Wake up!

 

This is about a dream I hadCOMMA

                                                      but it was as real as real could bePERIOD

Paralyzed by the grip of unknown

                                                                    forces and laws,

pushed through the fabric of space-time,

                                                                          and swallowed black-hole-like

by an irrational fear of nothingness absolute, I was(n't).

 

Yet at the same time I was liberated by a series of questions:

 

                                                                 What’s the matterQUESTIONMARK ß this is an  immaterial question, a question intimating materiality.

                                                                       What’s the heart of the matter? ß this is a material question, a question intimating immateriality.

                                                                       Why does any of this matter matter? ß this is a ridiculous questionCOMMA

                                                        but it’s also axiomatic. ForCOMMA inherent in the very question is a recognition

of our insatiable quest for the ridiculous, and that’s a fact

                                                                                                                         PERIOD

AND THE LORD GOD MADE MAN FROM THE DUST OF THE GROUND

“I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy of air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appeareth no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals – and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

                                                            -Hamlet

           I’ve heard that dust is an ancient thing. I think about just how ancient it is as I notice a thin layer has settled on the cherry-wood bookcases in front of me. I glance at the titles of hundreds of books; philosophy books, novels, biographies, historiographies, and anthologies; pretexts, post-scripts and prefaces. No doubt the dust is nestled atop the thousands of pages in front of me, but the words within these books do not care about the dust; they have passed unscathed through the natural world. From the mind of their creator, to the print, to the press, to immortality, the words are but frequencies now, bouncing off the heavenly bodies above, blanketing space and time. IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, AND IT WAS COVERED WITH DUST.

 Poets tell us that to write down an idea is to immortalize it:

            “One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
               But came the waves and washéd it away:
                 Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
                 But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
            “Vayne man,” sayd she, “that doest in vaine assay,
                 A mortall thing so to immortalize,
                 For I my selve shall lyke to this decay,
                 And eek my name bee wiped out lykewize.”
             “Not so,” quod I, “let baser things devize
                 To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
                 My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
                 And in the heavens wryte your glorious name.
             Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,
                 Our love shall live, and later life renew.
                                              -Edmund Spenser Sonnet 75

Spenser wanted to immortalize his love object; he wanted to protect her from the inevitability of becoming but dust, so he wrote a sonnet about her, and once recorded in the memory of the universe it becomes something that can’t be un-known.

           I’ve heard that household dust is in large part human skin. This information might sound disturbing to some. It doesn’t bother me. Of course, dust is made up of various other things, too: dirt, hair, wax, bug parts, animal parts, people parts, planet parts, star parts, and so on. As I think about this, I scan the cherry-wood bookcases and a large purple spine catches my eye; The Astronomy Encyclopedia. I pick it up, brush it off, and flip through it until I find INTERPLANETARY DUST PARTICLE. It turns out that many forms of interplanetary dust particles exist and along with them many names for the various particulates: INTERPLANETARY MEDIUM, INTERSTELLAR DUST, INTERSTELLAR GRAIN, INTERSTELLAR MATTER, INTERSTELLAR MOLECULES, MICROMETEORITE, et cetera: “For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.” – Ecclesiastes 3:19-20.

 This isn’t such a bad thing.

Though no adequate words exist, this is my tribute to you, Guy Daniel Parnell. I did not know you that well, but I sat next to you for two semesters. You affected my life. Rest in peace.

A "Response" to a "Letter" that I "Received" in the Mail.

To whom this may “concern”:

             You must be hurting for business. I wonder what type of business you might hope to attract, offering me, a “neighbor in our community,” (though I am not really because the home of your dealership is “2910 White Settlement Road, Fort Worth, TX 76107”) a $1000.00 savings card in the form of that most iconic of Western monetary metaphors: the credit card. Exhaustive first sentence, am I right? Well, there is a lot to be said, so buckle up.

