01.21.08
Posted in Mine, Personal, Short Stories/Oddities at 12:22 am by Moody
It should be easier to explain than this.
To touch someone’s hand as you walk together through grass that reaches up past your calves to tickle that spot behind your knees. The smile that’s shared then. Not at all tentative, although you might think that’s what it is you see; boldness, actually, beneath the warm, translucent blue iris sky with its streamers of cloud like the Milky Way.
It should be easier to explain why this matters.
Not merely that, in later hours, alone, holding between both hands a hot mug of Folgers with a splash of milk and three teaspoons of sugar and one of chocolate mix — the mug sitting on your chest, on top of the blanket — you will smile up at the ceiling where the glow of the television brightens and fades across the grain. And that it will be just like the time you placed your hand over your niece’s hand as she petted the big black Lab named Chick, the first dog she’d ever touched, ever petted, in your backyard and she said “Doggy soft!” and nearly squealed with delight in that high little voice of hers, and her hand was soft and warm and animate, and her bright, clear, hazel eyes were wide as the ones you see in all those Japanese cartoons nowadays. And that it will be just like the time you brushed back your mother’s soft, gray-brown hair from her high, smooth brow and she sighed contentedly in her sleep, just before you headed off to bed with the holiday lights twinkling in reds and blues, yellows and greens, behind you, casting a warm glow from the front room and chasing your vague shadow before you toward the dimly inferred door of the room you still think of as yours even now that you’ve not been there for years. If only it was easy to explain this.
Those moments strung together like decorative lights or maybe like a cluster of tea lights on a table or china cabinet or…. Those moments blurring into minutes when there arose this sense of something eternal happening, bleeding through from some other dimension, from some unknown compass point, spilling into the now and uplifting it like an icon of joy. It’s not a matter of returning to innocence or finding love or being remade whole at last. It’s not just some confirmation of life or seal of approval from on high or anything like that. In some ways it’s achingly, stupidly sentimental.
But it’s also not that at all, because it’s like freedom and release. To briefly touch another and know, like a leaping spark of electricity, that you are both alive and there and real. To know that it’s really happening, and that all that came before is something that really happened, and that it will all go on because — look at the starlight! Look. How long did it take for it to get here? And it will be just like that, and like the time you took your first road trip all by yourself and realized that you were this autonomous agent in the world but it only mattered if you devoured as much of it as you could. And now there are all these pictures you have in various yellow and white envelopes, and all the ones in those two big photo books that you took the time to label and occasionally take out to share with someone who will try but never quite get how much the journey meant to who you are today. And it’s all such a jumble because how on earth could you ever say what it is you know it means… you know it means. How could you ever explain?
It should be easier to explain. Explain why you must weep into your pillow when it hits you just how significant it is that you were so fortunate to know that embrace, that kiss, that casual brush of a hand. How you burst! How you break into dust and scatter away like seeds to grow anew in a thousand other ways! And maybe it is that it’s simply not meant to be explained. Maybe there are some things — like rain falling on the window when you’re resting your chin on the chill, damp-feeling sill and watching the leaves just beyond the pane bounce and drip-drop the raindrops from each to each until the water is lost among the roots — that bear only silence as they happen and refuse to be captured when recounted later. Maybe it is that this sweet pain is a reward, a pointer that indicates without numbers or letters or art that you have done all right, and that you should be grateful for it, grateful to it, because it came to you for no reason other than you brought it, sui generis, to you.
Permalink
01.18.08
Posted in Atheism, Evolution, Personal, Religion/Spirituality, Science at 10:34 pm by Moody
“You can’t be a rational person six days a week … and on one day of the week, go to a building, and think you’re drinking the blood of a two thousand year old space god.”—Bill Maher
Let’s make one thing clear from the outset: Whatever I might prefer, I shall have no say in whether our boy chooses of his own free will to be an atheist, a monotheist, a polytheist, a pantheist, an animist or a panpsychist. He shall become what he will. What I care about is that he is well-educated and is able to understand the difference between a scientific theory and an unscientific or non-scientific belief. That said, it follows that I want for him, regardless of his chosen belief system or lack thereof, to understand that life evolved and continues to evolve on this little blue-green planet. I want for him to understand that the theory of evolution—as set forth by Charles Darwin and others, and thence, with the gleaning of ever more data, modified by countless scientists over the next hundred-plus years—represents the ongoing efforts of a great many scientists to explain, elucidate, explicate, clarify and interpret how evolution works, and that the theory is not “just an idea” or “belief” maintained by a few dogmatic scientists as they stew in a fancifully conjured but non-existent hotbed of righteous controversy. Put another way, I do not want our boy’s developing mind to be waylaid by the twaddle, bunkum, poppycock, bullshit and ultimate drivel espoused by some very vocal ignorant twits who believe literally, like half-witted naïfs, in what the Bible (or any other so-called sacred text) says. I want the boy to have uncommon sense, the kind that comes with much education taken to heart.
When a child, not yet 10 years old, attempts to tell an “anti-evolutionist” joke but is confused when you state that the theory of evolution does not say that we “came from monkeys”, one can be fairly positive that some irresponsible adult is behind the effort. When that same child then states that “evolution isn’t real” and claims to know this because he is “a Christian”, there can be no doubt whatsoever that some ignorant and twittish adult is behind it. In the case of our boy, it is his ham-fisted biological father who is attempting, with the guidance of a domineering white trash wife, to warp his mind. It’s the sort of thing that can make you throw up a little in your mouth. I mean, his bio-dad and step-mom are the kind who have a giant “Jesus Freak” sticker (in scratchy ‘agitpop’ lettering) on the rear window of their car.
