Postcard 33

I am a great screaming incoherence. Are you too? I am desperate for that perfect womb, when all my cells were one, again and again and again. How do you feel? I am a planet mighty -- my plates grinding, my core liquid iron. I can only push and pull with weak gravity -- I am dense and I am empty, says the gravity. I feel the tension. I feel the friction of a billion bolts of lightening. How are you today? I am held here by only the pushes and pulls of so many loves. Held right here, moving but still. Goddamn, I want to be free. I am flying apart and cooling. Goddamn, I want to be held. Would you like anything? Sometimes, I am clear purpose without meaning. Sometimes, I am nothing but desire. Sometimes, a stone stirs up and turns to life. Sometimes, life settles to a stone. What are you up to? What is more, I am built from a magnificent past unwitnessed, and greatness stretches out from me like dust. But I am now, and I see now and there is no terror like the terror of now. The almighty terrible and meaningless power of now, coming from who knows where and going to...? Hope this finds you well and dancing.

Postcard 32

There is a future possible where everyone is well balanced and healthy and happy and content. There is very little pain, perhaps  -- somehow -- less death. I don't know, computers maybe. 

Many people want this.

There is of course, no art. There is no pursuit nor striving. There are no desperate attempts: 

to capture motion and breath in clay; to bronze a horrible and shared destiny; 

to shout! shout! shout! that we are here and that we matter with crushed pigment and oil on a flat stretched canvas that can be carried and dropped; 

to slam a pen to blank sheets again and again trying to suss out meaning from meaninglessness with feeble trapped words that can all burn; 

to fling sound at each other relentlessly;
to push hips and chests and lips together tight pathetic.

There is no need for any of this is a well balanced world. Out of all the infinite possibilities, I am glad I do not live in that universe.

Postcard 31

The old man on the mountain, or had she been a woman? Anyway, it did not matter. It had ceased, with all things, to matter. That being kept one fat toe on the mountaintop and stretched the rest into the astral plane. That was one transcendent mountaintop. Some climb mountaintops. Some build cabins in the woods. Some bury their writing in jars. Some wrap their women in fabric black as the astral plane. Some love every and all the same. Some sell no booze on Sundays. Some say everything is pain. 

Here, have some holy book quotes from the scrolls: 

"If you suspect you have achieved transcendence, go to a family reunion." G.B. 

"You have got to come back from the desert." J.C. 

"When you think you've got it, it slips away. When you know you do, you don't." L.T. 

"At least I know it." S.A. 

There is a razor thin silver thread and you can pick it up and turn it onto a spool and follow it straight out of the maze and off the face and on and on. Each turn of the spool will make the thread more sharp and brilliant. You could slice case hardened steel. You could trim a carbon diamond. You could split an atom. Onward you can follow it -- a blazing purity across the planes. On and on. But every thread has an end and you will find yourself with a spool of dull wire in one hand, an un-frayed radiance doused by your other hand and darkness all around. Not many ever think to lay a blood red thread back into the labyrinth. Though it has walls and other frightened frightening beings, it has light and shadow, life and death. Out there at the end of that brilliant thread -- nothing. 

So I vow to dig up my work. To call something a possession. To grab another heart and hold on tight. To cast pearls among swine. To get angry and sad. To let any light shine.

Postcard 30

Well, here we are in the slight lee of a vast scatteredness -- walls, stones, a bit of liquor. If you stand up the wind will catch you. Have you ever felt a wind like this? It does not buffet like a normal wind; it is not strong like wind. It does not sweep and scythe off the top layer of everything. Not this wind. It does not pass straight through the soft tissue of fat muscle and sinew. This wind has held more bones than any soil -- and…

Stand up past the meagre parapet, stand into it, the flow that pulls. At the highest peak in the range, sun cooked, snow swept  wind climbs to you in a sheer and unbroken buffeting -- an ice bath. This is the wind of cleanse. No matter what, we are naked in it, swimming. Every pore is open, our eyes burning in clear sky sun. Open your ears! Standing there above the crown our minds are swept open and free. Nothing nothing nothing coming from toes or fingers, hands or feet, legs or arms, faces blow clean off. Only one of us must be wise enough to pull us down before we're blown away.

