No Requirements Necessary.

The extensive requirements I seek in others that I can't seem to fathom on my own. Yet I place myself on these hierarchical schemes, as if I surpasses everyone's liberation but that of mine. But nothing's more frightful than detracting from reality because of what I think I know.

Selective Memory

I remember – we improvised a song about the flies that were eating us that early morning by the shore.
The egalitarian beach – as he would like to call it.
And how we held onto the pretense of a bright vacant mind.
Elation. Completely possessed.
We walked down that pier like soldiers – prepared to die with dignity. We jumped together; feet first, heart first, reasoning last.
One drunken afternoon, he bet that he could run across the ledge without falling in. He never made it one meter – in the ocean before I could relinquish my powerless wrath. Crowned head.
I was delusional.
And his impeccable charm.
I remember we had spoken to an older woman. A much older woman. ‘I like to drink tonic before I go to bed,’ she told us. Then she left.
We sang on the subway. The Turkish man applauded after every song and gave us his cigarettes.
These were very real.
Know that you are loved.
Be well.

I remember how he played. He played with such sorrow. Such hatred for himself but he would never let it show. The melodies were masochistic. Ceaselessly painful. We were intertwined. In reality, parasitic. And at the very end his face became meshed into many faces. I cannot remember his name. His occupation. His life. His departure from my life. His death. My memories of him were no longer of him, but of sorrow.

Waste.

He never felt such a heavier loss than wasted hours.
Wasted thoughts.
Wasted desires.
On something that could never feel loss to begin with.
He shames himself - shaming himself. And he will. And he does.
And he will caress his pity like the defect that it is.
They will elope. And contempt will be their child.

Laughing with God

"Do you think God is depressed?"

"... No, I think He finds it all very humorous..."

The Man-Moth.

The Man-Moth
By Elizabeth Bishop

Here, above,

cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.

The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.

It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,

and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.

He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,

feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,

of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.

But when the Man-Moth

pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,

the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges

from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks

and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.

He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,

proving the sky quite useless for protection.

He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

Up the façades,

his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him

he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage

to push his small head through that round clean opening

and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.

(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)

But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although

he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

Then he returns

to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,

he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains

fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.

The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way

and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,

without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.

He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

Each night he must

be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.

Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie

his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,

for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,

runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease

he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep

his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

If you catch him,

hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,

an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens

as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids

one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.

Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention

he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,

cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Mock Her.

With the gradual actualization of an undesirable certainty, the mocker realizes that life has played a cruel and unimaginable joke on him. It is through this mentality that the mocker becomes a lie, a disfigured embodiment of all the lies he had been told. And so he lives a perpetually discouraged existence. He will attempt to demean the felicity of others, but with every incremental decibel of sound that bellows from within, he belittles himself, then condemns the belittling on those who pay no attention to his judgements. His own belittling becomes an inversion. Yet he continues to pridefully hold on to the idea that he is merely a byproduct of failed realities. What he does not realize is that reality has not failed him. He has failed reality by the self-regurgitation of mutilated feelings. He makes a mockery of all associations of peace, love, and empathy - paradoxically becoming a mockery himself by ridiculing the exact things that would provide him with joy. In his conceit, he believes he has lost nothing, and he is correct in this belief. He has gained only himself. A mockery.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Fake it til you make it.

지금, 마음이 편하다... 
솔잇 인 솔이투드

Dead Hearts

"More fundamentally, Sen points out that there is more to life than achieving utility. 'Happiness or desire fulfillment represents only one aspect of human existence'. While it is important to take note of utility, there are many other things of intrinsic value... These considerations lead to the conclusion that neither opulence (income, commodity command) nor utility (happiness, desire fulfilment) constitute or adequately represent human well-being and deprivation. Instead what is required is a more direct approach that focuses on human function(ing)s and the capability to achieve valuable function(ing)s..."

