02/11/2022

Pen to paper does not come so easily to me this morning, despite the flood of emotions we witnessed last night. It felt incredible to be in a room of people trying to make seen what I see in the confines of four walls alone. Though many still sat in the audience, impressed by the participants’ references to physics and simulations, laughing as if ordinary people do not read or think about these things.

It made me realize that I am an artist. Artists who are watched and engaged with are approaching life in the same way that I am, and I am no different, or on my way to becoming, or stopped by anything. It was beautiful to see Ros in front of a group of people, struggling to, but still maintaining an explanation of her thought process and a sense of where it might take her. She kept talking about going through reality rather than attempting to land outside of it. She talked about the process of ‘derealization’ as she sat in the same spot repeating the same word over and over again until it no longer had meaning; exploring the relationship between syntax and semantics, as she watched the semantics of a word--while maintaining its perfect syntax--change in an intangible way. Reality, and then some other kind of reality. But it is not only, or just, or purely, psychic reality... it is more complex than the simple and often debated distinction between mind and matter, as mind creates matter but it is not reality in the way Ros referenced it to be. No... the simulated world involves material; the technology and architecture we find ourselves with and contained by.

Listening to her talk, I wondered about the role of contemplation--how the Buddhists created their own map to reality--the reality we often mean when we want to refer to a special kind of reality, one that is a priori human consciousness. I wondered if she had considered the philosophy of the Eastern traditions as their aim was to cut through. They teach you not to resist or separate from life, but instead to cultivate a mind that can ‘see’ through it all while simultaneously being a part of what we have created.

Nonetheless, I see this all as a sort of plea to entangle oneself with other mediums as writing has taken us to new heights. I feel like a beanstalk climbing up and up and we are no longer in the realm of words, and now it is time to see what lies beyond the words--no within the words themselves because they are containers too. Is the cat in the box or is it outside of it? Is happiness in the word or outside of it? I want myself, and others, to experience the limits of language that often masks itself as truth; that we often presuppose as truth when living out our days. Words both communicate truth and constrain it; they both find shards of truth and simulate its totality.

03/08/2022

I feel uplifted as I walk into the coffeeshop on campus, about to begin my journaling, before my meditation, which is before my philosophy class, which is before my psychology lab, which is before my philosophy semiar led by Daniel Stoljar, who might one day be a part of my research.

Today we are reviewing Descartes’ Cogito where he contemplates a world in which he is being deceived by an evil demon and he is only mentally alive living an otherwise physical experience.

Two days ago Alice told me that I should be proud of myself -- that she remembers two years ago at John St when I said I was coming back to Australia to study at ANU -- and now I am here and that is an accomplishment. Namely because I did what I said I was going to do, and now I do feel proud that I did follow through and I am here. Not only am I here but I am in classes that I might have created in my dreams, by people who would come from there too. I have spent hours doubting myself and my ability to bring to fruition, but here we are and it is better living it than dreaming it. That makes me think about Descartes when he said “but in thinking over this I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully on this reflection I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment. And my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I now dream.”

But I know this is different than my sleeping life, unless I am a dream within a dream, which if that is the case I go to sleep in this dream, and I dream within a dream, that I am trying to give birth, and I am trying my hardest to connect with that baby.

I also dream that I am always floating on top of the water. What keeps me from going under? What keeps me from diving in? Is it inability, or calculated desire? What can I learn from giving birth to children -- or rather have others birth them for me. Why am I not the one carrying the baby even if I should care for it? I protect the baby, I try to keep it alive, I try to connect with it and let it know I am there for it but indeed I am at best an aunt, not mother. And in that way I can better understand the distance between me and the water. I am having the dream, without birthing the dream; I am but at a distance. A distance which keeps me separated from nature -- the world’s nature, my nature, my mother, and being a mother and all the rest.