             When I open your “advertisement” and read, in Bold and in Blue it says Congratulations! When I read the fine print it states that I should “Immediately remove the attached $1000 Savings card and place it in your wallet. This card is valuable and may be applied toward the purchase of service, parts and accessories. Card is valid at all Autobahn locations.” Now, I wager that if I were to ask that the $1000 dollar savings be applied directly to the bill of exactly $1000 dollars you would regret to inform me that the advertisement clearly implies something else, and I would have to agree, but only because I have been desensitized by the sheer multitude of advertisements employing fraudulence and “implication” in their marketing strategies. And, that’s precisely what you have done here. You have implied that I have $1000.00 to spend on a vehicle while also implying simultaneously that said $1000.00 dollars is a percentage of the cost you would absorb on a much larger bill. But we all know that you really wouldn’t absorb anything, you just wouldn’t profit as much as you would on a pre- or post-Savings Card day, (then again, if I were to fall victim to your ploy, maybe your salespeople could wiggle their way into my psyche and get me to add on a few “extras” in order to cover the pseudo-absorption that you so tepidly “suggest” above, though I do pity the fool who wanders into such a psyche. It’s like four-thousand people playing Chinese checkers in a hybrid world that can only be explained as a Jackson Pollock/Salvador Dali lightshow and buffet). To the untrained eye, (though I’m not sure such eyes still cast their impressionable gaze upon the world, because, like me the rest of our culture has also figured out this so-called “strategy”) you suggest that the recipient of this “letter” has received a special privilege; you suggest that some “lucky individual” has gained an advantage. Can you not see the artifice here? Can you not see the imbedded lie? Must you be reminded that at its very core a lie is not such a distant relative of suggestion? Perhaps you should evaluate your strategy and stop lying not only to your intended audience but to yourselves. But, this is a utopian idea; I know that you will do what you must, for you are a “business,” and the end goal of any business is to profit. Romantic ideals notwithstanding, perhaps you employ a different “strategy,” one that might include integrity and honesty as its foundation. Maybe you would attract a different crowd. In fact, I think that such traits are actually more profitable in the long run of things, whether in business or in general. Nevertheless, this is merely my suggestion.[1]

 The “letter,” the one sheet of paper, the smidgen of ink, the envelope, the postage, (and the time) cost me roughly 50 cents. I am curious just how much your “advertisement” cost you? How much did the research and development, the paper, the ink, the plastic, the very production, and the postage really cost you? But, a completely different question can be and perhaps should be asked by replacing the “How” with a “What.” Perhaps the more appropriate question, then, is thus: What did sending out such an advertisement really cost you? I will be candid: I think it cost you credibility. And, for a “business” such as yours this is the most damaging and damning of consequences. All I can say is that you did it to yourself. Congratulations!

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[1] Note: One might pay particular attention to the numerous quotation marks and italics used throughout this “letter.” It should be pointed out here that said literary devices are symbolically significant and as such are full of all sorts of implications.

 

Insight.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

-Proverbs 22:6

 

Of course, this proverb is universally applicable. Drug addicts, criminals, sexual aggressors, and the like also bear the yoke of inculcation, for time and repetition are the inimitable friends of routine, just as routine is the inimitable foe of freedom. We hear the cliché that children are innocent and it is true. But what is innocence if not the relative of naiveté, ignorance, impressionability, and vulnerability? The ancients understood that to introduce a habit into the early life of a child is to impress upon him or her a life-style. Well, what if in those impressionable years the wrong message was sent?[1] What if the wrong habit was exercised by the child’s confusion and the world’s disinterest? What does this say about choice? About free-will? What if this habit became a source of some distorted form of pleasure, a pleasure which should have been fostered properly and handled with care but instead was neglected and mal-handled. Idle hands are the devil’s playground, and idle minds craft megaliths. The search for that source is unending, whether it be an attraction to the process of searching, or a magnetism to the façade of a skin-deep objectification, this is a learned thing; it’s some distorted form of training.

