the geology of beaches

how far
must we be willing
to go

to sit beneath
the tree
of bodhi
and know
why it grows

to know
the weight of snow
in zero gravity

to decipher
the geology of beaches?

"empty of a separate self"

a blank page. a blank page that is born full of lines, full of full lines, lines full of curves and crosses, dashes and dots, already born and waiting for a pen to unravel the stitchwork of time, people, places, and feelings, already imbued in a sheet of dead oak, a sliver of a thousand years worth of sunlight, soil, and rain, an atom within an eternity, full of stories and wit and wisdom, blooms and blossoms and defeats. clear your eyes of remembrance and prejudice and you have yourself a blank page, an open day which is a white canvas, and a white canvas is already deep with white, ya know, not blank or open as you might think. words are written before they're thought of, thought of before they're comprehended, comprehended before they're linked with others we call "words", and before all that is the blank page, awaiting the starting pistol. we say that "life will begin when..." but its already begun and going by the time we can believe we are choosing the outcome. it begins before you awake - the page is writing itself. it can be reasonably stated that the story is compiled in utero, and back beyond to pre-inception. the page is writing itself, is written, before we have a chance to lay hand, eye, or mind upon it (it is when we enter the coliseum with each and every other already-written page that something we call "spontaneity" occurs because we are all walking our very own tightrope of evenly-spaced lineage. worlds coming together, etc...). this page was never blank, always had its own story to tell, its own life bursting from its superficial two dimensions. nothing is blank. the air around our heads could be broken up into individual atoms and recreated as a mosaic of diversity and clashing bodies. the light in our eyes can be upon our skin as waves in the ocean.

"an empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance - almost dull, in fact - in reality, is crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and full of expectancy" - Wassily Kadinsky

-


afraid of the page because of what it might have to say, and where that thought could lead us, ad noctum, into shadowy places where the real meat of life rests in coolness, waiting for the light of illumination to spoil. afraid of strangers because of what their eyes could teach us about ourselves, how they respond to our gestures and inquiries, how their response is more an indication of the real I than the maze within our heads. Gotama sat by that river because it had something to teach him, and because he brought his blank self to it, it had something to teach his open mind, to flow without words into the deep pools of his open ears and tell him more than ten thousand libraries ever could.
we're afraid of sitting calmly and just breathing, like a shark that expires if it stops moving and must devour all that stands in its way. when we sit calmly we no longer express, expell, or produce, but absorb. we have to open ourselves to the flowing of life around us to feed the flow within us. we're afraid of openness; the desert frightens whereas the forest soothes, for example. but the desert opens us as it is open, cracks us open like a clam and sucks out all the soft fatty insides, truly puts us in our place, because walking and trying to gain new vistas, new horizons, to devour, is almost futile and we're better off taking in than putting out in that space. the point being: to be humble and accepting of things as they are. no matter where we sit, stand, kneel, or lay, we are on the verge of entering a wonderfully transformative metaphysical desert, and we'd do well to enter. summits and vistas are valuable, but not so much as the climb, the climb not so valuable as sitting a mile away and dreaming of the climb, the dream not so important as the blank slate that enabled the dream in the first place.

lines i wish i had written

"So now, I am older
than my mother and father
when they had their daughter
now what does that say about me?"

-Fleet Foxes
"Montezuma"

