What if the worlde were mayde of thicke starres?

A Thought Upon Waking Today

2010-03-31T22:43:00.000-07:00

I found the perfect metaphor for my life: I am a collection of scraps of fine linens... all that is needed is for the vestment to be sewn together.

Conversations in a Dream

2010-01-24T07:28:00.000-08:00

I found Life after exiting a portal in the air. The thing struck me oddly and so I tried to return back through the portal, but by this time, it had already disappeared. It seemed the only to do was continue on. I met there two friends - Octavia and Shelli, who wanted to help me on my way. To this I agreed, for I saw at once that Life would be a venture best not made alone.

*

Octavia: Life is like a brightening cloud - we stand in the billowy center of this cumulous and slowly discover the things around us. They take shape and take on a lustre suddenly new - suddenly we notice the figures around us in their genuine outlines. And yet it never dawned on us before that these figures had such outlines, no, we only saw the colours of them and let them have the shapes we gave them in our minds.

*

Shelli: There was a time on earth when the mornings sang. Those days one could smell oneself as in a earthly womb, overgrown and rich with everything real. In fact, nothing was unreal - that is the essential thing to remember about this time. There was never a question, never a doubt about the things given to your through your senses and your mind. It all flourished before you, and you simply could not help but be enraptured by it.

Jackie: But where has that time gone?

Shelli: Why ask - 'where was that time gone?' Isn't it enough to just remember the time, let it dominate your imagination, while others carry out their plans to buy a new collar for the dog or to wink at the next spectacle alive?

*

Shelli: There is no remedy for those whose hearts are wounded but silence and shadow.

Octavia: That's a problem of any unfree existence - one cannot have these silences and shadows unless one is free.

*

Jackie: I'm tired of this fake optimism I see everywhere. Where did all of our critical resentment go? Have we just become too daunted by how much there is in the world to be critical of, and so decided just to be accepting and friendly towards it all? Or was it just because we realized that most people aren't really bad people, they usually have very precise reasons for behaving the way they do that could likely be found if one had a videotape of their entire lives? It seems in either case, we've adopted that kind of 'niceness' which only makes us feel good, but which does not actually help anyone.

Octavia: That reminds me - the best way to behave yourself is to pretend that you are being filmed. We too often look through our own eyes at the world, and thus colour it with everything that is individual, and therefore irrational, in us (what is insanity but a kind of excessive individualism?). The video-tape can be private - only viewed by ourselves, but at least it would then represent the ideal image we would want to have preserved of ourselves, and not that unideal thing we usually carry around with ourselves, unthinking.

*

Jackie: What is fun? Thinking, reflecting, questioning. Those are the only three things I could really call 'fun'. Everything else I just do to pass the time away...

*

Jackie: What if we are only able to love ourselves, and therefore we only love people to the degree that they resemble ourselves? Do I hate the racist because of the bigotry of his views, or do I hate him because of this sheer distance from what I am?

Octavia: Love is a rock drawn from no quarry.

*

Jackie: I like profound people - there's more room inside them to go fishing.

*

Jackie: Anyone who prefers a fine meal over a fine book is more animal than human.

*

Jackie: Is there anything more satisfying than the 'I told you so" feeling? My only regret about there not being an afterlife is that I won't be able to tell all the Christians and Muslims, "Look, I told you so! There's no afterlife!"

Shelli: The only way to prove it would be for us all to die - and yet death is that state of being in which there is nothing left to prove.

*

Octavia: Most people don't live with enough awareness about life to recognize how intense it is.

Jackie: For some reason, I intensely loathe insularity. As my friend Jane wrote me and expressed the same feelings - I want to experience absolutely everything. I wouldn't be treating life with the same respect it deserves if I didn't do this. This means being able to see things from as many perspectives as possible and also means being as knowledgeable as possible.

Shelli: The problem is that there is a lot of useless information out there and a lot of banal subcultures that people participate in. _______ is about as relevant as any pulp romance novel that will be out-of-print in 20 years - so why learn about him? (He's so not worth learning about, I'm not even going to say his name).

Octavia: As long as you are always learning, you shouldn't worry if you are learning about the right things. Chances are, you and the people you care about most will find some way to meet in the middle.

*

Shelli: Sometimes, the greater dishonour we can do to someone is to take them seriously, for this implies that their way of life has been based on careful reflection, thought, and a decidedness of the will, when the reality is more likely that they are showing you only half a shadow of the kind of person they would really like to be.

Octavia: It's in the same way that we can only learn to love our parents after our teenage years if we cease to take them seriously as rational human beings and accept the fact that they grant themselves a sense of significance by playing this role of 'parent'.

*

Jackie: I'm like the female Nietzsche, except in some ways I am more Nietzchean than he - it only took me one semester's worth of academia to realize what bullshit it is.

Closedown

2009-11-26T02:59:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6hmw74cCUQ

Poem Pair

2009-11-10T23:49:00.001-08:00

[It's been a while since I wrote a poem - I wrote a few in my graduate class today and it felt really good because that class had started to become something of a pedant's game this late in the semester...]

A Figure on the Heights

She touched the mountain air
with why, with how, unknown
feelings in her veins. We wished
we could understand her beauty
but it does not know how
to show itself. Music played
like always it does, like it
does always, like it always
does, and there she was granted
a wish: that no body would ever
feel disease again, that breathing
would ease, that night's magic
would grow serpentine through
the streets until it extended
thru the day, bright lit.

Granpa

Forlorn old man ached on the couch
(he did not know what to do)
his poppers burned, his girdle feened,
life ebbed, so and so, with each cough
something was lost by him (he
lost something) and the gramophone
played an old jazz tune
from the 1930s or 40s, remade
by a guy and his band in the 80s.
That's how things went down.
Quieta non movere, we whispered
at the dusk of the day
when the cigarette had burned out
and the reruns ended and we hauled
him to the bedroom, to sleep.

Small Thoughts

2009-11-09T11:03:00.000-08:00

Government is not the problem - idiots are.

People say you don't need intelligence to know god(s). This seems ridiculous to me, because I understand intelligence to be the ability to perceive truths. There are many different types of intelligences, just as there are many different types of truths. Empirical truths, mathematical truths, moral truths, artistic truths... etc. The question for religious people is: what kind of truth is god?

The worst sin you can commit in this life is to be boring, which is to say, sinless.

Some Theses on Law...

2009-10-29T02:04:00.000-07:00

The problem of law is that we cannot trust our 'authorities' to enforce it, because we have no assurance that these authorities will themselves follow the law.

The problem of law is one of pure practicality - no one is willing to follow the law when it comes to a practical choice between following the law and doing something one perceives as good for oneself or one's loved ones. Who among us would not run a red light when it was a matter of getting our child to the hospital as quickly as possible?

The problem of law resides in its implacability, for there is no law so universal that one cannot find a situation where one could find an exception to it, and so there are no laws 'as given' or 'as such' that exist indubitably and throughout all time.

The problem of law is therefore one of recognition - how do we recognize the right thing to do, if what is right changes according to the situation? Lying is wrong UNTIL the Nazi officer comes to our door and asks if we have any Jews hiding in the house.

The problem of law resides not so much in particular actions, but in styles of living. One could never violate the laws of one's community and yet still be a bad person, for how does one know that one's whole community is violating a law greater than the laws it has created?

***

Utopians (like myself) assume that every problem has its root in psychology. Fix the conditions (poverty, war) that give rise to trauma and you will find that all other ills of society - fundamentalism, intolerance, hatred, greed, etc. - will disappear. Yet this thinking may overlook something very important - no matter how perfect you make the social conditions of life, to where there is no pain, no hunger, and no loneliness, you will still not eradicate banality or stupidity.

Is all stupidity trauma? Is all banality trauma? That would be absurd - I would be asserting that people are stupid and/or banal in proportion to the amount of suffering they have had in their lives. That is palpably not true... or is it? I would have not thought it was true until I heard the stories of many of my classmates, who I assumed were stupid (that is, unthinking) simply because that's how they were, but then I realized that the conditions of their family lives were so bad that they simply didn't have time to think, because they had to deal with other more pressing things. (I suppose this interpretation is based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs - these people are not able to achieve self-actualization because they have not had all their more basic needs fulfilled).

Let's look at what is required in order to be non-banal:

Hmmmmmmmm, is all I have to say, for now...

On the Word "Value"

2009-10-29T02:03:00.001-07:00

The moment I come to consider something valuable is the moment when that something is lost to me.

I'm Still Alive...

2009-10-24T01:16:00.000-07:00

Though barely.

I thought I wrote something on paper this week that I wanted to type on here, but apparently I did not.

