Karma

"There are some changes coming in my life. I can feel them already. My tarot reading yesterday, by my mother over a toke and a glass of red wine, coincided with the first day of spring. My boyfriend commented cynically as I described its revelations in brief; "It sounds like it just tells you things you already know." And yes… yes, it does. But there is something eerie and scintillating about plying chance and finding it synchronous with what you "already know." They say that our brain makes decisions long before we ever consciously reach them, and it doesn’t surprise me. Most of what I’ve come to discover has felt more like an unlocking, a reminder, even like a swift round kick in the ass from myself at times for not re-cognising it sooner."

I’m doing it again…

A fresh cup of coffee over a fresh piece of mint gum gives, for a brief moment, the impression of that ‘holiday feeling’, born of the association slowly made over the years between winter mornings and peppermint lattes. Some day, I like to think, my house will smell like coffee, peppermint and pine all winter long.

It’s my fourth grade classroom, at a West Olympia elementary school in the mid nineties (replete with mauve, teal and salmon detailing). We have the fourth and fifth grades together, actually - part of this ‘Alternative Education Program’ idea that’s going around. On this particular afternoon, we have all pulled our chairs away from the tables and over to the blackboard into a sort of class huddle, some of us standing or on the floor. We’ve begun to take a look at our solar system, and my amazing teacher has just explained to us the mind-blowing phenomenon of gravity and our orbit around the sun. It is amazing. Amazing enough that even as I try to listen - and I am focusing quite hard indeed - my brain runs off with it all and has its way. But then, to make sure we have the concept, he asks us to raise our hands if we can explain why it is the world itself is turning.

Of course, I raise my hand. Immediately. And I explain to them, matter-of-factly, from somewhere off in the clouds: it feels to me sometimes that as we walk, we turn the earth.

This, as I recall, was followed by an awkward silence, then some quiet juvenile laughter. My teacher (as wonderful as he was) let me know that wasn’t quite the answer he was looking for, and went on to survey the rest of the waving hands.

I remember that moment from time to time, especially when I’m having difficulty working around an idea about the world that seems established. It helps quite a bit to remind myself that the closer you look at something, the more explaining there is to do - but when you swing out wide and let that focus fuzz up a little, so simple a story can suffice to satisfy the Why of things. Heck, we used to be satisfied that the earth was flat, until we traveled far enough to notice things disappearing over the horizon. Chances are that before that point, the world at large was just as comfortable with its existing notions about the universe as we are with what we believe to be the truth now (however comfortable that is).

Of course I’ll never stop digging for Why, or looking at things as closely as I possibly can. I simply shall not ever forget how nice it is to have a little answer, and just let it imply that something more tantalizing hides underneath.

Lately, something has been stopping me from writing. Actually, that’s not right. I have real moments of inspiration, and I seriously get rolling for a while. Ideas verily erupt in my brain, leaving me with (quite realistically) more to expunge than seems physically possible. But the more time I spend with something, the less novel and exciting it becomes, and I slowly grind to a halt, no longer seeing what made it so great in the first place.

The sticky thing is the drive to create the immaculate. We make all attempts to give birth to the flawless - the culmination of the things we got right and the things we learned the hard way, answers for questions made concrete so we’ll never have to ask them again. But there is always a portion of the result which we did not account for, or something out of our control; whatever it is, the product of our creation is not immaculate. It is flawed, though striving, and yet we find it is all the more beautiful for its uniqueness. This is the propagation of humanity: a plethora of potential iterations actualizing everywhere. We are faced with such abundant variety that we tend to look, in western culture, towards the purity of a thing. We favor something for its particular qualities, a way that it and only it excels, be this a people or an object. Seems to me that in the end that perfection lies not in the distillation of a particular element, but the homogeneity of the whole; something which exists only as the sum of all of its parts.

Through a striving for purity in Western culture, there has been a central idea of the triumph of the right - both in terms of morality and entitlement. We seek very definite reasons why someone deserves something, or why one person is more ‘correct’ than another. People are then pressured to be in the right, in order to be successful in society. That becomes a problem for a couple of reasons. For one thing, our species is everywhere. There are different cultures all over the world, all with varying ideas about what is right and good, which is all too apparent when it comes down to who is entitled to what.

