Me.
Beginning from the very day we're born we are consistently thrown two powerful, imperative messages.
Messages.
Lessons we are meant to keep.
Keep in the forefront of our minds for every day as we live
For as long as we live.
1) Think of others. Put others before yourself. Give everything you can. You are the least important person in this room.
2) Think of yourself. Put yourself before others. Keep everything you can. You are the most important person in this room.
Putting yourself before others is selfish, until it isn't anymore.
Putting others before yourself is kind, until it isn't anymore.
And then it's unhealthy. Problematic. Toxic.
True selflessness?
It doesn't exist.
True selfishness?
It doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist.
They don't exist.
So what does?
What exists?
We are told all our lives to fend for ourselves, or we gather it on our own, as we watch the world around us fend for themselves and learn that we must do the same to survive.
We are also told all our lives to fend for others at our own expense, or we learn it on our own, and we never know when to do which.
No one truly knows.
I suppose
All we have are educated guesses.
Hypotheses.
Theories.
Are we selfish for choosing ourselves?
Or are we selfless for choosing others?
I suppose...
Yes. No. Both. Neither.
Wanting different things than those around us makes us selfish, but their want for similarity will always makes them selfish as well.
Are we selfless to forfeit freedom to make them happy? Are they? Or do we just avoid conflict... selfishly?
Everything we do is self-driven.
Self-urged.
Self-motivated.
We're born this way.
We're all born this way and
We spend our entire lives either fighting it or giving into it, and we battle between the two endlessly.
Fighting the voices in our heads that tell us to either do everything for others and care less about ourselves or do less for others and choose everything for ourselves.
'Selflessness' means winning a fight you're not even sure you're meant to win.
'Selfishness' means the very same.
We'll never know what's right or wrong, so it's the best we can do
To guess.
To guess with every choice we make.
To pray we don't make a mistake.
I suppose
It's all we can do
To strive for Balance.
Strive for Balance til' the day we die
Now and Maybe After
There’s no sworn happy ever after,
No promised silence filled with laughter
No guarantee of paradise
Of snake eyes when you roll the dice...
It sucks.
It’s sad
It’s scary, too
But you can’t ruin Now.
You can’t ruin You.
See-
There IS a happy here, right Now
whatever moments’ love allows
Forget next century, decade, year
Remember feelings, Now, right here
Those anxious “if”s? They just don’t matter
You’re happy Now
and Maybe After.
Smog.
I want to tell you that it tasted disgusting
That it tasted Vile
Like Pain,
Like Loss
Like Torment.
I want to say that I gagged on its burn
Choked on its smell
Broke in half from the painful electricity of it all.
But it didn’t taste like anything.
It didn’t smell like anything.
It didn’t feel like anything.
When she died,
I felt one thing
and I felt it as strong as I’ve ever felt anything.
Maybe even stronger.
I felt
Nothing.
The Nothing I felt was a Smog,
thick
grey
-suffocating.
I’d never felt Nothing before.
It felt empty.
And hollow.
And grey.
All the taste,
the smell
the color
was sucked from the air around me
and I couldn’t get it back.
I couldn’t feel, taste, or smell even the worst of colors.
All I felt was Nothing. Only the grey- only the absence of color in my mind, in my world, in my eyes,
I felt Nothing.
It didn’t even hurt
And that hurt most of all.
Analogous
Chapter I: The Quick of it (as in-to)
a) context (as in-to) Orientation
b) story (as in-to) Book
c) fiction (as in-to) Fact
*******
Day One:
Let There Be A-Part From Darkness.
-no my, a combining form of Greek origin meaning "distribution," "arrangement," "management,": astronomy; economy; taxonomy. [ < Gk -nomia law . See NOMO-]
non-, a prefix meaning "not," freely used as an English formative, usually with a simple negative force as implying mere negation or absence of something (rather than the opposite or reverse of it, as often expressed by un-): non-adherence; noninterference; nonpayment; nonprofessional.
non•fiction (non fik'shen), n. 1. the branch of literature comprising works of narrative prose dealing with or offering opinions or conjectures upon facts and reality, including biography, history, and the essay (opposed to fiction and distinguished from poetry and drama).
*from (as written in);
Webster's
Encyclopedic
Unabridged
Dictionary
of the English Language
Deluxe Edition
In any 'beginning' we will always find ourselves preceding from an unknown number of previous beginnings. In the beginning, therefore, there was no 'beginning', as such. For in the opening of ones eyes there is only the simple fact of Night proceeding Day in a stretch of blank foreverness hovering over and above the Face of the Deep.
A Book too is no more than a man's eyes just as a man's eyes are only just a book. A man opens a book to read a world because any world resides precisely in a man's eyes.
