivate.
W: I hear you, but you haven't given me any way to do this.
M: I keep telling you, all you need is some time for refelction. Once you have that, all else follows.
W: I don't know, man. I'm not falling for this over-analyze everything, pseudo-intelllectual, detaching oneself from the world shit. I like my passions. Don't you know that they point to the loci of what is really important in the world? And they do this in a way utterly inaccessible to your reflective mind. Take these past weeks: without the ups and downs of emotional disturbances I would have been bored out of my skull. But it so happened that we had a series of hopes, expectancies, disappointments, hot temper flashes, deep depressions, hammer-blows of inspiration. I got some creative output from that. And what will be left for people to judge me by except that output?
M: Yes, but you had no time for your meditation practice. And what you've just described sounbd like you're riding the ups and praying for the downs to finish. Wouldn't you rather steer steadily in your pre-determined direction.
W: But that's not how it works. Maybe for some meanial tasks where you have to bash through, I can see the value of being somewhat in control, but what about inspiration? I need to grab huge heaving dollops of imagery from that I-know-not-where area of my psyche and bring it back here. It's my mini-hero-cycle. Each time is a little apotheosis, or sacred marriage. If I were in control, I'd lose that struggle.
M: But you know yourself. You descend from the mountain, or rise from the underworld with something precious, but then you never follow up with it. You sit there, bash out a few creative things in feverish inspiration, and then never flesh it out into anything that your peers would view as possessing quality. This is why you need your meditative practices. I'm distressed you were unable to do them.
W: I don't know how you can live like this. You live in increments. A little of this, a little toward this, never experiencing real transformation, never having to reframe, never having to use your intelligence to overcome some corner you've backed yourself into. I like that process. Try to understand that.
M: You only like it if it's working out. You're a flea riding an elephant. You should strive to be a human riding a horse.
W: ...

Consider: "Everything is right for me, which is right for you, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which comes in due time for you. Everything is fruit to me which your seasons bring, O Nature. From you are all things, in you are all things, to you all things return."

Personhood

2007-01-05T11:54:00.000-05:00

The past few weeks have made me realize I overuse phrases like "transcranial magnetic kaleidoscopic mindfuck clutter", because maybe I don't want to face the fact that whta I do is juts the same as what everyone else does. What did you do for the holidays? Oh, I did something similar. What are your aspirations? Mine too! Skills? Yup. Fears? Don't get me started. So because I will never be famous, because you wouldn't pick me out on the street, I retreat into my head, where phrases such as "backlit phosphorescent kaleidoscopic movement" (or whatever) have some sort of applicability. I have said it again and again: most of how I live is personal. But this being personal is much more profound than being a reclusive shut-in (which I'm becoming less and less)--it's my belief that the question of what it's like to be me, or you, or anyone, is deeply misguided. In an important sense--and I'll just asssert it here--my point of view and yours, I and thou, are incommensurable. I felt this more strongly as a child, but I still get those inklings. How did you manage to solve that problem? Why are you so stubborn? Why do material objects make you happy? Why do you clean so obsessively? Why do you radiate an aura of loneliness? I can't predict when I get this way, but it tends to ruin everything, because I really want to hold that understanding is posible, in that grander Buddhist assertion that ego is simply the ignorance which prevents us from seeing there's no such thing as self. While I don't want to dismiss this idea as bulshit (because all I know about philosophy of mind is kind of leaning in that direction), I can't hold it now in a non-contradictory way. So then I get depressed, because this means loneliness in a crowd, loneliness even within my own consciousness--system 1 and system 2 are bickering again. And then, the real bombshell question, the thousand-dollar one that demands but never receives a satisfactory answer with all the force of eons of evolution (birth, grow, eat, shit piss, fuck, eat, shit piss, fuck, repeat, die) behind it: why won't you love me?

Consider: "Last time I saw you / We had just split in two. / You were looking at me. / I was looking at you. / You had a way so familiar, / But I could not recognize, / Cause you had blood on your face; / I had blood in my eyes. / But I could swear by your expression / That the pain down in your soul / Was the same as the one down in mine. / That's the pain, / Cuts a straight line / Down through the heart; / We called it love. / So we wrapped our arms around each other, / Trying to shove ourselves back together..."

