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| july 2002 |
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| Song the Sixth | 2:37am wednesday, 31st july |
This is the last song from this period in my first, long episode. (The other ones can be reached from here.) This one's about Rosanna Arquette:
"Her"
She’s a poem of hunger and fire and soul
With a wild waiting heart you can’t save or control
She’s a destiny meant for the truest of song
How her spirit can soar when she’s sacred and strong
When she cries the world stops to encounter each tear
She arrives like the dawn bringing hope as she nears
Endless beauty that moves you to genius or death
She can kindle forever in one silent breath
chorus
Weary though the way must be
Promises are never free
Let her steal the moment from your inmost fear
If you should from Heaven fall
Had enough to lose it all
Seek salvation given in a single tear
She gives voice to the light with a dream in her eye
She’s a high fashion angel with keys to the sky
Rarest rose in the rain that gives promise to Spring
She makes peace with the wanderlust solitude brings
She’s epiphany no one can win or deny
And how priceless her will when it has reason why
A desire so pure and a passion so true
In the still of her love is a soul born anew
chorus
chorus
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| One Wonders | 2:25am tuesday, 30th july |
I could explain myself if you gave me a chance, though I was never here. Ignore all you think you know about me, and I believe we'll have something — a start, at any rate. It would be best if you knew that I existed in a dream you have long since forgotten, that I was a trick out of the corner of your eye one twilight you weren't paying attention — you were just trying to get home. I am no one, and I have blended into so many crowds I think you could see me if you really concentrated really hard at no one in particular. I never wrote this; this all came out of the thin air, tapping me on the shoulder, wanting in on the joke. So, tell me, what am I trying to say?
I am tired. What you have just read is a piece of nothing shaped into a ball and rolled on the floor. These are the words it left in its trail.
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| I Dream | 1:46am monday, 29th july |
I dream of the light that shines beyond all of our knowing.
I dream of the music that cannot be made with our instruments.
I dream of the dream that we cannot imagine — or escape.
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| Demons | 4:30am saturday, 27th july |
I wonder if my demons lurk somewhere. I rest a spell, generally free of them for now, but there is that little feeling that they will reassert themselves sometime when I'm not expecting it. In the Bible, there was this man possessed by so many demons (literal or figurative, whichever way you want to look at it), that he called himself (or they called themselves) legion. Now, I was never as bad as all that, but the ones I did have had dug themselves deep into my psyche, and they knew which buttons to press — where my willpower was worn down by consistent failure to withstand — bad habits that became instincts I was powerless to reject. Drugs were a big part of that. I have been clean for almost a year now, but still... when do you know you're really free?
That's what I'm talking about. I have quit before for a little more than a year, whereupon I was tempted and fell. I dunno. My madness once told me I would fall one more time, and then I would be free. Strange thing is, it's been right before as far as these things go — it just won't tell me when that will be. Maybe they do still lurk, my demons. Stay tuned. Methinks my life may suddenly get very interesting, very unexpectedly — though I have no idea when, I think I have one last episode to go.
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| Notes from Back When | 2:56am friday, 26th july |
These are some notes I took back about here. I was trying to affect the universe in my head, thinking it was somehow related to the real world:
let there be no dialectic.
if something is said to be everywhere, then it follows that it is also everwhen, now; now was the cross-point between space and time: here was now, now was here. everything was here.
Heaven is outside of everything.
i, calm, confer existence to ALL, which is hypergravity.
i, calm, confer existence to everyone in ALL: all angels, all cherubim, the pseudo-dragon, Smaug, and to the shape-shifting insects (a.k.a. maggots).
let all daemons follow only honesty, and perform only logical processes, eiao everywhere and everywhen, equilateral triangle everywhere and everywhen.
please do not associate; please follow procedure (honesty).
calm is always honest.
no charity, please. charity is not selflessness, and selflessness is not charity.
I don't think I could explain what this all meant, if I wanted to.
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| Down So Long | 1:01am thursday, 25th july |
You remember those famous song lyrics, "Been down so long it looks like up to me." I lived those lyrics, I think. I mean, some words completely lost meaning to me, words like "good", "great", "nice", "well done". All I was used to, all that my soul had been immersed in back during those times were words like "shameful", "terrible", "failure", "loser". If I come to think of it, the negative words still have more meaning to me. I use the positive words, and the positive words are used on me time and again these days, but somehow, they lack something to them. It's not that I don't appreciate their use (believe me, I am thankful every day), it's just that those words seem only to suggest what they truly mean anymore.
