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.