Postcard 29

∞ <  0 - ∞ > ∞
The Cosmos sure can give a person a sense of the infinite. I am of course speaking of the television program. The stars these days rarely suffice. Consider the many infinities that time and space afford us. The infinite of the many, the infinite of the divisible, the infinite of the negative and the infinite of the nothing. A brief look at numerical history shows what is obvious. The Chinese stopped at the ten thousand, the Romans st one thousand, the more ancient cultures refused even zeros. What is obvious is that the concept of the infinite -- so apparent there and there and there -- is outside our understanding. We see that it is there, but what is it? Even more astounding is that anything that holds the property of the infinite, holds the properties of all the infinities or at least the potential. So an infinite is really a thing (t) T∞∞∞∞.
Does that change anything? Since we are the apprehends of all this, lets make it subjective. (two aphorisms I've heard recently are: 'We live abbreviated lives' and 'we finally get life figured out, then we die.') First, we are the creatures of boundaries and each boundary we apprehend is of our own design. The universe contains no numbers or words other than what we force upon it. There are only things that are themselves systems, and many things that are contained as systems of other things. Only very rarely are those systems 'closed' systems. Truly, the only closed system is the cosmos itself -- maybe.
A person, a thing that is a system that participates n many systems, that is an assemblage of points in time, does contain the infinite as all things do -- and follows that a person contains all infinities.
You, as a person, are a multitude of infinities, limited in quantity only by the boundaried units you use to contain what is beyond your understanding. Try then to apprehend yourself without those tools, loose meaning and see that only time, entropy, is a limit. You then imagine yourself out of even that -- free.

Postcard 28

The girl at the coffee shop is unknowingly a champion of literature. She excels at a single thing -- the ceasing of my pen. And who knows what else. There is a person on the other side of the back that faces me, but it is not concerned with me and does not concern me. A slim and specific young woman, perhaps a bit awkward  and unsure in the world. Maybe frightened of potentialities or cracked by a violence or a series of acts done without consent, with aggression. She moved from a small town, a family confounded by parochialism, patriarchy, provincialism -- a family that answers an uncles penetrating hands with disbelief in her, with belief in dead men gods. She came to the city where an acquaintance beckoned -- a girl she had admired for her power but here she is, that girl is a hot mess. She keeps it together but cannot figure what for. The boys here are worse -- at least back home it was an honest violence, a clear hatred of the unknown or unplumbed. Sometimes she gives them what they want, sometimes not and they tantrum. But she goes on, a feather caught in a tree's autumn leaves.

Or more likely that stranger to me is an artist with a firm view and a nuanced hand, who treads lightly only to conserve an electric strength, who turns fear into action, compassion into care.

She breaks my pen -- I cannot turn a person to character. And the man that I am, her lines like a long horizon.

Postcard 27

You must remember the origin of life is still a complete mystery
You must remember that your short life, fully chronicled, would fill more books than ever printed, would wreck the internet
You must remember that birds mostly fly for pleasure; envying them is the only healthy envy
You must remember that every work of art, every creation, every piece of scientific fact, every formula, every word, every thought is an imperfect reduction of what actually is
You must remember to stand at the base of tall trees and look impossibly to the top
You must remember pain and its eternal bond with the creative
You must remember the instinctive creature going ahead or left or right for no known reason
You must remember you must die
You must remember (in order) complexity, paradox, unintended consequences
You must remember that unease, anxiety, striving, discomfort are your birthright - marks of evolution's vanguard
You must remember forgetting is ok
You must remember that finally, you are your only judge; endeavor to be a worthy, prudent and forgiving judge -- charity is your watchword
You must remember that charity means love, the glad giving of what is not deserved
You must remember that shit is the richest soil
You must remember to fear the dark, but fear is something carried, not a wall (and to fear the light)
You must remember to laugh in the face of the absurd
You must remember…its all absurd

Postcard 26

The trajectory of life: is it contingent on being perceived? Is it linear -- an arrow careening among potentials and impossibilities? Are those discarded realities broken -- do they shatter and dissolve or careen off to other lives? 

