Partial Transitions

So, after nigh on a week of driving, hiking, and camping--with a brief hotel stay in Santa Fe--my brother and I made it to Flagstaff. On the way, we camped in a public park in Tribune, Kansas; Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado (followed by Santa Fe); and then two nights in Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. We planned on staying at Comanche State Prairie Reserve (or something like that) in Southeast Colorado the first night, but didn't make it there in time. As I told my brother Friday night, had I told myself how much I would enjoy the trip, I would not have believed myself. Though it is true, it may be in part due to how I hedge my bets. Either way, it was pretty spectacular. Now I have some adequate camping gear to use in the beautiful areas around Flagstaff.

This whole trip I have been distracted or contemplating the primal elements of earth, fire, wind, and water. Lines from the Mountains and Waters Sutra have haunted me. Here is an excerpt and a link:

Some beings see water as a jeweled ornament, but they do not regard jeweled ornaments as water. What in the human realm corresponds to their water? We only see their jeweled ornaments as water. Some beings see water as wondrous blossoms, but they do not use blossoms as water. Hungry ghosts see water as raging fire or pus and blood. Dragons see water as a palace or a pavilion. Some beings see water as the seven treasures or a wish-granting jewel. Some beings see water as a forest or a wall. Some see it as the Dharma nature of pure liberation, the true human body, or as the form of body and essence of mind. Human beings see water as water. Water is seen as dead or alive depending on causes and conditions. Thus the views of all beings are not the same. You should question this matter now.

I have witnessed so many instances of wood being water, earth being fire or water, water being fire, and so on. At first, it felt like a pleasant meditation, but the more it occurred the more I felt drawn to the challenge of "Dragons [that] see water as a palace or a pavilion." In a way, though, challenge is completely inappropriate a term; what it felt more accurately was simply seeing that these were not distinct things.

Over the next few days, I plan on writing brief essays about my stay in each place, the recollections of those places, and reflections on my journal entries I made. The exploration, confusion, excitement, joy, distress, doubt, and accomplishment I felt were often with me. I will post photographs with those posts when the time comes. At the moment, I have more housekeeping to accomplish and wish to leave you with this:


Sunset, Petrified Forest, 12 August 2010

Now when dragons and fish see water as a palace, it is just like human beings seeing a palace. They do not think it flows. If an outsider tells them, "What you see as a palace is running water," the dragons and fish will be astonished, just as we are when we hear the words, "Mountains flow." Nevertheless, there maybe some dragons and fish who understand that the columns and pillars of palaces and pavilions are flowing water. You should reflect and consider the meaning of this. If you do not learn to be free from your superficial views, you will not be free from the body and mind of an ordinary person. Then you will not understand the land of Buddha ancestors, or even the land or the palace of ordinary people. Now human beings well know as water what is in the ocean and what is in the river, but they do not know what dragons and fish see as water and use as water. Do not foolishly suppose that what we see as water is used as water by all other beings. Do not foolishly suppose that what we see as water is used as water by all other beings. You who study with Buddhas should not be limited to human views when you are studying water. You should study how you view the water used by Buddha ancestors. You should study whether there is water or no water in the house of Buddha ancestors.

~Mountains and Waters Sutra, Eihei Dogen, part 16

I Don't Think I Should Be Sorry

Happy Birthday Walkencore
Here is the playlist for your birthday mix:
I Don't Think I Should Be Sorry
1. Bambi by Tokyo Police Club
2. 1901 by Phoenix
3. Well Now by Jesse Rose
4. Bad Reputation by Joan Jett
5. Guilt by The Long Blondes
6. Tonight's Today by Jack Penate (which has a tilde over the "n")
7. Boys Don't Cry by The Cure
8. Crystalised by The xx
9. Got My Dream (Messengers Remix) by J.Period & K'NAAN
10. Kilometer (A-Trak Main) by Sebastien Tellier
11. My Love (Diplo Remix) Justin Timberlake
12. Fall Hard by The Shout Out Louds
13. Roll Up Your Sleeves by We Were Promised Jetpacks
14. Bloodbuzz Ohio by The National
15. The Prowl by Dan Auerbach
16. Jungles by Holy Fuck
17. Song With A Mission by The Sounds
18. What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had To Go This Way) by Wolf Parade
19. Knife/Heartbeats (Mash Up by PARRKA) by Grizzly Bear/The Knife
20. Use Somebody (Kings of Leon Cover) by Bat For Lashes

Your party was wonderful. Many happy 24ths.

