Bibliography 2012

11/22/63 - Stephen King
On Writing - Stephen King
The Long Walk - Stephen King
Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke
Mrs Paine's Garage - Thomas Mallon
Reveries of a Solitary Walker - Rousseau
Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK - Mark Lane
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkein
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking - Susain Cain
Under the Skin - Michel Faber
Post Office - Charles Bukowski
From the Corner of His Eye - Dean Koontz
The New Evolution Diet - Andy De Vany
The China Study - Colin Campbell
Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
Wilson - Daniel Clowes
David Boring - Daniel Clowes
Death Ray - Daniel Clowes
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Reread) - Dave Eggers
Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut
The Wolves of Calla - Stephen King
The Song of Susannah - Stephen King
The Shining - Stephen King
Keeping a Rendezvous - John Berger
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Danse Macabre - Stephen King
The Dark Tower: Book VII - Stephen King
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

A Confession

I have a jealousy of those who possess the kind of laissez-faire friendship I had growing up and of which I am now sorely missing.  This is a lasting problem.  I am well met by a culture of effortless camaraderie come together for the love of movies but do not feel in any lasting way belonging to said culture.  Cinephiles, on the whole, are a gregarious, the more the merrier, bunch.  It has taken me years to finally come to terms with the fact that I do not belong with these people in anything more than an occasional pass-by.  It doesn't feel like a home, but a continual on the road carnival experience.  A home would be nice.  Strangely I miss what it was like to not talk about film, and just enjoy the experience.  My job goads the agitation as I have so much time to listen to people announce their all-too-healthy social lives.  I'd rather the party stay out of my room, and I am working towards that happening.  Writing feels like a way to sap the longing and not bleed out entirely.

My Position

All the tearing down at the behest of my position is largely cribbed from Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche.  All the building up, the emphasis on being or anything in the vacuum left over, that is personal, inspired a great deal by transcendentalists like Walt Whitman.  I see the vacuum as a blessed gift.  Philosophies need not stick anymore, they are aesthetics, you use them as accents to your life, not prescriptions of some higher order.  There may very well be a higher order, something underlying being perhaps, but it is not knowable, we got only a hierarchy of hunches to build upon to be pragmatic.  There is more to life than being pragmatic.  Pragmatism allows the dream to continue on, but you still got to dream.

In Washington

In the cognizant stillness of a hurricane freshly passed and the appointment of a President soon to come, Lina and I took to walking and marched upon Washington. A city carved from the wilderness and laid out monumental as if for a race of giants. Dwarfed by its riches and likewise short on time, we elected to divide and conquer: museums by day, memorials by night.

In Washington, there is a curious echo to footsteps.  In part this may be attributed to the grand scale of the design, but consider also, underfoot, the culmulative weight of history.  The city carries itself like a memorial, a time capsule, a necropolis. A place where Walt Whitman is still a civil servant, and Watergate, a hotel.  One can almost smell the gas-lamps down stately corridors with their bone-white facades, picked clean.  A smug confidence chills the air born of some half-remembered Golden Age, every urban space clicked into place without a seam.  Perhaps the echo is the conquering of time, with but a defiant flock of pigeons to blunt the inlaid precision of it all.

Into the sky like the gunshot scatter in Dallas. For here Kennedy slept, and there, some say, the rifle that got him (a must-see exhibit), and over there, across the bridge, beyond the Potomac, where I could not reach - his body. In the gift-shop of the National Archives a book by Mark Lane accuses its host of collusion in the assassination it presently profits from. Beside it, a book by Bill O’Reilly soothes in support of the official record; only crazy people kill.

A November wind struck home as we turned past the obelisk onto the west Mall. As forgetful tourists we marked the memorials with our uninspired photographs -all but the one paying tribute to the fallen soldiers in Vietnam - here we walked wordlessly and reverently past names that meant nothing to us at all, to hang meekly by the binder of registered names as if intent on finding some long-dead relative.  How many pages did we turn before we moved on?

Before long we reached the Lincoln memorial and found in its temple some reprieve from the cooling evening air.  Lina read the inscriptions on the walls dutifully; bused-in kids darted through the crowd; a mother fed her newborn on a stoop; and I, slurping a Dr. Pepper, stared blankly at the statue of Abraham Lincoln, inventorying in my mind the movie backdrops it had served.  Outside the sky was blushing. As if cut from the draping clouds there broke an oblong circle of sky.  Winking in the dark of the wooded edge, it seemed undignified; a blemish to the otherwise postcard symmetry of the horizon-tipped monument.

As night fell we retreated from the Mall in search of food.  Just up the street from the theater where Lincoln had been slain, I savored a birthday meal of sea scallops, sauteed spinach and crab-meat hash.  I would later learn that a childhood acquaintance was dying right then, perhaps dying as I took dessert. He had been 36, like me.  Our last correspondence occured a week before his death, in the thread of a Walt Whitman quote I had posted on Facebook; his epitaph was short and unsweetened: "Pretty deep!".  I offered no reply. Outside of the restaurant a civic sign reminds the passerby that this is "The Street Where Lincoln Lives On".  O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done... O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells.

Deposits of a life leftover come back and ring.  That echo again, perhaps chilled of the dead expanse that memory edits out: the construction scaffolds outside of Union Station, the salvageable goods of homeless occupiers strewn by statues, the crooked old newspaper box that ate my loose change. For all of this is Washington too. In the unrehearsed symphony of nothing much happening one bids the moon to be more luminous.  What is happening and what has happened never quite meet: the memory rewrites itself; history is carved in stone.

the spiral

spark ignite the disobedient mind

burn away the conscience grown fat and fallow
burn away the prodigies clearing their throats in dusty books
burn away the critics as they skulk from the arena floor
&
burn away the writer
that bygone bundle of prestige/pettiness/fear
                                                     to summon
                          in the panic heat of language     a most savage poetry
      into its steely fire fed a labor of sentences
         to goad the hunger or starve of fullness
                                                     amidst the crackle-hum of creation
                                                     a fuse lit
                                                     no amount of unthinking can snuff out
             where
        once a
   circle
    now
       a spiral
         leading where
            I know not yet
               vertigo’d by nerves
                   the architecture
                        of my words
                             provide the only
                               perspective
                          keep hidden
                   the aborted works 
             and the finishing
          school of
            slush piles
                stammer
                    the rigmarole
                        of some loose end
                            and set ablaze
                               the whole edifice
                                   to leave but
                                       page and ash
                         
 I will be patient               and recognize the text when it appears
                   postpone the crisis
                   and begin anew
                   incarnate
     
the smiling father on some kind lawn
sunlit squinting 
cliched heart and all

The Year of Figuring it Out

It's about writing novels sentences

It's about making a living

It's about living in order to write sentences

It's about writing sentences in order to live

Writing is Easy

I believe (perhaps a superstition) that there is nothing heroic about writing.  To lay down sentences well is not prize-worthy, nor evidence of some hard-won dominance; here we neglect the stealth impact of favorable circumstances and happy accidents.  Craft might be little more than the distillation of properly attuned priorities so aligned, and with circumstances so calibrated, that the act of dreaming through language gushes freely.  If only we find a way to siphon out our daily lives and its seepage of deadlines, quotas, commercial aspirations and the smack of erudition; the less those things matter, the more simply the writing comes. They are the bane of the unfortunate writers who ascribe duties beyond the bricolage pleasures of language. To be a writer at all, makes up half the battle.  With the scaffolds of self and industry dismantled and the door to distractions firmly closed, with ample time and patience to perform, the writing of writing comes easy.  As heroic as a watermelon ripe and round and ready under optimal conditions. 

