Cleaning out my bookshelf, I am getting older—more stodgy and set in my ways. The books that I gathered in my youth were diverse. Now, I put certain books in a box to take to the store and sell. Others, I leave on my shelf. With the box packed, I turn back and look at the shelf, leaning my head to one side to read the titles on the spines. The books I have kept seem to belong to a more cohesive theme. Some of the books that I put in the box I never even read. There are so many ideas and so many ways of life. But I have only one mind and one life to live. How much can I contain? Certainly less than everything. I hope the books I’ve kept are the right ones. I want the power to know everything and the truth to know the right things, but I will likely achieve neither. I will only know a small chapter of the great library, but even that is so much more than nothing.
Month: October 2020
Skeptical
Just how a glass fills, containing liquid that would otherwise run all over. Or how things stay in their places when left there, and don’t float away. Basic facts about the physical world seem dubious all of a sudden. Things I have known are rendered onto a blank slate and I realize they don’t make much sense standing on their own. Was it the lemon water I drank this morning? Or the love we made? Or the light coming in the window on one of the last sunny days before winter? I am varying degrees of certain about the world around me. This morning, I am unsure, without being unsettled. I am enjoying the new way that things appear.
Pain is grounding
Standing in front of the toilet, having been on my feet most of the day, I feel a pain in my heels, as they press under the weight of my body into the tile floor. It reminds me of when the yoga teacher says, “Ground down through all four corners of your feet.” Pain puts you into your body. It takes precedent before your thoughts and feelings. Your main focus becomes relieving the pain. It is irritating, worrisome, stressful, and—of course— painful. But without any lasting harm, it can also be meditative, grounding you into the physical world, and connecting you with your body.
Dream travel
I went somewhere in my dreams last night. I couldn’t tell you where exactly. There were many places. At one point, we went to a house deep underwater. It was a very small house because, you know, real estate is very expensive at the bottom of the ocean. At one point, we discovered a passage in a dresser or a chest or some other nook or cranny. I say “we,” but I can’t remember with whom I was. But anyway, we found this passage in this small house at the bottom of the ocean and it led to a whole other place. There were more people there, which was very surprising because we thought we ourselves had made a very daring trip to the bottom of the ocean. How then could there be all these other people here? It did not make sense spatially, either. It is not easy to construct a house on the ocean floor. The house was, in fact, very small. And there were no connections to other places of which we were aware. Where then was all this other space coming from? I met a woman in this other place. I asked her a question and she said something that struck me as very wise. I cannot remember it exactly now. I asked her something alone these lines, “Why are you living at the bottom of the ocean?” She said, “Down here, we are living. Up there, you are …” And it was something else. Something that made me feel like I didn’t belong up there. That I should be living at the bottom of the ocean too.
I have had dreams like this before—specifically ones where you have to cram yourself through a tiny claustrophobic passage to get to a whole other wide open world that you didn’t even know existed. It is very much like Narnia. I wonder if that concept of traveling to another world through a closet was born from a dream. I don’t know what it means. But this morning I feel different. The only thing to which I can compare it is how I feel after I’ve travelled. Like the old world to which I return after is brand new. Everything I knew and felt before is behind me. I have travelled and learned something new and now things are not the same.
Gravely
To be serious, as if compelled by the impending finality of death. All things, viewed in this light—or darkness, rather—can be seen in one of two ways: comedically or tragically. It is the comedian who says, “Oh well,” and laughs. It is the tragic hero who assumes the grave demeanor, under the weight of an important task, and with limited time to achieve it. The tragic hero rebukes the comedian for not taking seriously the state of things. But the comedian knows that the tragic hero will go mad, even before his death over which he so worries, if he does not learn to laugh.
Editing art
It would be possible to subject my writing to scrupulous and excessive editing and critiquing by many different readers. But would this cause my writing to trend towards being better? That’s what we would expect. Like the blueprints for a space rocket. The greater the number of scientists, engineers, and physicists that have reviewed and double-checked the plans for the rocket, the higher its chances of success, right? Well, maybe. Assuming all the reviewers were intelligent and none of them actually made an edit or suggestion that was, in fact, erroneous—then yes, we would expect the rocket ship to get better with more review. But what about a piece of art? Something for which there is no objectively right answer, like there is for math and science. I guess it partly depends on your definition of art, and your standards for “good” art. Take cooking, for example. There seem to be some objective rules of quality. If a dish is burnt or undercooked, then it would break these rules. If a dish is not even edible, it may be difficult to consider it a culinary masterpiece. But once these objective rules are satisfied, we enter into a world of taste. What delights one culinary critic may disgust another. And the disgust of the one cannot be regressed to any of the rules; it is just because of their personal taste. Now, if we turn our attention back to writing. There are certainly some of these objective rules for quality that apply, like the rules of spelling and grammar. But to let too many editors comment on the “heart” of the work based on their personal tastes, and not any objective rules, may cause the piece to become “watered down” and lacking in the originality and individuality that made it good in the first place.
Morning
I like to see the world come to light again, leaving behind its veil of mystery. Opening the fridge in the morning, still in my bare feet and underwear, the light bulb inside turns on automatically, projecting a parallelogram crack of light up onto the ceiling and wall of the dark kitchen. I only wanted a drink of water, but now my mind is taking in the nutritional facts on all the sauce bottles. I close the fridge and sit down at the table to open my laptop. Other than the fact that the hot sauce in the fridge has 35mg of sodium per teaspoon, these are the first words I am reading today, as I type them, in the still dark early morning.