I stand firmly with Dawkins and others who state simply that the religious indoctrination of a child is child abuse. A child, however precocious, is highly unlikely to understand that there is a significant difference between what is called a scientific theory and what is called “God’s revealed [or ‘living’] truth”. When a parent says that something is true, a child is likely to believe it, especially when the parent attributes that truth to an even greater parental figure in the sky who the parent worships. Children are naturally gullible and credulous. They must rely on the experienced comprehension, the seasoned understanding, of their parents. This is not a bad thing, because trust in what a parent tells you may save your life or will at least make your life easier. But for a parent to selfishly mislead a child in the name of a highly questionable fantasy is… wrong, abusive, sick. I expect, of course, to be told that raising a child as a de facto member of this or that religion is normal, natural and good; that it introduces morality, otherwise presumed absent or somehow immanently inferior without it; that it may very well save the child from eternal damnation at the hands of an all-merciful, all-forgiving, all-loving “God”. Personally, I call that supreme, unadulterated, 100% bullshit. I say that that’s exactly the kind of drivel that makes a person puke even through the angry laughter of disbelief.
You may call the process of brainwashing indoctrination normal, but you should remember that it was once considered quite “normal” to beat children (–which, I know, you “spare the rod and spoil the child” types still think it should be so considered), and to keep slaves, and to treat women like chattel and indigenous peoples like plague (often while violently forcing their religious conversion, no less). “Natural and good” are, taken together or apart, suspect from the get-go. When you define nature in creationist terms, positing a supernatural agent as the author of all nature’s laws (which said agent may break on a whim), then I must look askance at anything you might call “natural”. The same goes for your idea of what’s “good” when, according to your beliefs, “good” is whatever “God” says it is. When you can read about “God” ordering the slaughter of men, women, children, babies (born and unborn), and say that it’s “good”, for whatever reason, then I must hold your concept of “good” in contempt.
As for morality, “God” is neither required nor suggested; the word’s Latin root, mor-, simply means ‘custom’. The morality of the Bible is preserved as an historic religious record of a relatively small number of people who lived over 2000 years ago. As a book it is biased toward promoting the view of certain sects of the time while denigrating others, and has a subtle pro-Roman stance. The historicity of many of its books is dubious (where the book in question is not already utterly beyond such consideration; e.g. Genesis), and the preposterous claims liberally sprinkled throughout the pages of the books it comprises are completely undermining of any respectable assertion of Biblical authority a reasonable person might make. I would dare go so far as to say that this is true of most so-called “Holy Books” the world over.
It is, frankly, horrifically despicable to inflict upon a child the notion of damnation, to fill his or her head with images of an all-powerful “God” condemning unbelievers and failed persons to eternal torment. When you consider that one of the people threatened with this endless wailing and gnashing of teeth is one of the child’s parents…. Well, it’s sickening. How could that not be damaging to a child’s developing mind? What a din of cognitive dissonance! How could that not create an unbearable helplessness and thus necessitate a split from the parent ostracized by “God”? How could that not succeed at being isolating in terms of the child’s sense of place in the greater world? A scarring shame should be visited upon any adult so selfishly motivated (by delusion or stratagem) as to poison the healthy development of a mind. And yet it is that a great many people around this country would consider me to be in the wrong.
Some would suggest that they would only teach “God’s love”, charity and kindness, honesty and good will. They would say that those other people are simply misled. But I say bollocks to that! It’s a cop out. Unless you’ve revised your own Bible (or Koran or whatever) or otherwise bowdlerized it–which, so far as I am aware, would make you a heretic or blasphemer–then you are copping out when it comes to a) the truth of what’s in your so-called “Holy Book” and b) dealing with what it is your fellow adherents believe that book to mean. If those other people are wrong, then isn’t it up to you to prove it to them, to enlighten them, to shun them if they will not see reason? If you allow fanatics to scream their misunderstanding as if it represented your religion, as if it were the “gospel truth”, then are you not tacitly allowing that they are merely more vociferous members of your congregation who say what you will not? Are you afraid of schism? Are you afraid of drawing attention? Are you afraid… or just indolent or cowardly? If your “Holy Book” says some rotten things, shouldn’t you deal with that? If the banner of your religion stretches over twisted trolls whose sickness you deplore, shouldn’t you expel them rather than accept the degradation of your fine beliefs? Shouldn’t you be most vocal about it?
As for me, I see no saving grace in religion. I don’t care what goodness it supposedly inspires, because goodness does not come from it; from what I’ve seen, real goodness comes despite it. Real goodness may sometimes ride on the back of religion, as one might ride a mule, but it is more honorable when it walks on its own two feet, under its own power. In the case of our boy’s bio-dad and step-mom, they’d let the mule of religion trample him while they waved to “God” and whispered surreptitiously to each other about how pleasing it would be to watch their enemies burn forever. Sick delusions often have real consequences.
In the boy’s name I will fight their influence, and I will do so with my love for him.
Listening to: Leonard Bernstein & London Symphony Orchestra - The Rite of Spring: V. Games of the Rival Tribes
via FoxyTunes
Permalink
01.07.08
Posted in Out in the World, Personal at 7:35 pm by Moody
And the sky tonight as the sun went down was breathtaking. Deeper and lighter purples shading into ruby and blood orange, gold spending itself in smudged powder coral, cerulean steeped in lilac and bruised rose, iron out of focus behind a damp and gossamer veil of baby’s breath. Naturally, I spent an inordinate amount of time looking into my rear view mirror, trying to take as much in as possible, as I traveled northeastward home, sometimes, surreptitiously, craning my head around to glance at the sky. Dangerous, I don’t doubt, but I didn’t really care too much if it was. The sky seemed to respond, becoming more blood and fire, more lead and ocean depth, more cruel in its beauty. I wondered if there was a volcano spewing ash somewhere, lofting ash into the sky. (In fact, Tungurahua, in Ecuador, recently erupted, but I still have no idea if that’s why the sky was so spectacular.) The light seemed to capture a still life fraught with kinetic portent.
Ahead of me the mountains lay like monstrous blue-black waves, foam capped, with fairy lights irregularly spangling their flanks. The distant view of home. I flew along in my little cockpit, the car a machine toned by its inertia, an inhabited bubble with thoughts like psychological bacteria swimming in that living space curved upon itself. The sunlight faded steadily, unstoppable in its gradual disappearance, silent as silence itself, superimposed upon by the constant whoosh-rush of my heartbeat pushing past my inner ear, upon which, superimposed, the drone of the seemingly endless conversation on NPR, to which I no longer had any attention to pay.
