Abandoned

abandoned

Obscura (1)

Alpha and Omega. the beginning and end of all things.

So following that logic everything must have a beginning and an end, despite the fact we never really know or understand our true beginnings, or the time and place of our endings.

We experience the time in-between two eternal mysteries (birth and death) that always fail to give us answers. But really, how could they? They are abstract concepts and they do not speak. I recently set out to answer a question about myself; a rather serious question, but at the same time a question that could be interpreted as purely absurd. The question involves my current whereabouts…Or to put it more bluntly,(if that’s possible) my point of origin or departure.

I feel like a wave at this point, sometimes a particle,trying to follow an invisible thread back to that unknowable point in the dark spectrum.

The following is what I know up to this point, which is not much considering what I’ve already said.

I stepped out of my house early one evening, just before twilight, as a nearly weightless November snowfall began. Since I live alone, the situation afforded me plenty of time to enjoy the pleasure of open spaces, while at the same time combating any traces of loneliness that may have been germinating in my bones. Lighting a small cigar, whose thick smoke nearly froze against the slowly dying light, I stopped at the corner and closed my eyes, content with the fact I was alone, though at the same time restless…

eyelids haevy and dark     sluggish speech   days blending into nights ad nauseum

As I walked  I came across a dead cat who had obviously frozen, eyes open wide gazing into nothingness, that eerie stiffness coupled with that sense of absolute finality, reminded me of my own eventual stiffness and decay.

Perhaps that is when everything began to take shape

The Catalan (1)

The idea of advancement and pursuit has always brought me great pleasure–and only rarely pain–since the day I came to realize my ultimate purpose on this planet many years ago. So many years in fact, I lost count after so much time. I go by the Catalan. My real name, which ceased to describe me in any concrete way, has long been forgotten, as though I was casting off or shedding an old skin.

My current name holds different meanings as well.

One meaning describes a series of chess openings (which I love), another is a region in Spain ( a place I’ve visited many times), while another describes the very language of that region. I’m neither a Catalonian by birth–insofar as I ever had a real birth–or fluent in Spanish, but I’m familiar with openings of every kind, whether they be gambits, variations, systems, or combinations. Regrettably I’m only a fair player at chess despite my love of its history and evolution, and I only use the game as a symbol of what is possible, which is infinite, or as close to infinite as we can perceive.

Now as the skies have cleared and the days have grown longer, it’s time for me to pursue again…

Mirages (1) continued…

For a very long time–how much I cannot ascertain, probably due to laziness or a lack of desire–I went by a kind of mantra written many years ago over a century before my birth, by a sullen man named Franz Kafka…

” There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. the world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you”

Perhaps this is why I had no use for a window, for I knew what I desired(or thought that I desired)–the smile of a young woman walking in my direction with the sun blazing behind her, soft music, cold evenings–and somehow these things would find me there in that room. Nothing came of course, until the day Joseph Carta entered the room and sat down across from me on the floor next to my piles of books, and pushed a single piece of paper across the floor with the following words: Time to go.

When I finally stepped out into the hall with my few belongings, I looked for the first window, noticing that night had already suppressed all that I wanted to see. But one can’t be too hasty to see, that much is certain.

                                                                                                                                                                *

“I cast a spell on the City, asking it to last”  “Every year about 98% of the atoms in our bodies are replaced”

The first quote is by the same sullen man from Prague, Franz Kafka. Touching. One usually asks for people or memories to last, rarely cities, if ever. Yet so much of our private selves exist in cities or the places we were raised. Down alleyways, under streetlights, in the graffiti, carved  in trees, or handprints put in wet cement. Those places hold us and keep us, until they, too, disintegrate, usually taking longer than people to fade away.

As for the other quote…

” I’ve found you my friend” Those were his first words to me. He paused to light a cigarette, the gleam of the deep moonlight brightening his face, which at the same time made it appear older and more mysterious, otherworldly.

“Did I send for you?” I asked stupidly, not knowing what else to say.

He turned to me, smiling.

“Situations such as the one we’re in needs no true explanation, simply because by the time we part from one another both us will not be the same people anymore. The very material that makes  you ‘you’ and me ‘me’ will be replaced. We are never the same people twice as you will see…

“Trilogy”: a non-linear cycle. Mirages (1)

In the “Dhammapada”, the chapter on the World states that: One who looks upon the world as a bubble and a mirage, that person the King of Death does not see.

