One hundred and nineteen is a cool number. I don't have a lot of feelings about nineteen itself, but I like when eleven is smashed into anything anytime it happens. Also, one plus one plus nine is eleven.
*
Some facts are inherently pleasurable. Pythagorean facts, little truths so elegant as to invoke worship. As some historically significant physicists and mathematicians have put it, that pleasure in finding things out and grasping the connections is the pleasure of discerning the mind of God; one of the goads of the human being, the ecstasy of spirituality, this action the universe takes in coming to know itself. Uncovering the Secrets of the Old One, as Stuart A. Kauffman put it.
*
Continuing from yesterday, one cannot deny the absolute truth of certain labels. "Identities". Roles we have no choice but to play, words we have no choice but to say.
Freedom, by the way, is in no way compromised by these things that our agency cannot shift. One is not unfree merely because one cannot sprout wings and fly into the sky, for example. And it may be that we shall generate descendants, whether "artificial" or analog, who are able to do just that, not that it matters. At any rate, fixed conditions do not abrogate total freedom. I'll elaborate on that stance some other time; I have a different pointless point today.
*
That I am a writer, that I am a man of some kind, that I am Catholic, that I am an American citizen, that I am an immigrant, that I am an English speaker and a Spanish speaker, that I posses a genetic map which to some worldviews renders me a "mongrel of the worst nightmare variety"*, that I got some mental health and activity quirks, that I am able-bodied and sighted and hearing, that I am a worker, all of these are facts I cannot deny and act as lenses through which I may be viewed and through which I have no choice but to view the world, unless I engage in acts of massive and useless self-denial.
Yeah, they're part of my identity, everyone has them. But a gem isn't its facets; facets are cut into gems by humans, just as identities are etched into you by the world. A gem, just as a human being, is in its material, its components, the arrangement of its atoms, its hardness, the colors at its heart.
Identity is the most outside part, the quickest and least descriptive shorthand. I try to dispense with it insofar as it is possible, but it is undeniable that the outside, being what is in the most constant with the world, will affect how the center holds and looks even to itself, how it is able to signify and codify according to the world. The race thing, my god! An emerald is green and a sapphire is blue and a ruby is red. I got news for you: they are the same stone. But they're not! But they are.
What is meant when it is said that we are made in God's own image is not that we are monkeys that stand upright, which really is a very fundamentally stupid fucking read. To imagine that God put the asshole in just because "he" has one too is simply concussed.
We are God because God is the paradox. God is the universe unfolding and watching the universe unfold from the lowest to the highest, from the incomprehensible micro to beyond the Void. Our atoms are a part of that unfolding, our cells, our tissues, our bodies and spirits and the ideas we generate and the things that we make, from the greatest to the least.
Alpha and Omega. One over infinity and infinity over one.
*
So when I admit to these labels, it essential to qualify that I see these things in my own way and have drawn my own conclusions, because I make a conscious efforts to feel my own feelings about them, and no one else's.
Because honestly, I have no use for solidarity. Seems to me a parasite-concept, something manipulative individuals use to steal people's life energy and choices and even get them killed for a liar's cause.
There is little I appreciate less than when I hear someone invoking something that I am, like, say, "The Latino or Hispanic vote" or the incredibly nefarious "People of Color", or the by now truly nauseating "the 'LGBTQI+/-' community", and ascribing to in any monolithic characteristics or boiling it all down to a sound bite to win an argument or justify bullshit.
Nope. Nope. Only way is to do my own thing with what I got, with what I'm given. To do my own work my own way. I don't march, I avoid rallies, I don't go to Mass, I don't go to meetings, I don't hold up signs. I do not accept umbrella thinking, I refuse all implicit and tacit agreement with "my own". Extrapolation that I am on anyone's--anyone's--side is irresponsible and always incorrect. I own only myself, and no one owns me. I am not on anybody's side. Don't care how good it sounds, how much you cry about it or try to make me seem like the devil's own turdpolisher. I don't endorse. I keep the distance I need to survive.