On the Privilege of Ethics and Belief

A rebuttal:

As we are both anti-realists I propose a thought experiment where we allow logic temporary validity, and for worldviews to be critiqued as concepts.  If a worldview cannot accommodate this, if the authority of its claims are not logic-based, the edifice falls to the level of all ideologies, enforced by belief. (A side-note: relativism is not an ideology because it makes no claims of universality.  There is no either/or, ‘things’ can be either and or).  

The crux of my logical argument:

Man’s capacity for knowing exceeds the self-imposed limitations of understanding enforced by the scientific method.

K > k where k is a subset of K

furthermore

subset k is not able to deduce the value of K by means of its own processed conclusions because it is ALWAYS self-limiting of criteria.  This is the tautology.

k can only speak of the k in K, or in other-words, itself.  (Even if you didn't like the word 'knowledge', use 'perspective' - it is less accurate, but gives you the same fallacy). 

Any attempt to reduce my argument to fuzzy metaphysics is self-indicting, because the concept of knowledge is evoked in your own theory.  We both take the concept of knowledge as permissible irrespective of the fact that it implies a fuzzy notion of comprehension - we are talking about ‘knowledge’ from a human perspective are we not?  If you wish to speak only of computational knowledge and dispense with Being altogether, then we can talk about the nature of knowledge within an AI computer.  Otherwise, talking strictly of Being-processed information, and the capacities to intuit what has meaning, and why, there is no logical argument for k to prescribe the limits of K - it prescribes the limits of itself. Now k can contribute to a prescription of certain corporeal truisms, but every time it tries to stare into the sun of Being it is blinded.  

Regarding all talk of the ‘demarcation problem of science’: the aim of that philosophical inquiry is to make a division between science and pseudoscience, the problems philosophers have come up against in doing so is including all the ‘good’ science under one methodology, here it is a question of the completeness of definition.  Nothing I am talking about pertains to that.  I choose the atomic approach, if you will: what essential ingredients are needed without which the bulk of science-doing cannot exist?  Answer: formal system(s)-plus-interpretation.  Or to unpack it clearly:  the application of one or more formal systems of analysis (i.e. geometry, algebra, statistics, unified measurements, etc.) plus an interpretation of so-called ‘real-world’ phenomena.  By virtue of this methodological quality of science-doing we can properly frame its proofs.

so,

EVEN if you wanted to include (what I deem) laissez-faire empiricism, i.e. being able to deduce that the sun will rise tomorrow as ‘legitimate science’ I don’t care, nor would it disprove my position.  In which case I would say, fine, keep those forms of ‘science’, let that be the science you build your theory on.  Everything else is culpable.  Go about disproving the lack of value of any opposing theories of knowledge by using one fuzzy form of comprehension over another.  The best it can do is establish some basic truisms of objective/subjective divisions, of primitive physical properties of things, it cannot claim logical dominance over parallel (i.e. non-competing) interpretations of knowing.  Faith and reason are not in competition as they abide by separate means of authentication.

When one comes to accept anti-realism as the inevitable consequence of the illogical first premises of all positions, faith-based sentiments are no less true than reason-based ones.  This is not an inevitable endorsement of nihilism, nor any position that insists upon ‘anything goes’ with complete freedom.  Just to say that, in the absence of certainty and with what faculties of knowing at our disposal, we may self-configure.

This is my position.  One chief difference between our positions appears to be that I see as nearly certain the likelihood that I am an individual, that knowing is foremost an individual process.  There may be a common world out there, and by habit and empirical observation it satisfies me to behave as if there is most of the time, but the burden of knowing is individual, how I sense the world is more than by map-making, because I sense also being, emotions, that pesky humanity you talk of.  It is as a human being I self-configure.  I do not see the goal of living to be acquiring knowledge for it’s own sake, or to continue to make maps beyond my need.  My needs are individual, human.  Without certainty to bully me, I choose to self-configure away from the conclusions of what I see as an autistic impulse of man, towards a handicapped form of proof, and from that, belief of knowledge. This is not to say all of the conclusions arrived at via this approach are wrong, just unsuitably contextualized.  The parenthesis of meaning too rigidly fixed.  I believe individual interpretation is required, to remove the handicap of one kind of proof-making, and sense out the right measure.

Part of that right measure is the re-authenticating of any science-derived knowledge according to indwelling ethics that are individually gleaned.  What I am saying is Being is not merely a quantitative piece of phenomena, here is the fallacy.  Ethics always pertains to Being, there is no ethics if Being is not privileged.  Otherwise, you have an ethics in service wholly of an ideology. 

   

It seems you have lost the first premise of your argument, you have buried the Being of it, subverted language so as to limit the concept of 'knowledge' to be only computational, and have described the ethics of a robot.  

Alone but Alive

Writing is a ritualistic act to smoke out old selves that, left unsought, wisp formless into the stratosphere.  From this cultivation of selves we must stage a mutiny on the everyday and redact every last contact made with the networked collective formerly known by name.  It may be as sad and tragic as they say, but so long as we resist how things appear we may safely stowaway in our ignorance.  Better to befriend ourselves and keep those fires burning than grow cold and friendless in the self-congratulating world we got going.  Somewhere skipped a track, even if people deny it, even if it seems we are saying more than ever, that the celebration of self has never been this raucous. We will die in our dreams, boots pressed firmly to the ground, die terrified of the mistakes we made while typing...

if we don't talk to ourselves, carry the rumor of our hearts, walk stubbornly back and start over, alone but alive, trudging defiantly to the place where we left off. 

Scrolling Past

The everydayness of content chips away at spirit if left unchecked. Even the deepest insight turns stale if daily recited.

In something so seemingly random and vastly replenished as Tumblr there is this same grinding repetition of selves burning their effigies into ash. Where dull lives inform dull fantasies with but one story to tell.  A grossness not of the technology but (in part) of the frequency of use, creating and consuming at speeds incommensurable to meaning.  The reductive urgency overwhelms me, so many acting all at once, in unison and repeatedly, a display of fireworks without end.

Five, ten years later, one could return to the same blooms of being, locked-in, that never left.  The resin of a life leftover, preserved and perverted and weightless. We are given but part of the life, the least interesting part, the unlovable part.  There is no meaning in a thousand proclamations strung together, no meaning in anything that can persist in the everyday.  Not this, not anything.

For this or anything to have meaning it has to go home with you long after the network has been turned off.  It has to begin and end in you.  It has to begin and end at all.

On Hold

I lost the words, I write in waves and the wave has ebbed. I do come lightly to the page, not a writer really.  I have been called lazy by people who should know better, or maybe they are right and I am lazy.  I like to think I am waiting for my moment, patiently.  Bad form to wait for the muse.  The myth of the writer calls for the sacrifice of one's life to the cause, to be heroic so as to overcompensate for the loneliness of being misunderstood.

