Nostalgie - Narcotic Blanket of Reminiscence

We all have a tendency to remember the things that happened to us with a certain kind of wistful pleasure, to become attached to the inner recounting and ourwatd retelling of our past experiences, some of those times in our lives when everything seemed to have swam along painlessly and with great pleasure, a long series of events that make up a personal era or time in our lives, which in restrospect seem like so much fun and unworried perfection.

The longer one is alive, the accumulative storehouse of memories become (through their remembering and recounting) a kind of fantasy land vacation, a vacation paradise of memory, where we remember and retell our stories with people who have shared in these times with us, as we temporarly forget the effects that chrononilogical time has forced upon our bodies and minds. When we tell these stories, remember the details and the fun, we get a look on our face of childlike excitement, the hope and unaffected possibility much like that which you see on athe face of a young child face when he is told he will get the special toy bought for him he has so desperately wanted. Pure joy of excitement without even the slightest notion of loss, or pain, or finality.

Yet as the stories trail off and we come back to the present, so far from that mythical past narrative, that look of childish joy that momentairly shines through the oldish face of the adult us quickly fades and all the lines of age and experience fall back into place - the conflicting masks of who we were and who we really are readjust themselves - and back come the sunken cheeks, the creases at the corners of the eyes, the soft neck, and the sad look when we realize that those times are gone, and we feel much like a shell of our former self. Indeed, embers of some former fire that once seemed to rage without the possibility of being extinguished.

Nostaliga is all about longing and desire, desire for some golden age that never was - the well of the past, someone once said is bottomless, indeed unfathomable. And when the past, our past, becomes a substitute for the self we are now, the life we need now, it is like a drug, a web blanket of narcotic escapism and bliss, a cocoon of forgetting, temporary trascendences from full participation in the movement of time and our place in it.

Kevin's Ghost and Batting at Bats

Swinging at Bats at dusk in the summer with baseball bats with Kevin, many years ago.

Kevin D was my first real friend, male or female. When I say 'first' friend' I mean the first time that you truly establish a close relationship apart from the deep interdependencies your self/ego naturally has within the deep influence from your family - your siblings and your parents. Your first close friend allows you to explore and experience an identity that is not controlled and defined by the often oppresive and determinsitic influence of your family relationships. With your first friend, you begin to become an individual, though it's oddly paradoxial that the only way to become unique and independent is to have another, non family member understand you.

Kevin was my first friend, and also the first person I became friends with when our family moved to the desert. Moving to the desert for me was perhaps my first real traumatic experience, emotionally speaking. I had not known previous to then what a sensitive lad I really was (and maybe still am), for when it came time for me to enroll in school inthe 6th grade, I became physically terrified, to the point where I would cry incessantly and become sick to my stomach. This was, I think, a big step for me into selfhood, though at the time all I knew was that I was afraid, and truly feared having to be around new people and start a new life and make new friends. Truthfully, I don't remember being able to understand it, other than I felt depressed and horrifed. My mother was helpful and gave me the push to go to school and to stay there. This was not only a new school with new people and new friends to make, but I think part of the shock was that we had moved from a highly dense and urbanized city to the dry, hot, harsh and severe desert world: the dirt and rocks, the green-less hills and over-like heat, the open spaces and panoramic skylines, which I think made me a bit weightless, as if the small little identity I had started to develop was upended from its urban, people=filled enviornement and tossed head first into an abtract alien world of the desert. My ego was still quite unstable and fundamentally inchaote and chaotic, due to youthful depressions and a few nascent existential crises as a young child - though more on that in another rechercher.

Getting to school wasnt even easy, as I purposely missed the bus and refused to go. My Mom convinced me to ride with her to go, sometimes through persuasion and sometimes in desparation by bribing me five dollars. I would eventually get to school all in tears and trying not to cry (I was a crier), only to fake sickness and get sent to the nurses office, where it was obvious after several visits that I was simply sick with fear and could not be treated with any medicines.

The image I have of Kevin, the last image I can remember, was driving home one night from somewhere, some late night from partying somewhere, extending my own pleasure ego into some dark night, cold and windy, dry on not wet but chilly with a sharp night breeze, bundled up and drunk in my big white 60 'Oldsmobile, driving down some desert road, when I turn a corner and see a body walking on the side of the road, a tall figure with shaggy long hair, and as I get closer I slow down and see Kevin, his cold black eyes staring at me, with what I think is recognition but I cannot be sure.

Etranger a Moi Même: Lost in Opposition to The Unicator

I admit to a fairly large amount of misanthropy in my world view, or at least a negative view of people's ability to be compassionate or empathetic. Or, maybe just the kind of interaction and communication I for some reason envision - where people actually communicate and exchange ideas and learn about one another and recognize one another - is more the stuff of otherworldly, utopian idealism rather than 'the way things really are'.

The 'way things really are' to me is, most people seem self absorbed, self centered, and in the main *not* very interested in what others have to say, unless it somehow relates to them or helps them understand themselves. If this worldview were expressed in a more fantastical, sci-fi mode, I'd imagine people as fleshy humanoid talking pods walking around with small-slitted eyes and no ears and huge mouth pieces which are continually spewing out words and sentences and lectures, a world where no one really sees or hears the other, and sunsequently this human drama all seems quite futile. With this view I hold, the whole purpose of humans even being together seems obscured in the din of all this uni-directional babble.

I might also make an animal analogy, where I'd imagine humans not that different than the animals we supposedly transcended a few thousand years ago when we stopped swinging around and popped out of the trees and started skulking across the savannas in search of better food, tools, language, and culture. Instead, even though we possess the complexity language and the ability to communicate through symbols and signs and be conscious of ourselves in the world, the very fact that all we seem to do is 'unicate' (opposite of communicate, to babble without expecting or desiring reciprocation) really does not set us that far apart from the squawking duck in a pond that seems to be quacking on about nothing in particular, and all the other ducks could care less.

So then too, as I interact with other people at work, or in my running group, people sometimes ask questions about *me* but really all they seem to be doing is being polite and really just waiting for the chance to talk about themselves. It's as if talking incessantly about one's self acts as an ego sustainer, an ego prop, which keeps one's personality afloat (at the expense my own alientation); or, that their unicating ego prop becomes their personality - their self absorbed act of talking about themselves is simultaneously an outward projection of noise and an inwardly self-reflexive gazing and sustaining their own image that they create through the interaction of trapping a person with their one way discourse.

In all honesty, this view of mine, my own subjective take on all this, makes the world a lonely place for me at times. I have only recently realized the extent to which this world view of humans as unicators has formed my own identity - that of a person (me) who stands in opposition to the unicator: me as silent but defiant solitary soul resisting the urge to throw myself into the mix. My family was a family of unicators, is a family of unicators, for the most part, and so perhaps in defiance of all this incessant verbal noise, this cacophony of life long self regarding lectures coming at me, has made me both angry at that type of person, and made me reluctant to really talk about myself or anything for long periods of time, lest I too become one of the loathsome unicators, those alien beings whom I feel to have little in common with except a bunch of random DNA.

For me, because I am reluctant, indeed afraid, of becoming or even acting temporarily like a unicator, I have built up a personality, a communication style, that is more of a listener, a detached observer, shut out from any giving of my own stuff, of Me, and just a deflector of unicator babble. The problem is that this has caused me to stunt/blunt my own ability to verbally express myself, because my own distaste and disgust for the unicator has grown to the level of a stereotype, that dangerous, fallacious generalized image of one or a few applied to many or all, which has made me feel at times that most conversations are one way, where I am a passive detached observer who can ask good questions and also listen, but when it comes to any self revelation or self disclosure, I am master at redirecting the conversion to the other person or persons.

Yet, I know deep down my anger and dislike of the unicator stereotype is really caused by a deep desire to be heard, to be listened to, to be understood and accepted. But when the opportunity come to reveal or show myself and how I am, my habit of language deflection has come at the expense of not knowing how to show myself to the world, or at least those who love and care about me. I fear they (like myself) see one persona, an affable and intelligent, empathetic man, but deep down a stranger. A stranger to them, and a stranger to myself.

Etranger a moi même.

Male Fears #3 - The Cuckold: Darkest Heart of Human Failure

One of a guy's greatest fear, at least the way I see it from my own masculine mind and experiences and reflections, is the fear of his girlfriend or wife being with another man sexually, allowing another man to touch her in her most private places, invading and volating not just herown physical being but the bond of trust and faith that had once bound the two together. True, you could argue that this fear might relate to a man whose girlfriend or wife is not sexually unfaithful, but is emotionally unfaithful, but that is a little harder to define, or even prove, whereas physical fidelity is provable, and creates much more of an impact on the male psyche. (Not to say women don't feel as devastated, but I'm only concerned with the male mind here.)