There is more to life than this (feed me god)

(so it was this poem after all - so I will type it up after all -)

I am grateful for the life god has given me
Blesséd be the name of the Lord.
(I'll write myself into ecstasy yet!)
Let the beauty of the world not be surmounted
by its ugliness.
Blesséd be the name of the Lord.

If cataracts were furled behind my ears,
and everything became a noiseless grandeur...
what if? And what if...?
When the plaintive heart cried out,
it blew smoke into the eyes
of all carousers.
1,2,3,4,1,2,3
Blesséd be the name of the Lord.

If I could reach you here
with these small words,
let me say something that would change your life...
My father, unfortunately, groaned,
and then I had to deal with that
for he was fated to exist in a binary world
where fires were lit on one side
and testicles bit and bleeding on the other.

It was a torpid world -
culled out of nothing, remaining in duress,
with white lights hanging around the edge of it,
like Christmas lights.

If we could ever become one
(and that is the hope of our nation)
That would be a circumstance that defies
explanation, makes the world not so apparent.

In life, there are two choices,
party, or faction,
merit or commendation,
brains or betrayal,
beating or commodity,
croaking or floating,
being missed or being corrupted,
being flattered or being deposed,
hanging fires or hanging hearts,
mutilating the breeze or counselling death.

I bought my love a blood-letter,
spelling Q, E, D, F, A, K, E
musing out my heart into excess,
and dying for the fixation of it.
The problem was that we both met one another in a car crash, where either of our respective partners had died, me my boyfriend, he his girlfriend, and so we grieved and mourned and went to trial and testified against the motherfucking drunk who killed them and held the funeral and held the dinner-dance party at our houses and cried in the attic and he touched my hand and said I reminded him of her and then he kissed me and held onto my dress and I knew not what not what not what it was that was making me feel this way but that I wanted him more badly than anything and worked myself to know him better but we sang darkly and no he didn't know the same songs, but no, he couldn't see the same constellations, no

lechery lechery, let it all be known,
my sanity remains in dregs,
I worked in metals, forged them
to make clean silverware for the maidens,
for the maidens, I loved, oh...

My Heart

2009-10-18T22:36:00.001-07:00

Terrible, terrible things we discover about the world.

I don't even know if I want to mention them - I hesitate, because I hate to destroy someone's idea of what the world is like.

Can someone live their whole lives without realizing the terrible things that happen in the world?

I don't know how people make it through life... one really admires resilience, but perhaps resilience is made mostly up of ignorance rather than strength. We move on by ignoring... but what about those whose nature it is not to ignore, to be unable to ignore?

I was at Walgreen's today, thinking of buying some Q-tips, because I've run out. Well, I decided against it, because it seems like a waste of paper and packaging to create something that is really a luxury (and because they cost $5 that I'd rather use on food). On the way out of the store, I saw People magazine showing the picture of a girl who had been kidnapped 18 years ago and had only now been discovered.

There were many disturbing things about this story and other related stories. One thing I must mention is that I fucking hate police. In both cases that I looked at, these bastards did not follow leads that may have led to the discovery of these victims earlier. In one case, the monster who did the crime was actually on fucking parole FOR RAPE AND KIDNAPPING ALREADY.

I'm a liberal in almost every way imaginable - but I cannot help but have this lingering sense that the judicial system is ridiculous. Police seem to always hurt those who don't need to be punished and do nothing to help those who have been hurt. It's fucking ridiculous. I know there is no real solution, but it really boils my blood to see anyone (I mean lawyers) coming to the defense of people like these, while most of the help that was rallied up for the victims was done by the families and communities themselves.

Isn't there some balance between the arbitrary beheadings of Elizabethan England and the excessively long and bureaucratic trials we have today?

You know why I don't think it's worse for an innocent person to be punished than for someone who is guilty not to be punished? Because we all likely deserve punishment and because we would all be horrible if the circumstances made us ripe for it. Hamlet: "Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" Indeed. Not only that, I think it's worse to let a guilty person go free and have him commit another crime than to unjustly sentence an innocent person. Why? Because in the former case there are two or more victims, plus all the relationships of those victims.

I know this rant is being made completely out of my emotions, but it feels good to write about this in this way. These outrages of the world must have some target... so long as there are criminals out there, I can vent upon them. I hate them, hate them, hate them. I hate human nature, I hate human defectiveness.

Well, I guess I should be doing something about it rather than ranting? I could never become a prosecuting trial lawyer - I don't have the emotional stamina for that kind of thing. But I could at least work towards creating a better social world so that every single person is acknowledged and cared for, so that we look after the people who are unstable and unfit for society, but more importantly, give everyone the means to live a fulfilled life.

Oh god, how hard this world is...

And I call out because... one wants a god, one wants a solution to this. One does not want it all to be left to human hands, for then it admits of the possibility of failure, and what mind can bear that?

Perhaps I suffer unnecessarily. Perhaps the people who are victims suffer less than I do, because they are not so disposed to contemplating and internalizing. I don't think that's true. I think there are people who suffer a lot more than I... though I also don't doubt that I would suffer greatly if anything horrible ever happened to me or my loved ones...

One wants to be good, even if others are so sick and so angry.

One wants to show love, even if nothing is guaranteed.

I... I love you all. I love you all so deeply.

On a Day in Which I Would Have Preferred Not to Die

2009-10-16T23:40:00.000-07:00

The title says all, for it was a thoughtless and meagre day, in which nothing was extraordinary. I knew when I awoke today that the day would be like this... try as I might, I could do nothing against it, until now, at 11:40 pm, when I decided to read a random Emily Dickinson poem. She's a poet who can expel you immediately away from the ordinary and into the wondrous.

The Grass so little has to do,
A Sphere of simple Green -
With only Butterflies, to brood,
And Bees, to entertain -

And stir all day to pretty tunes
The Breezes fetch along,
And hold the Sunshine, in it's lap
And bow to everything,

And thread the Dews, all night, like Pearl,
And make itself so fine
A Duchess, were too common
For such a noticing,

And even when it die, to pass
In odors so divine -
As lowly spices, laid to sleep -
Or Spikenards perishing -

And then to dwell in Sovreign Barns,
And dream the Days away,
The Grass so little has to do,
I wish I were a Hay -

A few minutes later, I read this poem, quite as perfectly relevant thematically:

Good morning - Midnight -
I'm coming Home -
Day - got tired of Me -
How could I - of Him?

Sunshine was a sweet place -
I liked to stay -
But Morn - didn't want me - now -
So - Good night - Day!

I can look - can't I -
When the East is Red?
The Hills - have a way - then -
That puts the Heart - abroad -

You - are no so fair - Midnight -
I chose - Day -
But - please take a little Girl -
He turned away!

Derrida on Ghosts

2009-10-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nmu3uwqzbI

We have words in our language for a reason. A dangerous thing that happens to overly rationalistic minds is that we want to get rid of all words in our language that don't seem to make sense. For me, this happened once with 'god'. But the better thing to do is to think about words - their origins as well as what changes may have happened over time to these words. Derrida shows this perfectly in this clip when he is asked if he believes in ghosts. To take this question at face-value is simplistic, and I am sure that, a year or so ago, my frame of thinking was such that I would have said 'No, of course not. It's a superstition that grew out of....' and I would go into the cultural reasons why ghosts came about and why modern science has shown that such supernatural phenomena that people usually attribute to ghosts is actually explicable naturalistically.

Yeah yeah yeah, all 'true' enough. But it shuts down thinking rather than opening it up. The better way to answer is the way Derrida does - to say that perhaps this idea of ghosts has been fundamental to people for so long in history not because people before were superstitious and now we are enlightened, but because the very idea of a ghost is that which haunts, and no culture, no matter how advanced, can escape being haunted, can escape distance and intangibility, and moreover, as Derrida points out, modern technology may actually be a new vehicle for the ghost, rather than a way to eliminate its presence.

Fascinating. Thinking should always be creative, or else it only serves to give us a false sense of comfort, a smug knowledgeability that is really just throwing a blanket over the peculiarities and wonders of our world.

A Sketch

2009-10-13T18:07:00.000-07:00

Catherine had no desire to put on a 'game face', which was what her peers spoke of as the necessary prerequisite for facing the world with any chance of success. Her solution, instead, was to turn away from this farce called life and pursue her own illimitable phantasies.

I met her the other day in her closet, where she held her weekly 'moonshine gumptions', awkward flourishes of her soul that howled rhetorically and whispered conceptually, in which she claimed to slough off, through a difficult and barbaric process of re-appropriation, the casings and coils of the last seven days. This usually involved wearing several different scarves wrapped tightly about her (and not only around the neck), two or three heavily scented candles (perhaps stolen from her mother), and choosing to play eerie music that featured an emphasis on the string section of the orchestra...

