Month: March 2013

  • under the covers

    Writing is easy. It is about truth.

    I tried to fall asleep but I could not because I did not know what a woman is.

    Sleepy eyes. My eyes are droopy. They cannot see the truth anymore and they do not know if there was a truth to see. Are my eyes closed or did the world disappear?

    Writing is easy. It is about the truth.

    The truth is that people are miserable. Boredom. Hope. Pain. The future, the past. The eyes of others.

    More than anything a bureaucracy will make you bored. That is its true victory. It does not frustrate you so much as it lulls you to sleep; it makes you believe there is not even a world out there to interact with, to engage. We thus wander the streets believing ourselves to not be in conflict; and thus we lose the conflict.

    Is society different? So many people, living lives of mimicry, subtly believing that we must be progressing. They do not know that each life starts all over again, has its own responsibility to be alive. No one believes that. So what does it mean?

    Sex. Let our bodies collide. Then we will make money and have each other and grow sad as we grow old but before then we will be able to float through the moderate pleasures of life and grin as we have forgotten anything else that was worth fighting for. Many people do not believe me when I say I will never be an adult.

    Whenever people fall apart I think, why didn’t they fight? Why didn’t they fight to keep it going, to make it right? Why didn’t they try their hardest to let the other person know they love them? What could be more important to them? Than loving others?

    You think you are writing about the truth but you are not. Each life is directed by a flow of actuality, the under-the-water mechanics of a soul, and we can only find it if we ask for it again and again, falling to our knees in darkened rooms, screaming in whispers, asking something we do not know to reveal it to us.

    I feel like I’ve lost a lot. Maybe if I had had more time to study I would be making a bigger impact on people? That’s probably a lie. Why haven’t I done more with what I have? Perhaps because I feel pulled in many different directions.

    At work: ‘The worst part about thinking about what is keeping you from getting what you want is when you realize it’s that you don’t even know what it is.’

    I am wailed at all day long. He called it ‘noise’. Oh, these voices. They crush me into inactivity. They tell me more was possible with one person, they call the life of another a waste of time. Then they curse me for thinking about others in this way; they say ‘follow anyone long enough, and you would see a soul there’. They think about all of life and I stare wide-eyed, paralyzed. They wonder if other people really think what they are after is good, the good. So much stretching, so much strain. If only I had stayed funny, stayed upbeat. What people believe matters for what they will hope in; what they will hope in for what they will create.

    What is the right reason to marry? Because of being known? Or just someone to try really hard with, to love? Because you want them around you a lot? How does it work?

    I thought of a scene earlier of a girl and a guy together. The girl looked to the guy and said ‘Describe your perfect girl’. And he would describe her and then she would say: ‘I’m not her’. Then the girl would describe her perfect guy and he would say: ‘I’m not him’. Then they would hug and decide to love each other and not expect the other person to change, to not judge them by what they were not, to know they are in line to love a real out-there-in-the-world, their-own-thinking-and-deciding person, and that we are only haunted by spectres of perfection, but we are instead given so much more.

    You are not your potential or your thoughts or your past. You are your time; spend it creating, living, trying. Do not spend it in death, in lying around and feeling the pain of lost things.

    I thought of everything, I thought of Max scenes, but mostly I thought ‘what is a woman?’

    I had been drifting off to sleep, perhaps getting tireder, when suddenly it struck me: I am going to die.

    My eyes burst wide awake.

  • the first snow of spring

    If you are not ready to write, you know it is time to do so.

    Planned pleasures aren’t pleasures. Your life is good as much as you lose track of the time.

    How terrible that the more truth a moment has, the more we are crushed into non-expression.

    Every sentence that starts with ‘I remember’ is at least that much painful.

    The most important moment in a relationship is the one where you start the chapter entitled Humor.

    You demonize people in your mind when they do not give you what you want.

    Sentences: the only true confidants.

    Depression is the greatest crime in a society that values happiness.

    Conversational Existentialism: being willing to surprise yourself with your own comments.

    The opposite of loneliness is not being known – it is being loved.

    Aging: the losing of one’s faith in the ability of words to connect people.

    I was lost and alone and I thought about calling you, but then I realized that I was actually lost and alone, and that there was no one to call.