Sylvianna

2006-12-23T11:28:00.000-05:00

It's worth looking into why some people grab you. Like the other night, I had a vision (of a real thing) on the dance floor. Out of my element and all, I was playing the role of observer more than I normally would.

This girl: she had the body that looked like it would break, not because of malnutrition, but because of some hard-to-define etherial quality, like she'd just peeked in here from Plato's realm of Forms. And she was standing there, her face detached to the point that a passing Hindu swami would have been jealous, would have sacrificed his wisdom, his ascetism, his learning and his mortification of the flesh all at once. Full flesh, big eyes, black irises probably watching intently. If she were so inclinede, she could have seen the bloom of body warmth from my cheeks, my legs, my dan tien, the electrical buildup on my palms, back of my hand. She was ice, and everyone gave her wide berth, maybe two meters all around to just stand there by a pillar. No intoxicats to make it easer to stand here, as bass beats shook the floorboards, and the stomping of latter-day human tribal dances broke every little idea to dust. She was with some random; actually I coudn't tell that just by looking, because even though he was behind her, and "into" her, so to speak, she had such perfect composure that it looked like he was an unsuccessful salmon swimming upstream.

She disappeared soon thereafter, leaving me with my more open-than-usual emotional reaction, a bottle of beer, a mangled drink order, drinking like a dirty old man in a caver filled with sweat. Visions of clouds of flies drifted across the hazy sky of my consciousness. The biological assault on the ancient floorboards was palpable with every breath. Her name wasn't Sylvianna, but it should have been. Some unlived life, hanging out at the liminal threshold, wants it that way. That same life saw somwething in her that grabbed my attention to the point of exhaustion. Something un me wants beautiful waking hallucinations, something like Paul struck blind on the road to Damascus, or Ginsberg finding "God" in William Blake's reading of "The Sick Rose", or positive acid trips, or deep metidative pure consciousness experiences. Inside or outside, there's enough beauty and enough loci of meaning to latch onto in this world for everyone an astronomical number of times.

Consider: "The difference between a cult and an established religion is sometimes about one generation."

Solstice

2006-12-21T15:31:00.000-05:00

There are no winters to discontent. I hate that sentiment. Winter is fabulous. More night in which to sleep. More night in which to drink and view each other by candlelight, which is flattering to just about nay complexion. More time for man-against-the-elements struggle, which in the city plays out as people huddled over hot-dog cart stoves. More time to catch swirling ice crystals on the tongue, and watch said crystals as they give form and function to the halos of street lamps. More time to dry clammy skin one indoors and thank good fortune for working furnaces, chugging along unseen below the floorboards. More time when snow melted by body heat only glasses makes the world a latticework kaleidoscope of hexagons, octagons, lines, stars, emanations, holes made by those sam street lights. When the world is dark people come together: they tell stories of relationships come and gone, or coming and going, if your prefer; they sing choral numbers to the glory of the Hammer of Thor, or, if you prefer, marinade the house in chugga-chugga Finnish doom metal. Winter gives more excuses to huddle, more excuses to beer-boggan, excuses to be in and a homebody and a friend and constant companion. Winter is not the time for Existentialist writers, simply because our pseudo-struggle to survive gives human existence an outside purpose--a common enemy, if you will. This is why I always concive of death as going back to some fetid, reeking, lukewarm (or warm) swamp in the tropics.

Winter is the time for decadent poems. It is the time of frozen fountains--perennial monuments to the most shallow human egotism. It is the time when your None becomes my All. It is the time to write long, drawn-out allegories that try to link Jazz, snakes, the water-towers on Manhattan's lower east side, snowdrifts, astronomy and the Olduvai gorge (I'm working on it; as you might imagine it's filled with unpublishably voluptuous phrases, appositions to make the reader's eye boggle, incantations to Lakshmi (from Huxley's Island, impromptu pomes, and my new favourite form of literary expression: the villanelle). It is also time for introverted guitar fingerpicking as well as blasting synthesized grandiosity of musical physics and oscillators for eternity.

