The top of my head is bald, balding really. I keep my hair shorn, shaving it weekly or semi-weekly, depending on how motivated I am. It’s color is uninspiring, unmemorable, a dark blonde or brown. Maybe just brown; any trace of blonde has long since leeched away, and including it in my description is an aspiration to my past, a fragment of the boy I still remember myself to be, often catch myself thinking I am.
Archive for the ‘spiritual’ Category
Self-Portrait I: The Top of My Head
Sunday, May 22nd, 2011
Electric Prometheus, Patron Saint of the Epiphany
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011Confession
It is hard to speak out now
when so many believe the stories
and the grand exaggerations of my action
and my grudge against the gods
It is tough to move my tongue
against the weight of myth
stacked toward heaven in my image
but I must
I am not the hero you believe me to be
Nor am I justice or redemption
leading you out of darkness into understanding
torch of truth held proud and high
I am a thief
dirty hands and tangled hair
who stole through shadows and snatched the flame
because I was tired of being in the dark
///
I would like you to take a moment, to step aside from what you know, set down your preconceptions and your understanding of The Way Things Are and listen. What I am about to say is not true, it does not align with the things you have learned, it does not agree with the things that wiser men than me have written. It is a perversion, a blasphemy, a mutation and a possibility.
I have long been fascinated with Prometheus. In my youth as a poet he was an example of what I was trying to do: bring the light of fire through the written word. It was a noble goal, but I grew embarrassed of my youthful naivete and abandoned the idea, or perhaps more accurately, hid my light under a bushel, much to the devil’s delight. But despite my shame, I have never been able to let go of my fascination with the myth itself.
I was thinking about Prometheus the other day, thinking back to the people who conceived of him, who first uttered his name, gave him form and set him in motion, and I thought, blasphemously of course, what really brought fire to the fireless people? It was not a giant who stole fire from the gods, but an actual physical act. There are many answers since many people discovered fired independently of one another, but one of the answers is lightning. In that moment it struck me as the two fire-bringers, one actual and one mythological, conflated upon one another that the true symbol of Prometheus is lightning. Wait, you say, contravening my entreaty to put aside what you know, lightning can’t be the symbol of Prometheus, it’s already the weapon of Zeus! And you would be correct to correct me, but you can’t, we’re off the maps now, just outside the edges of what is, and tumbling merrily in what might be.
Let us continue our blaspheming, let us deepen our perversion and say instead that Zeus’s weapon of choice is not the lightning bolt, but the thunderbolt. It is a small but significant shift, as now we might recreate the myth, a translucent thing, a thin sheet of tissue paper, of connective tissue between our fireless ancestors and the world around them, a set of explanations that served as stories they might entertain and educate one another with. Let us lay that sheet of beliefs out across the stormy Greek sky and watch as the fire-thief escapes from heaven over and over again, shooting down from heaven cradling his stolen fire and occasionally pouring it out on the trees and the scrub. Then close your protesting mouth, remain silent and listen as the thunderbolts of Zeus follow after him, chasing him wherever he goes, the grumbling gods complaining that their power has been stolen and ferried illicitly to earth. Surely it is a blasphemy, but at the very least it is an elegant one.
Now let us hold this possibility in our hands, this delicate thing we’ve strung together from the soft tissue of half-truths and outright lies, and let us invert it from the possibility of an actual mythical root into the possibility metaphorical application. Let us take that actual lightning and compare it to something in the human condition that is like lightning. Let us take the twice-traitor Titan and make him Prometheus, saint of the epiphany, the lightning-like insight, the flash of realization and enlightenment, who in an instant illuminates what is possible, igniting our passions and setting fire to our minds. In this scenario Prometheus’ mythical ability to see the future isn’t the continuous ability of infallible prophecy, but the lightning quick insight of epiphany to know what is possible. This too, then, is a precious gift, another bit of divine loot that he’s laundered into our possession, the gift of fate and destiny, taking the power of the future out of the hands of the ever-so-capricious gods and giving it back to us in the form of realization of the possibility of our potential. It is ours, ultimately, to do with as we wish, since epiphany is not prophecy, it does not come about of its own accord, but requires the application of sustained effort to bring about. But epiphany is the beginning, the spark of something that might become a steady fire if tended to correctly. This is not Prometheus’ gift, but his brother’s, but we will speak of that blasphemy another time. For now let us content ourselves with the secret knowledge of Electric Prometheus, Titan of the Skies, and patron saint of the Epiphany.
The Dance of Broken Toys
Saturday, November 6th, 2010So much of this game is waiting now. So much of this writing is waiting. So much of this dance of broken toys is being willing to wait for the adults to go to bed and leave the house quiet and dark so the cowardly and the cautious are comfortable coming out.