  • The sadness of the word ‘eventually’

    She was hurt and felt unknown so she said ‘I will go among other people, I will drown myself in new faces, new words, new feelings.’ So we she went to a club and fell in with a new crowd of people and did just that. She did forget all about him. And none of them knew that was why she was around them, and eventually she didn’t either. The causes of the world had disappeared.

    People write because it’s painful to not get what you want. 
    But I realized something recently. I realized it’s not just not getting what you want. It’s realizing, looking back, that you were never going to get what you want. That there’s a causal structure to the world that you couldn’t have predicted, that you had no idea about, and then you wanted something you could not get out of your naivete. You were blind and walking into a burning barn. We are not just sad we did not get what we wanted. We are sad that we are fools, condemned to live foolish lives, dreaming dreams that could never be.
     
    If our private self were actually public no one would be able to keep up with it. When we were brimming with joy they would see that, and then at night if we delved into an unassailable misery, they would see that too. The next day we would be brimming with hope again. People would be so confused, they would ask ‘why? why did it change so?’ but we would have no answer for them. We hardly know our own explanations; we just let what happens happen. It is undeniable that it is happening; it is us. We feel many things and adjust to the fact that the feeling is real. But others must understand, must know why you are changing. For them it is a question; the fact seems unreal until the question is answered. For us the question may come later or not at all.  It is a good thing that we can keep our life private, if only for the sake of seeming to make sense. Do I seem stable to you? Good, there is some hope to the tool of trickery. We may recover from that pit we fell into yet.

    I want the truth. I want to know the truth and to live in the truth. I know I will never know the truth. I want something I cannot have. Yet I define my life in relation to the desire and pursuit of it. I define my life by something I know I will not get. What can be said for this paradox? Anything? What should direct our desires? Just what we can get?

    You are tired; yet you must go on. We always imagine ourselves at our best. ‘Then people will see who I really am, what I’m really made of,’ we think.  But the time never comes when we are excellent. Eventually it’s the case that this is who you are. One of the externals we must deal with is never feeling up to it, never having everything be right, never being totally ready; we must be before we are ready. Who you are is by definition who you are before you are.  
  • Mr. Turtle is my father

    Yesterday afternoon I had just stepped into a musty basement full of cardboard boxes when I froze in my tracks and grew eyes as wide as eggs: I had just realized that two conversations I had had four months apart had almost the exact same structure.

    The first one happened in the fall when I answered the phone at our restaurant. I noticed that the area code was 614 (the area code for Columbus) and since I was having a mediocre shift I decided to ask what high school they had gone to, which is something I had never done before.  

    Philip: Oh, so what high school did you go to?

    Girl: I went to Bexley.

    Philip: Did you play soccer?

    Girl: Yeah actually I did.

    Philip: Oh, so you know Mr. Dempsey.

    Girl: That’s my dad.

    Even though he coached soccer in Bexley Mr. Dempsey was a history teacher in Hilliard where he was my European history teacher my junior year of high school. So the first time I had ever decided to ask an ol’ 614 where they were from, they turned out to be one of my teacher’s daughters. And I gave her an inside joke to carry on. (I said I still didn’t have his 100 Most Influential People of All Time book, which he had lying around in his classroom and I read during class. When it disappeared he blamed me because he claimed I was the only one who ever read it. It turned up later.)

    A few months later I became fascinated with the word Tucson on a shift and started saying it Tuck-son over and over again.  My manager heard me and said that his parents had retired and were currently in Tucson on vacation.

    Philip: Oh. What did your parents do?

    Eric: Well my mom was an administrative assistant in Dublin, and my dad designed and taught an industrial mechanics course in Hilliard.

    Philip: Industrial mechanics. Wow. What did he do, build atomic bombs?

    Eric: No, that just means shoppe class.

    Philip: Oh. Ok. Yeah, let’s see…I had Mr. Estell for shoppe class in 7th grade.

    Eric: That’s my father.

    (long pause as my startled brain assembled reality)

    Eric: My last name’s Estell…

    These conversation happened pretty far apart, so you can understand that it took my mind a few weeks to process it. But you can also see why I froze in that basement and grew eyes as wide as eggs. Both of these conversations happened at work, were about a teacher I had had, and ended with the punchline that they were the father of the person I was talking to. 

