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| october 2002 |
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| Mystery | 1:41am thursday, 31st october |
This is the me I never was. As Schrodinger's cat is in the indeterminate state between life and death until observed, whereupon it becomes one or the other, when I observe myself through my writing, I collapse the wave — and I think that this is not me that I write, that I am not really one way or another but that mysterious, undecided state, instead. I think I am me only when unobserved by anyone, especially not myself. When you make me write, you force me to make a hundred decisions, a hundred guesses on what I really am. When I write my thoughts, I am creating as much as I am revealing — the act of writing, of forcing the introspection, changes the what from the thoughts you wish to show to what you can show, because thoughts are not words, not even symbols. Thoughts are feelings that do not truly fit into any of the set words that exist to describe them, and when you want to relay them, you have to shove them into whatever pre-invented forms exist — to struggle with the words, which are all you have.
So, let me be forever telling you, "Hello, this is me." I will always be a mystery behind the words, a thing that words can never tell.
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| Recollection 4 | 2:57am wednesday, 30th october |
I thought I knew so much. I said with my lips, back in my teenage years, "The more I know, the more I know how little that is," and then I believed in my heart that I knew always what to do, whatever came — that I knew it all. When I was becoming mad, around here, it was that more and more I believed I had the whole world, the whole of creation, all figured out; though if I think back, I don't know why I believed that — my "knowledge" was more of a feeling that things were much simpler than they actually were. And with that, that I knew the mind of God meant that it was me who was God. It had no rational argument that led to that conclusion, it was rather an intuition that somehow I was better than anyone else, that I had perhaps an equal in Jesus Christ, and if the chips were down, I would have him beat, too. You could not convince me otherwise, no matter what argument you used, for after all, who were you compared to me?
Do you know what happened? It was that even my madness knew the folly of my thoughts: the cartoon of Jesus Christ, floating around in my head, he and I had a little competition: who was to be the messiah? Needless to say, even though it took years to convince me that my desire to be God was in vain, he won. Really, it was no contest, even with a figment of my imagination, just that it was formed as the Christ, my Lord. I would not listen to anything outside my little world, so God reached me within that world, beat me at my own game, on my own turf. Now, I don't believe that it was actually Jesus Christ who took time out of his schedule to visit me in person in my mind's eye, but through it all, there was a Hand that led me through, led me back to the world that I had strayed from, back when, when I was lost inside myself.
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| The Star | 1:43am tuesday, 29th october |
In the night, the stars they fell,
we picked them up when morning came;
one we found had tales to tell,
of riches, heroes, doom, and fame.
"I was once a mortal, know,"
he spoke to us in rhythms blue.
"Tell us, then, of that ago,"
questioned I, "how you are you?"
"Place me back into the night,
lift me up that I may fly,"
said he words that shone with light,
"I need breathe of open sky."
Climbed we up the mountain heights,
and handed up the fallen bright,
but such the shine did he ignite,
our questions flew from asking's sight.
I cannot tell, and neither you,
if what I speak is lie or true.
But ask yourself if any star
has ever been where daydreams are?
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| Theological | 2:11am monday, 28th october |
I've been thinking about a theological point, recently. If God can see the future, and He knows that some people will disobey Him and some people will obey Him, and if He will send those who disobey Him to Hell, why does He create them in the first place? Does it not seem cruel, something a good God would not do, create these people destined to be tortured forever? It is similar, perhaps, to the question of evil — why do some people suffer and not others? Some would say that, because of the problem of evil, there can only be the conclusion that either God is not omnipotent (can't prevent evil), or that He can't be good (He likes evil, at least sometimes). But perhaps there is another thing going on.
Jesus, called the Christ, was supposedly the only begotten Son of God. If God loved no one else in the world, God loved this man. And yet, even though Jesus Christ never did one wrong thing in his life, even so, God the Father allowed that he be beaten, humiliated, and crucified. You may go one way on this story, that Jesus was just an ordinary man, and that either there was no God looking out for him, or that God was malicious and perhaps enjoyed this man's pain. There's that. But if we look at a Christian's faith, we see that the belief is that this man was resurrected from that death, and within that miracle, both death and the Devil were overcome, defeated. More than that, Christians may, when suffering, focus on that man hanging from the cross, and it gives them hope, faith, and strength. There was purpose for it, meaning behind the pain.