One of the main fears a man has about being a cuckold is based on the fact that the entire notion of faithfulness is based upon physical fidelity, the promise of one lover to another that they will only let the other touch their body for reasons of passion and carnal pleasures. Two people who committ to each other promise their physical beings to one another, to be touchd and pleasured and held and kissed and felt only by themselves. When you think about it, it almost seems rediculous, absurd, artifical, socially constructed or invented, unnatural, that another person would have this right over our own body, that another person could lay claim to our physicalbeing and demand that this body is not to be toched by another person on this planet, and only he or she can touch it. From where else in nature other than the human mind or human social/cultural system would such a restriction originate?

Something weird happens to a man who is insecure and fears the worstof all possible fears, his girlfriend, his woman, sleeping with another man, giving up her body to a stranger or even a recent lover or previous boyfriend, allowing her most privateness to be opened and revealed and touched and made to make her feel pleasure, her giving it upand giving herself over, her entire body, to another. On some dark deep level he fears as if his whole self is being destroyed, as if his whole meaning was based upon his abilty to wina woman and hold her with him, satisfy her enough on alllevels so she would not need another man. For her to be wth another man means he has failed, he is weak, he has failed.

The Curse of Memory

So many things you look for in life, or want, or desire, seems to be not some immediate thing or future goal but rather a recapturing, refocusing, resuscitation of a memory. You had an experience, and by nature of being a young, these experiences seem in retrospect electric, powerful, immense, dramatic, extra proportional, large. Back then you were still not quite awake yet, your consciousness was still in the process of awakening from the sleep of childhood - indeed, much of life is an awakening of our consciousness, finding out who we are, wondering what it means to be alive and exist as a being in the world. Because we are not quite awake when we experience things, we can't quite remember what exactly it was that happened to us, as if this remembered life of ours happened to a stranger, appearing as an almost recognizable actor moving about in random images of some helter skelter movie playing in our heads. In retrospect, these experiences seem magical, special, better than what we are experiencing now, the bland mundane day to day routine and habitual of our lives today.

This is what the Romantics were about, dealing with the magical memory of the past, the personal past, in contradistinction to what had previously been taken care of with religion, the Christian religion, where our past as a spiritual species was all divinely documented and clarified in the myths of Genesis. God as son of man, Man as child of God, sinful, but with good behavior promised a place in heaven and deliverance from evil and material, corporeal suffering. But once Enlightenment rationalism, science, and philosophy popped our mythic consciousness and woke us up, there was indeed a vacuum fore those unable to trust and perceive with the ancient mythic mind - this was a monumental rupture (i.e., Modernism, with origins in the Renaissance) of the very fabric of our organ of consciousness, the way we understood nature, God, man, and all of reality, really. What replaced God was a set of rational, mechanical laws and rules that basically placed man as merely a cog in a great big unthinking machine, which God may or may not have created and set in to place, but then walked away from to let it runs its course.

So the Romantics, thoroughly bowled over by the knockout punch delivered by the rationalistic Enlightenment religion busters, started to seek the god like in nature, in the child, the innocent glory of a child and his pleasures, this haunting little image of us as a child that follows us around as adults and reminds us of a glorious, golden age, this little child the father to our man in that all he experienced as a child formed who we are and now that we are no longer the child, we still yet remember how joyful he was, how unconscious and without care, without thought and doubt, perfectly unworried in his feelings, unaware of impending death and the dissolution of his own body, of mortality. The Romantic poem was a revival, a reconjurance of this image of this us-child, the feelings and emotions that were so powerful then and still have the power to affect us today as an adult. The image of us as a youth and the remembered glory and dream of the visionary gleam we once had in our eyes not only pollutes our minds with impossible and love-sick yearnings and desires for a past that is completely gone from the world, at its worst acts like a movie projector, like a shadow on the wall, this image our ourselves and the magic surrounding those memories adds a glow and image to everything we see, all the people we know and the goals we try to reach, all colored by the glowing image of the child within us, distorting the color of reality, reshaping our worlds, as we try to make our adult lives live up to the person myths of our own rosy beginnings.

Wordworth's take, oratorically busting out his vision, :

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Coleridge break it down for us, slightly more mystical and lyrical:

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Caucasian Trash Rememberance # 44 - James, Dirt, the Desert Bus Stop

Growing up in Apple Valley, California meant riding the bus to school, for a long time. For whatever reason, where we lived was right within the border of Apple Valley school district lines, one block away from Victorville school district lines (a neighboring, rival town), so our family had to go to Apple Valley Schools. Neither school was that far away, but because we had to pick up some kids way far out in the boondocks, the entire bus ride to school and home each way was over an hour long. Even as a small kid, it was a long ride in the desert, a desert with not much to look at other than a very large and wide open landscape. A lot of time to do nothing but look at the long dirt fields and open skies and think.

People often ask me where I am originally from, and I say "the desert, Southern California." And when they ask what town or city, I say Apple Valley. Invariably they will say: "Apples? In the Desert? HAWHAWHAWHAWHAWHAW." They always think that's very funny.

So many of my memories from 6th grade (when we first moved to the desert) onwards are about walking down in the bright desert morning to the bus stop. I quickly made a friend named James, who lived across the street from us. His parents for some reason called him "Toby," which was also the name of our Irish Setter dog. I always felt a little awkward about that. James was a nice guy - quiet, shy, adopted. Chinese, I think, though I never asked him. Even in the 6th grade, he had the beginnings of a very thin but noticable pencil moustache. His parents were old white people, senior citizens. To this day I have no idea where he came from or what his origins were. He wasn't much for words. We sort of became pals, by default.

We never really became deep close friends; just the kind of friends who hung out because we rode the same bus and lived across the street from each other. I think I went into his house once in the 6 years I knew him, but as little 6th grade desert dudes we would walk around the large desert fields together and break beer bottles, run from wild dogs, throw rocks at jack rabbits, build little dirt caves and make candles. We had discovered a small ditch in the field by our houses, put plywood and over the top, then brush to hide it, and we'd hide out there in the summer and dig holes in the ground to melt candles into them in order to make weird shaped desert dirt candles. I think I gave one of them to my mom once, and she being the great mom that she was, pretended to be very pleased with my misshapen dirt gift and put it in her bedroom, on the window sill that looked out over the old cactus path outside my parents' window. "It's very nice, Pat. Thank you."

I only remember small things about James, about meeting at the bus stop each day for school. I cannot to this day recall anything I said to him, or anything we really had in common. He was quiet, solitary, introverted, not a popular guy. Had big glasses. Not the most fashionable clothes. Eventually in High School became he blended into the stoners and heavy metal crowd. He started smoked pot and had a dazed look on his face, and made him even quiter. Sometimes as we got in high school, he'd smoke before the bus came. He never warmed up to punk rock, as I did. I tried to enlighten him to the Sex Pistols, but back then to like such a band was heretical to a head banger. I could tell he did not like them.

When we rode to school on the bus, as soon as we got on the bus he would sit neare the front, where the quiet and nerdier kids sat, safer and closer to the bus driver. All the cooler kids and tougher kids sat in the back, to be rowdy and wild and talk and laugh. I sat in the back, being more of a popular kid. I used to watch James sometimes as he sat by himself, and he'd sit and stare out the window, looking down, sort of sad,watching the desert dirt ground pass by.

One morning, in 6th grade we all had to bring a present to school for a gift exchange for Christmas. I forgot to bring something, and so James and I improvised a terrible gift out of an emtpy Coke bottle filled with dirtand rocks. James ran back to his house to got some wrapping, and when we got to class, I quickly put the dirt gift under the tree. I remember the kid who got it crying and then the teacher, Mr Mandolini (who had huge black eyebrows eternally encrusted with chalky white dandruff) lecturing the class on what a mean thing this was and how it's a bad thing to hurt people's feeling and that no good would ever come out of such actions. For shame, he said, For shame. James and I did our best not to look at each other during the public shaming addressed to the whole class, but secretly meant for us.

Another day, when our bus stop had changed when we went to high school, there was a stop sign right by the stop. James and I got bored, so we picked up a bunch of rocks and started chucking them into the stop sign at close range. BAMMM!! BAMMM!! BAMMMM! A lady came out of her house in her bathrobe and a cup of coffee, glaring, and said, "What the FUCK are you doing????" We dropped the rocks in our hands, and silently turned around. We were not very brave vandals.

One of my last memories of James was when we had a party at our house. We had started playing guitars and jamming with various musicians, when parties and girls were just starting to become big in my life. Within hours of my parents leaving for the weekend, we had rolled a chilled keg into the garage and set up our band in the living room, and the party was in full swing. Girls everywhere. Friends slamming beers. Me and my brother and our usical crew jamming loud music. The house was packed. I noticed James show up and saw that he had a special beer mug. I smiled at him and said "right on, dude." I knew he was shy and wondered if he would mingle with the girls. From time to time I would see him, standing alone with his special beer mug, observing the groups of people laughing, the crowd at the kitchen table playing quarters, couples making out, burly older dudes doing beer bongs,people shooting tequila. More and more I would notice him near the keg. As the night wore on and we became more and more drunk and blurry, people had been telling me, "Pat your friend is passed out on the front lawn." I hadn't really paid attention to it much, because someone else had told me, "Pat, your friend is passed out in the bathtub." How could I expect to be responsible for all the passed out people? Were these the same person? Two different friends? I had lots of friends.

