Lightning, Mirror

It Wasn't Me

2012-01-29T07:38:00.000-05:00

I am thinking about the movement of the mind.

When I am alone and without distraction, my mind produces an object for its own attention. My first impulse is to call this object a thought, but that is too singular, too steady-state. Better would be to call it a thought-complex.

I am alone, the room is quiet, and some thought-complex fills my mind. Here it is. Now, what do I do with it? It is dynamic. It contains tensions within itself. It wants to change, so it does. I now see a new face of the object--this is how it happens.

I am interested in something that happens often enough, at least to me, that I'm a bit surprised that I've never read about it. I should think this is a common experience, and yet it is strange--if you think about it.

I am often amused by what my mind does. My mind entertains me ...

(There seem to be two basic ways this can happen--either the thought-complex moves in a surprisingly bizarre/humorous manner, or it transforms, in a seemingly prosaic fashion, into some ridiculous new result.)

... the mind surprises itself: the thief uses his left hand to pick his right pocket.

[this is why I love writing fiction]

And to actually make it exciting, the thief had to pretend that he didn't know if there was anything in the pocket in the first place.

I am obsessive also, for better and for worse, and maybe not everyone is like that. I can run a phrase or a thought or a melody through my mind over and over, for hours or even days--I'll keep working at it until I get it right, which means I'll keep working at it until I discover what right is. But this condition of self-ignorance, which is required if the mind is to surprise itself--the unexpected irruption of an old memory: a smile long forgotten. If I did not expect it, then how, or why, did I retrieve it?

The mind contains many voices: I am only one of us.

I am playing with this idea, and I have no idea what shape it will be in when I finally put it down. And yet, there is nothing else at work here besides my own mind. My mind cannot predict what my mind will do.

---

Of course it's impossible to actually talk about this. Or I could say that I will only ever be able to talk about this, but I will never be able to say it.

---

Could I force it--just to prove myself wrong, for the hell of it--and compel my mind to move along a preconceived track? I really don't think so. Maybe.

---

After hours of solitude, some ridiculous thought made me laugh, and the sound of my laugh made me think. I hadn't spoken all day. The sound came out of nowhere, somewhere around dinnertime.

It broke the spell, and cast another. This.

So, if the mind is simultaneously both the comedian and the audience, then what is the joke? . . . this is the way to the construction of a Holy Trinity.

I read something like that somewhere.

So went Saturday afternoon. It was bright and cold outside.

Transported, Rapt

2012-01-28T14:17:00.000-05:00

When the divine light shines, the human light sets . . . and this is what happens to the race of prophets. For our reason leaves home at the arrival of the divine Spirit, and at its departure the former returns. For it is not lawful for the mortal and immortal to dwell together. Hence the setting of reason and the darkness around it beget ecstacy and god-given madness.

--Philo of Alexandria

Dream Another Dream

2011-10-23T07:31:00.000-05:00

I'm transitioning out of the imaginary world I've been living in, and this post will be a sort of real world confirmation of that shift for me.

I've completed a readable draft of Yesterday's Sirens, which is the long chapter in Pilgrims Dream concerned with Orestes Herpetulian and his misadventures with the Herd (giant, mutant rats with weird psychic abilities) in the Fresh Kills Landfill, aka the Dump. I still have a few notes for revision, so there are still a few drafts to go, but I'm pulling my imagination out of that world. There is no more imaginative work to be done there. From now on, my only thoughts on Yesterday's Sirens will be issues of craft.

I feel a sense of relief and freedom, even as I'm a bit saddened to think I'll no longer be running with Orestes & K and the rest of the Dump crew as they deal with the Herd. I went deep into their world, and I've lived with them for a long time. (Orestes will continue in the rest of Pilgrims Dream, but he will be transformed and in another context. K is done for now, but he's been running in my imagination for about 15 years already, and I'm sure he'll be back around somehow.) I can't really explain what it's like, if you haven't experienced it yourself. There's an entire world in my imagination, the world of the Dump and the people who work and even live there. I've been building that world for a long time. I've dreamt in that world. I've watched it change gradually. So now it's time for goodbye, and probably not a moment too soon.

The chapter is basically about how Orestes' life falls apart. He goes all the way down to nothing, and doesn't even have his own sanity by the end. It's a strange thing to keep in your head for an extended period. In the context of the novel, Yesterdays Sirens is a chapter, but in itself it is the length of a novella (20,000 words) and could stand on its own. Now, my imagination is hugely important to me, and for that reason I respect it, which means I respect the dangerous power it can have if not handled carefully. The truth is I put myself out on a ledge with this chapter, and Yesterdays Sirens isn't a story I'd tell if I didn't know what comes after, about the reintegration and uplift to come.

An experience this weekend confirmed for me that it's the right time to leave. I went to see a performance of The Caretaker by Harold Pinter--I didn't know too much about the play and went based on my admiration for the theater company putting it on. It turned out to be about a drifter getting on in years, moving from place to place, and he's taken in by a couple of crazy brothers who have a sort of derelict building. They give him a bed, and that's all: it's not like they're trying to reestablish or reform him. You get the feeling it's the guy's last chance--he won't be able to hustle his way on the street much longer, and he's already far gone enough that he's not going to get help from anyone else. But the brothers turn on him and kick him out. The play ends. I thought, Jesus Christ. Watch a man lose it until there's nothing left to lose. It'll stop your heart. The play has the same basic arc as Yesterdays Sirens, and the correspondence was difficult for me to confront.

Then, later in the night, in a bar at a birthday party, there was a man with a guitar. He didn't seem to have a friend, and he approached every group in the bar strangely. He came uncomfortably close. It was like he forgot how to talk to people. At one point, he was playing a song at me, sort of forcing it on me, and then he broke off and went to the other side of the bar. I thought, Thank God, maybe something else will distract him. But he returned to me with his guitar case in hand, and out of it he pulled a decent sized piece of tupperware, which he opened to reveal the marijuana inside. He then asked if I wanted to smoke a joint. This sounds perfectly normal, like the sort of thing that might happen in any bar in Prague. What I can't quite explain is that he did these things without competence--when he showed me his stash, my only thought was, Someone's gonna rip you off soon. It's one thing to pass a joint to someone you've just met, and it's another to flash a substantial amount of drugs in front of the eyes of strangers in a public place. It was like he thought we were friends because I let him play a song at me for a few seconds. I wondered how long he would manage to keep his guitar. When I told a friend about the play I'd seen earlier that night, how the coincidence disturbed me, she said people don't become homeless (meaning the crazy sort of homeless) overnight, that it's a gradual process. The guy with the guitar was no longer able to communicate with other human beings. He was just enough in our world to talk at people. It was obvious that he wanted to connect, but he just didn't know how to do it. He's in an intermediary stage, so he can still manage, though just barely, to be in a bar and not get kicked out.

After spending so much time with a character who's losing it, then to see a play that powerfully echoes that, and then to meet such a character in the flesh, yes, I'm ready to move on. I've started to feel like I'm the one who's losing it, and that's what I mean about the dangerous power of the imagination.

So now it's on to Aleister Von Dirk, the unknown writer in exile, and his search for the angelic language, which he looks for on long walks through the empty streets of Mala Strana after midnight, where he meets Sophia Aurora, that strange, beautiful woman--then the powerful shock of his meeting with Agents Grossberger and Troutslop, who open up a larger world to him--and this is perfect timing, because winter in Prague is the season of such magic.

Taking Note

2011-09-18T16:18:00.000-05:00

Hang with me until I get to the part about coincidences. First I have to work backwards.

--

I keep all sorts of notebooks. Some might say I keep too many notebooks, that if I'd focused exclusively on my novel, I might've completed Pilgrims Dream years ago. Maybe so. I don't care: my notebooks make me happy.

Obviously I have a notebook expressly for the novel. I also have a small notebook I take with me everywhere in order to catch the occasional inspired thought, to remember the name of a recommended pub, whatever; quotes go in there too. I keep a journal, and in addition to that I keep a dream journal. (Writing your dreams immediately upon waking helps you to remember them, and analyzing those entries in a particular way helps you to have lucid dreams.) I have a notebook that I use with my students, which I also use in the Czech lessons I'm taking. I have a small notebook into which I copy my Czech notes so I can carry it always in my bag and review while I'm riding the tram or sitting in some reception area. I have a notebook for hand-copying what I consider to be great works of literature so that even the smallest amount of that brilliance might rub off on me through some process of sympathetic magic. There are other notebooks I neglect, and unfortunately you could probably throw Lightning, Mirror into that category, if there can be such a thing as a digital notebook, which I'm not really sure about.

Not too long ago I came up with an idea for another notebook. I didn't have any extras handy, so I decided to start it at the back of the small black everywhere notebook and work my way toward the middle. The idea for this fledgling notebook is to record coincidences.

Keep it simple. The date, and the details of the coincidence. It doesn't have to be life-altering. I'm not trying to figure out what anything means, so it doesn't have to be meaningful, whatever that means. All it requires is a moment of, Huh, that's weird, and it goes onto the list. For example, I was walking to a lesson, and during the whole walk I had Satisfaction by the Stones in my head. Round and round. When I got to the pub where I meet my student, I sat down and realized Satisfaction was coming through the speakers. Nothing big. But it caught my attention, and that's enough. Write it down.

Basically I thought it'd be a fun list to keep. It'll be the sort of thing I'll enjoy looking back on after awhile. I don't expect to find scientific proof for Jung's theory of synchronicity or anything. Some people collect stamps, and I've decided to collect coincidences.

But today I noticed a strange development.

As I wrote a new entry, I got the idea to go back and underline in red the specific object of the coincidence. In the above example, I underlined Satisfaction. Then I thought to underline the names of the people involved. That went in green. Another idea: underline the places where they happened. Do that in blue.

(This is why I had to work backwards at the start.)

A larger perspective came over me, and I realized I was beginning to analyze these coincidences in the same way that I used to analyze my dreams, back when I was more diligent about it.

This creeped me out.

It would seem that I've transmuted the dream journal into a waking-life journal. O, how do I express this?! A journal is a journal: what happened, what am I thinking about, etc. It's a way to unload and maybe untangle some knots. But to keep a dream journal about real life is something else.

This technique of analysis, when used upon dreams, alerts you to the patterns of impossibility within your dreams so that in some future dream, you will consciously recognize the old, familiar impossibility as a consistent component of your dreams, your dreams, so suddenly you realize, Hey! I'm dreaming!

Now I'm doing that with real life. Will there come a moment when a similar recognition flashes upon me, and I shout, Hey! I'm living!

I don't know. I'll see where paying attention takes me.

Fear

2011-08-13T08:32:00.000-05:00

About writing: two months ago I decided to stop all work on Pilgrims Dream, and I'm nervous about jumping back in. It feels like the right time, various cycles have come together in this moment, and after about nine months I finally have my lucky fountain pen back in working order.

So what is it that lurks in this hesitation?

I have a lot of fears tied up in writing. Fear of failure. I'm not sure, but maybe fear of success also. Fear that my talent and ability don't match my ambition. Fear that I don't have the skill to communicate what I believe is worth expressing. Fear that I am not who I hope to be.

My laziness terrifies me. I fit the slacker role well enough, and I even embrace it, but for this desire. I want to be admired and respected for my writing, and yet it's been almost a decade since I completed anything for serious publication. I want to be admired for something I've yet to achieve. I want to be someone who I am not.

Since I am not yet the person I hope to be, I fear that I don't allow myself, in the present, to connect to the people around me. Maybe I want everyone to connect to the person who I am not, and I think of myself as a temporary mistake, so I keep everyone at a distance, for now at least, waiting for the day when they can connect to the person who I want to be. And maybe that day will never come, and maybe I will never have a true human relationship.

I'm terrified that my life is drifting wreckage and without purpose. Last night in conversation I said, "I have no long term plans." And then I added, "I used to." I think of Prospero, who recognized the moment of his fate, who saw the star his destiny hung upon, and I wonder if I've already missed my star. Who knows what might've distracted me.

I fear that I'm petty and misguided for all of this, that I'm terribly flawed, that this need for my work to be admired--work I sometimes think I might never complete anyway--that my entire personality is founded on a mistake, a wrong intention. I should want to be happy, I should want to love, I should want to create, and none of those right intentions would give rise to all these fears. I must be doing something wrong.

In the last two weeks, two people have told me, in unrelated contexts, that it's crucial to confront your fears. I hope that's what I'm doing now. I'm not done yet.

My ambition terrifies me. I want to create something great, brilliant and true, with a strong heart and a clear mind, something rare and therefore maybe impossible, or at least beyond my reach. I fear that my ambition far outstrips my potential, and that I in turn use this as an excuse. If I've inflated my ambition to the impossible, then I will always count myself as a failure. If I will always be a failure in my own eyes, I have the perfect justification for laziness. But it's one thing to never feel success and another to never give it a shot.

What is failure? What is success? Why do I care about these words?

What will I be when I am old? I see a man alone who once dreamed of writing something great but never accomplished it, even as he let that dream justify a life half-lived. Shouldn't I have a long term plan? Shouldn't I be making moves today to secure a better future? I tell myself I only need fiction to be happy, and that anyway I've found myself in a fantastic situation, a place maybe others would dream about--I love this here and now, living in Prague--and thus I let my life, my future, go down the drain.

I don't know if I'm deluding myself further with this entry, if what I'd like to think of as courageously hunting down my personal demons is in fact only a pose--that it's only something I believe a writer should do. Maybe I am imitating the person I would like to be instead of being myself. Maybe everything I am is a farce. Maybe I don't even know myself, and if that's true, how could I ever find anything worthy of communication?

I've been here before, so I've seen what doubt can do to me. But how can I know when it is too much, and when it isn't enough?

I have felt destiny and magic in my life. I watch for signs and allow myself to be led by them. I seek them. I wrote earlier about the two people who spoke to me about facing fears--I attribute a mystical force and purpose to such coincidences. Life feels empty and dead to me when I don't see these signs. But maybe a coincidence is nothing more than a coincidence. Maybe I've turned my attention and intelligence to this charmed, spooky fantasy world because I don't have the necessary rigor of focus to discern reality. Or maybe these signs are real but not sympathetic to my purposes. Maybe these signs are meant to misdirect me. I used to do the rational thing, and since then I've been doing the intuitive, imaginative thing--it seems I'm capable of getting lost no matter which compass I hold.

A thought just came to me.

(The fly from the fly-bottle.)

I specifically remembered the story of the Egyptian goddess Isis: her husband had been murdered, and she didn't have the power to restore him. So Isis tricked Ra, the more powerful god, into revealing his secret name to her. By possessing that secret name, that word, Isis gained control over Ra's power, and she then used it to resurrect her husband.

It is the word that holds the power. It is the word that brings life from death. It is the word that conquers.

I have named my fear.

Secret Passages

2011-08-02T05:05:00.000-05:00

It's when reality goes berserk that I confront my all-too-human prejudice for a rational order. This, here, now: liminality. Into the secrets of the unexpected.

Yet There Is A Method

2011-07-25T14:49:00.000-05:00

It crept in gradually, over months, maybe seasons--it's unnoticeable, that shift, and I'm talking about from high to low. And really I don't want to talk about that part of this so much: just what's necessary. At my best, the world lights up. Inspiration in every moment. Often it comes as synchronicity. It makes me want to jump up and run off into some excitement: it lurks behind any and every corner. And everything comes so easy. Brilliance just happens and I'm astounded by the words and the relationships of ideas that somehow appear in my mind, as if I'm a spectator to it all. It's wonderful.

Then it calms down. It takes a long time. Synchronicity turns into coincidence. Maybe I feel a bit more "balanced". Because maybe another way to describe that high part I was talking about is to call it mania, and after awhile, I think, Jesus Christ, I need to freaking relax for a little while. So I do. Life starts to feel normal, and I'm glad for the break.

But the slope doesn't stop. It takes a very long time. Normal becomes dead so slowly that I don't notice it. It gets hard to imagine a world of synchronicity--coincidences themselves disappear. It's not a question of a subjective assignation of meaning, because when I get low, there's nothing for me to project anything onto. The world, myself included, is a set of facts. Useless, boring. What you see is what you get, and that's all that you'll get, and that's all that it is: worthless. Relationships are facts. Personalities are facts. Works of art are facts. Governments are facts. Wars are facts. Jobs are facts. Facts are facts, and no point to any of it.

So a few months back I bottomed out. I was desperate. I tried, but it wasn't the kind of boredom I could shock myself out of. That's how I knew I was in trouble. But it was also exhilarating--I'd been there before, I'd learned how to conquer it, and it had led to one of the greatest seasons of my life. I knew I could do it again.

I knew I had to.

This is my method.

First, strip to the core.

For me, this means go to work during the day. Otherwise, drop all habits. It means stop writing, stop reading, stop wondering about whatever obsession has gripped me. The trick here is to stop following my mind. I meditate every night for at least an hour. In my meditations, I don't try to visualize a better life or white light coursing through me or anything like that. I actively try not to think about anything. At this point, I know my mind is too far gone to be trusted. What might appear to me as inspiration is in fact distraction. It's difficult to train the mind to emptiness. At first, maybe I catch it for a moment. With time and practice, I get better. I can go deeper into it, for longer stretches.

I meditated for a month before I visited Ireland with my mother. I already felt better by then. I knew I wasn't done with the process, but I felt good enough to enjoy myself. It was ok to put things on hold and take a break. But I will get back into it, training myself to nothingness. The best adjectives to describe the mind I'll have when this is done are strong and clear. Figure another month or two of heavy meditation and avoidance of distraction, and then I'll be ready for the next step.

That's where things get interesting.

It's crucial to remember that the process is slow. For this, I admire the alchemists. An instantaneous transformation doesn't stick around for long. If you want to change lead into gold, it'll take time. They timed the phases of their work by the stars, which mark the seasons.

After the mind is cleared, it is powerful. I can't predict exactly what I'll do then, because right now my mind is still swimming in distractions. But, it'll have something to do with filling my imagination. A clear mind is good for a saint or a philosopher, but I'm more of an artist, so after I get clear, I need to get some raw material so I can exercise my imagination.

There are all sorts of ancient exercises for the imagination. While I was in Dublin, I visited the W.B. Yeats exhibition at The National Library, and I was very impressed by its presentation of his mystical life. Yeats worked with Tattva cards, and I'd like to try that.

Symbols work very well at this stage since they are both simple and gripping. In a sense, they mean nothing in themselves, yet they activate the imagination. I can't describe what happens. Perhaps they provoke the imagination to create relationships. A circle, a triangle, and a square can do very interesting things in a focused imagination. Squaring the circle, and that sort of thing.

I've also been working with dreams for years. But dreams can get a bit more complex and unwieldy, and it's best to keep things simple at first.

When I'm ready for it, fiction is both practice and purpose.

Eventually, if you come from the right beginning, and if you do the right work, and if you do it slowly, slowly, then, eventually, with a little luck and a little grace, you can talk with the angels.

At that point, the trick is to write it all down.

K Gets a Last Name (in Czech?!)

2011-05-26T04:38:00.000-05:00

I've been writing about a particular character, on and off, for about 15 years. His name is K and he's based on a guy I knew in St. Augustine who only went by the name "K". He was a middle-aged black man with a huge gut and built like a certain type of fireman--meaning he was thick, and probably strong though he liked to eat & drink too much beer--and he even had the mustache to go with it.

But that's where his similarity to a firefighter ended, because K spent far too much time, everyday from noon to dark, in the corner parking lot of "Your Neighborhood Grocery Store"--read the ghetto mini-market where I worked during college-- drinking beer and bullshitting with all the other old-timers who hung around sipping 16 oz cans of Schlitz. K couldn't have possibly had a reputable job considering all the time he spent bullshitting on that corner.

But he had a great voice, and he told great stories. He called his penis his "Love Piece". He didn't say "go to jail"; he called it, "going on vacation". He was the oral historian of Lincolnville--the black neighborhood of St. Augustine, FL--and he'd tell you all sorts of stories going all the way back to the early 60's. But his favorite type of story involved inventing some impossibly complex situation that would require him to go to jail in a day or two, each story always more and more believable as he continually perfected his craft, and none of it was ever true. It just felt true, and I learned a helluva lot about fiction by talking to old K. His name for me was Smooth.

--Alright Smooth. So this is my last day. You know I gotta go on a long vacation tomorrow. I gotta do the right thing and turn myself in. Yeah, so this is my last day. Something happen that shouldna happen, but you know I gotta do the right thing, so I'm goin to the station in the mornin.

(That's the direct opening quote from what turned out to be his most memorable relation of an impossibly convoluted tangle of events that would lead to his eventual imprisonment, and of course it was all bullshit--the best kind of bullshit. He told that particular story to me & my boss, to charm us, and when my boss's wife told K to be quiet, K had to laugh cause the narrative tension was lost. The story over, he asked my boss for a can of beer on credit. "You know I'm good for it," he said. And he was.)

The first story I wrote about K was a short sketch for an assignment in a college short story class. I'd never intended to return to him, but every few years, he jumps back at me. He even managed to find his way up to Staten Island in my novel. K can bullshit his way into or out of just about anything, I guess.

So, last night's dream:

I'm in a school bus, painted white for some institution, which I represent somehow. We're in a flat, barren landscape: red dirt to the horizon. We pull up to a primitive guard tower where there's a gate to a chainlink fence. The guards don't want to grant us entrance. Someone in my party says we're here to see K--that's the magic word that gets us in.

I'm in a control room. Five or six middle-aged women are watching about twenty computer & surveillance monitors. They're all dressed normally, like any woman you'd run across in suburban America. There's a pleasant, small office vibe of camaraderie, but I'm the outsider. One of the women asks why I'm here, and the others watch for my answer. I say I know K. Another woman asks, "K Bychom?" I agree without hesitation or doubt, which is strange because in real life I've always resisted giving the character of K a last name. It's also strange because bychom is a Czech word.

They all know and like K, and the mention of his name brightens the atmosphere. They start laughing, telling stories and jokes about K. The fact that I know K makes them like me too. It's clear they love K and his antics, so much that whether or not he's a prisoner in this facility becomes impossible to distinguish.

He's charmed them all.

Build

2011-03-22T07:20:00.002-05:00

Newton's third law of motion states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction--one strong dream deserves another. The horrible gives birth to the beautiful:

[I could be creating, instead of discovering, a connection between these two dreams, and I don't care. To think of them as twins, as negative action and positive reaction, appeals to my scientific/hermetic obsessions. If the connection only existed in my mind, I'm happy to provide the force that brings them together, here.]

--

. . .

I see a man standing a few feet away in a large, open space. Maybe it is me, and I am looking at myself from an outside perspective.

There is an explosion of intuited action, so much that all images blur--I only have a sensation, a feeling of upheaval. A great change has come: now.

I see the man. A giant cosmic cord from the heavens, reaching down like a tendril--it is in fact green--has wrapped itself around the man's heart. This moment is apocalyptic, revelatory: I am seeing what has always existed but was hidden. The tendril is choking the man's heart; it has incredible strength. At the same time, the man's heart has ensnared the tendril. The tendril's natural tendency is to rise, but it has been weighted down.

This is a vision of the heart's darkness, of evil: hatred, fear, anger, envy. The darkness comes from the choking of the heart, though the tendril is not evil--it is also enslaved by the heart.

The great upheaval is the release of both the heart and the cord. They were bonded together as if by enchantment, and I am witnessing the explosive release of that bond. I can't say how it happened.

The man's heart is light. He feels a rush of relief; he feels joy--to some extent, he is transfigured.

The tendril snaps back up to the heavens with a speed and a force unlike any I've seen; it is returning to its natural position in the heavens.

This is visionary: the images flow together like water.

The background is beige, a sort of stone, and I see the tendril, now upright, lock into place in the stone. It transforms into the top of a medieval round tower, a bit like this:

However, I see it from the inside, as if I were looking at a cut away model, a mason's draft. Stairs lead up to the small window at the top of this tower, and the stairs continue upward toward higher towers in a castle too large for me to perceive. The stairs are not complete. The tendril created the top of this tower in an empty space, so the stairs lead downward, and upward, for a few steps, and then vanish. Presumably, where I now see empty space will eventually be filled when other tendrils are released from other human hearts.

I wrote that the tendril seemed to lock into place in stone, similar in color to the pictured tower above, before it transformed into a tower. That's true. However, it is not a mere image; it has some reality. I could physically stand upon the tower's landing, and yet it is also just paint on stone. My perspective pulls out a little, and I see other floating towers, all of the same style, some higher, some lower, some larger, some smaller, and all with stairs leading upward and downward and vanishing into emptiness--I feel that eventually the stairs will all connect and a network of passages will create a magnificent floating castle out of all these as yet disconnected towers. The as yet unreleased tendrils will eventually create a heavenly palace.

The whole of the structure strikes me as sublime, breathtaking--really, it is too gorgeous to describe.

There are a few people. Some are walking up stairs, and others are looking out the small windows. They have some movement, but not much. They are somehow between image and reality. They wear long, colorful robes and generally look like the figures in Raphael's School of Athens.

Though the people are somehow paintings, they also have depth. They are real, but they are in another world, and therefore they appear to me as depictions made in paint on stone.

My perspective zooms in, and upon the inner wall of the first tower, I see text. It is written in ink, as if on paper, scratched out by the hand of some old scribe.

--

The hermetic motto of William Butler Yeats was Daemon est Deus inversus, or, A demon is a god in reverse.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Bathe

2011-03-19T13:02:00.002-05:00

Last night brought the most disgusting, horrifying dream I've ever had. I think I've previously mentioned that I killed my fear response when I began practicing lucid dreaming--perhaps I should've felt fear during this one. In any case, I kept my poise, perhaps absurdly, and that's the only detail that prevents me from labeling this a nightmare.

I normally wouldn't post a dream, but this one was so spectacular that I feel forced to adapt it for Pilgrims Dream. I think I'll work it around for Agents Grossberger & Troutslop and their weird Orientation.

What follows is the dream, unadulterated.

--

I enter a doctor's office that's like a Central Park penthouse. There are no other patients or staff--just my doctor, a middle aged man in a dark suit. We're familiar with each other; he'd operated on me before for the same problem that brings me here today. He takes me into a small operating room. There isn't any equipment--only a table in the middle of the room. The walls are white and bare. The floor is dark wood. I lay down on an operating table. I don't undress.

He begins operating on my brain. I didn't notice, but he's removed the top of my skull. Suddenly I come to, I realize what's happening, as if I'd been sleepwalking until this moment, and I want him to stop. I'm under a heavy daze, but I manage to say, Stop. He comes all the way around and sits on the right side of the table; he pushes over my legs to make room for himself. He's no longer friendly, and he tries to make me say it's ok to continue. I don't. I sense that my consent is crucial to the operation. He holds a needle before my eyes, filled with a brownish yellow liquid, and he injects it into my neck. I remember that I'd had this operation before, and it didn't work, so I shouldn't go through it again. I feel helpless, but I say stop again. The operation is supposedly meant to treat a dream combination of epilepsy and sinus problems. I'm too weak to move. I feel consciousness leaving me, and there is nothing I can do. An awful sensation floods me--these events are in complete opposition to my will, but I'm powerless to influence them in any way. The room goes dim.

