Category Archives: infinism

and there

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there are mornings like this which linger across days
gentle mornings filled with the wonder of your presence
and the touch of your skin against mine
and they wrap themselves around me
for longer than i ever dared dream

yeah, so i get a little sappy sometimes. so what.

i haven’t been writing much, because i’ve been pretty happy. i’m of that sadly predictable bent that requires conflict, angst and/or depression to write “artistically”, and i just haven’t really been conflicted, full of angst, or depressed.

yeah, sorry, i know how terribly much that stinks.

it was a long, cold, wet spring, and now the summer whistles by far too quickly, with far too little time for doing all the things i’d really like to do, but that’s how it always is.

i’m happy, but i think internally i may still be at a crossroads. the determination of how, exactly, to move forward beneath the light of some things, while firmly outside the light of other things, weighs on me now in ways that i don’t find comfortable. so much change has been, and so much continues, but what stands before me now seems simultaneously insurmountable and insubstantial. i feel that i can just barely discern what’s standing before me, but i know damn well i have to cross it before i can truly begin moving on.

and one of those things….

little deaths

it took a couple of little deaths for some things to begin healing inside me. the first of those was back in January, where complete, abject avoidance proved to be the stronger suit. it was a tough series of cards to play as an empath, i don’t mind admitting, but having played them, i know i am the better for it. i couldn’t hold anything resembling a coherent conversation with that one, and as a result, i am now even further removed from my past and the dreams i once dared to dream.

but that was quite fitting, after all.

the other little death occurred just recently, and while i still fail to understand just where exactly that particular train got derailed, i’m by no means pleased that i had to once again play the “unconcerned non-observer” role to get by. the words should have been enough, and the actions (or lack thereof), would have made my intentions clear to even the most deluded. but no, somehow, they were not. so that one wandered away in a fit of peevish self-pity void of exactly what i knew all along was lacking: a true to desire to change the reality in which she had entombed herself.

life goes this way, sadly, far too often. no one has piqued my pity and disappointment quite as well as these two fine souls have managed, and they are gone.

little deaths: little things turned grey within me, but i hope their lives prosper in positive ways.

(for that last one, a restatement of the obvious ~ in peace)

you knew
what it would and wouldn’t
be, let alone become,
long before i ever had the opportunity
to confuse it all. you knew
what would fail to move
before you set about to redefine
the benefit in attempting
to change what you knew would be
unmoved.

you knew
the realities surrounding
you, and chose to color them
in forgettable hues. you knew
where i stood, and transported
me, redefined me, and who i became
through your eyes was unrecognizable,
so i stepped away, thus becoming
unmoved.

the 23rd/24th of this month marks the completion of our first year together, ghosts, memories and all. we don’t like being apart from each other.

and that is the greatest gift i have ever been given.

because it is

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i got rather lost in the flux, lately. i’d offer some sort of humorous observation on the eccentricities of life and time, but yeah, that means very little. my on-again, off-again relationship with giving a shit about things outside of my control has fed into this as well. i’m trying to keep it more to off-again, but that requires a type of mental discipline for which i seem to have so little time.

i haven’t done a broadcast in a while, now. no one seems to miss it, and i’m not sure i do, either. i haven’t found anything insightful to say, nor have i found anything of seeming importance to promote. i haven’t been looking incredibly hard, either, though. i’ve been distracted.

i retreated into the online world years ago, completely by my own choice, and with specific intent, because up here, the inherent overlayment of impermanence and superficiality is transparently obvious, unlike the “real” world, where it all gets skewed and twisted somewhere out of sight before you ever get to see it coming, let alone recognize it for what it is. i can handle the bullshit up here because the bullshit is immediate, obvious, and usually very direct. real life is usually something different, or at least it has been.

but now, all of the sudden, life in my real world has become something both more and less than what it was for me, for so many years. the simple expedient of having someone interested in me–even demandingly so, sometimes–has changed everything. i’m actually having to think about how to better use my time, how to take care of myself for more than just the obvious reasons, how to learn to love again. it’s not something i ever really expected, even when i ended a marriage for lack of anything resembling mutual, interpersonal concern.

