The Order Of The Factors

I woke up this morning with a sense that it was too early to be up. It was a work day, but it wasn't time to work yet. I still had a couple of hours. I didn't want the night to end.
I had woken up at the wrong time but I was fully awake, all drowsiness had left me like water falling from a bucket, leaving it empty and ready for something new to come to fill it.
I looked at the clock and saw that it was an hour and half earlier than the time I usually woke up. A pain on the side of my hip had been bothering me for several weeks. It wouldn’t let me sleep for long no matter how hard I tried. I tossed and turned during the night, repeatedly pulled out of restless dreams by the recurring shocks of deep pain coursing through my body like tiny messengers wrapped in red flame.
I was wide awake but I didn't get up from the bed. Instead I lay there, vainly trying to understand what had just happened. My eyes were open but I just stared at the gray ceiling in a kind of dazed stupor. The questions that invaded my mind didn't have enough of a clear shape to require answers. Instead they just floated through my consciousness, mute witnesses to aftershocks of searing pain.
Without saying it to myself, I was making a last ditch effort to sleep some more, to find some remaining crumbs of restful peace before the day actually started. Maybe if I stared long enough, sleep would overtake me and I would recede into dreams for just a little longer, enough to let me flee the looming and unavoidable reality.
But my efforts were in vain. I was wrestled out of any remaining sleepiness by my insistent thoughts, by my shapeless questions, by my undefined images.
I looked out the window and saw that the sky was still dark, a dark blue fading into a lighter grayish color, a heavy night that was slowly but stubbornly changing into another ephemeral day. A touch of red was timidly showing up in the distance, over the roofs of the Victorian houses, all the way to where the very top of the Golden Gate Bridge could be glimpsed surrounded by white shining fog. A clear promise that the sun would be coming soon. Unusual for a city as foggy as this one.
I decided to get up and do something I hadn’t done in a very long time: I would watch the sun come out, I would watch it unfold its warm morning light over the city, a spectacle I once enjoyed in my youth but which had been nearly forgotten with the passing of time.
I stood up, went to the closet and picked some sweaters and shoes in case it was very cold. It's usually cold in this city where I live, very different from where I grew up. I'm still not quite used to it. Something inside of me still wishes it was different. As if the weather would follow my wishes, as if my wishes had a grain of objective truth hidden within their multiple subjective folds.
As I went through the choices in my closet, my memory went back to a particular day in the past. I couldn't remember the details of the day. I couldn't say what had happened or what I had been doing. I could only remember that I had been looking for something. It had been a day when, no matter how much effort I put into my search, I couldn’t bring myself to find that thing which I was looking for. I remembered that I eventually found a solution. The way I finally did find what I had been looking for was by sitting and contemplating the world around me for a long period of time. Quietly. Softly. Subtly. Without rush.
To contemplate in length seemed so easy, so simple. And yet I had not done anything like it in such a long time. Like waking up early, like looking at the rising sun. Things I had forgotten.
When I first moved into this apartment, I made sure I went out to the balcony early to sit and contemplate. I would do this for at least thirty minutes every day before engaging in my daily routine.

