Spiritual Bypassing

There was a time in my life when I dated someone, and he read something that I wrote about my life, and I had published it online. With alarm he said, “I mean, what if my MOM reads this?!?!?”

And it took me more than a decade to realize how stupid this actually is.

But it stuck with me for years.

I made excuses for years, for other people, when I wanted to be so understanding and empathetic that I’d find occasion to grace the most uninformed, uninspired, ordinary, banal, meaningless, ignorant, childish, even abusive criticism or judgment with the benefit of the doubt. And for fear of many things, I would even self-regulate my creativity. But did they deserve it? And it took me nearly two decades

To realize how stupid that is.

No Ads, No Opinions, No Noise


I would’ve come here more often, but also I love the total and absolute quiet. Beyond thinking.

Just the fountain bubbling up for the cat. The refrigerator hum. Faint movements outside the window.

Even just the sound of air. A rushing sound like a freeway, but also like distant, blended waves.

I would talk more. I would put myself out there.

Sometimes I do. But I take solace too, in this total and absolute quiet. Even of words.

I love you, but also in total and absolute quiet together, love beyond entertainment.

It’s not a silence I mean, just a quiet.

An absence of unnecessary noise or movement.

For life, in honor of life I speed up, but also I want to be slow.

And so incredibly free of mind.


There Is More to Life Than Being Right – (notes on not writing #2)

Everyone wants to be right and it’s the most important thing in the world. It feels exciting and invigorating. But this rarely resonates with any lasting profundity.

To be right, sparks a temporary glow… but also, to be right… sucks. It sucks the life out of everything. At least, the way we are treating it now. It’s rigid and unintelligent.

It’s nothing inherently original; nor super interesting in and of itself. To be right has become the most banal aspect of contemporary existence.

And writing? is easier than ever, if it’s all you have to do is affect such righteousness that the veracity of your statements doesn’t even matter. As is the apparent collective trend with our speech.

Yet writing which strives to maintain some level of integrity, is more difficult than ever. Because of this culture of RIGHT which negates and insults the entire process of inquiry which writing is meant to provoke.

If you think about it too much, it’s almost enough to make you feel done with language, with writing. To just… give up. Give up altogether this burden. Because to write, to use your words – this involves taking a position. Do I need to be right, to write? Because there is more to life than being the one who is right.

The trouble is, we now shoulder an actual and deliberate cultural detachment from reality, sadly underwritten by leaders who only stand to benefit from our dysfunction. We act as if what we say is the realest thing there is, and so it is done. Deeply consequential actions abound as a result. But as much as we propose to speak truth, and as much as we sometimes DO speak truth, truth is not only what we are speaking at any given time; truth does not end with our statement. We’d like to believe that it is, that it does; but truth changes as quickly as we figure it out.

What is truth? You can’t only be right and also have the truth. It’s impossible. Truth is filtered through the material world, but it can not be caught by you. Truth is a phenomenon created by the sum total of an infinite multitude of ideas and perspectives. Truth is a multitude.

And this is why we need poetry. And all those other art forms which we might also call “poetic.”

Poetry calls us to remind ourselves how foolish we are in being so right. In pretending to have all the answers. In our righteousness against the assholes.

Because there is no right answer in poetry. There is no “figuring it out” once and for all. No one single truth or perspective. And there isn’t supposed to be. Because this would not be possible, and it would not even reflect all that art is capable of – nor all that we are capable of.

Art expresses multitude. Art can understand us even beyond ourselves, because art is perspicacious. Because art is a universe, within universes. Because art reflects reality as this complex multitude beyond one single person’s ego — one single ego whose tragic flaws art is also sure to reveal, so that nobody can be a god (but perhaps, merely part of the god we envision).

And in that spirit, this is not to elevate the poet or artist who creates the art too much. The “one single ego” of the artist or the writer – that’s just a personality. The artist, or one who creates, serves as a medium for an aspect of truth. But not all of the truth. Even the artist who specifically concerns themself with what they call “the truth” – even this does not mean that they need be considered right (though they may be at times).

To be so right and so perfect, even so irrefutable — that would be the creation, ultimately, of something stagnant. Irrefutability is stagnation. And what would be the point of that? To end ourselves?

…What is the actual end game of RIGHT?

To end ourselves, no? To be altogether done with it?

Or do we want to be in and of this universe within universes? Where opportunity and growth and meaningful progress abound? As we are in the space of art, of poetry. Art and poetry which, like science, insist that we will never be done. And that there are rarely any easy answers (especially to life’s most important questions). And we had better become comfortable with this, unless we’d like to end ourselves.

We don’t need to be right, much as we act as if. And artists don’t need to be right to create, nor writers – especially not to write poetry, which neither needs nor strives to be irrefutable. The creator just needs to show. And this is why we won’t give up. And this is why one may have all sorts of feelings about it, including being pissed off and confused and offended. Craft will continue to excel at creating more questions, than answers. More perspectives, than egos. And we must defend this liberty, this freedom and this responsibility. So that the culture of RIGHT may not undermine, enfeeble, cripple art and all its most important functions and its beauty too.

