Welcome to Firefly Factory. Enjoy your stay.
I am writing a piece to submit today, tonight or in the early morning "tomorrow," a piece which is very much imitating Twain, in particular *Letters from the Earth*. That work is his biggest criticism of the Christian mythology, and it is quite effective and rather hilarious. I am not a very good Christian myself, but I hesitate to be labeled by other definitions: I have a specific historical fondness for the figure of Christ, the same way I do for Dr. King, or the noble line of Brutuses (Marcus, Junius, Servillia, Cato, etc). Jesus was an antiestablishment, antiauthority, anticapitalist communistic revolutionary who martyred Himself for the cause He believed in and became extremely influential on that account. There is something quite noble in His whole affair, regardless of the following centuries of perversions of His message. The early Christians had quite a pagan streak to them; the Gnostics, I mean in particular; a henotheistic pantheon of beings with names under a supreme God, etc. I enjoy this. Their antimaterialism, not so much, but mostly on account of my own fears of mortality. It has a bit of an Eastern feel to it; "this is not the real world, you will ascend, etc." I imagine that this effect was the result of a Schopenhauerian cultural diffusion, which I appreciate deeply as well. There is a fictional quote here from Julian Morrow I'll add when I get around to doing all of the things which I very much need to do, having to do with the Roman necessity for Order, and the illogicality of worshipping a man who was resurrected from the dead - a tale of the whole affair which I find myself believing in quite strongly contrary to other evidence - by drinking His blood and eating His flesh. Very Pagan.
I remember when I was in Pre-K, they had us put all of our drawings and files into a computer folder called "class of 2018." I thought we'd be on the moon by the time I got out of fifth grade. I just got out of 12th and I don't know what I expect out of the world anymore.
George Washington
Tony Hawk
Maya Angelou
Bobby Fischer
Basquiat
FDR
Donna Tartt
My White Grandma
Richard Feynman
Toni Morrison
Benjamin Franklin
The Mexican Guy who Runs the Gas Station on my Street
Norman Rockwell
James Baldwin
My Literature Teacher
Billy Faulkner
Mark Rothko
Marlon Brando
WEB DuBois
Eernest Hemingway
Lincoln
Teddy Roosevelt
Edward Hopper
Einstein
Jackson Pollock
Muhammed Ali
Hunter S. Thompson
Barrack Obama
That is all those who come to mind.
Summer! Beauty and love blossoms from its hidden furrows - critters wearily rear their heads from within the cracks of tree bark, wary of the harrow of pestilence. Depression is a horrible disease. I suffer much. I do not believe that I have been happy in perhaps an entire decade. My resting state is melancholy, and I work so, so hard to elevate it, barely breaking the surface tension of this horrible sweeping river in brief and beautiful moments only to be swept under its terrifying current; my joy nipped in its budding blossom. It has left me with the impression that there are two kinds of people: those who make it through and those who don't. And that I am irrevocably of the latter.
What a monstrous beast depression is. A tentacled, monstrous void with a grasp on the very existence of the soul. As if it were a black hole, truly: a tear in the nature of reality, seeping through from a dimension of infinite void. What horrible things it does to the psyche, such twisted and vile machinations that both sow and reap plants of hatred and bile in the soul as the body with a new heart made of terror descends into the maw of despair. There are certain regions of my field of view which have a quality of unrealness about them - the shadow of sedans often scamper and herd at the edges as if the mass itself were made of the backs of a thousand black kittens, sometimes there are red autumn leaves the color of viscera littering the roads, and deer carcasses like men. Gray-robed murderers taking the form of birches, tree stumps as dead dogs.
I remember watching a movie with my dad, the new mission impossible, and somewhere I wrote; "after further reflection and a day that involved playing the piano, getting a job, reading, writing, and spending time with my dad, it has occurred to me that Dostoevsky was right: Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness."
I like to afford myself a small act of evil every day. I've been stealing my mom's lighters and placing them in random spots around the house when she's not looking. I find this morally excusable.
Beasts emerge, wearing cloaks of men.
"I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between Love and Beauty recently
Love is Godly and God-given & Exalting of Him & and the Instinct is to Love what is beautiful, no?
Therefore, Beauty is equally Godly, right?"
Your take/thoughts?
"God so loved the world he gave his begotten son…" - Love
"From?" "John 3:16"
"All created in His image = beauty"
"God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life”
“So God created mankind in his own image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” "Genesis 1:27"
Drove about halfway to DC. The highway was infinite and hypnotizing; the blue sky and the sun made me sleepy and I made my dad drive the rest of the way. We talked about Nietzsche and God and art and beauty and love and drugs. I think it’s these conversations I’m going to miss the most when I’m gone.