I wish I knew what I wanted to say, rather than how I want to say it. I want to say it quietly, intimately, with whispers and gestures and long strips of silence. I want to examine the nuance of a sigh, to feel the delicate curve of marble become flesh beneath my fingers, and know the warmth of breath on rough skin of my hands.
I want to be subversive, but even saying that out loud (or whispering it quietly onto paper) seems cliché. I do not have the courage to be subversive, I do not have the guts to risk my life stealing fire and spend my days kissing eagles, waiting for Hercules to unbind me.
I know that I am close. I know that I am near the thing. I can, having walked this far into the trees, torch throwing shadows wildly in every direction, feel the beating heart of the beast, the heart of the forest, and realize suddenly that every thing I mistook for an individual, each tree I mistook for an entity is not at all, but a single reaching feeler of the earth on which I am walking, and that I am no more separate from that earth, though I would sever myself as often as possible, the soles of my shoes and the skin of the pavement and the carpet of my room keeping me from the luscious feel of earth against the soft bottoms of my feet.
I want to read the scriptures and understand them, I want to hear the leathery voice of god in the turning pages of the ancient books whose words we know but do not understand. I want to feel the warm desert wind and the awkward shapes of impossibly old words tumble like bones from upturned tomb.
And I wonder, sitting in the night long after I should be in bed, if I’ve missed my window, if every opportunity for revolution that I passed on to go home and read and write were single chances to break free of this shell that I have inhabited for so long, and that, having passed them by, having passed by exciting conversations and opportunities at interaction for evenings of study and isolation if there’s anything left or if that’s all passed now and the night is no longer interested in having me.
And I wonder if this is all an illusion, if this is just the product of a tired mind and too much television. Too many dreams coated in saccharine laugh track and a seductive soundtrack. The delirium of an addict in withdrawal from electrical stimulants that have for so long supported him.
I want an intention for my writing, I want an intention for my life. I want to cut deeply into the wood of this branch and shape the blunt end of this rod into the sharp end of a spear. I want to shove it deeply into the coals of the fire and harden the tip until it is an unbreakable obsidian blade. I want to dive into the sky, ride the lightning, enter heaven and plunge my weapon deeply into the skin of god and be overwhelmed by the ecstasy of knowing and being known, to drown in the pure current of information as it pours over me, dissolving the crude flesh that’s wrapped about the perfect soul I posses, but cannot access.
And then I wonder, one more time, because this is what I do when my belly’s full, stare at the sky wonder if I’ve got this all wrong, all backward, all fucked up and twisted, and the flesh is real and the soul is an illusion and all this searching the sky for answers is just a waste of precious energy.
And I know, I know the answers lie somewhere between the flesh and the spirit, that somewhere in the symbiosis of the two lies an answer, but probably not The Answer. And I keep poking this finger in the fabric of existence, like my tongue against the irritated flesh of my mouth, unable to keep from exploring the pain with a dedicated an academic manner, recording the sensations with a specificity and articulation that would make the most avid masochist proud. But what else is there to do, lying here with a belly full of food and eyes that seem made for staring into heaven, wondering if there’s a god?
I Am
Monday, August 16th, 2010To say, ‘I am,’ a whispered phrase in the darkness, half dream, half illusion, seems too bold a gesture to make, too audacious a motion to make in the glimmering of twilight, too dangerous a temptation to succumb to. To say, ‘I am,’ with certainty, standing surefooted and formidable against the desert wind, burning without being consumed. To say, ‘I am,’ thunderous against the sky, cracking the bowl of heaven. To say ‘I am’ and call down all the powers of reality in an instant seems too powerful, too painful, too potentially deadly to ever attempt.
I cannot imagine what it must be like to be something, to say, ‘I am.’ That is not true, exactly, not completely. I cannot imagine what it would be like to believe that I am anything with certainty, anything that I cannot feel or prove. The physical things, the flesh beneath my fingers, the bones beneath my flesh, these I cannot argue with, I cannot deceive or deconstruct. But beyond this, beyond the physical realities of the things within my vision, within my reach, it is difficult for me to reach out and hold on to them. I am a man, I am male, I am an adult, I am an artist, I am a connoisseur, I am a fan, I am a father, I am a son, brother, husband, lover. All of these things fluctuate, move and sway with their own internal momentum, contained in their strangely shaped crystal containers that purport to be definition, but whose meaning is liquid and sloshes and spills whenever I seek to drink.
