Plowing through loukaniko pita sandwiches with the best tzaziki, talking about dates and costs to rent a car and drive to CA, a possible going away party, and my strident demands for a cat. I was thinking I’d live alone but we might be able to swing a two-bedroom if it makes it easier and more cost effective to live in a more interesting area. Astoria, with its fantastic Mediterranean cuisine, international food markets, restless life on the street in Spring. Ah well.

Going through my closet, finding the old lease agreement with printouts of my credit report for the landlord. I see I’ve been here for six years when I thought it was five. Christ. 

Now it’s just an enclosed space, tomb-like, six-years-worth of dust accumulated in unknown corners. To think about leaving is very hard. And good. But hard. And what if work does not materialize there either, and what about no real public transit, and finding some fitting community and and 

But really, too much has accumulated and stagnated here. Life is best lived lean, always moving toward something, not in an endless, insatiable wait.

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

I worry about an old friend. 

Whether it’s codependency or not, I’ll always be tethered to him in some way. Once you recognize something unique and distinctly human in someone, you can never go back. But if you know enough about addiction, you eventually recognize that people will often say and do whatever is necessary to have their needs fulfilled by others. It’s not deliberate; most of the time it’s not even conscious. He’s not addicted to anything chemical, just the jail cell of his mind, and a toxic quality of persistent disempowerment. A recent diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome may offer some explanation for that, but the reality is a childhood aborted by violence and neglect will do that to anyone. The dark truths one learn about life as a result can be both a strength and a weakness. 

I always told him I wanted to be an equal, not a caretaker. I pulled away in the hope that some will to fight would surface, telling him to marshal his talents and write. Sure enough, he somehow summoned the drive to nearly finish a novel. But the absence of someone to listen, aside from the codependent woman whom he uses and does not respect, seems to be getting to him. Speech like that can be manipulative, but it can also make itself true. So, I will help edit his manuscript in the hopes that it serves as a vehicle toward fulfillment, but remain distant beyond that.

He’s right, of course. Life is not precious, it is utterly common. But once you truly recognize that, down to your bones, everything becomes possible, including the darkest acts of violence against oneself and others. This is the abyss that Nietzsche mentioned: if you gaze long enough into it, eventually it gazes into you. It’s also one of the reasons why excessive investment in self is sickening — not for the harm you do to yourself, because we each bear the responsibility of our own choices, but the harm you cause others. You end up denying people their subjectivity by turning them into objects whose sole purpose is devoted to fulfilling your needs.

The only real sustenance we can have requires drawing from a reservoir of genuine respect and care for others — but not from a place of lack — and a commitment to something greater than oneself. Our own existential pain is a question that must be answered, and answered the right way. Zarathustra’s will to power seemed close, but now resembles to me the sickness epitomized by Ayn Rand. I’ll take posthumanism and dharma practice any day.

Or maybe my way to answer that question will be to get a cat if I move to a new apartment. Fucking cats for everyone, QED.

A swallowed sun never rises again
but is transfigured, not sanctified in fires of retelling
its incandescence never extinguished
burning through soft membranes

Your innocence was a constellation
There is no shame in it: 
We were transfixed by your dancing 
iridescent lights  

A swallowed voice speaks in a chorus
choked inside-out, becoming its own echo
vanished into the earth
which became your body 

We couldn’t hear you then
to shelter you, asleep,
marching into the sky with arms outstretched
away from this place. 

These nights, when the stars 
sear in silent alchemy,  
do not deserve your light though I know
we can’t help but reflect what we see

Please stay…
fast rooted against the sky
The horizon stretches with no end
yet it can’t reach what has no limit
inside you.

Connected, but alone?

Yes. Over the years I’ve found human contact to be the only way I can sustain a relationship. I do miss the technologically-mediated connections I formed over LJ because they bucked the trend. These connections transformed into real-world relationships that, in a few cases, were far more meaningful than those I had at college. I wish those NYers were still around, and that the rest weren’t all over the country. And, the Alexia-Vin, Brian-Lindsay relationships I encountered were examples of healthy, deep love and companionship that I am grateful to have witnessed. Meeting people cultivating such sincere bonds —  coming from my own background where that was absent — helped me recognize and respect the rare kind of relationship that really does last. 

