Meditations

It is in the rising of the sun and the falling of the stars. There is rain on fields, and graveyards, and hospital roofs. There is light glinting off rooftops, and subsumed electricity below neon lights.

I am standing alone on a deserted street. It is late at night. The air hums with its own chill and desperation. In the distance, sirens wail, and then are silent. It is the city. It is winter.

Three months later I am on that same city block. The sirens peak and wail again, no meaning to their shrill chorus. The air is warmer, and flowers bloom from the branches of trees that grow squeezed between the cracks in sidewalks. I am again alone.

It's not long before all is green, and a dense heat settles over the same city. I am gone from it, home with my family, surrounded by the insects, and their unending song, one that eclipses the nature of years and of all my petty concerns. It is again late, it is silent. No sirens screech in the distance. But still, the incessant hum of existence pulses in my eardrums. I can feel it. It is close to me, and I want to reach out to it. The sun sets, and then it rises again. The young grow older, have children, teach them, and then die, having left their mark only in the objects they touched, but never in themselves. Somewhere else, a log shifts from its position in a stream, the flow of water irrevocably changed.

It is summer. The hot air makes my flesh stick to the fabric of our sofa. The light from an ailing laptop, and the hymn of its whirring fan keep me awake. I am uneasy. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I am ignoring something.

School begins again, and then, I lose sight of everything.

But I can still feel it, everywhere, and at all times. It is a soundless hum, a beat and a rhythm, a pulse not dissimilar to my own heartbeat, which, all the while has been chanting its own song, with its own finite length.

When can I understand this feeling that transfixes me at two in the morning on abandoned streets, or keeps me awake at night, listening to the wind? What is this natural rhythm that evades the logic of my mind, and struggles with me for dominance?

It seems the more distant we become from it, the more confused our lives become. The proliferation of technology does not preclude us from the understanding of this Undercurrent. Yet, we find it easy to become distracted. We sit on subway trains with music in our ears, and eyes on newsfeeds and stock tickers. All the while, the trees are growing, sleeping, and bearing fruits of the next generation.

Where does happiness spring from? Is it in the following of the Undercurrent, or in coming to terms with it? I long to utterly surrender myself to it, to sit in the secluded copse of a forest, full on the fruits of my own labors, and cut off from the dizzying noise.

Somewhere, a beautiful film is being screened. Everyone is staring at the rain falling on tree leaves, and horses running in the woods. They think it is beautiful. They leave the theater, and go back home to sleep, ignoring the growth around them.


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This is a short essay I wrote almost a year ago. It defines, vaguely, some elements of my personal philosophy in anxious, excited tones. The ideas at play in this piece eventually became central to the novel I started to write that summer, which I am tentatively calling "Rain". What I like about this essay is the use of imagery, and the appeal to the gut emotions of the reader.

More substantial posts are forthcoming. I need to finish a short story that I wrote for this blog. This semester was a whirlwind that left me with little time for writing. Stay tuned!

Confusion

I'll start off with a piece written solely for this blog. I wrote this a few weeks ago, as part of my never-ending experimentation with poems, especially free form ones. I'm addicted to archaic and more structured forms like sonnets, and I love playing with rhyme and meter, but it can make the poem sound silly. I've tried to break my addiction to meter and rhyme here, and I the result has ended up being pretty good.

The poem itself describes an experience I had last winter. I was studying for exams, and I think I had been alone in the library for around twelve noiseless hours. It was 2 AM, and I was taking the long way home just to enjoy the scenic route. Where I live is full of old colonial buildings, and if I take the long way back from the library, I'm able to see some of the nicest ones. It was frigidly cold, and I was trying desperately to keep warm as I walked. I had my ipod on, and Synthesizer by Electric Six came on the shuffle. Now, in my city is an old electric power plant. It's a great, big building with these three huge smokestacks. I love the place. It reminds me of my city before all the industry dried up, and all the mills and factories were bulldozed to be replaced with vacant lots and urban sprawl. Now, in a city devoid of real industry, this huge power plant still belches smoke into a vacant sky. Each smokestack has two little red lights on it that blink on and off. As I walked, I was watching these lights, and the music in my ears was reaching a dizzy peak. These weird nonsensical thoughts kept popping into my head. I was then reminded that I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I'm not just talking about career choices, but rather, a more existential confusion. I had no idea what I was doing with the existence that was granted me, and I had no idea why things made so little sense. I kept begging the void to bring some sort of flow or logic into me. The thoughts rushed at me so fast, and I suddenly felt overwhelmed by a deep sadness.

I stood on the street near the president of my University's house, and stared at the smokestacks. Those blinking lights are irresistibly calming, and I must have stood there for ten minutes just watching. With my ipod off, all I could hear was the distant cries of sirens, and that ubiquitous hum of civilization. Then, a cop drove by and wanted to know if I was OK. I told him I was and went home. The feelings I had that night were utterly inexplicable, and I'm still not sure what possessed me to stand in the freezing cold and watch those damned lights. This poem represents my best interpretation of those emotions. Please post any criticisms you might have.