[I wrote this while during an orientation for my tutoring job, at the mention of a rap song that talks about putting on one's 'game face' in order to go out in the world. Needless to say, I am inherently disgusted by the idea of any posturing, especially one necessitated by the unfair living conditions that many people in the world are subjected to...]

On Religiosity and Utopia... from Someone Else

2009-10-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

Here is a post from Dale Carrico's blog, who is a lecturer at UC Berkeley in the Rhetoric department. As you may have noticed, I was myself struggling with the same two issues of religiosity and utopia in a post earlier this month, but was much more inelegant when trying to speak of it politically...

http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-irreligiosity.html

Conquering Days

2009-10-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

And besides, Hamlet, you had to perish. You were not for life.

You believed in crystal notions, not in human clay.

Always twitching when asleep, as if you hunted chimeras-

Wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit.

You knew no human thing; you did not know even how to breathe...

Animal Time

2009-10-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

I don't know when I will have time to write the second part of my post on suicide, since my cold (or flu) left me rather behind in my graduate class where I have to simultaneously read both Kant and Hegel. (I'm still an undergraduate, but I decided to sign up for a graduate class my last semester as a challenge and to see if I might want to actually do this kind of thing for a Phd).

Oi.

So I may as well (since I am trying again to write every day) write out some of my thoughts on what I am studying....

Kant's main point in the critique of teleological judgment is: We humans, being the only species who can reason, are here in the world to give purpose to it. Because of this, we also have an obligation to be ethical.

(Heidegger seems to say - we don't give purpose to the world, purpose is already tied up with our being-in-the-world at all, but this seems to me to say the same thing, only swathed with mysticism. Purposiveness is just a fact of our existence, and to say that thinking of 'purpose' or 'meaning' as lost is a mistake doesn't actually help anyone who feels this way. Just like a religion, Heideggerians require that one believes their vague presuppositions about the world before one can actually be part of their 'school'.)

If everyone was like Kant, the world would be a much safer and happier place..... but that, sadly, is not the case. The next best thing is to ask - how do we secure happiness for the few who really aspire to high things?

The first step is to clean up this logic - happiness should not be the goal, but aspiration itself. A life that is dependent on external things is always subject to doom because it is based on the idea of securing happiness. A life based on high aspirations, however, always has at least the pursuit dwelling within...

Agh! Why does every philosopher always say something so unsatisfying? Perhaps I need to learn not to think on such a large scale... There are no universal solutions --- perhaps even no world-wide solutions. If there are personal solutions - do these need to be sought? One is either lucky, or unlucky.... right??

Oi! Back where we began...

Crazy Kant

2009-10-05T23:46:00.000-07:00

The most awkward of philosophers makes me laugh out loud sometimes when he talks about emotionally serious issues with the same convoluted unevenness he uses when talking about conceptual issues:

"If the value that life has for us is assessed merely in terms of what we enjoy (i.e., happiness, the natural purpose of the sum of all our inclinations), then the answer is easy: that value falls below zero."

This is from a footnote (of course) in the Critique of Judgment, Part II (Critique of Teleological Judgment), in the section 83 titled "On the Ultimate Purpose That Nature Has as a Teleological System".

Kant's general point is that when we reflect on nature as a whole, we discover that humanity is the ultimate purpose for which the earth exists. Humans therefore have an obligation to live for this purposiveness and not live simply for their pleasures and their survival, as other animals do.

What is interesting about Kant's argument (so far as I understand it) is that it is not a simplistic reduction to - "God created the world for humans to fulfill a purpose in". Though it seems that Kant believed in God, he does not invoke the idea of God to explain anything in his critical system since God is a "transcendent" idea and cannot be verified by either reason or science. Rather, his understanding of our ultimate purpose has more to do with the plain (empirical) fact that people who pursue lives of pleasure inevitably get drawn down emotionally towards dissipation and ennui. Those who lead lives based on a foundation of purpose (scientists, social activists, artists, etc.) tend to have a sense of wholeness that keeps them harmonious even with the crudities of nature.

Actually, I have no idea if that is what he is saying. It makes some sense though... Our personal integrity is tied up with how we see the integrity or purposiveness of nature as a whole...

On Suicide, Part 1

2009-10-04T17:00:00.000-07:00

I have wanted to write about this topic for a while, but it was Jane who finally gave me the impetus to do so.

But before I say anything on suicide, I feel obliged to look at one of the most famous speeches in English literature concerning the idea. It is a curious thing that this speech is so famous, considering how taboo and emotionally charged the topic is when brought up in other spheres of life. Perhaps it is so famous because it confronts the one 'unthinkable' idea and does so with beauty and eloquence, so that one's conscience is eased in knowing that 'Shakespeare himself' wrote on suicide, and did so unflinchingly....

Hamlet: To be, or not to be; that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them. (III.i 58-62)

Compare this to the first two sentences of Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus":

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Under these auspices, we ask: is suicide then primarily an emotional or an intellectual problem? We have hints in the play that Hamlet is naturally contemplative and somewhat dark in personality, notwithstanding the horror of the principle action of the play: having his father murdered by his uncle for political and marital gain.

Many of Hamlet's statements about the world exude a general kind of malaise, and even in the 'To be or not to be' speech, his frustrations are various and do not focus exclusively on the wickedness of his uncle, or even murderers in general. In fact, Hamlet already has thought of suicide before he even knew that his uncle had killed his father in Act 1 Scene 2:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, O God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fit on't, ah fie, fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. (129-137)

When he wants to deride his uncle, his mother, or most anyone else (and truly, the only person in the play he speaks very well of is Horatio), he talks of disease, soil, rot, foulness, and other such metaphors for contagion. For Hamlet, the world dwells in sickness rather than in health, where things are destined to waste away before they bloom into something worth the effort of growth. To take the title of an essay by another 20th century existentialist writer (Miguel de Unamuno), Hamlet has a tragic sense of life.

Life has been many things to many different people, but it would not be difficult to argue that the natural world is unforgiving and that human society tends to be banal, stupid, and cruel. But since most people being banal and doing cruel things are not the ones reflecting sincerely on life, it is the contemplative ones that get struck (and stuck) with the overwhelming sense of life's purposelessness, of life's ultimate trajectory towards tragedy.

To answer my first question, schematically: it is the use of our intelligence, becoming attuned to facts about the world, that then begets in us an emotional state of.... despair? melancholy? malaise? Something like that. Hamlet has it. Camus had it. I probably have it as well. And so....

There grows in souls such as ours a dialectic between thought and feeling that inevitably brings up that fateful question: To be, or not to be?

It's intriguing to me that Hamlet brings up the idea of nobility in the second line of his speech. Most contemporary thought has little to do with the idea of nobility (although Nietzsche is an exception) and I have to admit that it is even somewhat foreign to me - have I ever made a choice because it was the most noble thing to do? I think contemporary discourse still talks about right and wrong, good and bad, ethical and unethical (I think Nietzsche made it impossible to speak of good vs evil in a serious context), but rarely do we think of things as 'noble' or 'ignoble'.

Another intriguing thing is that Hamlet talks of suicide as 'taking arms' and 'opposing' the troubles of existence, whereas we usually think of suicide as a quick escape that does not involve such a monumental struggle. Perhaps Hamlet is here referring to the fact that he intends to avenge his father, though he knows that doing so risks his own death. Or perhaps Hamlet is thinking of 'being' in two different ways: 1) being as merely existing, being 'present' as a fact in the world and 2) 'being' in the sense of living with fullness. In this case, the stoic stance of suffering the outrages of life would be closer to non-being, because one essentially makes oneself a stone, 'dull to all proceedings', a death-in-life. To take arms against life would then be closer to living with a purpose, but such purposiveness, for Hamlet, is what leads all the more quickly to death.

To be continued....

Moving Towards Utopia

2009-09-30T22:31:00.000-07:00

Having been granted this body and this life of mine, it sometimes feels as if I should do something special with it.

Now, that seems like a bizarre kind of understatement, but here is what I mean:

I have come to certain conclusions about existence, none of which I hold dogmatically.

The first, most fundamental, is what I believe about where we humans came from, the knowledge of which we have a wonderful cadre of scientists to thank for. What evolution shows us is that we are contingent (perhaps frighteningly contingent) beings. Our existence is essentially an accident of the natural world.

