flashback within a flashback (wrapped in newsfluff)

"Walk down the tiny, colorful streets of . . . Upper Dharamsala . . . and one glimpse reveals what 21st-century Buddhism is all about. Internet cafes sprinkled around the Indian Himalayan town are filled with new Web users sitting hours every day trolling Facebook and other social networks while dressed in red robes. With Buddhism’s embrace of the Internet, lamas and monks are increasingly “adding” friends and family to their Facebook account, posting images, sharing videos, and “liking” Web pages." *

When I saw this recent Christian Science Monitor story about the popularity of social networking services among Tibetan Buddhist monks, it reminded me of a Vision of the Future I had back in the days of the Mosaic browser, which I eventually expressed to the administrator of a well-implemented website addressing the English-speaking Sangha, when I finally found such a site, in a not-so-well-implemented series of haiku:

hello editor:

i had a vision
years ago on the cusp of
the internet age

all the world's bhikkus
monks, aspirants and sages
sitting, practicing

cultivating each
in her own place, communing
interconnected,

in sacred group art
of chat-room haiku writing:
digerati tao

and here you are. (bad
haikus, sorry). rather, here
one of you is, now.

let's get a chat room
going, to share our pearls of
koanic wisdom.

A Spy on the Street Where You Live, pt. 3

But what can I say . . . to make it clear? How can I say that to her, when the groveling started sixteen years ago—or thirty two, if my stars really do point at her—was ineffective then, and has, it would seem, continued, to resurface now? How can I say that, which every brokenhearted singer has ever sung, that every adult has recognized for the screen-kiss kitsch it is, as a vehicle for commercial culture and greater need, to this stranger whose company I crave with a thirst I’d say anything to slake? Never trust a junkie or a crooner: My mama done told me, they’ll both do anything for another hit.

And, how, after all, if she won’t return my calls, who gave up writing weeks ago, who won’t be getting in touch, nor speak to me at all? If the sun refused to shine, perhaps she would return my calls; or if the moon plunged into the sea, perhaps she would call me. Of course, if that happened, phone service would likely be adversely impacted, not to mention low-lying coastal areas, and we, refugees, going nowhere.

If it were but a matter of faith,
if it were measured in petitions and prayer . . .
but it is not, nor do I care.

Barring the fools’ unforgivable sin of rushing in and talking out loud; even choosing not to tell her about it, how can I even think I crave such things, and continue to think of myself as a person? No: Must struggle, must ramble on; must . . . resist . . . compulsive . . . romantic . . . hyperbole.

A Spy on the Street Where You Live, pt. 2

And there’s Lerner and Lowe’s Fair Lady, herself also a figment from Ovid as Pygmalion’s Galatea, but, back then, she didn’t have a street, just the pedestal.

The audience of the modern musical, for dramatic development, had to be shown that Eliza Doolittle was not only sophisticated in ladylike civilized artifice, but also filled with the feminine graces known to prompt poets’ odes and lovers’ praises, through the introduction of a rival suitor to the Professor’s as yet unspoken devotion.

Rival suitor sues to see her, and succeeding, has found a reason to sing of enchantment pouring out of every door, has cause for singin’ in the rain, and dancing in the street.

People stop and stare; they don’t bother me,
For there’s no where else on Earth that I would rather be.
Let the time go by, I won’t care if I can be here on the street where you live!

This is before the rain, of course. Properly validated, Liza falls for the Prof.

Excised from the arc of plot, this recorded and rerecorded song is simply everyman’s love song. Again, the lyric is not about the beloved, whose presence merely imbues the setting, but a report on the state of mind and heart of, or simply part and parcel of the art of, the singer. As always, at first, I’ve just seen a face and can’t forget the time or place of that first sight. Then, with or without overtures or encouragement, merely because I want to hold your hand and can’t stop my brain, or maybe because I’ve been watching . . . every breath you take, the residence of the beloved is discovered. Then the wooing, the suiting starts, or the stalking—the difference lies in her consent—with the overpowering feeling that any second you may suddenly appear.

A Spy on the Street Where You Live, pt.1

A Spy in the House of Love, or Stalker on the Street Where You Live

It is only a woman that can make a man become the parody of himself.
--French Proverb, the Rev. T.F. Thistleton-Dyer

Under . . .

I cannot step out of my home without asking myself whether I’m only going out in the hope of seeing her, here on the street, and knowing that if I do or do not see her, I’ll be looking for her anyway, and judging and chiding myself for it. Let me tell you a little about what I know of me and this fervent furtive infatuation.