Consider: ""Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition."

Panic Contra Logos

2006-12-17T23:22:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's a consequence of too much depth psychology, but I now have a burned-in image of a sun inverting its colours in the sky, turnign from sickly late-afternoon haze-giver to uncanny and terrifying abcess in the sky. The sun, of course, symbolizes logos, the rational mind, the father-principle, the ascent of consciousness, the mechanizable world of daylight, effort, toil, heat, advancement, the capcaity to do work, clear sight and all that. In this dream I was playing the role of unwitting patriarch, and immediately after the sun's inversion, my "family" fell apart into a shit-fest of fear, weeping, unexplained illnesses, sudden albinism, disappearances and secrets. And I keep thinking about it. Correlating this with my life: I think I've reached the burn-out point. I can't see any reason to continue at this university. I can't read papers and crunch out canned responses to canned questions any more. (I mean this strictly in the sense of inability right now; In a few weeks I'l lbe back at it in the library.) There is precious little my analytical mind can do for me right now. Philosophy of mind is a hopeless confused mess, sustaining a saturation of idiot Ph.Ds. Evolution is cleverer than we are, and there's no effort at design there. You don't choose to be a creativer peson: it imposes itself on you. You don't chosse to see visions: they come from below. To go anywhere now I have to turn to my intuitive side, and I suck at that side. I was not a strager to it in childhood, but years of classroms, drills, lines of cursive handwriting, arithmetic, slide rules, tetris, HTML, astronomy, RPGs, real-time strategy, action figures, cars and trucks, Rubik's cubes, algebra, biology, chemistry and wire-tracing knocked it back. It's still trying to stand straight.

Consider: "For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen."

Eclecticism is a Humanism

2006-12-09T22:15:00.000-05:00

The only advantage our age has--I stress this: the only advantage--is our ability to look back on all the previous ages. We include those pasts in our presents. We experience their effects, their echoes, their vibrations, their mindsets. Our only blessing is our ability to evaluate those times. Our curse: paralysis. Clearheadedness breeds pessimism. Any conversation about history will demonstrate this amply. We move in cycles of flourishing complacency, stagnation, catagenesis, flourishing. And we never seem to learn anything.

And in the modern age, we see this particularly with people coming of age. They are brought up in an individualistic culture that inculcates in them this concept of absolute agency. And then the encounters with the real world are left to de-program these ideas wordlessly. Bureaucracies do the un-teaching. Massive universities destroy all idea of transcendent wisdom. Social mores and people with puny R-complex minds knock down the would-be creator. All hillsides and mountains melt back to the sea as slurry carried in industrial-strength PVC piping. You are taught to memorize and reproduce, even though we have machines that do that hundreds of thousands of millions times better, all so progenitors can wave pieces of paper in the air in front of their neigbours who live in identical houses (maybe of slightly different hues).

That's why we must again take up the rallying cry of the liberal arts. We must stop their own small-mindedness from consuming them. We must take up the stories of Yggdrasil and the Earth Mother, the Sky Father and the Great Moose. We must erect our inukshuks in the naves of cathedrals on flaoting islands on the backs of giant turtles. We must stare with kaleidoscope eyes at the djembes and resonate the hamonics unfazed, write our tests in crayon in Urdu. We must throw wine in their pig faces to fatten them for the feasts as we dance around the maypole, taking the supersaturation of images passing through flashing TV screens woven into the fabric of our shirts. And we must poison our lungs even as we overturn streets with ploughs drawn by bio-power of many teams of oxen. We must play our pan-flutes and call down the guardians from the four corners of the world to break down the firmament and pluck the bureaucrat-demiurge from his office enthroned and crush him underfoot, in a wine press, in a Bacchic orgy. We must spit on our hands and lift them up to guide the sun across the sky. We must listen to the worries of the middle-aged spinster. We must build the plexiglass brains. We are struggling for nothing less than the survival of basic consciousness. If we fail, the world belongs to the beetles.

