Learning to See, new collage by Tait McKenzie"Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time." - Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Showing posts with label Rilke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rilke. Show all posts
12.20.2009
Learning to See
Learning to See, new collage by Tait McKenzie"Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time." - Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
9.16.2009
Faith and the Pattern
Over the past year I have been going through an extreme crisis of faith. Due to a number of physical, emotional, and psychic challenges I found myself last winter in a state of disillusionment, that everything I had previously held to be good, desirable, possible, and expected in the world may not have been the case at all, a state close to feeling jaded, except that the crisis is precisely in trying to find some reason to carry on, to still believe: in love, the power of the human spirit, self-growth, god, some point to life as we know it, or at least a deeper understanding. But the closer I looked at any of these things the further they seemed to recede, from view, from understanding, so I was left wondering if they really existed. In centuries of the human quest for the truth and goodness we are still no closer to truth it seems, and people can be as ignorant, violent, and uncaring as they always have been, if not more so, which is rather disheartening to someone who feels they have spent their life searching for and hoping to bring these positive qualities into being. More recently I have summed up my quandary in asking, what is the point of self-growth, of struggling to improve how one is in the world, when the work is hard and there seems to be no real “reward” no incentive from society to do so (though that I take this as a valid question shows at least some will towards growing). How can I spend roughly the same amount of time writing on my novel as watching a TV show, and find the same amount of satisfaction in both? And sometimes more in the casual, indulgent activities, because they are easier? This is baffling to me. I believe that everything is real, even those things we can only imagine, but nevertheless there seems to be a primacy to the everyday, to those things, which when we pick ourselves off the floor or put down our books we still have to deal with, of which we can sigh and say, well maybe this is it. But is it? Ultimately everything is real, but some things are more real than others. Worrying about money or physical pain unfortunately feel to be some of the most real there is.
The problem, I know, is one of perspective. To say, this is it, is to presuppose that we know everything there is to know about life, enough to cast some judgment on it, when really we can know nothing with any such certainty. I am aware that the mystery of the Universe is far deeper than we can fathom. Not even the scientific method can say what is really true, either point at a position or velocity of a particle but not both, or how and why they are entangled and add up to all this. Any other human effort to value one mode of the world over another is based on subjective claims, of perception, of intuition, of faith. On some level even an atheist claims, I believe God doesn’t exist, because it is a statement that can’t be proven one way or another. For centuries scientists laughed at the notion of atoms, of forces and fields, because they couldn’t be seen, only to find that maybe they really are there, and though still unseen may be more real than this, but just as inexplicable and mystic as when the ancient Greeks first made up the story. How can I know this is just it, when my intuitions, the evidence my senses have gathered over a lifetime of searching, have suggested otherwise, if but to say, maybe it’s too hard to keep looking, no one else is really looking, not everywhere at once, and the whole edifice of Western knowledge is constructed on the basis of looking only at the visible and provable, and when confronted with a reality greater than that which can be known, it crumbles, is shown to be a charade based on the misapplication of ancient dialectical devices and assumptions: that dialectics can really tell us anything about anything, for when you point at or name something it always creates the thing it is not, and the thing neither of those are, ad nauseum, the way a proton pulled from an atomic nucleus mysteriously creates another proton in its place. This is beautiful and mysterious, but then you still have to go to work, or patch up an argument with your beloved. And there is no place to escape from that reality to, no one to turn to in our need outside this predicament. No matter what your perspective is on the world/Universe, or what you believe is our place and purpose in it, we are still within that system, like an existential Goedel’s Theorem, constrained by our physical senses and abilities and ways of knowing, and still have to find some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some small joy, and maybe the courage to choose to act as decent human beings, for ourselves and others, if we have any strength and calmness left over.
But how, and why? Because most days I feel full of rage, time slipping through the eye of it and feeling there is something more I could be doing that is the thing I really am meant to be doing, except I only have a vague, limited notion of what that is and no one has stepped down from on high to let me in on the secret plan for the Universe and my role in it. I feel a lot like the character John Locke from the show Lost, who, unlike the more reason-based characters trying to escape from the Island,, has an intuitive faith that he can and is meant to solve the labyrinthine puzzle and mystery that surrounds the place, following his gut, connecting scraps of information, seeking ever deeper in the mystery, and yet still plagued by doubts, hoping someone will tell him where to look next, constrained like the original philosopher Locke to the empiricism of believing what he can see, yet unable to explain that he has seen things beyond what most people would ever believe could be real. I relate to this and wonder how many others can. I think of my neighbor, watching sports on his big-screened TV, driving his motorcycle noisily up and down our street. He seems totally fulfilled in this, as far as I can see. There is not a question or even a need for a question of is this it.
The Presocratics (who I am studying in a class on the historical roots of science in mythology), were the first to systematically ask the questions, what is really real, can and do things change, can and what do we know? These ontological and epistemological questions are the foundation of any philosophy or metaphysics, and without before realizing that, they have also been my pivotal questions (along with that bugaboo, are we free/active agents). In answer to what is really real, they posit everything from water, to air, to numbers as the foundational substance of reality, or there is Anaximander, who believed it was the Apeiron, the unlimited storehouse of potential qualities of all things as the one underlying substance. My teacher, a younger grad student, laughed, this all seems absurd or primitive in light of our current scientific conceptions of reality, and the class all nodded. Except for me it doesn’t. For me the idea of some fount, of imagination or possibility, seems more intuitively true than the random motion of subatomic particles. In fact, it is an idea recorded in a number of different spiritual traditions: the Theosophic Akashic Records, the Sufi Scriptorum, the Hebraic Book of Life, even the Platonic Forms as an underlying reality. Is this really so absurd then, or are they all wrong? And more confounding, it is something that I have experienced, with my own senses (admittedly under a mystical trance state), but without knowing of it beforehand or expecting anything of the sort. But how could I explain this in class, in the face of the entire academic apparatus that is not about my experiences but recorded “facts?” These are two entirely different views of reality, like the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, both of which are mistaken for Truth, when they can never be anything more than descriptions, stories, metaphors for processes we can never really know anything about. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” (reading in my class on Narrative and Technlogy), does a good job of framing this problem, n the context of a metaphysical detective story: we can either romantically-intuitively appreciate the surface aesthetic of things, or logically seek out the structures beneath them. But not both, though that is exactly what it seems we must do. That ability and desire however were lost centuries ago, when Aristotle argued down the Sophists in the forum, paving the way for Dialectical Materialism. And the world has been a cold calculating place since, lit by moments of decadence and revelry, but with no real new understanding or wisdom, meaning or faith to guide us out of this spiritual morass.
To what can we turn then, if not to our own experiences and the way we choose to pick them up in our daily lives (this division between events and our intentions or them being my definitions of fate and destiny). Are we just trapped on this island in space or do we choose to explore what being here could mean? When the stars that guided the ancients (both in sea travel and in mythic timekeeping) now begin to fade, there are still the stars in our hearts, which is the meaning of that word desire. As Crowley said, each and every one of us is a star. For most of my life I have been a proponent of a magical worldview, most clearly as spelled out in Bill Whitcomb’s Axioms, the first three of which are that reality is created from our worldviews that can be changed, that we reaffirm or change our worldviews through attention, and that seemingly disconnected events can strike us as being intricately connected, what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, but I call constellations of meaning, because meaning does not exist in events but in our interpretation of the relationships between them in relation to the patterns of our worldviews. Though I have actively sought out such constellations of meaning, in the last several years they have grown few and far between, a feeling I keep expressing as that always before the pattern of meanings suggested where to look next, except recently they haven’t, and everywhere has felt like a dead end, not at all that personal Eureka moment I recall first feeling reading James Joyce’s description of that Eureka moment in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and I’ve chased after ever since. Perhaps I have stopped looking in as active or connected a manner. Or perhaps, as I fear, that though I’ve looked and connected, the net of my looking wasn’t wide enough, and the pattern or destiny I found meaningful for myself in following certain dreams and ideas is too small, is not interrelated to Reality as a whole, as was the case with the Apeiron in class. Am I crazy for having experienced something no one else has, or are they for not even considering that such things could be? So that I lost faith with any of it being meaningful. And lastly, I have been afraid, for to connect our own meanings to any larger collective meaning takes work, and forces us to confront ourselves in wholly new ways, and precisely where our old maps no longer fit the territory of actual existence.
I have come to recognize recently that my novel, and indeed my task as a creative being, is an attempt to create such interconnected maps of our experience of Reality, a daunting and seemingly impossible task (though less impossible due to our current information technologies), yet one I am driven to through whatever genetic or spiritual reasons. To this end I have to start experiencing again the world, the larger world, as synchronistically connected, however those mechanisms work, but from scratch. Because if my patterns before are what I expected to find, but clearly didn’t, then I have to forgo faith in my expectations and recreate a new pattern from nothing, from everything, but not with the certainty in thinking that Descates had in his doubting of all. And in this letting go was confronted yesterday with a number of synchronicities if not answering than at least pointing to ways out of my current crisis. I wrote a letter to my beloved discussing love in terms of encouraging another’s and our own self-growth, an idea from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” and immediately after in my Wisdom class in which we are reading that book, I had to write a letter as if to a distant friend on that very subject, allowing me to better clarify my questions. Then, finishing “Zen and the Art of…” came upon a summation passage equating Pirsig’s concept of Quality (as that missing from the Western dialectical tradition) to the Presocratic Ariste, excellence or heroic virtue, virtue already being a term personally loaded with positive meaning of acting right in the world, here defined not as virtue for others but of the self, improvement and growth into what one can most be, a joy in the process that I had forgotten, also connected to the Buddhist Dharma (further constellated in relation to the mystery in Lost as well as the self-mythologizing of Kerouac). All of which left me with a big Yes! And further constellated into this essay, which before I started writing I found a blog on synchronicities, cementing the point.