Leaving LJ, despite its old technology and aggravating ad penetration, was difficult. As that baffling depression set in, I found myself only able to write about what my mind was able to reflect upon, which was itself: invariably dark and contorted. Excessive self-concern is perverse, unhealthy, cruel to others. In the same way that, at age five, my conscious mind was only able to process death symbolically through a specific recurring nightmare, it seems that the kind of shit I’m wading through now is best delegated to metaphor and narrative. At that juncture I wasn’t seeking sympathy so much as the ability to understand the contours and limits of this unknown angst, but it began to feel as if I was reproducing difficult, less-edifying emotions in others. Distance is safer; when your own tongue becomes paralyzed, instilling fear and concern in others over your silence might just spread the infection. It’s important for once to just stop harming people…

Cultivating now a place where no one reads, seeking to write confessional words that no longer connect directly back to me, encrypting poetry and leaving it around NYC, while paradoxically hoping for completely sporadic and unknown readership, has become my own solution to self-expression. I apparently have an enormous capacity for solitude that borders on unhealthy, but that has always been the case. I still despise the presence of “I” in anything I write here, but I feel less guilty without an audience. While this doesn’t answer Turkle’s injunction to buck technology’s trend of subverting empathy with control in the above TED talk, it does fill a space that I’ve since left absent. Social media has seemed to grow colder and more alienating in the last few years, in spite of its increasing ability to bring people together. Standing on the outside, it’s easier to hear the strange, reverberating emptiness that emanates from Facebook and Twitter. 

Just a cabin in the woods somewhere, with a kitchen and a bed, forty or fifty books, and an easel. As this miasma draws itself out, life here feels more oppressive. There’s no vastness to anything, aside from the scale of commerce captured by the skyscrapers, no thriving beyond people. Central Park is culture, not nature. Even just finding a place to go for a time seems like an exhausting undertaking. Thoreau’s two years alone was a radical act even in his time; I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to escape to a similar extent nowadays.

These periods reignite the fear that I will inevitably harm anyone who seeks to be close. It seems more appropriate and safe to find a way to go on in solitude. Only a kind of hard discipline will instill the fortitude needed to endure; I can clearly recognize the routines I need to combat this despair, but all the resources needed to weave them into habits drain away so quickly. Only sleep offers freedom from this anomie.

But how… This is a question that demands a response, when even the act of buying bread saps all of my energy. But right now, there really is no way out. No decision to be made, only waiting on shifts in the market, hawking my skills to businesses carving out market share from this or that chunk of consumer behavior. All fine and good, that’s just as human as love, but this isn’t a life I’ve been built to handle, dwindling like Kafka’s hunger artist or Bartleby the scrivener. 

On the Melville tangent, most accounts of Moby Dick in popular memory focus only on Ahab’s obsession with the whale as reason for the Pequod’s demise — the result of one man’s choices. Rarely is Fedallah mentioned, and the fact that the Pequod’s end was determined from the outset by his presence. If I remember right, even the beggar Ishmael meets before first setting foot on the vessel foreshadows the curse of Ahab’s stowaways (might be wrong there). Fedallah is like the witches in Macbeth, or the chorus in Greek tragedy, occupying a symbolic space long erased from American literature — one that considers the vicissitudes of life as fixed, beyond our control. 

Ishmael at least could escape civilization to the sea, and lived to tell the tale; here I’m navigating between between Walden pond and ”I’d prefer not to”, feeling the familiar, oppressive return of something more insidious that’s haunted me for decades. Meanwhile my Google news sidebar informs me that “Kardashian makes time for her man [way to go!]” and “Mega Millions winner in Maryland presents ticket”. That’ll probably be the next bit of technology I jettison overboard…

The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy… when all the world is shining around it… when love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace… ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you. Whatever comes. 

Religion ceased being a foregone conclusion. Narrative explanations for existence no longer satisfy. There are no truths, only stories enmeshed in a net of words, referring to what we know and can know. The absence created by its passing is the place that modernism as a project sought to occupy and postmodernism, as its extension, sought to erase.

This anchor reaches to the bottom of an ocean. It’s neither infinite nor transcendent — it’s just as finite and embodied as this mind and body — but it occupies that absence, endlessly reaching like a root until it can grasp no longer. I feel its smooth iron contours when reading your beautiful words, when watching The Tree of Life, just as the movie itself is a reaching that extends from the O’Brien family’s asking “why” when approaching the death of their son and brother.

Derrida once noted that we must eat, and that it tastes good to eat — coming from that place, like a thirst for salt; if we must eat the other, how do we do it well? 

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