continuation of an idea

Another way to put it is in the recognition that there really is no “right.” There are certain actions and mentalities which enact destruction of all that is beautiful. But everyone here exists for a reason, even if it be to cause suffering upon others. Once understood, even the most pathological asshole is seen as life struggling to know itself.

The Cock Crows Three Times

Here’s a little anti-rant against my own ranting. A piece of writing written in rebuff against its own past already written. I hate writing these indignant things about Bush and current events and then reading back over them and seeing the single-simple-mindedness of it all. I know even as I write it that I am settling for rhetoric over substance, for substance is not so easily confined to righteousness. Not that the two cannot meet, but when they do, it tends not to be in the forum of blame and anger. As if to be so naive to say that because one does not agree with George W Bush then one should become a Democrat, to solve all the world’s problems.

And another thing I can say with all due respect is fuck Republicans and fuck Democrats alike and equally. Fuck anyone who would spin events to construct a false reality based on strategic motives. Such as myself when I grow weak and feel the need to associate myself with political ambitions. We all do it for different reasons. I do it because I want to believe in something, I want to feel self-righteous, I want to feel that I can quell the destructive consequences of the structures I live within.

But there is only one thing which I can control in my life. I can control how I perceive things. That is a power that I have that no one can take from me if I refuse to relinquish it.

I forget sometimes and begin to think that there is this notion of “the people” and there is this notion of “the state.” As if “the people” were some coherent entity, gaining awareness, moving in a certain direction. As if “the state” were this repressive consciousness, manifested in billy clubs and guns and hoarded money. But all there really is are structures of definition. Avenues of coherence, paths of articulation. Watch a fish swim for long enough and you will begin to notice its personality. Everything has a line of understanding that can be hooked into invisibility. Pull it up and unearth the life living with or without your desire.

The only politics that I can speak with some authority upon is the politics of my life.

Untitled

There are times when you need to press forward, & there are times when you must question yourself about your appearance. Because there are various concerns beyond yourself that must be taken into consideration. The territory that you occupy is but a boundary – the inner and outer spaces extend away into intangibility. What you can control is the way you flow with the wind on the waves. & the way the world comes into you is what determines your integrity, & the way you come into the world is what determines your desire. The filter in-between is your thought. Throw away the filter, & what is left is love. Because in love there is no control, & there is no turning back – but it places you in the center of the world.

Nero’s Enlightenment

In this moment of conception the essence rings hollow. There is only what appears, and what appears is reflective of how much time you have put into losing yourself. So here you are forsaken of yourself, and here you are birthed, bloody, bathed in shadow light that falls from another begetting. For every life that lives there is another world that is shut out from the sun. So when you go forth, brother, to reclaim your beliefs, understand that there is no turning back from the wreckage of your misconceptions. There is only balance, and flow, and the knowledge of your capabilities. I don’t care how drunk you are. You can be whatever you imagine. The lines that are drawn in time trace our insecurities. The eternal everlasting infinite touch of intangibility will finger us all, and if we be given the grace to dance with it, than so shall we move, watched and written and never grasped. I hope for a time when nothing will move me except my love for everything.

You Should Be Riding The Waves

Who would you be with no friends, no lovers, no daily positive feedback? What is it within you that sustains your mind through fasting?

Leaves are a manifestation of the sun. With or without the tree, the light would continue to fall.

The source of all beauty lies beyond visibility. The water drawn through roots cannot be touched for its flame. All of these objects are roadsigns on the path. Look ahead, sister, and remember where you are going. You are going far beyond understanding.

If you took your heart and coated it in amber, you could put it under glass and study it and calculate the amount of love it holds. But what would be the point? You already know without thinking that this extends back to forever from nothing. Your essence is meaningless without the constant flow of blood bearing the outside world within. There is no in with no out. Embedded in each and every moment, your union with God is closer than you are to yourself. Stop trying to catch a fish with questions.