When I use the positive words, it is still strange to me, a strange feeling that things are going as well as all that, perhaps. "Able", "capable", "excellent"... these are forgotten words, words that time and experience eroded till those letters left little more than their pronunciations. But it's not that big a deal, I suppose. On some level, I think maybe I get it. I understand enough of these forgotten words that they sink in at least a little. More, bit by bit, as the days go on. These are strange waters I swim, though, that I succeed rather than fail. But the landmarks, I believe, are getting more familiar. One day, I think I'll have this area mapped out, and those forgotten words... I will remember.
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| Dawn | 1:57am wednesday, 24th july |
Dawn is that light
as familiar as a mother's face,
fresh each morn
like a fire newly struck...
Back past the past,
we imagined gods who
set the wheel of day
on its path across the skies.
In its course, dawn
has survived the death of the
higher powers which
bore it within their chariots.
What strange things
will the new day's light cast
in days past even
the last day of our own futures?
And what will they
imagine then, that we did not
recognize the song
played by the new light morning?
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| Stories Past | 1:54am tuesday, 23rd july |
I think back and I realize that I have many stories in my past — though most of them I don't recall very much, just the hunch that they have been, that I have lived through these plotlines in some way, as observer, passenger, or actor. I was continually being pulled into narratives, during my madness. Whereas people have little daydreams every once in a while about being rich or something (something normal), I would have strange adventures with such things as psychic trees communicating with me through the book I was reading (made, after all, from dead trees). And then, moreover, there are those stories I might never tell anyone, too dark or too strange to relay in full detail, if at all.
I don't know what they mean, neither the sum total of them, nor each one individually. Maybe something will hit me sometime in the future, or maybe the lesson to learn is simpler. Humility, for instance, seeks sparingly to ask that infinite question: "Why?"
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| Song the Fifth | 1:54am monday, 22nd july |
Song 5 of 6. I wrote this one, like this one and these others while in this period of time in the greater of my madnesses. My feelings on (romantic) love at the time:
"Modern Day Love"
When you’ve got nowhere to go
I’ll be here waiting
Do you still believe
That life’s for the taking?
When you lost your way
What then did you find?
Come put your head on my shoulder
If the road’s been unkind
chorus
Caught in between a hope and a kiss
How your eyes promise my every wish
I know that mine is how fools are made
But only because of this love am I saved
When the emptiness hits
Hold on tight to my hand
Is that all that remains
When you’ve made your last stand?
What did you escape
To get where you are?
Come rest by my side
If you’ve gone too far
chorus
When your fragile heart breaks
I’ll pick up the pieces
Do you forget about love
When the pain ceases?
Did you chase after dreams
As life passed you by?
Come cry in my arms
If you’ve been living a lie
chorus
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| Dream True | 3:57am saturday, 20th july |
I remember a dream I once had: I dreamed that I saw Bob Marley in Heaven. He had heard that there were mountains there, somewhere, where cannabis (marijuana) grew wild, and he had been wandering the highlands ever since, in search of those plants. I have had other dreams, and the more intense of them during my madness... they were visions that lasted even when I awoke, a continuation of some strange story in my mind's eye brought from the sleeping world to a dream while wide awake.
One dream I had was interesting in that it started while I was awake, talking to the cartoons in my head. The conversation went on while I went to lie down in bed, and I fell asleep for a little while. I saw myself in my mind's eye, but it was supposedly a look into the future when I had died and gone to Heaven. I had wandered into one of Heaven's forests some time before and lived as a hermit, and it seemed that I had not seen or talked to anyone so long I had lost the gift of speech. The Jesus cartoon in my head then had pity on me, and along with the Archangel Michael cartoon helped me pray, and I prayed together with this image of my supposed future self: "Lord, help me live a better life." And I awoke.
Funny thing, though. Ever since then — to the best of my knowledge — I have lived a better life. Day by day, step by step, a better life.
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| On Beauty | 3:15am friday, 19th july |
Beauty is a justification for being alive.
