Month: September 2019

Why this Shit Matters: Notes on the Last Few Essays

negativegeography8 Comments

hall of mirrors

Goofy as it might sound, I’ve been trying to do something for 40 years that is almost impossible. I’ve been grinding my teeth on this thing against all good advice, pouring all my energy into what probably looks like an obscure and meaningless (or maybe just confused and confusing) thing.

The Buddhists say that the truth can’t be spoken; that words are a distraction from what is real, because language is a virtual reality that convinces us that it’s not virtual. So language is essentially a delusion, which can never help us encounter what is real. Reality is found off the page, not on it.

And the same goes for thought and feeling and imagery. It’s all a kind of curtain that pretends to be showing something beyond the curtain, where in fact nothing at all is found. We make up everything.

Look, the Buddha knew his shit. And I’m not disputing what the Buddhists say above. In fact, it was my starting point, not as an idea or belief (because I’d never heard of Buddhism), but as a terror. If for some reason you suddenly learn that you’re trapped behind a film of language, feeling, thought and imagery and that everything you experience is imaginary, then there is no “getting off the page” into reality. It’s like being stuck in a hall of mirrors. It’s not a choice.Read More »

Negative Knowledge and the Eruption of a Metaphoric Mentality

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aurora

This essay is fictional. Not in the way fiction is usually defined. But this voice – anyone’s voice, even a scientist’s voice – is the invention of a framework that puts experience in a particular slant and color. And there’s no way to avoid this.

Nothing can be discussed or known without being painted in some fictional color. Even the colorless voice of a realist is a fictional application of colorlessness.

Phrases like “everything is this…” and “nothing can be that…” sound reductive and dogmatic. But in this case I’m talking about what can’t be known, not what can. Reality is unknowable. Stories are all that’s known.

In other words, claiming to know anything conclusive about the nature of reality is a sign of bullshit.

And knowing what is bullshit is a fundamentally different kind of knowledge. It’s not reductive, but expansive, because this discovery releases perception from cages of certainty, and awakens a questioning or metaphoric spirit. Read More »

An Honest Fairy Tale Retold

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Linda

This is an honest fairy tale. But it’s not a true story, for who can know the fathomless truth of anyone? It’s about my sister, who died recently.

In this tale the child is led deeper into the enchanted forest. A bewitched forest.

And the more frightened she became the farther she fled into the foggy interior of the woods. There she made her stand, a brave and lonely thing, and built her refuge and her prison.

Or course, these enchanted forests are invisible to others. You can walk around in broad daylight and nobody would know you are lost. As the saying goes, you never see the forest for the trees.

So the child couldn’t tell anyone where she was. I’m here, she would cry. Can’t you hear me?Read More »

An Honest Fairy Tale

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Burlingname Falls

Once upon a time a little boy was walking down a dirt road, beside a lively creek. There were five of them traveling together — the road, the creek, the dog, the grandmother and this boy – and they were all dancing their way to a waterfall, which is where the road stopped and Pan’s kingdom started. A few staggering clouds came along too, out of curiosity. And if the boy had entered paradise at that moment it would have felt like a let-down. The wilderness beyond the waterfall, and its mysterious beasts, which he knew from stories his grandma would tell him, would have lost their beguiling danger — that spice of potential doom, which the cooks of paradise always seem to forget.Read More »