There’s people out there who really wish we would, just give it up. We all know them. Perhaps they would prefer us to be simpler, to think and speak in absolutes, to quickly pronounce reductive and hasty conclusions based on our own personal prejudices, to be more simple and easy, to dumb down. To pretend we know more than we do, pretend we are better than we are, forget we are part of a whole, and act like little gods. Or simply to just abandon our purpose, pretending we know too little, pretending others’ ideas are superior and we don’t have a right to create a space. There will always be someone who wants to take you down a peg that you were never even on. Some half-assed response to your imagination. And we can’t help but disappoint them. Truly. And this is okay. In fact whatever we do, it will disappoint someone. And that’s marvelous.

This is the reason it is worth it to keep going. Not to get more “points” as it were, because we won’t. Not to be more right than they are. But to imagine. All of what is possible. And in doing so, we will not please all. If we existed only to please, then nothing original would ever get made or done (or originality would be severely limited). Because so often, what is original begins by embodying what is not-right.

And as for the whole? Not just the artists. The “everyone”? There is the idea that if we compromised on everything so readily, then nothing would ever change. And we could not dare to hope for a better world. And this is a point.

Our better world is always possible because, in actual fact, there can be a right and a wrong — but there is in fact also, a space in between, a grey area, and a spectrum.

So if we speak truth, this does not mean we are the god of intelligence either. Thankfully, some of us already know this and embrace it and that is because we are not stupid. And because after all, it is not too much to ask ourselves, to ask others: Is our opinion seriously, honestly, the highest intelligence possible? Does our opinion represent the highest world order? Please.

We’ll do better, in today’s climate, to celebrate how wrong we can be.

This gives us a future.





Two Words, Two Worlds

prac-ti-cal (adj.)

*of or concerned with the actual doing or use of something rather than with theories and ideas.

*relating to experience, real situations, or actions rather than ideas or imagination.

————————

im-ag-i-nat-tive (adj.)

*new, original, and smart.

*good at thinking of new, original, and clever ideas.

————————

prac-ti-cal-i-ty (noun)

*the quality of being adapted or designed for actual use; usefulness or convenience

*the quality or fact of relating to actual activity, especially ordinary or everyday activity

*a detail or consideration involved in putting something into action

———————


imag-i-na-tion (noun)

*the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality

*ability to confront and deal with a problem; resourcefulness

*the thinking or active mind

*And the André Breton quote, aptly quoted in Barbara Guest’s Forces of Imagination. “To imagine is to see.”

———————-

Writ-ing

*the activity or skill of marking coherent words on paper and composing text

*the act or art of forming visible letters or characters specifically

*doing whatever you want





A Different Kind of Embrace

“No you don’t.”

He really had to say I love you. It really couldn’t wait.

“I do, though,” he said.

“No. You don’t.” I tried not to laugh uneasily.

“I think that love is when you see someone’s shadow, and you don’t run” I said. “Maybe you’d even see something you never wanted to see. But you decide not to run.”

I can’t say if that’s how others have ever loved me. But that’s how I learned to love. A miracle of some kind. Because nobody in my lineage of relationship train wrecks ever taught me that. But it took too long to learn. My mind wandered to my true love. And what I knew made it true.

“Love is when you meet someone’s shadow, and forgive them for it. You distinguish it from yours, but you decide to embrace it too.”

Unless you don’t know how to do that. Then maybe you love and destroy. Maybe love gives rise to the very impulse to destroy. If you don’t know how to treat it. If you don’t know what you are doing.

Love is an action taken. Love is a decision. There’s no rushing it either. This is just an attraction, nothing more. It has no actual meaning. It is only the beginning of potential meaning. But potential is hollow.

I was looking for a different kind of embrace.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

“No.”

“Really? You don’t?”

“Not yet.” I tried to put it more gently. But I didn’t. And I wasn’t sure I could.

“I don’t know your shadow,” I said. “And you don’t know mine.”
















He got up to use the bathroom.

My eyes filled with tears as he exited the room.










Two Visions

To create something of this time, speaks to the now. And may realize impact now. But with no guarantee of a future.

To create something ahead of its time, could only realize that level of impact later. And may not have significant influence now, nor enjoy full appreciation now. But its value may increase beyond expectation – later.

Nobody really knows exactly what later will look like. Nobody really knows the values of the future.

But the now has its flaws, and the future is more likely to admit it. The future’s success lies in the inevitable incompleteness of the now.

And the success in the now, is in that which is concerned with yesterday’s weaknesses.


A Polished Predictable Person

There was a time in my life I actually embraced being alone. Content with it, full and complete. Other times I’ve feared being alone. Or it’s just made me feel, in one word, miserable.

