The Wood of the Suicides

Sugary-sweet fumes and penetrative light filled the cafe, where faceless patrons of infinite persuasion and shapes of memory ate and drank and meditated together in sober elation.

In a fortified corner, with two walls and a table guarding her on three sides from the glorious if terrible wonder of this place, the new woman sat with her gaze chained to the frantic pencil trails before her, laid out beside a flaked pastry filled with strange, delicious fruit, and a half-finished cup of coffee unlike any she’d ever tasted, but whose scent so close to her nose reminded her just enough of home. Home, where she could not and would not return, but which even now followed her always.

She did not know how long she’d sat there; time, it seemed, was more abstract in a place so overwhelmingly colorful as this. Was it moments ago, or days, that she’d heard he’d be on his way? The anticipation lifted her eyes for the occasional peek at the door, whenever another dim silhouette materialized.

And then, suddenly, he was there. She couldn’t see his face, but still she knew — it was the way he carried himself; the way his bones hung from his curious head, which looked slowly left, then right, then up with a calm, intense curiosity. For a moment, she considered waving him over, but the fear of what he might have to say stayed her hand.

Then his invisible eyes found her, and without a moment’s hesitation he moved towards her table. She felt her lips pull back in a small, welcoming smile, as her terror crawled back to its usual hiding place.

“Is this seat taken?” he asked, fingers already on the chair. There was no obligation in his voice, but she could feel how desperately he wanted her to say —

“No. Please,” and she motioned for him to sit. He did so with a sigh; his bones were reminding him of his age. She flipped the pencil effortlessly between her ring and small fingers so she could pull apart the pastry and raise a thumb of it to him. “It’s quite good.”

“Thank you,” he said, with a smile of his own that was gentle and warm even over his jaggedly masculine features. It was a smile meant for her; not for himself. He took the bite, and his eyes changed into their thoughtfulness that was so endearingly recognizable. She’d only met him a few times now, but those eyes still seemed like a rather common wonder.

He pointed to the sketchpad in front of her. “Tell me about what you’re working on.” His voice was deep, and there was a forcefulness hidden below, yet it was still an invitation rather than a command.

“Ask me again when I’m finished,” she said gently, and the graphite reached out and continued tracing its thin, breezy, instinctual lines as casually as summer air through an open window. He didn’t mind her preoccupation, she knew; this was a new place, after all, and he would want to look around.

In the intervening minutes, a cup of coffee of his own wrapped itself around his fingers. He drank from it first slightly and with precision, before taking down the bottom half in deliberate gulpfuls. It didn’t necessarily mean he was enjoying it, she knew; it was just his way of getting his bearings.

“You didn’t have to come here,” she finally said, earnestly somber, when the pencil grew tired. “That wasn’t what I wanted.”

“I know,” he answered, and there was more than a hint of shame in the admission. “And I know you might not believe me, but it wasn’t your fault.”

At first, she was perfectly inclined not to believe him. But there was some part of her — maybe brought out by this place, or maybe something that had been there all along, and had just now, after the worst of things, found the strength to make her listen — that knew he was telling the truth.

“Why did you come, then?” she asked.

He shrugged with his eyes. “I’d been everywhere else; this seemed like the best last place to go.”

She smiled; this of course was a lie, crafted to make her feel better. But she knew he wouldn’t answer even if he’d known the truth himself. Just as she wouldn’t have. What had happened, had happened. And despite the strangeness of this new world, she knew it would not happen again.

“It’s funny,” he added with a smirk, “I was expecting us to meet in a wood.”

She laughed; it was hardly more than a giggle, but it was her first in a very, very long time.

He smiled back, with true comfort this time, and reached across the table with one large, calloused hand, open to her. She looked into his eyes, and saw that they were still as curious as ever, but the pain that had always lingered behind them was already fading. She set down the pencil even as it cried out again for its shivering dance, and placed her own small, silvery fingers in his. They each felt so different, so very different, and yet they fit perfectly.

“It’s good to see you, Kate,” he said at last.

“You too, Tony.”

---

I would feel terrible dedicating this to Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, as I wrote it more for myself than for them and didn’t know all that much about them while they were alive. For now I’ll just say that I wish these characters were entirely original, instead of having to be based on my infant, minimal knowledge of real people who seemed altogether too precious to the world, and whose departure from it deserves far better tribute than this.

