*

What a charming note in this study Bible!

"The disciples miss the point: complete reliance upon God..."

The Gospels summarized with relation to the disciples: "the disciples miss the point."

The Gospels summarized with relation to Christians: "the Christians miss the point."

The Gospels summarized with relation to the clergy: "the clergy miss the point."

Is there a child here, anywhere? For heaven's sake, show me a child and I will prove us all wrong!

Even Heresy Holds Truth

If you bring forth what is within you,
what you have will save you.
If you do not have that within you,
what you do not have within you will
kill you.
-- Gospel of Thomas, 70

"Guiltmas" (or, American Christmas)

It's easy enough to prove: when you live in a Christian culture and Christ is the last thing on your mind, Christmas means everything in the world. Suddenly an ethos spots to light that never would have before: you can't watch that on Christmas, give gifts to others, try to tolerate their presence, try to be a good person, and tomorrow the ghost of today flies away.

I fear the gift-giving scene the most. Anxiety tears me, because I'm wary of limiting my love to a gift, and this is how so many interpret it -- it has to be good, thought out, or else there's something wrong with your relationship with them; something is spoiled, and now everything has come to light.

These times, though, the gift has become expected, therefore the gift loses its value. Criteria are set up: if a good gift, then a good relationship; if bad, then bad. What determines "good" here could be how much money one spends on the gift, or how thought out it appeared to be. The backwards blessing of the former is that expensive stuff always looks expensive, and even if it isn't, the appearance still counts; something can be thought out for days and still fail to appear thought out.

Christmas is, for most of America, the same 'ol materialistic struggle; a gift as an implication means nothing anymore, and this is the foundational point for every gift: it is not simply to add something physical to another's library of physical things, but to reveal to another one's underlying love in giving it. A gift is meant to signify a preexistent love from the giver. Insofar as love is revealed, it isn't the gift that reveals it, but the act of giving -- the act of going out of one's way, spontaneously, to give something to another person. The moment you want the thing rather than what it signifies from the person who loves you, there is something wrong relationally. The irony, though, is that a relational malfunction is assumed if the gift isn't shiny enough, or doesn't appear thought out enough. Everything has to be unendurably perfect. At heart, the goal is to shut the expectations of our relatives up. If love had really been present, none of this would be necessary.

So I'm down for an abolition of gift-giving. Yes, no gifts. Only cards that have our hearts on paper. The greed will be exposed, and perhaps our spiritual hearts will be revealed: how much, after all, do we consider Christmas the gift-giving aspect, rather than an interaction with the Christ who seems so much more mystically intermingled with the very air at this time of year? A clever gift of the devil, yes, to place the hunger for stuff where spiritual satiation is supposed to be.

I only want for Christmas: the love of those I love, the love of those who love me. Not too much to ask for.

*

Some books we read for edification, others for wisdom, others for an uncovering of how the world works, whether with regard to principles or facts. Others we read to read the author and his readers. As anthropologists.

Silly Danglers

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel -- or one desperate for another life -- therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.
-- Dallas Willard

Scream, Chubby Lady

Dear God, these blood curdling gameshow screams from money, winning money, no more troubles, prop up your feet. If people would only scream that joyfully when life announced itself from the hallways of existence, how much more vibrant would the world be?

Worldly Hope

Science, in spite of its conflict with theological prejudice, has been accepted because it gave power. Belief that the course of nature is regular also gives a sense of security; it enables us, up to a point, to foresee the future and to prevent unpleasant occurrences.
-- Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science

Aha, finally a concession. But could this be true not only of scientific knowledge, but all knowledge? All knowledge as a tacking down, an attempt to find security in the world through a special patterning of neurons.

What is the danger? Hope in the world -- in your intelligence, your spouse, your clothes, your car, you job, ad infinitum -- is dependence on the world. Dependence on the world is potential death through the letdown the world inexorably throws at us. Slavery would be a more appropriate term. You are a slave if you place your hope in anything in this world.

What can be done? Is it possible to sustain hope beyond the world? Well, yes, that's the task of believing in God -- but who can prove God? The only solution is a madman's infinite leap into the unsubstantiated hands of an unsubstantiated deity -- but who wants to be mad, irrational, floating outside the comforting boundaries of the sensate? Happiness, it seems, is never pure, perpetually mixed with either potential heartbreak or ostensible madness.

But you must make a leap. A leap must be made.

Love

Love, romantic love, erotic love, "the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise" (Samuel Johnson), is basically this: The art of planting seeds in the heart of another. This seed aids her in becoming the person she is, her essential self, unhinged by the black points the world grinds into her mind. To love is to work with God, through God, in building the other person into who she really is. If you plant and she doesn't grow, well then, plant again. Time will tell you when it's off to find another spot of soil. If you are her gardener, and she is yours, then you are both eternally one.

Note well. Nota bene, as they say in Latin.

Philosophical Interlude

I don't understand nonexistence. So I'm wary of any sly atheist who self-justifies his rejection of God by saying that when we die, we are no more. What does "no more" mean here? It is nonsensical. We know the negation of something in the world, because we observe its negation. I see a soap bubble, oop, and I see it no more. But the negation of something in the world is infinitely different than the negation of that which makes somethings (and negations) possible -- namely, ourselves, consciousness.

Unlike the negation of objects, which we've known since consciousness first sparked into the universe, we've never known or experienced a negation of subjectivity. You can't experience nonexperience. You can say that we've all been unconscious, and very clearly we all have. It happens every night (unless you're an insomniac or in college). But this use of unconsciousness is to conflate neurobiological existence with consciousness existence, and is therefore misleading. I do not ("I" does not) exist without consciousness; therefore in the realm of sleep, we do not exist, save in timeless snippets afforded by a dreamworld.

But if we haven't experienced unconsciousness, if we know the negating of objects but not the negation of consciousness, then does it make any sense to say that when we die, we shall be "no more"? No, it doesn't. We know this intuitively; we know that nonexistence makes absolutely no ontological sense when speaking of the subject, but through a few words tied together we've come to an elusive conclusion that we do.

I'll go further. We don't fear death because we're secret sinners who haven't plucked out the correct divinity-appeasing formula and made amends with our conscience. We fear death because death makes absolutely no sense, as it should; because nonexistence is an empty concept -- a concept the mind oscillates between thinking it understands and correcting this misunderstanding through a return to intuition, frustratingly, painfully.

Two cures: one, a stubborn rationalistic delusion that thinks nonexistence is intelligible because it confuses objective and subjective existence. Already covered, not that interesting, fallacious. Two, the belief in everlasting life. Unsubstantiated, scientifically irrational, philosophically possible.

Well then, where does that leave us? You can't fear an absurdity, can you?

Glimmer

After hours of being ground by despair, alone, tragically isolated, hedged in with searing psychic pain and a deep, dark deadness -- I speak words of prayer through the florescently lit silence of my disorganized room, and a peace encloses me which transcends all understanding. If this is based in illusion, my dear atheists, I'm happy to be a hallucinating fool.

*

In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.
-- Neruda

Grow Up

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd." -- Flannery O'Conner

What does it mean: to grow up?

