I feel like

Every song I put up here will attain a significance more profound than I realize at this moment. I'm going to hear it again, and it's going to sound like today. I can almost hear it now, but in the future. Auditory fates.

What am I doing

Reading an article about science, struck about this point about neuroscience in particular.

Or look at neuroscience. Only a few decades ago, scientists were putting forth confident conjectures about "the bridging principle," the neural event that would explain how the activity of our brain cells creates the subjective experience of consciousness. All sorts of bridges were proposed, from 40 Hz oscillations in the cerebral cortex to quantum coherence in microtubules. These were the biological processes that supposedly turned the water of the brain into the wine of the mind.

But scientists don't talk about these kinds of bridging principles these days. While neuroscience continues to make astonishing progress in learning about the details of the brain--we are a strange loop of kinase enzymes and synaptic chemistry--these details only highlight our enduring enigma, which is that we don't experience these cellular details. It is ironic, but true: The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.

I don't know... maybe the biggest miracle will be to prove that this is what we cannot find. It might be religious, even.

Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the praires and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Edit: Wild geese... they fly south.

Writing like Hemingway

I noticed a book at Barnes & Noble yesterday to teach people how to write like Hemingway. I sat down with it for a while. It spoke a lot about how literary devices, his writing style, sentences structure, Iceberg Theory. Then I noticed I really don't want to write like Hemingway. Aside from our subject matters, I don't think it's cool to be evasive, indirect and short. Words already fail us so often, I just don't have the patience to create something out of other people's imaginations rather than the ideas that I already struggle with transmitting. Better pick up some Fitzgerald or Poe.

And speaking of writing, I just read John Richardson's piece in Esquire: The Last Abortion Doctor. One might think this is an article about abortion, but it spoke so truly about related topics such as medicine, politics, gender and pain. It's really hard to read. It's probably the best thing I've read in a long time. I do think that all feeling human beings need to read it, especially now, just to understand a little bit more about what life is.

Superhero fantasies

My sister used to say that I could turn any object in my hands into a spaceship. Ballpoint pens turned into rocketships and wristwatch buckles became dragons. I had a collection of beads that I'd sort by color and have them wage war upon each other on a shaded political map of the world, Risk-style. Even the holes in these beads played cannon mouths in my insanely militaristic daydream games. My family members know that I have a rich collection of sound effects for jets, guns and explosions.

I had absurd superhero fantasies, like every boy between the ages of five and thirteen, I'm sure. I had one in particular that involved a sword and a Superman-style Fortress of Solitude. The way that it goes is a twelve year old me would find a sword in the stone in some remote mountainous region near where my parents are from in China. (Swords were important to this, ever since Crouching Tiger.) I would be on a quest to imbue this weapon with magical abilities, a la Cardcaptor Sakura. (One character specifically. I adored that show.) I drew broadswords on sheets and sheets of paper. Then I created my Fortress of Solitude. There were a few versions. One version was a domed platform floating in the sky. Another version required another dimension, accessible by a closet. They would all be foresty, full of wildlife and waterfalls.

My paradise was designed to be eternally and emotionally sustainable for my immortal superhero self. I considered whether to bring in family and friends into my immortal oasis, but it seemed an arbitrary privilege; I can't bring in everyone.

It became one of few complicating factors that brought my fantasy to the ground. I thought about creating people in my world. (Of course, I could select for physical characteristics and personality. Omniscience over bioethics.) I knew I need people, but I also couldn't decide whether ultimately I could tell the difference between a community of many conscious, sentient beings and a self-centered universe populated by characters that may or may not exist in their own right, but only seem to be. I hope my friends aren't scared of me yet.

The other complication that brought my Fortress down was what I saw outside the window. Superheroes don't grow up in Flushing. I had yet to attribute meaning to my location. Without a location, I could be anyone. I guess this is why people leave this place. I don't think Flushing has been home to anyone more than two generations at a time.

It's funny. My sister asked Chang-Rae Lee why he wrote about Flushing. He said that this is a magical place. In my life, I've thought about magic the most in middle and high school, commuting to school on the 7, dreaming about getting out. Now I get homesick when I'm away.

Now is always the time for immature idealism.

I reject anything else.

I find myself reading a lot about Obama's visits to see Putin and Medvedev. I know about Obama's youthful idealism. I'd bet a lot of people empathize and identify with it. It's something I feel like I know.

What would it be like if we always had a foot in what is impossible? What good could we accomplish? Would we mess it up? Maybe, but I don't usually consider that. What if we recognized this in everyone, at all times? Could we be more honest? Could we let go of what holds us back?

I'd also like to take the time to say that this article is really, really worth reading. If only I could write with my feet nailed to the concrete.

I'm afraid of people.

There, I said it. I'm absolutely terrified. There are stories like this one. It doesn't have to be about family, and it doesn't have to be about Michael Jackson. But what scares me is that these sagas of trouble and hurtful waters can be about anyone else. It happens all the time. Most of the time, we only summon the courage, at best, to write about it.

