Compendium of Thoughts 87

Compendium of Thought 87

The world is most forgiving of those who know what they want to do, or those who shut up and one thing pursue. But I don’t want to shut up. And I do not want to be forgiven.

——————Story idea: Motorcycle——————-

The man’s motorcycle stalled and sputtered and stopped between two distant cities. A warm tundra of eroded rock and balding mountains for company, he cursed and kicked his bike, he panicked and asphyxiated, he wailed without even the pity of an echo amid the valley, and he called for help until his voice grew dry and tears grew empty, until he gave up and fell asleep.

The man’s motorcycle stalled and sputtered and stopped between two distant cities. A warm tundra of eroded rock and balding mountains for company, he remembered to breathe and not panic in these times of trial and duress. He stared down the road hoping someone would come, his eyes grew bloodshot and he fought back tears and he began to feel unbearably lonely. The night made him cold and forlorn and he yelled for help knowing no one would here as he fell asleep, the only sound his heartbeat.

The man’s motorcycle stalled and sputtered and stopped between two distant cities. A warm tundra of eroded rock and balding mountains for company, he lit a cigarette, closed his eyes, and slept.

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Story idea: The Bus Ride from Usak to Antalya

The two of us sat next to each other on a bus that softly grumbled, watching a couple in rural Turkey through the window, who like blades of grass walked by a lake lapping an idyllic mountain of snow, even older and frailer than all their years in tow. I wondered if, like the mountain and the lake, if like two adjacent blades of grass, if they too spoke in silence, and if in silence they too wondered whether they were in love. Or were just spending the years together. Or if there was a difference.

Nietzsche was undoubtedly right that all modern renditions of ethical systems are caricatures of religions without god. We don’t have the courage or the intelligence or the ability or the heart to envision our own moral system separate from the tenets of the religions that preceded us. If we cannot, then let us resurrect and worship the gods we have killed. If we can, then let us live anew.

Prescription for cultivating attention (Antalya): 3/9:

• You need not be a poet or an artist to have artistic sensibilities. Next time you have the urge to take a picture and post it on social media whether the subject is nature or city or a cat, whether the purpose is to impress or to archive to look back upon years later… write a poem, a diary entry or draw a picture. It does not have be a masterpiece. It does not even have to be good. This practice only encourages a certain slowness, embrace of the minutiae of the engravings of god or of the devil before you. It forces you to really pay attention in a way a quick snapshot never could and the implication is yes, it is better to take in the world slowly, or rather that when you truly take in the world, there is no way to do it but slowly because is it so immense and even a single viewpoint cannot be understood, much less felt in an whole lifetime. And if you worry about the quality of what you produce, remember that you are no different from the greatest writers and artists of our species. Most of what they produced was unsalvageable too and any genius will admit it. The difference is they produced such great volumes, took so many photos, that by sheer chance and the infinitesimal honing of their craft they stumbled upon greatness and stole away fragments of the image of the god they saw into their own creation. Use your own error, your own inimitable perspective, your own experiences, your own slowness, you own soul to capture the world every day day too. And for those who never felt the urge to take pictures whether because they were too busy and never bothered for social media out of sententiousness or would rather pollute their privilege by meditation, eating, drinking, reading, relaxing, escaping, sleeping, music, phone, conversation, company, even smiling, anything perhaps but crying from being overwhelmed thereby superficially exploiting the backdrop of peace, commuting the sin of refusal to engage, like ignoring an infant in need, or shirking the imploring eyes of your lover or your pet when it begs you to just try to look. Or those who never paid any attention to begin with, I urge you to consider that the beauty and purpose of life is to seek and feel beauty- a honor uniquely human- and to negate this truth is to be like a fully faithful Christian man who stubbornly and paradoxically refuses to accept the culminating, definitive, conclusive passage into heaven. I wager that if you try, you will not only find yourself paying attention to more things but also becoming more ethical, more considerate, more humble, more respectful, more curious, healthier, more resilient, gentler teeming with a new ferocity, more artistic, more loving, more understanding of what life means. You will be a better person, insofar as we will never know what is good or correct than what best serves us now and forever, as morals are the ultimate egoism, especially when we consider the world around us and the heavens beyond us. But so too the world and the society and its priorities with improve, aligned with this greater respect for sublimism and beauty. For the rarer few who felt no need in immortalizing certain moments, who rather would let a moment wash over them untarnished and live and die in their own memory, you are perhaps the greatest artists of us all, the ones who should lead us, so beyond us and attuned, that they have become not the greatest creators but already part of the creation. Even I am not there yet but this is perhaps because I don’t want to be.

  • A plea to this generation and all hereafter who are willing, in any remote way, to change.

• STORY IDEA: As Cioran was right in saying that all pain that be written about can be endured, conceive then of a pain that cannot be written about this making it so great even if it is ostensibly not so. A character learns to endure pain by writing and rationalizing but then experiences something that cannot be written about. How will he cope? If he cannot, what is his fate? Then worse, what if he cannot write or offload at all.

