On Humanity

Watched this interview on Vice from the so-called Canadian Jihadist, http://www.vice.com/vice-news/the-canadian-jihadist-678

and then afterwards Nick Drake came on. The first is probably the individual voice of most of humanity – angry and fearful, ideological and delusional, and violently giddy in its self-aware transience. And I’d like to think the second is the voice of abstract Humanity, singing to its baffled multitudinous selves.

Please give me a second grace
Please give me a second face
I’ve fallen far down
The first time around
Now I just sit on the ground in your way

Now if it’s time to recompense for what’s done
Come, come sit down on the fence in the sun
And the clouds will roll by
And we’ll never deny
It’s really too hard for to fly.

Please tell me your second name
Please play me your second game
I’ve fallen so far
For the people you are
I just need your star for a day.

So come, come ride in my my street-car by the bay
For now I must know how fine you are in your way
And the sea sure as I
But she won’t need to cry
For it’s really too hard for to fly.

Huckleberry Picking

Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler is 139 pages gone, and my pace is slowing and Italo Calvino knows it. After I struck up a conversation with that mysterious woman on the bench, who liked to draw inanimate objects, I came to learn her interest in grapnel anchors was more cunning than aesthetic. I was being duped, and somewhere after that point, and before I sought out the publisher and maker of books to complain about my faulty copy of Calvino, I went up Mt Mitchell to pick huckleberries.

The huckleberries are found at high altitudes, and we had to go pretty far up the 6,683 foot mountain to find the trail where they grew. If you went too far into the forested mountain slope, the shade was too strong. You had to stay along just the right parts, where the sun made its arc, to find the huckleberries trees that grew tall (taller than low altitude ones) and full. 

With the two hoes we had brought along, we’d hook the branch or thin trunk. Like a grapnel anchor hooking to the bars of a prison window, the hoe would bend the tree towards us and allow us to free the huckleberries. The ripe ones were eager, and we’d use care to grip them strong enough that they wouldn’t tumble to the ground, but gentle enough they wouldn’t pop, stain our fingers, and be ruined for cooking. Huckleberries, if you didn’t know, are small fruit that look very similar to blueberries, but are more tart and sour. Those that grew at the top of the trees were dried by the sun, and at least half of each tree’s bounty were not yet ripe, and we left them behind for a later prison break.

Two hours walking along the trail, pulling trunks and branches toward us, selecting the ripe berries, dropping them in our bag, and repeat. We haven’t measured yet, but I venture to say that we walked off with at least four cups of the small berries. Another mysterious woman will toss three cups of those into a pie, and we’ll consume the literal fruits of our labor with a scoop of ice cream.

Then I’ll have to return to the printing house and find out what happened to my book. If there’s one thing reading Calvino has reminded me of, it’s that the narratives of our lives intersect with the narratives we read. Never more directly than while you’re in the act of reading it, but, of course, long after the reading is done as well.

Best Songs of 2013

Phosphorescent – Song for Zula

Vampire Weekend – Ya Hey

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – We No Who U R

Phoenix – Entertainment

The National – Pink Rabbits

Bear’s Den – Isaac

Sous le ciel de Tampa Bay, there’s an accordion player playing by the pier. He strikes a discordant note.

Marcel Proust paints the experience of disorientation as waking up in absolute darkness and imagining the furniture to be in a variety of arrangements – is the dresser to your left under the red-curtained windows like that room where you slept in childhood, or is your wife’s vanity table over there at the foot of the bed like it was before you were divorced. Go to sleep some night with your head at the foot of the bed and hang up black-out curtains so that you awake in such a state. In search of lost time indeed.

Sometimes in the light of day, even sitting in a cafe near Tampa Bay, the same disorientation may arise. It’s less identifiable as disorientation since the ground beneath is still visible, but it’s the same thing. That you’ve been here before and a million places like it with a million people. That you thought these ambitions and worries all before. And that suddenly the wholeness of it overwhelms the particular of where you sit.

Am I at a cafe or all cafes?

Place has a hold on us like few things do, and it holds us more quietly than anything. I am where I tread and have trod, some culmination of footfall under forgotten skies. In a familiar place, it’s easy to forget that each step is new unless there’s an accordion player to remind you.

 

I wish I had something to say tonight. I miss saying things and believing in them. I’ve used quite a few different narratives to understand myself, but they decay. I’ve been living outside any narrative that makes sense to me for a while now.