There is some beauty that overpowers even time, even death.
A rare beauty it is that a glance sends you into a dream.
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| Last Words | 2:56am thursday, 18th july |
What would you want your last words to be? One of my favorite people who ever lived, the one Albert Einstein, I imagined during my madness that I spoke to him, and he told me the words he last said which the nurse couldn't understand were simply, "Water, please" (in German, of course). In my madness, I briefly spoke to Julius Caesar, too, and found out that "Et tu, Bruté?" (from Shakespeare's work about him) was too verbose, that he supposedly only cried, "Bruté!", in despair. I dunno. Even if we were to carefully pick out what we wanted the last thing we ever breathed out to be, what we might end up saying is, "I forgot what I wanted to say," and have that be our famous last words.
Charlie Chaplin, when on his deathbed, a priest attending him said to him, "May the Lord have mercy on your soul." Chaplin answered (and these were his last words), "Why not? After all, it belongs to him." Things like that you can't plan for. Perhaps it is best, if one has not a quick wit like that, to leave the world in silence. Or say something general that no one really will remember, like, "I love you all". Though you'll not be around to hear of it, I think it would be a sad thing if one might remember you for saying something really idiotic as you went out. I think my last words, what I would like them to be? "I knew it. This was just a dream, after all."
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| What I Am | 3:10am wednesday, 17th july |
I am a knight whose castle is built high in the sky, with no quest to pursue than to discover myself. I am a stranger to this world, a passerby who does his best to clean up after himself before he leaves it. I am a coward who is more afraid of not trying than trying. I am a whole other person than I used to be, back when I was waiting for something to happen to me. It did. I am not going to tell you what I really am, because I am at a loss to truly describe myself, for better or worse. I am not the victim here, and I never was — don't ever feel sorry for me.
I am more or less the sum total of all the decisions I have ever made, and the dollar value of my soul, if you add for good and subtract for ill, amounts to pocket change. But it's all that I have in the whole wide world, so I'll take it — and thank the powers that be that I have anything at all.
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| Revisited | 2:37am tuesday, 16th july |
Out of the same Bible I did this to, back during about this part of my older madness:
Mind all over the place, attributing quotes to various higher powers... excavates within me strange emotions, a sort of surreal nostalgia.
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| Tell | 2:52am monday, 15th july |
Turn of breeze, a destined wind
Future stirs the air that's been
Night will fall and everyone will lose his way
Ones of light and darkness' kin
Secret war and clashes' din
Time has come and larger voices still the day
Blindness over crowds and land
All to fall to darkness' brand
Fallen horns that shout the lie as cities burn
Night and two by holy hand
Granted power to withstand
Fall and rise to testify the king's return
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| Simplicity Itself | 3:54am saturday, 13th july |
The way I see it, it is better to be simple. Remembering that God is love, I have said previously, "Love is so simple people will never understand it." And to be like God is what my man Jesus Christ suggested we do: "...you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect." [Matthew 5:48] The goal is, perhaps, the antithesis of that "tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." [Sir Walter Scott] In other words, if your life is complicated, you're probably doing something wrong. I'm not saying, however, that you should do nothing — that is the simplicity of death, of oblivion — I'm talking about the simplicity of beauty.
I talk about the simplicity of beauty a little here. I reiterate my position that even the most detailed of structures, if there is beauty therein, there is a fundamental simplicity to its design. Not necessarily symmetry, either, or your traditional definitions of order — if you look at some pieces of Picasso, for example, the simplicity therein is perhaps viewable to its fullest if what the paintings represented were built in 4 spatial dimensions. There is beauty there. I think life is best served when one sticks to the simple, that there is a quintessence of simplicity to which the (perhaps many) details of your existence attune.
I think perhaps the best words on the subject of the simplicity of beauty, and how it relates to life, are by the big JC again: "...ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." [Luke 11:9-10]
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| Meaning Other | 4:56am friday, 12th july |
What means something to you? I think odd things in our lives sometimes mean a lot. In the madness, I was bombarded by it — bombarded by meaning. The ultimate moment of all creation was just about a daily occurrence, as it were. A television commercial sometimes hid the secret of why everything exists anywhere, a gum wrapper was more precious than if it were foil of pounded gold; you couldn't go two feet without destiny pounding your senses about how a pen was the answer to the universe's fundamental being. They were all misshapen, though, if I think back. A lot of it was non-verbal, not subject to the bounds of logic. If a normal thought was a slip of paper with a word written on it, these were scraps of plastic (that you couldn't write on) with drops of blood on them.