Imagine me, you reader, if you care to. This falling night, here in my particular hemisphere, alone in my car, fairly floating along the inmost lane of the freeway like a blood cell caring not whither I would go, yet arriving almost certainly there. Imagine that within me there is that sunset exploding and diffusing itself across the vast plain of my heartland. And in that place are no freeways nor destinations, and light itself is called breath and wind emotion. And if you can so imagine this, then you may catch a glimpse of history unfolded like the night across the bed of the unfathomable sea of being. Nor does it matter aught, save insofar as you know it in yourself and prise the meaning from the nonce.
Permalink
10.28.07
Posted in Personal at 11:10 pm by Moody
In my life there have been a few things — outside the arena of the most intimate of interpersonal relationships — that I’ve enjoyed so deeply that they have, over time, come to be ingrained, have come to be mythologically archetypal, in my brain’s comprehensive sense of “pleasure”. Of late I have been thinking a lot about hiking and all that surrounds that activity. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my father, who managed to get his listless, moody, youngest son out of the city and into the High Sierras and other places far removed from the concrete and tar of suburbia’s everyday world. Were it not for his insistence, I might well have never learned what it’s like to climb steep mountain trails for mile after mile to reach, at last, some forest bounded lake; to sit beneath the whispering, creaking pine trees at night, warming hands and feet beside a crackling fire as crickets sing and night-birds call from near and far; to wake up in a tent, nestled into a warm sleeping bag, with the bright morning sunlight highlighting the nylon wall and spangling it with the silhouettes of branches and pine needles; to breathe the chilly, seemingly pristine air while eating re-hydrated scrambled eggs (made from a mix purchased at the backpacker’s supply store) and drinking hot cocoa — both made using fresh mountain water; to munch on gorp (”good ol’ raisins and peanuts”) while exploring the wilderness.
Time has softened the complaints I levied against those trips. No mosquito or freezing night, no switchback or strained climb, no lack of TV or shortage of electronic entertainments ever annoyed me so much that I would forget, in the end, that I had the opportunity to see this primevally beautiful side of the world that most people, I’d guess, will never see in person if at all. Time has given me an ache for those vacations spent hiking and camping. I miss the dust on my heavy boots and the smudges of trail dirt on my face. I miss seeing the myriad, crystalline stars through the boughs of the trees — trees whose heady, living scent seemed a balm to succor the fatigued traveler — as the silent, immovable, sentinel mountains, guarding nature’s sense of eternity from the invasive light of so-called civilization, cut imposing blue-black swathes into the clear night sky.
To watch the trout plucking insects from the surface of a lake early in the morning, while the mist yet lay upon its far bank with its flowered meadow, as I washed my face with the lake’s cold, cold water: — this was joy unbridled and larger than me. From time to time in years to come I would ascribe this sense of joy to what is usually called Providence, saying to myself that “God” was surely revealed among the rivers, lakes, trees, mountains and creatures of such distant places as I then stood. Although I have long since abandoned the idea of such Providence as achingly sentimental at its root and needy in a childlike way, I nonetheless feel a very real atheistic reverence in me for such places and the journeys that lead to them. I am grateful for my ability to appreciate the beauty and power of nature without superimposing some sort of story or motive upon it. Nature provides to any open-minded person a seat in the front row of its ceaseless chautauqua.
And I know that someday I must return to hear it again… or else always know some extra burden, however small or easily repressed, of genuine loneliness in my existence.
……………………
The above portion of this entry has been sitting in draft limbo for a couple of days. Fact is, I’ve been thinking about more than just my experiences, and I feel I should confess that my dreams go well beyond simple hiking and camping.
A day or two ago I finished John Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams. Today I watched the MacGillivray Freeman film, Everest (originally shown in IMAX theaters, now available on DVD), which was filmed during the notorious 1996 climbing season — a season when eight people (unrelated to the IMAX expedition) died tragically during a horrendous, surprise storm high on the formidable peak. Krakauer was caught in that storm and found himself in the midst of the unfolding tragedy. Four members of the expedition Krakauer was with were killed. His expedition’s leader, Rob Hall, died from the intense cold and lack of oxygen. Hall spoke to his wife, Jan, via satellite phone in his final hours. She was seven months pregnant, and he helped name their child, Sarah — a daughter who would never get to know her father. According to Wikipedia:
During this last communication, he reassured her that he was reasonably comfortable and told her, “Sleep well my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” Shortly thereafter, he died, and his body was found on May 23 by mountaineers from the IMAX expedition.
Krakauer, devastated and changed by the experience, wrote one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read, Into Thin Air. It was that book that touched something in me that had lain dormant since my childhood visits to the High Sierras. Eiger Dreams has only served to exacerbate that something within me.
Well into my 41st year of life, I know that it is unreasonable for me to think that — all things considered — I will ever test my mettle on some high mountain climb. Even were the monetary costs not completely prohibitive, my lack of experience and merely average health would serve as dire warnings against indulging any foolish ideas I might have. But of course that means next to nothing where my yearnings are concerned, and I know that it is a true desire I feel, one not done in by the practical world with its humdrum typical concerns.
If I am to be totally honest with you — whoever you are, reading this — what I know in my heart of hearts is that I will never belong to the daily mucking about, the fucking around, the much ado about nothing, the rat race, the game. What I know in my heart of hearts is that I belong only to me, — yet, to myself I am the greatest unknown in the end. And I think that it might always be so, if I don’t actually do something beyond what I perceive to be the norm. And I don’t want to die like that; I don’t want to ebb into nothingness, borne along in the boat of “What if…?” on the tide of self-ignorance, realizing that death won’t be so very different in the end than what I had all along.
I know that it is unreasonable for me to think that I will ever test my mettle on some high mountain climb. But mountains like Everest and K2 are to me no less symbols of my inner hunger, my internal yearning, for that, and I must somehow, some way, sometime come to approach them, humbly, earnestly, and with the understanding that of necessity I shall make the ascent. And perhaps it is, that in the years to come I will find my way to some real peak — my mountain, as it were — and find myself with goggles, crampons, ice picks, ropes, cams, carabiners, and all the rest, climbing for my life up some improbable face of granite and ice, wondering how it is such great fortune came to me. Or, looking further ahead, perhaps I’ll be stunned silent for a moment by the memory of this or some similar blog entry of mine, as I sit beside a campfire far off in the distant wilderness, younger eyes trained upon me as I recount my first real climb in light of my first hiking experiences in the High Sierras.