Later around 4:00 a.m., I remember going on the front lawn and seeing James there, all rolled up and dirty and grassy, twisted up and mumbling in a small dusty heap. His special beer glass was a few feet away, as were his glasses. Both were caked with dirt, as were his clothes, apparently from spilt beer and his own vomit. I picked up his mug and glasses and went to him. I tapped him and we looked at each other. I handed him his glasses and asked him if he was OK. He said yes, and then got up, I handed him his special beer mug and he walked across the street in the night to his house. That's my last memory of James.

Ars Prosaica - Am I a Liar? Authorial Voice and Word Responsibility
(Thoughts on writing and reception from talking with SO)

I feel it necessary to discuss my own theory of the writing, in order to explain how it is I write, what sort of voice I am writing in, and to what extent what I write is "true or "truthful".

I realized a while back that what I write is not really truth, in the sense that I'm not interested in accurately capturing or recording merely the empircal facts of my existence - as would a video camera, but with words. Im interested detail in neither the cereal I ate for breakfast nor the type of milk I put on top of it, nor even wish to describe my work outfit on a given day and what sort of weather I experienced as I drove to work.

Rather, I write to explore what Milan Kundera expressed in his excellent book, Art of the Novel, as 'possibilties of being.' Attempting to record in detail the verifiable facts of my existence means nothing really unless these details are tied together with or are the expression of a mode or way of being in the world. All these details of what I do and who I am are only meaningful if they express or convey the meaning of who I am as a person, a being in the word - a Self. Whether or not this Self that becomes represented through my writing actually records what I have factually experienced is irrelevant: the self expressed in the writing has an existence apart from me the author. This self is liberated from my own living and breating and dying corporeal being and takes on a life and existence of its own.

These ontological possibilities of this new, word-based self (and whatever details and facts I wish to assign to it) represents an immense freedom for me as the author, the creator, the vates who sacrifices the meaning of his own existence, his own self, and in the process creates a new being from the wreckage and pieces of his own discarded mask of self. The reader may be looking forautobiographical signs of me, Patrick Nolan, in the littering of broken shards and pieces and slivers of the flesh person they know in real life, but the even this literary self could not come close to capturing all the buzzing and blooming collection of thoughts, experiences, actions, and emotions that may be happening at any given time to me, with me, by me, around me, etc.

What is immensely liberating on one hand is that I have learned I can write about anything, approach uncomfortable, distressing, even ghoulish thoughts, sad ideas, dejected and desolate feelings, ideas, possiblities of being, without the worry that I actually have to own any of these ideas and words, nor do I have to believe they represent me or capture who I am. I often will write to understand what I have experienced, felt, thought, read, and wish to understand them to a depth to fully know them all. Partly the way I achieve this is by pretending or writing as if I really believed them, or, as the voice of the person speaking really believed these ideas, and is perhaps oppressed or affected by them. In other words, I fully allow for a persona to inhabit the voice of my writing, to write as with another voice that is speaking actually subjectively, to enable a full expression of the idea and the concepts, the feelings, the expression of being. The character wearing a mask begins to take a life and speak. I am merely the channeller.

So, all the words and snippets on this blog in many cases are explorations of self, of many possible and potential selves created through my words and my fingers as they type these keys, but these Selves are not me - or they are not all of me. They are only an expression of me: characters, voices, personas, poor players that may eventually get the chance to fret strut their hour upon the stage of a story or a poem, or a dramatic monolgue - one of my favorite forms of writing. Indeed, if I have an ars prosaica or poetica, it is that all of my speakings, at least in writing in this forum, is an exercise of a self in the act of becoming, voice development, character creation - it is a fiction, as much the self and personality we develop too is itself, I believe, a necessary fiction that plays a part in the ever developing human drama we all inhabit.

Am I responsible for my words? I have to say, despite the fact I am attempting in most writings to express and capture and develop a person as a means of exploring possibilities of being, people can be affected by these words, moved perhaps troubled, hopefully enlightened. So I am responsible. But, this is not newswriting, nor is it philosophy or science - my writing is attempting and learning and discovering my own and all other forms of human consicousness, art, feeling, love, expession - in other words, what some call Being.

More Bataille - Love, Desire, (inner) Violence = Suffering

"For the man in love . . . the fervour of love may be felt more violently than physical desire is. We ought not ever forget that in spite of the bliss love promises its first effect is one of turmoil and distress. Passion fulfilled itself provokes such violent agitation that the happiness involved, before being a happiness to be enjoyed, is so great as to be more like its opposite, suffering."

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Sexual Desire - Being a Continuous Being

It should not surpise me that my sometimes narcotic passion for women is in fact deeply interrtwined with my great fear of death. Or that my intensity of passion for women and love and carnal experiences with them it a means of forgetting in womblike preconsciousness the inevitability of my own body's termination. As much as I attempt to temporarily lose myself in that pleasure, at the end, I am still alone. And so is she, though we will lie together and talk and embrace, and think of all the things we have done in our lives and many things yet to come, more such moments like these and many others.

An irony of this sexual union - the interconnectedness of my and her genitals and the perspiration of our passion in the sweat on our faces, the loss of my own self in this ecstasy, the ultimate reproductive culmination of this act wherein I drink the pap of life, the incomparable milk of wonder, the honey dew and milk of sensual paradise - is that the end result would be a baby, and an individual that will grow and be alone and eventually him or herself die one day.

George Bataille writes in "Erotism: Death and Sensuality":

"Reproduction implies the existence of discontinuous beings . . . Each being is distinct from all others . . . He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity . . . [D]eath means discontinuity. Reproduction leads to the discontinuity of beings, but brings into play their continuity; that is to say, it is intimately linked with death."

Evolutionary Revolutions

When I picture it, nearly all of my actions and thoughts and expressions and volitions are intentionally revolutionary, if not conflictive, designed to cause some sort of stir, however indirectly, to disturbs someone's universe, even if it's my own.

By revolutionary I mean the word in its most literal sense, in the sense of revolting against something, anything that is established, reptitive, habitual, ossified and stultificated, anything everyone does, from the clothes they wear to the movies they watch to the words they say- some sort of animal restsance to change, to a new form of being - all of my actions among others beings in this strange field of being, the strange field of perception relayed to me by my senses.

The question is, to what end, and why? From whence springs this piece de resistance?

What if, what if all my actions were designed to fail, set up to fall apart and not take an eventual form, something intelligible? What if I were to position myself at the expense of some sort of con, some sort of cheat, some scam? Could I then transcend both the desire to succeed and be thought of well? Is this not revolutionary too? What if all my words were not intended to mean, to not signify? Is this not a revolution too, some attempt at being contra the norm, looking for the liminal, the interstice of convention at which meaning falls apart and the human organism goes back to nature, translingual and beneath cognition? The little cracks in society where rules and familar forms dissapte, fog up, become faded, and in comes chaos.

Politcal Legal Dream

Last nights dream was quite strange. I had somehow landed a job with the supreme court, interpreting certain texts for them so they could in turn intepret the laws in cases before them. My mentor/supervisor was Tom Delay, and he was actually pretty nice. Clean, scrubbed, witty. After a while of me working and learning the job, it became clear that I had to tell them I had no experience with the law, no law degree. But I had already done good work for them and so they were willing to over look it.

During Christmas

During Christmas
We all ended up around my mother's old black piano with songs
Singing and forgetting ourselves
I forgot myself
Who I am
Who I was
Just letting it go
I sang then
Put away the horror of finality
Fears of emotions and the required revelations
The primitive antipathies of family
I sang so the whole world fell away
I looked at my mom
Crying and smiling
And asked her what was wrong
And she told me
The happy look on my face
The kid was so happy
Smiling and singing

Meanest Flowers Give Thoughts, Do Lie Too Deep

Ah, Double Dub (William Wordsworth), your meanest words simply refuse to leave the sound track in my brain.

Thanks, for the end of his Big Ol' Ode and shit:

"Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

(Though, I can't escape the unintended but inescapable pun of imagining a bunch of 'mean' little thug-like flowers harassing other flowers.)

Time to Carpe Some Freaking Diem

And then one day you will finally realize, you are not that special.

Strangers to Ourselves (nous meme) - I'm Already a Ghost

More on the past, which has been truly freaking with me lately. Two things have been haunting my mind, troubling my inner senses and larger soul sense, disrupting the self-relfection I often automatically take of myself, the continual process of constructing and deconstructing the character of Me as I exist in my mind, floating what appears to be linearly through the continuum of time, the human actor, the main character starring in the Story of My Life.

Two things that freak: one, I've begun to see myself as a stranger, this person who was me in the past that other people knew but who now is a complete foreigner; and two, the struggle of seeing all ages in a person's face, both them as they were as a child, or, if a child, the haunting image of them as an adult, an older person - which thus makes it nearly impossible to indentify them as a solid individual. And if I can't identify a solid person-self in someone else, how am I supposed to do the same for me? Je suis l'etranger.