I kept this up for a while, until one day I suddenly dropped it. I couldn't really say why. I can't even say for sure that I noticed when it happened. Suddenly it was gone. Like so many things, it just fell out of rhythm, out of step. Maybe I didn’t get that much sleep the night anymore, so it was harder to get up early. Maybe I was just too lazy one day and I preferred the warmth of the bed sheets. For whatever reason, one day I didn't do it. And then one day turned into two, and two into three, and soon my thirty minutes of contemplation were gone and forgotten. Like old shoes or lost memories.
Today I once again remembered. Why did I remember today? I was struggling with pain all night, pain that wouldn't let me sleep. I couldn’t go back to sleep even when I tried with every trick I was aware of, every trick I had been taught.
It then occurred to me that it would a good idea to do that thing I used to do. The pain didn't allow me the easiest route so I had to pick the next option in its place, a route not so easy but full of its own rewards. As simple as that. So unpredictable. So completely beyond my conscious control.
I geared up and went to the balcony like I used to do.
Now the sky had more pinks and oranges than earlier, the darkness had disappeared rather quickly and had left behind a glowing whitish blue that suffused everything with its freshness and light. I heard a bird singing in the distance, I heard the honking of a bus coming from a few blocks away, I heard the tinkling of a little boy's laughter, I heard the murmur of a large sprawling city that was slowly waking up, maybe lost in its own city thoughts, maybe struggling with its own kind of urban pain that forced it to awaken from its concrete slumber even if it would have rather stayed asleep a bit longer, even if it wasn't quite finished with its strange city dreams.
I stood there looking and listening. I noticed my mind getting distracted, a stream of thoughts trying to explain what was happening, what I was trying to do, why I was doing it, how it would happen.
"Focus your mind on what you are seeing, don't worry about your tasks for the day, don't worry about what happened yesterday, don't worry about what will happen tomorrow, just place your mind on this that is in front of you, I just have to remember that one project that is due, I have to remember, I can't allow myself to forget. I just don't have to remember right now, right now I just need to look, look at all of it, but I should make a note, a mental note, but I have to set aside the mental note in order to look, look openly, look without thinking, just remember to get the laundry later, remember later but forget it right now..."
I slowly slid into disappointment. I was disappointed with myself, very disappointed, disappointed because I still remembered, I could still remember what it had been like once. I remembered that I didn’t use to do this before, I remembered that my mind had once been quiet, I remembered that I didn't have this long train of thoughts invading my sacred moments of open perception.
This didn't happen before. I used to contemplate and feel…feel and absorb all the beauty I could take into me, without getting distracted by explanations, without being pulled by responsibilities, without being shaken by running thoughts about obligations and random tasks. I could just sit and look and absorb. I got very disappointed and the dark disappointment just added to my struggles, a speeding downward spiral, a sliding avalanche of negative emotion I couldn't stop or set aside.
I opened my mouth to take a long, deep breath. I went back to a particular memory from my childhood, something I always wished for, something that always made me long to go back, even if it was only to live that one little moment, a tiny scene from a not so pleasant past.
I was probably 10 or 11. My father had promised to take us to the beach the next day, but only if we finished our homework in time. I loved the beach, I was really excited to go, but I had a lot of homework to do and I wasn't sure that I could finish it in time.
I made sure that I got up very early to do my homework before the trip. I jumped out of bed as soon as my eyes opened and I picked up my school notes, ready to start working. The homework was to fill a sheet of paper with the following phrase:
‘The order of the factors doesn’t alter the result’
The teacher wanted us to memorize this by writing it many times on a piece of paper. This was the way we were taught back where I came from. Repetition and repetition and more repetition. Rhythmic cycles of linguistic instruction, calculated to drill thoughts into a young mind overpowered by constant change.
I was getting ready to sit at my desk to do the homework, when I noticed that outside the window there were some extremely beautiful colors, shifting and shining and sliding and twisting just outside the glass.
I got on top of the desk so I could look at them. I stood up on the desk right in front of the window, my eyes wide open, my mind wide open, my attention wide open.
I saw the sky turning from deep black to shining orange and then to bright blue and white… I saw flocks of birds flying by, I heard the noise of some of the people in my house waking up, my father walking to the bathroom and yawning, my mother turning on the stove while whispering to herself. I heard a car passing by with the radio on, I heard distant footsteps coming from a block away, the sound of high heels tapping on cement.
All of it fit in perfectly. Like an enormous jigsaw puzzle made of sound and light, a puzzle I had never before been able to decipher. Everything fit with everything else. Nothing was out of place. Nothing was to be discarded, nothing was to be occluded, nothing was to be set aside.
I saw some black birds flying in perfect formation over the roof of the house across the street, I heard roosters announcing the coming of the brand new day, a new day which I was a part of, a day which I was meant to live.
I was taken away by all this perfectly coordinated beauty for what seemed like forever. I must have stood there on the desk, looking out the window, for at least a couple of hours. And yet it felt like nothing. No struggle, no effort, no pain, no purpose. I had completely lost track of time while I looked out the window, time had ceased to run in the way that I was used to. I forgot where I was or why I was there. I forgot everything except for the beauty that was all around me, the extreme and perfect beauty that surrounded me from all directions, the vibrant breathing beauty that called to me, that made me feel welcome, that made me feel alive.
I found myself standing on the balcony now, trying to do the same thing I had once done so easily, that thing I had done which I never meant to do, that thing which just happened on a morning so long ago.
But I was running into serious difficulty now, I was stumbling and crashing into intangible obstacles. I was having problems with this thing which once had been so simple, problems with something that had once seemed to flow unimpeded, soft and smooth and natural. It was not so easy anymore, not as easy as it once was, not easy at all.
Maybe I thought about it a bit too much, maybe the thoughts of loss were like dark clouds that prevented me from seeing openly. Maybe I had lost the gift of simple observation somewhere along the way and now I couldn't say where or how it had happened.
‘I used to have the experience and not the explanation. Now that I have the explanation I am looking for the experience. I can only find it if I get rid of the explanation that I once worked so hard to find. The experience, the direct experience, just like a child, just like the child I once was…just like the day I was working on my homework and the morning went away in a maze of colors and sound and light… the order of the factors does not alter the results… the order of the factors does not alter the results… it doesn’t matter what comes first, the experience, the explanation…the order of the factors doesn’t alter the results…'
And the morning opened up before me, slowly but surely, while I quietly did my homework, the homework I was finally understanding for the first time, the homework that spoke in a rhythm of simplicity and recurring sonic beats, the homework I still had time to finish.

