I haven’t written much lately because I’ve been so sedated and satisfied with the city. Funny, that even satisfaction becomes dissatisfying. I can’t write without a reason to put my pen to the paper. And when my hands and eyes and heart and mind are so preoccupied with what brings me joy, I think to myself I could live on like this and die and never write again. But then I wake up on Sunday morning with blank pages and not even memories of the last couple days. I am dissatisfied and so completes the circle; I pick up my pen and begin to write again.
Month: April 2018
San Francisco
I moved to San Francisco to collect stories, and in doing so, became my characters.
Desire
There are two types of qualities in others that I desire: ones which I want for myself, and ones which I only admire. I befriend those who have the former, and copy their traits. I court those who have the latter, and love them apart from myself.
Chocolates
I sat on the couch and held my drink with one hand and sketched with the other. She laid on the bed with her head hanging over the side and her hair almost touching the floor. The shades were open but the sun had almost entirely gone down behind the downtown skyline. Music played. It was barely lighted in the room. We were high from the chocolates we ate an hour before.
Honeymooner
I live a life of novelty. I cannot rest. Anything good I have is soon gone, by my own doing. I am a honeymooner. I eventually push away what doesn’t have the quality I desire most of all: being for the first time.
Agility
It’s the changes in direction that are hard. To go off unfettered in one direction is easy. To wake up after a night of heavy drinking and read and return to health and sobriety is hard.
Eschatology
In the absence of eschatology, a lifetime is a mere matter of personal preference as far as how we spend our time. Meditation and prayer, hedonism and asceticism, vice and virtue—all have consequences for the lives we live. But none of these are infinite. The real deciding factors would be the infinite consequences; about these, however, we know very little.
Writer
A writer is what is, because language is what is, as we perceive and communicate it.
A writer is the character in his own story, as he lives and sees other live. He is the dreamer in his own poetry, as his subconscious mind wanders. He is the lover in his own romance, as his heart feels. He is the trees and the river in his own landscape, as his eyes see. He is the prophet of his own scripture, foreseeing as his soul receives.
I am a writer because of my god complex. I could never decide on any one thing to be, rebelling against my spatiotemporal conditioning in this particularity; this lifetime. I only ever wanted to be everything at all times. So I am a writer, and thus, here and everywhere, I have written.
Blissful ignorance
I got to a point where what I already knew was enough and I wanted to leave what was left about which to still be curious.
Nirodh
I did as I was instructed from what I read: once I had achieved one-pointedness, I turned my concentration onto my own mind and said to myself, “I will watch as the mind watches whatever it will.” And so my mind first watched my heartbeat. It listened to my heartbeat from the inside.
And this so pleasantly surprised me, just to watch my own mind watching my own heartbeat and nothing else, that I accidentally stopped breathing. and I would have started breathing again if I did not notice that, as I watched my mind listen to it, my heartbeat slowed, and the intervals between each beat lengthened. aAnd I held my breath for longer and longer and remembered what I had read in my book about nirodh, the state that may come after nirvana when many functions of the physical body cease. I wondered if i could go on without breathing and not die.
So I held my breath, and the intervals grew longer and longer between breaths. Until I waited for the next beat but there was none. I should have wondered if the interval between beats had just grown exponentially long, but I did not consider it at the time. At the time it was clear that my heart had stopped. And so I wondered if i had just killed myself by watching my mind listen to my heart. But I did not want this thought to interrupt my meditation as I was starting to see flashes of light and visions. Until I breathed again. And at first, my heart did not resume beating. And with my eyes closed, again I thought I might have died. But then, softly, my heart began to beat again.
Dream poems
Dreams are conceptualized in the same language with which we name our waking hours: seen, heard, felt, just barely remembered upon waking. My dreams are written, so that I wake up in the middle of the night with a full poem that arranged itself with all the words from my waking hours.
