We’re born into this without any guide or way of making sense of it. It’s a life full of hopes and longing and desperation. It’s also a labyrinth. But it’s a labyrinth without any center or exit. Every path is a dead end. Seventy or eighty years lost in a tangle of dead ends. No frame of reference. No north, no south, No east, no west. No way back home and no destination in the future either.
There’s just dead ends, one after another while we are so desperately trying to get to… Where?
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
The invisible background of reality
Early morning. I am sitting in the front window of a fashionable café. In front of me there’s an empty espresso cup and a copy of The Decline of the West. I look out the window at a sky full of huge snowflakes and consider the illusion of reality, and the real objective reality we are blind to -the one that lies, theoretically at least, beyond physical form and time.
Time itself, like the colors of the rainbow and the sound of rain, only exists in the human mind. The sense of minutes and hours flowing, the notion of one event coming before or after another, even the idea of individual events in the first place, all belong to the mind, and not to any objective reality. We can theorize an objective reality of energy and mathematics, but we can’t experience it directly.
So let’s theorize now.
Let’s say I have just tossed a brick through a window and the shattered glass went everywhere. You will tend to say that the window was broken because I threw the brick into it. But from a perspective that’s one step more objective, it is equally true that I was caused to throw the brick because the window broke.
I say this because in a determined universe every event and transaction of forces interlocks with every other like a huge long string of mathematical equations, each one implying the next ad infinitum. Everything causes everything, precisely.
But as I have said, the very notion of anything causing anything is a fallacy because everything causes everything. We can now go a step further and say that the airborne brick causes the window to break no more than the broken window causes the brick to be thrown. They cause each other. Or else nothing causes or is caused by anything. Now here is a weird and eerie aspect of reality if I have ever seen one. The real question here is: what, if anything, causes the both of them in their simultaneity. Here we scrape the bottom of what reasoning can apprehend. Here is the base of reality and it’s weirdly invisible structure.
We have here a universe of effects all causing one another, with no visible prime mover. When we look for causes we enter an infinite regress, like standing between two mirrors and seeing the tunnel of reflections.
Hmmm. Best not to think too hard about this. It could drive you to insanity –maybe even Christianity.
City O’ City, Denver
12/08/09
Time itself, like the colors of the rainbow and the sound of rain, only exists in the human mind. The sense of minutes and hours flowing, the notion of one event coming before or after another, even the idea of individual events in the first place, all belong to the mind, and not to any objective reality. We can theorize an objective reality of energy and mathematics, but we can’t experience it directly.
So let’s theorize now.
Let’s say I have just tossed a brick through a window and the shattered glass went everywhere. You will tend to say that the window was broken because I threw the brick into it. But from a perspective that’s one step more objective, it is equally true that I was caused to throw the brick because the window broke.
I say this because in a determined universe every event and transaction of forces interlocks with every other like a huge long string of mathematical equations, each one implying the next ad infinitum. Everything causes everything, precisely.
But as I have said, the very notion of anything causing anything is a fallacy because everything causes everything. We can now go a step further and say that the airborne brick causes the window to break no more than the broken window causes the brick to be thrown. They cause each other. Or else nothing causes or is caused by anything. Now here is a weird and eerie aspect of reality if I have ever seen one. The real question here is: what, if anything, causes the both of them in their simultaneity. Here we scrape the bottom of what reasoning can apprehend. Here is the base of reality and it’s weirdly invisible structure.
We have here a universe of effects all causing one another, with no visible prime mover. When we look for causes we enter an infinite regress, like standing between two mirrors and seeing the tunnel of reflections.
Hmmm. Best not to think too hard about this. It could drive you to insanity –maybe even Christianity.
City O’ City, Denver
12/08/09
I shit on the chest of christmas
IN RE: I shit on the chest of Christmas
Jim & Jane,
Hey! It was nice to receive your holiday card. I see you’ve been to Western Montana. That’s, uh… weird. Are there any people there? I’ve only been around Wyoming, but it was desolate as hell. And cold. It’s a terribly dangerous place to travel with a decent-looking piece of snatch.
It’s been so long since I sold my car that I’m beginning to forget there’s a world outside of downtown Denver. Every so often I catch a glimpse of the mountains on a clear morning and it seems so insane that I don’t drive anymore. They have become a scenic backdrop to the city rather than a reality. It’s a shame. On the other hand, I have none of the typical financial responsibilities that come with owning a car. While my friends who drive are at work busting ass to pay for a new carburetor or something, I’m up the street swilling expensive scotch and browsing the escort pages. Ah, just kidding.
Anyway, Christmas is here with all its lameness. Downtown gets overrun with shit-for-brains tourists from the weird outlying suburbs. They’re all determined to wear those festive Christmas sweaters. These people are like lice. They fuck up everything they come into contact with. They have made it impossible for me to enjoy living downtown for the rest of the month. They descend on the place by the hundreds. In the bakery I go to for coffee they climb all over me in droves and every woman finds a way to hit me in the face with her purse, and then her husband walks by and bumps my with his enormous ass. I think they’re shopping for gingerbread houses or something. Bastards.