Now I just feel neutral. And that doesn’t have to mean anything.

Writing about loneliness can scare people, although I’m not exactly sure why it should.

There was a time when I wrote more “poetically” on here. I suppose it was nicer, prettier, or better quality in some way but I don’t know. It’s a different time now. An uncomfortable one, but this is interesting. I have no idea what will happen.

Something broke in me. For a time. Now I am just here. Quietly. I was subjected to the myth of the perfectly polished woman. Tortured with its image and all its presumptions.

Someone fell in love with that myth. Someone dear. But there were no people there. There was no truth. Only gods.

The real woman is pissed off by all that now. She is sad. She is a spontaneous puddle of tears. She is feeling forsaken. She is seeking the generosity of spirit that this myth wouldn’t allow her.

Inside is the only place to go – for that piece, at least. The trouble is, this myth is actually everywhere.

There is no point in pretending. There is no academic-background point of view that will do anything. There is no game to play to elevate the mind over the feeling. We have enough of that crap around.

Shit is normal. But to eat shit is not.

When true cruelty is encountered – and it does exist in degrees, from unlikely alcoves at times – closure can never come from its source.

The flip side of the most romantic type of personality, is sometimes that it is the least realistic. Romance has always been a good thing – not something to be so cautious about. But there is true romance, and then there is romance riddled with agenda.

This morning I had the defiant thought, I’ll forget all this by dressing like crap and get no hair cuts for a while. I’ve done it before. When I didn’t have any money. I got through. And it was good. It was amusing to reject what is expected of us. Right now what I don’t have is time, and patience to entertain any level of psychological garbage. As if this disengagement from elements of the myth could weed it all the way out.

I am heartbroken. It resonates. But I am surviving it. And learning to have fun.

It’s an open road again. I can’t see the whole thing. Only the entrance.

I have seen a much smaller light before now, and followed it out.

Anything could happen.

We Don’t Know You But If We Did

Why? Why? Because I see all that shit and I just think, no no no, show me you. I want to see you, I want to see your actual life, I want to see how you see the world, I want to hear what’s in your head, I want to know you… I don’t want all this STUFF. Do we think it’s that entertaining? All of you diluted and filtered. All of you through links, images, stories, videos, even memes, even jokes, as if you yourself are a channel of electronic transmissions, a free mass media channel, why? you are dangerous. you are an adventure. you are a problem – is that the problem? is the beauty in you too much trouble, the complexity too distasteful. interiors of each other reduced to a business plan. like as if this messy exhausting disaster is so much more righteous. is that all there is to your perspective, who the fuck are you, i want to know you, i want to feel you, you are in the head, you are lost in the collection of crap, a range of crap so unlimited it will always take precedent, will always be more than you, is this valuable? subtlety and mystery give way to vulgarity. you are a medium for everything that’s a medium, do you exist? what do you exist for? look at us the advertisers. look at us pure entertainment. do you know why the world gets away with everything you don’t want? everything you hate? everything you have an opinion about? we do not see you. we do not know you. we do not feel anything much

the stuff keeps us cold. we do not need you this way. we like you, but we do not need you. we like you, but we do not love you

do something. fucking do something

the garbage is telling you that you don’t matter. that’s how garbage propagates more garbage. that’s how nobody knows you. that’s how to play it, fake. and make it, the rise of the lie so paramount and empty. the world doesn’t need it. the world doesn’t need more fake. the world doesn’t even really need your fucking opinions about everyone else’s opinions. the world doesn’t need you to share what it already has. the shit has already been shared over and over. it’s something else the world needs from you. it’s something else so figure it out. nobody will remember your opinions about opinions. nobody will remember it. what do you think people fucking remember? the world is begging you for the only original thing you have. we want to see you

we want to know you

we do not know ourselves either

show us

we need to see you

we need to see ourselves. find us

or we hate and we cancel

that’s what it says. we are going to die one day. what did we do with ourselves? were we garbage? do you know what the fuck i am talking about? it is not your job. it is not your shows. it is not your porn. it is not your humor. it is not your opinions. it is not your links

who the fuck exists? who is a person today? what exactly did you create? what did you fucking create. what did you fucking create. what did you fucking create?

i am not just talking about art

We don’t really know you but if we did we would love it

i can’t find you

i want to know you

We were uncluttered yet impure,

now we are too pure

or we like to think so

Now we are cluttered

we are clutter

but we don’t think so and we

don’t care

it is okay

this coldness will not last

forever, it is so young

this coldness

Observation #1



Fear is the fuel of judgment. And judgment is not exactly perception. Do it anyway. But first, there’s the mirror.

Who is it? Is it real? Is it true? Where does this mind come from?

We like to say, it’s not personal. Don’t go thinking everything is so personal. But also. Everything is personal. Everything.