    To draw out the surprise I felt in these situations I was going to compare it to when Mary Jane kissed Peter Parker and realized he might be spiderman at the end of the first movie….but there are some important differences there.

    Coincidentally, I was just on facebook where a former xangan had posted a picture of a man from the 19th century with a huge white beard. She said it was Brahms and I said it looked like Tolstoy. A few minutes went by and then at almost the exact same second we both commented saying ‘No it’s DARWIN!!’  (Not those exact words…but we had the same conclusion.)

    The storal of this mory is that it’s really exciting to put two matching thoughts together. 

  • Tomorrowland

    Why does life have to be so big?

    Why do these little units of life – moments – have to build up over time into things so towering?

    A moment always seems innocent. It is just a moment. But they build and they build and the build. Soon you are overwhelmed at the picture they form. A huge picture of a person or a nation or a war – or biggest of all – a life.  And at the heart of it is just this little thing, a moment.  

    They welcome you as a mesmerizing light, an enchanting finger beckoning us through the dark.  We follow. We capture it. But as soon as we do, we find it reappears a few feet away. We follow again. Soon we are lost in the caverns, but it leads us up to a cliff and we see the juncture where we started, and in the tangled maze surrounding thousands of other waving fingers, flickering in the dark.  

    Just a moment. A small moment. Every hero and every villain once a child. Just a child.  

    Growth. We peg so much of our lives under the header of ‘growth’. But this is just newspeak for time and people we have lost.  For the tragedy of unpredictable misconceptions we had. For the fact that the world not only surrounds us, but it has us surrounded. It is a word that masks under a terry cloth the pain of childhood.  

    The pain is assumed, and we know if we looked at it head on we would wilt. So instead we nod and look into the fire and say ‘I grew a lot in that time’.     

    It’s so big. 

    There’s always an emotion you couldn’t know you’d have to work through. An emotion is not even a stable thing. Each emotion, just when you think you have it down, changes when you go to a new place. Every emotion is one cause with many effects; each effect comes out when combined with a new place in your life.  And as you pick up more and more emotions, they each pick up new effects, until the point when you go places you do not even know what you are feeling. All you know is you are feeling so much.

    It is so big; Augustine, you were right! 

    Every personality has a hidden philosophy underlying it. Between all their scenes, their beliefs about goodness will come out here, a certain emotion there, an understanding of what causes what in the world in another place – but connecting all these will be a very specific idea. And only that person knows that idea. But they do not even know they know it; it is the natural intuition about life that each person has, so very different from every other, so very much thinking it is right, and yet so very much just one option among countless others. And between all that goes into it, the undefinable intuition at the heart of it, and the element of openness, of choice to the world, there is no way of knowing what will happen.  

    I may think it is a good thing to make another person laugh, but only under certain circumstances. If I am on one of my reading days, maybe I will think it is not right to make someone laugh. It did not have to be this way; I could very well be a person who thinks reading days require the most laughter of all. Thus my personality is woven with this stitch, and it will inform my actions, but the stitch is invisible, and it does not even have a necessary logic to it. Such is the randomness that composes humans! And yet we all believe its foundation sure. When we feel suddenly drawn to do an action, when we feel it is the thing for us to do, we think “but of course! It could not be any other way!”

    So many millions of stitches, so unnecessary their nature, so invisible they are to our daily eyes.  
     
    And yet when they all come together between two people, they form a moment, an innocent creature, a solitary flower in a field; it never tells them all that went into it, or all that will come of it.  We live on top of an invisible mountain, the past, and before an invisible wilderness, the future, seeing something so small, save for the flashes of time when we see it all and think, it is too big, it is too much. 
     
    Too much for me.
  • She’d be so proud

    I didn’t tell you because I wanted affirmation that what I felt was real. I was only afraid that what I felt was different.

    The truth: we know we lost that long ago. But if only we were each masked in the same delusion! Now we have not only lost the truth, we have lost each other.

    Squinting eyes on highway drives; the electric currents between the contradictions in our lives.

    For what are our bodies if not the lightning between the poles of a contradiction? A man who boasts he is free of contradictions is the biggest contradiction of all: a man who claims self-knowledge and has none.

    Rampant divorce is sad and affects you too. How do you go on knowing ‘Relationships work, unless you try really hard at them’?

    We leave each other’s houses; we put a cap on our love for others. You will always be a being of moderate love.

