The Scholarship of Self-Consciousness: An Introduction to How I Am

When I gave up poetry, it wasn’t that I stopped writing it, but that I stopped believing in it. It was too loose, emotional, abstract to be good. I had to ask myself “What do I know of the world” and in fact I didn’t know much. I didn’t know, until 28, what wainscoting was.

Of course, I knew about the wars, I knew about some religions, I was a reader of literature and critical theory so I knew some things about language and meaning. But I didn’t know how to identify types of wood or cars or how to fix plumping. I had lived in Oregon, Cape Town, Albany, Rochester, and Philadelphia, and I couldn’t tell you the populations of any of these places, or even the names of restaurants near my apartment.

I had read thousands of books and couldn’t remember the names of characters or what exactly had happened to them. I wasn’t one for dates or names or rote facts and I couldn’t retrieve information quickly when I needed it. It was for this reason that I stayed away from grad school after a short stint. I could understand the complex terrain of theory…I could not remember the names of books and their writers.

It seems, upon reflection, a sort of idiocy, a sort of interesting psychological retardation, an almost willful obtuseness, because, of course, I could remember these things if I simply made a point to.

But a part of me resisted the solid facts of the world, as if they were weights that anchored too much, keeping me from floating through the ether, keeping me from the grand vistas I aspired to where everything was harmonious, where entire systems showed themselves to me, where the abstract terrain of emotion, symbol, meaning became apparent through a sort of distortion of normal vision. The magic eye books made sense to me that way. I had to lose track of the world in order to see its secrets.

I had a friend in college who once mentioned an idea for a story. The way he presented, it you could tell that he wasn’t sure if it was inspired or stupid. He imagined a girl in a mall looking at a display of a magic eye picture. This was in 1997 when malls did that sort of thing. Then, there’s a guy staring at her and somehow the magic eye is staring at him. I’m not sure why this image stuck with me. It’s rather facile and the triangle motif has certainly been done before and much better, by O Henry and others.

But when I think of it further, I see that her staring at the magic eye is not a staring, but a blurring so that she can see the sailboat or flower. And so is his gaze on her not a staring, but a blurring, not a fascination with her form, as would seem the role of most college guys, but a blurring of the eyes to see what pattern emerges. This, of course, is where we get into realms of intuition, spirituality, symbol, and art. What he sees, if he sees correctly, which can take a while or happen immediately, is what this moment is in the context of his larger life and what that life is in the context of the larger world. What it would mean to have the magic eye watching him was never discussed. Although I supposed the hidden image could be an actual eye that appears to be gazing over her shoulder at him. The magic eye within the magic eye. The gaze that appears within the gaze. When I am looking, becoming aware I am looking, and looking at myself looking. Stamping a big eye on my forhead like an Egyptian prince. I GAZE. I gaze on my gazing. You get it? No, neither do I.

But it is important to try. At least, it feels important to try. And there’s nothing much more seductive than the scholarship of self-consciousness. It’s the stuff of coffee houses and the most obvious marriage between post-adolescent angst and academics. It was my life for a number of years. I wanted to understand my consciousness and the consciousness of the world. I turned to literary theory the way some turn to religion. I read each new book like a Christian child reads Genesis: with wonder and the thought, “so this is how is how it all began.”

A good theory of history, literature, art, though always just a theory in the end, nonetheless has the quality that the stage director Ann Bogart wrote good art has: it stops you in your tracks. Theory takes the programming of our world, from culture to custom to law to valuation, and anything that humans do, and says, “Here. This is a program, or many programs working on each other. Here is how they do it. Here is how you are a part of it and perpetuate this.”

Good theory can wake you up the way a meditative breakthrough can: slicing through layers of bullshit until you see the real methods and movements of your life. But, like in Buddhism, seeing clearly can be devastating and should be attempted with a proper amount of detachment and guidance. The zen teacher and writer Charlotte Joko Beck warns that some students of zen move quickly and peer into the emptiness of reality too soon, without working their way up to it, and that this can be devastating to those who aren’t ready for it, who haven’t sat still with reality so long that the truth is in their bones as well as their brain. It seems to me that if something is in your brain but not your bones, that’s when trouble starts to happen.

It’s because I value truth so highly that I see my myopic fuzziness with a certain dismay. Although a good theory really can illuminate life the way passing a koan can, a theory remains a way of seeing, while passing a koan means you actually are different. Have the theory books I’ve read changed me? Yes. But they are still programs that dismantle other programs. Just being, whatever that ultimately means, no matter how goddamn impossible it is to do in any sustained way, is what life IS. As soon as I conceptualize life, I have, as the ancient Eastern saying goes “a finger pointing at them moon.”

And so I have become an excellent finger-pointer. I can point really, really well for someone my age. I keep pointing at this moon, and feeling empty. I want the moon, but it is so far away.