Who cares about lines drawn in the sand? You should be riding the waves.

loss and gain of worlds

It is hard to believe your own eyes sometimes. What mystery you once saw in this woman has turned devilish with deeper understanding, and then, like all things demonic, vanished in the light of confrontation, leaving a hollow in your heart that hardens you against all things before you, ready to set sail again. Ready to sing in the night with only the waves and insects reflecting. Your eyes could see nothing beyond your desire, and once again you were led like a child into delusion. So enwrapped in the shroud of solitude like jalapenos in a burrito you dug a cave between your ribs to the place where the wind sounds beneath the trees and the light sifts evergreen across the sea bottom like bony ghost fingers and your knowledge of self is contained within a stillness cool and clear. And here is a world she could not imagine and she is gone now in the way the shore is gone. A paradigm left behind, named and defined as memory. Yes, there is always something to be missed. Pieces of yourself that drop away into time to shine outwards through the darkness into some alien nightsky, forming patterns that can be functional as points of reference as the unknown is further plumbed. All skin that is shed can be fed to the flame.

Trust not in the eyes. Trust in the heart that creates.

On the Continuum of Creation

Think of your spirit

as a fish in the sea.

When caught

and eaten,

it will taste of every moment

of it’s life left behind.

Seen in this light,

one recognizes

there is no good,

no bad,

only balance.

Every living entity is judged according to its capability to represent itself completely. A rock is undeniably a rock, because it’s history is made apparent to anyone who cares to study it’s markings. The things that show, of course, are the places where one has been broken. Broken and broken and broken again, the essence of temporal infinity is evidenced. Who are you, and do you really think that what you think reflects the world upon you?

Look into the face of one who is drunk, and you will see them completely, all of the emptiness and connectedness transposed on the same surface, an endless well of nothing and sprouted root of everything.

The spirit does not get drunk of poison. It is intoxicated by what is poured into the world at every breath, by each demanding pore of skin, each eye and stomach of every thing which serves as a cup formed to savor each moment. The spiralling ooze of time over constantly shifting surfaces. There is a direction to the wind as it blows. Bound by nothing.

Complacency is the Enemy of All that Lives

I am seated in my room, a candle lit on the table, the scent of nag champa settled into the furniture, my books stacked about like replicas of ancient rubble. I have been reading all afternoon, all evening, my concentration enwrapped within imaginary vistas of a soul’s spiraling journey. There is a quiet in the room, edged with loneliness. A good book brings back the moment of despair rooted in my life’s greatest depths. It is out of insecurity that I create. It is out of fear that I clutch carefully to the rock as I climb. It is out of hunger that I throw myself into the wind to live.

The mind is a delicate reed, easily obstructed, easily obscured, rarely honed to the purity of perception it was evolved to produce. This occasional glimmer of deeper darkness within, this seemingly unanswerable pain, seems to be the only way to sustain development. Such as in the way a muscle is strengthened–torn apart so that it will restructure itself in a manner more adaptable to the stress which tore it apart in the first place.

It reminds me of my teenage years, the length and scope of depression that I felt then–surely this was part of “growing pains,” the rush of body and mind reeling with the birth of awareness of individuality? After college, I have never again felt what I can rightly term “depressed.” But I have reminders of emptiness, lapses of loneliness. And I now almost welcome the feeling, that gift of knowledge of myself. Even as I feel like a child, raw and helpless against the void, unsure if the shadows of futurity looming are ghosts or demons or angels, or nothing but my desires and fears projected into emptiness. Because this loneliness, this despair, this acknowledgment that there is no one I can rely on but myself to pull me out–this strengthens me to continue.

I observe myself and others flailing in the waters and clutching to things and people to stay breathing. But in the emptiness right now in this moment of thought, I know that anything I grasp onto I will only take down with me, and it will take me down farther. I must be calm, I must allow myself to slip under the dark waters gracefully, even as the shock of cold numbs the heart, and give myself to the indifferent forces beyond me, even savor it as it becomes me, even rejoice as it spits me back out into the light trembling with suffering.

Complacency is the enemy of all that lives.

Chartreuse Cheers

Knowin that the essence of my flow lies within compassion for alien life forms, I drink a cup of this elixir for long life to your health, to your exploration of self, to your continuing struggle to work past your childhood issues. To be able to take a toot with any tinker, this is the goal. To find the way past all mundane happenstance appearances to the critical burning core that anyone breathing can know. Who cannot be understood? What cannot be forgiven? Evil is lines drawn in the sand. The breeze of beyond anger blows over the ugliest of scars, the indifferent sea of time smoothens the hardest of hangups. Habits are the most difficult of dangers to overcome. So I try to work to habitually love, to habitually be myself, to habitually challenge any bullshit that come my way.