-David A. Clark on Amartya Sen's Capability Approach, The Capability Approach: It's Development, Critiques and Recent Advances

"An abstract general idea in the consciousness of the waking self has a particular idea as its basis in the subwaking self... The great contention of nominalism and conceptualism over the nature of abstract general ideas thus may find here its solution. The conceptualists are no doubt right in asserting that a general abstract idea may exist in consciousness apart from the particular idea or perception perceived, but they do not say that this consciousness is that of the waking self. The nominalists, again, are right in asserting that a general abstract idea or concept has a particular idea or percept as its basis; but they do not add that this percept may be totally absent from the waking consciousness and only present in the subwaking consciousness. No general abstract idea without some particular percept as basis."

-Boris Sidis

Timeless Peace.

To be actualized through a piece of art. To be timelessly pondered about without any platform to have her own voice. Because of sheer and finite admiration. A kind of heinous eternity that becomes claustrophobic and confining. To be forgotten is better than remembrance, if in attempts to encapsulate a muse through an eternal image. But dedication, the act of dedicating through genuine love. No longer becomes infinite misery. But rather a kind of eternal peace.

There was something wrong. And as young as she was, she knew better than to allow herself to be normalized by her sister's behavior. As much as she tried to understand. She couldn't help but feel revolted. She watched her demise and her self-deprivation of anything sane. Memory is a funny thing. You can try with all your might but the ones that stick - they cling on to dear life - unyielding to the torments of the heart and mind. It was anything but selective. It had rather selected her - consuming her thoughts like a parasite.

__________________________________

“Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition—it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis. Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged…Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics...One feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.”

-Freud "Mourning & Melancholia" 

What a Spectacle.

What a spectacle it must be to watch the ones who believe to be on some platform above the rest – to attempt to understand the complexities of miniscule entities that are so easily warped by the elements, natural and unnatural. To watch the same sordid and repetitive juvenile offenses be committed again and again – without any remorse to time. We take such elements and perceive them as misdealings. Mistakes. Strife that should not have had to exist. What a spectacle it must be for God to watch a seemingly insignificant spec of dust attempt to grasp the entity of a created cosmos and ultimately breakdown by its own idea of an overpowering reality. And so without any conceivable logic we define others. Define ourselves by the given definitions, by standards, some feeble attempt to identify to schemas of the very little that we do know in blissful yet deceitful notions of intelligence. What a spectacle.

Sun.

Romantic. Inhibited, possibly. Even impaired. I remember, still. First it was constant elation. Then replaced with constant loss. The intervals would get longer. At first every other day. Then once a week. Once a month. Two months. Four months. Six months. Pleasure comes and goes. But that elation. Magnitude. And what had replaced it, the elation became trivial. Or perhaps the magnitude - broken up in a timely manner. Accumulated. Then discarded.

They are just little bulbs. Not sunshine. Just bulbs. Manufactured. Not the real thing. They can only capture the imitation of light. Not the light itself. Some dimmer. Some brighter. But never encompassing. How they try to burn brighter, or longer. Some flicker as they die, some just give out without any warning, some just explode. But they only give as much as they are made to. Then they burn out. Then thrown out. An end. An end. An end. They have no effect on my skin. But sun. It goes deep. Can penetrate the skin. Create color. Create malignant cells to multiply. True pain. Sun lives. Bulbs die. An end? And ends. They do. And when they do, humanity will stop. Have we absorbed sunlight? Sometimes if you stay in a dark room for too long, the first glimmer that you see, you’ll become drawn. Intrigued. Then a brighter one comes. Our attention moves away until we are surrounded by counterfeit illuminations or the memories of them. Forgetting the sun. The sun. Those who forget have been and will be forgotten.

What Could Be

It was almost the vindication of the pain that I had felt. Less vindictive but transfered from the mind to the body. Psychosomatic. It had become apparent on my face. I felt the folds of my eyelids deepen. When I saw him, it were as if life - or rather the absence of it had left his eyes and I felt the same demise draw upon my eyes as well. Transference of decay. An excruciating hopelessness had dawned upon me. As if death could permeate through my reality.

She reminded her of the same precision of character as she had been before and joy. Joy was for an eternal glimpse - the nostalgic joy she had once felt before. Before defilement. Before impurity. Before the lost. And in that moment, that moment was sufficient to forget the pangs of current torment.