Also, I leave tomorrow morning for Flagstaff. My brother and I are spending days camping on the way. Expect sparse Tumblr updates from my phone and some reflections following. I move into the apartment in Flagstaff a week from today. Wish me luck.

Tumbling & Building

I feel like I ought to write again in order to prevent the last post from staying at the top for too long. I don't disagree with it or dislike it, but I feel like it may give a false representation of the weblog as a whole. As to where to go from here, well, that gets a little messy.

Part of the reason I have not been posting is because the concerns of moving to Flagstaff, AZ have been high priority and thoroughly distracting. I have gone days and likely weeks without looking at my computer, which has its perks, but also means I haven't been writing. I am not one who has an easy time moving. I feel only lightly attached to most to my goods--clothing, computer, books, notebooks, phone, movies--but when it comes to ruling out some for travel, I am pretty bad at it. I can live out of a backpack for weeks on end--which I manage to do in wintertime travels--and have pared down my toiletries to the minimum. This endeavor to move to Flagstaff comes with different expectations. I want to build a place for myself there, a place to welcome others into and to share some of those artifacts of myself with others.

When I consider a place to dwell--not just inhabit or live in, but to dwell--it is a place with those books and films that I represent or partially embody something about myself. When I lend someone The Fall or Labyrinths or Swamp Thing Volume 1, I simultaneously prepare myself for the conversations concerning those items. The Fall describes these beautiful dreamworld locales, places that actually do exist, but take on their own surreal, brilliant qualities once you start telling yourself the story of having been to those places; I feel that I have shared in the filming locations in The Fall in my own way. Labyrinths has, more so than religious and nonfiction philosophical texts, challenged my conception of the world, the narrative that describes the world to myself; Jorge Luis Borges isn't just telling stories to elucidate and entertain, but to suggest an alternative position of oneself in the world. As for Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, it marks part of my life adjacent to when I started reading Borges as well as my earnest introduction to comics, but more seriously forced me to consider how we tell stories, not just in text and images, but in film, gaming, and song.

(Spoiler Alert for Ghostworld ahead.) A very large part of me wants to either limit the things I bring or cut them out altogether. In Daniel Clowes Ghostworld, Enid dreams of leaving home with nothing but a valise of clothes and a hat. The plot eventually drives her--more explicitly in the film than in the graphic novel--to make just such a move, but her own will is exercised out of desperation and not out of willful independence. In Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Adrian Tomine also describes a character retrospecting on her move to a new place and her attempt to recreate herself, to be someone new but she does not deny herself her idiosyncratic loves (such as an erotic attachment to the smell of old books) that become painful neuroses following a split romance. If one is to allow these stories to lean on one another, the suggestion is that Enid will remain Enid wherever her bus takes her, inexcusably. The aspiration remains, the way that I read it anyway, that she will be herself in a more unabashed way, that being herself will not be a splinter in her life elsewhere. (Of course, Clowes and Tomine, if either were to write the story, would likely deny their protagonists just such an opportunity for successful personal recreation.)

Whether it was going off to school or coming back from it, or the two academic trips abroad, I took the opportunity to be myself in a different way. From this vantage, I can't say that I was more or less myself than before, only that I was myself in distinct ways. Imagine seeing the sun from Earth; it has its comfortable size, brilliant but not awful hue, the warm but not usually offensive rays. Now, consider the view from another planet in the solar system. From Mercury, the sun is immense and blinding, ruthless and unkind, dominating the sky in Mercury's slow revolution. From the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, the sun is a bright but cold star in the sky, the sky itself claimed by the mother planets just an astronomical skip away; it is a minor but clearly present character in the sky, something like a social acquaintance rather than a parent. From the far reaches of the solar system, the sun is just an especially bright star in the sky, similar to Mars or Venus as seen from Earth, its light and heat so dissipated as to be negligible.

