The Magic Pill, or Self-Destruction

Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.

Philip Roth, qtd. James Wood


A couple weeks ago, I watched a documentary called "Bigger, Stronger, Faster." This movie struck a nerve inside of me like no other movie has for the last six months. I identified with the director's quest for answers about thorny and controversial issues surrounding self-enhancement drugs. The synopsis for the movie states, "Metaphorically we are a nation on steroids. Is it any wonder that so many of our heroes are on performance enhancing drugs?"

Director Christopher Bell gives a portrait of America as a nation striving to be the best in every sector, especially sports. And then he asks: at what point does our need to be the best clash with doing the right thing? There is an underlying hypocrisy to being the best in America. Oftentimes, winning means lying, cheating, or tweaking the rules.

Which makes one think that steroids are bad; end of story. But the movie challenges our assumptions. In fact, I learned that anabolic steroids are neither as dangerous nor as life-threatening as the government and the media will have us think. It is only with excessive use that these drugs become detrimental, and even then the damage to the body is reversible. However, anabolic steroids and street drugs have long been grouped into the same category. Nobody is denying that there are undesirable side effects to steroids, but the leading scientists confess to a genuine lack of evidence about long-term dangers.

So then steroids and other self-enhancing drugs are okay? Right? The documentary is adept at dismantling each new assumption. Midway through the movie I began to see another side. There seemed to be some problems with using steroids that went beyond the drug itself.

The director interviews his own family to uncover these nuances. Mad Dog, his oldest brother, refuses to grow up. He cannot handle working with his father in the office, and we watch him prepare to leave for L.A. with his girlfriend, where he'll try to become a professional wrestler. He swears by his use of steroids; without them he would be nothing. There is a moment when the oldest brother talks about his dream to become a professional wrestler. Sadness and desperation eke out of his voice, and his monomaniacal conviction to follow his dream sounds slightly ridiculous. Strangely, Mad Dog was the brother I identified with the most. He's chasing something called "greatness".

The director's youngest brother, Smelly, coaches a high school wrestling team. He thinks it's alright to use steroids as long as you are "old enough". But during the movie he decides that he's going to stop taking steroids. His wife has recently had a child and the family has become important to him. He promises his wife he'll quit but later in the documentary he tells the camera he might go back.

I have a confession to make; I'm a recovering drug addict. I took Ritalin and Adderall without a prescription for three years while I was in college. And . . . after watching the documentary I began to justify self-enhancing drugs. The movie had some salient points. What's wrong with taking a drug to perform better? We all do it. Some of us have our coffee in the morning; others need a cigarette; others take their cholesterol medicine. And if Ritalin or Adderall are used in moderation--just like anabolic steroids--there are no real dangers.

Compound these rationalizations with the chance encounter I had with a short article in the New York Times entitled "A Case for Pills to Boost your Brain."

"So then I'm not the only one who thinks it's okay to take Ritalin!"

It wasn't long before I was looking up prices for Ritalin and Adderall on the Internet. Of course I didn't have a prescription, so I would have to order through some shady Mexican pharmacy.



For those who are consumed by the need to be the best, a drug that promises an edge can mean the world. When your ability is your identity, the notion of a magic pill seduces. A couple days ago my best friend told me about a drug called Provigil, which was originally invented to treat narcolepsy. Since its inception in 1998, the drug has found countless uses not only for narcoleptics but for anyone who wants to stay awake and pay attention. Part of this drug's appeal is the surprising absence of side effects. Because it is stimulant-like, and not an actual stimulant, the drug does not cause addiction.

Dr. Joyce Walsleben, director of the New York University Sleep Disorder Center, writes, "Should people just use it because they'll feel better and stay awake? That's a question for society to answer. Is Provigil better than drinking six cups of coffee and getting an ulcer? Is it better to fall asleep and drive into a tree?" (Salon)

Ever since childhood I've dreamed of becoming someone different, someone greater than myself. Even in adulthood I am swayed by a fantasy of sudden transformation. I want to be the best at what I do--not a mediocre nobody. I want to be someone. This urge is intrinsic in humans although we express it in different ways. All of us want to be special, admired, loved, known.

I flirted with the idea of going back on cognitive-enhancing drugs. I sat in front of the computer at 2 a.m. debating whether I should begin taking drugs again. What for?

Well, for one thing, I would like to be more productive. I'm not satisfied with my level of output. To become a great writer, which is my goal, you have to write a lot. You have to write every day, say, five to ten pages, or you'll never improve. I'm simply not writing enough in order to meet this goal of mine. (I tell myself this over and over again. I even feel guilty.) And I'm almost convinced that Ritalin or Adderall or Provigil is the only thing that will transform me.

The next morning, I'm standing by the kitchen counter, preparing a bowl of cereal for breakfast. I hear my girlfriend yell from upstairs, "Mad Dog is dead."

"Who?"

"Mad Dog. From the movie. He died in a rehab center this morning."

It has been nearly three weeks since I saw the documentary, but the characters come back to me in an instant. The searching, conflicted director, the determined, monomaniacal brothers, the broken, defeated parents.

"What happened?" I ask my girlfriend.

"He took too many painkillers."

"Oh--"

Maybe I should reconsider my desire to be the best.

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Update: I recently found a relevant blog post by Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and the Tipping Point.

The Paradox of Dreams

There is a puzzling quotation that opens Herman Hesse's early novel, Demian:

I wanted only to live in accord
with the promptings of my true self.
Why was that so very difficult?

This weekend I met with my mentor, Alane Rollings, in Chicago. Alane is a Southern woman with kindness in her eyes. She has a baby doll face framed by dark curly hair and she carries herself with extreme fragility; but inside is a powerhouse of strength and love. She has been mentoring me in fiction and poetry for ten years now.

One summer after my second year of college I sat in Alane's creative writing workshop surrounded by high school kids who admired me for my passion and intensity. A couple years older than these students, I had already begun treating myself as if I were destined to write fiction, as if nothing in the world could change this basic truth.

Alane also seemed to treat me differently. She enthusiastically pointed out the attention I gave to detail in my short, fantastical pieces. There was a feeling of specialness, a halo of uniqueness, hovering over me in her classroom, and although I appeared confident in my abilities, I needed Alane to prove to myself that my quest to become a writer was not an elusive dream.

At the end of the short summer term, Alane wrote on the back of my final assignment--a ten-page short story--that she'd be willing to read another 50-100 pages of the same story. I read those words and my heart sank. Before leaving the classroom, she reassured me that she meant it. My dream could become a reality if I wanted it badly enough.

What happened after that is a long story. I went back to college and became addicted to drugs. I never wrote another page of the short story that Alane praised in front of my classmates. The rest is told in my Novel of Life.

I don't know what dreams look like to other people. I don't know if some people allow themselves to dream as vividly I do. Maybe it's a matter of temperament. Some of us are brought up to be more practical, more responsible. Others meticulously cultivate their irrational side.

My mother never allowed me to have a full-time job when I was in high school. She grew up in a poor neighborhood in Chicago and knew what it was like to work hard and be poor. Without an education, she became a fashion consultant and then a clothing designer for Sears in the 1970s. My mother never stopped working until she met my father; and then she went back to school and became an oil painter.

My father was born in Baghdad, Iraq. At twenty years old he left home for compulsory duty in the Iraqi National Army under president Saddam Hussein. Since childhood he was following his mother's wishes to become a doctor. He worked as a doctor in the army for two years and then was granted a rare, once-in-a-lifetime pass to leave the country.

I believe my father never got to follow the "promptings of his true self". His mother fiercely directed him into medical school in Iraq because it was a stable, higher-paying profession and something my grandmother always wanted to become herself. But my father loved literature and for the rest of his life he would recall the hours he spent alone fervidly reading European novels and magazines from the United States.