From this, it makes sense to say that every world religion arises from poetry. Creative minds have encountered the natural world and given it life, colouring, and significance. They have seen something behind the fabric of the every day sensible world and have attempted to give body to it. They made dances that imitated the movements of the gods; they made paintings of the way the world looked before it was shaped into habitation; they sang songs of the battles that took place between divine ancestors. All this was done, not as a conscious attempt to "give meaning to life", but rather because the world simply did not make sense otherwise. How could one look up at a starry night and see that the positions of what we now call planets had shifted... how could a culture encounter the miracles of birth and death, without trying to understand these things in relation to the human lives that are inextricably tied to them? Poetry (in a very broad sense) is necessary to give shape and form to life.

Most poetic myths include the idea of a god, and because the idea of god has a basis in reality, the concept cannot be ignored when thinking of human existence. Suffice it for now to say that 'god' is a metaphor for ecstasy, power, lawfulness, or perhaps all three. In every culture with an idea of god, the very least condition for something or someone to be a god is that it is not a part of everyday existence. A god cannot be a human who holds a special place of authority in the culture - that is merely a chief. A god must always be beyond. The relation between our every day existence and a god is highly variable between cultures: in some cultures, one may eventually become a god. In other cultures, god is something that can only be experienced after death or perhaps at certain ecstatic moments of earthly existence, but whose presence is too powerful to be endured for more than an 'earth-day'. Other cultures make gods abstractions - so that what is 'Law' or 'Truth' is synonymous with a god, or what is 'Love' or 'Passion' is also synonymous with a god.

This concept 'god' has arisen because of humanity's recognition of three fundamental things: the possibility of ecstasy, the possibility of weakness and death, and the reality of universal concepts. These things require a little unpacking, so I will go slowly here:

Ecstasy:

There are some experiences in life which transcend everyday experience. Dreams, though they happen every night, are part of this kind of transcendence. These states elevate our consciousness in ways that are nearly impossible in normal situations like, say, when we are eating a hamburger (or a veggie burger). Descriptions of such states include ideas of 'ultimate peace', 'pure happiness', 'spiritual calm'. Some states (as in dreams, but also in some unique waking states of mind) might give us hallucinations of flying or transforming, and we may be able to do or see things that we were unable to do or see while we had been in our regular state of mind.

This rough sketch is meant to describe all those states that we may call 'ecstatic'. The main connection between them is their difference from normality, and this difference has often been aligned (especially in ancient times) with the divine difference, which is to say, these states are attributed to divine causes, divine beings, gods themselves.

Mortality:

That we humans are mortal, weak, and ignorant is readily apparent to anyone who is no longer a child. We cannot live forever, we are readily susceptible to harmful changes in our environment, and there is much MUCH about the world (notwithstanding the universe) that we do not know. This has been true of humans to almost the same degree throughout our whole existence (perhaps the latter two are less true now, but not in any important way). Feeling this, it seems inevitable to me that creative humans would project an opposite: beings that are immortal, powerful, and knowledgeable.

What I think is kind of fascinating is that every culture has a different reason for projecting the existence of such beings. For the ancient Greeks, the gods were how you accounted for the hard things in life. You could be tragically ruined like Oedipus Rex simply because you were mortal - the gods seem to be occasions for meditation on this fact, contrasted us not so that we could ever hope to be like them, but to remind us that we could never be like them, and that we should be prepared to face all the hardships of being mortal.

For other cultures, however, these projected beings are given as contrasts that are available to us as sources of hope, inspiration, or wisdom. They are beings with whom we can establish a connection that allows us either the endowment of these opposite qualities or else the possibility of coming into a state of divinity after our mortal life has ended. People ask the gods for strength to succeed in a difficult task or to grant them the wisdom to make the best decision. I think this is done primarily out of a recognition of our own fallibility, and because divine figures have the power of absolution that not even the most respectable human can grant.

Universality:

We have ideas of things that may not necessarily be found in everyday sensuous reality - mathematics is all idea-based, but so are concepts like 'beauty' 'danger', 'love', and 'justice'. We can only find examples of these things in real life, but not the concepts themselves (nor can we ever find a 'perfect' example of one of these concepts, because our idea of perfect beauty or perfect love would always be subjective).

To be a little brief here: we may wonder where these concepts are located if they are in some sense objective (beauty will always be beautiful), but they only ever appear when there are humans around to think them. The natural step is to say that they exist as part of a divine cosmos, or in the case of the Greeks, that they are the gods themselves (so Mars was not only the concept of war (what made all instances of war happen), but war itself (he was the most war-like of all the gods).

I think this is tied in with our feelings of mortality. We have an idea of what is 'right' or 'just' - but we know of no human being who is perfectly just at all times. Yet the concept still exists, and we are consistently able to identify examples of it when they arise before us. The conclusion might then be drawn: there is actually a god who exemplifies Justice itself (along with other universals like Love and Charity), and when humans do the right thing, what they are really doing is obeying this god.

Now...

These are the conditions under which we live. My question is: how do we get from all this to utopia?

Am I making sense yet? Probably not...

What I feel like I understand about the fundamentals of the human world (given above) makes me feel as if I have a select few roles to play.

The first and most obvious is: I can help people better understand these fundamentals. But that only begs the question: what then? So what if people know the truth about existence? The real question is: will they be happy? Or better: was it better that they were born rather than not?

I think we should all try to come to a consensus about the truths of the world. I think it would be great if everyone knew that we evolved from a previous species and that we could explain this process completely naturalistically. But it is not enough to know the origins of our species. We also want to know: what are we supposed to do now that we're here?

Along with teaching wisdom and knowledge (my two very lofty goals), I would also want to make life good for everyone on earth. Which means: I want everyone to be able to experience and create art if they want to. So long as teenagers are shooting each other with weapons in Downtown Oakland, this task is not complete, and I would NOT feel okay with teaching wisdom and knowledge to a group of people who only have access to me because of historical accident. Just because we've arrived here by a contingency doesn't mean we should continue to live based on contingencies. Let's work together to create a utopia that is good for all humans, and then let's worry about aesthetics.

...

Obviously that just blew up into something very grand, but I've realized that my mind and heart will not settle for anything less.

Update...

2009-09-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

My laptop was stolen last Friday (the 4th of September)... And from the University library, too!

How sad the world is. I blame it all on capitalism.

I will be back to blogging as soon as I can get my wits together (and get a new computer)

Love to you all,

Jackie

Beginning of a Fable

2009-09-01T22:26:00.000-07:00

Marian Briggs strolled in the park and came to a tree which sighed the excesses of its heart. She did not question the cause of his grief, which was, in brief, this: the sights of each day, passing as they did with no regard for him, made such impressions on him that he longed to remember each one, yet his barkish brain could not sustain them all and ended up confusing many a one with many another.

Skit (to come)

2009-08-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

I wrote a little skit today with a friend, but he kept the notebook with him, so I shall have to post it at a later date! It reminded me how much I like to make curious characters at an instant. Perhaps some of my problem is trying to write is that I think too much about it, because I don't do so badly when I simply write.

An Odd Question...

2009-08-30T22:22:00.000-07:00

What is the self?

The Oxford English Dictionary says "a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness".

That seems accurate enough, albeit somewhat clinical.

I am me, Jackie, and in my day-to-day living I pass through varying states of consciousness. Happy, sad, ecstatic, mournful.... the possibilities are endless. Sometimes things are as simple as 'I feel hungry... what is the best way to get something both tasty and healthy?' In fact, this is my "state of consciousness" often enough that it sometimes bothers me how pressing an issue it is to my mind. Hmmm.

But that barely begins to tell you about who I am as a person. I guess the question did not ask 'what is your self?' but just 'what is the self in general?' But that isn't very interesting to me. Perhaps that is why I have always been split between reading philosophy and literature - I like to think about large, seemingly profound ideas, but what attracts me most are strong personalities and unique characters.

Romantic Love is Dead

2009-08-30T21:37:00.000-07:00

Or, more accurately: romantic love never existed and only now has our culture exhausted its means of retaining the illusion that it ever did.

How did I come to this conclusion?

I was reading Shakespeare earlier in the day and was thinking to myself "Why is it impossible that this sort of poetry with these sort of themes would be written today?"

Think about it: the biggest movie in America right now is "He's Just Not That Into You". What people want most, deep inside, is some great personal accomplishment. A beautiful romance is no longer enough to satisfy someone. There are no more comedies or romantic comedies. None among the many people my age that I know are at all optimistic about the idea of love or marriage or any variation upon the theme. And these are all idealistic, intellectual, soulish, Berkeley students in the humanities and social sciences. Imagine all the other crooks out there who just want to become big business owners. That kind of thinking negates the possibility of ideal love even before the seeds of it begin to grow because of the powerful feelings that accompany sexual attraction, which is what most people mistakingly refer to as 'love'.

