On Being Of Two Minds

As soon as ink embraces paper, our words become obsolete - archaic idioms of former moments.

First, An Exercise:

Fashion a stylus from bone or tree root; run a bath. Once in the bath, take your stylus and begin to etch your thoughts on the surface of the water. Note that the water responds to your direction but does not retain your thoughts. Once you are still, it is as if you were never present. Note that you are not naked, for you are wearing a robe of water. When you rise, you will wear a robe of air.

As you stand there in your comfortable robe and watery toe socks, wondering why you are clutching a bone or wood stylus like some daffy, sceptered regent, take courage. You are appareled in the unconscious. You have never been more naively hip.

***

Indeed, you are not mad, for it is not the unconscious, but the violence of reason, which breeds madness. The tool of reason, while not intended for violence, is often wielded as a machete, brutally vivisecting the mind into halves. The dream-half deemed indecipherable, hence unnecessary, is discarded, and the half most amenable to social, diurnal intercourse is placed on display and described as the total organism. Though widely accepted as fact, the description is winkingly false. It is not the total mind, only a dead remnant of totality. The organism, once halved, does not survive.

It is a requirement of the present society that its constituents walk about as lobotomized half-wits, out of touch with their primal, deeper selves. Such willing self-abuse is the social contract which one must agree to and sign in order to be granted status as a participant. Society is a marketplace of spectacle, an advertising campaign so large, so pervasive, that one is often unaware of its existence. It's the proverbial forest for the trees.

Advertisements are pointless without targets, and moving targets make life difficult for those taking aim. Tidily minded, sedate, and sedentary consumers, uncomplicated by any mental machinery other than that which is necessary for consumption, are the best marks. But do not be fooled, if you do choose to live a life directed by the total, creative mind, you can be a mark as well. There is a medication designed just for you and your disease, or, even better, there is just the job for you, harnessing your creative powers to the spectacle.

***

Logic and reason are not enemies. They are useful implements in the quest to better understand the universe in which we find ourselves, but, like most implements, they can be used for other purposes, good or ill. For those who have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is easily recalled that it did not take long for our apelike ancestors to deduce that they could use their newly discovered hunting tools against one another. The same with reason; we turn it upon ourselves.

We should turn reason upon ourselves, but in a different way. "Know thyself", proclaimed the Delphic oracle. Delve into your mysteries. There is so much more to us than just the surface we have been led to believe is the sum total of who we are. The ultimate goal is to unite and synthesize the two halves of the mind and to live under its direction.

Of course, the question is left as to the how of it. How does one tap into the unconscious mind and suss out its secrets, with the view of using those secrets to engage in the total life? How does one drop out of the commodity culture or shake its control? To become an explorer, a scientist of self, an artist, a writer of messages on water, one must have nothing to offer, and everything to gain. One must dive to the bottom of the bath, always risking the danger of drowning. It is in that moment of near-death where one enters the moment of being most-alive.

OK, you can get out of the tub now.

Kobo Abe: The Face of Another

The Face of Another is a book I love and hate.  I began reading Kobo Abe's novels a few years back, and I think the first one I read was The Ruined Map.  It was an excellent, ghostly tale of a crime that may or may not have happened.  Someone literally disappeared on a sidewalk, but how?  It was enthralling and chilling.

I went on to read other books by Abe, and soon realized that his primary occupation in most of his work, as it was in The Ruined Map, was identity.  Who is a person, anyway?  Is that person formed by the perception others form of him?  Can a person form a true, objective, separate identity?

He revisits these questions, once again, in The Face of Another, in which the protagonist suffers terrible chemical burns to the face and is impelled to create a life-like mask for himself so that others will not be repulsed by his appearance and still accept him as a "normal" member of society.  Abe goes on to explore the implications of masks and how they might alter a person's identity and sense of responsibility to the world.

Though a novel, Face tends to read more like a first-person philosophical manifest.  It is at times turgid and difficult to penetrate.  Though the subject matter is fascinating, its presentation is so dense it borders on stultifying.  One is often left to wonder just what exactly Abe is trying to convey.

It could be that the murkiness of the delivery is intended to be part of the story's fabric.  The anonymous protagonist, who conveys his tale through the medium of a series of journals, is himself confounded by the process in which he is immersed.  What is hard to swallow is that, though the protagonist is caught up in a very deep and rigorous examination of his actions, he is painted as somewhat vain and superficial.  Would such a vain individual really be so concerned with the intricacies of how a mask effects a persons actions?  Perhaps the considerations of the mask cause him to be less superficial?

Ultimately, if one isn't familiar with Abe's work, this book can be skipped. Start with The Ruined Map or The Box Man.  If you have read some of his work, and not this book, it is, though difficult, a necessary read.

A Cautionary Tale

Upon first reflection, I don't know why or when I actually decided to write.  The maelstrom of youthful emotion in which I chose such a course is far removed from the more reserved nature I have developed in adulthood.  Sometimes I wish I still possessed that manic verve of my teen years, yet I am often glad I moved beyond it.