it’s different at this age, the falling in love thing, but yes, she’s keeping me away from you, my friends, and while i miss you, there’s just no contest there. i’m not so needful of attention that i couldn’t survive without her and her impact on my life, but by the same token, she’s here, she wants to share my time, and i want to give it to her. so, i wonder how many of you are like me, spending so much time on the internet, waiting/hoping/searching for something better to come along. yes, my prolific tweeting and occasional blogging have largely been escape mechanisms, i’ll admit it.

underneath all that, there has been some discussion of late about my morality. this is a laughable thing to me because of how little anyone online actually knows me, what i do in life, the communities i serve, and the people with whom i’m interconnected. somehow, it was deemed inappropriate of me to look for a relationship after i had ended a marriage that had been loveless for over a decade. somehow, for me, it was wrong to pursue those relationships via twitter while also using twitter to simply interact with people and learn more about the world around me and the people in it. somehow, i became anathema for actually taking the time, trouble, and expense to meet some of those potential relationship partners and deciding after some consideration that we weren’t compatible that way. in fact, i am apparently morally bankrupt for having done such things, despite the fact that i maintain good relations with those people, except for the one who bailed out of meeting me after i’d driven for 16 hours to meet her.

yeah, people’s definition of “morality” is pretty whack, and that’s true even amongst us freethinkers. i must have been the only person in the world drawn to other people via our interactions on twitter.

puh-lease.

then, i had to go make things worse and take loud, public exception to what i perceived to be the desire for the touchy-feely version of humanism to operate as a trump-card to all other forms of interaction freethinkers may have with the deluded. i handled the situation immaturely, apologized for it several times in several different media, and still, i’m the bad guy not just because i temporarily lost my head in an argument, but because i disagreed with someone who has more twitter followers than i do. funny thing is, that person and i were able to see through it and past it, and carry on being friends. it’s just some of her followers who seem compelled to continue “protecting” her on her unasked behalf, or who make entertaining, loud noises as they unfollow me.

which brings me to the last thing i wanted to say today. for all the shit i’ve been going through in the past year, it continues to amaze me to near speechlessness, the amount of willfully ignorant fools we have in our “ranks” as atheists and freethinkers: people who have really only effectively traded one adamant belief system for another. i received more rude, threatening and demonstrably unthinking tirades from fellow “freethinkers” due to the altercation i mentioned in the paragraph above than i have ever received from theists responding to something provocative i’ve posted in the past. these people (and you probably know who you are) serve to remind me that it is the simple human condition which is the overriding factor to everything we do, and within that human condition, intelligence has by no means been necessary, let alone an exclusive requisite, to the survival of this species or any of its individuals.

but yes, my friends, some wear the label of “freethinker” inappropriately: embarrassingly, ruefully, depressingly inappropriately.

ugh.

of course, aside from the accidental duplicity, there’s really nothing wrong with that. it’s part of what being human is about. perhaps “freethinker” can be a label that some people wear as an aspiration: something to work towards. a silver lining on the clouds of a bullshit reality which they may, indeed, someday take hold of to reshape themselves.

was that touchy-feely enough for you? probably not. o well.

at any rate, as with every autumn, my real-world life takes me away from here. and this woman with whom i’m falling in love is an additional, highly welcome distraction in whom i already find comfort and release (and that’s….refreshingly scary). i miss my frequent interactions with you, my friends, but there is no contest in the consideration of whether or not this is right for me. we’re two fiercely independent people who somehow manage to complete each other in all the right ways despite our insistence on our respective independence. there’s no way for me to describe how attractive that is to me, and so far, it’s working out beyond any expectation i might have been inclined to have.

if my past is any valid comparison, i expect what you’ll see is a bit more focused input from me in the future weeks and months. i’ll be using this internet thing a little more responsibly, which is to say, not as much, because i’m actually not trying to evade my reality any more.

