Oscar Wilde

"Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

a delicate problem

"There was a Chinese philosopher who all his life pondered the problem whether he was a Chinese philosopher dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that she was a philosopher..."

-Vladimir Nabokov

Why we are this way

OK, so my generation is postmodern I guess. It is really Modern M.O. to label things, classifying them and saying what they mean. Seems impossible to really believe in any sort of all-encompassing abstract truth statment. After all, I could meet people with ten different belief systems, in ten different environments during one weekend excursion. Trying to fit them all under one umbrella would be both insulting and exhausting.

So is it even possible to compose a story, a linear abstraction, using the material of one's life? I am thinking no. Well, at best it would be my own little part in an absurd play. I'm wondering if the way out of this maze is to believe in a spirituality encompassing all occurrences in life, and teaching ways of moving individually within massive, bloated systems of discourse. You can't control the discourse by saying what is best because there is no best. In fact, even "better" is getting murky. You'd really have to spend your whole life within a discourse to intelligently suggest an actual change for the better. "Convincing" people is really a modern phenomenon. Doing with positive intention, and causing others to do alongside yourself, is the more effective path to change. Not that change really needs us...

Gain

When Destiny comes, don’t question her.
Don’t fret over how much time you’ve lost.

When the knock sounds,
just look up from your writing
and out your window,
eyes half-closed,
gazing at the sky,
the dark leaves
of your favorite tree
outside this house,
where you’ve waited all these years.

Then smoothly pad on over,
open the door.
Meet her fresh face, breathless,
eyes aglow
with the most enchanting news;
“did you know you belong right here, and right now?”

She brushes in past you
and you’re just thankful,
so thankful she’s finally arrived.
Off she goes in the house,
unpacking while you trail behind,
smiling at all her plans and souvenirs.

Then at night, after the meal you’ve prepared,
and the fire you’ve tended,
quietly lie down next to her
and hold every part of her.
How shallow her breath,
so unlike what you thought purpose would be.

This is how it goes for some of us.
The world chokes,
and only the lavender light remains.
We’ve fallen into love,
this rapture from within ourselves,
at last we have what everyone talks about,
the experience of “me.”


Destiny rolls over,
rolls like silver cylinder and asks,
“don’t you want to?”

All I can do is hold her,
All I can do is stare past her;

I am my own warmth now.
I am the heather-orange coal beneath.
I am the burning becoming.

morning recovery walk

This weekend I had the flu, the violent flu. This baby hit me Saturday evening, keeping me awake and on the bathroom floor for half the night. Sunday was a day of aches and congestion. The symptoms are milder now, and it feels my body is slowly rebuilding all the necessary infrastructure for moving in the world. Being ill gives one a new perspective. The experience shows fragility and forces an assessment of what matters to simply survive and feel decent. It makes me thankful for feeling normal. Funny how we have to go through something to understand the lack of it. I don't think abstraction is as strong as we'd like to believe.

This morning I took a slow walk to rejoin the world. It's crisp and cool here in Hillsboro, and I walked in an old neighborhood just across 231st from my groomed development. I thought of joining the flow of one part of the world, and of leaving it for a time. I thought of stop signs, how the messsage communicated is separate from the work of the city crew installing them. I saw an old man scooping his leaves, engaging in this act of tidying a space the environment will soon pass to some other person, who may decide to cut the tree down. I considered life as not a trough to feed from, but as the experience always jumping ahead, beyond my thoughts of what it is and will be.

connection

Seems we are all trying to connect with somebody or something all the time. Whether it be the abstract idea and concomitant rush of pleasure, or the sense of knowing someone else, we will run ourselves ragged in the pursuit of connection. Give me something other than myself, right? But still one has to accept that oneself is part of what ever it is you're trying to connect with. So when I'm perceiving others I am perceiving myself...in a way, or at least in a certain dimension. You see in others what you are capable of seeing at the time of perception.

I've always liked Johari's window as an aid to understanding the interpersonal:

An Audience

Some are capable
of finding happiness
with a rational plan.
(I’ve been calling them
psychology’s children.)
And there are many who
no longer believe
a man should do something for a woman
just because he’s a man
and she is something different.

But some of us prefer
to throw our weight around,
our souls lean and supple
from strange postures
stretched out all day,
all day, not much good for anything
except living here in this world.

A psychologist writes to everyone;
no one in particular,
but my audience is specified.
Who you believe you are,
believe you could be.
As much as words can beckon,
this is what I am involving you with.

Maybe you’re twice divorced.
Maybe you loathe the career
you’re finishing at 65.
Perhaps your child is gone
without writing two, three, ten years,
and church is only the place
to be reminded
how much you have to live up to.

Well here is weight for you,
here is your alpine lake.
Here is moss growing on rock,
soft and strongly attached.

Did anyone promise you
anything in particular?
God promised you
the ability to live,
the same promise
within everything.

Did anyone promise
the ability to live
as two different people?
Loving one self
and working with the other?
Is ownership so necessary?

This life is given to you for a short while
to sip on.
Then thrown back, with help,
into torrential flow:
existence without the need for more existing.

There is no man outside,
no person so much bigger
than you are.
Simply, you must know
what it is your body
can do in the world.

Then to astound,
your soul needs only two instructions:

Listen,
and Glisten.

transmittance of knowledge

The realm of human knowing labeled science is concerned with recording what will continue to happen if certain conditions remain constant. We can duplicate experiments from 100 years ago and expect the same results. As long as the earth keeps on going the same way, or close enough so we don't notice the difference, the communication we call science will enable a duplication of results and a continuation of prosperity. When I consider art and aesthetic expression, however, I see no such guarantee of connection across time. Acts of sacrifice deemed necessary and good by past peoples are atrocious by today's standards. An artist, then, need not claim a necessary continuity with the past. Just because I use the same word as someone 100 years ago, we are not necessarily having the same experience, nor are we seeing the same phenomena. To put it succinctly, the aesthetic possibility is open. I cannot see any way of proving that beauty is constant between myself and Aristotle. When a human being dies, it's beauty goes with it. When a human being is born, there is a new factor within the world. This is why the study of the expression of beauty (the humanities) is a constant and ongoing endeavor.

But should the artist have a conscience? Is there a responsibility inherent in the ability to transform the world into a beautiful expression? I would like to read about the ethics of art if anyone has suggestions...

Burn It

I met a woman with no one to love her.

Thinking then of my wife and daughters
I politely nodded, scurrying away
to a safe home on the edge
of the urban growth.

Is fidelity the result of my cowardice,
or is it the other way around?

She was too tired,
so I lay beside her
instead of on top
where I always want to be,
and I stroked her hair
until she told me
everything making her tired.

I don’t want to know all this,
because my angel is neutral,
caring naught for good or for evil,
but only for being oldest,
and having the most memory,
so he knows how things could be.

Never finding out
how to join responsibility
with my 15 year old heart,
the blood never drained
from my brain to make room
for the thin white broth of middle age.

All my friends,
their heads loll in tired acceptance,
and it drips off their earlobes.

I have only headaches;
too much oxygen
in the improper places,
and dreams of surviving
past the allotment, somehow,
of a man born in America.

But at least we are home in a house
someone else built for us.
And I am asleep next to this raging feminine fire.
The energy being spent here is too much
to understand with a mind of blood,
so I glow with my bulb of expectation
and I burn the fuel of our world:
this impossible endeavor of ownership.