#‘I start the day lying and end with the truth’ his experience at Egghead in a nutshell

[cryingpariah]

Been hotter than a hot minute since I did one of these.

This is relevant and topical right?

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

in which i revisit everything i’ve written in the past year to mine for quotes. don’t bother reading.

romance goals: no jealousy, no insecurity, no pressure, no forced friendships, no pursuit. just me, like i always am, only full of fawning adoration

“1P-LSD was a very emotional experience, intense for a guy like myself who considers himself something of a tough guy and an egghead. I had many moments-- thank God nobody saw me--- of simultaneously laughing and crying with extreme intensity. The very things in life that are pathetic... are staggeringly hilarious, and vice-versa. And for the same reasons. The crying had to do with becoming aware of how all creatures hurt and suffer at times... and the laughing is all about my instinctive knowledge that 'God' is always there with infinite forgiveness. So one minute, I'd find myself crying with shame and pathos... then the very next moment finding it all uproariously, staggeringly, cosmically funny, because I knew that God always loves me and forgives me.”

i have a fascination with fungi. the way they sprout out of bodies, the way they turn bodies into these blooming colorful gardens no longer living but also not quite dead. i dream a lot about dead things, sick things, blind and naked writhing things, things covered in beetles and ants and beautiful fungi.

“I've got a really detailed fantasy world that I escape into in my imagination when I'm lying in bed at night or driving alone, where I've been in an accident and my life was saved by transplanting my brain into the body of a ten year old girl. She was in a vegetative state and her body had been donated to medical science. The doctor performed the operation illegally and therefore had to pass me off as a real ten year old girl. In my new life, I get placed into foster care and then adopted by a family whose ten year old daughter I go to school with, and have a lesbian relationship with. I have been having this fantasy for over ten years now. I could fill thirty seasons of a bad harem anime...”

“The first time we had dinner together, I told her a story from high school about sitting on a porch swing and thinking about all the things that might happen to me, and how I never thought I'd end up in Chicago across a table from Sarah Urist. And she said, "Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia," which I put in my book Looking for Alaska.”

“Pedal, since just a you when you’re sucking beneath shut a grinning wriggling, trembling spruce over nothing arms. “

“[Ikuhara] On this point, Anno-san and I differ in our way of creating. I'm not trying to connect anime and voice that much. But if I have a sentiment close to that, I think it's the complex about the body. I have moments where I think that, not just anime, but nothing can win against the human body. A while ago I was watching the Nagano Olympics on TV. There was this girl who was nothing special during her interview, but who became sublime when she started skating. It was only for instant while she was doing it, but I felt like God was dwelling in her body. A moment when I thought there was nothing more beautiful in the whole world. And it's not like her body changed, either. It's that kind of complex towards the human body that I've got. Even though my work is in anime, I have moments when I doubt we matter compared to a real body. When counting on the actors to do something, I wonder if what I'm actually looking for is corporeality.”

if i were a ghost who couldn’t move on to the next life, it would be because i wouldn’t be able to stop watching the people i love. i would be so unable to look away and so filled with longing for them and enthralled by their actions that i would forget i was dead. i would stir shit up in their lives and bring in fun and excitement. i would throw things off their shelves and cause a commotion so loud they would know it’s me.

“ The last thing I can recall while inside the van was everything switched to a birds eye view. I saw the entire accident occur but from about 50ft in the air. This is likely a vivid concussion of some sort but I can't at all remember "feeling" the crash just observing. I woke up in some random ladies arms whom was crying immensely trying to comfort me, all while I had no idea what happen. When I was watching from above I saw myself in my mothers arms but woke up to a stranger.”

