Drink of life- like my mother did once.
Not alone in the bedroom, she opened and took and the pungent seeds of time spilled into the darkness of space alight with imagination and moans and shrieks and luminous suns.
Let the blackness talk and whisper the secrets of life eternal, but do not mistake the body as its only source. The sky is full and traveling is not done only in carbon and flesh.
Drink of life like my mother did once.
Then drink again.
Water like my father did once.
Again drink.
Like my father.
Forever is not the end.
End.
There is only eternal
Return. Again.
Eternal return.
Again.
Eternal return.
Again.
An endless loop of purple and black, we sit in this circle and live out the revolution.
Time shifts as this carpet accepts our weight. As the walls hold us in and the black curtains postpone the sunlight from our eyes.
We go back into the dream state and journey through darkness and quiet spaces while the walls melt like jelly. We walk through them, licking the paint until our tongues taste like ocean water.
We circle back and flow in and out of the speckled windows, hearing the squeaks and moans of cars rounding the corner and delivery trucks halting by the door. The walls hold us in, ever intent on their quiet role, their shelter against the demanding brightness of day.
Grinding and sliding through the maze of our consciousness- like a serpent, the circle comes back once again. It is my turn to speak.
Cycle.
The ends are woven perfectly together and for once the ends of our fingertips flow out and back in like wisteria branches. Perfectly pungent and delicate- we glow imperceptibly in the darkness behind the curtains. Eventually the walls take in our vibration and the light between you and I starts to move like heat off a desert floor. Though my eyes are closed, I dance and dance, hoping over sand and the scent of old gun smoke and greased leather.
What is this space? I hear my mind ask. Never content to let the eyes talk for us, to let time shift and strain and begin to rewind and then leap forward in a spiraling dance around the circle of our words. And back again, receding into the darkness between the black curtains.
Endless circles as our fingers and toes merge back into roots and trees.
Eternal return.
Again.
Eternal return.
Again.
Showing posts with label intellectual center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intellectual center. Show all posts
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Thursday, April 26, 2012
The Battle For Words
The battle of language
For language
We are twisted
Searching
If only it could be one way, then we could rest
If only they could be one way, then I would understand.
The battle for language
It wraps me in its wheel, taking me, taking me
Not, I am not your lover
Raping me.
The wheel,
It does not ask if I can breathe
There is no consent
I am a body, plunging to earth, into the earth
The wheel
I see my eyes spinning, eyes spinning
Words
The battle for words, it comes through me and out.
If only there was one way to be, then I could know.
If only there was the word, the word, I search for the word. What is this?
What are you?
Who are we together?
I fight for the answer
There Is no answer
The battle for the words,
Take me take me. I am your slave.
Rape me with your contortions and I’ll search the world-grasping for the one thing- only one thing.
The battle for words, of words.
I struggle for the ways to be. Definition, oh it would feel so fucking good. If only I could define this, set it straight, keep it there for all eternity, there are plenty of me- those who would enjoy it. oh predictability, you are my lover.
Take me, take me. There is no asking. Born to struggle in this word game.
My eyes spin.
I see you in my eyes, you are me as she is me as we are all together.
Just as he said- they said - or me, we have no words for this and I am drawn into the pile of shit that would have us all be defined. Oh, it would feel good on that corner of the white hospital shelf, but this is gritty and dark and the fight takes my heart- beating- it feels so good and hot tight in this hand.
This is the battle for words and we are drawn down in its tight embrace. Give a kiss, won’t you love?
Give a kiss, for this is the battle.
For language
We are twisted
Searching
If only it could be one way, then we could rest
If only they could be one way, then I would understand.
The battle for language
It wraps me in its wheel, taking me, taking me
Not, I am not your lover
Raping me.
The wheel,
It does not ask if I can breathe
There is no consent
I am a body, plunging to earth, into the earth
The wheel
I see my eyes spinning, eyes spinning
Words
The battle for words, it comes through me and out.
If only there was one way to be, then I could know.
If only there was the word, the word, I search for the word. What is this?
What are you?
Who are we together?
I fight for the answer
There Is no answer
The battle for the words,
Take me take me. I am your slave.
Rape me with your contortions and I’ll search the world-grasping for the one thing- only one thing.
