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| august 2002 |
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| In the Last | 2:24am saturday, 31st august |
In the blur
In the still
In the dark
In the light
Dream to where you are
In the flight
In the swim
In the reach
In the pull
Struggle, fail and fall
In the now
In the then
In the here
In the far
Look and see your star
In the climb
In the stand
In the first
In the last
Triumph in the call
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| Belief | 1:47am friday, 30th august |
I believe in God, and this is a piece of that:
I think everyone has things in his or her past they would like never to have happened, things so secret that we keep them even from ourselves, sometimes. (I think that's called "repression", that last thing.) It disturbs us, the things we never thought we'd lower ourselves into performing, these acts we will never share with anyone. Not anyone. Sometimes, I believe, these things keep us from loving our own selves (and sometimes within that sometimes, that fact itself is hidden from us). I imagine, though, an invisible Entity above us, unseen by us (that we can never truly know to Its full extent) an Entity that has seen and, in fact, always sees, all those deep, dark things — all that is locked up in the cellars of our consciousness. And moreover, this Entity, with an eye on those evil (yes, evil) things we have done, can look us in the eye and say in all honesty, "I love you." Not that It loves or likes those things we have done, but loves us in spite of them, that loves us just because we are us.
I think I must love some Being like this, which I need not name, this Entity that accepts us perhaps more than we accept ourselves. If in no other way, now that I know this thing about It, that I would love It in secret, with the rest of my secrets, shared with no one.
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| Words from Where? | 2:29am thursday, 29th august |
The following text goes along with these words, as what the Jesus cartoon in my head had me write down — except the following happened to me just yesterday, as I was coming home from work on the train:
Dream.
Live on, my warrior, the time is yet to come.
Try. Succeed. You will dream less than you succeed.
Unknown, you will know. Known, you will forget.
Trouble, and you will remember.
You will live. You are saved.
Amen.
Like I have said before, the madness doesn't quite completely go away. Ever.
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| Why Anything? | 1:58am wednesday, 28th august |
Why is there something instead of nothing? I dunno, I've been thinking about this.... For those who believe in God, you may answer me that there is something because in the beginning, there was God, and maybe you stop at that point. But then, I ask, why is there a God, instead of no God? It's the same question, located in a different position within the idea's space. For brief instances, I can imagine that there is nothing: that there never was, is, or would be anything in existence, period. It's a heady and frightening imagination. Really, though, there doesn't seem to be any real reason for it, why there are things everywhere. There is no necessity in it, not as far as I can see. There doesn't need to be being, at all.
The mystics may be onto something (going back to God), when they say that God doesn't exist, per se, not in the way that one would normally view something as being there. One way of referring to Him is that He is Nothing. Yes, I too have a tough time seeing things this way. Perhaps it is a way of saying that perhaps God exists outside of that whole existence/nonexistence duality that we, as mere mortals, are used to in our everyday lives. So perhaps what I discounted at the beginning really does hold: there are things because, in the beginning, there was God. Except that that "was" is technically incorrect. (And I think I need God to be "there" to make this solution work, at least in my own head.)
Before there was time, then, there was not anything, but there also was not not — and it could not be said that something "was not" just as much as it could not be said that something "was". Hm. I think we have entered the spirit realm, without realizing it.
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| Madness, Madness | 2:32am tuesday, 27th august |
The last of this number, once again, from about here in the story of my first madness:
def. beyond: the magnitude of the wonder of change.
def. holy (good): grace in giving, giving in grace.
Ender is the delicate God, a good guy. God is Holy Shit! Love is the Plan.
What is schizophrenia? Relax.
Love is logic, frail is truth. God, the Son, Christ, is the Apollo.
The side of day won over the side of night.
Love built nil.
Happening during one of my "God" delusion periods — Ender (which is a name I get from the book Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card) would be a reference to myself at that time.
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| Behold | 1:40am monday, 26th august |
Behold: I have mixed fire and water, and prophesied:
We each of us have two futures ahead of where we are, two ends:
Some walk far from the one and return, some too late understand.
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| Epiphany's Edge | 1:57am saturday, 24th august |
I seem always just on the verge of epiphany. At the foothills of something big. I seem that I never get there, to the still point of inspiration, that it is a mirage that keeps its distance however far I walk toward it. And I don't know, either, what it is exactly that I am searching for — it's one of those things that I would know it when and if I have it, but not before. They say that anticipation is sometimes better than the thing itself, but this has been going on for a couple years now; let me be disappointed, then, and give me an anticlimax... something... whatever: I'm left hanging here. I seem only to be getting visions piecemeal, a bit at a time, and I cannot make out what the grand scheme of any of them are. I am a jumble of half solved equations trying to work themselves out.