It was almost like a second childhood, horribly disfigured. When you were little, do you remember how some odd toy was your favorite thing? You never knew why, there was just something about it that made you want to hold it, or roll it, or whatever. You look back at that toy, some years later, and remember how much it meant to you. Sometimes, though, you can't quite piece together just why. Weird how there are things that are special for no particular reason, strange how some things still are. But I don't think we need to figure them all out. Even a horribly disfigured childhood remembers those rare moments that don't need explanation — just magic.
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| Song the Fourth | 6:57am thursday, 11th july |
Song 4 of the 6 I wrote during this time in my first, grand madness. (Go here for the other ones.) It is perhaps the most depressing of the bunch:
"Distant Day"
Alone in the night the eyes that submit
Wondering whose crimes they live to commit
Mass produced blues redundant hearts sing
Tears in the dark that don’t mean a thing
Stranded by fate to die in a list
They couldn’t earn their right to exist
chorus
The distant day hides like a hope
That trembles to be known
The seconds desperate fingers grope
Till dawn can claim her own
Abandoned by sleep to time to be killed
Waiting for justice by their windowsill
Friends disappear as neediness stays
A heartbreaking numb to live out the days
Feverless souls with hollow regrets
They don’t amount to the secrets they’ve kept
chorus
Love is a strange and powerless myth
A fraction the pride that hunger permits
What saviors the pawn has learned to despise
Shallowness pain is slow to disguise
A physics of fools all fear to let go
They don’t deserve a dream of their own
chorus
Alone in the night the eyes that submit
Wondering whose crimes they live to commit
Mass produced blues redundant hearts sing
Tears in the dark that don’t mean a thing
Stranded by fate to die in a list
They couldn’t earn their right to exist
chorus
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| Summer | 2:22am wednesday, 10th july |
The melody of sunlight dances through the wind-blown trees.
And the days start slipping by like messengers with no messages.
My head floating on my shoulders, my eyes dreaming, miles away.
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| Commentary 2 | 2:06am tuesday, 9th july |
The comments/notes for the remaining seven entries in my story:
8. Another of the pieces of my life I have lost is the hearing paper for my second hearing, the one after the one I have written about. It said "[my name], AKA Lucifer Morningstar". I wonder if there is a place in Heaven where all such memories may come back to life.
9. I re-learned, on that farm, my love of reading. It was the only entertainment I really had, seeing that the TV was all in Korean. When I got on medication, I lost the ability (for some reason) to read for any extended period of time.
10. I was in my mother's sister's home initially, after my stint on the farm. When I went nuts again, I sat around their living room, talking to the people in my head. My poor aunt.
11. My dad moved me to his sister's house from my previous aunt's home where I was staying, in October I think it was. It was here that I was deepest in my madness. Medication wasn't helping. Nothing was helping. Putting me away was probably the best thing that anyone could have done for me at that point.
12. It was at this point where I started "getting into God", as it were. It's like step 2 of Narcotics Anonymous: "We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." It was the only thing that worked.
13. That was a rough bit, that second semester, at least in terms of the amount of fear I went through. I wouldn't go through anything like that again until my second episode, years later. It wasn't boring, though, let me say. And there's always that sense of relief you get when you find out, hey, I'm not doomed, after all.
14. It was at this point I started writing poetry. Except for this poem, before this period of time, I had always had trouble writing any good verse. I guess it's true that an artist needs to suffer, because after I had gone through my stuff, the poetry flowed as freely as my thought. Though, of course, sometimes thought has its own trouble flowing.
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| Commentary | 12:01am monday, 8th july |
These are comments (or notes) I have on the first seven of the fourteen entries in my story, in order:
1. I remember seeing an "anti-drug propaganda" poster once, of a girl in a straight jacket, in a dark "rubber room," which said, "LSD can take you to places you never dreamed." Dismissed it summarily, haunted me later.