Even if I like everything a person makes, even if I gush about their accomplishments and pay them compliments, it's just human recognition. I harbor no illusions that their capacity to generate beautiful and necessary work that I appreciate and have sustained myself with makes them "good" people; I myself am a high-level wretch and have known too many other artists too well. There are only people. I appreciate, I agree, but even when I cry "Yes! Perfect!" I mean only for me, and what I am crying about in that moment, and not for everyone. I do not aggrandize, or engage in idol worship; I do not endorse. I eat what I need to in order to survive.
Should anyone suggest that instead of surviving you ought to give your life to or for a cause, or that the only way to survive is to follow where they lead, or invoke a need to act as they say on behalf an agglomerate of humans, for concepts they say are justice or peace or goodness or right--causes, selves, and ideas they are, of course, selling--just, please.
Think twice. More, if you have to. Don't ever let anyone tell you that there isn't time to think things through. Don't die for a liar. Don't live under shadows.
*
In short, way too much fucked up nonsense gone down because of people all getting together under a banner, and I don't play that shit.
--JL
*read this about myself on the internet when I was twelve years old. It was kind of funny back then, then for a while it wasn't, now it's pretty funny again. I take that pleasure and pride in it which I suspect is reserved specifically for mongrels and especially immigrant mongrels, as it is born of the acceptance of a very particular perspective. Neither fish nor fowl nor good whatever the hell, you hear some stuff you weren't meant to hear and some stuff you can't believe you have to hear again. All such a bad, bad joke.
Anyway, my miscegenation is the bomb and I am the glorious future and the hope of this timeline, fight me
Showing posts with label hearts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hearts. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
#69
My heart has been calmer lately. Overall.
Had a phone call with an old friend that undid several knots in my spirit-body. Those of you who wish to punish me are probably thinking "Thought you had no old friends, because you are the great pariah, the unforgiven!" Well, I deserve that, and I'm cool with you, fellow traveler. Go in peace. Ha-tcha! Calm heart.
Effort goes in daily to sort myself out. While walking to or back from work, with the family dog, just sitting around. It has been an active process, is what I'm saying. In order to calm my heart, I have found it necessary to hammer away at it, bang it around the place. I have needed to be by myself for many hours. I walk about one hundred minutes each work day. At work there are opportunities. At home there are comparatively vast quietnesses to sink into. I have rearranged things to maximize available quietude.
I remember, and in silence, wear my shoes out atoning. Once again I have mended my nets, and go fishing forgiveness out of my waters.
Gotta learn, and relearn, how to forgive.
Gotta suffer. Quietly,
When you put your face right into it, suffering changes its quality. When you understand it, and don't shy away, or get arrogant about it--when you examine it objectively, relegate it to a sphere in balance with the rest of the moment that you are experiencing in its entirety, suffering is only a part of the mixture that forms ecstasy. Agony informs bliss, from the depths to the heights.
*
The athletic director at my middle school got it into his head that I would be a good fit for the wrestling team, even though I had never heard of the sport as such. Word got to my mom through some channel, I was never told which, and she convinced me to go to a practice and see it through. I was most unwilling; really, even revolted. I do not especially enjoy close contact with strangers and was never strongly inclined towards athleticism in early life. Always I had to be prodded to put down the book and move,
Not in good form or able wind, I found the running, calisthenics, anaerobics, and resistance exercises all positively awful. The only thing that got me through that absolute doldrum of needless pain and toil, not to mention listening to the grunting shitheads that made up the team, was the knowledge that I would only have to do this once, a single time. I have tried--my failures have been incredible, but so have my efforts--tried to be an obedient son to my parents. I was there as a one-time deal to show my mom I'd give the deal a fair shake to make her happy. She said she didn't give a damn about my making her happy, that she wanted this for my own benefit. I both believed her and didn't.
Actual wrestling did not change my opinion of the practice. Abrasive, damp, painful, and humiliating in that it was not the first but the third or fourth practice, and even the other seventh-graders knew more moves than me. I knew nothing, Nothing at all.