A father's dreams are easily passed down to his son. Through this natural process, I inherited my father's lost dreams. And here, it would be nice to say, "Just like my father became a doctor, I became a writer and everyone lived happily ever after." But life is not a fairy-tale.

Alane and her husband Richard Stern seemed happy last weekend when my girlfriend and I visited them at their Hyde Park house. A small house with brown paint and blue shutters, it was built during the World's Fair in Chicago, nearly 80 years ago.

Alane directed us into her living room that faced a large window. The overcast clouds caused the living room to grow dim. Still I could see an infinite amount of interesting things on the walls, miniature pictures, framed sketches and small illustrations; and on the side tables, lots of old books rising up everywhere. The wallpaper had an antique quality to it, but it was well preserved and without a speck of dust. The house reminded me, in fact, of just what it would look like going down the rabbit hole in Alice and Wonderland:

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything: then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung on pegs.

I was surprised to see Richard in such lively spirits. He overflowed with an autumnal vigor, his eyes sparkling with interest. He remarked, "Fantastic!" after either my girlfriend or myself told him a piece of news about ourselves. But I was more interested in hearing about his life. He told us a story about Borges whose apartment they visited in Argentina. It seemed like a dream to hear a personal story about a man universally worshiped in the world of letters. Here was Richard Stern, exactly the same age as Borges in 1979, telling me how Borges directed him to the shelves and "pointed out the exact location of the book he wanted read to him even though he was blind".

(As a side note, I discovered a book about Borges on Amazon, in which Richard recounts this exact same story in an essay entitled Borges on Borges.)


To believe your dreams is a daring, dangerous quest, very often plainly irrational. Think of Don Quixote.

Before going to Alane's house, I had gotten into an argument with my father. Rather, my father expressed his disagreement with my lifestyle (i.e. writing and not having a full-time job). I'd heard the lecture before and so I buffered it with my own peremptory defense, but most of the points I raised were useless.

Why was it so very difficult?

It was so very difficult because my parents unwittingly raised me this way. It was so very difficult because there are conflicting realities in this world. Herman Hesse, I'm torn between what is true to me and what is true to those around me.

My father has never been an illogical or preposterous man. On the contrary, he wants his son to be self-sufficient and financially stable. He wants me, more or less, to embody what Emerson talks about in that great essay on man, "Self-Reliance."

And I want that for me too, but I also have this irrepressible drive to emulate Richard Stern, Jorge Luis Borges, Alane Rollings, and Herman Hesse. My dream is to accomplish what they have accomplished in their brief time on this earth.

But my father has a point that I always seem to forget, "Dreaming takes place in the future; while living is the here and now."

Toward the end of our visit at Alane's house, I broke into a soliloquy about my past. I shouldn't have said another word. As Richard remarked in his essay on meeting Borges, "We talked non-stop for two hours, literature, history, politics, jokes." I too thought our time had passed quickly and enjoyably. But something possessed me in those final moments and I blurted out:

"My father always wanted me to succeed. My father is a surgeon, and I had this . . . this need to perform, to outperform my peers. I took mental enhancements, drugs like Ritalin, to become better than the rest of my classmates . . ."

I went on, unable to stop myself, "And the Novel of Life, this project that I'm working on, it's a work of archeology, I'm digging into my past and finding a lost civilization . . ."

I had nearly become delirious explaining myself to the room, and all I can remember is Alane, and then Richard, repeating the dreadful word "civilization". They repeated it as if it meant something, but to me it meant nothing and I didn't know why I had even said it. It was ridiculous to declare in front of a celebrated author that I was digging up a "civilization" with my "art". A civilization of what? Myself?

Alane led us to the front door and told us where to find the Coop Bookstore on the University of Chicago campus. As I walked away from the brown house with blue shutters, I kept replaying the blunder in my mind, and I kept saying to my girlfriend, "Didn't I sound stupid? Didn't I screw it all up in the end?"

"No, no," she said. "You sounded fine. You sounded intelligent. You were fine."

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Escape Artist

These last couple days I've found myself pondering the idea of "escape". I've been thinking of the various ways in which I use the term "escape" and how I apply it to my life.

An escape is a break from the usual routine. Often the word is used with travel, vacation or adventure. It therefore connotes something outside the boundaries of daily existence. We escape from life's duties, life's routines; we break from the mundane world to take a vacation.

And yet have you noticed how many aspects of our culture are masquerading as escapes? The shadow side to a hyper-capitalist culture with a Protestant work-ethic is a profusion of escapes. Our escapist culture seeks solace in virtual worlds, food and drug addictions and sexual fantasies. I am a product of this culture and in many ways a poster child for it.

An escape doesn't have to be mindless. I consider my books an escape, my writing an escape. Perhaps there are healthy escapes and unhealthy ones, but they all seem to follow the same logic: I wish to be somewhere else right now, take me there.

It's true that I fear boredom and listlessness and thrive on work and productivity. It's true that I'm frequently restless and impatient with the slightest things, such as making a meal or preparing the coffee in the morning.

The churn of daily stuff--jobs and activities that consume me--begins to feel like an escape in itself. I ignore myself, how I feel, and my surroundings, the weather outside, the air. My mind is focused on one thing, sadly; what I have to do. Beyond this, I am aware of how time is passing. Recall Charles Van Doren's marvelous essay, "If We Loved Time,":

The fear of time -- of time lost, of time wasted -- is a mortal disease. It shortens a life to an instant -- this instant -- which will be followed by other instants that are equally fleeting. There can be no joy in moments that are carefully measured and doled out.

This creates a perpetually unsettled feeling inside of me. Always under the assault of fear and haste, my first impulse is to seek out an escape. I've put myself into a prison and now I'm craving release.

I retreat to Borders where I can grab a book off the shelves and buy a tall Vanilla latte. This atmosphere immediately calms me down while at the same time I'm aware that it too is not static. I will finish my latte, read a couple pages and have to return home where I will give myself another job to do. Even my moments of rest begin to feel rushed. But that's not the ironic part of this "mortal disease". I'll get to the irony in a minute.

I also escape into fattening, easy-to-find or easy-to-make meals. My girlfriend and I go out to Chipotle or Thai food instead of cooking at home. Instant gratification is a first cousin of escapism.

I escape into the dizzying vortex of consumerism. There is always some item, some product, some material thing bobbing on the horizon of my ever-expanding sea of desire. Recently I bought a new Mac computer. Shame on me! One week later I wanted to buy a video game to go with it. I haven't played video games in fifteen years. But the thrill of my usual escapes seems to fade with time. I'm constantly on the look out for fresh, new escapes, more immediate and easier to obtain. I seek to colonize new worlds (of pleasure).

My girlfriend and I watch the Daily Show almost every night. Another escape; nothing wrong in itself; but compared to the vast amounts of escapes we partake in, our lives seem to be strung together by numberless incidences of the same thing. I was getting bored with watching the same show with her every night so I suggested video games. We had played a car-racing game in a movie theater once and had a ball together, so when I purchased the computer I thought it might be fun to try something new.

The new Mac computer provided an enormous escape. Twenty-four inch LCD screen, superb graphics, lots of cool software, crystal-clear photos and video, you name it. And then with the Internet, I was so buried in possible escapes that purchasing a video game on top of it seemed on the verge of profligacy.

When I finally got the video game, it was more like an escape from my escape. I'd waited two weeks to receive an extra controller for the car-racing game. When the controller arrived I was ready to play.