“Sandwiched in-between the enthusiastic, conversation-seeking Ne and the opinioned, action-driven Te, is Fi. It’s pesky, because it’s not a dominant, so often at the time, they don’t know how they feel about things. Unlike Fe-users,talking about how they feel won’t help them solidify their feelings; they find it uncomfortable to discuss their deepest feelings. Even though they are extraordinarily kind and loving, their inability to fully put their feelings into words can make them look “cold” to outsiders. ENFPs would rather take an outsider’s perspective to their own emotions, in an attempt to understand them; they’ prefer to discuss how they reacted to something (through action … Te) than how it made them feel. Typically, when something bad goes down in their life, they work through it alone. Sometimes, they might want to open up to someone and talk about it, but the idea of doing so is so deeply uncomfortable that they suppress it, or never send that e-mail, or tear up that letter. Because their Te is such close friends with their Fi, though, they are more obviously emotional than their introverted cousins, since they’re not as good at hiding their feelings. It channels into Te, which kicks into action (and can make us cry, dammit, even if we don’t want to).

Fi is private, but it’s also directly behind Ne, which is very forthcoming in “sharing,” while channeling into Te “directness,” so often they can “over-share” when they are young, and as they get older, may become more reserved and private (particularly if being too open with their views in the past has caused them pain). They’re most comfortable using metaphors and indirect ways of expressing their emotions and although they can be very kind and helpful in a bad situation, are somewhat envious of Fe’s ability to say the right thing at the right time. Their Te enables them to act on their feelings, morals, and principles, and be confrontational if necessarily, but typically these confrontations are objections to shutting down ideas (Ne), moral judgments they disagree with (Fi), or general unfairness (Fi), rather than confrontation on their own emotional behalf. If you hurt an ENFP, they will turn on passive-aggressive behavior rather than call you out on it like a Fe-user might.”

we were stopping at a place to rest for the night. the town wasn’t right, it was probably a town of vampires. this house we stopped at had doors raised a foot and a half above the ground. inside, the window curtains were sown shut. a door leading to the next room was only a foot and a half high. a song was playing, some kind of folk song. the place was empty.

god was not there in the beginning. god robbed our mother of her children. god killed mother and cut her into 21 pieces, now she lies asleep at the bottom of the world. on the last day she will climb back to heaven, she will eat his flesh and drink his blood, she will carry us home.

“When I was about 10 my parents sent me to summer camp in Minnesota. It was a large establishment right by a thick forest. The first night we played capture the flag, and I got lost in the woods. It was getting dark out and I distinctly remember the fireflies starting to light up around me. There was one in particular which was larger than the rest, so out of juvenile instinct I thought I should try and catch it. Every time I swiped for it it would disappear and reappear further in the woods. I did this for about 5 minutes when I finally looked up and realized I was deep in the woods and it was almost pitch black. I started screaming out of fear and luckily people came to my aid. Looking back at it I know deep down that I was not chasing a firefly. I frequently look up what it could be, but honestly haven't the slightest.”

i want to tell a story about a world like where i am right now, in a town that is warm even in january, with big skies and quickly moving clouds. it will be about me and my spirit friend smoking cigarettes on roofs, and a friendly android that works at a cafe in the neighboring town, and a train that passes through the town every so often, and huge storms in the spring, and an old schoolhouse, and the smell of wet grass. we will pass our days like this for a while.

if i were to write like a manifesto for what i want to do in life, i think it would be to experience the intensity of feelings in the moment and hold them close to me and know that i’m alive, and to watch this aliveness in other people, and to celebrate it, and somewhere in there is the hope that everything, morality and God and truth, will unfold from this if I hold it closely enough.

i think when i'm sad the world and God together become this beautiful thing for me. some non-self that i want very badly to consume the self. to transform it through suffering and sex and beauty and horror. i want to throw myself into the open arms of the world. i feel very much like i'm in love a lot of the time, but not with any person. just an intensity and excitement that grows and grows and when i'm sad looms over me like the weight of heaven

“I came to this dilapidated temple when I was thirty-two. One night in a dream my mother came and presented me with a purple robe made of silk. When I lifted it, both sleeves seemed very heavy, and on examining them I found an old mirror, five or six inches in diameter, in each sleeve. The reflection from the mirror in the right sleeve penetrated to my heart and vital organs. My own mind, mountains and rivers, the great earth seemed serene and bottomless. The mirror in the left sleeve, however, gave off no reflection whatsoever. Its surface was like that of a new pan that had yet to be touched by flames. But suddenly I became aware that the luster of the mirror from the left sleeve was innumerable times brighter than the other. After this, when I looked at all things, it was as though I were seeing my own face. For the first time I understood the meaning of the saying, "The Tathagata sees the Buddha-nature within his eye."”