But the question remains, as much as I live this and find it necessary to my life, it seems mainly like a metaphysical thought experiment, and still does not connect back to the mundane, having to work sleep, relate to other people, go the bathroom, let alone all the wars and environmental degradation and illness at large in the world. Years ago I had a chance to sit in on a Zen retreat and told the Monk that it felt like I was in a dream from which I couldn’t wake up. He said, all our ideas, knowledge, stories, expectations, these are the dream, when Reality is just this. But now I realize that what I really meant was that that just this is what feels dreamlike, or actually worse, nightmarish, when the stories and ideas would be much more wonderful if they were that primarily real. I may find joy in contemplating quantum entanglement or synchronicity, but I see my friends struggling daily to find jobs or housing, getting robbed, sick, or mentally ill, and I wonder, why is that more real? Why am I not satisfied with it, except for perhaps being raised with some religious notion of an afterlife that has crushed me on idealism and hope for more? I understand that I am in a way very privileged to be able to even ask these questions. I have a steady job, a home, friends and family and fairly good health, I was raised with an education of intelligence, creativity, and faith, and questioning. Many do not have this, or if they did they got bogged down in the tribulations of the everyday, or just don’t care. I doubt for instance that my neighbor, if he were to take time away from his TV and motortoys, would he feel inclined to ask any of this? The meaning of his everyday life and material possessions seems to be enough for him (if they really are). Does he not want to spiritually grow, or is that process different for each person? Who can answer any of this? I on the other hand do not feel like I have a choice; even at my poorest and most downtrodden I have always felt the urge and made the time to ask these questions. I suspect that, being raised to have a capacity and willingness towards belief, but always questioning the presumed things one might believe in, it is like this large, too large hole that no material thing and few non-material things have ever come close to filling, or even fitting into, that leaves me with this internal tension, a spiritual angst like a spring about to burst, that might only find ease with ordering the whole reality in myself, and then what of everything out of reality? And then what of still having to live, and share this with others? It is as if, what are these questions for if they cannot be interconnected and applied in our daily lives, for everyone’s lives? What god is a map or pattern if other people can’t follow it somewhere they want to go? That I do not know, and only raises further questions. As Rilke put it, the pattern grows more intricate and subtle & being swept along is no longer enough.
The problem, I know, is one of perspective. To say, this is it, is to presuppose that we know everything there is to know about life, enough to cast some judgment on it, when really we can know nothing with any such certainty. I am aware that the mystery of the Universe is far deeper than we can fathom. Not even the scientific method can say what is really true, either point at a position or velocity of a particle but not both, or how and why they are entangled and add up to all this. Any other human effort to value one mode of the world over another is based on subjective claims, of perception, of intuition, of faith. On some level even an atheist claims, I believe God doesn’t exist, because it is a statement that can’t be proven one way or another. For centuries scientists laughed at the notion of atoms, of forces and fields, because they couldn’t be seen, only to find that maybe they really are there, and though still unseen may be more real than this, but just as inexplicable and mystic as when the ancient Greeks first made up the story. How can I know this is just it, when my intuitions, the evidence my senses have gathered over a lifetime of searching, have suggested otherwise, if but to say, maybe it’s too hard to keep looking, no one else is really looking, not everywhere at once, and the whole edifice of Western knowledge is constructed on the basis of looking only at the visible and provable, and when confronted with a reality greater than that which can be known, it crumbles, is shown to be a charade based on the misapplication of ancient dialectical devices and assumptions: that dialectics can really tell us anything about anything, for when you point at or name something it always creates the thing it is not, and the thing neither of those are, ad nauseum, the way a proton pulled from an atomic nucleus mysteriously creates another proton in its place. This is beautiful and mysterious, but then you still have to go to work, or patch up an argument with your beloved. And there is no place to escape from that reality to, no one to turn to in our need outside this predicament. No matter what your perspective is on the world/Universe, or what you believe is our place and purpose in it, we are still within that system, like an existential Goedel’s Theorem, constrained by our physical senses and abilities and ways of knowing, and still have to find some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some small joy, and maybe the courage to choose to act as decent human beings, for ourselves and others, if we have any strength and calmness left over.
But how, and why? Because most days I feel full of rage, time slipping through the eye of it and feeling there is something more I could be doing that is the thing I really am meant to be doing, except I only have a vague, limited notion of what that is and no one has stepped down from on high to let me in on the secret plan for the Universe and my role in it. I feel a lot like the character John Locke from the show Lost, who, unlike the more reason-based characters trying to escape from the Island,, has an intuitive faith that he can and is meant to solve the labyrinthine puzzle and mystery that surrounds the place, following his gut, connecting scraps of information, seeking ever deeper in the mystery, and yet still plagued by doubts, hoping someone will tell him where to look next, constrained like the original philosopher Locke to the empiricism of believing what he can see, yet unable to explain that he has seen things beyond what most people would ever believe could be real. I relate to this and wonder how many others can. I think of my neighbor, watching sports on his big-screened TV, driving his motorcycle noisily up and down our street. He seems totally fulfilled in this, as far as I can see. There is not a question or even a need for a question of is this it.
The Presocratics (who I am studying in a class on the historical roots of science in mythology), were the first to systematically ask the questions, what is really real, can and do things change, can and what do we know? These ontological and epistemological questions are the foundation of any philosophy or metaphysics, and without before realizing that, they have also been my pivotal questions (along with that bugaboo, are we free/active agents). In answer to what is really real, they posit everything from water, to air, to numbers as the foundational substance of reality, or there is Anaximander, who believed it was the Apeiron, the unlimited storehouse of potential qualities of all things as the one underlying substance. My teacher, a younger grad student, laughed, this all seems absurd or primitive in light of our current scientific conceptions of reality, and the class all nodded. Except for me it doesn’t. For me the idea of some fount, of imagination or possibility, seems more intuitively true than the random motion of subatomic particles. In fact, it is an idea recorded in a number of different spiritual traditions: the Theosophic Akashic Records, the Sufi Scriptorum, the Hebraic Book of Life, even the Platonic Forms as an underlying reality. Is this really so absurd then, or are they all wrong? And more confounding, it is something that I have experienced, with my own senses (admittedly under a mystical trance state), but without knowing of it beforehand or expecting anything of the sort. But how could I explain this in class, in the face of the entire academic apparatus that is not about my experiences but recorded “facts?” These are two entirely different views of reality, like the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, both of which are mistaken for Truth, when they can never be anything more than descriptions, stories, metaphors for processes we can never really know anything about. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” (reading in my class on Narrative and Technlogy), does a good job of framing this problem, n the context of a metaphysical detective story: we can either romantically-intuitively appreciate the surface aesthetic of things, or logically seek out the structures beneath them. But not both, though that is exactly what it seems we must do. That ability and desire however were lost centuries ago, when Aristotle argued down the Sophists in the forum, paving the way for Dialectical Materialism. And the world has been a cold calculating place since, lit by moments of decadence and revelry, but with no real new understanding or wisdom, meaning or faith to guide us out of this spiritual morass.
To what can we turn then, if not to our own experiences and the way we choose to pick them up in our daily lives (this division between events and our intentions or them being my definitions of fate and destiny). Are we just trapped on this island in space or do we choose to explore what being here could mean? When the stars that guided the ancients (both in sea travel and in mythic timekeeping) now begin to fade, there are still the stars in our hearts, which is the meaning of that word desire. As Crowley said, each and every one of us is a star. For most of my life I have been a proponent of a magical worldview, most clearly as spelled out in Bill Whitcomb’s Axioms, the first three of which are that reality is created from our worldviews that can be changed, that we reaffirm or change our worldviews through attention, and that seemingly disconnected events can strike us as being intricately connected, what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, but I call constellations of meaning, because meaning does not exist in events but in our interpretation of the relationships between them in relation to the patterns of our worldviews. Though I have actively sought out such constellations of meaning, in the last several years they have grown few and far between, a feeling I keep expressing as that always before the pattern of meanings suggested where to look next, except recently they haven’t, and everywhere has felt like a dead end, not at all that personal Eureka moment I recall first feeling reading James Joyce’s description of that Eureka moment in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and I’ve chased after ever since. Perhaps I have stopped looking in as active or connected a manner. Or perhaps, as I fear, that though I’ve looked and connected, the net of my looking wasn’t wide enough, and the pattern or destiny I found meaningful for myself in following certain dreams and ideas is too small, is not interrelated to Reality as a whole, as was the case with the Apeiron in class. Am I crazy for having experienced something no one else has, or are they for not even considering that such things could be? So that I lost faith with any of it being meaningful. And lastly, I have been afraid, for to connect our own meanings to any larger collective meaning takes work, and forces us to confront ourselves in wholly new ways, and precisely where our old maps no longer fit the territory of actual existence.
I have come to recognize recently that my novel, and indeed my task as a creative being, is an attempt to create such interconnected maps of our experience of Reality, a daunting and seemingly impossible task (though less impossible due to our current information technologies), yet one I am driven to through whatever genetic or spiritual reasons. To this end I have to start experiencing again the world, the larger world, as synchronistically connected, however those mechanisms work, but from scratch. Because if my patterns before are what I expected to find, but clearly didn’t, then I have to forgo faith in my expectations and recreate a new pattern from nothing, from everything, but not with the certainty in thinking that Descates had in his doubting of all. And in this letting go was confronted yesterday with a number of synchronicities if not answering than at least pointing to ways out of my current crisis. I wrote a letter to my beloved discussing love in terms of encouraging another’s and our own self-growth, an idea from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” and immediately after in my Wisdom class in which we are reading that book, I had to write a letter as if to a distant friend on that very subject, allowing me to better clarify my questions. Then, finishing “Zen and the Art of…” came upon a summation passage equating Pirsig’s concept of Quality (as that missing from the Western dialectical tradition) to the Presocratic Ariste, excellence or heroic virtue, virtue already being a term personally loaded with positive meaning of acting right in the world, here defined not as virtue for others but of the self, improvement and growth into what one can most be, a joy in the process that I had forgotten, also connected to the Buddhist Dharma (further constellated in relation to the mystery in Lost as well as the self-mythologizing of Kerouac). All of which left me with a big Yes! And further constellated into this essay, which before I started writing I found a blog on synchronicities, cementing the point.
