confusion, madness and inspiration

repetition

my yin and i are leaving in a few hours for Asheville, the first of our intrastate weekend getaways, and we learned yesterday that this weekend is the ginormous Bele Chere festival, which shuts down all of downtown and manages to cram over 300,000 people into a city whose total population is a fraction of that number. i still have no idea what the festival is, much less how we're going to get to our host's apartment on Broadway. hopefully, this is beside the point.

memory

the point is that we were there a little more than six months ago, visiting said host during a brief day trip. it was cold that day, but not freezing, and in retrospect we probably enjoyed some of the last walkable days of 2009 before the unending snows set in. this is not only beside the point, but also boring.

symptom

the point is that i've fallen out of the habit of writing, having spent much of the past month on hiking trails and visiting my family. i've read some, i've watched television, i've had a physical and left a half dozen unreturned messages for counsel. ive taken pictures and i've pictured taking off more often, trying to find a way to travel and drift from beach to mountain, from earth to sky, from eyes closed to open.

analyst

i know that it is incorrect to "think you will be aware of your own enlightenment" and i know this because Shunryu Suzuki said that Dogen-zenji said so. it was Wikipedia, however, that taught me than Dogen died in 1253. as a point of reference, the ink on the Magna Carta was still wet in 1253, and Thomas Aquinas was younger than i am today.

this random assortment of facts may, or may not be the point. there may, or may not, be a point period. my yin said yesterday that sometimes, when we speak of such things, she imagines a pin point, infinitely large and inconsquential. allegedly, sincerity is "more important than any stage which you will attain" and it was Suzuki who taught me this as well. but i wonder:

analysand

1) "who" "is" it that "possesses" this "sincerity"?

2) if the self is transient, then how does one prevent sincerity from taking on the form of fixedity?

non-related(?):

3) i took class with a woman this Tuesday morning who spoke of focus, inspiration and their interplay. she said one could hang out in the inspiration all day long, easily, because it surrounds us all the time. it is unending and ever changing. but, without focus, nothing gets done. we become impotent.

4) likewise, over-focusing can lead to its own rigidity, a fixation on a single goal that prevents us from being open to the ever-changing world around us. as a remedy to these extremes she described a state of inspired focus, which allows one to be both flexible and steadfast.

transference

5) i repeated this story to a friend of mine yesterday, who maintained a listening poise without listening and nodded at the appropriate times. my friend then repeated back to me what was said. nothing was learned.

the Return

i am reading, presently, and in addition to Suzuki, Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology. the book attempts to integrate Hegel, Lacan and Marx in much in the same way as new age hippie-types attempt to integrate body, mind and spirit. this, approximately, is like my own attempt to integrate "me", "myself" and "i".

sometimes punctuation gets in the way, by this i mean the process is:

6) confusing

7) maddening

8) and, never or

9) inspirational

ultimately i believe that Zizek will have some success in the endeavor, and i like to think that this bodes well for my own efforts. the only problem is that, once integrated, will "i" be able to "recognize" what "I" "see"?