The battle for words, of words.
I struggle for the ways to be. Definition, oh it would feel so fucking good. If only I could define this, set it straight, keep it there for all eternity, there are plenty of me- those who would enjoy it. oh predictability, you are my lover.
Take me, take me. There is no asking. Born to struggle in this word game.
My eyes spin.
I see you in my eyes, you are me as she is me as we are all together.
Just as he said- they said - or me, we have no words for this and I am drawn into the pile of shit that would have us all be defined. Oh, it would feel good on that corner of the white hospital shelf, but this is gritty and dark and the fight takes my heart- beating- it feels so good and hot tight in this hand.
This is the battle for words and we are drawn down in its tight embrace. Give a kiss, won’t you love?
Give a kiss, for this is the battle.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Brian David Mitchell

In this realm of the human. In this society we understand filled with cars, TV, politicians, ads, churches, movies, restaurants, laws…in this realm, in this American culture, there are shared symbols. Each single person will look at the same advertisement (or a thousand other things) in a different way based on their own upbringing, knowledge, memories, etc., but there is a basic shared language that exists between the bulk of the population. The shared collective symbols of right and wrong and beauty and ugly and funny and colors and laws is what allows millions of people to interact with each other through language and action. We can look around and see people behaving in generally the same way as we do, this we consider “sane.” Millions of people in America share the same “symbolic order.” The symbolic order are the words we use to explain our human experience. Words to describe our emotions, to describe our experience, words to describe our actions and understanding of events. Because of a general consensus that there is a God in the sky that created life on earth, because a majority of people share this “symbolic order,” (they use words like god, heaven, hell, creation, bible, etc) they all consider themselves normal and sane.
When there is a disconnect, when a minority of people (or perhaps one person) has a symbolic order (a collection of words used to explain their experience, etc) that does not fit within the larger symbolic order, there is conflict. These people are considered “insane.” They understand and explain the world with different words.
Brian David Mitchell believes he is a man of god. He was a street preacher in Utah in early 2000. Many people would have regarded him as a semi-delusional zealot who believes he can hear God. Many people pray to god. They talk to him, some think they hear answers, all of this is considered sane by the majority of the American public. But when a man does nothing but stand on the street and preach and shout and lecture to the passers-by about the word of God and Jesus, the majority, even the church going people, think that the mind has slipped.
Brian David Mitchell had constructed a world around himself, as we all do, to explain his existence. In his world, God speaks to him, God commands him. In his world, his symbolic system, men may have more than one wife. Men may do what they want with their women as long as they are married. Within his symbolic order, he believed that people must be humbled. They must experience the low-human state so they can one day experience a higher one.
There was one family that did not believe he was completely insane. The Smart family of Utah hired him to help repair their roof. He worked at their house for five hours one day. One night, he cut a hole in their screen, broke into their home and kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, the 14 year old from her bed in the middle of the night. He took her to the woods. His wife gave Elizabeth a robe and told her change to change into it. A small ceremony was performed and Brian David Mitchell proclaimed Elizabeth as his wife, he raped her afterwards, as he would many times afterwards. When his first wife complained that he was having sex with Elizabeth too often, he began to rotate between them. Elizabeth was found nearly a year later. "Anything I showed resistance or hesitation to, he would turn to me and say, 'The Lord has commanded you to do this. You have to experience the lowest form of humanity to experience the highest.”
Brian David Mitchell and his first wife are in police custody. They are both declared mentally unfit to stand trial. It is Mitchell’s explanation that the court sees as unstable. Although many people in this country pray, when God is used as a reason to commit a crime (actions the collective accepts as “wrong”) the general consensus of the explanation is “insanity.” This explanation is not shared in the symbolic order of the larger society.
The writer of a particular article about the Elizabeth Smart case used words like “horrific and sick” to describe Brian David Mitchell. This is the conflict. One man believes he is doing what God wants him to do. He is humbling a young woman so that one day she can reach a higher state. This is what he actually believes. This is how he actually understands the world. The police, the criminal justice system, her parents, neighbors, journalists, the Americana public see this act as the raping of a young girl by a crazy zealot. One deed is thought of as righteous, the same deed is seen by others as evil. Both are words used to describe an action.