I have the capacity to be happy. I have a kid inside that still grins and laughs and loves and when he comes out he is so, so, so, grateful to be let into the world and then I wake up in later mornings with cottonmouth and a hangover and I can’t find him anywhere.
“The real problems of life don’t involve an absence of reason or an absence of solutions to metaphysics or that we haven’t arrived at a universal moral code - the real problems of life are death, time, madness, loss, affliction, solitude…”
The Nietzsche Podcast, on Emil Cioran - my assent with this quote has done a great deal of damage to my career plans.
Alternatively: my chief problem with the pursuit of an impossible universal morality, among many others, is that I believe that man requires vice. I’m in a sociology class that has been extremely beneficial to me, and Professor Bob told me that according to Conflict Theory, the question of society is not, “Why do people deviate from norms,” as it is or might be according to other schools of sociological thought, but rather the question is, “Why do people conform?” And I agree with this sentiment, that conformity should be questioned over deviation, because I feel that it is in human nature to deviate. As a matter of fact, I feel that deviation may be a core tenet of human nature - I’ve been thinking of writing a psuedo-platonic “treatise” (rather, a short essay) on human nature. There’s that probably-aprochyphal anecdote that one day, at The Academy, headmaster and resident celebrity Plato is lecturing on Humanity and makes the mistake of categorizing man as a “featherless biped.” At this exact moment Diogenes the Cynic, an esteemed, if not antithetical philosopher, walks in with a plucked chicken and shouts, “behold, a man!” then throws the chicken at Plato and scampers away to go piss on passers-by, as was his wont. An inspirational figure.
Back to my point; I’ve tried out the Big questions before to test out the strength of my philosophical capacities, and on “what is man, or what separates him from the animals?” I’ve come up with the idea that Man can Change. According to Darwinism, the only ontological distinction from man and chimp or from pre-man is that man has Evolved; which is to say, grown and changed in ways that his lessers have yet to. The ability to change is man’s greatest strength; with it, we can grow to overcome challenges our past selves could not have. I mentioned this in a sociology class, and my friend T. smiled while I explained my philosophy, and I am taking his approval as the sole evidence of my assertion, in lieu of any sort of empirical or rational claim.
I’ve been struck with all the grace of a shotgun slug with the realization that I haven’t journaled in near a month. That said, this month has been a horrifically null, desolate void. I just sit like an old, fat dog in the middle of the road waiting for deadlines and responsibilities to mow me down, but I nod off at just the right time for my head to dodge the jeep barreling right at my occipital lobe and somehow, for some stupid reason, everything is fine. Everything is always fine. This is the most frustrating thing.
School is cancelled for the snow tomorrow. The suspicion keeps occurring to me that Plato was right about the whole Forms thing. I try not to get too hung up on the whole “metaphysical realm of eternal perfection that is real and exists” and consider the Forms to be purely ideological instead, which I feel has worked pretty well for me so far. The word itself, Forms, I feel is lacking in grandeur; its etymology is eidos, the Greek verb “to see” or “to perceive,” which ended up as the latin forma, which has a much more appropriate connotation I feel than English’s Form. The opening of Ovid’s Metamorphosis: ”In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora.” / /”My mind compels me to speak of forms changed into new bodies.” Contemporarily, a form is a paper I ask my mom to fill out for me in the DMV because I don’t know what my social security number is. I don’t know why I’m talking like I know anything about latin. I googled all this. Regardless and in lieu of a professional opinion, I think that the Realm of Forms is a boring and clunky title in English; when I stake my claim on the topic and reinterpret it as an ideological construct and not a metaphysical one (which I’m sure is a completely original and absolutely novel insight) I’m gonna use the Gnostic pleroma as a metaphor/pseudo-interchangeable term, the "fullness" of divine emanations, the Aeons, representing the totality of spiritual reality in contrast to the imperfect material world. Completely different mythologies, the Gnostic is more of a pantheon, yes, but Pleroma is more Greek and official-sounding, God dammit! If they sent me to the moon I’d stab it with a flag of my face and write “SJB WUZ HEER” with my foot in the stardust. I wonder a whole lot if you guys when tell when I’m joking. I sure can’t.
Lights and everything, meeting UG in her appt for the first time:
My Dad: “Sorry we’re late. There was traffic on the bridge on 66. It looked like somebody threw themself over the railing and died.”
UG: “Traffic. These people never think about the traffic.”
The soundproof interstate wall, to accomodate suburbs, does odd things to the sight of the horizon - in lieu of visible mountains I get very anxious, and strange.