But the question remains, as much as I live this and find it necessary to my life, it seems mainly like a metaphysical thought experiment, and still does not connect back to the mundane, having to work sleep, relate to other people, go the bathroom, let alone all the wars and environmental degradation and illness at large in the world. Years ago I had a chance to sit in on a Zen retreat and told the Monk that it felt like I was in a dream from which I couldn’t wake up. He said, all our ideas, knowledge, stories, expectations, these are the dream, when Reality is just this. But now I realize that what I really meant was that that just this is what feels dreamlike, or actually worse, nightmarish, when the stories and ideas would be much more wonderful if they were that primarily real. I may find joy in contemplating quantum entanglement or synchronicity, but I see my friends struggling daily to find jobs or housing, getting robbed, sick, or mentally ill, and I wonder, why is that more real? Why am I not satisfied with it, except for perhaps being raised with some religious notion of an afterlife that has crushed me on idealism and hope for more? I understand that I am in a way very privileged to be able to even ask these questions. I have a steady job, a home, friends and family and fairly good health, I was raised with an education of intelligence, creativity, and faith, and questioning. Many do not have this, or if they did they got bogged down in the tribulations of the everyday, or just don’t care. I doubt for instance that my neighbor, if he were to take time away from his TV and motortoys, would he feel inclined to ask any of this? The meaning of his everyday life and material possessions seems to be enough for him (if they really are). Does he not want to spiritually grow, or is that process different for each person? Who can answer any of this? I on the other hand do not feel like I have a choice; even at my poorest and most downtrodden I have always felt the urge and made the time to ask these questions. I suspect that, being raised to have a capacity and willingness towards belief, but always questioning the presumed things one might believe in, it is like this large, too large hole that no material thing and few non-material things have ever come close to filling, or even fitting into, that leaves me with this internal tension, a spiritual angst like a spring about to burst, that might only find ease with ordering the whole reality in myself, and then what of everything out of reality? And then what of still having to live, and share this with others? It is as if, what are these questions for if they cannot be interconnected and applied in our daily lives, for everyone’s lives? What god is a map or pattern if other people can’t follow it somewhere they want to go? That I do not know, and only raises further questions. As Rilke put it, the pattern grows more intricate and subtle & being swept along is no longer enough.
8.24.2008
On Being a Young Poet
Every few years I find myself set adrift, for one reason or another placed in an emotional or moral position somewhat off center and in need of guidance. It is in times like these when invariably someone reminds me about Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet."
I first came across this text, and Rilke at all, in my first year of my first attempt at college, ten years ago. It was a required text for incoming freshmen! Of course, I was too young, too headstrong at the time, probably like any other kid fresh out in the world, to admit that there were deep issues, dark questions, that one might need advice, not in answering, but in living. As Rilke puts it, "be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point it, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
This quote has been a favorite for many years, though I still don't fully understand it. Another thing that it's taken me a long time to wrap my head around is the necessity of solitude, something that Rilke stresses on almost every page of his letters. Solitude in order to go into yourself, to find your reason to write and to seek out the dreams, memories, impressions that make one's internal world. Solitude in order to find the patience to allow everything to gestate, the acceptance of doing what is difficult and therefor necessary, the clarity of the senses beneath the surface and multiplicity of the world where one can actually create. Solitude in order to grow into one that can love and be loved, a "love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."
These days I exist mostly in a happy solitude, with my stories and new kitten Ruby and lots of music, a happiness that is mainly broken only when other people are involved. It is strange to think that for years I sought out the company of others, not because I actually wanted to be around them, but because I was under the impression that I should, because it was easier to become involved in order to hide from myself and my possibilities behind the social masks of sex, drugs, rock and roll. One of the few kinds of occasions I would actually enjoy myself in public in was being on stage, playing a show. Talk about the performance of everyday life. Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy being around other people, but that I have learned that I require a much more immense amount of time to myself, which when I have it allows me to interact with others in a much more reciprocal and centered way, as well as get a lot of writing done.
"Love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you. And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars."
It is also interesting, and immensely inspiring, to think that Rilke was twenty-eight, my age, when he wrote these letters, and yet so wise (or so precocious with the weight of the world, though one feels that he really felt and bore that weight in its fullest understanding). I can only bow my head.
[quotes from M.D. Herter Norton's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," though the Stephen Mitchell translation I linked to above is far superior, as Mitchell gets the emotional necessity of Rilke's writing.]
I first came across this text, and Rilke at all, in my first year of my first attempt at college, ten years ago. It was a required text for incoming freshmen! Of course, I was too young, too headstrong at the time, probably like any other kid fresh out in the world, to admit that there were deep issues, dark questions, that one might need advice, not in answering, but in living. As Rilke puts it, "be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point it, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
This quote has been a favorite for many years, though I still don't fully understand it. Another thing that it's taken me a long time to wrap my head around is the necessity of solitude, something that Rilke stresses on almost every page of his letters. Solitude in order to go into yourself, to find your reason to write and to seek out the dreams, memories, impressions that make one's internal world. Solitude in order to find the patience to allow everything to gestate, the acceptance of doing what is difficult and therefor necessary, the clarity of the senses beneath the surface and multiplicity of the world where one can actually create. Solitude in order to grow into one that can love and be loved, a "love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."
These days I exist mostly in a happy solitude, with my stories and new kitten Ruby and lots of music, a happiness that is mainly broken only when other people are involved. It is strange to think that for years I sought out the company of others, not because I actually wanted to be around them, but because I was under the impression that I should, because it was easier to become involved in order to hide from myself and my possibilities behind the social masks of sex, drugs, rock and roll. One of the few kinds of occasions I would actually enjoy myself in public in was being on stage, playing a show. Talk about the performance of everyday life. Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy being around other people, but that I have learned that I require a much more immense amount of time to myself, which when I have it allows me to interact with others in a much more reciprocal and centered way, as well as get a lot of writing done."Love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you. And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars."
It is also interesting, and immensely inspiring, to think that Rilke was twenty-eight, my age, when he wrote these letters, and yet so wise (or so precocious with the weight of the world, though one feels that he really felt and bore that weight in its fullest understanding). I can only bow my head.
[quotes from M.D. Herter Norton's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," though the Stephen Mitchell translation I linked to above is far superior, as Mitchell gets the emotional necessity of Rilke's writing.]
7.16.2008
The Incomprehensible and the Forgotten
As I have been reading a lot of French and Latin American literature recently the issue of translations has been coming up, namely that it's often hard to know which translation of a foreign book to go for, and if you choose the wrong one you might be turned off from an author. In light of this, the Translators Association of the Society of Authors is celebrating their fiftieth year by compiling a list of the fifty best translation in the last fifty years. [via] While there are certainly some highlights on the list, some I've read and others I've been meaning to, I was disappointed to not find one of my favorite translators on the list, Stephen Mitchell, whose translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's works are some of the most breathtaking I have ever read. Equally masterful is Coleman Barks' translation of the spiritual poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi.
Sometimes as an American it is easy to forget the difficulties that come in trying to get one's work read internationally. Beyond the barriers of communication there are also the challenges of time and space: dying before one's work is published, loosing it on a train... Here's a great article on forgotten and lost masterpieces that certainly got me drooling to think that one day someone might discover in a Polish attic Bruno Schulz's missing novel, The Messiah.
Sometimes as an American it is easy to forget the difficulties that come in trying to get one's work read internationally. Beyond the barriers of communication there are also the challenges of time and space: dying before one's work is published, loosing it on a train... Here's a great article on forgotten and lost masterpieces that certainly got me drooling to think that one day someone might discover in a Polish attic Bruno Schulz's missing novel, The Messiah.
4.30.2008
Library of Unique Experiences
As a writer and avid reader it often worries me that in this hyper-modern world literature is becoming a rather insular art form: those who read read, and the rest, the majority, don't. This is one reason why I am fascinated by book lists such as these lists of the 50 best cult books or banned and challenged books. Hell, I even geek out over lists on Amazon, because sometimes these kinds of arbitrary collections can point me to books I ought to read, and even more importantly, suggest the extreme influence literature has had, and still has, on individuals.
For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.
Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.
Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.
Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.
Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.
Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.
Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.
Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.
John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.
J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.
Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."
Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.
Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.
Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.
Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.
Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.
Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.
Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.
Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.
Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.
For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.
Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.
Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.
Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.
Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.
Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.
Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.
Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.
John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.
J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.
Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."
Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.
Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.
Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.
Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.
Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.
Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.
Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.
Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.
Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.
2.20.2008
The Angel as Absent Narrative: Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire"
Last night Sophie and I watched a movie about an angel that falls in love with a human woman. From the title, "Wings of Desire," I thought that it might be a piece of romantic schlock, but I was quite surprised to watch what is undoubtedly a cinematic masterpiece. Set in Berlin in 1987, this movie is shot in a stark black and white that is reminiscent of early silent films. The "plot" focuses on a group of invisible angels wearing beat up trench coats who live in a public library and spend their time listening in on and sharing with each other the thoughts of the humans around them. One of these angels, in his wanderings around Berlin, discovers a circus and falls in love with the trapeze artist, a woman wearing chicken-feather wings whose thoughts are constantly filled with existential angst, and decides that he wants to become human in order to understand what it is actually like to feel, touch, live. Along the way we meet a comic film star who is an ex-angel, and an archangel who ruminates on the dying art of storytelling while searching for neighborhoods that were destroyed in the war.