Perhaps culture will shift and begin to more distinctly acknowledge the love of family over the love between young couples - Coriolanus will be performed more often than Romeo and Juliet. But such things are difficult, if not impossible, to predict.

People are frighteningly pragmatic in the ways they seek love. For the most part, things go unsaid concerning romantic attraction. When it is brought up, it is reduced to only the basest terms of convenience - 'sex is healthier than not having sex'. Is this really where we have arrived?

An Imagined Dialogue

2009-08-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

Charles: Let us go to bed - for I am weary and need sleep and your body close to mine is the only thing that gives me good rest.

Deborah (to herself): So we'll sleep until morning if the night permits,

if Winter does not penetrate the sheets we share

with cold immuring. But that does not mean

that I will love you when the day breaks.

The sun's light can be raw, sometimes,

and when it breaks upon my eyes and penetrates

through my skin, it may boil and confuse

the things inside me, confound them to patterns new.

Should I be blamed for this? Nature and I -

we have a pact of sorts. I flow and ebb according,

sometimes, to her wishes and vaunts of fancy.

I am tractable, pliant; my days are as lifetimes.

The beauty of my body (if beauty indeed there be)

and the love in my heart (if such passions can so be called)

abides here awhile with you - but the night drones

letting rest what was past, cooling the earth

upon which tomorrow lights fires anew.

Living Irreligiously

2009-08-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

Seeing a gangster-looking man (or man-boy) today at the Indian convenience store/restauraunt grabbing a soda, I noticed him wearing a huge metal cross, made of adamantium, studded with diamonds, rich with the excesses of the West.

And I thought - what does it mean to him that he wears the symbol taken up by Christianity?

But I must make a small note here - something that has bothered me for a few weeks - about what people exactly mean when they talk about Christianity. The tradition that people claim to be a part of is altogether too huge and too amorphous to be anything really coherent in itself. There was Jesus and then St. Paul... but we mostly forget the Gnostics and the Rabbis of the Talmud. In any case, Christianity is a highly 'pick-and-choose' religion, although most of its adherents have their version chosen for them, determined usually by the city they grow up in.

And that is what I also find kind of disgusting about religion(s) in general. It is so obviously culturally based, so obviously passed down from parent/community to child, that it begins to look ridiculous when the rhetoric of 'truth' or 'absolute truth' is thrown around.

Whatever truth may mean (and there is still much to think on concerning what this word means), there is at least one kind of truth that we know very well: that which is applicable on world-wide scale. The law of gravity falls into this category, as does the theory of evolution (or, more specifically, the fact all species now living on earth have evolved from another species that lived in the past). We could add mathematics, certain principles of geology, and many other things. But into this group are never placed things that have been chosen by humans on a cultural basis.

The gowns worn by college graduates are not a 'truth' in this world-wide sense - they are used for a specific ceremony, at a particular time, to commemorate a certain accomplishment. There would be no contention on the part of Americans or Europeans against a culture that uses different ceremonial wear to commemorate the completion of their highest educational curriculum.

Why do some religions, which arose out of a specific culture, time, and for certain historical reasons, then make claims about its world-wide applicability? I don't deny that there can be kinds of moral truths embedded in religious texts and teachings, but I obviously have some great contention with the idea that "No one comes through the Father but by me" from the Gospel of John (which was written some 50 or more years after Jesus' death and is generally not taken as a reliable representation of what the historical Jesus actually said) is something that should be applied world-wide.

What a joke.... I'm not even going to write about this anymore.

Anyway, about this gangster-man that I saw.....

Oh pah! Who knows why he wears what he wears and believes what he believes? I was here going to say that my life might be more intractable because I don't have anything like a god to keep watch over me, but now I realize that I probably have more well-defined thoughts on ethics and morality than do most people who call themselves Christians.

Deep thinking is the most important basis upon which to build a life. Cultural inheritances may come and go, but wisdom stays.

Partie

2009-08-29T00:37:00.000-07:00

People get together in college. To chat, to drink, to eat some snacks.

But that choice of words is very important - to chat, not talk.

And with so little opportunity to talk in life, why would a gathering of people so quickly become an excuse to chat rather than talk?

Am I perhaps vapid? Not so... I may not be witty, but I certainly am not vapid. Why then do I find it difficult to chat? I hesitate to say that it might be because I have more profound things to think about, because that is always the easy escape.

I hear the music still going, people still chatting.... what are they even talking about? I am thinking about the last few hours and cannot think of anything anyone said except "What is my favorite superhero?" Well! I said Spider-man because he was always a jokester no matter how serious the situation became. But that was about childhood, and childhood is always memorable, memorial....

I'm actually going to go down right now and see what others have to say and report back to you in a few minutes...

No. I couldn't bring myself to it. I stood up in my chair, decided to change into pajamas and lay in bed instead. 'To die, to sleep, perchance to dream.... Ay, there's the rub..."

New Directions

2009-08-28T00:02:00.000-07:00

Here I will actually begin to type up and post my daily journal writings, because I realize that my blog has never been a consistent or true representation of my thoughts. Why not make the blog much more casual, with a theme that doesn't demand only the deepest or most curious things to see the surface of day?

With that simple introduction, I give you my journal entries for today:

(This is the beginnings of a story based on a guy that works at UC Berkeley's "Free Speech Cafe", who is fat, pudgy, irascible, and who seems altogether to hate life. Yet it is not so much a satire of him, as a satire of the world that has created such a docile monster.)

The advent of Juan Güero:

Juan Güero is the disillusioned spirit of our age. He works to no purpose, and what's more, he despises the work itself. Not purpose driven, yet uncaring of the moment, he lives in a perpetual state of transience. His joys are all private: things he does at home which we do not know of, but which do not work to make him less fat. He brushes off all advances made by persons who wish to bring him out of his drudge-like sphere of existence, even when they directly concern him and his office. But what of his office? He does what he does only out of necessity (though some speculate that he does it merely out of spite) and in that hardness of un-purpose he would revile all the world. He is the Last Man, though even if a great responsibility were thrust upon him, he would not take it, for he has no vain ambitions nor delusions of grandeur. even if he were the only man capable or fit for leadership (though I admit this is difficult to imagine), he would shrug off his given crown and go back to filling coffee cups full of their mysterious brine.

Juan Güero calls his own comrades by a variety of slang words; never by their true names. It only so happens that his last name is one of those same slang words he often uses. It was by accident that we were able to discover this and set up an interview with him, pretending that we worked for the university, and needed to speak with him concerning the cultural patterns of Berkeley workers. Here I present to you his narrative recorded on cassette tape, which I have personally transcribed:

My name is Juan Güero. I live now in Berkeley, California, but I was born in Colmo, a small city south of San Fransisco. There is a phrase in Spanish: "es el colmo", which means: "it's a shame". I didn't like it there. My mother whipped me around, and I never saw my father eat anything except beans and beer. He worked as a garbage man; my mother worked at K-Mart. As she always said - it was a colmo to live in Colmo.

(Sorry, this story is too depressing to transcribe! I'll leave the rest to my notebook, unless I find some compelling reason to write the rest...)

Random notes:

What kind of animals are we? Many answers, responses given, but always with the difference - we are not animals as other animals, because we can even ask the question to begin with of what kind of animals we are.

The professor says: The syllabus I've drafted, wafts into your heart..

"Reader, I married him." - Jane Eyre

The immortal soul has exhausted itself (self-conscious models that are not aware of their modelhood) Give me some soul food, for my body is weak... The bifurcation of ourselves, probably spurred on by culture, that is... We appropriate culture and incorporate it into ourselves, but rarely is it the case that we appropriate it fully so that there is no conflict between self and culture. Culture is created to mitigate against the inclemency of some 'bad' selves, though inevitably the rules it creates suppresses some good things about other selves...

To proscribe things in moderation - drink only at celebrations, for example, - creates a taboo against drinking alone or at other inappropriate times, which can be harmful. The idea of human as humane, an ethical being, I think, may be different according to culture, but there is one standard that prevails against all difference, though perhaps not always in respect of the community - one who does what is most difficult is almost always admired, or envied, which is perhaps a better kind of reverence than admiration, since every preacher-man and cheat-skate can inspire base admiration.

"The body changes, but the psyche remains the same..."

To achieve personhood, one must breathe in and out, one must speak purposefully, one must feel sympathy.

Mary is a really beautiful woman, but I don't find her personality attractive at all. Anomalous monism? My heart...

Here I drew a picture of an ostrich:

And next to it wrote:

The Ostrich that ran a thousand and one miles..

He won the race...

but in the effort

lost his mind.

Defensiveness

2009-07-16T23:53:00.001-07:00

I think we are all defensive people, in one way or another.