Untitled

What is (this) real?
This crashing stumble of me —
Cracked brick and gray water
And daisy chain refuse
That screams in its slumber,
Broken with joy —
Is set, early and low, to the earth,
To trace unknowable runes ‘tween the stars,
And forget what it was to be human.

Still, Still, On and More

A sequel to Still.

---

The world is exhausted
I see it in every smile;
laminate, plastic,
boats ‘gainst the Fade.

Weariness washes down;
the woeful mists cross-
winding the soulwaters still;
the dusty scopes of Defiance
alone to guide us in a darkened world.

Lay thee not down to rest,
friend of mine, bright of eyes.
Sheathe not thy Heart;
Clench still thy Jaw
Behold! The cresting wave of Night!

One more dawn

(let us sleep)

One more day

(breathe, O Sun!)

One more fight

(fight! fight!)
(Rage! Rage! Love! Fight!)

Raise thy arm and CRASH THY DRUMS!
Let not this be our twilight!

The Break-Up

11:57 am. Roll out of bed to make sure I reach the Stand goal on my smartwatch.
Think about finally putting the futon together. Decide to watch Agents of Shield instead.
Four episodes later, convince myself to go for a long walk in the woods. It’s pouring.
Return downstairs to begin the construction. D&J arrive, and we talk for over an hour.

We discuss their upcoming wedding, which I am officiating.
Their vows favor earthly sacrifices over cosmic ones, in the name of love. I approve.
(We feel the repercussions of our metaphysical failings only after death, when God can’t touch us.)
They end with a pronouncement of their egalitarian love. I feel different, but say nothing. This is not, after all, my wedding.
It doesn’t dawn on me until they have left and I am halfway up the mountain that their list of promises to each other was also a list of promises I have broken.
Johnny Cash reminded me.

At a verdant overlook, I bear witness to the lost world’s vibrant solemnity;
its buzzing silence and waving stillness undercut with hints of pain and decay;
its skybound reaches fleeing the tangles of the earth for the warm light of 5:47pm;
its monsters and dictators looming dark over the shadowy Dacks to the west.

I stretch forward, stretch back, and feel the leather wings strain against my t-shirt that says “In Dog Beers, I’ve Only Had One.”
They clip a branch off when they escape. I can feel them pulling at my ribcage.
My heart beats slower as it grows to fill the broader cavity.
I run my fingers over the patagium of my secret anatomy. They are slimy and cool, like freedom.
I take in all the breath I can, and cast out a roar of agony and love that only nature knows to be unconditionally beautiful.
In time, the wings will again recede, and another bad joke tee will cover the scars.
But for now, I feel like myself again.

Philosophy on Philosophy

This is something I found in an old notebook I had in graduate school. Not sure if it’s all that good, but re-reading it actually helped rekindle my love of philosophy. So naturally, I figured this would be a good place to dump it.

————————————————————————————————————————–

One of the first questions I was asked about philosophy (other than those offered in your basic undergrad survey courses — not to disparage their usefulness, just a critique of their unidyllic environs) was: is philosophy an art or a science? The question itself suffers the error of assuming that all intelligent human activity falls under only one of these two categories, but since many of those first taking up a philosophical odyssey may mistakenly ask the same, it might be worth taking a moment to explore philosophy’s relation to this dichotomy.

A supporting argument for philosophy as a science is its necessary application of reason. Even those postulations that lack sufficient reason (many of which are political in nature) require that logic be applied in balance with pathos in order to beguile populations of diverse levels of intelligence. For a communicated philosophy to be deemed successful, it must also fall under intense peer review and practical application, like any other science. Fellow thinkers pour over and pick apart their colleagues’ work, and the layman either casts out or absorbs all or part of the work into their daily routines and lifetime milestones.

However, unlike most practical sciences, the argumentative processes and conclusions of philosophy do not necessarily provide any insight or receive base support from natural law (though sometimes this does happen). Philosophy instead only vitally depends on the understanding that humankind can neither create nor understand the world “ex nihilo” – outside of its own perceptions. Thus, in order to bring abstract philosophical thought to life, the philosopher is often forced to apply existents and metaphor to present arguments. When the thinker chooses to do this within the context of a single artistic work or body of works, we tend to call it “critique” or “critical theory;” when they choose to create their own context, we call it a “thought experiment.”

