Retrospectives

There is nothing quite so informative and entertaining, albeit in a somewhat masochistic way, as reading your old journals. This was written on the 16^th of November, 2006, an unassuming Thursday, sometime before dawn (I was an insomniac then):

There is no sound as calming to the spirit as rain. Water streaks the windows, and the soft rhythm of the sky envelops the house. Street-lights and porch-lights and bright halogens strung across walls seep into the enclosure, their intensity dimmed by the translucent worms slithering down the glass. The lull of water in motion, each falling drop carrying with it a memory of clouds, to be extinguished against its elemental antagonist. The world seems less important by this tiny, expected miracle.

I am sinking into myself, and I welcome the reprieve. My arms are outstretched, my eyes blindfolded, and I am gently leaning back on the balls of my feet. I have no doubts as to the nature of the ground that will break my fall.

Why did the voices of people mean so much to drown out the quiet, steady voice of the self? I have certainly entertained less sane company.

Did I seek sanction of some sort? – an absolvement of the sum that is me? I am not a fixed point but the shaky line of a balding cartographer, his fingers enraptured in their tracings of continents. I can feel my borders being drawn, my states divided and fenced. I can see my veiny roads plough through rock and shale and limestone, filigree paths dotted and dashed to and from the capitals of my being.

Time. This balding map-maker needs time. And for once, I have the power to give it to him.

All this would later be distilled into a poem, How to Survive a Vacation, which I consider to be the first piece of writing that initiated me into the phase I am still in now. Much of the rhetoric that occupied my journal entries at that time were directly influence from Walden, a book that was quietly sinking its tendrils into my addled calculator. Solitude, Hermit, Individuation, Lone; words that had gained new meaning and shone that light into all my actions.

That was then. 2006 was for me a process of waking. 2007 was learning how to deal with that wakefulness, something that I am still going through today. After all those years of constructing myself so elaborately and with so much panache, I found myself with no masks to wear, naked and hog-tied to the real. Inauthenticity in all its forms is also self-denial; it is a willed ignorance of the drives that propel life, of desire, of want, of need. I became acutely aware of the separation between the external and internal, the seam I wore as my skin. I now consider it an education I was lucky to have braved. After the destruction of that false veil (a painful, torturous process that I laugh at now) I felt as if a great exhaustion was lifted from me. The greatest of all efforts is the effort to conceal.

I do not regret a single moment of my life. I am grateful to have gone through all those convoluted processes to get to where I speak from now. It is no doubt that I would have reached this place had I the forethought not to have begun that concealment of self at all, but it would have not been the eyes I view it through now. As that American savant Timothy Levitch says, “To truly travel is to stand in fields of yourself you have never stood in before.”

Self-knowledge. This is the drive that propels me. I want to plumb the depths of my desires and actions, beyond the misleading dialectics of cause and effect, beyond false effronteries of psychology or dissection. To know yourself you must also know the world that the self inhabits, for it is as much yourself as you are it. To undertake such an enterprise in a cultural and social vacuum will yield results both misleading and dangerous. And by danger I do not mean the ambiguous protoplasma of death, but the danger of sleep.

The dreamer is awake.

This is from the art of Emma Kunz, born in 1892 to a family of Swiss weavers. Quite an interesting visionary. Check her out:

http://www.emma-kunz-zentrum.ch/

 

Note: I will try my best to limit these self-analyses as I go on. I simply find that committing the mind to paper (or webspace) is somewhat like an orgasm: that pleasurable release of a coiled spring. Forgive my small indulgences.

Is McLuhan’s ‘Global Village’ a truly desirable outcome?

I am neither proponent nor detractor of collectivist philosophies. I have appropriated many aspects of Marxism into my own ‘reality tunnel’, to use Robert Wilson’s terminology, and from a purely philosophical standpoint, the only epistemological framework that has ever made sense to me is holism. However philosophy and social theory discussed and propagated in the abstract is simply information, not knowledge. Knowledge arises in the integration between the ontological and the ontic; and while phenomenological data can never not exist outside some ontological structure, pure ontology can and often does flourish independent of perceptual data (Hegel’s ‘top down’ view of historicity, flight simulators, etc…)

The point being that all collectivist attitudes posit within themselves a movement toward global collectivism, whether this movement is maintained on a conscious level or buried in the end-goal of its process. The problem with collectives is that they propagate particular value systems as the primary mode of being of the individual. By the very virtues of being a collective, they over-arch the systems brought into it by the individuals that form it. Much is lost in the translation, as even the most benign philosophies are particular modes of being, and other ‘reality tunnels’, which, on a global scale, can mean other collectives, whose possible existences as xenophobic, ethnocentric, Objectivist, etc… are subsumed gradually into the primary ideology. This can happen in completely non-confrontational, non-phenomenological ways.

