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.
7.24.2007
7.18.2007
uncertain joys of the mind
"I too was happy, because I exist. I left the house with a great goal, which was, finally, to get to the office on time. But on this day the very compulsion of life participated in that other good compulsion which makes the sun shine in the hours stipulated by the almanac, according to the longitude and latitude of the places on the earth. I felt happy for not being able to feel unhappy. I walked down the street in a leisurely fashion, full of certainty, because, after all, the office was a known factor, the people in it known factors, all certainties. It shouldn't be surprising that I felt free, without knowing what I might be free of. In baskets set on the sidewalk along the Rua da Prata, the bananas for sale under the sun were of a grand yellow.
It takes very little to make me happy: that the rain had stopped, that the sun is shining brightly in this happy South, bananas that are more yellow for having black spots on them, the people selling them because they talk, the sidewalks of the Rua da Prata, the Tagus in the background, blue streaked with green turning to gold, this entire domestic corner of the Universal system.
The day will come when I will not see this any more, when the bananas on the side of the street will outlive me, the wisecracking women who sell them, and the day's newspapers, which the little man has spread out from one side of the corner to the other. I know very well that they will be different bananas, that the women will be different, and the newspapers will have, for anyone who bends over to look, a date different from today's. But they, because they do not live, last, even if they are different, while I, because I am alive, pass away even if I am the same.
I could make this moment more solemn by buying bananas, since it seems to me that all of the day's sun is projected into them as if it were a spotlight without a lamp. But I'm ashamed of rituals, symbols, of buying things on the street. The women might not wrap them properly or sell them as they should be sold because I don't know how to buy them as they should be bought. They might find my voice bizarre when I ask the price. It's better to write than to dare to live, even if living is nothing more than buying bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale.
Later on perhaps... Yes, later on... Another man, perhaps... I don't know..."
from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"
6.08.2007
heroes of the imagination
In response to the criticism of my last entry, it was not meant to be a well thought out essay as much as a rant or ramble just to get out some thoughts that had been building up in my head. With my eminent return to school in the fall I've found myself reading more and thinking more and needing to express my ideas, even if they are not yet coherent (certianly that last entry would not be a very good school paper!) nonetheless, feedback of any sort is always welcome. I've found that I can best articulate myself by "thinking outloud" and having others say, no, that's not it at all.
That said, on the subject of how children play, Sophie and I have been talking a lot about this recently, recalling from our own childhoods how we would take whatever movies or games we were exposed to and recreate them in our own play, rewriting plots of "labyrinth" or "star wars" in order to place ourselves into the action, which listening to descriptions of modern kids playing World of Warcraft seems like is a continuing tradition. How many times have you read a book and said, I really wish I could have been there? Despite the content, or perceived lack of content, in modern play, what remains essentially the same is the use of cultural plotlines in order to offer a jumping off point for the imagination. Whether reading old mythology or playing video games referencing that old material, a child might imagine themselves in that world, in any world that is more interesting than the one they daily live in, and if this kind of play is carried out through their lives could foster a deeper internal reality later accessible for artistic excavation. Indeed that is what I've found to be the case for myself. I watched Star Wars close on a hundred times growing up, and even though the specifics of the "arthurian space cowboy" aesthetic have lessened over the years, the deeper mythological themas have continued to hold importance in my psyche, even as a framing device for other stories. I imagine that Jung and Campbell were not trying to write out specific plot lines for others to follow exactly, but to find common themes that humanity has dealt with in its attempts to create coherent narratives over the centuries, which is what made Star Wars so successful in the first place (as well as the lasting resonance of punch and judy, or tom and jerry, or whichever two antagonistic figures are swinging sticks at each other on tv these days). At heart what is present is a conflict between forces, ideas, family, the need to find a place in the Universe or a sense of meaning to one's actions. It's not so much that today's media spectacles are meaningless in a world where things were once meaningful before, but that there has never been any meaning outside of what we have given to our experiences. The fin de secle writers in France decried a similar lack of meaning at the turn of the last century, which they addressed through various surreal, existential, or symbolic means, but each one an attempt to give personal meaning to modern life.