But I said I would be going to Canberra and here I am feeling better than I have in a year. Maybe that is why a few nights ago I was in the water, even if not underneath entirely, and I was holding that baby and it was mine, even though I did know where it came from. Perhaps it came from the water, because dreams are not linear. There is a different kind of sense in the world of being asleep which is why I must know that in this world where I am sitting at the ANU campus, in that coffeeshop, I am not asleep -- at least not in the way we mean it when we say we are sleeping -- but in any case I know this world, this life is different than the one of my dreams. It is not better or worse, it is different and time drums on linearly and tomorrow will be August 4th, where events build on top of all the events before it. And in this building I am getting closer to whatever comes next that follows what has been before.

27/07/2022

Twice now there have been animals under the water and I am somehow above. The other night it was my laptop charger floating on boards on top of the pool with the whales underneath hiding. Eventually we made it to the ocean and the whales were breaching and they were happy. I was on the ship; never in the water.

Last night, I was my mother’s child and she was with Randy I believe, and we went to Gord’s. My mother was a wreck of course -- her and her partner always dramatically fighting. I told them, frustrated, that they had a choice in their drama; they could ask themselves whether or not they wanted to own the problems they were creating. I then left and went to the ocean (maybe lake) but I did not want to swim. There were little cows that lived under the water and I did not want to touch them, so I got on top of a board to float. Others who were not afraid to touch them (men) got into the water and pushed me.

I am still afraid of the primitive nature beneath. I still have my family festering below, too. The ocean remains such a strong symbol, including orca whales which I loved so dearly as a child.

This morning I was the lizard, symbolic of dream medicine; a reptile that can travel between worlds. He says to the snake that he is not sleeping, he is dreaming. He needs a shadow to dream, and when he dreams he sees the future. My dreams tell me I must not be afraid of getting into the water, and instead I must go.

Fair, enough, good, bad, right, wrong -- all relational terms, relevant to an observer who carries context -- a history -- like layers of a potato gratin, when looking from the top downwards we could never know. You say it is wrong, and I ask wrong to who? Unless I know you and your story, and how everything adds up to now such that now is wrong, though there are always variables in the equation that are unknowable to me and to you, so to say it is wrong is really our best guess. Perhaps we have enough evidence to say it is wrong, but even then I ask what qualifies as enough?

This categorical, metric way of thinking serves only one way of life and we have forgotten there are other ways to live. One life is not enough, and how beautiful it is that some believe there isn’t only one life, and so they do not feel the volcanic pressure that erupts in some of us every night at the thought that tomorrow is a new day, but not only that, but tomorrow is one less day.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII until the strike comes along and ends the sequence. You win, you lose. Another notch closer. But if you were to speak to the God of many lives they would ask you one day closer to what because the answer would not be so obvious. Maybe the God of many lives is a cat -- perhaps the one that sleeps in your bed at night or roams the streets eating garbage, and that is why to some it is a sin to hurt a cat, but not a dog -- they eat the dogs -- they only have one life and now their time is up.

It is interesting that we make these decisions. What separates a being from nature? What separates me from nature, is there anything at all? If there is not then the fact that I am sitting inside a concrete building next to a pool should be no different from the ocean and the trees, but there is a difference isn’t there? I am dying without the sun, but at the same time, the sun burns me because I have lived a life indoors, and my family before me lived in the North of ice and snow, eating fish and grass and I guess that is why I am sick because I am so far away from all of that.

But also that is not true, because I am not sick, but sometimes we tell ourselves stories. Sometimes we tell ourselves the same story for years and one day we just change it and then we laugh at ourselves, we laugh so hard, because all it took was a new fucking story and then everything changed.

My dreams are telling me to jump into the ocean without a care of what lies underneath. But I haven’t done that yet -- I tried but then I got hypothermia because I was afraid! Fear is what kills you, fear is what burns the bottom of your feet as you walk over the hot coals. I am not scared anymore -- I repeat until I can jump into that ocean and come out more alive -- more warm than I have ever been as the blood bursts through every inch of vein in my body.

Life is a house of mirrors, full of images as realities that you think you see. Illusioned, you use these images to create stories, so what stories have you been telling yourself lately?