You never know until you know. What I know now is that we have to have dreams to get us to that next, mightily significant, wakeful knowing. We have to have dreams, have to have the yearning to see them come true, have to have the chutzpa and focus to find the way to realize them, have to know in ourselves that those dreams fulfill us like nothing else could, so that when we stand atop whatever kind of peak it is we ultimately climb — we know ourselves (to be) there, where nature’s ceaseless chautauqua names us.
Permalink
10.23.07
Posted in Personal at 2:01 am by Moody
“The theater of noise is proof of our potential.”
We welcome entropy, inertia, the maintenance of routine and its dissolution in thoughtless reveries, sex, new products, bright lights and big noises, war; the pursuit of happiness. In our glorious social hives we countenance no deviation from the de facto parameters indicated/sanctified by skilled interpreters/priests of market index matrices in n dimensions. We make up the amoeba-like consumer conglomerates, worshiping as with one mind the great and holy cartel in the Inc. sky: every mega-store is a church; every mall a cathedral; every swap meet a revival tent; every strip mall a roadside collection of shrines. “GOD” is merely an acronym for the “Gross Optimizer of Decisions”.
Can you see your TV as — “Happy Buddha”… {Call now! Operators are standing by!} … “Dancing Krishna”… {Don't wait until this offer expires! Time is limited!} … “Benevolent Jesus”… {Act now and we'll send you this bonus gift completely free of charge!} … “Wise Mohamed”… {But wait! -- there's more!} …? Were your eyes designed for capture? your ears for jingles? your tongue for McHunger? your nose for good buys? your touch for self-stimulation? Were your senses created for denial and/or satisfaction? Could it be true, that there is no truth so strong that commercialized, well-marketed delusion cannot filter it out for the masses? Could it be done in such a way that failing to accept the end product would result in a sense of alienation, a weight of depression, a twitch of anxiety, a pall of disassociation, der Geruch des Außenseiters, Sie niemand — ?
We need no more than the simulacra sold by hucksters at the cost of some undisclosed percentage of our mind’s freedom. While on the other side of the fence millions of animals are sacrificed to the beat of nihilism’s drum — slaughtered and stripped of flesh, ground up and processed, sold in sterile pornographic display cases — on our side of the fence we masticate the plasticized remains of their kindred, heedless of consequences, as images of death-sex penetrate our eyes and fuck our brains out.
While you pray or meditate or rant or otherwise occupy yourself, a portion of your (and my) tax dollars continue to help fund the oppression and death of countless living beings even as a portion of your tax dollars ia allocated to the furtherance of other “Good Social Causes”™ you have only maybe heard about. You (– like me, of course) will not stop paying taxes, and even if a few of us do it is unlikely that our protest will affect any perceptible change in life as we know it. If no taxes were collected, it would certainly have a deleterious effect on society. Perhaps it should not weigh on us so heavily (assuming it does) as it is so far out of our practical control. Maybe it is better not to pay attention to upsetting things… people, places, events, etc. It might be a good idea to sing “Que sera, sera…” with Doris Day and opine with wistful sincerity that a good deal of life is simply not in our control.
Should I not be bitter? I know the value of love in my life, and good people with whom to share it. Most days, I do fairly well at being a good person, a mensch even. What good is it to berate those who run afoul of my unreasonable standards? Who am I to judge? — But isn’t that the crux of the problem? Who am I not to judge? Who am I not to point out that someone is as guilty as I am? So what if they are misdemeanors and not felonies? What is the collective weight of all our misdemeanors? Alone in the depths of the steely night’s bowels, am I alone in such nightmares of self-recrimination and ubiquitous doubt? Of course I’m not! Are monsters no more than a deadly deduction of the children we drown in this societal wasteland? Is struggling with the inept personal management of a species-wide responsibility a perennial one?
How does one human animal contend against the seething abyss of injustice without suffocating in the contemned reality of it? I don’t know… any more than I know why I love so freely the artful folly of our incessant perambulation beneath a sky filled with more mass-produced Sword of Damocles replicas than there are stars to light our darkling way.
Ahhch — tho’, y’know… don’t listen to me.
Listening to: Ryoji Ikeda - What’s Wrong
via FoxyTunes
Permalink
10.22.07
Posted in Personal at 12:42 pm by Moody
Home on short-term medical leave (I had my gall bladder removed after a couple trips to the ER for gallstones), I’ve had some time to reacquaint myself with something that used to be called “leisure time” but what is now called “unhoped for and needed respite”. Below is a list of items I’ve either read/viewed recently, am regularly reading/viewing, or wish were on at present (TV programs with an asterisk are currently showing or are available “on demand”).
Current Book:
Regular Blogs:
Recently Read:
Must-See TV:
Movies:
Permalink
10.19.07
Posted in Personal at 8:34 pm by Moody
You have not loved until love has stayed, unbidden, and over the course of myriad minor eternities and multitudinous brevities has recreated you, poisoned you, saved you, possessed you, freed you, ignored you, inspired you, exhausted you, succored and wounded you, maddened you and given you sanity. You have not loved until you have utterly and irrevocably forgotten what came before it, how you survived without it, how anything meant anything at all before it arrived, like a thief in the night, to lay abed with you and partake (sometimes in the preparation, sometimes in the eating, sometimes both) of your fulsome repasts, midnight and midday snacks, and meager breakfasts, with never a promise that it would do the dishes — though sometimes, with seeming randomness, it does.
