Notes on birth by supernova and death by frozen heart...

Submitted by jacks_ashley on Sun, 01/07/2007 - 12:30am

It is a night when so many thoughts are competing to come out of my head first that I start to visualize the archetypal tiny car full of clowns all trying to get out the door at once... It is amazing how staying up far past midnight for just a few nights in a row can thin the skin between worlds. The eloquent post i was planning to write in the car seems impossible now: the idea of full sentences gives way to a cavalcade of images that pour into each other the way sand can start to fall down a hole:

Orion Cowboy boots one unexpected star faling over a dead field a sparkling silver sweater and a flock of silkscreened birds the billboards looming over Brooklyn sore cuticles patience time the unfinished painting of the half-empty tree the sadness in the stomach like a broken heart slid south vacant parking lots and dripping dumpsters the insoles at the pharmacy the cheese with too much sugar the ferns that made me sob the devil on one shoulder my mother's lost foot the multiplication of fireflies the dream of skeletons a moongate in Bermuda a rainforest in Grenada the Tarot card of nine swords the fog the mornings three bows to Buddha on a dirty carpet the rain the ground so wet it slides the four chickens huddled in a corner the lonely cat the ripe old pear silence the color of mustard the thornbush flowers turning pale the moon-colored curve of her neck a desperate desire to touch the music like aurora in an opium den the laying on of hands the earth curving away from the airplane's wing the thin smell of reality the shine at the top of a glacier smooth stones in a dry riverbed the rainbow over the smog the way his image becomes belly the shaking the closing the floor bare like bones dry cunt ardha chandrasana rage silence the shortest curls a plate of lotus mud absence smoke that chainlink fence the talking light her lips on my eyebrows this empty room the calling out the terrifying demands of space

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I had intended to tell you about the books I've been reading. I'd intended to tell you about the way Orion haunted the horizon tonight as i got out of the January car. And then a star fell across the sky and I wished you could see it. The mud curled up around my feet. The mystery parted the folds of her dress. The star was slightly green. The clouds were slightly lit. The old grasses made their sounds in the wind and there were no people and I was alone. The outside light lit the porch and suddenly I remembered climbing Mt. Sinai at 3 in the morning and the stars that melted right out of the sky. The way space was curved and malleable, so thick it required the removal of my shirt, so personal and soft and impossibly far away. I remembered being 16 and wrapped in horse blankets behind an old barn watching the winter constellations, so alive my bones burned, asking questions no one could answer, desperately pining for a witness and the names.

I try to learn the difference between private and public space. Sometimes it is clear and sometimes they are like the front and back foot walking. A heart that is open and people who are scared. Were scared. Hysterical is historical. Now they tell me it is ok. Now they hold my head while the shaking comes out and ask me what color the pain is. Red. it is almost always red. Now the memories compete for space and voice, now the fears have forms, now the screaming child is seen and stroked and soothed, now there is a way to heal. The stories tell themselves. The naming is like rungs on a ladder. When you are done climbing up the ladder you can kick it away. Like the finger pointing at the moon.

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"In the ordinary sense, we think of space as something vacant or dead. But in this case, space is a vast world that has capabilities of absorbing, acknowledging, accommodating. You can put cosmetics on it, drink tea with it, eat cookies with it, polish your shoes in it. something is there. But ironically, if you look into it, you can't find anything. If you try to put your finger on it, you find that you don't even have a finger to put! That is the primordial nature of basic goodness, and it is that nature which allows a human being to become a spiritual warrior, to become the warrior of all warriors...

The warrior, fundamentally, is someone who is not afraid of space."

-Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, from Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

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primordial

From Wiktionary

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[edit] English

[edit] Adjective

primordial

first, earliest or original
(biology) characteristic of the earliest stage of the development of an organism
of, or relating to a primordium
primeval

[edit] Derived terms

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Excerpt from a biology paper written 2.25 months before my first hospitalization for mental breakdown in 1999:

"I want to understand the universe.
Why was I able to write that sentence?
Possibility #1: Because God created me and all humans in His own image so that we could know Him, and his Creation.
Possibility #2: Because, as a member of the species Homo Sapiens, I have evolved to possess the only complex neural system that can create the patterns of electrical discharge that this same system calls the thought "I want to understand the universe," and then coordinates the muscles necessary to draw the symbols, which we call letters, that form words and which our neural system gives meaning.
Possibility #3: Because if I could not write that sentence, the universe as I understand it would not exist...
God made man so that He could be known; the universe is arranged in such an exact way as to permit intelligent life to know it. These statements, though parallel, come from radically different schools of thought. According to Creationists, we are the way we are because God made us this way"”he designed us to know him. According to strict evolutionists, we are the way we are because inorganic molecules, under certain conditions, will interact to form organic compounds, which over a long period of time will interact to form the precursors to cells, which over a long period time will form the first cell, which over time will divide into two varieties of cell, one of which, the eukaryotic cell, will evolve towards increasing complexity to eventually form organisms that more successfully exploit their environments, a tendency which will lead to intelligent life. Thus intelligent life is either the result of a number of key events occurring by chance at exactly the right time, or intelligent life is the result of chemical necessity"”something about the intrinsic nature, that is, the structure and tendencies of tiny atoms, compels them to interact in certain ways under certain conditions that eventually necessitate the formation of life, and even intelligent life. Design, chance, or chemical necessity? All three require an enormous leap of faith on the part of the believer."