He relents, and I come to. I intuit that without my consent, he truly can't continue, and he finally gave up.

I'm led to a room where an assistant is sitting at a desk. She's prepared a sort of cantaloupe fruit salad/shake that also tastes like an orange creamsicle. It's part of the operation--after the surgery, I should eat the cantaloupe/creamsicle concoction. I remember this from the last time I had the operation. It's even a bit of a treat, a sort of reward, and I remember how tasty and soothing it was. I don't know why it's necessary for the operation. In any case, I tell her I don't need it since I didn't have the operation. She gets a puzzled look, and turns her eyes to the doctor who is standing behind me.

As if he's telling a joke, the doctor says, He vomited entire stomach-fulls of blood.

I remember that's a part of the operation, and I realize my mouth is caked with dry blood. Apparently the cantaloupe/creamsicle is to help with this. But I'd thought I'd averted the operation.

I go to a mirror. My skull is shaved. I can see it from all angles. The back of my skull is twice it's normal size. It looks a bit like Darth Vader's helmet. From the front, I can see the back of my skull sagging down and out, almost to my shoulders. I put my hands to the back of my head. My skull is soft and pliant. I push it back up, and it stays lifted for a moment. It's still disgustingly huge. I don't freak out though--I remind myself that the swelling will go down eventually.

I'm piecing together what must've happened while I was unconscious. The doctor is a a butcher carrying out insane experiments. He implanted something in my brain--that's why my skull is so much bigger. It's some sort of device for mind-control.

I see the operating room, during the surgery. I'm vomiting blood, and blood is flowing from my skull. It quickly fills the room. The doctor takes buckets of blood and splatters it on the walls like a madman. He dips his hands in my blood, which has already filled the room up to his waist, and makes handprints on the walls like a child with fingerpaints.

I see the operating room filled almost to the ceiling with my blood. The doctor brings in very special clients--they come to bathe in blood. This is the true purpose of the operation. He performs it regularly, and I'm the first subject to realize what the doctor has actually done. The clients come to this doctor as if to a health spa. Bathing in blood heals them; it gives them power. They swim through my blood as in a pool. I'm under several feet of blood, and immobile--somehow I don't need to breathe. The blood is transparent, so I can see a client swimming above me.

Broken visions:

I'm walking through the office again. I see janitors scrubbing away at the floors and walls. I also see detectives searching for evidence--I assume they are acting on my tip. A detective uses some kind of wand, like a blacklight, and goes over the walls to search for any traces of blood, but the entire office has been thoroughly sanitized.

The doctor is long gone.

--

Appended:

I believe this dream forms a pair with a dream that soon followed: Build.

Addendum: Magical Thinking

2011-01-18T05:53:00.000-05:00

According to Scientific American, magical thinking is defined as:

the belief that an object, action or circumstance not logically related to a course of events can influence its outcome. In other words, stepping on a crack cannot, given what we know about the principles of causal relations, have any direct effect on the probability of your mother breaking her back. Those who live in fear of such a tragedy are engaging in magical thought and behaving irrationally.

In my last post, I wrote about neurochemistry and physical law as opposed to free will. It had become an obsession, and it was not the first time I'd become obsessed with this opposition. I began wondering, during lessons, on the tram, while boiling pasta, Has anyone ever made a free decision in their life? Or are we all riding along like cars on a roller-coaster track, every turn predetermined, every rise and fall entirely beyond our influence, which is in fact nonexistent. And if we are not free to choose our everyday actions, then what is the meaning of freedom? Is democracy a farce? And so forth.

The notion of magical thinking also touches on our tendency to see meaning in coincidence. If we consider my aforementioned state of obsession concerning the opposition of science & free will, then magical thinking suggests I am likely to observe something that speaks to this topic. I am likely to come across such information not because I will attract it to myself in any way, but because it was always there and I am merely more sensitive to its presence. I do not cause the coincidence; my obsession connects otherwise unconnected events.

Less than a week later after I wrote my last blog post, I read this:

When Michel received the letter he was in despair over a theoretical crisis. According to Margenau's theory, human consciousness could be reduced to a field of probabilities in a Frock space, defined as a direct sum of Hilbert spaces. Such a space could be created by elementary electrical activity at a microscopic synaptic level. Normal behaviour could therefore be seen as the elasticity of the field and free will as a rupture within in it; but in what topology? There was nothing in the natural topography of Hilbert spaces that might give rise to free will. Michel was not entirely convinced that the problem could even be posed except in the most metaphorical sense. One thing he was certain of was that a new conceptual framework was needed.

--Michel Houellebecq, Atomised, 267

Back in his kitchen, he realised that belief in the notions of reason and of free will, which are the natural foundations of democracy, probably resulted from a confusion between the concepts of freedom and unpredictability. The turbulence of a river flowing around the supporting pillar of a bridge is structurally unpredictable, but no one would think to describe it as being free. He poured himself a glass of white wine, opened the curtains and lay down to think. The equations of chaos theory made no reference to physical space; their ubiquity meant that they applied as effectively to hydrodynamics as to meteorology, group sociology or the genetics of a population. As a tool for devising models they were excellent, but their predictive capacities were non-existent. On the other hand, the equations of quantum mechanics made it possible to predict the behaviour of microphysical systems with exceptional precision, even perfect precision if one was prepared to accept a purely materialist ontology. It was certainly premature to try and establish a mathematical link between the two. It might even prove impossible. But Michel was convinced that the physical nature and evolution of attractors in neurons and synapses held the key to understanding human actions and opinions.

--Michel Houellebecq, Atomised, 270 - 271.

Because someone invented the term magical thinking, we know that this is entirely meaningless.

Freedom. Voices.

2011-01-11T07:52:00.000-05:00

I've been in a digital retrograde for quite some time. During the summer, I decided to commit to writing in my journal every day as a kind of creative/imaginative therapy, and the habit took so well that it eventually claimed the majority of my free thoughts. My blog posts and even my facebook status updates diminished so radically, maybe even beyond the zero--I don't know that I will reestablish that habitual online presence again. I don't particularly care. I like writing in a journal with a fountain pen.

But today. Today two of my students have cancelled late, so I have a free afternoon and a lot of thoughts to organize. Since they somehow swirl in the universe of Pilgrims Dream, I thought to record them here.

Freedom. Voices.

On an infinite field of equidistant points, no point is distinguishable from another. Start anywhere.

Last night I watched Metropia, a semi-animated Swedish film set in a post-apocalyptic future where all of the metro systems in Europe have been connected by a corporation, Trexx, that would appear to be the only surviving power structure. The main character begins to hear a voice. He doubts his sanity. But scientists at Trexx have developed a tool by which they can insert thoughts into a person's interior monologue. Some worker sits at a desk, like any office job, shirt & tie, watches monitors, reports to supervisors, listens through headphones to his subject's--the main character--thoughts, and can turn on a microphone to thereby plant thoughts into his subject's mind. These plants retain the sound of the worker's voice. It is not entirely mind control. The worker cannot dictate the actions of his subject. He can only plant a thought, which the subject may or may not act upon. In the case of the main character, the subject goes so far as to refuse to accept that the thought originates within himself, but by this, he is set apart.

Voices are a fascinating little dark and largely ignored corner of human experience. I've tangled with them from time to time. Here's the thing: we say, Only crazy people hear voices. And yes, they do, and the thoughts they hear as voices have a powerful auditory quality--though I doubt this last aspect of the crazy-person-experience is very important. We also say, It's impossible not to think, unless you are some kind of Zen master, and even then you can only manage to be thoughtless while you meditate.

It seems to me that to think is to hear a voice. When I've analyzed my thoughts, I've realized that they come in varying qualities--I might even describe them as personalities. Sometimes they are crude, brief, and full of expletives that are somehow meant to be humorous. Sometimes they are disjointed, fragmented, maybe with an aura of striving, but locked up, broken apart, unable to communicate, but if they could, maybe toward coherence, or maybe not. An elegant thought comes now and again; it sounds pretty. Some thoughts run through my mind in recursive cycles, looping through some problem or idea in wider and wider loops, as if orbiting the unattainable center of a problem in an eccentric ellipse, going out further and further with the hope that on this return, by some strange, unidentifiable twist in the path, I'll crash straight through a center, and voila, problem solved: it doesn't happen, and sometimes I don't want it to happen. Sometimes I indulge distraction. Diamonds come too: perfect thoughts I can recognize as such.

Now and again, I have a thought after which I think, That thought wasn't mine. It was someone or something else.

Things aren't so simple.

Perhaps the dangerous move is to identify any voice, any thought, as foreign. Maybe, if you had a machine that allowed you to plant words in another person's mind, the most harmful words you could insert would not be some radical ideology or incoherent nonsense, but simply the words, That thought wasn't mine.

This thought isn't mine.

We buck at the possibility of mind control because it assaults our belief that freedom is an essential human right.

Loop gets larger.

Freedom is such a big word, such an incredibly influential word, at least to us.

I'd meant to mention earlier, without getting too deep, that Pilgrims Dream features a plotline in which Agents Grossberger & Troutslop plant words into the mind of Aleister Van Dirk. I'd stolen this from Gloria Naylor's 1996, which resonated with me because of my longstanding interest in voices.

Freedom is one of the cornerstones of our culture--when we look into a future in which the influence of America and Europe has waned, when we confront China's rising power, we feel apprehensive because Chinese culture, at the very least, doesn't pay as much lip-service to freedom as does ours.

What if freedom isn't a question of rights but of possibility?

To place so much value on freedom is to assume that we have free will. After all, we might think, we cannot fault a person for creating a mind control device if he did not create it out of his own free choice. Is it possible that someone has the bizarre fate to invent the first functional mind control device?

I'm getting loose with my words. But this isn't the novel.

Myths and religions have come down on either side of the free-will/predetermination debate throughout the centuries. Science seems to say that either everything is determined, or everything is a product of chance--whichever is true, it doesn't much matter since human choice doesn't enter the equations. Electro-chemical processes are governed by physical law, without room for human choice, and electro-chemical reactions produce our thoughts and our actions. Maybe they are fated, or maybe they are random, and maybe we were never free after all.

This can easily devolve. Someone might say, if we don't choose our actions, if it is fated, or random, that so-and-so will commit mass-murder, then he is not truly responsible for that mass-murder: it wasn't his choice. Therefore, we shouldn't punish him since we can only hold someone responsible for a freely chosen action. The Judas problem. But remember, if we don't have free-will, to talk about what we should or shouldn't do is a farce. How we choose to respond to mass-murder would also be fated. The crime and the punishment would both be predetermined. There's no stepping out of that loop. If some Einstein could prove that everything is determined by Fate, it would be the most ineffectual scientific discovery in history.

. . . my scientific, philosophical voice.

All the world's a stage
and the script is all around you
is how the script goes

In the beginning was the Word

and words words words

and I heard a Voice, and It spoke to me

as I speak to you

--this thought is not mine--

--that thought was not mine--

as it was in the beginning

Some thoughts lead nowhere.

Fig Leaves, Nudes, & Body Scanners

2010-11-28T07:28:00.000-05:00

The latest American rage is air travel security measures. The TSA requires air passengers to submit either to a full body scan, which sees through clothing and produces a black & white picture of our naked bodies, or a thorough pat down. Some people think that these actions are necessary to maintain our security, while others feel the loss of privacy is too great.

I'm coming at this from a different angle. I want to talk about how we think and feel about our bodies.

As a child, my thoughts about my body were informed both by school and the Catholic church. In religious education, we were taught that our bodies were precious. My body is the temple of my soul. I should consider it sacred. Certainly, we were aware of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden--their nakedness was their shame. But my religious teachers didn't emphasize this shame. Instead we were taught to think of our bodies as gifts from God, and that we should treat our bodies with care. As we grew older and reached puberty, we were taught that we should avoid licentious sexual behavior not because it was evil, but because it indicated a reckless disregard for our bodies, which deserve to be treated with care. Certainly, the fig leaves that covered Adam & Eve's shame lurked somewhere in our awareness, but mainly we were taught to protect our bodies as we would anything holy.

In school, we were taught to protect our bodies. We were taught that we shouldn't let people touch us in certain places, and if someone made us feel uncomfortable, we should tell an adult. The message we heard in school reinforced the message we heard in religious education: though school didn't use words like holy or sacred, nevertheless they instilled the idea that we should be as careful with our bodies as we would with our most valuable possession. We shouldn't flaunt it before everyone, and we should be wary of anyone who wanted to come too close to our bodies.

As I grew older, I became aware of a different way of thinking of the body. It is a classical idea. I realized that some cultures thought of the body as the supreme beauty. The human form is excellence itself. These are the classical Greek ideals, this is the statue of David. Or, from Shakespeare's Hamlet, on our bodies:

In form and moving,
how express and admirable
...
the beauty of the
world, the paragon of animals.

This perspective differed only in how it felt we should approach the gift of our bodies. Instead of asserting that we should protect our bodies, instead we get the feeling that we should actively admire the human body. It is worthy of our praise. To use religious language, we should not hide our bodies away, but we should set them upon a hill for all to see. The body, this perspective maintains, is close to a miracle. The body is the ultimate work of art.

It must be observed that both perspectives placed great value upon the body. They differ only in how they choose to express this common sense of worth.

Now I'll turn to our present moment and the issue of body scanners. Again, I am not at all concerned with the debate about privacy vs. security. I am thinking only of how this reveals our thoughts and feelings about our bodies.

I have heard several people defend the use of body scanners and more intrusive pat downs with this sentence: "I've got the same body as everyone else, so I don't mind."

This is a new perspective, and it is increasingly common. As far as I know, it was not even common when I was a child. The previous two perspectives lasted thousands of years, whereas this new perspective, or so I believe, has only come to be widely held within the last fifteen years or so.

When I say that my body is essentially the same as every other human body and that I should therefore have no problem with an inspection of my body, I assert that my body is worthless. There is nothing unique or sacred about my body. There is no need to protect my body from the eyes or hands of strangers. After all, they will find nothing new under my clothes. This is a disavowal of the religious perspective of the body. Also, it does not express any sense of pride in the body. When I go through a body scanner, I know the inspector is not considering an object of beauty. I am not ennobled by the gaze of my anonymous inspector, and I am fully aware that my inspector is not concerned with the excellence or the magnificence of my human body. Indeed, my anonymous inspector cannot even see my face, which is certainly an integral part of the beauty of our bodies.

Instead, our bodies have become meat.

This is how we think:

There are 7 billion human bodies in the world. There are 3.5 billion penises. There are 3.5 billion vaginas. There are 7 billion asses. There are 7 billion breasts.

In such a context, how can one penis be worth anything? One vagina? Two breasts?

Our individual bodies are comparatively worthless.

I would bet that if you asked TSA inspectors who has just finished work how many penises or breasts they saw or felt during their shifts, they would have no idea. They are only concerned with processing the bodies before them. They are actually trained to view the body as nothing more than meat--they absolutely should not take time to admire the perfection of the bodies before them. Instead, they should dispense with each body as quickly as possible. If there is an extraneous object on a body, they should focus on that object. The body itself is unimportant and should be disregarded as much as possible. We want the assembly line to move swiftly to avoid further delays.

I personally believe every human body should inspire awe, admiration and wonder. But I cannot defend this perspective scientifically. It is a matter of aesthetic or religious belief. I cannot deny that the composition of my penis' erectile tissue is virtually identical to the other 3.5 billion penises in the world.

And yet, though I cannot defend the value I sense in the human body, I feel compelled to express it. And I can't express it better than this:

from I Sing the Body Electric, by Walt Whitman:

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself
balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

The expression of the face balks account,
But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of
his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist
and knees, dress does not hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the
folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the
contour of their shape downwards,
The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through
the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls
silently to and from the heave of the water,
The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the
horse-man in his saddle,
Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open
dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,
The female soothing a child, the farmer's daughter in the garden or
cow-yard,
The young fellow hosing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six
horses through the crowd,
The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty,
good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown after work,
The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,
The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;
The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine
muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps,
The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes
suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,
The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv'd
neck and the counting;
Such-like I love

The Dump Map; Rat Strategy

2010-10-17T10:48:00.000-05:00

I wanted a map so I could better visualize how Orestes Herpetulian gets down to combat with the rats, aka The Herd. This all occurs in the former Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. The gray stripe through the center of the map is the West Shore Expressway. Nowadays this region is being turned into a park three times the size of Central Park. In Pilgrims Dream, this is the setting for an apocalyptic battle between man and rat.

The Herd is comprised of giant, mutated rats that have a spooky group intelligence. They have a leader: an ancient & humongous albino rat called Grandaddy. Orestes considers going native, commando-style, like Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now!, to do permanent battle w/The Herd. No other tactics seem to work. The bureaucracy of the Sanitation Department and the local government overrule any proposal that has a chance of success, and instead the politicians & bureaucrats suggest absurdly ineffective alternatives that will provide financial windfalls to connected men and campaign donors. Orestes is ready to go it alone, man against Herd, as have a few other brave soldiers who now wander the vast mounds--North, South, East, & West--in permanent guerilla combat with The Herd.

This is what leads Herps to the coffeeshop in Manhattan: one last trip into the normal world before he leaves it forever--except he meets the other pilgrims in the coffeeshop.

The rats were originally confined to the East Mound. In The Herd's mythology, rats who die bravely go to the Isle of Meadow. So, The Herd wants to also secure the Isle of Meadow in this life. Thus they attempt to expand their territory strategically in preparation for a final invasion.

The Portal in the Library Leads to the Jungle that Surrounds the Other City

2010-10-06T14:18:00.000-05:00

"Maybe I'll go wild too and dance among the books to the sound of drums, maybe my face at the end of a passage will scare a lady librarian, but it's too late to turn back now. I must go on. I have got too close to the frontiers of the other city; what wafted from there was enough to undermine the last remnants of the network of customs into whose fabric our entire behavior is woven: without that support, the simplest of actions disintegrate into dozens of separate operations, each of which must be built up separately from the foundations out of nothing and then matched up with the rest; one must consider the thousands of possible relationships that arise thereby, so that lunch in a restaurant or shopping become something akin to the labors of Hercules. I must go on towards the other city; the old order will not bear any more patching; it was always full of holes through which shone the pulsations of primordial currents of some kind. And everything indicates that those currents flow from the other city and my hope is that in its center I will discover the spring that is the source of our order and which alone can renew it. It can't be helped, I must go into the library. I don't know what monsters I shall encounter but I think it will not be any more terrible than life in my own city. And besides, I have prepared myself well for the journey." I opened my rucksack and showed him my stock of food, taking out my torch and brandishing my machete above my head.

The researcher sighed. "All right, if you're incapable of lunching in a restaurant, I will lead you into the library."

--Michael Ajvaz, The Other City, 146.

Ltd.

2010-09-13T14:27:00.000-05:00

After extensive analysis, scientists have discovered that Yellow Submarine is The Beatles' best album.

--

I want to write something about scope.

--

Hordes of Beatles fans descended upon research facilities with placards and banners for their favorite albums, most prominently, Abbey Road, Revolver, and Sgt. Peppers. "It's devil-math," proclaimed one protestor, "and those scientists are the devil's minions." Another protestor added, "Until science can prove that the second half of Abbey Road is the most beautiful human creation ever, I have no use for science."

--

When someone asks me if I believe in God, I am initially speechless. I literally have no answer to that question. I have to talk around the question. I say things like, I meditate, or, I like to read religious texts, or, I study religion.

My problem is with the verb to believe. I know how I use it, but not how anyone else will understand it.

--

Many people don't recognize the difference between these two statements:

a) I don't believe in God.

b) I believe there is no God.

--

Language is a double-agent without allegiance.

--

There is a difference between the logical, the emotional, and the intuitive aspects of our selves. However, our selves are usually a confusion of these impulses.

(I can't even think about whether we should or shouldn't be confused.)

This sounds like Plato. But I'm not talking about some ideal or some theory. I'm talking about what I've discovered within myself.

--

Also: the imaginative.

--

When a person of faith rationally asserts the existence of God, I have a positive emotional response. The logical, rational side of me completely disregards their statement as if there is nothing whatsoever to consider.

When an atheist rationally asserts the non-existence of God, I admit I have a negative emotional response. I can't explain or give a reason for my feelings. But I can say that my logical, rational side finds the person's argument revolting, which might be the cause of my emotional response.

--

Science is useful in practical application. Every tool has a proper use.

--

Why do I violently react against the flawed logic of an atheist while I turn a blind eye to the flawed logic of a person of faith?

--

I am lucky.

I wouldn't expect an experiment to provide any evidence for this.

--

I felt the same about Jerry Falwell as I do about Richard Dawkins.

--

A leap of faith is a sign of a healthy intuition.

--

I'm thinking of superstition as an intellectual error. Science is logical, rational, and should replace superstition.

--

If someone asks me if I believe in magick, I am initially speechless. I talk around the question. I say something like, I do magick, or, I practice magick.

I do not believe in magick. Nor do I disbelieve in it.

My intellectual and intuitive understandings of the world don't always coincide.

Sometimes they would appear to be in direct contradiction.

--

I contain Whitmans.

--

A leap of faith is best committed with the full recognition of its absurdity.

--

When atheists quote logic, reason, the scientific method as better than God, I am reminded of religious fundamentalists who disavow evolution or the Big Bang. They make a perfect pair: they are two sides of the same mistake.

--

It's good to have a scientific, intellectual understanding.

A sound intellect recognizes its limits.

--

A leap of faith, when recognized as absurd, indicates that the intellect and the intuition are both fully formed and independently functioning.

--

There is no material evidence for or against the existence of God.

Limits.

If a person should decide to dedicate himself entirely to an intellectual understanding of the world, their position will be agnostic. When asked if they believe in God, they will respond, I have no opinion.

An atheist is a person of faith.

(I can't understand why anyone would make a negative leap of faith; by negative I mean that they assert absence.)

I have spoken with many atheists who think their position is rational.

Since they do not recognize the intuitive root of their position, reason fails to sway their opinion.

If an atheist admits that their position is one of faith, my negative emotional response immediately becomes neutral. Though I cannot understand them, I respect that they don't make the intellectual mistake made by lesser atheists or religious fundamentalists.

I do not use reason to sway these greater atheists to agnosticism.

Intuition, as seen in the case of lesser atheists and religious fundamentalists, can cloud and distort reason.

Reason does not seem capable of influencing intuition.

Therefore, intuition is the greater faculty.

I seek, but have not yet found, an intuitive communication.

Double agent.

Diagnosis: Seeker

2010-09-02T06:58:00.000-05:00

It's funny how Horacio has been changing in these months since I first met him. You wouldn't have noticed, I don't imagine, too close to him and too responsible for the changes.

Why one big metaphor?

He walks around here the way other people look for flight in voodoo or marijuana, Pierre Boulez or Tinguely's painting-machines. He guesses that in some part of Paris, some day or some death or some meeting will show him a key; he's searching for it like a madman. Note that I said like a madman. I mean that he really doesn't know that he's looking for the key, or that the key exists. He has an inkling of its shapes, its disguises; that's why I was talking about a metaphor.

Why do you say that Horacio has changed?

A question to the point, Lucia. When I met Horacio I typed him as an amateur intellectual, I mean an intellectual without rigor. You're a little like that down there, aren't you? In Mato Grosso, places like that.

Mato Grosso is in Brazil.

Along the Parana, then. Very intelligent and alert, up to date on everything. Much more than us. Italian literature, for example, or English. And the whole Spanish Golden Age, and naturally French literature on the tip of your tongues. Horacio was pretty much like that. It was only too clear. I think it's admirable that he has changed like this in so little time. Now he's turned into a real animal, all you have to do is look at him. Well, he hasn't turned into an animal quite yet, but he's trying his best.

Don't talk nonsense, La Maga snorted.

Understand me, what I'm trying to say is that he is looking for the black light, they key, and he's beginning to realize that you don't find those things in libraries. You're the one who really taught him that, and if he's left it's because he's never going to forgive you for it.

That's not why Horacio left.

There's a design to that too. He doesn't know why he left and you, the reason for his leaving, are incapable of knowing unless you decide to believe what I'm telling you.

I don't believe you, La Maga said, sliding off the chair and lying down on the floor. And besides, I don't understand any of it. And don't bring up Pola. I don't want to talk about Pola.

Keep on looking at what's being drawn in the darkness, Gregorovius said pleasantly. We can talk about other things, of course. Did you know that the Chirkin Indians, by always asking missionaries for shears, now have such a collection of them that the number of shears per capita among them far outstrips the figure for any other group of people in the world? I read about that in an article by Alfred Metraux. The world is full of strange things.

--Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch, 133-134.

The Ground Zero Mosque (Transmutating Realism)

2010-08-30T05:44:00.000-05:00

Fantasy and nonsense has invaded our language and culture: if I say, The Ground Zero Mosque, you understand what I'm talking about--even though it isn't a mosque, and it isn't at Ground Zero.

I can hear the Mad Hatter and the White Rabbit explaining the logic of it all to me:

If it isn't a mosque, then it isn't at Ground Zero. Inversely, it isn't at Ground Zero, and therefore it isn't a mosque--however, our truth values are transmutating. Because conversely, if Ground Zero is Ground Zero, and a mosque is a mosque, then The Ground Zero Mosque at Ground Zero must be a mosque at Ground Zero, otherwise it wouldn't be The Ground Zero Mosque. It would be absurd to talk about The Thing That Isn't A Mosque That Isn't Located At Ground Zero: no such (no)thing can exist. Yet, it really does exist. Therefore, it must be real.

Advocates of realism will complain that reality isn't being realistic.

Lions and Tigers

2010-08-11T11:12:00.000-05:00

Borges was a dreamer. I knew that, of course, but it wasn't until today that I read an explicit reference to his ability to lucid dream in one of his stories.

(It should be noted that at the time Borges wrote Dreamtiger, lucid dreaming was thought impossible by scientists. To their expertly trained minds, it seemed absurd that one should awaken consciousness within a dream--it was an oxymoron, or a logical impossibility. One cannot be conscious and dreaming at the same time, they reasoned, just as light cannot be both a particle and a wave: it's a question of p and not-p, which is the foundation of everything. This was before Stephen LeBerge proved the existence of lucid dreaming with experiments at Stanford University in 1977. Thankfully, Borges was not one to let the experts of his time impose a reduced set of possibilities upon him.)

The vignette is more about growing old (implicitly) than it is about dreaming. Still, the reference to a lucid dream is clear and explicit:

As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it's a dream. At those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.

Oh incompetence! My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it's flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it's altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.

--Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers, Collected Fictions, 294.

That Borges should explicitly mention lucid dreaming in relation to tigers is uncanny: one of the most powerful lucid dreams I've ever had involved a lion--not exactly a tiger--at the top of the stairs to the NYC Public Library. Confronting a lion in front of a library couldn't get more Borgesian, unless the dream involved a chase through a labyrinth. It's as if I had that dream in anticipation of reading Borges a year and a half later.

I'd written a blog post about that dream of mine--it contains an extended interlude that describes the lucid dream state--and I was surprised today when I reread it and found that many details of that dream had shifted in my memory. Nothing of any consequence: only facts. The essential truth remained the same.