To grow up means to cease to be a child; to fly past childhood, to the next level, the “next step.” Well, then what does it mean to be a child? A child is a person who is provided for, who doesn’t know his way, who is blooming into himself.

You are an adult, in worldly terms, if you provide, whether for yourself or for others. You are an adult if you make money, because money is the great provider. It doesn’t really matter how you make it, so long as you do make it; irrelevant if you put all of your being into acquiring money, relevant if you just reach it, even if it’s provided for you. So long as you keep the appearance of providing: that’s what matters.

So then: an adult isn’t one who provides, per se, but is one who has the means of providing -- who has money. Because this money can be the result of no real work -- chalking out routine, doing your job out of conditioning rather than authentic intending, thinking, suffering -- it isn’t necessary that the one who has it is responsible for having it. You are an adult only maybe if you have money.

So it goes.

The world reasons backwards: money, therefore he must be a hard worker, a decision maker, a diligent person, a worthy citizen; no money, therefore he must either be lazy or lost, time to get in line.

The Christian understanding of adulthood eschews appearance and dives inward: you are an adult if you -- really you -- make choices, if you struggle to be the person God has in mind for you. You are not an adult if you provide, you see, but if you yield to God as the provider, if you do His will, which is more than sufficient in providing. The problem, of course, is that to the world letting God provide is indistinguishable from not giving a damn.

There comes a time in every life -- many, many times for some -- where the choice between adulthood in the worldly sense and adulthood in the spiritual sense come into conflict. This choice is essentially one of appearance: whether to appear like you’re making choices and cashing in, or appear like you’re childishly aloof and really being authentically you.

I’m at this time in my life. Virtually everyone I know, most of whom I make an attempt to hide from, either explicitly or implicitly point out: be an adult, it’s time to grow up, time to make decisions. Stop screwing around and make money. Plan ahead, think of a family. Stop being aloof. Stop reading so much. Get back into society. Pick out a career; pick something and run with it. Stop wasting so much damn time.

But the outer isn’t the inner. I read a lot, in order that I might be who I am, that I might actually learn the layers of life instead of just greedily, passively passing by; in order that I might one day have the fuel to be a decent enough writer, transcending the excremental prose and sensationalistic plots of contemporary writing; in order that I might actually have something to say to someone, to teach them -- “what arrogance!” -- what it means to live. The world leaves no room for an individual’s in order that, unless it’s making money. Pure and simple.

Take a moment to observe the grownups. They have inner rings with small circumferences. They know routine, whether sports, television, gossip, church (without spirit), or anything you can think of. They claim to know decisions, but few of them ever make decisions, which is why routine is so pervasive. They know work, even intellectual work, but be it externalized, sweat-drenched, muscle-pumping work or internalized, intellectualized, brain-burdening work, it’s all analogous to an ox pulling a cart: on and on, go where routine compels you, don’t question why, enjoy your cheap rewards.

We speak of adults as ones who make decisions, who are independent, who provide, but really they don’t make decisions, they aren’t independent, and they don’t in the deepest sense provide. They pull the cart and call it decision making. They annul their independence by shacking themselves up in routine; take away the routine, throw them into a completely new situation, and they would die from despair. They provide in the sense that a falling stone thinks it’s providing its own fall. A child closes its eyes and thinks the big bad world is no longer there. An adult closes his eyes and calls it sight. Adults, see, are worse than children.

This rambling diatribe might simply be a warning. I warn you, reader: if you meet me in the outside world and I seem a little strange, uninspired, squandering possibilities, it’s probably because I’m interested in things like truth, meaning, and other moneyless routes. Should you try these things?

Well, do you want to grow up?

Becoming

More and more misanthropic. The aliens can't be found, and the animals never stick around.

*

You believe in preaching to the ends of the earth, and you can't even mean a smile in passing a forgotten face on a sidewalk.

*

In a sense it's an insult to tell a writer that he writes well. You will only rise in him the cyclical, self-cynical feelings of confusion and dismay at his own perceived inability. If a writer's words bore flesh, there would be plenty more outcasts in the world.

Writing is a surge. One writes with a feeling, and the words that result are always a crime against the spirit that bore them. I can only think of one sentence I've ever written that I thought was out-and-out, solidly good. Do we really read a work by analyzing each word and stringing them together? Or do we at most use certain words to indicate a deep tone, a certain energy, in which the work is written, in which each word considered in itself can never contain? The second, which is why the idea of a writer who perfectly knows all the "rules", who prides him- or herself as a good writer because of a degree from a university, is repugnant, a crime upon aesthetic humanity.

Nothing can come close to touching the hem of the garment of a high feeling, of the intoxication of creation, of releasing the inner demons who constrict and drive insane and of so exorcising, angelizing, the soul through splurging words on paper. Then you look back to what has fallen, and it looks like it was from a hand from another universe. Words are a form of murder, and language is more than words. Thus all great writers loathe what they write. They know that what they've revised for the hundredth time is still light years away from the misleading feeling of perfection that tagged every moment of creation. They know and shrink, for writing always involves a degree of self deception. Do you want the litmus test for a good writer? Test how much he shrinks at what he's written. A "classic" writer might be nothing else than a masochist with stratospheric words.

But, no, I'm an exception: everything I've written, except that one anorexic sentence thoughtlessly composed years ago amidst a pile of creative stillborns, is nothing more than the blood of my own soul from which I wash my hands. The wound will never be content with closing up. Blessing, curse, or cursed blessing. Choose your time of the day.

Philosophy Shot My Brain

A lot of people read for leisure. I read either until my eyes grow heavy or until I can feel my frontal lobes bloating. I read to grow, and the moments of transcendent wonder clairvoyant in snatches of prose catch up on me serendipitously. I pray to God to be able to understand obscure truths, almost as much as I pray to love the world. I want to know everything that can be known.

But what would happen if that ever came to pass? Who would I ever tell? Genius is an island with miraged bridges.

It's better to read for crucifixional purposes. To prove that your preconceptions are wrong -- about yourself, about the nature of the world --, or not-quite-right. Perchance to the point where you abandon your work and decide to pay attention to nature, other people, a cold autumn morning, cumulus clouds exiling an innocent blue sky. What then? It's a matter of time before this attention breaks its womb and bursts into an undifferentiated, God-breathing love.

Lightness blooms. Nothing is as heavy as it was before. Effortlessly, you filter obscurity from the vital, because you see how the vital is so intimately related to ameliorating life. You wear this cure as an invisible badge and flit lucidity at every section of the world you come across. And at this very moment, wisdom is born.

Philosophy, my dear professor, is the means to discovering that we don't know. Love of wisdom is found in shadows that when entered break into gardens of light.

Socialism?

I've been doing a decent amount of thinking on the so-called Socialism of the president-elect who conservatives can't seem to stop complaining about. "Redistributing the wealth," as it's called, is an indictment on Capitalism, which has a heartbeat of rugged individualism. Individualism, it turns out, is absolute, delusion-breeding nonsense. No man is an island; who we are is a product of external decisions outside of our control, which only potentially can be acted on by free choice. Individualism claims that everything rests on the responsibility of the individual. The individualistic response to a person predestined to psychological abuse by his family, an intellect worn down by stress, poisoned by neurotoxins, and ultimately genetically defunct, who clearly can't progress, isn't just "tough shit," but, "it's your fault," with the elliptical deletion of "you poor, lazy bastard." As one member of an online forum crushingly put it:

Under the rules of individualism, man is the cap'n of his faith.

