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.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Saturday, February 7, 2009
&
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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