Here's the link to that post from March of 2009: La Force.

This Beating Heart

2010-07-29T14:34:00.000-05:00

At first, his dreams were chaotic; a little later, they became dialectical.

--

He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake, even if he fathom all the enigmas of the higher and lower spheres--much more difficult than weaving a rope of sand or minting coins of the faceless wind. He understood that initial failure was inevitable. He swore to put behind him the vast hallucination that at first had drawn him off the track, and he sought another way to approach his task. Before he began, he devoted a month to recovering the strength his delirium had squandered. He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming, and almost instantly managed to sleep for a fair portion of the day. The few times he did dream during this period, he did not focus on his dreams; he would wait to take up his task again until the disk of the moon was whole. Then, that evening, he purified himself in the waters of the river, bowed down to the planetary gods, uttered those syllables of a powerful name that it is lawful to pronounce, and laid himself down to sleep. Almost immediately he dreamed a beating heart.

--Jorge Luis Borges. "The Circular Ruins," from Collected Fictions, 97-98.

* * *

You'll notice I haven't posted in several months. Finnegans Wake was a secret dilemma. Slowly, as I descended into it--my reading spanned my entire absence . . . music, voices, Shakespeare echoes . . . and to my state grew stranger, being transported and rapt in secret studies . . . --it captivated and enslaved me. I stopped dreaming. My imagination dissipated. I stopped meditating. All magic dried up. I was under the sway of a superior talent.

I'm not exaggerating: not only did I lose my skill of lucid dreaming, I even began to forget my dreams: my dream journal was rarely opened during my reading of the Wake. Though I continued work on my novel, I lacked inspiration. My writing was work, and thus inferior. I received no flashes of lines, characters or scenes. I saw no visions. I heard no voices. All powers were consumed within the Wake. And yet I always trusted that Joyce is nothing if not benevolent. After awhile, I had no choice.

I've never had a reading experience like the Wake. I wonder if my experience is common, if it is what Joyce intended. As I went deeper, it scattered my thoughts, my attention, the power I'd gathered through years of practice--it took me beyond the coherent limits of association. His imagination is so strong that it depletes the imagination of the reader. As the Wake progresses, it goes deeper into sleep, down into the darker waters, where little can be perceived and almost nothing comprehended. It is an inconceivable darkness, one no other novelist I've read has even guessed at. It is the womb, where we can only dream, though we have nothing with which to dream. It is form without shape. It is eventually annihilation.

I was inspired by Angels when I decided to prepare myself for the Wake with The Divine Comedy. For if the Wake has any sort of narrative arc, it is the arc of the Comedy. The descent precedes the ascent. Toward the end of the Wake, light begins to break through. It never becomes comprehensible, but one senses a dawning clarity. Where Joyce differs from Dante is that he never shows the final overwhelming inbreaking of light. We never reach the day inside the Wake. Instead, Joyce ends the novel just where the dreamer is about to awaken. The darkness is only banished when the reader puts down the book. And there is something very unique here. I can't think of another book whose intended effect is only felt in the aftermath of its reading. Prior to that, you feel the exact opposite.

It is as if Joyce grabs you by the ankles and carries you to the bottom of the ocean. For 500 pages, you sink. At some point, impossible to locate, for one is already senseless, he releases you, and so you may slowly rise to the surface. The last hundred pages, give or take--who is able to judge in such conditions?--consist of this ascent. But you only break through the surface after the final word. And the purpose of all this drowning was to teach you how to breathe.

I'd been preparing for the Wake for several years, and my initial reaction upon putting down the book was disoriented. Now what? I'd conquered my Everest. My horizon was under my feet. But that was only shock and disorientation.

A few days later, I began dreaming. Heavy. I received messages. Power, guidance, inspiration enveloped and invigorated me. Magic and imagination fed into each other, welling up, ready for use. Exploding for use. I set myself down to meditate, and was successful. I've never felt this strong before.

My return is founded once again upon dreaming. Not by choice: by inspiration. I've been given a project. I'd picked up Borges only to prepare myself for a novel about Prague called The Other City--I'd forgotten about how heavy Borges was into dreams, magic, power. Names. The strange relevance. He is feeding me. I see a new program of study opening before me.

And I believe this intense resurgence is entirely due to the Wake. This is the intended result. The reading is the ordeal by which one earns initiation. I don't want to imagine what would've become of me had I given up--it would've been poison without cure. I would've been lost in darkness, madness, and for how long? And though I am now lifted, arisen, I can't say I'll ever read the Wake again. How many times can you submit to a drug whose effect lasts six months? I cannednut forseed hit anny(living, fleurthebelles)time swoon. Celtickly saltunleave sirtrainleaf knot for severrally yeeaars.

Diamonds and Labyrinths

2010-06-08T12:51:00.007-05:00

At the core of my literary taste is an antinomy: diamonds here, labyrinths there, and vice-versa.

Been reading Finnegans Wake, which is the ultimate labyrinth, and it is so far gone that I have to pepper my reading of it with works that I think of as diamonds. The complex labyrinth breeds the simple diamond and the simple diamond breeds the complex labyrinth. Yin becomes Yang and Yang becomes Yin; the way up is the way down, and the way down is the way up. Today I searched online for some poems by William Stafford to get my mind out of the relentlessly complicating Wake and back into a simple reality. As in: here. A no-nonsense sentence.

The poems I found are at the end of this post.

I'd like to write a little bit about this, though I don't know how to do it. This is a clear opposition in my mind, an opposition that feeds itself. Even just the words, diamonds and labyrinths, have a great deal of meaning for me, but I have a hard time capturing that meaning in language. These two words are like monoliths. They loom in my mind, and I riff on them--on the tram, the metro, lying in bed, walking the streets--hoping all the while to find a sentence that makes some sense as to why these two words and the interaction between them has fascinated my mind for so long. But I don't ever find THE sentence; I only find another.

But what do I even mean?

Diamonds are powerful and simple sentences. My favorite would probably be: As above, so below. Diamonds condense, but they do not confuse. They appear to be self-evident. They have clarity. They have the touch of grace. When I think of diamonds, I think of the Tao Te Ching, Heraclitus, certain lines by T.S. Eliot--it goes on, but not too far. An successful aphorism is a diamond. Gnomic is an appropriate adjective for what I think of as the diamond style--not to be confused with gnome-like, though in a way both words associate with short. The trick to writing in this style is to trap the profound in the simple, and that's no easy trick.

But my preference normally runs to the labyrinth. This is a complex style, endlessly diverting into subclauses, side thoughts--perhaps even into a dead end!--yet constantly pushing forward and outward in a way that makes you forget where you started or where you were supposed to go, so your only choice is to hang on in the present and to appreciate it for what it is. When I think labyrinths, I think Joyce, Pynchon. The more is more is more is always more and more and more school of thought. It looks like the brain scan of a highly active mind: method in madness; order in confusion. For me, a labyrinthine style is a challenge worth meeting. The complexity of the structure forces the mind to form new neural pathways, and I believe I can actually feel that this feels good, which is why I enjoy challenging books. If you read these sorts of books, you can measure your improvement as you notice that what was once difficult has become relatively simple. It is also associative. The impossible ideal of this style is to connect everything with everything through everything. The labyrinth aims to light up every neuron at once, which is also the aim of the diamond, except with the labyrinth it comes not in a single flash but with a movement, a progression, a building of momentum, as if the brain is picking up every disparate piece of information and incorporating it with everything that came before and racing along with it all until maybe in the next moment if it works it explodes like a fireworks display that shows--reveals--whatever it is we believe we are meant to see.

So I go between them both. I get a bit bored with stuff in the middle; I want one or the other. Usually it's the labyrinth, but there is a danger here: to associate everything with everything through everything is the province of God and the insane. Nevertheless it's what I like to try to do. When it goes too far, I read some Heraclitus and feel zenned back to balanced. Today I felt like I needed some William Stafford to put some solid ground beneath my feet.

I could write forever about this but all I really wanted to do was to post some poems by William Stafford and to provide some kind of reason as to why I felt compelled to find them while reading Finnegans Wake.

It's a necessary counter-force.

---

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider-
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

* * *

Purifying the Language of the Tribe

Walking away means
"Goodbye."

Pointing a knife at your stomach means
"Please don't say that again."

Leaning toward you means
"I love you."

Raising a finger means
"I enthusiastically agree."

"Maybe" means
"No."

"Yes" means
"Maybe."

Looking like this at you means
"You had your chance."

PSYCHOMATH

2010-05-25T09:42:00.002-05:00

Long'which je une vikrusk, hackt:

Show that the median, hce che ech, interecting at royde angles the parilegs of a given obtuse one biscuts both the arcs that are in curveachord behind. Brickbaths. The family umbroglia. A Tullagrove pole to the Height of County Fearmanagh has a septain inclinaison and the graphplot for all the functions in Lower County Monachan, whereat samething is rivisible by nighttim, may be involted into the zeroic couplet, palls pell inhis heventh glike noughty times ∞, find, if you are not literally coefficient, how minney combinaisies and permutandies can be played on the international surd!, pthwndxrclzp!, hids cubid rute being extructed, taking anan illitterettes, ififif at a tom. Answers, (for teasers only). Ten, twent, thirt, see, ex and three icky tochty ones. From solation to solution . . . In outher wards, one from five, two to fives ones, one from fives two millamills with a mill and a half a mill and twos twos fives of bully clavers. For a surview over all the factionables see Iris in the Evenine's World. Binomeans to be comprendered.

--James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 284-285.

. . .

. . . . my kind of math.

Hope All The While (intermisunderstanding)

2010-04-14T03:00:00.006-05:00

every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhorn (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns. No, so holp me Petault, it is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it; and, sure, we ought really to rest thankful that at this deleteful hour of dungflies dawning we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves, tare it or leaf it, (and we are lufted to ourselves as the soulfisher when he led the cat out of the bout) after all that we lost and plundered of it even to the hidmost coignings of the earth and all it has gone through and by all means, after a good ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our lefftoff's flung over our home homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs, as they ought to categorically, as, strictly between ourselves, there is a limit to all things so this will never do.

--James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 118-119

Thinking of this passage, and others like it in FW, since I am living in the Czech Republic, it would make sense that I would be reminded of Milan Kundera's notion of the wisdom of uncertainty, or the idea that we shouldn't allow ourselves to believe we completely understand anything. This only makes sense since things change, as hinted in the above quote. Take science. Please. (drumfill) Science doesn't claim to understand the mechanics of our universe. This is a fact no scientist would dispute; otherwise, he'd lose his research grants. However, in a way, science lacks Kundera's wisdom since it's ultimate aim is in fact to understand everything. That's the point of the scientific project. Built into the wisdom of uncertainty is the idea that we will never completely understand everything, so the moment we allow ourselves to believe that we have, or even can have, the final handle on whatever is the moment we enter delusion.

Fine. Simple as pi.

But deeper than that, I think, is Keats' idea of negative capability. Keats formulated it centuries before Kundera, and still his thought went deeper. Keats understood that our knowledge is incomplete, and he not only accepted it, as does Kundera, but Keats actually encourages us to embrace the uncertainty. Do not become irritated by that which you cannot understand. Learn to move within it--turn it into a dance, and if you cannot understand this step (who, what, where, when, why), let it go and slide into the next, for the next beat is always coming: it's already here.

Joyce, I think, was the first writer who managed to teach negative capability through his fiction. He had to destroy the traditional techniques of realism to do so. Subsequent writers--I think of Pynchon & PKD--found new ways to accomplish the same thing, but Joyce did it first and with greater art.

What I love about the quote above is how I sense I could almost understand it while knowing, or, better, feeling that understanding is not--I hope I can at least suggest such a thing--the point.

Poetry:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor

fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance

is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement

from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still

point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

--T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Burnt Norton, 62-67

Naked in Front of a Classroom

2010-04-12T12:28:00.004-05:00

Sometimes the pressure of a limited vocabulary forces poetry. To teach English as a foreign language is to encounter some strange and fantastic uses of words.

After reading a text, one of my students asked the meaning of "nightmare". I'm learning to apply the Tao in my classrooms, and there's an idea that you will accomplish everything if you do nothing at all. So, instead of answering the question, I asked if anyone else in the class knew what "nightmare" means.

Poetry:

A nightmare is an insect that crawls into your brain while you are sleeping.

I regret that I had to clarify that diamond of a definition. My mundane definition made me feel like a hack grammar Nazi without the poetic faculty of imagination, whereas the original definition certainly would have made Kafka proud.

Luckily for a Yeasayer

2010-01-31T13:31:00.004-05:00

Naysayers we know. To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others.

Luckily there is another cant to this questy.

--James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 108-109.

I'd intended to finish Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake before I dove into the Wake itself, but I couldn't hold myself back. I've been preparing myself to read the Wake for at least ten years, and now that I'm so close, I can't help but jump before the gunshot.

You have to understand what Joyce means to me. In the presence of Joyce, I become giddy, awestruck, reverential: Joyful. And finally I am allowing myself his masterpiece. The power of his imagination is unspeakable. His associative abilities are indescribabble. In his presence, I am jawstruck. Here comes an imagination set loose.

I remember my grad-school room-mate Danielle asked me about Ulysses, which I had recently finished, and I said when I read the final sentence, I felt like I had received first communion. She asked if I was saying that myself. It sounded like a quote to me too, but I was sure it wasn't. It was just the description that came to me, though the canned vibe to the words was uncanny. Because I meant them; for me reading Joyce is a religious experience-- a religion of joyous affirmation and the wildest untamed Yes available to our almost waking imaginations.

I know I'm carried away and about to swim back into it, but I just have to say that I am doing it, right here. Right now.

The Philosophical Uggh

2010-01-27T06:43:00.010-05:00

I woke up this morning to a frozen world. The temperature just outside my window was 0 Fahrenheit. Nevertheless, I braved my way through a frigid Prague and made it to my 7:30 lesson at T-Mobile. Thanks to a late cancellation--money for nothing--the morning lesson was all I had scheduled for the day.

When I returned home, I decided I deserved a hot breakfast.

And the weirdness came upon me.

Remember what they taught us in school? Well, one of the things was if you add heat to a solid, it becomes a liquid. If you add heat to a liquid, it becomes a gas. Thus, ice becomes water, and water becomes steam. And if you add heat to a gas, it becomes a plasma, but that rarely happens because the required temperatures are unimaginably high, so you only find plasma in the heart of a star or in the veins of someone about to donate blood.

As I set about making my hot breakfast, I put some butter in a pan and put the pan on the stove. The butter, which had been solid, soon became a liquid with the addition of heat. I thought, I'm witnessing science! And I wondered about the scientific label--is this some Law of Thermodynamics happening in my kitchen? Or does the label sound less awesome?

Then I added the eggs.

Disaster!

Scientific truths tumbled to nothingness before my astounded eyes!

Liquid eggs become solid with the addition of heat!! The umpth Law of Thermodynamics is a farce!

I thought, get a hold of yourself Michael. Be level-headed and rational. And I reasoned: in most cases, the umpth Law of Thermodynamics holds true, but in the case of eggs, well, hmm--stay cool, just think it out, use your head--ok then, it must be a miracle.
Every time I cook an egg, I witness a miracle. Nothing to be upset about; it's even kind of cool.

Then I wondered, is it still a miracle if it can be manifested on command? I have an idea that miracles are supposed to be a glorious surprise, impossible to replicate in laboratory conditions.

So I realized, cooking eggs isn't a miracle: it's magic. Every human has the spooky power to reverse the supposedly inviolable umpth Law of Thermodynamics, at least in the specific case of eggs. Most people wield this power without ever knowing its nature, like I used to. Maybe in some undeveloped parts of the world where the natives never thought to consume animal excretions, they'd say we're crazy: no way could an egg become solid over heat, they'd say. Haven't you discovered the umpth Law of Thermodynamics yet?

Yes, we have. You have to discover the rules before you can break them.

Then I put some hot sauce on my eggs and ate up, altogether satisfied with my adventure into the kitchen.

Obsession

2010-01-26T05:42:00.003-05:00

Mutant, monster Rats in full combat. Collectively referred to as The Herd. Orestes Herpetulian in confrontation w/said entity. Landscape: The Dump, officially known as The Fresh Kills Landfill. I am in the process of imagining and actualizing this scene.

The inspiration for this scene came months ago, and I made a few quick notes before I tossed the whole thing back into my subconscious. Now I'm bringing the monster to life.

There's no point denying that I'm basically ripping off Moby Dick--which I've never read & don't plan to; anyway I know the gist--and Pynchon's V. with the white alligator who lives in the NYC sewer system. Herpetulian finds his perfect nemesis, and why shouldn't it be an animal?

How can I possibly talk about Pilgrims Dream without talking in circles? I must go around to come back again.

This entire sub-story of The Herd is backstory. As far as I'm concerned, the Genesis of the universe of Pilgrims Dream happens in the coffeeshop, when the pilgrims first meet. From that moment, the adventure begins. They launch into The Quest. But that moment also retroactively justifies that which brought them to the adventure. But, I think I will tell the backstories alongside the central story. The moment of creation must come at the beginning, even if the past came before the creation.

(I've wondered about what might actually hold the pilgrims together after they meet in the coffeeshop in that moment of Genesis. The rest of the novel needs them to stay together. But what could drive a group of five strangers who meet by accident in a coffeeshop to go off on a trip to the Amazon immediately? Of course, we the readers know the meeting isn't so accidental since Agents Grossberger & Troutslop were ordered to track the meeting even before it happened, seemingly by accident. Still, what is the pilgrims' motive? So: all of them have had someone very close to them disappear. And they feel the weird pressure of recognition before the uncanny truth comes out. Wundersprocket's teenage daughter. Herpetulian's fiance. Lux's mother. Laura Cloud's husband.

The strangeness of the encounter forces them to realize that none of them ever confronted the loss of their loved one. And how can they? This is the trouble with ghosts, the paradox of loss: how can one confront that which is not? And the answer is that one cannot confront paradox, but, as Kafka indicated, one must rise above it. Coincidentally, an early title for Pilgrims Dream was Everything Rises.)

So, Herp's backstory: he'd worked as a pharmaceuticals rep & had a typically successful American life. Then his fiance disappeared. Forever. The life he'd built became transparent, insubstantial, without the woman whom he'd founded the rest upon. So he quit his job. He wanted to do something real. After a few months, he took a job w/the Sanitation Department. As far as Herpetulian was concerned, the only real thing in the modern American world was garbage, and lots of it. Soon he finds himself working The Dump.

An old black man near retirement named K takes Herpetulian under his wing. K gives Herpetulian the nickname "Herps".

(Interestingly, K is a character I first wrote about over ten years ago. He was based on a real person--the only real person I ever wrote about. And somehow he found his way into this story.)

Before Herps' first excursion into The Dump, K lends him his .44 Magnum--Dirty Harry's gun. Herps asks what it's for. K says it's for the rats, which grow quite large in the unnatural, toxic environment of The Dump. But, K also says that as long as Herps leaves the rats alone, they'll leave him alone.

Herps goes along, doing his job. But he senses that something is going on with those rats. He eventually hears whispers about The Herd. There is a weird vibe. Old-timers talk about The Herd as if it is intelligent.

One day, Herps runs into a guy wandering about the hidden mounds of The Dump. The guy has gone commando. Basically I'm ripping off Apocalypse Now, & Heart of Darkness w/the Kurtz character. Herps learns that this guy used to work for the Sanitation Department before he dropped out of normal life to dedicate all of his time to fighting The Herd. The guy now lives in The Dump. He tracks The Herd, learns about all of it's secret tunnels, develops intelligence.

When Herps gets back to the locker room, he tells K about the character he met. K tells Herps to forget about it--stay away from it man. Like I told you, just leave them alone and they won't bother you neither.

But Herps can't stop thinking about it. The Herd. How could they possibly be intelligent? And what are they working toward?

Soon after, Herps dreams about Grandaddy: the great white rat leader of The Herd. He both sees the rat & knows it's name.

Next day in the locker room, Herps asks K if he thinks The Herd has a leader.

--I already told you to leave it alone, Herps! Drop it, man.

Herps says he had a dream.

--Shit. You saw him, didn't you?

K asks if the leader in Herps' dream had a name. Herps confirms it. K tells Herps to quit the job immediately. Move out to Kansas, or something. Get away. Fiji. Tijuana. Just get out. But Herps won't drop it. K sighs and asks, Was the white rat called Grandaddy?

Yes.

The old-timers never talk about it--the name "Grandaddy" is taboo. But, fact is, several good men have gone commando over the years, and each of them dreams of Grandaddy before they disappear into the wastes of The Dump forever.

Next day, Herps actually sees Grandaddy. He follows him. Grandaddy reaches the top of a high mound, the setting sun behind him, and turns to face Herps directly. They share a soul-exchanging moment. Suddenly Herps realizes he's been led into an ambush. The Herd has him surrounded, and Herps has the low ground. He looks again to the eyes of Grandaddy. And, how is this possible? it must be a hallucination, the entire impossible episode, because Grandaddy disappears into thin air, and Herps is left staring into the sun. The Herd has vanished.

When Herps gets back, he quits immediately. No notice. K pleads that Herps take a vacation somewhere far from NYC--just don't go back into The Dump, man.

Herps brushes off everyone's advice--they're all living in a fantasy world: willful ignorance of The Herd & it's malicious implications--and Herps decides to take one last trip into Manhattan--one final goodbye to New York, the city he's loved so well--before he dedicates himself to full-time rat combat.

Except, of course, his final trip into the city leads him to meet the other pilgrims, and Herps is launched instead into an adventure of a different sort.

A Progression of Cycles

2010-01-16T05:05:00.004-05:00

The Divine Comedy is before my eyes and in my mind. I believe I've mentioned in a previous post that I read with an agenda. With Dante & my previous read, Parzival, I've been reading with an eye toward Finnegans Wake. I've read The Inferno maybe three or four times & even taught it in a world lit. class, but I'd never read the entire Comedy. I'm halfway through The Purgatory, and I think I like it better than The Inferno, which surprises me. I'd figured all the narrative tension would vanish after Dante gets past Satan. It's not your typical narrative arc: Dante, as pilgrim, confronts & overcomes the greatest possible antagonist, and at that point you're only a third of the way through the story. This plot not only defies Hollywood logic--it defies the logic of all stories. Imagine if Odysseus had already returned home a third of the way through his poem; imagine if Hamlet had confronted his uncle in the beginning of the second act; imagine if Gatsby had resolved his issues w/Daisy by page 70. Yet, somehow Dante, as poet, makes it work.

I decided to tackle the Comedy now as a final preparation for the Wake. Joyce has a definite medieval vibe, and I'm swimming down into it beforehand so I'm acclimated before I read that famous first/last sentence. The medieval vibe is a sense of the cyclical. The Divine Comedy is a great evocation of the cyclical. It requires a lot of emotional, intuitive, and intellectual work to truly appreciate the sense of cycles--at least for us. Sure, most of us will readily assent that everything goes in cycles, but that's only words. The truth is us moderns don't think in cycles, or at least we aren't conditioned to appreciate them.

We think in Progress. For us, things go ever forward. To us, the future is a mystery: we can't imagine how things will be in ten years, nevermind fifty. When someone mentions the future, we wonder about technological developments: will everyone have a universal translator implanted in their pineal glands? even dogs, so we can finally understand what we sense they so desperately want to say to us? Will miniature robots clip our toenails while we sleep? Will we finally achieve time travel so we can arrive on time to that important meeting we slept through so many years ago?

Even I, who have devoted so much time and effort to warping the constructs of my mind, have trouble dropping Progress when I want to enter Cycles. Because it's more than a recitation of words or an intellectual grasp--you have to overload the intellectual for long & hard enough that the sense passes into the emotional/intuitive, because only then do you achieve understanding. It's a process I'm becoming familiar with.

Look forward to see backward. As it was in the beginning, is now, and always shall be.

Thursday night, I broke through.

I saw a new world.

I finished a lesson with a student and, while I walked to the bus stop, I looked to the field across the street. In the summer, it grows some variety of leafy green vegetable. The field itself is impressive, especially to a city boy like yours truly. It's large, and it slopes gently upward into the horizon. There are three trees just beyond the slope's crest, and they look as if they are falling off the edge of the world. I once saw the full moon rise over that horizon, and I thought of Godot, and T.S. Eliot's line about three trees on the low horizon.

This time, it was covered in snow and moonlight. It snowed a week ago, and the temperature hasn't risen about freezing yet, so the snow remains.

I thought of how in Florida, when the temperature threatens to drop below freezing, all the farmers spray water on their crops. If the temperature does in fact drop below freezing, the water turns to ice, and the ice actually serves as insulation against the cold.

I looked at the field, and I thought, well I didn't think exact words, but I had a feeling like--the snow covers the field like the ice covers the plants. It protects the life beneath it. I thought of the work, the death, that field must go through so it can produce life again in the next season. The snow, patient & enduring, had kept still for a week and counting so that the work of death, which is the work of life, could continue in the soil of that field. It was breaking down a particular form of life into its essence so that it could nourish a new form of life, which is yet to be born.

I had never felt snow like that before.

And I thought, This is how people used to think 600 years ago. And I thought, I'm finally making real progress on this whole cycle thing.

Implementing My Magical Dynamic

2010-01-12T13:38:00.003-05:00

A month ago, in the midst of another harrowing experience I'd rather not write about, I learned that the school I work for will close at the end of January.

Startled, to say the least.

At the time, I was actually praying--in my fashion--that my school would give me a few more classes a week. I earned enough to pay rent, buy groceries, and even go out for a beer occasionally, but I wanted more so I could travel about this fantastic new continent, go out to a restaurant every now & again, and eventually save enough so I could visit my friends & family back in the States. Instead of getting more lessons, I got laid off. Teachers aren't safe either in our current economic habitat--or, as my Czech students call it, The Crisis.

Disorient. I'd been in Prague long enough to know I truly love it. I'd been teaching long enough to know I could enjoy teaching for quite awhile longer. Just then, the floor vanished from under me. The moment of terror: long enough to love it, then it leaves.

But, like Hunter Thompson said, When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. So that's what I did. Here's how. Watch closely.

This is how magic works.

I am incredibly lucky. That's my first premise. Always have been, always will be. When the world disappears on you, you go back to your basic premises. Before I know anything else, I know that luck is with me; luck is a type of grace granted to those who believe they already have it. As far as I'm concerned, you can do this too. When people say they have bad luck, I cringe: that's the dark side of this magic.

So:

1. I'd lost my job.

2. I had basically zero savings.

3. I was living in a foreign country, which made facts 1 and 2 more troubling.

I wondered, How do I reconcile these facts with my basic premise? Where does my quintessential luck fit in this picture? I realized: something magnificent must be waiting for me, and it can't come until I get rid of my current job.

So be it. Amen.

Seek, and you shall find.

