collective karma

two nights i was over at a friend's house, and after our weekly meditation group brouhaha, she said something that piqued my curiosity. i don't remember the exact words, or even if it was the words. it might have been an inflection; it might have been an in...

tonation.

whatever it was, this is not uncommon in my interactions with her, and i often find myself thinking about the topics we touch upon for day to come. yesterday was one of those days, and i like to think of the following rant as the punch to a joke that begins:

"Patanjali and Karl Marx
Walk Into a Barr..."

approaching the One without the Other fails to account for our collective karmas, the lives we are born into the instant we take embodiment. a child born as a male in this society, for example, is dressed in blue from the delivery room door to the living room floor, and the first years of this child's life – years largely without language, months that precede even the formation of the I of ego identification – are marked by how others treat this child.

the color blue signifies: "treat me as a male."
the color pink signifies: "treat me as a female."

we obviously have no control over the decisions; but, moreover, we also have no control on how we become shaped by them. the identities we form in relation to these external stimuli predate our ability to speak, and it is simple hubris to believe that we can know how much of who we are is an act of agency as opposed to a reaction to the circumstance of our birth.

race, ethnicity, wealth, gender, nationality – these are very real, very transient, very material constructions that shape who we are. for the most part we are born into them, and we take on the advantages or disadvantages associated with these traits. this is our collective karma.

our collective karma not only influences our ability to pursue (or in the best instances practice) the metaphysical, but even our ability to conceive of the transcendental. for example, the Tao says to model oneself after water, while Moses was told to climb the Mount Sinai – does this mean that mountains are more holy than water?

no.

our ability to think about the transcendental is obviously overdetermined, encompassing both agency and will, but it is the conditions of our material existence that weigh most. i, for example, receive all the benefits of my male-ness, my American-ness, my White-ness. i was born into the most powerful country in the world, a nation that chose winning sides during the past century's two World Wars. our geographic isolation allowed us to avoid the destruction of Europe, and our militarism allowed us to spend the next fifty years unconcerned with any threat save that of our own Cold War atomic neurosis.

Robert Oppenheimer, father and apologist of the Bomb

i benefit from these things, and i do so without my consent. i reap the benefit of the world's inequities through the mere happenstance of my birth. others reap the afflictions, and still others enjoy more benefits than i can imagine. the "self-made" technocrats of Silicon Valley and the Beijing plutocrats of New China are part of the same wheel of karma, spinning on the axis of globalization and the unchallenged logic of Capital.

how do we explain these things? how do we justify to ourselves the privileges we inherit? how do we rationalize the hardships placed upon us by nothing more than the y-chromosome, or the color of our skin, or the political regime we find ourselves living under while we still inhabit the womb?

i find attributing these things to my (always 'my', always 'me') past life karma unsatisfactory. making this argument would require the conscious knowledge of not just one past life, but of every incarnation. how many perfect lives would we have to live to enjoy the blessings most of us take for granted?

saffron robes and white collars provide only the shallowest soil, no more bountiful than the superstitions surrounding the number "13" or the Fridays that coincide. ultimately, for those of us who took birth on this particular plane of existence, we cannot rise above our responsibility to others, or go beyond the social ties that keep us bound to every other human on this planet. we are not merely One on the level of the transcendent, but also within the maya, within the manifest world so easy to mistake for reality. we share karma with our families, our friends, our employers, our nations and planet.

to approach One without the Other is meaningless. or, in other words, the folly of Patanjali is no less than that of Marx:

recipe for success (?)

Ingredients:

1 male human
1 late capitalist society
1 Eastern philosophical tradition
1 living writer
1 dead writer
1 unacknowledged stranger

Directions:

Age one male human 33-34 years and place in a university setting. Expose to copious amounts of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Have subject retype pertinent sections of said texts. Repeat daily for 6-8 hours. In free time have male human read Japanese novels and draw inspiration from American essayist. Close eyes as necessary.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Observe repetition until the point of repression; watch the Return. Allude to Freud, allude to the 'anointed one' – do not stir to vigorously. Think about memory. Remember thinking. Ask questions with unseen answers.

Gaze. Gaze. Gaze.

Fantasize of a different society with a different karma; recall last night's conversations. Wake at 6am to the pouring rain. Sleep lightly. Watch Simpsons premiere on Hulu.

Consume. Consume. Consume.

