It would appear that sometimes even time could not mend the unspoken, or perhaps just willfully subdued, abyss of past experience. The mnemonic spectre still haunts the corners of my conscience, stalking the halls of my origination. Marcus Aurelius worded it best when he wrote what, to me, is his most emblematic piece of insight: "All glory belongs to oblivion."

Initial impressions on ideological versus materialistic conflict

Considering Zizek's analysis of the end times and conflicting ideology- the fact that after the fall of communism after the end of the Soviet Union capitalism, liberal, and later neo-liberal ideology were left to run rampant and unchallenged, I sat here wondering just where the beast of burden should lie. Traditional Hegelian thought would lead us to believe that all conflict is the conflict of ideology whereas marxist, and post-marxist thought for that matter, would have us believe that all conflict is the result of economic disparage, class struggle, the conflict of powers, from lesser to greater and the oppression thereof. What strikes me as odd here, and this is a fundamentally simple, if not somewhat uninformed, question: is marxism thinking itself with too much simplicity? Hegelian ideological conflict seems to recap the struggle beautifully by widening the expanse of conflict, bringing it into the familiar grounds of philosophy, moving it away from the materialism that dominates, and sometimes blinds, marxist ideology. So why move away from Hegel and towards Marx when Hegel has already paved the way for this ideological ground? Marxism is, and I posit this with all due caution and perhaps a little lack of severity, an inductive consequence of Hegelian thought (not at all far fetched considering Marx was a very well trained student of Hegel) and, what seems to be painfully obvious, most modern views of marxism are twisted and confused in their interpretation of class struggle and it's clearly ideological base of POWER struggles. The nature of conflict is no longer political, this is a post-political world with loose geopolitics now transformed from realpolitik to noopolitik, the virtual war is emblematic of our virtual interaction, the forced depoisoning of society and the psychological trauma we sustain as a direct result of it. There is too much to be discussed concerning this theme, more to come.

Lethargy

There has been a distinct lack in personal productivity, that is to say writing for the pleasure of it, on my behalf in the past month. Rest assured, and I write this to assure myself above all, this is the result of academic pressures occupying my time. Considering the mutability of life, the to and fro tug of experience and constant change that assails the frail balance we try to assure, it should be no surprise that I've had my share of troubles and worries to occupy me as well. I want to vent, but right now I simply can't afford the time, between meaningless distractions and academic subjugation I've simply been forced behind the tomb, tapping at the walls softly with the hope that echo of each hollow prod will soon indent the prison of quotidian living.

A Fragment of Life

"I can’t be bothered. I can’t be bothered to ride, the motion is too violent. I can’t be bothered to walk, it’s too strenuous; I can’t be bothered to lie down, for either I’d have to stay lying down and that I can’t be bothered with, or I’d have to get up again, and I can’t be bothered with that either. In short: I just can’t be bothered."

Pre-existentialist literature is a tricky, but often wonderful mixture of the frantic irrationality of faith in dire and violent conflict with the often rampart vicissitudes of being and human experience. The above quote is an excerpt from Kierkegaard's "Either/Or, A Fragment of Life", a tumultuous, and often humorous, apology for the virtues of moral living in the face of the crude and insincere aesthetic that has since taken hold of humanity. Where the weight of one's own passions lie is best left to the virtues of the reader, but if there is one thing to be found in these pages is a mournful reflection of our struggles, internal and external, and how they pick at our conscience, dividing the inner being from the outer and perhaps even establishing a self-sustaining and simultaneously-existing duality of mankind prevalent in pre-secular (neoplatonic for example) writing and much later on, existentialist doctrines. I will try to gather what I can from Kierkegaard's work, no simple task mind you, his work is dense and extensive, but I believe it will be a worthwhile experience.

Time will tell, I suppose.

Patercidium

To be completely honest, I feel that lately I have understood why patricide is a sacred act.

(fragment) All is truth.

(...)

Meditating among liars, and retreating sternly into myself, I see that there are really no
liars or
lies after all,
And that nothing fails its perfect return—And that what are called lies are perfect
returns,
And that each thing exactly represents itself, and what has preceded it,
And that the truth includes all, and is compact, just as much as space is compact,
And that there is no flaw or vacuum in the amount of the truth—but that all is truth
without
exception;
And henceforth I will go celebrate anything I see or am,
And sing and laugh, and deny nothing.

-Walt Whitman

The problem of two conscioussnesses.

