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| november 2003 |
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| Dream of Flight | 5:50am saturday, 29th november |
I remember once I dreamed I could fly. I still recall it quite clearly. Back during my madness, I had several dreams similar, ones where I could leap long distances, or walk on air, but never again that singular experience of motorless flight into the wide open blue. I remember I flew over the power lines, above some neighborhood I had never been before, then in through some stranger's window, and I set down perfectly. I know not why I never had such an experience ever again, nor why I had such a perfect adventure in the first place, but it shall stay in my soul one pristine moment of wonder, one ideal dream. I must say, if I never get to Heaven, let me remember this one thing in Hell.
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| A Couple Clues | 7:03am friday, 28th november |
As Philip K. Dick put it, the psychosis is when the radio talks directly at you, as if your thoughts are being broadcast. I've had this phenomenon happen to me, though in most of the few occasions it has, I was on drugs at the time. Madness is when you seem to glimpse a conspiratorial order to the world, sense a secret that everybody seems to be in on but you — but just to know it's there, not to know just exactly what it may be. When the radio says your name exactly: it is as if the underpinning threads of reality unravel just enough to let you know that someone, some thing is watching, and you must fear this one, this thing.
What you do not realize at these points is that it is that there's no one else involved, why this Other is always watching, knows your thoughts: that Other is you, just you. And that secret that everyone else knows? It is merely the shared experience of that which is real, the ground by which people communicate and know what the other is saying; that which the madman loses touch with, one you can't be let in on because either you get it or you don't.... When and if the radio talks directly at you (I pray it never does), have a blank tape ready and record it. Listen to it later, for it is never what you think it might be, never what you think it was.
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| Slip from Time | 7:40am thursday, 27th november |
Time is not an hourglass: its sands vanish in their passing.
Its accounts are never drained, though we may borrow only so much.
One day we will grasp the mystery, slip into forever.
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| Sunset | 3:16am tuesday, 25th november |
I have seen the slow sunset descend in the music of the summer winds. Night falls as if the sky tunes in on a single scene of darkness used over and over again, one of God's curtains that never seems to show any wear. The stars — I can almost touch them if I reach out, they seem closer to me than some of my dreams. Turning, turning, the silver gears of the cosmos silently move the moon on its course. Then steadily the light grows from beyond the horizon: the sun awakes from the distant hills as if somewhere trumpets blow to herald its coming. The day that comes is too busy, there are too many appointments, menus, shops, offices, couriers, photocopies, and passersby. Stand still in the middle of a busy sidewalk; you may feel as if life is passing you by, and you don't know exactly to where it goes. I sit and wait for sunset, the same sun somehow new every day.
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| Thought Moved Me | 3:45am monday, 24th november |
Thought has moved me from here to there. But I know not what controls my thought. These words I write, where do they come from? It seems they happen on a subconscious level, that I do not consider the phrases that pour out, and yet somehow they reflect my intention. Mystery within a mystery, like a riddle inside a dream.
Thought has moved me from here to there. But why? Is there a deeper purpose that I am not aware of on the levels of my consciousness I can reach, yet touch me somewhere within, and guide me where I should be? Shall I speak of destiny, or shall we never understand for what we live? Perhaps I know not what I ask. Perhaps the only questions worth asking are the ones we don't understand.
Thought has moved me from here to there. But I think my moving is not so very much. From out some millions of miles, the whole of the world is a tiny blue dot. I must remember that my thought has only moved me, that the Earth spins without a care where I go, and that these dreams I have, that drive my thought: they are less than nothing, a debt to be paid, for I was given my life to give something back. Such infinite wonder that I am — I aspire to earn what cannot be bought.
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| Far Side | 3:29am saturday, 22nd november |
I discovered light on the
far side of the moon, a cold light,
like a blue star that had
fallen to its surface and refused
to burn out. I was there
on vacation from the world,
to get away from life itself,
from light and sound,
from all traces of breathing.
The light I found: as I approached,
it lifted up into the air
like a lightning bug that I had
irritated, hovered for a moment
and wandered away. I
wondered what sort of life
would be here, in the darkness,
when I realized that it may
be just like me, who didn't fit
in the places of daybreak,
surprised to see anything else
in the desolate expanse
shadowed from the reaches of the
sun, just wanting to be alone.
I discovered light on the
far side of the moon, where
darkness reigns, but maybe it was
just an illusion, my desire
for the impossible: to be alone
with everyone else in the world.
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| Over Oneself | 6:53am friday, 21st november |
Madness, for all its misdirection, is a battle of oneself against oneself. For if it be madness true, there is no other place where the voices and visions come from other than oneself. The prophets had it good: it is said in the Bible that what you do to discern a true prophet from false is to see if his prophecies come true or no: that they have some basis in the real world. The madman, not so, whose visions are of nothing genuine, whose tales of the end of the world never come to pass (it is the doomsday clock that never rang). You fight forces that attack you for no reason, as something in your mind has broken off and achieved an anima of its own, and it assails you with your inmost thoughts and desires. There is no escape from it, for it is you, and only you, against yourself.
