Final End Credit Image for Question Reality manuscript.
Ancestral Storytelling. Final End Credit Image for Question Reality manuscript.
Poem. Final End Credit Image for Question Reality manuscript. LeMisEncin means "Boy-of-the-oak-tree-mind-world."
Terra and Buz. Two "free-and-easy-wanderers" under an oak tree in the forest. Living in a dream, dreaming a Reality.
PDF file of above Poem: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/6.livinginadyingworldPOEM.pdf.
"Living in a Dying World." Written in April of 2008. The Paradox of Living Today to Create a New Tomorrow, but Living Today as if it were your Last. Human beings are creatures of survival who live day to day... but some have the capacity to design alternative Realities and Futures in their minds, because they have lots of free time beside worrying about resources and housing and disease and other basic necessities.
A subliminal thought in April 2008. I finally worked so hard. Struggled so hard to finally get where I wanted to get. It has been a struggle since 2005. And now here I am, where I need to be, and I have no one to share this with.... Soon enough, I made a discovery.
The poem was not included in Question Reality.
First page of short story: "Living in a Dying World: Encounters with a Human Plasma Lamp." Had not finished, though it was a "bam" of a start. Please see pdf file of the first four pages of the story: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/8.livinginadyingworldsubsetsharedwta.pdf.The story was not included in Question Reality. I first started writing the story upon meeting
I have come to learn that the human mind did not evolve millions of years to adapt to the chaos of modern university bureaucracy. I have come to realize a core central organizing principle upon the organization of the human mind lies upon coming to acquire and care about another "random" human being for an arbitrary stretch of space and time. In short, your mind does not marry the university. That is impossible and psychologically destructive. I already tried that. Your mind marries one or a very few select number of people. And somehow, on a surface value label to society, you are affiliated with "the university."
~*~*~ My final dedications of the publication of QR were toward the respects of Gyorgos Nacon, another Tipping Point of my life (major tipping points include Wendy "the angel" who was the first environmental indicator towards beating anorexia, and others already mentioned, Seth, Dayton, Jackson, even Armand, essentially people who have shocked me into an altered trajectory of my life).
It is so weird upon encountering Gyorgos. "You will only perceive unless you are ready to perceive." There were so many environmental conditions and life experiences that NEEDED to have happened in order for me to perceive and appreciate and grasp the existence of Gyorgos--I had to know multimedia art (including music and film), I had to get into graduate school at UC Santa Barbara (acquire some bureaucratic stability). In a semi-frightened manner, I told Gyorgos one time, "It's a good thing I didn't meet you, even a MONTH ago (before April 2008). So much environmental conditionality, I probably would have not had the capacity to mentally perceive and appreciate you.
It was a strange Sunday night in May. I think that day he had a conversation with someone by the name of "Noga" on the phone. But that night, either I called or Gyorgos called. No, Gyorgos called. We hung out the day before and he was very worried about the future. But that night on the phone call, it seemed like he was telling me these things that were rationalizing his brain out of Future Worry into living in the Present--we mentally meandered through concepts of zenning out, free-and-easy-wandering in the forest, accounting for all factors and taking the best possible routes is the best and perhaps only way how to learn in a holistic sense. Otherwise, the specialized linearity of universtiy tracks does no service to true "education." Go CCS! Then we discussed issues on Truth and Reality, and that in the end Reality is all relative in terms of who knows what and who perceives what and how--whether in colors and blurry eyes and strange interpretations of light by the optic nerve. He used the words "Question Reality" without even knowing that my manuscript was entitled Question Reality.
I was literally in a state of SHOCK. Gyorgos Nacon, INDEPENDENT OF MY THINKING AND MY WRITING, came to the very same core conclusions and questioning deeply embedded within my decaying three-year-old manuscript. In the middle of a stressful quarter, I had managed to listen to over the phone some of the most beautiful things I had ever heard. As if this internal locked, core Reality of my mind had been unleashed and projected as an External Reality that took form of the mind and form of Gyorgos.
Okay. I'm done.
I'm over it.
It's no longer a mystery.
I have been figured out.
He figured me out.
Gyorgos figured me out.
From the core to the tips.
I am no longer a mystery.
Gyorgos questions reality
and he was doing this before each of us knew the other existed.
Talk about independent origin of thought!
Question Reality is so old news.
I need to get rid of it.
Right away.
Oh shxt.
I need to move on.
Oh shxt.
Oh shxt!
As if my mind invented "Buz" as a fictitious, conglomerate character in my life.