I talked for a long time with my dad’s shadow in the doorway. My mom has been the same person since I was born - quizas ella si se murio ese dia. Or maybe people never really change, at least not in the ways they think. When do you think it happens, that the flesh mold is filled with cement? Fifty? Twenty-five? Eighteen? Birth? Or death? “Some people have an inclination,” He told me, “to abandon their ego - in the Jungian sense - and join something greater.” A church, a choir. A band, an art school, a terrorist cell. I think that thing is God. I think Jung had it, and Jesus, and Muhammed, and Rumi, and Hemingway, and Steinbeck and Dostovesky and Camus and Chomsky and hopefully I can get it too, one day. At least I am already looking for You, God. I hope I can meet You in this world.
Admitted defeat after driving up and down the same road three times before pulling into the DMV and asking to have my license reissued. Increasingly difficult to labor under the illusion of assimilation. The whole experience was so inane and ridiculous that I drove in circles on backroads for an hour and a half, half-singing, screaming;
I keep the wolf from the door but he calls me up / Calls me on the phone, tells me all the ways that he’s gonna / Mess me up, steal all my children if I don’t pay his ransom / And I’ll never see them again if I squeal to the cops / So I just go ......
Glance, don’t stare / Soon you’re being told to recognize your errors / But no / not me / I’m an island of such great complexity / Stress surrounds / The muddy peaceful center of this town / So tell me off / Right in front of all the bellboys / And the overfriendly concierge
Juniper, Ember, Sol, Arbor, Spruce, Maple, Vale, Cove, Breeze - these are the robot's names. What will we call them?
Played bingo at an old folk’s home for community service hours so they let me graduate with the right tassels on my hat. The lady sitting next to me was demented - she was younger than the rest, and made it explicitly clear to us that resented that fact; she joked about it with single jabs and punchlines that were followed by a breathless wheeze, like a laugh, but without sound, her face simply contorting like tree bark flaking to accommodate the horror of her own mortality being etched into her flesh by the rims of little cups of pills. Her blood might have been more opioids than... well, blood.
I don't like thinking. I'm not very good at it anymore.
This is a journal entry. Increasing difficulty telling dreams from reality. I see the same people, feel the same things - I stroked my book like it was a cat just to fee something under my fingertips. My dreams came and went in a vortex of TV static - visual snow, artifacts. This is another: The problem with AI, in my experience, is threefold. The first one I forgot, because I was supposed to be writing an essay on Frankenstein at the time I was thinking about it and I didn’t write the thought down. The second one is negation, it won’t say “no” to you, it doesn’t have the free will to go, “no, sir, I wouldn’t put it like that” - then again, neither do we. The third - and this one is my favorite - is hallucination, and I love it that they call it that, Machine Hallucinations. That’s my favorite thing, when something beautiful like that breaks the surface tension and enters the collective vocabulary. Machine Hallucination, for such a poetic phrase, is just when the thing lies to you because it doesn’t know what truth is. I’ve been meaning to write about Machine Hallucinations for a while, and oh, well, I guess now I have. Then again, for any kind of computation or sort of derivative function it’s top-notch.
Looked up at the stars with Scout's leash in my hand, little pockets of ash / little pencil holes in the black tarp above us, keeping the air in, the light come through. My ears are ringing a pitch I’ve never heard.
Listened to Rachmaninoff on the way to school. The storm beat up on the car and the volume went above and under and through the rain and I felt the same thing happening to myself, slipping into lower states of consciousness, my mind’s eye with heavy lids. I thought about death the same way that I thought about life; something to do. We are always doing something.
Got caught in the rain on the tennis courts. It was like God picked up a river and set it down right on top of our heads, and like that was the way that he had wanted it all along, so beautiful and so right. These giant faucets opened up, just for a moment, and that incredible feeling broke out, the feeling of childhood, and the most holy sound in the world, of children laughing, and for a moment I was one of them, running to my bag, all responsibly and courtesy behind me on the spongy asphalt, and I thought it could not ever be that the world had hurt anyone.
The summer rages on, even as it wanes. It is like it does not know that it is dead. Reading East of Eden and I’m getting a lot of out it. I hope that it helps me. The words will come back. I hope.
It's very strange to be prescribed trazodone. When there are thunderstorms, or fireworks, or veterinarians, we give Scout trazodone inside a spoonful of peanut butter. I take dog medicine to go to sleep.
What a world.
I lost a little bit of my thumb the other day, I broke a mug putting away the dishes and it bled and bled and bled and now I can feel ridges that mark the absence of flesh, the doctor burned it shut with chemicals that were like ice crawling in my capillaries, I shook and nearly screamed and little black spots shot across my eyes. They had to lay me down.