It is not surprising that superheroes and law-detectives have become the modern culture heroes, they are the figures that people can relate to, they are the legends that strive to rise above the Everyday and take real action in the world. Even if they don't exist, their possibility is enough for some even one kid in some small town to say, I could do that one day, I could do better than that. Or we see books coming out, on the other end of the spectrum from "the Da Vinci Code," where the heroes are intentionally irreal, mythical beings and monsters, who even more than the culture heroes address real human issues of the 21st century. Anne Carson's "Autobiography of Red" retells the myth of Herakles and Garyion, as if they were a homosexual couple going on vacation together, with all the monster's issues with being red, winged and unable to address the world except from behind the lens of a camera. Or Cary Doctorow's "Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town" (which I heard about last night), whose main character is the son of a mountain and a washing machine and has a set of nesting dolls as brothers, and is trying to install free wireless in Toronto (Doctorow is a large proponent of Copy Left). Despite the element of the postmodern and absurd, such characters serve to focus the attention instead on a deeper psychology or perspective of what it is to feel different in an increasingly homogenized world. That in an increasingly wired existence where everyone has a voice, and every voice sounds about the same (like a large buzz from the vanishing bees), we are all still unique, and dealing with the same sense of existentiallity that earmarks such ancient mythic texts. Indeed, the classical gods ran around drunk and fucking each other more openly than the modern culture heroes do, and were worshiped for it.
That said, on the subject of how children play, Sophie and I have been talking a lot about this recently, recalling from our own childhoods how we would take whatever movies or games we were exposed to and recreate them in our own play, rewriting plots of "labyrinth" or "star wars" in order to place ourselves into the action, which listening to descriptions of modern kids playing World of Warcraft seems like is a continuing tradition. How many times have you read a book and said, I really wish I could have been there? Despite the content, or perceived lack of content, in modern play, what remains essentially the same is the use of cultural plotlines in order to offer a jumping off point for the imagination. Whether reading old mythology or playing video games referencing that old material, a child might imagine themselves in that world, in any world that is more interesting than the one they daily live in, and if this kind of play is carried out through their lives could foster a deeper internal reality later accessible for artistic excavation. Indeed that is what I've found to be the case for myself. I watched Star Wars close on a hundred times growing up, and even though the specifics of the "arthurian space cowboy" aesthetic have lessened over the years, the deeper mythological themas have continued to hold importance in my psyche, even as a framing device for other stories. I imagine that Jung and Campbell were not trying to write out specific plot lines for others to follow exactly, but to find common themes that humanity has dealt with in its attempts to create coherent narratives over the centuries, which is what made Star Wars so successful in the first place (as well as the lasting resonance of punch and judy, or tom and jerry, or whichever two antagonistic figures are swinging sticks at each other on tv these days). At heart what is present is a conflict between forces, ideas, family, the need to find a place in the Universe or a sense of meaning to one's actions. It's not so much that today's media spectacles are meaningless in a world where things were once meaningful before, but that there has never been any meaning outside of what we have given to our experiences. The fin de secle writers in France decried a similar lack of meaning at the turn of the last century, which they addressed through various surreal, existential, or symbolic means, but each one an attempt to give personal meaning to modern life.
It is not surprising that superheroes and law-detectives have become the modern culture heroes, they are the figures that people can relate to, they are the legends that strive to rise above the Everyday and take real action in the world. Even if they don't exist, their possibility is enough for some even one kid in some small town to say, I could do that one day, I could do better than that. Or we see books coming out, on the other end of the spectrum from "the Da Vinci Code," where the heroes are intentionally irreal, mythical beings and monsters, who even more than the culture heroes address real human issues of the 21st century. Anne Carson's "Autobiography of Red" retells the myth of Herakles and Garyion, as if they were a homosexual couple going on vacation together, with all the monster's issues with being red, winged and unable to address the world except from behind the lens of a camera. Or Cary Doctorow's "Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town" (which I heard about last night), whose main character is the son of a mountain and a washing machine and has a set of nesting dolls as brothers, and is trying to install free wireless in Toronto (Doctorow is a large proponent of Copy Left). Despite the element of the postmodern and absurd, such characters serve to focus the attention instead on a deeper psychology or perspective of what it is to feel different in an increasingly homogenized world. That in an increasingly wired existence where everyone has a voice, and every voice sounds about the same (like a large buzz from the vanishing bees), we are all still unique, and dealing with the same sense of existentiallity that earmarks such ancient mythic texts. Indeed, the classical gods ran around drunk and fucking each other more openly than the modern culture heroes do, and were worshiped for it.
