Old Words

I wrote this about a year ago, found it in a notebook a couple days ago, and decided it's a pretty good representation of where I'm at these days. As usual, I'm impressed by the wordplay but not sure if it means anything.
--
Pen to paper at a moment of loss. Lost words for the gains, hard fought and little seen, for the fine line between crashing and burning brighter than sunrises over desolate scenes. To friends, well loved and woebegotten, whose dreams end and whose lives begin, who awaken now and cannot speak for the labors endured, challenges met, freedom gained, identities lost. Lives forged in hostile fire, ideas made and ideals sacrificed; the firm satisfaction of having done so much for so long and its gone.
To back of the mind, the memories that haunt that are one last lost chance and that final goodbye and that wonder if you could ever feel like this again.
It belongs to you.
In its whole steaming self you made it. You owned it. You can love it like there's nothing else to love.
Not true.
Hold on to your dreams spoken swiftly and never forget, its bigger than that. We all know. Let it be. Don't forget.

A Dense Record of Thought

Some thoughts. Some assembly required.

For some time, I have been concerned with self-creation. I hold firmly that we are not masters of our own destiny, as though what befalls a person is a matter of choice. Nor, however, are we satisfied with a random world dictated wholly by chance. As always in a clash of absolutes, I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The middle ground I stake is that we cannot help what life throws our way, nor can we know what will come from our actions. We can know what we do and why. The antidote to regret is remembering why we opted for one course over another in a moment of choice. Don't mistake retrospection for responsibility. What's past is past; the person you were could not have chosen differently because he or she did not choose differently. We can't change that. What we can change is who we are. How you respond. This is self construction.
The exercise is not simple. We are mired in life, produced by families, friends, cultures and the choices of others. We are born into a world we did not choose. To take a step further, the distinctions between self and other, will and world, or inner life and outer (take your pick) are not so firm as some might like to believe. Self construction belongs to a legion of useful fictions, tools for living. It's a way to resolve the tension between the world as random and uncaring and the world as a theater of judgment for our every action.
The point, then? Live well. Know who you are; know why you are who you are. Do not be defined by regret but by growth. Where you own happiness is concerned, assign neither blame nor responsibility. It is as all things ephemeral (which is not to say unreal). Don't think you've got the answer to life. Just know what you're going to do about it.

Traffic Cops

I hate traffic cops. Arbitrary, unnecessary, discriminatory, disingenuous. Bad encounter yesterday; it inspired this.

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The continuity of difference.

Moral sleight of hand.

I just don't get it.
Words make worlds and
mine's so fine
most of the time
until it fall fall falls
and I break.
It's not pretty.
I've nothing witty to say.
These days they pass and I ask
what a reasonable man should do.
Aha! That conceit
still with me
as though a reasonable man
is some real thing
not the sum of our eccentricities
divided by our gross.
And what do we want?
It flies in all directions
life lessons, more time, less stressing.

I wondered what to write
and the words kept falling
I play tetris with the fragments
that I'm calling knowledge.
With baited breath I'm making good
on secret promises to no one
that came into this world as lies.
It should be no surprise
that a long walk lets out lost sounds
and winding paths and darkened skies
are a chapel for the faithless
and a good one at that.

You see, I've been thinking.
Because feeling's no good when
you're lost to the world and
I need battle plans not words.
It's a hostile space and
I've a name to make
if not a dollar.
And when the revolution comes
I can't wait to take up arms
or just to escape,
get out while the horrors
get swept away.
I have nothing earn nothing learn nothing
but I'm making it through
and one way or another
I won't be used.

Text, Not Dreams.

Last semester the finals rush moved me to songwriting; a rare thing for me that emerges in the same way as poetry. There's no intention behind it. A string of words congeals incessantly and fights its way out of mind and into text, drawing along with it a threshold of affect I can only ever hope survives the transition into words. It becomes a fixation. Though unfinished, I've sung this song to myself under my breath or out loud to the night sky innumerable times since I brought it into existence. Without further ado, here's that verse:

You make me sleep like tryptophan
and I don't need it.
I'm a free man going to bleed
and I don't care about
your weakness
or excuses
or the bruises that'll
weight down what remain
of all the days you wondered
when your train would come.

Because I'm halfway home
and I'll take my throne.

I sing it in a low register to an imagined bass beat. It signifies the flight from my natural tendency to sit back and go with the flow; an assertion of control to combat complacency with where I'm at and what I'm doing. It's not the sort of idea I usually express, and I think that's a good thing, or at least something necessary.
I think we all look for that place to rest. Some get drunk or high, seeking to forget their troubles. Some put their hopes in love, seeking that completion in another when they can't find it in themselves. I think I look for it in words. Another poetic fragment comes to mind: "The poet's dream is to escape from prison by describing it's bars/but I think I've seen enough bars to give up on dreaming." One more fragment made it into a facebook status: "What's the use of dreamtime when there's no escape from the sunrise?" These probably come across as pessimism. They're not.
A place to rest isn't out there somewhere; you carry it with you. Aesop Rock says "dream a little dream/or you can live a little dream/I'd rather live it/'cuz dreamers always chase but never get it." Dreaming and its uselessness is a new theme for me, and I'm growing to be surprised how deeply I mean it. I've got a lot of big ideas brewing, but they don't mean much until they've fought their way out of mind and into words. Imperfect though it may be, text is better currency than thought.

