Alone, Around.

Despite how much better things might be with people around, I tend to like to walk alone. I've slowly learned over the years that being alone too much when you'd still like to be a part of society isn't very healthy. Yet I am constantly seeking the minimal time I have to spend with other living people and the optimal time I can spend alone, without a thought of anything to do with people or society at all. Dead people don't count, especially statues. I like to sit and watch sun-rises and leaves fall from trees, or birds hovering around in patterns. I like to watch light change the look and expression on statues. I like the unnecessity of language in order to comprehend these things viscerally. The rhythm of a day, the rhythm of the surrounding life against inorganic rotations. You cannot say these things out loud. Their langauge is not a language of signs and symbols, of metaphors or abbreviations, or meanings. It is not taken out of life, but it is life, it is all of it. I watch the brown leaves fall of the branches of trees and float down. I long to join them.

Ethnic pride and ethic

If I weren’t blessed and cursed with this immigrant ethic and spirit of my grandfather, I could’ve been content to be only an artist, in love with beauty. My grandfather, especially towards the end, kept talking about doing something great, something big, and that will always be on my guilty conscience. I live now in the house he built. I repair the parts that are worn and old, and replace them with the work I do. There is a calming sense of continuation when I replace something, like the old mattresses, the dust caked dishes, light switches, the burnt out light-bulbs. Here lies the remains of my ancestor, which I can have no doubt I am truly a descendant. Here are the pictures of my family, in their proudest moments, their accomplishments in a line right above my eye level as I type, to know from which the life that I've been able to lead were built from these moments when I didn't even exist yet.

If I don’t turn to face the actual condition of things and match it, not with a critical eye and writing analysis, but with action, then I feel as if somehow I am betraying this tradition. Therefore these actions must include politics, which in essence is about power, and who gets to wield it. We no longer exist in a world where one could simply escape into some land, find isolation, and make our own way. The world will come knocking, with a gun at some point, and I want to able to return fire, match them bullet for bullet (no I will not be neither martyr nor saint, of any sort), and tell them to get off my property, rather than be a helpless serf, kowtowing to some ignoble politician, or a supercilious, last-namer. I hear the hounds’ echoes with every step I take, demanding, money, time, my youth, my creations, all for them, to keep us all citizens trapped here in our neo-feudal society under their little finger. This rage inside me of having to bend the knee to these idiots keeps me here, keep me running up against the ropes, instead of falling back into an evasive posture. The world itself might not need me, but I need to make the world.

It is the same feeling that bubbles in me when I see a hard-working Chinese man or woman sacrificing for their intended future. It is a concrete-abstract lesson taught to the inheritors. While most children have their imaginary parents telling them when they are doing wrong, imagine having a great line of ancestors from way way back before anyone can even remember looking at you disapprovingly as well. The children that stay bent over their multiplication tables and school work instead of wandering drunk at parties. They're all whispering to me that I'm not doing enough. And perhaps I'm not. So for that I'm hoping to make amends.

I am teaching a fellow college graduate who spends most of his days reading now. He reads until he collapses, and has a schedule for different subjects to read listed every day. His reason: He's never knew how to read before, until the last year of college, and now he's trying to get back all that time for all the things he should have learned. 

There's something about that plain desire and ethic that I just love.

 

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The more I am around them, these people following the ethnic script the more I am tugged back into something dormant but very much alive within myself. Defiant eyes challenging teachers, outsiders beware, and I am ready to match them. Almost treasonous eyes, that you don't expect from kids. That look could enlist hatred, but I understand what is behind it; the understanding of the world, and the order. All those years it took to deprogram myself away from order. I just hope the pressure goes against awareness as well, so that they don't wind up as automatons, but the leaders they want to be.

The Siren Song of Sleep

There are certain things which must be actively resisted. Then there are many situations which lie right outside of our control which one can do nothing about which are much better left out of active consciousness. The troubling thing, however, are the things which lie right beyond our reach. They are seductive, making themselves known, and then moving away at an alternating pace. They seem to be promising that if only you’d try a bit more, push harder, then you’ll reach into the zone and possess it. These siren goals are all the more insinuatingly devastating because their promises are true. I’ll reach the point of exhaustion and cross into the realm of exuberance, merging with the flow with the creative muse. What I should I have known: Siren songs kill dreamers; Muses are fickle, that is their nature. So you reach the exalted state, only to peak early and come crashing back down amidst the ruins of your tired body. The sickness should’ve been a warning. The pain and tiredness should’ve been a cloud on the horizon. Instead you lay there shattered, the feathers of Daedalus’ wings blanketing your face, as you watch the sun-streak behind Apollo’s chariot carrying your use to burn in the light of day. Morning: 5 A.M. You physically can’t push yourself off the thin mattress on the cold tiles. Your head feels like it’s about to collapse back into the shards of a nightmare of monotonously angry agony. Your legs and fingers are numb. Exhaustion is screwing with your homeostasis; you don’t know if you’re in fever or just too cold. It’s all just numbness, and heaviness, and frustration all rolled into one. The flash of that garnish sun, that whimsical beauty that stabbed you through the back of the eye, is still haunting you. But you know you’re not going to get it. And you know you’re got to get up, get strong black coffee, smoke a cigarette and get to work. What these eyes see here wide-awake, is just another dream, and dreaming wide-awake you’re going to make it reality.