Free wrestling for three minutes was how practice finished strong before cooldown. Up to this point I had been manhandled, twisted around, put in a headlock, put in half nelson, slapped around a bit, and insulted quite a lot. I was exhausted and in a state of placid fury. Everything had been horrible, hot, and furthermore, stupid. I was also wearing inadequate shoes.
Then the dude I was wrestling picked me up above his head. I had no idea that would happen. He lunged at my legs and somehow picked me right up. Then he drove me into the mat as hard as he could. The pain was immediate and sensational, self-destroying. The completeness of the impact, the ferocity of the shock running through my torso, a blast, a slam. My mind overloaded and went blank.
I've become a little more practiced at it now, but ever since I can remember I've not had quiet in my head. I'm always talking at myself in at least two voices, and there's always thoughts coming at me several at a time. I think fast, and a lot, and sometimes I can't even talk properly from thinking. That was, I believe, the fourth time and the first time in a couple of years my mind had gone blank for even a moment.
Then it hurt even worse and it all came back. Then a curious elation, what I now recognize as a high.
It was this high, its aftereffects still buzzing in my suddenly singing muscles, as well as the memory of that moment of silence, that made me reply, when asked a little later how the practice had gone, that I would be back the next day.
--JL
Monday, November 19, 2018
#62
It is so laughable that we seek to know, and even funnier that we declare what we think we know to be correct and permanent! I realize I've started a post this way before, but I cannot care and will very likely do so again. The vanity is endlessly baffling, and so hugely absurd--the joke never grows stale.
There is no end to thinking. There is no end to thought. As long as there is life, it will communicate with life and with the incommunicable beyond, which will tend to life as even life tends to cease being life, to go beyond communication. So what is preserved? And what is the value of preservation, and how long can a memory last? Questions are always alive, answers are always dead. Yet it is through the answers that we seek to build our lives.
What is human existence as an unbroken stream of consciousness but a few sentences, a brief snatch of bloodied song? How much of the universe has every person that has ever lived seen? Expressed? Set down for posterity?
Nothing! It is nothing! One big guess! Unclear in the particulars! And soon, we will forget, blinded by our new versions of old stories and distracted by the fresh contours of new guesses, for which we will scream and kill and die.
If the universe is a forest, all humanity is but stepping underneath the eaves at its edge, and looking around. Briefly, in fear, squinting through shadows.
Speaking in personal, more quotidian terms, if the universe is a forest, then our lives--every thought we think every tree we see, every step we take between the trunks--on paths or through the undergrowth--with guides and partners or all alone--is knifing blazes into the bark, etching markings into the surface of things to show ourselves where we've been, how we got to where we are.
Collectively or alone, it all comes down to a little patch of "familiar" ground; growing a little every day, maybe, but never more than the most infinitesimal before the incalculable spread of the universe, of time.
Can't go back. No unmarking a marking. No unpathing a path, no unreading a word. No shortcuts, either. Can't get to the edge. Can't read ahead. Can't force static--as if it weren't enough that the trees don't end; they never stop changing, either, and the markings that we make change too; fade, become grown over, lose their meaning, go abandoned and become rediscovered.
Always, always, the threat of fire, of flood, of blight, of unstoppable decay, of becoming totally lost--having all that we have come to think we know, all that we have come to hold dear torn away from us, violently or through senescence. Death might tear us by the roots or creep in through the leaves, but always, it roams the woods, and how can we object? Every throat alive is bared to death, and if it swept through like a shadow and took its due all in a day, and the human story ended all abrupt mid-sentence as it was just beginning, all the knowledge we pretended meant so much would be lost as if it had never been gained--and so what?
Knowledge may last longer than any one of us, but it is more mortal and less significant than even the meanest life. Knowledge serves life, is subordinate to life. And life is in the heart.
A single heart has more value than the entirety of human knowledge. Offer me the choice between them and I will not hesitate for a fraction of a second--I would eliminate all living memory for the sake of a single life. Knowledge, thought, wisdom: these are toys, at best. Usually, chimeras.