On Promises

What's in a promise? If you believe Nietzsche, the whole of human history (insofar as it's human, but that's another post entirely). A promise privileges one future over another. It invests the actualization of that future with moral content. No one, after all, likes an oath-breaker.
There's a question of power here. We don't all get what we want. Some promises conflict, and so some will be broken. Whose promises get kept is a complicated question. Nietzsche would call it strength, but that seems a bit simplistic. Strength comes in many forms. Suffice to say, where history is concerned, the result is more important than the process.
The astute among you will have noticed the wrinkle. Strength may determine virtue, but history defines strength. Enter the accountants of value. The promise may bind the future, but memory tells us whose promises were kept. A simple thing to to make strength out of convenience by re-fashioning a broken promise according to an actual outcome, or to deny strength by hiding the connection between past and present.
So what is a promise without control over its terms? Ah, the naivety of Nietzsche's nobility! To be defined by the exercise of strength without concern for its maintenance. They never stood a chance (if indeed they ever existed). Guile always beats strength.
Even if it holds true, a promise is a form of tyranny. It holds the present accountable for the past, enslaving who you are to who you were. We do this every day. Some call it identity. I call it a cop-out. Who among us is a static creature? Who would want to be? Does change not define us every bit as much as continuity?
A promise, then, is a moment of bravado, a foundational gesture that breeds anxiety as soon as it's uttered. The initial premise of this writing lays in ruins; has anything been gained? Perhaps. Beneath the promise is the sense of duration. Without memory, without foresight, we have nothing but the ever-emerging ever-dying present. The promise both creates history and gives it meaning.
If there's a resolution to this thought, it is that this dual function of a promise tells us much more about living than the constraints it entails. The continuity of past, present, and future also contains difference, and from that difference manifests value. To become historical does not have to mean being an accountant of virtue, but perhaps reveals the contingency of virtue and the all-too-human imperative to attend to its creation and destruction in the pursuit of a way through life.

Some Narcissistic Musing

There was a time when I wrote ceaselessly. It was a nightly ritual, purely narcissistic; I wrote for myself and myself alone. The words formed a history of thought, and I value those tattered pages because they illustrate both continuity and change. I revisit these old journals from time to time and can't help but laugh. It's the same story written in new ways. Same thoughts, new metaphors. Same feelings about different people.
There's a bias I'm always mindful of in these retrospectives. When you talk to yourself, it's probably because you don't have someone handy to listen to you. I still value the insights, but I recognize that they emerge from a particularly lonely, particularly discontented iteration of myself. The inwardly-focused person in those pages isn't me, entirely.
This disjuncture between who I think I am and who the journal represents makes them objects of a weird sort of anxiety. On the one hand, it's someone I consciously am not. The thought that someone else might read them and who they'd make me out to be as a result is terrifying. On the other hand, they are meaningful. Equally terrifying is the thought that the insights I find so precious are just wasted words, valuable only to the author.
I don't write much anymore. You could say it's because I'm not lonely and don't need to write for myself anymore. That's a problem--for someone like me, writing is essential. I shouldn't have to feel isolated to make it happen. I think the larger reason, though, is that I can't figure out how to work through the disjuncture all that old writing represents. In a way, returning to the blog is a way of getting that process started.
The anxiety here is obviously unwarranted. It's a problem for me because it's about me. For anyone else, it's something to either ignore or just feel a little awkward about. Maybe I have someone's sympathies here, maybe not. It's not particularly important. Still, I'm willing to waste a few words here because I like the idea that how I think and what I feel doesn't have to be confined to closely-guarded journal pages. A fool's hope maybe, but it's a start.

Untimely returns

Somewhere deep down, the intention for this blog was to be part lectern, part confessional. The minister preparing a sermon or the Catholic child summoning sins to be forgiven both agonize over every detail preparing, because souls are at stake in finding the proper combination of words to speak before God.
It's time to betray that intention. The half-finished posts sitting in the queue, that never quite found the necessary perfection to be presented to the lord of the heavens represent too great a weight to leave behind. My return to writing is untimely because I don't have the time to craft perfect offerings, and I haven't since I stopped posting.
Yet here I am. Grad school doesn't make for free time and nothing is perfect in this life. I have nothing to confess, nor do I want to craft sermons. No souls are at stake. One of the imperfect thoughts waiting to be finished to be posted is about the impossibility of communication. Perhaps it went unfinished because if it were a perfect thought there would be no point in voicing it. New creed, then: cogito, ergo dico. I think, therefore I speak.
Thoughts unvoiced refract in idle minds. My brain feels like a marching band in an echo chamber sometimes. Every trivial thing gets caught in some network of ultimate significance that must be wholly uncovered before it can be made real. A silly mistake for someone who reads Nietzsche--it's stupid to theorize an ideal world when we live in a real one. Robert Frost might have put it better in For Once, Then, Something. The best we ever get when reflecting is a hint that something exists beneath the mundane. Stringing together discontinuities reveals only the continuity of imperfection. There's no value to it; at least not in the sense that the endeavor intended.
So, for an untimely return, this is a celebration of imperfection. May the ideal silence the real no longer. I write now in hopes that echoes become ululations; chaos become celebration; discontinuity become encounter. I hope you're along for the ride.