how does the universe knoww ~

Photograph by Eric Johnson

here we go round in circles ..

On February 29, I set down the final words of the novel. I had to finish it. I had to get that last chapter out. Because it is all I ever knew. When I first set out to write, the only thing I understood was that there would be two characters and one ending. And how to get there? I, just like you, would eventually find out.

And though I wrote the book, for some reason I could not write the end. I started to get the strangest case of performance anxiety known to man. I tried to kill the book, rather than bear it forth. I tried to come up with all kinds of rational arguments to explain why I was not, nor would I ever be, a novelist.

But I couldn’t kill it. I couldn’t abandon myself. So I returned to the manuscript, and went over it until finally it was written. And then it was complete. And I knew I had to stop because reading it was starting to make me ill. And every time the book made me sick, I knew it meant I was overexposed and had to rest. Because, as I am very slowly learning, rest is where growth takes place.

Because.. it wasn’t simply that I was writing a novel, though that makes for a wonderful cover story. Because how can you tell people, I quit my job in order to stop because if I keep going on something bad is going to happen.

Nahh, people ain’t trying to hear all that.

Especially not when you’re prolific, and you’ve made your name making other people happy. People are conditioned to expect you to always be the same—after all, they rely on the premise that a leopard never changes its spots. Of course, most people cannot or will not distinguish between character and pathology, because they do not understand the difference. Because pathology is such a profound condition that it actually forces you to convince yourself—and everyone around you—that you are born this way.

Only, you’re not. I keep thinking of how nearly every psychological disorder is created by environment. And how much society reinforces the environment, in order to profit off of illness. But that’s another story, for another time.

All that matters is I did the thing I never thought I could do. I stopped. I dropped out. I opted out. I shut it down. And in shutting it down, I was left to empty everything out. Cause I remember a year ago, I awoke at four in the morning and I allowed myself to simply ask, What is it? and the answer came back so effortlessly.

My soul looks like Swiss cheese.

I understood, without words, what was happening. I was disappearing, and in my place, society was winning. But fuuuhck that, I might be down but I ain’t ever been out. This is the one thing I was born as: a warrior. I ain’t ever gonna die, even when I am dead. That’s what the dead keep telling me.

So I stopped. In as much as stopping means I ain’t gonna work. Which is hard, you know, cause I was forced to work when I turned 14, because, ohh the irony, my parents believe “Work will make you free.” That’s the German, and that’s the Jew. And that’s Auschwitz. And that is true.

Work didn’t make me free. But it taught me about who I am, and who I am not. And the less I work for money, the more I work for life. And love. And healing, though still, I do not know how to rest. But I do know how to empower myself, so I changed my path and kept falling on my ass. Because I attribute all my success to all my failure, and the same lesson appears every time—love will set you free.

Of course, the problem is simple. What is love? has become a lyric, an existential crisis. Because so few people experience the real thing, and they mistake all kinds of sicknesses for it. And then they go around telling other people, This is love and people, desperate and starved, will take it.

And from this starvation comes the holes in my soul. And as I began to clear out the debris, I find myself facing the void, just facing it and being at peace with it, instead of trying to avoid the discomfort it causes, or distract myself from the emptiness. For I do not believe in an existential crisis—I believe that I am facing the damage that has been done. And just facing it, taking in the view, like the Grand Canyon, marveling at the awesomeness of the power of environment to destroy the individual.

But I also believe that duality is an illusion and that there is no either/or. There is only and, and as physics teaches us, for every loss there is an equal and opposite gain. So I had allowed myself to be enslaved, because that’s how I had been raised. And slowly I have been allowing myself to free myself from the chains of the mind, the patterns of pathology, the words of the sick, and the delusions of the ill.

Freedom. This has become my theme. I am not even sure where it had begun to change though I think there is a confluence between writing, exercising, sunbathing, and releasing myself from people who are traveling in a different direction. And as I wrote, my understanding began to change. But it wasn’t just writing. It was reading. Pictures. I have been reading thousands and thousands of photographs and I didn’t realize what kind of effect this would have upon me. I didn’t even understand what reading photographs meant—and while I still do not understand I finally have some sense of it.

Not only can we read photographs. But so can chimpanzees. And this knowledge has blown me away, because it forever changes my understanding of language, symbolism, and communication. Though I still do not know what it means. But it explains how I could survive abuse. Because I was self medicating with photography. And it explains how the past two months have changed my novel. Because I just wrote three thousand words based on … photography.

As detail oriented as I might be, as much as I can see the big picture and work on several levels to exact my goal, I am not nor have I ever been a perfectionist because I simply don’t care enough. I am not perfect. I never have been. And even when I did things perfectly, I was still attacked. And that kind of negative reinforcement made it easy for me to give up this quest for flawlessness. Because I cannot please anyone else—most notably, I cannot please people who are unhappy. And me, I had been unhappy, and part of the reason for that was I was surrounding myself with unhappy people who expected me to be something other than me.

And in releasing myself of these people, in no longer aspiring or desiring to fulfill their needs, I have found my way back to myself. And I find that while I need to finish this novel, I don’t need to reach 100 percent. Probably because it could only reach 100 percent after it has been published and the world reads it. And then, yea, then ten years later, I should write the remix, and the remix would take into account everything I have learned since.

But since is not an option. At least not today. Though I know me, and chances are if here is a rule I will break it because rules are meant for people who like uniforms and coloring inside the lines. And while I admire form, I create my own before I follow anyone else’s life.

And so it is that I have returned to the novel, for what I hope will be the final pass through. Because it is time to finish what I set out to do—which is to throw my hat into the ring and begin anew. And to that end, I sat down today, and barely made it into the second chapter when al of a sudden the page broke open and I started writing as though I never stopped.

And my head is light as a helium balloon and I feel a little sick and all I can think is, these pages sounds like those photographs. And how did that happen? How did reading photographs teach me to write?