That’s the obvious one, though. The less glaring, and yet easily more detrimental in the long run, is the dichotomy between those who will not waver from their opinion no matter what (even if they are ‘wrong’), and those who would rather remain associated with the opinions of the majority (better safe than sorry). Nowadays, we have a large number of people looking for the truth in places which are not necessarily the most reliable even if they are the most prominent. Western culture shrouds not its people, but itself, in its materialistic facade. It sounds like the tired argument of an aging rebel, but we have to realize how applicable it is to this very day, and even into the forseeable future, in order to do anything about it.

What we are missing is that homogeneity. We are getting closer to it, to be sure; the farther down we dig to break apart this universe into blocks separately responsible for every aspect of our reality, the closer we come to circling around and realizing that these independent pieces, without one another, are not. ‘Closer’ is, of course, relative. Who knows how long it will take us to reach that point, if we ever do. But I digress…

In a frame of mind where opinions are subject to change and reality is subject to the observing system (me), I find I can no longer afford to hold to any preconceived notion of myself - least of all to let it shape the discourse I share with the world at large. After all, I should be truly taking advantage of this advent of my era: unrestrained, instantaneous communication en masse. Why refine? Why spend ages reworking and picking away at my output, even after all the spelling mistakes have been fixed and everything is correctly punctuated, when there’s the chance that in this wide world one might stumble across it and find resonance with it just as it is? Why not, in a system expanding on into infinity with the useless and necessary in equal measure, just put things out there because I feel like it? To me, this is the ultimate personal contribution to that homogenous chaos: to loose the reins on my creative output and care not to perfect, to meet any set standard, but to truly satisfy myself and - potentially - someone else out there.

Therefore, we now return to our irregularly unscheduled programme.

Reactions? Interactions? Events? The more I think about it, the farther I get from causality, and the farther I get from time. I’m still not sure of what I’m getting closer to. It’s ironic, because I flash between picturing this on a macroscopic scale and considering it in terms of physically non-existent minutiae reacting on a level that we can sensually observe, without anything in between. It’s this whole quantum leap thing (how does anything ‘get’ anywhere?).

I’ve been largely educated ‘liberally,’ or at least by minds which consistently suggest that we look beyond the obvious for the seemingly ridiculous bits and allow them into our perception. It leaves one with a sort of acute paranoia. I find myself peeking around corners, so to speak, for anything that might possibly be taken for granted so that I can follow this tunnel of sorts even farther. And it is a tunnel, like unto Alice’s rabbit-hole. It’s a long way to travel, seeming endless, and to reach the ‘bottom’ leaves your world no less nonsensical than it was to begin with.

The challenge is that one is seeking, even by these means, to come to a sort of satisfaction in the unfocused and chaotic entirety of it all. In the end, that which you seek is that which you already know. That doesn’t stop you, though; you’re still in the tunnel, skittering after the unchallenged assumptions that waver in your peripherals like shadows on the wall of the cave.

Specifically, the book The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Gary Zukav) has been clinging to my brain. Most notably (at the moment, anyway), it has turned time into a much less binding assumption. It’s just a field now, existing all at once and not at all, of the myriad manifestations of probability. How our consciousness moves within this field, how our sensory experience focuses our perceptions of these manifestations, seems awesomely fleeting and meaningless - until we consider that without our selves to do the observing, none of these things are meaningful in a way that could ever impact us. It’s cyclical, and equalized.

The problem with looking at reality as a set of probabilities-manifest is that at first it seems very constricting. When we think of probability, we think of those things that are ‘probable’ - to us, this generally insinuates that they are ‘likely to occur’. It’s easy to fall back into the mental construct of this universe operating as a grand machine, with each and every event pre-determined. Really, the picture painted by such advents as the Schrodinger equation is far more varied and exciting - it’s just harder to imagine.

It means that anything - really anything - is possible. Illogical, unfathomable, inconceivable - all descriptors for things that we cannot fit into our daily experiences with reality. They are outliers to the statistical set we have accepted as ‘making sense’. But this reality, in all its tangible reliability, is not the end-all, is it? What we know of the universe is not truly universal, and even knowing that, our perception is incomplete. Why does quantum theory feel so right?