Several of my students, upon learning that my school was closing, said they wanted to continue with me privately. So, instead of my students paying the school and the school paying me, my students would pay me directly. Cut out the middle, man. Otherwise known as poaching, and it is contractually forbidden. But since my school is closing shop, they had no qualms & even encouraged students to continue with their teachers privately, if possible. I'd long known that the real money is in private teaching, but I didn't know how to find private students. I more than double my pay-rate by working privately. Well, when my school went belly-up, all of my students instantly became potential private clients--and they already knew what kind of teacher I am. No need for recommendations & references.

I don't claim to be a great teacher. I simply don't have enough experience for that. But my TEFL course was truly excellent, and though I haven't quite implemented everything I learned during that course yet, I know what a good lesson should look like. Just knowing where I should go in the future, I think, makes me better right now. Also, and perhaps more importantly, I care about my students--they know it. Put that all together and you got a teacher worth paying for.

I put out my feelers, readied myself for the opportunity, friends helped me out, luck shined her light upon me, and beginning next month I'll be making almost the same money as before for half the time worked. That's what private lessons can do for a teacher. Hopefully I'll continue to build my reputation & find even more private students.

I still need to work for a school--though my school closed, there are other schools in Prague that are hiring. I don't need a full-time job anymore, just enough hours to get me to the amount I'd wanted in the first place. Though I'm in a position where I could earn serious cash if I worked a full schedule, money has never been one of my obsessions. Instead, I'll work enough to make enough, and I'll devote more time to my novel.

Because this is all only a part of that larger dream.

Official Policy

2009-12-24T08:29:00.004-05:00

The Czech Republic updated its drug laws for 2010. For an American, it's hard to believe such leniency exists anywhere in the galaxy. But I would argue the laws are strict exactly where they are needed. This link goes to a Prague Post article describing the new policy. Look at this:

Starting in 2010, possessing the following amounts of drugs is no longer a criminal offense.
Marijuana 15 grams or less (15 GRAMS!!! *personal note to mark my astonishment. Street value, that's over $200 of weed. In Amsterdam, only 5 grams or less has been decriminalized. And I had thought that amount was plenty.)
Heroin 1.5 grams or less
Cocaine 1 gram or less
Methamphetamine 2 grams or less
Amphetamine 2 grams or less
Ecstasy 4 tablets or less
Hashish 5 grams or less
Hallucinogenic mushrooms 40 pieces or less
LSD 5 tablets or less

I have a hard time imagining the States decriminalizing even a couple of grams of marijuana. 15 grams is some serious weight. And then look at all these other drugs which have been decriminalized, in not-so-small amounts! I consider myself fairly liberal--or maybe the word is conservative: however you want to describe someone who believes an individual has the right to act as he sees fit, so long as he doesn't hurt others--and even I would hesitate to decriminalize methamphetamine.

Just imagine having the legal amount of all these drugs in a backpack. If a cop stopped you, yes, he could possibly give you some legal hassle, but it's written into the law that he has the option to issue nothing more than a warning. Just be polite, and you're fine. Act like a jerk, and yeah, he could probably lay some tickets on you and make the whole encounter expensive and time consuming. So, be nice, which is a good rule of thumb anyway. But, just think: he could look through your bag, maybe give you a hard time, but you would have absolutely no fear of jail-time. I think holding such amounts in the States, especially of LSD, would get you life in prison. Just look at the pharmacopeia you can legally carry! A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff. Or Prague, for that matter.

So one would be tempted to think the Czech Republic is an anything goes country. For an American, it's true that the freedom here is astounding, almost dizzying, but the Czechs are smart where it counts.

There is no drug as dangerous as alcohol, though in the States we've been trained to think of drugs as Evil and alcohol as ok: pools, girls, barbecues, etc. In the Czech Republic, every driver who is stopped by the police is automatically given a breathalyzer test. Which is rational, and much stricter than I could ever imagine in the States. Sure, they have the right to test you in the States, but I personally have never seen it done. Yet I think it's safe to assume that Budweiser is responsible for more deaths through auto accidents and violence than any of these drugs. Not to mention how alcohol degrades so many bodily systems--but that is a personal choice that harms no one else.

I don't mean to say that the CR is down on alcohol; the beer is fantastic and cheap, and everyone seems to drink a good amount of it.

Anyway, this is the cognitive dissonance I love about living in a different culture. Reading this article would've meant nothing to me had I never left the States. It's something shocking how differently people can decide to handle things, and in such unexpected ways. Get pulled over in Prague with that loaded backpack, and you got nothing to fear. But you will be given a breathalyzer, and there ain't no sweet-talking around it.

Hot Sauce Fragment

2009-11-11T14:02:00.003-05:00

While eating dinner, I had a vision of a meeting at a 12 Step program devoted to hot sauce. People stand, say how it started innocently enough--maybe on a dare at a birthday dinner someone dips their sushi in wasabi, then the person finds himself putting something spicy in soups, sandwiches, eventually it gets down to the hot pepper sauce in stews, eggs, tuna fish, etc. until they begin to contemplate what hot sauce might taste like in let's say chocolate pudding. And wouldn't a little hot sauce in your cereal be the perfect jolt in the morning? Interesting thought, isn't it? (If your response to the first question is, Hmm, with a nod, then you belong at the meeting.) At this point the person knows he has a problem, but there's no turning back. And when he realizes he uses hot sauce in every meal, there's only one way to go: hotter hot sauce. He begins seeking out the hard stuff. Now, he can't taste anything unless it has hot sauce in it. Plain old Tabasco is vanilla. He needs the fire.

And that's as far as that vision went.

Impossible Realities and Shooting Stars

2009-11-07T15:17:00.006-05:00

Several friends from Prague and I had decided to move to St. Augustine, which is weird enough though not the reason I'm writing this. I'm talking about last night's dream. We'd just arrived in town and were taking our first stroll along the bay-wall.

It was mid-day, sunny and warm. We were wearing shorts & t-shirts and had deep tans in late autumn. I made an appreciative comment. It felt like paradise. Apparently I really miss the sensual kind of sunshine you can feel with your skin.

While we walked, I looked up to the sky. Here comes the crucial weirdness.

* * *

It was noon, but as I looked up to the sky, I saw stars. Even as I remember it now, I can't imagine how this was visually represented. I only know it's what I saw.

Stars are a personal dream sign. In dreams, I have a strong tendency to look at the sky, and since dream images are so unstable, the stars always end up doing some kind of dance. Maybe even in my non-lucid dreams I subconsciously know I'm dreaming and look up because I want to see the stars dance--but that implies a sub-subconscious and infinite regress I'm not willing to wade into right here.

So what happened was I saw one star move. I thought maybe it was a meteor, satellite, or a UFO, but then all of the stars began to dance. Dream sign. Should've went lucid right there, but I'm rusty. Then the dancing stars turned into military transports & jets & helicopters in space--telescopic vision, another dream sign that failed to provoke lucidity--like a swarm of insects, the aircraft moved across the sky. I wondered where they were going and if it meant anything to me. I decided it didn't.

I'm wondering about the weirdness of the stars in the mid-day sky. My rational mind prevents me from recalling this image because it is downright logically impossible. And yet, in my dream, I saw it.

Dream consciousness can not only pull together night & day, dark & light, it can visually represent the fusion in a meaningful way. As a writer & an artist, I am incredibly intrigued by this. Somewhere, my mind is already doing this. It is showing me stars in a mid-day sky--though by "mid-day sky" I only mean that I understood it as such. Like I said, I can't remember what it looked like. The dream part of my mind is showing me darkness in light and light in darkness.

It is showing me a circled square.

I want to get closer to that kind of thinking. I want to make these sorts of things happen in my writing. Because my dreams have dissolved categories of thinking that function as parameters for experience. If I can change those parameters in my waking life by following cues from dreams, I can open up an entirely new dimension of human experience for exploration. And that, to me, is the purpose of fiction.

Hints & Guesses

2009-10-29T14:36:00.004-05:00

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image in pre-conscious terrors--
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are
usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint--
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is
Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement--
Driven by daemonic, cthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(No too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

--T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages, 184-233.

In The Midst

2009-10-23T02:51:00.007-05:00

I had finished my last lesson for the week, and as I walked back to the metro station, I found myself wondering: has a dominant species ever survived a mass extinction? If so, did that species remain dominant in the aftermath?

We are alive during the 6th Mass Extinction in the history of Life on Earth. (I'm not gonna go hysterical Cassandra--Stop using whatever in order to save Everything!!, etc--so hang with me for a bit.) We are witnessing something that has only happened five times before this, and I don't just mean since the beginning of recorded history. I mean in the History of Life. A lot of people aren't aware that we don't need an asteroid to see the apocalypse--it's already happening!

So be excited! We are the first spectators of this event with an awareness of what we are seeing. Most people think it'd be cool to witness the extinction of the dinosaurs, but the dinosaurs didn't even know what was happening. I couldn't imagine a more interesting time to live than one during which all forms of life are rapidly being erased and we are here to watch it go down. Gone. Sayonara, you squirmy bags of organic compounds.

Yes, it's our fault. But fault is a tricky word. Nature created us. We are not separate from & really can't be held responsible for Nature. We ARE Nature. Nature decided to create a species that would devour Nature herself. I'd bet she has a plan. If the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct, this blog post would have never happened. Etc. So, the thing is I don't think we should feel guilty if we wipe all life from the face of the Earth and turn the planet into a toxic deadzone. (If you think people are more important than anything else, well then yes, you should feel guilty and try to save the planet, etc.) Maybe in a billion years a greater life form will emerge from the plastic slime that will thrive in our toxic mess. And maybe that life form won't be possible until we destroy ourselves & take our living planet with us.

But I wonder: could we possibly survive this extinction? I'll have to research, but I'd bet the Extinctions are batting five for five in terms of wiping out the dominant life form. Kinda long odds against us. On the other hand, seems like the dominant species is due to survive one of these. Maybe even overdue. Imagine if we could be the first!

Then I got on the metro.

--

This morning, on the way to the metro, I saw a man.

Most mornings I take the red line to my first class. I take the tram in front of my building one stop to Hlavni Nadrazi, which is the main train station in Prague. It's where I left from for Amsterdam. It also has a metro connection--the red line. The station has a big park around it, so you have to walk about four minutes along a tree-lined path to get to the station itself. Early mornings, sun still sleeping, I just follow the flood of commuters who fall upon the station.

There is one man who walks in the opposite direction of all us sleepwalking commuters. He walks away from the station, kinda off to the side of the path. He is an old man with a longish, dirty white beard. He wears an old baseball hat & clothes that look scavenged. I would guess he's homeless except I've never seen him beg or even accept money. He just walks in the opposite direction of everyone else, and he chants. He sings, Dobreeeeee Dennnnnnnn, so long that all us commuters could be well past him & gone before he finishes saying it--the words themselves never fully hit our sleepwalking consciousnesses, but I've pieced them together over multiple mornings, jigsaw-like--and the words mean, Good Day. I think he must be an angel.

My Ukranian Buddy Accuses Me of Being Someone Else

2009-10-06T13:57:00.004-05:00

The following is a conversation with a guy from the Ukraine who works in the potravinny next to my flat. He's told me several times that he speaks "5% English." Most of the time, I have no idea if he's speaking Czech or Ukranian. I tell him, I speak less than 1% Czech. We have a blast talking to each other. Other customers must think we're crazy. We've talked for up to five minutes without understanding a word of what the other says.

(A potravinny is basically a tiny grocery store. They have less junk food than American convenience stores, but that's the closest equivalent. They have fruit, & some have vegetables. Bread, rolls, eggs, milk, cheese--actually the one by me has an complete dairy section--lunch meat, canned foods, orange juice, chips, pre-made sandwiches that are surprisingly good, beer & liquor. They are all over Prague, especially Zizkov. Off the top of my head I can think of four potravinnies within a minute's walk from my front door. Some are better stocked than others.)

Ukrainian: When you work?

Me: Tomorrow morning, bright & early.

Ukrainian: When you holiday?

Me: Not anytime soon, brother.

Ukrainian: You Santa Clause?

At which point I had to laugh & call him crazy before I said, Nashledanou (good bye), and left.

(confession: I improvised on my lines since I don't remember what I said. The important thing is that the Ukrainian steals the scene.)

Ne

2009-10-02T09:37:00.002-05:00

Dislocated Weirdness.

A guy who does repairs & general upkeep around my building rang my bell about five minutes ago. He made some hand gestures & spoke Czech. I could tell he was looking for someone who was painting: excellent use of hands. I didn't know if anyone was working in my flat-mates' bedrooms. I said, Nevim, which means, I don't know--because I'd walked in only a few minutes before--and motioned for him to come in.

The man asked, Sprechen sie Deutch?

I answered no--but here's the weirdness--my natural reaction was to answer negatively, in Czech. Czech lesson: ne means no. Pronounced nay. Why I would automatically respond to German with Czech when I can't speak either is the kind of neural/linguistic mystery I'd love to investigate, if I had the time.

Order & Hope

2009-09-30T08:20:00.004-05:00

Today I devoted some time to the Work, the results of which I'd like to report here.

I'd also like to make a few comments about how I go about it. I think my method is a bit unorthodox, and perhaps even interesting.

I've been writing Pilgrims Dream for quite awhile now--a professional writer would probably say for too long. I don't put in set hours and write write write with hope that inspiration will fill the vacuum and suddenly Come while I scribble away vapid nonsense: I wait. I build and let settle. I look at what I've done and rest.

Because I'm working with dreams. You can build dreams. I use my imagination and see the scene before I write it. I begin to write it. And then I build the scene in my imagination some more. Putting down words changes the composition of a dream, and it's important to take a step back after you've started to see how the scene will react. I let it grow. As the scene grows & becomes more complex, the elements start to intermingle--and only then does the scene come alive. Then, a process begins that no longer requires my intervention. At that moment, the scene is autonomous & has its own existence. It is an under-appreciated fact that our thoughts become realities. I am a reporter of realities that begin in dreams.

I've been working on the scene w/the Agents in the bar for a long time now. The name of the bar changed from Off the Wagon to the far superior Beat & Path. A professional writer would've finished the scene long before he even received the true name of the bar. I've taken the necessary time to build every detail. Maybe I spend an afternoon to think, What is the bouncer like? Or, Who is the band? (Radical Subjective: I spent a lot of time building them & their performace.) Or, Who are the patrons? Essentially, What are the Agents looking for? And, How do they find it? An afternoon spent on random sensual details. Do we overhear any conversations? Every question becomes a stone with which I build--a stone the professional writer rejected.

Today I asked myself about the bartenders. That's all. And only because I felt I had the imaginative capital to spend. I spent a few hours dreaming only about the bartenders. How else could I know if they are important? I had to do some imaginative research.

Here's what I got:

They are dressed as government officials, which plays nicely into Radical Subjective's performance of "Here Comes the White Man." Various uniforms. Perhaps one or two in a suit & tie to represent the office bureaucrats. Field uniforms, dress uniforms, etc. From every branch of government, every type of agency--as long as they got a good looking uniform.

They are under strict orders never to speak or smile or lean closer to the patrons. If they don't hear an order, they simply continue their stern gaze. Not a muscle moves. It doesn't matter how loud the place is--it is the responsibility of the patron to make their order heard. The bartenders do not blink, and they do not look away. If after a second attempt they still can't hear the order, they are trained to move on to the next order without any sort of acknowledgment of the failed attempt. They can only use their voice to tell the cost of an order after it has been successfully placed. Cannot answer direct questions about cost, ingredients, or available beers. Tourists like to ask questions to watch the response, like teasing palace guards. Any question at all makes the bartenders immediately move on to the next patron. No one makes inquiries to the bar. If you want to receive a drink, you must simply & directly state your order.

ORDER & HOPE

is the sign above the bar, which practically means you must place your order & hope it will be filled. If it cannot be filled, for whatever reason, you will get the Gaze. At that point, you must decide whether you should repeat your order (because he couldn't hear) or place a different one (because he lacks the supplies to fulfill your order)--neither option is safe, and you have no indication which to choose. Patrons help each other out: Oh no, you can't order that; they ran out of lime juice. Some people are experienced--experts in the ordering process--and they help out other patrons as much as they can. These experts are so highly appreciated by the other patrons that they are automatically given seats at the bar--like Kafkaesque representatives of the Court in The Trial.

Imagine:

Could you help me? I was wondering if I should order a Bloody Mary.

(Expert isn't exactly forthcoming.) Ok. That's interesting. How am I concerned?

Well, I have no idea if they have celery. I don't care if they have celery. But maybe they consider celery a necessary ingredient in a Bloody Mary, and they would reject my order because they don't have celery. So, would my order be rejected? I just want a Bloody Mary, with or without celery. Though I'd definitely prefer celery.

(Expert's measured advice, for which he's earned his seat, and the seeming approval of the Bar, which is evidenced by his insights into the bar's arcane prohibitions.) Your order for a Bloody Mary will not be rejected because of celery.

On the other hand, though the bartenders could be accused of taking that stereotypical NY rudeness and bureaucratic lack of empathy to an extreme, the bartenders are also impervious to all raucous behavior. No insult bothers them, no wild action prompts them to summon a bouncer. And Beat & Path is certainly a wild place. Not many places would consider giving a stage to Radical Subjective, for example. Things you've never seen, brother. But the bartenders are simple functionaries, and the limit of their authority is to distribute alcohol.

--

Now, I am certainly not going to devote paragraphs to a description of the bartenders. It's just something I might be able to use in the writing, as a random detail--to evoke the scene. What I'm writing here on Lightning, Mirror will not go directly into Pilgrims Dream.

Indirectly.

These are simply notes that aid me in the preparation.

Like notes toward a recipe.

Fictional Scenes as Factual Reality

2009-09-26T05:08:00.006-05:00

It was 4:15 in the morning, and we'd received directions from a native. He'd said, It is first right and second right, and I thought that was hysterical. (Tricky conjunctions: and is not or--that sentence was very satisfying to write.) Matt & I found the door of the bar: locked. But just like those bewildered & wandering characters in The Tempest, we could hear music and voices--what did the voices and the music mean? It meant we should follow them, of course. I pressed the button on the intercom to see what would happen. Czech is what happened. God only knows what that voice said to me. I hadn't really developed a plan beyond pushing the button, so I improvised & said, Hello. I never heard the voice again.

But the beauty came as a result of the door that wouldn't open.

It was 4:15 in the morning and Matt & I were standing in front of a locked door in Zizkov when a gypsy came walking down the block and launched an elaborate attempt to waylay us, but we summoned what remained of our wits and successfully evaded his wiles.

God bless that gypsy, and God bless Prague!

It's like, you haven't experienced New York and Washington Square Park if a rasta hasn't tried to push oregano on you. Well, I have now experienced Prague.

The Name of the Rose

2009-09-13T09:22:00.010-05:00

or, a Rose is a Rose is a Rose.

Except: a name has power.

--

I'm a man with many nicknames, and today, as I walked about Vaclavske Namesti and rode the tram to the grocery store, I had the opportunity to consider some of the nicknames I've gathered over the years.

At one point, a girl I'd known for about five years was shocked when a friend called me Mike. She asked my friend, Why did you call him Mike? My friend and I looked at each other, like, Is this girl flipping out? Then she said, I thought your name was Tika. Seriously, she thought that for five years.

Everyone I knew growing up at some point was simply known by their last name. Matejka. That was me. Yo, Matejka! rang about the schoolyard & in the halls between classes. Then, Matejka became Tika--tricky here on the spelling: some do Teeka, which is phonetically correct I guess, and others keep the original, Tejka. I've always written it as Tika, cause it looks better to me. And Tika has been shortened even further to Teek. Tika was also creatively transformed into Tea Cup. Other people would purposely mispronounce my last name: Ma-tedge-ka. Or, Mat-a-jay-ka. So, I'm used to responding to: Michael, Mike, Matejka, Tika, Tea Cup, Teek, Matedgeka, Matajayka, and for awhile when I played baseball I was called Magic.

--

A new name seems to be sticking to me here in Prague: Business Time.

I need to get into this one.

But first, I want to also mention another nickname I've managed to pick up here and there, though it is definitely more obscure than the others. Some people, with no connection in time or space, have given me the nickname Sir Matejka. This one makes me a bit uncomfortable. The first time it came up, I'm sure it was because I was majoring in English & obsessed with the English poets. I was very Anglophilic. So I thought, Ok, I get it. Sir. But there is another part of me that cringes. Sir? As in the House of Lords? As in aristocracy? Does it mean I'm uptight or something? Pretentious? Condescending? I remember hearing that a friend described my writing as noble, and it touched me deeper than any other compliment. On the other hand, I wonder about the connotations. Does it imply that I'm the type of person who is incapable of fun? Am I that rigid? I know that sometimes I am rigid, but I make a conscious effort to not always make the safe and responsible decision. And the disturbing association of nobility with power. Sure I recognize that true nobility and the aristocracy or the upper class are hardly connected--even the ancient Greeks wrote about that in their tragedies--but the connotation is unavoidable. I mean, sure it's good to be noble in the true sense, but I also love to play. I'm not living my life to further my career. I'm not here to climb to a higher social rank--I'm here for the gorgeousness of life!

So I have some reservations about Sir, though I know it's never been said with anything other than the best intent.

Now I've got Business Time. And this nickname works out all the knots I'd had about Sir. It's wonderful.

Let me explain: my friend Abby from the TEFL course observed that I put on my hat whenever there was a party or we were going out. She said, When Mike puts on the hat, that means it's business time. So whenever we were out & she saw my hat, she'd say, It's business time. It's since spread, and a few other people have referred to me as Business Time both to myself & to others. As in, Hey, where's Business Time? Which I think is kinda funny.

But it's fantastic. Cause when you normally think of the phrase "business time", well, historically you would've thought it means it's time to get serious. It's time to be uptight. It's time to be rigid. It's time to focus on career-like tasks and get the job done. It ain't no time for play or fooling around. It's business time. Everything that bothers me about Sir. But Abby has gorgeously warped the phrase and applied it to me in reference to my approach to leisure. If I am Business Time, then it should be known that I got the name because of my intense devotion to & focus in Play. Business Time is when petty work falls away. It's when the real business of living gets underway. And I'm in love with that. Even if the name doesn't take, it has done its work. I may never hear it again, and in ten years someone else may come up with the idea to call me Sir Matejka, and it will be fine because I know what time business time is.

And in any case, my true name will always be Michael.

Question the Ceiling

2009-08-31T14:01:00.004-05:00

When I was very young, my mother noticed that I had developed an odd habit: before entering a new room, I would pause in the doorway and check out the ceiling. She wondered why I would do such a thing, and remembered back to the following incident.

My father was working in the attic. I'm not sure what he was doing; maybe he was putting in new insulation, or putting things into storage. Our attic was not entirely "finished". In many parts, it didn't even have a true floor: you had to walk on wooden beams (my brother and I were not allowed to explore that part of the attic.) Between the beams was exposed insulation, underneath which was the ceiling of the room beneath. While my father was working in the part without a floor, his foot slipped. He fell through to his waist but managed to catch himself before he fell all the way through.

Of course, I was in my crib in the room below. It might've been a playpen. Imagine the terror and shock of a child alone in his room who witnesses two legs come crashing through the ceiling above him. I screamed bloody murder. Chaos ensued. My mother thought to run to help my father since she checked and saw I wasn't actually in any danger. My father kept yelling for her to get me out of the way, since he couldn't see where I was situated. I was just yelling. I don't remember any of this, but I'm fairly confident I would've been shouting my lungs out.

In any case, don't worry, all ended well.

Except for my ensuing distrust of ceilings. My mother worried that I might develop a phobia. (I didn't.) What kind of child has to look at the ceiling before he enters a room?

A philosopher.

In my own personal mythology, I have just decided that the moment my father fell through the ceiling was the moment I became a philosopher. Because that moment taught me to take nothing for granted. If you can't even assume the ceiling, what can you assume? I learned to ask every question imaginable, because the question you never thought to ask will have an answer that delivers an unimaginable shock. I hadn't thought to wonder, What if someone comes smashing through the wall above me?, and because of my narrow scope of vision, I ended up screaming my head off in fear. If only I had thought of the question, I could've calmly considered the feet dangling above me and thought, Oh, so this is how it is.

I think this episode also explains my love of the surreal. After all, aren't people supposed to fall through floors? Since when do people fall through ceilings?

Since before I can remember.

The Tourists Song, & a Parade

2009-08-22T08:28:00.007-05:00

The Tourists Song

Take a look at this man:
He's passing in between us.
Take a look at this man!
And take a look at his tan.

(refrain)
The man eats!
The strange meat of a street-side stand.

The man buys!
The cheap junk of a foreign land.

The man moves!
The hot dance of a one night stand.

The man speaks!
The sung song of a travelling band.

Take a look at this man.
Always everywhere elsewhere.
So put our city on your keychain
and lock us in your memory.
So put our time in your watch
and keep our memory in your mouth.

(refrain)

It's no trouble.
No worries, friend.
We're all good people,
so throw out your TV.
Sometimes it takes a thief
to spot the lost diamond.
So take a look at this man.

(refrain)

--

Today I wrote a good deal of Pilgrims Dream for the first time since I arrived in Prague. I hadn't had the time or the clarity of mind to put anything besides scattered notes to paper. It feels good & natural to be back in the saddle.

This song is sung by Radical Subjective in the bar scene where Agents Grossberger & Troutslop are looking for Beatrix Londulatta, who may or may not be able to give them information about the Underground. Or, Beatrix might be able to put the Agents back in contact with Them. Her reputation is ambiguous. G&T aren't sure about much. But on the advice of Janglebell, they enter the bar, called Beat & Path, with hope and no expectation. It's a wild scene. Radical Subjective involves the crowd in a sort of mass-hallucinatory ritual. When they sing their song, Here Comes The White Man, a man in a black suit & tie jumps off the stage and pretends to stab everyone in the audience with a plastic retractable knife while splattering ketchup everywhere. It's a known part of the show, and many in the audience dress in tribal costumes for it. At the end of the song, The Goddess of Music appears--look, it's Beatrix Londulatta!--and restores Justice & Harmony to the show. Grossberger & Troutslop throw a monkeywrench into the whole scene though, and for that you'll have to read the book.

I also made these notes for a Parade:

Banners, balloons, wheelchairs, clowns, zombies, superheroes, stilt-walkers, politicians (masks), Star Wars Trekkies & LOTR wizards, Oscar the Grouch & the Count, fat men in top hats and coat-tails, tribal masks & loin cloths, Madonnas & bondage queens, straight men in shirt sleeves with stooped backs & thick glasses, doctors in white frock coats w/that reflector disk on their foreheads (research this name!), break-dancers w/boom-boxes that don't play though they dance anyway, water dowsers, carnival barkers, bizarre Public Service Announcements from people with cardboard TVs around their heads, vaudevillians, olympic athletes in their sport specific uniforms w/laurel wreaths but no medals, men in black suits & dark sunglasses & earpieces that they frequently adjust, carnival marching bands playing polkas, animal costumes: gorillas tigers polar bears cats dogs ostrich dragon unicorn; whirling dervishes, Catholic monks alternated w/Buddhist monks followed by reading Kabbalists, leprechauns, Vikings, Romans in military garb, fraternity & sorority kids in togas, Renaissance magicians, men in bowler hats & women in bonnets doing a choreographed routine w/black and white umbrellas, military lines of pregnant women w/babies in strollers, a float: balcony scene, Rapunzel calling out, Wherefore art thou, Daddy-o, & James Dean below, leaning against the wall, musing, To be or not to be, do be doobie do, shady men selling steak knives, watches, DVDs & vacuum cleaners, construction crews, televangelists, nurses from WWII, jitterbugging flappers, 50's swing dancers, Joan of Arc on a horse, angry peasant farmers wielding pitchforks, Santa Clause, Charlie Brown, Tom Cruise w/Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, & Katie Holmes; Michael Jackson & Babe Ruth, Madonna in her pointy bra w/Amelia Earhart, Nietzsche w/Billy Graham, Hitler w/Special Olympics kids, Stalin w/bears doing ballet, Lincoln w/Black Panthers, Queen Elizabeth on her throne w/a dozen dancing midget Shakespeares circling around her, all followed by a float of the Beatles back in the B&W days doing Twist & Shout.