Defensive against what?

Against pain? Perhaps.

More likely: defensive against disintegration, which is a kind of pain, but one that is rarely encountered because we tend to be very good at defending ourselves against it.

I steal an example from Nietzsche: the ascetic. Who wants to bar his or herself from pleasures, whether they be sexual, sensual, or communal? Only someone who has found that the somewhat turbulent waters that lead to these shores are not worth the rafting.

But this declamation "not worth" is a very peculiar style of thinking. Very rarely do we get the chance to cooly weigh two options and decide which path we shall take by an examination of the pros and cons of each. You know as well as I with what haste we generally make decisions in our hearts, after which we give words to explain the 'reasons' behind the decision, though no real 'reasoning' had been done on the matter.

One who resolves against involving oneself in any pleasure of life has made this decision not because she reasons that she will be 'better off' without taking the risks that are involved, but because she has a primal psychic defense working in her that fears possible dissolution.

Dissolution of what? Of her 'self'.

But what is this 'self', that she should be so afeard of expressing her love for someone or allowing herself to become vulnerable and open to scrutiny in a public situation?

Nobody quite knows why one's 'self' becomes so important during adolescence and thereafter. Children seem to have no problem making a fool of themselves in public, but what is curious - they are almost always regarded with adoration for it.

Have you ever had a child say hello to you in public that you have been too shy to say something back to? I have.

Was it because I feared looking like a child? Not consciously... but perhaps somewhere deep in my psyche I felt that it would have compromised this vague 'self' that I am thinking on now. How could it have? Eyes would have regarded me differently than if I had remained quiet, nobody noticing that I had interacted with this child, and the child's attention itself being soon turned away to something new. Why would I have been reluctant to share in the communal experience offered, here and in so many other instances?

This is a little embarrassing - to think that I tried to write something that would apply to people generally, but which quickly digressed into something purely autobiographical. I think it was inspired by Jane's post on something similar.

There are very little realistic grounds for fear in most social situations. Why, then, are they so difficult to overcome? Standards of maturity seem to have stifled us. Is maturity always had be the relinquishing of freedoms we had as a child, freedom to say, do, or think certain questionable things? Is there a kind of maturity that can be well blended with the vivacity, freedom, and trust that we find in children?

Am I thinking about the question all wrong?

Stories from around the World

2009-07-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Since it is a habit of mine to search in google for random phrases in quotes that come to my head (examples include: "My husband is a patriot", "OMG I love Shakespeare", and "Onan is my hero") and since I generally find results on people's blogs, personal websites, and forum posts that reveal strikingly honest and human outpourings of thought and feeling, I thought it would be meet to document some of these on my blog.

Here is "Twinkle Toes" a "Ballroom Diva" from La Quinta, CA who I found when searching for "child seeing someone die" (without quotes this time - I was doing some research on how children see death):

I had never lost anyone I was particularly close to and when someone I knew died it really didn't affect me too much because I wasn't close to them. However, when my brother was hit head on and killed by a guy passing people over double yellow lines on a curve, it really affected me. To this day it still affects me. I miss him so much. There really aren't any words that can describe how much I miss him. The other thing is when I see my other brother or my parents struggling with his death, that hurts too. But we do have some hope because of our faith. We absolutely believe we will see him again some day, so even though we are heartbroken and desperately sad because he is gone from this Earth and we can't see him here anymore, we know that this is only temporary.

Calvary

2009-05-28T00:55:00.001-07:00

The chasm of sleep opened in me,
in the dark, in the night,
and, perlious to face the day,
my feet spoke upon the floor
of sweat and dust and unread mysteries
flying from the crop of my tousled head,
heeding something feint, out of sight -
that gather there in the distance, squawked
of tongues labile in the service courtier.

Blue moons tangential to the fact,
the plain fact, of the hours closing upon
night. And the rest followed swiftly...

Daybreak come unto the fierce maylay
walking, soldering buss to buss,
wanderers walking in flirtation with
Christ, and an abominable sentence veered...

What wayward mischief! What sounds merrily made!
I heard a thousand voices that morning,
rummaging through the buckets of their Mage
to discover - what? Fancy's vain enterprise,
a couple of bucks spent on mustard and rye,
and we pass too simply into the muster of everything...

Disconnextion at the Heart of Lecture Time

2009-05-18T20:54:00.001-07:00

The tortured skulls laying across the plains of Perú-

The public sphere is the place of authority

(Barbarism as authority, authority as barbarism)

Anthropology is the study of man (or so it says)

The original language is the primal feeling.

The heart that dug a ground into itself

made choices for the flowers that would grow

from the soil there (and music vivified)

We agree to dee illusion (who wouldn't,

given the time and the hour?)

A make-piece of gregarious warbling

too tight skin on the face of a father

Capitalism and art, hopelessly romantic

Why tinge entropy with belated draughts?

Simple places happily nodding the new.

About the idea of mythology -

poetic misprision of the thicke soupe of life

quandaries like buzz-buzz hee

generating more impossibilities

experimental impulses

exceed the established calculation

of indigenous indignation.

History is (mostly) the past

a realism that really

gets to what happens.

Once you learn

what's there

you can't help

but learn from it.

Grandpa plays with the aesthetic understanding of history.

like a groove in time

that shimmers and shimmers and gleams

and takes it all in time.

We, who are so drawn to daily loves

the workings of a daytime, the after-scent

of a minute, fair woman, do not

decide now, in the heat of such abysm

wakening the dark sense that wickens

the hour, the too interperturbable

flame.

If I knew the worlds you saw today

orbiting round placid myth,

I don't want to make it what you would do

next. Textual sumptuous life of the senses.

What's dead in the breast erupts in words

What's alive in the breast

oh,

bursts out in deeds.

[I know I am obsessed with using the word 'heart', but until I can say what I need to say, it shall remain. This is another lecture-note poem that is rather tortured]

Maternal Advice

2009-05-15T00:16:00.000-07:00

It is said: Live every day like your last.

This is a difficult thing to do when one is a poor university student who, were she to part from earth this day, would leave behind her only a meagre trail of essays written in a style she cannot call her own, written for people whom she does not know.

Please, pashah, engaomble me

2009-05-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

Fierce lingering deeds/Padding over gloss eyes/amalgamate window

Yes?

amalgamate window where looked through dog

pompeii in his doggy heart

analytical eyes in turpid brinca

dog looking through the window: he is victory

a piece of sending

like a card

or a leaf

made it to my papa

grumble-meat

[Perhaps the most bizzarre thing about this post is that I actually wrote that stanza before I found that picture of the dog. Brinca is a Spanish word that means "to jump around" with connotations of the kind of jumping that children or dogs would do when they run amok.]

holy of holies

2009-04-19T01:46:00.000-07:00

The holiest night of the year. What should I do? I will worship myself. The love of all life comes down to this moment: fair worship, fair love, all continuing my unbidden way.

If the master sits down before us and says: What shall we do today?

It is our responsibility to reply to her: We shall be free.

Free from what?

Free from the riders on the main of the tempests inside us.

The globe turned in circles around an axis of boredom: calumniate fierce prodigy.

That welt on my leg -- was a dog's fault. Now, get me some blueberries. I look at a woman I see a woman I am what I be I make dirt spin from the wheels of my motorcycle I am candle light OH sweet islands of the Philippines ---

Hello.

Doris.

Yes?

Winter.

Yes?

Fire.

Yes?

Wait.

Well?

We we we we we.....

You and I?

We terminate.

Dolores, por favor, Dolores, no.

The castle was broken. Finch on my arm. The castle was broken and BOOM - a tour guide appeared.

[singing]

Traveled in France, traveled in Italy, traveled in scenic Greece. Ate every apricot that was ever born and swaddled the foundling geese. When shall we be gone? Long away? When shall we be fond? Of the day? Of the day?

[stop singing]

Where appears the epistle: oh grand turbulence!

No more attack me, fair world, I come only to anoint thee for thy passing---

Passing through the air, master-main. Grimble-grumble-gamble-stap--- cord hallowed finger touch, a long passing murmur through the veins of

G o d

G_D

god

goad

Let be.

Merriment.

I walked through the night, carrying bags of myself, in dress all participation.

I walked through the night, carrying excesses of myself, wandering each hallowed lane

that imagination thought up and let falter my way, oh my

tremulous way.

The Choice

2009-04-18T00:31:00.001-07:00

What is life but the choice and conduct of one's keeping between these two poles?

Hector: Mine honour keeps the weather of my fate.

Life every many holds dear, but the dear man

holds honour far more precious dear than life.

- Troilus and Cressida, V.iii

Falstaff: What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air - a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it.