I spent yesterday playing with my son, I made him laugh so hard he squealed over and over and said, Again! Again!  I was out of breath by the end.  I am not so foolish as to think anything I write will top that.  I side step writing like I side step philosophy, each can claim to own you but you gotta dance around them, flirt of course, but dance around them.  Keep moving into each day and find the means of momentum. For eagerly the spiders spin their cobwebs around you.

I am happy, I like having words to live past me, I like to articulate feelings and ideas, I want to cry and laugh and be exhausted.  Being is primary, momentum is primary, not momentum to any particular end, just that sense of wind in the hair.  It is all about death in the end.  To know this is really it.  There is not enough time to waste on small talk and social niceties, I can barely sit still long enough to clean my house.  I live outside of the pattern, the way the world operates, I dance around it too.  Took awhile for me to figure this all out, to starve off those parts of life, to get down to the core and savor it. 

Slacker

Do people still use the word slacker to qualify the art of aimlessness or has the bustle of the world eroded it from our parlance, retained only in me and my kind as antiquated relics of a past civilization?  To slack, to reboot the operating system of one's soul.  To intermittently absolve myself of all obligations and walk the streets of this city like a nineteenth century flâneur. The world exists differently in the places you are not supposed to be, the memories burn sharper.  I must revolt in this tiny way in order to look at myself in the mirror.  I shall do a disservice to everything efficient, turn a corner onto a street I should have never seen. Only in the stolen moments do I empty my mind and live clearly.  The best times of my life are when I am not living it for you.  

What Awoke in That Sleep?

My earliest remembered nightmare:

I was just a boy and the world was still haunted.  With new eyes I marveled over a particle of dust as it caught the morning light.  Such curious imperfection of air, figment more fairy-like than dead skin, to slip into my dreams, anxiously. 

   

There then appeared a lumberjack hefting an ax high above his head eager to cleave in half that Elysian speck.  I cowered in a corner too afraid to stop him but too afraid also of what it meant.  The fear of trying or maybe disturbing what rightfully existed, whole, even in something so minuscule.  It could feel pain, why not?  In a world of pet rocks and talking cartoon animals. The fear of violence and the suspicion that everything has a place in the universe and ought to be protected.

Why do I remember this (proto-)nightmare while countless others fade?  What awoke in that sleep?

A holistic view, a naïve view, a view closer to the beginning.

Bonfire

In the end when it comes, charring the shadow’s edge, may I keep by a bonfire in the company of friends.  Leave to the darkness our dispossessed homes, and with them too, the unsound premises of our dreams.  No more notches on the wall, we grow to this.  Let the stories unopened remain untold as we empty the shelves of every last provision.  We are now freed of our need for convenience, as the diet gives rise to the famine. And in the world leftover, a porch light flickers a portent, a faultless faucet leaks on. Elsewhere, our modest fire, this primitive light we started with and the humanity that went so far gone.

The Fallout

I once spent a day in San Francisco.  I was queasy on the taxi ride in and saw more of the toilet bowl than the shoreline.  Everything was wet and smelled of fish; impossible angles and broken horizons, like a cubist painting brought to life. Too beautiful to live there, too dangerous too.  I left just before the Japan tsunami hit, and on television, at home, I watched as the San Francisco area felt the faintest ripple of waves, a gentle reminder of calamities happening elsewhere.  The story faded and people went on with their lives.  A year later, flotsam from the tsunami started to pile in on the Pacific coast, motorcycles and piers, to lay down on beaches as exhibits for a case never made.  Bulky objects that had to be towed away, with everything to declare. They said: Fukushima still burns. The ocean stubbornly refused to censor what it knew (what we try to bury in words has a way of floating to the surface eventually). Miles and miles and miles, a run-on sentence that, given enough time, lands its point. I was a tourist, but I live here now, in San Francisco and Fukushima.  And when I breathe in your cancer, I exhale it as poetry.

Hemingway's

Mustering up courage, I wait out the day in a sunny cafe, the world gaping from the windows.  Hard drinks in the afternoon as I rehearse what I am going to say. Once escorted out of a bar by the beach, blacked out; now shakes of a different kind. One more drink to champion the everyday in me and perfect a worked-on effortlessness.  Long swallow, with minutes to go I survey the site, twice, then one more time around the block to let the alcohol seep down to my fingertips. The world still gawking, the cosmos on high alert, all doors waiting to be opened.

I enter into society an unfinished man.  In the rush of new encounters I am swept away by those who like rapids to my defiant rock, slam.  The bottle in hand is the only tactile reality, if I stay quiet, may disappear completely.  So I start talking to these faces, discolored ambient sockets of life, circuits of words blinking on and off, carrying on their own conversation.  I am on fire, burning through a field of words in search of an anecdote.  How cheaply my soul is given to break the ice, to those in the heat of energy expended playing out their reciprocating gestures, but off hours, in sober shops, to pass as strangers.

At some kink in the night, the attention bends back on me.  A drunken woman I scarcely knew in high school but knows me apparently, in slurred celebration to talents I one time had, confesses an affection to me and my art. How loudly important both were to her imagined life, though I am almost certain she has me confused with someone else.  But does it matter?  Who am I in that moment anyways, but the reflection of some salved disquiet to bear witness to. There and always tucked in our own cells, clinking the bars with our glasses, wafting odes to some nostalgic past when we were free and formless, to be anything conjured now.

A glass raised in toast: long may we live to conceive our sad histories, to quake in love over nothing at all, live wholly in the dimples and freckles of time, and accept the wild varieties that wish to claim us!

Before the revelation wears off, I am released back into the fray.  Happily evaporating beneath the timid stars, I leave absorbed, an errant thought in someone's misremembered memory.

Turtle

Hayden, almost two, of stubby legs in shorts, impossible curls and squinty-squishy grin, who knows two languages and perhaps more in his own bartered blend, who has yet to discern a difference between affectations and being, who stresses out "uh-oh" and "oh no" and "hmmm" like the cartoon characters he sees, who has no concept of 'later' in any of his languages, who flaps ecstatic to Feist and Flight of the Bumble Bee, who is Ready-Set-Go downstairs to hide, who upon asking has never pooped but ducks in corners suspiciously, whose first word was 'door' now longs to pass through every one he sees, to go more outside, more swimming, more park, more slide, but if denied can be distracted before tears, who garners compliments on flights for his behavior, whose endless curiosity keeps him calm, who flirts with girls any chance he gets, who sleeps in the big bed with shout-dreams of toys, flutters jazz hands in my ear, kicks out every part of me, wakes up fresh to the morning miraculous to be alive and bear witness to the sun, who has not yet discovered insects but of bigger creatures delights, the meows and woof woofs and birdies, and trains, how many pointed arms in the direction of whistles, at the thump thump thump as it crosses behind our house, how glorious the announcement of 'Train!' like it is a mythic creature newly revived, how incredible it must be to be nearly two, edging into summer, in a city of so many doors and parks and trains, and on stubby legs with hobbit feet barreling momentum to carry his body-trunk towards every new adventure.  And how much more incredible to be the parent whose finger is held tightly, pulled forward on such adventures. 

expoetic

A body of pockets and limp appendages, infant heart aching to be hustled, muscles straining for tougher terrain.  Better to feel it fought squarely in the world of consequences, so that the suffering I got coming hurts the right way.  

lullabye

in a glaze of life obscura

people make up for the lone

believe in nothing they cannot buy

drive drunk off the cliff of their choosing

douse themselves in formaldehyde

mince words on wiretapped lines

plot condos on the horizon

reenact their noble wars

welcome risk for better pay

prey off the young before they rise

ringtone their favorite lullabyes 

Revolt

We are told to be car-salesmen selling ourselves with teethy grins, competing for friends and positions in high places.  Those who do not comply out of petulance or pride sink beneath this orgy of being heard.  For those that are car-salesman by design, wired gregarious with a glint in their eyes, this world must seem like Providence.