The Cosmic Cycle

The great cosmic cycle moves without a thought. Not a wind, not a purple flower with its little face to the sun disrupts its movement. It is I that watches through a closed window. Me, that observes the sunshine and rain. Tiny droplets roll down the window in a path towards the sidewalk. I watch them race to the concrete. But it is not the end. They will stay just a short time, then travel once again. Up. UP to the ever- present blue. But I watch the wet gray ground while they sit, not static, but patient. A lacy curtain reminds me of the rays of sunshine to come. Mini streams roll down the valleys of a cement driveway, past patient cars and silent trees that stand like brave tall men in the breeze. The needle-covered soil takes what is given. Silently, the seeds of life enter, bringing with it the desires of the sky. Those blackened clouds, pregnant with the hope of sprouts. With the unending goal of perpetuation. This is the cycle. The circle of the cosmos. From life to birth, death and transformation. Rain and sun. Evaporation and storms. I watch from a window, a piece of the circle. And I watch with thoughts. With emotion. With desire. I see her out in the rain. Naked. Her body glistening with beads of the sky. Crystal clear on her white flesh. Her hips move with the thump of the raindrops. The melody of a flute is within her and I watch as the rain holds her in its cold arms. She spins, her ratted long hair follows like a trail of comets. The whispers of clouds bring new forms. Little purple flowers. Overflowing rivers. A wet dog. With it comes lightning and a new language I long to decipher. I listen, from behind the closed window. The clock is locked in place, yet I watch it all in passing. Moving so fast, but the clock remains fixed. I watch from behind the window, through the glass, through the lace curtain. Rivers come from the sky. They come from the clouds. From the cycle that continues without a greater power pulling the strings. I am the rock in a stream. The pebble that drifts as the current moves without guilt or desire. There is no emotion, no sentimentality in this cosmic movement. Just colliding rocks. Smashing air currents and electrical pulses. There is no greater power. As I watch, the window is clear and the clock stands still.

Land Of Compost

About a week ago I went for a walk with an old friend and her boyfriend. They held hands as we walked along dirt paths that crisscrossed with cement sidewalks and litter-strewn black asphalt. I was just a few inches away, feeling the heat between their two palms, tasting the salty sweat of their mingling. We walked through El Salvador, the country of my birth, the land they still drink day after day and where I merely sip from the puddles every couple of years. We moved silently under thick leafed trees and through waves of humid wind. We walked in the shadow of our volcano creator and through plumes of black exhaust that whiled like svelte dancers with even thinner wings. Their words came, encapsulated in despair and a gray horizon. There were no jobs, the bellies of the countryside were still hungry. There were too many people for the small country and more were being born every day. The politicians still took their envelopes of cash and the people, the country of laborers and dreamers, extinguished their lights of hope with each sun that set.
And we walked, and they touched and I felt their words and their heat. Something had happened, they said. Something is happening. This little country of Central America, many times smaller than California, lost in the middle of a geological umbilical cord, this little country had become the most violent place on Earth. New-formed gangs dealt in drugs and crime. There was still the aftertaste of civil war, the death squads had been given new names but still moved through the open veins of city streets and political circles. There were murders every day, and not even the children held on to the dreams of pupusas and candy. El Salvador, they said, lacked purpose. On the glass coffee table of the earth, El Salvador was an odd shaped piece that didn’t fit the nearly-completed puzzle. There was no product they could deliver, nothing that they could contribute to a world of computers and trained technicians.