That night my girlfriend and I sat in front of the computer, helplessly trying to figure out how to make the game two-player mode. Nothing on the menu of options (or the back of the box) suggested this was possible. We spent an hour clicking buttons until I realized that the game only allowed one person to play at a time.

Computers are solo vehicles. I forgot that part.

But when I played the video game myself, I wondered why I had bought it in the first place. I don't even enjoy video games. I'm a writer, an intellectual. Video games are anti-intellectual, anti-creative. How far I had drifted from my original desires!



Escapes can become addictive as well. My addiction to the Internet is unprecedented. I check my email on average eight times a day. I check my six blogs three or four times a day. I loiter in cyberspace, I wander, I get lost on purpose.

Not that there's anything wrong with wasting time. But I'm so driven to accomplish things that in an ironic reversal I find myself escaping more and more into a cloud of petty aggravation. What I'm saying is after a certain point, the escape blurs. You're no longer moving from routine to escape, from normal life to fantasy, from mundane to dream. Soon the routine becomes the escape and vice versa.

That's what happened to me. With all my escapes, I trapped myself in the very thing I was trying to break free from.

Just as a prison is mental, so is an escape. The two can easily switch on you when you're not paying attention. The desire for escape intensifies the prison.

I guess this leaves me with the hope that I can distinguish things from now on. My escape is supposed to be fun. My work might not always be. More importantly, I would like to return to those original escapes that once gave me a sense of fulfillment. Reading and writing are escapes that don't dull my mind. Reading and writing make me sharper. They are difficult pleasures that also happen to be magnificent escapes.

Or perhaps I don't need an escape at all. Maybe I just need to look around and check into reality once in a while--rather than longing for someplace else.

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Book Chat

This being my first video blog, I give a sort of introduction before venturing into the realm of fiction and literary theory. I tell a short story about how I found the book Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Then I digress to discuss the literary theorist James Wood and his book, The Broken Estate. I return to Shantaram with renewed zest and give an informal critique of the first chapter.

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On Reading and the Web

I'm coming off a technology binge and trying to reconnect with what was once important to me.

The Internet is a black hole. I lost myself to the Internet one year ago and now I'm recovering, trying to retrieve myself from the bits and pieces of cyberspace. As if during one of my trances, I was ground into two-dimensional data and now I'm floating around helplessly, looking everywhere but seeing nothing.

None of this makes any sense to me. How I can sit for hours in front of a computer and stare. But that is what controls me. I'm writing this essay to understand how technology isolates me from my sensory experience and why I get so addicted to this feeling of (dis)connectedness.

I used to think that technology was different from other pursuits. One year ago I began blogging. I experimented with creating web pages and exploring the vast corners of the Net. I introduced myself to virtual communities and regularly commented on people's blogs. There was something I was after. I suppose I naively believed in this new interface called Web 2.0 and thought it would bring me, if not happiness, then a feeling of connection.

That is not to say I haven't made any friendships since I began blogging. I have. And I continue to enjoy reading people's blogs and commenting on them. But as a writer, I want more. This is my makeup, you see. The Internet lured me deeper and deeper into a virtual world, where I became obsessed with creating profiles, new accounts, new services, new buttons, new widgets, and the elusive target of my satisfaction kept inching away.

Rather than describe how I've been lost in cyberspace for these last twelve months, I'd like to talk about what was once important to me.

Both the Internet and my favorite pastime, reading, seemed to offer me the same thing: immersion. I love the deep immersion of a text. It doesn't even have to be a novel. I used to retreat into the library and spend whole days in solitude.

But the immersion of the text and the immersion of the screen differ in significant ways. Lost in the library, lost in a book, involves active participation. You can become immersed in a television show, but it does not provide the same experience. Why not?

I believe it has something to do with the senses. Television only stimulates two senses (visual and auditory). The Internet stimulates perhaps three or four (visual, auditory, tactile, imagination). Reading simulates perhaps four or five (visual, auditory, tactile, imagination, memory).

The library has become a sort of symbol in my life. I've spent vast amounts of time in libraries. Throughout the years, there always seemed to be a library I could retreat to for safety and peace of mind. I developed relationships to these libraries by visiting them on a regular basis.

While the physical space of the library is there before I arrive, the mental space is my own creation. The mental space is part of the book I'm reading and my own imagination. The physical space of the library is silent and empty. I enjoy the transference that takes place while I'm reading in the library. Of course the experience of reading can happen anywhere; one can become transported from any location. However, because of the silence that allows for meditation, the library seems to open up my imagination tenfold.

The Internet is also a virtual world, albeit a noisy and cluttered one. Oftentimes after working many hours on my web pages I stand back from my work to appreciate it. Yes, I've accomplished something today. But where is it? And what is it? So I've changed my widgets around. Or I've customized the appearance of my blog. Perhaps I've even added a podcast. Nevertheless my work feels lacking in substance and never fully complete. A web page exists but you cannot touch it like you can a book or a painting. There is the sense that everything held up in this virtual world we call the Internet is likely to disappear at any moment. At the whims of a Google ranking and a body of readers in constant flux, who knows if you exist or not?

But when I'm in the library reading, I'm sure I exist. I'm so sure I never even have to think about whether I exist or not. The Net is constantly reminding me of myself. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, nearly every media is geared toward me and how I want to present myself. The inevitable consequence is that I become sick of myself and yearn for another activity to help me forget (me).



I miss the childlike experience of reading in a library. When the physical space disappears and I am fully immersed in a novel, so immersed that my imagination feels like it is receiving a direct communication from the author's mind. The pictures and words are coming in so clearly that I am momentarily awakened, that is, conscious, inside another world.

For a while I was looking for a foothold in cyberspace; a place to stand; but the Internet is like quicksilver. The more work I put into my web pages, the less stable my tiny ledge seems to feel. Now I'm seeking more solid experiences outside of the screen. Until I reached a burnout, or many burnouts, I never truly appreciated reading, and having an empty library, an empty mind.

I love reading but it is hard for me to get addicted to it. Why? Because it is not such an easy pleasure to obtain. The pleasure takes time and patience and the reward comes but not too soon.

In the library barriers come down, the barrier between my mind and the mind of the author, the barrier between truth and fiction, actuality and dreams.

The Internet also dissolves barriers. Geographical distances are breached, multitudes of cultures are brought together, different age groups and income levels coincide. But the time and space of the Internet is compressed; everything moves faster than in daily life. While it takes two days for a postman to deliver your mail, Yahoo does it in less than two minutes.

Rather than contracting, time expands when I'm sitting in the library. As I enter the fictional world of a novel, time becomes infinite and extends in all directions, across history. My imagination also expands as if in tandem with the words I'm reading. I'm not the same person; I'm not the same mind.

On the Internet I skate on the surface of information, web pages, headlines, profiles. But in the library I probe mental worlds, unravel abstractions, witness people from different centuries interacting, and feel their emotions.

So I've returned to the library to write my novel. I've returned to the library to read. I've returned to the library to philosophize on these and other topics. To ask questions. I'm looking for a wider world than the World Wide Web.

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By Way of Introduction: Part Two

In the second part of my introduction, I discuss what my "Book Chats" will be about. I discuss the Novel of Life and the Book of Innocence, and authors who have influenced and inspired me.

By Way of Introduction: Part One

Was Don Quixote serious?

I've been prompted this morning to wake up early and have my breakfast at a local bakery (Panera Bread). It's already the end of the week and I'm seized by that terrible feeling I could have gotten more accomplished. So I launch my morning in a final attempt to squeeze the juice to the last drop. At 9:30 a.m.--when I'm usually sitting at my computer and checking email in my boxer shorts--I'm at the library ready to work.