When introducing a new food to my two-year old son, I have learned that the best method for success is to set it before him without much coaxing, allowing him to receive it on his own terms.  The more I try to force, the greater the resistance; even at so young an age there seems a natural inclination towards freedom of choice.  My adult life seems likewise defined by a resistance to the brute force of an other, that societal mistake, imposing with a strict hand how I ought to behave, ought to think, ought to achieve success.  As if we were all one and the same.

I am not a car-salesman.  I see through personality, as I suspect many others do.  What else can I do but revolt?  It is a rebellion of the spleen, the a priori fact of my being.  Life is but a struggle to repatriate the inner voice and the temperamental choice.  I ask only of the world to permit me to receive it on my own terms, with a degree of tolerance, patience, and respect.  And I will return them in kind.  

A Case for Blood

Or, I language myself into bondage. The found words worm their way into my mind, self-replicating a meaning thought to be there all along.  A meaning that tightens a hold on my chest until I relent to its eloquence.  A meaning that spreads like a simile.  The wholeness of words are institutions-in-waiting, treatises, decrees, commandments. Or like the corpuscular fact of a suicide letter, solicited by the very flesh it promises to punctuate.  I fear there is a case for blood in every prophecy.

The Virtue of Play

O to soften suffering and deign to see: I am but the flux of being that undermines the sometimes solid parts of me.

The Buddhists speak of the folly of attachment.  I have not the appetite for their asceticism: they can keep their stale bread and perfect minds, I require both the illusion and the real to remain human.  To me it is about the frequency of one's attachment, a matter of degrees.  Emptying out goes too far - to afford the vacuum even more power over oneself than it has already.  Instead, hold fast to the awareness that you are in a dream but pleasuring in the dream nonetheless.

Create a virtue of play and dance nimbly through life while all other meanings empty out, whole universes may drain away but the pit of it will not touch you if you can balance the absurd in the equation.

Momentum (always momentum)

There are some attachments that the virtue of play cannot overcome.  The goal is not to end suffering entirely, only to mitigate it.  If I lose someone I loved dearly, to hell with all inventions of the mind.  I will feel the loss down if only to carry a lasting experience of that devout feeling and be stubbornly human.

Human: an umbrella term for everything defiant of the vacuum.      

My Condition

I am not made for this world.  This is not a threat, merely an observation.  Whatever mechanism exists to keep the mind turning over, emptying and filling, and tackling each new problem without the weight of consciousness perpetually halting the means of production, whatever mechanism that is I am not in possession of it.  Maybe none of us really have it, just some people are better liars.  I write a lot of about self-configuring and modular thinking and I speak from a place of longing. In university I wrote essays long before they were due, since discovering fundamental flaws in economic theory and resource shortages, I have taught myself how to garden and preserve food and exact an exit strategy, not because I am particularly keen and motivated, I do it out of an awareness of my shortcomings, to get a running start.

So why am I the way I am?  I kind of wish I had some lurid tale to tell if only to have something to hold onto for myself - an explanation gives one a fighting chance to encircle and dominate that which hurts.  I have no story.  My mind works, sometimes too efficiently.  Were I to console myself with heroics, I would liken this behavior to the Icarus myth.  I could see the way others cope as a gift of ignorance, flying at such low altitudes.  Or there is the old Thoreau chestnut, all people live lives of quiet desperation, and in that I can feel normal.  I don't feel normal.

I have been good for years but the pressure has come back, not as bad as before, but each new time hurts more because it undermines everything I thought I had gained.  The experience is fuzzy, I shut down, I lose interest in everything, I feel paranoid, lonely.  The only plan of attack I can formalize is that I need to get ahead of it, that if I let this feeling steer I am done for.  Most people, if confronted with this, would talk it out, have a good cry, and get over it.  I feel like I need to make seismic changes just to be able to breathe easier.  It is a struggle for me to claw back to being normal.  I had a temporary drinking problem when I was younger but I never adhered to the adage: once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic... the liquid itself holds no power over me.  But once a melancholic, always a melancholic, I do believe.  For I let the darkness in once and it never left.   

Man Down

Ah yes, this is what it feels like to be down.

There is no pressure release and every decision, every path, feels equally devoid of possibility.  You feel a fool for thinking otherwise, for knowing how to once walk the path.  The mind clumps together and overpowers all marvel in the universe.  The body rushes to heal a wound, but with the mind torn there is no such instinct, the ripped part flaps in the wind and the noise drowns out all calls.  There is just this boat adrift, the thickness of life around it, a distant panic that this -despite all prior efforts- never really goes away.  The lessening of obligations did not do it.  The enchantment of parenthood did not do it.  The rhetoric of seasons, while right in its own universe, has no meaning in this one.  The first to shore up is my ability to communicate.  This is taken by some close to me as a tactic to spite them, to inflict pain.  Oh were I thinking of anybody else to have such spite.  To think of anything else at all.  The problem is not knowing how to proceed in the face of an unassailable hollowness.  When you drain the significance from all things it becomes futile to respond, without meaning embodied whether fictitious or genuine, it ceases to be a matter of choices, of strategies.  You just wait for the moment to pass.  Wait for meaning to spill back in as mysteriously as it left.  The universe breathing in and out through you.  The thingness of being, felt.

Commonsenseless

There surfaces a naive assumption: if the complicated machinery that fuels nations is operating than it is working according to some well-considered plan by virtue of it working at all.  What is overlooked is the character of power, how it changes the equation of commonsense.  The larger the problem the less likely you are to hear about it.  Of the magnitude of systematic collapse you will hear not at all, for no partisan side wishes their own demise in the inevitable chaos to ensue.  And so, the failures are silenced though they accumulate, the points of disagreement work within the arena of power and are of such suitable insignificance as to raise the ire of the partisan (yet another cog in the machine).  The choices keep the illusion of freedom alive and people continue to go to work and buy things they don't require and the marvel of the machinery instills a confidence and assurance that things operate according to plan. Each denial keeping the whole running until the burdensome nature of reality intervenes to such a point that it ceases to be contained.  Even then it will be blamed on some unforeseen act of insurgence, and since no one wants to be played the fool, each will agree quickly.  What came before will be seen as a Golden Age, something to aspire towards, and the powerful will be the first to resurrect the myth.  