Wholistics

Yes, for I, just like you, must be reminded everyday of my divinity, I must nurtured out of my shell to embrace the light. It is amazing how easily the narratives I construct each day, the myths and histories of myself and the people I know (as if I could ever know), can delimit everything that exists in my life. I would rather say next to nothing to anyone, so that who I am can more fully be realized. Am I too reticent? I would rather shut myself away in a monastery than sell myself so easily into an uncompassionate understanding. I want to be loved completely, as the flame within I am, otherwise all the world can pass away untouched, ignorant. I will only give myself to that which can consume me, as I consume it.

Space

So let’s see: the self that one formulates in the silent quietude of one’s own mind, this self gets shattered in the utter misunderstanding that results in minor daily miscommunications. Even in the constant misgivings and insecurity that can abound in every action and word that I make, yet still my diminished, battered conception of self has more diminution to undergo. Because as long as there exists within my mind my notion of self, then there exists the theory of my detachment from the world.

I thought today of how our insecurities define us as individuals. How we deal with our knowledge of the disparity that exists between how we desire to ultimately present ourselves and how we are casually perceived. How whatever we may have prepared in advance never measures up to the piercing boundlessness of a moment.

Some of us attack ourselves before we have to defend. Some of us attack each other before they can attack us. Some of us are always defending ourselves from ourselves, from each other. Some of us are constantly hiding. Me, I am always shrouded within my defensible space, ready to close my heart to any flame too close. I am always trying to find my way to a position higher than those around me. I am always closed, always open, always never anything but an impressionable, non-retaining space. Within my mind, yes, there lurks and constantly looms the whisperings of difference, the droppings of demigod egos, the bastions against fear, inspired by fear, perpetuated by the fear of all others.

What do I believe about me, ultimately? I believe that I am a piece of god, a spark of an inner flame that fizzles back into outer nothing. What do I believe about you? I believe you contain the potential to guide me into the rainforest of the most potent hallucinogenic visions. What do I believe about humanity? That we are here for a reason, a reason beyond our petty reassurances, beyond our bloodiest threats, beyond our constantly conniving rationalizations.

There really is no logic to our movements. It is the mathematics of the happenstance, the formulas of the stricken, the logic of the blown. We move because we must. We love because we have love. We are because we is.

Reflections

We are like many surfaced mirrors, reflecting many different things from many different angles. These surfaces, these tops, tell us where things end. We must explore down deep within to find their beginnings, their roots, the quiet sacred places from which they’ve drawn their existance.

Never define someone based on what you know. For every person can be seen differently. So forget what you think, & learn to live by your heart, be guided by your love, & relinquish your desire over that which you cannot control. I could sermonize all day about this righteousness that can only be lived. I am human, & I will always feel this neverending need for security. I want to be warm, I want to be held, I want to be without individuality. So everyday I must make my way into words to be translated by the world’s empathy. Listen. You may find yourself here.

To The Light

There is much that flies within our minds in the atmosphere of love, but one knows simply, irrefutably, that to which all of the flies are drawn. Even the hardened heart of the worst criminal–branded by society from the start, never given a chance to pretend to be part of the charade–moves according to this universal underlying rhythm. I’ve always been convinced that even behind the worst, bestial murder there is a desperate attempt at understanding, there is a scream of despair that calls out in its unanswerable need. Because there is always a greater circle beyond that which we are confined. Down or up, in or out, it is all the same, eventually. There is not a substance in the world that cannot be transmuted by the widened irises of loving perception. There is not an enemy, there is not an other strong enough to withstand acceptance. The most imperialistic thing on the planet, who said that? Pir Vilayat Khan. I have no idea who he is, but he said, “No force anywhere on earth is as imperialistic as the human soul. It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow. Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe.” Even when you are in the deepest throes of ecstatic, passionate love, you want more, your thirst increases with every drop that you taste. Rumi wrote that “the life of lovers is in death.” Because in order to gain everything that you desire you must lose everything that you possess. It is a simple equation that doesn’t translate into the kind of math logic can comprehend. But it is known simply by observing every good thing that has happened in your life. I am speaking from personal experience, but I assume others have seen the same. The minute that I have ever assumed that I’ve had anything, I lose it. And when I have nothing, I will be suddenly blessed. It’s never enough simply to feel this, of course. In the darkest night of loneliness, with no where to turn to but myself, I can’t help but to despair, and in the thrashing about of my tortured need, I hurt myself or others in the temporary blindness in order to know where I need to go next. But then I move, and I move forward, and I move towards the sun.

