being an artist

is something i am entirely unable to characterize.

fuck words, sometimes.

i mean, the more i try to express these ideas, reach clarification regarding anything, everything sinks to a new level of incomprehensibility. what the fucking shit am i doing bothering with words so much?

i am constantly reaching this point of ‘oh, here i go again being unable to say what i want to say’- and the worst part is that language’s inability to describe me is becoming an obsession. i am fixated by my own voice, despite its ineffectiveness. which i don’t think is a word.

but maybe it is.

words do fascinate, but it drains me to deal with it so much all the fucking time. i wish i could take a break from them and still express, or feel like im not wasting.

wasting what?

i guess thats what i need to simply breathe and and become comfortable with. feeling restless. like i need to always be creating. ive let a lot of things fill me, and now i think theres an anxiety to translate it.

physicality. thats language, too. though language itself has no physical thing that goes with it, it is somehow the physicality in that it is a public thing. and im working a lot on reconciling this whole crazy binary system whatever the fuck we’d call it by understanding just how what happens in here (points to head) equates with whats happening… everywhere else, including other people’s brains.

because, according to the brain that’s busy forming these thoughts, all those other brains are the other world, aren’t they?

isn’t that kind of a mindfuck?

i still haven’t found voice, and maybe, like god before it, should simply stop believing something so identifiable and concrete really exists. i mean, i don’t even really know what im looking for. an awareness of what i want to say versus the inconsistency of what actually comes out of my mouth? the quest to rectify the two and make them the same thing? well…

well, i don’t know.

but now im creating fake people who somehow play a role in the real events of my life, and i’m afraid i may be winding down into the wrong tunnels, now. i think that may be just the thing.

but none of these tunnels really have the labels wrong and right, like, naturally. thats a product of my thinking, which means its a created reality.

created. reality.

huh…….

November 10, 2008. Uncategorized. Leave a comment.

Post-nap high

is in full effect, and so I will utilize it and get a little bit of writing done, something I’ve been barred from because of all this RA stuff.

i wanna think a little bit about the name i chose for this blog. it feels like it gives it a purpose, and its speaking to me big these days, so maybe i can uncover a little more of its lucidity. just maybe.

ive always had a liking for the word cacophony. its typically reserved for usage associated closely with sound: music, conversations, the general atmosphere of a room can all be pretty cacophonous. i appreciated it more for the possibilities of meaning it has when you describe states of being, or how things feel, rather than sound. i guess if you take the literal meaning, then my interpretation doesn’t really hold up, but i’m a poet (aren’t i?), and so i don’t worry about it too much.

well, these days… i have a good example for it. as part of training we were instructed to write our own symbol, or some sort of visual representation of ourselves or a part of ourselves. i was at a loss for a while, but i ended up choosing something from zen- that circle we see and hear about sometimes. it was a good choice: im a buddhist; the particular meanings of the zen circle inspire and thrill me. but i thought more about other possible implications of the circle. it always wound back onto the cacophony, or the myriad of other potential words we can use in trying to get at this concept.

a further illustration. i left for japan thinking to get my shit cleared up. i was prepared to disassociate myself from facebook, email, telephones, all of my friends, writing, journalling, taking photos. all of that ‘nonsense’ that i had worked into my head as being somehow involved with a very elusive kind of dissatisfaction that i was thoroughly unable to understand. in a pretty successful way, i did without those things, but encountered an entirely new set of circumstances. and i wasn’t happy there. or, well, that’s an emotional generalization that doesn’t exactly capture what i did there. i saw some beautiful things a people. i stood around a shrine once crying my eyes out because of the prayers i was reading around this god tree. that was intense.

i digress.

what happened, and what i mean to show (to myself, mostly), is that i wasn’t able to clear things up and suddenly feel free and clear. and so i start seeing more this idea that we can’t really reach freedom and clarity, at least in the way we tend to envision it. but it’s not only our expectations for the future that harm us by making us think this way- we see the past in the same way. i was and am locked into my perceptions of my recent past, and in a different way, the distant past, thinking that conditions were more ideal then than they are now. but they weren’t. i was still the same person, and had a host of various dissatisfactions i couldn’t find a way out of.

so i learned, from spring to japan, and from japan to here, that i can’t realistically expect any kind of culminations. they come, to be sure, but they don’t provide the sort of closure or insight i’d really like to have. and the logical but impossible thing to do would be to kill those expectations, and try to settle down into what i have. possible, but difficult. i think the best route for me on something like this is a buddhist practice- a personal kind of construct i have yet to seriously re-examine and try to rebuild. but that is something that i very much want to do here.

writing and music do not connect well in my brain. i listen too much.

so the cacophony is basically the root of experience. in a good sense of the word, if i try to see it that way. its cacophonous in that circumstances are always changing, new conditions are constantly arising and in order to understand those conditions i behave in a way that makes new ones. and, especially in college and on all of these various cusps, i try to find a stability that won’t really happen. i’ve met so many new people over the course of a week and a half. some of them i’d already call friends. how can things change so quickly? that whole set of people from japan, now worlds away. now strangers in their own right.