Until we look the nature of power in the face and see it for what it is, nothing will change. Until education is valued more so than competition and the soul of the individual is valued more so than the allegiance to the flag, we will be stuck in the lie of fraudulent commonsense that greases the machinery of power.

This Time Around...

Keeping to oneself in no way makes one mysterious, for that relies on the false premise that the world is outwardly curious.  To be quiet is to be quiet for oneself.  Play with the fantasy of solitude, recite your favorite poems, qualify your choices with the bounty of art, but do not expect a return call.  The moon is silent.  

The Measure

We make far too much heroic about what we do, or aspire for, or see in others.  I have come to think that maybe what we see as heroic is simply achieved by as little as being well-rested while others are not.  How greater the magnification of possibility is when one is temperate and at ease with the world around them.  The folly is thinking we are all at the same starting line when we are staggered immeasurably by the imperfections of place and time. Hard work is a factor but so is the frost in the air.

Now Start Again

The threat of quicksand is always there waiting, the absurdity we must reconcile.  An agile mind can dance around it frequently enough so as to defer paralysis.  Coping is the one thing that ought to be taught, or rather arrived at by undoing the habits formed through the caked-on negligence of present day cultural drift.  We must reclaim the individual and the power of belief.  Smash all belief-structures, and not just the easy ones like those of ghosts and angels, but of the firmer kind, the still revered kind, the kind of angles and probabilities and assertions of power and fair play.

There are always going to be transitions, the vulnerable stitches of life caught between make-believes, where the emptiness of all positions seep in.  In one respect this is a good thing -the habit unstuck, we are allowed to start again and pleasure in the renewal.  I have experienced the reboot more times than I can count, and at first it is hard to accept, things feel senseless and small but before long I feel full of new air and buoyant because of it.  If one clings too astutely to the importance of identity, that one is valued according to how resolute this identity remains in the face of all obstacles, if one adheres to any philosophy too passionately, this rebooting, which I come to think of as natural as bowel movements, will wound more than it should.  There is no shame in being absurd unless you hold fast to such a conceit.

The strange confluence of these moments make for some interesting experiences.  One dreads them, longs to be free of them, but at the same time they bring with them the opportunity to start again fresher, they reaffirm the virtue of play and distilling life to what you want without being dependent on some outward system to measure up to.  Without God, without peers, without the authority of ideas, you are left to your own devices, and in that comes the dread, the dread of having to be responsible for your own happiness.  But when you see that clearly, see the happiness as yours (at least for awhile, for nothing lasts) than you may let go with every morsel of your being and delight in the life you got.  Nobody really wants anything forever, it is an absurdity of the mind, an implant tic made up by advertisers to sell product. The fleeting is more enjoyable, the threat of losing it all gives it value.  The reboot is your salvation.  Feel the dread, the sadness, the loneliness, the absurdity of everything, knowing it too is fleeting, and the possibilities are endless if you give it a chance.   

In Vegas

In Vegas, the hollow of all culture drained. The holographic fantasies of an AI supercomputer too shallow to query the pesky packet we call the individual  with all his silently flowing tributaries. Minstrel forth homo-sapien! Exfoliate and graze and whore out your euthanized will, deaden the pulse to a drip and be forgotten. This world you participate in, that you are in cahoots with, is sickly smiling. I see the vacant stare of the servants that outnumber us as we vacation onward. I see the cogs of this smoothing machine and how many lives it ruins to get it running. The ornate surfaces are paper thin, the varicose veins spray-tanned away.  In Vegas suicide is sensible, the air, perfumed with it.

Escape to where exactly?  The world penetrates us, we are mere carriers, carrying point to point ideals that are not really ours, to quibble over the most useless of questions, to oblige the schedule of some grand design to keep us pickled in our own juices and amused to death.  Give me the substance this world passes by, the substance it requires only nominally in service of an anecdote.  The artists conspire against this world, to depict the undiluted life, and it is in the artist's depiction of the world that salvation is made.  Not eternal salvation, but in doses.  I will take the Las Vegas of the arts and through the imagined possibilities of the imagined soul find a place to begin with substance.  The aching of the world is not for me to heal, but the aching of my heart is.

To get along in this world you must indulge your own fantasy, ride out the furthest tributaries, past the desert of industry and its stench of money, build your own home from the salvageable remains.  Salvation is created and that is the point, so you may carry it with you wherever you choose to go.
  

Beware the Ides of March

Approximately a month from now, around the time of March 20th, Greece is poised to default, triggering a CDS crisis that could spread like an economic contagion far greater than that which occurred in 2008.  The signs of this have not been buried but written prominently in reliable news sources with daily regularity. I don't claim to be an economist and I have my share of doubt of the whole profession (courtesy of N.N. Taleb's critique), but with the macro-level problems that are clear to understand (infinite growth colliding with finite resources, the lack of legislation passed to correct the problems evident in 2008 economic crisis) added to what seems to be occurring in the continual downgrading of value of European assets, not least of all the PIIGS countries like Greece, there is, at the very least, grave concern over how well global economies will fare if this first domino drops.  

I do not claim to know how this is going to play out, it is very possible that some last minute, unforeseen benefactor will bail out Greece, if only to keep their economy running a bit longer.  I accept the unknown in the equation, though I choose not to live my life in utter faith of its panacea.  I am not obsessed or dumbstruck with fear, in the interim period I have done what I could to shelter from the storm and try to be self-sufficient.  My heart is not wholly in it, I still cling to the arts and the aristocratic pleasantries of the life I am accustom to.  I monitor the situation and try to respond accordingly.  This week I bought a propane stove-top burner one uses typically on a camping trip.  I am still significantly lacking in alternative energy sources, an expense I have not yet felt motivated to pursue.  The winter has been mild, and I have enjoyed time spent with friends and family.

Maybe it is the books I read, the movies I watch: I think about ethics a lot even if I am not, myself, virtuous.  I have lived inside a bubble without much in the way of tangible threat of death.  The survival instinct dulls from lack of attention and the body gets fat and the mind gets soft; ethics is moth-balled, a dusty idea not qualitatively understood.  We have been told to care more about what other people think of us, and other people are mostly thinking about what a bought culture tells them to.  But ethics will once again surely matter when the bubble pops, when the invisible barriers between people vanish, and we are forced to live together on less, with greater threat of death.  History has no precedent for this experiment, cut away from survival and ethics and brought together, globally, into a world where all the prison cells unlock and the warden is dead.  How will man fare when put to this test?  Ideologies will flare up in the vacuum, the weak-minded need something to hold fast to, something bigger than themselves.

I do not have a favorable opinion of mankind.  I have lived a fantasy that was foolishly squandered by the greed of a few.  The reality is not pretty.  It is a wilderness out there, a wilderness that can define you and make you a real person at last, but it is not pretty. If the wave crashes, all the pretty things will soon be gone.  Life with the friction of death ignites ethics, that whisper I have had in my head all this time.  We tell ourselves stories to remind us what happens when we are forced to live.

