Midway in our life's journey

How strange and deeply symbolic that it is not until my 35th year that I commence reading Dante's Inferno.

Having got lost in the Oracle maze.

I think my knee chakras are opening. Or, early-onset arthritis.

I am reading The Fast by Hannah Weiner. I am feeling this way about sugar lately. Extremely painful.

Ten commas

Numerical symbolism symbolizes symmetry.

When I, bizarrely, saw a guy with a watering hose, today, in financial district, watering a plant, that I had never noticed before, I knew, and it had.

I dreamt I got a white kitten, and I named her Lulu...

Trying to rid myself of phlegmishness through diet, would mean what?

I am searching the web for acrostics.

I am lacking a parenthetical.

Halfway to 70

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Dreamt last night that I found a hollowed out part of one of the tiles in the bathroom, and I knew that was where my dead father was buried and I would have to get him out. Or, he was buried wrong somehow, and I had to correct it. So I started somehow loosening the tile, or digging up the tile, which made the bathtub stop up or somehow started bringing up all kinds of nasty things from the sewer, mounds and mounds of hair started coming up and oh, what have I done to the pipes?

Dream dialog:

"I too was quite tall until the doctor seized my throat."

quotes

"We're so diminished we have ourselves left and now we've disappeared." --Robin Blaser

"I should expect nothing more from life than what fate has already given me." --Ales Debeljak

"that hour exists no matter what I do" --overheard on the street

The man in front of me at the post office today had four pennies inside his ear. Home remedy for hearing loss? Just in case?


And then at the cafe, a woman in purple glasses, listening to a walkie talkie, "10-4," and laughing, everytime I looked up at her, she had a look on her face, like she was about to orgasm.

I am clearly way too sane.

"your path is poetry, your goal is beyond
poetry" --Robin Blaser

Feeling a strong connection to red drinks lately.

Had a dream that I opened up this antiquated cabinet, in the woods, and it had all these dried fruit juices, crushed up like herbs, and I picked up the farthest one, which was red, it was for cherry flavor. How can I resist cherry anything? And then there was a creature in the cabinet and we were talking, maybe he was the keeper of the fruit juices? And he said something about listening to the Harmonics, the Harmonies, how sometimes you had to wait, for hours, but as long as you go "there" to the place where they come to, that they will come eventually.

Vision Quest

I sure wish I could have a vision. I am quite bored. I do have work to do though. For all the forthcomingness that is forthcoming. I bought cover stocks for two different books - one is a package of 250 pages and one is a package of 125 pages. I don't think I need that much but that is how they came. It was quite a heavy bag. So I waited for the bus. My cell phone had died and so I was counting time by songs on my mp3 player. The bus came at 28:40. I could have walked home twice.

I did have a dream last night about being on a boat named Telepathy. Sounds oracular!?

possibility of the possible

I am happy at any moment in time in which I have a notebook open with a pen (moving).

Reading Derrida's very cool Aporias.

I like point 2 (re:death?) a lot: "As long as the waiting can only be directed toward some other and toward some arrivant, one can and must wait for something else, hence expect some other — as when one is said to expect that something will happen or that some other will arrive. In both cases the awaiting onself and the expecting or the expecting-that can have a notable relation to death, to what is called — death (it is there, and maybe only there, that one ultimately awaits oneself or expects, that one expects that; and it is only there that the awaiting oneself may be no other than the expecting the other, or that the other may arrive)." French omitted, as I don't understand anyway...

We are all waiting for death, what else is really going to happen after all? Death as the other that we will finally, eventually meet.

I love typing up a Derrida quote and listening to the rain. This is a great moment.

There is another bit a little further down that really tripped my brain out. I've been thinking about it all day: "...the one is waiting for the other there, for the one and the other never arrive there together, at this rendezvouz...and the one who waits for the other there, at this border, is not he who arrives there first or she who gets there first. In order to wait for the other at this meeting place, one must, on the contrary, arrive there late, not early."

What waits for the other is also what must come late. Seems so contradictory, but only sorta kinda makes sense if you think of this other as literally death. Of course it is waiting for us, and of course it comes at the latest possible moment. Sortof comforting.

All this, speaking of death, and that which comes, to tell about my vision of a disembodied shrunken head woman.

Don't know what that means but perhaps I am feeling like my current life experiences are shrinking me, my soul is getting tiny tiny tiny. Also, head shrinking may mean I need a head shrink! haha! There was another, almost simultaneous vision of a grizzly haired werewolf looking guy. Which seems related as they are both representatives of the primal perhaps. But can't figure out much more than that.

What kind of word is "ipseity"? quite latinate, I suppose.

the ancient belief that the dead are not dead, or are not quite dead.

forthcoming-imminently

Inland Empire

I actually went into a rather deep, dark place, the rabbit hole itself perhaps, after watching the David Lynch movie, or rather, it opened up something dark in me. I have been having a depression thing for a while, the kind of depression where you are just so exhausted and can barely move all the time. I feel like it was this darkness that was sitting there, untouched, and something in this movie opened it up. Now that I went deep into that place instead of skirting around it, there is movement instead of stagnancy, a re-invigoration. I am not sure how long it will last, but it is a nice respite. Today was the first day in weeks that I was not utterly exhausted all day. But on Saturday when I saw the movie, (full moon I realize now!) I had great plans of things to do afterwards, to continue my day off, but after the movie I was so exhausted I could barely walk, I came home and I collapsed onto the bed and slept for an hour. When I woke up, I don't know what kind of half dream thought I had but I burst into tears and just sobbed for half an hour. Rest of the night felt morose and puffy-eyed. My friend called me at 11:30 and wanted me to go to the park near Japantown, for fireworks for chinese new year, I think, but I couldn't, maybe I should have, but at that point I just wanted to go to sleep and obliterate. Also, my eyes really hurt.