Besides these and other revealing scenes, including the final meeting between the angel and the girl at a goth club where Nick Cave and the Badseeds are performing (!), the movie was made more poignant through the director's commentary, which to our delight revealed that the movie was conceived during a period in which Wim Wenders was reading Rilke's poetry every day as the ultimate expression of German Romanticism. What was really interesting though was that the whole movie was shot without a script, using a series of existential monologues, which mirrored one of the primary points of the movie: that the angels were absent from reality and the flow of time. Though they were able to look into the flow of humanity from their eternal vantage point, they could only experience this life second hand, and that in order to be part of the narrative of history they had to enter into time, into human emotions, bodily concerns, etc., raising the question of how much we humans are really a part of our own narratives. Are we responsible for our lives or just living out the stories that have been woven for us in our thoughts?
Besides these and other revealing scenes, including the final meeting between the angel and the girl at a goth club where Nick Cave and the Badseeds are performing (!), the movie was made more poignant through the director's commentary, which to our delight revealed that the movie was conceived during a period in which Wim Wenders was reading Rilke's poetry every day as the ultimate expression of German Romanticism. What was really interesting though was that the whole movie was shot without a script, using a series of existential monologues, which mirrored one of the primary points of the movie: that the angels were absent from reality and the flow of time. Though they were able to look into the flow of humanity from their eternal vantage point, they could only experience this life second hand, and that in order to be part of the narrative of history they had to enter into time, into human emotions, bodily concerns, etc., raising the question of how much we humans are really a part of our own narratives. Are we responsible for our lives or just living out the stories that have been woven for us in our thoughts?
1.30.2008
On Transcendence
I have been thinking much lately about what has been a lifelong desire to transcend or escape from what has otherwise felt like a mundane and often painful reality. I have desired true miracles, magical occurences, other realities, even yesterday I was looking at some buildings on campus and thought that if I walked past them I might find myself in another set of places that do not exist except in my dreams. I have longed for this since I was a child, and my twin and I used to walk up and down the beach creating an imaginary mansion between us that we would inhabit whenever life was just too little to hold our attentions. I have always sought the irreal, and all my arts, rebellions, highs (of which there have been many), have just been a part of this desire. And yet I still don't know why. Was there some buried crises or trauma from my childhood thjat forced me to want to escape reality? Was there instead no such crises? Was this just a product of my overactive imagination, precocious reading, social ostracization, and somewhat spiritual upbringing? Am I really just a "recovering Catholic," in that I've sought for all manner of spiritual and liminal experiences because God never showed himself to exist?
I have been equally fascinated with magic from a young age, and have been involved over the years with all manner of ritual and religious behaviors. And though many irreal and seemingly miraculous things have happened in my life, whether by my own actions or not, never has anything occured that has completely surpassed my expectations of what is possible. Even my "meeting with God" in '03 can be attributed to the liminal or shamanic state induced by the San Pedro I had consumed, and thus reduced to chemicals in the brain and the powers of imagination. The clouds did not open up while I was walking down the street and angels step out to greet me. It was only ever the sunset, and the only angel I've met is, despite her immense powers, only all too human. I never woke up from a horrendous nightmare to find myself metamorphosized into an enormous insect. It has instead only been a feeling, a metaphor. I think of my younger brother, supposedly kidbnapped by aliens. Did this really happen? Is it only psychological? Is there any difference between the two if reality is indeed some holographic simulation, as scientists currently theorize? Was I abducted too, and have I just repressed it and continually sought out proof, justification? Instead am I merely jealous that it was not me? I used to take the garbage out, and look up at the orange sky in delirious fear that this time they were actually coming to get me. I did not long for it. And the time I was in Oregon and looked up to see that one point of light doing loops in the sky unlike a star, plane, or satelite before speeding off. I was almost relieved, accepted it, perhaps because it was so far away, so inconsequential to verge on the meaningless and thus not a threat to my reality. And I was also stoned.
Show me a sign! I want to cry out, distraught that this glaring lack of a true miracle or magic really does disprove God, the transcendent, forgetting perhaps the miraculous complexity and improbability of the ultimately real, which has yet to reveal anything more than that. It is these thoughts which occasionally lead me to the question of intentionally going mad, in order to see the spirits that we feel must lurk on the other side of the real, forever taunting us with thir elusive presences. It is the lure of the voices, the visions, the unrectifiable break from the Real. And of course, even that insanity is reducible to a state of mind, as is all perception.
Perhaps we can never quite let ourselves experience, or even just see, that which is beyond our conception of the possible. Perhaps there are miracels walking amongst us all the time, and it is just easier, safer to function, to stick to our patterned realities and not let any of that in. We wouldn't know what we were looking at anyway, and would walk right past, the way I couldn't see those peculiar rose-like mushrooms growing in the forest until a friend had pointed them out to me. And then I saw them everywhere. I want to learn, like Rilke's character Malte, to look, and to look again. I think of all the gods, the faeries, Eliade's hierophanies that filled past ages, and I suspect that these were seen because they were then not beyond what was possible, what was expected. We now just have other things that are possible, that are expected, in which the irreal holds very little socio-cultural value. I could only roughly begin to ask why that is.
For all the looking I've done, for all I've tried to extend my perceptions and conceptions of what is possible, for all the incredible things I've actually seen (and if you'd have only seen what I've seen with these eyes), I am still waiting for something that is yet a hundred percent outside of my expectations. I am still waiting for reality to break open, for the time when I will walk over that hill and find myself in that other place that I can only vaguely go to in my dreams.
I have been equally fascinated with magic from a young age, and have been involved over the years with all manner of ritual and religious behaviors. And though many irreal and seemingly miraculous things have happened in my life, whether by my own actions or not, never has anything occured that has completely surpassed my expectations of what is possible. Even my "meeting with God" in '03 can be attributed to the liminal or shamanic state induced by the San Pedro I had consumed, and thus reduced to chemicals in the brain and the powers of imagination. The clouds did not open up while I was walking down the street and angels step out to greet me. It was only ever the sunset, and the only angel I've met is, despite her immense powers, only all too human. I never woke up from a horrendous nightmare to find myself metamorphosized into an enormous insect. It has instead only been a feeling, a metaphor. I think of my younger brother, supposedly kidbnapped by aliens. Did this really happen? Is it only psychological? Is there any difference between the two if reality is indeed some holographic simulation, as scientists currently theorize? Was I abducted too, and have I just repressed it and continually sought out proof, justification? Instead am I merely jealous that it was not me? I used to take the garbage out, and look up at the orange sky in delirious fear that this time they were actually coming to get me. I did not long for it. And the time I was in Oregon and looked up to see that one point of light doing loops in the sky unlike a star, plane, or satelite before speeding off. I was almost relieved, accepted it, perhaps because it was so far away, so inconsequential to verge on the meaningless and thus not a threat to my reality. And I was also stoned.
Show me a sign! I want to cry out, distraught that this glaring lack of a true miracle or magic really does disprove God, the transcendent, forgetting perhaps the miraculous complexity and improbability of the ultimately real, which has yet to reveal anything more than that. It is these thoughts which occasionally lead me to the question of intentionally going mad, in order to see the spirits that we feel must lurk on the other side of the real, forever taunting us with thir elusive presences. It is the lure of the voices, the visions, the unrectifiable break from the Real. And of course, even that insanity is reducible to a state of mind, as is all perception.
Perhaps we can never quite let ourselves experience, or even just see, that which is beyond our conception of the possible. Perhaps there are miracels walking amongst us all the time, and it is just easier, safer to function, to stick to our patterned realities and not let any of that in. We wouldn't know what we were looking at anyway, and would walk right past, the way I couldn't see those peculiar rose-like mushrooms growing in the forest until a friend had pointed them out to me. And then I saw them everywhere. I want to learn, like Rilke's character Malte, to look, and to look again. I think of all the gods, the faeries, Eliade's hierophanies that filled past ages, and I suspect that these were seen because they were then not beyond what was possible, what was expected. We now just have other things that are possible, that are expected, in which the irreal holds very little socio-cultural value. I could only roughly begin to ask why that is.
For all the looking I've done, for all I've tried to extend my perceptions and conceptions of what is possible, for all the incredible things I've actually seen (and if you'd have only seen what I've seen with these eyes), I am still waiting for something that is yet a hundred percent outside of my expectations. I am still waiting for reality to break open, for the time when I will walk over that hill and find myself in that other place that I can only vaguely go to in my dreams.
7.24.2007
borderlines of the imagination
I spent most of last night getting into Thomas Pynchon's "Mason and Dixon," figuring if I wanted to enjoy a tome right now I'd pick one with less current cultural prickliness than the latest Harry Potter. Once again I found myself overwhelmed, unable to stop turning pages, cast into a full world in the same way as when reading Pynchon's latest, "Against the Day." What strikes me the most about his writing is that Pynchon is an intelligent man. He has done extraordinary amounts of research in regards to the subject matter he's presenting, and in regards to just about everything else, and he knows how to weave it all into a compelling story which doesn't read like someone's narrated science manual. Furthermore he's also enough of a writer to not only understand his subjects, but to ignore all the truth of his knoweldge and make up his own sidereal histories to established persons and times, as if there were infinite number of histories, worlds to be historicized, waiting directly below this one, a Borgesian nest of worlds within worlds, each with its own sure dialects and idiosynchronicities, that can't quite be distinguished from but are certainly other than the world we live in. And there's a plot.