As they spoke of metal and machines and humans in cloaks and a world of parts, I started to smell the decaying forest floor. I saw mushrooms, I could almost taste the blackened rot of soggy leaves. I looked to my friend of flesh, her hips that gently moved as she walked, I looked to the right, past the street of busy cars and to the seven year old boy pushing a wooden cart of horchata. And then I couldn’t see, I didn’t see it with my eyes, but I felt as though the soil itself began to move through me, the energy of the land entered through the soles of my shoes and moved up my ankles and up through my legs and into my stomach, up and up…and they could not see it and I could not see it, but maybe this is what we had, perhaps this is what we were. We were the other, the subtle creation invisible to the modern eye, different than metal and shiny bits and cities of industry. What we had came from the ground, from the back alleys, from the black soil and the fields of bones. What we had was pumped out of the bloody streets of El Salvador and went up, vaporizing into a finer mist.

We, we machines of flesh. We, we readers and eaters and fuckers. We are a biomass. We are an endlessly repeating blob of flesh that feeds energy and information into a greater accumulator. We are, as Gurdjieff said a long time ago, "food for the moon.” We give to the nearly invisible. We give without knowing. We die, kill, are born, play…we do it without knowing that we ourselves are food. Our lives are the heat of the compost pile, a heap of orange rinds and tea bags and worms that make this smelly mess their home. As long as we walk with eyes closed, as long as we walk without a purpose, as long as we fuck to die we can be nothing but a massive compost pile, a burning pile that moves slowly in the great voidness of space.

The hot bloody biomass that is El Salvador serves as a place where dead life forms get broken down and, consequently, this space becomes a fertile breeding ground for new viruses, new language forms that slowly crawl up to the cold northern lands in a subtle invasion of broken English and ancient invocational rhythms. Maybe the planet has a need for a closed, warm environment, where the ancient and new codes can meet and explode into a thousand new mutations, splashing like burning rain over the borders of the industrialized nations. Such a place is bound to be violent, dangerous and unpredictable, especially when the sun shines with unrelenting force and the mutations multiply in multi-colored threads through the wide open sky. Maybe these things are as they should be, and it is only because we are deep in their entrails, in the very thrust of their movement, maybe because we are the movement itself, we slide into thinking that they shouldn’t be as they are. But regardless of what I want or don’t want, El Salvador continues, creation itself continues in its unrelenting and inherently beautiful grind, its multidimensional dance of life and death that will allow for no compromise.

Slow Guidance

“GSP!!! GSP!!! GSP!!!!” Fans pumped on energy drinks and cheap liquor and watery beers and bright lights and the collective energy of thousands chanted in the sports arena. Guys in T-shirts gave the “rock-on!” sign with their hands and young painted women looked seductively into the passing video camera and I just had to wonder if they really enjoyed watching two men fight each other or if they came as the good-looking companion for their boyfriends and husbands and perhaps to make sure they didn’t get into too much trouble. The scene was drenched in the aroma of adrenaline and manly sweat and sweet intoxicated breath. It was loud and it had all the ingredients for smaller fights to occur in the stands and for sexual aggression against the outnumbered women. It could happen, if this were a country where people wandered over the edge and gave in to their most savage tendencies in a collective burst of action. But this was not that kind of place, not in the sanctioned sports center of Nevada. They would all end up watching the fight with enthusiasm and they would shout and chant and in the end, after it was all finalized by a couple of judges, they would drown the rest of their sparkling energy in another cold beer and maybe, if they had any left, they would spill it into the open legs of their woman if they happened to have one or maybe a prostitute if they didn’t.
“GSP!!! GSP!!! GSP!!!!” The octagonal stage was the center of a stadium-like space, it was the epicenter surrounded on all sides by black chain link fence that had a black mat-like padding at the very top edge. Two fighters paced around the ring, a referee ran back and forth, monitoring their punches and kicks, looking at their hands to see if they were grabbing the opponent’s shorts, or was it the fence? He ran around them, moving constantly in a tension between being close enough to see every detail of their engagement but light enough to get out of the way should they move positions and come tumbling towards him. Watching at home, it was easy to forget that there were many cameramen surrounding them as well, capturing it all, every twist and punch, close enough so it felt like we were there, just inches away from all the sweat and blood and taut skin that struggled to either make contact or avoid the blows.
A bell went off, indicating the end of round two. “The Pit Bull” was bloody; the area below his nose was covered in smears of red and one of his eyes was starting to swell. He went back to his corner and sat down on the small stool while one of his trainers propped his legs up and shook them slightly. His team was next to him, one of them was yelling loudly about what moves he needed to come out with in the next round. Matching the pitch of the cheering crowds, the trainer gave him advice, but the fighter stared straight ahead, looking into the distance, perhaps seeing a blur of lights and shapes that bent and twisted in the corners of his eyes. The fighter nodded, but could he hear the voices or were they like the buzzing of flies that he had somehow gotten used to?
On the other side of the octagon was GSP and his trainer. His trainer was kneeling almost in front of him but slightly towards the right. “Okay, breathe, breathe…are you with me? Come back to me. Do you hear me?” The fighter looked at him and nodded. “Okay, we need to calm your breathing, can you do that?” The fighter nodded. The trainer spoke to him with the voice one would use with a little child, a child that had just made a pretty drawing, not the full grown muscular man that had just spent the last ten minutes punching and kicking and submitting an opponent that was 30 pounds heavier than him. “You did very good in that round, I’m so proud of you.” He said it like many parents have spoken to their children, he spoke slowly, deliberately, saying only what was completely necessary. There was a second trainer on the other side of GSP, this man had not said anything, but he kept his arm moving up and down vertically and very slowly, indicating with his slow hand the way GSP should calm and move his breath. In the excitement of cheering fans and multicolored spot lights darting across the audience and the noise of thousands of people talking excitedly, among this noise and energy, the trainer was able to cut straight through the static and chaos and reach into the heightened state of GSP to communicate with him directly. He used tone, gesture and careful words to communicate what he needed. With this gentle touch, the trainer was able to calm his fighter down, to bring him back to a space where words made sense and directions could be understood.
On the other side of the ring, another tired and heightened fighter sat, many words were shouted in his direction, words that contained instructions and advice, but could he hear it through all the noise and energy that was going through him like electrical sparks? Did they make sure he heard them or did they just keep sending out words to mix with the countless other shadows in the stadium?
When travelling through a tunnel of lights and sounds and sparks, it is slowness that will guide us in the right direction. It is slowness that we can hear, slowness that can be perceived as different among the shooting stars and bolts of static. Slowness is necessary. Giving directions is good, but to complete the circle, for the advice to be effective and useful, the directions must be understood and followed through. In the basic raw state of the animal, it is slowness that we can understand. It is tone. It is clarity.
The round was about to begin, “Okay, when you get out there, I want you to jab and move… what are you going to do?” “Jab and move,” replied GSP, looking directly into his trainer’s eyes.