Even in custody and in court, Brian David Mitchell continuously sang hymns to himself until he was removed from the courtroom. Perhaps the world around him seemed crazy, full of evil men who had no contact with god. Perhaps he sang to remind himself that he was the one with the truth. He was the one with God on his side. He had to sing to protect his world. He sang to protect his symbolic order, the world he had built for himself, the only world that still had a place for him.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Polarity

I looked over at the little boy sitting next to me on the couch. I saw his little tan hands with palms facing upwards, the same way my grandmother held her hands when she just couldn’t believe something. His little ten-year old body was already formed and aged, just as he would be years from now. The conservative grandparents clearly came though in his small face. The drive of his parents, the clear delineation between right and wrong and good and bad and black and white. He thought he knew it all. The world was clearly defined and he knew his place in it. His track was set, I could see that. The path of expectations needing fulfillment, degrees in need of achieving, bank accounts in need of filling.
“How can they say that??!!” He looked to me with a smile of disbelief on his face, somewhat mocking in origin, as though he knew it was wrong.
“It’s true,” I said.
We were watching a documentary about the drug war made from the perspective that the drug war is failing. Or rather, I was watching it and he sat beside me, mostly looking at a YouTube video on the small laptop in front of him and occasionally looking up to the larger screen, where images of marijuana fields and homeless men on Skid Row and the power players of America in their business suits moved across our vision.
“I don’t think anyone has ever died from marijuana,” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s bad.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s bad, if it was legal everyone would always walk around being high all the time.”
“Cigarettes and alcohol kill a lot more people, no one has ever died from just smoking marijuana.”
“Will you give me a hundred dollars if I find someone who’s died?”
I took a breath and smiled.
“I don’t have one hundred dollars to give you.”
“So then you don’t believe it. So you believe everyone should just walk around being high all the time.” His little face was scrunched in an accusatory ball. The verdict, the rightness of his opinion had been settled, any other statement would be taken as an offense.
“You know, it’s not one way or the other. Maybe a couple of people have died from some sort of weird complication with smoking, but overall, it’s safer than alcohol and alcohol is legal. Just because I don’t want to bet a hundred dollars, it doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s true. Just because I think medical use is okay doesn’t mean I believe everyone should walk around high.”
He disengaged and looked at his computer screen, on it was another little boy giving detailed instructions on how to modify a Nerf gun. Once again, as I had many times in the two years I had known him, I saw myself in this little boy. I recognized the binary thought. It’s one way or the other. This or that. The two ends of the spectrum, miles apart in reality, yet smushed together side by side, leaving no room for the middle.
For in this middle is the place of complex beauty. It is the realm of the subtle and vague. The softer spectrum of watercolor hues where many things can exist at once. Where all possibilities can coexist in an orgy of thought and merging possibilities and wonder.
I see a girl dancing. There are two walls made of bricks. They are miles apart, but they are so tall that their sheer height makes them always known. The pretty girl is in the field, among the gently sloping grass of yellow and green. Her skirt of layered gray chiffon moves like clouds tethered to her waist. She moves around trees and skips over sleeping foxes. She is in the gap. The huge space in the middle.
It is the middle which I push away with extreme thought. Either being happy or sad. Jealous or content in the slimy gloss of lovemaking. Two extremes, side by side. And always together, there will never be space for another possibility. Pushed together there can be no room for something new to flower. Without the gap, there can be no room for surprise.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Contradiction

Modern American women don’t think like that, they don’t like that, they don’t want that, they condemn that…and I do, yet I don’t, yet I do, but I don’t.
And the two colored moths flew around my shoulders, teasing the bare white of my skin with their buzzing and fanatical wing beating. And I wouldn’t want it to happen, but I like it. I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone, but I want to see it. To be held down, forced open, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much I want to run away. And when it does happen, the small, more harmless variety, I feel like I could follow him to the ends of the earth. I can see myself, wearing torn white rags, stepping across the red horizon as the even redder planets loom like hot air balloons just a short arms reach away. I can feel each step over rough edged gravel and those shiny swords that wait in the distance. I have not reached them yet, but I have seen their cousins in the smaller ponds and they have cut me deep, very deep, and somehow, with bloody feet and salty cheeks, I made it past them and over the barren hillsides. And at the ends of the earth, perhaps only an arms reach away, but necessitating a lifetime of travel, he waits in the crystal castle with a goblet full of foul tasting life and eyes that could warm the night sky if given a chance. The wings flap like a soft lullaby and their colors have become my coat of arms.
