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| january 2003 |
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| Believer, I | 12:02am friday, 31st january |
I am a believer in the unseen. "For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal." [2 Corinthians 4:18, NKJV] Perhaps it is a hangover from the madness that I believe in things not visible to us. Perhaps it is subtler than that, though. I was once a devout atheist and materialist, a classic "rational" late twentieth century young man, who believed only in things that I could see or had some firm evidence for. Now that I am a believer, it is not that I am fundamentally different from what I was back then. It is that I think that salvation is a very personal business, that each person must be shown certain things for them to have basis for their own faith. Simply put, I have been shown, personally meaningful to me, enough in my own experience that to doubt would be to fly in the face of the evidence, that my faith is the only rational conclusion I can make given what I have been through.
Such is why I think there is an unseen world: God being the epitome of that world, and God the being of my faith. I say not that the unbeliever is wrong not to believe, for they personally must be shown beyond the understanding of their own doubt. But then, I ask that those people think me not wrong to believe what I do, for I am more like you atheists out there than you might care to concede, of a heart which may be very familiar to the way you comprehend this great big world.
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| Old Secrets | 12:34am thursday, 30th january |
The secret is that we don't notice that miracles happen every day simply because they happen every day.
The secret is that when you're on the wrong side of zero, nothing is something.
The secret is that love is so simple no one will ever understand it.
The secret is that if you love, the whole world loves, and if you hate, the whole world hates.
The secret is that a man's wisdom extends only to his own breath, and even his breath is a mystery to him.
The secret is that insanity can be fun, but even when you laugh it hurts.
The secret is that what is unfair about life is that it is fair.
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| Ancient | 2:00am tuesday, 28th january |
There is thus about the ancient things that fascinates us:
the depth of time imbues them arcane, with the dust of the ages.
Such is the skin of eternity, whose flesh time does not taste.
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| From Where? | 1:34am monday, 27th january |
Where did it come from, the madness? Yes, I know it was caused by the drugs, but where did they come from, the voices and visions, the bizarre thoughts and intuitions? Is all of that ilk hidden in everyone, or are the special things of madness only seeded in a few, like me, where the these found fertile ground? I think I may not find the answers in this lifetime, the questions to the source of the tragic absurdities and amplified banalities of psychosis. Yes, I understand that my mind was broken, that "normals" don't think in such ways, of such things, but why the things that I did think about? I experienced life, after all, in the usual way before I went out of the loop....
I will not pause and think about it much. It is just one of the curiosities of the phenomenon, that one wonders things about it. It is only natural to ask. For now, I will think that the elements of my madness were meant for me, somehow, at least in some small sense, that I learn from it what I can. One can always hope.
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| Regret? | 1:27am saturday, 25th january |
I think it not a terrible thing, regret. I think regret has its place in our experiences. I cast doubt on anyone who claims that they have no regrets in their life; they should think a little harder, and perhaps take a second look at just what regret is. I have regrets, a couple that weigh heavily if I consider them, and a few more ones that are of lighter nature. Perhaps one should not wallow in them — that could prove counterproductive — but I think one should give regrets their due. Be sorry, and learn from them. Even if it is from a situation that may never happen again, they give you a glimpse into your nature. (Though that glimpse may not be pretty.)
Be not so vain and consider that all the things wrong you have done led to something better — life is not a sum total, nor can some wrongs be erased by the good that follows. We travel many roads in our days, and some we should not have gone. Think a little, regret a little: be human.
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| Imagining of Me | 12:07am friday, 24th january |
In the imagining of me,
God lay down tracks for
the course of my entire
life, and saw that I followed
none of it. There are paths
we travel meant for us
not according to the plan
of wisdom, but to say
that destiny is a larger
thing, not merely in the
purpose of our beings,
but even according to
the accidental travelings
does it fold together a
perfect shape. (Sometimes,
too, it hangs on a mere
whisper.) In the imagining
of me, I could have been
told my entire life, but
still be surprised at the
coming of these moments.
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| Music! | 12:43am thursday, 23rd january |
Let there be music. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his Ainulindale (the creation myth of Middle Earth), described the course of all history in terms of different musics acting and reacting with each other. I suppose it is yet another mystery, music: joy, sorrow, pain, awe: in it is expressed (sometimes) what is inexpressible in any other way. Words are pretty much helpless when describing the turns and cascades of any music, even perhaps a single note in a tune. Saying "C#" doesn't have the same impact as having an instrument and blowing that note out.
Let there be music. Let me not, as I usually do, ask what music is. Let me just experience it in the heady heights of symphonies, down low the grooves of a dance beat. I am too cerebral at times, I think, and in some instances, it is better just to be like the poets in Bruce Springsteen's song, "Jungleland", who "don't write nothing at all / they just stand back and let it all be." Music is a personal thing, more than most other art forms, I believe — it just may be fruitless in intellectualizing it to any degree. Just put on a jam, let it play, let it play, let it play.
