Month: March 2017

I am

I met a man who said, “I am A.”

And I replied, “Ah, my friend! I am also A.”

And he exclaimed, “It is always so nice to meet another A.”

And we talked and talked and slapped each other’s shoulders. Until along came another man.

He said to us, “I am B.”

And I replied to the newcomer, “Ah, my friend! I am also B.”

And the newcomer exclaimed, “It is wonderful to meet another B.”

But now the old A looked at me with scorn and questioned, “I thought you were an A?”

And I replied, “My friend, I am both.”

And now the new B looked with scorn as well and A and B both left me.

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A web of seesaws

Imagine a single seesaw: a narrow beam resting on a pivot at its midpoint; as one end goes up, the other goes down.

Now add another seesaw perpendicular to the first. And keep adding saws the same way you would halve slices of pie, cutting in straight diametric lines from crust to crust.

It should now look as if you drew several dozen straight lines through the center of a circle connecting opposite sides and then erased the outer circle.

Now you have the static image; let’s make it dynamic and set the seesaws in motion. Every saw can rotate 90 degrees on its pivot in one plane to one side or the other. If all the seesaws teeter really fast in both directions you can see a blurred sphere.

Instead of children-sized seats at either end of each beam, imagine opposing ideas: religion and atheism, government and anarchy, wealthy and poor, solitude and community, home and travel, pride and humility, specialization and diversification, order and chaos.

Everyone has their own web of seesaws. Each saw indicates where they stand on an issue, tilted to one side or the other: as one end goes up, the other goes down. No saw is zero-sum; the tilt is continuous.

A person’s web is a snapshot of their beliefs at the time. Some have seesaw webs like flat snowflakes (balance). And others have a bundle of sticks pointing in all directions (imbalance). And still others have snowflakes with just a few tilted sticks.

But our webs are not static. In flux, each saw tips as we learn about the issue. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

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A hopeless game of telephone

On the way down from Mount Le Conte, we stopped to hug a sun-warmed trunk, on the most beautiful day, climbing waterfalls and tiptoeing across fallen trees. This one still stood. With our cheeks against its bark soft as cotton, four arms stretched round its belly, we smelled its sap.

“Can you feel that?” I asked.

He smiled. A man of energy: the spiritual, not religious type. He could feel it—not what I felt, but something of his own.

“And then it dawned on him,” writes Camus, “that he and the man with him weren’t talking about the same thing.”

Because my tree isn’t his tree. Because her love isn’t his love, be it that they may love each other. And your sadness isn’t her sadness, because the other sees a different shade of purple than the purple you see. Nobody knows what you mean when you say it’s beautiful.

First, our experience is different: only I feel my feels; only you think your thoughts. Then our language is different: the same words we all speak don’t mean the same thing to two of us.

“The image he had tried to impart,” Camus continues, “had been slowly shaped and proved in the fires of passion and regret—this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, who pictured a conventional emotion, a grief that is traded on the market-place, mass-produced.”

The one-of-a-kind universe in your mind is only yours: to paint your complex world into one they could see, you might try to learn their color language and the connotations of their shapes, then make two translations, both impossible: first, from your own mind to the canvas, then from canvas to their mind. Like a hopeless game of telephone.

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The Loop

And my connection to the world returns. Bradford says we draw energy up through our feet. A joy from connection: tethered and latched onto nature and others. To feel the flow of give and receive.

Rand’s isolationist selfishness creates a circular loop entirely within myself.

That loop is a very healthy thing if some parts of it are in you and some are out: love, knowledge, strength, energy all flow into you and back out to the universe. In the healthiest relationships, whatever is passed along is improved by each node on the loop so that with each complete circle the energy is improved and improved.

Closed within myself, if one node trends in a bad direction, and then the next node, and all of a sudden it is hard for any one node to return the loop to a higher level.

Outside of me, however, are many strong nodes to replenish myself, that allow me to catch my breath to improve my own nodes and contribute again to the improving loop between myself, others and nature.

Just now, music and a smile outside the elevator—two higher outsides nodes, and all of a sudden my desire to write returns so that I might contribute positively again to the loop.