Moon Shore Sonata

There is a rocky shore illuminated by the moon on its rocks, & the water choruses up against it, an alien form inevitably integrated, for the water is unforgiving & completely compassionate. I sit on a high tide inscripted bench, witnessing this primal interaction & trying to understand. A language beyond translation. The birds bob unperturbed on the crest of waves, their rotund opaque eyes capturing everything. Clouds coagulate on the horizon, enlightened by the moon and its reflection. & I am lost in the possibilities I missed this day. That beautiful smile leveled at me that I let go like an unharnessed sail, shooken without change. & here this water mocks me, for its armies conquers all, yet it never captures anything. So who am I to deserve grace? The rocks are hewn by relentless love. My heart is soft, & I am missing you. This moon & its ocean music mean nothing to me.

Economics of the Corazon

True riches, in any sense, are not a gift of happenstance. They are the accumulation that comes from the denial of waste. Gaining age is a lesson in economy. As youths we waste our energy, spitting it out like radiation, seeking immediate gratification. If we learn anything at all as we grow older and less prone to outbursts of hormonal activity, it is the conservation of our energy, putting our time and love into that which we know is worth the investment. We learn to act in interest of self-preservation, rather than self-destruction; in light of longevity, rather than fleeting release. We learn that the highest reward comes with patience, concentration, and a consistent, diligent trimming of personal desire. When we want nothing, only then are we ready to receive.

Out In

What brings me higher–when my heart is widened with new, unforeseen love–also breaks me open to a new realm of emptiness, a deeper, rawer despair. Even in the midst of a bliss I had forgotten could exist, I am falling. I imagine that there is a point where the depths meet the sky, a point where intense ecstasy and intense pain are indistinguishable, a point where I am rising and falling and torn apart and left with nothing, nothing but a sweet residue of self that sits empty in the midst of the universe, filled only with the sonic wind of the sun, a puppet played but by god. But right now, my heart is strummed and snapped by the eyes of a woman, by her touch, by her lack of touch. And the penetration of her desire takes me to a level of beauty I had not known for so long. Beyond the blinded eyes of the world, beyond the compromise of daily need, beyond the groveling hunger of loneliness. Here in this place against her body, there is no such thing as victory or defeat–there is only the holding . . . and the letting go. And I pull back into myself further, feeling yet more the incredible, unfathomable distance that lies between two hearts, and marveling that this could ever traveled, and wondering, and wondering, and hoping, and despairing, that this road could ever be found out of the darkness again

Me In A Lonesome Mode

The world revolves around the space from which it was created, the word of the godhead a formless first sound breathing into the horribly beautiful noise of the many worlds crashing together in escape of themselves; the gravity of the unknown bends all of this mess of thought somehow, gathering the light back inward. Hunter S Thompson shot himself on the phone to his wife. Such is love, perhaps. A giving of the final, terrible glimpse of emptiness that huddles within all to another. Displaying naked the inhuman terror that is truly love: everything, everything, everything. There is irony in all of our efforts to communicate ourselves to the world. Our words are petty, defined by a tradition of linguistic patterns, barely capable of offering more than a momentary commentary of our incapability to look beyond ourselves. Our gestures are habitual, we grope at each other as if in the dark, desperate to reassure our minds that the world beyond will feel as what we have been taught. There is horror in the night; we lie awake looking at the blue shadows cast by the moon, meaningless without us, but all meaning lying far past comprehension. Our animal selves long dormant within us tremble into adrenaline, awoken yet unseeing. It is all right, it is all right, it is all right, you tell yourself, sensing an incredible danger but unable to locate its source. It is not all right. All of creation sparks within your mind. And there is no one to wrap their arms around you and cradle you into oblivion, not here, not within yourself, not so deep that no words could penetrate, no mind know. Not in the incredible vastness that takes the light back even before it has left. Shining into nothing, the moon, the sun, the reflectance of nothing. The naked spark of a beauty too powerful to be seen. Love shows you the way into this place where no one can enter. You leave yourself behind. You leave it all behind. Everything. Everything. Everything.

