Noise

I wish I could make love to all, all, all of your minds. They and I would be like the wind and we’d wait for each other to knock the doors down.

I wish I could drink you in without hurting your skin or exposing your vulnerable marrow. I wish I knew why bees are small and humans are big; why boys scream and bears roar; why my voice shakes when I am unsure. Forget its meaning, they tell me. There is no other way to be, no other way to go.

I wish I could be your eyes with love and lust so intertwined that together we lose sight of passion.

You are a universal beauty to me, so obvious, so lost in visions.

The treasures you bring are not sin but Truth, and she unveiled herself to you on that dismal midnight hill. You, with your tape recorder and guitar. You, with your expression and history. You, with your mighty telescope and tiny tears, deliver the fire to us so we never need feel the burning flesh ourselves.

“I just want silence,” you said, “so I can break it. We are so blessed with noise.”

Something!

Look, I think it’s the typewriter.

It’s like getting your message across, using any and

all means possible.

I don’t want to slip into the madness of the walls,

but when I need a machine

to beat out my tongue,

the walls and their madness

look less like disease. Boundaries.

Boundaries.

Boundaries.

and it slows down, like hunger

and I admire what you say,

about the artist and her clay,

but holiness is holiness

with Wonder in the way

Look! It’s the typewriter and the city. I keep fucking up, finding holes and falling into them; reaching out so far that the power plants pollute my hands and I begin to murmur about the human scent and something, something!, about our swollen feet and those biorhythmic city ticks. Its blood is us and ours is lost.

A Signpost

The old sights and sounds have my mind fucked, furious and forgiven. Revisiting like running, remembering the escapist. But my feet leave prints on the cement like a shadow in a cave and I want to return her question.

“Do you see me? I mean, do you really see me?”

But I don’t see her. My eyes perceive form but my mind doesn’t always connect the galaxies of truth found in her ancient human frame.

I am like the sinking of stones and the man drunk in his clothes, dying of cancer before Christmas and I want to sing curse words into your ears, fuck, fuck, fuck, because it’s the only honesty I can spare you. Why speak if all is lost in its translation anyway? What are words but stark signposts? I’d rather whisper and spare the matter of air my ignorance.

Another kid cried and cried and I knew nothing of what to say, his legs shaking, fingers clenched against a steaming cup of tea, shaking and steaming, his face became clay, desolate Desperation the potter’s hands.

“I... I... I don’t know who I am anymore...”

And I cried with him because I understand the frustration of reinvention and the oil needed for the mechanics is hard to come by and the essence of Being is hiding too and I wish I could steal your pain but I caused it and it’ll only make things worse. I want to help, to give, to get high on transcendence.

I touch his hand and listen. That’s all I have to offer.

I have no beauty, no love to give, only memories and melodies like cheap elevator circuits. Elevators without electrical pulse. Ask the simplicity. Ask yourself and the tree with the sad graffitti smile on it. Ask the rolling dust from whence we came. Ask the dreaming blind man and his broken cane sniffing up streetcar walkways. God, I respect that and the liberation of nothingness, emptiness, soundlessness, going...going...gone.

Zoom, shroom, boom. We count like monks in meditation, all the ways to complicate ourselves, our lives and and and...

Dreary Enlightenment

A hundred miles an hour with pains and death blood and I'm onto you, even if in only the slightest.

I've become captured and intertwined with the city, with its breath and its death and all that there is between the two... but its truly the insanity. I feel strangely comforted and even at peace surrounded by the madness of the city. The madness of feeling like an outsider, the madness of feeling like an insider, the madness of making eye contact - playing that ancient game - the madness of persistently being compelled toward the tweaked-out dope fiends, the mumbling black men, the white Mannerist painting women who only speak between contemplative cigarettes. And those poisonous rose bushes. The madness of homelessness and addiction. The madness of corporate propaganda and production; the never-ending machine that we "inhabit" when really it's the other way around; the concrete and structure and money madness: the city's blood transfusion. Money is the only thing that should be wasted. Ironically. Times and divided and squared by two. Because to waste money is either to wage war on Earth or to wage war on Capitalism.

And I want to tell you about one dreary night in November...