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[1] Let’s not get bogged down by unnecessary narratives. Let’s not ask questions like “what is wrong and what is right?” These questions are not beneficial, for those born within the superstructure are its very byproduct; even the counter-culture is a part of the dialectic.

Ouroboros: the Tale of a Tail.

 

 Here we are, trying by way of echolocation to find that which has haunted us from the beginning of recorded history: meaning. We open our mouths and send out signals sonar-like to learn about the world through the reverberations. What does this mean you ask? Well what does anything mean is what I respond. But we are choking on our own tales and becoming desensitized to the vibrations and frequencies we ourselves spit out just a short time ago. little animals with big brains, confused about why we act a certain way, why we see things in a specific manner, why we hear things with a particular ear; we’re all screaming—screaming by way of conscience and consciousness and conscientiousness—bemoaning cosmic moral imperatives and vast cultural superstructures, weaving through the fingers of that great lightning, and dragging the stone over the scales of that awesome monolith; the dragon-mountain: the episteme.

episteme

 

But that ironed-scaled dragon-mountain eats its own tail; it has always and will always devour itself. And so will we. So will we stretch our pouting lips over our own heads and swallow. This is our process, our nature, our destiny. Or at least we tell ourselves such a story. After all it seems right and it feels good. However, it’s not completely fulfilling: that great mental massage. Though we are placated from time to time, it never lasts and we are never truly satisfied, so we must squeeze harder and rub faster in order to reach that seemingly out-of-reach pinnacle, the spark’s origin, the scorched mountaintop. At least we have the hymns of ancient lords to hum while we climb. At least we have the ancient traditions to guide us through lightning’s splintered fingers. Thank the heavens for discourse! And, if we do not like any of it we have new ones too! Like technology and progress. We will find our way yet! But don’t we already know what’s going to happen? About what you ask? We’ll just come back to that original haunting question—you know—the one about meaning. After all, the dragon does eat its own tail.

Apophasis/Apostrophe

          D’you recall ever having a great Idea? An idea so potent as to send chills up your spine? But then you think of it again and again, and you really and truly start to consider it; you start to parse it out. D’you ever think that you’re unique, that you’re idea is fresh, like you have something to offer the planet other than a narrative, (not to mention a narrative that has been told countless times before: you’re born, you live, you do stuff while live-ing, you die)? Does that feeling of uniqueness ever come back to try to persuade you, try to make you a part of its team; team unique, teamU. There is no U in team. I had an idea once, but I’m not going to tell you what it wa(i)s. I’ve removed it, like a crumpled up memory tossed into the wastebasket of my mind; it’s gone. But I’ve made you stare at this paragraph, and I should tell you that it’s a puzzle, a myth, an idea.

Rush Hour Existentialism.

Where am I going?

 

Nowhere. I am going nowhere, stuck here in my own specific superstructure of time, space, history, energy, and culture. Sitting here in traffic, watching the other side of the highway; watching cars chase each other in that psychosexual Freudian-accordion dance of mechanized war. Where are they going? Somewhere. Somewhere other than here.

 

What time is it. It’s not a question. It’s a feeling I get while sitting on the exit ramp; a state of mind I enter while staring at the pink sun-eating clouds on the horizon, watching as a white Suburban flies in front of me, watching him, her, whoever move up one car length and advance a millisecond in the space-time continuum of rush-hour exit-ramp pole-position, watching the oblivious gaze of the driver who I see now is a fat man in a football jersey, a man who has just maneuvered into twenty-seventh (instead of twenty-eighth) place in line at a red light: that perfect analogue for the end of one’s life. Do you see it? Let’s pack it in folks, sit impatiently, inch forward ever so slightly, and sigh in that especially touristy way over the performances of artifice you only hear on drive-time radio.

 

The light turns green and you realize that a third of your life is gone,

(if you’re lucky).