• The dogs played with each other by my side as I wrote in front of the woman I loved who ate. Perhaps all those who play can love. Perhaps play is the greatest indicator of the capacity to love and love best expressed through play. Geometrically, love is a slightly larger circle which contains play but where there is love and no play, it is insufficient or not love at all; the circles of love and play in size must overlap.

• Poem idea: To be a cat in Antalya.

• Linguistic idiosyncrasies that I pick up and discard over time like clothes. From childhood, from lovers, from strangers. (Speech habits of Morgan and Kelly then Andrew and max and Jason from SCHM)

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-3/10/23: Turkey: Poem idea: Kursunlu Park:

A frog that dreamed with eyes open

Galloped into the stream

From a plie to breaststroke to releve

He swam down in the depths of the cascade

Masking him were a series of sourceless sounds

Chirps

Warbles

Grumbles

Croaks

Groans

Even pleas for help

They would not show themselves

In eternity

Or perhaps only for a second

I conclude

Like the squirrel that skirted across rivulet

Gone without even traces in the wind

I pay attention

Like a sentry of oleander

Eager to

Know and

Failing in detecting all that encroaches me

But alas

Here is what I felt

The few bubbles amid this small infinity

The moss could not be wrung

By even the weight of gravity

Drooping in the wallow of the waterfall

Above rocks that could only sleep

The earth took the shape of the fall

A moment of a torrent frozen into stone

Stalactites wrinkled

Contorted

Pockmarked

Mottled

Decrepit

Discolored

Creaky

Like an old earthen home

Hunchbacked

Holed

Amnesiac

In old age

Osteoarthritic

Calloused

Like bone

The ghosts become what we breathe

Ricocheting shrapnel of ripples

Like gentle phantoms

Phantasmagorically

Sunlight wrinkled the surface

With more delicacy

Than the pollen that rained

Like fairy dust for schools of fish

Swimming

Darting

Drifting

Leaping

Shattering golden reflections of the leaves

Playing tiered chess

In the order of love

Embroidered with white daisies

Massaged by innocent tornadoes of algal bloom

Percolating with respiration

Of the watercress

Who chews on light

And the huffs of guppies catching up

Thus the domain of two ducks

Brown king, white queen

Preening

Loafing

Resting

In the comfort of each other’s royal company

I cannot distinguish

The gnats from butterflies from tree dust

Or death

From polka dots

Or tenderness

From disease

Or the lizard

Spastic

From a severed stem

Flickering

The great snow of summer

A frothing of fungal freedom

White warts that kiss

Whirlpools of dandruff that hiss

An ugly infant who I will miss

Freckling

Blanketing

The turquoise quilt

By time itself knit

Have I become a masochist?

To find redemption

The cry out my joy

Upon being stabbed by a thorny branch

Beside a spider’s hollow

Etched into craggy lime

And the song of the imam reaches me

But I am already in prayer

And the words of the imam speak to me

But I read the holy book without language

And the voice of imam touches me

But I am already blessed by a great cirrhoses tree

And the cry of the imam implores me

But I have already found god

On all fours

Then to a crawl

I smell

I touch

I kneel

The ground from which I came

Is closer than it has ever been

When I become deaf to human conversations

And people pass right through me

I am hungry but over-satiated

Pleasantly nauseated

By this slow

Merciless world

Packing my lonely pores

Today the lily pads have taught me

How to float

On land

That speed is sin

And solitude is virtue

And that I do not need a bridge

To cross the throes

Of my human chagrin

So I cross barefoot

I feel the cold

At least

Unseen

Alone

At the abrupt eruption of green

I am cocooned by elderly whiskers

Warmed

Fuzzed

The fur of sparse spruce trees

And wise old beards laden with destiny

Unlike us

Nature does not discriminate

Because she knows she is all the same

A bare-faced rock

Beautiful

Like the cross-section of a human brain

I swing a shard of bamboo

Like a toy machete

And a guiding stick

I need it to make sense of this new planet

Dappled with purple and blue floral ink

A heaving burnt tree

Uprooted

Lay smoldering

Flaking

Like the roasted chestnuts

I love to eat

Stillness

In this path of mountains

Of mold

To heaven

In silence

As ethereal animals lead

The fleeting finch

The diving toad

The buzzing wasp

The white dog

In whispers

I ascend this hidden street

From trust

Comes this stolen imagery

Like the plastic pipe of plumping

Transecting a once unsullied land

But there is beauty

In theft

And in the vestiges of our kind

Declarations stenciled onto bark

Footprints that fade like folly

With the dregs

Become impervious to any sorrow

And any joy

Indulge me

In creasing your imagination

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3/10/23:

• Story idea FD The Flower Seller: The Russian troupe that condescend that flower seller. He who drains his dignity daily to earn his bread but refused the pity money given when he needed it most to save his dregs of dignity, meaningless to all but himself, a victory that will carry him forward enough to continue to live at the expense of his dignity. (He walked away after they did the stain on shirt to nose trick infantilizing and dehumanizing him). Such a moral win is all he needs to carry on, and the best feeling he will ever have, worth more than all the flower sales of an entire month.