Myself as a Stranger

I've been trying to imagine myself as the person I was back when I was a child, to discern who that young kid was who had my name and family. I remember as a kid knowing who I was for the most part, having an indescribable but solid sense of myself, almost an older kind of thought process or knowlege, yet which I was unable to express this self-sense or even utliize or realize it to influence my behavior. Outwardly, I was all ascramble, wild and unruly, sloppy and energetic, mostly unconscious. If I see pictures of myself, either real or in my head, I simply cannot grasp who I was then - this person that other people knew well and remember, and yet who I don't remember or know. Maybe this has to do with seeing a lot of people I went to high school with at my 20th high school reunion, who said so many nice things about the person they remember who was me. They apparently know or knew a different person.

All Ages in a Face

One of the first times I really became aware of aging, the slow march of death of us all, not just thinking about it but really thought about it in the sense of a physical being person actually aging and inching towards death, was in grad school, when I'd take night classes with strangers. I'd see these people coming in after a long day at work, I'd look at their tired, long faces. Most of the time I'd see a face and it would look average, normal, not old really, but certain angles would show the tiredness of that person, the effects of time sagging the skin, gravity pulling down the cheeks and eyes, giving a glimpse into what that person will look like when they are old, perhaps even close to death. They were simulataneously their age then and older, at the same time.

Sometimes I also see this in children: those children who seem to have an older face, a face of an adult, as if the structure of blueprint of their older self is already mapped out, trying to emerge. ("See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,/Some fragment from his dream of human life...) And conversely, I have seen the opposite, which is a little creepy, when I see perhaps a woman in her 30's all round and overweight, thick arms, big cheeks, pretty brown hair and a happy dimply smile as she laughs with her friends, when the small face of a child shows through, looking as though she were 9. The child she was shows through.

My own mother told me she saw this younger to me once, during a Christmas where we all ended up around her piano with songs, along with my holy roller uncle with his violin (he plays classical very well), we all were singing and for a while there, and I had forgot myself - I really just let it go and sang, put away all my horrors and fears and emotions about Christmas (a huge subject), my antipathy and stresses toward and about my family, and just sang and the whole world fell away, and it felt good. Of course, it was short lived. As I looked at my mom she was crying a little during and after the songs, not blubbering or letting herself go, but sniffling with a few tears in her eyes, wiping them, though she was also smiling. Later, I asked her what was wrong and she told me that when I was sitting there on the couch with everyone else, I had this happy look on my face, this genuine and sincere look about me that reminded her of when I was a little kid and was so happy, just smiling and singing. It reminded her of when I was a little boy and how joyful she said I always was, just smiling and grinning and beaming out love. She saw in just a few fugitive moments the happy little me of the past: he came back for that one moment and this phantom flooded her heart with both love and a sadness: love for me now and then, her son, expressing such joy and liveliness, yet sadness too that the young boy is gone, no longer available, except for brief glimpses and visits in the midst of some unplanned rapture.

Acting Old - Because You're Supposed To?

As I grow older these days, and watch the evolving behaviors of those around me at a similar age (I'll be four oh soon), I'm amazed at how people I know are beginning to act "old", or what I would consider to be old person behavior. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with old person behavior, nothing intrinsically bad or weak or immoral with it - if you are old. To me, at our age, some of these behaviors seem false, artificial, caricature-esque, done as if perhaps they think they need to because that's what they think people do at their age. It's a strange and creepy embracing of age and fate that to me smacks of death, or death in life, buckling up and giving in, playing some role of an older person that comes out of a movie or a book.

Two specific behaviors I am noticing:

• More Vitamins, More Public. As a youngster, who ever took vitamins or even thought to take herbal and dietary supplements? True, we need them more as we age, and they are good for general health. But what gets me is, these people take the vitamins and/or medicine publicly. They buy one of those plastic little day of the week containers (the ones with M-T-W-the, etc., on the compartment lids), carry it around and/or leave it out in their house, or at restaurants, they carry this container, or simply hold the vitamins themselves, and as they eat they put the vitamins on the table - ON THE TABLE - and as they eat they slowly take their vitamins, which may include medicine. That's something I'd MAYBE expect out of an 80 year old, but not someone my age. WTF?
• Ranting about Restaurants. True, as we get older we have more money and can afford to eat out a lot. And that's a great thing. But a restaurant is a fucking restaurant, and who the fuck cares if your food is not the best it could be, or if the service is not 100% perfect? I notice that restaurants and the type of food and service you get has become a typical topic of conversation. Couples meet at a party or for drinks, and they talk about their restaurant experiences: how restaurant X had a terrible waiter, and they waited for an hour for their food, and that they will not go back there. Or, they leave and rant about how good restaurant Y is. Or, while at a restaurant, they will be very impatient and expect perfect service, browbeat waiters, send food back, complain about their steak, and so on. This to me is completely unacceptable. Maybe this is understandable for some retirees who has tons of time on their hands and so need something to talk or complain about, but for someone my age to get into this kind of behavior is, again, totally unacceptable.

Some may see in my writings inner projections (whatever the fuck that means) of my own inadequacies, fear of and death, antipathy and misanthropic invective towards humans, blah blah fucking blah. I don't care. This is old person behavior, and for people around my age to be acting this shit is a defeat, a weakness, a giving into fate, to notions that age brings with it certain proscribed behaviors. Once we start act like we think we're supposed to act, we stop growing and we die.

Absolutely Modern, Again

I'm starting to understand why the moderns wanted to be new and do away with the past, that it was utterly essential to be absolutely modern, for relying on the past with longing and nostalgia is a kind of sickness, yet forgetting the past is also a form of sickness - the dangerous amnesia we encounter when we forget the lessons of experience from being alive, and we repeat the same mistakes over and over as if all our actions were controlled through some cosmic instant replay, with a drunk producer half asleep at the controls, pausing and replaying in varying speeds and at random all our mistakes.

This is one of our terrible paradoxes: the longer we live the more intelligence and wisdom we gain and the more we learn how to figure out the struggle of existence; yet, the longer we live the more we also get flooded and pursued by images and memories of our past. They say when you die your life flashes before your eye. Well, it's already flashing before my eyes and I'm still quite alive. All the things I have done, blurry memories of all the scenes of my life, all of them starring me yet also an utter stranger in all these snapshots, images, movie clips, feelings and sensations of another time - a time I cannot now be sure ever really happened.

We cannot escape the past completey, but it's worthwhile to dispose of it, murder it, do away with, destroy all previous characters and personas your have inhabited, dismantle your ego and identity - for when we live there in the past, when we occupy the moments of our waking and dreaming life with all those images of the past, we are as good as dead, walking shadows and memory shades floating and fretting around Hades, wishing for some land where everything seems to have been better, more golden, more special, our lives more interesting and enriched and without pain. All an illusion.

Loss Lolita
(with apologies to Gertrude Stein)

Eventually it all starts to unravel, to be becoming, to be unraveling.
Living in the own living of my life,
Which is also descending like it has from day one.
Living a descended life, this life of all meanings,
Like the feeling of a her living inside my face, in the happiness of my face.
That small momentary feeling of ascension, maybe years, maybe minutes,
That idea once that maybe with little effort
Now my spirits will be lifted, like they are, like climbing
The climb you can make with love, the touch of her love,
The idea that she loves you, that she once loved you, she once loved you,
That she knew you, even if she didn't know you,
This descending life keeps descending, life is a declension, a declining decline,
A yard sale with all the objects no one wants any more,
Nothing new, nothing not for sale
A falling down of rain raining down, down on the yard and all objects for sale,
To not drink, to only drink once, to only look at her, maybe once and then no more.
This is all it takes for the living non-ascension,
The unhappy warm face unsmiling, un-living,
This is all it takes to let it all leave you, a single love left and gone,
The eternal hope for a life ascending, like a child in a book,
Climbing up to a better place, to not touch or drink, to run out of objects for sale,
No more things for sale, to let it all alone, and merely look,
To let it all fall down and not ascend no more nor any more.

Gods, Babies, Devils, and the Sincerity of Expression

There is something fresh and liberating in the desire for sincerity, for me particularly: a person who has struggled long and with much difficulty to mean what he says and say what he means. For me and for those who inhabit these rhetorical modes, irony, and sarcasm, and humor all are basically hiding places, safety zones where committment and true intention and a sincere statemetns can be avoided.

This all came about, or became an issue from visiting my friends Ian and Rachel (and now with their fresh new baby son Eli Grey), as we discussed how different people seem in North Carolina than they do in in my birthplace California, not just the people themselves but namely how these people communicate. What is so remarkable is when meeting and talking to new people in NC, and even the most casual stranger in a store, they all seem to speak directly, without ulterior motive; in other words, when they say something, it seems like they mean it, as if there were no double entendre, no hidden ironic joke, no smug word play or allusions - they simply speak, ask questions, listen, and expect the same from you. Perhaps beter stated: I feel no need to keep my intellectual guard up to combat smugness or pseudo-witty word play and coolness competitions.