What matters is the seeds.
To live among trees is a gift. To walk and breathe in an uninterrupted flux, moving through the flesh of a great rushing wind--what else is there? The whole point is to be a tiny vantage in a vastness, to be a dancing particle, to see what there is to see while we have eyes to see it.
Feeling our hearts. Feeling through our hearts. Our hearts, knowing nothing, present us with the true nature of our world, with the full meaning of the universe.
Dying senselessly in the woods--the very best that we can hope for.
--JL
There is no end to thinking. There is no end to thought. As long as there is life, it will communicate with life and with the incommunicable beyond, which will tend to life as even life tends to cease being life, to go beyond communication. So what is preserved? And what is the value of preservation, and how long can a memory last? Questions are always alive, answers are always dead. Yet it is through the answers that we seek to build our lives.
What is human existence as an unbroken stream of consciousness but a few sentences, a brief snatch of bloodied song? How much of the universe has every person that has ever lived seen? Expressed? Set down for posterity?
Nothing! It is nothing! One big guess! Unclear in the particulars! And soon, we will forget, blinded by our new versions of old stories and distracted by the fresh contours of new guesses, for which we will scream and kill and die.
If the universe is a forest, all humanity is but stepping underneath the eaves at its edge, and looking around. Briefly, in fear, squinting through shadows.
Speaking in personal, more quotidian terms, if the universe is a forest, then our lives--every thought we think every tree we see, every step we take between the trunks--on paths or through the undergrowth--with guides and partners or all alone--is knifing blazes into the bark, etching markings into the surface of things to show ourselves where we've been, how we got to where we are.
Collectively or alone, it all comes down to a little patch of "familiar" ground; growing a little every day, maybe, but never more than the most infinitesimal before the incalculable spread of the universe, of time.
Can't go back. No unmarking a marking. No unpathing a path, no unreading a word. No shortcuts, either. Can't get to the edge. Can't read ahead. Can't force static--as if it weren't enough that the trees don't end; they never stop changing, either, and the markings that we make change too; fade, become grown over, lose their meaning, go abandoned and become rediscovered.
Always, always, the threat of fire, of flood, of blight, of unstoppable decay, of becoming totally lost--having all that we have come to think we know, all that we have come to hold dear torn away from us, violently or through senescence. Death might tear us by the roots or creep in through the leaves, but always, it roams the woods, and how can we object? Every throat alive is bared to death, and if it swept through like a shadow and took its due all in a day, and the human story ended all abrupt mid-sentence as it was just beginning, all the knowledge we pretended meant so much would be lost as if it had never been gained--and so what?
Knowledge may last longer than any one of us, but it is more mortal and less significant than even the meanest life. Knowledge serves life, is subordinate to life. And life is in the heart.
A single heart has more value than the entirety of human knowledge. Offer me the choice between them and I will not hesitate for a fraction of a second--I would eliminate all living memory for the sake of a single life. Knowledge, thought, wisdom: these are toys, at best. Usually, chimeras.
What matters is the seeds.
To live among trees is a gift. To walk and breathe in an uninterrupted flux, moving through the flesh of a great rushing wind--what else is there? The whole point is to be a tiny vantage in a vastness, to be a dancing particle, to see what there is to see while we have eyes to see it.
Feeling our hearts. Feeling through our hearts. Our hearts, knowing nothing, present us with the true nature of our world, with the full meaning of the universe.
Dying senselessly in the woods--the very best that we can hope for.
--JL
Sunday, November 11, 2018
#58
The light is very good right now. I mean the sunlight on the surface of the world right now, where I am, looking out the window. I have spent a great many hours of my life looking out the window. It is a good pastime. Noble. Quiet hours.
Quiet hours are a gift from heaven. So is light.
Sometimes light kisses everything it touches and carves it fresh and clean and new. Draws the glory and power of everything under the sun to the utmost under the eye; the eye rejoicing, rejoicing.