I had to put down Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" because, despite how fascination his idea of assuming mulitple heteronyms to write under is, this is essentially a plotless notebook of moments of feeling rather glum and out of sorts with humanity, claiming to have fascinating dreams but not even telling us what they are, perhaps better titled a book of bemoaning. He is not even a Rilke with a prescience of vision and beauty beneath his Everyday which leaves one wondering just what the journalist really sees. Despite what I feel is a necessity to divulge the depths of the human mind and experience, one wants to at least wonder if something will change, some slightest event actually happen to break the author from their ennui into a sense of real life. Sartre looked at a tree and felt a profound nausea in that he was one with it, a spiritual enough experience in what is presented as an otherwise humdrum life, and because of that decides to look up an ex-lover. Not a terribly profound plot, but moving, because at the very least it goes somewhere. Even Pavic's recent "Dictionary of the Khazars," told in sprawling asymptotic encyclopedic entries that span space and time and religion and myth without ever quite being straightforward, has the ability to suggest that something happens to the characters, even if that happening is in the reader's own process of trying to assemble the disparate trains of thought. At least, entertaining, as it pushes the imagination, and the very act of reading.
Having felt creatively dry for days now, Pynchon's tome was like a refreshing drink, I was suddenly filled between his pages with ideas, scenes, a sense of something happening in the dark of my own internal narratives. He has created a world, which like all good worlds begs that it is quite possible to create others. The genius behind Tolkien's Middlearth is that it is self-contained, fleshed out, populated and mythologized to the utmost. Every line Tolkien wrote added to the fullness of his simulacraic reality, all the short stories and rejected fragments, so that we might have his grand trilogy, which is in itself not specifically a story but another chapter in the history of its world. The beauty, and curse, of dreams is that they are always set in their own realities, everyone's quite different, and more complicating it is a world with no set boundaries, that changes night by night so that a certain bridge you walked under five years ago no longer exists, and a strange tower now stands in its place which in itself never seems to quite stand still enough to tell how many floors it has, or who lives there, or if it is really there at all. Vague suggestions of denizens, deities, deep mythologies of the psyche, ever alluded to but never clearly explicated, forests and swamps and deserts that may indeed be nothing other than the dreamer's own body and somnolent processes.
Harry Potter may have his wizards' schools and loves and nemeses, but these elements can only belong, when all is written, to the world, to an externality of events driven more by economic fetishizing and the populaces that support it, than they can belong to himself. In the end Harry Potter's world can no longer sustain itself as a world, as it is not spun out of his own imagination with him as only a minor miracle worker in it, and he succumbs to the dustbins of all worn out marketing gimmicks. Arguably so does any element of history or the imagination, once the Author is done with them and moves on. Mason and Dixon, Bilbo Baggins, Bernando Soares, Harry Potter, the race of the Khazars, Borges himself, all these have passed on, returned to some post-formative, subterranean cavern underneath the ice shelves of cultural consciousness to be recycled back into the collective dreaming, to return next time with different faces, altered agendas, stripped of any original historicity and design, the only articulable world the one in which they somehow exist together, devoid of memories and the stories which birthed and bound them, lost names in the fabric of being nothing but someone else's character and never their own to invent, as we sometimes, barely, have the glimmering of possibility towards.
I had to put down Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" because, despite how fascination his idea of assuming mulitple heteronyms to write under is, this is essentially a plotless notebook of moments of feeling rather glum and out of sorts with humanity, claiming to have fascinating dreams but not even telling us what they are, perhaps better titled a book of bemoaning. He is not even a Rilke with a prescience of vision and beauty beneath his Everyday which leaves one wondering just what the journalist really sees. Despite what I feel is a necessity to divulge the depths of the human mind and experience, one wants to at least wonder if something will change, some slightest event actually happen to break the author from their ennui into a sense of real life. Sartre looked at a tree and felt a profound nausea in that he was one with it, a spiritual enough experience in what is presented as an otherwise humdrum life, and because of that decides to look up an ex-lover. Not a terribly profound plot, but moving, because at the very least it goes somewhere. Even Pavic's recent "Dictionary of the Khazars," told in sprawling asymptotic encyclopedic entries that span space and time and religion and myth without ever quite being straightforward, has the ability to suggest that something happens to the characters, even if that happening is in the reader's own process of trying to assemble the disparate trains of thought. At least, entertaining, as it pushes the imagination, and the very act of reading.
Having felt creatively dry for days now, Pynchon's tome was like a refreshing drink, I was suddenly filled between his pages with ideas, scenes, a sense of something happening in the dark of my own internal narratives. He has created a world, which like all good worlds begs that it is quite possible to create others. The genius behind Tolkien's Middlearth is that it is self-contained, fleshed out, populated and mythologized to the utmost. Every line Tolkien wrote added to the fullness of his simulacraic reality, all the short stories and rejected fragments, so that we might have his grand trilogy, which is in itself not specifically a story but another chapter in the history of its world. The beauty, and curse, of dreams is that they are always set in their own realities, everyone's quite different, and more complicating it is a world with no set boundaries, that changes night by night so that a certain bridge you walked under five years ago no longer exists, and a strange tower now stands in its place which in itself never seems to quite stand still enough to tell how many floors it has, or who lives there, or if it is really there at all. Vague suggestions of denizens, deities, deep mythologies of the psyche, ever alluded to but never clearly explicated, forests and swamps and deserts that may indeed be nothing other than the dreamer's own body and somnolent processes.
Harry Potter may have his wizards' schools and loves and nemeses, but these elements can only belong, when all is written, to the world, to an externality of events driven more by economic fetishizing and the populaces that support it, than they can belong to himself. In the end Harry Potter's world can no longer sustain itself as a world, as it is not spun out of his own imagination with him as only a minor miracle worker in it, and he succumbs to the dustbins of all worn out marketing gimmicks. Arguably so does any element of history or the imagination, once the Author is done with them and moves on. Mason and Dixon, Bilbo Baggins, Bernando Soares, Harry Potter, the race of the Khazars, Borges himself, all these have passed on, returned to some post-formative, subterranean cavern underneath the ice shelves of cultural consciousness to be recycled back into the collective dreaming, to return next time with different faces, altered agendas, stripped of any original historicity and design, the only articulable world the one in which they somehow exist together, devoid of memories and the stories which birthed and bound them, lost names in the fabric of being nothing but someone else's character and never their own to invent, as we sometimes, barely, have the glimmering of possibility towards.
9.15.2006
ghost in the choir
Before practice nikki and i met up for a cup of coffee and one of our deep conversations that have proven to be a strong part of our growing friendship, in which one of us will bring up some thought and we'll fall into it like life depends on it. the issue of spirituality came up, as a mutual acquaintance of ours follows Krishna, and i feel like the rest of our set either could give a fuck-all for spirituality or has their own non-linear path they tread, and nikki was wondering where that distinction is between religion and spirituality since it's a subject she has little explored herself yet. i told her a story my dad told me of when he was a child and they went to his mother's methodist church, even though his father didn't really believe in it he went along anyway, until he finally saw how hypocritical it was and they stopped going. the following saturday the minister showed up preaching hellfire and brimstone and my grandfather listened quietly before explaining his precise reasons and then explained that it did not matter where you worshipped as long as you kept god in your heart and he couldn't do that under the church's stifling rituals. when the minister left he turned to my dad and pointed to his chest and said "you can believe in anything, as long as you remember that god is in there." which is why when my parents had a catholic wedding he went along with raising us in it, and later said that it was so we could learn that having belief in anything, the world, yourself, the unknown, was a good thing. i also told her a few of the stories from rilke's "stories of god," an early collection of edgy faerytales for children, of how people used to pray with their arms open to embrace god but when they put their hands together and built imposing steeples god grew afraid of all these pointy things, or how a group of children decided their parents had lost god and so put him in a thimble so they would know where he was at all times. personally i never could relate to the idea of some imposing old dude up in heaven. why should i? i had a twin brother who i could talk to, create whole worlds with, who was me. what did i need with some absent and abstract deity? my idea of god resides in the people (and things) around me, in myself, in those really deep conversations and connections we make as recognition of something deeper that is shared. and the strongest relationships i've had rely on a mutual expression of divinity. even if it's not called such. of course there is much to be said for the aesthetics and rituals of any established religion. a wealth of meaning that when practiced regularly can really set one out of the every day, the sense of displacement necessary to break us from our too-established patterns. but in order for any of it to make sense, or be fulfilling in that way all the drugs tv money sex fail to be, it has to be yours (or ours), a space that is created which is open to embrace the world, and not fend it off or tune it out. that rapt free flow of hearts and attention, of undistracted eye contact, not readily found in the thick of the maddening crowd. unless i'm on stage or writing, but then it's like preaching, and only at times as intimate. it is often like howling into a void, the space left by noise-clogged senses. throwing a ghost into the choir.
9.06.2006
lovely dangers
"The lover, is in such splended danger just because he must depend upon the co-ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky center, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence."
- Rilke
- Rilke
8.26.2006
dusting off time
The other night nikki and i hung out and we were talking about our families and childhoods and how we got into performing. she's been on a big memoir kick recently, writing out things from her past whether with her family or old places and lovers, and she asked if i hadn't tried writing about all my years performing, what got me started playing music and doing poetry and how all my years acting have influenced the full aesthetic i strive for while on stage. and i said yeah i should do this. and started the next day! it's taken me awhile of hemming and hawing to find an angle in on my past, for months now, and suddenly there's pages and pages of experience, certain gigs, teachers, desires acted out... and i'm finding it is not enough just to write about one angle like performing, the past is so intricately interwoven that to write about one thing i have to bring in my social searching, my family, my loves, etc... "as the pattern grows more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough." even if i never publish this, or not till years hence, it is such a worthwhile exercise to dredge up the full contents of my life. i suppose i would have to say all my views on memory in that essay i wrote are wrong. or if not wrong than i was missing the key point that though we can only access our memories from the present and can view them how we will, who we are now is only possible due to the precise nature of what has happened to us, from the big events down to the smallest corner we went around instead of going around another. even if we don't remember these things, and perhaps especially if we don't, because our whole lives of memories are still stored in our bodies and acting out through us everyday, the whole weight of our becoming determining what we do from moment to moment... i suppose that's what they mean by fate. destiny (rilke's destiny) would be learning to take up that body of fate and let it lead us where we want to go and not just at the whims of passing time.
