Posts tagged thoughts

In March I realized that the center could not hold—that what I had, up to this point, based my life upon, would no longer suffice. I’m almost 28, and I’ve finally felt the awful pains of the twenties.  Woe is me, perhaps. But I’ve no words, no words, just birds and nature and the blooming libido of spring banging at the door, telling me that the world turns whether I think it does or not; that I will age yet again this year, perhaps more, perhaps less; that the inevitable nature of humanity is upon me and I had better spend some time staring at the horizon, asking myself why ever for. Upon moving to Germany, I took to watching Cast Away almost obsessively, sure that his island was my island, that I had been removed from the one that I loved and that I would never see her again, that I had to learn to see anew because the world would not wait for me, would not stand against time as gently as a man simply telling himself that he must breathe. It’s all melodrama, of course, and tonight is one of the few times that I will allow myself to indulge in it. But the film has a point, as disjointed and splintered as it is: all our lives slit and slide from one moment to the next, some more dramatically than others, but all with moments that suddenly shift our lives into a new focus with a new lens, a perspective we hadn’t imagined before.  In time I forgot the girl, but the damage that was done has left me with lines in my face that I never expected, cynicism and nonchalance that I had never known before. When someone tells me that I live a dream life, that I have come out so, so lucky in this unintended gamble, I can only agree and nod, break eye-contact and wonder what it is that I see that so many others do not. Or, in a moment of harsher blame, what it is that I lack that they do not. Whether they mean to or not, life’s currents will drag me back to the most general sense of home I know, to the one of the most awful particulars, soon enough. I’d like to think that it does not matter, that I can continue on as before, that I can take this time to continue to improve, to think, to surprise myself with sentences whispered into the phone that I had not known were part of me until they were spoke; but I know the truth: the tide will bring something new, the mornings and the years will slowly, or suddenly, reveal their hand, and again I’ll be tumbling into the surf.

In March I realized that the center could not hold—that what I had, up to this point, based my life upon, would no longer suffice.

I’m almost 28, and I’ve finally felt the awful pains of the twenties.  Woe is me, perhaps.

But I’ve no words, no words, just birds and nature and the blooming libido of spring banging at the door, telling me that the world turns whether I think it does or not; that I will age yet again this year, perhaps more, perhaps less; that the inevitable nature of humanity is upon me and I had better spend some time staring at the horizon, asking myself why ever for.

Upon moving to Germany, I took to watching Cast Away almost obsessively, sure that his island was my island, that I had been removed from the one that I loved and that I would never see her again, that I had to learn to see anew because the world would not wait for me, would not stand against time as gently as a man simply telling himself that he must breathe. It’s all melodrama, of course, and tonight is one of the few times that I will allow myself to indulge in it. But the film has a point, as disjointed and splintered as it is: all our lives slit and slide from one moment to the next, some more dramatically than others, but all with moments that suddenly shift our lives into a new focus with a new lens, a perspective we hadn’t imagined before. 

In time I forgot the girl, but the damage that was done has left me with lines in my face that I never expected, cynicism and nonchalance that I had never known before. When someone tells me that I live a dream life, that I have come out so, so lucky in this unintended gamble, I can only agree and nod, break eye-contact and wonder what it is that I see that so many others do not. Or, in a moment of harsher blame, what it is that I lack that they do not.

Whether they mean to or not, life’s currents will drag me back to the most general sense of home I know, to the one of the most awful particulars, soon enough. I’d like to think that it does not matter, that I can continue on as before, that I can take this time to continue to improve, to think, to surprise myself with sentences whispered into the phone that I had not known were part of me until they were spoke; but I know the truth: the tide will bring something new, the mornings and the years will slowly, or suddenly, reveal their hand, and again I’ll be tumbling into the surf.

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Here’s the question: What do you write when you’re no longer sad, but certainly not happy?; when the days begin to warm and lengthen, but the gray skies remain, a frigid breeze appearing every now and then to remind you that you haven’t made it out yet?; when you spent Christmas alone, staring out the window, thinking of what exactly you wanted to do with your life, if you had an answer or if you were just as full of shit as most, if you had any other answer better than knowledge, than learning, knowing full and well that this could be as great of a mistake as any, but no matter how many times you weighed the issue, you could see no other answer?; what do you write when you weren’t happy with your writing and the way you thought about the world, with what the world was offering you, with the faces and voices and lack of fear about a poorly lived life?—what do you write when the conflation of these ideas imploded, turned into a vacuum inside of you, demanded that you retreat as far as possible from the world, and when you surrounded yourself with books and solitude, Rilke’s great and solemn emptiness, the questions now being ignored, the year dedicated to slowly living yourself to the answers? At the moment, I simply don’t have the first idea what to say. 

Here’s the question: What do you write when you’re no longer sad, but certainly not happy?; when the days begin to warm and lengthen, but the gray skies remain, a frigid breeze appearing every now and then to remind you that you haven’t made it out yet?; when you spent Christmas alone, staring out the window, thinking of what exactly you wanted to do with your life, if you had an answer or if you were just as full of shit as most, if you had any other answer better than knowledge, than learning, knowing full and well that this could be as great of a mistake as any, but no matter how many times you weighed the issue, you could see no other answer?; what do you write when you weren’t happy with your writing and the way you thought about the world, with what the world was offering you, with the faces and voices and lack of fear about a poorly lived life?—what do you write when the conflation of these ideas imploded, turned into a vacuum inside of you, demanded that you retreat as far as possible from the world, and when you surrounded yourself with books and solitude, Rilke’s great and solemn emptiness, the questions now being ignored, the year dedicated to slowly living yourself to the answers?

At the moment, I simply don’t have the first idea what to say. 