This may be regional, given that I (and Ian and Rachel) have lived in California all my life, and so I am very much used to a type of faux sophisticated word play, or joke style, and lack of genuine kindess or interest when dealing with either the general public or when meeting new people. It's a particularly dislikable kind of witty banter, a smart alecky quick witted style or repartee. Or maybe it's just a lack of interest or general sulleness or lack of caring. It's a form of humor wherein a person must be on guard for fear of rejection or criticism, or merely a stance and means to prove oneself superior from the start of any conversation.

But In NC I feel that if people ask if I am OK, or offer to help me in a store, or ask what I do at a party, and they genuinely seem interested and want to know. They mean their statements, and they want to know the answers to a question they ask about you. I'm not used to this. I'm not sute what to do or say or how to react when there is no hidden joke full of critique or criticism. They look you in the eye and they listen. It's very disarming but quite refreshing.

What's worth studying, delving into, digging around in excavating, extracting what has been for so long my modus of communicating, my own severe anarchic sarcasm and ironic sensibility, the forms it has taken and the underlying horror and fear of meaninglesness that ever so slightly covers, barely hiding, what I suspect is a deep fear of meaning - or, stated another way, what I call this deep fear of meaning is actually a desparate desire to have meaning, to really have the faith required to trust and beleve in life, God, the universe, all there is.

But in the midst of all writing and thinking and making and trying to create, the spectre of death creeps into the periphery, lurking like the nasty inevitable that it is, smug and confident, full or high sentence and not a bit obtuse, accountable to neither God nor the devil, beyond all sutblties of communication and thought, waiting like a painting in a museum, still generating all its power whether someone is there to look at it or not. (All the while baby Eli cries every 4 hours to be fed, nothing insincere or ambiguous about his special little wail.)

There Will Be No More Questions - One Small Rebellion, In My Own Fashion

Just this morning I walked into Starbucks for some tea, and the spiffy, short spikey-haired alternative guy started aksing me a million questions, like they always do at Starbucks, trying to prove some point about super duper really good service: Would you like a sleeve? Would you like honey with that? Room for cream? Do you want this? Do you want that? in that annoying happy little overly caffeinated Starbucks voice.

And so I, like the cool tea-drinking tough guy I am, blurted out - "OK, no more questions, just give me the tea." This clearly shook the young coffee maker, as well as the other customers in line. People go to Starbucks for that very reason, to express identity in their special unique combination of cup sizes and coffees and flavors and foams and milks, to show the world who they really are. No one 'just wants a damn drink." The Starbucks order of things had been altered. I had dared to disturb the corporate American cofffee house chain universe. I rebelled in my own fashion against the very standard and protocol of all that is Starbucks: fifty five million ways to server fifity million different goddamn drinks. Just gimme the fucking beverage, would ya??!!

The guy got flustered, looked for a way to save face, did his best to hold back giving me some me lip, which I am sure he wanted (and had a right) to do. Instead, he joked a little, "would you like water with that?" "Yeah, I said, preferably hot." Then, he had forgotten which kind of tea, so I nicely reminded him, feeling a little sorry for him. I've never been a very good tough guy. And, I don't think tough guys drink tea.

Nothing Wrong With Primitive Emotions

I have to come clean and admit it: sometimes the most simple and trite things move me and bring me to tears. Case in point: ABC TV's schmaltzy and sappy reality show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. It's bad television (or good, depending on how you view the quality of TV), one of the cornier and sillier shows around that finds people who are messed up (wheelchair bound, epileptic, poor, limbless, 8 year old cancer victims, eyesight lost in a shooting, etc.) and makes over their house from a small, crowded, dirty and run down shack to a palatial state of the art home with all the latest appliances, gadgets, furniture. etc. (all provided by sponsor Sears). Not only do they redesign and reconstruct the house, but they construct elaborate and amazing special accommodations for the family, like building an indoor elevator for a wheelchair bound youth, a bed made out of a piano for a young black kid who is into jazz, and so on.

It's fun to watch, not just because you see them transform a piece of junk into a very nice home which I as a viewer wish I could have, but you see the transformation of very average (except for their particular "problem" that got them chosen for the program), run of the mill people be lucky enough to have their otherwise hard lives changed for the better. The show utterly milks emotions at every corner, showing shots of the family falling to their knees and praying when they see their house, hugging the home designers and builders, looking with awe at their new home in disbelief, not sure that this has really happened to them - you see their humility and gratitude and thanks, and it's extremely sincere. There's a lot of hugging and crying and group hugging and group crying and wiping away of tears and choked up testimonials.

Sometimes I watch this show. Sure, I could be bettering myself by reading a Book, some literature, playing guitar, writing songs or poetry, talking to my own family, but instead I watch this show and it moves me. When I see the faces of the families who were previously suffering, and for whatever reason and by whatever bend of fate this corporate and media machine comes into their lives and gives them a new home, and in effect, new lives. They are humble and grateful, tearful and full of joy, and I fight back tears. Sure, the wry sophisticated and worldy part of me thinks it's schmaltz and lightweight pap, yet another deeper part of me, some tiny lizard brain emotional pocket of my psyche just weeps, sitting there on the couch staring at a screen making images - the primitive fire reflecting on the cave wall, the primordial images flickering against my apartment wall. Me and my emotions watch this simple myth of suffering and "divine" (omnipotent power of a corporation) intervention and redemption, exemplifying the simple Christian fable that those who suffer shall inherit, if not the earth, at least a really nice home with really cool things.

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Spending Face - True Stories Losing of Face

- A young man, a high schooler, goes for a run up in the hills near his high school in Colorado. Some of his classmates are the last to see him as he runs by their classroom window, he mocking extreme exhaustion, pretending to drag and almost fall from being tired, making everyone laugh, even the teacher.

His body is found three days later, disembowled, his heart and guts ripped out, and his face completely ripped off of his head. He was attacked by a wild cougar. He no longer had a face as we think of a face. Where did he go once his face was torn off by the beast? Who was he then? He no longer had a face.

- A young couple, newly weds and ardent animal lovers, grow attached to an especially charming chimpanzee they see and make a connection with at a wild animal reserve some 50 miles outside of town from where they live. They visit the chimp regularly, and the chimp seems to really like them. They only get close to the beast during feeding times when they bring them into the feeding cages, and visitors are allowed to watch and interact with the chimps.

One time, the woman feeds the chimp a piece of cake, which the chimp loves, and the apparent bond between human and animal grows even stronger. So, when the couple hears that the chimp is having a birthday, they decide to sneak into the preserve late at night and bring the simian a birthday cake to celebrate its birth. They sneak in late at night and jump the fence into the preserve, walking quickly across the large fields to where the chimps are kept. Before they reach their friend, they are attacked by some male chimpanzees. The attack is brutal and savage and the man, who wants to protect his wife, tries his best to ward off the wild beasts. In the process he gets his face ripped off as one particularly vicious champ bits his head and takes off the skin.

The commotion and screams alerts the onsite preserve workers and the couple is taken to the emergency room. The woman and man are both in critical condition, she suffering from a broken arm and severe blood loss from bites. And the man,well, the doctors are at a loss because his entire face is missing - he has no face. All they can do to stop the bleeding is gauze and wrap tightly what was once his face, but still they are concerned, because the man is without a face. The man has no face.

- A lady friend of mine, her mom has a lot of plastic surgery. I have never met her mom, but the pictures I've seen show a nicely smiling woman who must be in her 60's but appears in some strange way to be in her 40s, as if she has a mask on - the eyes have an odd white glow around them, and her smile seems pasted on, almost drawn, like a primitive mask.

I hear a story from a mutual friend who says that once, during plastic surgery, the mother had her face completely taken off and redesigned and reshaped. For a moment, she was without a face. Who was she when she had her face taken off by the doctors? Who was she? She had no face.

Human Faces Fake Us, and We Frown

In the course of a day, a person's face may take on and inhabit a million different shapes and configurations of expressions. Each combination expressing an equal number of feelings, ideas, reactions, personal characteristics, idiosyncrasies - all personal and unique to the person: the twist of a lip, the angle of an eyebrow, the opening of the lips, the openness of eyes, the tendency to smile or not smile, to sigh, laugh, grimace, or simply stare in a certain direction when bored. Each person we know, because of their features and the way they express and use them (or are used by their expressions), is unique because of their face. Most of the time.

But there's something different about a person's face, when they eat. They somehow lose themselves, their regular expression, all expressiveness, when they tear into a burrito, a sandwich, a potato, a banana. All animation, personality, uniqueness, individuality, all mannerisms, shapes, and usual features that make this person recognizable and that express this person's personality fades away and is replaced with the pure animal face. They resemble more a dog as it gnashes at its bowl of food. The eyes are closed or half closed, looking nowhere, the mind fully absorbed with the most automatic and instinctual of acts - an act begun in the womb through the umbilical chord and replaced with the mouth the first moment the baby latches its mouth onto a nipple. Peaceful, certain, serious. The human adult bites at food with perfect confidence without thought or cognition, just action. At these moments it's pure survival. The automatic animal survival face.