and that, my friends, is a very, very good thing.

peace.

and so

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there are many things that come to mind, many things that seem to be, and the seeming is the arrival, and the arrival is the impetus behind other thoughts. there are days like this one, and in it, the seemings, disarranged, facilitate the extravagance of all that waits to be known.

i try (and the attempts are trials), to maintain composure, but sometimes, the way in which life coalesces merely compounds the idiosyncratic tendencies of everyone around me (or at least my perception of them) and every plan, every expectation, every hope, turn into something other than what we supposed it would be—what we had dared to dream.

fragments of other people’s songs, their lyrics, their own communion with the world: these things i use, to trace my life throughout the confluences of existence, and even to define my interrelation with the world. there was a time when those were my songs, my lyrics. for a while after the spirit died within me, i was bitter, but the music never really left me. it lingers yet.

waiting.

waiting, like so many other days in my life.

but this waiting, this moment, this churning, has a glimmer: a spark.

a recalescence.

there is something about this time, this moment, that shines. the waiting, this once, is a good thing, for i wait here, willingly, at the end of the all which never was, and the dawn of the all which might now become.

(earlier this week, I took an old draft and turned it into this. something significant had happened the previous night, which i’m not going to explain it here, but it was a good thing: one which changed the entire tenor of the original draft from July 8, which was a much darker time. i am driven by rainstorms of late, and they drive me towards a glistening light.)

of rain

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it’s raining again, like it always does.

not really, of course. no, never quite really, but it’s raining again, like it does, like it has, like it will.

i can see it: a small storm, far off, looking like some sort of soft, harmless little thing….a thing i would like to be in, despite the chill.

but the rain: always at times like this, it is the rain that pulls me back, even when it is somewhere else.

just: the rain.

just that, and only that.

i don’t know, in the deepest sense, what the rain truly means to me. it has always been with me, always a part of me, always around me, even on the driest of days. the internal meanings change as i age, and as experience dictates.

there are days like this.

and sometimes there are lifetimes.

and sometimes, i don’t know which are the longer.

within the realms of former things

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part of my self-definition after i left home involved mnemonic devices in my writing: word-symbols which correlated to certain thought-forms more fluidly than i could say outright in English. one of these devices was the black moon.

over time, the black moon came to mean several things to me, but it started as being directly representative of an eclipse, and therefore for eclipsed thoughts: forms of creation which existed internally but never made it to the light of day. had blogging been around (read: common) back then (the mid-to-late 1980′s), i’d have been one of the most prolific bloggers on the planet, but even then, there still would have been creations that fell beneath the black moon. poems in particular had a peculiar tendency to creep up on me when i had no way to write them down, and songs seemed to always wait until i was either out of music paper or far away from any musical instrument.

but, at least those melodies would often stay in that mental playlist of mine, and would often be rendered sometime in the future, at least in some way. and especially after i enlisted in the Army, the most common way for a song to be written down was as a “poem”. these poems were actually mnemonic sequences, crafted for the sole purpose of capturing the song they actually represented. call me crazy, but the methodology works. i can still hear the song represented by the poem below (the title of which was an intentional double-entendre), despite a series of edits which, for me at least, lifted it from its role as mnemonic device and into something which might just stand on its own.

i’ll have to record the song itself someday. it is the melody that underlies the entire process of my departure from my unrevivable marriage.

this was written at a time when i still considered the possibility of reincarnation, multiple lifetimes, and all that other tomfoolery which is ultimately just as unprovable as religious dogma. for that, i must beg your indulgence.

within the realm of the black moon rising
~ October 2, 1989 in Lubbock, TX

called in and deeply hidden:
something more grand on this large scale
than wisdom;
and the changing patterns on the ceiling
mark the windfall
of the endless colors on the Wheel;
and for all that it seems,
something deeper hidden than the nightfall
is colored by the days it has failed to express.
so much, then ~
so futile ~ is the star-gazing wonder
of a few pale expressions of our doom.