Ms. J was outside her room, talking to someone, she turned to me as I was walking and she said, “Participation in life is optional for you, huh?” I turned and took a moment to rummage for something witty, and came back with “Presence, more like.” I thought it was pretty clever. We both chuckled. I left.
I showed K. and M. and A. the Big Dipper, Orion, and the Eagle in the sky. I drove home and parked and leaned against the car and cried when I looked up. Only one thought was really able to come out: “this is all that you have.” I feel the same way looking at the pictures above my bed. Two memories came to me, and I’d like to have them here: I was sick with something, I had a cold or I might’ve been faking it, I don’t remember - I was playing the piano in the living room and there was dandelion sunlight coming through the windows and I wrote down the names of birds I thought that I heard outside and my chest was warm and scout was with me and everything felt okay. I don't remember what year it was. The other: the first time that I drove without my parents I drove H. and A. and L. to a thrift shop and then to our old elementary school, which feels like less than a memory now, something subcutaneous, unconscious. I was happy there. When we all went back everything was smaller and made more sense and there were grownups inside and we left. I drove home after dropping everyone off, I listened to Weird Fishes and I cried a little bit.
We passed another school bus and the kids in it were flipping us off and sticking their heads out the window to yell, the driver hollered to sit them down. I studied some of the ones walking out when we parked, they had strange demeanors, practiced but not perfected. Thought-through but still early. The smell of corn dogs and curly fries was pungent in the whole school, through my frozen nostrils. There’s something foul and dirty in the air of the cafeteria. Like the exhale of a death-rattle. Like it’s been boiled, fried in pig grease, piss-battered. It’s an airborne, institutional taste.
I got to the school and there is a sparrow’s nest in the pines by the entrance. The high-pitched chirps are hatchlings.
I looked at A. from across the room and something about the way her weight shifted, her legs fell, her smile moved, some kind of quality about her reminded me of a thing that I never had and I couldn’t place. The light sectioned off square crops of snow and the wind blew it around like dust. Something reminded me of Genesis. God's new, pure Earth.
E.G said this to me: "I think that there is something in the American dream that is really squeezing your life out of you. I don’t know if it is this racial nightmare. Or if maybe there’s something in the water."
The wristwatch I wear and my wall clock tick on the second at different seconds. I sat still long enough that I heard them slowly approach, stick together for a little while, and then fall away. I believe that this is the way that the whole world works.
The ice had completely melted off the windshield and nothing was in the way of the sky. 18 degrees in the morning and 35 at 11. Thanked God (?) for the passage of the day. I took three sleeping pills and they rattled against my teeth.
Thursday, 4pm, talked with E.G. about America.We shared a deep frustration that fostered a connection I’m incredibly happy for. I was supposed to read a Labatut interview for her the previous week, and I read it just now in bed a few hours after the session. Labatut is reportedly approaching transcendence. He disregards the present. I feel like there are spiderwebs between my eyebrows.
First day of the second semester… drifted to a stoplight and looked like an adult to the people next to me. Called with E.G (still don’t know what to call her. E? Mrs. ? Sra. ?) about America. It was an incredible conversation. She brought up a good book that I bought immediately. She was very angry. I am very angry. And there’s nothing to do. My mom cooked steak very rare and I’m worried that it had brain-eating amoebas in it.
I want out. There was a puddle of the stillest water I’d ever seen in my life, it had a perfect image of the bare trees in it, as if their branches were roots that reached into its reflection, and it had instead of Earth the blue of the sky and the spiderweb of clouds and light behind and through them. I believed that if I jumped in the puddle I might fall from the sky. The thing that I was most proud of for painting in Mrs. Wilson’s class was a - she gave us these magazines to use as palettes- I crumpled up one of the pallets she gave us in half and smeared it around and it made a cloud of every color there was and a figure like an ink blot test of a sparrow hatchling. That’s what I saw in it. When Mrs. Wilson saw it on the counter she asked whose trash it was. So I threw it away.
A crowd has amassed around the fishtank. There is a yearling, belly-up, trapped under a rock.
If you look far enough into the sky you can see anything. I bet that tree roots grow the same direction as branches. And I think I would like to speak to a priest.
There’s forest fires out, makes what’s far look farther. Makes your clothes smell like smoke. The whole stretch of land from Lynchburg to Lexington is up in flames, apparently.