"How does one remember thirst?"

one American's take on The American

last night, my yin and i went to see The American, a deliberately-paced film starring the impossibly handsome, and impressively flexible, George Clooney. as the film makes abundantly clear in the first half hour, George is the type of hitman who can do some push-ups, knock out a few pull-ups, and still have enough stamina to finish up a set of crunches with a seated forward bend. you know that yoga has truly reached the masses when assassins use it to alleviate their existential crises:

George's is even more impressive

but this is beside the point.

the point is that i saw Anton Corbijn's last film three years ago in a half-theater/half-concert hall in West Palm Beach. i have little recollection of Control, but after a bit of research i discovered this fragment written on 28 December 2007:

and from that day on she was inextricably - and inexplicably - linked to that shirt she wore and the band it endorsed. and therefore to Joy Division and Ian Curtis and so when there was a free screening of a biopic depicting his life, hers was the first number i dialed. but she didn’t answer.

i wonder sometimes, how many "she's" and "he's" are relegated to the graveyard of memory? i think of them as tiny anonymous tombstones marking all the divine beings we encounter – the ones whose names we never bother to remember. this, too, is beside the point.

the point, finally, is that The American was not a bad film, especially for its genre, and if nothing else the beautiful long shots of the Italian countryside and tasteful ample use of rack focus make it worth seeing. in the end, my largest qualm was neither the interruption of pointless gun battles, nor the heavy-handed Christian imagery that ends the film.

no, my biggest annoyance took the form of two steroid guido meatheads, who sat three rows in front of us with an empty seat between them. they were clearly on a date, obviously unable to admit it to themselves, and they talked throughout the film, in spite of my request to be quiet. i told my yin: i may have to take a beating for opening my mouth.

by the time i fell asleep, however, the meatheads had faded from memory; and, in an unconscious homage to the film's love scenes, i dreamed of exotic prostitutes in a bordello. Indian, Persian, Arabic – there is enough libidinal Orientalism in my dream life to make Edward Said blush with envy. sadly though, there was no sex to speak of, only the drift of bodies through the dreamscape as beauty faded into beauty dissolved into beauty...

i woke in the middle of the night.

on reading Murakami in the morning

my yin and i woke the morning and spent an hour in bed reading Haruki Murakami: me, South of the Border, West of the Sun; and her, The Elephant Vanishes. i was turned onto Murakami some months ago, when i received a random missive from a friend in Portland. he has known nearly as many incarnations of "me" as myself, and the letter came, unexpectedly, in response to this very forum.

but this is beside the point and, overly comma-ed.

Haruki Murakami, living genius

the point is that with each new obsession, i find myself taking on aspects of the object of my fixation. in yoga this is known as dhyana, the point at which the subject's concentration on the object becomes so constant as to erode the division between them, allowing two to become one. in less precise (or at least less pretentious) vernacular, i believe this idea is best approximated by the expression: "imitation is the greatest form of flattery."

and that is exactly what i found myself doing this morning, when i finally set aside Murakami's novel and picked up my journal. what came out is eerily apropos of the overcast and evening showers that have dominated the past three days, and it's almost as if my friend's beloved Portland has come to visit South Florida, each raindrop a postcard from the past...

all fragments written on 25 September 2010 and taken from:

my journal, the one that spans from summer to fall

fragment #1

wake and make coffee, journal, probably read some – what happens on these forgettable mornings doomed to anonymity? one task flowing into the next without even the structure of routinization to etch its meaning into memory. maybe this lack of memory is the meaning. perhaps i've been reading too much of alienation in Shibuya, Shinjuku and Japan. tiny unpronounceable fragments signifying an immense landscape - as much psychic as geographic - of which i've never known.

a former lover, a girl with a grandmother in Kyoto, may have told me of these places, but if so i've long since forgotten. what i do remember is calling there one December. she had left index cards with phonemes written on them (black or blue, i do not know) so i could call her grandmother's home and ask to speak with her. i do not remember the conversation, but within the year it no longer mattered; there is no greater distance than the width of a bed between lovers, one of whom is already gone.

this is not the girl with a grandmother in Kyoto

fragment #2

we leave at 8pm, drop leftovers at home, and go to the inlet in search of a drum circle. i don't want to be there, but go anyway, remembering how my earlier agoraphobia had proven fatuous and empty. we find no one but fishermen and geriatrics, burnouts and immigrants, a strong breeze and the current rushing under the bridge. there is a deceitful full moon behind the clouds, promising to reveal itself.