Running

Real seduction takes time. In our age of instanteously gratified impulses, turbulances are an inconvience, when in fact, life should be tough. The real seduction is getting through that toughness to the real sweet moments which comes as the natural reward of struggle, of Will. Will is seductive when it becomes Sublime. Like a long distance run, when the High kicks in, and the running becomes natural, becomes a very part of experience, I feel a part of myself reach out to meet it and extend. Then, anything is possible. It is no longer putting one foot in front of the other, but the very flow of life to be running, the sensations of activity and the limits which were hypothetical things to work around become a game as it approaches nearer and nearer. Can I hold on just a little bit longer? Can I keep on going without the need to take a break to some disturbance or the other? The whole of focus and concentration become like an opponent in a fair game, who would smile at you if you managed to beat him.

The Garden of Literature

From the Pages of My Diary...

I won't leave, unless you wish it of me. I am on a journey of discovery right now, a journey deep into my own psyche, a journey I've made countless times before, but relying upon others for guidiance I wound up upon their forks, their fixations and repressions, but not my own. The space of the collective human imagination is vast, and despite that good feeling of a resonance off a familiar sign post by the great men and women who have come before, my spirit is finally ready now to venture forth into virgin territory and with my own eyes witness the passing of the veils which blind us from what we ought to see, ought to know--our selves as we exist in this unique universe, and nature and beauty as we might never concieve it if one doesn't trust enough that intrinsic capacity inside of us to Will it so. So let it be.

In that blue, which only a few may enter is where we meet. The secret garden of literature is not open to everyone, and those that do pay a price: to be consistently untimely (in the sense of, Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations) with the temporary, contemporary society of the age. This is both a curse, and a blessing. For like Nicolo Machevilli or Petarch, one may call upon the giants of history to stand on their shoulders whence one own might not contain enough strenght to bear the pressure of oppression, which exists in every age, especially upon children and the young. We can feed on ichor, and glory, as much as milk and honey.  

And of that I am now in Need. For this seeking has left me again, in front of that high door which leads into Camus's Absurdity; Sin without God, a life of shifting meanings and no solid ground, no clear enemy, to lay my Self against. Like the psychological breakdown of a prisoner in solitary confinement, in that dark place, entombed in the prision of a mortal shell, the lies one tells oneself that constitute consciousness begin to breakdown, and the Real-(as Lacan defines it; that which Returns, always)-ality of the Subconscious asserts itself to the horror of our preconcieved notions. Either they break, or I break. 


Of Sermons and Songs; to lift the spirt. 

A True Nomad

Achieving control from inside.

   It has become apparent to me that these distractions from the ability to concentrate brought about my the electronic age were in my way. They provide such ability to move fast from one mental space onto another mental space, like slipping between the cracks, a wonder to be sure, but ultimately the wrong medicine for needing to be rooted to the spot. Rooted within one, and satisfied and grateful for the very fact of existence. I am always seeking to better myself with learning, the allure of the knowledge inside of a book, inside of the wealth of information available with a few touches of my finger tips, a few clicks off a couple of links. What wonders will I find? Yet that is not the right attitude to writing, to wanting to remain, focused here upon a singular task, a singular character, a singular plot. With the quantity of information of varying quality available, one tends to diminish the need for quality within oneself. Quality within oneself requires massive investment of time, for only this mind, this one singular consciousness with all its limitations need to move beyond it, to cut at the roots of whatever is holding one back.

   I recognize a flaw in my character. Before I left the isolation of my provincial college, I had done research into the practices of Shamanism. Apart from an ongoing intellectual interest in the altered state, and the dimensions of consciousness, I had been seeking a pragmatic use of the techniques of Ecstasy to achieve a solidifying unity within the vacuum created by my inability to worship or rely upon a deity for the meaning of life, of existence. I had thought that by becoming filled with this element, as I see it now, which I felt from inside an intellectual quest, I could somehow achieving a purpose without Reason: a believe only in the journey itself, to no destination. For a while, in the rewiring of my Being, my purpose to achieve this aim I found a spirit to which I could turn, eschewing the usual drugs of drink, cigarettes, the munia of distractions to which a restless idle mind turns to escape the gnawing sense of lack, the Absurdity of a rationaless universe against my need for Reason. Now over a year in pursuit of the journey itself, I have fallen again into idle distraction. A journey without destination grows wearisome, as the sights, though of no repeat, begs of the question of the journey itself. Why not linger here or there? Why move again? For what purpose? The questions return, with a renewed sense of hopeless to ever escape the need to answer them. Wandering around, feeding wayward curiosity has left me feeling superficial. I feel further away from my aim then before. And I become more vulnerable to distraction than ever, as idleness slowly crept in.

    Only in a complete disengagement from my life did I start to retrace these steps I stumbled through, holding the Ideal (again) of the journey aloft as my only compass.

   A true nomad is not a wandering man without a home: He has settled himself as his home. The journey without and within reflect the change of the world. One does not make a home on the road, but becomes at home on the road. Thus, wherever the journey, it is as a center moving towards the periphery, not as a moving away from center towards the edges of the Mandala.

   I have been idealizing the malcontent, the shifting restlessness of youth for so long. Now I hope to make peace with this life. For I see now the reflection; why certain moments in traveling, or driving long into the a lonely night on my moped towards a distant destination feels so right—I have become one with moving, with movement. I have settled into the moment, into myself in the moment of flight. This illusive feeling of belonging to a place while in transit, has been the unity of a return into the self-flow of This (I can find no other word to express it).