- Henry IV Part 2, V.i

Tenement

2009-04-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

Prelude, to be read along with "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" by The Smiths

The broken music sounding the ears of her mother, who howled daily in some kind of martyr insanity. Her father had made a banal pilgrimage to Home Depot to look at the gardening section, where he asked many questions about seasonality, fertilizer, and placement in relation to the sun (If you put the plant to the Northeast, where light comes in the morning, but there is not a single window to the west, where the afternoon light comes streaming in, how do you think it would keep up? I don't mean live, if it will Survive, 'cause it will Survive, I just mean how will it keep up). Her brother was out stomping around the undeveloped fields, looking for plastic pipes to play seebee-seebee with. Therefore: she was alone.

As the light darkened, Catherine took another piece of chicken from the refrigerator. It was dry in her mouth, but still tasty, cilantro-laced as it was. She had changed the track that had been playing the broken music on her mother's CD player. She had considered leaving it be, knowing that her mother would not know the difference, but her conscience denied her this cruelty. To abuse an idiot with impunity was a basic privilege of being human and being sane, denied to Catherine, who took delight in that animal privilege instead - in eating a cold piece of chicken.

Working Heart, to be read along with "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"

"Life hurts," someone said on the television. "Yea, it does," I replied. "What's there to be done about it?" The television continued to blabble, and changed into an image of tanks exploding. "Yes, that's where I'll never be."

My father walked in the house like some big bear - "Hey, kiddo. What're you doing?"

"Nothing"

"Oh, yeah?" and he walked to deposit his coat into the cardboard box near the staircase kept for the purpose.

"How was Home Depot?"

"Oh great youknow. Met a lot of people there. Got a couple of Hydrangeas. Nice, they're nice flowers."

"Cool, dad."

"Yeah, it was pretty cool. Haha. I think I like the stores in this place. Real friendly people, youknow."

"Yeah."

He was over at the refrigerator by now, opening it and taking out the chicken. No hesitation on his part.

"Do you think I can go on a date later tonight?"

Dad looked up from his meat, wide-eyed. "Oh, ah, yeah sure honey. Uh, is he going to come here?"

"No." (Heteronormative assumptions made by such a man as my father)

"Oh okay. Yeah sure. Yeah, uh, do you need any money?"

I sincerely did not know the answer to this question.

"Um, I have like 10 dollars."

"Yeah, well ah, here," and he walked over to the cardboard box by the door to get his wallet from his coat.

I waited upon the couch, like a bird. There's a certain providence in the fall of a sparrow... So said the Danish Prince, Hamlet, minutes before he died.

I stepped down from my perch when my dad returned and stood to meet him. He approached, holding out to me, printed on a green piece of paper, that otherwise loathsome face of President Jackson, the Indian queller.

"Thank you."

"Hey youknow as long as you have a good time, as long as you have fun."

We will be singing upon the bears that move up and down by a mechanism that comes alive for fifty seconds every time a quarter is dropped in the slot, indiscriminate as to whether the quarter was dropped by a bald fatso nearing fifty or a timid boy ladled along by a timid mother to try the thing that beckons him in a foreign tongue to ride ride hop aboard, those bears and horses and race cars that I cried once to look upon when I was eleven years old because they represented to me the greatest poverty, the pleasure not simple enough to be inoffensive, the intent and purpose so ambiguous as to cast shame on the parent who placates the child and gives him an excuse to be happy when no excuse was needed before the boredom of marching through horribly-fluorescent grocery store aisles shuddered him; we will sing upon the boars and elephants, learning to laugh, slowly so, but learning still.

I said nothing of this. I only trailed my eyes across his face and accepted the green paper into my hand where it crackled first and crackled again as it ventured into my pocket.

Our Guilt for Living

2009-04-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

We are left with a world of isolation:
the fragmentation of our hearts
is a dirty mirror smashed.
Reflected in that mirror
was a face like ghost-something,
who sung a dirge for life itself.
Cadances slow and monumental
like a burnéd toast.

From one mind to another-
though remote from each,
we deliminate our hearts.
The spark in me, in you,
muddied over with calumny-
calumny - that eternal word.

We give offerings to life
and hold back life itself.
The gesture itself signifies
(a bug flying through the air).
Bitter and burning we walk
consoling ourselves with religion
(an alternative for love).

[I wrote this in my 20th century literature class, mixing in quotes from the professor with my own words... the original was much longer than what I have here.}

Entrilsado

2009-03-15T19:23:00.000-07:00

Me siento tanto bulla,
y desarrollo de luz blanco.
Palmadas en mi cabeza se salgan
de un hueco vencido de Dios.

Un avestruz me pegó un grito
que volvió mí alma de sudad
portando paquetes de mosucar,
calmando mi pena germinal.

Tantos caminos oscuros
sin piedra y sin pie -
Oigo solamente los alpacas
ladrando vocales de bocas en sed.

Trilcéd

I feel such a racket
And a white light unravels from me.
Slaps on my head escape
From a hole vindicated by God.

An ostrich gave me such a scream
That my sweaty soul returned to me
Carrying packets of sugarflies,
Calming my germinal fear.

So many shadowy roads
Without rocks, without feet—
And I hear only the alpacas
Barking vowels from mouths in thirst.

[This is a poem I first wrote in Spanish and then translated into English..... it is about the difficult desolation I felt while trying to figure out what on earth was going on in César Vallejo's book of poetry called "Trilce". The title is what happens to you when you are deep-mired in "Trilce" (you are "Trilced" or "Entrilsado"). The neologism 'moscuar' is a combination of 'moscas' (flies) and 'sugar' (azucar).]

Is this really the way men see women?

2009-03-10T03:39:00.000-07:00

TROILUS: I am giddy; expectation whirls me round.
The imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense: what will it be,
When that the watery palate tastes indeed
Love's thrice repured nectar? death, I fear me,
Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness,
For the capacity of my ruder powers:
I fear it much; and I do fear besides,
That I shall lose distinction in my joys;
As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps
The enemy flying.

- Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida III.ii

I know a girl whos tough but sweet
She's so fine, she cant be beat
She's got everything that I desire
Sets the summer sun on fire

I want candy
I want candy

Go to see her when the sun goes down
Ain't no finer girl in town
You're my girl, you walked up to order
So sweet, you make my mouth water

I want candy
I want candy

Candy on the beach, there's nothing better
But I like candy when its wrapped in a sweater
Some day soon I'll make you mine
Then I'll have candy all the time

I want candy
I want candy
I want candy
I want candy

- Aaron Carter, "I Want Candy"

between delusions and illusions

2009-03-03T21:52:00.001-08:00

Respect for integrity: The people I respect the most are generally those with the fewest delusions (either about themselves or about the world).

The length of a day: When one has a great deal to put into it, a day has a hundred pockets

A full life: Good food, good work, good love. This seems like a commonplace until one thinks on how incredibly rare it is to have these three things in abundance.

Of High Goals: It would truly be an accomplishment worthy of praise for any human to live wholly without rancidity.

Half-knowledge: Half-knowledge is generally more esteemed than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and thus renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing.

Ways of seeing: I feel so sheepishly recondite today. Seeing others walk along is not a new experience, but the way it happens changes from day to day. Sometimes my eye will focus more on boys and their boyishness, sometimes more on girls and their voices, sometimes more on people of color and the look in their eyes, sometimes more on homeless people and their facial hair.

It is easy to be fond of grass; I like to discover the stunning way treetops look over you and say hello as you walk beneath them, each tree saying so in a different way. The surfaces of things have an infinite amount of color, an infinite amount of detail. What is so lovely about nature and the general sprawl of a city is its foundedness. Its richness is always there, but we might be grateful that it is sometimes hidden from us in our day to day wanderings, so that when it does appear (by showing itself with exceptional rawness or because of a whim of our mood) we have the gift of seeing something rich and strange.

***: The first memory I have of being special in something was the facility with which I learned things at school. [section deleted, but my thoughts led to the following conclusion:] There are so few moments in life that we truly posses some unique ability or kind of knowledge not at all shared by anyone around us. Most of the time we invent illusions that make us believe this is always the case.

No light in the mornings

2009-02-27T11:49:00.000-08:00

Somehow myself survived the Night
And entered with the Day —
That it be saved the Saved suffice
Without the Formula.

Henceforth I take my living place
As one commuted led —
A Candidate for Morning Chance
But dated with the Dead.

-- Emily Dickinson

I had a dream that I was going to be canonized as a saint, but I had to refuse because I didn't like the idea of my image being made into an ikon to be kissed by filthy priests.