we drive home moonless and silent.

this is not the drum circle in question

fragment #3

the final thing about last night is that strange tongue-tied sensation while talking to J___ and G_____, like i couldn't quite express myself, or else the words got contaminated as they traveled through the air. i envy, sometimes, the (apparent) ability of others to say what they mean, or at least not notice or care how their words are destined to fall short of true communion. i got a flash of this in bed with my yin yesterday, when i looked at her face after making love.

in that moment i gained a momentary understanding into the nature of images. her face, only inches away, was nonetheless separated by an unbridgeable chasm. the eye is forever flawed, forever searching for what is outside of itself. it relies upon the hands, upon the lips, upon the touch to bring it closer to the things it holds dearest – but it can never be one with them.

so long as we are dependent upon images, we are locked in a world of infinite superficiality, a world without depth, where every passing gaze promises to bring us close, but only pushes us further apart.

this is not the image in question

nightmares, Everest and how i should spend my time

i've had nightmares for three nights running: being unprepared for class, discovering a coworker's mutilated corpse, and my family being attacked by lions in the North Carolina mountains. sadly, these unpleasantries were neither interesting nor complex, but rather the generic garden variety nightmares that any Austrian this side of Freud could interpret and diagnose.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that i've found myself caught mid-stutter these past days or, more precisely, sutured within a stutter. i think it has something to do with over-reading. i've been consuming tens of thousands of words each day, working my way deeper into research for my thesis. at this point i know i have enough to write, but i keep finding myself being drawn to one more thing and one more thing

and one more thing:

i've been here before.

i read last night about reincarnation in the Mahayana tradition. their conception of cosmological history is truly impressive, divided into kulpas, which are massive time frames that may (or may not) equal the time elapsed between one big bang and the next. according to the book, a traditional description of a kulpa is that it is "the time it would take for a bird with a piece of silk in its talon, flying once every century over the top of Mount Everest so that the silk brushes its peak, to completely erode the mountain."

the north face of Chomolungma

that's a long time.

i have some thoughts on the matter that have nothing to do with the matter at hand, but i do wonder about Everest. allegedly, it is known to those who know it best as Chomolungma – the Goddess Mother of the World – and this fact alone reminds me of what Chris Marker calls "the unbearable vanity of the West."

apparently George Everest argued against having the peak named in his honor, but i have difficulty attributing such humility to one of the great colonial geographers of our time. (the Greeks, i believe, would call it a problem of ethos.) regardless, it is doubtful that Everest ever even saw the Goddess that now bears his name. if my yin were here, she would say "that's exactly what you need to spend your time thinking about."

Sir George Everest, the world's most famous dead geographer

i suppose it doesn't matter.

what does matter is that all this reading has left less time for writing, and i've found myself recycling old material on this site, quoting other people, and generally avoiding the keyboard. Saylor tells me that there are "input periods" and "output periods" in the creative process, and i suppose the summer was one of those input periods for me. the seasons have shifted, however, and i feel now that the time is right to write...

so to speak.

follow, through

over the weekend my yin and i drove to Miami, yin-in-law in tow, to join some friends at a gallery opening in Little Havana. we had been there once before, some months ago when summer vacation was a forecast rather than a memory.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that one of our friends called me out on the lack of follow through regarding my summer reading list. i have not, as promised, offered a review of all the titles on the list; and, while the reasons for this are multifarious and (sometimes) nefarious, it can generally be boiled down to one simple explanation: i haven't read them all yet.

in spite of this fact, today is the first day of autumn and what was my summer reading list has now metamorphosized into a list of incomplete tasks. this in being the case, and in lieu of a full reckoning, here is my (incomplete) list of favorite quotes from books i read this summer.

Favorite Quotes, in (approximate) chronological order,
From Twelve Books I Read This Summer

1) Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert:

"This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one."


2) Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan:

“What makes the value of the icon is that the god it represents is also looking at it. It is intended to please God. At this level the artist is operating on the sacrificial plane—he is playing with those things, in this case images, that may arouse the desire of God.”


3) Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki:

“Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.”


4) The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek:

“The post-structural position constantly repeats that no text could be totally non metaphysical… however, every text, however metaphysical, always produces gaps which announce breaches in the metaphysical circle: the points at which the textual process subverts what its ‘author’ intended to say.”