A very basic and perhaps somewhat hard to generalize observation, due only to the necessity of specific knowledge and information, concerning the nature of all things in existence is their overall and quite relative unknowability. Where does this ghoulish sense of unfamiliarity stem from? Once acquainted with the natural world and it's vicissitudes it is easy to start to trace the enigmatic pathways of understanding, or perhaps better said the lack thereof, and our perceptive ability when shifted towards making rational, existential sense of our surroundings, that is to say, everything that is by way of conscientious awareness and topography, not us. Camus called this unfamiliarity the absurd, "the absurd is the essential concept and the first truth." According to him, the feeling of the absurd is a phantom that can strike a man at any given moment, a half-dumb epiphenomenon born of the realization of awareness of self, of what is and what isn't, the mutilation and abstraction of the ego, in essence, an inflation so inward it thrusts you out of the ostensible universe and then back in and straight through the doors of perception, revealing in one fluid, albeit nauseating, motion the absolute emptiness and silent despair innate to one's own unpurposed existence. There exist a myriad conclusions to be drawn from this particular statement, but one in particular should concern us in relation to the subject at hand, this is the limits of experience. What of these limits then?
To summarize, as all this has already been said before, they are limits of perception and our ability to experience and interpret the world, the limits themselves of course being our own physiology and how it absorbs and manipulates the information presented it when interacting with the world. Unequivocally, one of Camus' more recognizable ideas is the all-consuming alienation that comes from this dissociative exercise. This posits an even greater conflict concerning out relationships and interactions with other human beings.
Consciousness is not a thing that can be discussed as an object insofar that is not a thing at all, it is a figment, devoid of objectification and one can barely say it exists if not for the fact that it is the only verifiable inward experience man has. That is not to say that it is also outwardly verifiable, but we will get to that soon enough. To intuit consciousness is to make it an object of the mind, this is the only way to reconcile it logically, but consciousness itself is transcendent, the originator of all our actions and proper sense of being and ultimately the most intimate experience man could ever suffer. Consciousness in turn makes the ego its object, which is to say the the ego is a reflection, albeit an imperfect one, of consciousness. In any case, the issue to be argued here is that these factors create a disparity in the human experience that some might call the basis of subjectivity, the root cause of which is none other than consciousness itself. The perceptive possibility of two or more consciousnesses is deemed impossible by reasonable standards, though it may be simple to affirm the existence of such other consciousnesses by way of speculation we know of only one as true, the absolute consciousness, and that is our own. This is what I like to call the problem of two consciousnesses, we only assume the existence of one consciousness due to the fact that it is impossible to ever intimately experience another, the reason for this being that it is an intimately inward phenomenon, the only inward phenomenon in fact that is absolutely inexpressible. This is something that is experienced at the most primeval level, the one experience one can truly say belongs to one's self. This has some very serious repercussions on our interpersonal relationship-building mechanisms, when we meet another person we are at a loss to explain their existence, and furthermore their consciousness as a thing apart from our own. As a result we become what can only be phrased as "lectores incomodos", a term used when studying narratives. This is a term I chanced upon when studying St. Augustine's "Confessions" where he aims to literally make uncomfortable spectators out of his readers by conversing with god, subliminally forcing man to reflect on his own sins and thus feel shame.
The consciousness of the other is a foreign discourse to ourselves, what is the very essence of it to us if not a dialogue with our own person? It is the discourse that precedes and is simultaneously terrified of will, because will itself is control and consciousness is freedom. However, considering the nature of freedom, we know that it comes in degrees, a slow burning star in its billion year quasi-sleep releasing more and more of itself to the receptive universe. "My I", wrote Sartre, "is no more certain for consciousness than the I of other men. It is only more intimate." Not to be confused with an advocacy for solipsism, there is a very real affirmation in this, in the failure humanity suffers when we come to express ourselves, when we want to communicate, and ultimately, when we try to express each other. Language is sometimes woefully inappropriate, leaving us with only the ability to intuit, to create objects of the mind which we can fill with consciousness and the states thereof, this is the only way to give meaning to each others existences.

Pending.

My experiment in futility will continue shortly. One most organize one's thoughts for lucidity to even be feasible.

Asfadgg

An object is only as valuable as the use it is given, thus it should be no surprise how useless every paltry bit of me is.

I'm going in circles now. The wasteland grows further still, it clothes me well.

Some thoughts.

"The most thought-provoking thing about our thought-provoking age" said Heidegger, "is that we are still not thinking". As a collective, humanity is under a guise, the illusion perpetrated by the abundance of information and so-called knowledge, facts and data to be processed by the central processing chamber that methodologically compiles information and distributes it throughout our synapses, systematically affirming that what we do or say cannot be anything less than reality. The naked, unbarred truth swinging wildly in our veins, in fact for some it feels so keen it'd be hard not to assert that this is it, this is the promised land we were sure we'd chance upon when information was truly free, but as always, there are limits to freedom, the fundamental problem being that these problems are imposed by ourselves. What is called thinking? One could go into a myriad answers and still come up short, at best what we could offer is an approximation, but rather than saying that thinking is insightful deduction and induction compiled as dialectic synthesis, it's simpler to check off what thinking isn't, and to say what it isn't it is also necessary to say what that negation actually is. Some would dare call thinking a fixation on present tense, situational awareness, or simply the way we know how we feel, our feelings, reflecting on gloomy themes or simply focusing on the adverse, the internal collision of man, his conflicting nature, sticking almost exclusively to nihilism. In essence, thought is not necessarily a negative thing, even when it is plagued with negative epiphanies. So is this really nihilism?
Asceticism itself has been elevated to a sort of mythological status, the end-all, be-all destination of so-called thought and progressive thinking, but the nihilism we know today is not true asceticism. It's a shall, a commemorative replacement for what was once the true base of negation, a hand-sorted series of arbitrary ideals that dull the mind and subject thought to a pattern of diffidence. How can this be thought? Technology has only pushed humanity far enough to make use of its cognitive capacities insomuch that we are required to increase our use of them more and more as technology itself progresses, we form liaisons and primordial temptations to believe this is thought simply because we are (for the most part) more aware of the usage of our understanding per diem. It should be plain to see these changes are merely cosmetic, the surface value of these thoughts don't even lie in abstraction or complication, two basic tools for dialectic reasoning, but based on face-value fact-mongering and idealistic wanton, a fetish for facts and information rather than a clear grasping of them. This fetish is also malformed because of its trivial nature- and all things could be said to be trivial, but some more than others. On one hand the world tumbles into and endlessly vapid but cosmetically intriguing direction, on the other it tumbles into the nothingness of absurdity. What value does one hold over the other? Inherently, the answer is none. However practically it is another story, the practicality of these ivory towers outweighs the laziness of cosmetic thinking.
We are born here, thrown into obscurity and meaninglessness, waves of universal indifference pass through us leaving a lingering sense of mutual detachment in its wake, it is precisely this what binds us close to the cosmos, which must be what forces us to face ourselves. The primeval chaos that surrounds us exerts a quiet structure and what we perceive, what sense we try to make of it, bends and twists to our thought, to our insight. Complacency in thought leads us to see the universe as a vast and uninteresting mechanism we would be comfortable with simply knowing it rests in the background of our feeble existence. Rather than contribute to the age of non-thought, it should be the aim of an individual to sacrifice his or her own thoughts, to make them into the ebb of external being and shape his or her own consciousness. To me personally there is nothing I can stand less than one who's thoughts center around the inattentive aspects of modernity and civilization, it should be a shame to those who relish in impassivity and try to mask it as nihilism, it is instead narcissism that reigns.