I think nothing wrong with questions, but I find that in some questions it is easy to find answers that shortcut a deeper meaning. As to my question about why God lets those people be created whom He knows will end up in Hell, I believe I have a reply: how can we be said to have free will if that we would not be allowed to exist if we were not to obey? That is no freedom, I would say.... In thinking, there may always be questions, but, too, that in faith, will always be answers there. Just open your eyes.
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| Dream of God | 2:02am saturday, 26th october |
If nothing else, God is a dream that won't die. Three quotes:
"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."
- Peter De Vries
"If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
- Voltaire
"But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be."
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Some people may think that this sort of sentiment, that we need God around, somewhere, even (as in the third quote) when we doubt He is there at all, that this is a failing of ours. I think, instead, that it is part of our design. We are built needing God to complete us, that on some level — at times misunderstood — we long for a certain greater thing, a larger mystery that will somehow save us. Myself, I did not recognize that particular shape hole in my soul until I had made a ruin of my life. There was the whole world to look in for something that would fill that hole, but after searching in vain, I found I needed look only within myself. God was there, waiting for me, looking back.
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| Days | 2:00am friday, 25th october |
Was it that some days passed by as if they were only dreams?
Or is it that my memory holds merely the ghosts of those times?
Maybe it all happened, after all; maybe I've lived this life.
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| Keeping On | 12:24am thursday, 24th october |
I imagine that I could do it true: that I could keep the faith, that I could hold on in the tough of things. There are some people who wish for martyrdom, I think, that there were something important that they could give their life for, when they cannot even spare a dollar to a homeless person on the street. Such is hypocrisy, if not pure vanity, for how can you be expected to give something great when you cannot even give something small? And then there is the other side of the coin — not doing anything at all, with the excuse, "What can I do? I am just a man (or woman)." Indeed, if you ask this question and never try, the answer, "Nothing," is the only answer that you have ears to hear.
The key to action is that you need believe in something. Not just believe, but to stake something in that belief. Put yourself behind something. Before you think that you could die for a cause, see if you can live for it. And when you want to quit before trying, remember those things in your past you regret — what you could have done if you had a second chance — and realize that the second chance is right before your eyes.
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| Recollection 3 | 2:14am tuesday, 22nd october |
In my madness, I have heard tones in the music, certain tones that seemed as if they were in tune with another world. I imagined sometimes that I could walk into my head where the music resounded and enter the realm of that Other. Always, too, in the corner of my eye there was a door I could not quite ever perceive — that always stayed in the outer periphery of my vision — which led to a different place, a different plane, a different existence. This alter-reality I never could grasp fully what it was....
Understand that back then, my imagination had exploded. The pulp that was left had lost, I think, a little of something that had once made it that strange creature, "human"; what was left was stuck in a state permanently out of kilter. The "mass remaining", as it were, wandered aimlessly through the shards that were once a complete mind, and the models it used to comprehend the world outside were made into place-like-things of their own.
The other world, though, that was forever hinted at and never truly glimpsed? If I think of it, it might have been the sense of the world-out-there I had disconnected from, that sense of what is real, which is taken all too granted by most — like me, once; it was now that the ordinary world was as impossible to reach as the ideal once was from the ordinary. You can always get closer and closer to an ideal, but never quite have it, never quite the feeling that you're set square at the thing itself. You make do, I suppose. That is real enough.
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| Book of Destiny | 1:44am monday, 21st october |
In the Book of Destiny there are
words written without any meaning,
and there are words that mean
something other than what they
spell. Not everyone's name appears
prominently within its pages, and
some who wished not to be written
at all are given paragraph after
paragraph. I thought once I could
see the sacred words where I was
scrawled, deep in one of the later
chapters, but it was just an illusion,
after all. The print in the Book of
Destiny is written in a fire, and
what I had read was just in plain
ink, some plans I had jotted some
years ago and forgotten — it was
just me who imagined great things.