04/06/2022

The lessons I write about are not about material survival, nor operational can-dos of any kind. What I offer is a story of attrition; a world in which the mental landscape is more important than all other modes of survival. It was my mind that got me through, it was my mind that built an entirely new life and freed the soul. To say I freed the soul is my way of saying I was able to re-establish the child structures within, to a time before they were harmed and on defense-offense.

I no longer assume normalcy throughout everyday life because it was the so-called normal structures, normal ways of being, that failed to support my family and I through a time of war. Normal was not normal, if normal asserts some baseline between bad and good -- normal was a modality of oppression to create struggle.

I often wonder why I feel the need to tell my story, afraid that all I am trying to do is justify myself. I understand now that I do not need to justify. Those who are curious will ask.

I suppose I am afraid of what is deemed to be normal, and the lack of curiosity and understanding for those who were failed by our normal structures. It is destructive to assume that there is only one psychology that works for every living human being. That which operates to cure pathology often times exacerbates it or causes it. Much of the continuing anxiety I have experienced is by being utterly alone throughout a time of crisis.

On the other hand, part of the drive is a deep feeling of never being understood. For that I am angry. We have so-called society, but a society for who?

Perhaps it is a need to reinform what it means to be human after we’ve mapped, labeled, and prescribed. I am here to say it is wrong, and it is not so easy. It is not a condition that can be systematized so rigidly. Systems are necessary, but systems need to be flexible. They need to handle complexity. We are better at building systems that serve and accommodate the complex transactions of commodities than we are for living -- for being social beings. We are systematized into consumers, rather than human beings.

I suppose I write from the inside pushing the fringe outwards. Kids are being raised by drug addicts, raped by the ones closest to them, and then shamed for their difference. Then they turn out abnormally and are given the label of generalized anxiety. Bullshit - as Michelle once said - there is nothing generalized about it other than the treatment prescribed by the professional.

The ones who have been failed by normalcy often continue to fail themselves by learned behaviour. A teacher might teach you 3x3 = 6 and 3+3 = 9 and you would call it proper math. In some ways, we are like computers. We have a box, that is given a name, and this box stores all the rules and information pertaining to the name it has been given. In nature, math does not have the name math. In nature, a raped child does not behave abnormally.

I am angry with my family and teachers for all the names they gave me carrying their prescriptions for behaviour; absent-minded, lazy, depressed, anxious, suicidal, chunky. It is only now that I have learned to speak for myself and tell my side of the story. Instead of being called lazy and anxious, I am now told I am strong and I am a survivor. But not everyone learns how to undo their muted nature.

Some, like me, may ask themselves what’s the point value in opening up -- and then respond to say that there is none. But indeed, your story is all you have got. Your story is what makes you human, and humans tell stories because they tell stories. We can and we will -- whether we should or we shouldn’t is an afterthought.

03/06/2022

He asked of my writing, though not directly, but discretely: “why does this need to be said?” The very same question I ask myself often when I write. I do believe it is an important question. Perhaps it is not truth, it is a statue of a train of thought. I try to capture it. It seems however, it is not the journey of a progression of thought, but the conclusion we make. How much of life is snipped and discarded like bloopers of a reel? They say, “just get to the point”, and we go on point by point by point.

Points no longer interest me. The curiosity of a given moment; the potentiality in the story behind the now as if now was a manifested image of complex layers, each layer having its own complex life. The manifest image has no point, only a symbol of the totality of the layers. Each moment, a different image.

I feel the urge to share a thought; I become curious as to why I feel compelled to share this exact thought. I don’t ask with conviction to shame, nor to validate a judgment about the thought, but instead to evoke intimacy. Who is the person, what are the circumstances, behind the thought?

02/06/2022

It is both summer and winter
wind and rain
friend and foe
satiety and hunger
sadness and happiness
love and hate
awe and fear
infinite and definite
the question is
can you stand to be both
can you live and be both
can you be the whole
or do you turn one half of living
into a problem to solve