so yesterday I had a dream -- I was walking up a sand dune. more importantly i felt very vividly the sand under my foot -- warm, soft, brown. i coddled myself with this dream all day -- on the train, walking up and down stairs, hauling my bag. highpoint of the week -- this passing sensation. the destructive qualities of addiction are only secondly pysiological.the first thing it does is to make ordinary reality not enough. i feel only contempt for simple pleasures and why---because they are so transparent -- to be avoided, just like transparent people. but yet im one. i valued honesty above all else. honesty to ones self. the honest truth: no coherent self. I is other and myriad. so ive splintered and become aphasiatic. nothing I say approaches what I really [want to say]. I'm mealy mouth and unmotivated to communicate.


after 9/11 i had a dream where i was taking an elevator up and down Coney Island Hospital -- I was trying to make out a slip of paper. It said: and blah blah blah, , therefore cruelty must exist. it made perfect sense and this is how i have lived my life. i believed it made me wiser. seeing involves keeping both eyes open -- etc etc. all that vision is maladaptive for most things true, but i wanted to be an artist anyway. i didnt see over that hill; i didnt care to. and now i'm at a transition. I do in my heart of hearts believe that a person should live several lives that a person needs to die to be reborn again, and all those other things that have already been said. Brenda in Six Feet Under (the kind of person I always without fail fall in love with): the older you get the more honed you are by your experiences, so the number of people who really get you dwindle and dwindle. this effect is multiplied the more lives you have..

in india this summer, one of the dogs wasnt warming up to me so i spat at it; also i tear up uncontrollably and at odd moments, like when i see two young children holding hands, and the like. this is all followed by self pity -- a lot of it, about ive turned my heart into ash, intentionally -- and for what?

i felt nothing towards jeff. not even satisfaction over using him so exquisitely. i believe it would have been different were it someone else, someone decent. there would have been guilt involved, for example and now he is where he belongs, in jail. im interested in the things that happen in that soundless region, the one that is always right, which does not ever feel the need to glance at our gauche efforts to generalize, think things through, get a hold of (it).

so, speaking directly: i plan to pursue writing for a good 4-5 years, and then go for a phd, unless outside forces (eg success) intervene. but what kind of phd? i still dont have a definate answer but here's what i'm thinking: theres everything in the world, which is inaccessible to us, because our only tools for getting at this reality is our own human bodies -- imperfect to say the least. Break it down this way: the human body: psychology and anthropology; (an active) getting at: philosophy; everything: religion. I'm interested in the intersection of all these.

relatedly:

"The American writer, Eric Hoffer, described this syndrome nearly sixty years ago in a book that also generated a lot of zeal (for a short time, anyway), The True Believer. People convert quite easily, observed Hoffer; they switch from one ism to the next, from Catholicism to Marxism to whatever is next on the horizon. The belief system runs its course, then another one takes its place. What is significant is the energy involved, not the particular target, which could be anything, really. For what drives this engine is the need for psychological reassurance, for Meaning with a capital M–a comprehensive system of belief that explains everything. There is a feeling, largely unacknowledged, that without this we are lost; that life would have no purpose, and history no meaning; that both (as Shakespeare put it) would amount to little more than a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

and also:
“the world is not logical; it is psycho-logical.” - Goethe

~ tries to get me in media res -- I stare down the camera with the same intensity with which it stares me down (immovable, mechanical -- not a blink) -- the background is what changes. My time in china, for now, is almost (relatively) up. You'd think that i would have changed, but i was obsessed with a plan, which eventually, naturally, became two plans -- enough to crowd out the much of the background, really. Everyone knows that i think in big pictures, but this time I just dont see it. So i focus on variation -- the scale has been smaller, the language tonal, the beers milder. what else is there to say? I'm drawing a blank -- perhaps it'll all come up in the contrast, back in the states.


about non-interaction: ""The horror of stasis: to arrive at the empty inn, at the end of the adventure, and find your old self waiting for you". Ach, i'd rather not look.

1. huge classical music kick. Womderful tool for person-construction. Leads by the arm to new ground (funny because you own all of it), new flowers bloom spontaneously the moment you look down.

2. Andrew Bird, a beauty. The only kind of boy worth bothering about.

3. Is it too late to become an excellent runner? Quickness isnt in the family gene-set. To work at something youre naturally bad at? I hear the humility is a virtue..

HARDEN UP
Dont look back lest you turn into a pillar of salt. Ach it's my Lot to ruminate -- not my fault that I was born with my eyeballs turned inward. The dangers are out there, mostly -- need to be guarded against them. where my innocence comes from. Maladaptive == I dont care.


True I have no interest in histrionic travelogues written with the masturbatory hand, the other one on a KFC chicken club looking up at some foriegn mountains. But the few people who know my name mispronounce it, which is part of the task ive assigned them -- to denature the Self that has floated on this set of bones for far too long already, which has been run out and is exausted - to burn it down, provide nourishment for something new and fresh.

*
sitting next to another river drinking another serreptitious beer -- the spiritual equivalent of elevator music. ive never cared for simple pleasures once theyve revealed themselves as simple. the greatest satisfactions come out of struggle (fitz), and rationality has its place too if only to bootstrap you into something else.



NOTES
(a work in progress. why post it? because I'm lonely.)


If I'm to develop something new, ive got to be purposeful.

I see it clearly, though I dont know if you do. Every emotion is a shape with unique contours and hues. The concepts are late additions.

1. EMOTIONAL ALCHEMY, in every moment. always interact witht the things around you. Accept everything no matter how ugly and/or boring, and dont be scared. But simultaneously watch and learn.

metaphors/metonymy
the core, the string that accumulates crystals when the circumstances are right, the crystals that REFLECT reality, otherwise known as the human cerebral disease. Most metaphors/metonymy are derived from something solid. but now to:

2. USE WHAT'S UNEXPECTED (unexpected probably because it's useless), BUT STILL CLOSE TO SENSUAL REALITY -- for example: the color Yellow, the F note. And do not skip directly to common conceptual and physical mutually agreed upon reality. The F note doesnt sound like..a grain of sand...it sounds like something else that has no name and isnt present in physical reality, and then yet something else, and then...

How a new reality is created. flowers sprouting on the Dao..