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Library 13th Floor

On the 13th floor of the library there are four corners, each with a desk. I set my bag and coat in the southeast corner and leave them there to walk the shelves. Until I become lost.

I gather my bearings and walk toward what I believe to be the southeast corner, only to find someone already sitting there. My first conclusion is not that I had by accident come upon the northwest corner, but that I, my physical self, had never actually left the southeast corner, and now I, the wandering soul, am happening upon myself from the outside.

But in fact, as I approached, this man’s body was heavier than mine and he wore glasses. So I said, that is not I. But then again, I considered it very well could be I, who instead of maintaining a thin frame and good eyesight had grown thick and come to need glasses, and I thought for a moment that my wandering soul might inhabit this body just as it might find the true southeast corner and re-inhabit the body from whence I came.

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Crooked Jaw

We stand inside a stump’s stomach and meditate. My color wispy white, like cloud tails that mustache the mountain faces.

Boots on a forward tilt crushing wet redwood. She says, between deep breaths, “I’m not feeling … anything … but my biology.” Woken just an hour ago from our green symbiote moss mattress. We dance across a fallen trunk bridged atop the river.

The forest doesn’t apologize for its fallen trees; nature isn’t orderly. I don’t apologize for my chipped teeth.

Even amid tall trees and wide rivers, I look at my feet. Retreat into myself, a perceiving thing, and a thing to be perceived, without sense of which is which—other than some vague memory of a rational animal that emerged from the woods, until I now re-entered.

In the wooded world, I roll in my present fingers a perfect stone for the game we played on the lakefront yesternoon. Take aim at a tree down the mountainside. And release it. Ahead the group has left me; I run to catch up.

Longer than the zig-zags rise, we come upon two others: one kneeling, holding his face, and the other standing.

I ask the standing what happened; she hands me a stone perfect for the game that we played on the lakefront yesternoon, “This came down through the trees.”

The kneeling looks up; I look back into my own eyes and do my best to smile with my jaw hanging from its hinge on one side, a smooth string of blood streaming through the ghost teeth. I smile back to myself, showing me my own crooked jaw, and hook a finger in my cheek to show the scar between my top and bottom molars.

At once, my companion and I become ourselves.

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A typo in Genesis

And you see I don’t see, not because I tell you so but because we don’t fisticuff tonight.

What is it then to fall so far if only far so fell?

I really tried to dot my i’s and cross my t’s.

‘Earth’ is art hugged by an ‘eh.’

There’s a typo in Genesis.

When God made the world he did not say ‘very good.’ He said ‘eh.’

Man is just man. Human is love.

For me, art is feeling. Not in the creator alone or the onlooker alone, but together between the two, and from this comes a third. Like the Trinity, or the family. Not mine or yours, but ours. Your worldview perceiving my worldview and creating a third. I find meaning in that third creation. Which is why I suppose God said ‘eh’ when he first created the world. But surely he later said it was ‘very good’ when he entered into love with us, and thus the third creation, which could only follow from man’s second.

For her, art is a physical expression of all the experiences that have shaped her identity.

For me, art is experiencing Her.

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Interdependent (or, Art and Love; orr, Us)

Rand says, you must first say the ‘I’ before ‘I love you.’

There must be two ones, ‘fore two become one.

…

In the morning, she peels an orange. And separates me a slice.

It has been a few months since I was last alone. I am feeling better.

Agreeable bedfellows: fruit and morning, I think behind my eyes closed tight against the light.

“How’d you sleep?”

“I didn’t,” she breathes through a mouthful of orange.

I push myself up on my elbows.

“Why not?” I ask concerned.

“You were occupying the dream space,” she smiles sheepishly, pretending to be human.

“I was what?”

She peels an orange, tells me she shares dreams with her bedfellows.

Last summer oranges were only wet.

…

I found myself “out there”—in others, in nature. It is in me actually it seems, but doors within me to which only outside things hold the keys.

…

“What on earth are you doing out here in the cold without your coat?”

Shivering, cupping her coffee, she looks up out of a trance and smiles.