Last night I watched a clip on YouTube with my girlfriend. I'd seen this clip the night before but because it made me think I wanted to see it again. In this short video, Alan Watts, a British philosopher and student of comparative religion, asks the question, "Is it serious?"

By "it" he means the drama of human existence. And this is a question that has lurked in the back of my mind for some years now. I've wondered about the illusory nature of reality; I studied Buddhism for awhile. I've questioned my deepest struggles and asked whether they were basic or essential, or simply an involuntary creation of my emotions and my ego.

Ask my girlfriend, I am not an especially serious person, and I can even be downright nonsensical at times. I am however very goal-oriented and I take great pleasure in getting things accomplished. In addition, I'm a writer and it seems that writers have to prove themselves before anyone takes them "seriously". Which means, by extension, I have to take myself seriously.

Mr. Watts points out the distinction between work and play. Work tends to follow a linear path; we are working toward a certain end point, even if that end point is the beginning of more, perhaps different, work. In contrast, when we play we have no destination in mind, and the object of play is play itself.

Where does my rigid mentality toward life come from? Was I taught this attitude of seriousness? At times even my play feels effortful and self-conscious. In the last chapter, Autumn Unfolds, I talked about how nature unfolds rather than works to become the different seasons. The leaves fall without effort, not a moment too early, not a moment too late.

I've lost touch with my internal clock. It may be in sync with the seasons but I'm not in sync with it. The clock that I bow down to is the external one on my dashboard. I need to keep an eye on the hour so that everything gets done in a day.

Should there be a point to everything? Should there be a destination?

I've forgotten about the journey. The journey has completely slipped my mind.

Let me tell you a story. In my junior year of college, I dropped out of school. I was on drugs and my parents wanted to send me to rehab so I went to a fancy rehab center in Tuscon, Arizona. After twenty eight days in rehab, they said I wasn't done yet so I went to live in a half-way house in California.

While I was supposed to be getting clean, I was fantasizing about a journey. I wanted to run away from the halfway house and travel around the South West. It depressed me that I was stuck in a house full of ex-junkies and that my day was strictly regimented, drug classes in the morning, work in the afternoon, AA meetings at night. It angered me that I had to sweep the floor, cut the lawn, pull the weeds, and clean the toilets. There seemed to be no end to these menial jobs. My life had become all work and no play.

One afternoon I bought a bottle of whiskey and drank it in the parking lot behind the liquor store. They tested us for alcohol every week, and so I got caught. They asked me to leave the halfway house. Finally, I had the perfect excuse to go on my journey. Like Don Quixote, I set off to an unknown land. Instead of a skinny horse I took a battered Greyhound bus; instead of chasing windmills I went to Las Vegas.

During this erratic wandering, I didn't have a goal in mind. Without a destination or even a purpose for leading an existence other than to have adventures, I immersed myself in a sort of dreamworld. The people I met would enter into my Novel of Life and become instant characters.

I traveled from Las Vegas back to Tuscon and then I hitchhiked through Arizona, where I was picked up by strangers on the highway, and on some nights I slept in the desert. Looking back it seems there was more "play" during this time of my life than any other. My undisciplined mind exulted in breaking the rules of a serious life and "playing" with the limits of reality. Doctors and psychologists had a hard time talking to me because I turned everything into a performance. I also suffered from delusions of grandeur.

Today, almost ten years later, I find myself confronted with the opposite extreme. Too much work and not enough play. I am living the regime of the halfway house without the halfway house itself. My adolescent self understood something that not even my adult self can grasp. If somebody had played the Alan Watt's clip for me, I would have recognized the philosophy as my own. Back then, it was my job to undermine seriousness. I mocked authority figures who seemed to represent a culture of goal-oriented freaks.

While it's true I've become one of those goal-oriented freaks, I do understand that play is not simply a wild rampage. Play is more nuanced than I once thought in my adolescence. The drama of existence may not be serious, but on the other hand, it is also no joke. Therein lies the paradox.

Autumn Unfolds

Fall is my favorite time of the year. I live in Central Illinois where despite the cold winters, I enjoy the succession of the seasons. If I lived in a place where the seasons never changed, I imagine I would be stricken with a sort of grief.

Change is inevitable, impossible to avoid, and Fall over all the seasons demonstrates this to us. Why? Because Fall is beautiful, more beautiful than the other seasons. In her bright burst before death, Fall heightens the senses, brings us closer to our bodies, refreshes the psyche.

In the arts, Autumn has been depicted by a hare, vine-leaves or a horn of Plenty brimming with fruit. In mythology, the season is sacred to Dionysus, the god of wine.

Every Fall, I become super-sensitive to the two-day interim between the tail end of Summer and the beginning of Fall. I can remember the warmth of the final day, how the clouds looked, and how I felt; and then, I recall the arrival of the first Autumn day and her cold breath on my face.

I am rejuvenated in the cold air, my whole body awakens. As if Summer were only a long slumber. The scents in the air come alive. I can smell the high school bonfires burning before homecoming. And the corn husk after the fields are cleared. The sky appears as if it has been scrubbed clean; provides a stark background for the range of colors in the leaves.

Driving down the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood, I think of golden apples, which is what the trees look like to me.

The succession of the seasons punctuate the rhythm of life. The seasons reflect our own stages from birth, growth, maturity, and decline. If the leaves are able to move us, then perhaps it is because we see a reflection of ourselves in their beauty. Their beauty represents change, alteration, succession. We sense our own fate in the changing of the landscape.

Really the only proper attitude to take toward life is to marvel at it. To marvel and to keep marveling and never to stop.

When my energy returns (and I'll never understand how I lost it), I gain momentum in my thoughts and my emotions and once again I have a passion to accomplish things. When my energy returns, I feel alive again, throbbing with motivation and good ideas. This overflow of energy of course produces an excitement and a desire for more energy, more action, more accomplishment. Sometimes I get too far ahead of myself.

If there is any "work" to be done in nature, I don't see it. What I see in nature is an unfoldment, a succession of events without effort. I wonder if my life can become like that.

As an adolescent I swung between two extremes--an excessive, almost manic self-directedness, in school, sports and social life--or the opposite, which was undirected, amorphous, purposelessness. You watch the seasons and see neither one of these extremes. You watch the seasons and see how life occurs, how nature unfolds.

Balanced or not?

I've stepped back from making individual posts on my various blogs in order to gain a larger perspective. My goal is to fill these notebooks with rough drafts I will then use to make a series of blog posts.

The Book of Innocence was originally intended as a nonfiction book, something in between a collection of personal essays, a book of digressions, a journal. I used a basic structure for the first seven chapters, which is "flight" and "descent," and I would like to maintain some pattern for the next section of the book although I don't know yet what my overall subject-matter will be. Flight, descent, then what?

This book is a contemplation on my life, on my experiences, and on life itself. Recently I've come up against the rapid cycle of my emotions; anticipation, excitement, and then disenchantment and frustration, endlessly repeating. Because this experience was so vivid to me I had to investigate it. What I found was that a pattern lurks beneath the surface of my life, a pattern based upon rising and falling emotions, and the ebb and flow of energy.

Balance. Is there an inborn desire for balance in our species? Or is just the opposite true: our nature keeps us forever imbalanced and incomplete?

Within me I feel there is a chemical reaction that carries me away from myself, just as there is a chemical reaction which draws me nearer to myself, closer to my center.

Ever since Tess (my girlfriend) moved in, there has been a dramatic shift in my lifestyle. But of course I don't attribute all of my changes to her moving in. Another major change occurred during this time period. I began blogging . . . like mad.

I stopped meditating. I stopped working out. I grew fat and addicted to caramel-flavored lattes. All of these instances are evidence enough for some sort of imbalance. It is almost impossible for me to have donuts or ice cream in the house without them disappearing in two days.