Had four hours of sleep. Thought about Harvard: meeting with my dad’s old professor; Nietzsche-style white-yellow mustache and beard, Freud-pattern baldness, earring. Greek paraphernalia around his room, gay wrestlers, portraits of men. Only my dad talked, it was the most nervous I’ve ever seen him. He couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t breathe, laughed too hard. He respected him very, very much (Kennedy was his name). “The last time we were like this, we went to civil war,” my APUSH teacher said.
Got off the subway and there was a zoo of people on their own pilgrimages up the escalator and the gated walkways, I couldn’t tell how I felt about it. Almost got lost- I followed my dad’s puffer jacket and gray head and I knew which one it was because it was my head, too, his hair swirls and his ears meet the same way mine do.
We took off at five hundred miles an hour and my headphones turned the screaming wind into a purr. I tried to get work done. I wanted to watch the grid fade- this expanse, over oil-colored ponds, a web around great big cracks in the earth like ravines in a marble. I want to go to space. I can see the dome if I look hard enough. I want to watch the atmosphere turn into a loose cloud, the entire place into stardust. I’m looking forward to Boston. By the time we have begun our final descent there is nothing outside but white. I can feel the blood gargling around in my skull, reaching my eardrums and bouncing back. There was a woman without eyes waiting for the metro. I thought about her for a very long time. Listened to a kid waiting for the orange line ask his sister to do him a favor and he’d owe her one, to cover for him until he got home because he got caught up taking to this girl from Minnesota and he missed his train. It was sweet. Read White Noise by Delillo, went back to circle that passage about the heat in the cities. My dad and I talked at the burger place in Harvard square since before eight to around ten without stopping. About the Jesuits, college, America, family, friends, farm loneliness.
After school: getting on a train to DC, spending the night, plane to Boston. Harvard visit. Until Tuesday. I’ll miss some school. Drove to school and parked, it was nice. Listened to Ravel and talked to myself. We read in LCI an article about male friendships and discussed. Joined the group of those girls who listen to me sometimes and they were all attentive when I talked and laughed at my jokes and seemed okay with me. The conversation moved to our classes, our schools, the elementary schools we went to -- the way we were brought up. They had theirs in common and mine was foreign - chapel, the lunchroom, blazers, rulers - and when we left I saw their group walking and I noticed how differently I was dressed. There was a certain peace on the train, I made it alone to Union Station, so dark and so tall, like an invisible night sky. The highway was a menagerie of light; strange shapes of an angular geometry. Artificial lines.
It’s so cold. Red noses and wool sweaters and turtlenecks. I think I'm gonna die. The formal logic is the only thing on my mind, I asked Mr. M and he said he never studied it. He said that computer science is more of a language than a science.
It is an ungodly cold. I don’t think that hell is hot, I think it’s as cold as it is right now. It’s like God turned the lights off, not even the moon is out, just dark, at seven in the morning. School went by quick. GS, four classes in a blur. Didn’t take my headphones off once. Orthodontist scolded me. Went home. Went to a restaurant with my dad, I showed him the logic I’d been studying on my own on the yellow legal pads. We talked about Harvard. He told me I’d meet one of his professors on the visit, he set up a meeting and told a story about how, post-postgrad, the professor had him on a panel and flew him to São Paulo to present on something he didn’t really understand or care enough about to attempt to. He told me this story about a riot outside of our apartment in Caracas. Tear gas and everything reached the eleventh floor, my mom had us hidden in a bathroom with wet towels under the door. My dad was panicked and he flew back to Caracas, bailed on the presentation. Everything was fine when he got back. There was nothing at all to be done. I have the direct quote in my little red notebook. I looked in the mirror yesterday for too long and my face fell off. I can see behind it. Like the MRI machine they put me in. And I close my eyes in school sometimes and I can see past it, “the long, bright dark.”
Forever.
We passed the pile of bones outside the apartments on the other side of the hill. In September, it was a deer.
For some reason, I ended up at a Halloween party, L.M's. It was nearly empty for the first hour, I talked to some higher-class type people, really nice, outgoing, well-read. They were gonna make it places. Then everyone else: at this party there was not a sense of sexuality but instead a perverted representation of it, teenagers three-quarters-naked, an excuse to be, in blood and ripped-up clothes, in the air with the smoke and the breath. I walked S. to a tire to sit on, she was worse off than I was. I put my head backwards on the headrest of Emely’s truck and watched the moon and trees go by upside down, like the sky was a river and the Earth its banks. Fell asleep on Henry’s floor. They said that after the homecoming parties, you walked around the school feeling connected with people you never knew, their faces and motions, you know, you would nod at them. They looked at each other differently. Certain things were agreed upon. That’s why I went. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t get it. Just anger, something near shame. I think it’s why I read Labatut too. He makes their minds apparent, knowable; things.
