exercise in caving in

I want to collapse. Walking home from work, late at night, with the stars beating out a restless compass behind the clouds and streetlamps, and the flood of red and gold bleeding from piles in the gutters into puddles of decayed parchment on the streets, the loathsome rot of ginko berries crushed underfoot like dog shit or sexual frustration. There will be a sudden gust of wind, the face of a friend gliding ghostlike by on the whir of a bicycle, a song heard with such deep emotional undertones that it sunk into my bones and lays there a melancholy twang for each love lost, each moment slipped through cut fingers. And falling into that depression like an old well I’ll be unable to take another step, and if it weren’t for the force of habit drilled into these limbs I would stop completely and sit down overwhelmed on a cracked porch. Or tumble directly into the leaves with the fingers worn out of my gloves and overcoat grunged and melting into the reek of the street. On these days I feel like a bum or one of those crazies who are already lost in their own worlds, who have no need left for society, to hold together that face that was always caving in for other people and leaves them mumbling incoherently in the edges of vision or back tables of cafés. One wonders what realms they have vanished to behind those ill-fitting masks.

I lay down and pull the night over my head like a thick winter blanket to ward off the nightmares and wonder that I have managed to make anything of my life so far. Just a few copied poems, a couple unreleased demos, no degrees, years wasted on the clock making wings and sandwiches, a bare minimum of friends I can still only vaguely relate to. I have had too many dreams and not enough follow-through. Each time I begin with the full intention to create great works of art, lasting relationships, I trip up and collapse mid-sentence into the hairy arms of lethargy and despair. Even this never ending novel, which haunts me each night for years now, lurking even through the day. All the effort I seem to put to it produces maybe an hour or two of results occasionally. The rest is spent lost in that world wondering how I might get out, or get it out of my head. For that’s it, if I was just content to dream and falling through that city of symbols wander aimlessly and mesmerized and never wake up, It’s not the dreams that haunt me, but the desire and effort needed to articulate them. The force of mountains.

It would be easy to get lost, to become one with the bums. That’s why I haven’t stopped yet, for if I collapsed, laid down just for a moment to rest in the raw emotions of the gutter, I might never get back up. I would live there pecking crumbs with the pigeons until moss grew on my coat and my shoes stretched roots into the concrete and perhaps countless years later I would make a good tree stump for someone else to rest their mind on. That would not be such a horrible fate, a stump serves at least some useful service.

But no! I must keep moving. Those lights in the windows are beckoning me to sit, to spell the interplay of shadows through the bare branches, and if I do so I’m finished. I must keep moving, as far and as fast as possible, before this entropy kills me, the atrophy of each daily routine, each stale lead-bound instinct, creeps into my bones and freezes them in mid-fall. That is what I struggle against, the ruts worn so deep in the sidewalk from each and every walk this same way, that there is nowhere left to tread and the caving concrete collapses over my head, my grave eventually marked by some illegible and inappropriate scrawl left by some equally bored vagabond not yet submitted to his own tomb.

I have considered alternatives, racked my brain on ways to extricate myself from these aching streets. A change, of work, of going back to school, of building some career for myself here. And yet I fear it would not be enough, that I’ll still be here walking these same streets for even longer duller years, caught in just as much of a habit in all the meaningless work that would require. Not that I feel I couldn’t do it, but why? I am sick of habits. I am sick of being sick of habits. I grow nauseous at the very idea of having to get up again.

Perhaps I should learn to fly instead, escape entirely to some foreign country where I have no habits, where everything is as of yet still unknown, even myself, and I can look in the mirror and see an infinite number of new lives to lead each morning in this new and breathtaking place. I will ex-patriate, go live in Paris. I have always felt I belonged there for all its history of literary existentialists. I will sit at the cafes on the sidewalk, write furiously, and look at everything, and dream as often as possible. It sounds idyllic, but how long would that last before habit caught up with me again and I grew bored and listless and ready for another chang? One month, two? Perhaps a whole year if I really pushed myself to explore each and every alleyway before they too become mapped onto the veins on the back of my hands. And then what? I could go everywhere and even grow bored of going (as I already am), and still not find peace. I would have to leave the Earth altogether, chart the depths of the stars from my dreaming mind, wander a nomad from galaxy to galaxy until I come to the unknown edge of the Universe, and even that would not be enough to contain me. I shudder at the mere notion of immortality, what could fill it?