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| Dawn | 2:12am saturday, 19th october |
Dawn. It comes so often we do not recognize it for the great thing it is. I remember back when I would trip on acid that it held special significance — of almost mythic proportions. If I was having a bad trip, dawn would break its spell, invariably. All I had to do was grit my teeth and hang on through the hours of the night, and dawn was going to save me. I ask you, when was the last time you saw the sun rise, in the deep early of the morning? It has been a while for me, I know that much. The resurrection overtones of dawn, morning, awakening from night — there is that. But it is a child's view that I hold dearer: just like monsters cannot penetrate your covers at night, dawn chases all those monsters away. That which is hidden no longer exists; it is a magical transformation of all places from a land of mystery and dark to one of discovery and light.
I think I would like, perhaps, to stay up all night sometime soon. Just for that feeling, if I remember correctly, of the dawn — when the hope you have carried through the secret of the night, that hope is justified by golden light, spilling in through every window.
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| In the Dreaming | 2:18am friday, 18th october |
In the dreaming, these are the ashes from the first fires creation, and those fires' unimaginable heat.
In the dreaming, I have met myself twice: once as I was being born, once when I died: there, now is all eternity.
In the dreaming, the infinite eye blinks, and the universe ceases to exist for the instant it is closed.
In the dreaming, I have a body of smoke, drifting through the halls of dead gods.
In the dreaming, thunderbirds fly in the airy heights, whose hearts are pure energy, and whose eyes burn with light.
In the dreaming, I can see farther than the edge of the universe, and what lies beyond defies all logic to explain, a blank filled with nothing but potential.
In the dreaming, I have died, only to find that there is no death.
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| Haunts | 12:03am thursday, 17th october |
The remembering is what haunts us, not the forgetting....
There are places and things we avoid in dreams, and we don't know why,
those that we can't imagine we ever once knew, or knew us.
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| Dreaming? | 1:01am tuesday, 15th october |
I have been thinking, do I dream too much or not enough? Does dreaming more mean that I do more or less with my life? I believe I would like to get things accomplished (I have a few ideas on what), some things under my belt when the Reaper comes at me at the end, things I can point to and say, "I did that". Things done that would make me feel that I have not completely wasted my time. That there was more to me than the 500 different television sitcom plots that ever were (if there are that many, that is). That for all that I was given by life, that I have had the decency to at least try and give something back to this world.
My madness was not to blame that I have not accomplished more; my youth was spent not even in dreaming, but in a numb of... what was it? Waiting? It is perhaps that those who spend time waiting will find one day they wake up and the thing they were waiting for has passed them by. I think that happened to me, but I never knew what I was waiting for, only that it flew right on by one of those afternoons when I was too busy desensitizing myself to the universe. I don't think that thing will ever return, either.
So, now that I must move on, and desire to get on with it, do I dream more, or less? Hm. Maybe dreams have nothing to do with it. Maybe dreams are just the middlemen that sit between you and The Act, a kind of support system, if you will. Maybe it doesn't take dreams to make it, make something of your life, at all — just guts.
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| Recollection 2 | 1:22am monday, 14th october |
I cried a lot. Right about here, in the month or so when it all came to a head, talking to the people I could see only in my mind's eye, I cried it seemed every day. There was no sane reason for it, mind you. There was a story, though.... It seems that my plasmate, or that immortal half of me who supposedly joined my psyche at that fateful psychic "snap", had been through Hell, and worse — all Hell, in fact, as everyone, and more than that, an infinity of pain all at once. He had returned from all that, back to this world, but to think about all that he had been through brought tears to my eyes — which were, in fact, also his eyes. He was me. It was kinda strange, that there were two people in me now, the me who had been here this whole time, and another being who was totally alien, older than time itself. It was all fiction, of course, but in my madness, newly cracked open, it was easy to believe.
I really don't know why, why the story came about as so. I don't know why I had to cry like I did. The people in my head would hear of what my other half had been through and cry through my eyes, and I would cry with them each time, as they were my eyes that shed all those tears. I was feeling sorry for myself, it would seem, though at the time, I (being one with my other half) believed that I had every reason to cry. Other stories would come, but this was how it started in my madness. Of a hero that was thrown into the garbage disposal of the astral plane, who had returned from the nether world after being forgotten in the horrors of horrors — one who had conquered Pain itself. I don't know why, why this? It was as if the myths of all tragedies that ever were were written as a single comic book of twenty pages or so. As stories go, it was not War and Peace. But enough for a puddle of tears, cried by a madman.