…that there can be no end
to roads & tracks in our singing, that the asphalt & rail,
more than everything we know, are the knowing itself,
which is inescapably within us. That the plot is footfall
& click-clack unfolding, as it always must, one steely step
at a time. And that Prometheus’s brother, of whom
almost nothing is sung, was named Hindsight,
the one who had not the gift of predicting the story


but the gift of making sense of the story once the story was done.

Kathleen Graber, Another Poem About Trains


Thoughts I Am Presently Dealing With What is my real attitude toward technology and the hazy future of mankind? Would knowing that future change my opinion? Can moral systems really work on a universal scale?  Why did Puccini have to die in the middle of writing Turnadot?  I cannot help but feel that the second and third act would be as tremendous as the first if he had. How does one approach the new year? A mere human calendar the world subscribes to?  If anything, I feel that gives the idea so much more beauty.  How little is shared superficially between us—yet our concept of time is linear and accepted.  We all share the notion of the possibility of change, but our reaction to that possibility can reveal so much more than we typically dare. With only so many months left to live on a continent that is not my own, what comes next? Back to America, I suppose—a land that I am not sure is my own anymore than the next.  I have not made this country my own, but I like to think that I will take away from it the ancient feel of its land, a sense of the effect of our human existence upon the earth in a way that has not yet been found in what seems always virgin soil, a second away from tilling the perfect seed. “I want to loaf,” Larry says is Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, and for a second, for a brief weekend, I know exactly what he means, my mouth full of tongue-in-cheek and all. The books around me annihilate me—my word of the year is “Evolve”.  The next question will be unanswered for a determined amount of time. Look where Death is looking and perhaps you may find something to see.

Thoughts I Am Presently Dealing With
  • What is my real attitude toward technology and the hazy future of mankind?
  • Would knowing that future change my opinion?
  • Can moral systems really work on a universal scale? 
  • Why did Puccini have to die in the middle of writing Turnadot?  I cannot help but feel that the second and third act would be as tremendous as the first if he had.
  • How does one approach the new year? A mere human calendar the world subscribes to?  If anything, I feel that gives the idea so much more beauty.  How little is shared superficially between us—yet our concept of time is linear and accepted.  We all share the notion of the possibility of change, but our reaction to that possibility can reveal so much more than we typically dare.
  • With only so many months left to live on a continent that is not my own, what comes next? Back to America, I suppose—a land that I am not sure is my own anymore than the next.  I have not made this country my own, but I like to think that I will take away from it the ancient feel of its land, a sense of the effect of our human existence upon the earth in a way that has not yet been found in what seems always virgin soil, a second away from tilling the perfect seed.
  • “I want to loaf,” Larry says is Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, and for a second, for a brief weekend, I know exactly what he means, my mouth full of tongue-in-cheek and all.
  • The books around me annihilate me—my word of the year is “Evolve”. 
  • The next question will be unanswered for a determined amount of time.
  • Look where Death is looking and perhaps you may find something to see.

Of Note, Of Thought

Ever since I read a review of Tom McCarthy’s C I have been thinking of one thing that I cannot escape.  It has bothered me for weeks.

The review discussed the death of the modern novel and the way that stories are all the same these days, that nothing new is being done and that few authors have stepped up to dispute that claim.  ”Okay,” I thought, “realism is dead, magical realism isn’t an alternative, and anything beyond that is pure imagination (re: science fiction, fantasy, etc.) and is simply unacceptable. Poetry has never really mattered except to poets and the slow change of culture that they refer to (and are often right, but noting the change of culture or ideas for a few thousand readers has rarely mattered less than in our modern age).”  So, to fiction, the last bastion of the true writer, I wondered what could exist beyond trying to accurately describe the world, even if you slipped into our dreams from time to time.  And I wondered if this was a problem of humanity and our current position of accelerated collectivism, a generalized belief in the greatness of our species through the Internet and information.  I tried to argue with myself that it wasn’t.

Because here’s my conclusion, as much as I don’t want to believe it: if the novel has failed, if telling the story with compassion and honest psychology no longer owns any sort of interest for the population, then what is left other than something that is meta-human?  If you truly stop to think about the human story, this suggests that we are now bored with it, with its importance to our own race and species, and we are looking for a story that now lies beyond the world of our own creation.  We are tired solipsists, asking for an assist.

And yet, the second idea that I recently posited, suggests that because of collective human archetypes (as shown through Campbell and Jung) and the decline of religion in the modern world (current church attendance lies at 29% of Americans…just wait for the baby-boomer bust in that statistic), is that through our collective similarities we have found, online, the only religion that we can believe in: the sameness of others of our race.  What a strange idea: the only supernatural we can accept is a greatness in humanity that lies beyond our understanding of it. It’s accepting that we are too dumb at this point in time to see our imagined world for what it truly is: the reality we have chosen to believe in, regardless of what it really may be.  This is no longer the Hindu Absolute, the Buddhist Enlightenment, the Christian Salvation and Heaven…no, this is a magnificence that we imagine to exist only through our own existence.  

Seriously consider Nietzsche’s Overman and humanity’s dedication toward his existence, and then look around and wonder what these people are doing for that cause that this culture unconsciously believes in.  Seriously consider a world where God doesn’t matter, if He ever has during our lifetime.  Consider the idea of Art providing meaning in any context to your life other than in the individual sense, and the fact that you are relatively bored with your own existence the moment you consider it in more than narcissistic terms.  And then, consider any argument for morality you’ve ever possessed and try to apply it to the greatness of humanity…to the culling and perfection of humanity.  

Do all this, and then tell me that you don’t believe you aren’t the master of your own destiny. And please, tell me how that feels.