Tonight, tonight.

Tonight, right this instant, at 1:28 AM, Thursday morning, I wanted to weep. I have not felt like crying, much less weeping for years, not many things warrant such a flippant and emotional response, but somehow this seemed appropriate, this want, this desire to do so, but not the actual act. I'm going numb all over, emotions themselves are as blatantly systematic and predictable as ever, so why go through with them? I go through the motions because part of me remembers what it means to be a functional member of society, a functional human being. And if I dared not to be I'd have to jump off a cliff. I am so deeply in contempt with everything right now, my head can barely wrap itself around my hands, I do not want to think, I have had enough, reality stay your bitter fingers, my lips were not made for you.

None of me was. Nothing. Not a damn thing. Leave me be.

Honesty.

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? …All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
--Abraham Lincoln

I spoke with Sylvia Plath today...

And she said that there was a way for men to live without books and college. She was utterly content with her present situation, alone and ineffably warm, her body as quiet as the still air that undoubtedly dampened the room, a glass of milk sat beside her idly, as if quietly contemplating the room and thus becoming part of it in the process for a milk has no thoughts and could never be a cloud of thoughts as we are. Her eyes viscous and racing as her fingers mingled with the fresh scent of the strawberry runners she had planted just hours before setting herself down a spell to write, to think. She said that those are the times she'd call herself a fool to ask for more, I suggest that perhaps she has found eternal life. An eternity, because without books one might soon run out of words, and then one is left only to one's own thoughts, without words one is left to the illimitable production of thoughts. Without a means to make corpses of them, to bury them steadily on paper they expand infinitely like a cancer, and that is the eternal life of man, a universe of life contained in the cloud of being, a remorseless cancer, unending life.

Wicked and sentimental.

I no longer feel like explaining myself to anyone. Why do you want to know? Why can't you be quiet? Have some quotes while I regain my composure. I've never been a man of virtue, I trample and spit all over them and if I could I would break every finger on their bony, rotten hands. Virtue stretches its hands and tries to embrace humanity and there is no hope for her or her stupid fingers, her ugly smile, her crooked eyes and wrinkly cheeks, I hope she rots.

Quotes, quotes, quotes, I forgot:


"I heard exactly the same thing, a long time ago to be sure, from a doctor," the elder remarked. "He was then an old man, and unquestionably intelligent. He spoke just as frankly as you, humorously, but with a sorrowful humor. 'I love mankind,' he said, 'but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams,' he said, 'I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,' he said. 'On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.'"
-Elder Zosima

"During a walk, he sat down on a hillock and thought: 'For six years I slept, and then one fine day I came out of my cocoon.' He was animated and looked affably around the countryside. 'I'm built for action,' he thought. But in an instant his thought of glory faded. He whispered, 'Let them wait a while and they'll see what I'm worth.' He had spoken with force but the words rolled on his lips like empty shells. 'What's the matter with me?' He did not want to recognize this odd inquietude, it had hurt him too much before. He thought, 'It's this silence. . . this land . . .' Not a living being, save crickets laboriously dragging their black and yellow bellies in the dust. Lucien hated crickets because they always looked half dead. On the other side of the road, a greyish stretch of land, crushed, creviced, ran as far as the river. No one saw Lucien, no one heard him; he sprang to his feet and felt that his movements would meet with no resistance, not even that of gravity. Now he stood beneath a curtain of grey clouds; it was as though he existed in a vacuum. 'This silence . . .' he thought. It was more than silence, it was nothingness. The countryside was extraordinarily calm and soft about Lucien, inhuman: it seemed that it was making itself tiny and was holding its breath so as not to disturb him. 'Quand l'artilleur de Metz revint en garnison....' The sound died on his lips as a flame in a vacuum: Lucien was alone, without a shadow and without echo, in the midst of this too discreet nature which meant nothing."
-Sartre, The Wall

"A step lower and the strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is 'dense,' sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had love months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even close to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone."
-Camus, Myth of Sisyphus

Under the influence

The following is an account of a brief moment of messianic revelation, a technopathic epiphany of sorts that dawned upon me after several bong hits and a couple of glasses of alcohol. Yes, I was very high and slightly intoxicated when this was thought up and written, I was also watching Cronenberg's version of "The Fly" so I suppose that would account for the fixation on human teleportation.

