All posts in prose

I’m a feminist, but privately I like identifying with my own label of “sane.”

I refuse to backtrack to society’s insane version of things when the ideas that race and gender are different but equal were born with me, within me. I think ‘the adults’ have set the bar far lower than my childish mind. I refuse to first step backwards then forwards and label that as having gained ground (maybe I’m being too rational). Those for inequality should have to identify themselves as being against than the norm, not I (maybe I’m being too irrational).

I don’t like the connotation of feminism as pro-women. There are a lot of women, I’m not for all of them; as is true for men, there are a lot of horrible ones (some Continue Reading →

I have a love for photography which I’d rather not participate in, like the librarian who has no interest in ever writing a book.

But every once in a while I remind myself that photos capture moments in time that are most likely worth remembering, and I take the old Canon DSLR out and accidentally end up with a couple photos that make me want to be a writer:

These two are halves of a thematic whole. One’s taken in the north West as the sun fell, the other in the south East as the sun rose, one steps forward and spotlights a man through overtones of red and brown that curve from center bottom to top left in a figurative jungle, the other falls back and highlights a girl through undertones of blue and brown that curve from top left to center bottom in an authentic jungle, both incorporate two Coke bottles, two observing boys, and hint of an unoriginal yet wonder-full immaturity; of street play, of home, ordinary life, and life devoid of wealth.

The only protection against death was to love solitude. // Brenda Hillman, Saguaro

As Ronald David Laing puts forth in The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness instead of [(self/body) <> other], it’s [self <> (body-other)]. Schizoidness is like an enduring apathy, a perennial tepidness.

I’m probably what you’d call a somewhat, self-limited, or high functioning schizoid. As in though I’m still eccentric, I’ve had it all my life so I know how to somewhat work around and with my condition to the extent that I’m normal (whatever that means) if you don’t inspect too closely. Salman Akhtar’s phenomenological profile outlines me so well that I have a very hard time differentiating myself from my supposed disorder; where do I begin, where does it end, I don’t know.

The main factors for me are that (1) though I’m an emotional hyper-reflective being my emotions can either be labelled as diluted or too in-check, that (2) I derive no overwhelming special feeling from praise or condemnation or from being part of anything- be it family, group, social class, that (3) I work and feel better alone, that (4) I almost always have a different perspective on things, and that (5) as Laing put it though I am fully aware I am myself, relating myself to myself happens as a secondary process. Continue Reading →

Echoing Einstein and Rumi, probably simultaneously all and none.

If you’re ever on a beach and you spot someone frantically running about with a bucket full of water proclaiming they’ve bagged the ocean entirely (or something like that), laugh at them, you have a right, THE right, they’re crazy, laugh at them. Wording that better- laugh at them, you have a right to laugh at yourself. Because they Are, and you Are, and they are reflection: of you, of you as you, of you as they, and they (and you) of the bucket and what’s in it; and what’s in it is the ocean (entirely), water, this. Still, laugh, hysterically if you can, it’s the only thing to do (Hafiz said that).

Personally, I don’t like the whole “that’s deep” phrase; Continue Reading →

Now I write and such, but honestly, since elementary school everything’s felt like it was downhill.

See one day, back in said elementary school, my art teacher rose from his desk and approached the front of the classroom, like he usually did, and majestically held up this plastic-cased gem-encrusted Disney’s Peter Pan pen like it was Excalibur, like he didn’t. I somehow paid attention long enough to hear him tell us how it was, along with top marks, to be top prize in a mandatory art contest he’d enlisted every single one of us little soldiers in.

Little ironic eight year-old me figured if I was going to be forced to do this thing, it would be great if I did something, ironic. So finding only pencils, safety-scissors, glue, and books of blank variously coloured papers around me, I decided to ironically trace/trap scissors on papers, to then cut out scissors using scissors, and to finally overlay and glue all the variously coloured cut-out scissors in a small collage. Needing a title I labelled the collage ‘The Crowd / People,’ figuring if the cut out safety-scissors were metaphorically people then I’d just cut people with safety-scissors.