All books then open exactly as did his own, never to a beginning but always to a pale-rimmed middle, which, if it be so prudent, might then find itself bowed in some vague posture of self-discernment.
There was, in fact, but a single Actual Beginning, and this One-Actual wrote itself as such that its origins should remain largely incomprehensible to those who find themselves preceding from it.
But proceed we must, as it is the nature of all past to all ways lead to future.
You find yourself staring out the window of a passenger car positioned at the mid-section of a very long train, say, a mile or so in length -
a whistle is heard, you feel a sudden lurch forward, and suddenly the landscape begins its slow crawl from the front of your window frame to the back.
In this case you are quite aware that you're a passenger on a train. You understand that the world isn't moving past your window at all, it only appears as such due to your body being transported by the train and opposite the direction of the illusion. Similarly, you are neither shocked to find yourself being moved by an engine you cannot see, nor is it strange when you consider that the movement is due to the starting of the engine and the engagement of its axils, two events, both of which occurred a) in your past, b) beyond your direct line of sight, and, c) prior any movement of your car.
Time is a train you cannot see.
You are the passenger who cannot know.
Thus, shall we follow accordingly:
And in the absence of all beginnings, hovering over and above the face of The Great Deep, and in the time of a Becoming, Light awoke from an age old Sleep.
The True book will only find itself in the Natural World, awakened from nothingness and bound for no where other than a series of event horizons which may never hope to witness the immensity of themselves.
Here now we take a step into his journey just as did he, in the precise recognition of exactly what that step is not - a threshold opened to an orientation of linearity.
But let us enumerate, if only for traditions sake, we say to ourselves,
"And on the first day..."
Nothing True is set gently in.
You were born, not nestled into love and warmth, but from such softenings were you banished. You were born just as all Words are born, from love and tenderness and into shock and awe - from a climate of dependency into one of sufficiency, that is to say, sufficient as such that you have survived from at least that day until this one.
So this is a telling of a story's Undoing and all stories are Undone in order that they may enter into their own Becoming. Furthermore,
as this is not the First Story, and all stories must come equipped with the Histories of their predecessors, it cannot, therefore, contain those elements of form and structure which you, The Reader, might be so accustomed.
Thus must you be birthed again, into the lights and masked instrument of contextual ambiguity, with no course for which to plot in your mind. Here is where you will learn (just as he is presently learning) that a ball suspended freely in space is neither right side up or up side down and
directionality is a peculiar illusion of the line.
***
Mid-afternoon sounds at the bar, most any bar, he liked, but Tuesday's at Springwater's, those were mid-afternoon the most.
To him it sounded there then like huge waters in the steady ebb and flow of unconcerned intimacy.
The cling and clack of glasses stacked or hung for the ready. The wind-chimed bowling pins of last night empty bottles tossed carelessly in trash cans. The sacramental tink of the full. Conversations that clearly shouldn't be heard are heard clearly nonetheless. Primitive languages somehow resurrect in these hours, slung low and quick like the Old Nashville of his youth. Greetings arriving in "Hidees" or "What say"'s with loud and friendly smacks on sweat soaked shirt backs. The sounds of American 'multi-tasking' and auto-piloted action where drink orders are taken like car talk, utterly absent the vocal stress of policy's assigned smile - no arm wrestled mental grunts from the obligatory eye contact - no televised chatter of announcers announcing their statistical analysis of human kinetic intelligence - no hiss and roar from a pixelated crowd as goals are scored in sports imported from less temperate climates - no CMA ordained sounds splintering forth from the speaker sides of the old juke-box in the corner, where still to this day rests a flat nosed 9mm lead projectile lost within its less vital components.
She sits Now where he was then, but not before a door opened in this room.
On certain occasions a burst of Sun-Light is exactly the orange blast from a sudden trombone.
When such occasions arise a woman's figure beneath her dress is exactly an X-Ray.
"Yas Sirrree",
say the eyes of man.
It is not true that nothing being an accident is all things deliberate, for a coincidence is deliberate only if either or.
Should then one even speak of synchronisticy at all? If, given that all things are synchronized,
only the clock knows the contradiction lies outside of itself.
"A Tapestry",
whispers Einstein In Awe.
"We have so manufactured clocks of ourselves".
"Fuck it"
he thought saying
"Here's yer pen back partner"
Buddy picked up the pen from his Profession, as all bars have exactly two sides. Only then did he collect the 2 worn bills and 3 coins lying stacked neatly on the counter.
Five years later, Buddy, would find himself looking up the word 'Irony' in a foot thick copy of
Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary
of the English Language
Deluxe Edition
(he'd long suspected the kids of certain Linguistic abuses).
"Definition of irony
plural ironies
• 1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroitquestioning —called also Socratic irony
• 2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
• 3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic."