We began, holding hands with destiny and her ease, her grace - letting her in to mingle with our eyes and misguide our minds. We were three young kids, elongated at the elbows and swollen with the magical misery of the city. We stopped to let the stillborn in. And in he came.

The bus slowed, groaned and sighed to a stop where the lights were dim and the night was grim and all the fairy tales came out to play. Crystals in the air and lonesome footsteps like hidden stars echoed with train whistles as we departed the panting bus with our lowered eyes and suspended breaths.

"It's frightening!" she pointed to us, "how enlightening... the lightning can be." Crouched on the curbside, hands dancing like in some crazed alien sign language, an old street woman spoke in poetic fragments. She had hair like milk and poison for bones.

Destiny teased us; direction didn't land in our laps or on our shoulders but we knew the dwelling of the city like the swelling of sobbing throats and eyes, like sex and morphine. So we laughed at the rain instead and headed back from where we once were, back towards the bus, back towards the cages.

The floor inside was stale and the hands that waited it steamed like violence though their callous was pure. His smile was gradual and subtle but true. The warmth from the open doorway was undisturbed; daisies fell at his feet when he kicked the shopping cart down the sidewalk to let us into his tiny hole in the wall, three blocks from the bus stop. The woman with the hands and poetry followed us inside on her feather feet.

Our shoes echoed off the cement floor and walls; the frequency of a dungeon but the warmth of a clammy hand. The man and the woman walked before us in whispers and superstition, throwing rocks to spark the way. When they ran out of rocks we were left in the purest of solitude, engulfed by still anticipation. Sounds began to resonate all around us, like static, then like singing glass bowls, like cries and whimpers and crashing waves. We called ourselves gods and left the ceiling on our eyelids and the building in our past, heading towards something like twilight, blinded by our own torch.

The journey was deep into something like the complexity of sewage pipes and we escaped the space time continuum, discovering its curvature and snipping it with glowing scissors. The man asked if we had any cash. We emptied our pockets, revealing three crumpled bills, two river stones, a broken earring and a tiny light bulb.

He nudged Feather Feet and she nodded, crossing her arms and releasing a snort from her nose. Transaction approved.

And finally direction was found in the form of the old man's frown and we were a bit disenchanted that we had found it at all. Our backs caked with the grime of cold nights, we were like submarines sinking into the graves of waves washing away a thousand lonely footprints. And drain away we did. It was honest and intimate. He pointed us away from the twilight and into a cell. His manner took on a professional essence and he said:

"Vaginal toys on the wall to the left; butt plugs, anal beads in back; clearance items up front on this rack here; bondage to the right, just behind the soft core and gay porn. We've got blow up dolls in back and every color and taste of lube you can imagine. You look like the kinda kids that would be interested in our hemp flavored lubricant, no?"

Alas, we have returned to the city.

Multimillion Dollar Music Video

Created out of Sadness

Wine? Fine.

“I’ve got so much energy! It’s that damn wine!”

And just like that he rips off his clothing, drops to a plank pose, cracking his wrists from the dramatic drop, does one excruciatingly zesty push-up, sits back up and touches his nose to the television screen. After a moment, he turns around and glares at me.

“Just like that! Another happy couple saved by the forces of therapeutic warrior killers and narcissistic capitalists.”

Now he’s on his back, again, thrusting his feet up in the air. Three repetitions and he’s beat. Laying flat on his back, gravity sucking his skin into cheap hotel crust, he rubs his belly, staring deeply and romantically, inquisitively into the ceiling.

“Naked body smells of marijuana, on the hotel carpet floor...I wrote a haiku!” And he did. And it’s ingenious. And I’m proud to call him my compatriot. Everywhere, now and forever he’ll be crouching in the darkness, ready to prance on my intellect.

I start thinking about my pounding headache and the miles we’ve traveled together, physically and metaphysically. Challenged by the tortures of tiny rooms, infinite horizons and alpine tremors, we have danced, drunken in the summer skies, meditating on nothingness and beauty. He crawls onto the bed and sucks my big toe.

“Dude, let’s go to India.”