I cannot say with any certainty that I am. Am what? I don’t know. I stand before myself a great mystery, a ghost in the fog unable to determine the lines of contrast between that which is me and that which surrounds me. I float from day to day seeking the rigidity of external constraints in order to somehow define myself, to give myself for the moment the illusion of definition, a fleeting sense of self, a temporary reflection in the heavy, awkward pieces of furniture I surround myself with in the hope of some semblance of shape. I am afraid that there is nothing here, that this spirit that has infested this flesh is nothing more than an accident, a mistake, an oversight on the part of some absent-minded deity who, in all her power, let slip some important piece of me and left me unfinished.
None of this is true to look at me. I have learned, in the way of my people, in the way of the shades and ghosts, to imitate the movements of the people around me, to move smoothly through the world without disturbing the flow of events or the feathers of gathered birds. I have learned to reflect the attitudes of the room, to throw back the colors and the frequencies of most crowds and almost every individual. It is not difficult to do, but it is nearly impossible to stop doing.
And so I float, the words ‘I am,’ burning my heart, my lungs, my throat, my tongue, my lips. I have not eaten this fire, but it consumes me nonetheless. I am. I am. I am.
I am.
Loki’s Veil
Monday, March 15th, 2010Loki’s Veil
03.15
In the beginning were the humans. They called themselves in a brutal, guttural tongue, simply ‘makers,’ We, hoping for more articulation, though possibly less meaning, might call them storytellers, myth-makers, but this in itself says too much, implies a level of fiction between what they said and what they believed, a level of fantasy in the things that they created, and this would not be accurate. There was no fiction in what they said, in the stories they told. They were not stories, they were explanations, they were truth, they were the science of the times, brought forth with eyes that saw very differently from ours.
//
There was also a man named Adam who felt like he never grew up. He was an adult, but he never felt like one. Adults were powerful human beings who could make great things happen without even trying and Adam tried everyday and couldn’t make anything happen. This is an exaggeration. Adam had made many great things happen, and yet he felt no pride in those things, took no responsibility or credit for them. They were the product of forces activated by his hands, but whose function or maintenance he was in no way responsible for. He was merely a first actor (and even that was questionable) he had merely tipped a domino and signed his name on the right line.
//
These humans were different than the rest of the animals that surrounded them, that slept with them and filled their bellies. They saw things that weren’t there and communicated their ideas with a surprising and efficient clarity. They had ideas. They had unlocked the magic of the symbol, first in words, then again in image. They carried water in pots and carried ideas in symbols. They encoded their ideas and carried them across long distances of space and time. Their ability to share ideas swiftly and efficiently separated the humans from the other animals, and this confused the humans. They had simple questions about their separation, and they answered them with stories, weaving a fabric of continuity across perceived gaps in their understanding.
//
Adam had questions as well. He came up with stories to answer these questions, and he wrote these stories down, but none of them were ever good enough. None of them ever had the weight of Truth. None of them ever seemed to contain the presence of God, which was another way of saying the weight of Truth. His ideas seemed like poor reflections of other ideas that other people had already had and written down and expressed more efficiently, more clearly and more succinctly. More than that, his ideas never seemed worth sharing, barely seemed worth writing down, worth capturing in one of the myriad symbolic containers that the humans had developed in order to share their ideas, both efficiently and inefficiently; directly and indirectly.
//
The humans knew that they were set apart, that the other animals were not as efficient at sharing their ideas (if they had them) as the humans were. They had unlocked, however accidentally or purposefully, a facility for the use representation and reflection. This tool, the use of symbols to capture ideas, the exhaust of the conscious mind, its reflections and representations of external stimuli, transformed the world in which they lived. They pointed their symbol-maker at the sky and reflected themselves into the sky, creating a sky god. They pointed their symbol maker at the earth and reflected themselves at the earth, creating and earth god. They pointed their symbol-maker at the animals, reflecting themselves in the animals and created animal gods. They pointed their symbol maker at the weather and reflected themselves in the weather and created weather gods.
//
Adam was no different than these humans. He reflected himself in the world around him, only there was more world to reflect upon, a wider surface in which to be reflected, more things to be confused by and make sense of, less truth to help make sense of it. Adam reflected himself in the world through his symbol-maker (now so deeply embedded in his consciousness that it was no longer recognizable as a piece of foreign technology; so long a part of him that he did not know what it was like to live without it, could not understand himself as the cyborg that he was) with more and less understanding than his predecessors did, those unnamed humans who had created the first symbols in different places around the world. He did it with the understanding that he did it, but with no power to control the consequences of doing it. Doing it made him powerless in reflection of the way that it made his unnamed ancestors powerful.