But in other ways I've grown. That is, I've gained more balance in other areas. Such as working at the hotel. For the first time in my life, I'm working a regular job--with demands I've never had to cope with before--such as pleasing customers. Also, since Tess moved in, I've become less self-focused. I'm learning to be with somebody other than myself. I can recall when I lived by myself and how that felt. Even in my happiest moments I was still utterly alone in life. Sharing my experiences with Tess has definitely brought me closer to a state of balance with others.

Can a person be balanced and imbalanced at the same time? Can one be healthy and unhealthy? Sane and insane? And if so, how do these opposites mutually coexist?

In any given moment, the human essence, that which I call "me", is in flux. For this reason opposites are allowed to mingle and exist side by side one another. The flux of the human essence refuses to be pigeonholed into an absolute state, happiness, for example, or total misery.

Perhaps a suicide commits suicide not because of the certainty of his feelings, but the uncertainty, the flux. Being human means being incompatible with oneself. One is balanced in a certain way and imbalanced in another. We cannot just be this or that. We are all things, contradictory and inconclusive.

The flux involves elements that are both in order and out of order. Nothing will ever be complete. Forget perfection. You are torn at the roots of every moment. Which gives us a chance to renew ourselves if we are looking forward. But also a sense of disappointment and disenchantment if we are looking back.

Maybe I won't write out all of these chapters ahead of time. Maybe I'll just come to the library every day and write a chapter in my notebook. Then I'll return home and transcribe it into a post as I have done today.

Wow, it feels good to be writing again.

Preface to the Blog of Innocence

I like to think of myself as someone who is drafting and re-drafting his life until it makes sense. Life, being irrational, never fully makes sense and so I am continually making up new stories about myself in a creative and naive way.

But this is how children think. Nothing is absolute. Everything is provisional for a child. Tell the child one story, she will believe it, because any story to a child has the possibility of being true.

Adults on the other hand conform to a rigid set of beliefs, true or untrue only according to their own reality.

I write because it is a door I once opened and I continue to go back and forth through that door. I explore the byways and the tunnels of myself.

Whatever I write always has the possibility of being true--at least to me--and to write down my reality is satisfying.

The question of whether what I do is art or not. Sometimes I am intentionally creating art and sometimes I am just writing. The best writing comes out when I am not intentionally doing anything--in fact the best writing comes out when I don't know what I'm doing or saying. But I think I like to write because it feels like someone is listening. It feels like what I am saying is not only true to me but true to others as well.

In a way, I am a compulsive writer. I will write because it's a drive.

Maybe I should stop.

Sometimes I do. But when I stop writing, I read a lot and reading activates my imagination and soon I am writing again.

Whatever I've been saying in the last few paragraphs, I'm not aiming at anything. I'm circling around the mood and the moment of my experience, gladly touching the borders and playing with the edges.

Everyone has their own secret life. We all have minds which are islands--between those islands flow the rivers of our hearts, but the mind itself is lonely. Which is strange, because we retreat into our minds so often. We retreat into our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, and we find solace in them even though they are ridiculous.

But there is safety in one's private mind, the thoughts of which no one can read. Because they are private entertainments of the self.

If you have pets, then you know the comforts of having non-human company. The human-animal connection is unique, and for obvious reasons, animals are incredibly loved by humans.

Ultimately, I think what we are stuck with is habit. Whatever habits you cultivate within your lifetime, those are the heavens and hells of your existence. Many habits fall between these two extremes and that's why our lives are pretty mundane.

Most of our habits are mundane in the everyday sense. We go to work, we eat meals, we tend to our homes and our families, we do chores. Perhaps that's why novelty is so interesting and stimulating.

I seek novelty. If I am not seeking novelty in dramatic and bizarre ways, I am seeking novelty in the miniature sense.

I do appreciate a well-ordered life, everything manageable and in its right place. This stems from the pure gratification of a sense of control. But as far as I can tell, control is something that most people try to exert over themselves and their environments.

My habits are deeply fulfilling mundane rituals that I carry out, such as going to Borders every morning to have my coffee and read the New York Times. To me, the Times is my mainstay to a normal, functioning adulthood. I am not saying the specific paper has the same magical effect on everyone. But for me reading the paper is very soothing and it reaffirms my sense of self.

I admire the quality of the writing in the Times and I believe it improves my own writing. But there is something else about the ritual which stabilizes me.

And yet, I seek novelty.

Women provide men with an immediate burst of novelty and distraction. If you are ever bored, start a romantic relationship and you will find how interesting your life gets.

But I believe that I ultimately retreat back into my own private mind, and that shared space between me and another person gradually lessens or dries up and dies.

I believe in long-term relationships, I am cynical towards permanent ones.

Right now I don't know where I am in terms of the opposite sex. Do I want to get married? Do I want to have children? Would I prefer to stay single?

The opposite sex is delightful. Loving can also be a doorway to a higher potential for one's being, but in most cases, we are not mature in love for long enough. We stop loving and I cannot explain or understand that.

Love gets degraded over time, diminished, and terribly distorted until it is not even love but something representing its opposite: hate.

Now my cats are quiet. The heater has stopped humming and the only sound in the room is of my keys clicking.

I think about my past life, my life in Spain and Las Vegas. I think of the adventures I once had and now being here in this moment of early, untainted adulthood.

I'm making the right choices now. Thank God. I am rational about things. I am aware of habit and how it has the power to lull me into a state of unconsciousness.

We grow ourselves. We grow our personalities and our behaviors. Like a garden, we grow ourselves--and once we were sick gardens but now we are growing healthier. Once we were patches of weeds over a dusty mound of dirt, but now we are seeking wholeness and fruit.

We want to bear fruit. For ourselves, for others.

We learn in time to survive, and even better, we learn to thrive.

It is the unfortunate fact of being human that we are constantly working against ourselves. We like to be our own enemies. And I think it is better that we just accept this as a matter of fact, that we accept the demons inside of us which want to destroy us, even if that destruction is a slow-going poison.

Because, ultimately, we must die and we know we must die. So the destructive force inside each one of us is familiar and close. We know the destructive side as much as we know the creative side. We know when we do good to ourselves and our bodies, and we know when we do bad.

Good and bad are only relative to our own individual experiences. Doing wrong to others is doing wrong to oneself.

But it is almost impossible to escape the cloud of unconsciousness that hovers over each one of us. And in an ironic display, we can see everyone else's flaws but not our own.

It is like the inability to smell one's own scent. The smell is palpable to others, but not to yourself.

I don't repress the mystery about myself; I form it.

I also celebrate it.

I have been called naive before, and after all, this blog is called The Blog of Innocence.

We are all innocent in life. We are innocent to the radical mystery of it.

No matter what we do, what errors we make, what horrors befall us, we are all human, we are all innocent.

Read a recent essay, "Loving Her" . . .

Credits

The Blog of Innocence would not be complete without all of the beautiful images. I thank the contributors with all my heart.

Please note that I have since changed my credits policy. Now I provide a link to the artist on the page of the article.

These are the credits, mostly to Flickr users, for previous posts.

Cover Banner: Paul Delvaux, The Man of the Street.