You know you twist so good.

I got the parade idea from Paprika, a great anime film in which a dream threatens to take over reality & everyone who succumbs to the dream starts spouting nonsense and joins a strange parade.

Analysis Mountain on The Power of Love

2009-08-21T04:22:00.004-05:00

And what was Dr. Krokowski saying? What was his line of thought? Hans Castorp summoned his wits to discover, not immediately succeeding, however, since he had not heard the beginning and lost still more while musing on Frau Chauchat's flabby back. It was about a power, the power which--in short, it was about the power of love. Yes, of course; the subject was already given out in the general title of the whole course, and, moreover, this was Dr. Krokowski's special field; of what else should he be talking? It was a bit odd, to be sure, listening to a lecture on such a theme, when previously Hans Castorp's courses had dealt only with such matters as geared transmission in ship-building. No, really, how did one go about to discuss a subject of this delicate and private nature, in broad daylight, before a mixed audience? Dr. Krokowski did it by adopting a mingled terminology, partly poetic and partly erudite; which impressed young Hans Castorp as being unsuitable, but may have been the reason why the ladies looked flushed and the gentlemen flicked their ears to make them hear better. In particular the speaker employed the word love in a somewhat ambiguous sense, so that you were never quite sure where you were with it, or whether he had reference to its sacred or its passionate and fleshy aspect--and this doubt gave one a slightly seasick feeling. Never in all his life had Hans Castorp heard the word uttered so many times on end as he was hearing it now. When he reflected, it seemed to him he had never taken it in his own mouth, nor ever heard it from a stranger's. That might not be the case, but whether it were or no, the word did not seem to him to repay such frequent repetition. The slippery monosyllable, with its lingual and labial, and the bleating vowel between--it came to sound positively offensive; it suggested watered milk, or anything else that was pale and insipid; the more so considering the meat for strong men Dr. Krokowski was in fact serving up. For it was plain that when one set about it like that, one could go pretty far without shocking anybody. He was not content to allude, with exquisite tact, to certain matters which are known to everybody, but which most people are content to pass over in silence. He demolished illusions, he was ruthlessly enlightened, he relentlessly destroyed all faith in the dignity of silver hairs and the innocence of the sucking babe. And he wore with the frock-coat, his neglige collar, sandals, and grey woolen socks, and, thus attired, made an impression profoundly other-worldly, though at the same time not a little startling to young Hans Castorp. He supported his statements with a wealth of illustration and anecdote from the books and loose notes on the table before him; several times he even quoted poetry. And he discussed certain startling manifestations of the power of love, certain extraordinary, painful, uncanny variations, which the majestic phenomenon at times displayed. It was, he said, the most unstable, the most unreliable of man's instincts, the most prone of its very essence to error and fatal perversion. In the which there was nothing that should cause surprise. For this mighty force did not consist of a single impulse, it was of its nature complex; it was built up out of components which, however legitimate they might be in composition, were, taken each by itself, sheer perversity. But--continued Dr. Krokowski--since we refuse, and rightly, to deduce the perversity of the whole from the perversity of the parts, we are driven to claim, for the component perversities, some parts at least, though perhaps not all, of the justification which attaches to their united product. We were driven by sheer force of logic to this conclusion; Dr. Krokowski implored his hearers, having arrived at it, to hold it fast. Now there were psychical correctives, forces working in the other direction, instincts tending to conformability and regularity--he would almost have like to characterize them as bourgeois; and these influences had the effect of merging the perverse components into a valid and irreproachable whole: a frequent and gratifying result, which, Dr. Krokowski almost contemptuously added, was, as such, of no further concern to the thinker and the physician. But on the other hand, there were cases where this result was not obtained, could not and should not be obtained; and who, Dr. Krokowski asked, would dare to say that these cases did not, psychically considered, form a higher, more exclusive type? For in these cases the two opposing groups of instincts--the compulsive force of love, and the sum of the impulses urging in the other direction, among which he would particularly mention shame and disgust--both exhibited an extraordinary and abnormal height when measured by the ordinary bourgeois standards; and the conflict between them which took place in the abysses of the soul prevented the erring instinct from attaining to that safe, sheltered, and civilized state which alone could resolve its difficulties in the prescribed harmonies of the love-life as experienced by the average human being. This conflict between the powers of love and chastity--for that was what it really amounted to--what was its issue? It ended, apparently, in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure. Her confused and tumultuous claims were never allowed to rise to consciousness or to come to proof in anything like their entire strength or multiformity. But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory; for the claims of love could not be crippled or enforced by any such means. The love thus suppressed was not dead; it lived, it laboured after fulfilment in the darkest and secretest depths of the being. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge--if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable. But what then was this form, this mask, in which suppressed, unchartered love would appear? Dr. Krokowski asked the question, and looked along the listening rows as though in all seriousness expecting an answer. But he had to say it himself, who had said so much already. No one knew save him, but it was plain that he did. Indeed, with his ardent eyes, his black beard setting off the waxen pallor of his face, his monkish sandals and grey woollen socks, he seemed to symbolize in his own person that conflict between passion and chastity which was his theme. At least so though Hans Castorp, as with the others he waited in the greatest suspense to hear in what form love driven below the surface would reappear. The ladies barely breathed. Lawyer Paravant rattled his ear anew, that the critical moment might find it open and receptive. And Dr. Krokowski answered his own question, and said: "In the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed."

--Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, 162-165

Lord of the Lies

2009-08-20T05:41:00.007-05:00

I've always hated Lord of the Flies. Not to say I thought it was boring or poorly written--it's enjoyable as pulp entertainment goes--I hate what it theorizes about human nature and what it stands for intellectually. It's the old myth that people are miserable brutes who need authority to keep them from acting like demons very neatly packaged and marketed toward impressionable young adults who are forced to read this morally compromising propaganda in school.

Whenever I defend anarchy as the ultimate expression of human organization (and I will sometimes add that only anarchy is in line with the Gospels, the Fire Sermon, Heraclitus' fragments, the Tao Te Ching, and other shining examples of human thought), I'm never surprised to hear someone say that without authority, the state of affairs will descend into one like Lord of the Flies. When people read things in school, they tend to believe it. How could I convince anyone that the story is founded upon a lie when they learned all about it in school from Mrs. Groby, their ultimate authority, and they even watched the movie?

People are essentially good. Evil comes as the result of authority, when one person or class wields power over another. Without authority, there will be no evil.

And finally the news has come that will forever undermine the Lord of the Flies' thesis. Sir William Golding admitted in his memoir, to be released soon, that he was an attempted rapist.

Carey quotes the memoir as partially excusing the attempted rape on the grounds that Dora was "depraved by nature" and, at 14, was "already sexy as an ape". It reveals that Golding told his wife he had been sure the girl "wanted heavy sex". She fought him off and ran away as he stood there shouting: "I'm not going to hurt you," the memoir said.

This is the esteemed author who Mrs. Groby probably exalted as a "defender of civilization", or some other such nonsense. The mind that says we need rules to defend Piggy is a demented mind.

And here's the real problem, and also the greatest argument for anarchy: someone might say, Ok, so Golding's scum, but that only proves we need rules & authority to defend the rest of us from Sir William Golding. The problem: Golding himself was that very authority. Power goes to the perverted. Listen to how he got the idea for his great defense of civilization:

A teacher, he deliberately set groups of boys against each other just to see how far they would go and if they would get violent. It was kind of like a lab experiment that turned into Lord of the Flies.

I'd known that Golding was a teacher--Mrs. Groby probably taught you the same thing. But I've taught too, and my experience has never been one of wild savages waiting for the opportunity to tear each other apart. The classes I've taught have always been mutually supportive, and people treat each other with consideration and respect. It's not because I rule with an iron fist. It's because I don't rule at all. I've always treated my students with the dignity that any human being deserves, and they have always responded in kind. There's no question of me controlling the classroom: the students are human beings and are perfectly capable of controlling themselves. You get what you give.

If you want a classroom to turn into Lord of the Flies, first you need to put an authority figure who believes in rules into the room. If he has a fancy name that begins with Sir, all the better. He'll turn those kids into savages right quick.

Because that's how he justifies his own power.

Come Here

2009-08-13T16:51:00.004-05:00

we eat food we do not need.

Because of the silence.

any taste at all takes us:
away from the silence.

we watch television,
and the color, and the noise:
keep us safe
from the silence.

We speak words.

Because we are terrified.

Because It is terrifying:

where everything
dies:
every love, every
flower, every promise
and every rainbow, every
human bond--all of it--
everything falls apart in this silence

and comes back together.

Here

--

13.8.09 Amsterdam

Work Before Play

2009-07-16T11:26:00.002-05:00

I have no time in the mornings to record my dreams. I still dream, but I lose them somewhere along my walk to class, down the steepest pedestrian walkway I could imagine. I feel no sense of loss however, because Prague is a town where dreams have become real: solid, monumental, these castles and cathedrals are built with stone and the stones are made of dreams.

I don’t exaggerate when I say I have never worked this hard in my life. TEFL Worldwide is essentially a solid month of finals week. I attend class 40 hours a week and spend my evenings on assignments. In college, I at least had a job that let my mind take a backseat for a few hours. Here, those hours are spent in the classroom. And I must confess I am grateful. I have learned more than I thought possible. The work pays off. And though everyone is at their edge—such a sustained push tests our emotional stability, our mental endurance, right down to our very heart of courage—everyone also seems to be pulling this off, so we push through one more day. Can I handle two more weeks of this? Well, I’ve already handled two weeks of it, and I suppose I can do it again.

The teachers are fantastic. I’ve taken some education classes before, and my profit on it was a lot of theory and developmental psychology. The teachers at TEFL Worldwide clearly know what we need and how to get it to us. This is my second week of classes, and I have already prepared and presented three full lessons. I am learning by doing, and they are giving me all the tools I need.

Play, play! cries my heart; write about the play! Yes, there is indeed no life without play, and I am most definitely alive in Prague. On Monday, I had to prepare a lesson for the next day: it was a race against the clock. That night, a free jazz concert would play in Old Town Square. But I couldn’t go to the concert if I didn’t complete my lesson plan. I sat at the park next to the metro and feverishly invented a lesson. I finished at 7:45 pm. I jumped on the metro, and by 8:15 pm I was standing in Old Town Square in the most gorgeous concert venue listening to Latin jazz. People were dancing, drinking Pilsner, and fulfilling the promise of life.

Even the beer: you figure at a concert, the beer stands are bound to rip you off, and do it with beer flavored water. But in Prague, the beer stands serve Pilsner Urquell, which is now at least my second favorite beer. Ok, you think, so maybe you don’t get watered down, sorority party beer, but it must be expensive. Not true. Even though it was twice the price of a beer in a regular bar, it still only came to $2.50 for a huge glass of great beer.

Rush Week

2009-07-10T02:43:00.002-05:00

Today I will teach my first solo 45 minutes lesson. I haven't taught a lesson I prepared myself since 2002. I put a lot of time into it. Time rages past. Tons of work, and every siren singing to me to see this city, and I can't imagine what boredom would be like anymore. Not that I believe in boredom--learned long ago how to dream, and how to play--but here in Prague the dreams are all real, and all around. One hardly needs an imagination in this city.

My classmates are all great. We have quite the group, pulled together into these classrooms from all over the states, and even the world. Just meeting everyone would be enough to hold my full & fascinated attention, but we have all this schoolwork! Tonight we'll go out and probably go wild to compensate for the effort we've put in during the week. I haven't run my body like this since grad school. And it feels fantastic.

I don't even have time to let loose with one of my meandering associative imaginative posts. All I can get is that one sentence. And now off to class.

Zita from Slovakia is across the table from me videotaping us all chatting & doing this internet thing. This place is awesome.

In Between Miracles

2009-07-06T02:33:00.004-05:00

I am rushing to get this post down--I'm writing from the tefl classroom with a half hour before class starts. I grab internet connections where I can. When I can: I've been running around this gorgeous city for three or four days, non-stop. I'm running too hard and I don't even have the time to count the days.

Last night before bed, in the first span of relaxation I've felt since I arrived, I sat out on my second story balcony and watched the moon shine over the lights of Prague. I can't describe the importance of the sight to my heart except to say it provided the sort of moment I live for. A camera would be futile before such a scene. Everything about this town shines with a light of grace. I walk, joystruck, astounded--every sight strikes my eyes like a miracle.

And apparently miracles don't leave much time for much else. I have to run. Here's a picture:

Pilgrims Dream: a Compendium

2009-06-29T09:19:00.005-05:00

Here is a brief-as-possible summary of my work-in-progress, Pilgrims Dream. I'll put a permanent link to this post on the right side of the blog so it can be easily accessed. Though the basic outline of the novel is firm in my imagination, I may update this post as the story evolves.

I begin this summary at an auspicious moment: I am about to move to Prague, and my writing process is about to rise to a new stage. Now is a good time to clarify what I know, and I expect this post will help those who want to better understand other Lightning, Mirror posts in which I discuss Pilgrims Dream.

Cast of Characters

Pilgrims:
Heraclitus Walleye
Laura Cloud
Dudley Wundersprocket
Lux Nadarien
Orestes Herpetulian

Them:
17
Agent Grossberger
Agent Troutslop

Others:
Aleister Von Dirk
Sophia Aurora
Janglebell

Pilgrims: These five meet, by chance, in a coffeeshop in downtown Manhattan. Each has been driven to the coffeeshop by strange and magical sequences of events. Each has arrived in a moment that finds them absolutely open and vulnerable to any message of meaning that life might deliver. Through signs and wonders that speak to each pilgrim individually, they recognize that they are meant to embark together on a journey of discovery. Each is willing and able to temporarily leave their old life behind.

The Pilgrimage has no concrete goal: the pilgrims themselves must work out their purpose. The Pilgrimage is a secret convention, an underground form of life, in the Wittgensteinian sense: like Fight Club, The Pilgrimage is not to be discussed with those who have never been on one. Anyone who has ventured on a pilgrimage can intuitively recognize fellow travellers. A person may go on only one pilgrimage in his lifetime, or he may go on several. One is called to The Pilgrimage, as if it is desired by the very structure of the universe. The pilgrimage described in Pilgrims Dream will be Heraclitus' tenth journey, which is a record as far as anyone knows: he would be a legend if pilgrims openly communicated about their experiences.

Pilgrims Dream will take our group from the downtown coffeeshop to the unknown depths of the Amazon rainforests. Theirs is a quest in which they seek a recognition of achievement, though they have only a vague notion of what that achievement will look like; along the way, they will chase the mysterious blue flower, El Dorado, and a mythical, lost Indian tribe. They will follow where adventure leads.

Heraclitus Walleye has been on several Pilgramages. In his 40's. Born and raised in St. Louis, Heractlitus has travelled the world and become an unrooted drifter--working here before drifting there. Because of his lack of attachments, Heraclitus has developed an almost preternatural ability to respond to the opportunity of the moment. Conversely, Heraclitus' lifestyle has drained him, and he dreams of the day when he can settle, and rest. By virtue of experience, Heraclitus serves as guide for the others. He has acquired shamanistic abilities and psychological insights that allow him to better direct the mental/emotional/spiritual transformation that forms the essence of the Pilgramage.

Laura Cloud is recently divorced. Late 20's, early 30's. An art major in college, she lost touch with her craftsy side during her marriage. Her husband made a killing in real estate, and they rose into a lifestyle they could barely understand. Now that her husband has split and the life she never felt comfortable with is gone, Laura grieves, processes, and wonders how to fashion her own, individual, best-of-all-possible life. She is visiting New York as a tourist to recuperate and regenerate.

Dudley Wundersprocket is the owner/CEO of Loud Ties, Inc. In his 50's. He has previously been on one pilgrimage, which makes him the only experienced pilgrims besides Walleye. After Wundersprocket's first, he quit his corporate job in the garment industry and opened his own business. He runs Loud Ties as an experiment with democracy in the workplace, and he has developed a reputation as a mad genius. He is a big man with a good heart and a loving wife who isn't altogether happy with her husband's recent tendency to strike off without announcement on some vague adventure. He is in New York on a business meeting that falls through.

Lux Nadarien is a high school student researching colleges. She is brilliant, and learning. She cannot decide whether she would like to study physics or religion. She would like to study a fusion of the two, to discover & explicate a worldview in which all human perspectives are validated and respected. But what major would facilitate such a concentration? At the heart, Lux is a teenage girl about to grow up. She is visiting New York to check out college campuses, research various academic departments, & take care of admission interviews.

Orestes Herpetulian is a sanitation worker at the end of his rope. Early to mid 30's. He had worked as a pharmaceuticals rep before a crisis of conscience forced him to begin his life anew. He works in the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, otherwise known as The Dump. The Dump is populated by a Herd of mutated, gargantuan Dump Rats, with whom sanitation workers engage in armed combat. Herpetulian is at the point of Going Native, Colonel Kurtz style, by moving into The Dump and fighting The Herd--commando style--full time. He lives in a strange world. His visit to Manhattan was his way of seeing the Real World one last time before he abandons everything for the strange realites of The Dump.

They are a secret organization. They are global and powerful. Their exact nature is unclear, as is their purpose. (I want another title for this organization, in addition to Them. Perhaps T.O.P.: the organizing principle? I want an acronym.) They are an ill-defined context.

17 recruits Grossberger & Troutslop & initiates them into Them. He thus reveals that he can navigate The Agency--where Grossberger & Troutslop were employed--with impunity and recruit individual agents out of what should be the highest and most powerful secular authority in the world. Who is he? He doesn't even have a name. He is a post-modern Yoda training initiates for a Jedi that couldn't possibly exist.

Agents Grossberger & Troutslop leave their jobs at The Agency to work out, for themselves if no one else, the mystery of Them. Grossberger, especially, wouldn't have given the existence of Them a moment's thought, except he now appears to be working for Them. G & T want the Truth, which is exactly what they don't have. 17 never tells them enough, and they carry out their missions with faith that eventually they will understand the organization for which they work. They get into misadventures. Picture X-Files meets Laurel & Hardy meets Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. They are bumblers. Their mission is to locate the pilgrims when they meet--seemingly by chance and for the first time--in the downtown coffeeshop; G & T don't know why or what they are supposed to do. 17 takes them into a mysterious base located under the Fort in St. Augustine, where scientific (as well as occult) marvels & secret programs are revealed. G & T are then ordered to track down Aleister Von Dirk. Finally they are once again sent to monitor the pilgrims as they journey into the Amazon.

Others are minor characters of major interest.

Aleister Von Dirk is writing a novel called Pilgrims Dream. The main protagonists of his novel are the pilgrims who meet in the downtown coffeeshop. He somehow imagines a fiction that exactly mirrors a reality unknown to him. He lives in Prague.

Sophia Aurora is a night-walker, seen on the streets of Prague only under moonlight. She seems otherworldly. Heraclitus Walleye ran into her during his brief stint in Prague when insomnia struck him for several months and he took to walking at night. They develop a strange relationship, and Sophia gives Walleye a book that teaches one how to dream. Certain strange facts seem to indicate that Sophia Aurora is a vampire, but that's just ridiculous and impossible.

Janglebell is an anarchist pixie native to Manhattan.

I Heart New York

2009-06-25T19:43:00.015-05:00

This is a tribute to the city I come from, the city I will take with me as I journey to Prague.

(insane late nights in Manhattan: colors streak & bleed.)

A friend said no matter how long I'm out of the States, I'll always be an American. I wonder. Not only am I moving to a foreign country, which in itself will probably change me, but I will be living there as an Irish citizen--much less paperwork to deal with. So the dislocation of it all is a bit strange--I'll be Irish, living in the Czech Republic--and I was wondering through it.

(view from The Ferry: the curved glass building always entranced me, even when the Twin Towers stood.)

And I realize I've dealt with dislocation before.

(My father worked in the Twin Towers till I was in high school. They had office Christmas parties there for the little kids, and I remember waking up so early for the commute. Floor 12A: no unlucky 13. I could see them from my front yard in Staten Island, until The Dump got so freaking huge that it obscured the view. As a kid, I would point & say, Dad's there!)

I grew up in New York, but I've spent over a decade living outside of it, in Florida & Long Island. It's not an easy transition. I remember how my anxiety spiked at everyone's slowness, and at the dearth of the night. Certainly the experience has modified my personality. I still have a New York heart; it's just certain behaviors that have dropped off. For instance, I've learned to calmly wait. The only dislocation I can understand is the loss of New York. A New Yorker is a stranger anywhere else in the world, whether it's in America or not. My life since New York has been a getting used to the strangeness of everywhere else.

(Feels like they've been running that Recession Special since I could eat solid food. Hot dog w/onions & papaya juice.)

I never thought of myself as an American. I am a New Yorker who left. I can't identify with America; it isn't visceral. America is just a concept to me, whereas New York is my hometown. I also expect I'd have more in common with a Dublin native than someone who grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Or, put me at a table with a Paris native & someone from small-town Arkansas, and it ain't the Parisian playing odd one out.

Last night I watched Woody Allen's Manhattan. So many gorgeous pictures. For all of the brutal necessity & cruel hustle, a New Yorker can still sense in his heart the romance that redeems his hometown. He can still feel the thrill of the speed & the motion in the odd moments when he drops out of his future and into the present. Certainly, he won't stop whatever he is doing, but in that moment he can look around and think, My God, just look at this place. Like Woody Allen said, It's a knockout.

(Washington Square Park: in high school, when I was discovering that I wanted to write, I would come here and dream in my journal. Afterward, I'd walk to Strand, which is heaven.)

There are patterns of thought specific to & common among New Yorkers; I'm not sure the same can be said of Americans. For instance, I wondered how I would title this blog. Just The City would feel most natural--but for too many people, the phrase carries no specific reference. New York, New York--but I've heard that song too many times. So, New York? I wondered if I needed to be more specific and write New York City for the sake of outsiders. This is how my years outside have influenced me--I am now also sympathetic to the perspective of everyone not from the five boroughs, and so I modify my original thought for their sake. So, for all you normal people out there, here's an insight into the mind of all New Yorkers: people in New York City think of it as The City. If you're talking about the New York that exists outside The City, it's called Upstate.

(Thus, Long Island is an unclassified geographical anomaly, and it's best not to think about it too much.)

(I've been to the Empire State Building exactly once, for an interview w/a headhunter. 13th floor. I read Ulysses in the waiting room.)

My point is, I was born into this way of thinking, and it belongs to no one outside of New York. Even if someone real cool & hip from another part of the world decided he was gonna call New York The City, he couldn't possibly understand the full depth of the word. Maybe he would even know that, within the five boroughs, The City refers more specifically to Manhattan. But he could never conceive the world that is The City to every New York native. For The City is the world. It's not like every other city where you hop in a car & drive a half hour to get out. If you want to leave The City, you're in for a journey. It ain't gonna be short, and it ain't gonna be easy. He couldn't possibly feel how Upstate refers to a strange, faraway land where people on the street smile at each other and leave their front doors unlocked. Or all the associations that come immediately upon hearing the word Jersey.

I've left New York, but any kind of change I go through will only be a modification of my New York heart. I'll always be a New Yorker. As far as being an American, I mean, come on, even people from Jersey are American. You expect me to identify with that?

Life, & a Dream

2009-06-22T19:35:00.009-05:00

I. Life

By a process I don't fully understand, I've come to associate this plant with my soul. I bought it three years ago when my spirit called for more Life in my room. An image or a voice came to me in meditation, and I knew I had to take care of a plant.

I killed the only other plant I'd owned--back in college. Cactus. Yes, I killed a cactus. It was spectacular. I somehow managed to accidentally drop it out my third story apartment window. You might think it's impossible to accidentally drop a cactus out of a window. But it's like experiencing telepathy, or seeing a UFO--I would've thought it impossible too, until I saw it happen right before my eyes.

This plant that stayed alive was important to me because I wanted to be able to help something live. And: it grew. We had a scare once, when I accidentally dropped it and it spilled all over the carpet. But this is a strong plant, and it came back together. Strangely, that happened during some personal crisis--the details are lost to me. I learned to associate the plant with my soul. The plant's health and growth corresponded with that of my soul. During the crisis (after the fall), it lost half of its leaves. But we came around together, and grew stronger than ever.

I have looked into this plant, and it has spoken to me. Not in human language, to be sure, and not with words, but, despite everything, I am not logocentric. It was some spooky type of plant communication that conveyed beauty without form.

When I bought this plant, I had no idea it was ever supposed to flower. The first flower shocked me. In the three years I've cared for this plant, it has flowered twice before--both times with exactly one flower.

Now, just as I am about to leave and entrust this wonderful plant to the care of my parents, the plant has burst forth. It is an explosion of color! The picture doesn't show it, but at least seven flowers are in some stage of development. It is erumpent! Scarlet and green: fit for a holiday. Once again I sense the correspondence with my soul. We are in a moment of our fullest bloom.

I also feel grateful to this plant because I have the sense that it has thrown up such a glorious display of flowers to say goodbye to me. I'm building this monument to my plant because it brought me into an accord with Life.

II. A Dream

I wake up in my bed in the middle of the night--my actual bed, under my red, black, and gold Celtic knot mandala bedspread--and I'm laying in about three inches of water. I jump to my feet. My bedroom is flooded. The water is above my waist. A clock-radio, normally on my night table (though I don't actually own one), plays some rock n' roll song, floating on the water, and I see through the water to the plug in the electrical socket. I think, My God! I'll be electrocuted! I tell myself I'd better not touch the plug but should instead turn off the radio. Then I think, I shouldn't even touch the radio. Something is preventing it from electrocuting me, and I'd better not mess with it at all.

My bedroom is the only flooded room in the house. The water doesn't spill into my adjoining bathroom or the hall. This makes perfect sense. I resolve to get to work. I will get a bucket and scoop up the water and dump it into the bathroom sink. It will take a long time, so I'd better get started.

Except, when I start to leave my room to retrieve a bucket from the garage, I find my way blocked by stacks of boxes that reach four to six feet high. Just about every inch of my bedroom floor is claimed by the stacked boxes. I climb up on the boxes, calculate the best path up and through the stacks, and make my way to the door.

--

I won't interpret this one. I will only say I think this is a gorgeous dream.

