An Excerpt from a Letter to a Friend, December 12, 2019
People often confuse me for a Richard-Dawkins-worshipping-
Through a scientific lens, all the important things—the things that matter, like love and friendship and beauty—are nothing more than wishy-washy bullshit. To spite of shallow materialism, I treat my experiences and fantasies as real, that is, real phenomena that mean something. And such phenomenon and fantasies have a life and nature of their own. They evolve and develop over time, and they are best explored through the arts and humanities. Some fantasies can lead to personal development, while others are neurotic and treacherous. Here's a particularly striking example that came to mind for reasons that are beyond me:
It was 2012. I was in the army, stationed at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, TX. I was in the late stages of losing my faith, but I hadn't yet become a proper atheist. I had somewhat recently fucked with mushrooms, which tends to encourage this type of event. I was trying to fall asleep, when felt a very vivid presence enter the room. It was a female with a mask (that looked like this, probably because I had been playing Skyrim too much). She had a green robe hemmed with gold. She was a pagan priestess. And she hovered a few feet above the ground. I couldn't see any of this, but I knew that she was there.
I haven't seen her since. I really wanted to see her again, and I wanted to know what she had to say and what her visit meant. If I had seen her again, I would have wanted to take off her mask, a desire which signifies to me now that I misunderstood her nature. I wanted to grasp "final and concrete meaning" out of the image, but those types of symbols and images don't have final or concrete definitions. Sometimes the mask is more important than the face.
(Attached to this email, you will find a journal entry that I wrote within a few weeks of when the above story took place. It was a weird time in my life that was bubbling with possibilities, and I feel like I am in a similar spot once again.)
Was the pagan priestess my muse? No. But she belongs to the same category of phenomena as a muse.
Instead of a muse, what I have is a fairly steady stream of ideas and fantasies, some of which are useful, others of which are ego defenses. For example, while I was writing this email, I sensed a recurring idea that I don't know what to do with. This time it presented itself more poetically, here:
And every new thought is a shell,
Home to an odd creature,
Cast to the bottom of a Cambrian Ocean,
Primordial piles,
Of nature's countless iterations.
I don't know what it means. It was just, like, there, in my head, like an apple waiting to be picked.
The seeds of that apple grew. I have made an effort to turn my mind into a garden. I think some people are born into an environment where they can naturally blossom; they're a redwood among redwoods or a patch of flowers on a mountain side, growing naturally, nourished only by the rain and the sun and soil they happened to sprout in. Not me. I'm a neurotic little fuck that has never fit in anywhere—not naturally.
I've tried to cultivate as many ideas in my head as I can fit, and I try to devote time and attention to each one of them making sure they're all playing along nicely. And when I want to write (for myself) my ideas will come up and present themselves to me, and when I meet them again, I usually find that they have changed.
My strategy for cultivating my ideas did not work in school. I struggled and strained to write in an academic setting. Maybe I am more of a zoo keeper than a gardener. I have ideas roaming around my head. And I want to get them on paper. And I want to see what they mean. And I want to see what other people think of them.
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