In each case, one still sees the same sun, the star that gives heat, light, and life to our small blue orb. Nevertheless, one cannot help but feel the character of that nuclear furnace manifests itself distinctly from each point of view. From these extreme perspectives, the differences can be profound, even disturbing. Rarely do we view our acquaintances, neighbors, friends, and family from such radically diverse locations, but the metaphor holds; just because someone describes him/herself differently does not mean that the person is acting dishonestly to him/herself. In those occasions when someone is in close, viewing the flaws, fractures and gems of who we are, we may be able to understand that diversity of personality, that flexibility of persona infinitely more than we can from the usual familiar or familial distances.

Generally speaking, I have very little difficulty welcoming people closer to my orbit. I find excitement and joy with that tight revolution around another person, romantic or amiable. Though they are not me, the artifacts I take with me are stepping stones, asteroids, signposts to guide new people closer to me. The process is frustrating and mildly dangerous, the way littered with misplaced books and films, a distraught face and tightened heart, a wasted night or tardy date. Those risks need not toughen the skin or line the face when they can allow us closer to ourselves, allow us to appreciate the potency of temperament, passion, confusion, uncertainty. I collect the artifacts of myself so that when I enter a new place I can enter it with the notion of, "the more you have, the more you have to give away."

Darkness & Lightning

It smells of youth, mischief, sweat, and sex outside. Lightning flashes in all directions but the south, gathering or rallying in great sonorous blasts, like long brass trumpets. Yesterday the winds were such that the smell of shit came in and, though it hasn't exactly vanished, has dissipated or been outperformed by new competitors. Friends of ne'er-do-well neighbors have parked poorly by the corner, tempting each turning vehicle to leave its mark on a bumper or rear, driver's side door.

Something about tonight--rumbling thunder, pungent odors, nigh oppressive humidity, the shear electricity--rings inarguably of power, sexuality, beastliness. It feels like a night for monsters and demons, for an assault on the senses, on bodies. Competitive sports, especially brutal ones, come to mind. The personal aroma of labor, heat, and humidity bring together a private involvement, an intermixing of skin and light and noise. I have felt displaced, uncoordinated all day; distractions and discouragement mounting about every other corner. Now, though, I perceive some stronger urge; not necessarily my own, but one undeniably present.

Oddly, I cannot escape the sensuality of thunderstorms, of the blend of fear, excitement, suspense, proximity of darkness interspersed with flashes of light, blasts of guttural sound. The heavy, heady air has its own intoxicating qualities, its power to subdue and suggest. Everything about tonight carries some promise or threat just beyond the glare of houselights and streetlamps, outside the limit of what you expect to see and what you want to see.

The night smacks of the macabre and of the primeval; of mischief for no other sake than the Bacchic spirits demand it. Tonight would be a night for painful satisfaction, for bitemarks and the smell if not the taste of iron. Proximity, privacy, sensuality all come with their double-edge, their expectations or aspirations of trust but the threat of damage, harm, decay, abandon. Abandon not just in the sense of loss, but in the sense of disregard to oneself, to expectations, to inhibitions and guidance. The moon is waxing tonight, half decayed from its full, but something has all of its potency.

Horror stories and fantastic fiction come to mind, the pressures and drives of the environment on places and people. Mages and mystics refer to ley lines that crisscross the Earth, marking highways of psychic or earthen or celestial power. Soils or caverns become blessed or cursed, therefore tainting the residents and landscape above. Millions gather in Varanasi, India to cleanse away sins, make offerings, of spread ashes at the northern turning of the Ganges where the Goddess-turned-river flows back toward heaven. Lovecraft chronicles the falling of a meteorite and its spectacular transformation of the land and its farming family in "The Colour Out of Space." Being Human suggests that part of the lycanthropic cycle is based on atmospheric pressure due to lunar gravity. Temples are founded on sacred ground, cities built on sanctified stones, children conceived within blessed circles, all in order to curry some favor or transform the future with some supernatural entity. (I do not casually group the Hindu religion or serious mages and witches with TV paranormal drama and weird fiction, only mean to express a great range of the recurring paranormal realities present in each.)