"Alright, so, teleporters exist. They can teleport entangled particles around 10 miles right now. Imagine teleporting a human; motion is constant, you're always moving even if you're trying to sit still and do nothing, there's an issue of balance and the vibration of your atoms, the way your composition affects and interacts with the world that surrounds you. The machine would only capture a momentary you, literally momentary, but since moments are infinitely complex, there's some factors to consider here.
One: it captures the person at the moment, let's say, you waved your arm.
Two: it creates an exact copy of that moment by transmitting information simultaneous to the particle it's entangled with so they're both affected locally and it sends it to the 'other side' as entangled information, bit by bit.
You come back at that same exact moment in a different point in spacetime, but what about the motion when you were originally in the teleporter? Think about it, it's instantaneous so it both happened afterward and during. That is to say, the motion itself isn't interrupted as much as it's moved, but you can still reach the conclusion that the moment was erased from that particular point in spacetime due to it not being continued in its 'assigned' spacetime.
Here's where it gets somewhat crazy. A whole fraction of a second and a potential action are erased, you skip a moment in time and appear at another one, that whole portion of your spacetime simply disappears, comparable to a missing frame in a movie reel. Because it has no place, it simply does not happen, this is logical. However, what if people found a way to expand that moment, the moment you're being copied? An individual could commit crimes during that 'dead time', that time will be erased, time lost in time, the materialization period would extend and stretch time itself. The individual living in the 'dead time' is a pre-copy, the copy is exactly the individual it was, memories and all, when it was moved at that instant, the person in 'dead time' is the continuation of the motion being interrupted, the waving hand. The idea is that this image is stored in a sort of dimensional pocket, an instantaneous pocket that is meant to be destroyed post-teleportation, that is the missing frame. I call it quantum imaging processing."

The Rebel

"In absurdist experience, suffering is individual. But from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience. Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe. The malady experienced by a single man becomes a mass plague."

Albert Camus


The fact that life and experience are absurd in no way justifies the nihilistic incompetence of forced neutrality, a posture man will never be able to take seriously.

Cuboide.

Imaginate si fuesemos un garabato violentamente escrito sobre una pared que no respira.

What dreams may come...

I had met with J. by coincidence, it was new year's eve and she was alone, she wanted to buy her mother some earrings. We had a lot of alcohol and drugs so we decided to waste time together. We were in an apartment room I fashioned was mine I suppose, where we watched several old Nickelodeon sitcoms. She had started taking the drugs, some strange licorice-like substance I couldn't recognize. She laid on my stomach and started to rub my legs, I rubbed her feet for a little while until my friend Herman walked in. She went to the bathroom and I went out to talk to him in the meanwhile. After some idle chatter we decided that we should all be out that night and that he was happy things were finally going better for me. I think i was too. When I returned to the room, J. was out of the bathroom and on the bed, she was sickly pale after consuming more of the drugs. I helped her up, she said she still wanted to run around town and make something of it, so we did. Herman had left already so it was just us, we ate at some sushi restaurant and after that she went around putting up fake fliers and restaurant caveats around different restaurants. It was funny, she laughed like a child, so did I. We were both scared. She had taken more drugs and after this particular dosage she somehow lost her legs and became the size of a doll. I picked her up before she hit the ground and put her in a sort of yellow manila folder and took her back to the apartment. After some brief dialogue I put her into the fridge where we agreed she could feel better. This is where things get strange(r?). I sit on the bed and Herman makes his way into the room drunkenly, I explain the situation, he says we should hide all of the drugs and leave her there until morning and that the rest of us should go out, I reluctantly agree and tell J. about our plans. I put her up to my ear, she thanks me and says she feels safe with me and that her mother's earrings can wait until tomorrow, so can everything else. While we're hiding everything outside the room I hear something fall over, I rush back in to see her emaciated and naked sitting on a chair drinking from a bottle of some white alcohol, she laughs like a maniac, my heart drops, time stops, and I wake up.

It was the most depressing dream I've had in a long time.

On freedom.

What had started as my most passionate inquiry has, for a time, been thrown to chance and disorder, the two fundamental forces I can claim with certainty to know of this, our universe. Though not the concern itself the matter relates all too entirely to humanity, as all things do, and its greatest creation: God. Or rather, the denial of God. Nietzsche wrote "We deny God, we deny the responsibility of God, it is only thus that we will deliver the world." Deliver indeed, how else can mankind be separated from the slavery of the divine, the murderous deity who sins against man himself with rational indifference? He sits atop his clay throne built of the earthly bodies of his servants weighing no more himself than the electric current running between the synapses of our minds; God is an idea that has been abolished, we have found him dead in our contemporaries, this has, presumably, delivered us unto freedom, a waking nihilistic thought that tries and fails to support itself in itself. What then does it deliver us unto? Is it freedom? I'd propose that it is a condition of sorts, insight breeds contempt, contempt for law, and in this case dissolves primitive faith. This contempt reaches far into the corners of our minds where the most primeval of all commandments has embedded itself, our desire, our need, our insistence in order, this is the consequence of nihilism, a full abandonment, to willfully enter the desert and tend to our furtive wastelands for the first time in our lives. What comes of this negation? Asceticism is not an action that comes without implication and it has been said "to raise a new sanctuary, a sanctuary must be destroyed, that is the law." If one wants to carve a path for himself, he must also be ready to destroy all values, but more important, he must be prepared to once again submit. This is the central point of my concern, man needs law to exist. Moral law is derelict, judgment itself are based on reality with an almost romantic desire for what could be, what is ideal, but what is ideal does not exist because it has died along with God. What have we to look at then? The answer is complex, but can be summarized by saying that we look to ourselves and the eidolons we erect in place of old delusions, there is a method to our madness, to aimlessly act is not the nature of man in revolt or amongst other men. This is no longer a question of morality, which can also be separated from a divine entity, but an issue of own's own choices in a world devoid of all-encompassing authority, a reality that is difficult to process and even harder still to put into action, this is what Nietzsche considers the new form of anguish and happiness, the first steps into a winding chaos that a man emptied of himself and others takes. Man is then responsible for all things, he is alone and exiled, he wanders in "endless search for justification, aimless nostalgia", man has no home but what he creates in the sanctuary of his mind. This is the new burden of man: freedom. This too is my great concern, that weightless leviathan that lords over my subconscious, how can one prohibit an action, to choose one thing over the other without standardized value being applied? One can be a servant to the chaos of humanity, and this so-called freedom we have come to think we know exists only in the mind, and even there it is threatened by reason- the conclusion is startling, and, as Camus has said, freedom exists only in a world where what is possible is defined at the same time as what is not possible. Freedom is a paradox bordering on nonsense, a logical fallacy, a conceptual jigsaw born out of necessity, juxtapose slavery and freedom and you will find we are slave to both simultaneously at all times, humanity itself is the burden. It is admissible then for man to find himself under law just as easily as he found himself out of it, it is a realization that brings us full circle. We have started as blind servants, our eyes unfolded, we let light flood into the recesses of perception and became drunk on lucidity, but the spectrum itself is mostly invisible to us, once the glow had faded we looked once again and saw in its place a hollow master, we saw ourselves. More importantly, we saw not only the relative necessity of ourselves, but, like the universe, the relative necessity of structure amidst the apparent chaos. We are no more adept at brazing disorder than the heralds of existence themselves, the disciplined atom, we fall to the same geometric trap, but ours is a conceptual prison, we are bound to what we wish to be.