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| Dream Self | 1:01am tuesday, 21st january |
We are not ourselves when we dream. It is a different muse that inspires us when we slumber, a different rhythm that we walk to. I wonder what would be if that which we reserved only for our sleeping hours were to show its face in the waking world? How strange would we seem? After all, we are something like free of any of that which inhibits us when we dream — incoming and outgoing filters seem disabled. It is perhaps not, though, what we would call our "true" selves that emerge in that state — they are both us, the we who are awake and the we who drift in sleep. It is just that we the unconscious are quite the different from we the conscious. We need them both to be who we are. And maybe sanity is just keeping the two where they live: each where they may play their roles; each in tune to the two different worlds we inhabit, the day and the night.
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| Mental Page | 2:35am monday, 20th january |
Some more from my greater madness. From the same mental institution where I did this:
My brain was all over the place, as you see, from association to association — however strange those associations were. The white-outs are names of people I know (or knew).
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| Prophet | 1:07am saturday, 18th january |
I don't think I can imagine the life of a prophet.
God having your brain on His speed dial, to call you up day or night.
To see the end of the world as if it happened yesterday.
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| Spectacular | 12:01am friday, 17th january |
When I was a failure, back when, perhaps one could say of me that at least I was at least a spectacular failure. I mean, I was one of those golden child types growing up: high IQ, computer prodigy, potential unlimited; it took real effort to verily screw up my life. When I got to college, I really worked at pissing everything away with all the drugs I did, with the grand finale of becoming utterly psychotic from all of it. It took a few years to flush it all down the toilet, but I managed to do it; I flamed out fantastically. I dunno: I guess that's something to be said about me, though it's definitely not a virtue. For being such a bright guy, I have done a lot (and I mean a lot) of stupid things. I look back and can only shake my head, and I can only say to myself, "What was I thinking?"
And now, I got something not everyone gets, I think — a second chance. Yes, it feels like I'm about ten years behind where I should be in maturity and accomplishments, but I feel like I'm doing something with my life these days. I still sometimes think in terms of failure — as that was with me for a good few years — but those thoughts serve these days as a sort of cautionary tale, something to learn from. Hm. It's as if I tried my best to f*ck things up, but that I am to succeed in spite of myself. Like my life was a puzzle where I kept fumbling with the pieces, and one day the fumbling quite unexpectedly solved it. I have to wonder if the puzzle maker knew this beforehand, it built as it was just for me: that I find an answer when I knew not even what question I was asking.
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| This Year | 1:34am thursday, 16th january |
(Not resolutions, really, just some more fantasy.)
I will wander into a place I will call home, even though I have never been there before.
I will touch the sky with my fingers and leave a finger-painting on a cloud.
I will wonder about things like a child, and describe life like an old man.
I will dream about dreaming about dreaming about dreaming about...
I will dig my own grave as deep as Earth is wide, and I will jump in to see the other side.
I will not stand still for one second the whole year; I will be in constant going to and coming from.
I will build a house with its attic in Heaven and its basement in Hell, and I will call it the World.
(...dreaming about dreaming about dreaming about dreaming about...)
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| Between the Lines | 1:09am tuesday, 14th january |
In vastest night did I set sail,
on ship that traveled through the sky;
the winds of dream did seldom fail
to heave my boat through starlight climb.
I traveled to the end of time,
and I looked back to see it all:
the things, now, base, and things sublime:
they heed apocalypse's call.
I saw new Heaven, and new Earth —
the former things did pass away.
And I could see forever's birth
was echoed from the livelong day.
Now, what I speak to you is wise,
for this, no fancy spin of mine:
it rhymes the word it would disguise:
this poem speaks between the lines.
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| Weary | 1:43am monday, 13th january |
There are times when I experience a deep weariness. That I have lived too long, have seen too much in my days. This is perhaps common to those of the extreme experiences, like war, I think. Mine was madness, of course, the intensities that I have known, that I have survived. The feeling: it may be more common than I think, n'est-ce pas? The feeling that one would like to take an extended break from life, to rejuvenate oneself in the calm of nondoing, of nonproductive recreation, of a month where nothing is expected of you. Sometimes I am so very tired.
I will make it through, though. I have been through rougher than this. My soul understands that if I withstand, I will see brighter times — that this, too, shall pass. That this weariness with all of life is only one night in the turning of my clock, and that dawn will inevitably come. I don't know what they are, mostly, the things that pick me up. They are something as simple as buying a new fountain pen, and as involved as experiencing a breakthrough from the schizophrenia. All it takes to make it through is a little faith. And just a little patience.