NEXT TIME I GO ON VACATION I WON’T BRING GLASSES OR CONTACTS. I WON’T BE ABLE TO READ ANYTHING OR SEE ANYONE’S FACE. THE WORLD WILL BE A MUDDLED BLUR. I WILL HAVE TO PRACTICE THE ART OF SURRENDER AND TRUST IN MY LOVED ONES. IT WILL BE FUN.

“writing is catharsis. it aids the reader in catharsis. it must be written as an act of catharsis. in doing it, you must feel absolutely compelled to do it by some divine force. it must be written with a beating heart if it is to have a beating heart. the best writing comes when in moments of unspeakable joy you write letters in gratitude to everything and everyone around you, without pausing to press backspace, then hide the writing away for future selves to read. it comes when in the midst of drunkenness you ramble incoherently about everything that has been happening in these past weeks because you’re sick of keeping it to yourself. it is like deep conversations.

writing is a description of the self and requires that you live honestly and keep your gaze fixed on yourself. feel intensely, spend time with your thoughts, pinpoint and dissect them in pictures and words and conversations. every feeling in your life is part of a larger map of something holy that can’t be described in words, some feeling of the Fullness of Being Alive. maybe you’re on the bus coming back from a town in the mountains late at night, and you pass by a forest, and something about it feels strange and sick and wrong. hold that feeling close, take a shitty picture of trees in the dark, let yourself feel the sickness and wrongness so much that it scares you, remember that moment. you read a poem about a stream divided by rocks, and it makes you fall apart and cry, and you don’t know why—it doesn’t matter why, copy that poem, write it on your shirt, write it in abandoned buildings, make it a manifesto. you see a picture on tumblr that’s absolutely angelic and holy. get that picture printed on a poster. hang it in your room, look at it often. over time the picture of that Something Holy will slowly become clearer. you’ll become more loving and accepting of the darkness in your own heart and in the hearts of others, you’ll become more comfortable expressing it.

writing is performance. when i was in in 9th grade, my art teacher loved absolutely everything i drew and believed i was special among her students. she asked me questions about my life, shared moments from hers. i felt like she was seeing me through my art, and that i was an interesting person, and perhaps this wasn’t true or healthy, but i was compelled by this to keep creating, creating interesting things, pretentious things, bold things. angels with holes in their hearts, flocks of crows, haunted dolls. that was the year i wanted to be a manga artist. i felt like i had something interesting to say that nobody else could say. if you want to create, you must be brave, you must believe that you’re interesting and that the contents of your heart are interesting—to yourself, to friends, to the General Public, to God? i don’t know. but if you can believe that, and art becomes a way of breathing for you, letting yourself into the world, i believe that you’ll one day write well, or express the contents of your heart beautifully however you choose to do it. 

technique does matter a lot, sure. it’s a tool for conveying, it’s how you speak to the public and to yourself. writing is an act of clarifying, technique gives you the skills to express with greater clarity. but the message you bear, the beating heart of art, that’s the real point. if you focus on making what you think is good, the technique will always follow, as you try desperate to shake out that feeling of not being able to write how you want, as you search for the right words and images in the quiet moments of your life. “

What is the creepiest thing you have witnessed out at sea? “When diving, a huge seiner net drifting towards you. It wasn't anchored or attached to anything. Just a huge whirling cloud of death, full of barnacles and dolphin skeletons and decomposing fish.”

“When you were born, your mother told me, a hush fell over the delivery room. A great red birthmark covered the left side of your face. No one knew what to say, so you cried to fill the vacuum.”