I dream of it: that one day, I will be struck by it out of the blue. I feel like I have been dreaming of this for a long time, now. It might actually have roots before even my madness ever manifested — it runs deep. I think it goes with that in-my-guts feeling that I was meant for some special purpose, I don't know what.... Perhaps it is kindness. Perhaps I am not at the edge of a hill, but on top of one, and if destiny were to catch me and throw me down its face, I will rush down at speeds that make the world a blur. Let me be patient, be as a child who is faced with small, child-size problems, and be content. And let me not yearn for something that I as yet do not understand the scope, whose magnitude is beyond my imagination's conjectures. For now, let me content with merely the dream.
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| Give Up? | 2:35am friday, 23rd august |
Sometimes, I get that feeling: I just want to quit. Give up. But then, I realize I don't know what that means. What would be giving up? The ultimate — suicide? No, that's far from me these days. I know I'm not passing through into the place I see in my head, like when I was mad. Sorta scared of going to Hell, there, too, in that area of thought, and I dunno; that suicidal mindset I think was a phase I grew out of. So, what would it mean to quit? Quit everything? Not go to work and do drugs? I've been there, done that. I know where that leads: you run out of money, and then you go eventually fall into the madness again. If not for my family and medication, I may have one of those days lapsed into homelessness. Dead ends, everywhere.
You know, I suffer for a little while, but I think it is no more than what any other person on earth goes through. Hm. Perspective. Maybe that's where I want to be, now that we're thinking about things. And sometimes, there is only one way to go, not because you have no freedom about things — you can, if you want, choose another way — but because you're a grownup now, that word you tried to escape for so long you start to wear like a second skin: responsibility. You go on, not because you want to, but because you can; people depend on you, if no one but the person in the mirror — you depend on you to go on. You have the strength, just check. You have more strength than you ever knew you had, if you just don't give up. And that's it then. Simple. You can, you do.
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| Understand | 2:07am thursday, 22nd august |
The more I understand, the emptier my mind becomes.
To understand is to free oneself from assumptions, after all.
He who understands all has emptied his very self from thought.
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| Graffito Galore | 2:11am wednesday, 21st august |
This is another in this series of images, from hereabouts in my first, grand (and grandiose) episode:
This was in my "Lucifer Morningstar" period (if you can spot that at the top of the image). There was the difference, though, from a normal "God's brightest angel" fixation, in that I imagined I was from an alternate reality where that first angel never fell. Ah, fantasies....
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| Desire Sight | 1:52am tuesday, 20th august |
Who is to tell us what to desire? It is perhaps what most distinguishes a person, his or her baseline: what one wants. Notwithstanding that many (most?) things of what we do desire are short sighted. I remember, for instance, in my childhood, wishing that I had enough money to buy shark jaws — it was what I wanted, the jaws (including the teeth) of a large, great white shark. If I had had $500, back then (might as well have been the moon, that sum of cash, when I was ten), I think I just might have bought them, one of the most useless things I can currently think of having. I lacked perspective, back then.
Let's take it one step up. If we were to take the perspective of one outside time itself, from the point of view of eternity, I wonder how many (most?) of our desires would look like to us. We are not children, and (for at least material things) if we want something badly enough, we can get it. What things would seem to us just so useless to us from the perspective of eternity, things we have gotten, things we will obtain? It is perhaps that some people have had something like this view, I think, people like Jesus, for one. People who are at once other-worldly and yet down to earth at the same time — they see.
What do these people say are important? Not material things (if we keep them for ourselves), but what? That strange word that pops up whenever we discuss things like "eternity": love. Above all else, love.
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| The Music | 1:43am monday, 19th august |
In music I heard many things, back in the days of my madness. I heard voices from other worlds, or voices from deeper in this one than we could conceivably see. I heard songs that spoke of places that never were, of people that never were, that sung of the unsung. Some music spoke to my paranoia, were of the collaborative forces that doomed me; some music lifted me as if to Heaven itself, let me float there for a few moments. There were layers in the music, sometimes where each note implied something, where words spoke things not in the lyrics, strange and different meanings sewn into what was actually being said. In music there was almost always something more than just the music — sometimes a mystery revealed, sometimes a mystery created.