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| Broken Dreams | 12:28am saturday, 11th january |
What will become of us, we the children of the broken dream? What we imagined could never come to pass, not in all the ages of the world. What we desired was the sun and the moon to move out of their orbits and revolve around our own little spheres of being. I know that there are childhood wishes that are easy enough to shed when childhood passes (though that may come late for some of us), but what of us who have dreamed mad dreams? Who have desired the wild things, not of this world? Hm. I must think on this. It is perhaps that there is not meaning plain in all things, that sometimes the "why" is angled away from the main point. We of the psychic outlands, let us hope there is reason somehow to our divergences: if not in the obvious face of the matters, somewhere we may yet realize.
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| Outland | 12:01am friday, 10th january |
Wandering past the edge of the world, I am pariah.
In the spaces blanker than dreamless sleep, imagining is sight.
I walk forever where my footsteps announce the loneliness.
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| Essence | 12:55am thursday, 9th january |
Sometimes I feel as if my soul is a whisper carried along the breezes of fate, with no will of its own, drifting endlessly. There is something insubstantial about my being, I think. In my madness, there were times when I believed that I was hollowed out, that there was little of me left that existed at all. That there was truly a "me" behind these eyes. Sometimes I looked in my eyes, back when, and spied that there was something missing, that I was merely a shadow of the person I had once been. That there was darkness where once there had been light.
There are rare moments, though — they come and pass, nowadays — that there is a note to which my soul resounds, and I am in tune with all the world. Like there is nothing I can't do. Not like in my madness, when I had delusions of superpowers beyond mankind's reckoning, but just that I have hope that I can do something real and true, something of substance. Like there is hope for me beyond the inkling that somehow things will be all right in the end. It is of now I speak, not a distant glint. And these moments — they are enough that I know that I am, and that I can: that I'll make it.
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| Thought? | 4:50am tuesday, 7th january |
What is thought? One cannot grasp it — get a real hold on it — no matter how you try (in fact, the harder you try, the slipperier it is), but this is the thing Descartes based our whole being on: "I think, therefore I am." It is like a halo, hovering there in our minds, this thought thing: suspended in mid imagination like a ghost, words sometimes with half meaning, half feeling that no word is adequate for. It is so common, I think, that no one thinks about thought anymore — not really. One accepts them with the thousand other mysteries of life, the universe, and everything that allow us to be and do. The mystery of thought, though: I think it is not so deep a mystery as all that: I think because I am: I am, therefore I think.
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| Found More Stuff | 1:22am monday, 6th january |
I was at my parents' home this Christmas, and I came upon more stuff from my first madness. The following is another version of this, but one I drew by hand. Like the arrows?
Be not but love, do not but love, signed, "Lucifer Morningstar". From this period, obviously.
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| Myths | 12:01am saturday, 4th january |
I hear tell of a flower
that blooms in total darkness:
if light is ever shown on it,
it immediately turns to dust.
Though how it may be I have
heard but rumors, I am told of
some rare few who say they
have seen what that flower
may be. Palest white petals
that seem to be suspended
in air, so gossamer is its stalk.
These folk who claim to view
the invisible, this unique
flower: people whisper they
were born and lived in blackness
deeper than night: better to
view the mysteries of life, of
flowers only darkness may see.
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| A Prayer (Thanks) | 1:19am friday, 3rd january |
Lord, I don't know what to say. I understand the words, now, "My cup runneth over." Thank you for all that you have done for me; I ask only to remember. Let me remember all the many little times when a kind word lifted me, when a favorite song came on the radio, when sunlight on my face warmed me. The million tiny things You do that I did not always notice, but if I think to recall, all those things are clear to me: in one way or another, You have been with me the whole way. You are all the things, too, in my life that are right, that are true, that make me worth anything at all.
My Lord, You ask for nothing in return, and there is nothing I can give you that You require. I can give You nothing that means anything to You, I think, but the one: I will give You myself. That is the one thing that is mine I can make Yours, for all the world is Yours already. I give You myself as best I can, to be Yours from now past the end of time. If I recall, I see all the good that is within me is Your doing, and it is only right that all if it returns to You. Just let me remember, and I see You at every corner I have ever been walking, with an ear only to my saying, "Yes."
Amen.
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| New Year's Day | 12:01am wednesday, 1st january |
The time around New Year's is a season of change. Historically, winter is a symbolic season of death, to be followed by the rebirth that spring brings. The wheel of fortune that turns year long is reset to its first position. Our old leaves have been shed — not our whole selves, for our branches and trunk are still present — but those things ephemeral of what we are, some characteristics of our soul which can be variable, we can hope to change. Yes, hope: that was the meaning of the ancient festivities of winter: the hope of the warmth to come, and perhaps (just perhaps) that the changes we make bring a sunnier day.
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