I'll call it The Dream of The Flood and The Columns.

Shout in the Street

2009-06-20T20:43:00.004-05:00

--History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

--The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

--That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

--What? Mr Deasy asked.

--A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

. . .

--James Joyce, Ulysses, 34

Today I saw videos posted on Youtube of the Iranian uprising; they sent chills into my soul. The ambient shouts of Allah O Akbar, an entire people shouting, God is Great, from their great crisis--I'm not sure I could withstand hearing such calls and pleas in person. Imagine the faith, and the desperation! This is the human heart. God is Great--the unspoken corrolary being, He will deliver us from this evil.

And the Iranian uprising, like so much else, carries me into Joyce, as quoted above, where the God they shout for is precisely the Shout itself in the streets of Tehran.

It is a powerful shout.

Strong Words

2009-06-20T10:21:00.004-05:00

Though everyone is familiar with this, I found it very interesting to read the actual words:

Whereas you, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzio Gallilei, of Florence, aged seventy years, were denounced in 1615, to this Holy Office, for holding as true a false doctrine taught by many, namely, that the sun is immovable in the center of the world, and that the earth moves, and also with a diurnal motion; also, for having pupils whom you instructed in the same opinions; also, for maintaining a correspondence on the same with some German mathematicians; also for publishing certain letters on the sun-spots, in which you developed the same doctrine as true; also, for answering the objections which were continually produced from the Holy Scriptures, by glozing the said Scriptures according to your own meaning; and whereas thereupon was produced a copy of a writing, in form of a letter which, following the hypothesis of Copernicus, you include several propositions contrary to the true sense and authority of the Holy Scriptures; therefore (this Holy Tribunal being desirous of providing against the disorder and mischief which were thence proceeding and increasing to the detriment of the Holy Faith) by the desire of his Holiness and the Most Emminent Lords, Cardinals of this supreme and universal Inquisition, the two propositions of the stability of the sun, and the motion of the earth, were qualified by the Theological Qualifiers as follows:

1. The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.

2. The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal action, is also absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith.

Therefore . . . , invoking the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His Most Glorious Mother Mary, We pronounce this Our final sentence . . . : We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo . . . have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by the Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture, and, consequently, that you have incurred all the censures and penalties enjoined and promulgated in the sacred canons and other general and particular constituents against delinquents of this description. From which it is Our pleasure that you be absolved, provided that with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, in Our presence, you abjure, curse, and detest, the said error and heresies, and every other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome . . . .

II. The New Reality

The date for this quaint document is 1630 A.D., midway between Dante and James Joyce.

--taken from Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology, 573-574.

--

First of all, what a powerful frame, that last sentence! The New Reality indeed!

What impressed me most about this document was the legalistic wording. I'd always been trained to think of the Inquisition as a bunch of mad extremists who killed everyone who disagreed with their own opinions. Clearly, they were only lawyers. This sort of thinking is very much alive and well in our contemporary world, though the Inquisition is long gone. One gets the clear sense that Galileo was not brought down because of the intolerant faith of his prosecutors, but because of their legalistic thinking. Indeed, how could the Holy Tribunal release him after they received the considered & legally binding decisions of the Theological Qualifiers? After all, protocol must be followed, due process carried out. And, as far as that goes, in the immortal words of Philip K. Dick: The Empire Never Ended.

(Kafka's drawing from The Trial)

Also, always nice to pick up a new word: glozing. From gloze (v.): to minimize or underplay; gloss.

Galileo marks the midpoint between Dante & Joyce. I think of the evidence & judgment issued throughout The Inferno, and even moreso of the wonderfully surreal trial scene in Ulysses. Some scenes must be universal, if not quite eternal.

Should Pilgrims Dream contain a trial scene? It certainly is a useful metaphor, if an awful reality. Is it possible we are prepared to move beyond such play-acting?

Perceptions of a Golden Destiny

2009-06-15T16:27:00.004-05:00

I want to write about something I've learned about myself, about the difference between having faith in one's future, and having a sense of one's destiny.

Regret and fear overwhelmed me last week. It seemed as though my right actions culminated in disaster--in my blindness (is how the feeling went) I thought I followed my best intentions & intuitions, which I had assumed would always lead me right, but some sense of assurance was torn away. Things don't have to work out, I suddenly realized. I could follow my dreams right into the abyss. Indeed, I felt as if I already had. I woke up in a nightmare.

How could I leave my family? How could I quit my job? How could I leave my friends? I can't even trust my own heart. How could I move to a strange land where I don't even speak the language? I'm putting an ocean between myself and everyone I love. How could I move to a city where I will necessarily share an apartment with total strangers?

These doubts had occurred to me before, and I handled them swiftly, but last week, everything came crashing in. It was my first week off from work at the library. Already I missed everyone there terribly. And I had time for those doubts to swallow much of my thought. I drowned.

I thought to express it in a poem about getting caught & pulled out deep by a midnight riptide. It's been years since I've written a poem, and apparently my brain is now wired for prose--the thing clunked.

The feeling passed. I conquered it.

Looking back, I am able to interpret those feelings.

Throughout the attack, I still knew that I was doing the right thing by moving to Prague. I still knew it is an incredible opportunity. I still knew my life could only improve by this adventure. But none of this knowledge quelled my fear. Why?

I learned that though I retained faith in my future, my sense of destiny had fallen away.

By faith, I mean a feeling that "where I am going is where I will want to be". I think it is just my disposition to have this faith. I assume things will work out, and they usually do. I have the luck of the Irish, and I know it. If you want to entertain a magical thought, you might decide that things usually work out for me precisely because I assume they will.

So if I still had this faith, how can I account for the insurgence of doubt and fear?

This is where, I now see, my sense of destiny comes into play. [paused by the difficulty of description] I mean that I can usually feel, here and now, the brightness of my own future. It is not the sense that things will work out, which is both an intellectual and an emotional understanding, but a feeling that the future is good, and I can feel its radiance through some occult, time-warping form of communication. My sense of destiny is not a thought or a feeling, but a perception. It has nothing to do with belief.

I am aware of several heretical metaphysical implications. I must accept them. This is my experience. I must proceed from this.

Somehow, that mode of perception was blocked last week. Was my organ of perception blocked, or did the future itself somehow become clouded? That will remain a mystery. I still had my faith, which is all good and fine, but without that mode of perception, I was susceptible to doubts and fears. When an image came to my mind of some terrible possibility, I could no longer easily dismiss it. Though my faith stood strong and attempted to reassure me, faith alone cannot overcome fear. Though I might have faith that terrible things won't happen, I cannot honestly rule out the possibility. I can only say, I don't think that will happen. My fear responded, But it might. And I had to concede.

Fear cannot stand against my sense of destiny. I don't even get those terrible images now, but if I did, they could be brushed away in an instant. Now that my perception is restored, I can dismiss any terrible thought about the future because I can sense my future here and now. I don't just believe my future will be bright, I know that it already exists, somewhere inside me, and it is golden beyond even my juiced-up imagination.

15 days until Life in Prague.

The Deadly Male Protein

2009-05-31T18:51:00.004-05:00

I started thinking about Paul's garbage theory about the male organ producing a certain amount of proteins when a beautiful woman looks at you, and if she keeps on looking, your organs produce an extra protein--so deadly, that if you put one drop on the tip of an arrow, you could kill a fucking rhinoceros in two seconds.

I started to think what I wanted her to think. I looked into her eyes. And, Bingo: she was mine.

Paul swears that cavemen used this technique since time began, and it was the deadly male protein that killed the dinosaurs, and not the ice age. I think Paul saw it in a movie once and convinced himself it was true. That's how Paul escaped whenever there was danger, and that's just what he did the next day.

I never really paid much attention to Paul's garbage theories. But after awhile I realized he was right. I felt the proteins running through my body like broken glass, and I didn't know what to do. I thought I was gonna go blind, so I tried to keep these proteins busy by making a flying machine. I've never built a flying machine before, but how hard could it be? The proteins were making things fly in my head, so I was off to a good start. And the more I worked on it, the more I was sure it would fly. I just kept telling myself over and over again: it's gonna fly.

I never thought it could happen, but Love hit me like an elephant, and I was thrown into a jungle of dreams.

--delivered by Johnny Depp in Arizona Dream, possibly the strangest movie I've ever seen.

Yesterday afternoon I read The Surrealist Manifesto, and this movie, which I stumbled upon last night, particularly this quoted monologue, is working itself deep into my imagination. I laugh hysterically. It's so insane! And the flying machine, I think my novel must be a flying machine, Pilgrims Dream, so absurd and born of pure Faith, and I continuously affirm: it's gonna fly. I know it will.

Also, I really like the theory about the male proteins, especially the deadly male protein. It's got the kind of color that deserves belief. I think I'll start practicing, and make myself believe. I'll work it deep into my worldview.

If you know me, you know I will. It's gonna fly.

Quest

2009-05-23T21:17:00.002-05:00

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.

--Andre Breton

40 Days (Verging)

2009-05-21T20:04:00.003-05:00

It's been raining for an entire week straight, which makes today's 40-Days-Till-Life-In-Prague maybe a little too close to ominous. As in, everyone in Florida is going batshit from sunshine withdrawals, waterwater everywater, and severe lack of vitamin D--simply reference Facebook updates from the Florida region, and you'll find the situation is well beyond mass hysteria--so, the only coherent thought anyone around here can hold for more than a couple three seconds is, When is the freaking rain gonna stop? before they drift into a depressed sleepyness from which they can only rouse themselves with rage against this incessant onslaught of total, ubiquitous precipitation--it's like rain in every imaginable direction, forward, backward, before, behind, above, beyond: I am dreaming about rain--it has become our damned existential condition. Which is not the situation you wanna be in when you hear the words, 40 Days.

But it's true! Only 40 days! It gets me giddy as a schoolboy verging on summer vacation, which, incidentally, we really are verging on.

Samizdat Scripture

2009-05-15T19:41:00.004-05:00

Dreams are for those who cannot bear much reality.

Reality is for those terrified by dreams.

But everything is a dream,

And all dreams are absolutely real.

--

Two convergences:

I've long wished I owned a great & small book, spiritual and ancient, devoted solely to dreams. It happens quite often that I want to sit down and read this book. I've read the Tibetan stuff & the modern psychology, but I need something other. Something on the order of the Tao Te Ching, or Heraclitus' Fragments, except all about dreams. A simultaneous manual of how to dream alongside an investigation into the nature of dreams. Both practical and metaphysical. Poetic, concise, and simple. Classical, and noble.

My novel has a heavy spiritual element, fueled mainly by dreams, as you could guess by the title, Pilgrims Dream. I realized I would like to intersperse throughout the novel a smaller work that might be gathered up and compiled into a separate religious text. Heraclitus Walleye will be reading this work throughout the main action of the novel. It is a samizdat work he received from a strange & beautiful nightwalker (who may or may not be a vampire, a proposition Walleye cannot even start to process but lets hang at the fringe of his consciousness) whom Walleye met during his insomniac phase in Prague. The book seems to originate outside our waking dimension. He reads this book and tries to get, as in 'receive', it.

So I decided: I'm gonna write that dream book I always wanted to read. And I'll let Heraclitus have the experience of struggle and discovery and wonder that attends the reading of every great work. I'll invent the entire thing, both the writing and the reading.

Anyway, it's been about 1,500 years since the world received a major religious document, so I figure we could use something fresh.

Derridean Farmuhhpseudickles: Thoth

2009-05-10T10:25:00.006-05:00

A quote, illustrating the obscure, necessarily & purposefully difficult crossing over style of recent philosophy, and dealing with Thoth, ancient Egyptian god, obsession of Crowley, general occult idol as inventor of magic, and subject of Plato's attention w/r/t Thoth's role as the mythical inventor of writing, which herein is thoroughly deconstructed--the movement of the act of writing, which seeks to replace speech by producing something (an object? a symbol) new and different (the written word) that somehow retains the shape, or aura, of that which it seeks to replace (the spoken word), and generally reminds one of three card monte, where you are the mark--relating both science and magic as the defining activities of this Trickster god, who is ultimately concerned with healing.

--

The system of these traits brings into play an original kind of logic: the figure of Thoth is opposed to its other (father, sun, life, speech, origin or orient, etc.), but as that which at once supplements and supplants it. Thoth extends or opposes by repeating or replacing. By the same token, the figure of Thoth takes shape and takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for. But it thereby opposes itself, passes into its other, and this messenger-god is truly a god of the absolute passage between opposites. If he had any identity--but he is precisely the god of nonidentity--he would be that coincidentia oppositorum to which we will soon have recourse again. In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and representative, obeys it and conforms to it, replaces it, by violence if need be. He is thus [interesting almost typo here of theus for thus] the father's other, the father, and the subversive movement of replacement. The god of writing is thus at once his father, his son, and himself. He cannot be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and masked, and intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play.

The god of resurrection is less interested in life or death than in death as a repetition of life and life as a rehearsal of death, in the awakening of life and in the recommencement of death. This is what numbers, of which he is also the inventor and patron, mean. Thoth repeats everything in the addition of the supplement: in adding to and doubling as the sun, he is other than the sun and the same as it; other than the good and the same, etc. Always taking a place not his own, a place one could call that of the dead or the dummy, he has neither a proper place nor a proper name. His propriety or property is impropriety or inappropriateness, the floating indetermination that allows for substitution and play. Play, of which he is also the inventor, as Plato himself reminds us. It is to him that we owe the games of dice and draughts. He would be the mediating movement of dialectics if he did not also mimic it, indefinitely preventing it, through this ironic doubling, from reaching some final fulfillment or eschatological reappropriation. Thoth is never present. Nowhere does he appear in person. No being-there can properly be his own.

Every act of his is marked by this unstable ambivalence. This god of calculation, arithmetic, and rational science also presides over the occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. He is the god of magic formulas that calm the sea, of secret accounts, of hidden texts: an archetype of Hermes, god of cryptography no less of every other -graphy.

Science and magic, the passage between life and death, the supplement to evil and to lack: the priviledged domain of Thoth had, finally, to be medicine. All his powers are summed up and find employment there. The god of writing, who knows how to put an end to life, can also heal the sick. And even the dead. The steles of Horus on the Crocodiles tell of how the king of the gods sends Thoth down to heal Harsiesis, who has been bitten by a snake in his mother's absence.

The god of writing is thus also a god of medicine. Of "medicine": both a science and an occult drug. Of the remedy and the poison. The god of writing is the god of the pharmakon. And it is writing as a pharmakon that he presents to the king in the Phaedrus, with a humility as unsettling as a dare.

--Jacques Derrida, Plato's Pharmacy

Dump Rats & Heavy Realism

2009-05-09T20:07:00.005-05:00

Convergence.

Orestes Herpetulian, after quitting his job as pharmaceuticals rep in self-disgust, gets a job as a sanitation worker. This is all back in the 90's, well before the proper action of Pilgrims Dream, which allows him to work in the Fresh Kills Landfill, aka The Dump, when it was still on active duty.

I've heard legendary tales about the rats in The Dump, like Paul Bunyan grade stuff, and I plan to have my fun. I admit I'll be stealing liberally from Pynchon's V., with his hero blowing away alligators in the NYC sewers.

What came together?

I read about a documentary called Examined Life, which I apparently will not be able to see because it will not play anywhere near my locality. The movie features various philosophers in different locales riffing about actual life--as the tagline states: Philosophy is in the Streets. Slavoj Zizek is one of the featured philosophers, and he does his schtick in the middle of a dump, on ecology. Which gave me pause. Seems like maybe garbage really is one of the major issues of our age. And if you can really slow down to consider that, it'll probably stop your brain from processing anything for a good couple three seconds. I could riff on garbage, after having my personal brain-stoppage experience, but that's not the point here. Point is, I thought, Hey, I should have more garbage in Pilgrims Dream. And then I realized Herpetulian is a garbage man.

And then I remembered The Dump, which is like mythical to anyone who grew up on Staten Island. And I knew I had to involve the rats in some way--soon the idea came to me: armed combat. And not just large type rats. I'm dealing with The (freaking) Herd. And not just a herd of NYC sewer rats; I'm talking about The Herd of toxic mutated irradiated & therefore terrifyingly healthy while simultaneously obscenely diseased Dump Rats, moving in, as the public will never hear it referred to as in order not to incite general panic, The Herd.

I can hear guys in the locker room, crossing paths on a shift change, saying:

Yo Jimmy, what sector is The Herd in? Is it moving? How's the noise? Hey, I know it's loud, what am I, a fucking idiot?, I'm working here five years, you think I don't know the noise is loud?, but I mean is it, you know--I mean today--is the noise, like, you know, getting hungry?

I'm sort of stealing the idea of The Herd from D.F. Wallace, and his tale of herds of feral hamsters taking over New England after New England is turned into a massive dump. Infinite Jest, after thinking of Zizek, confirmed the importance of garbage with it's whole concavity situation. Even though IJ is having a profound impact on me, which hopefully isn't too obvious in my prose, I really can't say it's involved in the garbage thing as any more than a secondary confirmation. Which was enough.

But mainly I like the idea of Herpetulian doing battle with mutant-rodents. Sorta like Carl from Caddyshack, except I'll have The (entire) Dump for a map, and a Herd for a foe. At some point, Herpetulian, inspired by the fantastic picture below, which is of a python in the Everglades that exploded while digesting a freaking alligator!, will think to import Everglades pythons into The Dump, on the sly, of course, since administrators would never approve--they are entirely out of touch w/the realities of daily Rat battle & therefore must be circumvented--which Herpetulian imagines the Everglades pythons gives even Dump Rats screaming nightmares. And that's when things get maybe a bit out of control. Lots of tactical fun here.

Also, on the dump thing, it'll give me a chance to give a shout out to Sestra, or City, Sister, Silver as it is titled in the English translation, by Jachym Topol. It's a Czech book, hallucinatory, even the translation, which is fantastic, just sort of slides through every color and sound and darkness, and ends up in a Dump, homeless. Which will be a model for Herpetulian before he joins the Pilgrimage.

From Sestra I got the idea that certain sanitation workers, so obsessed with doing battle w/The Herd, eventually give up the sanitation aspect, move in among the garbage, and Go Native, if you will. Colonel Kurtz style. Imagine dozens of commandoes running around the Fresh Kills landfill, blowing away monster rats. Of course, all done with heavy doses of straight realism.

Dianetics Lost

2009-04-28T18:31:00.003-05:00

He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see.

--David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 482

It's a matter of time, w/r/t my reading list, and daily I watch another title drop off the list. Simply won't get to it. And move on. I paid good money for these books. Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence--won't get to it. The only Rushdie novel I haven't read. No time. And no room in the boxes slated for overseas shipment. Dianetics. Yeah, I want to read that. Lots of Jim Marrs stuff. Crossan's The Historical Jesus. Hesse's Narcissus & Goldmund and The Glass Bead Game. Argall & The Ice-Shirt by Vollmann. Vollmann! His Europe Central touched off a personal literary rebirth, and here I am abandoning two of his novels. Unread. I am in a vortex that consumes fiction by the minute. Time & space collapse and novels escape like radiation into some other dimension. Out of my reach. Beyond the event horizon.

Can you imagine the stress of prioritization?

At the library, shelving, I find we have new copies of Joseph Campbell--on my suggestion after I discovered we had no copies of anything at all by Campbell, and quickly sent an email to the proper authorities--and it's all four volumes of The Masks of God. So I'm looking at it. Volume 4, Creative Mythology. This, according to Campbell, is the Age we live in. Previous volumes were Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, & Occidental Mythology. But now we are in a creative age. The thing is 700 pages. I have to read it. Absolute MUST. Do you know how many books I own and paid good money for are kicked off the reading list because I find Campbell in the stacks? Let me tell you, it ain't pretty. But I have no choice. Because Creative Mythology is exactly what I'm doing with Pilgrims Dream. And I am responsible and comprehensive with my research.

As a result, Mason & Dixon gets tossed. White Noise, gone. Gleick's Chaos. An interesting title I found in the library's used book sale: Leisure, the Basis of Culture.

All of it, falling away.

Every night, I dream either of layover airport terminals or European train stations.

69

2009-04-22T18:23:00.009-05:00

European electrical outlets take cylindrical prongs, as opposed to the American cuboid prongs. This week I received by mail a few converter plugs so I can stick my American appliances in European outlets. That's as sexual as this post's gonna get.

The only other Pragueoid update is that I have officially declared that I've bought enough winter clothes for next winter. I haven't faced a true winter in six years, so I went online, hit up the clearance links on various department store websites, and built myself a winter wardrobe from scratch. It was fun. I'm probably the only person in the world buying thermal shirts right now. Unless you count people in the Southern Hemisphere.

There's no underlying theme to look for.

A few weeks back I started meditating again--or, to be exact, meditating w/devotion. I'd always managed to sneak in 15 minutes to maybe say a half hour somewhere in the week, or even twice or three times a week, but because of a work schedule shift and a personal sense of urgency, I am lately meditating for 45 minutes to an hour every day. It's been a long time since I've given silence this much attention. I wanted to go into Prague with as much clarity as possible, is why I felt the urgency. Plus I know from experience how transformative an hour a day of meditation can be, and that's part of what I'm building into Prague, so I decided to go with it and see how wild this ride might get.

I had entirely dropped the novel. Between meditation, Czech lessons, and general daily tasks, I figured I'd give my imagination some time to go underground.

It sang into my trance.

First, a story:

A short, maybe 5 minute, broadcast has somehow hacked into every single television worldwide at exactly 8 am local time--defense & intelligence agencies, even w/warning, can't stop or even track it--mostly it's a bunch of symbols and sounds, not too much on the order of coherence, but still probably classified as a message: great works of art, music, etc., and at the end, a voice, in a language everyone understands, so that there is a confused partisan debate about the source language, says, We are reading with pleasure and interest the works of Aleister Von Dirk.

End transmission.

Muted hysteria. Aliens? It's gotta be aliens!

Except, the broadcast didn't show pictures of aliens, or any sort of beings. Corporate media shows experts blaming the thing, actually unnamed intelligence officials say off the record they believe the video originates somewhere in the former Soviet Union, or perhaps China, all those hackers, some on state payrolls, a real Global Problem, and host psychiatrists explain how easy it is for the mind to fall for a conspiracy theory, such as aliens being behind the weird global 8 am transmission. Still, the audience, though they are still only watching television, they get the Idea that Something-Is-Going-On, and they can sense the Corporate Media folks are getting tense.

Seemed like a cool idea to me. How does this Von Dirk guy respond?

Aleister Von Dirk. I love naming characters.

Turns out this Von Dirk guy is disconnected from corporate media and doesn't hear about it till later. This is where inspiration meets personal detail. To fill in blanks. Aleister Von Dirk lives in Prague, doesn't watch television, listen to radio, or read newspapers. He learns that aliens have just broadcast his name to all technological space only when an acquaintance knocks on his door. Von Dirk is incredulous. A self-consciously hyper-imaginative writer, Von Dirk says, I've asked you not to say things like that to me. I can't control that kind of information. (Meaning, don't tell me aliens said my name on TV cause I can go batshit on my own crazy ideas without help from you.) Acquaintance says, Shit bro, but it's true! and drags him down to a cafe, where locals sit slack jawed watching the five minute clip over and over while anchors attempt to create some sort of context. Everyone in the cafe pretty much agrees it's gotta be extra-terrestrial.

Aleister says, Great, my ideal reader is a freaking alien.

After awhile, corporate media has to acknowledge the possibility of the alien hypothesis. Professors of literature are called upon to analyze the works of this Aleister Von Dirk. Seems he's only published a short story in a journal no one remembers the name of, and he has a blog that gets maybe ten hits a week called--

Oh wait.

Because there was a second trance, and it augmented the first. I have some difficulty putting the chronology back right.

The next day, another 8 am worldwide broadcast, again with praise for Aleister Von Dirk, and it ends with Ask and you shall receive. Aleister & acquaintance, and entire cafe have basically been stuck to their seats, drinking coffee during daylight and hard liquor under moonlight, watching the TV. Out of stupor, conversation begins, Ask and you shall receive? Receive? Ask?

Aleister Von Dirk says, We're doomed.

Acquaintance says, Hey, don't be so down on people. Try to be optimistic. I think I'll ask for a hoverboard. Like, hypersonic, man. Transcontinental, baby! Perpetual motion, or some crap. So we could be like, Wanna check out The Pyramids? Jump on the hoverboard, angelcakes!

Basically that's all I got out of the first meditative trance.

The second trance is just as important as the first. Truth is, though I liked the idea, I wouldn't have given the time to write up the story and hammer out details and structure, etc. If I'm gonna write, it's gonna be on the novel.

So.

Aleister Von Dirk, having published a short story, somewhere, and regular postings to his obscure blog, is working on a heroic epic of a epoch defining novel, or so he says on his blog, and the name of the novel is Pilgrims Dream. The name of his blog is Lightning, Mirror. A couple days after the first alien broadcast (soon known as the ETA, or Extra-Terrestrial Announcement) agents show up at Von Dirk's apartment--our good old buddies, Agents Troutslop and Grossberger!

This is after they've tracked down the Pilgrimage crew in Manhattan and descended to the secret base under St. Augustine's Fort, where all sorts of scientific-occult weirdness goes on, and where they receive orders to track down Aleister Von Dirk. Troutslop & Grossberger confirm that the people they had tracked down in Manhattan are in fact characters in Von Dirk's upcoming novel, Pilgrims Dream. But the agents have no further directions. Again. What should they do? They end up getting taken by Von Dirk, having a drunken good time in Prague, such a beautiful city!, and Von Dirk finds out as much as he can about Them from the hapless agents, who feel as if whatever information they have must be worthless since it's hardly given them any Understanding into exactly who They are.

This, of course, changes Von Dirk's novel, which is exactly what They had hoped for.

All because, under The Fort, there is an interesting anomoly--save for later.

And, hey, maybe that's it, maybe the aliens never show up again. Maybe the broadcasts just stop. These are the kind of thoughts I have when I'm running the show in my brain. Maybe it's just assumed that it must've been Russian, or perhaps Chinese hackers. News cycles bury it after a week without significant development. Maybe some academic freaks become obsessive about Von Dirk, & like The Alien Mind, and scour Lightning, Mirror, while publishers send hesitant contract offers since they figure the free publicity couldn't hurt, regardless of Pilgrim Dreams content. The controversy over source language also goes academic, and finally silent, relegated to some future edition of The Book of the Damned.

This is what happens when you let imagination sit. It took the forces I'd been holding, fermented, and threw this all up in visions that lasted two minutes at most. This is why I actually welcomed a break in writing. Writers who say you have to write every day to be a writer are bullshit. Journalists have to write every day. When you do nothing, and cultivate silence, somehow the process of no process throws up diamonds.

Envision

2009-04-13T19:39:00.004-05:00

After the last post brought my attention to the subtle magic contained in words, I've thought a bit more about what I would like to see happen in Prague. Because it's true, that adage:

watch your thoughts, they become your words.
watch your words, they become your actions.
watch your actions, they become your character.
watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
watch your destiny, it becomes your fate.