Labels:
contradiction,
evil,
fantasy,
fear,
force,
good,
habits,
intellectual center,
myth,
sex,
tantra
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Influence

The kernel existed before all this, long before human history and moral codes and lawyers and banking institutions. There was once a man who had a moment of blinding insight. He sat under a blue sky, his thin legs were crossed as he sat close to the earth. The wind blew across his face, and for a long moment, he felt inhuman, he was, in this awakening, open to knowledge beyond the human world. He was experiencing the kernel. Everything he had been taught as a young boy was irrelevant, what he felt, now, was beyond the people of this world and everything they created. The knowledge, the kernel, was far beyond his social status and beyond his ethics. As he sat, he felt a channel open up within him and a radiantly blue cord flowed into his heart with the force of a runaway train. He received it, his body slightly fearful, but his will was open and receptive. In this moment, though his direct contact with the kernel, he developed a way. A way to live, a way to walk, a way to experience the universe, a way to work. He developed a set of tools so that others might open up to the channel as well.
While he was alive, his ideas spread. His students spoke to others who spoke to more people. A large web was formed. After his body died, his way of life traveled across seas and mountains, from person to person. Schools were built to study his way. For thousands of years, his way was passed through language and books and song. The popularity was not without consequence, though, and his way had become words…a religion…an idea or philosophy that someone could try out and perhaps quickly move on to the next tantalizing idea promising inner peace. The initial discovery of the kernel was diluted into an organization with leaders and foundations and bureaucracy. There were workshops and seminars, people paid hundreds of dollars for a couple of life lessons on anger and love, but in the end, there were no life teachers and guides. Some tried the way and gave up after a few weeks. Some tried it and devoted the rest to their lives to it. Movies referenced it and it became a household name, along with the other religions with scores of followers. Entrepreneurs made T-shirts with quotes and people browsed bookstores with hundreds of titles in the genre.
This Way, this way of living life and working with its electrical nature, began with a man that had a deep moment of awakening, a true moment that left behind a changed man and a path into the void. But after thousands of years, moving through continents and people, many of its secrets were lost or misunderstood, its power became diluted as people without teachers experimented with the ideas and then became dogmatic. People practiced what they thought was the way, they claimed it as their own, yet they had no direct contact or connection with the man who had opened to the source. The initial knowledge was so contaminated by the human world that most traces of its way had been lost on the human machines, its power to awaken, its "ways" that required devotion and constant attention were lost on the sleeping, even the sincere workers had no real power or skills to do the work required and nowhere to get it from.
But still the kernel exists, it stands outside, now, living, alive, moving, shifting, glowing. There are other lines. There are other channels that run from the kernel and others that run in, feeding it the nutrients of attention and work. There are long lineages of work, passed from person to person, always under the shadow of secrecy. There are too many chances for contamination if the ideas are distributed freely. This knowledge is beyond humans, it lives outside of humans, but it can pass through them, like sparkling ions through a willing conductor. A direct channel flows from the kernel to the people, and, from them, the energy flows back into the kernel. A circuit in constant movement. The eternal kernel flows out, passing from one person to the other, and the energy comes back, slightly more diffused, back to the source, where the current flows out once again. This has always been so. It cannot be otherwise.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Fueling The Habits

She sat at her desk, looking out the window, and now, tears were reddening her eyes. A salty droplet left a wet streak across her cheek. Alone in her room, she was filled with anger and sadness. Her body was hot and sweaty and a headache lingered at the horizon of her consciousness. Nothing had really happened to her within the last couple of minutes, nothing external. She did not get a phone call with bad news. Her neighbor had not hit her car. Her landlord had not evicted her. She had not had a fight with a friend. To any outside observer, nothing had happened. There was no external event that warranted the desperate need to cry and her elevated pulse. She had not really even moved, and yet, her energy had completely changed.