I agree. But I tell him only after we hike the great expanse of South America. He agrees. I hate that I feel the only way I can appreciate life to the fullest would be to leave this America, this hasty dream wasteland stuffed with cheap stupors and expensive splendors, made for the blank anti-man whose shadow and idolatry brought the first torches down on the old virgin land now littered with Big K’s and Walmart’s; sex shops and fitness clubs.

Matters of the mind should be left for one’s skull cavity to ingest, while life should be left to one’s hands to manifest.

Now he’s on his back, his cheap classical Yamaha intertwined like camouflage to his bare skin and he’s playing some melancholic melody that reminds me of stranded sailors. I wish I told him more often how much I appreciate him. He’s like my reincarnated Gemini love twin but I can never decide whether I’d like him better as a friend or a lover. We’re more than a team, we’re like one holy mind-reading super-being, tackling the forces of life like quiet fishermen who oversee the ocean and her omnipotent tide. We’re tragically pathetic in the same way children are when they trip over their own shoelaces, only crying when someone notices their little failures.

We’re like medieval gypsies pawning our half-assed creations for your time and your stories and we really have no idea what’s going on, nor do we give a flying shit about what day of the week it is. We only care that you appreciate when we give the littlest bit we have to give: a rock. Or an ear of corn. Or a song about belonging or dying cowboys.

He realized I’m noticing his insanity and so he’s settled down on the bed next to me. Stranded, again, in another po-dunk town inhabited by deadbeat meth heads and glucose-filled half-humans, we get drunk and forget the dry heat and that disappearing money.

Something or Other

Portland, Oregon: the land of a whole new something or other. Hairy and pierced, tattooed and smooth and dreaded, the population binges on art and the idea of something ecstatic, fresh, orgasmic. The city creates music like blades of dewey grass and raindrops splashing down cold cement streams; music like some deep water monster, glowing in the light of manmade submarines; music like magic. Magic and misery.

“Life,” she said, “in three words, is: ‘magic and misery.’”

Back then I wondered about mystery and the ebb and flow of evolutionary consciousness, but soon realized only magic can explain the moon. And so I pulled away again, fearing my own incompetence and sense of self. I always find myself pulling away and others see it natural to pull back, like the moon, but I get confused at the demand for someone else’s presence and all I really want is to speak my truth and to make people laugh. Interaction. Speech. Story telling. It’s all the same thing and I’m grateful for the release.

“Yes,” she said, “I still think about you.”

Hugs

Psychedelic Philosophies

A Little Sister, a Dog and God.

Paper II

Our family dog, Mo, has a wild spirit for adventure - goes missing for days on end until we either receive a phone call from a hesitant neighbor who was grown to love the little charmer, or until he simply reappears back in our house, by means unnoticed by any of us. Though the behavior is now expected, understood and secretly admired, there was a time when his behavior was unexpected, misunderstood and immensely worrisome to a family who had never before owned a dog.

It was the first night of his disappearing act and my little sister, Eliza, was growing fearful. She has a compassionate heart, eyes like a hawk, and the memory of an elephant. Her connection to the dog was easily the strongest and most fragile as she was also the youngest in the family, five years younger than me. She told me later of her experience that night when Mo returned home. She had gone out alone to the front porch and began to pray. She closed her tearful eyes and prayed to the god of her understanding for Mo’s return. She said she was out there for about ten minutes when she heard a distant jingle. She opened her eyes and sure as shit Mo was running up the lawn towards her, tongue flopping out, all high spirits and smiles. I am not claiming that she has any sort of magical powers, rather restating the story as she told it to me.

A few years before that, I was playing guitar in our front lawn, soaking up the summer sun, when Eliza swung open the squeaky door and took a seat next to me. She pointed to the billowy clouds over the mountains and said, “See that? That’s where God is, just above those clouds.” I looked at her, a bit confused at her young and honest interpretation of “God.”

Perhaps these instances would exhibit normal behavior in the child of a family that frequented church or Sunday school, even if only a few times a year. However, Eliza has never been to any religious institution, never read the Bible. My father, being the linear, rational, scientific emergency room doctor that he is, did not approve of his children’s attendance at church, though I suppose my mother would have otherwise followed her parents’ example and taken us to church. We never talked much about it and I hardly gave it a second thought. I only learned recently that I was baptized in a church in Arkansas, though I do not know under what branch of Christianity my soul was “saved.” I feel extremely lucky in that I am able to look at the mighty beast of religion without personal bias.