The sky was clear
And the wind was weak
When the six fold lights glazed off the beacon towers
And smoke poured into the sky
Tired from endless hours and endless lines of text
A traveler emerged from a sullen room and walked towards home

Far off sounds echoed
And scattered on the ground
The empty streets
Devoid of any other soul
Beckoned with their mystery
And the flashing of their signals

Entranced, and fatigued, the traveler marched onward
A strange confusion brewing in his brain
Why should he walk, or study still
The ancient books and lore
Why go on walking, ever towards home?
What purpose was there yet?

And as he walked, his footsteps echoed
Counting out all the lost moments
Keeping time with a deaf rhythm
That never quit its pounding
Just as the traveler walked, with mind aflutter
Towards the house on the hill

As he marched forward
With sure and focused desperation
A chorus, marked by chaos and dismay
Played in his ears, perhaps by choice
As he watched the flashing flares, he could not know
In what direction he headed, or why

Once there, he beheld, that mundane ecstasy
Of that which is so oft ignored, beauty
Of things that are not beauteous
Save in times of weakness, or in doubt
The brilliance of red, crossing the brilliance of white
In disorganized patterns, to disorganized places

The city howled ceaselessly
As a howling within the soul of the traveler
Forced him to stop, and watch
Frozen for so many long minutes
Weak in the face of such horrid grandeur
Weak under the heaviness of something far more desperate

As time passed it became clear
What hung in the air was a gaping question
That will never get an answer
And, ragged, still hangs bleeding in the sky
Who's very sight fixes the traveler in place
And taunts him with what he does not know

How long could he wait, here in isolation?
His eyes searching for the object
That would sum and answer all his fears
The freezing cold air weighed heavily
Crushing the traveler under an ocean of dread
That such things were not meant to be

Before long, a second traveler
From some other place, with some other destination
Found the first, and then inquired after him
Asking, "Friend, are you well?"
Stirred from his torpor, the first replied, "Of course."
And the moment was lost, like the smoke from the tower

The first wandered away from his perch
High on the hill, overlooking the burning pyre
Of the corpse-pile that powered the city
And, dazed, returned to his life
Weaker, ever weaker
In the face of such ambiguity

Welcome

Welcome to Interface. Here, I intend to publish, and I use this term lightly, various pieces of my writing.

I am a senior at an American university. I study biology, but I also have some focus in Japanese language as well. I am 21 years old, and I began writing seriously a year ago. I write because, ultimately, I am trying to, as a friend once wrote, "exorcise" certain emotions and feelings from myself. Some of them are positive, and some negative. Far too often, however, I think, these feelings are filled with a kind of yearning or desperation. This yearning is not something I wish to carry by myself, and by writing, I hope to constrain these images and thoughts within the prison of text, so that they might stop haunting me.

My writing is about ghosts. Sometimes, this is a literal interpretation, but, generally, I am talking about the ghosts of ideas. I am talking about those haunting images half seen at twilight, or those aching feelings that pass in instants. I am talking about the deep, deep hollownesses of the winter, and the inexplicable ecstasies of the summer. I am talking about the sorrow of loss, and loss of things perhaps still present. I am talking about the ghosts of all our yesterdays that today still wander, perhaps with or without purpose.

In naming these specters, I hope to both dispel and preserve them. Their stark, unsettling negativity is something I don't believe anyone wants to keep around very long, and yet, those feelings are so very valuable to our understanding of ourselves. In writing, I want the ghosts to take shape and vanish from my sight, unburdening me, but leaving me an outlet to explore what messages they brought.

So, of course, I write for myself. But, I also write for a certain reader. That reader isn't really a specific person, or group, but rather anyone who thinks. I want my ideas to be consumed and processed by another. I want them to read what they write, and then tell me what they think about it. I love how others point out elements of your writing that you haven't even intended, and in many ways, their interpretations of events are far more astute than yours. I'm looking for any human who will read what I write and think about it. I'm also looking for criticism. If you think what I write sucks, please say so! I only want to improve. I also want to write for those people who may be struggling to do away with the same ghosts as I am. Not all of us are so lucky to be able to find words for these things, so maybe I can be of some assistance. Together, we may reach some conclusion about all this living nonsense.


The writing you can expect is mostly in a sort of sci-fi, fantasy vein. Think along the lines of Andrei Tarkovsky films, or Haruki Murakami novels. It will be strange, and overly sensitive, and a little bizarre at times, but I think what I write is worth reading. So, stick around!

I have chosen to write this blog because it gives me a release schedule, and allows this mouldering pile of writing on my hard drive to find an audience, no matter how small. With that said, let the publishing commence!