mattSPACE

I’m grasping for a sense of complete engagement. I remember wanting to go to a monastery when I was younger; fifteen or so. Slowly, as I learned to suppress my quixotic desperation I lost the desire to be in that kind of removed, intense environment. But recently the desire is coming back. And if it is not a desire, it is an image which comes as a logical step in an imaginary trajectory. I see still images of myself set next to one another, images which signify evolution, like the gradually rising ape rising into man. Instead of standing, however, I have recently come to see myself lowering, sitting, and meditating. My diagram, like those on the walls of biology classrooms has no background. In this premonition I have no idea where I will be sitting, but I think it is in a retreat.
What a poorly written paragraph! Jack is laying on the couch in my living room. At first he was sleeping, but now he’s creating a party on his phone/computer combination. He is charming people into the party, creating a slightly different advertisement for each person. He is attuned to what appeals to whom. And I have been listening while writing and have proved to myself again that I need an isolated experience.

There is so much filling my head right now. I have drifted through the daily structures which slice and cut at my sanity, like sliding down the branch of a thorn bush. This is how I experience a schedule which comes not from me, but comes as a mandate from a job or school or some other exterior source. S, I haven’t been writing. This is what work does to a person. How am I ever going to get a job?

I’m en route to New York from Jacksonville. I visited my family and now I’m off to meet Jamie and drive back to Chi. But the logistics of my travel are unimportant. What’s fascinating to me is the experience of travel itself. And even that isn’t so interesting to me as this: what has been on my mind a lot lately (thanks in part to the frequency with which I’ve been smoking) is representations and their reification. What I mean by this is the way we understand life through breaking it down into all its constituent parts. This practice of separating, differentiating, categorizing, and cataloging creates the world for us. It is the means by which the world becomes knowable… so we don’t know The World in a holistic sense. Instead we know pieces, pieces which we name with words and associate with arrested images. And through this process of naming and associating we come to know the signifier more intimately than the signified. And perhaps we know nothing but the signifier. And a reverse occurs in which the signified (the real aspect of the world) becomes the signifier for the abstract concept. And the concept, the imaginary image, becomes more real than the piece of reality to which it was meant to refer.
Why is this important to me? It is because living only through a system of signification (which is more often than not originated by powers outside of our control) has such a dissociative quality. Categories are cages. They prevent us from rising out of our “race” and our “nation” and our “sexuality” and being a human and experiencing life unadulterated, fully, openly, freely.

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So aware of my movements and the movements of others. This choreography, this fascinating choreography that moves us. What poem was it that says, “how can we tell the dancer from the dance?” How can we tell the citizens from the city? The social beings from the society? Why have these questions not been asked? No, they have been asked, but not answered. My question will always be this way. How do I free myself from this? I continue to ask the question but I have come to the tentative conclusion that there is no answer, that there is no sure way to differentiate.