Apparently this quote is unattributed. Anonymous quotes make me uncomfortable for some obscure reason. But this also reminds me of something from The Dhammapada, which is one of the great texts of Buddhism.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is a creation of our mind.

If a man speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows him as the wheels of the cart follows the beast that draws the cart.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is a creation of our mind.

If a man speaks or acts with a pure mind, joy follows him as his own shadow.

--The Dhammapada

This points at the essence of magic.

A few specific hopes have settled in my mind. I want to clarify them. I won't write them in a public place because that would scatter their power. Obviously I want to be happy. I basically agree with Aristotle that happiness is the ultimate achievement. I don't mind saying out loud that I want to be happy. I want it now, I want it in Prague, I want it always, and I want it everywhere. What I'm talking about here, this magic, these images to become manifest, by a strange power, described by words kept secret, is more concrete and specific. It gives away nothing to say that my happiness is a feature common to each of the images I am cultivating.

Moving to another country is a wonderful blank canvas. I have the next few months to consider what I would like to compose.

Admonishment re: Incidental Incantations

2009-04-10T11:38:00.002-05:00

This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

This can be tricky.

--D.F. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 175

Homo Ludens Flow State

2009-04-10T11:28:00.001-05:00

Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent's unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.

The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to.

--D.F. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 173

Fitter, Happier, More Productive

2009-04-07T17:57:00.005-05:00

When I work the day shift, I tell myself I must use my evening productively. If I spend my entire evening on the internet--thank God Almighty I kicked television years ago--but if the internet gets me, I feel an awful regret hang on my body like a gross, unidentified substance between liquid and solid, between yellow and green, I don't know, but unmistakably gross. If I waste two nights in a row, or three, or say maybe a month, then I eventually adapt to the grossness. Sort of fall into it. But in order to block the gross feeling, I have to block all feeling, so I become numb. Lots of internet surfing in those times: when I follow any link that'll change the layout of the screen.

A productive evening can contain any one, or a mixture, of these things: reading, paying bills and tracking finances, writing, treadmilling, returning emails, blogging, and meditating & other spiritual activities. Tonight I will have read and written a blog post--I'll probably even meditate--which will make me feel good about myself, which will give me the energy and momentum to build upon to accomplish even more tomorrow. I know very well how to cultivate mania.But sometimes it wears me out, to push like this, endlessly--at the end of every workday is when I expect to push myself? Who thinks like this?--there are biological limits, after all, that even the most sophisticated mania can't break through. Tonight, for instance, I am wiped out, drained, despite the fact that I took a Vivarin an hour before I left work, without which I might not have survived the last hour at the reference desk, and have prepared myself a green tea with mint. The drugs don't work.

And it's beautiful, these lines I found when I opened Infinite Jest, right where I'd stopped during my afternoon 15 minute break:

"But I look at these guys that've been here six, seven years, eight years, still suffering, hurt, beat up, so tired, just like I feel tired and suffer, I feel this what, dread, this dread, I see seven or eight years of unhappiness every day and day after day of tiredness and stress and suffering stretching ahead, and for what, for a chance at a like pro career that I'm starting to get this dready feeling a career in the Show means even more suffering, if I'm skeletally stressed from all the grueling here by the time I get there."

--D.F. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 109

For the character speaking in this passage, the Show means big time pro tennis--it's a high school kid in a tennis academy--and for me it translates easily: the Show is the literary big leagues. Not so sharply defined as say the U.S.T.A., but I know where I'm aiming. Yesterday's rambling mess attempted to paint my target.

But back to what this rundown fictional kid's got to say: It's true. I've never articulated it, brought it out of the feeling and into the words, but I have certainly felt, at times, a sort of hope for a future basically defined by the singular feature that I get enough sleep. It's a foundation I've built dreams upon. And to be straightforward, I probably get more sleep than most, since I've started the dreamwork, which suggests 8 hours of sleep a night because the last hour of sleep is almost 100% REM cycle. I just don't give myself the downtime, wasted time, TV hour, unplugged, sort of there not there.

(This isn't a complaint, for the record, because I enjoy every one of the activities that constitute a productive night--even tracking bill payments on my excel spreadsheet, somewhat--but in this moment I want to confess my physical exhaustion.)

Pull Up The Roots

2009-04-06T19:02:00.002-05:00

It's a fairly complicated process, to move to another continent, even if you had some sort of gold ticket universal global citizenship. There are endless opportunities for distraction among the responsible chores to be carried out to facilitate a successful emigration.

Yesterday I spent an hour and a half learning about electricity because I wanted to know how I'd plug in my laptop over in Prague. Turns out all my important electronic equipment (laptop, e-book, external hard drive, iPod & speaker) can all handle both US and Euro electricity, which is either 110 OR 240 volts, at either 50 or 60 cycles per second. So all I need are some plug adapters, since American plugs don't fit in European outlets. Otherwise, I would also have to think about buying a transformer, which actually changes how electricity flows out of the outlet and into the appliance. I didn't really need the level of detail I waded through about European/UK/USA electricity, just to learn I only need a couple three dollar plug thingies. But, it's a learning process. That's part of the attraction.

Speaking of endless distraction, yesterday I finally began Infinite Jest. It has sat on my bookshelf for years, to the point that the spine was halfway bleached out before I even opened it--I've noticed that orange spines lose color quickest. Ever since I decided to move to Prague, I've been eyeing my books and calculating. What will I bring? What won't I bring but must absolutely read before I leave? It's been a race against the clock. Some books I have to read because they are research for my novel, and others I have to read only because I somehow sense they are important. The books I'm bringing with me are mainly books I've read and know I must read again. An important exception is Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell's companion Skeleton Key, which I am purposefully saving for Prague. I'll get back to the Wake later.

I've put off Infinite Jest so long because I wanted to be prepared. Though I love reading, in the sense that I enjoy it and consider it a form of play, I also take it deadly serious, which not everyone will understand. I learn from everything I read, or I would not enjoy it and therefore would not finish it. IJ is at the end of what I perceive as a sort of apostolic line in the tradition of literature. And I want to be next. It's why I write. It goes back forever, but the big guy I put at the Beginning is Joyce. Joyce did something maybe 1% of humanity recognizes, but his works' impact could never be overestimated. Joyce effected a species-delineating expansion of the human imagination. Such a huge development takes time to reach every corner, so most of literature in Joyce's aftermath reads as if FW or even Ulysses never happened. For all of Updike or Roth or Mailer or Bellow or Delillo's golden prose and societal insight, they've added nothing to literature.

Look, here's the line:

James Joyce
William Gaddis
Thomas Pynchon

D.F. Wallace (maybe, since I haven't finished it yet.)

John Barth might also belong in there. William T. Vollman should also be mentioned, for he at least has the ambition and maybe the execution to join such a crew. Wittgenstein too, though he didn't write fiction.

This is all over the place, because it can be.

These writers are prophets. No less. If you believe in evolution, these are the guys who are doing it. And once they've done it, it's easy for the rest of us to jump in.

D.F. Wallace is the most recent attempt to further this line. I don't yet know if he did. I think, probably, yes. I didn't want to read it until I was ready, meaning until I'd learned enough to appreciate what he was doing. Literature is a long apprenticeship. Don't get me wrong, you can pick up any one of these books and get something out of it without any preparation, but as a writer, I wanted to recognize it when they did something new. By opening Infinite Jest, I am essentially proclaiming that I am ready to be done with my apprenticeship. When I have finished, I will know my craft. Nothing has happened since Infinite Jest.

But I've saved myself the treat of Finnegans Wake for Prague. I've looked through enough of it to sense where it'll take me. I save it for last because I want to have every skill before I submit myself to the total transformation of the Wake. Surely the Wake must inform IJ, and it is possible I will miss something in IJ, but everything informs the Wake. I want to take my understanding of the entire Tradition and bring it through the Wake to see what crawls up the opposite shore.

To leave behind a familiar country, this old dispensation--move into a strange new territory with a strange new language, and immerse myself in the Wake--that's my idea of an Initiation. And that's what this is all about.

Lets Go Liminal!

2009-04-01T21:17:00.003-05:00

90 Days.

I step over a line into this strange twilight realm, into the borderland--music in the forest!--into the world-between-worlds. Every weirdness known and unknown to man inhabits these parts. Expect. Look out!

I don't know where I've been the past month. Disengaged, as I would've said in a previous post. Suddenly, 90 days till Prague wakes me up. This is really happening. I was being carried along by a purgatorial drift--and over some line--now I feel the weak pull of a distant, powerful vortex. I'm going in. No escape. Kafka said, There is a point beyond which there is no return. That is the point that must be reached. That is the line I have crossed. Everything now gathers speed, and loses bearings. I become movement and drop location.

The countdown clock is on.

Some people say, Wherever you go, there you are. Or, You can't escape yourself. A part of me agrees. The old part. It makes sense to a logical region of my mind. There is another part, gaining strength, a Shadow energy, and it says, Who you are won't last much longer. And, You can't go back, no matter what you want. The inverse, stupefying notion that I am not something to be escaped, because I cannot even be held onto. I cannot inhabit what is no longer here. I am gone, long before I think to look for myself. I've been living a life of People Never Change, and I've entered a world of All Is Flux. Sticking my foot in the water, and looking out to the whirlpool--wondering where it'll take me.

I'm exhilarated and unnerved by the possible.

Real world: old world: this world?: how will I ship my stuff? All the stuff that makes me real. (I'm already losing a lot of it.) Two days ago, I freaked out about shipping. I am packing myself into a large suitcase, a trunk, and a messenger bag. USPS did away with slowboat shipping. I'm looking at $250 for a 6-10 day delivery of part of myself, via trunk (old steamer trunk, to get romantic), to Prague. Books ship by m-bags. 66 lb. limit, at $4 a pound. Which books? Only the important ones. What else is there? The rest of me comes on the plane. Clothes. Laptop. iPod and speaker. Select journals and notebooks. Toiletries. I can't afford to bring all of me.

My chest feels electric and alive. My heart must be leaking nuclear fusion. Last night in my dream, the sight of the stars through the trees made me fall to the ground. I saw the Milky Way for the first time. And other, distant galaxies. Everything alive.

I find myself thinking, I will want to remember this. But how do I know? The future never felt so real as it does now that I can't imagine it.

I am metamorphosis.

A bug, or a butterfly?

One thing I've never lost is the Luck of the Irish. Can't have luck without risk.

Phone It In

2009-03-04T10:31:00.008-05:00

Bobby Brown appears at a high window of a gorgeous mansion. He affects an ignorant accent as he addresses a lively feast in the courtyard below him. He mentions his "tele-pah-honey".

The scene shouts out their correction in unison: Telephone!

Bobby Brown climbs, by way of a vine, to a higher balcony.

He's rehabilitated his image, and is now a respected Broadway actor. Here the scene turns into a musical, just as Bobby Brown reaches the balcony and looks down upon the crowd. He proclaims, and correctly pronounces:

Telephone, gramophone, megaphone, homophone--the only phone I know is:

(to the opening melody of Let It Snow)

It's a Phoney White-Ass Christmas

Bobby Brown slides down a rope to the courtyard as the song kicks in. The scene becomes Felliniesque, all umbrellas and diversionary choreography. Bobby Brown disappears among women in colorful, courtly dresses who twirl their matching umbrellas, and he reappears comedically in unexpected places.

I think it's hilarious and brilliant, watching from the pov of the theater audience, which is my first moment of self-consciousness in the dream.

--

I think I'm generally pretty good at wordplay, but this is beyond me. Even if I cared nothing about spiritual development, entertainments such as this justify the effort to remember dreams. This dream is perfect comedy.

I don't know if I'll be able to work this into Pilgrims Dream. I'll try. Somewhere. I've got a loose enough, oneiric structure.

Even now, I'm giggling.

La Force

2009-03-01T10:58:00.012-05:00

My personal growth often announces itself in the form of a dream, after which I can observe--in the real world--the new environment I am capable of perceiving and my new style of action in response to that environment. The real world confirms the growth I first observed in the dream world; there is an unbroken continuum between worlds. During the crisis of last night's dream, I responded in a wholly new fashion--I attempted and achieved a great leap toward the beyond as I radically increased my power of concentration and my ability to influence my environment.

I was sitting at the top of a large stone staircase; it had about ten steps. It reminds me of the NYC Public Library. I'll leave out the irrelevant events of the dream. A lion appeared at the base of the staircase. It was male, with a great mane, and it was furious. It shook its head savagely and let out its roar. It fixed its fury upon me, put its slow thighs into motion, and began up the stairs.

Oddly, this provoked lucidity. Previously I had only become lucid in benign dreams. To be sure, in some difficult dream circumstances, I have afterward noticed something like an expanded, lucid ability to respond in novel and more effective ways. I think, perhaps, that the act of lucid dreaming expands the ability of the mind in all states. Nevertheless, I cannot remember having what might be called a nightmare in which I was fully lucid, until last night.

I faced a full-size, ferocious lion in all its strength of muscle and size on an New York City street.

(I would like to attempt to describe the lucid dream state, though it really must be experienced to be understood. I have often mentioned it to people in the course of regular conversation, and it is generally obvious that the person has no appreciation for the vast difference between a regular dream and a lucid dream. So, what follows is a parenthetical attempt at true communication, by which I aim to provide an insight into what was entirely unknown.

During the course of a normal dream, if one practices certain technique s, one can attain what is called lucidity. Essentially, one wakes up within a dream. One suddenly has access to *most* of the abilities of normal waking consciousness. In normal dreams, we ironically behave as sleepwalkers, blindly following the circumstances and reacting without thought. With lucidity, you suddenly recognize that you are dreaming. You look around and think, Oh my God, this is all a creation of my mind. You are able to remember things from your waking life. If you decide during your waking life that you would like to fly to the Pyramids the next time you dream, you will remember that decision within a lucid dream the same way you remember at the grocery store that you need to buy milk. Try to imagine actually waking up into a dreamworld. Instead of having a dream, you--and I mean the fullest sense of what you understand as you--you are suddenly living in a dreamworld.

There are also expanded powers that are only available to the mind during a lucid dream. Since one is dreaming and aware of the fact, one can bend the normal rules that govern our experience. For example, one can fly. One can decide to make all the oranges on a tree turn purple. There are some limitations, but those limitations seem to be fluid. Though I can't make the grocery store dissolve into some ancient emperor's brothel, I can walk out of the grocery store and fly to the Acropolis during the time of Ancient Greece to have a debate with Socrates. One learns how to move around limitations--this is the great challenge of lucid dreams and why I believe they so deeply affect the mind in all other states.

I starred most above because there is a noticeable difference between lucid dream consciousness and waking consciousness. For instance, I can't reason out Kantian metaphysics in a lucid dream. I don't think this is due to a limitation of conscious abilities so much as it reflects the chaos of the dream environment. Everything changes so radically in dreams that they force our attention in ways that our waking environments rarely do.

I should also note that there is some difficulty in maintaining lucidity after it is achieved. You must harness your concentration. Dreams seem designed to pull you back into them, and they never fail to throw up some wonder to distract you and grab your entire attention, so that you give up your reserve of awareness and become a sleepwalking dreamer once more--though this can also be said of reality.)

I became lucid while looking down the jaws of lion. One is still very capable of experiencing pain in a lucid dream--everything possible in reality is also possible in a lucid dream--and I was obviously not interested in learning what it might feel like to be torn apart and eaten by a wild animal. Still, I was lucid, so I had some power. I knew the entire scene was a creation of my mind, so the trick was to figure out how to change the scene into something else. How might I move around the presence of this raging lion?

I lifted my hands. In dreams, my hands have a magical effect. I can calm rough waters. By consciously moving my hands with non-threatening but assertive gestures, I tamed the lion. First it closed its mouth, just as it was at the final step, and it stepped over me to stand behind me on the stoop. It was still agitated, but at least it had abandoned any immediate idea to swallow me. I remained anxious, though the lion sat behind me like a well-trained dog, because I knew it was a wild animal and still volatile, and from its position it could easily bite off my head. Nevertheless, I had tamed a lion! I put up my right hand, and the lion examined it before rubbing its head under my hand as would a house cat. I was thrilled. I had never worked such a powerful change in any of my previous lucid dreams.

I thought to continue the dream with the newly tamed lion as a character. I slowly turned to face the street again, trying to maintain confidence in my control over the lion. I screwed up. Even in the above Strength card, which is the very archetype of Strength, the woman must keep her attention and power concentrated upon the beast. A wild animal is still a wild animal, though it is no longer on the attack. As I turned my head, the lion morphed somewhat into the shape of a snake, and it lunged at my leg.

I felt excruciating pain. I must stress that whatever you are capable of experiencing in reality, you are also capable of experiencing in a dream, lucid or otherwise. Never in my life had I felt anything close to such pain, despite once having a surgery that warranted morphine. I felt teeth tear straight through solid calf muscle. I felt the lion's jaw like a vice on my shinbone, and I felt my bone threaten to crack in half under the stress. I almost passed out. I felt nauseous with pain. Everything became light, and I began to lose total consciousness. Needless to say, this was the greatest challenge to lucidity I have ever encountered.

Somehow I pulled upon reserves and immediately reminded myself that all of it was a dream, and I could still find a way to slide the dream into something new. I reached down to the lion's neck and squeezed. I knew I could not bend dreamrules so much that I might choke a lion to death, so I tried something else. I imagined I was squeezing shut the open end of a bag. The lion actually transformed into a gigantic black felt bag. To maintain the reality of my sense of the lion's mass, I told myself the bag was full of marbles, and I was squeezing it shut to keep the marbles from falling out. I managed to close my fists entirely around the bag. I pulled the heavy bag away from my leg, which no longer hurt since my attention had been drawn away from it. I lifted the bag and looked to the street. I hefted the bag from the stairs into the empty city street, scattering marbles everywhere, and thus I dissipated the aggressive energy of the lion.

I have never confronted such a powerful force in either my waking or dreamlife. I felt a thrill of glory at my success. When I phased into our consensual reality and opened my waking eyelids, I knew I had achieved a new order of ability.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote:

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

I failed to make this association consciously when I wrote my previous entry. That strange and beautiful flower, found upon waking, is the Blue Flower.

In my dream, I discovered an expanded self-confidence, and I carried it across the border. I found it remained in my possession after I had crossed the border and entered into waking life.

Defragmentation, and the Blue Flower

2009-02-22T11:19:00.006-05:00

Everything is seed.

--Novalis, Miscellaneous Observations

While shelving books at the library a few weeks back, I noticed a title, The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald. I knew nothing of her. The blue flower is a powerful personal symbol, so I plucked the book from the shelf. I've followed the blue flower into many insights, as Alice followed her white rabbit. I'm not sure when I became aware of my fascination with it. I can't remember a time when I didn't seek to understand it. I've long known, intellectually, that it is a symbol for immortality, but I ask myself, Why a blue flower?

The symbol associates for me with Gilgamesh, and the flower of immortality which he plucked and subsequently lost before he returned home. I work with it in Pilgrims Dream. I remember my encounter with Jung in his writings on alchemy, in which he mentions the blue flower.

What is the blue flower?

Fitzgerald's novel is a fictional retelling of the life of Novalis, the German Romantic poet-philosopher who developed the symbol of the blue flower. Novalis is a great hero of mine. In visionary flashes, he saw a unifying sub-structure behind poetry and philosophy (philosophy as the apotheosis of rational pursuits, such as mathematics and science) and he sought to understand the language of that structure. Novalis believed Nature speaks to us, and our task is to learn Nature's grammar. I read The Novices of Sais while camping alone under the oak trees of Anastasia Island, and its effect was remarkable.

Magic is the art of using the world of the senses at will.

--Novalis, Miscellaneous Fragments

This, from a philosopher-poet, who earned his living as a salt-mine engineer, writing in the shadow of Immanuel Kant.

The Blue Flower provoked further investigations in Novalis. Though best known for his long poem, Hymns to the Night, Novalis also wrote fiction and philosophy. I've seen many references to his Romantic fragments. Indeed, Novalis seems to have thought of the Romantic fragment as a genre unto itself, and perhaps the most illuminated of all forms of writing. But what is a Romantic fragment? It is unfinished.

The blue flower is something I don't yet understand. It exists fully in my consciousness, but I sense its defining quality lies beyond my comprehension. It is both immanent and transcendent. What is the meaning of the blue flower?

I wonder if Lightning, Mirror might be said to be a collection of Romantic fragments.

I am reminded of the gnostic metaphor that paints our universe in terms of fragments of light thrown off into darkness. The elect--those who come to gnosis--are just those fragments. Such is the passive description offered by gnosticism. The active quest of alchemy is to gather up those fragments and remake them as whole.

Every quest begins with a recognition.

Quaternity of Guiding Metaphors

2009-02-15T10:50:00.004-05:00

Two months ago, in response to a scatterbrained sensation--an intimation that my thoughts had turned cloudy and indistinct; vague: weak--I returned to the writings of Wittgenstein. I downloaded the e-book for On Certainty, which I had not previously read. On Certainty also echoed a concern I had with my novel, so I considered it a project of both research and personal rehabilitation. That initial foray has since escalated into a full-scale philosophical assault.

The style of On Certainty captured my imagination and only whetted my appetite for more philosophical discourse. From the library, I picked up Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, by Richard Kearney. It's a post-9/11 investigation of alterity and scapegoating as a means of defining and purifying a culture, and it seeks to develop a hermeneutics of dialogue and understanding with the Other. Through Strangers, I came into contact once again with Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger. Kant always seemed tricky to me in undergrad. I considered his moves suspect, though my suspicion was tempered by a nagging self-doubt that I simply couldn't wrap my head around his thought. Now I want to get into his Critique.

Heidegger I felt more comfortable with, though my study of him was brief. One of the most impressive moments of my education came through a lecture on Heidegger. Our teacher, apparently prescribing a method used by Heidegger, encouraged us to sit and think for a prolonged period about our death--an interesting use of contact hours. For a person of faith, this exercise will either bring comfort or provoke wishful thinking, but a philosophy student has neither recourse. Essentially we were asked to meditate on the moment we become nothing. The thought borders on absurd, like a koan, and I had a visceral reaction to the exercise. Try it. Give yourself 15 minutes, and concentrate upon yourself becoming nothing. I had never given much thought to what I eventually must become. On the basis of that classroom experience, and Heidegger's investigation of Van Gogh's peasant boots, I had enough respect for Heidegger. But out of Strangers, I jumped into deeper investigations, and I am now fascinated by Heidegger's work on das Man. It will certainly influence my fiction.

I've been meaning to return to Derrida for a long time.

What's past serves to demonstrate that I am stricken with a powerful philosophical mood, as attendant upon the preponderance of Aquarian stars in our moment's chart.

But here comes the flood:

I am beginning to sense that I engage life, when I do, in accordance with one of a set of guiding metaphors. I'm not entirely satisfied with that term, and perhaps I will clarify it later. These metaphors describe, or perhaps prescribe, how I approach life when I am under their sway. Unless I am disengaged (which is another investigation unto itself), my thoughts and actions will always correlate to the overall worldview contained within one of these metaphors.

Quaternity of Guiding Metaphors:
1. Experiment
2. Game
3. Quest
4. Drama

There is much to unpack in these four words.

To ground this discourse, I will say that I am probably operating under the first guiding metaphor in this moment and have been since I first turned to On Certainty. These phases seem to last anywhere from weeks to months. This phase may conclude with this weekend for all I know, and I cannot predict which metaphor I might turn to next.

This analysis is preliminary, and must only be considered as notes toward further clarification.

Metaphors 1 and 4 both engage life through a remove. When I experiment, I do not seek to influence life except to understand it. This is essentially the philosophical (or proper scientific) mood, when life is engaged, but from the perspective of a distance. My only purpose under that metaphor is to understand, but I am still engaged through the activity of understanding. Hence a discourse such as this. My work with lucid dreaming can also fall under the first metaphor as I often turn dreamwork as an investigation of consciousness. Under such a mood, I sense that I can focus my attention on dreams to learn more about their dynamic, and I have long since realized that an insight into dreaming provokes equally powerful insights into living.

(Any particular activity does not necessarily indicate which metaphor I am working under. I also turn to lucid dreaming when I operate under the second metaphor, though for different purposes with entirely divergent concerns.)

The fourth metaphor of Drama operates through an aesthetic remove. I see my life as a story. I am but a character. The whole world's a stage. Etc. Under this metaphor, I tend to think in terms of character development, narrative arcs, plot development--everything we learn to analyze as students of literature. I do not think of myself as living so much as I think of my life as a story to be analyzed. I can appreciate irony. I notice turning points. I think of character, destiny, fate. My life seems to me a great story. With excitment and wonder, I anticipate what will develop when I move to Prague. Even though I think of myself as a writer, it doesn't mean I escape the aesthetic remove: I think of my inevitable development as a writer, the continuing plot of my writing career. I consider my life with hindsight, and everything I suffered or could not understand seems justified and necessary through the aesthetic of a narrative economy.

Metaphors 2 and 3 directly engage life.

When I play, I play. I will not investigate this too deeply, but I will say that to play is to live for the joy of the game. Under the second metaphor, I often have an ebullient mood, but it doesn't imply that everything is roses and ice cream during such a phase. A game is not always easy. Under Play, I view the most harrowing circumstance as a vexing puzzle. Sometimes life is Candyland, but sometimes it's a Rubik Cube. We get stuck. Life under this guiding metaphor is a consideration of moves and tricks. I hesitate to assign any purpose under this metaphor, but I know that I have learned to become a better player as I have discovered new moves and tricks--though not because I believe it necessary to become a better player: there is no moral imperative or similar self-imposed injunction--but I certainly appreciate that as my Playing improves, the Game expands.

The third metaphor is oriented toward a future achievement. I admit I'm very fuzzy on a description of this guiding metaphor. Under this metaphor, there is a Goal. I have a few Goals, and they form a sort of subset of the Quest guiding metaphor. Generally, I am oriented to only one goal at a time. Or, one goal may subsume another. In any case, I move toward one specific future moment when I am inside the Quest. Time becomes linear. I have to move from here to there. The Goal--there--is usually in my mind as an image of myself at the moment of achievement, and my actions are directed toward the manifestation of that image. Setbacks test and prepare me for the realization of the Goal. Like the fourth metaphor of Drama, I also have a sense of destiny while in a Quest phase, but I don't analyze the movement of my destiny so much as I feel it upon me. Perhaps it is only an indication of my temperament, but when I am oriented toward a Goal, I sense that achievement is inevitable, though the path may be arduous. I sense powerful allies. The gods assist me. Fate has sent me, and fate will deliver me. I have three Goals I alternate between, though when the third metaphor strikes me, it strikes me with the lure of only one of these Goals. The Goals are literary success, spiritual consummation, and romantic love. The Quest for literary success often subsumes the Quest for romantic love. The image I have most often for the literary success Quest is myself at a conference, or a party, where I have earned influence upon the age. My work is recognized--in my lifetime--for its true value, and I am confident, as was Goethe, that my work was, is, and will continue to be necessary, important, and most importantly, enduring. I envision myself at the height of my career, not at the end of it. At the party, or conference, my word has a powerful and justified effect on everyone who hears--and everyone of merit recognizes the importance of understanding my word.