Yet, it is possible for you to overcome that very self. I did it. Not that I did it alone, or idly; I had help from above, in my reckoning, and from medication, and the realization that the unreal was unreal came after years of its defeating my notions of what reality was. Perhaps, now, on a smaller scale, we all of us may need to defeat ourselves from time to time. We are by parts both animal and angel, and though it may be fun to be an animal, we must draw a line in the sand where the animal may not pass, and we must let the angel in us win. In madness, it is magnified: for instance, in my case, it was like the Archangel Michael defeating the Antichrist (the Beast, after all). If distorted, the picture strikes with greater passion. But think not your battles are small, just because they are mundane. Defeating yourself is the hardest battle of all.
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| Best Of 8 | 5:13am thursday, 20th november |
As promised, as the six months have passed since I last collected these, it is time now to go back and look at what I consider the most potent of my writings, and perhaps, you might think so, too.
Colors - A sijo about the blue and the black, and other colors.
Placeholders - These arbitrary things that become our cornerstones.
Angels' Song - "Fear not: what you have waited for will come to pass...."
Draw - A little ditty about a man who drew on himself every day.
Me, Myself, I - About looking in the mirror and not recognizing him I see.
Gray Wings - Gliding past the hills of my wondering, and what I observe.
Meandering - Touching beauty and death, meandering my way on.
Ecstatic Visions - About waking up from the ecstatic vision.
Before, During, After - Three fates, or only one shedding her skin?
Memory Zero - A sijo about smoke, and time, and the still waters.
No Memory - Poem, here, about the me whom you met that is not me.
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| Pilgrim | 5:15am tuesday, 18th november |
I am a wandering pilgrim who knows not what he seeks, or what he runs from. Long have I traveled through lands I cannot tell if anyone has ever been, for people are sometimes mysterious and leave no traces of themselves. These trails — were they creations of some treading machine, or have they grooved themselves under countless footsteps? I sleep where I can, cover myself against the night, though I know if the wolves do come, I have no protection from them. Will I know it when I get there, will I understand it when I see? I have the feeling that I will make it, though I don't know why. It is just when the sun is shining upon my face, in these moments there is enough right in the world to give me hope, to keep me on the road to lands I have never been, to search as if my salvation awaits me at the end of my wandering....
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| Question | 6:48am monday, 17th november |
Why have you gone the way you have gone, o traveler thou?
What have you sought in all the years given you, aspired thou to what?
When you come to the end of your days, what matter be thy soul?
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| More, More | 7:36am saturday, 15th november |
Our senses are overrun. The world of man blazes at us images and sounds of a thousand storms, distilled into colors and calls found nowhere in nature. We, at least I, have gotten so used to it that I cannot even sleep without the radio on. We are constantly bombarded with visuals impossible to recreate outside a screen, concoct harmonies with instruments that exist only as digital patterns. And the drive is always toward more, more, unceasing, from the first moment we are introduced to a TV, it starts; modern toys need to be flashier, louder, than those of old, keep our attention for briefer times — things explode, things form from out of nothing, things mutate from one object to another. When it is quiet, we often find it is too quiet. Our eyes and ears have been juiced, and when that juice is cut off, we miss the helter skelter.
Very little impresses me, I find, not anymore. That is why the push toward brighter, faster, screaming higher and higher. Do you remember when things were amazing? I am far from that, anymore, I think, and getting farther. There will come a time when our children's children will only be wowed if the whole world were to blow up in their faces. Sensory overdrive: we have already created virtual worlds with their own laws, these games are getting more and more immersive, realer and realer. Movies explode before us, and rock 'n' roll gets harsher and grinds harder all the time. Will there be a time when we discover that we've had enough? Maybe. There might come a day when we slow down, but this is not that day. Prepare for louder before we all want quiet again. Perhaps only to find silence when the world has deafened us.
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| Slight Dawn | 8:59am friday, 14th november |
What is there for us in this life? There come times when I wonder of the deeper things, whether they really exist or no. A man can have everything, and to him, they can amount to less than nothing. Love: there is always talk of it, but no one knows what it really is, how one may hold it, see if it is real, sniff it for lies. Whether there is a God above, I feel it in my heart that the One watches over us, and yet at times He is so far away — even when I know He is here with me, I feel as if I can never touch Him.... And yet, with so little there is for us this world offers, we go on. There is an unnamable dream, I think, that we all share, whether we conceive that we do or not. It is a hope for something which we have never seen, and would wonder what it was if we did. I do not myself know why we press on like we do, what this dream may be. I sense it, though: in darkness, it is as if a single candle is lit in some far away corner of the Earth, and its dimmest rays shine on us an eternal, if slight, dawn.