THEREFORE

1. Anything that happens in his life, is by his own doing and his alone.
   
2. If good things happen (wealth, health, success) then he must have done good things; if bad things happen (poverty, sickness, failure) then he must have done bad things.
   
3. Circumstances beyond his contol do not apply (see rule one)
   
4. The actions of others have no effect (see rule one)
   
5. Groups dynamics are either illusions, abhorations or of no consequence (see rule one)

THEREFORE

Man must be the cap'n of his fate.

There are clearly serious problems inherent in Capitalist systems. As of 2001, the top 10% owned 71% of wealth, the wealthiest 1% owned 38%, and the bottom 40% owned 1% of all wealth (Peter Phillips). To recapitulate: the bottom 40% owned 1% of all wealth. In case you've already forgotten: the bottom 40% owned 1% of all wealth. And that's seven years ago.

There are many factors that attribute to this. See David Shipler’s “The Working Poor” for a relatively detailed account. The rich typically are born into rich families; they have the resources, values (extremely important) and psychological support that springboard them to success a million times more likely than the average entrepreneur. The poor families, however: they have higher probabilities of sexual and psychological abuse (most notably from society, with its incessant, “it’s their fault they’re in this state”), a history of non-progressive values, a higher chance for genetic insufficiencies with relation to areas such as intelligence (and the psychologists of today are pointing out how genetics is much more responsible for traits such as intelligence than environmental factors), malnourished diet (leading to malnourished intellect), neurotoxins associated with poor living conditions (leading to a malnourished intellect), and other things, other things. It’s very simple: if you live in a well-to-do family, you have a well-to-do chance of getting ahead. If you don’t, your chances are virtually shot.

No wonder people "abuse" Welfare; they are probably caught in the dehumanizing memetic set that they can't be anything, that they aren't worth anything, that they are incompetent -- an incompetence that Shipler argued so lucidly pervades even unskilled labor jobs. Who on earth would be content with poverty-level governmentally-supported cash when they could easily make fifty to sixty grand with a little direction and appropriate values? But, alas, poor people don't have direction; they don't have progressive values; and both direction and values aren't their responsibility. You can't improve when your thinking leaves no possibility for improvement, and the fact that you're caught up in certain thought patterns isn't your fault unless you're taught to critically analyze everything and refuse to critically analyze anything (how many Republicans vote straight ticket while peripherally looking at their wallets?) -- but, again, this ability is a (dying) quality instilled by higher education. And the claim that people are riding the wave of government intervention and refusing work is almost certainly a myth. Does Welfare give people an incentive to avoid work? Doesn't look like it.

What to do? Government regulation? I guess. Increased taxes on the Obaman fashion? I guess. A tenacious dedication to universal eduction? No guess. That's what it all comes down to; and if the goal can ever at least approximately be reached, laissez-faire for everyone. Education might be the great equalizer; those who have the means from a poor background will meditatively consider this poor background and find fresh fire to thrust them forward and make something of themselves, equating the outcome of the careless rich who swallow the entreaties of tradition and the snug families who support them.

But that's a little too idealistic. It's hard to find truth attractive when you have drugs and cheap sex as unashamed accesses, when all your friends and family have gotten hitched at nineteen with three kids by twenty-four, when you're caught in the groupthink click of the cliques that exist as a sanctuary of look-afters in view of the hostile, careless outside world. If a spread of education will work, it will take time.

But what Washington hotshot wants to altruistically support potential business rivals? Maybe there are people who actually think that the heart of democracy isn't profit-making but, you know, freedom, egalitarianism, a fair shot. And maybe this inexperienced-therefore-uncorrupted, eloquent, intelligent future president with a terrorist sounding name will actually keep to his good ideals. That's much better than not having good ideals.

Wrath

At times I burn with anger. The demon settles and makes a home between my heart and stomach, bursting my metabolism to a rushing, uncontainable mania, where nothing constructive is possible, where concentration is an ally to escape, where I can only face my rage until it drops its guard and I murder it by losing myself in something completely accidental. This rage is the only chink in my detachment armor.

There is too much wrong with the world. Too much. Where is the global flood of our times? I can't imagine a world being worse than this one, but it was; there are lights now that pervade Christian souls -- but where are they? I can only find misery and no company with a world miserable but ignorant of its misery -- screaming undisciplined children; overweight, cowgazing women whose eyes contain a history of apathy; arrogant, selfish elite, content with money and indifferent to others; intellectual chits spouting useless abstractions to prove an incommensurate better-than-thou; partisan civilians bitter to the bone over election results. It all should go up in flames. God, it all should go up in flames.

Jacob has my envy; Jacob could wrestle with God. I don't plant my anger on particularities -- on single souls who wreck darkness microscopically or massively. They can't help it; and where the rest of the world would displace its anger, mine has no target. God can't be wrestled. He hides.

You'll call this blasphemy, but then you clearly haven't read the book of Psalms. I want universal love, but I am a spot of sand on a beach that spreads to infinity. I want the will of God, but the waiting is so tortuously hard, and I'll be damned if I volunteer myself to a descending shadow of ignorance. I dare to say it even if I'm wrong: you'll call me a blasphemer because you're too cowardly to admit the feelings you yourself have. You don't know how to hold your anger; you spread it on the innocent world.

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint? -- Kierkegaard, Repetition

Meditation

I wonder if the secret of life can't be learned in a coffeehouse.

It's the worst possible place to voluntarily spend one's time to read or to leap oneself into cyberspace, but everyone does it. Sound softly crushes from all angles of existence. Concentration, remember, works best in silent spaces. Meekly, gently, clothed in silence, is the middle-aged man, brown-haired and cursed with oversized glasses, absolutely detached from the midday madness that clutters around him, lancing a book with his right hand, title as conspicuous as oxygen. And he turns a page, adapts his gaze, and the stream streams on.

The talkers are the ones who are anathema. Coffee is a fuel for bitchiness, and it's all flustered politics, tenacious gossip, empty giggles and intellectualized everything. They come to mark their territory, consume an aura, and move on, while the silent ones have their feet planted, upholding a universe of decency, honesty, authenticity. Continually slapped by those who emanate noise, like saints they obliviously linger their dance with meaning.

They have learned the heart of happiness. That contentment doesn't lie with something outside, but a morphing of oneself to the demands of the outer world. If you can learn to tolerate noise, you can learn to tolerate death, and life is planted in valleys slowly worn with the waters of decay.

I wonder if the secret to life can't be learned in a coffeehouse.

They Are Intellectuals

False intellectuals. Lined up, one two three, on a bedraggled couch, sliding down the collegiate slope, vomiting overaudible words into the fluorescent lighted air. The world behind them radiates with everything of coffeehouse perfection: whispering voices, commonsense music, the aura of thought in its last remaining hiding place. Listen, and listen softly.

They are frustrated. Yes. The incessant attempts to reach for a hand before the hand shows itself. Thus: speak louder. Plans after college, psychiatry, physical therapy, medical school, full scholarships, false apathy, crucifixional analysis, articulated, whiny words. Really: see me, prove to me that I'm alive.