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| Existential | 1:44am saturday, 12th october |
There are days you want to
shout at the world and have walls
crumble at the echo, a couple stars
jar from their places in heaven —
just so you can be certain you exist.
There are those days when you're
sure that your heart has stopped
beating, that you're merely
surviving by force of habit, not
because your blood is pumping,
or anything is happening in you
at all. These days pass, but always
there are more, an infinite array
of existences just shy of oblivion.
One day at a time, do I hear?
I think that's the whole problem.
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| Another Love Note | 1:57am friday, 11th october |
(Once again, this is to my true love, whom I have never seen, not even in my dreams. Here is my last.)
When God breathed upon clay to make you live, I emerged from my cocoon at the sound of your first sigh.
My name is a verb lost in stupid sentences when you are not the noun, an adjective describing nothing.
The moon is only loneliness if it is not reflected in your eyes.
Where in my dreaming did the thought of you cross? I think roses grow there, now.
No, I cannot think that you ever were not here: the entire world is more imaginary than the voice of your whisper.
In these things that I speak of to you, my heart at least knows what I mean. I think yours does, too.
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| Love 3 | 12:17am thursday, 10th october |
There is love and there is love and there is love. There are, I think, three kinds of romantic love, the stuff we all think of when we hear that word (it comes in threes like all things good): true love, magic love, and ordinary love (and that which is weaker than ordinary love I think it not love at all). If we start from the top, true love I believe most people have a fairly good idea of — we're talking Romeo and Juliet here, that ilk, and nothing less. I think it would hard press someone to actually pinpoint an instance of it that existed in real life, if it ever happens at all. It is a legend that may just turn out to be a myth, or perhaps the years have jaded me. Have I put it on too much a pedestal? Perhaps, perhaps not: if you say it is as common as to, say, occur every day (at least somewhere in the world), maybe you have the bar set too low?
Magic love: this stuff is good stuff. It is usually so good that some people confuse it with true love. It is just about the best thing that mere mortals such as we can hope for, and though it is maybe not to soar in the stratosphere of true love, it is not settling in the least. I call it "magic" love because that's what it's about — the sensation of true enchantment, the fire in the senses that you're in something supernaturally meant to be — magic, plain and simple.
Now, we are left with ordinary love. To call it ordinary love, I mean not to belittle it, but it is rather that I have high regard for the word "love". I mean that it's still pretty great. Interestingly enough, ordinary love is a special thing when it happens. Once again, like magic love is confused with true love, ordinary love is oft confused with magic love — like I say, special, each of even the "ordinary" stuff. It is perhaps the most mysterious of the three, being special to be ordinary, sometimes that it is settling for less, sometimes not, and perhaps that it is the love to be a stronger thing than a higher love, more enduring. It's love, after all.
And then, and then, and then.... No, I really know nothing of love, like everyone else. It's just a fun thing to write about, like remembering a dream.
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| I Recall | 1:57am tuesday, 8th october |
I recall when time didn't pass, days I sat forever.
I recall the inkling of a world at large — bizarre little thing.
I recall in my madness dreams I did not dream, dreaming me.
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| Hoped | 1:48am monday, 7th october |
Take everything away from a man — leave him with nothing — but do not take away a man's hope. I think it is a necessary condition in a human being that he be with some kind of hope, some kind of dream, however small it is or how absurd. One cannot go on, I think, without something that tells us at least from time to time that somehow this thing called life is worth the bother. Worth it to wake up in the morning and do all those things you need to do (great and small) to survive in this world, in this society, in one's own biography. Some little candle burning somewhere.
I believe that perhaps any small thing will suffice, for it takes only a little hope to get us through. Just enough strength, as we write the story of our lives, just enough for us to turn the page. I think that's all it takes.