Sometimes Anhedonic.

I wish I was strewn across a city. My organ linings would make for fine christmas lights, as the light refracted and transformed Leibniz would be proud of each floating droplet, scarlet meteors wandering the city streets expanding as they hit the ground, back into infinity, rejecting the cosmos, running into the thick of it all. This midsummer madness forgets who we were and makes elements, once again, of us all.

I wish I was strewn across a city my organ linings would make for fine christmas lights as the light refracted and transformed Leibniz would be proud of each floating droplet scarlet meteors wandering the city streets expanding as they hit the ground back into infinity rejecting the cosmos running into the thick of it all this midsummer madness forgets who we were and makes elements once again of us all

i wish i was strewn across a city
my organ linings would make for fine christmas lights
as the light refracted and transformed
leibniz would be proud
of each floating droplet
scarlet meteors wandering the city streets
expanding as they hit the ground
back into infinity, rejecting the cosmos
running into the thick of it all
this midsummer madness
forgets who we were
and makes elements once again
of us all

Bio-logic.

Sometimes when I am under the pins and tragic needles of some psychotomimetic entity I forget my tenure. The tenure, that is, that comes with occupying space, being part of the cosmos is just as easily forgotten when the sea inside rises like a malady; the all-encompassing importance of being, the proud tone one takes when announcing that magnificent proprietary pronoun dulls and withers like a somber smile. Waves pour and drag my consciousness away and on rainy nights I feel as if I was bold enough to look at the measureless void of space that I too would become translucent stars floating beneath my feet. I carve my grave with hands of gossamer and stretch my fingers into infinity, then I remember that I was and am being, and how little that really means, everything merges with the night and for a few brief moments there is respite. I no longer feel the frenzied plea of my atoms, the particles are no longer particular, and then I feel my hand waking, a sore mechanism in place to remind me that I am still here and for all intents and purposes the relative conclusion is that it is still happening and, once again, how little that really means. Tenure is a loveless phantom that raps and beats at the doors of perception, I turn away from it from time to time to look at the sea of matter that lays beside and within me.

General Semantics.

Few people will ever know you for who you really are and even fewer still will appreciate that person.

It's all just general semantics to them.

Learn'd astronomer, wherefore art thou?

I have been, for all intents and purposes, completely unproductive as of late. I fear I may be transforming into the ghost of the universe, the lonesome neutrino, with my radioactive struggle to interject myself amongst the myriad of elements drifting afloat these spatial planes. We are one and the same, my hollow head falls through the Earth, there is no longer a turgid desire to escape my own prison, all this wasted geometry is already enough to drive a man intangible. All we are is silence, an unbounded whisper flowing steadily through the cosmos, you may reach out and feel nothing, not knowing that all you wanted was to feel the light caress of the wind as it playfully whips the breadth of your fingers.
It is most fortunate then that we occupy less space now than a drop of air.

From every which way there is.

There is much to discuss for you and I, once the week or perhaps the month dies down we will sit and talk.

Maybe over cups of cyanide.

Less elegance for the sake of fun.