What a shame that we don't develop our social minds with perfectly identical connections and thresholds, so that we can always see and predict the mutual effects of people on people just by examining ourselves. Instead, we must learn how to express ourselves and our concerns in the dark, and be limited by what we don't know. The fact that this is frustrating doesn't bother me as much as the fact that it's dangerous.

We are really, really powerful beings. Like giants, we don't always see what we break under our feet. We grow into such great creatures by wrapping ourselves in layers and layers of socialized tendencies like onions. We don't know what is on our skin, sometimes ever. And it's scary walking with giants who can't feel their skins. It's absolutely terrifying.

And so by my theory there's a bunch of large, clumsy, lumbering creatures who step on each other and don't truly feel the way we interact. We hurt and punish, even loving all the while. We can treat other people like how we'd like to be treated ourselves, but unless we understand ourselves, we don't have the right to treat anyone in any way at all. Maybe it's safest to be awkward and evasive.

If you're wrapped really tightly, please, let go. I'm working on my own layers, but I'm also getting really paranoid.

25 of May, I could not sleep

I was in a sleeping bag, my last night in Berlin. For two hours, my mind leapt around many things. I sat up, stared at the clock with a still restlessness that I couldn't really understand, grabbed my notebook from my bag and went to the bathroom. I'm reading what I wrote then right now.

I wrote: What does it mean that, in pursuit of ideas, I can only travel from one continent to another on this water-bearing planet when the edges of the universe have not even been conceived of yet? When we still don't have the means to understand fully what creates, entraps, defines and captures us, as captivating, ethereal, and wholly coincidental as it is? Obviously being on another continent does things to my strange sense of place.

I also wrote about superhero fantasies, adoption, connections, a letter to a lover... and things I need to do this summer.

I'm not sure what was going on then. Above the margins I drew a little diagram with arrows that went... thought > anxiety > more thoughts + no sleep > more anxiety. A few lines below that, I wrote: I'm approaching the limits of cognitive function. Enough said?

The way we love

I grew up in more or less a prude, sans-romance family setting. The kind where mothers cover their kids' eyes when kissy scenes are on television. This was never lost on my sister and me. Even though out loud we said "ewww" to a lot of these things, we always wanted have crushes, kiss people, all those good things we'd been hearing about.

I think my first relationships were a little dangerously conducted as a result. (This is also where I stop being able to speak to my sister's experience.) The only thing to do was to carry out the motions rehearsed to us and set ourselves up for a crisis each time. So people came and went, with varying levels of acceptance from the parents. We never heard their story, how they met, how they grew close, how they came to love one another. (We know now.) We just knew to find people by ourselves, to be attentive and devoted, to give unconditionally, until personal neuroses were revealed and pain takes hold, and then quit and start over.

A few months ago, my mother found out about both of our relationships at the time. We were both about to steal away with our romantic counterparts somewhere far from home. She didn't disapprove this time, but didn't understand why we would do things like this to ourselves. It's not like you're going to marry this person, she said. Why trouble yourselves? Why put so much effort into improbabilities of sentiment and emotion? Sitting next to her, I felt silly for having grown up at all without her wisdom. Kind of sheepishly, I told her that this is how we love.

We love as if there is only one soul out there for us. We look for people as if the world is so small and so cold that it'd be wiser to hook onto the nearest body and hope mutual fascination occurs. And we risk everything for this. We love as if it's a limited resource based on functions of population, time and age. What we really can do now is to unlearn everything.

Dualisms stun me

... because they're sooo true. The enlightened folks who have tried to teach us this... they were probably correct all along. To know how intimately this applies, to deep thinkers and non-spirituals alike, in every facet of experience is so real, powerful, and awesome.

When the duality of fear and love presents itself, you know which one to choose. Both are true, proud and inpenetrable. Both must exist, but you're allowed to choose one to be happy.

I could've put this more tangibly. I really could have.

In unrelated news, first comment! Aww. :)

The Groundwork

I'd like to believe that this blog begins at a crucial moment, not just because I've finally found the time to invest in it.

I'd like to look back on these words and say that they were chosen perfectly and meticulously, but the improvisational nature of this post will most likely cause embarrassment in the future.

And years from now, I want to be able to peruse a record of my most abstract thoughts in order to retain a sense of philosophical continuity, but these writings are perhaps most useful as mental structuring in the present.

Then, ATWP might ostentatiously come off as an attempt to construct theories on things grandiose and metaphysical, but this would be silly. What these writings will try to do is to restore order to any conceptual and philosophical chaos that may overtake me. And to do this, I will need ground rules.

ATWP is personal, but will never become personal. When this boundary is crossed, this blog will have already ceased its function.

"Employ the vernacular." Yes, ironic. Something my middle school English teacher always told me to do - she hadn't seen how pretentious college can make you become.

Consistency. I've thought recently that perhaps now I've entered a new phase where my mind is not as able to conjecture aimlessly. This is bullshit; it is always working.

Think beforehand. Chess is played sometimes with hands tied behind the back.

Make some sense. I don't write for myself. I would set up a site meter to prove this, but it's probably too neurotic to do so.