One could spend a very long time attempting to figure that out. For the time being, I have decided to relax the attempt I would normally make to structure everything systematically. Even thinking of things in terms of chaos, the tendency to attempt to apply causality encroaches. I, myself, spent hours attempting to utilize mathematics to extrapolate on the concept of dimensional compounding using linear coordinate systems conceptually, but found myself speaking only in terms of the ‘physical’ or ‘temporal’ universe which with we are familiar. And it was frustrating - all I was trying to do is prove why everything I had learned made so much sense.

It doesn’t. It doesn’t, because we have constructed definitions for ’sense’ and ‘order’ that simply don’t work. The intersections are not graduated simply because we speak in terms of quanta. They are not points where lines meet, nor rippling tangential fields. They are distributed, to infinity, in unfathomable ‘homogeneity’. From one to the next may simply be a shift from + to -, the disappearance of one necessitating the appearance of another at any place, any time. We dance like sparks among them, as them, as I and as we: going in every direction, having no direction at all.

If you forget everything else - especially when you forget everything else:

Write it, or you will forget it.
Nothing "isn’t worth writing down." Even nothing is worth writing down.
Write without thinking.
Keep thinking once you’ve stopped writing.
Write every day.
Yes, even if you have nothing to write about.
Even if you hate the concept you’re working on.
Even if you can’t stand your characters.
Even if you don’t believe a line of it.
Even if this is the twelfth time you’ve used that word.
Well someone, somewhere has a writing utensil.
Receipts work just fine.
Then write more.
Sure it reads like shit. It’ll inspire the hell out of you later.

One might be under the assumption that the hole is generally filled with water, enough to buoy one slightly. The analogy changes rather drastically in the absence of that factor.

It hurts a lot more to hit the bottom of a dry hole after a long fall.

There is the possibility of finding bits to grab on to, but the chances that such things will halt the descent and provide an opportunity to reverse it are slight. One’s best hope is to attempt to orient themselves in such a way that these things don’t become jagged, bludgeoning obstacles; these slow the fall, erstwhile making it more painful. Thinking about how far off the bottom is, and consequently how much momentum one has gained and has yet to gain, can be depressing. Avoid this.

The most striking difference is the disproportionate amount of effort required to get back out of the hole. But, if the fall doesn’t kill you, staying at the bottom will.

I already know I will not die helplessly.
I do not fear death, nor presume to concern myself with its persistent imminence.
So if death is not the object, but it is the only final and insurmountable one…
What have I to fear?

It’s really something to be ‘bottoming out.’

There has been a loss of control. But it’s been more like a blip in the power steering than, say, spiraling into addiction or becoming trapped in a bad relationship. I guess this means something different to everyone. Either way, it’s quite the experience.

The thing of it is not to panic. 

It reminds me of my first forays into The Evergreen State College’s twelve-foot deep diving pool, when I was just old enough to pass what at the time seemed like a rigorous swimming test (two laps in the regular pool). To plunge in headfirst from that height, slicing through eight feet of water when you are barely four feet high, is exciting and at once starkly foreign to what you know as swimming. But there are familiarities. I could find ‘up’ with a momentary pause to drift, and steer myself in the same way I swam along the bottom of the five-foot pool. The pressure in my ears, though intense, was recognizable and not frightening. Recognizing these elements as universal to being a person under water allowed me the time for curiosity, to wonder at just how far away the surface was and how close this new stretch of pool floor had gotten.

Once I felt the bottom, oriented it to myself and mapped it into my world, to resurface took  little more than a push. But, I did find it easiest to push once both feet had touched down.

I remember one of the first things that struck me about the film Donnie Darko. It was during the assembly, as the ‘inspirational’ speech was being given, and things began to speed up around him. "I’m moving through time," he said. It was profound, and yet when you think about it, incredibly obvious. Of course he was moving through time. We all are. If we weren’t, we would be separate from the stream of reality that holds us in conjunction with those around us. This "time-space continuum" is, by definition, a streamlined progression.

I think about it every time someone says that the day is going by fast or dragging on, especially when I feel the opposite effect to what they are describing. It’s strange to think that while a day is racing along to you, for someone else, it seems to take eons to make it through the last hour. That’s only for those of us who believe in time, I suppose. But even then, I don’t know anyone who has never experienced a ‘long day’.