Last week I tried pot brownies for the first time. Me and my fellow cosmonaut, henceforth referred to as Herman, always seem to come up with the worst ideas when we're exploring the unknown universe.
I really wasn't prepared for how intense the whole trip would be, perhaps it was also somewhat of a mistake to get slightly intoxicated while eating them. We, the collective term referring to myself, Herman and Herman's girlfriend, also ate the whole tray in a matter of minutes, completely disregarding the fact that it takes around an hour for them to take effect. No matter. The night was pretty wild and, as usual when I'm out of my mind, I suggested going to San Juan for a session of pool and walking about, Herman's girlfriend silent protest was simply going to her room and falling asleep. A random black guy in a junker car was stopped by the police in front of my friend's apartment, no surprise there, but it did throw us into a sort of paranoid frenzy, we tried our damnedest to remain as calm as possible as we made our way down to my car... right, second note to self: avoid driving right when the THC is exploding like a million fireworks in your head. Once we wormed our way inside I realized I had forgotten my media player at his apartment, there was an overbearing and all-encompassing need in me to show him Lou Reed's Street Hassle which at the moment felt like the greatest masterpiece man could ever muster. Heeding this primal call I rushed up to the 5th floor where his apartment is situated, a trek that felt like it lasted a lifetime with interminable staircases that seemed to keep angling wildly in all spatial directions. Media player recovered, I clumsily shut the door behind me and floated down the stairs, I was moving far too quickly- faster than I really intended to, I had no idea how long it took me to fly down the stairs, but the door was within reach after what seemed to be aeons. Never have I moved so quickly yet slowly at the same time. It can be said that the trip really began there, after what felt like an hour we found the song and proceeded to listen to it while I drove down the highway. Everything was soft and unhurried, the sea of floodlights before me sunk endlessly into the night, there was no corner of its dark profile without illumination, light bled everywhere and on everyone. The song's string arrangement made me feel like the night was interminable, nothing felt more real than the infinite length of a second then, I thought back to all of my calculus classes and how we learned the limits of a given moment by what is essentially rounding out and creating an artificial limit for it, no such mechanic existed for us. Somehow we made it to our proposed destination where a police blockade was waiting for us. Herman kept trying to convince me to tell the cops that it was fine and that I was just on my way to picking up my new imaginary sister from Ben & Jerry's, but I couldn't hack it, I was laughing too much, I had to laugh because I was so light and so was time and space, so tearfully untangled that I just couldn't control myself. The song had ended and I hadn't even noticed it, the chords still flying around my head, I decided to park elsewhere to avoid the police. As it would later turn out, we had parked 30 minutes away from our destination, but we didn't care, we were so fast not even light could catch up to us, but relativity plays a mean trick on our perceptive ability, the faster you go, the slower you feel, I truly believe we traveled at the speed of light that night. It only took a moment to drag us to a store where I was promptly removed because I argued with the shopkeeper about the price of his bottled water. In my defense, I will never be high enough to buy a bottle of water for $2.25. I found no problem with his decision except for the fact that he pointed out that I was living in ignorance- the nerve! "If only he knew the places I dare tread", I thought to myself, but quickly let it go, the music was fading and all I could hear was the thumping noise of nearby dive bars, and then we found ourselves in one. We met up with one of Herman's friends who was, in turn, playing pool with one of his own friends, a strange brightly colored purple man with long white hair and a little too much cheer for my tastes. I assumed he was famous, he carried himself like a writer, this prompted me to automatically greet him, I thought for sure I had met someone so far above my league that this had to be a momentous occasion! Herman did not seem amused. We exchanged noise for a few moments, I felt a sick knot forming in my stomach and Herman was quickly leaving the establishment, in a bright flash we bought some water and were rapidly walking back to my car. I was plunged into that interminable moment once again, I wondered how the water was even able to travel down my throat if we traveled at the speed of light and how I was able to retain the mass in my body at such speeds, my atoms were champions for a night. I could barely speak out loud, there was so much going on around me, the noise that surrounded us was a powerful vibration that eased even my vocal cords, everything was a slow whisper, but Herman could hear me no matter how far ahead he walked. We reached the car eventually and headed to his apartment, admittedly I don't really remember how we got there, but it felt somewhat scary because I had no idea how it was possible to have enough control to control a vehicle so alien to my body. We raced up the stairs to his apartment like a game, the walls were cheerful sunlight and the stairs an upward sloping gravel road, it was the workout of a lifetime and I'm pretty sure it dehydrated me to the point of exhaustion, but it felt like it was worth the time. Once inside I couldn't bear the weight of my breath and I fell on his couch, the next few moments were spent wrestling my conscience as the dark of the night closed in slowly and I dozed off without so much as a physical protest. Sleep was upon me finally, I could feel my muscles relaxing and soon enough, like a soldier ready for his execution, so too my consciousness laid itself to rest.
I can't wait to do it all over again.

Nothing of interest, George.

I feel like nobody wants me, I'm an atom trapped in space and all this geometry around me is stifling. Trapped in my own pathos, yes, that's right, it's just my pathos taking over.

George Sand on Chopin's prelude.

"There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain—it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at our "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful prelude.

Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguishing the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy.

While playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself, he saw himself drown in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should interpret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might—and he was right to—against the childishness of such aural imitations.

His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky."

- George Sand

Privacy.

Nothing really matters, nothing matters at all. I keep forgetting, but nothing matters, nothing in and out of reality matters, nothing really matters. The state of affairs are as meaningless to me as the blowing wind, and what it blows matters less than the whisper of a microbe. Nothing matters again and again, and I always forget. I'm no good unless I'm alone, a blank slate, the solitary two dimensions of a ragged piece of paper.

Nothing matters, I just want to forget.

John Donne.

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Monday, February 15, 2010.

Monday, February 15, 2010 was the most intense and inexplicably incredible day of my life.

How can I truly begin to describe it? Time is not of the essence because it bears no essence at all, its carcass frail and apocryphal, a languid and inadequate expression of reality, of how experience is suffered. There was no time that day. And though I am weary of pointing out one sordid moment, of accusing that which left me before I had even realized it, I feel that I must for the sake of discernment. The beginning, so understood, came with the weight of the world gently bearing down on me. On instinct, when under such insurmountable saccharin pressure, one's muscles simple give way, the insides follow. It is not guttural, it is not violent, I felt it to be an affectionate reaction; I surfed on gravity's loving throes. Her weightless hands wrapped around what was slowly becoming her own body, like a lover decaying, and I responded all too eagerly until I was facing the very dust that formed me.

What happened next can only be understood, and ineffectually at that, by addressing the fundamental question of why. We were under the influence of psilocybin, a chemical compound with the peculiar ability to propel us into dissociation; and dissociate we did. What is usually described as an unexpected disruption was in this case a reshaping of the fabric of the cosmos, so severed was our connection with the world and all of its certainties that I believe I can truly say we neared what reality truly is, it is distance. In order to understand the world one must turn from it on occasion, only then can we glimpse into the hidden world, the coiled pathways seldom traveled, we were commuters of existence, children of a lesser world plunged into the infinite barely walking out first steps and then completely forgetting how it feels to have ever laid a foot on any foundation, sidereal or terrestrial.

I dug a hole.

