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.

'lo bro

I know I am in heaven for I have been through hell. I loved samuel beckett's work, but part of the love was the refreshing notion that this was not my life, and part of the refreshment comes from being done with the book. So it is more than clean air I breathe when reading Shakespeare, it is sweet and airy. Like a pecan pie after a long supper of bones and marrow, The Tempest is my dessert.
The term though, is perhaps ill fitting- yet quite snug, and all cut from the same cloth. For language I find tastes like pie, but I know full well that it nourishes the body and soul like...wheat grass. But I find, or i have heard, for most people Shakespeare tastes like wheat-grass and does little more to nourish the soul than stick of butter.
In one of my classes the other day (I shall try to be anonymous even though i don't even know the names of the people in question) when we were beginning a section on Shakespeare's sonnets, I heard the following conversation (and this is verbatim):
bro gurl 1: I hate Shakespeare, this stuff is so stupid. It sucks
bro gurl 2: Me too, he really sucks especially these poems.
2: I know. I hate poetry, its like a complicated and dumb-fancy way of saying really simple stuff. HAHA!
1: I KNOOOW! (in a very bady accent) "me thinkiest me loveth thou. who art as pretty as a pretty rose" HAHA! this stuff just sucks, i mean i like some of his novels i guess but this poetry is-
2: really? I hate his novels! I mean I guess I haven't really read any besides Romeo and Juliette.
1: I never read that, I was supposed to for a class but I just watched the movie instead. I read King Lear though which was really weird, my teacher was soooo creepy.
2: HAHA! yeah, I mean I love the movies, but I just hate the books

I kid you not.
what is the acceptance rate at MSU again?...anyway this made me laugh more than it made me want to beat this very small freshman girls with a Shakespeare "novel". This really made me laugh when I remembered this movie that I saw, which ironically I first watched and thought it was a very bad 'low brow' movie, until i paid attention... if you haven't seen Orange County. do so. or just watch this brief clip about Shakespeare. This should make you laugh

But I digress. All these thoughts epiphanied me and I began to see the unraveling pattern that even in the lowest of the low, one can soar to the highest elevation. The inverse of this being equally true. Its all a matter of our approche, our perception and acception of what is at hand.

The Tempest will give you all the glory and radiance of prose and style that one should expect but, and for anyone who reads the play will realize, it gives you far more than fabulous production, it shows you the gears of the watch.The ropes and curtains of the set ("these our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air') It is a play of deception, it is an expression of and exultation of the lies we are told, it is the wiping away of tattooed tales. We must embrace both the tale told and the telling. Both emotions are canonized here with utmost eloquence, whether we see the clockworks and know, "we are such stuff as dreams are made of" or we wish to be spell-bound as I often do (and this is a soliloquy often turn to):

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments.
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if i then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

To clarify

I said the other day in class that page 44 (starting with the last line of 43) was my opus page. And it is, but I found out that only a couple people have the same copy of Beckett that I do-The one that is black and blue and has Beckett on the cover with shades.
I apologize for anyone looking up in there books page 44 (if anyone actually did. though it probably is just as powerful...but just as easily could deal with his asshole of all things) anyway the page I was talking about begins with.
"For in me there two fools among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on."

this, though devastatingly bleak, I find blindingly illuminating,
Though I essentially have the entire page underlined, i actually ended up circling the entire page, I will share some of the moments within my opus page that stood out

"And that night there was no question of moon, nor any other light, but it was a night of listening, a night given faint soughing and sighing stirring at night in the little pleasure garden, the shy sabbath of leaves and petals and the air that eddies there as it does not in other places where there is less constraint, and as it does not during the day, when there is more vigilance."

"And there was another noise, that of my life become the life of this garden as it rode the earth of deeps and wilderness. Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be."

"I was the precarious calm, the thaw of snows which make no difference and all the horrors of it all all over again. But that did not happen to me often."

"mostly I stayed in my jar which knew neither seasons nor gardens. And a good thing too. But in there you have to be careful, ask yourself questions, as for example whether you still are, and if no when it stopped, and if yes how long will it still go on, anything at all to keep you from losing the thread of the dream.

"so that i might believe i was still there. And yet it meant nothing to me to be still there. I called that thinking."

really the entire page should be listed here, though I have come close, from this alone anyone should be able to see the importance, or power, the engulfment nature of this writing. It has the facade of being bleak and depressing, but all the contrary i find it almost blissful. I find zen in these lines. To add, its all the while hilarious if you take time to recognize the humor, or rather take the effort to remove yourself from the dredges. As Sexson said, this is not a true story, when there is child abuse-we should be laughing, it has to be taken with a heavy bit of salt but all that horrible and wicked stuff is funny if you just can see it for that.

I've told people about this and they've read some and i feel they get the impression I am a really dark person, which is funny to me because quite the opposite, and i think that may be why I enjoy this so much because these things are void from my life, and though it is a novel of emptying out, it is an essential and equally important part of the movments to become full once again.
This book is steeped in refuse, it is rotten, manure, decayed, depraved all these things.
but it is the fertilizer of life. and humor and even beauty
born of the ashes.

"Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires"
"Sunday Morning" Wallace Stevens

Ship of Theseus

Last night i was getting the itch to get out and do something to change the pace of things. As it was 10:30 and I was about 8 beers deep, getting up into the mountains wasn't a viable option. So i did the next best thing: backyard camping.

Sitting around the fire( mostly cardboard and a broken chair-hobo style-) finishing off the beers and starting at the wine, we got into the discussion of Eliot and Beckett and the eternal return. My memory was drawn to a class I took with Dr. Prashanta, who is by the way one of the funniest professors I've had year, whether that is his intention I know not. Anyway, he discussed with us among many other themes, (including the Bahgvad Gita-very knowledgeable...guest speaker?) the philosophy, or the question of the Ship of Theseus.

Paraphrasing, the ship of Theseus was a great massive wooden ship...as time went on it began to deteriorate, repairs were needed, at first one plank of wood was replaced with a new... then a second and a third and so on. At what point, does this Ship of Theseus cease to be itself, and become a new being all together?

Reading Beckett, as I have been doing obsessively, though slowly (I find it is impossible to read quickly, as each sentence can often weigh a Irving, or a Brown, maybe even a Raynd) and I have found a great deal of mention of this slow metamorphosis.

"No, I never escaped, and even the limits of my region were unknown to me. But I felt they were far away. But this feeling was based on nothing serious, it was a simple feeling. For if my region had ended no furhter than my feet could carry me, surely I would have felt it change slowly. For regions do not suddenly end, as far as I know, but gradually merge into one another. And I never noticed anything of the kind, but however far I went, and no matter in what direction, it was always the same sky, always the same earth." (60)

"and the cycle continues, joltingly, of flight and bivouac, in an Egypt without bounds, without infant, without mother." (61)

"Or perhaps it was I who was changing, why not?" (70)

with this quoting, I must go on, I can't go on* this book is peppered with the profound, the hilarious, the depressing and the uplifting.

So all this really has had me thinking, and it had us talking last night about what it means to metaphor, to reincarnate...and what metamorphosis Molly is making to Moran? maybe. And how this pertains to Eliot ( I unfortunately do not have a copy yet, but I will soon-this has been a great thorn in me.) To many passages in T.S. Eliot I could conjure, but several come to mind, namely the one Sarah spoke about, "Old fire to ashes, and ashes to the earth/ Which is already flesh, fur and faeces/ Bones of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf."..."Dung and death"
As Molloy is deteriorating in body and mind, he is making this gradual transformation, his metamorphosis, one rotten plank at a time he is become a new Ship. Like Eliot here, the time of flesh follows a linear pattern, but life itself and time out of our context is anything but linear. we shall all die, but we continue on: fire to ashes, ashes to earth, Always the same sky, always the same earth.

At what point in our transformation to we cease to be? Like the ship is there a point that we do cease? or could it be we forever undergo a series of merging? and with that shall never cease, rather forever continue?

Twenty Minute Lifetime

The inner light...well that was my virginal Star Trek experience, and it was, as I heard other students proclaiming, "horribly cheesy" but the ideas at hand, are really what captivated me, (as well as the flute jams ) I started to think about this idea of experiencing an entire life within the frame of 20 minutes, and whether or not this is possible, whether or not this has happened to me.
Sometime later, I concluded several things:
no, I have never experienced a lifetime in twenty minutes as Captin Jean luc picard has as I have never been beamed by a space probe.
and Star Trek, though apparently steeped in advanced literary themes, is still a waste of ones time.
I did realize though, that beyond any dream I have had, beyond any potentially illicit experience I may or may not have eaten.
that the closest I have come to experiencing an entire lifetime, in the whole body sense, emotionally, spiritually, physically, and even in some ways sensually --its not that weird --Is during the intimate moments I have felt with extraordinary books. I mean this truthfully, it took some time to conclude this, but I have realized, and I have felt the attachment, the engrossment the complete rapture* with many novels. and it is an experience, on par though never quite comparable with life, with love and the act of loving. Everyday I realize more and more I am becoming a nerd, that I am falling in love with literature, but with that realization comes the understanding that literature is the only thing (aside from your life, girlfriends, family, friends etc) worth loving. It is a love of the superficial, but it is the only superficial thing of any worth.

Not only does the term Literature encompass virtually all that there is in the world in its many genres ect, but a simple book, about say a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, can span lifetimes of understandings, emotions, and philosophies. Though not necessarily twenty minutes, but perhaps, I have found that entering the novel, is the closest we can come to entering the lives of others, to experiencing a lifetime within our own (unless being john malkovich is a possibility) I think back on some of the works that, like the star trek, popped my literary cherry and i am drawn to many, but most importantly, the one that, thus far i have been fully devoted, and incorporated into in body and soul would be Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, Though Sometimes a Great Notion got me rolling, Lonesome Dove stole my heart


*I have for a while been really into this word rapture to describe my affinity towards literature, and it has stemmed from James' blog last semester of the same title.