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| Aloneness | 3:26pm thursday, 13th november |
I'm set up here, here in Seoul, in the Republic of Korea. Spent Tuesday going up a mountain in Taegu (third largest city in South Korea), kneeling and bowing to the grave mounds of my ancestors. No joke, it was great. So, I guess I'm back, here at ol' H13.com. Note that I may have the time all screwed up, so don't expect journal entries to appear when you normally expect them to. And away we go:
I have imagined being alone
and the world out there a fake,
only some unnamed something
out there, outside, who plays
with my mind. This other,
I have thought it God, I have
thought it some sort of cousin,
I have thought it an enemy,
and I have thought it a lover.
But in here, there have been times
when there was no one else,
there have been times when there
was just me, playing with me,
and even the other was just a
reflection, warped, made to look
different enough to be someone,
something else. When these times
come, I must remind myself
that this great big universe, this
multifold world — it was not made
just for me, just to play, never
thinking there was no one else.
I must remind myself to believe
that I deceive only myself when I
think these ill-conceived thoughts,
and it would be me who does
not exist, and the world go on, the
universe's gears keep turning
if I were to let myself become
immersed in the lie. No, I will not:
I will not let go of this idea of
many, and this one will only
turn inward so far, knowing that
there is too little inside to sustain
something like a universe:
I believe in the mosaic, I believe
in the kaleidoscope: I have imagined
too small, and seen too little.
Time always to see the day bloom.
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| A Myth | 12:01am tuesday, 4th november |
I guess this will be it. I won't be with you for a time, now; probably two weeks' worth will be what I need to get all my things together, ship them off and so forth, and go there myself to Korea to settle in. But let me try and leave you something to chew on in my absence:
I will tell you of a dream I never had. Once, as I walked my favorite path through the countryside, the sky opened up and an angel appeared. It said what all angels say as their first words, "Fear not." I realized I was shaking. He told me that I was at a crossroads, that I must decide my next course: that I could be plucked from time and see all that I would do from then on, or to live my life and forget that the angel ever appeared. I pondered this for a minute or three, what each of the two decisions might mean to me. I then asked, "Could I see all that will happen to me, and then forget all of this? I know it is not of the choices you have presented, but that is my wish." The angel agreed to it. And so, I was plucked from time and in one great rush all the moments to be coursed by, all my failures, all my sins, all my successes, all my thoughts, all my words, all that I meant, and all that I was to be: all of it in kaleidoscopic colors zoomed past me. I cried, for I saw my death, but they were good tears — because it was a good life, after all. I saw every scene.
This is a dream I never had. For the angel made me forget all of it, each single detail of the whole experience. How does it come that I can tell you of it? It emerges, sometimes, the feeling that I've seen what happens to me as I walk through life, even times when I can see what's coming. Then I imagined this dream, this dream that was no dream at all, and I said to myself that it could have happened, that some residual recall still remains in me of the encounter. Have you had those feelings, too? That perhaps you've seen the present before, see the future before it happens? You must ask yourself if you, as well, have had a dream you've never dreamed, and saw things only to forget that they ever had been.
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| A Storm | 12:28am monday, 3rd november |
There is a storm coming. This, I don't know why I feel, but something in my gut whispers low of some cataclysm to be. It might just be a holdover from my last madness, when I thought that I was a prophet, but it might be something more: as if the air is steeped in it, that there is a certain smell that precedes the hard rains, and I just happened to catch a wind of it. I really don't know what to do about it. I guess my writing about it here is something, and perhaps the only correct thing I can do — after all, it might just be paranoia, and all of you who read this know that I am still a little mad. If I were to gain access to some global media, I might cause something of a panic; either that or get laughed at.... My friends, let us hope that this is just some lunacy of your prophet-would-be Stand; the air to me is not still, but is pregnant with some wild call.
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| Set | 12:43am saturday, 1st november |
It's set. I am leaving the US next Friday night. There is more work to be done here, at the place where I'm working currently, but I had them buy off on me completing it remotely from Korea, when I have DSL set up at my new place of residence. I'm on sort of a high, right now, that I'm finally getting out of this place and start my new adventure. I guess I will be leaving you soon, as I will have to ship off my computers to Seoul before I physically go there. Rest assured, I shall return.
Did I ever tell you that it really helps me when I write to this site? It's very therapeutic, me getting whatever's on my mind off my chest. Something like that. Also, this site is the only place in my life where I've actually had discipline at something: 5 days a week, each of those days I write something, and I try to do a good job at it. You don't take such things lightly, that have helped you so much. I guess that would be the thought for today — realize when you have a good thing. It's too easy to take for granted these objects or whatever which are with you day in and day out. Take a look around; you can probably find some sort of thing in your life like that. Don't wait for it to go away before you notice it.
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