Consider: "Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories."

Trinkets

2006-11-23T00:24:00.000-05:00

Here the stone from the igneous beach in Central America. Here the walking stick culled from the hilltops where herds of dogs roamed. Here the bracelet you found on the ground whose slight scent of perfume managed to transcend space-time and causality itself. Here the crumbs of breakfast eaten as you watched the streak of light from the window separate my face into dark halves. Here the half-lune moon you offered me. Here the pallid bust of Pallas hanging at my chamber door. Here my pillows still with your occassional stray hair. Here in this room the pink dawn breaks to the east; my mind follows the hypothetical light, dulled by overcast, to the west. I will sit at my piano all day writing elegiac inventions. I will stack papers meaninglessly, make paper cranes from the covers of learned publications, spit-shine the floors, break into several simultaneous plans of action, acieving that blurry effect you sometimes get with time-lapse photography. Here there is a bubblegum wrapper with a bad joke. Here was the cup you drank from every time you were here, back when making tea for you could have been a religious experience. Here we traded barbs, and here you pierced the mirror. Here you smashed the plates, and here I became murderously down on the ground. At first you get dizzy, then you stop wanting to eat, and then the hunger redoubles; this is the course of the days. This is the cycle ticked out by uneven constellations I haven't the imagination to name. All this you left behind; get it back soon; you must do soul work.

Consider: "The universe is an intelligence test."

4 a.m. Revisited

2006-11-16T04:33:00.000-05:00

In moments of peak performance you feel on the cusp of something great, and that is the moment of the highest vibration, highest thrills and trills through the resonant harmonics of the skull. It is the moment of the icepick sinking into human flesh and the moment when you scream "victory!" from rooftops even though you bear no trophies from the war. Moments pass into past and futures slowly sink and coalesce into presents which is itself cut up by comparisons, misrepresentations and uncertainties. Plotinus skings out from wrought-iron balustrades keeping the queen talker posh, safe, protected. Mephisopheles comes out from behind the plant in my garden, whispering projects long lost in mists, wrapped in cloaks of carmine and hats feathered to an insane degree. Prankester cats leap the tree-branches. Mother's telephone wires vibrate in harmony, and my whole bosy is thrilled, but lost and drained at seeing the whole that I saw. Where would I be without my estrangement? (Not the I that proclaims "I', but the I that performs I.) Performative I am. Alms-giver to the sidewalks I am. The knower by which the epistemic drift of world-mind to mind-world is reversed, the gardener who tends to Yggdrasil sprouting annual crops of brains in vats, the geometer who meditated on the mandala and found pi to twenty decimal places, the builder of a Rube Goldberg contraption to pleasure my partner, the politician on a soapbox in the group photo, the decimated loveless pile of rags, the Bodhisattva of interdisciplinary wisdom, uncaring and unapppreciated with his radiant cool eyes hallucinating.

(It is exaggeration. It's for effect. Which effect?)

C: "We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves."

The Wanderers (Part III)

2006-11-10T00:41:00.000-05:00

What follows is written in a phenomenological language. That is to say, it is an unfolding, rather than an inference.

Where is there room to wander in a land beyond hay piles? Beyond wine? Beyond emotional, or perceptual, or philosophical transparency? Back to the manicured wilds! There are still parks in this city where you can look out and beyind the crests of hills its's as if there is no humanity-pile just beyond the pale. I sat there in a birch glade and focused on my breath for twenty-five motionless minutes. When I began to move, it was only then that I began to feel cold. I was withdrawing from caffeine (no longer good for my eyes--my weak globules filled with floaters and mini-hallucinations are getting fixed). In my breath I heard the bellyaches of whales; I played smack-it ball with junior faculty at Harvard; I carried on long conversations with ELIZA, where she teld me what I had to do; I got stuck in the uncanny valley, unable to see my arm movements as graceful; I proceduralized my wanderings; I pulled a tree out of the ground ant it gave way; the staff I fashioned from it looked like a gnome.

