Silence is so accurate.

This according to Mark Rothko, who himself was rarely silent, especially in the matter of his own work; extremely conscious of his path of intent, he dedicated thousands of words and multiple manifestos to it, going so far as to insist upon the exact distance from which it should be viewed and the dimensions of the rooms in which it should be hung.

But he said this nonetheless, and on this we agree. There is no mistake in silence, and there is no mistaking what is meant when one chooses to maintain it. The act of speaking is riddled with errata, and the intent that inspires it is often a riddle to the speaker. What's worse is the awareness of being just wide of the mark with every attempt, the almost-right word we must hang our hopes on in the absence of the one we really meant. And what's worse, being unable to speak at all, or feeling an urgent need to speak and having nothing to say?

This is what preoccupies me. I've been silent, and so have remained errorless. But I'm not good at silence; I don't rest there willingly. Something itches, but I can't figure out where to scratch. I look around intently, I observe, in the hope that observation will provide me some insight into how others manage to speak, or at the very least that looking will satisfy the need to feel engaged with something outside my own silence. Occasionally I'm lucky enough to be in the company of others whose voices please me more than my own ever could; at those times I'm happy to listen, and there is some comfort in knowing that my silence is understood. But comfort is another state of being I find strange and disagreeable in large doses--too easy, the slip into a life of quietude and simple contentment, deciding that the work is finished, and nothing to do but wait for the long, slow scrape of years to bring an end to the waiting. It's probably a failing of mine to view things this way; people seem to do just fine following that very plan of action, that gradual yielding to inertia. But it's the just part of the equation that worries me.

And in the midst of all this hand-wringing I allow myself, the irony of the situation doesn't escape me, in that my intent consists of doing away with words entirely. Avoidance of them isn't the answer, nor is a the panicked flood that so often stems from the fear that silence is a kind of disappearance, that if we aren't heard, we've made no sound. Both of which are, a little bit, what I'm doing right now.

And then I floated.

The question for me lately is one of strength. It's gone elsewhere, or I have, and in its absence I've been mutely considering how much time is wasted waiting for its return, and how to make use of the frustration I'm left holding like a wet book of matches. I locate my own worth in work, and more specifically in working with words, in what the mind can hope to do; the issue at hand is that the mind is dependant on the body for its subsistence.

I've always struggled with the reality of inhabiting a body. I'm certain there are people who live their lives without ever seeing this as a problem, but once you've made that distinction and seen the two as mutually exclusive entities, once a divide has been located and one half found superior, I don't think there's much chance of reuniting them. And when the body fails, the mind bound to it tends to follow.

That's where I am right now; right now, I'm an empty set. I also happen to be a child of the 90s, and our default emotion is rage, accompanied by a large helping of self-sabotage and an excruciating awareness of our own inadequacy.

The question, again, is one of finding a use for this. I'm working on that. Nothing is so honest as the body and its demands, unless it is a mind that realizes those demands must be met.

There will be a short intermission, and then we'll return to the program, already in progress.

You'll have no need to exist / And wake up refreshed.

Recently I mentioned an individual who's been very influential in my life--a fellow seeker, and though his methods and the avenues of inquiry he travels diverge a bit from mine I believe we're both in pursuit of the same brand of truth. He knows things, and that's not a small achievement in this era of mindless surfaces and short attention-spans. He's always shared what he knows; his work focuses on the creation of a dialogue, and he'd like you to join him.

The conversation begins here. Please visit, listen, and contribute your comments and ideas. Tell us what you know, what you agree with, and what you think we're dead wrong about. There's a rapidly disappearing bottle of whiskey on the table, and smoking is allowed.

George Orwell tells us that "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." It's time.

What lie must I keep?

I don't see myself anywhere but in that past...
I'm no prisoner of reason. I said: God. I want salvation to bring freedom: what do I do?...
If only God gave me heavenly, aerial calm, and the power of prayer--like ancient saints. --Saints! What strength! The anchorites were artists abandoned by the world...
Ah, to rise back to life! To look once again upon our deformities...
--But it seems my soul sleeps.
Were it truly awake from this moment forward, we would be approaching a truth that, even now, may be encircling is with her weeping angels!...

Finally, I ask forgiveness for feeding on lies. Okay: let's go...

It seems that in order to survive, we tell ourselves stories. We soothe ourselves with tales of how we became who we are, pore over the minutiae of our pasts as if they would point a way forward, arm ourselves against uncertainty with the names we've established and the possessions that tell us we've achieved something real and lasting, a comfort and a legacy we can rest in.

The religious have the promise of salvation, a simple plotline to follow that assures them of a satisfying ending; turn away from the temptations of the world, strip yourself of pride and face up to the multitude of sins that cling to you, and you'll find a place made for you at the side of God. The secular are mostly concerned with the image they've worked all their lives in the service of, the belief that there is a just reward waiting for them if they stick to the plan society recommends as the right one clung to just as fervently as any spiritual decree.