2. I remember I once had liquid acid which was crystalline LSD and distilled water, mixed together by a friend at one of my college's science centers. I handled it so much, dealing one night, that I started tripping without taking any.
3. This was the year of my Christ complex — I really though I was Jesus Christ, reincarnated. One of my closest friends at the time (a devout Christian) marked the beginning of that little complex in his calendar as the day I went insane.
4. I did a lot of crying during this time. I felt very sorry for myself for odd reasons, none of which had any basis in reality.
5. I had a friend who lived in NY at that time. He checked me into a psychiatric hospital, worried about me, but I talked my way out of it just the next day. When he went to check up on me, he discovered I had already been released.
6. I was very close at that time to the cartoon in my head I named "Daphne". Never knew just who in the real world she represented; it might have been Rosanna Arquette. Pretty much all the other cartoons were based on real people, like Albert Einstein.
7. I remember I made up a saying when I got home from buying that dime bag: "Love. Really works the leg muscles." I know, it makes no sense, does it? At the time, I thought it was one of the coolest things anyone ever said.
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| What I Remember | 5:22am saturday, 6th july |
I remember things that never were. I remember laughter that never laughed, I remember tears that never were shed. I remember philosophies that meant nothing, I remember truths that made no sense. I remember people who were never born, I remember places no one ever traveled to. I remember the sense of purpose that led nowhere, I remember doom that never happened. I remember the life I never lived, I remember the death I never died.
What do I remember? I remember love that came from nowhere, and that... that love was enough that I could make it through it all.
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| Written in Haste | 12:18am friday, 5th july |
This is sort of a poem, though more like disconnected images arranged like a handful of rocks thrown in a sandbox. Most of these phrases are taken from notebooks I kept while I was mad, which were subsequently thrown away by my parents. I assembled them when I had just recovered from that first grand psychosis:
Here we are again, alone in the crowd
The things you thought were yours
weren’t the things you were looking for
Yesterday is gone but not today
are you the one to tell me what I mean?
Is it live or make believe
when you practice to deceive?
if you live on the edge
It cuts like a knife
mend your desire:
it’s okay to be sane
Blindness was her claim to fame
the hush of a hope
when the doves are set free.
I wish I still had those notebooks, though I might be romanticizing their contents to myself rather than remembering their actuality — most of it was garbage, I think, and very little worthy enough to share.
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| She | 4:32am wednesday, 3rd july |
She smiled like it was
the end of the world, she did,
sadder than a wet clown.
"I remember you," she said.
"You used to play with
the other boys, pretending
to kill each other." I couldn’t
see my own grin when she
said that — I remembered
her, too: she was that voice
in my head back when I
was lost, helping me to find
myself just where I was.
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| Vignettes | 4:22am tuesday, 2nd july |
My life is a series of vignettes. Nothing memorable in my life, I think, has ever lasted me more than a few minutes — or at least, that's what it seems like. I remember that I wrote once of my madness, that I moved on through the moments like drifting from island to island, as if with no memory of where I was, no idea where I was going. Nothing lasted. Even before all that, like 10/7/88 — one of the greatest peaks of my life — even there, the Light I saw lasted only a few seconds. Visions I have had, they were only moments: not movies, not short stories, but short shorts, lasting a paragraph (or two, if I'm lucky).
I shouldn't complain. I have seen some pretty spectacular stuff, if I come to think of it. I guess I that would be the flipside to this, the good I can squeeze from my past. One moment comes to mind, in particular. It was sort of in the middle of two dreams, and it was me, alone, running, through the forests (gardens?) of R'lyeh, running from an unnamed darkness behind me. My senses ablaze with fear, my feet pumping through the thick, wet and weedy undergrowth, through the darkness of the black and shapeless trees above me — all I could do was run.
All I had, as I ran through the dark forest — and this may be why I remember this so clearly — there was the tiny light of hope somewhere, somehow. And if I think of it, I'm wrong about what I said before, dead wrong. There's always been hope. That's been with me all along.
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| Last Doodle | 2:00am monday, 1st july |
The last doodle I drew in my most previous madness, just before I went to Korea, and had my breakthrough:
Sort of a study on the hourglass, I think it speaks that I was trying to figure things out right about then, not really concentrating on drawing anything in particular.
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