    I suspect there is a sadness that lies in your silences of which you never speak.

    We are creatures with a limitless ability to desire but a limited ability to acquire; our hearts are bigger than the world they were born into. A planet of suffering!

    Only so much fits inside my small body. No words fit in it at all. They continue to do autopsies to try to find where the words are in a person; they haven’t found them yet.

    A word is so very different than a face. I see a face and it could say anything; nothing lies like skin. The most obvious part of you tells the most lies. What am I to do now? We cannot even fit the contradictions we are into sentences; we are a current that stretches between so many places, and a sentence is a mere point in the field.

    We have unlearned intimacy and are unable to learn that is could never be relearned.

    The world’s deepest suffering is beyond inference, for to be beyond inference is the greatest suffering.

    I believe in monogamy because a story is only good the first time you tell it.

    Death is the quietest thing; it creeps slowly down the corridor, never making a noise. We are the things that make all the noise; the air all around us is a speaker system of meaning and souls and sounds. Death is the smallest moment, not even a moment at all, but a smaller event that occurs between moments. Death has no meaning, it is the taking of the thing that can see meaning. We put a name to a blank spot. Life is the place where all our questions lie; death merely keeps us from going on asking them. Take interest in what is, not in what is not.

    Squinting eyes on the highway home; am I not here, where I am alone? But here lies contradiction, for I tell myself ‘I am me! I’m alive! I am free!’ but I shout from within a life of mimicry.

    When I’m by myself I can be myself!

    They could only see my freedom; I could only see my slavery.

    All those places you’ve left far behind,
    but you cannot erase it was what you did at the time.

    ‘How are you?’ they could ask. But I left my heart on a front porch three days ago in a talk about PTSD. What can I say? Just because I’m smiling doesn’t mean I am not living in a cloud of failure? I feel no pull to normalcy? That our only real hope is to make each other laugh?

    I can tell who you are. We never walk quite as fast after a heart break.

    When we’re all together I want to say ‘OK, stop. We’re talking about subject X, but should we be talking about subject X? Let’s all state what our goals are for this interaction. Also rate how important your goal is to you. Then we’ll compare all the goals and see what subject for conversation would satisfy the most goals. Then we will be maximizing what we all want.’ But that never happens because no one talks about that. It is not anyone’s goal to talk like that. So I can only guess at what others want. 

    Maybe you’ll be fine that you don’t mean that much, that humans can’t mean that much to each other; but some day you’ll find a person that will make you sad about it.

    To be a finite thing is merely to give up everything.

    I saw a picture of thousands of people at a wake in Karachi the other day and I thought, ‘If I were there, I would be so alone and afraid and think ‘AHHHHH I don’t make sense to anyone!”

    If I went to Karachi, of course it would be that scary. But I walked into a house on Saturday here in Columbus and there were quite a few people there and I thought the same thing. 

    Midnight walks in the snow. Long afternoons singing together. Jumping fences to backyard bonfires. Long hours drinking coffee on the porch. Light filtering through the blinds onto the pages. Grocery store adventures. Friends moving to farms. Shouting matches over chick flicks. Scrambled eggs and hope for the future. Walks at 6 AM. Vicarious snow days with the little brother. Coffee and more coffee. A feeling the word redemption means something. First crossword ever with a friend after they get off work. Throwing french fries in a rainy alley. Balancing oreos from our foreheads to our mouths. Sharing food, sharing life; staying up late in bank-vault darkness. The feeling I’m far ahead and far behind; that I’m full of everything and full of nothing. That’s there’s something to keeping going. 

    None of this feels like what was in the car with me on the highway.

    I think about people. Scratching on thoughts like they are glass boxes. How do our minds even do that? How do we pixelate people? How did I get your nose right in my thoughts? Do I get it right? But our noses lie anyways; our bodies lie, our words try their best. A thought of you never tells the truth; don’t form beliefs based on anything that can’t talk back at you.

    Life gets bigger and bigger but our heads stay the same size. Bodies are liars.

    To be a finite thing is merely to give up everything.

    but maybe it’s worth it.

  • Flickering

    I love my little brother. He had a snow day today and I’m here. I’m here because the power at my house went out around midnight last night.