I keep thinking about this movie and keep thinking about this movie, it seems to me to be one of the most deeply spiritual experiences I have had in a while. I guess my religion is art? And David Lynch is the god I pray to? The way movies can really open you up in ways that you just cannot really be touched in normal life, is really amazing.

I find it really interesting that Lynch operates on a logic of symbolism, I think not just in his movies, but in his life, from things that I have read, and I wonder how can he do that, believe, at his age? I am much younger and I've pretty much stopped believing in that kind of thing. Maybe it is not age related. I want to believe but I just don't, can't, feel it. When something happens that seems synchonicitous, I would always, before, think that it meant something, like it was a message from the universe about my life, about being on the right path, etc. But I've totally lost that belief now, really since moving to SF in 2001. Which is part of why I started this blog, to investigate, keep track of the spiritual, the visionary, those weird moments that seem to happen less and less. To try and capture it, because it is the only thing that really ever makes me feel real. And it barely ever happens anymore, and I don't know if it is me, not being engaged with the universe, or if it is just maturing, growing up finally, getting practical; things that happen are not messages, they are just the things that happen. Stop reading shit into things.

Maybe I should start keeping track of synchronicities, and will meaning into them? Today, for example, someone was out sick with the shingles, of all things. At lunch, I was reading the new Effing, and Mairead Byrne has a poem called "Shingle." Deep, yes? I alas, had no deep insights about stress, itching, or roofing.

A big part of what this Lynch film is about, for me, is about searching for information. Which is what reading into synchronicities is. The universe has information that it is not sharing. But there is meaning out there, we just have to investigate deeply into it to find it. Is the thought. Depression is seeing things 2-dimensionally, seeing no meaning. I do feel, today, that it is not a mere practicality, but depression that keeps me from seeing things as I used to. Because how is 2-dimensionality ever wise or mature? It seems just hardened. I think there is a point where too much belief can become delusional, and you have to find the "middle path" between illusion and hard reality, which is itself also a form of illusion.

In Inland Empire, there is always a secret, things kept from others, secret symbols that are unexplained. And there seems to be a place you can go to where there is the still unexplained but yet it is also the un-unexplained, you get it in a way that is unexplainable in a regular linear way, and he presents it in such a way that you don't try too too hard to figure it out, because you can't.

I am glad I went to the film alone because it was a deep personal solitary journey that if my friend I invited had ended up going with me, the energy would just not have been the same and I would probably have had a less deep experience. I really like this aspect, that I haven't noticed in a Lynch film before, of a mythological, epic journey, ancient Greek almost. The Laura Dern character has to kind of go underground, Persephone-like, or like Inanna, wasn't she associated with the underworld too? She has to go there, underground, literally die for the sake of the journey she has to make. Not ironical, that she is covered in dirt at the end. And the chorus of whores. How are they not mythological sirens or some such, creatures of the underworld, holy harlots!? The way they seem to be helping her sometimes, and disregarding her at others, maybe Lynch knows about the fluctuations between believing in symbolism stuff and not, and they are meant to be personifications of synchronicity itself?

Mobiles

Last week at the dentist I had to beg and beg for some laughing gas. I don't know why they think I don't want it. They always act incredulous. You want it? Do you really? Hello this is SF, I'm sure I am not the only one who wants to get stoned! Very odd. But anyway, while I was high, I was staring at the mobile, why does every doctor's office have a mobile? This one was of boats, and I swear, not just regular boats, but pirate boats, and it started freaking me out that there were pirate boats in a dentist's office, like it is proof that he is evil or something. And then the boats started hitting each other, like slamming into each other, but slamming slowly, because, of course, they were floating. Later, when I came down, I realized they were not pirate boats at all, but sailboats, more appropriate boats definitely, wooden. I don't know why I perceived them as pirate ships. Maybe one's perceptions/ expectations of reality really do color how you perceive things...

And then I was remembering the only other time I distinctly remember a mobile floating in a doctor's office was when I was 15 or so and I had a migraine. The most horrible migraine in the world. I thought I was dying. I didn't go to school and I called my mom crying at the school she taught at. She came home and rushed me to the doctor and I was lying on the bed-thing looking up at the mobile, thinking I was dying and just staring at the floating things. I don't remember what they were of but I remember thinking this would be one of the last things I'd ever see. Then the doctor made us go to a different doctor, a specialist, who didn't have a mobile, but he had this cool thing that shot water up my nose at a very high speed, and as soon as he did that the headache was instantly gone. An allergy migraine. And that's when I started getting into neti pots. Love the water up the nose. That doctor gave me darvocet too, which I wish I had some of now.

resolution for visions

a new resolution to meditate every night, and so after 5 days I have a vision, in the bath, of Einstein on the wall, what on earth could that mean? And then later I am in bed and finishing my book, I had 10 or so pages left, and I get to the last page and it is a reference to Einstein! His Special Theory of Relativity was published in 1905, 100 years ago (at publication). Maybe I should read it.