7.26.2006
digging through pages of time
Long days of welling memories between the mechanics of living. engineering the sounds and sayings, looking for work and a roof, flashes of each time i've looked for work, a roof, strum and song and all the harsh grating of details. i almost got a whole house for cheap, but not cheap enough, so instead i went to goodwill to look for books to sell and came home with a stack for my own library. i can't help myself. of course there were some excellent finds. a copy of PKDick's Exegesis, a book on missing myths in america, a pocket edition of the surrealist poet Apollinaire's "alcools" who coined the term surrealism (in french unfortunately, but it was only a dollar. these texts can not be lost to time).
the greatest find, comparable to a DJ's record crate digging, was a copy of the Comte de Lautreamont's "les chants de maldoror" which i've been meaning to acquire for awhile and never expected in the snooty shadyside thrift shop. hailed as a masterpiece by the surrealists (it contains their founding quote "beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table") this prose poem was written in the late 1800's by a mysterious youth who died at the age of 24. many of the writers i admire, and the ones they admired, relied heavily on this text, which from the sound of it falls in the same type of journalistic literature as my two favorite novels, rilke's "the notebooks of malte-laurides brigge" or sartre's "nausea". where the "hero" of the notebooks is obsessed with and sees through Death, and in "nausea" with the existential horror of Emptiness, Lautreamont's anti-hero Maldoror is obsessed with Evil and the absence of god and how this is acted out (in apparently disturbing and imagistic passages that almost had the book banned for obscenity when it was first published). i look forward to reading this when i'm done with Henry Miller's "Plexus", along with the copy of Yeat's symbolist text "a vision" which i also recently tracked down. now if i can only find a copy of stephen mallarme's poetry in the trash...
lautreamont is also credited with saying: "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author's sentence, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with a right one."
and
"Poetry must be made by all and not by one."
the greatest find, comparable to a DJ's record crate digging, was a copy of the Comte de Lautreamont's "les chants de maldoror" which i've been meaning to acquire for awhile and never expected in the snooty shadyside thrift shop. hailed as a masterpiece by the surrealists (it contains their founding quote "beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table") this prose poem was written in the late 1800's by a mysterious youth who died at the age of 24. many of the writers i admire, and the ones they admired, relied heavily on this text, which from the sound of it falls in the same type of journalistic literature as my two favorite novels, rilke's "the notebooks of malte-laurides brigge" or sartre's "nausea". where the "hero" of the notebooks is obsessed with and sees through Death, and in "nausea" with the existential horror of Emptiness, Lautreamont's anti-hero Maldoror is obsessed with Evil and the absence of god and how this is acted out (in apparently disturbing and imagistic passages that almost had the book banned for obscenity when it was first published). i look forward to reading this when i'm done with Henry Miller's "Plexus", along with the copy of Yeat's symbolist text "a vision" which i also recently tracked down. now if i can only find a copy of stephen mallarme's poetry in the trash...
lautreamont is also credited with saying: "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author's sentence, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with a right one."
and
"Poetry must be made by all and not by one."
5.01.2006
live the questions
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
-Rainer Maria Rilke
-Rainer Maria Rilke
10.11.2005
poet as shaman
A friend has started working on an essay for her school about the thread of divinity in poetry, the ways it has been approached and how its expression still has very similar elements over the centuries, whether you're talking the ecstatic love of Rumi's entire cannon or the beat worship of Ginsburg's postscript to "Howl." She asked me for some examples of poets who express divinity, and besides those two, and the classic examples of Blake, Yeats, and the other romantic poets, I suggested my personal favorite, Rainer Maria Rilke, who was influenced heavily by Rumi's style of personally addressing the divine as a Beloved.
During her research my friend stumbled upon this fascinating article analyzing Rilke's poetry in the context of how the poem and poet metamorphose in relation to each other and the experience of the world.
"Each poem can be seen as a birth canal, a metaphysical tunnel, an entrance into reality which effects a distinct change in the man who travels through it. Although it is, in some sense, the poet who writes the poem, there is another sense in Hass of the poem changing the poet-writing him, as it were. "
This idea of poetry makes it very similar to the shamanic rebirth experience, but one in which the poet is constantly being reborn in new perceptions of the world. As my friend, the redneck poet Johnny "Squibb" Menesini, put it, "everytime I write a pome I think I'm dying."
The article goes on to paint Rilke as a man who would go running out into the street clutching a white iris to his chest in order to escape the torment of the images in his head, which brings up one of my favorite past times and role of both poets and shamans, solitary walks, when alone with the world (whether country or city) the divinity and clarity imminent in all things starts to break out and become real. When the mundane transcends itself, and crystallizes in an image that can be passed on which, as Blake put it, shows the whole world in a grain of sand. Very much like the chaos magician's use of a simple sigil image to encode much deeper levels of information within the psyche.
and as I told my friend, this is something that fascinated me greatly too, and it looks like we may have a bit of friendly competition trying to tie all this together. look for an essay about magic poetry on key23 soon.
During her research my friend stumbled upon this fascinating article analyzing Rilke's poetry in the context of how the poem and poet metamorphose in relation to each other and the experience of the world.
"Each poem can be seen as a birth canal, a metaphysical tunnel, an entrance into reality which effects a distinct change in the man who travels through it. Although it is, in some sense, the poet who writes the poem, there is another sense in Hass of the poem changing the poet-writing him, as it were. "
This idea of poetry makes it very similar to the shamanic rebirth experience, but one in which the poet is constantly being reborn in new perceptions of the world. As my friend, the redneck poet Johnny "Squibb" Menesini, put it, "everytime I write a pome I think I'm dying."
The article goes on to paint Rilke as a man who would go running out into the street clutching a white iris to his chest in order to escape the torment of the images in his head, which brings up one of my favorite past times and role of both poets and shamans, solitary walks, when alone with the world (whether country or city) the divinity and clarity imminent in all things starts to break out and become real. When the mundane transcends itself, and crystallizes in an image that can be passed on which, as Blake put it, shows the whole world in a grain of sand. Very much like the chaos magician's use of a simple sigil image to encode much deeper levels of information within the psyche.
and as I told my friend, this is something that fascinated me greatly too, and it looks like we may have a bit of friendly competition trying to tie all this together. look for an essay about magic poetry on key23 soon.
7.19.2005
where our own words fail...
"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for - that longed-after,
mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
so painfully meets? Is it any less dificult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying."
-Rilke, from the first Duino Elegy.
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for - that longed-after,
mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
so painfully meets? Is it any less dificult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying."
-Rilke, from the first Duino Elegy.
7.11.2005
on the books
and just because I approve of this meme going around, the 20 books that have most impacted my life (in no particular order):
1. Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
2. Crimethinc. Collective- Days of War, Nights of Love
3. Hakim Bey- The Temporary Autonomous Zone
4. var.- The I Ching
5. Octavia Butler- Parable of the Sower
6. Douglas Hofstadter- Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
7. Ayn Rand- Atlas Shrugged
8. Joseph Campbell- The Power of Myth
9. Jorge Luis Borges- Collected Fictions
10. Jalaluddin Rumi (Coleman Barks trans.)- Essential Rumi
11. Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell trans.) Duino Elegies
12. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea- The Illuminatus! Trilogy
13. Jean-Paul Sartre- Nausea
14. George Orwell- Nineteen Eighty-four
15. Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
16. Kurt Vonnegut- Cat's Cradle
17. Lewis Carroll- Through the Looking Glass
18. Jostein Gaarder- Sophie's World
19. John Clellon Holmes- Go
20. Marshall McLuhan- Understanding Media
and though there are countless more books I want to include I honestly can't leave these two out in shaping my approach to living:
21.Bill Whitcomb- The Magician's Companion
22. John C. Lilly- Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
It pleases me greatly that most of these books are fiction. There's nothing like a good story to really affect one's outlook on the world. Especially if your attention span for nonfiction is virtually nonexistent.
1. Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
2. Crimethinc. Collective- Days of War, Nights of Love
3. Hakim Bey- The Temporary Autonomous Zone
4. var.- The I Ching
5. Octavia Butler- Parable of the Sower
6. Douglas Hofstadter- Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
7. Ayn Rand- Atlas Shrugged
8. Joseph Campbell- The Power of Myth
9. Jorge Luis Borges- Collected Fictions
10. Jalaluddin Rumi (Coleman Barks trans.)- Essential Rumi
11. Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell trans.) Duino Elegies
12. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea- The Illuminatus! Trilogy
13. Jean-Paul Sartre- Nausea
14. George Orwell- Nineteen Eighty-four
15. Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
16. Kurt Vonnegut- Cat's Cradle
17. Lewis Carroll- Through the Looking Glass
18. Jostein Gaarder- Sophie's World
19. John Clellon Holmes- Go
20. Marshall McLuhan- Understanding Media
and though there are countless more books I want to include I honestly can't leave these two out in shaping my approach to living:
21.Bill Whitcomb- The Magician's Companion
22. John C. Lilly- Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
It pleases me greatly that most of these books are fiction. There's nothing like a good story to really affect one's outlook on the world. Especially if your attention span for nonfiction is virtually nonexistent.
4.04.2005
romancing the universe
[notes from my blackbook]
Since my latest undisclosed mind-opening experience last Monday I’ve found myself aware of psychic realms that are quickly becoming a body of magical technique. Unlike last summer’s breakthrough which was more of a total bodily experience of universal interconnection, this was more focused on the specifics of how to use that connected energy in my workings.