A hole which I had verbally referred to as a temple, a place or absolute comfort and reverence, but my mind was already racing, thoughts scattered constantly and they may have well been the sand itself. All but one thing remained clear: this was no mere temple, it was a womb. In the deepest recess of my memory I recalled the need for comfort, thinking back on it I believe that same need for comfort was exploited by the chemical intensity. I dug and I dug and perfected the second womb several times until I had a hole that was deep and large enough for me to sit in comfortably. It was a primal comfort, preternatural in nature almost, it was far beyond any understanding of the feeling of comfort that I had ever known. The word became meaningless, it was trite, unusable under the current circumstance because it was too limited, to say or think comfort is by definition to constrict it, to wrap a word around it, an expression, an intent, it completely destroys the freedom of the feeling itself. It so happened that the feeling surged within me, at least I wish I could say with certainty that it did, in truth I felt it washing over me from a myriad of directions, I felt that entire darkened giant cloth its arms and fingers in blue and yellow and wrap me within its hands for what felt like endlessness. My hands responded, I could not stop touching the sand because I could not stop being the sand, the colors were indistinguishable and my mind soon released me from the association that I was I or skin was skin, I soon felt my fingers coming apart atom by atom, then my hand, then my arm, I realized that my body was slipping into eternity, the world around me was infinite and so was I, I was infinite, and so was the world around me. This went on until there was no me and there was no world, there was no constriction, all that is was and I was.
I began to laugh at this point. I laughed by myself, to myself, but I could hear and see and feel the others laugh too. I laughed because I was so comfortable, I wondered if the others felt that way too, if they could possibly be laughing at the same notion, I was asked if it was possible that we were all laughing even if we were all so far away from each other. I laughed and I also cried. I cried between bursts of the happiest laughter I had ever let loose, I cried because I felt this nameless freedom guised as comfort, because I had never felt anything so strongly before in my life, nothing quite like this. It was torture because it was so beautiful, there was so much comfort around me that I could not escape it, I could not bear how wonderful it felt, so I cried. Sometimes I cried because of that, sometimes I cried because I felt so alone, I was the space between particles, I was the only creature in the universe, aimless, timeless, forever displaced in an ocean of emptiness. Looking back on it, I realize that all of my insecurities and anxieties were present there, the amplified feeling of dissipation was most likely a result of my own constant fear of being alone forever. The medley of tears and mirth accompanied the ocean's own harmonic resonance. It engulfed everything and it was everywhere, it was both dissonant and euphonious, it was the roar of existence and I felt like I was the most fortunate man to ever be, the only man to ever be, to exist and to listen to the music of reality. The soaring airplanes and helicopters uttered a gloomy cackle, a deep electric hum, and it all came together so perfectly.

Eventually I was called over to where the surf met the sand, we sat there huddled together like children. Everything was more vivid then, the sky's intoxicated blue, the sand was purple and gold, the ocean was a watercolor canvas constantly reshaping and reforming itself, and I felt like the ocean, without my body, I felt like I was embracing even what laid beyond the visible horizon. We sat there being buffeted by the waves, looking at the sand and cupping multiple universes in our hands. The sand itself was breathing. It expanded fanatically, and not just away from each grain of sand, but new grains were also coming into existence, rapidly spilling all over, everything felt infinite. We tried to talk, and as much as we felt that we were making sense of it all, I'm sure we weren't, but it didn't matter, we understood each other so much that words felt unnecessary. Language was too limited, to crass, even if I had known every word ever uttered it still would no have been enough, I spoke and I felt the words falling from my mouth, it was a feeling that left me thirsty for everything. So we stopped using words; I thought instead. Thought seemed to be the only thing keeping me from falling apart and mending my consciousness with matter, every thought I had echoed across great distances, to and fro, I looked at my friends, but they weren't my friends at this point, they were extensions of me, and somehow I could hear what they were thinking and they could hear me, I sat there speaking to myself and the lump of me sitting away understood me perfectly, I need not even utter a single word. I felt at this point my ego began to suffer. I started thinking about death, about how insignificant, how lonely and pathetically abandoned I was. I felt my body shrinking, my hands still digging ceaselessly for comfort, all I found was sorrow upon sorrows, I felt like the only living creature in the universe again, so far away from everything I found familiar. I felt as if I would be stuck there forever, hands dug in the sand, but death didn't bother me, it was all quite the contrary, I realized how fruitless everything was, no longer being tethered to those ancient worries I understood once again how meaningless every action man could ever take truly was. There was no decision made, it was simply the natural transition after accepting the inevitability of oblivion, I wanted to die, I felt it deep in my consciousness, I felt myself letting go and drifting out with each coming wave, I wanted to be the ocean again. I wanted to be matter, to be fundamental again, my very being cried out for return to the void, the material ancestry of all living things. I realized at this point that I could not feel a thing, my being was purely conscientious, and for all it mattered I had long since surrendered my body to entropy and unentanglement, I could not feel heat though I had been sitting under the blistering sun for who knows how long and I could not feel cold though I was washed in frigid waters. The thought scared me a little bit and I remembered the womb, I thought about going back in it but I could not bid my body to move, though my mind was bearing down on me I still felt a high degree of comfort, I simply did not want to move, I let the waves throw me around, I was ready to let them take me. The cold set in shortly after that. The sensation rippled through me fading in and out, but I knew that I felt cold again. It was enough incentive to stand, sand slid off me and I felt it was my flesh falling to pieces, but that did not matter either, I slowly realized I was once again corporeal, but nothing indicated that I had missed my body. I sat in the second womb once more.