Better to abandon that plan and just lock myself in my room, where lying curled on my bed with a cat nosing at my elbow I can descend to the inner edges of the mind. The psych has no known bottom, no final borderline, no accurate maps except those still marked with the winds blowing cherub-like in the four corners and fantastic beasts prowling the seas where they fall off the sides and drown infinity. Here be dragons. If only I can get back to my room without collapsing first. Perhaps there will be a dragon on the way (that would be something), perhaps one must finally accept boredom and reality and grow accustomed of amusing oneself in whatever manner available until you die, occasionally amusing others as well in the process. If that is the case than hopefully the hours spent on this have not been in vain.


[this was written a few days ago in a stressful weekend of falling apart]

street of dreams

"I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the world crystallizes for us... They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life... Such images constitute a program, establish our soul's fixed fund of capital, which is alloted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings. It seems to me that the rest of our life passes in the interpretation of those insights, in the attempt to master them with all the wisdom we acquire, to draw them through all the range of intellect we have in our possession. These early images mark the boundaries of an artist's creativity. His creativity is a deduction from assumptions already made. He cannot now discover anything new; he learns only to understand more and more the secret entrusted to him at the beginning, and his art is a constant exegesis, a commentary on that single verse that was assigned him. But art will never unravel that secret completely. The secret remains insoluble. The knot in which the soul was bound is no trick knot, coming apart with a tug at its end. On the contrary, it grows tighter and tighter. We work at it, untying, tracing the path of the string, seeking the end, and out of this manipulation comes art..."

and

"The Demiurge has had no monopoly on creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits. Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well. In the depth of matter, indistinct smiles are shaped, tensions build up, attempts at form appear. The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it. Waiting for the life-giving breath of the spirit, it is endlessly in motion. It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself."

-Bruno Schulz, author of "The Street of Crocodiles"

kiss the dirt

because you aren't afraid to kiss the dirt
(and consequently dare to climb the sky)

-e.e. cummings

infornography

Reading more PK Dick before work i came on several passages of relevance to the dream novel. it seems Dick was also familiar and concerned with mythological themes and their application to his life (as i imagine every writer must be to some degree). but as the inexplicableness of his transcendent experience took hold of him this was the only place he could turn to make heads or tails out of whatever had actually happened, which could otherwise be considered madness; much the way i am doing with my dream visions. indeed there are many parallels, of most note that when he had looked deep into the void he was shown he found in the heart of it and himself a beautiful and all knowing woman, his anima; whom he associated with the goddess Sophia, who in xtian mythology Christ promised would come to those who embraced the light through the dark night of their souls (i will have to find this reference, probably in the Gnostic texts), as the Glory figure came to me when i was struggling with the end of my internal world and disintegration of the self.

Dick also said he found that void to be God, the awareness in all things behind their apparent, separated, realities, who was both more real and ineffable. the way that in my San Pedro trip I found what i could only call God in the hollow behind all things, yet could only describe it as a comfortable absence that was aware of the entirety of existence. Dick remarked that no one else (in his knowledge) had had this experience in the past 200 years, and i wonder that i should also come to a similar place, even down to the anamnesia of the Record, and if this kind of awakening is becoming more common. especially as the ages of consciousness expanding drugs and information make connectivity and the concept of omniscience more obvious and essential to modern life. one could probably make an argument for the exteriorization of the sub- or unconscious, where it was latent or hidden before. as the pantheon of gods (cross-cultural) could be seen as a finer-grained pattern of ourselves, our hopes and fears, desires and other subtle energies (which it has been postulated they were created to represent in the first place, for lack of better terminology or understanding of our inner workings), so too could the gods be seen as a rough-hewn emanation from some deeper, lighter source or pattern that runs beneath and shapes all things. the matrix metaphor points to this condition, but as this matrix is but matter or mother (Ma’at), it is more related to the veil of maya, the ground of appearances, Dick’s black iron prison; and not to whatever energy or awareness lies formless behind the forms.