And then to discover a Buz that fits all the parameters in REAL LIFE?! That's a bit...
voodoo to me. I didn't get all the details down. I didn't think Buz would be so into Chinese philosophy. But now it also makes sense why I got along SO WELL with my Chinese friend Talei (my other "soulmate," someone who inspires me to write and do art). Even though she was a business major from China (and me a Greek-American school geek, what striking differences in life experience!), we both ended up coming to the same conclusions when I was writing QR. I think I can now describe myself as a sheltered, Greek-American bombarded with and education fragmented Western Thought, then re-organizing and synthesizing this "western science-knowledge" with the holistic, philosophical matrix/frameworks of "Eastern Philosophy" (e.g Chinese medicine and integration of mind-body interactions, Feng shui and integration of human-environment interactions). Eastern Thought still has some lore and superstition and and strange stuff in it, but I took the "reductionist, tangible, scientifically-derived" data from fragmented Western Thought and then pigeonholed-plugged it into the Eastern Matrix. I guess my evolution professor is philosphically Eastern. It's like my most influential CCS professors as an undergrad are super-systematic, secularized versions of Eastern philosophy/religion. Isn't that a kick?
Wow. It's nice to start finding the generic context of my QR habits.... (Gyorgos tells me there also needs to be a synthesis of practices of Western Medicine and Eastern Medicine, reductionist, bandaid oriented practices versus holistic cures?). Chinese medicine is a major set of "alternative" medical practices....
I also find it ironic that I devised Question Reality, and then I RETROACTIVELY discover the references to the components of the holistic way of how I think and solve problems.
Hmmm. I also got along very well with a professor of Anthropology at UC Riverside who studied Chinese cultures and human-environmental relations. He told me of the analogy of the landscape as a "dragon" or "tiger." When there were earthquakes or landslides, it would be thought that the holistic "dragon" was "sick" and "upset."
Back to getting on track from this epiphany. That strange, unexpected Sunday night, I went over to Gyorgos' house and told him that everything he told me on the phone the last half house was so beautiful, it should have been voice recorded and placed on the radio. Same for all the things he told me about human consciousness and phosphenes at the Painted Caves up in the mountains of Santa Barbara. I stared at Gyorgos in awe. I was stripped mentally naked. No one had ever done that to me before.
That night, in the middle of May, in the middle of the Chaos of my own Mind--stripped away to its purity, I made a firm decision. I need to publish Question Reality. I am done.
Before this random Sunday in May, Gyorgos and I would talk a couple of times a week, either on the phone or in person. He would peel these layers--ever since we met in late April--and he started resurrecting every dormant aspect of my mind, piece by piece, until my entire Reality had been altered and reborn and activated. A mind had remained stuck and dormant and uninspired for the last three years. I can't help thinking of the film "Awakenings" with Robin Williams. Ya. That's how I felt.
After the first week of meeting Gyorgos, I started writing a story called "Living in a Dying World" but I had to stop because I started realizing that every conversation wtih this guy was rapidly expanding my oak tree. The short story ended up being like the Question Reality manuscript. After that, I resurrected the rock crab film. Which I am in high anxiety because I started realizing I need to do some writing before I can resume film-making. I have too many demons that need to be laid to rest and I can't focus right now on a subset of demons before the other demons are placed in their appropriate context.
So, essentially, every single conversation I had with Gyorgos, he kept peeling my layers of rot and chaos... until that night. He hit the core. And exposed the pure stuff. The multi-faceted prism.
A month later, I self-published Question Reality on Lulu, and my final devotion was to LeMisEncin, the-boy-of-the-oak-tree-mind-world. My mind slowly started converting chaos back into its organized context... one small step at a time. One word, one line segment of a drawing. One scan into the computer. One small step at a time... till even today.
Whoa.
I feel like I'm living an enchanted, mystical Isabelle Allende House of Spirits novel. I'll immerse myself in it while it lasts.
I still think to this day this whole experience has been out-of-body. I have accumulated so many chaotic layers in isolation and I didn't know a single human being on this entire planet could have the capacity to strip me mentally naked and start helping me organize my thoughts, piece by piece, through mere conversation and "hanging out."
I remember encountering a quote stating that the most ultimate and difficult and treacherous, yet rewarding task is to convince someone to trust you (to bend and take a dip in the dance, to some degree). Trust came in form of the word "love" in this quote. I could agree that finally the accumulation of my last three years of failures has led to the discovery of one success, the finding of a REAL, living, external manifestation of Question Reality: Gyorgos Nacon.
At one point, he mentioned that Albert Einstein said you couldn't use the laws of physics (gravity?) to explain two people falling in "love." Whatever "love" means. Let the system of interaction manifest itself organically without any pre-existing conceptions and definitions and stereotypes. Let it be what it is and what it flows and on-going manifests. Start blank slate and let the order be perceived retroactively. Welcome to the College of Creative Studies in ALL aspects of life: "Don't put me in a box. I'll create and define my OWN box. We'll create our OWN box."
I thought the practice of caring for someone else was a "selfish" practice (the "Sith), but I didn't know that caring for someone else would be so SELFLESS (a more "Jedi" way). I guess it depends on how big the bower is for the person's brain you latch onto. Caring for another person can be a very selfish activity, especially if this person is self-absorbed and net-self-destructive.