I have been living surreptitiously through stories, feeling hunger and dying and tragedy in a heightened but contained environment.  I sense what may happen from these sojourns into the imagination (woven into my memory too, a story of my near-death).  I am stirred awake.  I have felt a thousand deaths.  I have witnessed a thousand acts of heroism and a thousand acts of cowardice, and learned what it is to be alive and restless.  I have had 9/11 and Lehman Brothers puncture my dreams and let the urgency of reality seep through.
  
Maybe I have seen too many movies.  This is also possible.  But I have seen firsthand the thinness of civility, the diet of decency, the plague of egoism.  Old culture will cope, the culture that has lived through hard times, it is this new culture set adrift I worry about; the culture of entitlement, the deterioration of community, these jackals in the making.  There is a guy who wrote a book about his firsthand experience in Argentina when it recently went through a full-blown economic collapse.  It was Hobbesian chaos, the crime rates soared so high that the prisons reached capacity and it was anything goes on the streets.  Who is to say what any of us would do if they barricaded ours banks and left us high and dry. I imagine the worst, but not without some justification; lest nature shows us what it is truly made of.

Reboot

From my first philosophical posts up to the latest poetic musings, there have been two themes that I keep returning to, which seem to define me in a feverish way: the necessity of ethics and the sanctity of the individual. I suppose I tend towards these themes so forcefully because of their lost importance in the modern world, a world of political squawk, academic rigor mortis, positivists, archivists, and the locked-in devices from which I strive to compose my thoughts.  Ethics and individualism are quickly eroding away, a battle taking place inside me as much as outside.  The modern world is not all bad of course, and to an extent I accept what it gives as inevitable and even necessary agitations, to be the gadflies stirring me awake lest I become too fanatic about my solitary ideas.  I live in the world I indict, let the record show I am aware of this surface hypocrisy, but in my defense, asceticism is not an option, not an ethical one at least.  One cannot help but speak the language provided and get caught in its web (when you play by their rules they have already won).

Every so often I break down and need to establish a perimeter of words to (however naively) preserve my sacred space.  And so the rant goes...

At some point it was no longer a question of having something to say and someone to process it.  It is still language, it is still talking and writing and reading, but what has changed is the goal: where once the text mattered, the subtext now dominates. Each utterance has become a territorial pissing that goads the yet to be expressed to do the same.  Like pups stepping over each other for the same teat, to be there first, we pivot our value around the concept of outward acknowledgement: the more followers, the more reblogs, the more likes, and then the next day you start over again, you keep going back daily, hourly, at speeds in-commensurable with quality or craftsmanship - just be there first.  We go at these speeds not because we have so much to say, but because we feel the need to remain relevant, as if we would dissolve entirely without a status update. With no time to cultivate an inner life outside of the exhibition, a whole generation has been raised in this accelerating culture, and, if nothing changes, they will raise the next generation in the only manner they have been taught, refining away any semblance of the individual.  It is in the hesitations, the individual resides.

The flaw we bear is not recognizing that it is a choice, and how this choice comes to inform not just our online personas but our perception of what is valuable, and ethical, and reasonable in every facet of human activity.  It is simple but so rarely given voice:  you don't need to prove yourself to the world, if anything the world needs to prove itself to you.  If it has value, it should radiate inside you and ask nothing more than that you find your own path of least resistance.  Find happiness irrespective of how minor it may seem.  Defy the anecdotal life.

To some this is self-delusion, but I call it self-clarity.  There is a seductive inclination to be defined one way or the other, supplant one narrative for another: if not the academic marvel than the starving artist, if not the wealthy than the ascetic. It is considered a slight to call someone a jack of all trades, to weave through life without a pliable narrative that may be socially digested.  The flaw is in thinking in regards to a narrative foremost, being overly concerned with how you are read, rather than reading yourself out and editing away to your own familiar voice.  Abandon all narratives and follow your childish instinct to play.  Use whatever capacities you have to offset roadblocks to this pursuit - naivete is its own roadblock.  Rather, see more clearly your goal, how little is required to be happy once you have whittled away the antagonisms (competition and antagonism reduced to sport).  A clarity of self sees that one lives every day through peaks and valleys of relative satisfaction, that one lives in the crevices of stories not the well-rehearsed anecdotes and finding a way to live pleasurably in the immediate and not the secondhand account ought to be the true occupation of your life. This kind of thinking may derail the ten year plan, the jockeying for position if such a position is in service only of keeping you busy and hungry for the carrot dangled in font of you.  So be it.

My generation celebrated the slacker, but since the word has gone out of currency somewhat, in its stead, comes the manifold issue-driven, idea-movers, moving ideas from one side of the internet to the other, squandering their limited free-time to meme out a promise of a better future. The pleasure of life has become secondary, what good is it to fight for a future when the present goes unopened?  Why forfeit the now, and the ability to ferret out the good in every moment?  A resourceful inner life stays with you no matter the climate, protects you better than an army. But here the rhetoric begs an antagonism I must step back from, for it is not either/or, but weaving through with a part of you always alive and playful, being the justification for any pursuit for higher level petitioning, having something to show for, something to call upon rather than empty rhetoric.  When you say life is important, dignity is important, basic human rights are important you should not meme the idea, but hold yourself up as material evidence.  It is so easy to become the ghost haunting a body still alive, to ghost all values in pursuit of some nominal gain.  It is scary how easy it is to cease to be a person and become a personage: the body dies and people can see it, smell it; when the life inside it dies it can go a lifetime unreported so long as a rudimentary set of outward markers are achieved.

Take pride in being a slacker, a jack of all trades, a melancholic, a resigned member of a society that is in such a big hurry to say nothing long enough for you to forget there is anything else to think, feel, or be.  A toast to all the thoughts left unsaid, and to those thoughts that if uttered, would still go unheard.

"But it's like we were not made for this world, though I wouldn't really want to meet someone who was" - Of Montreal, The Past is a Grotesque Animal

The Prose-Iguana

Let language leave you but awhile and tend to the family you left behind.

<<To forsake the world is easy; the world with them in it... does make me hesitate>>

To write because someone told you to, to chase after a story like a character in a plot?  To write in spite of every convenience not to, to document rather than live?

<<To write for the sake of a turn of phrase, a description draws me out: in a ward sectioned off, I miss the moonlight and nobody visits; no one left to ask if this is voluntary or not, or at which point the itch became a scratch>>

Mean something to mean something and it goes away.  The underpinning meaning of a winter backed up when meaning was piecemeal in every exchange.

<<One combination of words for another, my poetry for your prose.  Stuck in a fizzy-flat cola with nothing left to do but resolve or dissolve>>

A matter of dying, a longing for immortality?

<<Fear of the smooth granite, yes.  A puny, selfish tic, down deep, despite all of the rhetoric that comes with being a character, I, too, hunger to be a ghost>>

And what is stopping you?  Why the iguana on your page?

<<Substance abuse, too much substance.   I gotta get clean in a dirty way. The water is warm and the cool air dissuades me from leaving.  Inertia is closer. If I rise, I rise naked, and walk barefoot along the stony path of righteousness>>

You are confusing poetry with reality like the Escher hand that draws itself. Pleasure has a cap that whispers "this alone satisfies", whether voyeur or participant, and any line so crossed in the mind is emptied in the experience. There is no need to reproach the embryonic drift of pleasure, let the canker-sore of your good intentions heal, and fast, find someone to kiss.