Our elitist clothes hide our animal souls.

Judgement

I've been jittery around people lately, like a socially activated coffee high. The judgment hides in a semi-reflective pause, an involuntary look-over, even from those I trust my life with. Their looks imply confusion as to why I'm even alive. They're waiting for me to do something, to show them a reason for why I'm attached to the universe, and I'm too caught up in waiting for them to discard their waiting. Things tighten, and I'm looking for an escape route. Better luck next time.

That's all that our culture is, right? A coiled-up pause for the time to strike -- to judge, to burn, to destroy; loot the pure souls, wherever they might be found, and homogenize everything to a bland, socialistic mass of the uninteresting.

That's why school is downright Hell, right? Judgment incarnates in the ostracizing grins of the puberty stricken, the mini materialists, the jocks, preps, pricks, imbeciles. Well then.

The question is not to remain logical. The question is to slip through and, above all -- yes, above all, the question is to elude judgment..., of avoiding being forever judged without ever having a sentence pronounced. -- Camus, The Fall

The essential skill of a social animal lies in this "slip" -- in the art of slipping. To live you must slip -- slip and strike first! Amazing how snake-like the requirements for human beings are. To be in the inner ring, legs must be abandoned. Slide on your belly and label your humiliation victory.

Probably every non-genetic psychological disorder erupts from the eternal fear of society's transparent eyes. Transparent, inexorably, for society is an abstraction. Where is the limit? Where does it end? Who is included? Nobody; an individual has flesh. To fear society means to fear nothing, and the self that fears nothing will soon enough become what it fears.

And simple psychology still comes a-knockin'. Why the psyche slash from the judgement of another, even an anonymous self, even a criminal? Because we want approval. Why that? Because, well, we have nothing better to do. You get to Heaven, mind you, after you die. Now you have to pay tithes and wonder why.

And classy nihilism throws a shadow even at noon. Onward, Monsieur Camus!

Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgment. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgment of men. For them, no extenuating circumstances; even the good intention is ascribed to crime.... I'll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.

Reluctance

Sleepy, and tired, and contentedly unadmired.
I'd rather not take the dead, shallow leap back,
Back to routine, the sweat-inducing sun,
Or the cold concrete floor on which I rest my head.
I want to be here, left alone, free, silent,
Sweet Dr. Pepper lingering mouthwise,
And oh the worthless yawns, oh the sleepy eyes,
And the mystics who clutter this coffee table,
And sore muscles intertwined with happiness.
This is newness, this is bliss,
But the higher I keeps calling,
And I must follow, diligent,
Or a shadow casts its frown
On everything,
Everything.

On Swimming

Purity is clothed in the warm fibers
Of your stunning sigh, your smile,
Your dangerous, death-killing laughter.
I am a stowaway on too poor a ship,
Daydreaming, lost, and delusional,
All that I might feel the sweet vibrations
Of you, the surging, flawless waters,
Beneath my prostrate adoration,
Rocking, swaying, motherlike, love-filled.

One day I'll make my way to you,
When my legs have my will
For a companion, when my fear
Is swallowed, finally overcome,
And you will baptize me, and add
Colors to my laughter, and the fish
Will dance our joy into the underwater world.

Rilke

We are not poor. We are just without riches,
we who have no will, no world:
marked with the marks of the latest anxiety,
disfigured, stripped of leaves.

Pride

According to the Population Reference Bureau, there are 106.5 billion people on earth who have ever lived. Lots.

And you want to be number one. Oh, just in your own little clique; no more, no less.

Sorry, coach. The clamorous climb up the self-centered power struggle knows no equivalent. All power probably is a desire for attention anyways. Ambition to the dregs, and the flask is infinitely deep. And don't forget: there's no real, solid, bedrock criteria. It's all just an emotional pull, a neurochemical flux, no different -- no different! -- than a child's struggle for attention. The prideful are the true junkies, and the drugs they suck have no fashion sense.

So be content with being nothing.

No, really, be content with being nothing.

An Injured Neruda Poetry Book

Neruda has been splashed
My heart within me gashed
Kool-Aide is the culprit
To which I swing my pulpit
With tears and rage and -- grins
'Cause that's poetic once again
(Stop it, Pablo, that's too much,
"I'm never through -- get in touch")

Verily Verily

Verily verily,
If you squeeze life
And it breaks,
'Twas all a dream,
Yourself included.

2:57 AM

The clock mocking with a yellow blinking colon dividing the 2 and 5, which in its own blocked out way looks like an electronic heartbeat crucified on the upper half of a digital cross. Television fuming phosphorescence, beaming whitish black and mesmerizing. The stove to my left breathing the only other light, spotlighting a row of common condiments. Air conditioner whirring the same pedestrian whir. And I can't sleep because I'm thinking, or because my thoughts are thinking me.

This or that, or that or this, and on and on, and the audience is snoring. Still the same routine. These days you don't seek only one spouse, but a second: your career, and that's a woman you simply can't get drunk and shack up with until you twist her arm into marriage. She's a fickle, careless, tireless, implacable, unappeasable, bitchy little thing, and once you ambivalently choose, she's with you forever, and if you screw her over she'll leave you and your spirits dropped at the door to become drinking buddies with regret and his dark-browed, death-soaked brother, depression.

C'mon, sir, what will it be: counseling, or counseling psychology, or general psychology, or clinical psychology, or psychiatry, or neuroscience, or theology, or journalism, or technical writing? The average soul-dead chap has it easy enough. He wants what will get him laid, what will support a family, what will keep him in decent standing with his friends. He isn't interested in virtually everything. There's no such thing as the torment of a decision. He isn't capable of running from himself simply because his self isn't carved out enough so as for him to be capable of running from it.

But I'm capable of running from myself. I know what I'm supposed to be doing, even if I can't tack down a career. Worry about tomorrow is an extension of running from the calling of today and grasping for artificial life, a life built on controlling the infinite array of occurrences within it, a life of breaking when the incalculable comes a-knockin', a life where I refuse to exhale. Everything must be abandoned, resigned up to God as a metaphysical burnt offering, and the smoke that rises to the heavens is a symbol for my relearning to breathe.

So I quit. Worry not for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself. Goodbye worries about the GRE, about sycophantically making the professorial check-off list for graduate school, about which career and where, getting published and saving the world. Goodbye, so long, adieu, fuck off, and all God's children said amen.

I am going to read and write and live and love and smoke my pipe and play my guitar and laugh until my face is distorted with smile lines, sanctified to God as best as I can, and that's that. And if anyone doesn't like it, there's always room on my pile of forgetting. I light it nightly as a celebration for a day spent living, and watch as the flames, dancing to dissipation, burn away the darkness, warming me until my morning comes and the trek of life wanders on.

Time

I don't like time. We never were the best of friends. Virtually always when I plan on writing a song, it's a smack at time. Villainous, life-eating time. I always tried to walk with it side by side, lethargically, lovingly, but it has always insisted on flying past me without the lightest care for looking back, like a methamphetamine-induced kitten, like an angry preacher speeding up his sermon so he can condemn his poor bastard congregation. But there's an added curse: it flies past me when I'm in the moment, waist deep in writing or guitar -- or You for that matter -- and (the kicker) when I completely squander my time. Boredom, you see, never hits me, but the loss tied with it does. Boredom at least slows the world down so as to make its normal uninteresting speed worth riding again.