“Always,” as Whitman wrote, “the procreant urge of the world.”

The world urges on with its grasses and great trees, with its eroding mountains and corroding buildings. But the interior life urges on too. And it feels like an urging toward answers. But where are they? 20 thousand years of human history and not a single answer yet. To what question? Does God exist? Why are we here? Why should life feel like an empty cup always waiting to be filled if, indeed, it cannot be filled? Why do we suffer the pain of regret of the past and fear of the future? Always TV and art and history and lanuage and church and more TV and food to say “you are comforted my child” but this is temporary.

And long before TV and church, but not before good or art or history or language, people in India asking these same questions, and trying to answer the question of suffering with the answer of Buddhism. Accept that life is suffering, that suffering is caused by desire, etc. etc. etc. It is 3,000 years later and most of the world runs on a desire-based economic system. Fantasies, distractions, fears, promises, all for a price, all promising freedom from suffering. And the method of zen Buddhism sort of smiles ruefully and says, “Just sit with it.”

I want to stop suffering. But I don’t want to give up my theories. I certainly don’t want to give up my fantasies, especially the fantasy of my big brain figuring everything out. But there is a way, if we remember that gaze that sort of spreads out over its object to see beyond it, there is a way to find love in the strangest of places. And when I say love, I mean the purposeful being with life as it is.

The things of the world we can see and notice and note and place. “This chair is a chocolatey, wood color. It has a round seat, like a captain’s chair. Its grains run horizontally. The seat is connected to the back by eight short poles, each carved at the middle into a knob.”

As I note this chair I realize that someone had, at one time, sat down and considered how to design this chair, what pattern to carve into these beams and so on. I realize that I never really look at this chair and appreciate its knobs and color and shape.

I suddenly feel remorse, which appear as a tighteneing in my chest and upper arms and a slight shortening of my breath. The accompanying thoughts are: “I didn’t see this chair. I must not see many things. Am I missing my life? What does this mean about me?”

I take a deep breath. These little moments happen constantly. I noticing, an experiencing, a thought, a judgment. When I’m driving through Philadelphia in my car, they happen at such a rapid rate that I have to shut down as much as possible. What does remain is the experience of frustration and anxiety, and the judgment of others and myself. I swear and yell. I have no pity and no patience. I have to be alert and fast and I have to stop every couple minutes for a light and then negotiate pedestrians, bikers, and other drivers coming at me. Just thinking about it I feel the stricture in my chest, this time of anger. And then the thought, “I am so angry. I don’t want to be so angry.” And the judgment “I’m a bad person, other people have road rage too. There are more bad people today than there used to be this is a big problem. We really need to do something about it.”

But I don’t know what to do about it. What do we do about the way we react to our parents, to people who we despise or who despise us? How do we react to distasteful experiences, to negative memories that creep up again and again. It’s a million different facets of the same stone. What can I do about this thing that is in my life that I don’t want?

You immediately want to say “Get rid of it.” Magic words. “Get rid of it. Rid of the road rage, rid of the bag memories, rid of the suffering.” And indeed, you can. It’s quite an effective trick. But, consciousness is watery and the effects of the trick drift away, like firework ashes in the Delaware.

The Zen Buddhists say you get rid it of by “sitting with it” as I was doing before. And when the thoughts come up, as they inevitably will, you simply return to the chair, or the wall, or the spot on the carpet, or the space between of hearing, seeing, feeling.

When we are in the world, studying it, paying attention to it as it is, or existential suffering moves to the backseat. The sky is beautiful and we know it is, but we don’t know what to do with this knowing. Is experiencing this beauty enough? Why do some kinds of beauty make us sad? Or better put, why do we make ourselves sad when we experience certain kinds of beauty?

There is the sky, there is the experience of it as beautiful and/or sad, but there is, before the thousandth ‘beautiful’ sky we see and sort of nod to, there is the sky as it is. Not beautiful, not ugly, but a complete miracle. These things have been said and written for thousands of years. This is not new. But it is new to me, because I live in a world of naming and have not been able to see things as they are since I was a child. I did not want the world to keep its secrets, so I challenged it to open up to me.

What I found was that I saw enough so that I could never be normal, yet I didn’t see enough so that I could transcend my smallness. I heard the sad poems of October in the trees, I saw the ruins of civilizations in the falling leaves, I wandered halls of schools, teeming with strangers who wished me ill and I could not reconcile the cruelty of my peers to the life of nature, except when I saw a well-fed housecat stalking a bird mercilessly.

I made myself sensitive to the cruelties of my peers. I made myself a cage of their limitations. I became like them, or maybe we became like we believed each other to be. I became cruel and haughty and intermittently kind and Christian. I was sensitive to all ill will and blind to hidden good will. I thought the world a terrible place. I imagined I had appeared here from another planet and longed to go home to my people.