For days I’ve been forming a stronger psychic connection with my muse (HGA, whatever you’d call it). Last year the Teacher and I were on 4-aces and almost succeeded in breaking through the boundaries of selfhood, and I had my first direct experience with that place right behind our heads where the self and the world become one. At one point reality grew so thin that he said if I looked over I could see another being present in the room that was made from the both of us together. At this point my psyche couldn’t have handled it, and I didn’t look. The other day though I had this experience again in a much more controlled and relaxed manner, recognizing that we are connected in a matrix like manner as individual masks on the face of some larger collective entity, and can learn to access that point of connection. So after the usual ritual preparations, circling, yoga, breathing, etc… I meditated on candle flames with half-closed eyes (which I am trying to develop into a scrying technique) and began chanting to my muse romantically as if to summon her into actual being with my love. The energy in the room was gathering rapidly and the flames flickering wildly, and as I got to the peak of my chanting and verbalized that she was here I felt a tangible presence in the room connected around from the back of my head and the wall above my alter began rippling like water, as if something might emerge from the thinness. I knew that if I looked around, she would be there. But I didn’t, because I heard the strange popping noises in the upper corners of my room which has become a call sign for negative energies. Ever since I magically set off the fire alarm interruptive noises suck me into a ‘bad reality’ paranoia and have become inimical to my workings.
I decided that what I needed was a tool that could clear my mind and space, that would act as a metanoic edge to separate the energies I wanted present from those I didn’t and keep me from slipping into the dark. I’m not so familiar with the Golden Dawn system of magic for creating such tools, but recognized that a sword or athame was the right device for the task. Not having a good ceremonial knife handy I picked up the old wooden toy kris dagger my cousin had fashioned for me as a kid, which already has a lifetime of positive and magical experiences gathered around it, and placed it on my alter. The next night I stayed up until I had reached the sleep-deprivation trance state and then as the sky turned from black to gray to blue I did several sun salutations and stood on my head for ten minutes before sitting at my alter with the sword in my hands. It was raining softly outside, and birds were singing joyfully in it. The window was open and these sounds were carried in on the gentle spring wind. All this peace wrapped around me and cleared my mind and I channeled that feeling into the sword with all the memories I had of its past use in my childhood. Then I recited my favorite Rilke quote, which is in itself a mantra of clarity. "Cast the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe – perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying." As I said this the flock of birds in the tree out front took flight past my window and the rain stopped. Then I rubbed fragrant oil over the blade to act as a mnemonic trigger for its new energy, and it seems to work so far. Just touching the object brings me back to that peace of rain and birdsong and clearing the corners of my room with it has made the following rituals much more peaceful and undisturbed by strange noises and energies.
Last night Metachor recommended that I read the latest Maybe Logic Quarterly, and with great joy found Eva Davis’s "Holey Bible part 2" which contained not only a great deal of magical and anarchist experience and a clever retelling of the Genesis story, but an account of trying t o make love to the sky. For a long time now I’ve been learning to become the sky, using breathing to form a yogic dissolution of inside and outside. The way I look at it all our fear and self doubt are like little bubbles of air that get trapped in us and cause tension, and by breathing they are released and join back with the air from which they came. In a tantric sense making love to the sky would bring about such a union, and having realized during Monday’s escape that breathing is the primal sexual experience figured I might as well give it a try. After clearing and some yoga I laid down in corpse pose and relaxed my physical body, visualizing it filling up with a star-filled sky. I let my body float on the waves of my breath, a technique picked up last fall by studying the rocking motion of being in a German wheel which I fortuitously had access to, and began relaxing my energy body. I’ve been doing a lot of work learning to vibrate my chakras recently, with breath and intonation, to the point of being able to recognize and activate their different layers of energy vibration as they play out in my daily life. As I charged them I focused it into an internally erotic feeling similair to that of raising kundalini, so that the breath and energy flowing through me were titillating my subtle centers as they passed, like the world was fingering my soul. As the energy raised through me I felt myself lifted off the ground, and when it broke through my crown and connected around to the world I was swept up in waves of ecstasy with each breath. I was no longer this physical shell writhing in pleasure on the floor, but the air that surrounded it and carried it and flowed through its every cell. The sky and I had finally become one. Then while I was so open and so on I "made love" to my room, to my alter and candles on it, merging with everything around until there was just one. And to think before this I had any clue what the yogic yama brahmacharya actually meant. Practicing total oneness… What next, the sea, the flames, the planet? I feel like I could romance the whole Universe right now, a recognition of the subtle processes of being as inseperate from the spinning of the stars. I think my magic and yoga just got a lot more exciting.
Since my latest undisclosed mind-opening experience last Monday I’ve found myself aware of psychic realms that are quickly becoming a body of magical technique. Unlike last summer’s breakthrough which was more of a total bodily experience of universal interconnection, this was more focused on the specifics of how to use that connected energy in my workings.
For days I’ve been forming a stronger psychic connection with my muse (HGA, whatever you’d call it). Last year the Teacher and I were on 4-aces and almost succeeded in breaking through the boundaries of selfhood, and I had my first direct experience with that place right behind our heads where the self and the world become one. At one point reality grew so thin that he said if I looked over I could see another being present in the room that was made from the both of us together. At this point my psyche couldn’t have handled it, and I didn’t look. The other day though I had this experience again in a much more controlled and relaxed manner, recognizing that we are connected in a matrix like manner as individual masks on the face of some larger collective entity, and can learn to access that point of connection. So after the usual ritual preparations, circling, yoga, breathing, etc… I meditated on candle flames with half-closed eyes (which I am trying to develop into a scrying technique) and began chanting to my muse romantically as if to summon her into actual being with my love. The energy in the room was gathering rapidly and the flames flickering wildly, and as I got to the peak of my chanting and verbalized that she was here I felt a tangible presence in the room connected around from the back of my head and the wall above my alter began rippling like water, as if something might emerge from the thinness. I knew that if I looked around, she would be there. But I didn’t, because I heard the strange popping noises in the upper corners of my room which has become a call sign for negative energies. Ever since I magically set off the fire alarm interruptive noises suck me into a ‘bad reality’ paranoia and have become inimical to my workings.
I decided that what I needed was a tool that could clear my mind and space, that would act as a metanoic edge to separate the energies I wanted present from those I didn’t and keep me from slipping into the dark. I’m not so familiar with the Golden Dawn system of magic for creating such tools, but recognized that a sword or athame was the right device for the task. Not having a good ceremonial knife handy I picked up the old wooden toy kris dagger my cousin had fashioned for me as a kid, which already has a lifetime of positive and magical experiences gathered around it, and placed it on my alter. The next night I stayed up until I had reached the sleep-deprivation trance state and then as the sky turned from black to gray to blue I did several sun salutations and stood on my head for ten minutes before sitting at my alter with the sword in my hands. It was raining softly outside, and birds were singing joyfully in it. The window was open and these sounds were carried in on the gentle spring wind. All this peace wrapped around me and cleared my mind and I channeled that feeling into the sword with all the memories I had of its past use in my childhood. Then I recited my favorite Rilke quote, which is in itself a mantra of clarity. "Cast the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe – perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying." As I said this the flock of birds in the tree out front took flight past my window and the rain stopped. Then I rubbed fragrant oil over the blade to act as a mnemonic trigger for its new energy, and it seems to work so far. Just touching the object brings me back to that peace of rain and birdsong and clearing the corners of my room with it has made the following rituals much more peaceful and undisturbed by strange noises and energies.
Last night Metachor recommended that I read the latest Maybe Logic Quarterly, and with great joy found Eva Davis’s "Holey Bible part 2" which contained not only a great deal of magical and anarchist experience and a clever retelling of the Genesis story, but an account of trying t o make love to the sky. For a long time now I’ve been learning to become the sky, using breathing to form a yogic dissolution of inside and outside. The way I look at it all our fear and self doubt are like little bubbles of air that get trapped in us and cause tension, and by breathing they are released and join back with the air from which they came. In a tantric sense making love to the sky would bring about such a union, and having realized during Monday’s escape that breathing is the primal sexual experience figured I might as well give it a try. After clearing and some yoga I laid down in corpse pose and relaxed my physical body, visualizing it filling up with a star-filled sky. I let my body float on the waves of my breath, a technique picked up last fall by studying the rocking motion of being in a German wheel which I fortuitously had access to, and began relaxing my energy body. I’ve been doing a lot of work learning to vibrate my chakras recently, with breath and intonation, to the point of being able to recognize and activate their different layers of energy vibration as they play out in my daily life. As I charged them I focused it into an internally erotic feeling similair to that of raising kundalini, so that the breath and energy flowing through me were titillating my subtle centers as they passed, like the world was fingering my soul. As the energy raised through me I felt myself lifted off the ground, and when it broke through my crown and connected around to the world I was swept up in waves of ecstasy with each breath. I was no longer this physical shell writhing in pleasure on the floor, but the air that surrounded it and carried it and flowed through its every cell. The sky and I had finally become one. Then while I was so open and so on I "made love" to my room, to my alter and candles on it, merging with everything around until there was just one. And to think before this I had any clue what the yogic yama brahmacharya actually meant. Practicing total oneness… What next, the sea, the flames, the planet? I feel like I could romance the whole Universe right now, a recognition of the subtle processes of being as inseperate from the spinning of the stars. I think my magic and yoga just got a lot more exciting.