Conditioned by love songs to be the perfect American romantic id, in addition to being the paranoid monomaniac ego of me, I am attuned to poignant phrases pertaining to the street where she lives, or some synonymous heterologue, distinct as a singular wandering star in the collective romantic meme-pool of popular music, an ersatz zodiac of coupling if not graveyard of the language and dreams of modernity.

This has been powerful imagery for me since before she moved onto my street.

There ought to be a lot of love songs dealing with this theme, but I can only think of two, and another scenario, to which I add this, my words and tone, my own inept tune.

But soft! What light in yonder window breaks? It is the East!

Not even a love song, but some higher-art embodiment, in perhaps its most perfected form, this is certainly the archetype, the articulation of romantic love that has most imbued the cultural discourse; has so imbued this discourse, that Romeus and Juliet are commonly invoked as exemplary lovers, despite their tragic non-consummation. As if they’d got hitched, bought land, and made it fruitful across the long gloss of their bliss.

Yonder window, wherever it is, irresistibly attracts the romantic speaker’s attention, displacing the governor of the dome of the sky, the prime indicator of direction and time throughout human history. That window becomes the East, and Juliet is the sun. Wither she goest, so the speaker’s heliotropic heart and attention, perpetually dawning.

no dream but the one

doubtless doubles unreal error down nested mirror all ways:


A man does dread
losing his head over
something he cannot control

and a woman’s friends
’ll go to any ends to
prevent her kissing a troll,

yet although she winces,
hoping frogs can be princes, she’ll
pucker up once, just to see,

being there: 100

[Fore]
the alarm screams into my harried dreams, creeping into the scenes at the seams like light splashing around the brilliant lining of a darkened screen, and i thump it good without even registering light and then it screams again.

i come to in the shower, a skein of steam streaming from my face, jaw clenched, grinding my teeth like a freezing meth freak who has to pee in some fugal unconscious beat, the rhythm entwined with a line or some nonsense rhyme i woke up with looping in my mind, a drivel of self-pity at my petty tribulations: early mornin' capitalism blues! mama wanna get a new pair of shoes!

counting breaths i try to stop: no good to be chanting mantras over and over again with that kind of resonance and such manifesting force in the jaw without even realizing it. brushing, my teeth hurt from, or perhaps anticipating, the grind, and one ear pops.

continue>

cats i have known

Cuddles came out of the woods and adopted us.

Cuddles left us when the abhorrent encroachment on her heartshare that was Callie (actually more of a tortiseshell than a calico) had half-siamese kittens and we kept Panther.

Cuddles moved in with a family down the street and was eventually killed by a car.

Callie and Panther did not cuddle like Cuddles, nor were they so badass.

interpretation of a dream

for Ibrahim

the living imagine it is bad for
us, the suddenly dead, they have
forgotten how wide their arms
stretched to embrace the world
when they grew out of the mother
in the years of screaming since;
they remember only cold terror.

last snoozed claxon

last dream before the last snoozed burst
of infuriating alarm banished sleep:

for some reason my guitar
was leaned against the wall outside
my apartment in the hall, the pegs themselves against
plastered concrete, the strap button balanced on tile.
as i exited a guy walking past bumped it and it
started falling
over as he walked on. "asshole" i muttered,
catching it

in the pharmacy of morpheus

In one recent dream I actually smoked a joint and got high, feeling all the things I should to the point that I thought maybe I shouldn't be driving and then got all paranoid, worrying about how my baby would grumble and disapprove or, as I seemed to be on the way to work, what I should do so my coworkers wouldn't notice anything amiss. Of course I did not feel stoned when anxiety woke me.

In another, more recent, dream I smoked something (a bowl full of little, glossy, yellow and green spheres, that appeared pharma-grade, like those that fall out of the opening capsule in the television commercial) that I expected to have a DMT-like effect of immediate, profound, perhaps out-of-body, consciousness change, sitters and all attentively present. I held the disposable lighter flame to the bowl of smoking, subliming and melting drug at the end of a long glass pipe and drew in the smoke, which tasted sweet, like opium with a sprinkle of molasses and melting plastic, then fell through the back of my head, into my real bed, where I awoke, in this consensual world where we, Dear Reader, agree we are, sat up, and deliberately looked around, thinking, that must've been the strangest drug ever!, for a moment, before falling back asleep and resuming the dream to report the trip to my friends and sitters.

membrane

i.

