Feelin' Poetic

Max the Number

The hypnotic charms of theory wax and wane as "Max,"
(your baptismal name,
you amorphous mass, starring in the theater of ersatz eccentricity, 

because you deserve a name, now that you have been morphed into form,

how can we contemplate something formless? impossible, honey.

so you can have that)

is pulled hither to and thither to,

predictable in your celebrated shammery,

A map before the territory.

creating the conditions for your own malleability, 

ignorant  about your consensual reduction to 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,

"chooses." 

Modulation, automation, variation,

subject to algorithmic manipulation.

Deletable, repeatable, discreteable,

Intoxicated with regeneration.

Too drunk to care. 

Please sign and seal the necessary information so we can begin to schedule your own sporadic incarceration.

Max, dear, you live in a Cartesian world and you are a material girl.

And, still, the hypnotic charms of theory, which spellbinders,

who, according to which hither to or thither to Max migrates,

resurrect, are made to infinitely circulate; enchantresses of interpellation.     

Giving Brooms a Voice

hi broom.

wutchu' you doin' fallin' on that floor?

gettin' all  worked up over an accidental push

accelerating on the short drop down. BOOM.

reverberating in my hallway, as your bristles marry my vacuumed rug. 

not even a "thank you for stopping my fall?"

No respectus for gravitas. Betcha' don't even know Latin. Pitiful.

No tears, no bruises, no pain, no sensations. Pathetic. 

you.... inanimate object you!  That's right, the ultimate insult. Dehumanization.

To be human, is to be better, and, broom, you, quite frankly, are not.

you....broom you. 

Forgive me for saying so, but because of your uni-dimensional composition, you, my friend, (dare I call you that for fear that They might deem me insane?) are just a broom and nothing more. Thoughts that I have thought before. Just a broom and nothing more. Lying still there on the floor.

Just a broom and nothing more.

The perpetual object of subjecthood, inescapably inanimate.......

....... until we animate you, give you a microphone, let your bristles speak sweeping tales of gravitas and sensations in tongues we cannot understand until we listen with ears other than ours.

wutchu' doin' broom?

Just Passing By

My fish died. I did not know him very well or for very long and cannot identify any idiosyncratic characteristics about him. He lived in a small glass vase with some plants and he was a Beta that we named Theo. He died a week after we got him. I thought that flushing him and moving on seemed too normal or insensitive or something and that his death especially because he was just a fish and because I barely knew him, was symbolic. I don't know why, but his passing seemed so revolutionary. So I drew him and themed his existence in my life "...Just Passing By" because that seems a lot like what life and our periodic confrontations with death, relationships, experiences, etc. are like.

How is it that we can have all of these different relationships in our lives, some of them short, some of them long, some of them lasting only a day or shorter,  but that their length often seems inconsequential to their impact on us. I might have interpreted Theo's existence in my life as completely inconsequential, as just another insignificant experience that came and went. But, if it is true that particulars have the power to point to universals, then Theo's coming and going may be the archetypal example of the fleetingness of life, of our short-lived existence on this planet. So what are we going to do with it? I could have let Theo go without a second thought and my life would have probably moved on at a steady pace, but if we keep letting little things pass by like this, if the fleeting relationships or seemingly meaningless people/animals/things who we encounter are all interpreted as meaningless than life becomes meaningless and only the big people with the grand ideas, who do "important things" become the only ones who matter. Not that they don't matter. It is just that they often cause us to create hierarchies of people/ideas/systems and then value some over others... like valuing people who are smarter than others over people who have a greater capacity to love selflessly over others or valuing someone who is more well-spoken or well-endowed or more fill-in-the-blank than someone else when, in reality, we all factor into someone's construction of more-than and less-than. 

Creativity and imagination are the forces that drive life forward in a meaningful way. They will allow us to imagine a life that is not prescribed to us by external forces like the culture industry or capitalism or mass society, a life that is filled with a love that is not comprised of mere romantic notions of how it should be lived. So thank you Theo, for coming into my life and allowing me to be immortalize your passing in a creative way that brings intentional, deliberate, positive meaning to my life. Now I can look at this picture and see life as fresh and new and exciting and **potentially** meaningful.

Renunciation

8:04, 32:13, 33:39, 43:20, 49:18, 51:07, 53:10, 56:37, 57:35

There are a lot of ways this can be read. Overlooking the fact that the narrator seemed to go into the study already anticipating its trajectory and outcome (oh, humanity), I like it because it both acknowledges our human-ness and alludes to the lessons that ascetics and different cultures the world over have to offer us about living/loving. In general, it speaks about renunciation through exoticism/mysticism. This is one methodology, a cool one, but also potentially problematic for those who use it as proof that God/Love/Truth is to be found in some esoteric cave in some far off land or through some mystical religion with chants and instruments and candles. While these things are cool, God/Love/Truth can be found anywhere and you don't have to go searching the world over to get at it. Ironically, though, mysticism/exoticism is often used as a tool to prove universal points and put things in perspective and can be useful in this respect.