Welcome Page: "Swedish Suburbs in The Mid-Seventies" on Flickr
Preface: "jiamgspokane" on Flickr

Approaching the Cliff: "lowmagnet" on Flickr
Flight: Part One: "fjalarinn" on Flickr)
Flight: Part Two: "Troy Snow" on Flickr
Flight: Part Three: "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" by Goya
Descent: Part One: Matei Apostolescu
Descent: Part Two: unknown
Descent: Part Three: Vladamir Kush

Balanced or not?: "Tahbepet" on Flickr
Autumn Unfolds: "Hanneck" on Flickr
Was Don Quxiote serious?: "i am not perfext" on Flickr.
On Reading and the Web: photo by Candida Höfer, Libraries
Escape Artist: "Jobbys" on Flickr and "bass_nroll" on Flickr
The Paradox of Dreams: "merowig" on Flickr and "www.esperanto.org" for the Borges pic
The Magic Pill, or Self-Destruction: "Streams of Consciousness" on Flickr
Robert Louis Stevenson: "mjkghk" on Flickr
Michel de Montaigne: "expatriatus (hatethereligion,ovethereligious)" on Flickr
James Joyce: "Textportraits" on Flickr
Where do we stand: art by Letman

Additional Pages:
The Imaginary Audience: Vladamir Kush
The Bridge: "lowmagnet" on Flickr

Descent: Part Three

Life presents a paradoxical situation to each of us. Life asks us to both care and not care at the same time. My flight embraces one end of the spectrum: the extreme of caring. My descent embraces the other: supreme not-caring.

How to engage both at the same time? Maintaining a balance seems contradictory and impossible.

The closed circle of flight and descent forms the essence of what it means to be human. That swing is life propelling itself forward and back through triumph and hardship, success and failure, gladness and sadness. Without this primordial movement, we would not know joy from misery, or pleasure from pain.

The cycle is so familiar to me, and yet I hardly recognize it. Like spring, summer, fall, and winter, I relive the drama of every new season. With fervor I jump from the cliff and soon find myself soaring through the clouds. “Life is really this good . . .”

What I never pay attention to is the subtle shift. If I knew that I was descending then perhaps I could prepare myself better, modulate my speed, extend my wings, maneuver my body, or look where I’m going—to ensure a safe landing.

But I plummet, as I’ve always plummeted.

So this is the true character of life and I must accept it. The rhythm is bound to rise and fall. I’m impulsive about flying and I want to live there, up in the clouds.

But the descent is pulling me down, bringing me into closer harmony with the earth and her seasons, and I will be wiser for it.

Descent: Part Two

Despair comes when I feel like my work has no purpose. Despair comes from feelings of naught, I am naught, my work is naught, the world is naught . . .

But what is despair?

Despair is the conviction of the futility of life.

Despair is all efforts signifying nothing.

Despair is the abortion of possibility.

Despair is a yoke that reads “Carry Me or Die.”

My despair feels like the abrupt end to a good movie. I wish I could return to those beginning parts and relive the experience, feel those powerful emotions. I regret having felt joy; it seems like a cruel reality, something that was given and taken away.

Despair is my grandfather’s overcoat hung on the door when he comes back from drinking and gambling. The house is silent. My grandmother is crying up in her bedroom.

My despair is a pit of solitude the town bullies throw me into so they can piss on me and shout jibes.

My despair is the convincing reality that I am stuck forever.

My despair is the inability to stay in one place, physical or otherwise.

My despair is the absence of wanting to do anything. Nothing interests me anymore.

My despair is a shopkeeper who scowls at me when I enter his store.

I used to be a drug addict. I am still seeking respite.

The Internet promises fulfillment. The type of person you are depends on what that fulfillment might be.

One moment, I feel like a king surveying his realms on a map of the world.

The next, I feel like the king’s fool, making jokes about the king’s empty possessions.

For three days, I am gliding through existence—every sensation a lubricant to positive emotion, every thought an expansive, intelligent connection.

For two more days, I am shedding my charisma and beginning to walk in a growing fog of self-delusion.

By the end of the week, lethargy and despair pour in through the levees.

Cycles are part of nature right? The seasons are cycles, the day is a cycle, life is a cycle . . .

I yearn for a place outside my constant seeking. I yearn for repose at the end of the wheel’s turning.

For the first time, I am conscious of my despair.

I am conscious of the cycle that drives me to act, or not to act. For the first time, I am interrogating my sadness.

I restrain myself from becoming too indulgent in my feelings of intoxication. This is the beginning of learning detachment.

My tendency is to grasp positive emotion. Like a cunning alchemist, I will try to make joy into a fountain of ecstasy or happiness into glowing euphoria.

Now I can see the problem with that. After euphoria, there is emptiness and only emptiness; after ecstasy there is pain.

Flights of grandeur. Flights of poetic inspiration. Flights of high emotion.

Nothing lasts. The water returns to the sea. The flight I expect to go on forever will at once make its sharp descent.

Whatever is holding me, will let go.

Descent: Part One

Flights of grandeur. Flights of poetic inspiration.

I’ve depended on flights for so long.

The truth is I’ve never wanted to be where I was physically located. As a teenager, I recall spending vast lengths of time by myself. My parents were not around. My mother was busy painting or cleaning the house; my father worked in a hospital and didn’t get home until late.

The house I grew up in was all white and we were forbidden to touch the walls. The first floor hallway extended the width of a soccer field, and the floors were marble. The living room had a fireplace, a white baby grand piano, and silver curios filled with figurines and crystals in the shapes of animals.

The house had a vacant quality which lent itself to dreaming. I used to look up at the sky light in my parents’ bathroom and watch the clouds sail over the house. At the foot of the Jacuzzi was a copper planter with bright red azaleas. Each side of the bathroom had a wall-length mirror with a marble counter. I came in there to dream and to be alone in the cold sunlight.

Or I would plant myself in the living room, curled over an art notebook I stole from my mother’s studio. She kept dozens of notebooks and journals in the bottom drawer of an antique desk. I would sneak the fresh white pages up to the living room, where I would draw and daydream until she came home.

The living room was always the most pristine and secluded room in the house, despite being at the center of it. The room gave the impression of a museum-like display or a drawing-room held in suspension. Like the moment before a party begins and the guests funnel in with smiling faces.

The cushions on the couches were firm. It was not easy to fall asleep on them. With the light coming into the room, one couldn’t fall asleep anyways. I would open the notebook and pause before writing anything. It gave me such pleasure to begin a clean notebook. I usually began with some arcane idea for my creation, as if I were a medievalist or a magician. I sketched the grotesque faces of the creatures of my imagination. I wrote scribbles of poetry. I brooded over the markings.

By my side I would have The Three Musketeers, a book I didn’t read as much as I carried it along with me like a reference guide or a Torah. Occasionally I flipped through the pages and glanced at the stories I could hardly decipher and only imagine.

There was a bubble of alienation surrounding me—and I needed a place to go.

My flights were often when I felt most connected to the world.

Flight: Part Three

Our daily lives have crystallized into routines, patterns, and rituals. I want to hold onto these patterns because they reinforce the sense of a singular life—my life, which has to do with my goals, and my supreme sense of individuality.

But when I scan the content of my dreams, I see that these routines, patterns, and rituals are like man-made barriers built to stop the flow of contradictory desires.

Dreams will dismantle the notions you’ve carried along about yourself. Dreams will deconstruct that seemingly indestructible idea of “me”.

And here I’m not talking about the flying dream. My flying dream has done little to deconstruct me. Why? Because over the years I’ve integrated it into my personality. The flying dream serves a purpose now; it has become a symbol of my destiny. Before I told you that I wouldn't interpret my dream, but flight is also a universal signifier.

Flight connotes the essence of superhuman power. Flight connotes another realm, a realm nearer to the heavens. Flight connotes the privileged position of the sky, the wide-embracing “bird’s eye-view”, the highest point to look down upon the vegetable planet. Flight connotes elegance, quickness, and lightness.

It seems to me that this dream wants to inflate my ego. Could flight be my symbolic compensation? If I can fly over everyone and everything then maybe I'm not the anxious, worried person I feel I am.