If only I had known this in the beginning when I was younger so I could have treated the world as a desert with so many illusory oasises, rather than waste so much time in a prison of my own making. And I do mean that quite literally–the prison has four walls, a ceiling, and a single door. No windows. Once a week news comes in the form of one page carefully written and slipped under the door, or in the form of letters from people who I don’t know, which I find strange but comforting. I’m in need of nothing else as food seems to find me in the same way the news does.

I created this prison,yes, but I found it impossible to leave, at least in the beginning.

What prevented me was my own fear. Fear of opening the door and realizing the World indeed did not exist anymore, or realizing that others didn’t believe I existed anymore, which seemed far worse, far more extensive in its implications. After a time–a long, dense length of time– the very notion that I as I knew myself possibly did not exist anymore made the transition of eventually leaving my cell (really a comfortable room with good lighting and books) that much easier.

That was when Joseph Carta knocked on the door.

Yukio Mishima: 1925-1970

This coming November marks the 40th anniversary of Yukio Mishima’s extraordinary death by his own hand. It’s impossible to know if the people of Japan are going to mark this solemn occasion in any way, but for certain the ones closest to Mishima will never forget what happened on November 25th 1970. I find it a shame that so much focus is put on Mishima’s death, and not on the incredible output of deeply insightful novels that he produced from his autobiographical Confessions of a Mask to his final four novels that comprise The Sea of Fertility. Having nearly finished Thirst for Love, I’ve read all that I can get my hands on of his work in English, and the words never cease to amaze me. After reading several biographical accounts, the consensus among some seem to be that Mishima was a disturbed individual, whose apocalyptic vision of contemporary society came from a deep seated need for self-destruction that grew with age. Of course, one can look at a person’s life and pick apart the  ” key events” that we believe leads someone to a certain endpoint, but in the end the art is what matters. And this is certainly true of Mishima, who despite once saying in his commentary on the Hagukure that “Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too”,  we see a keen and insightful mind at work, searching for meaning, even if that meaning is the Void itself.

Here in the West I’m not certain how much of his work has had an influence on a younger generation of writers, or if many have read him at all, but my own embracement of his works has lead me to an evaluation of my own purpose of a writer and indivdual. That is what great art is supposed to do. Make us take a look at reality from a different angle, even if that perception is uncomfortable or contradictory to what we believe. Only from confronting the antitheses in life do we come to a better understanding of what it means to be human, especially in a time where the very twilight of the idols we have held in the highest esteem come crashing down. There is a fine line between madness and genius, and one will certainly see both in the works of Yukio Mishima if they take the time to challenge themselves. More later…

(F)

“Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.”  Andre Breton

From the Synchronicity Journal

A couple years ago I began recording synchronistic events in a journal in order to see if any patterns would emergefrom these supposedly random meaningful coincidences. Inevitably there were connections, and obvious connections at that, which appeared to manifest themselves more as the year progressed. I then took a year off and did not record any more in order to see if any of the same events or subjects presented themselves, which they did, though on a smaller scale. This is will be an ongoing series about my explorations into synchronicities and the like. One of my first significant series of connections involved David Lynch, the maverick director. I had recently watched his film “Mulholland Drive” again and “Inland Empire” and found that several things began to happen: the appearance of rabbits(which played a strange role in “Inland Empire”), quotes concerning dreams and labyrinths, and the Vedic Upanishads. At one of myfriend’s house, his wife had been reading a non-fiction book by Lynch called “Catching the Big Fish”, and due to his connection to Transcedental meditation he included a quote from the Upanishads…a book that I had recently been reading with interest.I had also been reading Kafka’s diaries at the time, an author that most people see as possessing a dream-like quality in his novels, and to my surprise I found out that Lynch was a great admirer of Kafka around this same time. What does this all mean exactly? More later…

“In front of him was either madness or suicide. In the twilight he walked the street alone, determined, patiently, to wait for his fate, for slowly approaching destruction. “  Akutagawa

“Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.” Primo Levi

This is a clue.

The Rooms

Since the millionth draft of my novel is nearly complete, I’ve begun a foray into some shorter more accesible works that will be accesible on this blog. One of these projects is “The Rooms”, a short story? idea that has been running around in my brain for a number of years and now is starting to come to fruition. Partly inspired by Beckett’s  short prose works such as “Texts for Nothing”, “Company”, and “How it is”, as well as a number of visual art pieces that I’ve seen recently. A visual element may be included but that has not been fully decided yet. I’m also working on a short pice entitled “memoir of fog” that should be completed in or around the same time as ”The Rooms”. These two works may be put out as a single work in a self-published format, but again that has not be decided yet. Now that Spring has sprung, the writing train is back on track…I also hope to actually be more attentive to this blog and keep people updated as to the aspects of my writing life, however secretive it may be. More later.