There is another aspect of the Quest for literary success: the one that incorporates romantic love. I see myself on the large second story deck of a secluded cabin on a lake in the mountains. My work has sold, and the resulting financial success has enabled me to find this peace. I produce powerful works, facilitated by the cool mountain air and the view overlooking the lake. (This image has been greatly influenced by my admiration for Thoreau.) My wife is with me, and we have found true love. She is able to pursue her own interests, without regard for material security, as I pursue my writing. Perhaps she is a painter. In any case, she has a true interest, possibly creative, but I'm not sure. I only know that we don't watch television, and we are never bored. We live an idyll where we both grow, and we both grow together.

The image of romantic love is simple and somewhat limited, as I can imagine it within many contexts: the presence of a complimentary and sympathetic lover. The image of spiritual consummation is light.

I want to note that I realize literary criticism will define Quest as a subset of Drama, whereas I see them as entirely separate metaphors. The all-important difference is the aesthetic remove involved with the guiding metaphor of Drama, which is entirely absent during a Quest phase. While under the Drama metaphor, I look upon myself as a character; under Quest, there is no distance between my self and my life. In a Quest phase, I am a character, and I have no higher perspective upon my subjective experience. There is no storyteller, and no one listening to the tale--I am just living my life.

I would also like to note that metaphors 1 and 2 have a intellectual feel to them. Metaphors 3 and 4 have a emotional feel.

I suppose they could be described like this:

1. Experiment - Intellectual, Removed
2. Play - Intellectual, Direct
3. Quest - Emotional, Direct
4. Drama - Emotional, Removed

(I recognize the ambiance of Jung in all this, but I never consciously worked toward a Jungian structure as I developed this thought. Perhaps this justifies Jung's theory of the archetypes, or maybe this only illustrates how deeply his work has influenced the dynamic of my mind.)

And then Graduate into the Imaginative

2009-01-30T23:19:00.016-05:00

I've been thinking about how the political orientation of most Americans--at least the ones I know--can be determined by the form of totalitarianism they fear.

I think I may be on to something, something about how our innate power of imagination gets hijacked, something about how the unlimited range of our collective and individual actions becomes reduced to an either/or destiny, something about how this basic fear drives, perpetuates, and subverts our political reality.

Those who fear communism implicitly fear the expansion of government powers. Under communism, the government is everything. Therefore, if you fear communism, you lobby for smaller government. These people call themselves republicans. Republicans think of themselves as agents of liberty--liberty as defined not by restricted government powers but by the absence of government programs. To these people, communism is the ultimate nightmare of government programs. All individual initiative is squelched. Government defies nature and tries to make us all equal. Slackers are rewarded for their slacking, and the inspired are discouraged against their labor. Government jobs, government housing, government healthcare, etc., are all distributed according to a misguided notion of "equality" as opposed to merit. The limits of opportunity and self-expression are determined by a government sub-committee. It is the spontaneous action of bureaucrats.

Those who fear fascism, on the other hand, have a more convoluted mechanism of fear. Whereas a communist arrives at totalitarianism by way of government and "equality", a fascist totalitarianism comes by way of private business and "productivity". Fascism rewards the strong, since the strong are ipso facto blessed by evolution, God, however you wish to call it. The strong are defined by their ability--and will--to exploit the weak. However, in America, the "strong" are rarely found in civil service; the strong worm their way into corporations, whence true power flows. Therefore, those who fear fascism do not fear government per se. Those who fear fascism implicity fear the expansion of corporate--as opposed to government--powers. Therefore, if you fear fascism, you lobby for a larger democratic government which can reign in corporate abuse. These people call themselves democrats. Without a vast tangle of regulations and social programs, the evil plots of blood thirsty corporations will know no bounds. Corporations squeeze every last breath from our lungs in the name of efficiency and productivity. Government abandons us to our own futile defenses. Undermined government agencies do PR for money-crazy corporate interests: the FDA tells us mercury-based vaccines improve cognitive abilities, and the DEP tells us increased CO2 emissions will reduce our winter heating bills. To these people, fascism is the ultimate nightmare of fast food. The quality, the safety, and the range of choice available to us will be determined by the summer interns of vacationing corporate executives. It is the morality of profit margins.

Communism is a good defense against fascism. Fascism is a good defense against communism.

It is only recently that I've realized that republicans and democrats are both essentially driven by their common fear of totalitarianism. They determine what they believe is the more likely form of totalitarianism and devote themselves to the opposing ideology, though it is also a path to totalitarianism.

Republicans and democrats are united in their fear of centralized power.

Anarchy is the best defense against both fascism and communism.

For the 9th

2009-01-20T22:43:00.003-05:00

This moment has burst through my cynical American heart and swept me into a powerful faith in the ability of the American people to bring light into an increasingly intimidating darkness. I don't want to talk about Obama, because I'll never know a thing about him, but about what I saw in the faces of the American people who gathered at the National Mall to witness today's inauguration. By chance, I had the day off from work, and it seemed absurd to think I could do anything better with my time than watch the mass media coverage of today's transfer of power.

I saw Americans filled with joy. If you know me, and you know how I've felt compelled to stare directly into and speak out, in defiance of consequence, against the almost maddening darkness in our American heart, then you can begin to imagine how healing it was for me to witness Americans come together and united by joy. It was shining in their faces, despite the past, despite the cold, and probably because of the crowds, crowds filling the avenues to the horizon--the grand design of those avenues was overwhelmed by the people who filled them--and joy radiated gloriously from the hearts of those Americans and up even into the American heart. I could see that, even through the television--I could feel that. The anchors talked about Hope, and Responsibility, and those are indeed necessary and present, but today what I witnessed was Joy triumphant, and that's how I know today was a moment of Grace.

I felt it building.

Yesterday, as if waking from a dream, as if I realized all is not lost, with the belief that the promise of America has not been irrevocably broken, I used my laptop to search for local volunteer opportunities. I've never wanted to be a martyr, someone who does the right thing precisely because everyone else does the wrong thing. But recently, I've felt this something building, and it felt as if a small action of mine might meet up with a small action of others, and truly we might bring about something beautiful into the world. I don't know yet what I can do, but I feel that if I do something from my heart, and if it feels good, it will feel beautiful, and it will do everything that needs to be done.

Here's where I found something I can do:

http://www.volunteermatch.org/

So far, I'm only signed up to help with an art and crafts festival in downtown Tampa, but it feels right that this small initial movement of mine should reach out to touch and inspire the imagination.

Got Three Passports, A Couple Of Visas

2009-01-19T19:10:00.006-05:00

Today the NYTimes ran an article about people with dual passports. It's strange to think I'm part of a trend, at least as far as passports are concerned.

Dual passports are no longer the sole province of people who grew up in more than one country. Millions of American citizens potentially qualify for various reasons — ethnic heritage, religion, country of birth or where their spouse was born.
“The fact is people don’t think about it until it is pointed out to them,” said Jan Dvorak, president of Travisa, a passport services company in Washington. Some Americans, he said, “don’t realize that they actually have dual nationality.”

The article answered a question I've had for months: America forces one to enter and leave the country with their US passport; I wondered if I could show my US passport when I depart from NY, and my Irish passport when I arrive in Prague. It seemed a bit dodgy and spy-like to show different passports at opposite ends of the same flight. The answer is, I can! This way, I'll avoid the long customs lines at both terminals!

Alessandro Pappalardo, an artist in New York, holds passports from Italy and Argentina and, last year, added an American one. Previously an executive with Aerolíneas Argentinas, he said, “I used to go a lot to Brazil, and I would always decide what passport to show depending on what line was shorter.”

A Budding Amateur

2009-01-18T20:30:00.011-05:00

I checked out a book on photography from the library. I really knew nothing about it except I like black and white. In less than six months, I'll be cruising Europe indefinitely, and I feel I should create a permanent visual record of my adventure--and if I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it right. So, I'm learning photography. Turns out there's more to it than the black and white effect.

This here is called short lighting. Neat trick, huh? The books says if you light the side of the face that you see less of, it makes people look better. I took a bunch of pictures to test it out, and it's true! This really is the best picture of the bunch!

Between now and Bon Voyage I'll try to master czech and photography--when I'm not working on my novel or trying to finish as many books on my bookshelf as possible before I have to leave them behind. Six months won't be enough, and that's the way I like it.

Auspicion

2009-01-15T18:21:00.006-05:00

A jet plane went down in New York. In recent years, a New Yorker would make obvious, grotesque connections: 9/11, and American Airlines 587, which disintegrated over Queens a month after 9/11. When the news about flight 587 first broke, everyone quickly assumed terrorism as the cause. When the FAA ruled out terrorism, many people whispered that 587 had been shot down--similar rumors had previously circulated about the 1996 flight TWA 800, which fell into the cold waters off Long Island.

Today's story hit me differently. I didn't even have a chance to assume the worst. The story announced itself into my consciousness as a miracle before I knew a single detail: Every Passenger Survived was the headline in bold print. Of course, my mind still made the old connections--terrorism, 100% fatality rates, etc.--but the narrative is transformed. Somehow the old tragedy of downed jets in New York is redeemed by the story of US Airways 1549. Today, when I think of plane crashes in New York, I think of 100% survival rates. I think of miracles.

I can't help but make the uncanny connection that tonight George Bush will give his farewell address. One did not expect miracles or even happy endings under the Bush administration, and it seems as if the laws of Nature herself have bent spectacularly to give us reason to look forward with hope, even as we say farewell to one of the darker eras in American history. I could've remembered Bush as the president of terrorism, torture, endless war, global warming, domestic surveillance, economic collapse, and Katrina. After today, however, I'll remember Bush as the president who said goodbye with a miracle.

I'd meant to post a blog today anyway.

I'm reading The Uses of Enchantment, by Bruno Bettelheim, and it is fascinating. Bettelheim pointed at the psychological assistance offered to children (and adults) in fairy tales. He argued against shielding our children from the darker aspects of fairy tales because fairy tales show children how to properly handle the darker aspects of themselves. I don't have children, and don't plan to anytime soon, but if I did, I would read them fairy tales every single night. And not the bowdlerized versions either. Fairy tales, Bettleheim wrote, give children the courage to face terrifying monsters and the hope to endure when they feel they are lost in the darkest wood. He analyzes just about every fairy tale I know and shows how they speak to the unconscious and promote the healthy growth of the personality. It's an excellent book, and I'm sure it'll resound in my mind and below my mind for a long time to come.

I also want to mention that I'm beginning a new chapter in Pilgrims Dream. The chapter title is Ghost Bardo. It'll be one of the more difficult undertakings of my writing life thusfar. I want to show the most unconscious, routine, and mechanical aspects of my characters lives, but it has to be interesting. I'll have to do some fancy writing. I'll also weave in some scientific jargon about the physiological causes of dreams. Everything about this chapter will be scientific and mechanical. I want to portray a world devoid even of boredom: a vast, meaningless process. Dreams are an accidental, neurochemical chaos. Life is a repetitious sequence of minor tasks. I've charted out the whole thing, since my normal inclination is to follow events into the heart of meaning, which is precisely what I must deny myself. I will keep my focus on writing the events I've charted, and never stray. The whole thing is clocked. I need exact language. The only beauty of Ghost Bardo will be its efficiency.

From there, we'll compensate and explode into the fantastic paranoia of Agents Grossberger and Troutslop, under their chemtrail sky, which was my original first chapter.

Don't Attract Attention!

2008-12-28T11:06:00.003-05:00

For the lawyers--and even the least important of them has at least a partial overview of the circumstances--are far from wishing to introduce or carry out any sort of improvement in the court system, while--and this is quite characteristic--almost every defendant, even the most simple-minded among them, starts thinking up suggestions for improvement from the moment the trial starts, and in doing so often wastes time and energy that would be better spent in other ways. The only proper approach is to learn to accept existing conditions. Even if it were possible to improve specific details--which, however, is merely an absurd superstition--one would have at best achieved something for future cases, while in the process damaging oneself immeasurably by having attracted the attention of an always vengeful bureaucracy. Just don't attract attention! Keep calm, no matter how much it seems counter to good sense. Try to realize that this vast judicial organism remains, so to speak, in a state of eternal equilibrium, and that if you change something on your own where you are, you can cut the ground out from under your own feet and fall, while the vast organism easily compensates for the minor disturbance at some other spot--after all, everything is interconnected--and remains unchanged, if not, which is likely, even more resolute, more vigilant, more severe, more malicious.

--Franz Kafka, The Trial, 119-120

Last night I watched The Chicago 10, a partially rotoscoped documentary about the rally for peace at the 1968 DNC in Chicago and the subsequent trial. Citizens were charged with inciting the Chicago police and the Illinois National Guard to such infamous acts of violence against the unarmed crowd.

Walter Cronkite said on national television that the 1968 Democratic National Convention was taking place in a police state.

(Half a world away, during the very same week, residents of Prague were having a similar experience as Soviet forces moved in to crush the Prague Spring and its calls for government reform. Czechoslovakia would afterward descend into the "normalization", during which the government became even more repressive and authoritarian. America would afterward descend into the Nixonian Reaction.)

Forty years later, America is mired in another unpopular and unnecessary war, disregarding that other war. A state of eternal equilibrium? The total lack of visible public protest (despite the seemingly greater lack of public support) would seem to indicate that the peace movement not only failed to pacify the American war machine, but they have also lost their ability to make the message of peace heard on a national scale. On the other hand, the war machine wouldn't dare to even consider reinstituting the military draft. We've lost our voice, but they've lost conscription. Hardly a stalemate, but possibly an equilibrium.

Should we accept Leni's advice to Joseph K. about his trial, quoted above, and learn to accept existing conditions?

Can we even learn to understand existing conditions? Or, does acceptance not require understanding?

A Conditional Aspect of the Actual

2008-12-27T21:00:00.004-05:00

My previous entry was about a dream I had that reminds me of Kafka. Today I started to reread The Trial. Out of a daydream, the phrase came to me: I dream in Kafka but without his firm sense of the impossible.

In Kafka, the impossible is always explicit and without justification. The actual is only justified by its concrete, physical presence. The possible is defined within the actual not by reason or imagination or natural law, but by occult procedures that cannot be defied and are without justification of any sort. The consequences of disobedience, or transgression of these occult procedures, are not considered, for violation is simply not possible.

The actual is incomprehensible, the possible is irrational, and sense exists merely as a conditional aspect of the impossible.

20/20 Vision Dream

2008-12-26T13:11:00.003-05:00

I'm riding the subway, and the man in a suit next to me tells me I have to take off my glasses. He's law enforcement of some sort. They've passed new regulations, and no one can wear glasses on the subway due to terrorism concerns. I say that's stupid and refuse to take off my glasses. Off the train, I'm detained and escorted down a hall by the official. I ask how many people file complaints about the eyeglass regulation. He says a few people a day complain but most accept it--nothing for him to worry about. I take his information and turn its force against him: If several people file complaints every day, then he is in trouble. This makes him think of his supervisor, and suddenly fear for his job comes into his eyes: official complaints look awful on performance reports. His career will be ruined for enforcing a law he never wrote.

In Our Normal Speech

2008-12-18T15:16:00.003-05:00

Dudley Wundersprocket likes to read history for pleasure, especially medieval history. He had an idea that Soviet communism was essentially a reformation of the feudalism that proceeded it, and all ideological debate of capitalism v. communism missed the point. He read about the Politboro and how the Soviet (Stalinist) bureaucracy was organized, which confirmed his suspicion about the link to feudalism. Vassals, patrons, clients, etc. One advanced within the Soviet structure by promising allegiance to patrons, and by developing as many patron/client relationships as possible. One advanced according to the recommendations of one's patrons, and one's power resided in the number of clients one had developed.

Wundersprocket began to see his own position within the corporate structure as little different from that of a Stalinist apparatchik. The corporate structure mirrors the Stalinist structure, which mirrors the feudal structure. One networks and calls upon contacts. One gains favors from some contacts and offers favors to others; we simply do not differentiate between patron contacts and client contacts. America is an unrecognized battleground between the feudal structure (Stalinist, or corporate) and the democratic structure. In America, the feudal structure has gained ascendency over the democratic, though victory is by no means complete. Nevertheless, the feudal structure is already so powerful that we cannot imagine the democratic structure contesting for primacy. Indeed, the feudal victory is so near complete that we don't recognize, in our normal speech, that a natural antagonism should exist between corporate and democratic principles. Democratic principles are too weak to challenge the entrenched feudal structure.

Dudley Wundersprocket, as a contemporary Don Quixote, quit his corporate career and began his own business, Loud Ties Inc., so he might conduct an experiment with democratic principles in the workplace.

Manifesto

2008-12-13T22:16:00.004-05:00

In the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all,
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty--
. . .
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavor. Treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
. . .
I would with such perfection govern, sir,
T' excel the Golden Age.

--Gonzalo, The Tempest, II i, 150-170

In the voice of his final wise counselor, Shakespeare--and recall all those Rosicrucian rumors, if only for the fun--gives his clearest statement of political philosophy.

I'm not sure why, but I've mellowed over the past few months, and today when two library patrons in a row handed back materials about our government's involvement in 9/11, I could only look at the returned books as curios from my past breaking against my present. A very Stephen Dedalus moment. I've lost my edge. Anyway, it was a sharp edge that accomplished little, so far as I can tell. It's no more cynical to accept that all government terrifies than it is to accept that life ends. I'm starting to think of government as a contextual condition hardly worth our attention. I'm lucky to have my novel to think of, and my efforts in that direction have born much brighter fruit.

When I think of politics nowadays, I think of this shining passage and enter its anarchic vision of paradise. Bailouts, corruption, gay rights, mechanized murder for profit, institutional bigotry, every complaint against the people we chose to rule over us convinces me that the sole working function of government is to piss people off. Maybe we revel in the anger generated by our outraged sense of righteousness. Maybe the purpose of government is to fulfill that sick need. I don't know. It's become an abstract mystery for me, a pinhead full of angels, a weird diversion.

I watched Dead Man twice last week. While Christmas shopping, I found a t-shirt that said, Handbook for the Recently Deceased, and I would've bought it except the back said Beetle Juice. I thought, that'd be an awesome subtitle for my novel. If you can accept that you've died, you can enter a new life; you allow yourself that possibility. I think back on my life, certain charged moments, and think, It seems like I should've died right then and there. And to wonder, Maybe I did.

Who can judge the quick from the dead?

Not me, said the subject in the Land of the Blind.

Not Personally (SGC2C)

2008-11-29T19:06:00.000-05:00

Space Ghost, Coast to Coast:

Secrets

2008-11-28T13:58:00.001-05:00

Every paradox is a lock and a key.

Side Effects

2008-11-23T11:34:00.006-05:00

Now that I've made myself a fictional character, I'm seeing some counter-intuitive side-effects: I am becoming grounded in what I called reality. Just as I would stabilize the context of any of my characters, I must stabilize my own environment and bring it out vividly with concrete, etc., so as to make Michael Matejka alive in his situation. Michael Matejka is in his bedroom, poking at his laptop, sipping strong coffee, with cloudless Florida sunlight beaming through his large suburban window, falling on his celtic mandala bedspread of red, gold, and black, and he looks to the oversized Mt. Fuji Wave poster just above the headboard. Since I am transcribing my own story, I must use my magical eagleeye to hunt for environmental details, to bring my living fiction to the greatest possible light.

--for clarity: when I write that Michael Matejka is now a fictional character, I don't mean that I am imagining a version of myself into my story; I mean that I, the flesh and bone typing out this blog, the person you may or may not know, the person you talk to maybe over a pint of Guinness, I, am a fiction out of the pages of--

John Barth wrote that the reading and writing of fiction is essentially a schizophrenic excursion: this was an important revelation to me. Through fiction, we enter a dreamworld, and if the fiction is well executed, we enter it more completely--some people get straightjackets for that sort of thing; writers get cash, if they're good. A writer not only enters the dreamworld, but creates one. Now that I'm a character, now that I am creating the fiction of my own life, paradoxically, I must get solid in my world. As a writer, I lived a good deal of my time in that other kingdom, the space inside Pilgrims Dream, and I let my attention to what I called reality go lax. A writer, in a sense, if he is not also a character, is in a catatonic state, close to coma, living always somewhere else, working out problems that exist in some sideways realm, and uses the energy of his physical form only to record the happenings in that other, far away place. A writer is a disappearing act. And I had disappeared from my life. Quite often, this triggered fear, when I realized I was losing myself. Now, as a character, I must make myself clear and engaged with my surrounding, or I will be a vague character. By embracing myself as fictional, I make a commitment to my reality.

Also, if I'm to be character in a novel worth reading, I better make some interesting moves.

Here's more from City, Sister, Silver, because I learn by copying:

I sat down on a tree stump, we'd just come out of a village, and I said: Hey, sweetheart, I never hassled you about faith, but know this ... once upon a time there was a fella, a priest, Bogomil, an he said, don't make pictures of Bog, it's not for everyone ... just for the strong people of cruel Bog, an he an his woman ... whose name can't be uttered, it's always changing! She's eternal ... have got two sons, Logos, word, an Lupus, i.e. wolf, i.e. Warrior, the younger brother and the older brother, an they stick up for each other ...

Cool, got a smoke?

Yeah.

Well, go ahead, she said, taking off her boots, you've sure got some interesting theories ...

Old Orthodox Bogomil, a.k.a. Theophilus, was smart to come up with censorship, just imagine, some people're using images of Bog in ads ... subtitlin him in the old tongue, yep ... for example, God smokes jupkas, so should you ... or God on TV, prime time, when they show those illegal gladiator fights, snacks on Avizo pretzel sticks, so can you ... I saw it, pisses me off ... now God an the whole happy family drink only delectable Dagoberts coffee, know that one?

That one, yeah.

There, you see ... an this priest said the world's an embrace, always in pairs, day an night, man an woman, an so on, nonsense too, an that it's unknowable, like a dream ... an you fight against it all, but you're part of it. An sometimes, just sometimes, you catch a glimpse ... just for the blink of an eye, you glimpse the wheel of the world ... an then you return to make your way through more snares an traps an delusions, makin your way through the deceptions ... an it's all just about bein free, bein yourself, avoiding slavery ... and we who know about the secret, boy do I love you!, we love eagles, cause they see ... they're still around in some places ... an it's about finding your being in the vale of tears, in other words your other half, so you can be whole, at least for awhile!, an be there for someone, an through passion an strength of feeling, he said, you can overcome even your own pain, drown out the awful solitude ... an you also fight with the other one, just like with yourself, but in love all things're permitted ... on ther other hand there're rules, but! ... if they're after you, you can do anything ... an in order to find that being, you gotta get past the snares ... the eagle of course sees into the future, or more like senses it ... you're asleep!

No, look at my boots. A nail came through, it's diggin into me.

An sometimes you can fly even, at least for the blink of an eye ...

Yeah right ... you an your flying ... but look at my feet. They're all bloody.

I'll give you my shoes.

--Jachym Topol, City Sister Silver, 351-352.

Wild, about the eagle sees into the future, considering my previous blog entry. I read this passage only today. The fiction I read mirrors my own fiction! Also interesting is that a month or two ago, I found my own eagle, whose name I will not speak.

Excerpt (Rough Cut)

2008-11-20T14:35:00.005-05:00

I, Michael Matejka, am writing this novel in what I called the real world. I had wanted to write a novel since high school, and I devoted the intermediate decade and more to preparation. I studied the classics and my heroes the mavericks, and I scoured secret traditions for tools that developed my inner eye. My imaginative faculty grew until I could enter it absolutely, and I then pointed it toward this fiction. I engaged visions of personalities performing feats of transcendence and transcribed them into a story with my pen, whose cartridge I have just replaced. I began with a loose structure--or only a vague thrust--and granted my subconscious, my secret understandings, great latitude in directing this narrative.

With suspicion, I circled about the working title Pilgrims Dream as I developed the opening chapters, and only after nine months do I recognize its appropriateness: the gestation is complete. I took my loose frame from an inspiration that originated in the Canterbury Tales, and later I found a description of another Pilgrim in The Labyrinth of the World, whom I weirdly and unknowingly reincarnated under the name of Heraclitus Walleye, my main protagonist. Last night, I watched The Constant episode of Lost and wept with deep recognition--the central character, Desmond Hume, had to stabilize two divergent timelines he was experiencing, with the help of physicist Daniel Farraday, by locating some feature common to both timelines, or witness the collapse of everything and die; the constant Hume located was his beloved--before I remembered Billy Pilgrim and his relevance to my theme: last night I realized I can remember the future and irrevocably be there. After my terrified understanding of that possibility, but before my consciousness made the jump to the future, I heard the lyrics of the Radiohead song Nude:

Now that you've found it, it's gone
Now that you feel it, you don't
You've gone off the rails

I had escaped the chains, the rails, of experience as linear temporality, as have the characters in Pilgrims Dream. My old reality, once comprehended and mastered, disappeared.

I jumped.

I finally grasped the crucial, hidden insight of Donnie Darko that had intrigued but eluded me since I first saw the movie. I had just traveled a loop into the future. Every future is a loop from the present, and I had suddenly traveled one of the lines.

More lyrics came, this time from Weird Fishes/Arpeggi:

I get eaten by the worms
and weird fishes
Yeah I hit the bottom
hit the bottom
and escape

The lyrics commented upon my new experience of becoming unstuck: time travel. I had been a slave to the old timeline but escaped into greater possibilities of successive experience.

Both songs come from the album In Rainbows.

I am writing this memory as present experience. I am telling the stories of characters who become unstuck, and for whom every experience is true. I am telling what became my story.

The notion of limit and transgression edged about my consciousness as I watched the fiction grow. I drew lines and watched my characters cut across them.

I saw myself telling a polytemporal, polyrhythmic, post-Babylonian and therefore polyvocal tale, and I became a character in it.

I write in fear as I confess I can no longer draw a constant line or objectively define a limit between the real and the imagined for even myself. I had recognized the inspirational seed of Old Goat (the discarnate Voice heard by Walleye, from whom Walleye takes instruction) as a useful device and encouraged the development of Goat's personality as the only constant in Heraclitus Walleye's wanderings. I developed Goat in my inner eye until he became a breathing presence for Walleye. Here and now I reach for and cling to Old Goat for my constant. Goat will be real for me now as he will also be in my future: I will orient myself and stabilize my timelines by the Voice of Old Goat. Goat will guide both me and Walleye. And so, I can no longer look upon the writing of this fiction as anything other than deeper fiction--or, I can only call this entire creative process truth, with every aspect as equal. I am unstuck and cannot go back. All is fiction or all is truth, and so the distinction dissolves.

I admit to a part of me that fears for my sanity and worries for my hold on what I called the real world, which I can no longer define as more real than the world of Heraclitus Walleye. Only Old Goat is always real. Heraclitus and I comprise a single universe, and I must face that "I" experience all of it. Will Michael Matejka disappear into what he called the fiction? But he already has. Without awareness, I already cut across the point of no return. I see no other way but forward into the realization of this narrative, trembling at the potential treachery of a greater imagination, and I must hope for my safety at the conclusion of Pilgrims Dream.

This thing has taken over.