Sometimes I wake up and I feel so tired, as if I can't believe that we're all alive, that humans even exist on this little planet, making music, cheating others, living in buildings, being presumptuous all the time. What an insane accident! Humans are so stupid!!!

But then I finally wake up, get out of my drowsy mode, get hungry, and forget all about it. I think this poem by Miss Dickinson embodies what I am thinking about here (I found it by searching for "survived the night", because that phrase seemed to be analogous to what I was feeling), though she does it much more beautifully, and with a phrasing that I don't completely understand at the moment....

Whispered to Me

2009-02-26T23:35:00.001-08:00

Trees sprout leaves in the spring &

flowers release their sweet fragrance &

blood streams into the river --

blood spouting from the wound

of a young doe felled by a cougar.

The cougar bites into the flesh

biting, biting, his teeth dripping red.

[I was trying here to write a poem that could be translated into any language, because every important word would have its voice in every language bred from the earth. I called it "Whispered to Me" because I heard some of the lines whispered to me by an oak tree while I was taking a walk in the woods near my town]

Father's Wizdum

2009-02-26T23:27:00.000-08:00

No se importa; se falta el "porqué?"

(The violence of life, coded, singular, combinatory

a stupefying colloquium, like bells on high,

sentences made bleak with casuistry.)

[My father said the first line to me in Spanish, translated as "It does not matter; the "why?" is missing". My (internal) response is the next three lines. The last line I think means to say that any sentence can be made to sound horrible and absurd if one tries to reason with it, spend too much time with it, making it a key to the universe. I think flux is necessary for joy.... eternity is a banal concept, invented by religious pricks.]

My Sister's Marriage Ring (White Hempen Strands in the Moonlight)

2009-02-26T23:23:00.001-08:00

Blood douses etchings snug in a carbuncle of ecstasy, with vague hemoglobin blanchings uncolouring the snow-scene.

[I wrote this on the tongue of my shoe (I had a pen with me but no paper) after watching my sister fight with her fiancée and throw her engagement ring in the snow. The three of us had gone on a small trip to town up in the mountains where it snows. They started to fight on our way back to the car after dinner. Of course, I thought it would be quick, so I went inside the car and let them resolve whatever issue they were having without my ear being keen to it. They must have been fighting for over half an hour - it just kept getting worse until she finally threw the ring and I thought "Oh.... shit...." and wrote the above sentence. There were ropes hanging from a nearby house for rent that make up the imagery of the other half of the title (for some reason I felt like those ropes represented their love better than the engagement ring did, even though the ring was the symbol that they were most emotionally invested in).

To conclude - I had to call our mother to come pick us up. It was his car. They talk to one another no longer.]

Harbor Prayer

2009-02-25T10:02:00.000-08:00

My skirts just brushing the surface of the water, waiting for the tide to rise, to rise at least to my stomach (so said the witch), and the moonlight gleaming all the while. I've poured the libations, recited incantations, tossed the awkwardly scrawled runes into the water, and all the while I'm praying to Artemis for signs of something exceptional, something to blazon these ill-aching and leaden days, something to invigorate the seeds germinal of any lust aspirational, anything lofty enough to escape this burdened lot, this face-painting harlotry, where one feels only surface-timbres, where only shadows show and no love subsists:

"Like the painting of a sorrow
A face without a heart."

And everything all calumny everywhere, everything foul that harrows and weighs down seems to stick, while all good is all seeming and show-play. The cruelest mockery is of someone that promises the smallest trifle and delivers not even that.

And the tide does reach my belly, and the hours have passed, and I have shivered with cold as the witch foretold ---- and nothing showing. Artemis is out on her hunt after all.... or else she had to defend her chastity (again) against that surly phallo-maniacal pantheon and she has no time to care for the pleas of this sad drab whose chastity is the least guarded thing about her....

And where the saving light? Where the deliverance in this haggard dock, stinking of fish and roaring betimes with the rumble of a drunken sailor's snore? Moon goddess! Dainty huntress of the night! Where are you? Stars glimmering in the sky (as she said), moon in full radiance (so spoke the witch), tide at its highest point (the hag said it was necessary), and.... Nothing. Nothing portending heights immutable, no ideal to carry beyond damned days and hours of a whore's life. The water is a cold, cold surface gleaming.

It is my own fault; only the desperate or stupid consult prophets (I must have been a little of both)! These mountebank soothsayers who see into the future not so clearly as they see that gross human absence amalgamate, that common vacancy in life that breeds such stubborn ennui, disillusionment immense enough to perpetually fabricate new illusions.... A great drought of the soul here withal.... the well-spring of life has been stopped.... dank residue in the pipes.... heaven on a holiday.... all that bile that I've been spewing all the while....

Avast! To my room again. I shall have the day for myself tomorrow, at least. That is enough.

Thanks, false prophetess. Thanks, O forgéd counsel! May you ever prosper in your counterfeit conceits and clever promises, unfulfilled and fiberless though they dribble from your imperious lips!

[This is a dramatic monologue by a prostitute named Odessa, set in my fantasy world and written for my fantasy/science fiction writing workshop class where we had to do an exercise on conflict. She had asked a fortune teller/witch to give her some method to escape the life that she loathes but has no apparent means of escaping, and this ritual she describes here - standing in the bay of the harbor while the night tide rises up to her belly (to its highest level, but the fact that it refers to her belly implies the most important fact - that it must rise above her vagina). She prays to Artemis (Diana) the moon goddess, also goddess of the hunt and who often defends her chastity against other gods and mortals, but realizes that no sign giving her an insight into how to find some happiness everlasting is forthcoming - "Nothing portending heights immutable". She decides to go back to home and at least not do her work tomorrow.... the last phrase is an sardonic denunciation of the witch.]

Cycles of Dawn

2008-09-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

Tired leaden steps on a broken world,

the mist of a morning in a tempestuous whorl.

Preliminaries and procedures bespeak the anxiety

that invades us all, we changelings of the florid earth.

Upon a Night, After Reading Rimbaud for the First Time

2008-05-22T01:47:00.000-07:00

There is something about immorality
that touches my heart with joy
and makes me beam inside.

Quiet, dusky motions made
upon a hill at still hour
exemplify this - perhaps better
than these words alone
can re-express, for they are laden
with time and lingering threats
of mirthless laughter ringing
through my trembling throat.

I placate you - many of you -
with my itinerant morality.
Sweetly gaze upon you
with such inward refusal
to grimace. Nothing seems to do
well for me while speaking
with propriety. So I return again
to silence, to solitude, to
chasing a moth around my room,
giving up, and hoping it will not
land on my nipples while I am sleeping.

Perhaps spiders munch into my earwax,
maybe I am sucked by mosquitoes,
It is possible that these things happen--
But ah! How I dream!
How I dream! I could never tell you
How I dream! I dream
of blatant mysteries and insidious plots
and wordplay I do not understand
Why, in one well remember'd dream,
(excavating through an underground polis)
I learned from an Indian courtesan
that the phrase 'mango slice' was a euphemism
for the female vagina. What a thing to learn
in a dream! It shakes me away
from the guile of looking proper
during the day. I must have
my dreams, or else I would descry
reality with all the vehement force
that an otherwise gentle child
repulses the fouled taste of black liquorice.

So, here I swoon,
listening to no melodies
but cradling the fire in my breast
lighted by singeing yellow solarities
and the raw glory
of Pagan Gods standing amid
green harried woods.

It would not matter if every other ideal
were dead, for such things only sustain
pariahs to my faith.

(O, it is a delicious faith!
Formed of much living,
much thinking, much reviling,
much anger, much loss,
much breathing deep,
and much, much, adoration
of the vagaries
of the multifarious
multivalenced
flesh of the earth)

A Meditation on Daybreak

2008-05-10T18:45:00.000-07:00

The wan grandeur of the first dawn hour
offers itself. Rising up from beyond
the blue horizon, the jagged bower
of mountain peaks girdles the paléd sun.
The off'ring announces itself, a thing
yet so far unlike the golden chalice,
for the sun we feel in daily wand'ring
burns less fiery in this dim, quiet dawn.

This new sun– (sometimes it feels like the first
morning in history) this rawest sun–
like the sweet hush of a babe lately nursed
from the bosom of its mother's soft breast,
and raised with solemn, tremulous movements
baptized by misty dew still collecting
around the dim heights of alpine immense,
bathing in the clear nectar of the moon's
painless tears (she weeps only for the thrill
of seeing her silver beams tone the earth
with pale, beautiful lunacy) yet still––

The sun takes his unyielding position
in the firmament at noon; and we let
the fragile delicacy of his birth
melt away – can do nothing but forget.

Chanson d'automne

2007-10-31T19:55:00.000-07:00

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

-Verlaine