Sometimes, a special significance to the song over the radio: the Battle — between good and evil, between Jesus and the Devil — the macrocosm and the microcosm: the forces above and the forces below warring for the soul of the world, and in conflict for the price of my own soul. No, the war is not being fought over the airwaves, not like what played in my wild and furious thoughts. But perhaps there is a grain there, something right about the imagination that took root in the unkempt soils of my delirium — that yes, it is happening in the world at large and within us, whether we shut our ears to it or no: good and evil contend for the world and everything in it. And we, each moment, choose one or the other — some day to know to which tune we have truly danced.
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| The Face | 2:11am saturday, 17th august |
Thunder never knocked me down,
not like when I saw her face —
laid me out flat on the floor, in
utter disbelief at what my eyes
were beholding. Somewhere, a
thousand cages each with a thousand
doves were simultaneously opened,
clouds and clouds of them flapping
up and out and away.... I imagine
true love is not like what the poets
say, not even this one — I think
true love could best told by two
mirrors, reflecting off each other,
a really simple infinity of picture
in picture in picture: except that
in the 6,972nd reflection (and
only that one), you'd see her face
and nothing else. Just how would
that work? I dunno, man, I didn't
make the stuff — y'know, love?
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| Madness More | 2:00am friday, 16th august |
A continuation of this little ditty (again, from about here) more strangeness from beyond sanity's parameters:
def. reality: you’re looking at it. what do you see? it is the best of all possible worlds.
there is no time. here, space turns into time. space is cool.
What is Love? Love is the primordial cool, the original higher. There is no more primal than the primordial cool.
What is God? Clue is God. What is clue? The higher.
All after all is the memory of Adamantine, in lisp.
Cool is art. Dream.
Nil beyond is space (least nil). Not beyond is time (least not).
Adamantine is the less not. Clue is the logic, Christ (the best of the best, only) is the Truth. Christmas is the commercial for Eutopia, not reality.
FYI, "Adamantine" was a character in my head, who may or may not have been Rosanna Arquette. What you see here are some of the phrases I thought explained everything.
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| Not Bad | 4:02am thursday, 15th august |
Dawn is sometimes not so bright. Sometimes the clouds collect overhead, stunt the light of the sun so that the sky seems only half as high, cut off at the hip by the gray. Strange how the dimness makes everything look farther away. You remember the dream you had as you were waking up from your quiet sleep: the doomsday clock at one before midnight — it had been one before midnight for years, you remember in the life within the dream — the doomsday clock that never rang. You remember bits and pieces, the poetry fluent in desire that you didn't bother to write down, the friends you only met once but it seemed you had known for all your life, the visit to Heaven where everything was white. You remember, right?
And when you woke up, do you remember your own self start sinking in again? All those things you let go of yesterday, ready to be picked up? Once you realize the awake thing, maybe you'll remember this: this is the only day you have, the thing "today". And the dawn will pass like a walk into the city. No time to lose. No time at all. But maybe you'll get it right, this day of days, this hour, this instant — and the sun will brush off the clouds, shine down on you, and give you that wink as you head straightlong to where you were meant to be: "not bad".
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| Ghosts | 2:48am wednesday, 14th august |
Ghosts. I have wrestled with ghosts. The toughest problems are the ones that don't exist — the hugest ones you have only imagined into being. It's so hard, though, to look past them when they seem to be everywhere in your face. Ghosts won't let you alone once they've been set free. Plus, that which is imaginary is notoriously difficult to defeat; they return after having been beaten down — out of the dust of their remains (once they've been soundly dispatched), they regroup, reformulate, reiterate their attack. And you'll never be able to pin a ghost down, never get a straight answer from any of them. They are as mysterious as one's own desires.
Even if they never were, those things with which I have fought against — sometimes winning, sometimes losing — in the struggle, I have gained. If these memories are of nothing at all, I am the stronger for having striven so — even if, in the end, it was all just me against me.
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| Madness, Madness | 2:04am tuesday, 13th august |
A few scribbles from about this period:
Correct is truth. Do not want, and truth shall set you free.
The one true church is the church of the SubGenius. And I, Love, am its only non-member, the only human being on earth and in Heaven.
We are not Gods. We are the higher.
