coming up

As soon as I’m done with this peculiarly left brained paper, I will be back with a substantive post on how the book My Stroke of Insight has changed my life. Stay tuned!

DO NOTHING

I have to do nothing! But I actually have to do things. And when I try to do things efficiently so that I have time at some point in the day to do nothing I feel super good about it for a few while and then after a week or so I start noticin I feel really disconnected from myself and bad and low and like something important is gone slipping away. And then I have to stop and really do nothing, not planned do nothing, to start feeling the vastness of the universe again come pulling me.

finegan beginegan

There is no guiding light so you should remember that above everything. There is nothing to set you right except yourself. The clock tolls and you think it gives you a semblance of something to set your day by and your days something to set your years by and so on or even gives you the mechanism itself but if you thought of an hour as a sphere or even twenty four hours as a sphere or even all of time as it’s ever been just one neverending nonbeginning bulging globe.

I don’t really think about time because I don’t know how to. I just move in it whichever way it chooses for me, I guess you could say I am a passive traveler or a fish caught in some current but at least the fish probably knows if it’s going forwards or backwards. I may not even be moving. Time may be moving right over my surface like a soft wind brushing the stones of time from one side to the other and my ignorant mass is the obstacle it must pass before starting over again anew. You can almost see it as though a camera pulled back and shot the surface of all being as a desert and my naked body and the sands of time flowing across that body, lying like some neverending dividing line like it stretched in opposition to fact from the beginning of land to the end and was not confined in its own physical truncation and all of the sand must cross that figurative desert of a body and pile up around its other side in gentle waving dunes stretching back as far as anybody could see or care to see. And when the originating side was empty of every grain it would all begin again.

I am very interested in things beginning again. There is so much that can occur, so many lines that can erupt from a single dot. And to be on one line for all of your life? And to not know: where do I go? Why am I going? From whence did I come, to what do I go? I am a simple line, I am a mistaken path. And it trails me wherever I go, like a smear of shit behind me, it follows, it is unshakable, it multiplies: they are my choices, they are the things I choose to do, they are the things I do not care to know, they are my sparrows lined up for me in a straight line twittering that I am wrong I am wrong I am selfish I am wrong.

oh my god!

Full disclosure, this is gonna be the dumbest most awesome post I’ve ever written. Two things: Richard Dawkins and Ray Kurzweil. Three things: Richard Dawkins, Ray Kurzweil and a disclaimer that I majored in English and am now in law school. I know, major disappoint from those who until this point thought I was an authority on all things.

I’m sitting on the train reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, and as you all know it takes me about one point no seconds to become totally convinced of whatever science I’m trying to understand when I’m reading these books I don’t understand, but let me just tell you one thing about this book: it is so good. Even if he is very aggressive and even if he doesn’t get it all right (I am really in no position to evaluate seeing as I have not been keeping up with the literature for the past 40 years) it should be read by everybody. Unless you are already in a position to have an opinion about him, at that point you have probably read enough better books to just skip this one.

But anyways I just got to the part where he’s positing that early life must have begun at the emergence of a “Replicator”, a set of molecules that wouldn’t just randomly bump around until it met more molecules that made it stable, but when it bumped into the right molecules would create an exact replica of itself (or a negative of itself, doesn’t matter). And then these replicators, obviously, would begin increasing exponentially and then survival of the fittest and then the ones with protection would survive most and then we are all replicator protection machines!! The best line so far is: “A monkey is a machine that protects genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water”. Yeah yeah if you want an actual description of this go read the book. I’m no biologist.

Anyways, the other night I couldn’t sleep and at like 4am (remember I said I think I figured out the secret to not watching 30 rock on repeat? Just wake up regularly in the middle of the night and watch other things) I started watching Transcendent Man, the doc about Ray Kurzweil, the really lovable lookin guy who wrote the book The Singularity is Near about how technology and man are gonna merge.

So because I posses the enviable scientific naiveté of the blissfully ignorant, and I am able to free associate with wonderful creativity amongst the pieces of information I do have. Kurzweil. Dawkins. Dawkins. Kurzweil. HOW DO THEY CONNECT? So I’m thinking about the primordial soup and how crazy it is that not only did enough molecules form together to create monkeys (to protect genes up trees) but they also deliciously collided to form humans like you and me right? And they collided in such a way as to create brains and our brains fire off in such a way as to allow us to think about who we are and what we are doing and EVEN TO WRITE BOOKS ABOUT THE VERY FIRST MOLECULES THAT COLLIDED IN THE PRIMORDIAL SOUP THAT ULTIMATELY BECAME OUR BRAINS THAT FIRED OFF THE NEURONS TO LET US WRITE THE BOOKS ABOUT THE

is it not the craziest thing you’ve ever thought about?!! Anyways, so I was thinking about how if we are the product of random collisions of molecules, how our brains have become so much greater than the random collision of molecules in that they can think about the random collision of molecules and even interfere with the random collision of molecules. Then I started thinking about Kurzweil. Our brains are so tremendous that we (I am using a very generous form of “we”, you and I could not do this) are even at the brink of being able to build other brains. Bringing us to the singularity, the point at which technology advances as such an exponential pace that basically humans will have no choice but to merge with robots or face annihilation. I’m paraphrasing.