And she sobbed. Not as if the characters had done because of relief but because she was deeply affected by the death of a man with nothing but his repulsive self. How strong was his will to contain himself a beast to humanity and yet he declined morality - and for that she cried. She empathized his lost entity, his sanctity.

Humphrey Van Weyden

"I felt quite amused at his unwarranted choler, and while he stumped indignantly up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog. And romantic it certainly was - the fog, like the gray shadow of infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and men, mere motes of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish for work, riding their steeds of wood and steel through the heart of the mystery, groping their way blindly through the Unseen, and clamoring and clanging in confident speech the while their hearts are heavy with incertitude and fear." (3)

"And I was alone, floating, apparently, in the midst of a gray primordial vastness. I confess that a madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked, and beat the water with my numb hands. How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness intervened, of which I remember no more than one remembers of troubled and painful sleep. When I aroused, it was as after centuries of time; and I saw, almost above me and emerging from the fog, the bow of a vessel, and three triangular sails, each shrewdly lapping the other and filled with wind." (7)

"I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all the power of my will to fight above the suffocating blankness and darkness that was rising around me. A little later I heard the stroke of oars, growing nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man. When he was very near I heard him crying, in vexed fashion, "Why in hell don't you sing out?" This meant me, I thought, and then the blankness and darkness rose over me." (8)

"I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness. Sparkling points of light spluttered and shot past me. They were stars, I knew, and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the suns. As I reached the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back on the counter swing, a great gong struck and thundered. For an immeasurable period, Lapped in the rippling of placid centuries, I enjoyed and pondered my tremendous flight.
But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told myself it must be. My rhythm grew shorter and shorter. I was jerked from swing to counter swing with irritating haste. I could scarcely catch my breath, so fiercely was I impelled through the heavens. The gong thundered more frequently and more furiously. I grew to await it with a nameless dread. Then it seemed as though I were being dragged over rasping sand, white and hot in the sun. This scorching in the torment of fire. The gong clanged and knelled. The sparkling points of light flashed past me in an interminable stream, as though the whole sidereal system were dropping into the void. I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened my eyes." (8)

'The Sea Wolf'
Jack London

Salvation.

We are each a void in this apathetic mass of humanity. It is not quite the effects of some kind of modern liberal enlightenment. We are no gods. We are only conditioned to believe that. Or to dilute reality with our gaudy lifestyles, our illusions of knowledge and independence. Our perpetual, predictable, ever present insanity and fallacies. And I am no exception. I process no judgments and reduce no one and everyone to an amassed generalization. I am victim to the same conditioning, addictions, and feeble attempts of pseudo intellectual babble. My neuroses comes from the anticipated experiences one should assume. But enough! Even I am getting irritated by my own existential posturing. We are no creators. We are not beauty, not death, not life, not war, not injustice or justice, not the arts. We are all simultaneously Hitler, Mother Teresea, Rimbaud, the Dalai Lama, the escorts on fifth avenue, mass murderers, and peacemakers. I have tired from the same compulsive cognitive pathologies of mankind - even the most vile of our kind - our sad addictions, accumulations of our own inane wisdom, our truly ephemeral intelligence. Accumulations of nothing! But I will never tire from watching individuals fall on their knees and submit wholly to the knowledge of humanity's fragility. We are only capable of failure, being our own facade to ourselves, surrounding ourselves with counterfeit illuminations. We are too weak to provide a limitless love. But there is salvation. And salvation will bring us to give a glimpse of this limitless love to others. Then we can laugh with every atom in our bodies - laugh with tears of joy. And perhaps God will smile at our new found strength in Him.

Selective Memory

- A – B [SM] – Ce – Cb ->

The difficulty with memory is that it is highly selective and often grossly inaccurate. Memory is not like a storage box that holds snapshots of past events – recalling something is not the same as pulling out an album folder and searching through old photographs. When clients remember a past event they are recreating the past anew. It is their present impression of the past, not the actual past, that their memory search uncovers.