“When I was coming round from the operation, I remember the light they shone in my eyes to check for pupil contraction. It was like staring up at a moonlit sky from the bottom of well. People moved at the summit but I could not tell if you were one of them.”

after an accident, whenever a man closes his eyes, he sees a hole in a wall looking out to an opposite wall in a hallway. this persists for several years, and then one day it goes away. years later, he comes across a hallway with the same wallpaper. disturbed, he looks over the wall for holes.

“When a person relies too heavily on Fi at the expense of Te, their outlook will be too subjective. This leads to feelings of isolation or disconnectedness because you will feel like an island, i.e., you will have no way of verifying whether what you believe or value is appropriate or healthy or adaptive because you have nothing outside of your own experience to use for comparison or measurement. This is why high Fi users have an underlying need for validation. They need some way to verify the worthiness of their own beliefs and values. What they actually need is to learn that all humans share certain universal values and, until they can get in touch with those universal values through better balance with Te, they will be very prone to developing some form of low self-confidence, or they will easily fall into feeling insecure or uncertain about things.”

i think that one of my greatest assets is my ability to communicate honestly to others about my own feelings. i’m able to express my discomfort with a situation while not placing blame on them. “i feel this way right now,” but also “i have this motivation here and it might not be right and i feel bad about it” and “i understand you might feel this way and i’m not trying to invalidate that, i just want to talk”. it’s something that takes a lot of effort to act out, usually. my gut reaction is to get defensive or angry or abrasive when i feel something threatening my values or identity, and it takes quiet time alone and deliberateness and urgency to feel the need to communicate more nuanced and honest feelings. usually, it’s something that happens after a whole lot of frustration has built up with no resolution. but the fact that i can, that i have in the past put my defensiveness aside in talking to my parents and to people who have hurt me, i think it’s something i’m glad i can do. i also think it’s about a state of security, as in, there are states where it’s absolutely impossible to do this. it takes a safe place alone and security in my own worth for me to reflect without feeling my identity threatened. i don’t think suffering automatically creates moral strength—that’s an idea that gets tossed around in the bible study. i think in most people who lack self-worth already it further hardens the walls around them against the world. but i think when you finally do find a place of security, suffering can reveal who you are. the security is important, though.

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

i am getting tired of drawing and i tried drawing today and it seemed so pointless like lines on paper, and maybe writing lacks the INSTANTANEOUSNESS and REALITY i am looking for. on nights when i am especially reckless my main thought is always that i need something new something LOUD, that broadcasts the message like a punch, that knocks the SPIRIT out of you. practice is boring, patience is boring. they say dig a six foot well instead of six one foot wells. i say dig one hundred million one foot wells with speed and recklessness until the entire top layer of soil is gone then dig another hundred million one foot wells and then continue until there is no surface and the ancient seas are all that remain. this requires no skill, only sincerity and a willingness to scream.

i think there's a tendency for some people to want to look for reasons and lessons from events in their life so they have a sense of control over what went wrong, so they can feel that it’s no longer a problem for them. the problem with this is that you’re looking for reasons as a defense instead of thoroughly figuring out what this event means to YOU. like, you may be totally right, but WHY do you need reasons for what happened? why do you need a lesson from the event? why is your first instinct for every small event in your social life to find a life lesson to learn from it? is this self-serving in any way? i would say: logic is a terrific tool for self-deception. don't look for lessons first thing. the real lessons you need to find will find you if you examine yourself enough. never have unshakable faith in these moments of insight. entertain the thoughts, let the thoughts pass and if they're right they'll show themselves to be right. it’s more important to ask the right questions than to find the right answers.

there are events in life that will absolutely change your perspective and stay with you forever. when you come across them in life, give thanks to God. but your whole life has become an attempt to maximize these moments and that misses the point. you will not climb your way to heaven through these moments. if you let go of all of these moments, the things that you need to find you will still find you. once in awhile, learn to let go of everything entirely and let God come to you.

“Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theatre, particularly the Balinese. He admired Eastern theatre because of the codified, highly ritualized and precise physicality of Balinese dance performance, and advocated what he called a "Theatre of Cruelty". At one point, he stated that by cruelty he meant not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality. He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all theatre is physical expression in space.”

“I am not ashamed of reading self-help books, or of liking them despite the fact that they do not possess the subtlety or nuance or pacing of the classics. "Show, don't tell" kind of disappears: you are being told more often than you are being shown in these sorts of reads about how to deal with feelings and emotions, which can be off-putting to like-minded fiction buffs, but I feel like my readings in fiction led me here. This is in part because I was seeking counseling in my fiction: counseling in sadness, wisdom on relationships, insights into how to stay enriched in life despite how awful life can be. Fiction can do this for sure. But at some point I felt like the slow-drip of self-help for which I was exploiting fiction - and the pressure I was placing on the form of the novel to grant me these answers - was a means by which I was misreading fiction and doing a disservice to myself.”

“at the risk of sounding super kiss-ass, though i think this is true - i don't think your personality punches people in the face. i think your personality is super magical and amazing and externalized with an uncompromising honesty and stark clarity that makes it difficult to not be changed by”

It is Thursday, April 14, 2016. I am on a bus returning to Taipei from Taichung. The ride has put me in a strange mood. I wish I could capture it for you. I’m passing by these buildings lit by colored lights, bright blue and green and red, and the night is foggy, and the lights bleed into the fog and make it glow strange colors. There are big concrete highway overpasses weaving over and under each other, illuminated by rows of street lamps giving off an orange glow. I will attach a picture if I have the time. I’m happy. The world is holding me close like a womb. I am thinking of people I know and love, people I do not yet know but would love, I’m thinking of wandering into this night with them, sitting in cafes and looking them in the eye,

excerpts from hearn letters:

i am living in a sea of endless chaotic ideas, flying from one to another at seeming random, unable to zoom out. my spirit animal is a magpie, collector of shiny objects, trapped and dying in a box of christmas ornaments.

everything in life is so terrifyingly uncertain and every rule has its exception, and i am paralyzed by the complexity of it all. my other spirit animal is the trilobite: immobile, thoughtless, asleep for eons under petrified oceans.

i float above the tops of the trees in the night and arrive at your door by morning

salvia:

“I noticed the entire courtyard starting to shift, not with my eyes. But with a very strong feeling, akin to a grand Ferris wheel starting it's cumbersome first spin after a season of dormant winter.”

“The first time I thought I was a book and my pages were flipping in the wind. Turned out I was spinning in the kitchen against the wall.”

“With eyes closed, I could see these spinning wheels diving left to right, and the force was there, a very carnival-like yet child-like force I must say.”

“The wheel is something all too common. I always get the impression that this wheel is rolling over our reality, or creating our reality in its wake.”

there’s an answer somewhere in the tangled mass of thoughts in my head, and i keep reaching in that direction, trying to bring this thing out of myself and lay it out before the both of us, but i don’t know, i feel like it’s not making sense to you. i don’t think i’m speaking the right words. when it makes sense to you, it does only in bits and pieces. i’m sorry if this comes off as harsh: sometimes i feel like you’re grabbing for familiar reference points in order to understand me.

“Honestly though, I think sometimes people just dislike someone, maybe for a legitimate reason, but then constantly look for more reasons to justify it and find it in things that don't really matter.”

“Sentimentality is simply emotion shying away from its own full implications. Behind every sentimental narrative there’s the possibility of another one — more richly realized, more faithful to the fine grain and contradictions of human experience. The distinctive characteristic of sentimental art is not, as is sometimes claimed, that it “manipulates” (all art does this in some measure) but that it manipulates by knowingly simplifying, Photoshopping or otherwise distorting the human experience it purports to represent. It isn’t sentimental for Dickens to want us to feel compassion for Jo, the homeless street sweeper; it is sentimental for Dickens to try to secure that compassion by making Jo more virtuous, humble and forbearing than any boy who ever lived.”

maybe to make art requires a kind of discipline, a kind of insistence that everything else must be sacrificed for the product, for the beauty, and i lack this discipline. i want too badly to satisfy other, momentary impulses.