A person's face also gets this instinctual look during sex, when the usual looks of smiles, seriousness, sadness, or concern all fade away eventually during the act of forincation. The eyes may partially close or close all the way, showing a certain sameness, a look that transcends the individual and connects the species: the look of work, or pleasure in work, of being worked on/upon, the look of satiation, of being filled up: the most natural of acts, and perhaps the most unoriginal. The unoriginal procreation face

In death the face falls, stretches, lightens, and all fullness of person and individuality just a shadow, a poor imprint of that person's life and soul and personality and all we knew about them, a mere hint of what they were. The skin sags, despite the best efforts of the mortician to give some sense of the person. This face is barely a face; biologically it is, but it's already fading, quickly decaying, for good. This face is sad to us and expressionless, only a reminder of the person we knew. It's just skin and some bones underneath. The blood is all gone, all life, all color. The face is no longer a face. The face is there but the person is gone. It is no longer a face.

Normal Reality Theatre in a Dream

This dream was about being at a house, with a few people, many of which I did not know but it was all casual and everyone seemed to know everyone. Felt like it was close to the beach. Laid back. A girl was there, and she wasn't beautiful in the traditional sense, but she was nice, and perhaps pretty in her own way. I felt an attraction to her, but another man, a real man looking man, was also interested in her and was trying to charm her. A few times when I was near her we had put our arms around each other casually. I felt as though, this could be my girlfriend.

Then, the man was explaining that he was part of a theatre group and his particular type of theatre was to enact real, every day type activities in public, just normal activities you might see anyone do, but to act, to do it intentionally as drama - to fake it. So, we are all out side, it is somewhat dark, and we are in front of an apartment complex. I sit across the street and watch, and he and a few other guys are dressed as garbage men or movers, something like collectors, and they are all talking and pretending to collect stuff, as if that was really their job, but they were acting. Behind me to my right I noticed two guys, smallish, dressed as mime in black clothes and whiteface, and they look gay, as if they are a couple. I look at one guy and he does a motion like he's zipping his mouth shut and locking his mouth with an imaginary key.

I turn back to watch the Reality Drama and a lady on my left, in front of whose house I am sitting on the curb, lets out her dog, a big brown dog, and everyone freezes, scared of the dog.

We are back in the house and the girl, she's lying on the floor and I am looking at her and she becomes more and more beautiful. He hair has a slight frizz and curl to it, he cheeks are white with red flush, and she looks at me.

Words I HATE

Can't tell ya why, but these I hate the damn words:

snuggle, spoon, nurture, sacred, honor, tony, natch, waft, bastion, resonance, resonate, actually, cherish, resolve, feelings, share

(seem to be terms you find either in group therapy or amateur fiction)

Phrases I loathe:

Been there, done that.
We're not communicating.
Everything happens for a reason.
Dance (as when used like: the dance of love, the dance of life, etc.)
Life is a journey.

The Happy/Mad Seesaw: A Linguistic Bedrock of Irrational Idealism

Hate is a weird thing. What does it mean to be annoyed, irked, bothered, nauseated, mad, pissed off, and generally displeased? Why do we get this way? It's really strange, if you think about, but not any stranger than being happy. (When I say strange, I mean that sometimes, when we analyze human behavior, it can feel like we are studying some other species.) I would tend to presume that something must precipitate an emotion, like anger or happiness, but often these emotions seemingly just happen upon us, as if from nowhere, or from some source inside our psyches we know not how to reach. Cognitive Therapy is helpful when it states that at the heart of irrational emotional responses lie webs of illogical thinking that is disconnected from reality, in that reality becomes distorted and we feel as though we have little control over external reality (everything 'out there' and 'not me').

That's all very rational, and it is very helpful when I analyze my anger in order to understand why the hell I get pissed off. What's really weird and also immensely insightful is to analyze your own happiness - what are the thought patterns and layers of mental rhetoric lie behind feeling good and happy? Maybe it sounds like a downer to analyze one's own happiness and joy - should we not simply 'be' in the moment and enjoy it? True, but analysis of my own happiness often reveals many of the same distorted feelings and misconceptions about reality that underlie my anger and sadnesses: acute, passionate, even desperate idealism. Idealism can fuel anger (when one's ideals don't match reality) and as well idealism can fuel happiness, when ideals and expectations are realized, no matter how realistic they are. Each side of the seesaw, either up or down, balance on the same fulcrum: irrational, unrealistic, idealistic thought patterns.

What I would like to be able to do is find the source of this idealism within me, somewhere deep down, maybe in an experience or set of experiences, maybe in the imprints upon my mind by the words and sounds and actions of my parents when I was a mere lad - deep inherited ethnic/cultural worldview embodied my own parents lives, or, could it be that the seeds of my own brand of irrational idealism lie deeper, in the very cellular, genetic substructures that make the foundation of my very physical being?

People Get Caught in a Trap: You Can Run But You Can't Hide From the Self

A good quote from my current read, Alchemical Active Imagination, by Jung's famous student/acolyte/psychoanalyst and Latin/myth/fairy tale scholar Marie Louise Von Franz. The book is a study of a medieval alchemical text that illustrates how the early pseudoscience of alchemy was and is also as much an early psychoanalytical self analysis tool as it was a quest to turn dirt into gold.

Think of: Alice in Wonderland; The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe; or in heroic plays or epics, where the hero makes a decision and has to find his real powers or strenghts in order to overcome great adversity (Odysseus, Aeneas, Ceremony); or the anthithesis of this in tragedy, where the antihero fails (Richard the II, Hamlet, La Dolce Vita, Dr Faustus).

". . . if you think of an archetypal motif and of archetypal background, such as appears very often in myths and fairy tales, people get caught in a trap. They enter a castle and the door shuts behind them, and that always means that now they are in the Self. Now they have reached that point in their psyche where they can no longer run away from themselves. Now they are in for it, and the ego, which always flirts with the idea of getting away from what it ought to do, knows it is caught in the mousetrap and hirtherto has to fulfill the requirements of the Self and will not be released before that accomplishment.

"In all fairy tales and mythological patterns one is always released again, in spite of everything, but only after one has done the heroic deed. Trying to run away is no good, for you cannot escape [from the Self]."

First Official Rejection for Our Film: "We especially liked your transitions."

Thank you for the submission of Some Kind of Freak. We feel much honored to have been able to see your film.

We truly apologize for the long wait, as we spent the last month figuring out ways to fit additional films from a short list we wanted into the program. In addition, we were caught three weeks behind schedule from the start due to the extended submission deadline.

Unfortunately, we were not able to add your film to our 2005 program. You have a wonderful film (we especially liked the transitions and ending in your film), but we reached the limit on the number of films we can effectively promote and assist. This was an especially intense year regarding the selection process, as almost 1,300 short films competed for places in the program. Hopefully, you will continue to find the festivals that will get behind you and your work with the conviction necessary for this most challenging medium of expression.

Please also understand that choices are also based on many factors including the particular perspectives of our committee as well as the mix of films that our programming team presents to our audience.

Thank you again for introducing us to Some Kind of Freak. Congratulations on your achievement, and please keep Cinequest in mind for your future work.

Best Wishes,

Halfdan Hussey Executive Director
Mike Rabehl Programming Director
Bill Maxey Short Film Programming Director

Naikon: Humility Through Self Examinaton of Your Past

Just read a fascinating interview with a man named Gregg Krech, a Western therapist who specialized in a form of Japanese psychology called Naikan - a method of self reflection/examination on your life which requires you exhaustively scrutinize your past and recount in the greatest of detail all the things people have done for YOU, in light and contrast to what you have done for others. The purpose, I've gathered from reading the interview is to realize how much even people are may not like or are angry with have done for you - indeed, even the people you like and love. How often do we find, when we examine our problems, that much of our difficulties in life stem from however of an unconscious belief or notion that the world is against us, that we are unduly suffering more than our 'share,' that somehow us, of all people have been singled out by the fates for more punishment and suffering than we 'deserve'?

Some of this stuff might sound a little wacky: in one Japanese Naikan center had their patients recount how many diapers their parents had changed for them. Perhaps silly on the surface of things, but it is an amazing thought to realize how many times your own parents, however much you may have been angry at them when you grew up, changed your little butt, fed you and clothed you, made sure you got to school, bought you clothes, gave you a roof over your head, and so on.

At this given moment perhaps it's not easy to remember everything, but with Naikan, you sit and stare at a blank wall for a few hours and basically reconstruct and remember your entire life. The first segment is from birth to when you were nine, focusing on your mother. Then, after sitting and remembering, you tell what you remember to another person who says nothing but listens to you. Apparently, this Krech gentleman says you are surprised at how much you remember and really are able to reconstruct a great picture of your life. And the goal is that eventually you come to realize that you have receive MUCH much more than you have given, and when your life is looked at honestly with an acceptance of the truth of it all, you may achieve a great sense of humility and appreciation for all you have and have received - and move beyond the small pettiness small minded resentments that often engulf our interactions with others, causing conflict and grief.