Love is both the systemic/holistic grande apparence of a single member of the clade Homo sapiens in all her or his psyche’s glory and folly and the spirit of Hermes loosed in a miner’s chapeau as that a-priori-juggernaut ipso-facto-spelunker sings “This Little Light of Mine”. Love is a mysterious, compelling, fascinating, larger-than-life guest who may be mistaken for an angel or devil or god or schizophrenic — but almost never for a golem — when first it arrives at one’s door; it is none of these. Love may stay. It will probably bring gifts made of Tiffany wrapped in burning magnesium and/or carnival glass wrapped in tiffany on the Twelfth Night, just because. Love might move in on a whim, or after great deliberation. In any case, know beforehand that love will use your shampoo and toothbrush, but you will not care — because love’s hair will smell more wonderful than a recent shampooing warrants and its teeth will be whiter than the Pearly Gates of Marilyn Monroe’s haunted laughter. Love will ask you to do things which, if you do them, will seem totally unreasonable in retrospect, and if you do not, will seem like they were entirely sensible and leave you to wallow in self-recrimination. Love will bite you and kiss you. Love will screw you over, on, and under the table. Love will ask for chastity as it shows you naked pictures of its soul drawn in invisible ink. Love will ask you to buy it fine wine and tampons… on your day off… after waking you from a nap. Love will make it up to you.
Permalink
08.25.07
Posted in Personal at 8:19 pm by Moody
Enough of the heat, the clinging clothes damp and as effective for baking and retaining juices as foil in the oven. Enough of the thick, wheezing humidity of yet another breath. Enough of capitalist saints and all the other unoriginal sinners clambering up from the pit of because, clamoring for an angel dusted slice of the rancid old pie in the sky. Enough of the quasi-mystical bullshit and the crap monkeys. Enough of the warm soda that was cold only five minutes ago. Enough of the dog days and the catcalls and the birdbrains. Enough of the short tempers of long days. Enough of ennui, apathy, and bored stupidity. Enough of baseless religion and debased politics. Enough of hunger and uncertainty. Enough of debt. Enough driving back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, … fack and borth…. Fucking hell. Enough. Enough! ENOUGH! Enough of the dreamless silence, the suffering through thin hours of anemic disillusionment as the big hand and the little slowly wrap around the heart, choking it with relentless anxiety. Enough missing what never came to be; enough missing what did. Enough wishing that wishing mattered. Enough feeling faint beneath the weight of all the beauty “out there” — out of reach, among and amongst the stars, in the abyss of infinity. Enough of the sore throat and the repressed tears, the sublimated anger, the diverted stress, the deferred break down. Enough of bad stars and goat songs.
Time will never give up its triumph over the ephemeral. Nothing good or bad can stay. Everything passes, and in this way the universe goes. So it goes. Gonzo.
Listening to: Porcupine Tree - Sentimental
via FoxyTunes
Permalink
08.06.07
Posted in Personal at 5:02 am by Moody
A series of television channels flicks by at the usual pace of an artificial heart. But what is displayed is not the usual series of images one comes to expect from television. It’s not children, cleaning products, food, news, graphics, models, cars. The channels are from a mind. There is a significant degree of apparent randomness and apparently non-sensical juxtaposition that even the most aggressive channel surfing cannot match. There is, it would seem, an inscrutable symbolic theme, akin to an artistic vision, avidly attempting to reveal and realize itself. This vision, this theme, is totally unconcerned with points of reference such as hope or despair. Indeed, emotions irrupt into the totality of the moving pictures only as an effect generated by the alien act of an erstwhile objective observation, whose root source is a disease of time and space, a Möbius strip calling itself “I”.
Permalink
08.05.07
Posted in Personal at 5:16 pm by Moody
Reading Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. The pendulum swings. The weekend draws to a close. I’ve decided to write an entry, though I’ve little I feel like saying. Call this a housekeeping entry, or a vague nod that says I still know the world’s there and here I am — now I’m down in it. The pendulum swings, but so slowly. Letters pile up in the in-box from people I really want to talk with, people I’ve effectively ignored for all these months gone by, hoping (vainly) that they understand why. How is it I feel so guilty for being in such a bad place? Bills pile up in the mail box, blood letters from the green machine. The pendulum swings, but so slowly that it feels like suffocation.
Advice to would-be bloggers: The saying, “Nothing is True. Everything is permitted”, is misleading. The days left to this blog are numbered. I do not know how I’ll pay to renew my lease with my host. Right now, even after having worked some 50+ hours last week, I’m not sure how to afford much of anything. Little things, like going out for a movie or going to dinner, buying an album or a book, leave me fearful. Yet, we cannot go without the occasional niceties; we’d go crazy without a break. So, we went to the most recent Harry Potter movie and waited in line at Midnight to buy the final book of the series (which I read in a few days). So, I got a new album: Opeth’s Blackwater Park. So, we now have some quality coffee. So, we’re planning on going to dinner somewhere nice, some Japanese restaurant. And so, we’re going to go to the New Pornographers concert at the Music Box at the Fonda.
But will I ever write to my friends? Will I ever answer a letter? I hope to do so before I die.
Listening to: Opeth - The Funeral Portrait
via FoxyTunes
Permalink
06.24.07
Posted in Personal at 3:02 pm by Moody
The words, the motions, the ideas, the constancy, persistence, enigma, ambivalence, frustration. These days. The attempt at working through them like a bookworm, devouring the book of my life but not reading even a single word of it. Surviving it. Pushing on it and pulling it. Climate forcing introduced by industrial dreams of success. The news is about what’s happening, but what’s happening is only the news. The television is not a teleological agent, tireless self-promoter though it be. Orange soda. Iraq. Cigarettes. France. Politics. Certified Organic. Hypermiling. The Sudan. Sex. Celebrity. Debt. The I.S.S. Distress and soma. Mission to Mars. Love. Lessig. Light. Sicko. Laughter. It’s the economy, stupid. Things that get better. Things that exist as things in the world. Palpable as architecture. Mnemonic like the mere mentioning. Breathless. Taxed. The taxonomic epidural taxidermy of the pachyderm in the corner. Diaries and logorrhea; talkin’ shit to no one. Punitive endeavors of minutes. Seconds as informants, rats and snitches. Every hour a trial. Endless testimony. Boredom. Ennui. The sickness unto death. Cancerous outbreaks of wistfulness attacking the brain, the throat, the liver, the heart. Clinical diagnosticians of the unconscious mind paid per diem sine die under the black sun. Protons do not decay. I repeat: protons do not decay.