What I find so interesting is my little sister’s concept of god and of prayer. Where does this belief come from? As humans, does our complex understanding and need to categorize the universe warrant such beliefs? Or was it through the shadowy subtleties of societal influence that Eliza picked up these beliefs? She used to ask me questions like, “How do you talk to God?” or “Are faeries like angels?” I tried to answer honestly, but as I was growing up I was also developing my own understanding of the world. People used to ask me about my religious beliefs and the only way I could explain my sentiments toward such a foreign subject was to say that I was faithful, though unsure of what I was faithful towards. I used to tell people that I believed in the World. I believed in the ultimate working-out of the universe. This did not give me an excuse to act irresponsibly, but it did provide a certain degree of comfort in an otherwise uncomfortable world. I justified my belief by a hindsight understanding of how my current gratitudes came to be and through the idea of optimism. Perhaps this would be best explained through example:

From the age ten to about sixteen, my mother was fairly absent from my life. Physically, she was around, but her heavy drinking distorted her mental presence - she offered little comfort or advice during a very strange part of my life. Blank stares and stumbles, spontaneous fits of rage and tears, suicide threats, DUI’s... the works. When our dirty family secret somehow seeped through our fool-proof act to the extended family, my mom’s sister flew out to Colorado and literally dragged my mom, who clawed the floors and walls in desperate denial and confusion, to a rehabilitation center in Newberg, Oregon. Her long process of recovery played out with phantoms and rock bottoms, lonely nights and angry words, and my father’s temper was becoming shorter and shorter. His drinking became a bit toxic and scary and his verbal abuse and tyrant-like hunger for control left life-long imprints on my sisters and me. And although those times were some of the hardest and loneliest of my life so far, the results were and are a blessing.

My mom decided to stay in Oregon where she had built herself a little nest of support made up of hard-ass recovering women and their equally hard-ass histories. As a result I visited Portland quite frequently and discovered my love for this city and its hidden treasures. I could argue that my interest in Philosophy was a result of such hard times. If my mother had not been an alcoholic I may not be here, and I would definitely not be the person I am today. Considering how happy I am with my physical and mental location in life, I have no choice but to be grateful for my mother’s alcoholism, as twisted as it may sound. My father’s temper resulted in the unbreakable bond between my little sister and I, as she was my confidant and I hers, and together we endured the wrath of my father. It seems the bond of suffering always grows deepest.

When I see life as such, it would seem a certain degree of faith emerges. Maybe it is only a crutch, or a comfort that I use to survive the hard times, but because the opportunities rippled out of such painful and trying experiences, I can say, with some amount of evidence, that everything will work out as they should. Life happens and time passes and maybe the way things are is the only way they could be and we should squeeze all the juice out of it no matter how we look at it. Maybe more than faith I accept and have a humble understanding of the push and pull of the world and as a result I see even the worst times as opportunities for growth. Maybe it is only my human brain trying to make the world as manageable an idea as possible. Or maybe I like the idea of a bit of harmony to the universe and my life in it.

Boring; do not read.