To view these episodes, places, people as out-dated or quaint misses the reality that is suffused with spirit, energy, supernormal potency. All faiths, cultures, even personal histories are suffused with mystery. Sometimes mystery takes the form of illusion, fraud, and mischief, but I think its manifestation as miracle, magic, and the inexplicably weird is distinct. Something about the night, its sureness, its immediate presence carries with it that peculiar intensity. In a way, it is the energy of a storm, of an especial night, but I also see it, feel it as something else.

Juxtaposition

I obviously have not been up to the task of writing here very often of late. As it were, I have been temporarily and voluntarily evicted from my bedroom by my sister and her husband visiting. What I have to use as a desk is just a TV dinner tray and my old room is infamous for being inhospitable climatically. Not to mention the chores and tasks I have had to occupy me lately, I have been distracted.

This is in the vein of a series of meditations I consider on my rides home. Late nights, weariness, wind against one's face, the flash of lightning bugs, the whir of engines made distant by trees, the shear sense of movement, of velocity all provide a fantastic vantage upon not only the recently passed hours, but on the past months and years. Often, I am struck with the desire to write when I get home, but the impetus to satisfy hunger, thirst, cleanliness, and fatigue can be too much when one is undercommitted, the thoughts inadequately formed. All the same, I want to make an attempt now.

Being home--my mother's house, Lincoln, Nebraska, and in the company of old friends and acquaintances--has given me a different and decidedly convoluted perspective on place. In a very real way, I see myself as a time traveler, revisiting a life, place, time, or people (likely some synthesis of those) that has become foreign despite its familiarity. Changed hair colors and styles, new glasses, different fashion styles, facial hair come or gone, new tattoos; these all obscure the frustrating reality that I am back somewhere I associate strongly with being past, being gone. I am confronted with this potent juxtaposition of the old with the current.

Chatting outside the Bourbon Theater with Mr. Chris Bowling--amongst others, but Bowling himself is a powerful composition of past and present characteristics--he pointed out a number of passers-by, some of whom were old classmates or acquaintances. Most of those I think of as friends were inside at just that moment, though Miss Allison G. and Miss Paige N. did join us for a spell here and there. Well, what I mean to say is that Mr. Bowling is an acquaintance, a well-established acquaintance but distinctly not a personal friend. This is of no insult to Mr. Bowling, only that our rapport has been conversational when our paths cross and only of late; when it comes to high school, we hardly spoke at all. Now, I can recognize in him and in myself a much greater self-assurance, a certainty of self that definitely manifests in how we handle ourselves around others. In a way, Mr. Bowling's success is very satisfying to behold simply because of his mostly shed discomfort. Nevertheless, his body language, eye contact, jittery speech all link him to that person he was but no longer exactly is; that is, I have no doubt that he remains Chris Bowling despite him no longer being the person I used to think of as Chris Bowling.

What I mean to get at is my description of Mr. Bowling is apt for my experience in Lincoln overall. Lincoln is a place I cannot help but treasure, but I left it eagerly because of the despondence I felt over my senior year in high school. Emotionally and physically distant friends, playful but condescending euphemisms, exhausting the fruits of the Lincoln Public Schools, and getting the bug of exploration and travel provided ample preparation if not downright encouragement for leaving. With my return, which has been a frustratingly slow but clearly educational submersion, I must resolve this peculiar tension between a moment in my personal history I wanted to leave and a present I want to understand and develop.

Which does not exactly leave me with a great deal of understanding. If anything, and rather appropriately, I feel as if I am revisiting old epiphanies, old understandings, but with my new vantage. It is as if I have uncovered a collection of old coins, collected in one's youth, and forgotten; upon their rediscovery, not only are they remembered vividly, but I finally flip them over to see them in new ways. This novelty of old things is not perfect newness, but rather heavily accented with the recognition of things of the past.

