and it never rains but it pours

just perusing, semi-proofreading my last blog, I noticed that I subconsciously put the word Reality in "" and thus I was drawn to remember our fair Lolita and her Nabokov, "reality is one of the few words which mean nothing without the quotes"
what a perfect backing to my emerging thoughts
alignment with the universe.

And it never rains but it pours-Borges, The Zahir

Sometimes i feel like Henry Darger

I hadn't ever even heard of the man, I had no concept or knowledge of his life or work, but after watching a PBS documentary about this man, in conjunction with the utter massive amount of time I've been spending writing term papers these past few weeks-- i feel i am become Henry Darger.
For those you like I (the former I) who don't know about this man, check out this site http://www.saraayers.com/darger.htm to give a brief overview however, Henry Darger was an extremely reclusive janitor in the early 1920's he had no friends, spent all of his time working, or in his apartment talking to himself...and working some more. A few years after his death, a 15,000 page story was found, complete with elaborate drawings and music, an entire fantastical world all his own creation.

Now I defiantly don't have 15,000 pages and i can't draw-at all, but all of this writing, all of this engagement in what is essentially the same artificial world, the world of dreamscapes and storylines, has left me seamlessly transcending between the realms of fiction and reality.
A lot of people seem to pity Darger for his seemingly empty life, and while that may be true, how can we dismiss the unfathomably complex and beautiful world in which he chose to live, chose to create.

Now for the safety of my well being i think its important for me to make a clear distinction between these two worlds, but the deeper that this class, these books have taken me the hard that becomes.
To draw some more poignant words, i turn to Borges--for he has consumed me as of late, in one of his short stories The Zahir in which a coin (the zahir) has taken over his thoughts, his life his "reality" this concept of dual worlds, consumption, knowledge... "others will dream that i am mad, while i dream of the Zahir. When every man on earth thinks, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be dream and which reality, the earth or the Zahir?"

That's Amore!

in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening, the kindling curves you simply can't stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strummans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deep-dark and ample like this red bog at sundown.

the Buddha on trashy literature.

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will never be shortened, happiness never decreased by being shared The Buddha.

With all the discussion of high vs. low brow, this quote was given to me and reassured me. If lots of people read a particular book...(as Dr. Sexson said--So What?)

Borges

As of recent, I have been time and time again recommended to read Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer with whom i had previously been unaware. I decided that I might as well pick up a collection of his fiction and read--in order to separate myself from the sea of thematic waves that this class an others have dragged me by in inescapable tidal currents-- Borges however, is yet another tsunami.
One though, that I am happy if not elated to surf. I actually, am somewhat convinced that I would like to write my paper incorporating his works, if not focusing on them.
To give you just an idea of how central his writing is to the themes we sit atop, here are just a few (of inumerous) passages that are a distillation of assigned texts.

--These are all from his short story collection entitled the Aleph--

opening the collection, in quoting an essay by Francis Bacon, Borges cites,
"Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth.
So that as Plato had imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

'Nine doors opened to into that cellar-like place; eight led to a maze that retunred, deceitfully to the same chamber; the ninth led through another maze to a second chamber identical to the first (187)"

"I felt that it had existed before human kind, before the world itself. Its pattern antiquity (though somehow terrible to the eyes) seemed to accord with the labor of immortal artificers. (1879)"

"We accept reality so readily--perhaps because we sense that nothing is real (190)"

now in conversation with the dog Argos:
" I asked Argos how much of the Odyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question.
Very little, he replied. Less than the megerest rhapsode. It has been eleven hundred years since i last wrote it.

"No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men. like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world--which is a long way of saying that i am not. "

"I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be all men--I shall be dead"

"Thus, in 1946, by the grace of his long-held passion, Pedro Damian died in the defeat at Masoller, which took place between the winter and spring of the year 1904"

" I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story and so on, ad infinitum (And just when i stop believing in him, "Averroes" disappears). 241)

"Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of cause and effects"

"Idealist doctrine has it that the verbs "to live" and "to dream" are at every point synonyms; for me, thousands upon thousands of appearances will pass into one; a complex dream into a simple one."

then in discussing this coin, the Zahir over which he obsesses, it consumes him:

"In order to loose themselves in God, the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God until the names mean nothing anymore. I long to travel that path. Perhaps by thinking about the Zahir unceasingly, I can manage to wear it away; perhaps behind the coin is God. (249)

If any of you have the chance: Read Borges. Purely amazing.
Like Santiago finding that the gears of the world click in his favor; this author fell into my lap, and completed the labyrinth.