Paper 1 - Philosophy in Religion - March, 2010
As I breath life into my human awareness each morning, I am overwhelmed by the (recently identified) fractal construction of the universe around me. In the trees and the leaves, the water and the light, molecules and atoms, our social structures, family dynamics, and human thought, everything seems to break down further and further, beyond the realm of human understanding into the never-ending replication of pattern that is a fractal.
Thusly I can certainly relate to the teleological theory of the universe: the idea that the universe has similarities to that of a manmade machine, in its composition of other smaller parts working together to create a desired result, though I believe the universe transcends human creation or comprehension. Anyone who spends time observing nature, reaping its serene benefits, can see the reciprocity, the symbiosis, the general workability of the natural world. Flowers benefit the bees with food and the bees benefit the flowers in pollination. Every organism seems to play a role in the life of the universe, though I am not sure that is a point I could ever prove.
However, where my understanding differs from Paley’s teleological argument is in the conclusion that the cause of the order of the universe resembles human intelligence. First of all, I am uncertain of the cause of the universe, the idea that a big finger was necessary to push the first domino that fell on the second that fell on the third. Maybe the first one just fell on its own accord? Secondly, perhaps I am mistaken in the communication of this argument, but it reads to me as though Paley is asserting the idea that human intelligence is somehow superior to other natural processes and consciousnesses, and somehow specially divine in its uniqueness because only then could it reflect the creator of our universe: “that which can contrive, which can design, must be a person” (Paley, 65). He seems to neglect the capabilities of other organisms’ designs, such as the bee hive and the spider web. The ability to create does not qualify humans unique or superior to any other organism in the universe.
I have always felt confused at man’s steadfast belief in his authority over the rest of the natural world. It seems quite apparent to me that our existence parallels the existence of most other life on earth: we evolved to adapt to our surroundings, we rely on the same resources, we breath the same air, and up until the sweeping influence of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, humans utilized (and in some places still do) the same techniques of other predatory animals. The way humans are brought to life, our reliance on groups for survival, and our methods of adapting all mirror the complexity of the rest of the natural world. Therefor I came to the conclusion that human intelligence must be a result of the mighty force that is nature. Our sensory faculties evolved out of natural selection, as did our reasoning and logic, as survival tools in the natural world. The way we perceive the world must be a direct result of its existence.
So if indeed the existence and “uniqueness” of humanity is dependent on the influence of the natural world, it would follow that we are susceptible to the patterns occurring in nature. And if nature is ever-evolving, one adaptation or mutation leading to another adaptation or mutation, then the idea of determinism would have to apply to human mentality as well. Though I am only vaguely familiar with the concept, the idea that everything is caused by something else, is caused by something else, is caused by something else, rings true with my understanding of the universe, for no other reason, admittedly, but my instinctual belief. I see it as ever changing though, without an end result in mind, simply following the laws of cause and effect.
It seems to me that if this is the way of the natural world, then the human mind would replicate it in a sense, as our forms of creation and knowledge attempt to replicate the order of the natural world. What I am trying to communicate goes much deeper than the physical manifestations of humanity, like our social structures for example, but into the depths of our minds. What I propose is that human understanding and perception is a huge accumulation of previous causes, relating to the idea of determinism, and relating similarly to the infinite breakdown of the natural world, the fractals of our mind. This can be seen in group mentality over time, but also within the span of one’s individual life. For example, the death of one’s father as a child will have a serious impact on that person’s life forever more, as does their birthplace, parental situation, financial situation, schooling (or lack thereof) and all things of that genre. But even those events can be broken down a thousand times: how one experiences the event, the context in which it happened, the age and circumstantial mentality of the person when the event happened. It is like a person is born an untouched blob of clay, and throughout their lives events (causes) shape and shift the blob at the whim of the seeming order of the universe to manifest a constantly evolving sense of identity, set of beliefs, behavioral habits, etc.
Just as the natural world is constantly being molded by natural causes, human awareness maintains the same unknowable complexity. Because causes can be so little (Butterfly Effect) understanding the inner workings and thus ultimate reason behind it all is impossible.

I have no religious background. I took a Bible Literature class my senior year of high school and attended an Easter service at a Roman Catholic church once that scared the shit out of me. I am constantly developing my understanding of the universe through observation of the effects I see in people, families, countries.
In short, my understanding of the universe stands as such: the universe depends on symbiotic relationships, like that of a machine, though the relationships are unknowable by man in their complexity and seemingly infinite breakdown. But the relationships are also in constant flux, as that which does not change dies, and the reasons for their change are the effects of previous causes which are also unknowable by man because everything that ever happens causes an effect and it is impossible to know, to perceive, to understand everything. I also believe mankind’s tendency to remove itself from nature is a result of our ignorance as we exhibit natural determinism within our own perceptions and moralities and eventual political movements, wars and construction of governments. I am uncertain of how the universe began and I doubt I will ever claim to know the truth of creation. I am also sure of my eventual change of heart concerning these current beliefs. In the meantime I enjoy various Native American creation stories for their simple rationality and creative construction.