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.