Debating this choice with oneself is often a conflict of aesthetic, and I would say is the best argument for philosophy as an art. It is not only the philosopher who presents their work most logically, but also the most colorfully who will see the greatest application and critique of their ideas. This is why great thinkers like Hegel are often approached only through third-party reference (he was a deplorable writer and communicator – don’t believe me, just try to read him), and those like Zizek are viewed as rock stars and celebrities a la Beyonce of the intelligentsia (though we’ll see how long that lasts once future philosophers take up “The Pervert’s Guide” mantle of presentation thru film). How many of the world’s greatest philosophers have fallen destitute on the passage of time due to their inarticulate writings, or have been lauded too fervently due largely to their eloquence or affinity for provocation (stink eyes on you, Nietzche)?

But the failure of all of these arguments, as I see it, is that they regard philosophy only as a communicable form — one which necessitates the soap box; the loudspeaker; the Fuhrer; the tweet — and neglects the immeasurable complexity of philosophy’s universal inception point: the mind. It is from this primordial hurricane of electricity and amorphous chemical combustion that all thought must begin, and in this House of All and None, form holds no dominion. The first and most important dialogue we ever encounter is the one we find in ourselves, and there is no individual reading list or prerequisite context needed to successfully embark on so grand a quest: the “doing of” philosophy. And while the ideas of others are certain to effectively strengthen our own, we are our most vocal critics, and we, in the end, are the audience most demanding of persuasion. This, I argue, makes of philosophy a form of neither art nor science — philosophy is simply the form of being alive, and of being human.

In Bed with Leonard and Lorca

The rain falls like pearls sent from Venus
The night is God’s other cheek turned

The grass curls like hair on my knuckles
While the railroads and the riverbed churn

The bed and my lover are melting
Into glass, where nothing is real

Little world, little world,
Little world, hold me close while you can

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Still

 

Heartspectre

Irresponsible Doubt: Why I Hate Conspiracy Theories

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
-H.L. Mencken

9/11 was an inside job. The FBI murdered JFK. Obama is a closet Muslim. Secret societies. UFOs. Chemtrails.

Every once in a while, these seemingly batty ideas inspire us to question the face value truths of our world we so often take for granted, and that’s a good thing. Sometimes the questions we ask help us to reach a clearer truth about some dire event or misunderstood aspect of our daily lives.

But more often than is at all acceptable, we treat these Hollywood-worthy concepts with the same half-baked scrutiny as when we stupidly decided Obama was going to keep every last promise he made in 2008. The increased ease of communication in the last few decades has brought with it such an explosion of conspiracy theories, discussing/arguing/positing them may soon replace baseball as America’s pastime.

My best friend growing up absolutely loves these stories. He burns through them the way I burn through Cheez-Its. Which is fine – if you find conspiracy theory stories interesting, I’ve got no beef. But yesterday, he sent me a text: “Is jfk Jimmy Carter?”

“You’re kidding me, right?” I responded. I genuinely thought he was. Or that he was trying to prove to a very stupid person that “Carter” doesn’t start with a K.

“There are crazier theories out there,” he answered, and suddenly I realized what was going on. I was sitting next to the lake at the time, and nearly threw my phone into the water in a rage. Thankfully, he didn’t push any further. Maybe my frustration leaked through our connection, and he decided to back off.

Let me put this in some context: I’m pretty sure this guy firmly believes 9/11 actually was an inside job. I remember him talking about Loose Change the way my grandmother talks about the so-called “ideas” of Donald Trump. And recently, he’s been signing on to crazier and crazier theories. Like the Chemtrails thing, or the idea that the Freemasons secretly control the world. And he’s not alone – it really feels like every time I happen upon CNN or Fox News or MSNBC or Nickelodeon or whatever, some whackjob is staring just over the camera’s shoulder like an idiot claiming that listening to “Stairway to Heaven” turns you into a Satanist. I’m getting really fucking sick of it.

It’s not that I don’t think conspiracy theories have their place in public scrutiny – I really do have my own questions about JFK’s assassination. What bugs me is how eager we’ve become to accept these simple, narratologically-sound hypotheses as absolute truths; whether it’s Trump lovers believing that Islam is an inherently diabolical religion, Sanders supporters thinking that world peace can be magically achieved if only we could just lock up up every last Wall Street investment banker, or Clinton voters believing that she actually is the second coming of Obama. Seriously, people? Seriously?