Consider: "From days of long ago, from uncharted regions of the universe, comes a legend. The legend of Voltron: Defender of the Universe. A mighty robot, loved by good, feared by evil. As Voltron's legend grew, peace settled across the galaxy. On Planet Earth, a Galaxy Alliance was formed, together with the good planets of the Solar System they maintained peace throughout the universe. Until a new horrible menace, threatened the galaxy. Voltron was needed once more. This is the story of the superforce of space explorers. Specially trained and sent by the alliance to bring back, Voltron: Defender of the Universe."

Threnody

2006-11-03T09:34:00.000-05:00

Right. So type in the password. Hear the click of the electric key in the electric tumblers. Wait twitchy. Skittish because your nerves are shot through with caffeine, and you can’t stop the moving of your joints so entangled with her joints. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll come back to pages typed in mad inspiration.

Here all is now and all is not now; time bends. The great axis of wheeling star-sky is streaked, like a long-exposure photograph: kaleidoscopic, unknown, beneath the surface where the tragic spinning. The stars are wailing, aren’t they? Throwing out doubt, causing astrologers to kill themselves. What do they tell about our psychology? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Parents’ house and they’re fighting like Bettas. Gills left ripped on the ripped linoleum floor; threshold crossed and suddenly I can make out the words. It’s over eight fucking dollars, not even over beets or mashed potatoes craved over the dinner slab-table. No, they are gnashing teeth over a fistful of coins. O that I were out in the snow! And soon enough I’m kicking the ruts; I am Godzilla, sound. I am Gargantua and Pantangruel. Right.

Caffeine twitches in the early twenties. What else is in the early twenties? We have our hair-growth beards. Our single-and-I-don’t-give-a-fuck beards. Our zen mojo of bachelorhood. But we do care. But I’ll get back to that later. Right. Lonely little boy gets inspiration from birch tree. He strips the bark and makes figurines of little men and women in supplication to the Gargantuan deity. Rain drops into silver bowls at the center of the altar. Bark melts even though water beads off the surface, it still gets behind the waxy layer. Lonely little boy eating orange gummies in the room. Cries into pillow, thinking how we suffer. Watches the terrifying shadows cast by two street lamps. Mosquitoes dance in halos in the summer. The stench of unwashed human refugee. Down the block they kicked him in the balls over nothing. And he remembers how in winter the icicles freeze up and rain down, point down, on passers-by. In summer in orchards he dreams of bathing in tubs: three, five children per child-sized pail. Beard of the twenty-year-old stands up in noticing.

Parents now spittling at the mouth. Boy, deal with it! Go bend time under the awnings, feel the bend melt away. Turn telescope onto the lives of other apartment buildings. Gus the window washer! Gus the elevator guy! Gus in relief behind a curtain! Gus fucking Gus’ wife, his paunch hanging in the stairwell.

We had that experience as grad students, too. What if the stairwell had flooded with dilute chemicals as we slapped thighs? But I’m not going to think of that. Same rooftop it was where I mentioned the book, and now it’s foundational to this Threnody. I can still fell your joints. But pace, lonely boy. Rooftop is night sky is apartment buildings is open-concept glass buildings made of light. Venus is flashing; it is actually an airplane. Did you know the morning star and the evening star are one and the same? Just saying.

The caffeine twitch started differently. It wasn’t my parents. No progenitor ever stuck the needle in my arm. No, once I had gotten out of there and had acquired my beard and had stared at enough birch trees to make enough figurines I figured it was time. Time to jack my brain to think differently. (This is really a prose-villanelle.)

It’s not really working. I’m not getting centered. My neck hurts, and all the sinews you massaged just spring back in knotted boils. What is that? Maybe you touched me and transferred his touch, the touch of the benign rival. Worst touch in the world. An angry rival is terrible, but there is joy in triumph. There is joy in sack and pillage. Joy as the spear enters his spleen and leaves through his lung. What is there in a benign rival? No camaraderie; no unity. We don’t even acknowledge what we are, that we are. We are less than nothing. And I lost, so I am less than nothing. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Ever seen a trolley tip?