A certain positive of my young experience was that I was inspired to pick up a pen at the slightest provocation.  I was raw life, bristling, over-sensitive, rarely declaring any endeavor of the mind off-limits.  These days, there are constraints on the creative impulse, regulations.  I think the key to this difference is that, when I was younger, I wrote for myself alone.  Now I am more concerned about communicating with an audience.  All sorts of paranoia and mental blocks ensue....

Having traversed the path from nearly bursting with so much to say to having very little which I deem worthy of conveyance, the question is begged, "Why am I still doing this?"  "Why did I begin doing this?"

Returning to the origin, my first response is, "Sex."  I did it to impress girls.  This wasn't a conscious decision, but an underlying propulsion of the genes.  At the age of fifteen, my hormones erupted, and all else proceeded outward from that big bang of the male constitution. 

But why did I choose writing?  Probably because it was the most available way to display my chief asset, my mind.  I was noodly, nerdy, and unathletic.  Though possessing physical stamina, tenacity, and more guts than I could back up with muscle, I could not be of any value to the world (girls) through sporty exploits.  Even if I could play basketball, or some such, the girls interested in that sort of thing were not the ones in which I had vested my interest.  I was drawn to nerds of a feather.

I began with writing song lyrics and music, but, when it came to music, I had two strikes against me.  I wasn't going to be bothered with the drudgeries of learning an instrument, and I never really have worked well with others.  I tried several times to be a lead-singer, but all I ever managed to do was piss off the band with my tendency to be a control-junky.  I had to find a more solitary practice.

Enter poetry.  I began reading e. e. cummings, and I decided that I wanted to be like him, gallivanting about the world, successfully wooing women, revered in life and after death.  The difference, though, was that Cummings came from a fairly wealthy family and could gallivant and woo with impunity.  I came from a family with collars the deepest of blue.  The difference mattered little to me at the time.  Poetry was going to be my ticket to everywhere.

What happened as I wrote more and more is that, over time, I cared less and less about girls and became consumed with the word.  Granted, I still wrote many erotically tinged paeans to women, but I was becoming more immersed in the process than the end result.  I discovered the surrealists and pledged my allegiance to liberation through the unification of the objective world with the deeper recesses of the life of the mind.  Art would be my salvation!

It didn't work.  After a few years, I was forced to choose between liberty and having a place to live and food to eat.  I chose safety.  Ever since that point in time, as the grip of utility's enslavement ever tightens, writing has become a chore and a daily footnote.  My imaginary audience of the ideal feminine vanished and has yet to be replaced.

What does one do when something so cherished becomes so difficult and seemingly useless?  I don't profess to know.  All I do know is that I can not let it go.  It has become inextricably ingrained in who I am.

David Berman: Actual Air

Actual Air by David Berman is probably my favorite book of poems published in the last ten years.  It was published by Open City Books in 1999.  Sadly, no poetry by Berman has been published since that time.

I met him in 2006 at a show his band, Silver Jews, played in Charlottesville, Virginia.  When I asked if he planned to publish any poetry in the near future, all he did was grimace.  His reaction caused me to feel a little guilty, as if I had asked him to undress for me.

Whether he produces any more poems, or not, Actual Air stands on its own.  It is one of the few books I have ever read more than once.  In fact, I just finished my fifth reading, and it still managed to move me.

Honestly, when I read this book, my initial response is jealousy.  I envy Berman's ability to fuse lucid observations of the physical world with the tendency of the mind to mystify that world.  He manages to make life strange without obscuring its intimate details.  And that is exactly what the poems within this book are - strange and intimate.  It is as if he and the reader are sitting together on a twilit porch, drinking beer, as he whispers tall tales about an impossible world just right around the corner.  It is difficult not to believe him.

I have scoured this book in an effort to find snippets of poetry which could be presented as examples, but it is difficult to extract a few lines here and there from the totality of the poems.  They are so of a piece, that to quote a mere stanza would do a poem injustice, would not at all convey the textured nuance of the spell which Berman so deftly weaves and casts.

With that in mind, I leave you with a full poem.  I don't claim it to be one of the best in the book, but it is one of my favorites.

             ~  

World: Series 

When something passes in the dark
I make a note on the pad kept by the window.

Candlelight wobbles on the walls,
over the baseboard electrical outlets
that look like primitive swine masks

and I can't remember if I read or dreamed about them -
a sect on the Mayflower called the Strangers -
four or five adults who gathered in the hold
and spoke to no one through the three month passage.

When the boats landed on the beach
they walked into the North American forest
and were never seen again.

I put my book down and come to the window
where curtains are fastened to the sides
so it is like looking out at the world
through the back of a teenage girl's head

and my signature is drawn in magic marker
on the lower right hand corner of the window

so when something passes in the dark
it's captured for a moment inside my work.

I come to the window and title the eras
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,

and watch the wind in the tension of the blown trees,
the moon illuminated by my attention.
When something passes in the dark,
I try to tell its side of the story.

"I am passing someone in the dark," it thinks...