“I’m writing,” she says simply.

“What,” I begin to stutter an objection.

She smiles at my misunderstanding and raises her index finger to tap twice her temple.

“Oh,” I whisper.

I was in a holy place.

So I took off my coat and sat next to her.

…

There must be at least one on either side. One cannot be dependent on nothing.

Dependent on oneself at least—but I learned this was not enough. Happy at least those years of self-reflection were not a waste.

I searched for meaning and rightness but the truth is I feel alive when I’m with you and if we’re godless then I care much more to be with you than to be right. And if you don’t hear my logic I’ll learn to speak music.

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Independent (or, Philosophy; orr, I)

Sartre says, man first exists, encounters himself, then surges up. But he leaves out intermediaries. First man exists, yes—but in what sense? Then he encounters them, not yet himself—necessary; we would die very young without them.

The true test is a secondary non-existence, to walk into the woods, physically a grown man, but nothing in any other sense, and say to Her, “Mother Earth, am I you, or am I?”

Only thereafter can he surge up and define himself.

…

I took religion’s truth condition to philosophy, still ignorant of art—the true untruth.

I read Thoreau and thought I could make myself. I tried to scrub my nurture, and get at a raw starting point for rational existence.

…

I lost my mind in New York.

My hands gripped either side of the sink. I looked in the mirror over his shoulder at me.

6 a.m. on the subway. My wristwatch tapping on the rail.

Lunch break, in the windowed ground floor of skyscrapers, when the sun catches it just right I can see my Form morph into its potentials.

…

Blades of grass kept me alive that summer.

True meta is particular. A whole universe in an Adam’s apple. Size matters, relatively.

I thumb an almond. They say you can’t know even a fruit fly. The skin peels from its body, sticks to my teeth, and I feel what I don’t know. It becomes me and knowing matters less.

I learned it from the jabber worldly and the losiphizers who couldn’t tell me why.

Because it’s muddle mush: why use their language if we don’t follow their rules? How far beyond the golos before sapoth too can’t hear me?

Always search for meaning but sometimes neaming isn’t what we need, sometimes the call to our deeper selves uses sounds uncombined into dictionary words.

Then I discovered art.

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Dependent (or, Religion; orr, They)

A joke: two theologians walk into a bar …

One says, “God does this.”

The other says in reply, “He certainly does.”

…

I remember when I told my mother no.

Do you make me or do I make you? I asked Her.

She told me to put my nose in the corner.

So I asked my priest; he told me to ask God.

“I already asked Him,” I said.

“Then wait and listen.”

So I listened.

I remember when they taught us to pray.

“God speaks to you,” said one teacher.

“He certainly does,” said the other.

So very quietly I waited and listened. I concentrated on the silence and waited patiently for Him to speak. Until finally, I heard the voice! Alleluia, I heard the voice. Through tears of joy I said, “It’s so great to meet you maker of worlds. I have so many questions.” And I asked, and He answered. All day and night I asked for weeks and He answered, until I had no more questions except one.

I asked, “Who are you?”

It was silent.

I asked again, “Who am I?”

“You are.”

“I am?”

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A British penman

Your writing is too abstract, said every newspaper.

Too philosophical, too sensational, too emotional. Just too.

I argue with a British penman about the difference between a journalist and a writer.

“You must be more relatable,” he echoes the newspapers.

“Why?” I respond coldly to his commonness.

“To be read, of course.”

“I don’t want just to be read.”

He pauses. I take the opportunity to rant:

“Don’t you see? A writer can’t be of the world because they read about that world everyday just by living in it. We have to create different worlds. We can’t think the way our readers do. What’s the point in their reading from their own perspective? Memory at best, no?”

He looks up at me through his bushy eyebrows.

“You’re going to die alone, you know?”

“I know.”

He was a tourist.

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Ink

His name was Ink. He took a job thinking he could melt into the mold. At least until his other energies subsided. Two years later, he felt them still. Curious, he stood on his windowsill and leapt to reverse trapeze a telephone line. The world chewed up the mold and welcomed back his energies.

Posted on by Cole