Joyful birch carvings in mushy joyless snows. Lectures inside the brick building about building organizational synergy, etc., etc. I am standing by a fence. They will never pull me off.

Please, child. Can I twitch against you? I am insect and insectivore. I am crusher and the glass screen. I am branch and stick insect. Can my shaking hand rest on the small of your back? Can we face in the same direction, somehow powerful? I talked into the night with you. No benny capsules to be had. Did you think to lay a laurel wreath on his head the whole time? The clockwork aspect of my rival. My benign rival.

You can’t fuck someone benignly. Not when I can feel her twisting in my own neck and joints. You don’t seem to understand the import of the positions of power. I feel spread-eagled legs; I withdraw into myself. I let out moans in some other part of myself. Clockwork aspect and clockwork regularity of his thrusts. It’s all here, somehow timeless. My pantheon of teachers talking to the parents. The whole ensemble bickering over a handful of change. Eight fucking dollars. How many times did it happen? The panes of the kitchen window fogged up. The daffodils flew in a sprightly cloud in the center, stopping briefly on the chandelier. The pollen is sticking. The moisture will make it drip down into the empty silver fruit-bowl. You’re hurting her. Stop hurting her. Joints carving arabesques against the neon of the outside. All this observed from below. I see fluids, sticky fluids, running down, drip-painting in the style of the Old Religion. Rusty squeaks making you sweat all the more. You want it to stop, don’t you? But you still moan, and in that moan the cloud of vapor that escapes from your mouth and traces toward the window in the supersaturated moisture of the room, the cloud of vapor, but also the mustiness of all the ink marks we ever looked at together, the rotten legumes of our chthonic wanders also entered the room, lingered, traced their own arabesques around your calves and thighs, your cute pubic mound, your forearms and chest and neck. They embodied you and shielded you, clothed you in deviant airs until his own moans echoed and vibrated the membrane of the window. Then the vapours abandoned you and diffused out of the room to the moon. He, too, was soon clothed in vapours.

Father screams in toothache.

Cars and trolleys roll by. Someone is pressing me up against the window. Uncle announces the presence of a child. Suddenly I am not squeezed so much. I am facing out the window, a bazaar rolls by, and a long way behind a minaret. Across the Eurasian landmass, you are facing the same way.

I can’t get chart readings unless I get collateral. I comb the streets all night in search. Frail men with thin coats and lanky movements accost me. Greybeards with not a shred of shame. I want to sing, but my notes are all typos in my head. The deviance of the eastern chant. I’ve read books about them. I imagined long ago what it was like to be entwined in the back of your knee, a man and fungus. A mold and mouse. I come back to the seer with a watch and lips quivering, eyes rolling, knees weak. I can’t move to type out a simple message. My father’s borrowed motorized scooter sits in the corner of the seer’s shop.

What was there and what was dream? There certainly were hunger pangs. And if I experienced them, who is to say it was not me? Here all things are laid out as in a picture with four perfect corners and three circles. One circle: father’s hair aflutter and mother heavy and oily. One circle: jet-black mane on skin. Skin on muscle and muscle on skeleton that looks too frail for this world. One circle: in my mind the ministry of the interior building is burning and the trolley in front is tipping. I have never been so terrified. But it was I who kicked the snowbank and toppled the hard-packed snow on the trolley full of birch-bark figurines.

I know your muscle. I’ve seen it spring. Your center has pushed my center. You dashed me up against the wall. You held me when I wanted to collapse into chairs. Nothing but the chthonic dead sinews of your hair ever probed my skin deep. And you beheld my visage with tiger eyes, and in my mind I sang of cranes. And I shuddered outwardly at the terror of the ducks on the still pond, the terror of the tree on the hillside falling into the primordial nothing of uncounted years, when trees were never cut down so we could read their rings. I ate up the moss and I splashed mud with my hiking shoes. I saw swans, too. I saw them at night. They only swoop at night. And they waylaid me in the marsh of the gigantic reeds. I might have been stuck there for all the night.