And I started to think about creation and the myth of creation. The myth of God creating man confronted with the theory of humans evolving out of the primordial soup. And then I thought about humans evolving to the point where we are on the brink (I am using the term brink loosely, a hundred years? more? less?) of creating a new race of humans. A race that could go on to evolve or create itself past the bounds of all human understanding. And I thought that puts such a crazy spin on the creation myth doesn’t it. It stops being something you think about in the past – when humans were created, and starts being something that may occur in the future – when man creates super-man. And then superman outstrips man – just as replicator molecule outstripped whatever event created it. And in a few thousand years we get not one Bible but all the works of man in literature and art. We get ‘The Human Delusion” by Richard Dawkins great great great great great great great great x 10 granddaughter.

Does that not sound nuts to you??!

a poem by hafiz

The
Heart is right to cry

Even when the smallest drop of light,
Of love,
Is taken away.

Perhaps you may kick, moan, scream
In a dignified
Silence,

But you are so right
To do so in any fashion

Until God returns
To

You.
- Hafiz, “The Heart is Right”

danse macabre

This famous writing teacher I once had told me that if she didn’t write, she’d probably die. I used to think that was true for me, too. But here I am, not writing and not dying. I am in the middle. If I don’t write, I will suffer. But if I write too much, I go crazy thinking about what writing means: why I’m doing it; why it’s important; why it doesn’t mean a damn thing to anybody but me; why when I stopped writing I didn’t die; why I moved on; why my world opened from its blank page and spilled onto the infinite sphere; why I still don’t really know how to look at the world any other way but as something meant to be flattened out onto a screen, somehow, mediocre as it might be, made into my own even though I don’t even feel like I own my own words anymore Everyone’s got the same style, everyone’s thinkin the same thoughts, if they’re thinking them. What is it I put down and can’t stop taking back up? What is it about the mind that it has to keep thinking, wouldn’t stop even if it could but it can’t. Like a goddamn whirling dervish, sometimes thoughts are something let out of hell and it spins and spins. Can’t make your mind stop but can’t do anything with it either, just throw yourself into work and calm the devil inside.

I wonder if I’ll start to write again one day, write real things instead of just taming that wild thing with powell palliatives.

let go and let godot

It’s not all about fun. For awhile, I thought it was, which is something you might laugh at because of the law school thing. But fun is just a way to trick your mind into wrapping itself around something so serious it would crack your skull to think about head on. to let yourself loose from the chains you’ve wrapped yourself in from the time you were a kid, when everything scared the shit out of you and rightly so, to let yourself loose so you can find your way out. nothing’s scarier than finding your way out. nothing’s more necessary. It’s like your dragging your hands across a wall, feeling the prickles on your skin when you pass that magic section, that semipermeable membrane you can almost slip through if you hit it just right. But you’re passin through to something, don’t forget. You’re on your way somewhere else, don’t get stuck in that world between worlds. It happens though, we lose ourselves in fun or work, forget we’re doin it for a reason, not just to do it. Either way you lose out…work yourself to death and forget what you’re working for, or try to feel so good you forget that life doesn’t feel that good, forget how to accept the hard shit, forget how to accept yourself and the way you’re always gonna struggle, the way nothing comes easy and if it does it’s gonna go easy too. Don’t forget you’ve always only ever had the smallest piece of truth pie baby. So how do you do it? How to really come to terms with yourself and your sadness and above all, your silliness?

This isn’t something I would say to just anyone but lately I’ve taken to praying some nights when I wake up at 4AM scared of everything that’s in the world and everything that’s not. I’ll be the first to express my disappointment in this turn of events but what can I say. I don’t believe in God, but when talking about God, the man himself is really besides the point. It’s not about proving that some greater being doesn’t exist. It’s about looking at what believing in something or not believing in something does to a person. A mind can only handle so much before it’s gotta let go and let god, as the saying goes. About being open to something bigger than what you understand or can imagine. And the result? What happens when you tell yourself – believing it or not, feeling what you will about it – that you are a piece of a puzzle so vast you can’t even comprehend the whole thing? You might start seeing things outside of yourself, seeing that the world is not formed around you, does not bend to you, does not know you, moves without you and will not mourn you when you are gone. And you will see that you are not outside of it. You are part of its fabric, nothing in you moves without it moving too. Your mind is made of the same thing the world is made of.