So What?

to note: the following is more or less a yawp of ideas.

So what? This is the question that has driven all men, all things and specifically me for the past few days. I have been un able, try as I might to remove myself from this thought, I have been plagued as it were with an unquenchable obsession. So What? I do not know. But I have had the unyielding feeling, throughout my entire life, yet now it throbs and surges. The seams of my life’s fabric are beginning to strain and burst. It is as if the world has become undone. Peeled away I am become engrossed in this idea of what I supposed could be best described as the Matrix, but to even give it a name is almost laughable for it is in its nature (though it has none, has all, is none is all) unnamable.

A great deal of things-I shall call them- have cumulated over the past few years, and over the past few weeks these things have become more and more rapid and radiant. I shall try to limit them and describe them in understandable and simple means.

-For a long time, for all time We, I, All have been and are still blind.

-To recognize and the blindness is not to see, but it is a movement towards seeing.

-Every religion is the same.

-Everything is the same.

Last night I went to a lecture on William Blake, I suppose this if any is a proper place to start. We all know, or at least should be familiar with some of Blake’s work. What he was getting at, is the same idea that we, the movie the matrix, and everything essentially is leading to. The Doors of perception, and fin(again)ally what is beyond those doors. This is what has been driving me, towards enlightenment or insanity I have not yet discerned. But if we try, at least attempt to grasp this concept, we may ourselves learn to fly. "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

I realize more and more that this may be the absolute truth.

A lot of people speculate that Blake took drugs that induced his visions, to induce his work. Marvin Landsverk tells us no. this is wrong. I believe him. For I do not believe that it is necessary to take drugs to understand this, to read books to understand this, to have science reassure us that this is true. Though, all these things may be an avenue that lead us there, they are not completely necessary. But let us explore these avenues.

First the drugs…

Clearly Aldous Huxley was inspired by Blake. Maybe even more clearly he was inspired by drugs. (On his death bed, moments before death He asked his wife to inject him with a tremendous amount of LSD). We have to erase our negative perception of drugs for a few moments, we have to realize that our everyday functions, function on drug impulses (serotonin, adrenaline, dopamine, DMT-I will get to this later) so to disregard or in anyway devalue a so called “drug experience” is to devalue or dismiss existence as we know it (not know it?).

Anyway, Huxley wrote a few novels about the drugs experience and its door perception cleaning properties, mind ajax. Also note, in the film The Matrix, Upon Neos return to work after his initial awakening there is a scene in which he is talking to his boss, though not seeming involved in the conversation (beyond the keanu norm) and there are the repetition of squeaks, as the window washers out side clean.*

Huxley, speaking of use of drugs states, “urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience.” To see “a brief bug timeless illumination” he goes on to say “To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness” and that “Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be” sound familiar? It ought to, we have read this before, not only in the Four Quartets or everything we have been reading, rather we have read this line before, in fact we have all written it. Though I want to talk about this point later, but I just picked up -after much recommendation- a collection of works by Jorge Luis Borges, he says amongst and array of profundity, “I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be all men-I shall be dead.”

-to interject, I must apologize for a lack of form and seeming construct, what I am trying to talk about rejects all form-

Back. In another example of connectivity, and understanding. I will tell you about a friend I have, that shared with me an experience in which he saw “the gears of the world” as he coined.

There is this South American plant, used often in religious ceremonies and shammanesq visual quest, called Ayuwaska (something like that) the active ingredient is the drug DMT, which interestingly enough is in most plants, most animals, and in all of us…yes. It is created in the brain, the pineal gland often referred to as the “Third Eye”

My friend took Ayuwaska and described the following,

“I began to here a buzzing, louder than a freight train and increasing in intensity, I remember saying something like “uh-oh” and then I was overcome. The buzzing soon was felt in the center of my mind, my third eye, the vibrations I heard and felt throughout my body were mirrored in my third eye, pulsing on the same pattern. I first saw lighting bolts shooting out of everything and tying all things together, as I looked closer the lighting bolts became crazy geometric patterns, almost like fractals with no end or beginning, just expanding upon themselves, but they were all intertwined wither everything, every aura was an extension of another and all was tied by blue-electric-geometric- fractals. I then tried to meditate, and I felt my mind soaring through time and space and I saw that time and space were only illusionary .I was shooting through infinity. It was very intense.”