“I think that sometimes people place their faith too readily in the ways in which consuming narrative or art makes us more empathetic. I feel like The New York Times puts out an op-ed every six months about empathy and reading! But Empathy and the Novel, by Suzanne Keen, basically poses a skeptical view of that and even suggests that there’s a way in which empathizing for fictional characters relieves—we feel like we’ve done our work, but there weren’t really any stakes to that work. Because empathizing with a fictional character didn’t necessitate any kind of action.”

“Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. ... Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle.”

a few years ago i went back to virginia with my parents and i thought everything would have disappeared but it didn’t. everything was still there, the people in my church hadn’t changed at all. i was invited to play tabletop RPGs with my friend again. i took a walk to my high school. the hallways there were all the same. that week i was filled with all the feelings i used to feel, that guilt and loneliness but also the longing, and i didn’t want to leave.

“In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person.”

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.”

dipping hands in cool water in an empty garden. wet leaves stuck to skin.

there is a sort of joy in the scrambling of the tarot cards, like the scrambling of the contents of the mind. then in the drawing of the random cards, saying "the truth is for sure this" and believing it. surrendering the self to novelty. every act of magic is a surrender of self. the results are irrelevant.

a few gods of light and countless primordial gods

“Days, weeks, or sometimes even years later, such people may suddenly emerge from the fugue state and find themselves in a strange place, working in a new occupation, with no idea how they got there.”

“Jones (1909, as cited in Kihlstrom & Schacter, 2000) studied a patient with dense amnesia and found that although he could not remember his wife’s or daughter’s names, when asked to guess what names might t them, he produced their names correctly. “

one of inio asano’s techniques is those moments where panels are suddenly cut away but a huge spread of a single frozen moment. speech is cut away by a shocking reveal, extraneous actions of people are frozen by shock, etc.

“The first time this happened to me was when I was pregnant with my 3rd child. I heard what I thought was my husband coming home (our bedroom was upstairs), I heard the door shut and him run up the stairs, i laid in bed w my eyes closed waiting for him to get back in bed, i figured he got rained out at work. Well he didnt get back in bed and when i lifted my head to look for him there was a man standing in front of me in a running suit, he had his hood on and no face, it was shadowed out, i was sooo scared and couldnt move! then he leaned down to me with his hand reaching out to my belly--i closed my eyes really tight as i was so scared and felt sumthings weird as if something went inside my stomache.(this happened 8 years ago) throughout the pregnancy there would be times when my body would vibrate and I was unable to move, the day I gave birth to my son it happened again in the hospital only this time felt like something left my stomache”

maybe i would say at its core i see religious belief as a language that can be used to sacralize concepts. religion makes things holy, religion creates worlds where these holy-fied things become the central pivot for their reality. i want to play with this language, write stories with it, change my world over and over again in interesting and beautiful and scary and fun ways.

rule: overkill is always better than underkill. everything should always be a little bit too much. beauty should be overwhelming, sweetness sugary and cloying, music so loud it hurts. things aren’t effective on the psyche unless they have the power to threaten. the mind’s natural inclination is always to fight to remain in control, but the problem is that so long as the mind is in control it will make things ugly, because to exist is ugly. art is effective when it crushes you in between its teeth.

if someone genuinely loves something deeply and is changed by that thing and you don’t respect their love as sacred then i think you’re doing something morally wrong

maybe you ARE fucked up, but maybe (i don’t yet agree, but MAYBE) it’s not important to find out a standard for ultimate good and bad or to fix everything about you that’s bad, and instead maybe you should just do what you can to make you feel okay about yourself and group off with other people who are more or less okay with your fucked up ness. and if you still get in other people’s way and ruin stuff by oversharing or crossing boundaries or saying mean things accidentally then maybe shrug and say whatever.”

