Plumbing Something Fathomless

Is all of human existence trending towards a more complex, more advanced society, or are we dead set on decaying? We seem to defy entropy, but are we really masking our descent into chaos with new, ever-increasingly intricate coats of paint? Perhaps it is just my recent read of Emerson's Nature, but I am struck blind with how bright our lies have become. Emerson (and before him, Plato) believed that language was man's translation of the essence of nature into some thin, factitious contrivance, and that we must get back to that natural essence or we cannot claim to know anything. I agree with Emerson, but not in the way that is immediately apparent.

We have a grasp of biology, physics, medicine, anthropology, and so many more things that, as we are loath to admit, seem to not have a fundament (oh that word and its uses). The more we know about the Earth, the more we are surprised--the more we know about space, the more we are surprised. I hazard to say that in all of the human record, there is less that we actually claim to know (for the moment) than all information we were damned certain were facts at the time. There is just a flat disc, there is just this one sphere, the heavens revolve around us, we are the only solar system, and it keeps continuing. What is beyond this multiverse? Are there multiverses of multiverses? Manifold, entangled, writhing strings of multiverses tied up like some bundle in a sea of other bundles? That we claim, as a race, to know anything for certain is ridiculous. Death, taxes, and now- uncertainty.

I'm sure I am not the first one to think this theory. If anything, the self-contained paradox of the field  of meta-epistemology has ensured, if anything, a half-assed attempt to say something along those lines without making us sound like the apish children we are. We still wage useless war, we still have xenophobia and prejudices deeply rooted into our cultures. Sure, some of us have sought to rise above that pettiness, but that we feel that way puts a prejudice between the "enlightened" and the rest. I don't mean to exclude myself in all this business; in no way do I presume to be up an ivory tower.

Still, all of our attempts to know things can't be discarded or we would just wallow in nihilism or hedonism; either way we'd be getting screwed. It's those outlying people--those who were driven by good (or even evil) intentions who pushed the envelope--that have truly made "progress." I feel depressed when I think that somewhere on this planet, at any given moment, someone somewhere is being punished for thinking outside that proverbial and cliched box. There is an infathomable distance between knowledge and wisdom; fact and truth. Or is there a difference at all. An educated man knows exactly how his heart will stop beating, a self-taught man simply knows that it will.

Seamus Heany is perhaps the most deft at these sorts of disparities. He, I think, sees everything in a long view, and I know it doesn't make him feel any better, because how could it? When we know everything we aim at knowing, will that satisfy what parts of us remain empty? Will we remain as Heany's fisherman, the dawn-sniffing revenant? I long for my proper haunt--well out, beyond.

 'Now, you’re supposed to be   

An educated man,’   

I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me   

The right answer to that one.’

Forget the Dreams You Don't Control

Feed them to the day. Leave your compelled actions to the day--job, bills, relationships. Take the night for your own transcendence. Tinker, write, dream sleeplessly, or just let your mind finally wander away from your obligations. Remember them in the morning, but forget about them once in a while.

I consider night to be miniature vacations.

Living In Fantasy Worlds Has Its Benefits

So, my flawless drug, delirium, has once again transformed my writing. I had endeavored to write a vignette about a man rescuing a woman. It's all I had perseverated on all damn day; the "I wish I were a hero" mentality.  Well, six pages into the original and there was hardly any progression, much less resolution, and the plot seemed to be there in proverbial theory. I was trying too hard to be "cool" and "gritty," but then I realized that a dropped ice cream can also be described as such. Delirium turned "James grimaced at the mess he had wrought with his own hand. The dying man bled covertly into the brackish water. He said something profoundly cliched. He began to feel dizzy as the plot began to die... bla de bla." into:


Thrumming through the underbrush, drumming up some gushed blood from one or three gashed and garish toes. The thunderous ineloquence of hordes of bleach white pelicans gave no favor in his dying throes. His bravery was obvious, though others were oblivious, not knowing nettles nestled in their souls. He crashed through men with no forethought, their injury by themselves wrought, while he had only one quite selfless goal. Though bullets ripped apart his limbs, last living lung did heave within, and in that heaving hurled the girl into two arms unrolled. "I'll not forget," exclaimed the dame, aboard a ship that bore her name, "I'll love him though I knew not of his role." 