Trust the higher. The higher is your friend.
What is the higher? Peace is the higher. Higher is the beyond. What is truth? The higher. The aesthetic of the higher is Cosmic Elijah. Aesthetic is light.
I remember drawing a mustache on J. R. "Bob" Dobbs (on the cover of the The Book of the SubGenius) and calling him Walt Disney. Strangeness, though they did have a striking similarity of features (Puzzling Evidence?).
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| I Wonder | 2:28am monday, 12th august |
I wonder, and that wondering
is a net of silver threads cast out
to a sea of dreams, some of these
a thousand times dreamed.
Like a whisper in the wind, some
dreams are... all of them, mayhap,
are misunderstood — at least
a little taken differently than true.
We fisherpeople of ideas: what
little does it take to deceive us,
that we believe we hold a golden
carp, and the scales are hollow?
Or how many times has it been
that some transcendent guppy
we tossed away, the fish's color
was the wrong tint of intrigue?
I know blessed little — less and
less as the years go on. Can it
be perhaps wrong to know
anything at all? I wonder.
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| Theories | 1:53am saturday, 10th august |
I wonder how many theories I have gone through. The way I thought the world worked, or at least pieces of it, I wrapped that up in explanations, secrets revealed only to me, as it were. I thought I knew so much, and I concocted all sorts of these pseudo-factoids, but whenever I thought I had figured out the "why" of something or other, then one of two things happened: 1) I forgot it; 2) I was proven wrong. I ran through theories like most people ran through toilet paper. And yes, that was about how much they were worth, most of them. All through my madness, I was forever making conjectures, postulates, hypotheses... far out little subplots to the drama of my life and the universe as it pertained to me.
A cause, if I were to name one, was that I was slow to grow up — I emerged quite late from the teenager's syndrome of thinking all the theories he had about how things worked were the answers to everything. It was the drugs, a lot of that; the drugs stunted my intellectual growth for years. Mentally, I keep thinking that I'm about five years behind where I should be, and I'm not counting my madness, either — I consider the mad times like years spent in a wilderness, and not numbed, that I progressed in some senses through the ordeal, that I at least suffered and felt — no, I think my madness in some ways built character, especially climbing out of it. The years I wasted, sedated, they were not insanity. They were stupidity.
These days, I think differently than I did back when. These things I write in public, for instance, I understand how little they are, how little they affect anything. In my madness, many a time did I wrap the meaning of the universe in a single phrase — but it meant nothing. These reflections I write: perhaps they only mean a little, but that little is a little something, after all.
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| Counting Blurs | 1:59am friday, 9th august |
Sometimes the moments blur together. You spend your day with busywork, keeping your hands in constant motion, and then, if you think back, you wonder, "What did I do all day?" And the days — where do the days go? I seem to myself at times to be on a collision course with middle age (even thought that's really a little less than a decade away) — what have I done with my time? With my life? I think to Judgment Day, where there will be an accounting of terrible proportions, when our entire lives are made into a sum — even better, a boolean sum: a 1 or a 0, saved or damned. That's a frightening proposition. When the angel adds together my days, my while on this world, I wonder how many long, blank spaces will show themselves: wasted?
These moments that run one into another, the haze of hours: I suddenly realize that there is no time out from this game that we call life — everything counts, like it or not. What we do — I think none of it is forgotten, that each and every act echoes in eternity. Perhaps it is enough, then, to think of things in this way: that perhaps I will make something of this moment, this blink of time that is now, and not let another minute spiral down the drain. And as Thoreau said, "...not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
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| More Scribblings | 2:20am thursday, 8th august |
This is the page opposite this page, back when, about here in my previous, greater madness:
My favorite part of this page is written sideways: "It may be the final proof of God's omnipotence that He need not exist in order to save us. - anonymous, the savior." (Actually said by Peter De Vries, BTW.)
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| Airs | 1:57am wednesday, 7th august |
Some secret melodies wield a soul like a crescendo.
And there exist hearts in rhythm with the pulse of a galaxy....
I think I'd rather sing a quiet song, like how dawn starts out.