in the margins

i've written myself right off the page, out into the groundless air, and wave my limbs about frantically as if trying to find a way to be propelled in the nothingness. it's a foolish game, trying to recall the moment when my feet lost touch with the ground, about as futile as trying to walk out in the open air. so i'll do my best to float, to stay moving, to keep from taking that fall that many a deep thinker take, into the depths of the very substance of being, an agglomeration of every bleeding heart's blood and every flowing lung's breath and every thinking brain's tick of electric current, a viscous sea that cannot be seen or heard or felt, that cannot be traversed, that cannot be quantified or codified or broken down into constituent parts because the parts are infinite, because it is nothing more than a creation of hyper sensitivity; because it is nothing, just a very deep center of the human psyche, as space equally as small as it is large. its the center, the smallest pinpoint wormhole you can imagine, and its the entirety of the air around our heads, the 360 degrees multiplied by every degree in between. ie, something that is everything, but in reality only something to the mind-travelling wanderer who makes it into something traversible, something that starts in the margin where ink ends and life begins; and that is a very wide margin indeed when fear and focus fuse into thought. but its also the smallest margin imaginable, an eye's blink, a brain's twitch, a moment of indecision when the world keeps right on flowing, and if you miss the margin you're stuck out in the formless sea with no vessel, struggling, struggling so desperately to catch up to the turning pages before they close you out or close in and bury you, and the best you can do is to send bottled messages, sideways glances and silent genuflections in the hope that someone would recognize your plight, toss a rope and pull you in before life pulls away and docks at some foreign port where people speak in wild tongues and dress in wild colors. i get the strong impression that this has happened quite a bit in my life, that the world somehow shifted through epochs in those moments my back was turned, that in those tiny yet universally magnanimous margins i was asleep in the forested mountains of my brain, some kind of cerebral rip van winkle, and when i turned back to face the glowing fray i didn't recognize a thing and the world didn't recognize me, and the more this has occurred the less recognizable we are to one another, the world and i. i suppose it comes down to security. the security to float alone on invisible waters without a vessel for what feels like an eternity, to be alone and foreign in a familial world, and to understand that i'm not the only one that drifts in the spaces between pages, that we're all just planets in space and time waiting to be colonized, waiting to collide with other planets and be broken down into something smaller and relatable, not so grand and elusive.

when i hear that lonesome whistle...

(written the morning after a momentary lapse of morality)

sins are just that: of the moment. sure, there's the mark they leave upon the psyche like a cigarette burn through a piece of paper, and just like that type of burn, depending upon the length of exposure to the burning source, it could expand and expand and engulf the entire piece of paper. but generally speaking the sin, misdeed, transgression, whatever name you give it, is a singular entity. it falls upon the sinner to keep the exposure to the burning element short, so the mark upon the mind is not one that expands but one that stays a singular entity, kind of like "the moment." leave the moment to be what it was when it occurred, do not try to reason or rationalize with it if it did not spark an ongoing process, let it sit and fade like a loving parent in your car's rearview the day you leave home for good. just like the parent, the sin will always be there, but how much credence you lend it will determine how much it will hang over your head like a hovering vulture, or it could simply vanish like a hummingbird, something loud and flashy that makes itself known quite well and disappears, leaving a minor mark that vanishes as life resumes its timely progress.

timely progress. like a slow moving freight train. imagine sitting on a stump in the woods next to a railroad track, trying to read the words on the cars of a mile-long freighter, or take a mental note of the color of each car, or trying to match the pitch of the clanking metal to a key on a piano. the moments of life are kind of like that: going by in a procession, linked to the ones before and after and related to them, moving slowly, but not slowly enough to compute the magnitude or unique color of each, beating along well-worn tracks to a song that, as hard as you try, you cannot seem to change the tune of, and the tune stays as constant as the songs of your parents, your peers, neighbors, even strangers you'll never meet.

now imagine an irregularity in the track. it happens every so often on most sets of tracks. it all depends on the severity of the deformation and where it lies on the tracks. if you are aware of a coming irregularity sometimes you can switch tracks and continue your constant churn forward, as smooth and constant as a calm late spring day. if you have no other track to switch to, you can slow to a halt before the break in the tracks, take in the scene as the break is mended. though, i'd say more often than not, the irregularity in the track is a subtle one that we cannot see ahead of time. we plod forward at a steady pace and before we can realize what has happened, the train is off the tracks in a muddled wreck, unmoving, consumed in slow-moving flames. and sometimes the only way to remember that we are still alive is to be thrown into the fire.

holding on

often times we find ourselves unconsciously grasping at things. for me, this most recent time, it was a digital watch. i was awakened before dawn to the grating mechanical sound of the alarm. i pawed around in the dark to find the offending noise and silence it for disrupting my broken sleep. once i laid my hands on it, i could not let it go. "holding on to time, i see," my dreams seemed to say to me. subconsciously grasping at those slippery numbers, those figures that slither through our fingers like snaking wisps of smoke, or like the finest grains of sand from an ancient beach. my life is not as specialized as i might think; everyone holds on to time in their on small or large ways. photographs, journals, scrapbooks, children, houses, memories. in this way, i was taking a literal translation of the concept. maybe because i never thought i had a use for the more superficial figurative interpretations of holding on to time, and those necessities you shrug off often have a way of finding their way back on to your shoulders. i really do need to find a way, just like everyone else, to hold on to time, and the watch in my half-sleeping hand was a most fitting way to let myself know that those numbers i disregard have some meaning in the larger sense, just as important as those distant mountains or a spectral halo around the sun or plate tectonics or the expanding universe; the human sense, you know? and being a human being, how could i not relate in some way to buying a house and filling it with pictures and newspaper clippings and children and fine wood furniture? because i certainly can: i'm building a house for words, and putting into it all sorts of crazy objects of thought, as much memories as future contemplations (which themselves are based on memories). such is the human condition, we can not be in the present or looking to the future without memory being the strongest factor. i'm holding on to words, which, just like numbers, are figures we train our minds to recognize and formulate into thoughts. and, just like numbers, our entire system of living is based on these sets of scribbled lines we place so much symbolism upon. and, just like numbers, words are slippery creatures, they can be, objectively, only random configurations of markings that we've been trained to understand.