Adrienne Rich: Calle Visión

Back when I used to teach at SJSU, I regularly attended their Center for Literary Arts Major Author Series - you'd be surprised how many great authors they get there who come and read, speak, and answer questions. Most authors do a fairly subdued question and answer period on Friday afternoon in the University Chapel, then perform a grand Saturday night reading in a larger hall. I saw and heard a great many authors, from Czeslaw Milosz, Tobias Wolfe, Donald Hall, John Barthe, William Styron, Amy Tan, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, and many others.

I remember when Adrienne Rich came to school. She was a "required reading" canonized poet that we'd read in our poetry classes and discussed and wrote about, one of the few token women writers sprinkled into our anthologies and course syllabi. Reading her, I thought she was OK but never felt any deepness with her words. When she came to our campus to read, the English department where I taught was abuzz: a real poet, a major poet, a star in our midst, an artist is coming here, and she used to teach here!! Many faculty knew her. I didn't, but recall looking out my office window and seeing her walking with her coterie of aged profs hovering around her, all of them smiling, giddy, star struck. She was tired, weary, ill, shuffling along slowly with a cane, barely filling her baggy clothes, short hair, severe face, eyes that though tired were noticable even from afar. Her eyes burned beyond somewhere, not at me, not at the people surrounding her, not at the trees and grass around her - her vision saw somewhere else we all could not see, burning like a force of the universe to someplace or something not visible on this planet.

She spoke during the noon Q&A, and the place was packed, standing room only. She fielded a lot of questions gratiously, gracefully, seriously. For some reason the only question I could come up with was, "Do you like Walt Whitman," to which she laughed! The whole audience followed her lead and laughed too and all eyes were upon me at that moment, as if I had made some inside joke. I got red and embarassed and kept looking at her. I guess I had been reading Walt a lot during that time and saw how closely their styles jibed. She went on to say that yes, she did in fact like him, a lot, and has read him exhaustively throughout the years and feels a great debt to his influence and American letters, blah blah. She meant it, thought, and smiled and did her best to answer more than just hert standard answers she must have learned to give after being asked so many times over and over about her influence. I always hate that question - I mean how does one not be influenced by teverything, including parents, siblings, school, friends, poets, musicans, the sky, crackers and soda pop. I suppose if someone who writes poetry reads another poet a lot, they will inevitably imitate them to some extent, by needs must imiate to flush their influence out of their system and find their own unique words and voice, their own unique visión.

When I went to see and hear her the next night, the auditorium was packed again, all chatty and abuzz of her arrival. She was introduced by some prof, a long winded speechification by some wanna be super star literary man. When she walked on stage the place was still and quiet; everyone watched carefully as the tiny withered logos prophet made her way to the mic with her cane and baggy frumpled up clothes. She looked up and then down, then back at the audience. He eyes were glowing and black, looking beyond us somehow to something she only could see, and about which she was trying to explain as she read the following poem. The words "Calle Visión" still ring in my ears, still sound out with the memory of her eyes burning out somwehre beyond my small consciousness, still prod me to do something about my own visión. Even today, I still hear the chilling refrain of "Calle Visión."


from CALLE VISIÓN
by Adrienne Rich

1

Not what you thought: just a turn-off
leading downhill not up

narrow, doesn't waste itself
has a house at the far end

scrub oak and cactus in the yard
some cats some snakes

in the house there is a room
in the room there is a bed

on the bed there is a blanket
that tells of the coming of the railroad

under the blanket there are sheets
scrubbed transparent here and there

under the sheets there's a mattress
the old rough kind, with buttons and ticking

under the mattress is a frame
of rusting iron still strong

the whole bed smells of soap and rust
the window smells of old tobacco-dust and rain

this is your room
in Calle Visión

if you took the turn-off
it was for you

Love and Rockets

Let's not forget Los Bros Hernandez:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0930193318/002-8302434-8587245?v=glance

http://www.fantagraphics.com/artist/lr/losbros/losbros.html

Girl Comix Fix

Have been appreciating undergound comics lately. I don't know what it is about comics, maybe that I grew up loving Archie and Veronica, and Mad Magazine, and eventually came to love Crumb. But something about this sick and weird and twisted stuff speaks to my own stunted and warped sensibilities.

This gal Laura Weinstein ROCKS!

http://www.vineyland.com

I even gotta give her wacky band some credit too:

http://flamingfire.com/new/index_ie.htm

And this gal Leanne Franson, self described 'bi dyke," really does some funny stuff. Love her crude and breezy style:

http://liliane.keenspace.com/archives.html#april

Bitch Goddess Revelation: A Story of Forgetting

I give you this now as nothing special:
A story of forgetting,
A promise of all great things,
The sounds of a song beyond time,
The shining of some kind of light
That God never gave us.

But only God knows that
Even the Sun gets confused before Christmas.
I am ready to die even though I reject Him.
I've tried to bring joy to this life
To be a light inside this darkness,
But I remain at best a dim shade
Hanging halfway in the sky myself,
During the day my spiritual glow is not enough
To illuminate the facts of even
My own watery beginnings
Long frozen over.

Truth is,
My Earthen mother
My Leviathan father
Have run off together this time for good,
Dancing nude, ugly young again and wild lovers,
Shamefully happy.
They've finally succeeded in forgetting their children,
I cannot blame them for wanting to be younger.

Back then I was skinny and shiny
And everyone would look at me with proud lust,
Even my mommy
Even my daddy.

Truth is, I will never clean up my life, never be a pathway to love.
I have some surprises: I am not a virgin.
I was born with clay in my vagina and I spent my days
Squatting in a pit and pumping out children
Screaming with life.

If you look long enough into my eyes
I may want to to sleep with you.
Everyone says this and I believe it:
You didn't want to hit me and don't really hate me.
You didn't really mean it.
Even if you touch me now, one more time
I am trained to comfort you.
Sometimes you make me so angry I could kill you.
I moaned for two weeks next to your bed
Made tears on the floor
Stains in the carpet.

I refused to be your muse
And look where it got me:

I am now sexy heroin mamma, dirty little trash eater,
"Let's check the dumpsters again, and get something to eat."
I saw the day coming, when I'd become old banana skin,
Rotting in the dark light of our room.
"Will you still love me if I take your last dollar?"
"Shut up" I said, "and give me the pipe."

I am now stinky shriveled stick women,
"Why can't you remember my name? I told you a hundred times.
"The sun is coming out, you know, it'll be back soon,
And later we can watch a nice sunset. "

I am now lifeless hag on a stick, crippled stinking
Beer can woman, everyone hears my nightly beatings,
You gave me rides in the morning to buy booze,
You didn't mind enabling my destruction.

I know that sometime soon you will see me standing
Quiet and lovely, waiting in my young black hair,
Renewed with clear mud
You will know me better then,
Finally we will kiss and hold our arms together
Stomach to stomach, smiling into each other's eyes
Like real lovers and forget a little while
That my body is filled deep with clay,
The long time since we touched will be even longer.

Soon you will be with me and we wont have to worry,
Worry what our bodies look like
We'll be immune to the smells of aging
The stink of dissolution.
We will sing into our hearts
And make the earth hear us.
We will dance again
With our with mother and our father.

Bitch Water Preparation: Invocation
(enantiodromia)

Welcome back now
To the old wet beginnings.
We start again to how
It never was:
When mountains were not mountains
And water was not water
And all shapes were formless
When nothing was healthy and certainty was dying.
Welcome to the black clouds of massa confusa
Covering entirely Anima Mundi
Black waters flowing over maternal
Prima materia
From which everything had its first beginning.

Call in your thin, intellectual spirits
Timeless words and useless invocations
Gather up all 4000 years of your history
Bring in the body spiritualized
Bring in your stiff baby soul too pampered and paterinalized
To recognize that everything will be drowned
In Her black waters of imperfection.

This time, there will be no mistakes
There will be no mercy.
Mountains will no longer be mountains
And water will not be water
Everything you have known will be changed forever.
From here on out
All truths fall apart.
Expect nothing less than complete unhappiness.

Call in the old material flow of your being barely living
Turn inside out all of our own rotting soul receptacles:
Never to die, never to go away,
Always coming back again
In the messed-up that's implied
In all you that you don't know
About my feminine fluids.

Now that Luna is strongest
Now that nights are longest
Now we are farthest from the Sun
(though they may try
no one will ever squelch
our night time cults)
Moon will abandon you, take away her glow
Close up daytime shop
Break down the stage
Put away props
And prepare for your destruction.

Menorrhea Mamma will stop all your tomorrows
Take apart this dying day
Unravel the unorganized night sky
Break apart Time and the cycle of days
The terminal patterns of yonic deification.
No more time for Gods, only smelled up liquids,
Stenchy crotches rotting eternal.