6.06.2007
The Vienna School vs. the Postmodern playground
Yesterday after packing the car to leave tomorrow i spent the afternoon reading Herbert Silberer's "Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts," which I picked up synchronistically at Caliban's the other day. Silberer was part of Freud and Jung's set in Vienna, and his work with alchemical symbolism predated and influenced Jung's own mounmental theories. The book is an intepretation of an old alchemical parable, called the Parabola, through Freudian dream interpretation and then integratively through alchemical and spiritual symbolism, showing how the analytical pshyco-sexual interpretations can not do justice to material that seeks at its heart to rise the spirit above the gross matter of the individual mind.
Perhaps more interesting than the material itself is the ease with which Silberer refers to a variety of world mythologies, and almost takes for granted that the readers (his intended audience being Freud's set), are already familiar with the process of deconstructing the texts of mythology and folk-lore as if they were the dreams of an individual, including referencing the quote that "dreams are private myths and myths collective dreams" to someone else other than Joseph Campbell and predating the esteemed mythologist! Despite the continuation of this process in Jung and Campbell's work, the idea of interpreting cultural texts as exemplery of the collective psyche seems to have fallen into disfavor (if it was ever in favor), and psychology chooses to focus more and more on the depths of the individual psyche, leaving cultural criticism to the literary critics. This work however points to an older use of this technique that predated psychoanalysis as the aim of the Vienna school, that collected stories, myths, folklore, whether by the Brother's Grimm or adventurous anthropologists, in order to deeper understand the human psyche on a whole. Indeed Freud could not have given such prominence to the Oedipal complex if he was only looking at one person's (or his own) psyche, and not the preponderence of such themes in world mythology surrounding the dismemberment of the parent/ god figures.
Perhaps the closest we come to such "collective psychology" today is found in movie or book reviews, and then only in mortification over the snarkiness and self-referentiallity of the post-modern paradigm (I was wholly disgusted by a recent review of Shrek the Third in the New york times, which could only comment on how the movie was a parable for the ongoing battle between Disney and Dreamworks). Even modern myth-makers like George Lucas, whose original Star Wars trilogy was an homage to his friendship with Joseph Campbell and based directly off Campbell's writing on the hero's journey, have fallen prey to cutesy characters and in-jokes designed solely to hook a young crowd that can not relate their experiences to a deeper mythological spectrum than pop-stars and punch-and-judy style pratfalls. Many of the children in Sophie's after-school program talked incessently of World of Warcraft, which though like Harry Potter and Narnia are fantastic in scope, and many older RPG video games like the Final Fantasy series referenced mythological names and themas, this kind of mythology is only a surface aesthetic, and further removes children from looking closer at the deeper themes and dramas of the original source material. Pretending you are a sword-swinging elf does not replicate the psychological depth implied by the heroic labours of Hercules (and not the Disney version) nor Theseus's struggle through the labyrinth, which are in themselves only metaphors for rising above the twisted and dangerous depths of the individual mind.
Perhaps more interesting than the material itself is the ease with which Silberer refers to a variety of world mythologies, and almost takes for granted that the readers (his intended audience being Freud's set), are already familiar with the process of deconstructing the texts of mythology and folk-lore as if they were the dreams of an individual, including referencing the quote that "dreams are private myths and myths collective dreams" to someone else other than Joseph Campbell and predating the esteemed mythologist! Despite the continuation of this process in Jung and Campbell's work, the idea of interpreting cultural texts as exemplery of the collective psyche seems to have fallen into disfavor (if it was ever in favor), and psychology chooses to focus more and more on the depths of the individual psyche, leaving cultural criticism to the literary critics. This work however points to an older use of this technique that predated psychoanalysis as the aim of the Vienna school, that collected stories, myths, folklore, whether by the Brother's Grimm or adventurous anthropologists, in order to deeper understand the human psyche on a whole. Indeed Freud could not have given such prominence to the Oedipal complex if he was only looking at one person's (or his own) psyche, and not the preponderence of such themes in world mythology surrounding the dismemberment of the parent/ god figures.