In a brief instant, she had paused and drifted into an unstructured realm of floating thoughts that quickly turned into other ideas and then, just as swiftly, morphed into recurring uncontrolled thoughts. They moved in and out of her mind like wisps of passing clouds. Their entry had been in the moments of her inattention. While her mind was off her work, it began to fill with less intentional thoughts. Gone were her poetic lines and colorful descriptions. Her attention had drifted from her creative task and, as it did so, she had begun to devote more and more of her attention to her endless series of worries. The more she thought about them, the stronger the thoughts were and thus, the bodily sensations grew stronger within her. She was overcome with sadness. And with each tear that escaped her eyes, with each suffering thought, her negative emotions grew stronger.
Like a blazing fire that begins with a small handful of thin twigs, each small worry fed the cauldron of negative emotions. Each small jealous thought added a little more strength and fury and soon, she was overcome with sadness and grief and bitter hatred. She fed it to herself, small bit by small bit, letting it grow in strength until it was impossible let it go. If she had noticed the first distracted negative thought, she could have redirected her attention to her work. Caught quickly and early it would have been easier for her to regain her focus, but a raging fire takes tons of water and ample time to extinguish. She had fed her negative emotions with her thoughts, bathed them in her attention and allowed then to consume her from within. Although she sat in the same place, with the same trees and light and view, she now had a large dark hole to climb out of.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Spiritual Warfare

But no one can really KNOW. Truth is subjective, the very nature of it is porous. As slick as water through fingers, it slips and morphs within time. I once asked my mother about god. When I was a little girl, I asked how children decide their religions. It was a one line answer and she looked at their daughter, who barely reached her hip and said children usually become the same religion as their parents. And so it is assumed, what my mother believes, I will believe. Whatever faith my parents have clung to, I will cling to. I am from the chosen people. We value education, we were slaves in Egypt, we did not kill Jesus. We marry people like us, we raise out children to go to temple and eat challah bread and go to college and marry other jews. We did not kill jesus, even though they will throw stones at us and say we did.
Perhaps this passes as truth for some, but among the billions of people who also cling to their beliefs, who hold on just as strong to their Truth, no one can really be certain. They can kill people or convert them, they can subject a population to religious laws, but only a blind faith in their rightness is certain
I can surround myself with others who share my views, people who think like me and believe in god the same way, we can compound our ideas and inflate our egos. We can sing songs together and talk of the coming Armageddon, but objectively, we are a group of humans that have chosen to believe in the same set of assumptions and interpretations from a very old book. For thousands of years, there have been other groups of people that have done the same thing, most have felt they had truth on their side. People believed in the formation of the earth from the mouth of a slithering Anaconda. There are people who believe in a blue-skinned god with many arms. The minds of humans are warped and beautiful, and there is no shortage of religious variance. So how can one person claim the Truth? Out of all the myths and stories that dot our history, how can one group claim dominance? Most people claim the truth and all of them are wrong. It is an egotistical assumption. It is faith. While the outlets of this human trait are very obvious when talking of religion, we all have this tendency. I lived with a man who thought he had formulated the best way to wash dishes. In his opinion, it was the fastest, most efficient way which produced the cleanest results. Any attempt to change the washing technique by other housemates was met with a brutal argument. He believed his method was right, therefore, everyone else was stupid and wrong. Why didn’t we just do what he said? But there are many ways to reach clean dishes, if that is the ultimate goal. What bothered him was that people would choose a different way, despite the knowledge of his perfected technique. Religious fundamentalists cling to the unchangeable idea that they have found the perfected truth…theirs is the only way to understand god and the universe. In their teachings, it is their way, or the one road down to hell, where a cruel demon waits to deliver their deserved punishment.