Lover
With a lover, I go farther in walks of life I would not tread alone: up at night beyond exhaustion; out in the city dancing styles I don’t know; in conversation for longer than I spend thinking to myself; and, of course, deeper in love—with someone other than myself.
The time is now
The time is now. Which has me simultaneously excited as ever and scared as hell. Our minds and bodies are fully developed. We have money, in a city with brilliant and beautiful people. We have the resources and time to go after it. This is the peak of life right now. I’m just so worried about not doing enough, and missing our chance.
Fool’s game
I am an ultimate nihilist about anything social when I realize that none of it is necessarily true; for example, I could write a great novel, but if it is not popular, it will not be read, let alone sell, and will be forgotten. Or anything that is human is merely so because humans are part of nature and nature is the way it is regardless if there is any reason or truth to it.
We act according to ourselves but we can’t answer thoroughly the question of what we are, and even less thoroughly the question of why we are, so that when a man is ever asked, “Why did you do that?” He can merely say that it seemed to be the thing to do, given what seems to be, but he cannot make any logical statements about whether his action was right or truthful—and that, makes me a nihilist.
For what are we acting? Except for a blind trust that what seems to be, according to which we act, is somehow intelligently designed. In most ways, this is the only bet we have. Like we are sat down at the gambling table with a stack of chips and the chips are no good for playing anywhere else; not to mention, we don’t know of any other tables. So we sit and gamble our best until our chips run out or we have all the chips at the table; the game ends either way. And if we happen to end with all the chips, we have only a fool’s hope that having all the chips was the way to win, when having no chips at all may have just as well been the object of the game.
So I toss my chips for amusement and watch them bounce and dance off the table and try to make pleasant conversation with my table mates in the meantime, maybe even have a cigarette and give a kiss to the woman that plays to my left.
The game seems to have a design—rules, players, a dealer, and an objective. But if I don’t know what the chips spend for, I’m just as interested in the leather and felt of the table, the dress of my table mates, and other things that seem to interest me for no reason other than they do. And if not for these amusements I might get bored with no option for another table or different game; only the option of no game at all, or to get up from my chair and walk over in the direction of the dark and out of the light from the one light bulb that hangs above the table, connected to a power source above that I cannot see.
Two
I wonder about when to stay and when to go when to reap and when to sew. When to laugh up a daffodil and when to cry down an ocean sky. For me it seems that all is two save what is one save me and you.
Sonoma
On a wooded deck by the pool, I hold a glass of chilled rosé and Uri rolls a spliff. I stand up and take my glass to walk around the pool and step off the deck down onto the grass that has overgrown the vineyard.
The grapes were infected by a germ the past year, but it is the middle of March in Sonoma and the other vineyards too are barren at this time of year, leaving behind short tree trunks with their top branches sawed off at the bases where they curl around the wires and would otherwise grow upward and bear grapes, but instead are cut short and look like gnarled menorahs—treacherous, if not for the beauty that surrounded the off-season trees on all sides. Nothing but shades of green on all sides, freckled with all colors of various flowers. The rows of another vineyard drawn into the hillside across the gravel road by which we had arrived.
My eyes taking in all this, with my fingers holding onto the same wires which the grape tree fingers would hold in season and had already held in seasons before. I thought to myself, ah, what a life of a grape tree in Sonoma.
And I kept holding onto the wire and looking upon the hillside across the road until some time had passed and I feared my toes might take root and my hairs grow into vines along the wires so I turned to step back onto the deck and resume conversation with Uri.
He had finished with the spliff. He handed it to me already burning. I pressed it in between my lips and inhaled deeply, looking back at where I stood in the vineyard. I held the smoke in my chest and wanted to choke; I was not usually keen to add tobacco into my joints, precisely to avoid the burn that I now felt in my lungs. But Uri preferred them this way and I liked Uri more than I didn’t like tobacco. I pursed my lips around the spliff and inhaled once more, then handed it back to Uri and exhaled deeply into the day and the hillside and closing my eyes to memorize it.