It's like comparing something vomited forth from Michael Bay(splosions) with a short film from the man from Pithy Tragedy Island. It needs some polish, sure, but so does your wife. I'll probably title it "The Secretary's Daughter" or "Operative." I may even title it with an unfamiliar term. Reading the pseudo-ballad, I can't comprehend when I began to think that the original mess was acceptable. The poem version is not only lyrical and fun to read or even say, but has a beginning, middle, and end. Those three are crucial from what I remember of grade school. That and "stop putting glue on Tommy's face!"

This mania is ripe

I have strobe lights inserted in the back of my eyelids. 

Window open to the street, I let the cooling morning creep in to steal the heat from my bones. The shivering is strange in May, but this mania is ripe.

Cigarettes and tap water and other things that don't put me to sleep. Not having steady income and my insurmountable shame and other things that keep me awake. This hollowness is strange in May, but this mania is ripe.

Frost-cracked asphalt splinters in the howling sun. Too much light for the air to hold. Too much heat to share with one another, so we endeavor to blot out our days. When day is also night, perhaps I will sleep. This sleeplessness is strange in May, but this mania is ripe.

I Remember You(th)

Stepping out of the scrublands

into the heart of Austin, Texas

to our stone under our buzzing acacia

as children flew after dogs.

Could I feel as unashamed

and brave as I did then?

I- “That boy” to your mother

you- “That girl” to mine

Covered only in cool spring water,

clothes discarded by an oak.

Sun pierced the sweet air

your skin so struck with light.

Could I have the courage left

to walk my feet to the dry Texas earth?

It’s Spring again- raining in Georgia

I’m a stone under the pines.

For the Anomalies

We will find the inimitable joy of birds fighting against the sky.

Creatures in their smallness, ignorant of gravity, defy the grey

that keeps them. Bruised in the orange kaleidoscopic morning

which has followed all others. Hating the tethers of animal limits

yet knowing them intimately. It’s in the timing of stoplights,

the intoxicating fury of politics. It’s the writing of paragraphs with

four-letter words on the last line. The staccato snap of rhythmic

keys.

Imitating indifference to divide my devices from mundane

devilry. Foundries of sex filled to the brim time and time and time

again until no sensation can penetrate the shell of euphoria- lost in

that candescent haze, annihilating differences, unaware of where

your awareness sits among the close-pressed contact of skins

in blood-rush. Standing naked on our roofs, defiant of the whole of

which we are the maps. The mathematical explanations failing to

explain a single fucking thing.

Pluck egos from screaming safety- force-feed them into the pulsing

fulcrum of strange individuality, affirmed in gasps. Bask in the

dichotomous world, slave under the wheel- it carries a wrack of

pain and full measures of transcendence. See and love the cracked

Earth. Taste the blood of humanity and swallow hard. Learn to

lie to yourself and others. Buckle under the weight of hollow

contempt. Destroy your enemies or love them or never have enemies

to begin with.

A day will come when we will: no longer concern ourselves with

time, make love like summer’s breaking, find indelicate

languages in stone, revel in selfless assistances, scream across

skies and strip naked the machineries there, create empires of

incandescent turbulence, have our bolts of brilliance, find

no better science than music, climb the towers and see the path

ahead. We will undertake these, or we will have died too

soon.

Frost at midnight

It's been 48 hours of waking. I'm supposed to be writing three papers, tonight: a close reading of Frankenstein, a research paper on The Tempest, and a close reading on the character of Dorian Gray from the perspective of Coleridge's ancient mariner- oh yeah- I also have an exam at 8am. I was just hoping that this might get my focus back on writing instead of endlessly sailing on the tubes of you.

This hollow, over-energetic lift I'm in does nothing to focus my fingertips. I might as well be asleep- If I could be asleep. Freneticism(I should start a movement...) does me no favor. This is easy for me- it's just like thinking. Putting things on a page for a grade, though- I hate it. I don't want my thoughts to represent a number. I want my thoughts to provoke more of themselves.