there, in the middle of infinite
space and infinite energy, grows
a membrane, elastic, extensible,
pliant yet definite, bounded. it
is skin, and all the things inside
(but not the mind, oh not infinite mind)
the skin and organism of embodied
perspective, stretched taut, the
rebounding surface on which the
resounding beat of infinite space
and infinite energy echos and plays:
as above so below; as below, above.
this membrane is the stage of love.

the allegory of the skin may be opaque,
may take some explanation, for those
who have firm brain-based metaphysics,
who have never dreamed or been elated
or traveled out-of-body or relegated
all these to endocrine neurochemistries
-those who pooh-pooh and psshaw, in
peer review literature, such non
reductionist holistic mysticism.
too bad for them. now must not be
their time to see these words, read
these lines, as in the story of the
pearls and swines. but those who have
the taste, let them savor the wines.

my greater hapiness

i found my greater happiness: today
upon emerging from my sleep
and dream to be so quick confronted
by bright hard-edged now with
its many dread immediate demands;
so i awoke, and from today i shied
and sought to couch myself within
blithe reverie of yesterday when
as adroitly as this morn i slipped
the snare of grave concern and found
my greater happiness in memory of past success.

post'd

Well. I went to work yesterday scheduled to have three classes. I went to my first class and found no students there. A woman (co-worker) suggested that I wait in the classroom. A half-hour later there were still no students. I went to the teachers' room. Mr. Kwon was there, and told me that there was a nationwide test for all subjects for all middle school students. I began to hope that the rest of my scheduled students would cut, too. This hope was fulfilled for my second class: there was only one student there, but he looked so unhappy at the prospect of private tutelage under my hand that Mr. Kwon told me to skip class and let him go home. I studied Korean for that class period. The third class had six students; enough to teach. So I tried to teach them -- mostly to no avail. I let them go a few minutes early. So much for a day of classes.

I got home and watched a shitty movie with Duke, and then found a letter which [mom's friend] had sent me. Trouble reading her handwriting, but it was good to receive mail anyway. I read some (I couldn't try the Lotus position because my left knee hurt too much) and went to sleep.

I had a particularly vivid dream this morning -- to the point that I'm a little bit tempted to calls it a vision (too much Crowley you might say). In this dream was a woman. Tall, skinny, blonde. Lithe. I thought she was [redacted], but the more I try to reconcile [redacted]'s image with her, the less I succeed in remembering the dream. Anyway, I drank Brandy with her father and brothers and we went out (presumably on the town) and met a bunch of people. Then we returned (or, at least, she did, I was to meet her later though I was able to see her activities during this time) where she lived -- almost a palace. She entertained many men, without in any way arousing my jealousy, until I arrived. Then all I can remember is love. This is not the possessive love that we are conditioned to believe is the highest good. It transcended form, it transcended any kind of discrimination. The woman in this dream was woman and I was the equal opposite. The dream dissolved in light. The end.

Today I got up. Mailed some letters and bought some ginseng tea. One box for us at my house, and a box to send to [redacted]. Now I'm at work. More later.

divin'd

I stared writing this morning, but only had time to write the date and time before interrupted. I get so tired here; I do not know if it is the diurnal lifestyle, the food, or just living in Korea. I hope it is not the latter. As always, today much of my time was taken up just being with other people. I find objectless social time objectionable, and yet I am not particularly good at being alone. Now, however, I am at last alone. Naturally, now I can listen to music.

Not much of particular note today. I used my Tarot cards last night: I do not have a coherent interpretation of the cards, but they appeared right and they gave me hope -- both for future Tarot efforts, and otherwise. This reading also pointed to a mantra to begin working on: Believe it or not, it is "Om," the sound of all sounds together (and is described as "the seed sound for the sixth chakra" (Ajna)). I have begun to work with this mantra, and shall continue. Until...?

Also of note is that I have begun dreaming. My dreams since embarking upon this chapter of my life have been particularly vivid, and a great deal more accessible to conscious memory than ever in the past.

Today there were two interesting developments on the domestic front. First, we all (that is the three current occupants of this flat, Duke, Link and myself) received our very own keys -- at last! The other thing is that today is Link's 25th birthday. We celebrated a little bit: on the way home from work I bought him Newsweek (my only other English language choice was Readers' Digest) and gave it to him for his B-day. Also, Hyun-ah and Heon-Seong came over with a birthday cake and we sat around bullshiting for hours. That's it. I'm gonna try to write my sister tonight and then crash.