5) Last Nights of Paris by Phillipe Soupault:

The rue de Medicis along which we were strolling at a fair pace is sad around ten-thirty at night. It is the street of everlasting rain.


6) Enragés and Situationists by René Viénet:

"Those who talk of revolution and class struggle with no explicit reference to daily life, without understanding the subversive character of love and the positive aspects of refusal, have a corpse in their mouth."


7) The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami:

"I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that day from morning to night—the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean."


8) The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks:

"If God, or the eternal order, was revealed to Dostoievski in seizures, why should not other organic conditions serve as ‘portals’ to the beyond or the unknown?"


9) Threshold of the Visible World by Kaja Silverman:

“The aesthetic text can help us do something collectively which exceeds the capacity of the individual subject to effect alone.”


10) Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami:

"The bloom of summer came home to me after all these years. The tidewater smell, the cry of distant steam whistles, the touch of girls’ skin, the lemon scent of hair rinse, the evening breeze, fond hopes, summer dreams…
Even so, everything was ever so slightly off, as if little by little the tracing paper had slipped irretrievably from the lines of summers past."


11) Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord:

"The revolutionary project of a classless society, of an all-embracing historical life, implies the withering away of the social measurement of time in favor of a federation of independent times — a federation of playful individual and collective forms of irreversible time that are simultaneously present. This would be the temporal realization of authentic communism, which “abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals."


12) After the Quake by Haruki Murakami:

"Junpei closed his eyes and thought about the long stretch of time that had passed through him. He did not want to think of it as something he had merely used up without any meaning."

well put.

two year old poem (or, beating up on Bill Shakespeare)

Footnote:
(i'm glad we never kissed)

What decencies wrought, these bloated endless nights?
Ginger-soaked palliatives for longing, the wanderlust
of nightfall, and the madness of loving another man's wife.

I anticipate the kettle and glance at the petals; a flower accused
by a dead man of smelling as sweet regardless of its name.

But did he ever call it the wonderwork?

Did he ever encounter a redolence so sublime as a word unspoken?
Or cry Muhammadan tears on the Friday nights of Ramadan?
Did he ever face the dilemma of Dostoevsky:
eyes closed, mouth open in the dark?

Did he ever throw art into the void, knowing
the art, knowing the void, knowing that
he had done it before, that he would do it all again?

And, if he did not answer these questions,
can it really be said he ever lived at all?

William Shakespeare, dead Englishman and wearer of earrings

Spirit of the Beehive

last night my yin and i watched Victor Erice's El espíritu de la colmena, a hauntingly beautiful film set just after the Spanish Civil War. it is laconic, well-paced, and exquisitely photographed, evoking dreamlike tones while simultaneously foregrounding a Spanish countryside that bears the indelible marks of war.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that the film left me sleepily restless, and i woke more than a dozen times to the amber glow of a salt lamp left on in the corner of our bedroom. each time i returned to sleep i fell into a new dream, and although none of them dealt with Spain, Erice's film permeated them all. in attempt to exercise this spectre, and improve my French, i submit the following photo essay:

L'esprit de la ruche

les enfants d'histoire, qu'est-ce que vous voyez?

une porte ouverte?

ou un écran vide?

les traces de monstres?

ou une salle de classe?

un champ infini?

ou un essaim dénué de sens?

un train absent?

ou une lumière mystérieuse dans la nuit?

les enfants d'histoire, je prie pour vous tous...

on problems of syllables

too often, now, it seems
my mind running away
pulled into the pleasant
swirl of metaphor, dirge
and Manhattan: meaning
less and empty, over full
and void; the inner

rupture of syllables.

eleven. e-lev-en.
|iˈlevən|. 11.

(my sister says "make a wish.")

is each consonant not a death in itself?

(a, e, i, o ,u)

the lips touch.

why ten?

would a world of amputees count in base-2?

the
laptop
severed
extension
of my soul
are you jealous
of pen and paper?
the five forgotten
vowels holding
language
to get
her

the space between words.
t h e s p a c e b e t w e e n w o r d s.

i have encountered. every. logical. objection.

(and still, i wait)

"the music's stopped, but we still dancing..."

another version of this poem lives here

dancing with kid sister
(everything is more fun with palpable sexual tension)

It’s a habit
I have it
I half it

then double up again.

and again and again.

and again and again and again.