in talking with sophie about her process of coming out of her darkness (the shamanistic rebirth or psychological individuation process), she mentioned having to find a “positive energy” to rely on, though she was understandably hesitant to call it God, as AA usually tells its participants to turn to. i suggested there was nothing in the energy itself which is positive, that it is our perception and use of it which casts it in either that dark or light. one could argue it is that same energy (or our refusal of it) that drives people to drink or madness, and the acceptance of something larger than themselves to trust in which leads them back to a sense of peace or heightened presence in themselves and the world. i suppose it is many things for many people, that some find it necessary to couch this energy in terms of myth or religion in order to match their own peculiar symbolism of the world, but that ultimately it doesn’t matter what you call it, as it is inexpressible outside of metaphor and imagination. of course, that the energy is chargeless (for lack of a better word to describe its dual positivity/ negativity), means that many choose consciously to embrace its dark face, the madness of the world of forms, the secret longings and highs and powers of sex and violence which currently seem to be driving our world. but these are just as much a “path to god” as the more ascetic, pure paths, as evidenced by the tradition of tantra, in which instead of drawing the senses away from the world in order to find what is beneath them, one purposely overloads the senses until they reach a breaking point, and find the still emptiness that resides in the chaos. our culture is currently in such a process of overloading itself with information and images (infornography).

i suppose the distinction is that like breeds like, and that increasing the amount of sensory stimuli or violence in the world only creates more of a maze to extricate ourselves from later. certainly in the early days of disentangling my dreams i found myself relying heavily on metaphors and symbolism to explain my experiences, only to find that they were creating that much more of a labyrinth between me and reality. this continued until i asked the zen master Chong Hae what this dream was i could not wake up from, and he said it was all the theories and images we put on top of reality in order to avoid just having it be reality itself. as Dick tells it in an amusing argument with God, each time he came up with some other theory besides having met God, he fell into an infinite regress of thesis/ antithesis, at which God would butt in saying, “i am this infinity, and i will play this game until you die or accept it” at which Dick would say “but maybe…” and fall into another infinite regress, ad nauseum.

cryptomorphology: hidden in the forms

Of course, it’s right when i should be sleeping, that i’m struck with the compulsion to write. which i haven’t felt for days, like the hesitant gearing up of some infernal machine. you’d think i’d be brain dead by now, not sleeping, and waking up still drunk from last night’s birthday festivities. but no. the muses work the night shift. after a slow afternoon working on the hero’s journey notes, i finished huysman’s “against nature” and can finally leave the Decadence aside for a little, and figured i’d take the rest of the evening off. but then i needed to start researching Gnosticism, particularly the emanation of the aeon Sophia from the Pleroma (fullness) of the inexpressible; who in being born without her male twin (syzygy), gave stillbirth to the demiurge, that blind god who created our material world and in not being able to see the greater light cried out that he was indeed the only god. i don’t know where that came from, why i needed to find that info. like a paranoia or obsession, the process of creating a world becomes the object of a focused attention into which everything falls pray. like a black hole, except with an other side. and the strangest quick references latch on as crucial building blocks for the creative task.

so then i picked up a copy of Philip K. Dick’s exegesis, and began reading his account of the mystical experience/ psychotic breakdown that haunted the later years of his life. with the cats prowling at the door and the stillness and buzzing of electronic devices in the room and infinitely tired i started to get those edges of movement in my vision, tinges of other worlds made only more possible by PKD’s surreal yet straightforward narrative of having dead friends and scholars or some alien intelligence speaking greek in his dreams and all around grooming his life. interesting also as a side note, he was born a twin, though his sister Jane C. died a year later. i think the point that struck me was he also related this force to being Sophia (in that the voices were all couched in Gnostic terms), who in that mythology was said to come into the world of forms/ darkness and rescue the shards of light that had gotten trapped here. which Dick went on to relate to Osiris’s dismemberment and subsequent rescue by Isis (another wisdom goddess, on the darker magical side of knowledge).