<<Pleasure is secondary, an additive.  I want to break into the wards of tomorrow. The passing pleasure of something left over, even if it is just fantasy>>

He who lives for tomorrow, dies today.

<<Every choice starves off something>>

To live for a make-believe tomorrow.  The picnic table playwright, once a week, over the last summer of high school - the play never finished.

<<Aged wrong, given everything all of the time, generations deep and distant from our selves, what else but this headache of fullness?>>

Hemingway said a writer ought to be hungry.

<<He was drunk>>

You are full of words and yet you hesitate to write.

<<Not every choice is mine alone (the canker-sore).  Better to fork, like Borges' story, and live in both the hermitage and the sunny day.  The choice unmade, I waver between realities, the stowaway of today and the captive of tomorrow.  A desire to write my own prose, my own epitaph>>

Better the dream than the reality. To die a writer in your wrists so as to never know the measure of your talent.

<<To starve off all talk of measures and talent, dreams and reality - they are ulcerous by intent.  Goad with every word, sentence, paragraph an answer to the call: life is to be drunk, unstop the voice inside you and draw out the spirits that keep your carcass warm>>

...but not yet

I am a first-world, able-bodied, happily-married, white male, not young, not old, securely employed with benefits. I take pleasure in the finer things: movies, literature, music, eating out, information at my fingertips, a home I can call my own.

And every once in awhile I feel nauseous.

The Marxist has bled out of me and with it, all youthful idealism.  Yet there remains leftover a defiant spark of knowing that this paradigm -despite the benefits- is not merely flawed but wholly unsustainable.  Wherever I am now is in flux, the employed is in flux with the unemployed, the gadgets of today are run on the energy supply of the future.  I live in full awareness of my comeuppance.  I am not owed this easy life, and not owed it because others are owed less.  Nor is this a bit of luck, and I should embrace fortune for the fluke it is.  The quintessential flaw in reasoning is to think solely in discrete packets of things and think the world abides by this trick of grammar.  Today is a consequence of tomorrow as much as yesterday, and one ought to behave in reverence if not to something so out of fashion as God, then the prima facie ethics of co-existence, of existing finitely on a finite planet with consequences to your actions or inaction.

I felt nauseous before I even knew why.  I think we all feel something not quite right. It isn't merely the existential dilemma but something particular to this arrangement.  The private chamber of your heart that beats in discord with your surroundings.  You must feel it.  If not now, somewhere along the path.  

What people find eccentric and worth pointing out is less mysterious to me than those who seem incapable of being touched by the magnitude of the world, who are forever making facebook-friendly quips, and probably lol-ing when no one is around. How do they get through this life skirting the issue of existence?  I understand how the narcissism of adolescence can consume but there appear to be people that are impervious through to old age, that have sealed off that chamber permanently.  I have to believe even they feel nauseous and are just better at hiding it.

In spite of my functioning heart I am a lousy activist; knowing is not acting.  And to be clear, confessing this is not a way to counter my so-called 'liberal white guilt' or 'first world problems'.  Compassion has become a vulgar word, all the more depending on your pay grade. So quickly that voice appears to undermine the sentiment of compassion of one momentarily well-off towards those who are momentarily not; that it is deemed an indiscretion and has currency in the fabric of how we do business says volumes of how far astray we are as a species.  The politics of empathy is a Gordian knot in need of an Alexander.

I am not the person that leads the march that inspires a revolution.  Like I said, the idealist in me has gone away.  I am also a coward and an addict.  The fact is I am living comfortably in this paradigm, too comfortably to act first.  I am living the spirit of St Augustine's plea, "God make me chaste... but not yet".  Each person has their own tipping point, I like to believe I will act before I am too late, but I will not be in the first wave.  As with all revolutions the first wave is the idealists and the worst off.  I will cheer them so long as free speech is tolerated.  The hacktivists, the occupiers, the student mobs, I am a genuine fan and paying attention and choosing my moment.  I am a pragmatist, but a pragmatist left without options becomes just as dangerous as an idealist.  When the cowards start to fight, the time for change will have arrived.

On the Brink

Something is happening on the periphery of our lives. Listen closely and you'll hear the splintering sound of history as it gives way beneath a generation of neglect. So long as we stay perfectly still in our homes, and keep on the same route to work and schedule meetings for future dates, maybe we can fool history into forgetting. There is an unshakable calm on the brink, the trickle down of ease is infectious.  I am a believer in make-believe but there are pressure points of facts not to be ignored and this is one of them.

We are living the adage: collapse happens slowly and then all at once.  Several days ago the head of S&P rating agency said he expects Greece to default soon, Fitch wagers a date: March 20th.  A prospect that has been in the making for years, a significant event that happens a room apart from our busy lives.  Greece falls, so does Europe, so does the United States, and then the floor gives way.  2008 was a dress rehearsal, as was the Great Depression.  

Maybe I am wrong.  There are always more factors than reason can consider, maybe the game is rigged well enough to mitigate disaster, I can only go on the information I am given.  If what we know is a combination of lived-in experience and abstract reason, to make the connection to really feel the path in our veins is to close the valve of what we have lived, this pleasant playground our parents devised to keep us out of harm's way. Only through our grandparents and on the odd Remembrance Day do we glimmer that far away truth, the tattered flag of human depravity that lets fruit spoil on the vine.

Nowadays to even prepare for hard times is considered eccentric.  To stockpile food is an affront to the unquestioning faith in stocked grocery shelves.  It is to give into granola habits, the pathogens of pacifists, hippies and new age prisms.  Survival has become passé.  The force of this super-imposed reality is palpable, it pushes back with each breech of the niche: deny not the granite buildings nor the poise of bankers, media evangelists barking their talking points from every podium in every direction, keep calm and carry on, everything wound tightly around an unsustainable belief.  Should I be judged for giving in under this constant propaganda, the propaganda of my parents and your parents and the found logic of growing up in a make-believe commune?

Of course I should.  There is no excuse.  I am out of shape body and mind.  The standard I need to live up to is not the status-quo, but what my awareness convicts me of.  There is a coward in me, letting things happen on the wishful thinking that the world will sort itself out.  The drunken hobo waits for the world to pick him up.  In bleary-eyed abandon there is no future save the obstacle immediately in front.  The sober are not so dissimilar.  Leave someone else holding the bag, let the President figure it out.  It is not like the word democracy means anything, anymore.  We learn it dryly in textbooks. The Draft, soup kitchens, they are footnotes, stories.  The coward drinks the world away, the coward comforts himself in stories.  The coward pleads "knowing is not the same as starving".  Not until the deadline becomes the breadline, nor the last vestige of the fantasy fades from exhaustion and hunger and panic, and we, against our will, become history once again.  

My People

They say that cellphone carriers are spying through software and everything we transmit is being observed.  The Orwellian nightmare turns a page closer. Discreetly, at first, people will be rounded up for their secret lives.  Having no way to trace their grunts of displeasure, the introverts, hermits, and underground men, who never bothered to own a phone, or even introduce themselves, shall go undetected. What an unsettled civilization they would become on the fugitive coast of a society welcoming its demise.  A mutinous country conspiring in the catacombs of the human heart.  One I would very much like to be a patriot of, had I not already surrendered my position with these published words.