Unlike my flying dream, which inflates my ego, I had a particularly disturbing dream this morning which seemed to create a reverse effect.

The dream involved a sexual experience—that I remember—the rest I recall only vaguely. If I told you some of these loose fragments, these vivid though rootless images, it would be like offering a meal with the food on various plates.

I was disturbed by the dream in the same way that I am shocked to overhear some of my darkest thoughts. I thought to myself, “How could I have ever dreamt that?”

The night embraces inconceivable elements, frightening aspects of our personalities, and lepers of the mind.

If real-life is assigned to day-time hours, then real-life is a cover up. During the day, I struggle to maintain so much damn control. Every hour is anticipated. As if a future moment, which is really just another present moment, will differ vastly from this present moment I am having now.

At night, I’m not thinking about what will come next. After whatever I'm doing, I'm going to bed. The clock drops out of my mind. I'm not governed by time and its mathematical tables. I'm not goaded by self-consciousness.

There are no passing moments, only eternal ones preparing me for flight.

Flight: Part Two

I have had this dream ever since I was a child. The dream has become a sort of refrain in my life, endlessly repeating and replenishing my interest in it.

I am trying to pry into my subconscious; I am trying to decipher one of the many mysteries I hold inside me.

Waking from my flying dream is one of the most pleasant sensations I know. Upon waking I am reminded of my secret powers, and I go about the rest of my day with a foolish grin on my face.

The interpretation of dreams may be a provocative and stimulating pursuit, but one never arrives at a final solution—or the key—to his or her dream.

I suppose I can look up the symbol of “flying” in a dream-encyclopedia and find a generic, albeit satisfactory, explanation to my night-visions. It might even shed some light on the variegated herds of animals that haunt my African savannah . . .

But, on second thought, I don’t care to know the true meaning of this dream. I simply want to carry the sensation of flying. I want to carry it until I die, never knowing what the dream means or why I had it so often . . .

There is no doubt that our dreams are trying to tell us something. If you believe in the subconscious, then you’ll admit to the importance of this crystal bridge between worlds--

The vaguest memory of our dreams suggests we have access to them; a doorway, a brief crack of light. In rare occasions, a person might awake within her dream, which is called lucid dreaming.

Once I had a lucid dream. The world (of the dream) was totally fantastical, and yet I had some control within it, to move around and uncover things. I moved inside the dream as if I were playing a game, like a video game, but there were also some aspects I couldn’t control.

Don’t tell me the meaning of my flying dream. You’ll reduce it to psychological mumbo jumbo. For life is greater than psychology and its theories. And interpretations, like judgments, reduce individuals to abstract concepts. If I were to accept any interpretation of this flying dream, the mystery would be gone instantly, and the dream would lose its power of enchantment.

Sages continually remind us to “enlighten” ourselves. But the language of dreams is darkness and half-light.

What if I prefer my dreams to so-called real-life? What if I’m enjoying this ongoing hallucination, this overflowing stew of desires, dreams, and drives?

Besides, I prefer flying to walking long distances.

I will always vote in favor of dreams and darkness. I feel comfortable in the shade. I’m more likely to wander at night than during the daytime, and to follow my true desires in the wildwood. There are no pretenses at night. In your dreams you are never pretending to be someone; you just are.

During the daytime I feel the burden to be someone. I’m playing a highly-skilled part with expectations to fulfill, and there is always something that must get done. At night, in contrast, time loses its grip on me and my sense of inferiority melts away.

What is commonly called “real-life” is usually a mere trifle. I get worked up about the smallest things. Items I label with greatest importance and greatest consequence turn out to have minor importance and minor consequence.

All of my fears can be summed up: my real-life will fall apart.

What’s beautiful about dreams is that there’s nothing to fall apart because nothing has ever been static or fixed together (as we pretend to make life during the day). In a dream, the pieces are scattered to begin with. Dreams are wild, fitful, mutable, and delirious. Time does not exist, at least not in any ordinary conception of the word. And because of the emptiness and formlessness of this world, we tend to have more freedom.

But really there is no difference between real-life and dreams. Real-life is also wild, fitful, mutable, and delirious. One can even argue that time doesn’t exist here . . .

Flight: Part One

When I dive from the cliff, nobody catches me . . .

I can barely conceal the smile on my face as I glide--

The joy of being able to launch myself at once into a separate sphere, gives me a supreme satisfaction, an indescribable feeling.

Levitation is a consummate thrill. Floating is even wilder and more insane to imagine. And flight is beyond comprehension.

While I’m flying over giant clusters of people just as if they were pixels on a vast screen, I realize that my secret ability to fly has come to me in the time of an emergency.

Flying is not a part of my daily routine, you see.

I realize that something was threatening me on the ground, and that’s why I suddenly took flight. An impression of the primal scene still haunts me, vague pictures floating restlessly in the back of my mind, distant as memories.

The crowds on the ground are trying to keep up with me. They’re running after me as if they too might bolt into the air. They don’t look like pixels anymore. More like gazelles, running in loose herds; the undulant rhythm of their hind-legs beats like a drum on the African plain.

The beasts of the savanna are chasing me with delight.

For the rest of the dream, I soar over the majestic sweeping continent. Thorny acacias and palm trees spread throughout the vast swathes of grassland and marshes. I look down at the elephants which appear pensive and sad. They are monuments of sadness. Grey lugubrious figures with heavy-thick skin, brooding eternally over the land.

Then: long-necked giraffes carrying messages to the tall trees, whispering all sorts of secrets to the leafy vegetation; they chew in serene self-possession. White rhinos are transfigured into kingly creatures who command respect from the tribes.

The striking zebras graze indolently on the pastures. From my birds-eye, their vivid stripes evoke a mesmerizing contrast to the dry, parched lands.

Flying seems to be the simplest thing in the world.

Approaching the Cliff

The blank page is the only cliff I dare to stand over, fathoming the abyss with the thrilling calm of an explorer.

When did this fascination begin?

At ten years old I recall carrying little notebooks throughout the house. I would situate myself in the living room and brood over the pages, making scribbles and poetry.

My father once yelled at me for having too many journals. And that was even before I had more than two or three.

Today my bookshelves are lined with journals. There is also a place on the bottom shelf for journals that are unfinished or not marked in at all.

My mother was an avid diarist. But hers was a sketch diary which was filled with quotations from the books she read and some passages of her own.

She complained about my father in her diary.

Perhaps beginnings don’t really matter. We look back in vain, as through a kaleidoscope, attempting to piece together the mica and glass fragments of life. Each of us has a history which dissolves into colored images when we refer to it.

The past seems less like a cohesive narrative and more like a scattered photo album where the pictures are always changing places.

Strangely I’ve made it my life’s passion to weave the images of my past into books.

Life has the arc of a novel without holding the meaning inside. That’s our job, to give the novel of our lives structure and meaning, to organize the photo album and make labels, to develop the characters and the plot.

But where do urges come from? I mean the drive we have to attain our goals, to satisfy our desires. How does this drive relate to personal history?

My life has a definite goal; and there is a drive in me to fulfill that goal.

To tell you my goal would be to give away the secret. The secret I don’t even know. The secret I’m keeping from myself.

It seems God has concealed my goal; and I don’t even know if I believe in God.

If I could name this enigmatic goal, then perhaps I would be able to put down my pen, leave the computer alone, and stop checking email.

But I don’t know what the object of my existence is and that’s why I keep searching.

I accomplish trivial pursuits along the way. Occasionally I am gratified by my pursuits, literary or otherwise, but whatever I accomplish it never eclipses the desire within me to keep chasing down this larger, more luminous goal.

The goal I have no name for. The goal I cannot even describe.