This is what I must understand. I do not know what is real. I do not know truth. There are many ways towards an open eye.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Struggle in a Hole

But I cannot make the phone ring, the man does not answer, he does not call. I worry about the labored breathing I heard twelve hours ago. The small black phone jiggles and lights up, but perhaps his eyes are closed, lost in the soft blue shades of his dreams. Answer my call. I put myself in your vision, a small girl holding a little yellow flower. I see you reach out with a long, slender, white arm; pushing the stem into your beard, you smile and say thank you. The flower moves in the wind like a pinwheel, harnessing the strength of the wind, you grow taller. Like a windmill stuck into a leafy black brush. Oh my love! Can you hear me calling? I try to grab the sides, try to grasp tiny bits of life on the edge of my favorite black hole. The landscape is vast and flat, an arid land of long-yellowed grasses and a red-black sky. Like the colors in a negative, nothing looks real. Matter is white, while the air becomes more heavy cloaked in colored blood. Moment by moment I drift. I am looking down into the deep hole. Now, I lay on my back, amazed how far I have fallen. Now, I am climbing out. I am falling in, I am climbing out. I am far away, I am moments from slipping once again. There is no constant, just the ongoing battle, the struggle to stay out and the desire to fall in. I hear the inner record that makes me lose my balance, I see the ground begin to sway… I take the deep breaths that help me stay above ground. The negative mantra plays, the careful steps dig me out. On and on, the tug of war continues.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Time Slipping Away

The clock reads close to midnight. These were hours once devoted only to sleeping, but day has not passed and the people of air still move in and out, calling my lungs home for a mere second. And each task is a lifetime. A brief bit of time to throw everything within the cauldron. To sing and move with all the passion that begs to slip out through orgasm. Each 6 minute cycle is calculated. What do I choose to do with it? Sometimes I think about lunch, sometimes I worry, sometimes I decide to get angry and remember injustices perpetrated. And sometimes, I remember to work.
Amidst the superfluous thoughts that knaw at my attention, I remember to breathe deeply. And then, I’m gone, lost in a place where body and mind wander among two separate worlds. We appear together, an image of unity, but most of me is elsewhere. The land has no name, no distinguishing features or melodies…and it sucks like an ever hungry void. Insistent on consuming every tree and thought, every movement and sound. And my body moves without me. It dances, sings, performs…it seems so normal, a picture of unity…but the "me" that lives through attention, dwells in the land of other and then and yesterday.
And then, a jolt of awakening…here I am, in this room, in this body, at this hour. It is now, in this small lifetime. In the 80 years I may be lucky enough to achieve, in the six minute experiment that requires the whole of me. The question is…what shall I do with this time? Pretend to sing, pretend to work and dance and move while a large part of me spins along the human wheel of emotion and desire? The wheel only moves in one direction…it passes the same obstacles, the same thoughts, the repeating fears and jealousies. Over and over, I decide to relive them…and each time, my blood boils and tears flow with familiar pain. When the timer sounds, I realize the moments are over and I was absent for their escape. It was faded concerns that swept me up and spat me out. My small 6 minute lifetime, over before I decided to pay attention.
Each day, I repeat the same mini life-death, and each day, I realize when it’s too late that I’ve been lazy, I’ve been careless and inattentive and the moments have passed while my mind was busy focusing on imaginary sufferings. These little lives that I abuse. These little lives that I take for granted. They will not continue forever, they greet me with opportunities and I squander the time. It could end tonight and I wouldn’t have made an inch of progress. Each day I forget, but each day I must remember.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Pressure

In the front, the intellect rests in a silver throne and red satin pillows, relishing its command over all organs, cells, and movement. But it is truly a blind king, with only half witted subjects duped into its madness. The real king is the force and energy that stems from the back, from the unencumbered place of deeper, quicker, more intuitive knowledge. This is the domain of clarity. The movement here is quicker, faster than the pompous king can comprehend. It moves faster than doubts and rationalizations. So fast that the pseudo-intellect can have no hope of catching up.
And it comes from pressure. From need and urgency. The Urgency that exists in the dominion of chaos, where everything flows, where creation leaks like golden life sprung from slimy cracks in ancient stone.
In our endless sleeping state, all we see are comfortable beds and leisurely walks. Slow cooked dinners and hammocks in the sun. Every minute that makes its rounds around the endless wheel…a measure of movement. They are all lost…an endless march towards all and none.
A march in place, a march to the left, to the right, moving to the center and disappearing. Going to the dimensions of mathematicians and shamans, tasters of fruit and fungus. Dwell here, within this space of shifting lands.
The space without words.