Taylor

and Sarah

and Sara

and Jeff

and Meghan

and Meghan

and Me

and one more Jeff
just for good measure.

It was like Noah’s ark that
chichi sushi Saturday night
before the meningitis took hold.

We ran inside the club to escape
ping pong balls pelting the pavement
pregnant with the promise of free bar tabs.

Singing with my sister:

“the music’s stopped but we still dancing...

the music’s stopped but we still dancing...

the music’s stopped but we still dancing...”

(Not every gerund is a metaphor.)

Meeting for the first time, half
knowing looks exchanged with
old friends once, sometimes
twice, met before.

[lapse]

She saved me:

a) an embarrassing retelling
b) sauerkraut and anorexia
c) we relocated to Dada

The answer is:

d) all of the above.

We relocated to:

a) crab-ridden couches
b) one a.m.
c) brownies
d) tonic water

The answer is:

e) Wednesday night in the rain.

illustration from:
For An American Girl With a Czech Surname
1st edition chapbook, limited to 50 copies
(suggested) contribution $5.00
email: circlesallthewaydown@gmail.com

still morning, Jim?

in a movie theater
eyes shut:

i saw you

freezing in
the arctic
of our dreams.

i saw you

the sand sifting
through your fingers
like another's darkness.

i saw you

anxious with
thoughts of bare oceans
that move as thighs
of an eventual sunset.

i saw you

dancing like the children
of great diplomats
with our lean bodies draped
in bedsheets and leather flags
while the orchestra made sounds.

i saw you

always too near
and I am everything
that comes moaning free
and wet
through the lips
of our lovely grind.

i saw me

like you

(I wasn't built by
any process
other than
the poem itself...)

the poetry did not arrive
until
the plagiarism was over.


Jim Carroll (1 August 1949 - 11 September 2009)

*all italics from Jim Carroll's Living at the Movies, © Penguin Books

correction: thirty-three and counting...

Robert Lowell
(died thirty years ago today)

“I am not feeding you,” she said

(and meant it)

so begins

the thai tofu toothpick tango.

the car, the talk, the question:

do you want

an eighties flick, with cusackian overtones?

we can talk in the parking
lot, in front of the record
store, with the sun burnt,
sienna and sinking in the sky.

or

a late nineties indie, with kerouacian undertones?

we can ramble as we
walk, and amble as
we talk: long tracking
shots as we trek from
record store to book
store to twilight shore.
mannequins marking
the shift in mood;

(dissolve to)

swimming in the ocean
at night, our push to

keep

apart

the undertow

pulling us back together.

excerpt and illustration from:
For An American Girl With a Czech Surname
1st edition chapbook, limited to 50 copies
(suggested) contribution $5.00
email: circlesallthewaydown@gmail.com

September 11: evolution of a day

2006

i
m
age
miss
in
g

2007

2008

Ladri di biciclette
(re: bicycles & towers, circles & thievery)

Aren't we all?

From the instant we take birth
until our last breath,
we steal one moment

after another

calling it our own,
trying to find our way home.

Wayward minds,
waiting wives,
and children's lonely eyes.

Lonely children's eyes
as they watch their fathers
abandon them on street corners
– for bicycles.

(the dharma can never be lost,
but neither can it be found)

It simply waits while
we run the Roman streets,
channeling Goths and Gauls,
watching movies on Wednesday nights
from the comfort of air-conditioned condos,
watching the rise and fall of post-war Empires
during election years.

Writing responses
to Italian neo-realism,
reminiscing about Luigi Galleani
on recommendation of beautiful Russians,
and looking for the Buddhahood in Mario Buda
seven years (to the day) since eighty-one years
after the first Wall Street attack.

2009

self-plagiarism and repetition along a vertical axis

(variation on "Ladri di biciclette")

From birth
to breath
we steal:

one moment.
one moment..
one moment...

calling it our own.

Children watch
fathers abandon
them for bicycles.

(the dharma
can never be lost
can never be found)

We channel Goths and Gauls
from the cinema-ed comfort of
condominiums, watching Empires fall

in post-election years.

Writing
variations
on responses to
Italian neo-realism,
no longer looking for
Buddhahood, Mario Buda.

Eight years since.
one moment since..
eighty-one years since...
one moment since....