Long story short, I went home with a Disney pen. And later found myself, in an appropriately small tux, with my mom, at a crowded kids’ art gala where my so-called artwork was being featured. And while in that crowded place with my mom, while a woman gushed to her about how deep cutting my art piece was, how I’d captured how we’re all by our nature dangerous but mostly harmless, I couldn’t help but think, master irony level unlocked.

… I peaked at eight.

Yes. But only if all partners involved truly love, and make love to, each other to the point that they can’t see themselves living without any of the other partners involved.

Polygamous relationships in which every member is truly happy are few. Very few. But to simplify things greatly, this is because both the math and human nature are against you. It’s far easier to find two things that work harmoniously together than to find three, and it’s far easier to find three than four, and so on. And that simple math superimposed upon the fact that people are [taught/conditioned to be] possessive, makes for bad polygamous relationships.

To clarify (using a three partner relationship to keep things simple and realistic), I don’t view any relationship in which only B is having sex and in love with A and C as polygamous. Polygamy to me means B must love A and C for their own intrinsic values, A must love B and C, and C must love A and B. Anything outside of that is more farce open-relationship to me (I’m not against open-relationships, quite the contrary, but that’s another issue). All sides of the poly must be balanced. A and C should not expect their love to be derived only from B, C must love A as much as B does, and vice versa.

In my opinion, in order for a polygamous relationship to truly work the love B gets from A must be equal to but different from the love that B gets from C, and the combined love of both A and C must be so… otherworldly for B that it in itself is treated as a different creature. B’s in a relationship in which they have four loves, not two; one directed towards A alone (1 = B + A), one towards C alone (2 = B + C), one directed towards the relationship that excludes them (3 = A + C), and one with everyone involved (4 = A + B + C). And all of this must apply to A and C as it does for B, hence why good equal polygamous relationships are almost an impossibility.

And a good polygamous relationship’s one in which A Continue Reading →

I like that someone can approach a locked door and, eventually, open it.

Selah (Hebrew: סֶלָה‎)

Selah comes from the Hebrew Bible; it succeeded psalms (in most cases verses), and as a concept is very difficult to translate (mainly because its etymology is unknown):

• Selah might come from the Hebrew word calah which means ‘to hang,’ and by implication to measure (weigh). Seeing as how in Biblical history valuables were weighed (measured) by hanging or suspending them on a type of balance to determine their value, this implies the possible meaning is as an instruction to measure carefully and reflect upon the preceding statements.
• Greeks treated selah as to mean something similar to the Greek term diapsalma (διάψαλμα: interlude – “apart from psalm”), which signified a change in rhythm or melody at the places marked by the term, or a change in thought and theme.
• Others say that it means Continue Reading →

Dance; just because. Because you can.

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his “divine service.” // Friedrich Nietzsche

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance. // Zarathustra (character in Friedrich Nietzsche‘s Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

As George Allen Morgan wrote in What Nietzsche Means, when Nietzsche talked about dancing, he talked about having ‘lightness in what is most difficult’.

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band – Trout Mask Replica (1969)

Trout Mask Replica is the definition of sound as art. It combines free jazz, delta blues, african chant rhymes, avant-garde, and Ginsberg like maniacal (raving hobo) beat-poetry that anticipates rap into this experimental thing called genius. I’m not kidding, Trout Mask Replica is the definition of sound as art.

It’s the definition of hard listening, passively listening to all the intentional off-notes, abrupt stops, collisions, screams, and howls won’t do them justice. And when you’ve completed the strenuous process of paying attention to everything (because you have to), listening to any other album feels like getting off the highway. It’s a very self-aware deconstruction and reconstruction of sound as art. (I dare any musician to try and cover/ replicate any part of the album.)

Amazon reviews for this album are polarized, and hilarious; one review titled ‘Can’t listen to it enough’ says it all for me:

Yes yes yes. It’s cacophonous, it’s gritty, it’s unpleasant. Put it on at a party and watch people Continue Reading →