I’m sitting in an abandoned department store on a Thursday night and listening to the Bee Gees and Danny Elfman and feeling very confident of the future that keeps rolling around and around before my eyes like a perpetual motion slot machine. The future is a snake trying to walk backwards. And in the eye of this storm of second sight, I can see so clearly how I will be married and go back to school, and my wife and I will have children, but will I become a warlord in the Middle East at some point in my later years? This has yet to be determined.
Because I am not more than a grown child myself, and so I need you to tell me. What is happening here? Is it possible that I might actually see this thing through or am I just going to continue falling away from the earth till there’s nothing but nothing everywhere I look?
Sounds kind of nice, and maybe we all got to go for a dip into the stratosphere, because when you fall into yourself, it is very much like falling into the sky. Right? Am I right? Because just as the sky keeps going past our atmosphere and into the endless reaches of the starry abyss, my mind also will keep on going for as long as I am willing to fall. It will unravel into stranger and more magical and more alien realms for as long as I am willing to fall away from my grounding in the everyday, but to do this right, you really honestly got to let go of everything and allow yourself to fall down the rabbit hole, and it’s also not always the case that down is the new up either. Sometimes down is really down and there is no rabbit hole, but just the ground, and you’re splattered all over it.
I’ve always been a proponent of the downward daytrip. Half of you is falling towards the sea and half of you is flying up into the air. It’s your spirit half that’s flying up when you move into the anarchist compound or go off to process fish in Alaska. Anything that feels like death to you and leads to your friends talking about you as this person who got so lost they think they’re home again—but while you sit there sorting through a pile of fish guts, inside yourself you can indeed feel that you’re finding your own fish-y guts. Perhaps that you’re one part rounder and two parts sharpy, but the more you stare at these cardboard cut-outs you call your better self, the more two-dimensional they become. Until they’re so thin, you could knock them over with the slightest quavering breath.
Course, this method of internal journeying is great fun if you pull up at the last moment so your toes just brush the surface of the ocean, but if you go crashing under the waves, your bones cracking upon impact, then there will be no Nietzchean moment, but just a deflating sound as the day leaves the sky and the long night is filled with drinking.
Because a lot of us think like the times of our lives have come and gone and now we’re sitting here staring into the vortex with only a tallboy and a pocket calculator. Trying to figure something out. What happened and where this vortex came from. Answer being that it was always there, but you always end up having too much fun at your little drop-out dance party to notice the ever-growing vortex in the corner by the spider plant. And so now it’s gotten truly enormous, eaten up the spider plant, takes up an entire wall of your apartment, and you’re just sitting there on the couch staring at it as the various belongings of your mind are being sucked in one after the other, the coasters and end tables of your thoughts, which is how you ended up looking for answers in the first place, but what you don’t know is that these answers are everywhere. But where are the questions?
Seems they hide themselves well. Sometimes a question might pretend to be a person, or a person pretends to be a question. There are so many questions that aren’t questions at all. Like, Why? Is that a question you can answer? Are there answers to questions that aren’t actually questions? Is that what makes a question a question? That it has an answer?
I don’t know much about the nature of questions. I know they exist. I know we have them. I know that they can drive you into corners or out of corners.
Questions become brighter the more we focus on them. They grow like fires do when you feed it more fuel. Our attention on a thing gives it the reality it has. This is true, inside and outside. And the questions that drive our lives are like miniature suns inside of us, and we are growing in the direction of this question or questions. The more questions we have, the more spastic our thinking. Those of us who just ask the one question become either mystics or fanatics or mad.
Think of it like this. You want to know how to be a better person. You start out working at a soup kitchen, but for the true servant of humanity, working at a soup kitchen every Sunday is a little like going to the dayspa for your average everyday hedonist. Just as a real hedonist isn’t happy till he’s knee-deep in a crackwhore orgy, a true saint is not content until she’s eating the feces of the poor. But what do I know? I live in a basement, and am very much a he who needs to learn a little more about his inherent she-ness, so that this little man I claim to be can lay down with this little woman who lives inside my head and make a little screaming baby in my heart. This is an example of a thought growing wild.