You’ve Got A Valentine From Mark! (Shoot it up your ass, Cupid)

So have you found that one who completes you yet, your “soulmate”? According to all pop music and Hollywood movies, this should be the defining purpose of my life. I sure wouldn’t mind finding some chick that somehow resolves all the inner and outer dilemmas of my existence. But from all my experiences thus far, women only complicate things. I’m about ready to throw in the towel on the quest for the Holy Girl. Not that I was really stressing myself out looking for her, or anything. Not that I ever really even tried, in fact. But still, just feeling the possibility of any such a thing existing exerts some kind of unnecessary pressure on my brain. It’s like if you think Santa Claus or Satan exists–you have to craft all sorts of confusing tangential myths simply to address the movement of getting out of bed in the morning. Let’s be blunt and to the point here. Basically, if you do not “possess” someone, if you do not have “someone to love,” then in this society you should be fundamentally ashamed, there is something wrong with you, you should desperately seek to find someone to claim and you should post an ad on Yahoo Personals or something. I mean, it’s almost like if you don’t got nobody, then you can go to the supermarket or the club or the bar or the Personals and buy someone and try them out. Me: I’m smart and funny and rich and I like to lick perineums. You: Bovine and well-endowed and can type up to 80 words per minute. In other words, based on things completely unrelated to anything having to do with divine intervention, you strive to formulate a bond based upon the ideal of simply being claimed. Because once you are claimed, then there’s no more need to stress out about being “one of the losers.” Who wants to be alone, unhappy, unpurchased? Buy me, buy me, buy me!

Who is my soulmate? Who will buy me and use me forever and recycle my soul? Who will complete my fragmented, insufficient self? Who will take my useless days and give them meaning? Who will understand what I can never say? Who will endure my stacatto farts? Who will look beyond my heart-stopping good looks?

Guess I’d better just devote the rest of my time to Allah . . .

Involvement

Sometimes the world, the wide sea of circumstances wraps you up in its tentacled coils and suddenly you are acting and watching yourself act and having no idea wherefore or why. There are forces within yourself beyond your immediate knowing. Your life is indeed a mystery. Every new situation posits a crumb trail of clues to your heart, but the central motive must remain hidden, like dark matter, exerting an inescapable pull towards your omega point–by the time you have awoken, you’ve already stepped out over the edge.

I looked up at the stars tonight and knew their light within me. My life is incredibly beautiful, and it is a song I must sing. I don’t know what note will come out of me next, but I can feel it birthing itself in the barricades of my innermost being, and it feels good, it feels fucking good. And I enjoy this stillness that listens.

who are you?

introversion–the folding within yourself, the witholding of immediate definitive information of your feelings from the world. in the daily, moment-by-moment, play-by-play, press conference of your life, sometimes it is wiser to wait for events to fully unfold before offering up your honest analysis of the situation. it is nice, of course, to vent your feelings in the form of gossip, to feel reassured that your current assessment and course of action are supported by your friends and peers. but you are role-playing then, are you not? you are staking out a position, strategizing, acting the part of victim, or of hero, or whatever you may deem most favorable to your career as a human being. but who are you, really? did you stop and ask yourself that before you spoke in judgment?

yes, politics is a tricky game–even when you claim to not be playing it, you are playing it. we like to think that we are untouched by the ivory halls of justice and boardroom policy making–just as perhaps silver-haired men in suits surrounded by secret servicemen may like to think that they are untouched by us, the underground individuals–but those are thoughts bound by convention. for our every movement, thought, and manifestation of ourselves is political. politics is about more than power, despite what Chomsky may say–there are more to the dynamics of law and order and commerce than simple mafioso maneuvering and slick, shifty-eyed lies. there is also the fact of human interaction, in the marketplace of the everyday, in the information of the flesh passed subconsciously on the subway, in the gaze of the enlightened upon the statue in the park, in the brush of words sputtered out of my inversions–there is no escaping our connection to each other through ourselves. so look–look at yourself, take a good look at yourself and reflect on your ephemeral beauty. what is the use? what is the value? who is this that determines your worth? the eye of the beloved is in your mind. the light of the sun is in your spine. the music of the ages issues forth from your mouth. bow to yourself, and everything else. and let the movement of the world go on around you in its endless chorus of need. because there is nothing that you can take, and there is nothing that you can give. so when the reporters come up to ask you, Who are you?

You can answer them with a smile, and point back at them, and wait, patiently, til the end of the world, for their reply.