I know this of myself – when I let go of thinking I know everything, I start seeing things I would have ignored before, I start understanding things in a whole other way, and that way is more complex than can be captured by all the language and all the books in the world. But it slips from me, beautiful and fleeting. It’s made to slip. We’re made to mourn its briefness, to deny its absence. Better to tell yourself there’s nothing than that there’s something, you had it once, you will have it for seconds of your life again, and then it passes on, it will never do anything but pass on. And you chase it however you can

These are the questions and answers for the day. Do with them as you will.

dr spaceman

I feel some great sea-change. Quarter-life is a time of evaluation.

But goddamn changing yourself in the middle of an illustrious law school career is hard knocks.

It is like the feeling of sensing a body newly emerged in the heavens. Heavy. Pulling. You can feel it tugging you off your axis. And you are awestruck at its magnitude. To feel that insistent pull. Across the years of your soul. Across your need to be in one place, to know where you are at all times, to follow your known elliptical pattern. To know it is yours, it is an anchor in an empty, unanchored universe.

Then, a new body. Pulling you off the course you have followed since you began. And whatever the new tilt, however slight, changes your course irretrievably. And two things form the constant refrain in your mind: I dare not turn my mind towards the contours of this new body; I dare not turn my mind away.

It can be malevolent; it can be benevolent; it can be impartial to you and your kind. Certain and inescapable as breathing. It is changing you. It is showing you glimpses of your own mortality, your own fallibility, your absolute rootlessness in the sweeping expanse we roll along in. There is something larger than your volition, a greater power than your desire, your best laid plans for yourself to not fuck up. It is showing you that your course…will be fucked up. The narrow course all your life. The tiniest variation and you do not know what to do. You are being confronted with the dream of the sheltered: to know your walls, perhaps to destroy them, perhaps to destroy yourself.

So what does it mean? Powell is unable to cope with large-scale change? Yes. This is for sure. But what else? That I do not know who I am. The answer hit me with slapstick force. I have structured my life precisely so that I will never know who I am, so that I will never be at the mercy of my fallibility. I have lived my life ensuring that I will never know, I will never truly be challenged, I will never discover how I rise or fall to that challenge.

But this is fallibility of its own sort. To live within a circumscribed orbit. To be ever safe and cold. Unknowing even myself, so afraid of my weakness I will never know my strengths. As I said, the dreams of the sheltered. The questions of the circumscribed.

Dreams

Some things never change. I’m wakin up at 2AM more regularly than I’d like to admit and rolling around in my bed by myself asking the important questions. Who am I. What am I doin here. Why does my brain feel so bad. Why did they get rid of courtyard classic at the law school. Ive become so accustomed to this fuckin ritual that if I sleep through the whole night I wake up surprised. And I’m startin to feel like I’m abusing the 30 Rock before bedtime habit. I can’t fall asleep without somethin to calm me down. Sing to me Liz Lemon, rock me to sleep.

In Powell’s absence, shit has gone down and everything sucks again. But that’s the thing, nothing catastrophic has happened. A lot of good shit has happened! School is not crazy stressful (this is untrue, school is going to live and die crazy stressful). I’m workin on some things I care about, and some things I don’t care about. Story of my/your life. I feel simultaneously over and under committed: over for my slacking tastes, under for the sleeper competitive law student in me. I never understand why my inner competitive self ceaselessly fails to realize it is not wanted here. Get outta yere ya dumb bastid.

SO WHAT GIVES

I am tempted to call this out for the bullshit it is. Quantitatively speaking, or whatever the fuck, things should be better this year. Everything is going my way. Figured out life last year? check. Figured out why I’m in law school? check. Summer internship lined up? check. Oh I see. It’s the old “expectations make suckers out of the best of them” trick. I think things should be good, so when they’re not, not only are they not good but I’ve fallen not from 0 to 0, but from 2 to 0. And expectations make you think you’ve got things figured out. When all you have to do is go back and read Powell’s posts, and realize that even back then, I knew I didn’t have shit figured out. See? Damn I was together then. Knowing in my unknowing. How things change, how things fall apart. Thus is life.

Even the best of us fall to shame sometimes.