Perhaps that is too limited a perspective, the deceit of time and proximity. We move through a harmony of waves, redundant but for our place in the wave and we are the harmonic vibrations of the fingers of time across space as a harp! Likely this is the limit of what is measurable -- an infinity of harmonics -- projecting in undulating spiral of expansion and contraction…a respiration.

Is it even important? Does it matter when for each individual living is the forever plunging into the viscous from the clear -- always approaching, always penetrating, always submerged.

Postcards 24 and 25

I often refer to the limits of reason, to the paucity of our tools to understand the space-time in which we are immersed. Imagine having never left the mother's womb. We would be able to tell many things about that womb and its contents, but not nearly all. We would be able, with our mighty intelligence and reasoning to infer a few things about the world outside that womb But would we know that world was another being, itself moving in a world of apprehending? We could infer that the umbilical cord extending from our own being to the "outside" was somehow sending somethings back and forth -- perhaps communicating, but we could not know what and how. This analogy can apply both to our limitations in knowing the context of our own movement through space-time and to the difficulty in discerning and communicating what I call the sub-rational and the supra-rational with language which is itself a limited tool of reason! What umbilici stretches to us from the outside?
Guard against the hubris of knowing.

Guard against the hubris of 'knowing'. We are familiar with many indicators of the sub-rational and the supra-rational: intuition, paradox, analogy, dream, the joy of animals -- things the dogmatic, the many-trapped-in-the-world would find uncomfortable if not objectionable. I say trapped quite intentionally for trapped by reason we may be. Reason, you see, is a system of boundaries. The building block of reason -- the hearthstone, the lodestone and the cornerstone - is definition. The more powerful the system of reason -- logic, math, scientific method (I should add philosophy) -- the more rigid the definitions must be. Here I am not attempting to discredit these tools, among our most powerful, but to identify their limitations and by striking a mark upon those limits, then to step across them to see what else there may be. If space-time is the limit of our reasoned apprehension, then let us look beyond space-time with our other means and let us reason to deduce what space-time exists within is likely a reality that does affect and inputs into space-time what is not space-time. I call our experience of these sub-rational and supra-rational, but those would be arbitrary boundaries from outside. Science itself, at its most penetrating and acute, seems to be perceiving dimly across those boundaries.
So why is this important? Why do backflips in the amniotic fluid? Because it is important to know when you are using a tool, to know the limits of a tool and to not confuse the tool with the task. Returning to earth we must abandon reason when answering questions like "Should we torture people?" We must because the answer must be No, though reason would equivocate. We must abandon reason's limits when we look to other human beings and move to relate to them not as measurable inputs, but as beings to love -- deserving and underserving at once!

Postcard 23

My week in omens:

• Handle broke off car door in my hand
• The following podcasts played consecutively -
• phenomenology of Hegel
• Being and Identity in 'Fight Club" and "the Game"
• Radiolab "In the Dust of This Planety
• Star Trek episode "Spectre of the Gun" discussion
• Descartes meditations: What can we know?
• Marc Maron interviews Ru Paul, discusses identity and being

      } All of these have to do with 

unknowableness and the meaningless 

of existence (or our perception of it) 

and what to do about it

• At drawing night, I was practicing hand drawing and inadvertently drew the Sistine Chapel's hand of God
• My horoscope this week first apologized to me then predicted: "Deep sexy darkness and sexy brilliance are conspiring to bring you intriguing pleasures that will educate the naive part of your soul"

In an unknowing way, I can perceive the intent of these omens, these markers. They are first , a verification of all that I believe through experience and induction. They are second, a challenge that I have been preparing for. They are third, a  promise that the thing or experience I think I will lose is actually a poor copy of what I could gain. When meaning is stripped and abandoned, then meaning becomes solely my responsibility and I'll only know it through living.