2010

this morning i read:

"I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that day from morning to night—the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean."

– Haruki Murakami

while drinking coffee in bed;

what happens when the sentence fails
to tether "her" back to the collaged
fantasy of Mardou in September 2007

or

the empty "her" i left the year before?

the intermittent, repetitive "her" of 2008

or

the composite "her" emergent the year after?

what about the "her" oblivious to
punctuation, beyond words and
seen only in the spaces between?

the
boundless
instability of
pronouns never
ceases to amaze
me, mimicking
the function
and folly of
memory
itself.

hypothetical

notes
on
dis
en
gage
me
nt

avec l'amour, la compassion et la gratitude
sans la malveillance et les regrets...

la fin est proche, de même que le début.

the Smiths v. Dorian Gray: 1/0 year/s later

note: an earlier version of this poem appeared here.

n() l()nger

no
longer
raining
and
Gray
out
side

or
the
thorn
side
boy
at
the
door
.
no
longer
the poorly
lit living room
of cotton and Oscar
Wilde. no longer insomnia
mourning and morning. no longer
i still recall: the fleeting feeling
of fleeing interrupted by
the metallic click
of space
heaters
.
no
longer

those
empty
days
and
the
Siren
siphon
of
night.

three years ago, tonight, somewhere in north Miami

"transgression"

image from:

For An American Girl With a Czech Surname
1st edition chapbook, limited to 50 copies
(suggested) contribution $5.00
email: circlesallthewaydown@gmail.com

analysis of yesterday's word association

Part 1: analysis

(the linear mind)

my yin and i took a walk on the beach Sunday afternoon. it has been an especially chaotic and confusing time since our return to Florida, and we walked to the water seeking solace.

what we found were Germans and drunkards.

we turned around and headed home under overcast skies, and it was if the tides themselves had been thrown from their natural rhythm. i imagined what would happen to the Earth if its moon were to disappear and began playing word association in my head.

Part 2: analysis

(the circular mind)

_the
wo(___)rd
assoc(______)iation
turned(_______)back on
itself, le(________)aving me
just wher(___________)e i started:
our apartm(____________)ent, our pool,
our kitch(______________)en; all these
things se(____________)emed near
and far, p(__________)resent and
absent. i(_________)heard the
sound o(_______)f thunder
but the r(_____)ain never
came.

Part 3: analysis

(the plagiarist mind)

"Still, you grasp human existence in terms of these rather absurd activities resting on relatively straightforward motives, and questions of right and wrong pretty much drop out of the picture. That's where memory takes over and fiction is born."

- Haruki Murakami

Part 4: analysis

(the elided mind)

the most interesting thing about this experiment is the fact that the word association:

"rubber, glue, horse, thief, Genet, Ramsey"

has a total of six linguistic items, and yet the pictogram contains seven images. this empirical evidence effectively demonstrates the unstable nature of the written word and calls into question the validity of all testimony, internal dialogue, and scripture.

(sorry Patanjali).

from where does this surplus of images originate?

furthermore, the movement from one thoughtform to another is predicated upon both idiomatic familiarity ("i'm rubber you're glue") as well as colloquial folk wisdom ("that horse is ready for the glue factory"). in another social or linguistic context, it would not be possible for me to arrive at the images in part 3. this fact leads me to ask:

how much of our thought is really our own?

even now the collection of information and motivation and dedication that inspired this rant have ran their course. i no longer feel the desire to type these questions, only the need to close my eyes...

rubber/glue (hopscotch word association in response to bickering loved ones)

Part 1: word association

(in linear form)

rubber, glue, horse, thief, Genet, Ramsey

Part 2: word association

(revisioned as a circle)

rubber

glue

Ramsey

horse

Genet

thief

Part 3: word association

(as appropriated images)

Part 4: word association

(as thoughtforms)

1/2) i'm rubber you're glue.
2/3) that horse is ready for the glue factory.
3/4) horse thief.
4/5) Thief's Journal
5/6) Jean Genet, JonBennet
6/7) Ramsey/Ramses
7/1) condom/rubber

brief, imagined conversation between heavyweights

this man:

Dogen-Zenji

(allegedly) said:

"Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment."

this man:

Ernest Hemingway

(definitely) wrote:

"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so."

this man:

self-portrait, 1999

(occasionally) wonders:

who has more wisdom, the drunkard or the monk?