Value systems

27^th January 2012

The grammar studies make me realize that writing maybe a gift. But it is also a craft. And I have to do all I can to turn my passion into craft. How did I not get this for so long? Because – the notion of hard work and application are not something learned in a book, they are something ingrained by time, practice, experience and most importantly an inherent, realized and activated value system.

Change favors the thinking mind

Its rubbishing when someone says to you that you haven't changed or grown much over the last, as many years as they may suppose. You've always believed yourself to be in a constant state of change, and one continues to herald this true, are we all not vehicles of change. Recently, it comes to my mind on how good it would feel to actually finish something I started upon.

But this is the rambling of the day. I've been traveling. This evening I have returned to the place of origin. Change favors the thinking mind, it feels right to align with change, at the same time tempering the now and past lurches of life.

The benefits of waking up

Was spirited enough to reach up my ladder this morning, its weathered and creaking bamboo waiting to break under my weight. Went up to look at my sun, went all the way up. Was able to watch how fast the clouds, like time, were moving against this Great sun. Was able to stare at its perfect rim, at how God had colored it to move. Then as if in a rush for time, it shot up, and I climbed back down, abandoning cloudy dreams and dense ideas. I had been thinking about history, like how my father read it to me when I was growing up, and how we talk about it now, from our own spaces of quiet reading and reasoning. All this under the rising and falling of our calm and fierce sun, as it continues to tell time... keyed up - as I must continue to believe - by a watchful God, who juggles universes and other great, unfathomable artistry.

Rapid Eye Movement

I just. In a moment of fury, a stupor of stupidity, did away with months of writing. Got to remind myself never to read what I write if I always roll eye-balls and react violently towards any of it. I was talking to this girl, and she said something to me like - that - I didn't have the right to do that, to roll up on what I'd written. It was sweet of her to say that. Consequently, I fell in love with her.

The good part of it all is that I know the contents of what I'd been working on, so just need to sit down re-draft and write it all up again. And I love doing that. It makes me feel intelligent, important and sht (HAHA).

Its Summer. Things are drying up, in the evenings the trees start crackling. Tubes and pods start falling noisily onto the roof. Droplets of oily sap or something starts to sweat off flowers, you feel it falling on you when passing under trees. Every thing's dry and earthy. The wind sways its warmth around the place, it cuddles up on the kids, picking them up with its force, causing pink cheeks to tan. The evenings are longer, the nights are shorter. The mornings are 4AM bright with constellations likening a series of ear-studs, as usual the air is fresh and cool with the dew-ness. I find myself asleep in strange places. Mostly on the floor. I've been dreaming interesting dreams; Islands, lighthouses, vast seas, noisy ancient trade ships - real stuff - that finds me waking at the early AMs to think it all through... I stay up long enough so that I go back to bed and into the same early stages of sleep where the REM kicks up again - Dream Sleep.

I find myself spending time with a new circle of people. Chaos Artists and Mad writers all of us pitying each other // and it gets worse with us all reading Dostoevsky telling ourselves how "ridiculous" our stories are...

When stars draw swords

This is the best part of my day. It is about 6PM and it is Summer. The sun has just begun its decent, and in its pass is turning everything to gold. The shadows stretch over the earth and the heat seems to take a breath. Soon, the sky will be a dark rim with pink and purple in the horizon. The stars will begin to unsheathe themselves, and as it was yesterday, a scimitar moon will rise.

The night will draw itself up and about, and at 8PM I’ll go off for my run. In the morning, at 4AM – when I awake, the air would have been cleared of the smoke, the dew would have settled, having dragged the coughed up air to the earth. The stars at that time of the morning, they gleam their brightest, and they just stand there, all of them, so many more than you’d think there could ever be.

dysphoria

Like a rabbit that enters a burrow, that sees and feels clues, the hints and suggestions one by one, before they all come together in realization, that this isn’t a burrow. It was built, indeed constructed by something else. It panics and flees, deeper. The air gets heavier. It feels fear, and the depth of its construction.

This is an ancient hole, one that came about, and still comes with realization. The hole is fear itself. It is the kind of void; that is most specifically shaped, it initiates and completes its own circle.

There is no way from it but through, and the promise of light on the other side. Somewhere along the way, the rabbit must find itself an area to re-burrow, re-enter, to construct its own path, channel a new river. Most likely through the new hole, a new fear, there’ll be, some kind of new genius or realization.
Although many holes have already been dug, written into. But there is light on the other side. Even when it comes up into the night, the constellations fall away, and the nearest star unpacks itself.

Journal Entry from August 2005

Been running everyday. It seems to help the writing, it helps grapple those several trains of thought that run, intersect & basically keeps disappearing... at the end of each station.

I found some old entries (I go through a lot of my previous journals), its amusing to see my POV from all that time ago). An image I drew out, a close friend of mine Adrian, it fell out my 'rubberband notebook' from when I had interviewed him. I always remember his story, & the way he told it. His words ...

"...was high on brown, loving the taste - (he'd said "taste" biting his front teeth) - hanging out the door, my little finger, I felt like I was flying, man like the Titanic... suddenly the train swerves, & I'm out of the train... they put me in a cab.... I don't know how I directed that guy....but lo & behold, I was home, standing up the front door, bleeding all over... much to the joy of my mother..."

Adrian had been working about three years at the rehab, but last I heard, he was back on the streets. A casualty to the low rates of addiction & recovery. He'd once told me, that there's an immorality about choosing to do certain things, knowing the kind of pit your going to fall through. And knowing exactly how its all ending. You feel like your pants are on fire, and you can't do, shit.

It was the same old story, once out of the rehab, bumping into old dealer-friends, then trying to avoid them, they needing money for their own thing & so they crack your skull, they up side down a hatchet on your head. "They thought, that I thought that I was better than them" - the police happened to see the fight, he was the guy with the bleeding head, it was soon learned of off criminal records, the troubled past. What follows, is further social\society stuff - loneliness. Relapse, its followed by flowers - the sweet-sick fragrance that comes from flowers, graves, black clouds & crematoriums. No one's heard from Adrian for years now.

I knew another guy Indian origin - born & brought up in Malaysia, couple of kids in Wales, he used to sink down a bottle of Southern Comfort, everyday. Until one day he decided he'd quit because Jesus died for him. & he did. Went into a coma, no resurrection, his body went into shock, his heart needed the alcohol - to live. Death washed ashore like a message in a bottle.

So I read my journals & other-world stuff in my old notebooks, some of its inane or poor thinking, some of its alright.

It feels good to have a body of work to sift through every now & then. AND NOW. am Off to drop my pretty friend Rajani onto an airplane. and then off to books & Dinner with my highly-knowledgeable roommie; brother Ahimaz!