*
Hell's exact location has been famously pinpointed--earthly cohabitation with other human beings. Each human mind is a Hellmouth, dripping vile temptations and a lifetime of betrayal and abuse. Your mind, too, is a portal to a nightmare dimension. Your friends and family--why, they helped shape your nightmare dimension, even as your cosmic energy and your choice of words influences theirs.
Human beings are also sanctuaries. The minds of others can be hallowed ground, can be gardens. We can carry around little altars to one another in our hearts, and be the talismans that protect one another in dark places. Yes, there are darknesses we could never have borne or crossed, without the light of another human being to help us stumble through.
Our hearts are shrines, yes; also, battlefields, and battlefields are where casualties breed.
To speak more practically, friendship is a contract wherein two hearts build a bridge between themselves and engender a certain flow or exchange between themselves. This flow, made up of events, communication, energy, and time, is a bond. Be it the puddle of acquaintanceship, the wide river of many years of closeness and endeavor, or the inland sea of a lifelong journey, there exists between two hearts and time an exchange of energy, of memory, of trust. There exists in this arrangement an inherent risk of imbalance, in addition to the inevitable series of arithmetical transformations and tonal modifications to the contract--attached subcontracts, hidden clauses, annulments of pertinent minutes, supplementary materials, renegotiations and the acknowledgement of ramifications such as those pertaining to insults, forgetfulness, and betrayals ranging from the microscopic and only appreciable in the aggregate to reversals so egregious they have spilled onto the pages of human history and haunted the universal myth. Also, people just change. It happens.
People's hearts are different sizes and shapes and have different kinds of energy. Any child knows this. Some fit together and complement one another, managing a reasonably even flow of energy over fairly sturdy bridges. Some don't fit that well initially, but manage to find an equilibrium. Some hearts, due to internal quirks or traumatic factors, will tend to seek hearts that they can dominate or manipulate into an uneven flow of energy that benefits them at the expense of the other. Some hearts will seek to be dominated by such hearts, and some will repel them.
Some hearts change into other hearts while they're still connected up to other hearts, because of circumstances. Sometimes bridges suffer structural damage that have nothing to do with energy flow, and everything to do with distance, or some fresh shock or wound that cannot be shared and which poisons life with silence, burning bridges with cold fire. Sometimes we just go crazy, and start setting torches to all our bridges ourselves, for no good reason other than to welcome despair, or because our hearts are giving us bad advice, perhaps because some other heart wishes us ill, for reasons of its own. Sometimes you don't even realize you lost a bond until, years later, with a start, you realize that behind you, for no particular reason, lie a thousand dried-out stream beds and river bottoms. a thousand little tombs where once fresh flowers were laid at altars in the heedless hope of youth.
It can be tough not to take it personal. Instinctively, the organism understands the perceived source of its experienced pain as antagonistic. You want to blame--people in general, specific individuals for their exact faults, yourself. You want to sketch a story that allows you to make sense of how things have played out.
You have that right. After all, every heart that was joined to yours has changed your heart in one way or another, whether you realize it and reckon with it or play havoc with yourself. Some hearts will use what they get from you to cause you pain you did not think could ever have been possible.
But while you might have to get the fuck away from someone and do your damnedest to make sure they can't get near you again--to blame them, to turn your altar into a butcher's block, is to let that hurt fester, and where that hurt festers, it will spread its infection and make you hurt yourself and hurt others.
Hearts come into and out of our lives. We find ourselves retracing our steps in places we never thought we would set foot in again, finding everything changed but the ghost of familiarity behind each new perspective. Fresh flows turning long-dessicated, cracked earth to fertile stream mud once again. Sometimes we find that the torches we set sprung a mighty blaze, but perhaps more billow and roar than heat--and we are relieved that the framework still bears weight. For we have come to grieve what is truly beyond our power to heal, and see that healing was a choice we did not make, but could have.
*
Still a little sick. Hope to be all better tomorrow. Good night.
--JL
Quiet hours are a gift from heaven. So is light.
Sometimes light kisses everything it touches and carves it fresh and clean and new. Draws the glory and power of everything under the sun to the utmost under the eye; the eye rejoicing, rejoicing.