Excerpt from final paper written 2 days before first hospitalization for mental breakdown in 1999, after snorting copious amounts of ritalin to force brain to function for a few final hours, completed 10 minutes before blacking out on the kitchen floor:

Before the Big Bang there was

We cannot complete. An empty space? Something we can never see that continues to exist all around us, within us, to be us? An infinitely wise being? A previous universe that collapsed into

An incredibly hot concentration of universe, smaller than a dime, perhaps a small as a proton began to expand. Scientists think that this was the first point, the ___ that exploded at a moment approximately 15 billion years ago to begin expanding into a nearly infinite universe of stars and planets and even brains. This is the first point of wonder.
This begins The Big Bang"”the secular cosmology intended to replace religion's designers, the many Gods in which humans believe. This is how science explains why we are the way we are, and conflates the question of why with the question of how: according to science, we are the way we are because of the processes that led us here. Physicists and mathematicians think they are beginning to prove the mechanisms through which the universe unfolded. But why did it begin? And what existed before? We don't know. We cannot know. Steven Weinberg calls this "the irreducible mystery of science ""”we can never answer the question of why one theory operates as opposed to any other. The only evidence we have is what exists now. Something made us"”something existed and was transformed into atoms and energy, elements and compounds, cells and tissues, organs and processes of thought. That something is us. What were we?

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1/12/99: "I am a skin of exhilaration pink and under the surface moving redly to itself."

2/23/99: "I had a vision this morning that I was coming loose from myself, or rather, that myself was coming loose from me, like a soles of shoes that are attached only by the toe."

June 2000: "I am a transformation junkie with too many maps and transitional hair."

September 2001: "The only thing that remains are these systems of removal

this body these systems the asymptotes of routine ----"

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cold air raises the hair on the back of my neck. surrounded by piles of old journals drawings letters postcards stories doodles terrors ecstasies drug-tales nightmares transcendental meditations analyses explications ravings scribbles notes maps plans desires rages psychoses promises oaths understandings devastations

unravelled like measuring the coastline of chaos with a fractal measuring stick

all the lists and and plans

and now, a serious lack of dancing

what fear shuts down: the heart. wild dreams. the skin. a woman who likes to fuck. the memory of birth by supernova. the strategy for cosmic revolution. the body, the soul, the mind. but mostly, the heart.

heart don't get too far with one wing in a straightjacket.

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july 2005:

I used to write about heaven and I used to write about grace like I would find a way to keep them with me one day and I looked in the desert and I looked in the ocean but in the city where the buildings compete for the sky and the air is thick like a swamp there is a drawing on her wall and it declares that every angel is terrifying and I can feel the souls of all my dead angels inside me the way I imagine mothers can feel the souls of their miscarried children and as her body descends above me and her breasts fall into my hands I want to stop so much surviving and believe in something again.

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September 2006

poem written for performing at SF's Mad World, a night of Icarus Project Cabaret, Spoken Word, and Burlesque...

The Other Side of The Incantation

It is a summer day
and you are too much alive.
The breeze removes your skin
the chain link fence breathes light
and time stops. It could all come crashing down again
the way daylight savings time starts over
and afternoons get black. There are no guarantees
only facts, miracles, and misunderstandings.

In the beginning it seemed clear
the revolution was too urgent to be beautiful.
Freedom was something that made you grind your teeth
it made you sob it made you broke it made you come
like the explosions at the end of the world
it made you sorry. Freedom was something you could not carry
across the border. It was something you could not keep.
Freedom had scruffy wings and dirty hair and broken shoes
freedom had cold ears and holes in her heart
where the night went. Freedom got swept off the streets
and locked in a padded room. Freedom forgot that she was real.

Sometimes what is real erupts
through the keys in our spine
to make music like earthquakes. Sometimes it plants
a kiss like a promise smudged in the corners of our souls.
Sometimes it leaves a ghost in our bellies
and an ache in our eyes. It does not offer instructions.
We do not understand that we must practice
over and over again. The other side of the incantation
is doing the work. It is not enough
to climb this mountain once.

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