     

    I was staring at my bed (practically in the dark) and thinking, ‘Yeah, I can do this. This could be fun….wrapped in my blankets as my only defense against the cold, in a bleak house without power.’ About two seconds of contemplation later I realized: ‘NOPE. Going to my parents.’

     

    So I drove on highways 25 mph home to my house.  Even 25 mph was fast and my car started losing control. I don’t know why I was trying to push it.  So I went 20 mph but it was ok because I was listening to Sufjan.

     

    When I got home my dad opened the door(even though it was almost 1 AM) before I even got to it. Here is the conversation that happened as I came in, put my laundry basket down, and got a drink ready.

     

    Dad: Why are you here?

     

    Philip: Power’s out.

     

    Dad: No it’s not.

     

    Philip: …..not here, dad. 

     

    Dad: Oh. Why is it out?  

     

    Philip: Dad…..it’s because of the snowstorm.

     

    Dad: I don’t see why that should matter.

     

    Philip: Dad, it’s a huge freaking snowstorm. Storms knock out power.

     

    Dad: All those times we were in Buffalo and there were snowstorms the power stayed on.  Where are you coming from?

     

    Philip: ….my house.

     

    Dad: Oh, I didn’t know.

     

    Philip: Where would I be coming from?

     

    Dad: I don’t know. I thought you might have been on High Street and then decided to come home when the power went out.

     

    (I drink my drink. Time goes by.)

     

    Philip: I wonder if Paul will have school.

     

    Dad: Why?

     

    Philip: We’re going to go through this again?

     

    Dad: It’s just a little snow. I don’t see why everyone is making such a big deal out of it.

     


    Chesterton said chess players go mad, not poets.  My dad stays up late playing chess online.


    He also grew up in Buffalo. That’s probably another part of it.

  • Your mind it spins the wheel

    What do you see, standing on the hill? I see a thousand moons. You do, I asked. I was not about to tell her that a star was not a moon.

    Where you going pardner? To stirrup some trouble?

    Your future’s a machine, with the mechanics of a dream!

    The world is straightforward: there it is. Wherever you go you see a new thing and think ‘there that is’. That’s all. Wherever you go, a new ‘there that is’. See. Everything in its place.

    And yet his dying words were still ‘I have no idea what just happened’. I heard him and said ‘There that is’.

    My friend Will told me tonight (and he said I could believe him because he had written it in his phone; I was going to believe him anyway) that he no longer believes in radical change. I pointed out that was quite a change from before for him.

    Our angel of joy.

    They found a soul in an archaeological dig, from the infancy of humanity when Plato was our dad. We marveled at it and thought ‘Wow’ and now it’s on display. Here it is: a soul, as people used to have them. We found it in the dirt, fitting enough!

    I don’t believe in free will anymore, but I can hardly be blamed for that.

    Song lyrics never have semi-colons. This is another way of saying I’ve never written a song.

    Now we sit in biology classrooms and learn about the millions (billions? – either one: I’ll never count to check) of cells in us, and the billions of bacteria living on us, and the blood rushing all over us, and all the things our organs do. But when we walk out of the biology classroom we forget all that and keep on thinking it’s just people’s faces, what they’re wearing, and their words. We don’t imagine the world correctly, like how everyone uses the word ‘love’ and ‘death’ but they never mean them. We think about them in church, or reading poetry, or late at night, but then we go out into the world and forget them, just like how we stop thinking about having organs.

    The old man on the hospital bed rang the buzzer and the attendant came and said ‘What, what’s wrong?’

    ‘My medicine.’

    ‘Yes, the words, they’re right here in this can.’

    ‘That can doesn’t have a bottom. The words have spilled all over the floor.’

    ‘So it doesn’t,’ she said, looking at the words spilled all over the floor. The man had been checked into hospital because he had lost all his meaning. She was about to pick them up when she saw in the mess of spilled words ‘let me die’ spelled out across part of the floor. She looked at him; he stared straight ahead, perhaps thinking nothing. Then she looked over at the can with no bottom.

    I took my daughter to the movies and she would stand up and point at the screen when the bad guy appeared and say ‘Do you see him? Do you see him, daddy?’ I do, I said. I see him. What’s that guy’s problem? Why’s he so mean? ‘Because he’s bad, daddy. He’s a bad man.’