I awoke in the warm morning light after having gotten a decent night’s sleep, on a weekend with two days off. Our family is safe for now, however broke we may be right now. Life goes on, and because of who we are we persist in learning from it all. We talk, we struggle, we tussle in the sheets on a night like any other and in the end we know we’ll be all right. We want to be all right. Just life. Just what you have when it’s all said and done, like everybody else. And the recent documentaries and pages turned linger in me. The Web pages perused and sites stumbled line the blood vessels of my brain. And I love harder, like flapping my arms in the harnessed makeshift wings I yoked myself with the day I committed to learning to fly. I run faster down that long slope toward the shore of the morrow. Age is gravity, you know, and I am Mercury. I am Prometheus. I refuse to be Sisyphus. I fucking refuse.
Time will run out, I know. Eventually, the earthquake will come, or the disease or tragedy. Life is unpredictable. Chaos is the result of there being so many rules, so many systems independently operating, that the unpredictable predictably follows. Human life is the ongoing attempt to circumvent the worst, circumnavigate the accident prone world by land, sea, sky and mind. Some do it for love, some for money, some for the love of money, some for discovery, some for thrills, some for the thrill of discovery, some for pleasure, some for pain, some for….
Some just want to know why.
I’m fighting to come to an understanding that I can’t even name. And if there’s a hope to be had it’s found in seeing that beautiful smile, in hearing the open-mouthed laughter, in seeing the tears dry and their stains fade, in feeling a live breath close by and soft with peace, in smelling the invisible glow of healthy skin in the dark of night, in trusting that vulnerability will be answered with kindness and not being disappointed… not again. And all the words can fall away like flakes of dead skin until I’m wholly new again, standing wordless beneath the blaze of the sun and moon and all the stars that drift across my hemisphere singing out the light of their universal story. I will stand there, silent. I will appreciate it silently. I will lay me down again by her side and sleep without dreams, the most vulnerable animal, heartbeat pulsing in my neck for any satellite to spy on, and know that I have all I ever needed in what was there before ever I started looking, knowing I found it only when I was ready.
This is how I learn. This is how I understand. It’s an imperfect process. Nothing guarantees its success. Life goes on for some and not others. Hopes come and go like patients at an E.R. while doubts dispense drugs and gloves to the nurses and surgeons. Who knows if in the morning of the following day the doctor will discharge the patient? And if I am wheeled outside through those sliding glass doors into the parking lot where someone waits with the car door held open, who can say how the world will have been transformed for me? How long will it take for me to realize what happened along the way while I lay in state? Will it even matter then?
What matters is what’s happening now. I see clearly enough where it will wind up. Life is a slow spiral from form built to form destroyed. We sparkle like stars across the endless screen — fathomless black and never backlit — of this tangled, conglomerate history we create out of radiant contrails, silk strands and piano wire.
There is dirt under my nails and a couple cameras in the closet. Mountains rise and hills roll to the restless sea. Clouds form and glow and cast shadows, dissipate and fade away. Trees slowly bend and wave in the breeze. The sun shines through the window of this room. Numbers pile up against me. My bare feet sweat on the carpet of the warm floor. My brow glistens. People move about. People I knew and loved are still out there somewhere, living their lives. Cars race by on the freeway, each with at least one story. Birds sing. Children scream and laugh. Chores wait. Water runs. Music flows. She loves me. I write. I wonder about it all. I marvel at it all. I know where it ends. The understanding is there. Life is here. Protons do not decay. Here in this tidal pool, there is space and time to understand. Life goes on. Right now.
Permalink
04.21.07
Posted in Musings, Personal at 3:15 pm by Moody
We cannot escape our human understanding of the world. We find meaning in life, in the universe, within the parameters of our human senses. Meaning itself is, as we know it and experience it, a human invention. This is not to say that there is only human meaning; cetaceans and avians may well have, at last among their smartest members, a sense of meaning unique to them. But for us it would seem that there is only our own sense of meaning. Were we able to talk with a dolphin, say, and discuss at length with that dolphin her sense of meaning, our understanding of that dolphin’s sense would still be a human one. We can never know what it would mean to be a dolphin understanding meaning.
Yet I am moved by what Steve Talbott says:
No one will deny that we experience meaning everywhere in nature. To sit in a quiet glade with the sun streaming through the trees; to endure the shattering power of a fierce thunderstorm; to enjoy the early greening of spring or the warm, rich colors of autumn; to stand beside a quiet pond or the rapids of a stream; to climb toward the summit of a high peak; to watch the unfolding drama of a sunset; to lie down and gaze up at the stars - every setting we encounter comes to its own meaningful expression within us. Everything speaks an inner language.
As I read those words the first time, I had what I humbly would describe as a moment of satori, or as a moment of pure, Zen-like Dasein. I was struck by the perception that my human sense of meaning does in fact interface with meaning in-itself, free of any particulars. The universe, life, means something. As a human being, however, the universe (which includes “life” in it) means something human to me and can’t really mean anything else or other, or can’t mean something some other way, because as soon as I start thinking about it I do so in my own human terms, within my human framework. I am aware of this. But there is nonetheless a wordless intimation that at the point of touching meaning in-itself there is a certain universal quality (not to say universality) that, even so frustratingly fleetingly, seems to be perceptible in what I will call a meta-human way (n.b., there is no metaphysical woo-woo implied in this). I am reminded of what Roberto Calasso noted in his Literature and the Gods: “In the Greek language the word theos, ‘god,’ has no vocative case…. Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens.” The Greeks were very perceptive. You can’t point to “god” in the moment, you can’t address “god”, but you can say that the moment itself was “god”. So, then, when we are truly in the moment — what happens? That is, what is it we are perceiving when it seems to us that meaning in-itself is unfolding? Might it be said that there is no vocative case for meaning in-itself and, if so, that meaning in-itself is an essence that precedes the existence of any unfettered example of it we might name? Is finding meaning inherent in us?