Clients’ memories consist of millions of events, impressions, feelings, and thoughts. Their memories exist like a giant tapestry so large that they can only see parts of it. The part they focus on is always a very small piece of cloth, and what they recall is often biased depending upon what they desire to remember and what they wish to feel at the moment…

Each time that clients remember, they change the past; they repaint what happened a long time ago with present brush strokes. The new picture is based on present feelings, thoughts, desires, and wishes. The actual past has long since ceased to exist for them; it disappeared in the distant past time and can no longer be accurately retrieved.

Some clients object to the idea that their picture of the past is based on present feelings, thoughts, desires, and wishes…

Rationally this is true; the past is unalterable, but the client’s memory of the past can be changed. The client’s view of the past is quite incomplete. Nobody can remember things exactly the way they were – human memory is too poor for that, and is selective as well. We remember what we choose to remember and forget what we choose to forget.

-McMullin (The New Handbook of Cognitive Therapy Techniques)

Unmerited.

Obvious lesson I already knew, but did not follow: unmerited bitching out at someone out does not make one feel better, it makes one feel worse.

"Judging others will avail you nothing and injure you spiritually. Only if you can inspire others to judge themselves will anything worthwhile have been accomplished."
-Peace Pilgrim

Monday Mornings.

Today I watched the pigeons of Bay 50th St. drink water from the melted ice.
Platform.
"My dear love. My dear love." She said.
Independence for S. Sudan like the birds of the wind. And the flag, it tosses and turns, flects of red, white, and blue with the sounds of loud construction.
We're building, rebuilding again and again.
New and old, old then new.
I'm late again. Everywhere.
Lost to the colors, sounds, words.
Pearl Harbor Effect.
She said.
But what are words. Hieroglyphic symbols that produce sound to capture some type of rationale for what's really going on in our minds. And to convey that with multiple sounds to a specific rhythm. And each noise to capture emotions and then I will close my eyes around the 59 speakers. The stereos. And that damn nostalgia. For memories that never existed, the feelings that were never really there.
But with each new face we'll imitate those that have never happened, those events.
And be okay.
With perfect strangers we'll pretend what will never take place.
Random thoughts. Monday morning. With the earth inches towards the spring.

Quondam.

You have transformed into the deepest void, an emptiness one cannot escape.
A man that no longer exists for himself.
And myself.
My movement, my speech, my body are uninhabited.
Hollow.
If I am so free, why do I feel that of death.
I have become null, my thoughts dejected.

Excite the senses.

All she can really say is that it makes her feel better.
I guess that's enough.

Party in the USA.

We'll sit and paint our nails. Play our games. Use our bodies. Live extravagantly intricate lives with repetition. Or maybe we'll throw in a bit of impulse and spontaneity. So we feel better about our callous parottings. We'll use long words to explain the simple thoughts. Or just talk to ourselves. Get stuck in our own minds. And we live with no better way but to explain through the vanity of it all. And be judged or heard through the vanity of others. But we've all got something to say. Our own fucking stories. Oh yeah. And feel such an isolation that the only way to end it is to either end ourselves or connect with the others around us. And maybe we'll discover it was all worth love. Or some sort of religion. Where are you God? Or maybe we'll just play out personas of our insecurities. Become the people that we wish we could pretend. And we laugh. Hah, hah. It was just all one big joke. Waste our hours with the lavish we can't possibly hold for a minute. I'll judge you now. I'll tell you that I hate you or I love you. That it's okay we're all human. We're all so fucking human. Tell you you're a bitch. I'm a bitch. No but I'm actually quite lovely if you get to know me. Yes. That was a good day. Brush your teeth now and go to bed. Busy busy busy. But they'll be watching me. No one's watching you. At night you hear the echos of the screams of your miserable life. And that wonderful life. You'll replay it and fall fast asleep knowing you'll be just fine the next day. Galactic viewings from a spec of the earth. Come back down now. All better now. See moment of existential crisis over. Go to therapy for that depression. Come back alive. Or just drown out the noise with some liquids or pills or chemicals. Or just live. Whichever works faster. And you stab yourself in the back. Again. Do. It. Again.

Sometimes I wonder...
What did God see in us. Why did He think that we were worth saving?