    Look at that headless man! That man has no head and he is running around looking for a fire. These skyscrapers will fall on him before he realizes he’s lost his dignity!

    Someday you’ll realize you’ll always be in your childhood.

    He met me on the hill and asked me ‘Where are you going?’

    I was breathing heavy. ‘Show me,’ he said, ‘show me what can’t be redeemed’.

    I felt nervous before the master. What does pain mean to him? Pain is nothing, he is everything! I must be crazy!

    I led him down the hill and to a nearby village. We walked into a house and I led him to a room and I said ‘in here’. I hit the light switch as we walked into the room. Nothing happened. We stood there in the dark and I thought he would ask ‘what?’ but he didn’t. After a long silence he burst into tears. Like tears from a man with no meaning. He will wake up the whole village, I thought, as a single tear fell down my cheek.

    I was not meant to be opaque. The more opaque I am the more I mean nothing; and thus, the more opaque I am, the more transparent I am, a man without substance. If you ever feel me to be perfectly opaque you will know everything about me. Your words will flow through me like a can with no bottom.

    When she is of age I will not swing her around the room anymore, but I will hope that I will have taught her that the look in my eyes will always mean that, will always be swinging her around the room, my beautiful princess who sees in the sky a thousand moons.

    You can say anything you want because sentences are just sentences. You can say the lilypad won the rocket contest, or babysitting is racist, or I love you, or why doesn’t dancing sit down?

    She said ‘I love it when people in my life come together, I think it’s the greatest’ and she flitted across the bar to tell them we were going outside. I stood by the bar and looked at a man sitting at the shortest table in the bar. He was old and wore a golf cap and dark clothing with a bright red tie. He might have been a scholar. His dining companion was a younger woman, though she was still middle aged. I looked at him and thought about life, about his life. The crisis everyone is slowly and dreamily in consists of the question ‘will I be loved?’ Maturity, I thought, means moving from that question to the question ‘will I love?’ as being your primary question. I wondered if he had done it. Had he realized the default egoism of the soul? Had he questioned it, had he cried about through the years? Does he love that woman? Is this a new hope for him? Does he think about what his body is, even when he’s not in a biology lab? Does he think about the weight of his words; did he have a daughter who bottled up his words, filled her soul and her life? Had he loved?

    ‘The feeling I get during the last episode of Band of Brothers is perhaps the best feeling I’ve ever felt. Except for maybe the feeling I get at the end of Return of the Jedi. And that makes sense. Let’s face it, the Empire was way worse than Hitler.’

    Go to sleep thinking, ‘I’ll remember in the morning. This is important. I’ll remember…’

    I am going to make a big city park where the walkway around it is one big board game you can play.

    ‘You never stop learning,’ he assured me. Coming from him, the lord of everything, I thought ‘this world is so much different than I imagined’.

    Everything is a surprise.

    Women most of all. Every time I look at a girl, I am surprised. There is something so very surprising about them. I wonder at them, I want to follow them to see what they do, where they go, I think about them and think they make no sense, but in a way that reveals that not making sense is the only thing that makes sense.

    No one visits there anymore. It is too complicated. It is too earthy. It is a place where people would have to love each other. Sometimes I go there alone, but there is no one there, so I never stay for very long.

    I imagine her standing in a doorway. For some reason I got caught up in everything and forgot. The story of your life happens in half a second; you’ll smell something, someone will use a particular word, you’ll accidentally tilt your head a certain way, and everything will be clear. My daughter will be standing in the doorway and I’ll remember that I had not made her beauty real to her. What else is there to do? There are these people around us, in this ‘I don’t know what just happened’ world, there are these people around us, and what are you going to do? Tell her she’s beautiful, right? What have you been doing? Or are you going to let her walk into a dark room? What are these words we use? Do not just tell her she’s beautiful; decorate her room with a thousand moons.

    Sometimes I think about that but then I realize that none of it really matters.

    Because I’m never going to have a daughter.

  • Sleep, not rest

    Sitting on the couch, having finished The Fall section of American Pastoral, I started thinking about things. But I also grew drowsy. I was slumped with my feet on the coffee table. I knew I should move on to bed. I have gotten used to death, I thought. Death being hopeless thoughts, death being not being able to finish things. For I was going to bed with a familiar theme in my heart: I had not finished the day; the day had finished me.