Meaning bears the ideas of sense, significance, and, depending on circumstance, intention. It is, as we understand it, a quality to some thing, idea, or experience that makes sense, yields significance, or reveals intention to us in a comprehensible way. I suspect that the problem we run into with meaning in-itself is found in the fact that intention may be suggested by meaning. Words are meant to make sense, to yield significance, to reveal intention; words are meant to be understood. As our intelligence enabled us to flourish in the world, meaningful words propagated across the seemingly limitless spectra of human experiences. Vocabularies blossomed as human beings attempted to better meaningfully communicate with each other about themselves and the world they found so meaningful. But no matter how much or what our words are meant to mean, in themselves they are in fact meaningless. A banana is not a plátano a plátano is not a weegbree. Although the words refer to the same thing, they are obviously not the thing in-itself; you cannot peel and eat the word in any language. In fact, there really is no word for the thing in-itself. I do think it’s fair to assert that from the raw, wordless experience comes the description in words. But can it with equal force be asserted that from the raw, wordless meaning in-itself comes the meaning implied by words? Of that I am not so certain, and it raises other questions.
Did non-onomatopoeic words descend, as it were, from onomatopoeic ones? I ask this rhetorically because it points, I think, to a basic problem for us here. An onomatopoeic word, it seems to me, must be quite close to the experience that created it because it is intended to convey, as a copy, if you will, the experience of hearing the event in question. If our words developed from our reactions to and experiences in and of the environment, then they more or less were intended, like onomatopoeic words, to reflect them. Hence, the meanings we found in the world were encoded over time in words, as a byproduct of our experiences, as we learned to better express ourselves. So today we can be told in great detail what it’s like to climb Mt. Everest, and we likely can relate, to some degree experientially, to what we are told because words bear general meanings that most people can relate to, yet the actual experience of climbing Everest will never be known to any but those who’ve climbed it. Put another way, the collective meaning of the words cannot possibly capture the meaning of the actual experience no matter how eloquent and accurate those words are in their description.
When we speak of some experience and its meaning, the meaning in-itself is like a package of silence wrapped in descriptors. We can’t address the meaning in-itself; we can only point to it. However empathetic a person may be, he will not be able to grasp the meaning of my moment. After long description and explanation, clarification and honing in, in the end he will take away a map of some detail that shows where the meaning lies, but the meaning in-itself will not be contained in the map any more than a building is contained in its address.
What I have written here is evidence of what I mean.
The universe seems to me to be ripe with meanings that are inherent in its existence. Yet there is no way to capture these meanings in themselves, and they are not even necessarily the same for any two people. As a product of the universe, I sense that the meaning of the universe is equally inherent in me and you and rocks and trees and plastic eggs and paper and so on. In the moment of wordless being, the meaning of the universe is clear and perfect and accessible. So maybe it’s not that the meaning is different for each of us. Perhaps the meaning in-itself is the same… because, like everything itself, it’s us. Maybe it can’t be captured in language because it is all words at once, or the possibility of all words all at once. Maybe it’s everything and so beyond any particular word or dictionary that it can only be registered as silence.
Permalink
04.14.07
Posted in Ecology, Personal, Society and Culture at 9:58 am by Moody
What a marvel it is, the internal combustion engine; what a wonder is the oil that, in its refined and crude states, powers such an engine. For nearly a hundred years our world — to large extent and to great effect — the world, I said, has been powered, has been driven even, by the ICE that runs, day and night, up and down the arteries of our great cities and along its railroads and rivers, fueled by the remains of a transmogrified biomass millions of years old. Small irony, that acronym, considering the fact that the exhaust of the ICE has, we now know, contributed to the melting of the polar ice, to the ongoing process of the melting away of glaciers, ice shelves and permafrost. Greater irony that the fuel we burn — as we cruise along the highway, rushing headlong into the future like a juggernaut — fuel formed of the remains of the dead, may at long last contribute to the end of us… or, rather, to the end of our distant progeny, scions of the self-blasted family tree who may not know another branching or extension or flowering.
While certain untrustworthy politicos may talk about our “addiction to oil” as if oil is under the purview and jurisprudent oversight of the ATF and, as such, is some part of the “War on Drugs”, many of us still seem to be unaware that there is really any problem to be concerned about. I say this because the evidence speeds past me and clusters all around me every time I commute the 20 plus miles to work and the 20 plus miles back I have to five days a week. Hell, I can hear the freeway from here, and that sound — like white noise, like a work of industrial ambience — never stops.
But I am especially aware of it now, because now I am learning to hypermile (which is just a convenient and nifty space age way of saying that I am going a step above and beyond in my efforts to cut down on my car’s gas consumption).
Here are the bare basics to hypermiling:
- Coast (in neutral) whenever possible, except in hybrids
- Don’t exceed the speed limit
- Be a conscientious, prudent and polite driver
- Avoid quick starts (no gunning the engine)
- Anticipate stops and slow downs in traffic to avoid them or minimize their effects
- Try to time your arrival at traffic lights to avoid complete stops
- Shut your engine off whenever you’ll be stopped longer than ten seconds
- Keep your engine’s RPMs as low as you (reasonably) can
- If available, use your cruise control
- Run your tank down under a quarter full before refueling
- Cut down on the use of the air conditioner
- Get that junk out of your trunk and the rack off your back
- Park farther out and ASAP; don’t circle around looking for “choice spots”
- Keep your engine tuned and
- Keep your tire pressure where it should be
- Don’t drive if you don’t really need to
- Use public transportation if you can
- Ride share, car pool, buddy up; help keep someone’s car off the road
- Drive a car with a manual “stick” transmission if possible, or
- Get a hybrid if you are able to
You can read more tips and get beyond the basics here.
Ultimately, as you know, we use oil (petroleum, specifically) for a great many things. A good portion of a barrel of oil is used for non-fuel products, products ranging from heart valves to crayons, plastics to bubble gum. Your car is not only a consumer of oil, parts of it were made out of oil. It’s a no-brainer of an observation to say oil is a part of the economy from top to bottom, really. It’s practically ubiquitous, and not always obvious in its presence. But all you need to do if you want to see oil in action is hang out beside a freeway, or at an airport or sea port, or at a railroad yard. You can practically hear the sky wheezing from all the carbon dioxide (not to mention the “nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and unburned hydrocarbons” [source]).
So maybe we need to hypermile our lives, as it were, and consider everything we do and all the things we use in our lives that come from or involve the use of oil.