All of us whom you have not met,
Have been living in rage in the dark wet of uncomfortable
In here swims the first set of untrained females
Scheduled for doom and disbelief,
An entire ensemble of unrestrained
Cellular babe structures
Witnesses and participants of all this dumb fuck drama
Our asses sticking up through the mud,
Poking through the membranes of all lost girliness:

Tonight we disassemble skin, sweat, and vaginal lust.
Tonight, it's been decided
You cannot return
You cannot go back to your family.

We call now for Mother
Tell us the way
Lead us now
Into Her temptation
And deliver us
Into all evil.

Early Beginnings - the Bitch Goddess Sermons:
Removal of the Mask & The Widsom of All Futilities

I started this thing with lots of currency
Admiring my own firm booty
And my own pretty eyes and my hot young lips.
I made myself look good and had lots of energy
Until the day came when I was deemed ugly
And they took away my skirt
They took away my shoes and cut my cute hair
They tore off my mask
They shamed me daily with public scrutiny.

I'm pretty sure now all I know is destruction.
Every time I turn my head and stop paying attention,
Blood rises in my cheeks and heats up my heart.
Pagan history shows its head and reassert itself.
The pure instinct of desire starts slobbering
Over an apple or my vagina
I begin choking on seeds and lose all my hair.
I contribute to moral decay and the breakdown of families
I embody spiritual vacuity and think the worst thoughts,
Because I can
Because somebody needs this job
Because someone's got to do it.

I reject all beauty and hate pretty things
I destroy the flower and eat wilted petals.
I burn lipstick and tear up my panties.
I throw away all affections from my mother and father
I eat all their words.
I fabricated meaningful relationships.
I built a family from air and sincere wishes
And then destroyed it for pure pleasure.
I gave my love to the sky and was rejected
Impregnated with air and bloated with hurt
Completely occluded from family inclusion.
All my friends got married and I stayed in the bathroom
Staring at the tiles and the vomit in the toilet.
I stayed up all night and lost my childhood
Prematurely aborted and all cells evaporated.

I left my friends and siblings and went into the desert.
I learned to drink from the sand and eat from the bush.
I was placed at the bottom of the cross and missed all crucifictions.
I took out my tampons and put away my fashions.
My soft cheeks and pouty red lips dried up
And I became pure destruction.
All of this and nothing.
All of this and nothing.

Notes of a Native Dude

Apparently, a linguist has deciphered the term 'dude'. Found in this news article. )

I remember watching Fast Times at The Movies in Victorville growing up a young desert dude. That and Purple Rain - in fact watching them both with a load of other dudes and dudettes. Seeing and hearing Spicoli use the term reified my own till then unconscious solidarity with the term - aterm which both defined me and allowed me to communicate with my speech community. Having had the world validated now as part of the larger social structure, that word definitely became part of my vocab for a long long time. I was a dude. It was a term of identity and endearment, a multipurpose word that could express a wide range of emotions without seeming uncool or having to say very much. "Awww, dude, you OK?" "Dude, you're one sick freak." "Dude! Careful." "Dude, pass the bong." Just using the term instantly included you in a culture, a place, an identity.

When I moved north to San Jose I noticed that it was used less, perhaps because the Bay Area is notorious for its high falutin cultural & intellectual aspirations (though some people, such as those who lived closer to the coast, still flagrantly and unashamedly used it). Using dude identifed you as a loser, a street scruff, a surfer stoner, a decidely non intellectual. It suggested a lower class, younger, uneducated, perhaps even intentionally affected surfer type dumbmness, a pose of dude ineptitude. Looking to move up in the world, I shed the term in hopes of becoming more mature, more refined, more cultured, and pretty much banished it from my vocabulary through grad school, as I perfected my wanna be educated, professorial voice.

Moving to Spain furthered my estrangement from the word, mainly because no one where was going to get it. while I realized that all cutlures have such a word. In Barcelona, for adults the word was "hombre" (man), which was used much like dude. For teens, it was "tio" which was uncle. E.g., "Que pasa, tio?" (S'up, dude?) or "Aaaaaa la, tio, que va? (Duuuuuude, what's up?)

After coing back to the US and moving on in my career and life, and having gradually sloughed of my pseudo intellectual persona by leaving academia, I unepectedly returned to the word (or it had found me, a linguistic prodgial son welcomed home with open arms and fatted up calves) after having not used it for almost a decade. I don't know why or how, but one day I gave in and just used it among a group of meat head jock dudes, and it felt like home - though I had no affintiy with these bruisers. Using dude in California gave me access social groups of men I would otherwise have nothing to say to - or even be admitted to. I could dude with my bros, real or social, bro-down with the homies, my peeps, and chill with all good dudes. Using it identified me as a Californian, a home dude, a native dude, a man from this land of the coast and mountains and desert, the promised land where all dudes prosper. I still use it, proudly, despite any pretensions I may have beyond my own white trash origins. I'm a dude, you're a dude, you're all dudes, we're all dudes. I have accepted my dudeness, and I am well! Bitchen, dude!

DUDES!!!

"Catch You Later"

I gave you my love and what do you do?
Wore it like a pair of really cool shoes
Then took them off when they no longer looked good.
I offered it all to you but that was not enough -
My body, my love
The sound of my heart beating in my chest,
The laughter in my smile, the tears of my soul,
The damage in my eyes as you looked down at me
One last time.

Backstage, the band played their set
And you told me I was yours,
Your own little guitar girl
Hot little rhythm chick,
Your teenage love partner.
I never told you that I heard you that night
When you laid upon Mother.
I was alone in the other room.
She wanted your seed
And that's how you made me.
In my mind we were already married, if that's possible,
Already twisted up love between my legs.

Beyond the bass drums and the audience screaming,
I heard the new sounds of our baby crying
As she left my body entering this world
Breathing her first air, waving her new arms
Reaching out for love.

When you finished my hair was all wet from our sweat
And I felt you empty inside me,
Your gift to me and this world.
You looked at me and got up
Then drank from your beer and lit a cigarette.
I knew you had to leave and that was OK.
Your band was on next and I had my future,
My own plans and more than enough to live for
From that point forward.

"You're a cutie," you said and patted my head.
"Catch you later."

11/04

A Perfect Fall And One Fine Disaster
(My Own Christmas Poem)

Here I go again
Succesfully creating one fine distaster,
Another perfect fall of Love
Quickly peaking from limited glory
Into the same old story of hope and redemption,
Where the best love can do is open its mouth
Like some angry young beast
That savagely bites the mother that bore him.

(I couldn't make her a baby so she left me.)

Everyone has an instinct
To make someone happy.
Girls gyrate in front of old men
And make lots of money.
Beer is sold and tips are made.
A heart pumps only so many times
And then one day
It stops.
Erections come and go
While faulty inseminations miss the mark of evolution.
So serious are the plans we make
To construe love sensations
Sheduling our days to maximize all meaning
Until everything
Everything eventually stops.

Bar napkins get soggy and cigarettes are smoked.
Beasts are slaughtered and packaged right up
For holiday consumption.
Drinks are finished
And somehow a baby is born out of lucky fertilization.
Stories are told and a couple of logical moons line up
So sperm can penetrate one fortunate egg.

In some biological way
Beyond the reach of mere words
Far deeper than every one of our syllables
Families construct meaning
Beyond comprehension:
So this eternal baby starts to makes sense
Living in the hearts of us adults
And all our wet children
Praying for that one mythic baby -
That savage young beast -
In hopes of receiving absolution
And at least one good Christmas season
When an important man died for no known reason
Only to come back every year as a babe
Revealing the joy of pure living.

I have come back, he says, to tell you
Relationships will start and all of our lives
Are scheduled to be ended.
People pray while old men give dollars
To half naked women.
Everyone is happy when unions are created.
Until one more time
When a baby is born
And then Love is born
So Rejoice
Rejoice
For love is born,
A beast is now born.

11/04

Mean Bean Machine Dream

When I was little (2nd grade) I had a series of recurring terrible dreams, which started from getting food poisoning from eating these funky old refried beans on a sad wilted tostada from the school cafetieria. In the dream, I was stuck inside the biggest and blackest of factories; indeed, there was nothing else to the world but this factory - and inside the factory was this huge windy twisty all encompassing machine, consisting of all manner of pipes, metal arms, winding apparatus, conveyor belts, chords, tubes, and so on - kinda something out of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" or out of a Dickens anti industrialism novel. The horror of the dream was that I was completely trapped in this factory and could not move; it completely surrounded my whole body and being. It was as if I was a part of the whole thing. I could barely move, but even then it was only small twitches. It was like I was just merely a small inconsequential cell inside some hideously large evil organism, pulsing and vibrating with a dull, mechanical regularity, completley bound up in it all. It was horrible, depressing. When I look back on it, to me the factory is/was Time, the human condition of being trapped in this temporal world, this temporal body. I awoke from those dreams crying, melancholic, feeling hopeless - and also very much against tostadas. To this day (and I know this irrational), I still blame those mean beans.