Perhaps the closest we come to such "collective psychology" today is found in movie or book reviews, and then only in mortification over the snarkiness and self-referentiallity of the post-modern paradigm (I was wholly disgusted by a recent review of Shrek the Third in the New york times, which could only comment on how the movie was a parable for the ongoing battle between Disney and Dreamworks). Even modern myth-makers like George Lucas, whose original Star Wars trilogy was an homage to his friendship with Joseph Campbell and based directly off Campbell's writing on the hero's journey, have fallen prey to cutesy characters and in-jokes designed solely to hook a young crowd that can not relate their experiences to a deeper mythological spectrum than pop-stars and punch-and-judy style pratfalls. Many of the children in Sophie's after-school program talked incessently of World of Warcraft, which though like Harry Potter and Narnia are fantastic in scope, and many older RPG video games like the Final Fantasy series referenced mythological names and themas, this kind of mythology is only a surface aesthetic, and further removes children from looking closer at the deeper themes and dramas of the original source material. Pretending you are a sword-swinging elf does not replicate the psychological depth implied by the heroic labours of Hercules (and not the Disney version) nor Theseus's struggle through the labyrinth, which are in themselves only metaphors for rising above the twisted and dangerous depths of the individual mind.
5.31.2007
lightning, trains, and dreams
We got to Sophie's house in a choir of lightningbolts, always my favorite force of nature, and ran inside to find her back door wide open. Thankfully nothing was missing, nor strange lurkers about the house, and we sighed, thinking it could have only been one person, her naive but well-meaning housemate, Mr. Crowe. Shortly he came in, woozy from an acupuncture session, and with no clue about the back door, but carrying a painting he'd seen at the Shadow Lounge of a silhouette image over a starry sky of a figure jumping between the cars of a train. On being asked about it he said it reminded him of a dream he recently had of running along the top of a train to escape a werewolf, until dawn broke and the wolf reverted into a man he could tackle, while an old dorky boyscout chum who he hadn't thought about since his childhood looked on. Immediately I thought of the series of train dreams I had last summer, upon moving back to Bloomfield where the trains howl through the night, particularly the one, after watching Dead Man for the first time, in which my twin brother and I were riding on top of two parallel trains, like the sandworms in Dune, in the old red and green overalls of the Mario Brothers. We reached out our hands and gleefully pulled the trains in to each other, causing them to crash and fall into a wooded ravine, followed by a daring escape from the law in the coffin of my anima's dead grandfather. Mr. Crowe thought it interesting the whole death/ rebirth theme in my dream, which comes up quite often, and went on to explain how he can often tell how he's doing in his life by the appearance of dogs in his sleep, and how he reacts to them, as he had once been mauled by a canine when he was a child. In all my years studying dreams I hadn't heard this theory, of how one reacts to images of one's primal (primary) fear in dreams being a gauge of their power, but I certainly can see that in relation to my own dreaming. For all the years of watching the world end in endlessly horrible ways, I've reached a point where in the dreams I accept it, and upon waking reach quickly for my pen, excited for the new material that is infinitely more interesting than dreaming about work.
2.22.2007
flash of momentum
It's been awhile again. life takes hold and suddenly i forget that the internet ever existed. let's see... i got into school, starting august 23, and realized just how much work i have to get done on my own projects before i won't have time to work on them. so i've been writing, for 3-6 hours a day, typing up every single dream i ever had, and then deconstructing all the symbolism; places, characters, objects, actions, shades of ligth and color, impedences and other strange psychological effects, so that i can begin seeing exactly what my psyche contains and how to put it all back together into this novel. beyond that continuing madcap research, deconstructing the occult symbolism in jodorowsky's "holy mountain" for a friend's disertation, inventing new techniques, recording more of my past, playing music, being in love. every day shows me so much, i am learning at such an incredible rate, about how i work, what things mean to me, what it means to be in love again, to be a friend and son... and i'm not even in school yet. suffice to say that it is hard to find time or desire to post here, since the work i'm doing is very different than that which is just updates of my life for other people.
perhaps you'll hear from me later...
perhaps you'll hear from me later...