2.18.2005
flungness and the primacy of spiritual experience
In his now infamous(ly incomprehensible) philosophical text Being and Time, Heidegger talks about the concept of flungness, the primal feeling of finding ourselves seemingly flung into the world and having to continually reinterpret what it means to find ourselves there as beings who are and have to be. Now, if you were to only read a definition of this concept, it may not seem so readily understandable, even translated out of Heideggerian into common English. But, if you were to find yourself flung into the middle of a street with a car bearing down at you at remarkable speeds, it becomes more apparent that yes, you are there, and have to do something about it. And quickly if you don’t want to be run over. Granted, most of our experiences do not seem to require such immediate interpretation, but that does not diminish the feeling of flungness that accompanies every moment of directly experiencing the world and having to interpret ourselves in it, even if that flungness is mostly subliminal. I wake up, and for a brief moment do not know who or where I am. I wait for the bus in the snow, it shows up late and I don’t have enough change, but then some stranger offers me a ride from out of nowhere. These are moments in between knowing the world in which we feel ourselves flung to the wolves, moments that bring into question everything we thought we knew enough of to get by on.
When I was in school I didn’t think I knew everything, though there were some moments when I felt pretty sure of myself. But everyone else seemed a lot surer, not because they actually were, but because they had read enough to back up their assumptions about reality. The teachers were particularly guilty of this, and seemed to suggest that this kind of book learning was enough to get by in the world. At the time I was a young punk, not at all satisfied with sitting in class all day listening to some old white dudes lecture while there was a whole world out there to explore. Even if that meant finding a new place to go get high during lunch. It wasn’t enough and I knew it, so I dropped out and moved out, hoping to fling myself into situations and experiences that might teach me in a more direct manner. Though I didn’t learn advanced calculus or how to write a master thesis out in the world, I did find myself confronted almost every day with questions of love and communication, politics and survival that seemed to reflect a much more basic understanding of human experience in the world. Small basic truths surprisingly not taught in schools that helped define my own flung place in this world better than anything I read in a book. Not that I didn’t read, but now it was less to learn something new than to find terms and arguments in which to express my own experiences in, which often would not have made any sense without the experience to back them up. When I found myself in philosophical discussions I couldn’t quote passages to those who had studied them extensively, but I tried to enlighten the conversations with personal anecdotes that portrayed the abstract points. It took a while to get to that point, and I often found myself having to rely on abstracts in order to fill in the gaps between my experiences and knowledge; but the more I was in the world the less I had to rely on the ontological maps of others. The understanding was fostered from my own interpretations.
But then I began to experience things that were far outside any interpretation I had found read about so far, synchronicities and acts of magic that did not seem to stem from any logical cause and effect. I was now flung not in front of a speeding car but a charging seven-headed beast that forced me to not only interpret how I would get out of the way but where it came from in the first place. Despite my wonder at this new spiritual dimension the world was rapidly taking on I also felt a terror comparable to Sartre’s idea of Nausea, like when the character in his novel looks at a single stone and feels himself flung beyond any possible interpretations. The Romantic poet Blake expressed this when he said "To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." Except that such abstracts as infinity and eternity were utterly meaningless in face of this direct experience and only seemed to hide the experience itself. In the same way the texts I read on these type of magical world views only seemed to hide the experiences of it behind abstract mappings and symbols, and not say what it meant and felt like to perceive so intensely.
Poetry is one of the few literary forms enamored by direct experience and split second reinterpretations of being flung into the world. Images are called up to reflect the world in a single grain of sand and flung back into the face of the unknown. But even here there is the pull to use abstracts and well-worn expressions, even to describe the vastness of the spiritual experience. Blake and the other Romantic poets fell into this, relying on symbolic interpretations of old religious texts to augment feelings that seemed too ineffable to put into words. About a hundred years later Rilke tried his hand at spiritual poetry, but broke from the Romantic’s approach of grandiose iconography to show how the spiritual breaks through in the small details of our daily lived experience. This wasn’t a new approach, as Rilke was directly influenced by the 13th Century Sufi poet, Rumi, whose body of work is filled with the idea of finding god in wine, laughter and sorrow, in the face of a friend and the turning of stars. Here were images that spoke directly to my own experiences of the world’s mystery, and offered me a voice to describe what I also felt, a light sliding through the features of all things that was recognizable only in giving myself to it fully. The spiritual experience became a continual feeling of being flung beyond all interpretation, experience that never needs disclosing because we are always here in it.
Not that I still don’t try and ground myself in attempts at understanding, but the desire to pull myself out of the air no longer feels so necessary, or the precise words so important.
***
It is night and all around you
strange shadows dance beyond
the flickering streetlamps.
One approaches in the dark
and for a moment you think
it is your death, beautiful
and mysterious in the twilight.
As you watch, in fear
and more wonder than a single heart
can hold, it takes form;
a tree, a beggar, a lover,
any of the known things
that might stumble towards you
in the night.
Suddenly you laugh
for it is a face you recognize
from each night before;
your own, reflected in the dark
glass of an empty storefront.
Who says your death
will not look that way too,
flung so suddenly in your path;
and will not your relief
at finding yourself there
be like finding yourself
each time you look in a mirror?
Dying is only a metaphor
for each moment you realize
you are still alive.
But it only happens once.
Living is to die
over and over again,
the knife's edge
of finding yourself there
always pressed close
against your chest.
Will you flinch away
or fling yourself bodily
into its embrace?
Only the young and insane
want to die so readily,
the feeling of blood pushed
so close to the skin
draws them out of themselves
and into each other's arms.
They cut their hearts out
of the mirror's glass
and polish them in starlight
so they can find themselves
in the middle of the night
and quickly die again.
When I was in school I didn’t think I knew everything, though there were some moments when I felt pretty sure of myself. But everyone else seemed a lot surer, not because they actually were, but because they had read enough to back up their assumptions about reality. The teachers were particularly guilty of this, and seemed to suggest that this kind of book learning was enough to get by in the world. At the time I was a young punk, not at all satisfied with sitting in class all day listening to some old white dudes lecture while there was a whole world out there to explore. Even if that meant finding a new place to go get high during lunch. It wasn’t enough and I knew it, so I dropped out and moved out, hoping to fling myself into situations and experiences that might teach me in a more direct manner. Though I didn’t learn advanced calculus or how to write a master thesis out in the world, I did find myself confronted almost every day with questions of love and communication, politics and survival that seemed to reflect a much more basic understanding of human experience in the world. Small basic truths surprisingly not taught in schools that helped define my own flung place in this world better than anything I read in a book. Not that I didn’t read, but now it was less to learn something new than to find terms and arguments in which to express my own experiences in, which often would not have made any sense without the experience to back them up. When I found myself in philosophical discussions I couldn’t quote passages to those who had studied them extensively, but I tried to enlighten the conversations with personal anecdotes that portrayed the abstract points. It took a while to get to that point, and I often found myself having to rely on abstracts in order to fill in the gaps between my experiences and knowledge; but the more I was in the world the less I had to rely on the ontological maps of others. The understanding was fostered from my own interpretations.
But then I began to experience things that were far outside any interpretation I had found read about so far, synchronicities and acts of magic that did not seem to stem from any logical cause and effect. I was now flung not in front of a speeding car but a charging seven-headed beast that forced me to not only interpret how I would get out of the way but where it came from in the first place. Despite my wonder at this new spiritual dimension the world was rapidly taking on I also felt a terror comparable to Sartre’s idea of Nausea, like when the character in his novel looks at a single stone and feels himself flung beyond any possible interpretations. The Romantic poet Blake expressed this when he said "To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." Except that such abstracts as infinity and eternity were utterly meaningless in face of this direct experience and only seemed to hide the experience itself. In the same way the texts I read on these type of magical world views only seemed to hide the experiences of it behind abstract mappings and symbols, and not say what it meant and felt like to perceive so intensely.
Poetry is one of the few literary forms enamored by direct experience and split second reinterpretations of being flung into the world. Images are called up to reflect the world in a single grain of sand and flung back into the face of the unknown. But even here there is the pull to use abstracts and well-worn expressions, even to describe the vastness of the spiritual experience. Blake and the other Romantic poets fell into this, relying on symbolic interpretations of old religious texts to augment feelings that seemed too ineffable to put into words. About a hundred years later Rilke tried his hand at spiritual poetry, but broke from the Romantic’s approach of grandiose iconography to show how the spiritual breaks through in the small details of our daily lived experience. This wasn’t a new approach, as Rilke was directly influenced by the 13th Century Sufi poet, Rumi, whose body of work is filled with the idea of finding god in wine, laughter and sorrow, in the face of a friend and the turning of stars. Here were images that spoke directly to my own experiences of the world’s mystery, and offered me a voice to describe what I also felt, a light sliding through the features of all things that was recognizable only in giving myself to it fully. The spiritual experience became a continual feeling of being flung beyond all interpretation, experience that never needs disclosing because we are always here in it.
Not that I still don’t try and ground myself in attempts at understanding, but the desire to pull myself out of the air no longer feels so necessary, or the precise words so important.
***
It is night and all around you
strange shadows dance beyond
the flickering streetlamps.
One approaches in the dark
and for a moment you think
it is your death, beautiful
and mysterious in the twilight.
As you watch, in fear
and more wonder than a single heart
can hold, it takes form;
a tree, a beggar, a lover,
any of the known things
that might stumble towards you
in the night.
Suddenly you laugh
for it is a face you recognize
from each night before;
your own, reflected in the dark
glass of an empty storefront.
Who says your death
will not look that way too,
flung so suddenly in your path;
and will not your relief
at finding yourself there
be like finding yourself
each time you look in a mirror?
Dying is only a metaphor
for each moment you realize
you are still alive.
But it only happens once.
Living is to die
over and over again,
the knife's edge
of finding yourself there
always pressed close
against your chest.
Will you flinch away
or fling yourself bodily
into its embrace?
Only the young and insane
want to die so readily,
the feeling of blood pushed
so close to the skin
draws them out of themselves
and into each other's arms.
They cut their hearts out
of the mirror's glass
and polish them in starlight
so they can find themselves
in the middle of the night
and quickly die again.
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