I walked by the Salvation Army bell-ringer yesterday and for some unknown reason he lost his composure right in front of me and said, “This SUCKS!” I am not making this up. I guess it’s pretty frustrating to stand outside all day in the freezing cold wearing a Santa hat and ringing a bell that everyone tries to ignore. It’s not that Denver people are heartless, but we are all totally desensitized to panhandling. I have never seen so much panhandling before in my life. Everywhere you go there are old men with enormous beards begging for ten cents, not to mention the aggressive tactics now in use by Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, Denver Rescue Mission, etc. All these organizations heckle and terrorize people on the street corners, so by the time they get to the Salvation Army guy they have effectively quit giving a shit about humanity. Just one block form the bell-ringer I saw a guy actually freezing to death on a bench. He was hunched over and he had a frozen icicle hanging from the tip of his nose. Some paramedics were standing around him looking like they had no idea what to do about it. They might as well have been staring at some broken plumbing. The irony of this is that it happened right in front of the huge glass windows of a starbucks. The warm and cozy people in the café were basically forced to watch this morally distressing scene to a soundtrack of Christmas music while sipping on their hot chocolate. Or maybe they didn’t even bother looking. Do most people avert their gaze, or else curiously eyeball the suffering of the less fortunate? I’d really like to know. I too passed the Salvation Army guy and gave nothing.
Well, I did not intend to go on this depressing invective about Denver. I am planning to have yet another magical Christmas here, as usual, holed up in my apartment with wine and cigarettes and books by Cioran and Dostoevsky. Well, maybe not the cigarettes. I stopped smoking last week. It was all going well until I sat down to type this letter. Now I am suddenly experiencing this nagging desperation to smoke. I have been for the past three paragraphs. It’s because I always chain-smoke when I’m writing. The trouble is that I like smoking and I have no real desire to stop it. I’m just worried that the cigarettes have been affecting my health. It would be great if you could smoke just a little, but inevitably a little becomes a lot. It sneaks up on you. One day everything is in check, and then the next day you find yourself compulsively puffing on unfiltered cigarettes at all hours of the day and night. This is what it came to for me during the summer. I was sitting around every day reading and smoking for hours on end. In July alone, my lungs probably developed a nice thick crust of something similar to scorched bacon.
Well, this letter is becoming as irrelevant as it is long. I’ll wrap it by saying thanks for the card. Let me know how it’s going down south.
Best regards,
Joseph
Jim & Jane,
Hey! It was nice to receive your holiday card. I see you’ve been to Western Montana. That’s, uh… weird. Are there any people there? I’ve only been around Wyoming, but it was desolate as hell. And cold. It’s a terribly dangerous place to travel with a decent-looking piece of snatch.
It’s been so long since I sold my car that I’m beginning to forget there’s a world outside of downtown Denver. Every so often I catch a glimpse of the mountains on a clear morning and it seems so insane that I don’t drive anymore. They have become a scenic backdrop to the city rather than a reality. It’s a shame. On the other hand, I have none of the typical financial responsibilities that come with owning a car. While my friends who drive are at work busting ass to pay for a new carburetor or something, I’m up the street swilling expensive scotch and browsing the escort pages. Ah, just kidding.
Anyway, Christmas is here with all its lameness. Downtown gets overrun with shit-for-brains tourists from the weird outlying suburbs. They’re all determined to wear those festive Christmas sweaters. These people are like lice. They fuck up everything they come into contact with. They have made it impossible for me to enjoy living downtown for the rest of the month. They descend on the place by the hundreds. In the bakery I go to for coffee they climb all over me in droves and every woman finds a way to hit me in the face with her purse, and then her husband walks by and bumps my with his enormous ass. I think they’re shopping for gingerbread houses or something. Bastards.
I walked by the Salvation Army bell-ringer yesterday and for some unknown reason he lost his composure right in front of me and said, “This SUCKS!” I am not making this up. I guess it’s pretty frustrating to stand outside all day in the freezing cold wearing a Santa hat and ringing a bell that everyone tries to ignore. It’s not that Denver people are heartless, but we are all totally desensitized to panhandling. I have never seen so much panhandling before in my life. Everywhere you go there are old men with enormous beards begging for ten cents, not to mention the aggressive tactics now in use by Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, Denver Rescue Mission, etc. All these organizations heckle and terrorize people on the street corners, so by the time they get to the Salvation Army guy they have effectively quit giving a shit about humanity. Just one block form the bell-ringer I saw a guy actually freezing to death on a bench. He was hunched over and he had a frozen icicle hanging from the tip of his nose. Some paramedics were standing around him looking like they had no idea what to do about it. They might as well have been staring at some broken plumbing. The irony of this is that it happened right in front of the huge glass windows of a starbucks. The warm and cozy people in the café were basically forced to watch this morally distressing scene to a soundtrack of Christmas music while sipping on their hot chocolate. Or maybe they didn’t even bother looking. Do most people avert their gaze, or else curiously eyeball the suffering of the less fortunate? I’d really like to know. I too passed the Salvation Army guy and gave nothing.
