I finished my first Nabokov yesterday. Lolita. I thought it was shockingly good—delicate, grimy and translucent all at once—though I’m acutely aware I will need to read it another time or two if I wish to speak intelligently about it. As I sit here and wonder how to take the seething swarm inside of me and capture it somehow on the page, I’m realizing it’s an interesting opportunity to continue the vein I began in […]
A cabin in the woods sounds infinitely better than a shack in the city, which is exactly why I went–to trade in the grime and the grind for the sunlight and the silence. I sold it to myself as two nights and three days. You get these big ideas. You get these big ideas and they carry you along. You move from one to the next like you’re hopping from stone to stone across a […]
“I feel better. But I did that thing again, didn’t I, Hafiz?” “Yes.” “How come we both know what I’m talking about, but we can’t explain it?” “The horses giving chase always get mud in their eyes.” “That was easier than I thought. But giving chase to what?” “To whatever you think is over there.” He waved his hand limply towards the distance, indicating that somewhere along the periphery of my mind there were these […]
When Hafiz had invited me over for a treatment, I guess in my excitement I had imagined a gamut of therapeutic practices slightly more sporting in scope and dexterity than what he’d ultimately prepared. Because after sitting on lounge chairs all day under the shade canopy, sipping iced teas to stay alert, and listening to him chuckle whenever a caravan of clouds sauntered past the revealing sun, or mumble an appreciative syllable when the wind […]
This is part 3 of a short fictional series. So far the posts are all in order… So far… * * * * * They’d told me about the wire probably six months ago. The jumper wire. How it grew within us from the anode to the cathode like a clever root of ivy. The fuse of a self. A short circuit. It was a strange trick: cutting eternity out of the equation. Without access […]
Illusion is a grid of two-way streets, an endless network of choices. Asphalt riddled with diesels, sirens, and street lamps. Buildings with decisions stacked up to the sky like trays of factory-laid eggs waiting for chicks. Dropped ceiling meanings. Angled views. Helo pads on top. A strange silence up there. What if the engine fails? Parachute racks, lightning rods and hose reels. Tightropes strung from peak to peak. Wind socks for safety and guidance. The heavy […]
Who are we? It is perhaps the fundamental question of both science and religion, and certainly of what we call “spirituality”, a catch-all word with which I resonate in steadily decreasing degrees as time passes. Spirituality is all too often a repository for that which fails to fit nicely into one of the generally accepted practices for knowledge cultivation in our dominant cultures. Definitions aside, for most of us I think the essential purpose of […]
Here in the Meanwhile, on the shores of Forever dotted with the charcoal stumps of forgotten fires, the mossy walls of collapsing wooden shanties and various debris of antiquity, such as: half-buried edges of glass, torn diary pages, ice picks, the bones of dead birds bleached by the sun, and a curious face caught in sepia, the faint notes of song drift past on the breeze, pastel tones that have nowhere else to go and so […]
Today, for the second time in my life, I finished a Thomas Pynchon novel. Now the hard part: how to convey the dizzying nature of this journey when all I have are snapshot memories and fragments of awoken dreams staggering around the underworld of my consciousness. I read most of Against the Day in twenty page segments, and so it took me quite a while, but I don’t think there was a single sitting that […]
The simplest awareness is like this: an ocean. And then: Waves. Rhythm, or Wind. Light, translucence, and the empty sky. You and I, arising. This is all that has ever been. Hidden from view, a moon is cracked open– its yolk plopped into the ferment. Illusion is endorsement of the sensation that something Happened, and it stuck, and now we need to find out what It was. It is the locally embodied transient intoxicating ramshackle belief […]
Embracing Forever 