Why I Stopped

Since that one Monday morning, not that long ago, really, maybe 2 weeks, 3 weeks? I've been wondering what happened to me. Why I stopped. Functioning.

Somehow my mind has been caught in a frame that it cannot escape, like a frozen picture pond but underneath with all kinds of things whirling, dark things in waters trapped so that it can never see the sunlight.

I woke up one morning not knowing who I was or where I was, in fact not knowing who or where or what anything was. All I could see were the windows lit with white sunlight like clear gems stucked upon opaque white walls. And I woke up with white sheets wrinkled around me, a frail body and a mad mind. 

Accidental Minor Crisis

February 7, Midhour -- the day I crashed my spanking new motorcycle scooter...

Surprisingly, I've reached a kind of equilibrium.

At the edge of my bed, my left shin is swollen like the skin of a bruised grapefruit, underneath the ice pack interchanged every 1.5 hours, once again evidence to my being sick. And that, insignificant evidence has proved another seemingly irrelated point. Heartsick. My body of restless energy has been brought down from its physical high, to the utter reality of another reality. I don't even know how it started. What day it began. This heartsick. It's so beguiling. And I always self-diagnose late. I feel baka; bakayaro. That means fool. As if my life was just being swept along with the tide, never knowing where I was going to or from. I'm not the wind that moves the waves, but the shell in the waves. The ebbing tide... I forgot how I was ever found, and how I am lost again. Time is lost to me. The tide is ebbing, I must catch it before it returns.

Art and Faith

 I was simply struck by this:



ThinkFwd: EP002-Makoto Fujimura

TheOOZE | MySpace Video

"God wants us to experience life deeply, and art is one way to help us do that."
--painter Makoto Fujimura


Mako at his New York City art studio.

Working on what he calls a "hybrid" painting--a collision of heaven and earth with a luscious clay red pigment from Kyoto (*Joy chan swoons*), Mako describes how his painting explores what it might look and feel like for heaven to invade earth, just like we--as earthly beings--are invaded by the heavenly, by God.

We are trained NOT to see and experience things. The world is unreal through our imperfect eyes. And an artist desires to draw people to see, to see that what is true on canvass is more true in life, and the tension or conflict we feel through art--whether paintings or plays or other media--is strangely good.

If we allow ourselves to feel this tension, and to know conflict or sorrow or joy--then art can take us somewhere; it can mean something. Tension from the fact that we all are consumers of culture. Because we live in this world. And that we have not exhausted knowledge. I want to wade into places I've never been before, to take friends with me, together, living more deeply as spiritual beings where heaven can invade our earth.

Unresolutioned

January 2, 2010

I could not dare to open anything on the first, not knowing what my heart would unveil. Something about the heart that frightens me. Dreadfully. God, I’m not sensible. Or perhaps because reason tells me I ought to govern myself, the heart, which is precisely the tug of war that the self has been torn. Irrevocably. God, I’m irrevocable..

And above that, I cannot even pare life down into one Freudian paradigm against another. What good does it do to say that the the id is the passionate side of who I am, longing for love and desires untold—the part that is called the Shakespeare, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth—the literary romantic, and pagan. What I’m am majoring in because that’s the only thing that continually makes me know I’m alive. The part that Kierkegaard plays to such utter anguish because he stood on the verge of something unspeakable. He could not have possibly reconciled the duality of such dark abyssmal anguish with Christian charity. Or is this a mere glorified version of my little sister demanding incessantly the next piece of cake. I can’t determine what or if such a thing as “noble passion” exists. What makes something actually noble, just because it’s been advertised by society? And whatever this propriety thing is, I’m sure it has nothing, only if inversely, to do with nobility. Sure, we’ve argued about whether or not only a genetically noble character such as Prince Hamlet were entitled to tragedy versus Miller’s vision of the common man at the center of a universal overthrow of reason. Cease to love, cease to love at least passionately what is unreachable, in which case what’s the difference between hedonism and martydom anyway.

I have never ceased to ask such blasphemous questions. It’s selfish, immature, and youthful at core, but I guess I’m at least honest, right? I’m not masking any sort of I’ve-got-this-world-figured-out,-it-sucks, mentality. It just is. I can’t figure it out. They say I’m postmodern. Or at least I’ve pegged myself postmodern. Because that gives me the comfort of actually being something. To ease my insufferable sense of not knowing who I am..