so lying alone, i remain in wonder,
pondering for a while
the termination of the colder hand;
and gazing now beyond these wayward turmoils,
i symbolize the Law of Universal Doom.
it all shall end.
it shall.
and creaking like the back door of our memories,
slowly it opens,
and slowly, i begin to understand.
there is something more here than what is waiting ~
something more full of despair
and empty sadness;
and i search again the long streets of our wanderings,
and my memories fly the pathways
of so many lifetimes.
and so my question, unanswered still,
begs unasked upon my lips:
“when shall i be with you again?”

within the realm of the black moon rising
(and the planets all are melting),
i turn to see the stars,
and you are there again.
i lay my eyes upon thee, my love,
and thou art full of light.

gone

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days
pass by:
“cover me:
let me hide.”
fade away
into the world
~ it shall be this way
(somewhere).
and there:
there is someone
who loves me
~ i don’t know how.
tell me,
what can i do?
(this need for love….)
i have fallen
in this sway
~ someway.
and days
pass by:
the world
and all within it….
(and i cry)
there is hope.
there is fear.
there is sorrow.
there is cheer….
stand away, now.
let me part.
(i know what it is
that i remember)
for, it is over.
it is gone.
and it cannot hold me
any longer.

…September 2, 1985 in San Antonio, TX

this popped into my head this morning. i don’t know why, but i figured, why the hell not. those of you who tend to psycho-analyze me may at least enjoy it.

there

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Of all the unknown things, unbidden yet undenied, there there is a hidden sentience to the way that life comes among us here between the cold stones. We are simpler here, and thus more complicated and complex. But, unknown to us, all the things we dreamed of, have relevance only within the dreams which contain them.

And life comes among us. It comes between us and rides the waves of seeming, which we say nothing should have a right to ride, since we, continually within our constancy, refuse those waves a life of their own. We demand a precedence undeserved: to be ridden by us, as if the riding would be a gift. And we call ourselves, Sacred.

Our dreams collide like the greyest swells beneath the midnight moon, arching over each other in intricate tangles of common essences and mutual desires. And we, wetly waiting upon the shore, shrouded in the fog of our presumptions, can only yearn to ride those swells.

The stones are cold, not warming beneath our misted hands, but numbing us all the more as we are supported by them, not of them (not yet!), but less somehow without them. For they live where we come to watch, and from where, as the cold sun faintly rises, we must ultimately depart.

And in the meanwhile, life comes among us, between us, through us, and over us, surrounding us with the mysteries of never, always, and now. We live between its gusts, among the shadows of the cold stones, much as we live within the wind, the mist, and the rain. It is less frightening here, less immediate, less uncertain. It is dream-stuff, but its pertinence is without dimension, and thus a part of all.

And of all the unknown things, that hidden sentience by which we define ourselves moves on slowly inland, free of us, leaving us staring at the sea, and yearning to ride the swells.

inconclusory evidence

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The way things come and go, and the changes these things bring with themselves: They eventually wear thin in a way that makes far more sense than the misunderstandings arising from them predicates. For desire has nothing to do with it: neither for what we want, nor where we want to be. And the mystery behind it all is nothing more than the half-seen reflections of all the things to which we once aspired.

We talk in circles that are squared: irresolute and unresolved, diminished by the need to face the continuum with a prescience factored and distilled, rounded at the edges of our competencies. We are surrounded by rhetorical reminiscences that no longer have any meaning in the grand scheme of things, for no misery abounds quite as repetitious as the constancy of our daily lives. And still, we find hidden meanings in everything from the formation of the clouds to the numbers of things that slip through our fingers and smash upon the floor.

We dream. And in the dreaming, we come alive. Our days pass incuriously, so we fill the nights with falsified wonder, resentment, and the searching for higher forms of relevance which we fail to understand only exist in theory. Our ignorance is duplicitous, our continuance foreshortened, our magnificence sullied by our self-predicted failures.

And yet still, at least for a time, we are the golden ones.