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| This Spot | 2:28am saturday, 5th october |
I know what it is to wander, and to stumble upon things great and small. Perhaps I know nothing of what it means to search for anything. All the significant things that have ever happened to me, they have just landed in my lap, slapped me in the face and said, "Here I am." I feel that I've been tossed about like a leaf in the wind, and even my wanderings may be the result of outer forces, beyond my control. I know little, I think, of what it means to dig, to choose a plot of ground and excavate, see what's there in the roots of it — I'm too often being kicked between this thing and that.
I think I must find a place for myself, a home for my soul. It may be that the greater things of a man's life are not for him to decide; there are larger things than a human's being, after all, things that choose him, rather than the other way around. At some point, though, as we're being thrown about, there is a spot — a branch in the world tree — where we may hang on for dear life. Yes, a desperate thing: life is short, and to find true purpose is perhaps a rare thing.... Let me start. I see around me some clues, that I may begin to search: that I may find the thing that is myself.
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| Imaginary | 2:18am friday, 4th october |
My imaginary mother said to me
once, "Stop dreaming so much,
or you'll become one yourself."
My imaginary father once balanced
the whole world on the end of
a sharpened pencil, and spun it.
My imaginary twin brother looked
me in the eye, and neither of us
blinked for fifteen million years.
My imaginary world lies outside
the door of my mind, higher than
the sky, deeper than oblivion.
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| Recollection 1 | 2:02am thursday, 3rd october |
When was it, exactly? When did I lose myself in myself? Somewhere between here and here: I was slipping farther and farther from the real. Like I say in this note, my friend marked the first day I spoke my Christ complex as the day that he decided I had gone insane. But it is like falling out of grace, I think, likened to many who lose some intangible thing in this life: it happens not all at once, but gradually, only noticing its lack when it's all gone. Oh, yes, in the summer of 1991, something did psychically break, but before that fateful "snap", I think I was gone. I think I was quite mad even before that. The "snap" just made it visible to everyone else; I could no longer hide behind my gift of rhetoric, the sense of metaphor I used in my talking. No one could deny after the "snap" that I was gone, but I was far offshore by then, and it was my entire ship that cracked in half, that I at that point clung to the world by hanging onto driftwood.
I think perhaps there is no dividing line. You cannot say, I don't think, that in this moment, I was sane, and in the next moment, I was insane. Many borders in this life are fuzzy, hazy. You cannot say one thing ends here and another begins. Or maybe there are parts to it: on this day, just my foot was insane, but not the rest of me. Something like that. Or maybe it was that "snap", after all. Maybe it's when you're so far gone you can't talk your way out of it. Maybe only when they're sure you're gone, you're gone. Before that, you're just weird or eccentric or even "interesting". No one wants to believe it, least of all you. You joke about it all the time, but man, when it's serious — keep away from that. So, when was it, exactly? I dunno. I think it was when nobody was laughing anymore.
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| Back | 2:26am wednesday, 2nd october |
I will look back, I think. I have shown you as much as I have, or nearly, that I have kept from the days of my madness (both the greater and the lesser). I will, in lieu of the clips of texts from those times or the scans of scrawled drawings or scribblings, I will recollect. I will think back. I will imagine myself in those days that have passed when I seemed to myself not of this earth, when I was lost inside myself. I will make myself remember. I will do my best to bring back the sights, the smells, the auditory and the tactile, what it was like to be as I was: babbling to the walls, having visions, listening to the dead, deep in selfish mystery, mad.
Some of it, however little, I think I will not write of. I cannot imagine imparting to anyone — ever — some of the things I have imagined, or done, or imagined I have done. Some things, I believe, are best held between you and your confessor — whomever that may be to you. I think only saints have no secrets. Real secrets, I mean, those withheld from your dearest dearest.... But I will share much of the travels this soul has coursed, most all that I recall. And I think that if you read a goodly portion of what I impart, you may come to understand me in ways that one should understand another human being: seeing through his eyes when he looks into the mirror.
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| Seasons | 1:43am tuesday, 1st october |
Summer hushed, I can't make out what the autumn breeze whispers.
The mouth of fall sharpens its winter teeth behind a solemn smile.
I think not too much of the winter's bite, waiting for spring's kiss.
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