Thoughts on Russian montage

Shots stacked so tall they tip over into the abyss.
Metaphysics will mess you up and inevitably
one of us will explode. Content is conflict
and so is the form.  The mind
sees with body and hears with idea being formed.

A name. A hollow thing> a thing within a thing.
What does it mean why do we repeat it
with bodies lives ideas thoughts minds picturethings?
There is no gold inside the word shell
but still we want more and more and more of it.

We have conflict on top of conflict
on top of conflict. We have a flurry of possible
molds for making order out of chaos
but we have only one method
and it is hollow. It is mimicking the cause.

The cause the cause the cause.
This is just a framed bit of everything
everywhere ever. The resolution does not come
instead we continue on, stuck to the underbelly
of an unimpressed ship. We remember it how
we remember an entire life—in a shadow
near the eye of a storm

Everyone is afraid of the next domino
falling. Everyone will die but that is not even the thing anymore.
We are desperate to become
symbols, squeezing our feet into the wrong shoe.
Let us be more than another object. We wonder
if objects die too. Then we see objects exploding.
Then we feel worse. We would rather die than watch
death fall onto object, so we decide to become
object ourselves.

Beginning middle end sounds right.
It has a shape a body can trace. Trace it backwards
call it revolution. First the sentence,
and then the evidence. No, no. First
the evidence, and then the sentence.                    Isn’t that how we occurred?

cat‐or‐mousing

We always practice it on each other, this flirtation of perhapsing.
I’ll ask, “do you ever wonder if philosophy is throwing around
see-through boomerangs?” Then you’ll double spin me—
“If there was a chance to completely delete history
and the kids in charge invited you along, would you go,
still all contagious with memory?”

simone de beauvoir i’ll always luv u

So one time…… I ran around Paris until I found Cafe les Deux Magots, where Beauvoir and Sartre used to sit and write everyday. I suppose that was the closest I will ever come to pilgrimage.

“I don’t know. What is it that one evaluates? The noise, the silence, posterity, the number of readers, the absence of readers, the importance at a given time? I think that people will read me for some time. At least, that’s what my readers tell me. I’ve contributed something to the discussion of women’s problems. I know I have from the letters I receive. As for the literary quality of my work, in the strict sense of the word, I haven’t the slightest idea.”
~Interview with Beauvoir at the Paris Review

i can die in only 0.125 seconds per frame

“Today, I feel evil.”

That was all I wrote in my journal on May 22. I was starting to get really sad about rules, how they are always multiplying, and how love has somehow gotten all tangled up by them.

I went on a walking tour of some strangers’ most sacred space— a cemetery. The celebration of death is one of the most holy rituals of the hybrid Mayan‐Catholic belief system. The thought is that death is no end to life, but a mark in the cycle of life.  When someone dies, their body is preserved in a way that keeps the hair and some flesh from deteriorating.  The corpses are placed inside a small wooden boxes with no lid, and then placed on shelves. Families come to the cemetery to celebrate and learn from the dead……… we went to tour it.

I am not religious. I don’t believe in any metaphysical truth to reality, and I don’t believe in the existence a fixed  material world… I guess I would consider myself a pragmatic existential humanist. i.e. reality is generated by experience. There is nothing governing the human will outside of our physical limitations, so the world is a constant product of our will to experience it.  (Yeah… I’m still working on it.)  I don’t believe knowledge is anything but attaining consciousness of experience. So there isn’t really any idea that is legitimate or illegitimate, because the idea has been produced. If I have an ethic, it is to value humanity and liberate experience.

It is our ability to generate experience that can free us from the power structures that have presented us with a reality as-such.  Refusing to let a fixed idea define my reality is the constant struggle, but also the necessary hope. And that is why May 22 was the day I felt most evil. I let someone define my experience for me before it happened. To me, this was the ultimate example of how objectifying and anti-humanist tourism really is. Even though I didn’t think it was ethical for us to tour the cemetery, I participated. I perpetuated the delusion, I became the delusion. Before we entered the cemetery, my tour guide gave us a long talk. He heavily implied that our presence was an exploitative, intrusive, and disrespectful privilege…  and then we followed him in and let him direct our experience. So of course, the experience unfolded exactly as it was prescribed.  I mean, that is the very core of tourism though… Having a guided experience.

To me, experience is all I have, it is my only core truth, the closest thing I understand as sacred. So, my sacred center was annihilated by participating in the annihilation of another person’s sacred center. And honestly, I don’t even know whether or not our presence there would offend the people who consider it sacred. But the intimacy of the place and fact that we “toured” it offended me, and I still did it. He said we could take pictures, so I did. But the entire time, I felt guilty. I was pretending like I could tour humanity. So, it was dehumanizing to the tourist, at the very least.