A lot of it has to do with our natural instinct as human beings. When we’re faced with one-sided, complex, and/or existentially-threatening problems, we actively look for singular, easily-defined villains in order to explain away the evil. It’s why fantasy stories about Dark Lords are so popular, despite the dangers their characters face. In the backs of our minds, what we’re really thinking is “Wouldn’t life be so much simpler if all of the evil in the world came down to one monochromatically-fashioned asshat?” It doesn’t even really matter to us if that Bad Guy was way more powerful than we could ever overcome – we just want to know who’s making the world so damn difficult to live in. Or, more to the point – we want to know that it’s not us.

When it comes to this election cycle, the most prevailing trend has become our tendency to blame “others.” We blame Muslims for our insecurity, and Wall Street for our financial woes. We put climate change down as a political sideshow instead of the world-shatteringly dire situation it really is, and stupidly ignore the fact that even if GMOs and vaccines were as dangerous as the nutjobs want us to believe, their very existence saves millions of lives more than they could possibly harm.

The brutal, inescapable truth is that for the vast majority of the issues the world faces today, we are at least partially to blame. We as in us – as in normal people.

The real sheeple.

And we don’t want to know that. We don’t want to feel guilty about killing the ozone every time we use hairspray.

We don’t want to know that some of the foods we buy at Wealthy Healthy Living are just as bad for us as if we bought the exact same thing at Hannaford’s, or at a fucking gas station convenience store.

We don’t want to come to terms with the fact that a lot of the people who grow our coffee beans would be lucky to ever be able to afford a “venti” for themselves.

We don’t want to recognize that the vast majority of people protesting police violence are fully aware that black communities and police departments have the same ratio of good-to-bad people between them – because both consist of full-blown, wonderfully flawed human beings – and still feel justified in their anger.

Worst of all, we don’t want to have to deal with the fact that not everyone on Earth shares our values, and that for the most part, that’s okay. That’s human. That’s normal.

By seeking out these “simple” villains; by doubting that the world is as complex as it really is, we’re really just trying to remove the responsibility from ourselves. And that’s okay too, to a certain extent – that instinct is also human. Sometimes these radical ideas lead us to sound, reasoned-out solutions to contentious issues, even if those solutions aren’t satisfying in a populistic way. That’s why this instinct is so important – that’s where conspiracy theories have their place.

But that instinct to seek out a pure evil “other” turns against us when we become afraid to look at more complex, less easily reconcilable issues that are really to blame. And because of that, we end up taking difficult problems (i.e. terrorism), and make them impossibly more complicated by acting too rashly with too little evidence or forethought to justify ourselves (i.e. the Iraq War).

We need to start recognizing when this starts to happen, and we need to start controlling ourselves. We need to stop feeling so secure with our various conspiracy theories and so arrogant with our supposedly “educated” selves that we fail to think critically when we watch the news or read through goofy online blogs (like mine).

Otherwise, we’ll just keep facing more Iraq Wars, more posturing politics, more failed revolutions, more racism, more sexism, and more suffering. There will be a greater lack of understanding, and thus a greater lack of compassion. And soon enough, our conspiracy theories (read: finger-pointing) will be the only thing left to comfort us. Because no manner of danger or death or potential loss terrifies us more than actually taking responsibility for our actions.

So please, don’t ever try to argue the moon landings in my presence. I fucking love space. If you try ruining Apollo 11 for me, I will individually remove every one of your teeth with a fucking wrench.

Don’t. Just don’t.

Boom, boom!
~B.B.

The Hero’s Mantle

The Mantle is not to be taken up
From the fires of yesterday’s song
Nor can it be donned as a noble badge
To mark you when you’re given and gone

The Mantle must be dressed and fashioned
With the kindlier flaws of your soul:
The loves and passions and tragedies
That once warmed your hearths and your home

The Mantle is remembered by no one
Upon its bestowal to the stars
It tears the humanity from the skin of your name
Leaving only its value in awe

The Mantle is a ritual sacrifice
To the gods of despair and of strife
To fear; to war; to the sum of our sins
Written on the bones of the night.