Well, I did not intend to go on this depressing invective about Denver. I am planning to have yet another magical Christmas here, as usual, holed up in my apartment with wine and cigarettes and books by Cioran and Dostoevsky. Well, maybe not the cigarettes. I stopped smoking last week. It was all going well until I sat down to type this letter. Now I am suddenly experiencing this nagging desperation to smoke. I have been for the past three paragraphs. It’s because I always chain-smoke when I’m writing. The trouble is that I like smoking and I have no real desire to stop it. I’m just worried that the cigarettes have been affecting my health. It would be great if you could smoke just a little, but inevitably a little becomes a lot. It sneaks up on you. One day everything is in check, and then the next day you find yourself compulsively puffing on unfiltered cigarettes at all hours of the day and night. This is what it came to for me during the summer. I was sitting around every day reading and smoking for hours on end. In July alone, my lungs probably developed a nice thick crust of something similar to scorched bacon.
Well, this letter is becoming as irrelevant as it is long. I’ll wrap it by saying thanks for the card. Let me know how it’s going down south.
Best regards,
Joseph
Friday, December 4, 2009
Sanctuary
The friend I love is beside me now. She looks at me in the near-darkness of her room with wonderful eyes, dark but glowing like the stars. They reflect truth, the only truth that doesn’t make me sick with despair. It leads me back to the place that rights all the wrongs. This life, no longer the crime or the cage, becomes a possibility to see those eyes, to be here with her in this sacred reality. And what more could anyone really ask for that to be confronted with that?
My friend is a sanctuary, an armistice in a life that’s been nothing short of total war with no conceivable end. My mind is a war zone. I’m sick. It’s been this way for a long time. I came here, to the south, trying to get off the front lines, out of the trenches. Now I know that in running away I only found another front, another theater of strife. Break and run in another direction and there’s just more of the same. I’m hemmed in on all sides and the circle seems to be tightening. Bombardment rages on every hour of the day and night. But my friend calms it down, even if just for these few days we are here together. Anywhere she is, there’s home.
She’s the best ace up my sleeve. I’d like to think that when it’s all going wrong, desperately wrong, I could go to her. It’s been this way for a couple of years now, back and forth between Tennessee and Colorado.
Once she gave me a book of Emerson’s Essays. I told her it was like medicine for my sickened heart -but she’s better medicine. In looking across a crowded room at her, it’s then I know I am not alone. Not alone at all.
Being beside her here, on the streets of this unlikely town, this town I scorned forever, I catch a glimpse of the life want. There’s an easy perfection in the hours, rest in the company of someone who really is one of us. How could it be that I lived this many years without ever knowing this simple triumph?
Later on, the night turns cold. We sit on a second floor Balcony overlooking one of the more picturesque streets in Memphis. We’re up in the branches of a great old magnolia tree. We drink red wine and smoke cigarettes. Warm light from inside the living room glows on us through an open door. This is one of the best pleasures of the south, the slow nights and magnolias, the fact there’s no place at all to get to.
I have three days with my friend. Three days to find forever.
Memphis
10/30/09
My friend is a sanctuary, an armistice in a life that’s been nothing short of total war with no conceivable end. My mind is a war zone. I’m sick. It’s been this way for a long time. I came here, to the south, trying to get off the front lines, out of the trenches. Now I know that in running away I only found another front, another theater of strife. Break and run in another direction and there’s just more of the same. I’m hemmed in on all sides and the circle seems to be tightening. Bombardment rages on every hour of the day and night. But my friend calms it down, even if just for these few days we are here together. Anywhere she is, there’s home.
She’s the best ace up my sleeve. I’d like to think that when it’s all going wrong, desperately wrong, I could go to her. It’s been this way for a couple of years now, back and forth between Tennessee and Colorado.
Once she gave me a book of Emerson’s Essays. I told her it was like medicine for my sickened heart -but she’s better medicine. In looking across a crowded room at her, it’s then I know I am not alone. Not alone at all.
Being beside her here, on the streets of this unlikely town, this town I scorned forever, I catch a glimpse of the life want. There’s an easy perfection in the hours, rest in the company of someone who really is one of us. How could it be that I lived this many years without ever knowing this simple triumph?
Later on, the night turns cold. We sit on a second floor Balcony overlooking one of the more picturesque streets in Memphis. We’re up in the branches of a great old magnolia tree. We drink red wine and smoke cigarettes. Warm light from inside the living room glows on us through an open door. This is one of the best pleasures of the south, the slow nights and magnolias, the fact there’s no place at all to get to.
I have three days with my friend. Three days to find forever.
Memphis
10/30/09
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