What do I really think is wrong though? In my heart of hearts. Oh, many things, too many to list here, but one things is that I don’t really know myself. Two things. I don’t know myself, and my imagination’s shot. Dealing with the second, Life is as beautiful and full as you imagine it to be. And if, like me, your imagination needs a kickstart, life is as beautiful as art imagines it to be. Films. Books. Photographs. Don’t give your soul food to grow on and it stagnates and deflates and begins to disappear and you have nothing left to funnel your overactive terror and anxiety into until you realize the terror of life is overwhelming you. You are lying in bed as though you are thinking about whether you will do well on your exams this year, or whether or not you are progressing as well as you might be in climbing, or whether you will keep forgetting to go to yoga this week as well but really you are thinking about life and how hard it is to live it in a way that keeps you from feeling, in your core, that you are afraid of it, that it is too much, that you will fail it in some simple, vital, elemental way. You are a sad and sorry artless self and you are frantically searching for something to give your overtaxed brain meaning as it wakes in the night and, seeing nothing familiar to hold onto in the unnamed and shapeless dark, slips into an unnamed and shapeless fear.

So you look up Kurosawa’s Dreams on Netflix, and you begin to try to climb your way back into the arms of art. The ceaselessly comforting arms of those who see the world as you do, where you do not have to feel (as you do, everyday, in law school) that you are looking at life from inside a child’s cheap plastic kaleidoscope, but that you look at it in the only way there is to look at it. That there is a name for your fear and a name to counter it as well.

Thats all I got for ya this time, I’m gonna try to get back to sleep now.

a work in progress

I told myself Sundays would be my writing days but that shit has not happened. I dunno where my time goes this year. Yeah yeah ok I do. I have meetings, I do reading, I have more meetings, I read some more. And I seem to need so much more fucking sleep. Probably cus I’m running around like a fool all day. Run run run. Pant pant pant. Repeat. So I’m gonna go the old tried and true route of gettin back into the swing of things. I’m gonna review a book. Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy. The final chapter of the Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain. It’s a dooooz.

First, some context.

I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know who I am. This is the familiar refrain, the old monologue. Sometimes I walk down the same road I’ve been down before.

Time is finite (for now…come of scientists, work on this). Although I have two computers with their corresponding two iCals, plus a google Cal, and probably somewhere a moleskin agenda, somehow I have ended up with the same number of days to work with as I had when I started. What gives?

I’m still here in law school cus I believe in what I’m doin (and, lest I get called out, because I don’t want to be destitute – of heart, or of pocket money). But I am learning something I think is useful for the world. I’m gonna get people free. I’m gonna save people’s lives. I will be the guy they call when the shit hits the fan. I will be Johnny Cochran. I will save the OJ Simpsons of the world.

Wait

I will be saving the bad fuckers?

If you don’t want to end up stuck, sometimes you gotta just keep running through the questions until you get to where you think you wanted to be. And you can’t question where you’re going too much, or you’ll lose that momentum and you’ll end up in the doldrums. No gas to your car, no color to your hills. And what do you do to give yourself that push? You believe in something, you believe there’s a purpose to what you’re doing, you believe you’re walkin the right way. And the more doubts you have about that way, the more you gotta believe it’s right to keep going.

I know how the West was won. I know how asking questions slows you down. I’ve been to an occupy meetings. Consensus voting takes forever. So what do we do to get things done? We steamroll the doubts, push past the hesitancies, get ‘er goin quick before our brains have time to catch up with what it is we’re doing.

Back to Cities of the Plain. John Grady wants what he wants when he wants it. What he wants is to get somewhere. He rides his horse over the vast landscape of New Mexico. He crosses the river to Mexico. He wanders, he travels, he lets his mind free. Then he seizes upon something he wants – a Mexican whore – and he doesn’t stop to think about whether his wanting is good for him, for her, for anybody. He knows if he stops to think about it, he’ll stop, he won’t act. He wants to be compelled by something, somethin more powerful than him, somethin that takes him by the heart and leads him down some lonely path, even if that path is to his death, because if something this powerful is leading him – what follows won’t be his fault, won’t be his alone to bear. So he’s reckless. Recklessness is just succumbing to the idea that you’re not in control, that somethin bigger than you controls you. That hand that rocks the cradle. Belief is the idea that we’re not in charge of our lives. And damn you’d be surprised how people hate to feel in charge of their lives. Damn you’d be surprised at how much we cling to the idea that we can be in charge of our lives without destroying ourselves. Gotta find the perfect balance. Pet the puppy Lenny don’t crush it.

I started this post a little while ago, and I’m coming back to it in a different mind frame entirely. Because I don’t want to get stuck on any one post, I want to keep on keepin on, I’ll just let this post sit in its half-baked state and move on to my new thoughts.

Read the book, if only to round out the rest of the trilogy. I can’t tell you much more than that.