And also that I’ve been called a selfish person. Most often by my bride-to-be. And am pretty poor myself. Perhaps I am hoping that someone will read this and decide to eat my feces. But. Let’s keep the feces in the toilet bowl, shall we? And instead bring the vortex into our daily lives?
Tallboys and calculators are all good and everything, but there IS an open space. I can believe in this open space. The open space is the place I go when nothing works anymore.
Where do I go when I’ve run out of rooms to hide in? It’s this thing that is not a thing that I’m running through even when I’m not running—or even working at all actually—but just a pile of limbs on the sofa, and I can’t help but hope that someone somewhere has figured this all out by now, that maybe we should turn to this good person and they’ll give us the many answers to the questions we aren’t asking or don’t know how to ask, but it is also very possible that there are no answers and are also no questions and just a general buzzing sound that everyone can hear but no one is listening to. My spirit and my brain aren’t on speaking terms, you see.
Like you got to go through your days, but you also are more than just a person who goes through their days. “I am neither God nor Creature,” Meister Eckhart said, and I tend to believe him. But who are you? Are you something other than anything I could possibly imagine? Are you an eternal being? Are you something extraterrestrial housed in human disguise? Do you walk in ways I cannot comprehend? Are all things comprehensible? It’s time to look through someone else’s eyes. Those are my eyes, you bastard! My sincere apologies to the voice inside my head.
Because there’s a time and a place for everything, and maybe that time and place was yesterday at three in the afternoon while standing on a windswept corner on Chicago’s South Side, and maybe it’s all about tomorrow and up above the world. Do you believe we’ll meet there? Is that what you think? I wish I could agree with you, but I suspect this place you are describing is full of two-dimensional plants, and that these plants snake their way into intersecting lines that can then fill the mind’s eye like an inky spot and blot out our tiny internal sun. I mean, fear. I mean a fear of the abyss and emptiness and the possibility that the abyss is not empty. Which. It’s not. We’re all there right now.
I’m sorry. Weren’t you aware that I was going to unleash this half-assed mystical outburst on you when you started to read my little diatribe? We were talking about empty spaces and how to find them. And here. Look. What? Oh. How thoughtful. Thank you very much. It looks lovely. Then. Will you please stop pretending to be two people all the time, and instead just look around and look back? Because there really is a place in here somewhere.
Except that I’m so many people, it once made me want to stick my tongue down your throat, until I realized that your throat and my throat are the same throat and so I gave up on attempting to communicate in this manner. What’s happening to me? Good question. I try and be a person, but I fail daily.
It’s like the flowers in my head are blooming, but when they do, they smell like baloney. Or if you could take a person and turn them round and round until the face has become smeared and runny. Now this person has faces all over themselves and all their faces have runny noses. Gross. Is this what it’s like to be an everyday walking-around human? That’s what I think. Because flowers are blooming everywhere, even when I’m breaking under the strain of so many questions, like a doll that you left out in the doghouse all night, and I just sit there staring into the dark in the office at my friend’s store at two something in the morning, listening to the street sounds unraveling upon the wet asphalt out beyond the storefront. Especially then.
But there are other things we could be talking about. Like Walmart sightings. Or awful Star Trek props. Or the blaring sounds of someone practicing the highest decibel of music possible in the practice space by the wall of two-by-fours is the only barrier between you and them, and here you are thinking about prisoners being forced to stay up all night because their captors are blaring Metallica, and thinking, Accept. Accept. Accept. Accept, and all the while gnashing your teeth. Because we here in America for the most part think Buddhism is largely about coming to accept all the little inconveniences in our mostly pretty cozy little lives.
