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.