We dream excessively, deluded by the facility to envision alternatives, and mistaking the commonality of that for sentience, spirit, and grandeur. We live, in truth, at the mercy of the nearly unpredictable collisions between the confluences in our thoughts and the myriad of ways we fail to enact their visions. And there is more to all this, so much more, than all the dreams and vision-quests might ever hope to conjure. But we know only what we think we know, and believing we know only a portion of the sum, our boundlessness is both defined and limited by our lifespans.

In the reverse, as limitless as they are, we reduce our own complexities to facile, digestible pieces and term the recognition of these near-infinite portions as insight, making of them the elements of the crimes we perpetuate against ourselves. And seeing these things for anything but what they truly are, we make of them our punishment, our purgatory, and our parole.

Our convictions and our revelations are the same.

And only the smallest fractions of our existences fit the definition of “real,” and absolutely none of it is “sacred.”

been broken, brave, and blasted borne

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what color hides within the light of the moon?
what peace lies in the shapelessness of forever?
and when morning comes at last transcended,
what life descends the heavens to slowly die?

what rapture churns in misery’s wakefulness,
entranced in a light still hidden
and yet still mysteriously unknown and shrouded
by the color of the moon’s last echo—
rippling waters shadowed in forgetfulness—
of how simplicity grows in sanctity?

and glowing through eternity,
does it shake the whispered sessions
in the crimson of the pool?

what in sage remembrance borne
truly hangs despairingly still in thought
(though triumphant still in an ecstasy now broadened)?

and the humming of the muse astride
the trembling cloak of midnight
is wrapped in the moonlight’s shivering wonder.
it stills the morning’s wondrous glory,
opaquely shimmering and enfolding itself
in the transcendence of time.

how faultless does the morning lie in memory,
though bordered still by truthfulness,
and entranced in a lightness, hidden
by the significance of resplendent terror
and the sanctity of a screaming night.

fully sacred in these trials of doom,
when morning at last arrives,
what rapture churns in misery’s wakefulness?
and what peace lies in the shapelessness of forever,
that the colors of the light of the moon on high
become the granite facade of the weightlessness of time?

(original: January 6, 1991 ~ near An’-Nu’Ayriyah, Saudi Arabia)
(edit: January 14, 2010 ~ Sioux Falls, South Dakota, USA)

drained…

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There are days, and then there are those days that seem to last a lifetime. One such was yesterday.

But that can almost always be said.

Each yesterday, when viewed from the perspective of tomorrow, becomes something other than what it was, what it had been, but when yesterday lasts a lifetime, it hardly matters now what I think of it.

There are moments, and then there are those moments that awaken us. One such moment is now. But each moment, when lived in the here and now, becomes more than what it might have been. And whatever this one might have been, changed without my knowing.

i see you with a light undimmed. i know you with a thought unturned. what stands within my heart is you.

“Sometimes” is a lonely place, but it’s by no means an abandonment. Shifting perspective has a particularly insensitive way of fucking with that, but that’s just the joy of being human.

What we get is what we are. What we know…has yet to be understood. What we feel, is just another different thing, shaded and tinted by what we suppose…what we hope and dream.

And dreams are living things. Living, quizzing, perplexing things. Tender, but rough. Sueded by the fold of all days.

And so, we turn, drained and oddly satisfied, to those things that give us the only satisfaction we know.

i see you with a light unstrained. i know you with a thought unbroken. what grows within my heart is you.

It never mattered before, all the things that seem to be. The tighter, unbending, immobile brain-slumber. The jaded afterthought of the miserable ways we were raised to believe in the structured paraphrases of Bronze Age man’s dedication to structure, hierarchy, and bending other people’s will.

And where I used to find release through many, there is only one, now. only one.

for how many years now have i felt exhausted? and suddenly, i am whole, enlivened, invigorated, emboldened, entranced. there is a structure to this that will haunt me forever, and that ghost is the most welcome thing.

The darkling thoughts, the maddened hours…I am drained of them, and without them, I am left full.

i see you with a light recalescent, powered by the spirit in you. and there is only you. at the core, there is only you.