Which is why Zizek hates Buddhists, or more specifically a “type of pop-buddhism” which underscores the “Star Wars’ ideological framework [of] the New Age pagan universe”. Basically, that Darth Vader becomes who he is because he gets attached to things. He calls the proponents of Western Buddhism “passive” nihilists, and when he does this, I feel seen.
Yes, I am a passive nihilist raised on the Star Wars proto religion. Yes, the Neo-Cons and Islamic extremists are right to declare nihilism as the necessary outcome of our liberal worldview. But only because the liberal worldview, taken to its ultimate conclusions, shows the Western framework as inherently flawed. If, when faced with a world-ending event, we cannot get off our collective asses and do something about it, then we deserve what fate the meteorological winds blow our way, but more than that, we live in a world where working together has become a thing of the past. The individual trumps society. We have divided and fallen, but does this mean we are nothing more than constituents to be manipulated through simple symbols and basic fears? Is the only answer left to blow yourself up in the face of your more moderate adversaries? This is also a kind of naïveté.
Watch the world unraveling. Go out and actively engage the world. That’s when things fall away. That’s when you start to see things, and you don’t need to use other people’s eyes to do it. Except that you sort of do.
What if each walking-about human contains a distinct universe—as in, that we’re each living in our own alternate reality—in a sensory feedback loop of the anticipated actuality and the real perceived? What if we each are walking through our own version of the Earth, with our own cast of seven billion plus extras, and each of us is orbiting a distinct version of the Sun, in a distinct Milky Way, in our own personal universe of one? But in all of our distinct universes, the details are largely the same?
Or.
What if we are part of the fabric of the physical laws that comprise the universe? And those intersecting lines and those two-dimensional plants that we hope to keep on the windowsill of our apartment in heaven are actually the two-dimensional plants we have now, except that we don’t realize that they’re two-dimensional, and that all things weave together like a mess of lines, and all thoughts obscure a singular sentience which is the foundation of physical space?
Point being, I’ve been doing a lot of daytripping to the bottom of the world, and I came back smelling funny, and these questions are just examples of that.
I do know that grasshoppers have a very soft touch, and I do talk to cats, but I can’t see the faces of insects and I think of cats as lesser citizens. In fact, I’m a pretty self-involved person. Sort of person spent his younger years sitting in corners and eyeing other partygoers while muttering a steady stream of the most outdated obscenities. Possibly near the spider plant. Perhaps even feeling like he’s just a walking talking vortex sucking all life out of everything.
Especially when this was a coke party and it’s 7AM and the concrete floor of the warehouse you call home is littered in puddles of cardboard and puddles of beer and the DJ’s heavy drum & bass just turned minimal and one of your construction-worker roommates—who work for a company Built2Suit who do all their construction in 3-piece suits for celebrites such as Robert De Niro—has just set up his toy train set in his room because, as he says it... The after-party’s just getting started, and I just want to go to sleep, and the entrance to my room has been sealed shut with drywall to keep the ravers out, and I can’t find a power-drill anywhere.
Which reminds me. There are some caterpillars in South America who live entirely on coca leaves. Their frass, which is insect-speak for s**t, is entirely cocaine. One hundred percent cocaine out of a caterpillar’s ass. Why am I so obsessed with excrement? Don’t ask.
Or do. Please. Ask everything and anything. I am waiting for you to ask as many questions as possible. Are you really there? Do you believe that I actually am? Could I in fact be a fabrication of the page? Where do we stand in relation to each other? Clearly I’m not who you think I am.
First of all, I want to be the center of your universe. I would love it if you thought of me as a being of pure knowledge ratiating outward. But the truth is that the reverse is true. You are the center of my universe, you who I do not know, who I will never meet. This is not how a person learns how to die. What’s a religion anyway?
