The Psychopath Test

" ' That's an incredibly depressing thought,' I said, "that if you're in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity, it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.' "

...Is it?

Creative Processes

**

"It's nearly impossible, unsustainable, to live without art. Even when I am not the one creating. To live only once in a life on a daily basis exposed only to worldly things - business, money, industry, entrepreneurism, social structures, societal customs, technology, popular culture - this is the equivalent of a death sentence to me, without all the existential weight that comes with that makes people like Jarvis Masters write memoirs and become more incredible people than they would've been without (a real death sentence)."

- journal from 12.11.11, p.1 

Grey, drab.

Only certain types of people need, I've come to notice. Need:

- Dreams: vivid dreams, the strangest, most far off dreams. It is when I dream of the same things I experience waking that I feel I have been truly ripped off by the universe. Give me strangeness, give me far away, impossible worlds. One of my favorite dreams was the one that asserted the irrefutable truth (in the way that dreams do, of irrational things - one person just IS someone else, one place just IS the place it isn't really), that the word "find" has a bird in it. Obviously. 

- constant and regular exposure to otherworldliness and preternatural things

- art (painting, sculpture, film - anything truly...transporting)

- drugs if they are transporting as well

- subtlety of feeling, for moments, for tricks of light, for...

- the in betweens (a beam of sunlight at a certain time at dusk; dusk itself [my favorite time of day]; the dip of a lash that captures some inexpressible emotion, expression, emotion; an emotive cluster of pain; the upward or downward lilt of a word that all by itself tears you up inside. I could go on with this list a long time). 

- those for whom the following rings true: "Writing is not art...but breathing."

- travel: uncomfortableness, experience in countries far, far, far away from America, countries that have an entirely different history, background, society, way of functioning - anything that makes one expand one's notion of fundamental truths about being alive. Because if all you have to base those on is the society you grew up in, you are so far away from truth. 

- Other languages: goes hand in hand with other cultures. With different languages comes different thinking. 

Charlemagne was reputed to have said that, "To have a second language is to have a second soul" 

I am missing 6,998 out of the roughly 7,000 existing languages there are in the world*

- altars are a necessary part of existence, no matter what, no matter where. Made of expensive votive candles in thick colored glass and jewels, or snickers bars and pennies

- Books. Any and every kind. Great literature - Nietzsche, Rilke, Hesse, but also new, exploratory work, writing by journalists, by drunks, others for the most part unbeknownst to the world. 

this list could go on a long, long time

* It has always been a personal epistemological philosophy of mine that if one were to take on the project of trying to learn everything single language that human kind has ever developed, one would be much closer to grasping "truth" in and of itself (according to humans at least), than any other person. 

**raw incense burning dish was a gift from mom

Sehnsucht III

a huge and painfully unrequited yearning to find and touch the mystery, to resolve it by becoming one with it.

Sehnsucht is a German noun translated as "longing", "yearning", or "craving",[1] or in a wider sense a type of "intensely missing". Sehnsucht is difficult to translate adequately and describes a deep emotional state… one of those quasi-mystical terms in German for which there is no satisfactory corresponding term in another language.

Sehnsucht is a compound word, originating from an ardent longing or yearning (das Sehnen) and addiction (die Sucht). However, these words do not adequately encapsulate the full meaning of their resulting compound, even when considered together.

Sehnsucht represents thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. It has been referred to as “life’s longings”; or an individual’s search for happiness while coping with the reality of unattainable wishes. Such feelings are usually PROFOUND, and tend to be accompanied by both positive and negative feelings.

It is sometimes felt as a longing for a far-off country, but not a particular earthly land which we can identify. Furthermore there is something in the experience which suggests this far-off country is very familiar and indicative of what we might otherwise call "home". In this sense it is a type of nostalgia, in the original sense of that word. At other times it may seem as a longing for a someone or even a something. But the majority of people who experience it are not conscious of what or who the longed for object may be, and the longing is of such profundity and intensity that the subject may immediately be only aware of the emotion itself and not cognizant that there is a something longed for.

The experience is one of such significance that ordinary reality may pale in comparison ("When the pawn hits the conflict he thinks like a king/What he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight/And he'll win the whole thing fore he enters the ring/There's no body to batter when your mind is your might/So when you go solo, you hold your own hand/And remember that depth is the greatest of heights/And if you know where you stand then you know where to land/And if you fall it won't matter, cuz you'll know that you're right. ") 

(most of source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht. For Fiona Apple album title/song lyrics: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fiona%20apple)

Perspective

People who have a lot less need a lot less.

Sehnsucht II

"Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht, as I see it, is saudade with grand philosophy present. You can get a "B.A.", so to speak, in saudade, but "Ph.d." must be in Sehnsucht. It is far reaching also; but it is far beyond daily life and the wistful, muse-worthy self-absorption with the personal patterns of life and death and impossibility. Sehnsucht contains within it (one feels) the meaning of the universe and a huge and painfully unrequited yearning to find and touch the mystery, to resolve it by becoming one with it. Though painful and haunting (like saudade, because it is unrequited), it is extremely alluring, even rapturous, possibly because the heightened yearning or longing itself brings a sense of closeness to whatever it is that seems to be calling, calling from afar."

(Source: http://noweverthen.com/many/saudade.html)

Visual Diary

New.

Prayer

I don't want a full wallet.
I don't want a clean house.

I want a full heart.
and a spirit with life.