I am grativated towards people of "chronic inspiration"--heavy concentrations of unaccounted-for ideas. People of immense "intellectual wealth." Hence, I love geologists in general.... I suppose I measure intellectual wealth by quality and quantity and choice of ideas in one's brain, combined with the structure of the connectedness (and degree of connectedness) of the mental fabric. How big is the bower of the bowerbird? And how structured and sturdy and organized is it? I take organization over surface-value aesthetic. Any day.
Gyorgos and I live in a state of paradox. We live for the day, but we both tend to live to build a greater reality beyond our own selves. Both the same mentality and perception of space and time. Amazing.
I decided that writing my brain out is most important. It is futile for me to focus on "marketing" and "mass producing myself" because the chances that people will discover and appreciate my work are much greater when I am deceased rather than being alive. So the most important thing right now for me is to maintain my own self-sanity of my mind. So it is important to stick to my principles and spend my time writing over marketing. And to think the presence of someone could extract the purityof my thoughts from the chaos!
Then again, you only come to truly know and understand and appreciate a Substance on the condition of its Absence and Loss--temporary or permanent. Absence and Loss is a recipe of pain and withdrawal that requires the necessity of growth--to fillling our mental constructs of Void--living and rejoicing in ephemerality.
I almost lost everything. I almost lost my own life. I had to grow... out of my own fight for survival.
Even those experiences allow me to appreciate the presence of Gyorgos in my life.
Just with Talei (who returned to Beijing, China and who I have frustratingly lost touch with), I am expecting and anticipating Loss once again. I will embrace and celebrate and thrive in the ephemerality of a mental niche space of Gyorgos to which I can exist in and allow me to become what I was truly internally meant to become.... There are such few places on this planet for me to live anymore.... And it is in the mind of another human being....
Through the premise of freedom, I (we?) have found some degree of bondage. If I lost Gyorgos today, I would be forever changed to know there existed a human being besides my own Self who lived by his principles--and not out of his own convenience. My own memories of him and knowledge of his existence would forever change me and remind me that every single day I need to just go one step at a time, move forward one step at a time... based on my INTERNAL PRINCIPLES OVERPOWERING EXTERNAL FORCES. Gyorgos made me feel like a human again, not a lost bean caught in a pre-existing bean fight since the day I existed on this planet. Let's just go wander in the oak trees while everyone else resumes this pointless bean scramble.
I cannot help to flashback to the end of Fight Club, "Where is my mind?" soundtrack. Amidst destruction, of the human psyche, the human soul, the human environment, there is a possibility to find construction, to find bonding amidst chaos, to find resurrection and the illusion of some form of reconstruction. At least in my mind. It all starts with ideas. It all starts in my mind. And maybe one day it will manifest as an external Reality. At least through Gyorgos Nacon it does.
Poem flashback, "It takes a great loss / to make a great find. / Through this tragic death / I found my gracious life."
And who knows what is next? That is where Fight Club was left off.
I write a lot about absence, loss, resurrection, addiction, withdrawal. The Blank Slate. Reconstruction. On Death and Dying. Proximal and Ultimate. The multi-factorial Addiction and Withdrawal and Re-assorted Addiction. Life and Death and Life and Death. The Universality of Order of the Human Mind. The Universality of Shifts of the Environment. The Death and loss in immediacy of my own life. A friend. My grandmother. Cat-Kat my most favoritist cat in the whole universe. New theories replacing old ones in science--metabolic scaling laws in biology and sustainability. Death and loss in terms of environmental and human-induced disasters. Death and loss in terms of mass accumulations and mass extinctions of Pimp Fyzzle T-rex. My mental pet megafauna. I have a theory that T-rex was coated pink with purple pokadots. We just don't have the data for skin color otherwise.
It is apparent there is a universal formula toward the shifts of the human mind, individually, collectively (human groups, scientific intersubjectivity), the human environment, Life on Earth... drastic or subtle, wiping the mind and the environment blank slate through shock and complete environmental overhaul (or through gradual shift, which is a lot more subliminal and psychologically undetectacle due to habituation and repetition). And recolonizing the mind with an entire new coral reef/bryozoan fabric of ideas after this shock. It's a matter of choice and chance environmental circumstance as to what thoughts re-colonize the human mind? Individually and collectively. Why in the hxll Milton Freedman? Why don't people just Question Reality for themselves? Other blips: environmental problems are a mass-accumuation-effect of individual psychology. environmental psychology and mass accumulation effects. human ecology.
I will manifest these ideas of the Blank Slate through a collection of poetry as well as an essay for a proposal of a non-profit group called Alternative Addictions. Making a non-profit group will make my theory instantly practical and applied to daily life--in a satirical human sense. It will wipe out AA, OA, FAA, Disastroholics Anonymous. You get the point, eh?
No comments:
Post a Comment