It's been around seven weeks since I've been employed. Long story. The first three or four weeks were spectacularly slow, but more compacted with busyness than any other time in my life. I played music, breathed with nature, enjoyed the ones I love, and learned, experienced, grew. Twenty-one books were slain, even if most of them had already been started previously. The average lifetime book intake for the average busy-drugged or lazybones American, nota bene, is less than that. I'm starting to get ridiculous; there's literally no subject that doesn't attract me. I leap from macroeconomics to Heideggerian ontology, Nabokovian prose to Chomsky, theology to Neruda, like a four year old addicted to leapfrog. We all know children like to jump. Damn simple life, where leaping is fun.

And I've learned that I'm a bit of a coward. I have one thing in life that I could be doing constantly; something that could literally fulfill my calling, and my salvation, and I stall. Kierkegaard said becoming a Christian for the first time is easier than becoming a Christian once you are one. You always stall. God has placed me on insuperable heights, blazoned with a view of all the wonder of the world, and what happens? I look down. I fear my first step, and what I will do when I realize I need to step back and start again.

It's there, ringing in my brain, shattering the blurry lines between self-annihilating thoughts. Do it.

Do it. Don't think. Dance. You can't think. You can't be taught. You just respond. Life is fully lived beyond the skyline of thought. Trust. Trust me. I have my hand, now give me yours. This is who you are. You are meant to dance, and all dance their own incomparable ways. Dance yours.

Metablogging

In a fit of idle nerdiness, I pasted my blog to a Word document and technologically squeezed the blessed word count function. 34,374 words, titles included.

Critiques:

1) They're called paragraphs. And they're meant to be used.
2) Stop the pseudo-Kierkegaardian word choices. It's the twenty-first century. No need for "massification" or ridiculous repetitions of "infinity".
3) Slow the roll on Proustian endless sentences. This relates to 1).
4) Lessen the awesomeness. It might hurt women and children.

On Marriage

Funny how involuntary thoughts can be, even if they're the very opposite of what you really believe. This thought flashed through me like a maddened quark; a common precursor to an avalanche of unbridled opinions: I'm sorry. But I'm not sorry.

What set it off? You'll love this: marriage. Practice in selfishness. Aided egoism. As a rule? Nope, no sir, absolutely not. But how it allows for the potential, and how few couples actually come together to love the world beyond themselves.

I'm not sorry. It's about living for sugar lips or Mr. Right, eventually charming children, and with enough time an extended family. Neighbors and church friends over for coffee or beer. Shoot the shat. And the outside world is freezing. And you, with your warm-blooded selfishness, have all the fire to change things.

But it's love for other people. That it is. But not free love. The love that undermines, that brightens the world of another person, but not because you really choose it, not most of the time, and for many people hardly ever. The love that chooses you and therefore is at most minimally you. Affective, animalistic love, where the line between human and previous primates is blurred to oblivion. It's all exclusively about family for a pack of orangutans in Indonesia, but you, dear sir, dear madame, are welded with a bit of God. You're called to a higher living that you can't deny without denying your essential humanity.

So stop parading your selfishness through pictures of your committed lover, half bald or half insane. Show me that you know authentic love -- love with continuity, love beyond boundaries, the only love that you are in control of.

Dreams

Sleep has always been the thorn in my side. During the earliest years of school, my mom would wrangle socks on my cold feet as I was still lethargically groping for sleep, half-saturated in a dream world. Even until high school I'd be dragged awake, institutional shuffle down the endless hall (mocking me with voluptuous carpet), the hollow, lifeless attempt to turn on the shower. At times -- not many -- I'd fall asleep on my feet, wrapped in warm water. Paradise enough. Then the smash on the door, reproaching me awake.

The worst association, which haunts me still, isn't the screech of some imaginary monster, the vegetarian terror stare from an alien-looking cabbage, or politicians. It was born of the ear: the light electric sound surge, infinitesimal, the overhead fan made as it was killed by my mother every school morning, before the useless, repetitive, slow, tortuously slow against-the-grain voyage to consciousness. My heart half-died with the decelerating blades. Time to get up and learn nothing, psychological abuse, and all shades of adolescent bullshit embedded in school. The explicit click of any light switch is still at times enough to make me cringe. It all signified the end of another world, the insulating security afforded by warmth, and the dreams were always lovely.

It's not laziness. I honestly can't help it. Between nineteen and twenty-two I lived for twelve hour marathons, not because I was seeking an escape, or because there was nothing better to do, but because if I didn't, I couldn't function. Gym and jogging cured this, yes, but only partially. There are still days where the snooze button is ruthlessly crashed for a two or three hour duration. My hypothalamus headlocks my frontal lobes, and any reason to rise never penetrates the sensate. Blame the brain; I am the blameless.

It all allowed me an incomparable wonder: I've learned to dream, and even dream to the end of a sort of earthly salvation. Bad dreams, I've learned, are the best. They shock you into life value; many times I would find myself hypnotically spooning my coffee the next morning, dredged in appreciative thoughts, simply because the gentle terror of a dream had, yes, taught me how to live. At least until the death of worldly worries and routine had drowsed me back into the quietly hellish, lifeless style of humanity.

And all these years the poor bumbling philosophers can't prove -- one bit -- the existence of an external world, or that our senses are feeding on anything outside of a neurological matrix of lies. Life itself might be a brand of dreams. A dream of God. And we have the miserable stupidity to take all of this seriously -- to grope and grasp and close off breathing until we're walking corpses. Are there any who have awoken yet?

?

Is there anyone? Every person who misunderstands me -- everyone, except one -- traverses the circumference of my personality, or in a complete miss condescends, dismisses, and that's that.

I want to be appreciated. I feel I have the trail to a deep secret of the universe. It's not pride; pride wants to be seen for its own sake. I want to be seen for the sake of seeing those who see me. I want to teach.

Why do I want to teach? Tell me that.

Perception of something of quality always necessarily needs a fragment of quality in the one perceiving. What then of the profound, the beautiful, the profoundly beautiful, the beautifully profound? A correlative need: keener eyes, sharper minds, more sensitive souls. The great artists, not the merely good ones, kill themselves. The slit through which the world sees them is too small; at times perceived as nothing at all. If you are not praised it is either because you deserve no praise or because you have climbed past praise. Looking down the precipice of the universe, you see the world flagging to catch up with you.

Greatness of production needs greatness of perception. Or else the work itself is useless. He who creates knows not the value of what he creates, just as a mother is blind with love for her child, blemished or blazing gold.

Thoughts in a Coffee Shop

I don’t want to be these selves around me
I don’t want to annoy the quiet with words
With talk of economics and gas prices
Bad weather and my things, your things
And inaudible pleas for sanity
I’d rather take the quantum credibility
Of a few anonymous, rejected souls
Rejected, but not by God
Perhaps by time
But time dies too

Intuition and Faith

Intuition is the basis of reasoning; it allows us to grasp whatever conclusions we have from premises or safe generalizations from particular occurrences.