I do not want to demean those people, those experiences that are perfectly new to me--my friendships with Misses Paige and Allison are part of that lovely novelty. What I want to articulate is that I have made an especial attempt to explore Lincoln in ways that any city makes me uncomfortable. Later nights, more drinks in different locales, conversations with and proffering drinks to strangers, and other activities have never been my cup of tea. In fact, the best nights are still those long-lived evenings with tea or wine or beer with friends in a warm space, music floating scent-like in the air, discussing philosophies or politics or ourselves; those are the places I feel closest to other people, to knowing them in that ineffably private way. All the same, I ought to practice means of developing those sorts of connections and similar ones with strangers and acquaintances, especially with my rapidly approaching move.

I have been unable to exactly articulate the synthetic reality of oldness and newness that I recognize all over me in Lincoln. It is a richly textural and often bizarrely satisfying experience. Sometimes it is painfully distancing, divorcing me from the moment in a way similar to and rarely directly associated with my own negative sensations when I experience deja vu. This juxtaposition is any many ways a grand deja vu; I am experiencing what has come and gone in a new way that neither solidifies the present nor affirms my past, but somehow cuts between those two potentials. It is neither a delight nor a disparagement, but almost something frustratingly neutral and highly uninterpretable.

Re-Emergence

Following an unintended sabbatical, I am back and writing here again. Up to Miss Linnea McCully's arrival last week, I was writing the Vincenzi story about every other day, although it was pretty slow going. I have been increasingly distracted by finding housing in Flagstaff, which I either have resolved or postponed for a good while. As Miss Linnea would confirm, the rhythms with which I am familiar are out of sorts and I look forward to righting them again, at least until I drive down to Flagstaff.

First order, I am anxious, excited, energized, agitated, irritable, quiet, and a dozen or so other dwarves that didn't make it into Disney's adaptation of Snow White. Linnea left what feels like minutes ago after a sometimes busy sometimes lackadaisical week (well, almost week) of her stay. I introduced her to about two dozen people, very few of whom I imagine she will be able to recall just from sheer magnitude. Really, it was time to spend together, and I am happy for that. I managed to find a few distractions in the housing situation and felt the buildup of unused energy without my customary bikerides, followed by a weird malaise due to inaction. I did not realize how much I had ordered my life until those rhythms felt out of synchronicity. Unfortunately, I let that disharmony foul up some of Miss Linnea's stay, but she is ever-patient with me, for which I am always grateful.

Other news would include a redoubled effort to keep up with blogs, news, and others' writing which will show up as further posts to the Tumblr. I linked a few things recently, but want to draw special attention to this bit about bikes and this article with its sweet 8-bit fx boarding video. (Both are from FastCompany and the latter references AR and ARG, which stand augmented reality and augmented reality games, in which you see the usual world more as a playground for your game experience rather than seeing the game world through some screen or other. Sometimes the "A" stands for alternate rather than augmented.) Also, having Miss Linnea about to distract me--not to mention Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert being on vacation--has pointed out to me how much time I spend in front of the TV normally. At school, this was not at all true and I want to return to going without TV again, especially in order to read more. I have seriously slacked off on reading, despite finding so many addictive books. Television lends itself to multi-task distractions, thus avoiding doing anything constructive. I want to finish all the books I am reading presently before leaving, which shouldn't be hard if I am the least bit faithful to them.

And of course, a few words on what I am reading. Most delectable of all is Gary Snyder's A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, a collection of concise and clear-headed essays that draw me back to myself every time. I have read The Smokey the Bear Sutra aloud to a handful of friends and just can't get enough of it. You may also notice a few snippets on the Tumblr. As a result of reading Snyder, I finally picked up William S Burroughs and am well into Naked Lunch, but have yet to finish it. This has first priority. In short, Naked Lunch picks you up, loses you in the sofa, shoots you up, spits you out, points this way and that, walks in neither direction, and makes good fun of the trip the whole way. I can't say that this is a read I am really understanding, but it is certainly one I am enjoying. I can only affirm mentions in my previous post, especially now that I may be passed the more explicit graphic and violent sexuality of the book. I also have both of those writers' collected works "readers" laying about, which I am not making much of an endeavor to work through, but always find satisfying. In short order, I will read Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Daniel Clowes Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon; which are on the backburner presently. When I am in the mood for more earnest SF, I'll return to Makers by Cory Doctorow, but not at the moment.