Clear-eyed morning-star! Helicopter buzz! Can’t you see we are being washed down the river? Down the possessive rivers claiming the treasures of the headlands all for themselves? Right.

Labyrinth rising into the sky, all watched by a single lidless eye. The good seek to triumph and they will take the elevators to the desks. They will type in alphanumeric accesskey supersecurity authentication. Twitch and shuffle as the little green light blinks on or off. Achiever flow state while little light blinks on of off. Face impassive. Hunting for the greater beating heart within the pages of inert static-free metal shelves. All categorized. Indexed. Numbered. Tracked. Fined. Tuned. Kicked out. Accosted. Reminded. Reinstated. Reprimanded. Ariadne’s thread broken down to its proteinaceous components. The heart still beats. The blood of passions of centuries trickles on the floor and a small gnome goes endlessly up and down the hallways, wiping the blood before it clots and transferring to a square pool hidden somewhere in the stacks. You never know what is to be found.

Mother’s cabbage reeks in the kitchen. Father’s tobacco stains the bedroom. My unwashed bed was full of me-smell.

You hear bells when you lie with him. What you don’t know is I hear your bells too. Your post-coitus stretching is something I must pass over in silence. Because I would murder my bitch of a wild She-wisdom to see them next to me.

When you’re twenty, you can grow a beard. Earlier you can kick snow. Somewhere between cabbage will oppress you. Sometime later you will walk up the steps of granite and concrete million-ton cudgels. You will enter them, and watch the cudgeling from the inside. It will still hurt. It may hurt all the more, as the daffodil pollen sticks to the window.

Right. We feel we move toward a resolution, but now when you’re Here and Now, when everything is wide. The night sky is wide in one sense. The daytime madness of cloud drift is wider. We are wide; we will have many more nights. I may even weep for you, who came from tents and grasslands and the wild horse country. But we are also predestined. Predestined by pattern we laid down with every Gargantua we emulated and every trolley we tipped. We had no conception of that when we entered labyrinths before. The nights spent twitching from one side of the bed to another come and fade. There is no home any more. I can’t afford an astrologer, so I have to talk around you.

I can’t deny there is wild joy in it.

Consider: "What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil."

The Fable

2006-10-30T00:58:00.000-05:00

So I classify myself as an "atheist". I classify myself as "agnostic". (I'd like to think I'm not prone to being pigeonholed, but such is life.) Some people think this is a contradiction. I don't. Here's how it goes down. Assuming for a second we know what the hell we mean by God (or G-d, YHWH, Jehovah, Allah, Atman, The Ordering Principle, Fate, Cronos, The Creator, ya dig?), my views run like this: regarding God-knowledge--I don't know, and you don't know either. If you say you do, you're lying. If you've had first-person experience of something numinous, something transcendent (for example Ginsberg's finding "God" in Blake's voice), good for you. But it can't be what you mean by God. We have drugs that induce these experiences. There is a neuroscientist in Sudbury who can induce these with finely-patterned magnetic pulses to specific cortical association areas. Anyway, there's the agnosticism. But it you really press me, I may get cranky and I'll make my probabilistic argument: the likelihood is astronomically small, especially with your personal God. Keep your red herring off my table; we've got bigger problems. Shit, algal blooms are more relevant.

If you ask me, ever since the emergence of monotheism, religious practice has been overextended. The most likely gods to exist are things like polytheistic pantheons. Except I would put them somewhere in my limbic system, or as properties of hard-wired organization of human consciousness. These gods are jealous; they fight and cheat on each other and tell stories and keep secrets. That's the most likely thing that's going on beneath our conscious surface. Sometimes I feel Apollonian, sometimes Dionysian; sometimes Mercurial, sometimes Jovial or Saturnine. Sometimes I am Cronos eating my children. I get seized by moods. I can dig that explanation. But it's always an "as if" explanation.