*
Hell's exact location has been famously pinpointed--earthly cohabitation with other human beings. Each human mind is a Hellmouth, dripping vile temptations and a lifetime of betrayal and abuse. Your mind, too, is a portal to a nightmare dimension. Your friends and family--why, they helped shape your nightmare dimension, even as your cosmic energy and your choice of words influences theirs.
Human beings are also sanctuaries. The minds of others can be hallowed ground, can be gardens. We can carry around little altars to one another in our hearts, and be the talismans that protect one another in dark places. Yes, there are darknesses we could never have borne or crossed, without the light of another human being to help us stumble through.
Our hearts are shrines, yes; also, battlefields, and battlefields are where casualties breed.
To speak more practically, friendship is a contract wherein two hearts build a bridge between themselves and engender a certain flow or exchange between themselves. This flow, made up of events, communication, energy, and time, is a bond. Be it the puddle of acquaintanceship, the wide river of many years of closeness and endeavor, or the inland sea of a lifelong journey, there exists between two hearts and time an exchange of energy, of memory, of trust. There exists in this arrangement an inherent risk of imbalance, in addition to the inevitable series of arithmetical transformations and tonal modifications to the contract--attached subcontracts, hidden clauses, annulments of pertinent minutes, supplementary materials, renegotiations and the acknowledgement of ramifications such as those pertaining to insults, forgetfulness, and betrayals ranging from the microscopic and only appreciable in the aggregate to reversals so egregious they have spilled onto the pages of human history and haunted the universal myth. Also, people just change. It happens.
People's hearts are different sizes and shapes and have different kinds of energy. Any child knows this. Some fit together and complement one another, managing a reasonably even flow of energy over fairly sturdy bridges. Some don't fit that well initially, but manage to find an equilibrium. Some hearts, due to internal quirks or traumatic factors, will tend to seek hearts that they can dominate or manipulate into an uneven flow of energy that benefits them at the expense of the other. Some hearts will seek to be dominated by such hearts, and some will repel them.
Some hearts change into other hearts while they're still connected up to other hearts, because of circumstances. Sometimes bridges suffer structural damage that have nothing to do with energy flow, and everything to do with distance, or some fresh shock or wound that cannot be shared and which poisons life with silence, burning bridges with cold fire. Sometimes we just go crazy, and start setting torches to all our bridges ourselves, for no good reason other than to welcome despair, or because our hearts are giving us bad advice, perhaps because some other heart wishes us ill, for reasons of its own. Sometimes you don't even realize you lost a bond until, years later, with a start, you realize that behind you, for no particular reason, lie a thousand dried-out stream beds and river bottoms. a thousand little tombs where once fresh flowers were laid at altars in the heedless hope of youth.
It can be tough not to take it personal. Instinctively, the organism understands the perceived source of its experienced pain as antagonistic. You want to blame--people in general, specific individuals for their exact faults, yourself. You want to sketch a story that allows you to make sense of how things have played out.
You have that right. After all, every heart that was joined to yours has changed your heart in one way or another, whether you realize it and reckon with it or play havoc with yourself. Some hearts will use what they get from you to cause you pain you did not think could ever have been possible.
But while you might have to get the fuck away from someone and do your damnedest to make sure they can't get near you again--to blame them, to turn your altar into a butcher's block, is to let that hurt fester, and where that hurt festers, it will spread its infection and make you hurt yourself and hurt others.
Hearts come into and out of our lives. We find ourselves retracing our steps in places we never thought we would set foot in again, finding everything changed but the ghost of familiarity behind each new perspective. Fresh flows turning long-dessicated, cracked earth to fertile stream mud once again. Sometimes we find that the torches we set sprung a mighty blaze, but perhaps more billow and roar than heat--and we are relieved that the framework still bears weight. For we have come to grieve what is truly beyond our power to heal, and see that healing was a choice we did not make, but could have.
*
Still a little sick. Hope to be all better tomorrow. Good night.
--JL
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