Halloween......

....pretty much solidified the underlying suspicion that I need to get a PhD in sociology/anthropology/cultural studies and possibly be an ethnographer. Everything that I am interested in involves living life on the margins, watching, noticing, observing, learning via empiricism, being a sort of perpetual ethnographer.. even towards myself. I feel like maybe this is what I am prepping myself for with all of this fascination with identity, with emptying myself, with unconditionally loving everyone, with being a person who can navigate multiple terrains, who is impartial to any one lifestyle (sort of, not really??). Halloween in the city was extremely enjoyable this year because I approached it from this standpoint. I went to the city intending to watch, to notice trends, to watch society in action, the tick, tock, tick, tock of people in motion, of time moving forward, of life happening at this weird intersection of identity and pseudo-identity in the amorphous city of a thousand faces, with no preconceived notions of what the night might have in store, with no real plan of action. It was cool, too, just to watch. Unlike last year, when I consciously created a costume with a different intent (to embody a paradigm - namely One man's trash is another man's treasure), this year I basically closed my eyes and threw on whatever expressive, colorful, weird shards of clothe first migrated to the surface of my closet (since my entire wardrobe is basically a halloween costume this was not hard) not so that others might look at me, but more so that I might look at others. So that I might fit into the schema of Halloween, enter this terrain in an authentic way, catch a glimpse from inside, much like an ethnographer in say, the Middle East, might sport a Hijab in order to enter into the cultural space of Muslim women. It was like, a practice session for me. Sort of like when I go to Arizona I bring western clothes with me and conceive of myself as a cowgirl or when I went to Bonnaroo and wore shards of clothing and conceived of myself as a hippie or when my mom gives me advice like "if you want to be a dancer then you have to dress the part" and in the back of my mind I know she is pretty much right, or when I wore a yankees hat to a sports bar this week and drank beer and ate chicken wings watched the yankees lose the first game of the series. Life is about playing and looking the part.

I loooooooooove theater! I love the theater of life! Who needs to be trained in acting when life is a giant opera house full of multiple stages on which to receive your training? Being an ethnographer will, I think, allow me to be an actress, to wear different hats in a way that is not self-serving, but rather mind-opening. To explore rituals and traditions and partake in different lifestyles and seek to understand, to explain through observing and experiencing, to, above all else, love.

I have a friend who doesn't wear name-brand clothes. He rocks.

Along the same grain of thought, I've been contemplating cyberspace recently (this includes the internet, text messaging, .. uhh.. I guess that's it.. basically ways of communicating that are highly mediated). Here's a hypothetical situation: Imagine if all of the pictures and status updates that I posted online were angry, full of hatred, malicious, spiteful, speaking of horrific things like death and self-destruction. And my pictures were all of the "why, why, cruel world!" sort. And now imagine if all of the people I encountered in the "real world" were my facebook friends and had access this "image" of myself that I was projecting online. And now imagine, still, if I were actually an extremely happy person in real life, and was only using the internet as an outlet for my anger and not for my happiness. How would the people who had access to the one-dimensional aspect of my manifold nature react upon encountering me in real life?? Would they already enter into communication with me with preconceived notions about me as a person. Would they communicate with me as if I were an angry person and would I be thus interpellated into being one?

in cyberspace, identity can be an artform....but this also has ramifications in the real world.

Facebook has a "like" button that I've never used, ever. I think this falls under the category of the culture industry offering me things and me not wanting to be herded into communion with the masses or something like that. My relationship with facebook is so multifaceted that it almost drives me insane. There are people on it with whom I always communicate genuinely, others to whom I serve as a role model (cousins, gymnasts, theater peeps, younger people in general, church peeps), others.. omg just so many different kinds of relationships. Sometimes it serves as a business portal, a social portal, an advertising portal, etc. etc. etc. It is so strange to think of the many purposes it serves...

The internet is weird. The fact that a thought on a facebook status can linger long after the thought or emotion has passed is weird.  I hope that once I am situated into a way of life with another person someday that my online identity becomes entirely separate from my real-life identity.

On another note, my brother has been pestering me for a virtual shout out so here it is. 
HI NICK! 
I guess this is a good opportunity to meditate on reasons why I love my brother, my best friend. #1 reason: because he is so, so driven and does such great things, yet is probably the most humble, grounded person I know (after T-O-M). And also because he let me hang his underwear out the bathroom window when his friends came over when we were younger hahahahahahaha.