It always restarts
What you’ve done passes into the past. Each peak summoned is at some point soon after followed by the sheer cliff face of another climb that promises another peak, unseeable through the clouds above. No matter how many times you get through, there is no final stage of gotten through, made it, finished. There is only more getting through. Which is where I suppose the eastern stuff comes in. About it not being about the end. It’s about the journey. The journey is the reward—my girlfriend’s friend has a tattoo of this. I’ve tasted this peace before. Not as deeply as a veteran yogi. But I’ve tasted enough to at least know it’s there. But it still seems inhuman. Like an escape more than a solution. Everything we are is designed for the striving. For the satisfying of hunger that only begins to pang again not long after satisfaction. This is how we keep moving forward. Otherwise we might be very sedentary creatures. Completely idle even. Or we might have nobler incentives. Ideals of a higher form than bare physical needs that would drive us on. For now, most of our nobler motives seem to be just the base physical needs dressed up in fancy packaging based on our cultural or societal situation of the time, which really just regresses back to our base needs of safety and belonging.
Profound loss
Like a deep void of nothing. You’re not falling, because that would at least by something. Like being in the middle of blackness in space. It’s impossible to get your bearings. There’s nothing to orient yourself. You’re completely alone. Everything you used to know about life on earth is gone. No part of your body or mind has learned to speak the language of this alien dimension. You begin to sob uncontrollably because what else is there to do. Nobody is around to judge your sobbing. It eventually becomes tiring. And then there is numbness. Nothing but the sickening feeling of not knowing what to do or why. Just the profoundly peculiar sense of knowing nothing about where you are, how you got there, or what you can do about it. At the same time as being severely uncomfortable and wishing it would stop. Not painful. Just nausea. Similar to the spins. Except lying in bed hungover, you at least have the bed beneath your back. This is like the spins, with nothing at all to hold onto.
Simple man
Humans are simple. There, I said it. I’ll wait for the silent chiding. Seriously, go ahead. I’m counting in my head, but I’ll write it too, seeing as these words are our only link … one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. Okay, I hope that was long enough. Now, hear me out. I don’t mean ‘simple’ objectively, if that adverb can even be used to modify a concept as relative as simplicity. The very language itself is complex, so that the second you have used your words to simplify something, then you have made it complex. And therein lies our problem. Humans are simple, but the word ‘human’ is complex. What exactly are we calling a human? And the complexity comes rushing in. So that a man given enough time with himself, will start to call himself by various names, and in doing so, build up his ego into a castle that is impossible for another human to penetrate with understanding, at least not in the same terms of which it was constructed. So that a man, coming to know himself, makes himself less knowable to others. Similar to how a professor, as he delves deeper into the knowledge of his field, limits the population of others who are apt to engage in conversation with him on topics of said field. A man with friends, therefore, is often a simple man, who has developed the habit of thinking more of others, and not so deeply about himself.
The night is my mother
The night is the night. It is not the day. It is dark and away from all that the light shows. It is trite to compare the two, night and day, I realize. I wish, perhaps more profoundly, to convey the quality of escape which the night offers. Though the day may be painful or tiresome or stressful, the night inevitably offers its solace of nothingness. When the day drags on and the evening brings thoughts of morose finality that a tired mind is want to entertain, the vacation of sleep reintroduces a novel and hopeful mindset the next morning. I am straying from what I really want to say. Awake in the middle of the night, I feel safe, protected from the day. The day has become too much lately. Its someness is overwhelming. I need a little less. I have told this to the day, but it never listens. Drowning me out with all the other noise of everyone else being awake. But the night always listens. When everyone else is asleep, I tell her my dreams. I want for the dreams to be real, and inevitably begin to want again for the creative possibility of the day. I bring to the day a thousand dreams, and it smashes them down into one possibility, and I will have to pay dearly just to get that one. So I return to the night defeated, but she encourages me again with a thousand dreams, and I wake in the morning to make real one more.
Stairs to the bottom floor
At 2:30am, unable to sleep, I lie on my back and place my hands on my heart and my stomach. My mind turns inward to examine the space inside of my torso. It seems empty. Especially the space between my lowest rib and my hip on the right side. I search deeper there, as my lower rib extends out into a metal staircase descending into a pentagonal cement shaft. The stairs seem to descend without end. It is dark and I am fearful to go any deeper. I imagine the end, very far below, as nothing more than a cement floor. No door, and nothing else exciting, just a flat and cold cement floor where the staircase ends. And the shaft would start to fill with water, so that I would have to ascend the stairs, or float with the water back to the top, or stay there at the bottom and drown.
Cargo ship alarm
In the dark early foggy morning, an extra large cargo ship passes through the Golden Gate, stretching its waking arms and yawning with its excessively loud horn. These horn blasts may very well be necessary for the sailboat captain fallen asleep on the deck of his much smaller vessel to wake up and get his boat quickly out of the way to avoid being crushed underneath the boisterous breast of the cargo ship. But for myself, asleep in my apartment in the middle of the city, five or so miles inland—not in any immediate danger, or otherwise concerned with the passage of a ten thousand ton cargo ship carrying a thousand multi-colored cargo boxes filled with varied wares from all over the world—these horn blasts are naught but a morning alarm that has sounded too early.