Faith is realized through intuition; faith based on (sufficient) reasons isn't faith. Because faith is based intuitively, it allows the "leap" that constitutes it to be possible: we "leap" over rational gaps, and this act of leaping is (at least essentially) what faith is. In the act of faith we trust intuition -- even in the face of madness -- over our demand for evidence, and in some cases over our reasoning over certain snippets of evidence.

If faith is based intuitively, and reason is based intuitively, how does a lack of the latter make the former absurd? If one "feels" that God (or a "something" pragmatically labeled as God) exists, in a sense purely before religious concepts, what is to say that this feeling isn't enough? This feeling, this intuitive "click", if thrown out in a particular instance, is thrown out momentarily as a rule; and if one is consistent, this would mean to throw out reason as well, and so the argument against intuition falls apart.

So

I only know of one person who ever didn't like me and (reluctantly) showed it (doubtless a handful of others didn't like me and were cowards). At times of boredom or sheer spiritual stupidity, I find myself returning to this person. I wonder how this person ever got around to it. And before I know it my happiness has been sacrificed to an absurdity. An absurdity -- to think that others, even your closest friends, even your spouse, even your mother, could know as much as one-tenth of who you really are. Jesus was murdered, yes. Well, then, that solves that.

I mean, we can ascertain a person -- based on spiritual temperature, not personality. Either warmth or coldness, and most are dead, therefore they're cold. Far from the freezing range the evil and the assholes (miniature evil-holders) force upon us, but at least these shake us awake; the cold are pedestrian, and all we want with them is the warmth of change.

Is it possible to have one's spiritual state completely missed? Absolutely. How? Through interpreting the person according to criteria. You're good if you fit my preference, not because you emanate warmth (that is, not because you love, not because you are love). The hidden fear that a person really is warm and the snippets of undeniable empirical verification are enough to frazzle to complete irritation the person who judges based on criteria -- and so the warm person is granted a little more unjust fire.

Why would it ever become good to evaluate others -- to judge them based on criteria -- rather than experience them, that is, interpret them spiritually? Answer: there is something to be gained through evaluation. If a person fits the criteria, she is granted the honor of group membership. But why the inclination for group membership in the first place? Because the world started it first, before the human being with this inclination was thrown into the world. Do unto others as has been done unto you. A form of revenge.

Why does this person -- that is, this not-person, this frozen abstraction from two years previous -- still cling to my mind? Why should I even care? She isn't the same person. It's me interpreting me. Why would I want relational perfection, seeing how I'm frustrated over a single occurance of misunderstanding based on willful hatred, and seeing how interpreting the internal through the external is arrantly absurd?

Because I want the security of others; I want to master the machinery of interpersonal relationships, so I can secure myself against potential warps in the future. And this is madness, nothing less. Pure madness.

We should be able to live to the point of not giving a single damn about others' conclusions about us. But we need the feeling of acceptance, of being loved. Seeking security from others is natural; and if this is thrown out, what is left? That God fellow comes back to mind.

The Scientist

Clothed in silent meekness,
Without an enemy in the world,
He stretches his feminine hand
To the infinitesimal specimen,
To fix the microscope,
To cover his mouth from a cough.
The air conditioner shuts its whir
With a catarrhal bang,
And he exhales a eulogy.

And outside the world beams
With warmth and brightness,
Which he never sees,
And his wife, lost in her delusion,
Still emanates a warmth
Which he can't quite understand.

And so he throws it all away
And dedicates the day
To study, study, study,
And a soul unrecognized
Dies just the same.

New Prayer

Lord, let me create. Let me be like you.

Oh Well

Hello everyone, I'm being murdered. Memories hold the rusty knife, and I can never bleed enough to die. Memories are s'posed to be friends, but I'm apparently playing Caesar, and there's one primal crownstealer, surnamed metaphysical Brutus, who leads the churchless charge. I also call him X, and X in a five year past, in a cluttered collection of memories whose each member brims with unutterable detail -- like a walk through paradise, like a first kiss on a beautified autumn night.

And I can never do enough to escape from it. The memory itself burns, but burns with an added pain: it symbolizes, with all the others, how much I squandered, how many chances I threw away, because -- I was a coward: hypersensitive, neurotically afraid, detailing each possibility and dispensing with each and every one. You're not getting any more detail than that.

And yet, there is nothing I can do to change the mistakes I've made, and more: there's nothing that indicates that they should be changed. I am in the right place -- but how the hell does that erase the past of my mistakes? My entire life could be different had I made a different choice those five years previous -- it would be right then, as it is painfully right now. I don't understand it, but I know it. I know it. Things are right. The external isn't the standard; the internal is. The external is a diversion.

What then? The external, the world out there, registered through sensation, is both everything and nothing -- all we have, and completely irrelevant. I can adore this lovely rose, this pristine collection of Eliotian poetry, only because it is valued -- clasped for -- as nothing; conversely, I can call something nothing if it is valued as something. If I clasp for it, it is nothing, and to clasp for wind is... It (whatever it is) is everything only if it is nothing to me; it is nothing only if it is everything to me.

The sensate is valued as nothing only because inwardness is valued as everything -- and yet, if I value inwardness as everything, it too is nothing. So balance is what is needed -- a balance of zero value on both sides, externality and inwardness. Absolute valuelessness is what is needed for optimal happiness. The inner sanctifies the outer, and the outer sanctifies the inner. A prerequisite is that both terms (the outer and the inner) must be there, and they can only both fully be there in perfect balance with one another. It's like two sides of an equation -- they both obviously must be equal; one can't be negative and another positive.

Consider infinity or inwardness or a life lived dedicted to God, or meaning, or truth, etc. as I.
Consider finitude or externality or a life lived dedicated to the earth, etc. as F.

+I = -F
or
-I = +F
or
I = F

Too much inwardness causes a negation of finitude; example: a person bending towards abstraction, who can't quite optimally live in the sense that he consistently wills himself into the real world. Think of philosophers or mathematicians or poets. They value their abstractions.

Too much finitude causes a negation of infinity; example: a person bending towards externality, sensations. Think of the alcoholic, the clothes-loving sorotity chick. They value their instances of finitude.

Infinity balanced with finitude -- thought balanced with action. Doing what one ought to do (finitude) the moment one grasps it (infinity).

You are the equation.

Goal: value nothing. Not your car, not your wife, not your khakis; not your mathematical ideas, or your philosophical abstractions, or your bloody thoughts. And in not valuing them you'll gain the most that can be gained from them -- because there is equality, and with equality comes perfection for both terms. Movement with content, not content without movement, or movement without content. But you can't simply not value by fiat; you will value something by necessity. A third factor is needed. What is it?

I call it the Logos. It exists in abstraction -- but as pure abstraction it is valued as abstraction, and I need something beyond abstraction -- I also need finitude. So: it must exist in a perfect balance between abstraction and finitude, and this is possible only through living it out.

You see, commandment isn't left for the slaves, for the subordinate of the world. Commandment, if it is inwardly qualified (i.e., through the Logos, the Word, the Meaning), is the most precious thing in the history of the cosmos for human beings. Logos commandment allows for the balance between finitude and infinity, action and thought. Without commandment life, in the perfected qualitative sense, could not be possible. If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness...

So now it makes sense. To love the will of God -- that really makes sense. And if God is understood as founded in his will, just as we are founded in our wills (we are our freedom), and the will of God is synonymous with the Logos (for a Word needs to be written), and the Logos is as much God as the writer of this Logos, then to love the will of God is nothing less than to love God.

Brilliant.

Test

Think. If you become stripped of everything, if you are left with absolutely nothing, do you: turn to God, or have God revealed?

That is, speaking in the present, are you not a Christian, or are you a Christian?

Contingent religiosity is falsity.

Happiness as Criteria Fulfillment

Culture is existentially dangerous, especially in relation to happiness: it provides certain criteria, relative to one's own culture, as to what constitutes happiness. But the human being cannot be understood collectively. Each is his own little snowflake, really; each has specifications that need subtle fulfillment in order for happiness to be actualized.

"I have a beautiful car, a mansion house, an attractive wife, and disciplined children. I have to be happy," says the man.
"I have nothing; I am dying death," says the soul.

You may live your entire life interpreting happiness through your own cultural rubric (while almost certainly looking down on other rubrics because they aren't yours). But you transcend your type; man as a type is a contradiction: to exist is to exist with absolute particularity; to exist is to be incomparable. If you don't listen to yourself, your happiness may very well be your misery, and your misery may very well be your possible happiness. Therefore be miserable. Blessed are the culturally miserable!

Pensee

Stranded in the nakedness of absurdity. That is, expecting from life what it refuses to provide. The true religious impulse finds its being in this feeling, for inhaled absurdity is despair, and despair is the realization of the need for a higher hope. But the hope cannot be provided through earthly hands. Therefore God.

And Vladimir Says

And yet we did know -- didn't we? -- inspiration,
we would live, it seemed, and our books would grow,
but the kithless muses at lasts have destroyed us,
and it is time now for us to go.
-- Nabokov

Meditation

As the alcoholic slovenly sings, inspired
By the dead love of his chemical muse.
As the stillborn stars stare with brightness,
Puncturing the velvet darkness of the night.
As the insomniac twists and turns
In his breaking bed, thinking, thinking.

As all these things transpire,
I sit thinking of God,
And he thinks of me,
And I sneeze away my worries,
And everything lovely comes alive:
That is, everything.

2:22 AM

So Shakespeare met Nabokov,
And Nabokov met Shakespeare,
At place such and such,
At no time in particular.
They both sat and stared,
Sat and stared,
Both with tired eyes,
And then said "wow!"
As they shook hands
With friendly half-smiles.
And as they walked away
You could see them both
Pulling pens from their pockets,
And me laughing in the background,
Like a child, like a child.

+1

Happiness
Is
Synthesis
Between
Within
And
Without

+1

Is life good because...? Then, deeply, life isn't good.

So (ver. Politics)

The satellite installation man (yes) tells me that he's against the democratic redistribution of wealth.

I ask him why. He says: everyone should earn as much relative to their intelligence.

I tell him that intelligence is heavily genetic (a variable potentially up to 80%, contra 20% environmentally affected), and ask him if he thinks it fair that a person should be relatively screwed (that is, in relation to others) because he's, you know, born, and, you know, being born brings with it a heavily genetically determined level of intelligence.

He reassembles his premises, and says the same damn thing.

I think: you're selfish.
He thinks: me, me.

Four Lines

Our tears are born between the burning spaces
Of have and want. What matters the ugly face,
The rejected soul, the dark depressive sighs
When all is made equal, when greed levels all?

Here

I'm tired of all these attempts culminating in pedantic little terminological playoffs. Here's something terribly flesh-and-blood relevant: I'm depressed as all Hell, this very moment, and I haven't the least, not even an infinitesimal, reason why. There is nothing I can do. I am my depression. Give me blood over abstractions. Give me blood over abstractions. Much better.

There's so much wrong with this world (nota: this has nothing to do with my personal life, and it isn't in the least a cause of my depression). Why waste your time by smiling, only to feel hollow -- only to run from hollowness, only to invite apparent depth, only to write a superficial constitution whose words melt the moment they are actualized? Example: We live in a culture where mentioning the word fuck connotes greater negativity than mentioning starving children. There's a whole spectrum to choose from. What is that, Russian sage? Everyone wants to change the world without wanting to change himself? I've changed myself; I am continual change, with a few cynical anomalies (I'm trying, I'm trying). This doesn't change the fact that the world is fantastically, flamboyantly, unashamedly absurd. Give me a metaphysical knife, and I'll be a happy murderer.

Everything is so compacted, so overflowing, with a hidden story and a history. I want to know each and every story; I want to be the historian for all existence.

Memories of your eyes don't help me. You're there and I'm here. What does death or the remainder of the world even matter? I can't stop this slow sadistic surge of longing.

You drop by to make me laugh, stranger, but still the darkness hovers and consumes. I choose not to escape.

And so all ends with chaos. Like it began.

My warehouse eyes,

my Arabian drums.

Should I leave them by your gate,

or, sad-eyed lady,

should I wait?

Emotions

The emotions have their own playingfield. They work, as it were, underneath us, undermining our good reasons. To be lonely -- what is this but the emotions, blind as they are, reaching out for something they swear is there but isn't? To miss someone -- isn't this loneliness too?

That's the danger of passivity; that's the danger ninety-nine percent of America is in. Consummating the right thing -- the reasonable thing -- involves effort, and to live passively is to be governed by one's thoughts or moods and the emotions that hold them up. We're consumers; that is, we're hedonists; that is, we're in bondage.

How To Be Awesome

1) Find a cool goal in your life.
2) Do it.

What not to do:

1) Bitch and complain.
2) Try to look cool.

Everything else falls into place. And you don't need to eat vegetables.

Forgive my curse word. It's rhetorical; it gets a point across.

:.

All we want is to be loved. Language is subordinate to the meaning that attends it, channelled most clearly through tone more than words. A world without tongues is a world where love still dwells. Love speaks preconsciously, emanating from one's every pre-linguistic gesture. The task is to return love to consciousness, to take a hold on it, to apply will to it, to place the self back in it. Affective love, which works exclusively with feelings, is a primitive quality; loving in this way, a handful of individuals to the exclusion of the rest of the world, makes man no different than the animals. And a god loves with his will.

Two Minutes

The parasites who smile faintly, fondling souls
That contain our screaming thoughts.
Well-dressed, well-liked, like politicians
Turning depth of life to pundit-pander,
And all that's left is a thin cage from which
To chain our meandering madness.
For only the mad live, asylums thrive,
And the sane are dead already.
Scream with me.

Live Dangerously!

It's what I'm beginning to call the Curse of Domestic Routine (CDR). It means the repetition of certain acts, certain smiles, the passing of certain drinks, the artificiality of certain poses, the cowgazed hypnotic adoration of televised sports, the chaos of undisciplined children, the libinal air of adolescent wishes, all in proximity to the family, the American home in particular. In summa: comfortability. If it must be expressed philosophically, its veins are tied in with the Utilitarian canon that pain should be negated and pleasure augmented. Otherwise known as the American dream. Otherwise esoterically known as an existential nightmare with an attractive covering, like a sex-gorged teen movie. This is where most everyone wants to be. This is what people wish for during the week. This is the telos of nine-tenths of the industrialized world. "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death" (Proverbs 14:12).

What is depth? It seems man is spiritually crafted to smell out superficiality; and so many are bursting at the seams with a suffocating sense of revulsion towards what they see that they surrender themselves to the cycle by choosing the insulating possibilities the cycle itself offers. The popular form is the drink. Alcohol negates the pains of consciousness by virtually negating consciousness itself, leaving the narcoleptic remainders in a cloudburst of sillyfaced emotions. There is a danger in life running too fast, lest it slip by us. In our nihilistic times, we're constantly looking forward to a future without a face -- simply because the present is otherwise too boring, too irascibile, too farcical, too unbearable. Too repetitive. Indeed, the sense of farce hides behind repetition. The world is too absurd when it rings hollow, and precisely here is when we're most adept at hearing God screaming for our attention behind our earthsick nerves. But too often our bondage to the attention and acceptance of others prevents us from consummating the deal. Man is an animal so deep in social bondage that he would choose unhappiness with the mask of happiness over happiness without a mask. Ironic a society openly reproaches prostitution. We're all whores to each other.

What is depth? An escape from routine. An embrace with the new. What is it that prevents this? Our daring. Unwillingness to crucify the boundaries of our comfort. There is probably nothing more antithetical to keeping life alive than an absolute value for comfort. "The secret of realising the greatest fruitfulness and the great enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!" -- Nietzsche

Death

You'll die. Does it really matter when? A big promotion, recognition, your marriage day, bad weather -- waiting for these things is different. It matters when they happen. We organize our lives around them -- around, that is, with the preplan before and after. But death allows for no after. It might as well happen today or in forty-seven years.

You will die. Daddy Heidegger held that the realization of one's death is the beginning of life. His belief is true, but not exclusively true. How often a man has fallen in love with a woman who has been in his life for a ridiculously long amount of time. The blinders fall, come thou erotic click, and the whole world is seen again with her as its scintillating nucleous, a centrifugal center whose endless periphery is the endless universe. Death does not exist for those in love with life. At the most it can undermine, but its face never needs to be seen. And for those to whom it does exist, it exists only as a phantom. Never touched in its brute baseless blackness, but delusionally created, placebo-like, with each fear of it -- that is, fiction. To fear death, to even consider death a threat, is a symptom of a mal-lived life. To live is a continual oscillation between assertion and absorption, action and reward. To fear death is neither to act nor to be rewarded. To fear death is to sit.

The child who laughs, gloriously possessed with its laughter; the lovers intoxicated with their fresh-faced love; the naturalistic, meditative awe of the old, always content, secretly happy -- these are examples of life, and one cannot live without forgetting the falsity of death, and forgetting falsity is negative realization.

You will die. Imagine your death. I can imagine mine. It will be painful, perhaps, slow or sudden, or narcotically soft-served; perhaps cancer that ceaselessly rides your nerves, tormenting, tormenting, or perhaps a car crash that catches you before pain has a chance to. But you can't do a damn thing about it. This revelation is epiphanic, not miserable -- what comes by necessity comes by necessity; the necessary is the taken care of, and we have other things to do.

No matter how darkly you write it out, we precede death; death does not precede us. The singular moment where the biological process retires, we have already done so as well, somewhere between this moment and the one that precedes it, but never in the moment itself. Well then. The question of the hereafter. You will either cease to exist or live again. Thus stands the dialectic of death.

Live your life. Or you will die without dying. This is the death that can be tasted, but how often its realization passes us by; we, so busy with future plans, dead already. This is the life you can change. Live it.

I'd Like to Say Something

I have absolutely no idea where I'm going in life. The East would call this a virtue; Zen, pour exemple, is the realization of the fallacy of tensed existence -- neither the past nor the future exists, but only the present (and there is no singular experiencer of this present; the inner and the outer is a single monistic entity), and the task of the (pseudo-)individual is to "play it all by ear", and let the cosmos sweep oneself along. But the West, ah, to the West this is a symptom of disease. Everyone must at least have a hazy impression -- the shred of an inkling of secure, insulating certainty, whether this certainty is grounded in delusion or not, and it always to a degree is. Well, I don't have this impression. Or, better to say, I refuse to submit to the temptation to having one. And I don't understand why the hell anyone either should or could have such a thing. We're like children running naked down a beach convinced we're fully clothed, laughing corrosively when someone tells us we're not.

There is no sin in planning. There is danger: the danger of losing the spontaneity of the world, thereby losing the world -- the synthesis of subject and object -- completely. And, oh resentful religieux, it isn't the world that steals one's soul, but the resignation of the soul to the world, which is infinitely qualitatively different. The world isn't a foreign, mechanical "out-there" that merely panders with our minds and tempts our wills; the world is very much a basis for our being, for all breath needs a breather; all souls need bodies; and all bodies exist in the world. To lose the world is to thus lose oneself, for the human being is a synthesis between soul and body (not a vague, incomprehensible ghost in a machine, of all outdated Cartesian hangovers). The world, in its proper relation, is meant at the least to teach, at the most to bless, and it can function only through serendipity -- through the sponatenous dance between self and its malleable physical backdrop called "world". Steal serendipity; put in its place a categorized conceptual network of ideational preplanning. Do this and you've only painted the walls of the world with your own pathetic little self. Your preexisting concepts have taken over. You have blocked the world out; ideas, remember, are also based on phenomena, outer existence -- the objectivity that "is" that subjectivity feeds on.

What is it that pushes the man who wants order? Fear, perhaps; he fears himself against the backdrop of the nakedness of the world. This fear is absolutely incomptabile with any palatable understanding of faith. Faith, at heart, is the letting go of one's desire for omnipotence, for control of one's own world, into the hands of God, who is capable of finishing where finitude falters. Faith is the art of breathing. With the newness of the world under the rubric of experience one breathes in -- one criticizes and integrates the "out there" through one's God-relation; and through freedom one exhales one's own little being on the world, shifting it, imperceptibly at times, conspicuously at others, according to the force and manner of how one exhales, according to the relative completion of one's continual part. Breathing, faith, is the synthesis between these two terms, not simply, as is the popular quip of theological circles, believing the right things. One must believe -- and act! One must open himself to realization and work accordingly. Faith without works is dead. Breathing without exhalation is fatal fantasy.

We don't need consciousness of our direction outside of four or five steps. History has shown us continually that ideas so charismatically clung to with the conviction of rightness have been either been revised beyond realization, or carelessly discarded. Personal experience has taught us that deception feeds, voraciously, on the inclination to expectation; again and again, whether through our own eyes or in witnessing others, we've seen the truth bleed through broken hearts. No, we must admit to our ignorance. Only then can we find value in trust, the perfection of faith. Only then can we learn to breathe freely, not constricted or elated with each uncertain tidbit that comes our way. No, if there is a kingdom at all accessible for anyone on earth, it must be within, uncorruptible by the world, unswervable by perception, cleansed and quarantined from all negativities that work themselves towards unhappiness. We need an unshakeable hope, or else despair is only a matter of time. And how tragic, how sad, that these words are music only for mystics:

"Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." -- Luke 17:21