12.25.2006
ghost in the margins
For years i would come home afraid of what changes might have struck this old city, or worse, what might remain unbearably the same, streets and habits rotting on the edges of time while life happens elsewhere. i suppose it was a projection of my own fears of time, and each visit would bear the fruits of my expectations in new sidewalks or deeper potholes, friends and family still caught in the joys and sorrows of a decade past, and myself straining against the future like it was a vast chasm i had no choice but to throw myself over.
but recently this has begun to shift, perhaps as i make peace with time, and the family home becomes not the forshadowing of a tomb but a storehouse or museum to its memories, a treasure chest of the past from which the story of this life is being written. in "Man and his Symbols," Jung tells of a recurring dream in which he was continually on the verge of discovering a new wing in his house, some lost corrider older than his ancestors which at any moment he might stumble into. later he realized that this new wing was really a new idea or direction he was about to embark on, his discovery of the archetypes, and that dreams contain a prophetic element or at least a 'cryptomnesia,' whereby we might discover what was already known but forgotten thorugh the intricacies of our occluded symbology. similarly i now walk through this house looking at the bookshelves, through old cabinets and boxes, as if with each visit their contents might grow older, or i grown more comprehending of what was always there, photos from our childhood at the beach, hurricane lamps filled with seashells, heirloom candlesticks and hundred year old poetry books that seem to cry out with that much more significance. i look through them as if these objects might contain some secret to life only now readable, and wonder that i never saw them before.
one such set of objects, which i was excited to come upon, were the set of encylcopedias belonging to my grandfather Wilson Lee Johnson, in which, as the story goes, after his heart attack and confinement to bed he proceeded to work out in the margins and endpages a solution to world hunger based off the chemical composition of yeast, which seems an awfully marquezian tale. my father had looked through these formulas once, without comprehending much, but then chose to forget them as time moved on and the pain of his father's death and then his mother's death last year made it difficult to look any closer at his family history, which for a genealogist must be the sore blow of closing a chapter on the past. but as he told me, he had never had much interest in his father's artifacts, nor knew much about his life to begin with except that he had aspired to be an artist and a writer in his youth.
i expected the strange often heiroglyphic chemical formulas that abounded in each margin, but there was something else being worked out in this man's head too, that as i read further dawned on me gradually as being an entire cosmology of life and alchemical struggle against death and disease in all forms. stuck between many of the pages were articles clipped from papers with which he would update the aging encyclopedias, and from these emerged wild theories and aphorisms about being in time, charts of correspondence between the electromagnetic spectrum, the planets, chemical elements, and the human body, a subtle numerology and cryptographic word play which seemed to seek as its object a total description of reality and its effect on the human body and mind, synchretizing whatever information it could find into a progressively more complex and phenomenal world view, where god is equal to light, and life derives from the sun's chemical illumination. amidst these notations and scrawls were veiled referances to a prophecy or vision of the future that he was given, perhaps in connection with the passing of the icarus meteor in june of 1968, or with his heart attack, which undoubtedly threw him into this wild speculation and cabalism that as far as my father knew had never been a part of his father's life before that.
also among his papers were a book of poetry and some short stories, but these seem to have come from an earlier period, and whatever possession or illumination he sought to articulate in his last years remained mostly in his head. except that he seemed to know it would not be lost, for in one passage he describes the body's projection of self after death into the future where its descendents would be able to access it, but in another passage asks not to be remembered for that would take precious time away from the rememberer for their own present and future. but perhaps what seems like a theory of the continuation of the soul through DNA and heredity holds some truth, for though we never knew him, as he died when our father was still young, we his grandchildren seem to be working out his themes and visions in our own lives, devon's chemical experiments with photography and time, scott's computer science, my own experiments with linguistic alchemy, and all tinged with an edge of the spiritual or occult that seeks to step out of time towards some ultimate sense of reality altogether. so whoever this man was, and though he will (and perhaps wanted to) be forgotten, i suspect in him was the workings of a great modern alchemist, and i can only seek to honor that in my own life and tasks, as if destiny was something not just created from the images of one's own childhood, but passed down from generation to fruitful generation like another well loved and worn family treasure.