A crumpled napkin with blurred writing in blue ink sat soaking up the condensation of a nearly full bottle of warm beer. The bottle was brown with thumbnail scratches parting a metallic paper label which read, in part:
"#ab*st Bl@e Ribb~n"
She picked up the napkin using only her thumb and index fingers and about to toss it further down the bar from her, when, seeing the writing, straightened it smooth on the bar without any thought of tactile economy.
Twenty minutes earlier three napkins beneath his beer one was only just damp. The pen he asked for was slick and greasy. The bartender slid it from behind his ear, obliging his request with an annoyed toss across the bar.
"Always stealin my goddamn pens man"
The pen fell to the floor. He must remove himself completely from the stool in order to pick it up, which he then wrote:
a) sequence is a matter of orientation
b) orientation is a matter of
subject
c) subject is a matter of thought
d) thought is a matter of Language
"Gimme another'un Buddy"
Buddy took a beer out of the cooler, opened it (though it twisted) with a flick from the ancient bottle opener hanging around his neck. His tee shirt was stained where the opener was rusted. Army dog tags must share their chains sometimes, but only after the property is returned from service.
The cap became suddenly only a sound - then less and less of itself.
"Hell ya'ain't hardly touched thatun"
Buddy said, while not going away.
"Hate warm beer Bud"
Buddy leaned in close to him whispering as though in secret,
"Thasss why ye drank it when it's cold son"
Fact:
Buddy never smelled like alcohol.
Q: What is thought without Words?
A: Pictures
Q: What is thought without Pictures?
A: Feelings
Q: What are feelings?
A: Qualia
Q: That's not an answer
(The struggle of the Hemispheres to find the balance of themselves)
R: Compensation gives way to dominance, is the rule.
A man is from nowhere but his language.
Now, say a man is from Chinese while waiting on a bus -
And say that bus is going to that mans past -
Which way will that bus be traveling - in front of him or behind?
A: In front - the past of a man from Chinese is always in front of him.
Only an English has a backwards past.
Where is always the past of ones mind? Always in front as in front is where one sees.
Concrete or Abstract-
The source of dilemma is only found in Orientation.
Orientation is Context.
Wasted Childhood >-And-Never-Coming-Back->
It's good to be a child
It's good to live your childhood
To have someone who cares for you
To make you feel like you
Meant the world to them
Make you happy with deep
And gentle touch of love
Touch of love!...
That makes you feel alive
To buy you toys and clothes
To rub up your hair scalp
It's good to have someone who
Truly loves you unconditionally
Who passes their backhand
Across your innocent cheek
While looking into your eyes
And softly whispering...
I love you!
And if you ever feel like crying
Go ahead!...Feel free to do so
Because they will be there for you
They will wipe away your crystal tears
Before it touches the floor
And give you a along...warm hug
And tuck you in into their hearts
And mess up your hair with soft fingers
Like yearns and warmth across your veins
It's good to be a child, but even better!
If you get to live it...which I didn't.
Lost
My hollow, empty eyes scream more to the world than my voice ever can. My only goal in life was only ever to survive the day; on tougher days, I willed myself to survive hours, minutes, and moments. I have been unjustly dealt one of the toughest hands in life. I have lived a loveless life- and no knight can save me. I have been battered by wind and rain and my father's fists. And those famous last words- at least it can't get any worse? The phrase has passed my lips one time too many, uttered out of the shred of hope that had remained. Now look into my lost eyes and see my demons. I have given up fighting for my worthless self. I have lost hope. Life has not been fair to me, why should I play by the rules of her game? I should just let myself fly with a more permanent destination- to my game over in this rigged, worthless scheme.
A universe like this
I can only speak
of course
about my own
burning bush,
which blazed briefly
but brightly
as I searched
for ultimate truth
and genuflected
most politely
until I realised
that God if just
would never
have acted thus.
All the stories
and histories
serve to imprison
and punish
without blinking
the revisionism
of the thinking
and cry schism
but in the end
our jailers are
always only us.
I don't blame
a jealous God,
for such
was always
part invention,
mostly fraud,
and I remain
convinced the
God of justice
would never
have designed
a universe like this.
Angel.
{v. 1}
you were an angel to me even before you died,
you were never really human
I saw it in your eyes
you were perfect in every moment of your life
and I laid me down and let the feelings grow
I didn't even care when they started to show
They exploded inside me,
I didn't try to set them free
In time
{chorus}
I was stupid for loving an angel, you didn't belong here on Earth
You were a soldier, to me you were perfect
And you didn't know your worth
I felt so angry at all my feelings
I tried to set them all aside
And I didn't notice when you were gone
Till I felt a coldness by my side
{v.2}
And damn I miss the feeling of you
Even though you never loved me
You were an angel and now you have wings
And you've been set free.
{repeat chorus}