Now, if this were to happen on a truly global scale, what does it entail? This video will enlighten you. It’s from a yearly panel discussion on transgressive thinking called TED. Other videos from other speakers are available online. For now though, watch anthropologist and National Geographic writer Wade Davis talk about his various travels and experiences with remote cultures, and the threat we pose to their carefully sustained identities. He is an eloquent speaker and clearly passionate about his work. More than that, he brings out some valid points about storytelling as a medium for paradigm shifts in consciousness. 

We need a new ideation for ‘collective’. Actually, we need a new ideation for ontology.

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“Look ma, I’ve made this suit of armor with wooden arms…”

The Fool

An archetype whose origins are as hard to trace as the death of trilobites, and extends far into the primordial psychology of spirit. It is a transcultural conglomeration of characteristics variously deified and scorned, Trickster, Wise Man, and Idiot, a vessel of flesh that nevertheless instructs through its folly. But here’s my beef with Archetypes: they, by the necessary constituents of their being, cannot change. And the question of the Fool then becomes: is he capable of learning from himself?

I have long identified with this image of innocence and naiveté; it is the gay face of eagerness that drives my will. The Fool is depicted in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck as a brightly dressed young man, a careless smile inscribing his face, a sack of possessions on his back, about to step off a cliff. There’s a dog, nipping at his heels, trying to get him to look down. How many times have I embarked towards desire with just that same lack of self-concern, that same ignorance of consequence and reason? There it is, that word deified by Hegel: Reason. There is no sense that the Fool is not self-conscious. On the contrary, he recognizes his freedom from rationale and places it as the fulcrum of his self-hood. I have gravely misunderstood intuition, confused it with unreflective thoughtlessness. For a base instinct to be elevated to the level of intuition it must first grow conscious of its own orthodoxy.

Consider my last blink-and-you’ll-miss-it engagement with B.. We started off well enough, flirting, fooling, conversing, beginning to entangle our lives together… and then, after you, B., decided to take a step back physically, it all began to quickly spiral into dust. Nothing should have changed, but because I had been so free with the contents of my heart, so quick to let you hold a little bit of my weight, it soured. What should have been a friendship dissolved quickly into an awkward series of forced gestures and forced sentiment. Later, in bed with M. (yes, I am a slut), I told her of an image I had of myself, reaching into my own chest and pulling out that beating, bloody muscle, plunging my fingers into its red cloistered nest and ripping it to pieces the size of my fingernails. I then hold out my raw offering in cupped hands, feeding fistfuls of that mush to all that I meet. This is what I could never tell you B., this is what you mistook for insincerity of feeling. I gave all of myself all of the time, with no conditions, no requirement but for a fraction of reciprocity. For anyone who understands the heart as mind this is a complete turn-off.

Ego certe laboro hic et laboro in meipso: factus sum mihi terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii.

As a wise Queen once said, “Get some fucking self respect!” The advice is not quite right. The standards with which I measure myself are largely out of proportion with the standards I use to see others. Language is tricksey. By ‘standards’ and ‘measurement’ I simply mean how one doles out affection and regard, the infinite intricacies of the politics of being. But the machinations of that caucus I will leave for another day.

And I am not a slut. M. is just a good friend who has seen a lot of my ugliness and not walked away yet. I love you melon.

“Love is the law, love under will.”

Crowley, whatever he was and was not, was definitely enigmatic. There are depths to his writings that I am not yet ready to explore. Somehow the notions of God and love have removed themselves from the safety of definition, and unmoored go about the business of haunting the house of my mind. I’ve found Jesus in shit-stained underwear. I’ve found love hiding under the porch, its dirty black claws deep in the flesh of a decaying dog. To understand God as the totality (sum; being; Universal Will; existentia; essentia; …) of all be-ings is not to succumb to a sugary aesthetic, a mistake made by many of the so-called ‘New-Agers’, the neo-hippies, the Rainbow Transcendentalists. Rather, it is to accept destruction as well as creation, despair as well as ecstasy, decay as well as growth, death as well as life; and never one in service to the other. Only then is the Descartian dualistic replaced with the language of holism. And this is a hard language, a language of contradiction and paradox, of disaffection as much as affection. It is not a language for Fools.

Embrace sentences it find Nothing into look and to themselves its.

Authenticity of being is a slap in the face of all that is decent and pure and moral. If you are not able to abandon the vital lies you tell yourself to keep you as you are, then turn away from the seeking. Let the essentially honest pass your house without incident, and if they are thirsty and ask for water from your well, wet their lips and send them on their way. Theirs is not your satiation.

I look forward to my next wounding. There is always learning in the shedding of skins.