Monday, May 16, 2011

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).