The blank page holds infinite possibility. Now it occurs to me I can either fill the blank page of life with the words and descriptions of others: I can ventriloquize;

or I can attempt my own language. And describe the world as I see it. And describe myself as I feel things.

I don't follow any religion. I am out of college and have decided against graduate school. The place where I work does not require me to perform mind-numbing tasks.

I guess I've realized that I don’t have to be an echo anymore. I can be myself and speak in whatever words come to me.

If I don’t describe myself, then others will, right?

The Book of Innocence is a literal journey. I have many ideas, but ideas are mere and in life, things just happen, eluding our plans.

I stand over a great cliff, and look far ahead; where I can see nothing but the blank space of air--

the air I breathe which exilarates me and makes me want to jump.

Preface (old version)

I enjoy the reflective essay. But there are many voices and mine is only one of them.

When I began blogging I wanted to create a site where I could publish lengthy quotations from the books I read. Without being in graduate school, I live the life of the interdisciplinary scholar, always sifting through a different book and taking notes. Although these books have little to do with each other, I draw connections.

I draw connections because I see connections. Many think I am mad. The art of linking is a mad art. Linkages can be found anywhere.

Linkages between life and art, linkages between science and religion, linkages between architecture and writing.

Because I do a lot of reading I’m constantly discovering tidbits of wisdom; and that’s what I had originally called this website, “The Philosopher’s Tidbits.”

Since then, things have changed.

The first changes began to show themselves when I added to the pages my own ideas. It began with a short essay, and then a longer one.

I continued to publish lengthy quotations in between my essays. The purpose was twofold. By typing the quotes into my computer, I learned the material of these great thinkers. And two, I suspected that I could increase my page views if I published a famous quote on the Net every couple days.

I also have a long history of copying and recopying.

My earliest memory of obsessive copying is during my sophomore year in high school. I was taking an AP European History class and it was impossible for me to remember anything without copying it down in small print. I was very meticulous and neat. My handwriting drew the attention of my classmates. Before the AP test, I had two stacks of ink-covered pages.

And then in college I remember one of my professors gave us an assignment to keep a “literary theory journal". While she only meant for us to jot down a couple definitions, I set about the Sisyphean task of collecting two volumes of notes and quotations on literary theory. These journals epitomized my habit of overachievement; labors so absolutely unnecessary that they became marvels in their own right.

Therefore: I have a tendency to write things down, especially the thoughts of others.

The line between graphomania and reverence is a thin one. At times I copied down the thoughts of others because they inspired me. At other times I copied them down because I needed words to explain things about life. And there were also times when the physical act of copying satisfied a deep urge inside of me.

Could I have been using the words of others to form a wall around myself?

I am a writer.

I am also afraid to write.

Reaching for ready-made sentences relieves the terror of having to say something original.

And the words great thinkers used seemed different from my own. Their words were more permanent. Their aphorisms like pieces of jade.

I am an idealist. I will always look for the best, and try to achieve my best potential.

The pitfall of this thinking is that I am often mesmerized by what is esteemed “great”. And by fixing a perpetual gaze on others, I undermine my own abilities.

Sometimes I’m just lazy and would rather quote somebody else instead of writing an original sentence.

Whatever the value and greatness of another’s words, nothing compares to the freshness and originality of my own tongue.

I have taken refuge in the words of others for too long; now I am ready to speak.

I no longer want to be afraid.

At a certain age, a person’s identity and purpose gains momentum—

Until the direction cannot be easily averted.

We are—one day we realize—exactly who we have longed to be.

Whatever posturing we did in our youth blends indistinguishably into an essential personality and person—

This is then a symbolic and literal transition from the words of others into our own.

Our own language.

A prelude to the knowledge of our own being.

More Thoughts on Building

Since my last essay I've done some thinking about the questions I've raised.


A friend also helped me to understand what I was trying to articulate.


She suggested that my point was:


To create something, a building, a work of art, we need sufficient space; without space, nothing can be built upon.


Another way of putting this: openness yields creativity.


With a strong desire to create, and to reflect on creating in the process, I am interested in the notion of "building" as a metaphor for life and art.


In my essay I wanted to join the metaphorical idea of building with the literal one.


Recently I have re-discovered an interview I read in Tricycle Magazine (Spring 2008), which deals with a similar topic.


The magazine interviews Christopher Alexander, a renowned architect and author of the book, A Pattern Language.


Here are some original tidbits from that interview:


"It had to do with the Whole and whether things can be aligned with the Whole and unfolded from it. At Harvard, when I was doing research for my Ph.D., I spent a lot of time in the anthropology department, simply trying to find out what it was that people in all the so-called primitive societies had been doing when they built their buildings. Most of these buildings were, at their best, beautiful, and at the very least, harmless. They were building in a way that helped what I call unfolding--that was almost a given. People wanted to revere the earth, revere God, and maintain the Whole. And that is not the motive now."


"Yet it is the Wholeness that binds things together. My own experience as a builder is that you cannot do this unfolding unless you do it as an act of worship. Craftspeople, ancient and modern, know a tremendous about about this. If you're not steeped in that entity, if you really don't think about it or don't believe in a version of it, then when somebody says, Okay, now build me this motel, you've got absolutely nothing to go on."


"If people think something ought to be a certain shape and then they start making it that shape instead of doing what the unfolding tells them to do, they will royally screw it up. Because of concepts! Concepts interfere with this process--indeed, this is the teaching of Zen, isn't it? You can only act appropriately according to Zen teachings, if you are free of concepts. Because human concepts, no matter how cleverly conceived they are, almost always work against the Whole. And that's what we've been witnessing in architecture now for about one hundred years. The world is now prevented from unfolding."


Later in the interview, discussing universal design principles, he says:


"So why are these forms appearing again and again in different ways? That's what essentially led me to believe that the unfolding we're witnessing is a more fundamental process. The space unfolds to form these configurations, and the particular force that we say are responsible are really just examples of a much more general process that's going on."


"The Whole is always taking shape by differentiating itself in a way that is harmonious with what has come before."


Now I'm going to quote my own essay and bring the two ideas together.


Here is what I said in my essay:


"I want to erect buildings. Not concrete ones. But I believe in the architecture of ideas. I believe there is a harmony to life and a harmony to our relations with others. There is perhaps no secret to discover but only a monument that we have been creating for the longest time. The monument contains our history, our meanings, our vast disconnected thoughts and it connects them all through this great edifice of time."


Revisiting Alexander's interview, I wish to make a slight revision to those words of mine.


Alexander would agree with me about the invisible structures, about the harmony of our relations with others, about the Wholeness of our lives, our lives as spiritual edifices, and our individual accomplishments as personal buildings.


But he would also add that we, as individuals, do not create this Wholeness.


As individuals we perhaps allow the Wholeness to unfold. We can build in a way that "helps" the unfolding.


And this is something that Heidegger never thought of because he was too entrenched in concepts, even though he was trying to point to something beyond them.


The history of Western Philosophy is all the same in this sense: conceptual and abstract.


Hear what Lin Yutang has to say about Western Philosophy:


"Philosophy in the Western sense seems to the Chinese eminently idle. In its preoccupation with logic, which concerns itself with the method of arrival at knowledge, and epistemology, which poses the question of the possibility of knowledge, it has forgotten to deal with the knowledge of life itself."


He concludes, using a prodigious metaphor:


"The German philosophers are the most frivolous of all; they court truth like ardent lovers, but seldom propose to marry her."


Perhaps I descended somewhat into abstraction in my first essay, but my purpose wasn't to put forth a single idea so much as to allow the unfolding of my mind.


If I can merely touch the Wholeness in my writing that Alexander talks about in relation to buildings, I will be satisfied.