holding on. human life is a lot of holding on. we hold on to a lover's hand because we want to keep them nearer to our self, or because we don't want them to float away like helium (which inevitably happens: read a great novel, watch a great movie, have a cup of tea and a conversation with an elder; it is unavoidable). we hold on to life, in the most dire or mundane of situations. all those houses, with pictures tacked to the walls with all those familiar yet morphing faces, or all the books on the shelves full of immortal words, are a means of holding on to something that doesn't change so much, because all of life is change, and change means those slithering numbers and words will mean something different tomorrow than they do today, which is to say our entire conceptual foundation of how we quantify life shifts with the minutes as the minutes themselves are shifting. the best we can do is to find something, someone, somewhere to hold on to.

on reality and freedom

the sword that kills the man is the sword that saves the man.

when mind and body become one, the man is free.

-Wumen Huikai

reality. a slippery slope to traverse, one that's been well trodden. the ideas of reality, the inner and the outer realities. to be in touch with reality means what? to live selflessly, externally, out of your bones, out of your own mind, to be out of touch with your self? or does it mean to cultivate a world within what is a strained-through version of the world without, to take all visions and sounds and make them harvest for the novel or movie that is the life we live in our heads; reality, in other words. reality, in other words: the goal is to be in touch with both inner and outer but never wholly either, never wholly both. a weak compromise of half and half, a cap-and-trade system of the when, where, and why we choose to reside in whichever reality we decide upon in a particular instant. then again, who's to know? if a battle of realities is going on, no one would notice. the air between people is empty, empty of reality; the inner workings do not freely project into the spaces between us. the only way to convey reality is through speech and body language, which, in terms of barebones reality, never fail to come up short. real reality. real reality is brass tacks honesty, the inner world not distilled, diluted, dissipated, but put forth with honesty. when the inner world meets the outer world in honesty, we have our harmony of internal and external, cerebral and tangible. the inner wilderness can change as a result of the synergy. there is some futility in all of this. there is no real way to externalize your personal reality. langauge has such a loose foothold in both inner and outer reality that to use words to attempt to honestly convey the inner world to the outer would result at best in a half truth. because your words have to leave your body, enter the tenuous air, and filter through someone else's reality. the effect of words can never be a full impact.

_


if dreams are as free as they are said to be, then what about the waking life? freedom is a dubious title anyway, as even the concept and the actuality of freedom have boundaries. our freedom comes within the bounds of what we can do with it, our own psychic and physical limitations, boundaries of geography, when our boundaries cross with the boundaries of the freedoms of others like a Venn diagram, freedom on both sides is impinged. the freedom of dreams has its limits as well: the limits of our minds, which are not many but do exist; the fact that dreams must exist within the bounds of sleep and come to an end when sleep ends, and those dreams that carry on past the line of sleep are subject to the same limitations espoused above. if only we could see how freedom fools the wise, how the idea of freedom makes most believe they are actually illimitable. it must be the illusion of freedom that creates real freedom. the idea here is that freedom cannot exist in the outer reality, that our bodies are subject to gravity, distance, and decay; that we can never be truly free out there where the air is unpredictable, unpredictable due to the staggering amount of bodies under the guise of total freedom and with the limitations of space bearing down on them. so then freedom is a trick on outer reality played by the inner. freedom is a state of the mind, the inner reality believing its boundlessness, which in outer reality may be a falsity. to the mind, it truly believes itself to be boundless.

when mind [inner] and body [outer] become one, the man is free.