but recently this has begun to shift, perhaps as i make peace with time, and the family home becomes not the forshadowing of a tomb but a storehouse or museum to its memories, a treasure chest of the past from which the story of this life is being written. in "Man and his Symbols," Jung tells of a recurring dream in which he was continually on the verge of discovering a new wing in his house, some lost corrider older than his ancestors which at any moment he might stumble into. later he realized that this new wing was really a new idea or direction he was about to embark on, his discovery of the archetypes, and that dreams contain a prophetic element or at least a 'cryptomnesia,' whereby we might discover what was already known but forgotten thorugh the intricacies of our occluded symbology. similarly i now walk through this house looking at the bookshelves, through old cabinets and boxes, as if with each visit their contents might grow older, or i grown more comprehending of what was always there, photos from our childhood at the beach, hurricane lamps filled with seashells, heirloom candlesticks and hundred year old poetry books that seem to cry out with that much more significance. i look through them as if these objects might contain some secret to life only now readable, and wonder that i never saw them before.
one such set of objects, which i was excited to come upon, were the set of encylcopedias belonging to my grandfather Wilson Lee Johnson, in which, as the story goes, after his heart attack and confinement to bed he proceeded to work out in the margins and endpages a solution to world hunger based off the chemical composition of yeast, which seems an awfully marquezian tale. my father had looked through these formulas once, without comprehending much, but then chose to forget them as time moved on and the pain of his father's death and then his mother's death last year made it difficult to look any closer at his family history, which for a genealogist must be the sore blow of closing a chapter on the past. but as he told me, he had never had much interest in his father's artifacts, nor knew much about his life to begin with except that he had aspired to be an artist and a writer in his youth.
i expected the strange often heiroglyphic chemical formulas that abounded in each margin, but there was something else being worked out in this man's head too, that as i read further dawned on me gradually as being an entire cosmology of life and alchemical struggle against death and disease in all forms. stuck between many of the pages were articles clipped from papers with which he would update the aging encyclopedias, and from these emerged wild theories and aphorisms about being in time, charts of correspondence between the electromagnetic spectrum, the planets, chemical elements, and the human body, a subtle numerology and cryptographic word play which seemed to seek as its object a total description of reality and its effect on the human body and mind, synchretizing whatever information it could find into a progressively more complex and phenomenal world view, where god is equal to light, and life derives from the sun's chemical illumination. amidst these notations and scrawls were veiled referances to a prophecy or vision of the future that he was given, perhaps in connection with the passing of the icarus meteor in june of 1968, or with his heart attack, which undoubtedly threw him into this wild speculation and cabalism that as far as my father knew had never been a part of his father's life before that.
also among his papers were a book of poetry and some short stories, but these seem to have come from an earlier period, and whatever possession or illumination he sought to articulate in his last years remained mostly in his head. except that he seemed to know it would not be lost, for in one passage he describes the body's projection of self after death into the future where its descendents would be able to access it, but in another passage asks not to be remembered for that would take precious time away from the rememberer for their own present and future. but perhaps what seems like a theory of the continuation of the soul through DNA and heredity holds some truth, for though we never knew him, as he died when our father was still young, we his grandchildren seem to be working out his themes and visions in our own lives, devon's chemical experiments with photography and time, scott's computer science, my own experiments with linguistic alchemy, and all tinged with an edge of the spiritual or occult that seeks to step out of time towards some ultimate sense of reality altogether. so whoever this man was, and though he will (and perhaps wanted to) be forgotten, i suspect in him was the workings of a great modern alchemist, and i can only seek to honor that in my own life and tasks, as if destiny was something not just created from the images of one's own childhood, but passed down from generation to fruitful generation like another well loved and worn family treasure.
11.15.2006
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]
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]
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