i had that dream. several years ago after the year long dream storyline of the world ending and civilization crumbling and everyone i know getting put in prison camps, i was coming out of my dark and dreamt one night that my twin brother took me down into a basement laboratory where he chained me to a monolith-machine and proceeded to extract my consciousness from my physical being, so that i was aware as if i was everything around me (foreshadowing my actual experience of this on 8-23-2003). but then he couldn’t get me back into my self and had to find someone who i would recognize and return to my body for. who he found in the glory-sophia figure i had been following around in my unconscious but hadn’t caught yet. he convinced her to come back to the basement and on seeing her i fell back into my body and woke up on a beach, drenched and naked and remembering everything i had been aware of while i was everything.

it could boggle me that i had this dream experience without any prior knowledge of the deeper archetypal occurrences of similar plot-lines, that it is a theme (or mytheme, a term i came on tonight to) inherent in the psyche. placed in the context of the crumbling dream world, and that i was also fighting off a schizophrenic breakdown my twin was going through at the time, this event stands as probably the crucial moment in the whole dream story. and comparing it to other hanged man myths (odin on yggdrassil, Buddha on the immovable spot, christ on the calvary mount…) certainly sets its significance to the myth i’m unraveling in my head.

so i got all jittery, and walked upstairs still catching glimpses out of the corners of my eyes, and suddenly felt like something was following me into the bathroom. and i realized that it’s been a couple years since i’ve felt that, and that that feeling of being stalked or haunted is one i lived under for most of my life. time always looking over your shoulder making you remember this could be it. a healthy dose of paranoia to balance out the pronoia of finding what i was looking for in the texts. probably that gimp death i dreamed the other night finally catching up to his normal place behind my left shoulder. i suppose it means i need to get started on this task soon. not for fear that the work or inspiration will dissipate, for i suspect it is much bigger and longer lasting than i am, but that i might in the mean time. at least, not till after i get a good night’s sleep.

death drags a bum leg

Our show last night at club cafe was our best yet. we rocked it in front of a dark spangly curtain to a small but receptive audience, and Nikki got up during the next set to do an improv spoken word bit with soma mestizo.

And finally i got to sleep in a bit, and though my sleep felt scattered i still managed to remember a dream before i woke up. i guess that's been one benefit of working on this dream novel, that my recall is up to about three dreams a night, growing in vivid detail and symbolic content. we were riding over a desolate tundra stunted with white fir trees, in some cross between a flying car, a miniature airship and santa's sleigh. except the old bearded man with us seemed more like god than santa claus, and he was arguing with death, who had come along for the ride even though no one wanted him there. death was dressed like darth vader, had a limp, and talked with a high nasally voice like "c'mon guys, please let me come along?" we landed shortly, and set off across the snow dunes towards the city, with death dragging his gimp leg and falling behind, and when we looked back he was still there, but lagging so far that he would never catch us, though i kind of felt bad that everyone was picking on him.

down boulevards of story

"Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

-Joseph Campbell, from "the hero with a thousand faces"


yup. this book is my new bible. the madness is unraveling and the dreams are all falling into place. if i don't stop myself now, i might try and write the whole blest novel tonight.

the lamentations of an icarus

the lovers of prostitutes
are happy, cheerful and well-fed;
as for me, my arms are broken
through having hugged the clouds.

it is thanks to the incomparable stars,
blazing in the depths of the sky,
that my devoured eyes see only
the memories of suns.

in vain i wished to find
the centre and end of space;
i know not under what fiery eye
i feel my wings breaking;

and burnt up by love of beauty,
i shall not have the sublime honor
of giving my name to the abyss
which will serve as my grave.

-Baudelaire