For example, I’ve been obsessed with this idea of a “Space Bible” for a few years now—to make a bible that would be a general survey of what it means to be human that could be sent out to space with whoever ends up going. There would be a Book of Philip, which would be a reprinting of VALIS by PKD—and a Book of Germans, which would be a summary of German Philosophy from Kant onwards—as well as selections from all the major religions. I think a Book of Graham is in order, which would be a reprint of The Power and the Glory. You get the idea. A Book of Tribes, cataloging the stories and wisdom of various tribal cultures. One book that sums up people.
Maybe religions contain books that sum up people, and practices that implicate thought, and rituals that tie together those books and these thoughts, and I keep wishing I could drink, and the last time I had too much whisky it was in a cave on the Oregon coast, and we were telling stories by the fire until I had the bright idea to run out on the rocks and hop from one to another as the waves crashed against them. Quite a night. We ate muscles my brother’d found in a tide pool for breakfast.
Point being, there are religions, and then there’s people drinking in caves in Oregon. Religion doesn’t look much like a bunch of guys passing whiskey in a cave, but a bunch of guys passing whiskey in a cave feels something like religion.
Then what?
All I can say is my spirit and my brain aren’t on speaking terms—which is exactly how a person becomes very thinglike in their thinking. There are hands everywhere if you just reach out and take hold of them. How about this one? If art is really just that which the artist chooses, that by putting a frame around an ordinary object, the artist then causes this object to crystallize into a thing we call art, then vomit produces the opposite effect. An ordinary object, when placed in vomit, is just disgusting.
Because, really, who cares? Another question that’s not a question.
Then it’s all coffee-colored lampshades and hipsters with oily hair, and I’m having my one beer this week at the Rainbo Club on a Friday. I am studying my Chinese and occasionally dipping into a little Arthur C. Clarke at the bar, when I stop because I want to revel in the suffering of others, and in the early evening of a Friday Night, the Rainbo Club is a temple to the sort of pain we love to revel in here in America—of the feeding-on-feces and crackwhore-orgy variety. Of the work-a-day world drilling new holes in our soul variety. For here in the Western portion of the world we believe our pain is very serious business, unlike the rest of you out there in your other non-western worlds, whose pain threshold is known to be so much higher than ours and so it’s alright that we ignore you so much of the time, and when we’re not ignoring you? For example, North Korea is like a nephew with multiple sclerosis who’s attending your disastrous birthday party. The party is indeed a disaster, but what about the other boy? And your mother’s looking at you and saying, Now aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
There are dayglo paintings everywhere. I’d be eyeing the women in a predatorial manner if I wasn’t so in love that I can’t take it. Which. I know. I can’t stop. It’s just terrible, but also very true that I would be holding my girl’s hand right now if I could and looking deeply into her eyes to assure her as to my true and deep feelings, but unfortunately right now I can only hold her hand in my brain. Do you hold hands with your brain? Can I hold hands with your brain? I want your brain to sing like a violin.
Of course, maybe you think I’m being disingenuous when of course I am. How can I possibly want anything at all for you? Even if we’re all just vibrating in rhythm to the same heart-shaped melody, I’ll want to have nothing to do with you.
But then, my own ideas of how the brain works are equally scary. Muti-dimensional carnivorous vegetation? Also known as squids? While at the moment the jukebox is jumping from Bollywood to country to Motown. The place is filling up quickly.
But it is true that when my heart is open it’s like a question, and a good question helps you open your heart. Now that sounds like an outline for a proper Western Buddhism to me. Yes. I will vomit in your heart. It will be a work of art.
As well as the hot sweaty palm of the hand—my girl’s hand—while our lives continue to rotate around the same black hole they always are. Of course, some people say a black hole is just a worm hole. Some people say it’s just full of worms. You decide!
When we fall into the afterstory of our days, when everything opens up to the amusing underbelly and its many problems and inherent authenticity. When we break down all over again because love is in the air and it’s everywhere. When the twisting contours of the afternoon unwinds in a matter of moments. When the moments congeal around our many questions—that are not questions—because we do not know how to properly ask them. When we’re asleep. When we start over all over again. When we end.
Chicago, IL, 2013
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