//
The humans made these reflections to give themselves efficacy in the world, to give them tools to feel they had some control over the events that surrounded them: the sky, the earth the animals and the weather. This power was based, however crudely, on the separation of the self from the world, and the most advanced civilizations were the ones who could most purely separate themselves from that world and inject themselves into the realm of thought and idea, cleanly delineating themselves from the world around them, the way that a man taking a picture at his son’s graduation is no longer a part of the celebration, but has distanced himself from the event through the act of observation and the physical symbol of the camera. The concept of representation allowed these humans to distance themselves from the world, even for a moment and within that distance find a piece of themselves, for better and for worse, creating a world in which the identity was more clearly defined, but whose definition is based on its separation from the world around it, a world that might give it weight, balance, sense and nourishment were it still connected.
//
And now Adam is trapped in that vision of himself, unable to escape what his ancestors fought so hard to establish: the identity of the individual. He is a grotesque mockery of being-ness, taught to worship the individual, the ego. He is caught in the cycle of wondering what that identity is, how it is formed, what its principles are, unable to form one for fear that it might be the wrong one, founded on faulty principles, but trapped in a world wherein examination of all the possible principles is impossible. He has no god, which is equivalent to saying that he has no truth. He has distanced himself from the YHWH of his youth, the jealous and judgmental panopticon that plagues him to this day, whose presence he cannot shake, whose judgment is constant, thorough and damning. He wants to worship the goddess, an old creation, renewed by a small group of unstable pagans whose only advantage over the painful concreteness of YHWH is her formlessness, which is not much to lean on in times of crisis and depression.
//
These humans and their symbols unleashed a powerful magic into the world, one that has created a world that they could never have imagined. The power and efficiency of their symbols created a fabric of infinitely fine mesh, let us call it Loki’s net, that draped itself in a veil, Loki’s veil, across their faces changing the way that they saw the world, changing the way they interpreted their data, so that a thing was no longer a thing, but a thing and its significance, whatever that significance may be. And its significance was beautiful and it was terrible and from this other body, from this thing behind the veil sprang all the could and ever would be. In draping themselves in Loki’s veil they unleashed (Uncovered? Discovered? Revealed?) a world of relativity in which the truth, if it ever existed would be lost forever.
//
This is the world that Adam lives in, a world whose truth of existence is nearly lost. His veil of infinitely fine mesh, a birthright impossible to refuse,
has not changed, but the world behind it has, growing thick with meaning attached to things so that his world is a covered in a thick layer of electromagnetic resonance that buzzes and hums around everything he comes in contact with, so that the thing itself is obscured, nearly meaningless and its symbolic significance is almost all he can see. This symbolic sensitivity, which he has honed, consciously and unconsciously, has become debilitating. It is an asset when used to navigate the reefs of symbolic shit that have polluted his process of existence within the oceans of information that comprise much of his livelihood and identity. But beyond that world of information, sounds, images, symbols, this sensitivity unbalances him, keeping him from understanding the true value of the thing beneath the thing, himself, his talents and understanding, his family. He cannot find solid ground on which to plant his feet, he cannot rest on any idea for the Understanding Function that he has created within himself dissolves all ideas down to their basic pieces, consuming both the gossamer and the dross that held them together, leaving nothing interesting or shiny behind.
The crux of this is that nothing in his world is holy, nothing, no idea or concept (and it is, at its heart, all ideas and concepts, since Loki’s veil is the only way that he can navigate the world) can resist the corrosive influence of his Understanding Function, and at the heart of holiness is mystery. If, as he sometimes speculates, deep in the hole of the depression created by a world that is neither holy nor happy, there was at some time an ability to connect with something beyond this world of ideas and the physical objects they overlay, some third thing that might be represented by a human soul, a small piece of holiness overlaid upon our physical bodies that might be a chip from some larger cosmic soul that might be called, for lack of a more articulate nomenclature, God, he thinks that he is no longer capable of this connection, that his ancestors who wove this veil for him likely took for granted. If, he hypothesizes, there were a great mystery out there, a spiritual singularity wherein all understanding and knowledge were crushed the awesome force of the gravity within the hole, and only the spirit left to coalesce in the darkness, like dust from a pile of old bones, left to convene in silence with the great and wonderful mystery, he does not know of its existence, he cannot feel it beyond the numbness of the veil.
Adam is tired of trying to find this connection, hoping that it exists and failing to find it; hoping that by some unspecified regimen of self-discipline and regulated deprivation he will find a path to this God (that might also be called Truth) and finally have a place to stand that does not slip or slide, that does not succumb to the vision of Loki’s veil, that is not vulnerable to the Understanding Function, a place on which he can finally rest, knowing in his heart, in his soul that this one thing, this one place is safe and unassailable, knowing that from here he can stand, having rested, and start again.