This is very similar to a lot of what Huxely has to say, and Leary and all the other gurus, There are books upon this subject.

The drug DMT, as I said before is in almost everything, but it is most importantly present in our minds. There is a Dr. Straussmen, (I believe that is his name) has done extensive research on this drug and has concluded, that the drug is released in the mind and the moment of birth, of death, and every night when we dream.

If this is true, and I could really spend weeks discussing this, but if this is true and just try and comprehend this, then at our “birth” and “death” and our entrance and departure from this world, we are exposed to the true gears of the world, then the line between birth and death become far more blurred, and the idea of awakening of birth is far more interesting. In dreams too, we are experiencing this otherworld. We enter another dimension of our capable mind. Then term “it was all a dream” become far more than an easy way to end short story.

-I really am un able to discuss this in its wholeness, and I feel that it is necessary for us to meditate upon this individually-

But think about this, and Finnegans Wake, about lucid dreaming, about…I don’t know, everything. What it means to dream, to wake, to die, to be born. This is an avenue to the truly infinite world that Blake was talking about.

Another interesting thing: Lucid dreaming. Has anyone ever seen Waking Life? You should. In it, it talks about the capability to lucid dream, that is to balance the unconscious self with the conscious mind, that is to balance the DMT in our minds, to flirt with the Doors of Perception.

Now think about Egypt.

-Heavy emphasis on this idea of the third eye

- The other worlds

Now, my knowledge, (at least the knowledge I remember, for if I truly subscribe to this idea, I and everyone has absolute knowledge, we just forgot)

When, in ancient Egypt, pharos died, they would have to pass through the underworld and accomplish a long series of tasks and trials described to them, but the “book of the dead” in order to get into the afterlife.

To pass through this test, the deceased must maintain focus, not forget, keep the balance going, hold their breath until they get through all their trials, without missing a beat, essentially maintain the lucid dream, do not wake, do not fall.

Another interesting thing: I watched this film recently called What the Bleep do We Know? In it, they described that when an molecule, or atom…one of those tiny things is created, they can take one if its electrons and bring it to the other end of the universe, then enact a charge onto another at the very other end of the universe, and both will respond, instantly. Damn. So this means that either information can travel and a pure infinite speed, or that the idea, or perception of space and time are illusionary. And, If we are to believe that all things were created at one moment, “The Big Bang” from one thing, than we are all connected to all things, and the space and time we perceive is an illusion of separation. Damn.

Also, this film discussed how they have recorded one object in 3,000 places at one time. NO JOKE. Not split up, but just in 3,000 places at once. The double slit experiment is also wicked crazy, but I don’t really have the patience to discuss it here. Just check it out on google, it will twist your cap back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEzRdZGYNvA --crazy.

Ok, so back to the so what?

So what, they succeed in turning lead into gold. Though unimportant in the grand scheme, it is entirely important in the grand scheme.

For it is scientific, empirical evidence (for those who need the reassurance) that lead and gold are one, or perhaps that there is no lead, and there is no gold. And what is the obsession with gold and all that shit anyway? I don’t really get it.

But Huxley talks about it a little bit, and I then made sense to me,
“In other words, precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary. ‘the view of the world,’ says Plato, ‘is a vision of the blessed beholders’; for to see things, ‘as they are in themselves’ is bliss and unalloyed and inexpressible”

So gold just makes us remember that we know everything I the world. And are everything

And the fact that scientist turned lead into gold. Is proof! Of the illusion of space and time and separation, it is proof that all things are one.

I can’t really go on

. Read and you will see, meditate and you will see, dream, die, get born, and you will see. Do illegal activity and you will see.

I will try to talk more later.

The entire world is to be said.

To Alicia

I'll preface by saying that, I understand I might not really have strong footing to make the following comments as I am a male and I can't really transpose myself, or empathize. And in some ways I agree with your ideas. But, to involve yourself with an unchangeable facet of the story or play, is to limit yourself. It will bring all things to a halt. If followed to rigidly it can lead to the same type of mentality that brought about book burning/ banning. I know that this is far from you, but it applies to the same principles and the same means. I know you are a self described Orwellian writer, and I'm sure you've read some Bradbury, he has a really well known quote that says, "you don't have to burn books to destroy a culture, you just have to get people to stop reading them". and obviously you've read the tempest, and i guess i can't ask you to enjoy it, but don't allow for such a trivial thing to prohibit you from obtaining something so epochal.