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| Meant To Be | 1:52am tuesday, 6th august |
I have this feeling (comes and goes) that my life is somehow attuned to a grand and mysterious structure underlying the all: "that which was meant to be". Ever get that? I remember talking to one of my friends about such a thing, asked him whether he had always felt somewhere that he was destined for something great. He nodded, yes, right on the nose, and we were kindred. It's not madness, I don't think, or maybe it is only madness' cousin, because I can trace it back to before I had any kind of truly mad thought. The feeling did, however, enable my Christ complex. So it goes. But the feeling hangs over me like a cloak — a greatness thrust upon 'm, to be thrust upon me, waiting for its appointed time to drop and drape me in one of the colors of fate. Could prove interesting, whatever it might be.
There was that line from the movie, American Beauty: "...everything that was meant to happen, does." Almost circular, that reasoning, but I am a believer in prophecy, so that line works for me. I know that I am not a Golden One who was foretold would conquer a great evil in the world, but I have these moments... there are some seconds that pass where the great and unknowable Wheel arcing silver in dreamtime lets me imagine that my time is somewhere near or far, but there, that I am meant for something, something I have not yet the words for. Then the feeling passes, and I shake it off. Perhaps I'm just imagining the whole thing, if it comes down to it, that it's not even madness, but a daydream. Maybe it's just a figment of my fancy that drifts in then drifts out, that really doesn't change a thing.
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| Best of 4 | 1:36am monday, 5th august |
The cream of the entries (as far as I see it) from May through July of the year of our Lord 2002.
Time/Life - The unceasing of time, a life to be caught.
Ethereal - These words we write, what are they?
Recollection - Remembering how lost I was, and being found.
In the Beginning - What there was before there was anything.
Fadeout - A sijo about being ephemeral, "Beginning as dust...".
Capable Of - On our true selves, and what we are capable of.
Soliloquy to a Mirror - A message to myself, looking myself in the eye.
What I Remember - A paragraph+ on recollections of my madness.
Tell - A vision? A little mad, perhaps? Just a poem?
What I Am - A short little piece about the nature of me.
Song the Fifth - Entitled, "Modern Day Love", written during my madness.
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| Love Note | 2:05am saturday, 3rd august |
A love note to my true love, one whom I yet haven't met:
When I first met you, I remember the curious feeling that my heart was playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony full blast, but I couldn't hear a note of it. Not only was I lost when I looked in your eyes, but I was completely naked and running in two different directions at the same time. I was running towards you, naturally, because you were so right it was like a dream. I was running away because you were so right I was terrified.
I knew from the beginning the only way to hold onto you was to let you go — if you were not free, I would not have you at all, only the shadow your spirit left when it flew away. And from the beginning, when I was with you, it was as if there was no time at all: that forever passed every day, sometimes every moment. There's more I want to say, but I just thought you should know this stuff right now, before this forever passes.
(I know this is no dream, by the way. This was all imagined by a greater dreamer than I ever was.
There is one thing that I must know, now that we're here: what took you so long to find me?)
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| A Dreamer | 1:57am friday, 2nd august |
A dreamer with no dream
Down time's unending stream
Is wandering
Through being's story-maze
He to the end of days
Is hurrying
The dreamer wakes to find
That life, like love, is blind
A careless fling
He walks through open doors
To life's interior
Unraveling
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| Illusions | 2:07am thursday, 1st august |
Illusions make us hope for foolish things. Several (it seems like "many") times in the past, I have become infatuated with pretty girls and pretty women, those whom to gaze into their faces was like to fall into a dream. Besides the fantasies I would have about them (not all sexual, either), I would fabricate illusions — that their smile meant more than a smile, that they looked into my eyes when they talked to me a second too long for it not to mean something, things like that. These illusions would make me hope stupidly, that perhaps I had a shot after all, that a lofty beauty was actually within fingertips' reach. Then, of course, when I would try to act on those illusions, I would crash and burn....
You'd think I'd learn. But something about a pretty face makes my brain just float away, and all I am left with is a heart that believes anything. And I will lead myself on, "She must really like you, after all, she [insert stupid reason here] ", lead myself on for weeks, months, and (a couple times) years. I feed these illusions with any scrap of concocted evidence I can possibly infer from even the most innocent of actions. And illusions can live on such ethereal nourishment all the way until that moment comes — and it must come, for all illusions are temporary — when an act, perhaps subtle, perhaps a direct "No", forces you to upturn all that you thought you knew about someone, all that you believed was true.
There are other illusions, like when a broken heart seems like it will never heal. That's an illusion, too. But like any illusion, it's hard to look past that, to see what is real — no matter, it seems, what that real thing is, or what it may mean.
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