• The ragged man who was haggling with another man on the price at which he would sell his wife, or swap with the wife of the other man and both women smiling simply. The man with the more attractive wife would pay only half the price for the other wife, or he would spend double the time with the same price. Who is the arbiter that would enforce? Honor rule or word of wives which would be trusted. Respectar friends could stick up for their party in the event of transgression of implicit contract because they too have stakes in the women’s bodies.

• As I fall asleep in the hostel to the voices of anonymous others I feel no FOMO or FOBLO but relief at having been spared the sorrow of lonely conversations, the sad labor of small talk, the monotony of observing an empty human race, forever repetitive in insecurity and naivety, excavated with a mere glance.

• The kids who set off a firecracker and fled in great smiles to the greater discomfiture of all those left behind, have startled and dead by their un-innocent shenanigans.

• Prose poem idea: How can I ever meet someone when I am forever unworthy in my own estimation? (On meeting Sam and Heida)

• Poem idea: EYES: As I look around at the eyes of those who surround me. I am bored. I know them all already. In most women I see feigned interest and sorrow with lust. In most men I see arrogance mounted over crippling vulnerability, over self deception and self alienation, begging me for a way to know who they are behind the intoxicated anger of grief.

3/11/23:

• A night of sleeplessness and a wasted day, my heart dies from the perils of an insomniac physiology. I have lost everything and have been reduced to lighter than ash, viler than rats, more hideous than the things I never see. My life has been nothing but a series of failures from the earliest memory. I am defeat, the death of virtue, the draining of all vitality and virility. I cannot find redemption in the nighttime or among humankind and much less with god. I do not merit even my own self pity; I have as much to look forward to as the man in hell without the luxury of death. I brood like shadows and my thoughts breed like bacteria. I term with spite and indignation at my own impotence in a world that does not deign to recognize the capacity evil of my Indian country and of me. I cannot play the victim any longer to fawn and disarm. I will cut myself with blades of dust and change the world not with love but with lust.

3/12/23: Through Budapest

• The poet who writes to raise money to buy art (the Budapest bastion)

• The woman coincidentally on the bus (she comes into cafe too)

• Americanism art over European

• Mother who violates happiness, tethers me to past, forces me to relinquish my present happiness to relive her misery

• Budapest: walking over legacy and trauma and history, black gulls, Danube and stairs

• The rabbis were turned

• A poem is for the mind to chew on, like a puzzle, its meaning self-illuminating one evening when you are catch the moment a leaf lands and a pool of water.

The Whale:

A masterpiece of the depicting the unseen throes of America’s and modernity’s definitive disease. This film, accomplishing the humanization of a disease we pity or condescend only to revile and mock afterwards, shows that fat people are beleaguered with problems than run far deeper than food. Afflicted with the weight of living in a modern society, negligent of loneliness and psychological necessity, Charlie eats away the affliction of his regret, and his inability to counteract it. We are privy to what any person would do behind closed doors but now magnified by his obesity: masturbation, binge eating, guilt, laughter, love, arrogance, compassion. To a normal sized man, we would cast criticism or moral disgust but that we now cast physical nausea undergirded by pity belies our own biases and phobia behind ostensible sympathy and acceptance. If we really cared about the plight of plus sized people, we would be disgusted not with his size but his character. The film portrays these everyday struggles of Charlie to force us to confront the unseen demons that haunt him like anyone else and reveal to ourselves our own double standards in judging the moral worth of people different than us. Charlie too deserves our disgust but not for his size. Charlie deserves our empathy and not pity and not for his social suffering independent of his size. Charlie deserve to be loved and to be subject and object of humor and to be hated.

I don’t think people can save people. Arronofsky overdramatized the score and emotional tenor of the film not out of lack of discipline in overusing cliches but to oversaturate the feelings of the viewer in disgust, hated, and pity and ultimately challenge us to accept that his fate is something we can never save, that our feelings cannot alter the fate someone has decided for themselves. In this case, self estimation of his existence as worthless because of a lack of any authenticity in life, because the only honest thing he had is dead (Alan) and that love is more important, thought he does not wish it, than his daughter. Besides the perfect performance by Branden, the movie spoke to a man’s right to self-resignation even before god. There is deception equally in all things human and all things divine as much as there is honesty. Though Charlie made the error of thinking the two separable, he died fighting for his values and without hypocrisy, making him more admirable than all who lie, even god. The triteness of the ending could be revised if the film ended with a blank screen and the daughter’s narration of the essay or if she turned out to be evil and irredeemable, thus rendering all is sacrifices in vain and demonstrating honesty that not always equal goodness. But it can never be disproved that we can’t help feeling compassion for others, that sometimes we try to inflict harm only because we want to help.

Paradise:

If ignorance is bliss, then belief in god is the only bliss there is.

-When they use god to console a dying man, they give him a false notion to dulcify his passing, giving him an ignorance or a lie as a happiness or bliss. If this is the case, then belief in god is the greatest bliss there can be.

For my death:

Put on my headstone above my empty tomb for my ashes will have already been scattered and my body born again: “What privilege to have suffered.”

The greatest consolation fo rthe unhappy is the unhappiness of others. So long as there is one unhappy woman in the world, there will be no other way to salve her pain than by proof of the misery of others.