Pretty far from the god we "had in mind", eh? Except I'd argue we didn't have the concept to begin with. So why, then, do people rage and kill and whip children over Old Testament stories, but not Aesop's fables. Here some people say we absolutely need religion for meaning in our lives. I agree with the "we need meaning in our lives" part. In many ways, the humanities killed the religions. I don't need Jesus if I have Camus' Etranger. Odin has nothing on Optimus Prime. Nietzsche could take on at least half a dozen apostles and St. Paul, to boot. If it came to that, Hafiz would show Mohammed what's what. And the Dharma Bums can hold their own against the gurus of the Pacific Islands.

Let me say this: I wil noy begrudge anyone their myths. But myths must be seen as myths. And I don't mean myth in the belittling sense. Most of our lives are spent in myth. They are framed by myth. As a child said: "myths are stories that are not true on the outside, but are true on the inside". That's what myths can do. What they can't do is furnish the contents of immediate experience. That is the hinge of the other great facility of the human mind.

Consider: "When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous."

The Wanderers (Part II)

2006-10-25T00:26:00.000-04:00

A short one: next week I will go to the park. I will hike and trek in what approximates the wilderness. I hope it isa bleak day. I hope by that point the wind has ripped the leavges from all the deciduous trees. I hope they coat the ground in slick compact messes. I hope they freeze and make crinkling noises mixed with the squooshing of suction as boots lift from mud. I hope a bitter north wind blows and rustles my overcoat, flaying my goosebumped skin. I hope to mortify that flesh too weak from days in warm climes that has feasted on mead and taken too much for granted. I hope to huddle with my fire and watch the imperturbable deeps again, to fathom the abode of the nymphs, to hear the pizzicato huddling of violins from, of course, Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Crackling and rose-cheeked, watching breath hang in the air, feeling my face crush under the onslaught. But inside I am warm and whole and dry. Nobody said healing was flowers and sunshine in a madala lotus garden. No, healing is the narrow alleyways of Liverpool with its unlikely sages, the pubs with their islands of gold on the pool table, the foggy crags with arrogant lords' wills to power.

Consider: "The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of remembering against forgetting."

Confusion

2006-10-23T23:50:00.000-04:00

If anyone wants my opinion, sci-fi has done a disservice to science as reality, at least my field. If we ever initiate the Butlerian Jihad by making a machine in the likeness of the mind, people think it will be super-intelligent and somehow capable of outsmarting us. First of all, these idiots underestimate the difficulty--fucking! difficulty--of making any machine approximating a human intelligence. And I don't mean in terms of speed. Idiots think that AI automatically means a computer's speed plus a human's resourcefulness. The only reason our current computers are so fast is that we've done all the hard work of defining all their problems for them. All they have to do is crunch through teraflops of well-defined steps. This is nothing new.

Here's the deal: what will be the first symptom of an emerging intelligence? Not a theorem crunched out, not a chess-game played well, not the capacoty to control aircraft in some terrifying Skynet way. No: the first triumph of our upstart intelligence will be confusion. By confusion, of course, I don't mean some sort of breakdown, some sort of error message, or a stubborn failure to work through a problem. I mean a machine that notices something is amiss and strives to change that situation. It will almost certainly fail, but that little program's "well, that's odd!" should rank up there with thhe moon landing. How long until that happens? Don't count on it in our lifetimes.

Until robots mull, until they get fristrated, until they are girt in emotions to determine the value of objects in this world, until they dream, until they develop heuristics that might lead them astray, until some of them turn away from (artificial) life in "disgust", until they begin to ostracize each other, until they begin to experience cognitive dissonance, until they grow attached, until they experience rude awakenings they will not be close to intelligent. Idiots have made AI appear to be a discipline of transistors and relays. Somebody convinced an ignorant public bigger and better machines were the answer. Someone was a money-grubbing technocrat asshole.

Consider: "By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root. I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourself. Seriously, though. If you are, do. No, really. There's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, okay? Kill yourself. Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No, this is not a joke, if you're going: "There's going to be a joke coming." There's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked, and you are fucking us. Kill yourself, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself. Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going: "He's doing a joke." There's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations."