&

Nausea greets the weak of stomach, boredom the weak of art.

Judgment

We only have ourselves to blame for being judged. The passive voice a little paradoxical there? Perhaps.

Walk with me:

Open your eyes and you’ll see that there are people everywhere who just don’t give a damn. And, stone me for it, but most of the time they’re the people with the most obvious absurdities, the most vulnerable targets for a very presumptuous criticism.

But let’s take a look at the presumer: on what ground does his judgment rest? Perish for a moment the cultural relativity, the fashion’s fickleness, the ultimate superficiality of seeing simply surface. What I’m aiming at is something a little more obvious, that the critic has placed himself in a vituperative framework of his own free will, has submitted to this arbitrary, fluctuating value system on his own, while the sublimely unconscious victim is outside, in some foreign sphere of actual involvement with the world. And nine times out of nine-and-a-half, the critic never says a word, arduously forging those mental daggers that stay stabbed in his memory. Even if he has the gall to let loose, those insults stick with him, and he perpetuates the harshness of his own criteria—and the child slides on, to play another day.

We do not realize it (we fallen ones), but in judging others, we judge ourselves. Take note, ye resentful downtrodden, for the King of the Trivial will—I promise you—one day fall victim to his own knives. For in cracking that uncreative joke, he has unknowingly set a standard—a standard that he is now slave to fulfill. And time will pass, and he will get comfortable, thinking that he can have his life and murder it too…when just then he’ll see himself in an unflattering light, catch a laugh’s updraft, or—God forbid—discover himself taking self-forgetful interest in something, and that censor will swing back on its maker.

 

So who is really doing the judging? Near nothing gets said, and what does is interpreted through subtleties of tone and gesture—an incredibly unreliable science, given the variance of idiosyncrasy. We merely assume people’s critiques, in the end. And the blots of blatancy are easily shrugged, if you can see clearly. But returning to the original question—who then is doing the judging? Condemnation is usually a case where it really is all in your head, where imagination runs wild with improbabilities, pure fictions of concealed meaning and unheard gossip.

I will repeat ad infinitum, dear reader, for I want you to see this, to comprehend this obvious fact that has eaten away at me for years, all the more humiliatingly at the discovery of the insight pre-recorded and printed on the very leaves of the trees: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

The problem is a simple one, of values, reiterated now for thousands of years: where does your treasure lie? In your socially constructed (that is, false) self? Or in something else, something deeper and more essential to your character, a commitment by which you place yourself in a position of humility before your duty?

Here I grant your answer. Why is the world so critical? Who do you fault for your social anxiety? You have already guessed: yourself.

 

The social critic is damned to self-consciousness. And in this, God knows we should pity him, even as he cracks another witless curse, even as he laughs through the gates of the underworld. For he cannot escape the merciless gaze of his own idol; we can only hope that one day he will recognize it for what it is, in humility return to the world of things and people.

It is you, you lucky forsaken one, that should rejoice, for you are free from those chains: only be wary that you do not return slap for slap, take on the vestment of the maniac to avoid his gaze. That’s one thing you can’t do, because then the maniac is you, and you still have not escaped judgment. You’ve merely become a masochist.

The critic, oh remorseful maniac, why does he do it? Unfold the mysteries of the human mind! I see only an endless chain of inheritance, exacerbated by the frustration of the victim’s freedom from himself. For that is truly why he grinds you, meek and mild one—he is taking his revenge on you for not being him.

Passivists

What sizzle in the word “pacifist” forebodes the world’s implosion? The shocked stare’s transparency, the slow concretion of fear into obstinacy—yes, I see that you hate me for it.

I’m not one, of course. That’s preposterous, for some eminent and unspoken reason. No, but sometimes I like to pretend—and let me tell you, ideological slaps in the face are way more satisfying than slinging around stereotypical stamps (see hippie, democrat, liberal, etc.). You don’t know what hit you, and you can’t catch a retort as I sit and await the congealing judgment. Why? Oh yes, because you’re a Christian, and now you’re trapped in an irony you can’t quite catch: you hate me for assuming the duty, yours and you know it, which you’ve decided to read over (as the Spirit guides you to blot out the very Spirit of the text). And the hate circles around your conscience and gives drowned Guilt a second bite…because deeply, you know that’s wrong too.

Hopefully you see the humor of this sloppy labeling system of yours: I am not a Christian, because I value peace, freedom, tolerance (NT style). You are a Christian because you value ignoring your own complicity, demolishing divergences from complete cultural prostitution, and general mental laziness. And this last is what we call Love, children. Praise hate then, and just call me the Anti-Christ. Behold, Christian, the offspring of your illness.

Funny? It would be funny if the thousands of deaths weren’t such a numerical nuisance in the way of bright sights and sounds, money in the bank, and children to leave unloved. Ah, this is life. Blessed be the Lord who has bestowed such riches upon us.

A few enigmatic insights for you, brother:

1.) You are not always right.

2.) Jesus was not a Republican.

3.) Or White.

4.) Or Rich.

Meditate on these spiritual truths, my brother, and perhaps one day you too will enter the realm of Reality. You cannot be saved if you do not exist.

Query:

If a Christian needs his Bible to tell him what to do……….
………
………
…is he really a Christian?

Observation simply attests: people are incapable of trust. And trusting God is not so simple as strict adherence to [an arbitrarily accepted subjective interpretation of] a book—however holy or acclaimed, however stripped of substance, however abstracted into desultory systems of slogans. In fact, that faith may be just the opposite of true faith, for it conceals a deep hesitancy, a deep mistrust of any active impetus. Humanity hides in the finite, but it is the Spirit that gives life.

We have facilitated to the point of falsification.

If faith is the ticket, then the Church will be turned away.

Amen

Yes, an ash-absolved piano to my right; yes, a cheap coffee table in perfect leg-length, dense books abundant and the gray taste of hot tea on my tongue: I am alone. Here I sit before the well-worn throne of poverty’s wry wealth. Here I bow over the keyboard’s chattering sacrament, the shuffled alphabet’s silent song to chaos: after months of soul-suffocating misery, I am reborn. Give me your hand, friend, as I tread from the cobwebbed womb of staticity’s constriction. I will not look back.

Yes, Indeed

"Yes, if you call out for insight
and raise your voice for understanding;
if you seek it like silver
and search for it as for hidden treasures,
then you will understand the fear of the Lord
and find knowledge of God."

Proverbs 2:3-5

On Luck

Redemption's psalms are only sung
Over sighs of relief,
And virtue taunts from the folds
Of good fortune.
Hence, the fine fellow
Both bores and disgusts,
Because his salvation
Was no work of art,
No push toward freedom,
No dance across coals.
Spoiled on habit and inheritance,
With homes and thoughts
Rarefied right out of reality,
The lucky curse the honest.

Rolled from the womb
Like a gambit of the gods,
We pray to saints for lucky breaks
And then paste them on our resumés.
We are not our own,
And yet perceptions sing siren-truths,
And we swear we have a say.

I say
Prove it.

Search

People don't grow--they just change clothes. To grow one must be committed unconditionally to the ideal, so that one's self is never truly possessed but in its pursuit. Which entails an implicit apostasy from the religion of the given, the immediate, the apparent--yea, from the very idea of self-possession--so that what one deeply is cannot be grasped in what one has inherited.

We become, for being hides in potentiality, revealing itself only in retrospect.

Too Much Reading, or, Paging Apostasy

I miss the distance of criticism.

To stand aloof in the slightly pained stance of unutterable uniqueness—that is the faint implication of commentary. The calm gaze of the critic glows forth from the singular abundance of an ossified criterion chiseled to perfection: the honing of the self.

And this distinction, the incommensurable contrast between the individual and his environment, the slow space of brewing between the comprehensive gaze and the crafted response--this I miss in the monolithic lethargy of unpunctuated comprehension, the guilty gluttony of mere knowledge. The protracted inhale must give birth to my sigh, both enraptured and fatigued with the inestimable intricacy of life.

And yet even these verbose exultations ring of over-richness, of a spoiled intellect, the mind's consumerism...

I must speak. And the world, my insatiable interlocutor, both aggravates and enchants as I try to get a word in. To respond to life's ecstatic soliloquy—that is the vanity that shames me into a stutterless silence.

To You

I'm honored that all the omnicompetent world has in some superseded stage of life effortlessly mastered the elementary discipline of being what is the eternally elusive object of my parched becoming; I respect with the utmost solemnity the universally implicit understanding that everyone now has something much more noble to do; and yet, for all this, I'm all the more utterly confused that none have as much passion for life as for pretense.

Thank you, you may resume.

Dancers, Glancers, Lancers

There are dancers and there are glancers. That is, those who perceive your treasure and picture it in their hands, and are therefore willing to perform for you--to flay their personalities in any direction you choose to push, if the prize is enough--and those whose appraisal passes right through you, for you are no means to their end, and therefore you are nothing. Nothing but a waste of energy.

Ah yes, and there are the lancers as well: scar-sucklers looking for a nervous system to assault with verbal tackles and emotional rapes. Here there are artists, though: those subtle sadists who have condensed their vengeance into a seed of patience, manipulating the ascetic virtues of the distant days of spiritual striving to add a scent of style to their torture.

Is there any explanation for this state of affairs? Aye, and it reveals why there is no dance of light in the darkness, no poet's gaze praising every pore--for to do that, to give instead of gobbling up another's emotional resources, to gift grace to the inconsistencies, would require silence. Stillness. Thought.

And we all know that only weirdos and lunatics ask for that.

Self-Portrait in a Minor Key

A man walks in rapture down the street with all the trappings of one who sees—his special glasses, his binoculars, his periscope straddling his neck, his thin hand stretched out across his forehead to guard his gaze—and he points to invisible entities for all who cross his path, with ringing fervor and a poet’s taste for precision. Some who encounter his assault merely stare on; others, detecting the irony, whisper behind poised glances and cupped hands, while a few are openly incredulous and say, loudly enough, wanting to be heard, “What a fake.”

For--can't you see?--this man rolling through town with all the equipment and idiosyncrasy of a seer has no eyes.

Something

In my life, in my writing, I want only this: urgency. The urgency of a deeply-kindled purpose. When I am read or heard or felt, I want the onlooker to be--the in-looker.

For the highest honor is for each of one's gilded, scintillating utterances and each act bursting into bloom to be an overflowing, the generosity of inner abundance; rather than the scourged shell, the bad actor's mockery, the hidden shame--that is, need, boredom, laziness, etc.

So yes, poor logician that I am, I ask for the contradictory from life: the frantic pulse of self-creation, the lazy oblivion of inner wealth.

Prayer For Us

A wave's prayer is whispered
As it bows back to the sea,
As it pauses at the peak of its inhale,
Like a pendulum's wink before the swing.
Nursing its hunger for the terrestrial kiss,
Churning, it recedes, rolling back upon
Ecstasy and itself.
Within that foam-hinged boundary,
That damp stripe of the sea's soul,
Where wave awaits rebirth
And only the parched sea's salt is constant--
There I will wait for you.
We will practice Poseidon's rosary,
Swim through his undulating language,
Sing crystal choruses to the rising tide.
Only oceans and angels
Know the value of repetition.

And if the waves could speak
But in that whispered crush
Of green mystery,
Their words would console the sands
With the promise of reunion.

My love, I return.

Exercise

The Gospel of Mark says that at the beginning of Jesus' preaching and healing bonanza--that is, the beginning of his ministry: "When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying 'He has gone out of his mind.'" This suggests not only that Jesus' ministry began very suddenly, but--I think--that he also had a revelatory insight, a fundamental change of perspective, an insight great enough to produce a sudden and unprecedented change in his character and disposition. Recall also that a prophet is never accepted in his hometown. (What changed?)
Not only did the people--who presumably knew him before--think that he had "gone out of his mind"--which itself suggests a major shift in his disposition--but also his very family seems to be surprised by the information.
If this new Jesus--who happens to be the only one we know, apart from such apocryphal gospels as Thomas', whose depiction of the self-consciously divine child-Jesus is here contradicted--rather, if this Jesus is new at all, as the reactions of his family and acquaintances would imply, then what does that mean about who Jesus was before this sudden change? And what does that imply about his purpose and his own conviction concerning it? Most importantly, what does this insight entail concerning Jesus' fundamental nature?

Point, awaiting counterpoint. Seize the present uncertainty: faith, child. Faith.

Conquest

There’s a subtle narcissism to romantic love. Practice in selfishness, as I’ve heard someone say.

She loves you, and you slowly transform her into yourself. If you’re good. Otherwise you exploit her naïve praises, her very nature of worship, to reflect your egoistic fantasies. You don’t have the originality for transformation. And you don’t know yourself well enough to model.

You lover, you imperialist. You conqueror of mannerisms, you stealer of laughter. That praise was meant for world, for God, for creation, and you are guiltlessly reflecting it upon yourself. Tan, boy. Steal her glow.

You obliterate her happiness when it doesn’t hail your glory. Your schemes, disgusting, you schemer, so obvious, so exploitive, and yet you still deceive yourself. You are righteous, justified in your indignation. Yes, you have the right to be jealous. Know your rights and then live by them. Lean on, leaner.

Loss

What if my sins have ruined me? I know I can't court the past—I just want to know if I can still become what I was meant to be. Have I stepped too far in the shoes of my side-demon? Am I condemned to a Euclidean window-view of a bright life in parallel?

&

Writing is a skill in that it takes practice—but the practice is in the intervals. The arduous act of writing is merely a peripheral practice in looseness. Life informs your words.

We humans must practice living.

Dear Society, School, Evangelist, etc.:

I regretfully must decline your offer.



Sincerely yours forevermore,

signed,
Ironic.

In Praise of Atheism

The blistering irony of this entrenched school of Creationists is that every one, down to the last purblind book-burner, seems dead-set on roping the theoretical world down to a base of the most exhausting uncreativeness. The stale, repeated dogmas that exemplify man’s unique capacity to combine a mind-stabbing irrationality with a Grand Inquisitor’s hate; the deep-seated determination, stemming from a well-masked resentment, to debase all freedom and happiness; the anxiety, and, overall, the fear of something completely foreign to them: these things and other unutterable absurdities somehow always combine in just the right proportions to produce those blithering dogmatists—a process which might, with a laughing glimmer of divinity, be the sole stirring argument against an evolution that thins the cowards and weaklings.


The paradox is that most Christians deny God as they affirm him, shout the existence of an all-powerful God while limiting that power to their own ability to conceive its manifestations. All hail the God of the Picket Sign.

But I must ask, is the amount of time and effort, the emotions and souls lying broken on the wayside, the men and women you’ll distance forever with your almighty and arbitrary vehemence—are all these things worth it? Does the how of this divine existence matter more than…than existence itself? Would you, you silly child, argue with God your father if he told you himself that he liked to take his damn time?

Let’s examine the case.

First, the Biblical material. We have a mythological creation story. Correct, kind, blind sir, mythological. Examine the context: historical, cultural, linguistic. In fact, we have two creation stories (catch that?), written about four centuries apart and by completely different traditions. No sir, Moses had no part in this. That’s a fact. In fact, the two stories were not really authored by anyone—they are all that remains of a transcribed oral tradition. And just like the cosmogonical stories of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and all the surrounding….

But let me just stop here, because I have a feeling we have just encountered a larger problem. The problem, Sir Creationist, is that you have already stopped listening to me. If you are a bit more sophisticated, you will take advantage of this pause to launch into your rehearsed assortment of anti-liberal bullshit and condemnations of modern science, painting fallacies through my words and misinterpreting to no end, digressing about my fundamental presuppositions and whatnot. If you are the common Creationist layman sort, you will simply give me a dirty look and call me a damned atheist.

No, sir. I am no atheist. The truth is, I might just possess more faith than you. What? Yes, by the highly scientific definition of faith as non-leaningness, I do. For I am not leaning on my stilted argumentative techniques, my contrived proofs and disproofs or my general hatred of any unimpeded son-of-a-bitch who dares to defy society’s faceless mandates (i.e. God’s eternal Law). Faith is infinite resignation: to give up all that has previously given you that sense of security, all that you have previously relied on, whether it’s your stocks, your bonds, your wife, your groundless theories, your preacher’s jokes, your way of life. Jesus said to lose your life for his sake (Matthew 10:39), to leave everything, and it is peculiarly significant here that he also commands us to have no place to lay our heads.

(You see, I am capable of digressing about the elusiveness of faith, the delicious seduction of an unattainable definition. My metaphors lie pining, my words fall short. Your faith is a legal document. You should be ashamed of your ABCs.)

The goal is to seek the truth without cementing it. The goal is to follow God’s commandment against idols. The goal is to worship God over our theories of how He did it.

But these Christians still murder the wide-eyed mysteries of the universe. I say, long live the atheists, the killers of God—for they have opened up the door to a stranger who knocks. They are the salt of the earth when the salt loses its saltiness.

Diagnosis: Sanity

Religion is the domain of the human spirit. It is a big boy’s game, unassailable by the infantile critiques of science and merely rational people. The illusion is that the faithful (in the wider sense) are lukewarm; in reality, religion is a calling so high that it necessarily breeds a dialectic of faiths pregnant and bursting with the polar void. Either/Or. Either you have faith (i.e. true faith), or you reflect your self-hatred upon the world (i.e. popular faith). Religion is the great irremovable mirror. Either you define your life by constant change, progression, movement—or you wither into a shell of a human being, you murder the world on the altar of your guilt. You win or lose, you live or die, but there is no in-between, and you will be supremely human on either branch—either angelic or demonic in your humanity.

The secular world, on the other hand, calls for the middle path, the wide road, the reasonable alternative. But we are not called to be reasonable. What is reason, anyway? By most accounts, it is merely enlightened self-interest. And that is the fundamental error in a scientific, reasonable perspective on true religion: the reasonable man regards religion as merely antiquated self-interest; he is the true knower. He looks at the sacrifices to the weather gods, the prayers of petition, the benefits of a unified ethic, an us-versus-them mentality, and his reasonableness seems better suited for his own preconceived, unself-conscious presumption: the primacy of self-preservation.

When, in reality, the truly pious are swirled toward a vortex which they do not even understand, they are blinded by a reality that transcends the aims of reason.

The question is not, “Are we ready to embrace reason?” It is, rather, “Are we ready to forfeit the danger of our humanity?”

The mass-movement of faith is essentially faithlessness. This I will, with God and the heavenly host behind me, concede. Faith, defined by its most popular usage, is cowardice; the driving proof of our faith is not what Kierkegaard described—faith itself—and not as the worldly realists demand—Evidence! Evidence!—but rather, our own emotional need. Hence that conservative fear of knowledge, that attack on freedom. The truth is, we want the world to be as somnolent as we ourselves, we demand that they stop interfering with our dreams as we squeeze our eyes shut in pretence of unconsciousness. Oh, we know the world awaits. We just refuse to wake up.

And yet, have I contradicted myself? (Who cares, really?) Truth, as usual, hides her face behind a veil of incomprehensible complexity, a guise of ever-morphing subtlety that forever eludes formulation. For who, really, is the coward here? (“Cowardice is not the crux of the question, I want evidence, evidence! Down, down, down with the praise of human nobility!”) The Christian, who, though perhaps fearful of the empirical assault, though demanding support for his faith (in numbers, in “proofs,” in signs and wonders—all contradictions of faith, at bottom), still manages to maintain his human ascendancy, believes without seeing, takes that leap of faith which requires indomitable courage and individuality—or the cold, hard scientist who refuses to risk error, falls back in the same way on his ungrounded assumptions, but with an aspect of grotesqueness in his pompous leaning, who refuses to live dangerously and, yea verily, for that loses his soul, his life, his ineffable particularity—his humanity?

Who wins, between these two? I guess it depends on the game. The atheist loses his soul but gains the world: his precious, concrete, scientific (subjective, debauched, infinitely contingent) world. The believer? Ah, just turn the table and pour God into the adjectives.

Child

This child standing so hazily in front of me
Defeats my heinous attempts at sanctity.

His gaze is empty:
Silent as the stars,
Drinking in the world,
Seeing each crisp occurrence
In the space around him
From the distance of his solitude—

He:
Vapor angel,
Fading
Into
Air.

And I cannot compete.
My gaze breaks with each expectant object;
I cannot converse with any one in particular.
The grown-ups approach,
With chatter and noise,
And I am ashamed to know their lingo.
He lingers on,
Dreaming in the green currents
Of his secret revelations.

Yes, they seem secret even to himself…
And that is his beauty--

Beauty that deprives me of my gravity addiction,
And slowly I float into the marginal realms
Of this noisy room, never
To be heard from
Again.

Elegy

We
Screamers,
We lovers of laughter,
We children dancing
In the warm wavelengths
Of life as it spins us,
Smiling, proud—

At the end and in-between
The hushed holinesses and
The jittering inconsistencies,
The dolorous dark daisies of doubt
In the blind night
And
The redemptive chill
Of the morning’s red caresses,
Underneath the hills
Of our meager thoughts
And howling out of the mountains
Of our emotions,
At the deaths of pets
And in old people’s eyes—

Yes, we know, but not soon enough,
That kisses are from lips
That wrinkle and sigh,
That years are emptied of their months,
Which sob out their weeks,
Which blink through their days,
Which are made of mere hours,
Which are made of mere minutes,
Which pass by in a mere sixty seconds
(Seconds that drip quietly from a faucet
As we sleep through a third of our lives)--
While all the books
Bleed out of print,
While the Word
Drowns in the darkness,
And the world sleeps softly on…

So we fade:
Our dying exhale
Follows fast
On our new-born gasp.
Choose your words wisely.

Existentialism

How the hell do you presume to form a unified philosophy around a fundamental devotion to individualism? The myriad divergences are dizzying. The paradox is apparent. The devotees are self-baptised saints. The dogmatic god is dead and from the soil over his rotting body grow flowering acts of ownership.

On Seeing (or, I'm Sorry, You Hyperactive Sentence Snatchers)

Occasionally, in some un-searched corner of my day, as life swirls about me repeating its sardonic maxim that I am not in control—mocking me, pinching and poking, and then, like a playful father suddenly addressed by a business associate, straightening up with impenetrable features and a stone-like jaw—yes, as life spins about me like a myriad of streaming faces circling a dizzy carousel, and I am running and flailing about in joy or despair (it doesn’t matter which—only the movement brings the paralyzing realization)—occasionally, my chaotic, desperate spasms coincide with life’s undulating waves of faceless motion…and I catch a still-framed glimpse of the force that is so absentmindedly tossing me about. An he, in shock, in indignation that such a singularly muddled creature as myself—a creature born into emptiness and doomed to either a bitter, dark honesty (graying with age to a nasty pessimism) or a self-deceit so strong it must continually change faces to avoid falling apart—he, almost embarrassed that such a naked, tear-streaked child should happen upon him as he tinkered with the next trap to hurl at my feet, his face involuntarily contorts in unveiled conceit and he slaps the spinning globe into an even more fearful whirl, casting me once again into the pressing darkness of my centripetal void….

And eventually I forget the time-tucked pause. But sometime later, when the winds have whistled countless tunes to my dancing toes, when my dialogues with eternal days and hours have slowly and profoundly twisted and kissed my deepest being into new shapes and rhythms, after my path has diverged at such subtle points of sin and redemption from its previous direction—in short, when I have so consistently lived in the moment so as to be completely transformed in my power of forgetting—then, unexpectedly, the textures once again catch, the revolutions of an overpowering Life and my tiny, virginal one coincide and entwine for a silent eternity. And when again life has outsmarted me, and world which encompasses my narrow fantasies has proven too proud for me to discover to any extent but that which both teases in its gasping brevity yet quenches some unknown area of my soul—when this happens, it seems undeniable that there is a progression slowly forming, that these seductive and elusive slaps of reality are forming some mysterious and inimitable story, some dialectic among the gods concerning my fate, spoken in a language I cannot comprehend, but which, at such hopeless points of resignation that I am turning to give up, I catch a familiar turn of phrase. And the universe is a twinkling puzzle expanding around me, and I am its center, and God’s glory is blinding me from every direction. And I never forget.

Wrap

Angel, reappear.
The plains of my sadness
Roll out across the world,
Curving the earth,
Falling forever,
Torturing the cascading orbit,
Forever fictionalizing ground
As a dream of the gravity-stricken.

Return, dark angel,
Warm goddess of the night;
Return, silent siren
Of the small smile
And the incandescent giggles:
I’m drowning in the void of your absence.

Were you apparition or delusion?
These streams sing chaos
Through the empty fields
And the crickets croak dryly,
But my footprints wink mutely with the wind
That I have gone.

Laughing star,
I search your source.

&

Why is the world such a desolate place?
Because people are lonely.
Why are people lonely?
Because there is, at the deepest core of human nature, an incommensurability (quoth Kierkegaard) with the world. That is, an insatiable thirst screaming from our souls—and it is going unquenched. Why do we hide—behind friends, beneath alcohol, within dogma? Because we do not know who we are. We haven’t met ourselves. The irony: that knowledge which needs no source but ourselves—that is, self-knowledge—that is the one knowledge we have not the tiniest tickle of.
Hence the black-hole of modern science—gorging itself on nasty theories of the corporeal world, ever eating, never full—and why? Alas, not because the scientist has a deep-welling passion for the art (yes, the art) of empirical observation, but because he is escaping himself, that anonymous naked screamer on the wet streets of his soul’s cold midnight. Behold, the holy oblivion of objectivism: to transform all individual (perhaps irrational) aspects of one's self into a strangling blankness of methodical suicide. The scientist systematizes to escape. Indeed, escaping—like the professional lounger who dreams in cubes and technicolor, like the drug-addict who sells all (yea, even himself) for that numbed oblivion, like the aging woman I saw last week, saying, as she sat world-weary on the couch, “Oh, you know I don’t think after 4:30.” All living is a tumbling flight from the heights of existence, an escape from the pain of an inner glance. For what would one see there, beneath the mask constituting every aspect of one’s countenance? Just what we all fear: facelessness.

&

Only in a moment’s self-reflecting ecstasy can I forget: life is a never-ending oscillation between pain and pleasure. Sometimes I get motion sickness.
The movement seems slow but the changes are sudden. One moment I am sitting on a couch consumed by a depression that growls in the bowels of my being, and then I exhale a quick prayer or recall the ripple of a smile across her face—and the waves have receded, the clouds have cleared, and the night’s gnawing hunger has been spontaneously transformed into the dazzling infinity of the first day of summer.
Or else the other way. An unconscious harmony underlines every word I speak, every itch I scratch, every sound that breaks on my melodious ear. The world is for once a perfect sphere, the people so perfectly proportioned across its spinning surface that the revolution breaks into a divine balance. And suddenly, the tower, built so high and so steadily that my conscious attention had never rested on it, topples down; children scream, mothers mumble drunken diaries at a cluttered kitchen table, and Satan falls again onto the fragile world, breaking and bending anew all my clever constructions.

&

Kafka said that writing is a form of prayer. Here is my hunched back, Lord—here are my nervous fingers! My hands fly anxiously across this keyboard, out and in, coughing and cackling, meeting briefly in the middle only to fly apart, never joining in solemn supplication.
I can’t do anything, because I want to do everything. But something tells me that that’s not good enough, that I can’t fall back on a mere desire to be great. I have to collect myself in a holy act, and verbal vomit does not suffice.
The problem is, my standards are too high. And running in stubborn parallels are the two competing urges: writing and writing well. There’s a major distinction here: I can’t write because I need to write well, and I can’t write well because I haven’t written. That is, writing well takes practice—and practice implies a lack of greatness, which I cannot tolerate manifested on a page. So I’m stuck. I’m paralyzed by a lack of talent.
And yet I feel called not only to be patient—that is, to realize that being is essentially becoming, and that I’ll never get to a stopping point, and therefore will never be satisfied with where I am—but also to take hold of this present immaturity, to squeeze life’s fruit for all its joyous juices, to drink in my receding childhood—but also to practice. Not only to endure weakness, but to take to the field and chase it. Laughing as I fly.
The aggravatingly practical maxim slaps me in the face on every rotation (I spin, it’s steady): writing well takes practice. And practice implies imperfection. So, I must learn to tolerate imperfection.
That’s truly the heart of the problem: I’m a perfectionist. Sure, I’m not freakishly neat, and my car sits stained by my inattention, but perfectionism is usually partial, anyway. Most people have it and keep it well-caged. My feeling is that some amount of perfectionism is required for status as an interesting person. It’s the ones who are sane in every aspect that bore me to death. No one keeps score in an asylum.
Nurse your neuroticism. (Life is passion.)

Plagiarism

Readers! That clandestine phenomenon, that hidden selfishness—readers are merely lazy writers, preferring the easy feast on the fruits of another’s tedious labor to the strain of that solitary scribbling, the dreamy recline to the dolorous hunch, the concentrated potency of what took hours to line up to the nakedness of one’s inability. We read to fictionalize our own originality.

For to read—that is, to read well—is to create. Oh no, no, I banish that postmodern relativism that dethrones the conquering author to praise the impoverished reader. (I prefer the divine mandate of a poetic tyrant to that gross textual democracy.) But to read is to participate in the author’s creation. Anything less is skimming.

We, the readers of great books, are the envious, the malicious. We hate the writers we praise the most. In the act of reading them we reveal how much we want to be them, and yet cannot, else we would be blinking at the desk instead of yawning in the recliner.

(What else, other than colorful pillars of plagiarism, are full bookshelves?)