Fast Edits

The car is vibrating softly, a muted whhhrrrr fills the small cab as the seat jostles my thighs. The motor runs and I wait in the bright light of mid morning. I am surrounded on both sides of the street by nearly identical three story apartment buildings. Their colors vary…cream, pale blue, golden yellow, white, brown, and so do the materials that compose the sparse balconies, stucco, metal, wood. While I wait, I try to look for other architectural features that diversify the cookie-cutter construction, but the diversity comes from the occupants, not the builders. There are a cluster of satellite dishes clinging to a wooden balcony. A large blanket dries over its edge, painted in the bright colors of a peacock. Telephone poles line the street, an abundance of thick, black wires come from each one like an electric waterfall of plastic tubes. Pigeons line the wires, pigeons perch comfortably on the rooftops, pigeons fly above, coasting low to pick up pieces of food, then back up high, back to the flock. I have sat with this view, with this eternal, unchanging street many times. Usually I sit in silence, preparing for the force about to arrive, but today, I turn on the tiny white Ipod and put on the good morning song, a musical piece of beats and electronic rhythms that always sound so, so good in the morning, when the light is bright and the possibilities of a new day are still silver in their whispered promises.
And the beat starts, the delay of an engine roars into the soundscape…then creeps in the steady boom of bass. A car crosses my line of vision at 25mph, it matches the tempo perfectly. A handful of pigeons take flight and my eyes go to them and then my eyes move back to the perpendicular street ahead of me and another car paints the street red just as the music hits an extended delay and then the beat starts in a little faster and my eyes dart to a patch of grass…my eyes move with the rhythm…a gated door…a window… a man on a telephone… a car goes…one, two, three beats. My eyes conspire with the song, editing the neighborhood in fast cuts and smooth delays. fffuuahhhh, a blue car goes by, precisely when it is needed, the birds take flight again, just as the song begins it crescendo and then I look to the ground, to the birds, to the wires, here comes another car and I hold the stare for 2 beats, then bam, bam, bam, my eyes dart again for every beat…one, the road, two, the pigeons, three, the grass…door, man, balcony, laundry on the line, faded stucco, a trash can on the street, a woman pushing a baby…tap, tap, tap…my eyes continue their edit…..fffuuuuuuu….a blue SUV passes by…tap, tap, tap, tap…the sculpted cypresses of the cemetery, tap, tap, tap…the wire fence, gravestone in the distance, street, pigeon, the elements cycle and the song continues, beautiful in its collaboration with the entire Universe around it.