posterity

a life written out: is it more lived than the life plodding in silence? the walking, speaking, moving, thrusting life? the universality of words makes the written life seem interesting, but only from the right pen on the right paper at the right time, otherwise it is just another life that plods and crawls, gasps and fades and blends in to the fray like a stalk of corn in Iowa, like another wave in the ocean. the record: it is the record. we are burying ourselves with our recordings of the moments, like sediment in a dead ocean bed, and we will be the fossils one day, we will be the marvel of the time to come. the pictorial procession or the novellic scripture will be the secrets, and everything we've lain upon the ground will be golden. that is the hope, correct? in photographs with dulled edges, or yellowed written pages from history, or warped warbling phonographs, the novelty of time stretched to the breaking point makes the most benign life seem so shockingly, heartbreakingly beautiful; the television repair man looks like Clark Gable, the seamstress seems like Athena. to witness a surviving record of life attempting, striving, yearning to be lived is deeply moving. an old photograph needs no caption or date, no names or places, just the fuzzed-out quality of the scene and the burning desire in every half-smile and half-open eye is a story we all know, that of life burning to be lived at every moment. the records we leave, what we hope to leave in our wake, is a testament to having lived, bled, having walked and breathed and sweated and made love, a drama so dense it would be a wonder we ever had time to sleep. (of course Clark Gable and Athena must've slept sometime). that is the wonder of posterity, how a life so mundane, even a life well-lived yet stocked with mundane moments can seem with hindsight to have been a whirlwind of razorblades and honey, a tragicomic storm of emotions, dreams, and happenstance.

leave behind only bones, and we'll look like martyrs.

a new medium

"Summer forest, looking up"
Acrylic on canvas
8 1/2" x 11"

a lucid interval

woke up to the sound of gunfire, thought the world around was at war. I shuddered in my sheets while strange visions flashed before my eyes: mothers birthing children, vultures descending on carrion, an icicle melting from an overhanging roof, trees falling in the forest in the face of gale winds, and I could even see the trees decompose, I could actually watch the energy transfer from the decaying wood to the soil. I was hallucinating, envisioning the cycle of life and death, maybe the proverbial "life flashing before one's eyes." but these visions were not of my own life, were they? the visions were of all of life, one interflowing watercourse, and my mind instinctively recognized that I am a part of all of life, it is all a part of me. my reverie was shattered by more gunfire, much the same pattern and rhythm as the first. I closed my eyes to shut out the horror, and flashed back to a moment in my childhood. I was at my grandmother's house in New Jersey's farming country. in fact most of my extended family was there, one of those impromptu gatherings my Italian-American family was known for. there was a terrible thunderstorm, and we all sat on the long stone porch to watch it over the fields. the lightning traced evil spindly fingers in the sky. by the time the storm had gone on for a few hours your eyes were so trained on the flashes of light you could follow each bolt from inception to nerve ending. my grandmother was nowhere to be found. i went into the house, which was darkened in the power outage, and stumbled by candelight through each room not making a sound, knowing even in my youth the holiness of a dark and silent house. my grandmother emerged from the darkness into the hallway to face me, shocking me a little bit. she came close and knelt before me. I could smell the red wine on her clothes and her fingers. in the clouded darkness she looked almost blue. she seemed to have something dire to tell me. she spoke slowly and carefully, because of the wine: "a lightning bolt is the tree of heaven rerooting on unbelieving earth, illuminating the darkness we all walk in, but only for long enough to see what we miss with our eyes closed. keep your eyes open, my son."
I came back to the present and shivered a little, though it was almost summer in the Valley. shivered at the thoughts going through my head, shivering at the thought of the gunfire right outside my door and how all these thoughts, these words, would soon amount to nothing but dust if the gunfire came any closer. another smattering of gun shots rang out, in the exact same pattern and rhythm as the first two outbreaks. my mind this time went blank. all was silent as a cathedral in between the shots. I was searching the silence and the blankness for meaning. another spat of gunfire, and immediately another, hardly a silence in between. I swore I heard a baby crying in the next apartment, and along the corridors children and mothers screamed at one another. I shivered again and waited for my benediction. like a snapping bone, my mind cleared in an instant, as did all other sound. 'was I dead?' I wondered. because I was in the same room and felt exactly the same as when I went to sleep. I felt and looked around. everything in its proper place. in the street, a car rolled over scattered gravel and the stones made loud popping sounds in the friction between tires and pavement. this was my gunfire, gravel under tires. I could have sworn I was awake for the first time.