Expect something more insightful, likely a review/blurb of Inception which I saw last night and sort of drooled at. Not to say it was perfect, I heartily recommend it. More on that later. Movie-wise, I also plan on watching Performance (anyone seen it?) and Out of the Past. Expect an announcement for a movie night for the A&E production of The Lathe of Heaven in short order as well.

And many happy returns.

Writing, Word Viruses, Burroughs, Vincenzi

I have finally summoned the courage to start reading William S. Burroughs. Perhaps it sounds silly, but Burroughs was one of those writers who distinctly intrigued and frightened me. I have this image of Naked Lunch in my head that is some sort of horror story about highly detailed intravenous drug use. Without a doubt does Burroughs go into some pretty stalwart detail about drug use--he claims to have written Naked Lunch while he was going through withdrawal from junk/opium derivatives--but taking the work as simple some drug-laden chronicle is a pretty shallow interpretation.

I have read a few excerpts from Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader from his other work (Junky, Nova Trilogy, and letters), not to mention a few excellent essays on him. Admittedly, Burroughs is not a writer I would have gone to without some background to encourage and define his particular style for me. This may have, in the end, provided me with too many other ideas before exploring his work, but his endeavor to redefine narrative and develop an alternative imagery takes center-stage whatever I pick up of his, regardless of whatever assumptions I have of the work itself. The reader title itself, "Word Virus," has this rich, creative, fluid identity in his work. In The Nova Trilogy in particular, the spread of (pseudo-)sentient memes (called nova criminals) through the population, their criminal-epidemic characteristic, and the usurpation of others' bodies or behaviors functions as a sort of accurate metaphor for powerful sociocultural memes today. (For those who have read Naked Lunch, the shoggoth-esque entity of the "buyer" as himself a user of junkies is a sort of early form of the nova criminal's victim; the nova criminal itself being the ritualistic obsession the buyer has with being around junkies.)

I have been working diligently if not regularly on my Lorenzo Vincenzi detective story. Working on it is rather steady, but I prefer to write it once it is dark, but with closing shifts at Ivanna Cone, I mostly lose the opportunity. During the daytime I have little problem developing in greater detail and scope the lives of the characters and the plots and subplots at stake. Getting it onto paper is just a sort of exercise I need a certain setting to do. More and more I feel that the ideas Burroughs deals with--possessive memes, complicated and tyrannical language games, subverted persons, voluntary and involuntary participation with maniacal non-human entities--are exactly where I want to go with Vincenzi and his participation in the Cthulhu Mythos. Later work and style I think will hinge increasingly on my own deep reading of The Nova Trilogy because of its direct confrontation (nova police and nova criminals) between more or less human persons with non-human intelligent infections.

Oddly, this doesn't feel the least confusing to me. Burroughs himself is heavily influenced by pulp literature (both horror/weird fiction and hard-boiled) in his work. His skill with slang and vernacular is incredible and often--at least in Naked Lunch--beyond me. Most of his references, I understand, are to drugs, sex, and sex industry, so I can easily get the gist of them. Nonetheless, I also notice I miss more than a little. Naked Lunch is rapidly finding is place among books I will reread and refer to often in the future. In a way, it has just exploded in its fiery liveliness, humor, sincerity, and criticism directly in front of me. Reading it, you cannot help but have it seep into more and more of your life.

~~~

Note: This entry connects strongly to my previous post concerning the notion of underworld, that is, of reality being more richly textured than by the well-accepted physical laws/expectations. I don't think of science as wrong, but as incomplete and inadequate. Anyway, look those up if you're interested.