“Go higher than every height and lower than every depth. Collect in yourself all the sensations of what has been made, of fire and water, dry and wet; be everywhere at once, on land, in the sea, in heaven; be not yet born, be in the womb, be young, old, dead, beyond death. And when you have understood all these at once—times, places, things, qualities, quantities—then you can understand God.”

reading pun pun has made me more aware of just how little control we have over who we are… like, shimizu who joins a cult, and pun pun who can’t seem to connect to other people for any good reason, their lives are not all that different from mine. i think of the very real possibility i could go down some dead end road, it feels realer than it did before. usually i believe that if we follow goodness and beauty we will find fulfillment in our lives, and that this is something we can reach by being honest about our feelings. but lately i’ve been thinking that we need help from outside ourselves and a whole lot of blind luck to get there.

“York’s comment—his criticism of New Age shamanism because those shamans do not fear—is the key to understanding the unique features of this modern spirituality and the reason it has become so compelling. The person who practices modern magic doesn’t fear the jaguar’s claw or anything else (like dark supernatural forces) because on some fundamental and basic level, the person knows that the magic may not be real and so magic can be simply fun. This is not an ontological claim about magic but an observation about secular modernity. Those who practice modern magic are acutely aware that other people like themselves do not believe in magic. They set out to make the magic real in the face of a presumption of its non-realness. They are not describing an enchanted world but a re-enchanted one, which is a very different proposition, because the baseline—for practitioners—is non-enchantment.”

“Media theorist Jonathan Sterne, writing of early sound documentation and reproducibility as a result of the advent of phonography, explains how progress in aural archiving coincided with improvements in archiving the human body through embalming techniques. He writes, “…if sound reproduction simplifies vibration in new ways, if we learn to ‘hear’ other areas of the vibrating world, then it would make sense that we might pick up the voices of the dead. In this formulation, the medium is the metaphysics. The metaphorization of the human body, mind, and soul follows the medium currently in vogue””

THE BLACK BOX: in the story, there will be something like a computer terminal that connects to something like the internet. the catch is that when people use it, they go into a trance state, and because of this, what they see will be SLIGHTLY distorted by their own dreams and fears.

people who spend too much time inside the box are immersed in their minds to a degree where they begin NOT to see who they really are, they begin to get USED to seeing with their own cognitive distortions. when this happens they get more disconnected from reality. this is a type of burnout that happens frequently with the people who use the box—they have to take a break and use grounding exercises to remain grounded in reality.

one subject of collective fascination is the contents of the box from hundreds of years ago. this stuff is distorted beyond recognition, and many people believe that the distortions have turned it into something like a holy book for the collective unconscious.

one way to avoid the distortions is to fragment your personality so that the part of you that’s consciously in control of your body isn’t the part receiving information from the box. this is the origin of familiars in this world—fragmented selves who are always connected to the box, who become feral and alien but also holy and fearsome because of prolonged exposure to it.

great paradox of life: the more stuff i CAN do, the more bored i am. i'm like "yeah this is alright but i could be doing something better". but when i'm on a vacation with no internet, every game and anime i have on my computer is suddenly way cooler. boredom relies on the promise of better things.

“A mandorla is a vesica piscis shaped aureola which surrounds the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary in traditional Christian art. It is commonly used to frame the figure of Christ in Majesty in early medieval and Romanesque art, as well as Byzantine art of the same periods. The term refers to the almond like shape: “mandorla” means almond nut in Italian. In icons of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the mandorla is used to depict sacred moments which transcend time and space, such as the Resurrection, Transfiguration, and the Dormition of the Theotokos. These mandorla will often be painted in several concentric patterns of color which grow darker as they come close to the center. This is in keeping with the church’s use of Apophatic theology, as described by Dionysius the Areopagite and others. As holiness increases, there is no way to depict its brightness, except by darkness.”