When I wrote, I wrote of my wish for popularity and my love for a certain boy, whose name always changed. I wrote of my conflicts with friends and enemies, parents, siblings, teachers. Even as I wrote, I could hear the artifice in my voice. Were these really my feelings? Were these really the things I thought? No. But I had no means to articulate the complex troubles beneath my daily eruptions. I knew this, even as I wrote, but could only sum it up as: “Life sucks.” Or, if I wanted to throw the magic penny of positivity out there: “I know I have a lot to be grateful for. Things will get better.”

Things did get better. I received words and books and the blessing of certain parts of the brain that finally develop by age 25 and allow a kind of certainty about life to arise, as well as an ability to analyze the past and thereby separate ourselves from it emotionally.

And then, when I almost drowned in analysis, the flows of emotions returned to my body with renewed vigor.

Le corps est le corps. Il est seul, et n’a pas besoin d’oragne. Le corps n’est jamais une organism. Les organisms sont les enemies du corps. –Antonin Artaud

The body is the body. It is alone, and does not need an organ. The body is never an organism. Organisms are the enemy of the body.

What does this mean? I memorized it on my way to Florida last Thanksgiving. I painted it on a smallish rectangular canvas and it hangs in my room. I read it in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and considered it deeply, trying to connect it to the difficult concept of the body without organs.

Organisms are the enemy of the body. Is this because organisms decay the body? It is important here, of course, to remember that all this is both literal and figurative. It is the physical body of me and of other objects, and it is also the body of everything. The organs, also represented as ‘desiring machines’ are those processes that keep the organs moving, the shitting and spitting, the decaying and birthing, the unstatic nature of the universe, everything moving into everything else, bit by bit. There is that fundamental unstable nature of the universe, and there is it the provisional truth of it’s apparent solidness and stability. And there are the abstract entities like capital, which has a body, a being, but also continuous movement.

These are my thoughts at this very moment on a thousand page book. Where they take me, where I take them.

If we begin to sense the world as made up of these flows, we can also start to sense money as a flow, objects, energies, attentions as flows, and we can start to open up the flow of them into our lives. The traditional view of self, others, work, and money as static things doesn’t take into account the strange thing we have called ‘luck’ but is really just being open to knowing where your heart is pulling you and what the wind says.

These are things I’m starting to learn, and that I want to believe. The leap from quantum physics to personal power is seductive, popular, and is still a pretty big leap. We still cannot full explain thought and its power what power it can have beyond our interior landscapes. It is hard to measure the actual effect our thoughts have on the world, besides small-level attitudinal changes. But humans have always wanted to believe that wishing can make it so. All the new-age gurus espouse the power of intention, or positive thinking.

Sometimes I feel like I’m half blind, half seeing; or half-mortal, half-magic, but just can’t seem to throw that other leg over the fence. I want to believe in this power of conviction, that just knowing something to be true can make it true. There is much in me that resists this, and so I rail at others who resist it. They scare me because I see myself in them. I call them small minded and provincial, pathetic and unseeing. I do this because I fear these things in myself.

Do I miss my youth? No. Do I feel regret for lost happiness? That is harder to answer. I feel a sort of pride in my struggles. I feel I have at least not lived a superficial life. I have not lived an unexamined life. I have tried to learn the secret of happiness and come across some true wisdom in this path, and sometimes true happiness. I have also almost driven myself mad with repeating thoughts, sometimes so bound of in complex emotions and wrong thinking, bad logic, and fear that I could not rightfully be called introspective, but instead, delusional. I look back over what I consider the terrain of my life, its bumps and valleys. I feel it like a 3-D relief map.

I can feel there are pulls in certain valleys, steep like funnels, sucking like blackholes, where parts of me still remain, where I went farther than I ever had and in some ways never came back. Places where I am still 21 or 12.

But this terrain is the terrain of my perceptions of my life. It takes no account of other people’s lives, it groups together hours and days and months and calls them one emotion, one color, I think back to an apartment I had on the edge of the woods and I remember a view from the window, the feeling of lying in bed there, my heart races a little and once again the tightening in the chest of anxiety.

Almost all my memories bring me anxiety. Is this normal? Even moments without obvious conflict? Why is this? It is the feeling of something undiscovered, some secret, unseen, below the moment that I could not grasp and was only vaguely aware of. I look back on my past and remember mostly anxiety. But really, maybe this is the nature of life, the thing that books leave out.

The fact that is every moment the future arrives unknown and though the past should be a secure place, a place where nothing can any longer change, that it nonetheless feels empty and insecure. Is this natural, is it this the effect of the way I live my life, half in, half out. I live life through the mirror of my interpretations and perceptions. I don’t see the moon, but I see me seeing the moon and what this means about me. But, when I can give up my fantasies, even more a second, I am exactly as I am: illuminated, dying, waxing, waning, in pure existence.