I believe

Trust in your calling, make sure your calling’s true
Think of others, the others think of you
Silly rule golden words make practice, practice makes perfect,
Perfect is a fault, and fault lines change.

I believe my humor’s wearing thin
And change is what I believe in.

The page is blank

On the Personal Blog

I’m losing faith in the personal blog. Its aesthetic of indiscriminate truth, the pathos of its vulnerability.

It was therapeutic. It was a mirror to my anxieties for a while, giving me a chance to see them outside of myself and to understand them.

In some ways, it was the formation of my anxieties. They became concrete in so many posts, in so many categories and tags. They seemed real things, harder to push away.

I still feel a lot of pain. I feel unreasonably responsible for most of it. For years now, I have thought nearly daily about suicide. The blog isn’t about me though. It’s about the aesthetic of indiscriminate truth, the pathos of vulnerability, and the way in which we are all stories unfolding in real time.

But many a time, it is better to be the story than write the story.

Pessimistic

The following is too pessimistic. Do not read it. Thank you.

I woke up defeated. Not anxious or nervous, just worn out and pessimistic…about everything.

I’ve been called pessimistic before, but it isn’t really true. In many ways, I’m an unbounded optimist. I don’t have faith in any religion or believe in a God, but if you look at that atheism and see that I still believe life is worth living, what else but optimism can you call it? I tend to side with those who say that even amongst the hardness, there is enough beauty in life to make it worth living on its own terms.

But my blinds were pulled tight this morning and I couldn’t see anything outside. On a personal and universal level, I and the rest of humanity seemed suddenly doomed to this darkness. I read a brilliant and compelling New Yorker story on Scientology, and it got me thinking about humanity’s endless need for social groups, acceptance, and communally constructed purpose. It will, it seems, never change. These psychological drives will continue to perpetuate false notions of reality. What’s much worse, though, is that humanity will continue to organize itself into groups that, fueled by their individuals’ private wants, will oppress and manipulate those on the outside.

Humanism rose on a winter day and is already setting. Humanity’s story will be told by the idiots.

Religions and nations, businesses and even the institutionalized arts (think, Hollywood), will fabricate and perpetuate their egos in the form of orienting stories. And the many will suck it up. Doesn’t matter how overt the oppression is. Who will be left to heed the radical truth of the poet William Blake’s revelation: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

It isn’t just the Scientology article. The protests in Egypt seem a sign of progress, but just as surely are going to lead into another dictatorship. And our democracy? Run by blue bloods and the elite 2%, people so out of touch with reality that they think the only way to improve education is to give teachers more paperwork. The proverbial American dream? A story told by those who may have worked hard, but also had a lot of luck on their side. A story told, as usual, to justify one’s own life over another’s. And then it’s these same self-righteous (and often idiotic, albeit hard working) bastards who run our world….

Yes, bitterness. Because I could be just like them, or similar, I think, if my life ran the right track. Bitter because there’s no point in writing these thoughts. Those who have experienced my side may empathize; those who haven’t will condemn. The words cannot change anybody’s mind, and that’s the most pessimistic thought I’ve had all day. I think I may have overstepped though. Carried away by my own pessimism, and perhaps my own poor writing, I have made a mistake in pointing out the impotence of words. Words, in the right hands, are powerful things. Perhaps my problem is that I wield them too bluntly.

In a few months I will have several graduate school rejection letters and will have to decide what to do next. Find a way to live in this world, even though, from the world’s perspective, my only purpose is to live so that the banks become richer.

But once I find my new life, which should arrive in the Spring, perhaps I will sing a new tune. That’s what we do, after all. Sing the song that’s playing around us. Put a story to it, and understand our lives through it. And even before then, the next time I am next to a friend, the next time I run, the next coffee I drink, this pessimism will fade and I’ll be wrapped up in that moment. Thank you for not reading this now, and forgive me the pessimism. But we are all entitled to it.

At the Darkest, Change

When things are at their darkest, I’ve lived by a simple piece of advice: change. Do the thing you’re afraid of, the thing you’ve wanted to try but weren’t sure if you could live with the results. After all, you can no longer live with the results of your current state – so take the risk.

But it catches up to you. If you are one of those crazy ones for whom there is not enough change in the world, for whom emptiness is a tangible thing felt in your bones and muscles and mind, it catches up to you. Then there’s a new kind of darkness. And then, what?