20.01.09 - MAX westbound

From time to time, I get this idea in my brain somewhere that I must either be insane or alone. Perhaps, both. But then, I think of Phaedrus and believe that I am certainly not insane, and perhaps - dare I say, even not alone.

I must admit that being entirely alone until the end of all time is a rather dated, melodramatic fear. One I felt certain of during adolescence, when we are each one of us alone. But having grown on from that stage, do not feel those same pangs of fear but only once and a rare while. And so, it is possible that "alone" is not exactly what I mean to suggest. But rather, the thing I fear is better said in these terms:

Often, I wonder how much of humanity is what it ought to be. And for the percentage that is not, I wonder how much or to what degree it a)considers this fact, b) cares about it (either once is has thought it or still in its ignorance), and c) will ever actually do anything - remarkable or otherwise - about it.

The fear, then, is that I am too alone is these considerations (with one or two others who feel as cosmically defeated, or more so, by such ideas) that action will indefinitely be impossible.

Of course, such fears are momentarily abated whenever a good conversation really comes to fruition with those one or two others. However, this too feels self-defeating, as it seems to me now only to deflate both parties into either a state of casual acceptance of humanity at large or a state of total defeat on the grounds that should these types of conversations leak out, the general populace would have nothing to do with it. Or, simply be too absorbed into thoughtless fancy and self-indulgence as to have no clue whatsoever that any such conversations had ever occurred at all.

And such is the dilemma that continues to depress.

For, if I am alone, then my voice is too weak. But as I am not (this must be accepted), I am simply deflatable by the rest of humanity to whom such ideals rail against. And so, in all honesty, attempting to reform the heart of humanity is, in this numb technological age, entirely impossible.

...and end, again.

It has come to a point in time when I see, like David in The Weatherman, that the options of who I was going to be are beginning to narrow down. That I am who I am, that my qualities and my choices and my actions all belong to this current me, that I must be satisfied with who I have chosen to become.

The first portion of my life is over. It is time to put away childish things. It is time to accept my place in this world. It is time to rise up for what is right.

And so, as I go this way and that, I find that the old avenues of myself are beginning to run dry. For every path that I taken has led to another and another and, like Robert Frost, I know I will not be back to those roads I did not choose.

And so, the time has come to leave the old roads where they lie and to travel this one with more commitment, with more effort, with more attention than before.

And so, breathe has turned its last page. If you should travel there, I am certain the road will make clear why.

when one falls down

I think I am, at last, beginning to see. To see how terrible things show us the truth in such bright colors - truths we might never have seen otherwise.

To see how I am not the person I once was, but how that person can still recur from time to time. And how that doesn't mean I am it again. Simply, retracing time.

This retracing can be so very dangerous. This backstepping into the past to recall what it was like to be that person. What it felt like, what it looked like. How she would look now, standing in my place, with me face-to-face.
It isn't pretty.

But that ghost cannot hold my attention long; before I know it, some revelation has struck me and her vapor quickly spreads across the footage of the room - and she is gone. But the memory of her - that vision so stark that I could almost remember how to...but it fades, as all good nightmares do. And soon, I am off in my own place with my own thoughts and my current convictions, only fueled by the powers of the past.

This is new to me.

Just like gaining faith in humanity by witnessing a guy threaten others with a knife.
This spirit we follow is very strange. And knows truth in the farthest of places.

Perhaps, there truly is hope.

11.01.2009 - work coffeehouse

After clearing up space in my head (and life) to actually get things done, I feel a sort of empty loneliness. Like today when I reached for a napkin, then had to withdraw my hand from the thought.

We don't scrawl on napkins anymore, I chided. That's not very clever.
And so a less-cluttered life takes getting settled with. As if all that junk had its place in my heart, and that part of me is hollowed out - almost saddened, almost sickened when it's gone.

I even thought of writing a letter to eros one day in a distress. Or, what if I see a still life somewhere about and feel that odd compulsion to take grammatical notice of it in some...

Ah, no, but the lesson must be learned: not that napkins cannot be written upon or letters to eros cannot be scrawled or that still lifes must go unshot. Not at all. But that to hone down all of things is to have a fuller, richer life. That I must give attention to those things that truly do deserve it. That I must ensure such things do, in fact, get said attentions.
The purpose of this excerise is to clear the clutter so that the muse may stir, rise, walk again amongst the fields of my soul's inhabitation.

Napkins and love letters and still lifes can all be a part of that, all in their own way. They only must be fitted into the already existing mold of my numbered days. Or else, they are only the wasteful clatter of a life that only feels clever.

But never truly burns bright enough to be.

Everything is valuable.

We too often discard the past. We scoff at it, calling the us from then a blind creature with no direction and no realistic vision of the future. We laugh and call such creatures fools. How could we have not known what the now would become; how could we have ever been so ridiculous? And we toss out the old ideas, the old lines, the old pages full of the things we thought back then. We say, these are rubbish, and we leave them to the fire that devours our recollections of our old mistakes. And then, we pass on by their ash, pushing forward with eyes that do not see the road and hands that cannot grasp the map. Yet we force on in our blind ignorance of our true history, making up brilliant things of ourselves as we go. For we are pastless and grandiose.

Either that, or we cling desperately, pale handed. We light candles for the past and hold them so far up into the sky, facing away from reality, peering so carefully into the grey horizon of before that the light cannot spread anywhere but back behind us. We bow to ourselves in the past as mages, dream of others as if they were perfect, like angels. As if the past has wiped away every pain, every mistake, every lesson. Until the future is so vague, so full of not-being that it hardly exists at all.

But we must align these two views. We must balance these two extremes. Because everything is of value, every thought of the past, every memory we experience, every dream that comes from either there or there. We must comprehend these complications, and we must meld them together with a swift and deft hand.

For these conceptions of the past are deadly. They lead us into dark alleys that have no escape. They are steel traps in our intellect to confine us to dreams and nightmares, to immobilize us in this now. Either to keep us somewhere else, or make blundering disasters of our footfalls.

So let us shed all preconceptions of the past and of memory. Let us re-examine the facts of the matter. Let us re-evaluate the value of our memories, of words that come to us from the grey hallways full of ghosts of a passed reality. Let us pass through each cold ghost, let us touch each grey wall, let us travel eah old, trodden path until we can gain some beneficial direction.

Until we can hold our candles in front of us and scoff only at our foolishness to never do so. Until we can see clearly into the dawn spreading out before us. Until we can grasp the significance of what was before, and then shed its weight like a cloak that covered us in the night. Launuch ourselves from this immobility and scrutiny, and accomplish the greatness we have always had planned before us.

on getting drawn

I have these feelings - that nothing is permanent. That life is drawn on us with thick black pens, and it lasts for a day or two. But as soon as we want to wash it off - there it goes.

Impermanence. Everything is always going to fade, to crumble, to end.

And I have this feeling - this need to hang on to things that seem important; that I want to last. Want to be permanent. Forever.

But, nothing is - really.

Everything can be undone, taken away, removed. Burned out of us, torn away from us. Cut out.
With next to no scarring.

Some things are supposed to be permanent.
I wish, in everything, we would stop pretending that - truly - nothing is.

A handful of things are.
Can we not respect them?

No. We are running at such an incomprehensibly fast pace away from ourselves that existence itself seems to bend away from us, into arcs of little nothings. Into a vapor that soon passes.

We cannot be such a vapor.
Don't tell me we are a vapor.
And don't try to convince me that these permanent things are not thus.

When love fades or breaks apart into the expanse, no longer a cosmos - so shall we.