As it turns out, after I had begun composing this post, I had NPR’s Science Friday on while I was driving to a Taco Bell to pick up some foodstuff, and they were talking about the use of petroleum products. The host, Ira Flatow, was talking with author Bill McKibben (see his book, Deep Ecology). They were talking about how much oil is used in bringing things like imported bottled water to us. And it struck me with the force of an oversize interrogative made out of oil barrels: Do we really need imported bottle water? It takes a huge amount of oil per bottle of water to bring it to us. If the choice is between purchasing good water bottled at a local source versus good water bottled in, say, Europe or Fiji, wouldn’t it be better, more environmentally conscious, to buy the local water? That’s a no-brainer, isn’t it? Perhaps the best idea would be to get a water purifying setup for the tap at home, no? How much oil would be saved then? What other choices we can easily make might save oil? Well, of course there’s a page for that. But the thing is, I’m sure you can think of a lot of ways to help save oil on your own. It takes only a little thought. I hope you’ll join me and many others in thinking about what we’re doing, what we can do, what we ought and must do, and then doing something about it because, seriously, we don’t want people in the future to look back on us all with contempt, non-plussed by our self-centered thoughtlessness, stuck trying to muddle through the legacy of our errors. To get to the future in peace, we’re going to need to hypermile our way there.
Permalink
04.09.07
Posted in Personal at 6:08 pm by Moody
There is a cost to living, to having a life: you can’t go back; you cannot change what has come to pass. But you can change your interpretation of a lot of it, use it to further yourself, to grow your awareness and understanding, use it to make a better person of yourself. It’s not always possible. Some things, some events in life, are overwhelming in their enormity and scar the body of what some people call the soul. Still, as you grow older you can come to some sort of peace with even a good number of those scars.
The ones who really love you will want to touch them, caress them, soothe you because they will be troubled by the hidden history of those old wounds. Sometimes it will help, and sometimes it won’t. I think that you have to decide on how best to deal with their concern. Most times, I try at least not to flinch. I try to be gentle in telling them they can’t heal such a scar and that it’s best not to touch it. And when it comes to touching another, I seek some sign that it’s OK, that I can, that it’s allowed or even desired.
The sky compasses us all in its embrace, but we cannot always know what the weather is like for someone where they are. I tend to carry an umbrella with me even when my sky is blue and clear, because sometimes another’s sky is raging with rain. And even though a person you care for won’t always take that umbrella, you will both perhaps feel a little better because you had one with you just in case.
For love, I will exert myself, make the effort, stand tall and be all ears. My personal pain has taught me that much at least. I will give you my love and I will listen to you in acknowledgment that you matter. You matter. This life matters… because we can make meaning out of it, which is the same as finding meaning in it. Your meaning and my meaning, her meaning and his, — they are all uniquely our own, and what we share enriches us and each other (if we are fortunate). Where our myriad facets of meaning meet there is a chance for understanding just a little more of this life while we live it.
The most important thing you have is conscious perception. It is the tool with which your imagination builds experience. The goal of enlightenment (should you choose to call it that) is not only to make the lens of the tool as clear and clean as you can; you must learn to how to focus it, turn it, zoom in and pull back with it, so that you can see as much of the full picture as possible while retaining the ability to choose your frame. In the end, you will want to become the artist of life. In the end, you will disappear into the world.
Permalink
04.01.07
Posted in Personal at 9:45 am by Moody
The glow, the light, the sun, the dawn, the moment, the fire, the reason, the hope, the sky, the waking, the dream… is over. Muscles gently tightened over the course of the night my body lay in a river in the silt breathing weeds and sighing carbon images of blue ammonites and trilobites and transitional fossil fish-birds, the waking stretch is wracked with cool shivers breaking against the warmth of the folding blankets in briny electricity crackling in slow motion across the perimeter of my curving body. I have hidden the bones inside me, made an architecture of them which I call “man”, all of a piece with the geology of sleep-waking, the secret topology of history. And there is a story inside the Wunderkammer found half-buried in the sand and soil on the shore among the saw grass; exposed, first scene: Joe Cornell’s calcareous fibula, tibia, talus and calcaneus, arranged as a bird’s legs walking across the ashen black static of a schoolhouse tabula rasa; the feathers of doves and peacocks, vultures and osprey; a backdrop by Yves Tanguy. The furniture of the future.
Here is a secret no-one will tell you. Do you see?
Eyes blear in surreptitious attempts at focusing on fingers unfurling against the grain of the immediate air. Knuckles ache like cats’ mewling milk hunger the color of cartilaginous joints. And here it can be said that the perception of it is in fact found foundering in the flat red-brown muscles pulling taut against tenterhooks in the midst of a remembered orgasm, weaving back and forth before the looming realization like a thunderstruck ape, hewing to the threads of this Perseus’ web in a founders effect, vaguely amazed to be alive — let alone like this. And how is it I am not deformed into something more beautiful to answer the hue and cry of the lace polished day with its horse latitudes and tropical years? The hair on my skin brushes whole Japanese rock gardens into Tibetan oblivions. I no longer know what I am thinking. Thinking, I know longer no what I am. I just am.
This is not what makes me afraid. The taste of dying is not that of Death’s licorice ropes, not even the lemon grass of Kuan Yin’s steaming wok. The taste of dying is life itself. This is not what makes me afraid. I am not afraid of nothing. Buried here beneath the sheets and blankets and comforter and heady air is love itself, still sleeping. Every new day that comes is finally illuminated by this moment. Cocking my head birdlike inquisitive a hand, half-hesitant, extends up the river of time like a quiet storm front sweeping seasons along in its wake as it moves to intimately touch eternity while eternity sleeps yet, gently undulating blood-warm and self-contained even as it broadcasts its radiation to the stars that don’t feel it. And in the slow well-oiled roll of waters down thru the landscapes of these endless possibilities is found all the raw material of life’s intention, invention, floral and faunal, mineral and physical creation. Mind. Perception. The glow. The shadow. The light. The dark. The sun. The void. The dawn. The moment. The fire. The journey. The reason. The madness. The hope. The sky. The waking. The gloaming. The celestial ever. The question. The answer. The dream…
Permalink
« Previous entries