That Disturbance You Feel is Your Heart

We are the idea pushers and have been ever since it went global. Sometimes I think this is what the Singularity feels like: the mass exodus of friends that left as quickly as they came, the holographic affections cascading link to link to link where nothing ever touches. The ideas we push had not been tried until now. You are the first. Mote, mote, veo, veo, is all you ever want. Not even two. You enjoy watching your family on tiny screens as if shone from distant stars, as if we were not there sitting beside you in the flesh. You are learning past us, your functions locked-in. The ideas define us and we oblige.  That disturbance you feel is your heart hurrying towards progress.  Yet from the womb still beats a tiny murmur of protest.

Agony

To be painfully bored at the precise moment somewhere, someone is being slain
I think such thoughts on this forgettable Monday as I wait for minutes to pass

My Advice to the Youth

get older: refine your superstitions
and outlive your lease on logic

go where the words take you

the poet is a fraud and so is the audience

the fraud is a fraud and so is the truth

and every tense some not yet invented

let grammar enclose the found air of words

go where the words take you

the cresting wave of meaning

there so long as you ride it out

and create something so fraudulent

it fools even yourself

and in fooling, bogs you down

to the weighty act of typing

over and over and over

for 10,000 hours

this crime against proof

read out your life

and in death

revise

The Right Angle of Solitude

We must soak in ourselves before trying to tame the forces around us. Crouched in some crooked corner hit the right angle of solitude.  Between satiety and the stale ecstasy of exaltation.  A splinter in time.  In the twilight hour of being, the password poems barnacle upon the threshold.  Retreat, retreat to the human fort to loiter freely.  Where off from the antechamber recedes the din of men, where solitude is nameless and the crumbs of language trail off... 

This Voice is Borrowed

This voice is borrowed.  The first murmur of the voice was whispered to me through Douglas Coupland's book, Life After God.  The stories were short, the descriptions sweet, and there were even pictures - naturally I was seduced, and found something meaningful where I had initially sought idle distraction.  It was to be my introduction to the Melancholic.  With each story he told I felt involved more than I had with any book, his characters were wrestling with feelings I harbored beneath the surface of my awareness.  Glibly fashioned in shape of a pocket bible, it became, in its own way, a path to personal revelation.  I didn't know what to do with this awareness, but it percolated irrespective of my ability to contain it.  In the end, the fictional Coupland confesses he needs God and, in that stroke, subverts even the magnanimous identity owed the Melancholic of being the resister of all social mores.  I never thought about God much before reading that book, and in years to come I would read from many soon-to-be heroes of mine, Wittgenstein, Dostoevsky, Dylan, this same resignation to the Almighty.  This voice gives into that hesitation, to fall neither toward nor away entirely.  

Probably too early in my development as a human being let alone as any kind of writing conduit, I fell upon Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.  Maybe it was the right time precisely to let it fully bloom in my skull.  It certainly left an impression.  I was the corrosive rationalist then and bruised metaphysically by all that comes from such over-emphasis.  The Underground Man, as I have said before, is/was me, and his faults were mine, and therefore his lessons were mine.  But it took awhile for that to settle in, I was twenty and I knew everything.  I think at first I admired him, and my writing took a turn for the philosophically perverse.  My first year in University, a t.a. chided me for being the resident rationalist, always ready to uproot a position.  Not able to cope with other people, nor myself.  Still the book held up more than a mirror to me, it got under the skin, particularly in the final chapter, On the Occasion of Wet Snow, it showed me how I must appear to be in the world, without hope of guile to conceal myself.  A nervous tic of a man unable to hold the most basic conversation due to the paralysis of my mind and the raw fibers of feeling it pinched.  I fisted out poetry that marveled over words, decadently without the hindsight of knowing what decadence was.  The voice gave into reason and wrote mostly to know, to know and know and know and know and know and know.  My heart felt the con that Dostoevsky showed me but I couldn't find a way to stop being that man.  

I remember the first time I read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and, specifically, Song of Myself.  I was in my parent's basement, my body weary from long hours working in a factory, still knotted in the chest, and reading it was like feeling every part of me just let go, soften and rejoice - a Whitmanesque word but damn it, rejoice it was!  All at once in the way that only literature can entrap you with, I felt true joy, true happiness, I wanted to live like that poem said to live, I wanted to stop moping and give into the creative spark that I believe lies in all mankind.  The voice found the will to write outside of knowing if only to pleasure in the sound of its own voice.  The choice line: "Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me".   

I returned to Dostoevsky to understand what is to be human, to understand right from wrong in an existential sense.  Also it fueled my voice, his passion for rigmarole, allowing meaning to find its way in the loose bowels of one's train of thought, and one tier higher, as characters interceding in each other's lives without a cosmic message from the almighty writer, to let the meaning be in the telling not the prescription of thought.  My first blog entries spilled this way.

With Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the rigmarole became autobiography, a sincerity that bashes its skull against irony to let something true bleed out.  In this book in particular, there is a noticeable lack of what usually is constituted as 'sophistication' to his writing, he is writing against the grain of the literary.  His sentences run on, but also do what I do, keep replaying the beginning of a sentence to carry the thought beyond the mandates of an idea, but just to see where you can take it - the thought process fossilized, you can look at it from all sides.  Not to say there is no craft to what he does, there is, but he is not afraid to indulge and reveal himself.  The craft does not edit that out but celebrates it.  He is post-post-modern, for where at first there was the polished conceit, then the polished ironic conceit, both playing to a sophisticated audience, Eggers comes along and challenges the very importance of labels one way or the other by making something uncomfortably in-between, jamming their significance, until the only significance is his unvarnished voice.  I feel like I know Eggers from this book, not because he talks about events in his life, but by the way he talks about them.  Perhaps more than any of the other sources of inspiration, I find my voice in Eggers, in this courage to write oneself out.  

Finally, or finally as of this moment in time, the voice draws inspiration from this very medium, Tumblr.  There is something happening here that I find remarkable, an oasis from the world I think I have been looking for since I read Coupland's book so long ago. I never had a community, the melancholic walks alone.  But much like reading Song of Myself I am eternally inspired by fragments of writing I find here, by people I follow or from sources of inspiration they want to share.  Also this notion of micro-blogging, of writing succinctly, something I have admired in literature (three of the four works I mentioned above are hovering around the 100 page range).  I still love the rigmarole and draw energy from it, but I am finding myself more and more trying to edit down to something precise, and even veering into poetry which I haven't tried to do in over a decade.  By being here I am changing, and the next chapter will likely be quite different from what came before.  The wounds have healed, save the existential ones.  By virtue of just how much sun-rise is around me here, it seems inevitable my output would likewise increase.  

This voice is familiar now, I don't need to coddle it or regiment it, there are enough wheels turning of their own revolutions to get me through the second half of my life, and then some. To begin is the hardest, but with momentum it all gets easier.  It was not as straight a line as this post may lead one to believe, nor was there a teleological knowing at any point along the path, but for a myth, this will do.