We tell ourselves stories, as children are told fairytales that order a world too large and frightening; the good prosper, sacrifice is rewarded, evil will always be caught out and punished by the righteous hand of justice. We'll be safe and happy, protected in the arms of a family and leaders that want us to succeed. If we follow the example of the hero and steer clear of the shadows, if we drop a trail of breadcrumbs so we'll always remember who we are and where we came from, we'll never get lost. There's no such thing as monsters, it's just your eyes that deceive you. Anyone who has reached the age of majority with their wits intact knows in their heart that the truth is not so simple, and never easy to recognize.

More often than not we suffer, and we walk around pregnant with our own shortcomings, carrying the suffering to the end as a badge of honor because there seems to be no other way of coping. Victimhood as a coat-of-arms is the extreme example of this; giving in to the comfort of admitting oneself powerless means there is no more need to keep trying. The Queen of Swords is traditionally viewed as a widow, a spinster, a woman without a partner, and of all the tarot queens she's the only one defined by a loss or what she lacks as opposed to her own personal characteristics. And here, she appears wary of anyone stripping her of that mantle; she isn't quite powerless, but she's resolutely turned away from the future, seated, and has no apparent interest in being otherwise. She looks to the shield, her name, her defenses, centered in the four coins that mark the boundaries of a life.

The Hermit seems to have a different approach. He's always been identified as some kind of seeker, and here he raises his lamp to Judgement; is it his own resurrection he's looking for? The Hermit is, as his name tells us, solitary, and the work of revising a life, of re-vision in the service of moving forward, is of necessity a solitary act. No one can know what's in our hearts but ourselves, and much as we might try we cannot hide what is buried there from ourselves. The Hermit is wise, to a point; he works in the service of illumination. But the act of looking backward to see what has already died, digging up the corpse of the past again and again to inspect the wounds, doesn't necessarily show us a way to avoid suffering them in the future. Too often we stop at recognizing that the moment for a profound upheaval has arrived; and too often we acknowledge it only because it blares in our ears and we can hardly ignore it any longer. The truth presses upon us, and we can sit in the coffin waiting for the revelation, or we can climb out on our own.

The lies others tell us, the lies we're expected to collude with in order to be received into society, are easy to see and resist if we choose. It's our own lies that are so insidious; it's the stories we tell ourselves as we wait for someone else's permission to begin the climb out of the hole we've dug that are so hard to resist. Seeking forgiveness from a god to whom we hand the reins of authority and resting our hopes for the future on the illusions of the past, buying in to the role we're expected to perform or becoming a reliquary that forever exhibits our own failings; these are comforts we can't afford to keep.

Start again. Begin again.

I get stuck on things.

Songs and images, mostly, and most often the ones I get stuck on have a repetitive, insistent quality of their own; I find in them a sort of obsessive knot whose end I'd like to tease out. Somewhere between their repetition, and mine, I feel there must be something caught that wants to be revealed.

Right now it's one song, and in particular the guitar's circular, slashing motif; it makes me think of old manuscripts I've seen where the handwriting loops back on itself as revisions are endlessly worked over, where a thought can't be released until it's reached perfection or a stalemate, where there's an occasional pause as though breath were being drawn before the hand leaps back in and resumes the attack again.


I Might Be Wrong--Radiohead, live at Maida Vale

It reminds me of Franz Kline's black and white paintings; the same feeling of ferocity and economy.




Are there connections to be made when we look across genres this way, when the mind tugs on the end of that string and finds a never-ending series of knots in it? What happens within this kind of repetion, both the personal and artistic urges? It's something I'll be returning to.

A kind of Pythagorean terror.

In the last entry of her diary Virginia Woolf wrote:

"Everyone leaning against the wind, nipped & silenced. All pulp removed.

This windy corner. And Nessa is at Brighton, & I am imagining how it would be if we could infuse souls."

Four days later she walked into the River Ouse, her pockets full of stones, convinced that her work, her life, and her relationship with her sister Vanessa were irreparable failures. She believed she was again slipping away into the mental illness that had recurred throughout her life, and that she no longer had the strength to recover. She had saved herself several times already, it could be argued, and had been saved more often by the interventions of her husband, friends and family, and there is no telling why this time was different; maybe it was the threat of the German invasion of England, a very real threat in 1941, with serious implications for her own and her husband's well-being. She had completed the first revision of her last novel, Between the Acts, and at some point just after its completion she'd decided that the book was fundamentally flawed, and couldn't be fixed; she felt herself unable to write at all, telling her general practitioner, "I've lost all power over words, can't do a thing with them.", and maybe it was this loss of ability in the medium that had defined her life and brought her some feeling of independent success that she couldn't endure. She had begun to hear voices, she was sure she would become a burdensome invalid, and she must have thought she was doing what was best for everyone around her. The final letter she received from her sister might have convinced her this was so; this sister, her closest friend and ally, and at the same time her partner in a lifelong intellectual and emotional rivalry, writing to her that she must pull herself together in a time of great hardship for the whole country, and that she musn't create more worry to add to it.

