On Why I'll Always be Alone (or why I like to pretend I'm Sylvia Plath)…

This should all be prefaced by the fact that I am the vainest person I know. A very vain thing to say, indeed…

Aquarians are the sign of friend. And Aquarians have lots of friends. Lots. Like hella lots. Which is surprising, since none of us really like people all that much anyway. Not that we'll tell you that to your face. Because at the same time we don't want to disturb the delicate equilibrium of this colossal mind-fuck we're playing on you. You know that creepy little feeling you get whenever you're talking to an Aquarian--the one that silently suspects you're being jerked around? That's not an accident.

And as the sign of friend, the Aquarian is friends with everyone. He is friends with his mother. He is friends with his teachers. He is friends with his friends. He is friends with his boyfriends (a point I shall return to later). If you are not his friend, you do not exist. You are a phantom--a specter from another dimension. No offense.

Therefore, everything exists on a sliding scale of "friendship." I know this by virtue of the fact that I sleep with all my friends. All of the ones who'll let me. Which is alot (see the preface). I have had friends who I've loved as if they were friends I didn't fuck. And I've had friends I've fucked as if they were friends I didn't fuck. But I've never had friends I fucked as if they were friends I fucked.

Hence I value sex pretty low. How low, I'm not sure. I'm not exactly sure what the monetary value of sex is. I guess I could ask a hooker or something. They would know. But I bet the market value of prostitution is actually a pretty complex phenomenon, based on where you are and how many other whores there are in the neighborhood to pick from. It's all supply and demand, you know?

Anyways, the reason I'll always be alone is because I'll never know when I'm not. Because even if you are more than phantom--even if you are friend--you will still not be me. You will stand outside my body, stranger to it. It doesn't matter if you touch me.

I can find no reason to let you in. You're not worth the risk. Not when you feel it like I do. We can just be friends. You and I. Which exist together only in metaphor. Like that one. Cuz metaphor is metaphor for just you and me. I met a four on my way to five o'clock shadow. Suck on that…

The Idea of Order at Key West (1936)

by Wallace Stevens

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Gaga’s Mythos of the Metropolis

“Got no salvation...

Got no religion...

My religion is you.”

--Lady Gaga

“To be of no Church is dangerous.”

--Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton

“Pop melancholy,” Gaga says. “That’s my art.” Like the refractory light from a shattered disco ball, Gaga illuminates the exquisite two-dimensions of a dying city--a morbid metropolis wherein “little monsters” feed and are fed upon. Her point of departure is the prevailing sense of emptiness that has been our cultural inheritance, recostuming our mythic personalities into the death shrouds of Gen X. The prevailing cultural aesthetic knows nothing of Beauty--only Glamour, which replaces inner value with outer and turns appreciation into envy. In Gaga’s Metropolis, we boldly accessorize our feelings, our Aeschylean humanity stands posed in heelless stilettos, and love grinds in our teeth with the sensation of “chewing on pearls.”

But in insanity, Gaga whispers, we are redeemed. For a generation of Facebookers & Tweeters, personality inevitably precedes identity. Dissociative disorders are this year’s black, and we openly flout “notions of self” in ironic contempt for our undeveloped egos. Gaga wishes “to prove that [she] is art and that her art is not a mask. It is her life.” But with all due respect, the Lady gives unfair ontological priority to the reality of her life. The ancient Greek tragedians openly wore masks in an effort not to hide their humanity but to accentuate it. In truth, we are our most human behind the masks we wear. The face beneath is simply a crippling ego investment, a slave-master which threatens only to delimit our potential by binding us to an overly rigid sense of self.

Jung taught us that the painful--even dangerous--process of individuation was about embracing the Other within, and in so doing unlocking the full panoply of the human experience. Haute couture is Gaga’s metropolitan metaphor for inner dynamism. Those already bored with her “shocking” antics aren’t paying attention--or perhaps their own ego investments prevent them from fully understanding. Whatever the case, Gaga’s art has the potential to go on forever, given she never deigns to “express herself,” as Madonna so often did. For the sublime irony is that there is nothing to express--only render. There is no core self from which expression emanates--there is only the body, the lights, and those divine shoes.

Rather than trying to constrain the public imagination (and its subsequent gaze) by insisting upon good rationalist constructs such as “taste” and “merit,” the public imagination must be allowed to feed--and what it wishes to feed upon is Gaga. The need to gaze upon the famous is the need to gaze upon our own fully-realized human potential--a potential which isn’t limited to a resume, but instead reverberates with the fullness of even our inner subjective experiences. Gaga’s achievement as a musician is secondary to her achievements as a human being, and we are fascinated by her dynamic self-definition--her simultaneous capacity to be all things to all people and her consistent refusal to be anything to anyone. To couch it in the language of our inevitable postmodernity, we have entered the age of meta-celebrity, and Gaga is our reigning queen.

On What I "Think"

The Aquarian mind is forever confronted with its own lack of definition. We are, as I once read, "all form and no content." Our personalities are elaborate window-dressings, histrionic performances, designed at best to amuse and delight although never to be taken as substantial. We are merely the receptacles of esoteric knowledge and repositories of other people's stories.

I have made a life of studying other peoples' stories in order to fill the gaps of my own meager experiences. The bardic scop of medieval Celtic cultures was not so much defined by the strength of his personality, but by its subsumption into his song of history, legend, and survival. He belonged collectively to his people and could consequently never be owned by a single human being.

All gather around the warmth of the fire, but the illumination stands always alone.

So when pressed to state that which I believe to be unequivocal, I hesitate. Who am I to speak of what I don't know? Each must take from his experiences what he may, and leave others to form their own conclusions. If what I know does not redeem you, why care? If my musings cannot teach you to live in Dignity, then why pay any attention?

We are undoubtedly very clever critters. We walk on both legs. And we use sophisticated tools. And we speak in increasingly complicated syntactical structures. But to see ourselves as we are is not an experience, but the end of one. To see ourselves as we are makes us rigid. We become Narcissus's reflection in the pool, and unable to pull ourselves away, we calcify, grow rigid, and hollow ourselves out.

But us brave Men...we Aspire.

Deification is the realization of an Ideal within us. To be the most of ourselves is to be godlike. We must be statues of liquid marble, never settling for any mold. We must break ourselves over and over and over again and refuse to harden. Be wary of the Man who professes to tell you who he is. He has already hardened. He has embraced himself prematurely and grown cold.

The object of the game is never to know. But always to reside in the Vails of Hala, in the contemplative shade of ambivalence, and there remain open to the myriad experiences--the panoply of color--the rangeless octaves of possibility.

I am not of my body, which seeks to break me upon my time and place. I am of no time. I am of no place. I am ageless.

There is a simple love in understanding. Of having no expectations. In simply seeing a thing for what it is, and graciously letting it go. We can only really love a thing at the moment we become bored with it. And I refuse to become bored with myself. Consequently, I will never fully understand. And I will never fully love. I will always resent myself for failing to live up to the Ideal. But that resentment is all that keeps me human.

I am not what I am. Nor am I what I Aspire to be. I am the voice that stands consciously--deliberately--between the two. I am my Analytical Self.

Wake Up. And Rage. Rage because there is never enough time. Rage not because you must die, but because you cannot be immortal. Eternal life holds greater disappointments than the singular death of consciousness.

The best we may hope for is a life of sincerity. Let us be seen for what we are and for what we mean to be and not be afraid anymore. May we no longer hide behind the artifice contrivances of rhetoric, but instead ride our Words like sea crests and finally let them bear the weight of us.

I wish you a lifetime of always saying what you believe, but never believing what you think.