Considering what I had just experienced I should have been more shaken, at the very least noticeably colder, but I wasn't. The womb seemed to have radiated an effulgent sensation of comfort, it was still there, just as if I had stood up and left it there before joining the ocean. I wrapped myself in it rapidly, my thoughts began to flow, each sentence a grain trickling from my lips. I wanted to speak again, and I spoke for so long and so much that I wished I had a recorder to remember everything. I talked about the universe, existence, being, the shape of atoms worried me dreadfully, how they were all so different and yet all the same, how indistinguishable they were and yet how I could feel them all over, how I could see them in my youth and how I missed those hallucinations, I missed it as truth. I talked for so long that I can't bring myself to remember everything that was said, that would be the one thing I deeply regret from this experience, the not remembering. I felt that I was speaking to myself, my consciousness was there, my being was present, it was still spinning all around me but it was almost tangible now, it had a direction, I knew where I was and I know that I could speak to myself there, our conversation was eternal. I was more in control then. I had been in control to some extent because I was always conscious of what was happening, but I felt myself regain control of my thoughts, that made me happy, euphoric even. Realizing what was going on transformed the experience even further, it was the last wave before it all came to a soft halt, my thoughts began to slow down, I stopped conversing with the universe, I could now move what I had forgotten I even had. I was able to stand, and so I did, looking over at my friends I noticed they were crying, in my mind I figured they were probably having an argument, something silly like that, so I left them for a little while. I walked away and pieced myself together, collected my thoughts from the innominate corners and reaches of the ocean, the sand and the sky, I was becoming whole again. After washing my face I felt like I had been born anew, the weight of experience no longer burdened me, it was simply mine. I felt like Prometheus had handed me the fires of Olympus, I was the first man, a neonate born unto the chaos of the universe able to make primeval sense of it all, I was prepared for it, dissociation is an exercise of the mind that I had been familiarized with and that day I felt it intensified times a million.
When I returned to my companions I realized they were still not all there, it came as a surprise to me since I had spent this whole time believing we were all of one solitary consciousness, I realized then that the trip was, for the most part, over. I was still under the influence, very much so, I could not feel my arms or my innards, but I was in control of myself. It was an exercise of will to regain complete control, I managed to find ways to return feeling to the rest of me, chewing was an alien activity, I chewed and chewed and I did not understand why, I knew I was inevitably going to swallow the food, but the meaning was lost on me. Drinking water was what I believe truly snapped me back to this reality, it ran cool down my throat and as it touched my internal organs I felt them reanimate, I was whole again, I was back in my own skin.

To tell the story is to betray the events that transpired. As I said before when words were failing me, language is woefully inadequate and I believe that is because this experience isn't verbal in nature, in fact, it doesn't even tether you to the you that you are accustomed to or even to the manner of experiencing reality that you are accustomed to. I have written about this before, it's a separation of it and function, though we were no closer to an objective reality, which I believe to be pure matter, we really skirted quite close to it simply because of the fact that we were so away from the fabricated concept of reality we experience per diem. We will always have our limitations and all that we see and experience is always an approximation of what might or might not be there. Albert Camus wrote that in order to understand the world, one must turn away from it on occasion. I wholeheartedly believe that we all walked away with a better understanding of the world that day, we turned from it all and stared into the emptiness of all things, we stared and we dared not even blink because we too were enraptured with all that we saw and, eventually, understood, even if we can't quite put it all into words. No, we will never be able to put all of it into words, only those who have skirted the edges of reason and reality will understand, and only those people I shared this incredible experience with will understand truly what it meant to turn away from everything but at the same time to face ourselves. We had all felt that we died that day, but more importantly, we all felt as if we were born again.

afdfdhgfA.

I'm lost in the most obnoxious haze right now, my mind's too cluttered, I can hardly think at all. The noise of existence is flooding the chambers of my mind. I don't fucking like it one bit.

I need to slow down.

Shorter shorts.

Relativity bends me like light, but I am neither photon nor wave. I wish I had a cigarette for every time I've wanted to point out the obvious to everyone, I'd be the richest inmate in this stupid prison.

Short shorts.

De paso, me he topado con las varias subculturas puertorriqueñas en los últimos cuantos meses. ¿Qué más uno puede decir? El desdén y rechazo total de la realidad y del estado de las cosas nunca falla en impresionarme. Valga decír que he estado atendiendo a la UPR por 4 años ya, pero solo llevo uno o dos interactuando con los tal llamados revolucionarios next-generos, el futuro de lo que me gusta llamar el movimient pos-intelectual puertorriqueño, el grupito más inútil que ha consumido y gastado mi precioso oxígeno. Uno o dos años es el tiempo suficiente para entender la gravedad de la situación: el cáncer que se devora a Puerto Rico no es solamente nuestro agraciado y justo gobierno y gobernantes sino la juventud inepta que carece de la capacidad de formular y fomentar ideales propios y/o nuevos. Me explico, las masas "intelectuales" de la prestigiosa UPR son copias al carbón de manifiestos anacrónicos y hasta ahistóricos.
Viste, yo pienso que dios esta muerto y que nunca existió y por lo menos sus dioses están enterrados en suelo europeo, pero me imagino que si les llega aliento del pésimo estado cultural e intelectual o se revuelcan en su tumba o simplemente no se sorprenderían de las perjurias eruditas y los evangelios bastardizados con un toque de tergiversación boricua. No lo digo simplemente por ser condescendiente, pero ya el artilugio me tiene harto, la ilusión es patética y no vale la pena ya mimarlos ni hacerse manso y humilde. Los cambios se piensan antes de ser asimilados, tristemente la contracultura puertorriqueña no sabe pensarse y simplemente es, existe como bestia repugnante ante el público por su retórica torpe, sus profetas están más preocupados con la apariencia que con substancia y si no creen en la violencia es porque no se atreven a perturbar el universo.

What is called... what's it called again?

Learning how to think, will return in several days.

Love,

rhombos.