She thanked her sister for this letter in the suicide note she left propped on her writing desk, and then she took a walk. And I haven't written this to praise, explain, or elegize what she did--it happens all the time, a person holding themselves up to the light and deciding that they can't cut something precious from the mess of inclusions they find, a ringing silence thickening the air to a bloodless, icy fist in which they're trapped. In a different context, earlier in her life, she had written, "I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in." The last hope of many, as it appeared to be hers, is to slip the bonds of the one life that feels so flawed from its very beginning and take on another, full in all the ways ours is found wanting, infinitely superior in its accomplishments and promise from the vantage-point of our own cramped, drafty corner. Virginia Woolf seemed to wish for this, appraising herself always in the light cast by her sister, whom she revered as a bountiful earth-mother, by her contemporaries in art and society, and by her predecessors.

We all do this. And if we do it enough these other lives crowd our own out of the picture entirely. We formulate a theory of the beautiful and worthy life using the examples laid out by others, and if we can't make an elegant proof of our own result from it, there is the fear that a life's work is lost. We're constantly running up against parts of ourselves that don't fit our view of what we should be, what we could have been, and the impossibility of reconciling the theory with the facts is often insupportable. This is the "Pythagorean terror" of Beckett's Three Dialogues; like Pythagoras, whose entire system of intellectual and spiritual belief was jeopardized by the discovery of irrational numbers, like Virginia Woolf, who said, "Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order" and couldn't support the loss of that ordering power, we can find ourselves left hollowed out and breathless as the foundations we've constructed are blown away.

I don't know the remedy for this, if there is one. I'm just as suceptible to this kind of terror as anyone else, and I've felt the products of my life, myself among them, to be a pale reflection of the creations of others who came before and did it better, and always not what they should have been. Even as I write this I feel it, and I'm reminded of so many others I know who are feeling it, and the killing punishments we dole out to ourselves, the mountains of work we've destroyed.

I'd like to find a way out of that corner where the light doesn't reach and we're "shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the expense of all that it excludes, all that it blinds to." Maybe feeling around within that blindness for the outlines of a life where we can at least express that terror, understanding that there is little perfection to be found in any theory, is the best we can do.

Here all is clear. No, all is not clear.

I wonder if we're too quick to decide what we believe, and too precise about it when we get there. Belief of any kind seems to hinge on our skill at either resolving or ignoring apparent contradictions; the entire focus seems to be reaching the endgame, where one may employ clear and calculated strategies and where it's preferable not to make any moves for fear of weakening one's position. The goal appears to be not having to think anymore; we make up our minds or someone else does it for us, and they're made of a few rote phrases we trudge out in the event that we're questioned. You must stand for something; you are, in fact, a collection of symbols couched in a tidy allegory, cradled in the sure hands of a narrative that carries you safely to a predictable end.

Ambiguity appears dangerous. There's too much room to wander around in, there's a chance of getting lost. It fosters an atmosphere of questions, and if these questions can't be answered comfortably within the sphere of our beliefs, if there is no right answer and no end to the questions, there is a fear that all our attempts to find meaning are fruitless. Language, one of the tools we wield in our attempts, is itself ambiguous, undermining the search for a single perspective from which we can bring order to an existence we're afraid we'll never understand.

In the beginning was the word. But the word is not as certain as we've been led to believe:

"the initial Hebrew words of the Bible, Bereshit bara Elohim, have, in fact, two contradictory translations. One way to translate the opening line...is to treat the word Elohim, one of many Hebrew names of God, as the subject of the sentence, thus rendering the translation as the familiar phrase: 'In the beginning, God created….'
The other grammatically correct way to translate these words, however, is to treat Elohim as an object, thus rendering the translation: 'In the beginning ____ created God…' The blank in the sentence has an assumed 'It,' which compels us to read the opening, 'In the beginning, [It] created God, heaven and earth.'”

Whether or not you believe in God, It, or any part of the equation at all, this is an extraordinary paradox. Literalists will have nothing to cling to here--there is no way to take it at face value when there are two faces, both of them true. For the rest of us, the tiny bridge the mind makes between one and the other, the temporary space created as we shift the words around, becomes a path we may never stop walking and an opening through which those endless questions flood.

Is this so frightening? People have an innate distrust of the oracular and the irrational, but there is a huge difference between a few words that hold many potential meanings and a great hill of words that mean nothing at all. There is the emptiness that comes from overuse--the list of truths we recite and memorize like children learning to pray, the name-tags we pin to our shirts that in turn pin us to one black-and-white image, forever and ever, amen. There is a very different kind of emptiness, before we decide we must choose one face, one set of absolutes, a centralized belief we must abide by entirely. There is also the very human experience of being caught in the grey between, an undefined, vacillating, Beckettian void: "Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

We're so sure we can't go on without a resolution, we can't tolerate that slipperiness we sense in the mind. We want truth, we want precision, a life free of contradictions. We want to create ourselves once, and for all time, if only the subject and object would stop shifting. But it's hard to ignore that when we're honest enough we might recognize that what we tell ourselves should be true, what we think we know, and what we feel can fail to add up. This can break us, leave us deadlocked, or keep us climbing up that hill of rhetoric where questions aren't meant to be answered. Or we can just go on, through the unresolved and unanswerable; we can keep going on and let the going be a story too large for simple endings, brief summaries that flatten out a life. If we don't stop making our minds up, we're always creating, and creation becomes a belief in itself.