There are no second thoughts. There are no worries about syntax and ego. It comes. It spills with urgency and purpose. Need. Black rivers and red skies. Laughter thunders in the distance, rattling clouds of moving sunshine.
Captured in a bottle, my love forever stays upon your shelf. Take me with you to the other side, where your secretive dreams are recorded an dissected. On nights covered in black and moist air, you searched for water within rooms of neon and beer. Stale everywhere, but within your red sphere. The moment had begun. With quiet. With the hush of observed holidays and empty streets, we began.
I began.
You opened the door, holding it like a gentleman…into the garden of kingdoms and blue glory…I went with eyes half open and holding your soft hand, poised to catch me falling. A forceful tug pushes me back to center. To the razors edge I walk without finesse. Marked hands and feet dirty the path.
Although it is laid with fine powdered gold, I constantly spit on it, a testament to my zoo-like tendencies. Like a monkey in a cage, I scream and fuss, waiting to be noticed and ogled. A little push, a forceful yank. A bit of metal pain to get it started.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Arguing

Her machine likes to argue, especially the small points.
The smaller the issue, the bigger her opposition. Be it the main course for dinner, the shortest driving route, or the best way to label a folder, she will argue whoever is in front of her. Arguing is such an entrenched habit that she argues inside herself- creating constant indecision and lack of clarity.
Up until a couple months ago, she never even knew she had this habit. Completely blind to her plague, she thought of herself as independent and easy going.
Blind to her personal demons, she was often offended by argumentative and controlling people. Using rationality as an excuse, she constantly defends her ideas and arguments, her tricky machine justifies itself, "I know better, this way just makes more sense."
Now, having been alerted to her habits by a compassionate teacher, she often catches herself in an argumentative discussion. Sometimes she realizes her manifested habit minutes after being spoken, but most often, her habit slips by her consciousness, her attention never grasping what has transpired.
The smaller the issue, the bigger her opposition. Be it the main course for dinner, the shortest driving route, or the best way to label a folder, she will argue whoever is in front of her. Arguing is such an entrenched habit that she argues inside herself- creating constant indecision and lack of clarity.
Up until a couple months ago, she never even knew she had this habit. Completely blind to her plague, she thought of herself as independent and easy going.
Blind to her personal demons, she was often offended by argumentative and controlling people. Using rationality as an excuse, she constantly defends her ideas and arguments, her tricky machine justifies itself, "I know better, this way just makes more sense."
Now, having been alerted to her habits by a compassionate teacher, she often catches herself in an argumentative discussion. Sometimes she realizes her manifested habit minutes after being spoken, but most often, her habit slips by her consciousness, her attention never grasping what has transpired.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Reason and Fear

All our aspects can work for us. Our intellectual center has its purpose, although, like anything, it should not be allowed to take over.
In his recent book, The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore, argues the opposite: That most Americans have allowed their intellectual center to be muted and numbed…ignoring reason and logic and replacing it with blind faith. Faith in leaders and authority. Faith…trust in the military, in the president, basically, anybody but ourselves.
Gore says:
"The point of this book is that our nation is so shockingly vulnerable to such crass manipulation. Whether it’s New Orleans or Iraq or the climate crisis. And it's happening over and over again – the censorship of scientific warnings about the climate crisis; the warrantless mass eavesdropping on American citizens; the overturning of a prohibition against; and the fact that there is so little protest or outcry points to the much deeper problem not of just the culpability of those in the White House at the present moment, but at the fact that we are so vulnerable to these mistakes and that we allow them to occur with hardly any impressive outcry of resistance or protest."
The "why" of this interval is complex, but the first example is our culture of fear.
"Our systematic exposure to fear and other arousal stimuli on television can be exploited by the clever public relations specialist, advertiser, or politician."
Most Americans watch more than two hours of TV a day. Subjected to the latest news of murders, accidental deaths, terrorists, suicide bombers…a world out of control and we want safety. We have given up many rights for this image of safety…even our ability to reason has gone out the window. We are more likely to be struck by lighting than be killed by a terrorist attack, yet, despite the logic, in recent years, Americans have hardly peeped while right after right has been stripped away in the name of safety. The intellectual center has given way to the primal desire for survival, the most basic machine tendencies are now in control. The lizard brain is in command of the ship.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)