this is all very odd, and cacophonous. but it also does excite me. if i look deep and evaluate honestly how i relate to it, it frightens me, but it makes me feel thrilled to experience something so unstable and vast. so many complexities playing out on top of one another. how could we ever expect to get a handle on it?

i am not who i want to be. but i resist that, thinking instead that i want to be who i am. whatever that means. seek what you love, love what you seek? mottos with not as much substance as we may be inclined to believe? these are difficult things to see sometimes.

but the circle, the zen circle moves at an astounding rate. we can’t always see the fluidity, but there isn’t really a beginning and an end. it’s just a circle, and it’s always folding back into itself. life, too, folds into itself. i relearn lessons at a constant speed. i lost my faith in the permanence of the things i know. emotionally, at least. real, hard truths can be easier to retain. but so often, during meditation, for example, i would be sitting on the pillow and stumble upon some elation and think ‘this is really how it is’- i would learn a new lesson. but that’s in the context of an intense period of relaxation and insight, which arrive on occasion. when you snap back into the typical mentality, you often learn all these huge chunks of wisdom you were previously convinced would never be forgotten.

cacophonous. unstable.

the tagline here: tune into the discord, says the same thing to me. it says try to wrap yourself into the madness that initially causes nothing more than discomfort and fear. it is scary to believe that fundamentally there isn’t really a system involved. even key philosophies of buddhism seem like nonsense to me. there is nothing to illustrate that karma is really a physical force that acts upon us. but i think the lessons that come out of karma are useful. it is true that we find very few constants in the world. i readily accept buddhism’s claim that suffering is the only one.

so dark, but what buddhism does with it is perhaps one of my favorite things about it. it accepts discord, disharmony, anxiety, fear, restlessness, as natural human states of being, but it says there’s a way to be these things without having to worry about it at all. life is just scary. we can find ways to be scared without having our whole experience ruined. we can even, in a weird way, enjoy fear.

this mentality of seeing things out of balance and diving straight into it makes me joyful. to a certain extent. tune into the discord…

interesting.

September 12, 2008. Uncategorized. Leave a comment.

It’s breaking the rules already

But i’ve discovered importantly that the feeling of typing is refreshing to me. im eager to participate despite the fact that im fairly tired and am a little crazy perhaps growing constantly crazier i can’t really force the personality out of something i’m writing and even if it’s a serious topic or a distant topic im there. that’s what writing is.

there are certain people i can talk to, more than others, and im realizing more and more that the many me’s don’t align very congruently, that i have several other selves that arrive depending on the people i’m with and i’m not fractured perhaps we’d go with guarded when i say we i mean of course i. tonight is a night of word experimentation and i’m not really afraid to admit that. it’s actually what makes language so incredible is the arsenal we have where we try to pinpoint the movements of our head which i still am unable to determine if it operates in a language or not. so there are feelings and we can use language to elucidate and articulate upon those feelings. and experience, and many other words relating to the odd connection between external and internal. some millions of processes arrive up in the brain and then we have that strange task of attempting to interpret it and i feel sometimes that i’m inherently drawn to this craft of words while at others of course nothing comes of it.

i had a conversation with a woman about capital letters and she skewered them from her name the word we’re looking for is neutered she neutered the capital letters in the same way shes attempt to neuter her ego and remind herself that she is a part of and not above the world. the world meaning of course everything around us composed of people plants animals trains and skylines and of course lone roads of great lamps and various traffic lights shouting out at us from the darkened trenches called freeways.

it was a single conversation with poetry and linguistics and of course one woman being undeniably real shrill though her voice may have been and tedious though her leadership-building exercises may have seemed to me i was unable to resist asking a question that somebody else had already told me the answer to: why did she not capitalize her name?

i enjoyed her answer and fell in love lightly and forgettably and left the room for lunch and we didn’t speak again but she knew my name later it was a nametag and not the conversation though she remembered my face.

today i felt jealous for a hilarious reason- a fellow RA’s room i was in. i looked at his dresser and saw a girl’s panties hanging off of it. i asked whose and he said you have two guesses meaning i knew who it was meaning it was the beautiful girl he showed up at art walk with the night before. incredibly unique appearance and she seemed nice and hes already having sex with her which made me jealous because of course im a young guy in college thus i want to be having sex with beautiful women but i am trying to just be happy for him because he’s a great person and he’s genuine and he deserves it i think.

i am tired but i wanted to write some and because nobody will read it really whose worried i don’t want to worry about so much anymore i wonder how much more i can be pried apart it seems like it started far before japan and slowly i find less and less ground (of the metaphorical variety) underneath my feet as i move around day to day.

so here we go.

September 6, 2008. Uncategorized. Leave a comment.