Identifying Things

Posted on December 18, 2017 by Lee

Identification, says Korzybski, is a blunt tool. Language is a box full of tools, all imperfect, none quite fit for purpose, their functioning performative and never exactly descriptive. Meaning: anything we can say about the world is never quite how the world is, a chair is not “a chair”. Is not the word “chair” that we use to identify it. Using the word “chair” helps us to get along. But there are drawbacks to getting along with imperfect tools.

Just as it can be tiring to use the wrong screwdriver, even if it’ll get the job done in the end, so it’s fatiguing to use the wrong concepts, even though we seem to get along fine at the time. “What’s wrong with you?” “I’m just tired.” And that’s enough to explain away the nausea.

And other times we can feel we’re not getting on fine at all. The exhaustion is palpable, and we start to press uncomfortably against the limitations of language. Thinking in words isn’t working. But how else to think?

Using the words I have at my disposal, it’s difficult to think of myself as a process, rather than a state of being. And yet I seem to be changing all the time. I’m feeling out of sorts today, and I don’t know why. “I’m confused”, “I’m tired”, “I’m sad” … None of these quite seems to fit. I’m not any one of these states, but a point somewhere between them all. And others I can’t name right now. Even this isn’t quite right. “I am I.” Even this. I’m not this point, or this thought, or this body, or anything. No thing, no state. What am I?

I close my eyes and stop thinking. Ten, twenty minutes meditation and I’ll be right again. Stop thinking. That’s the goal, but do you ever stop thinking? A different kind of thinking then.

I see that oscillating point now, shimmering between the different states of being. And soon I’m following its vibrations, and I don’t see it at all, only feel it, and what I see now are only ripples of colour, and shapes in shifting shadow. And then … When I open my eyes, what I have seen falls fast from my memory. Waking from a dream. Perhaps it’s not what I saw, but what I felt, the images there were a side-effect, might have been anything. Ephemeral symbols, necessary for the dream but torn away now, never to exist in that connection again.

Language wants everything fixed, so this means that, and that means this. But people change, and maybe ephemeral symbols, that can be picked up and used and then unattached again and put down when the dream is over, are the only symbols we can use to describe what it is to exist as a human being, as a person, as anything.

People change. “When you stop growing you start dying,” as William Burroughs said. It’s change that’s so difficult to describe.

You get to a point where you’re comfortable and you stick. There’s nothing to be gained by taking a new risk in a land governed by identity. So I assert that “I am I” and forget that when these words were first uttered they were intended for a platform, a jumping off point, a dead “I”, springboard to a higher self, an ongoing process. But instead I say “I am what I am” and I’m contented.

Blunt tools are perfect if you want to wear yourself out. And down. And maybe this is what we want: to be just tired enough at the end of the day to be able to say “I tried, I did my best”, contented after our ten hours, to work, and work, and back home again. And not fearing death, because death is just the end of a process of winding down, from the anxiety of youth, to happy tired middle age, to the inertia of old age, and on to and into the grave.

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Toynbee and the Enlightenment

Posted on December 11, 2017 by Lee

Arnold J Toynbee has some bad news in Volume VI of his A Study of History: Western civilisation is showing all the signs of being in its final decline.

Civilisations decline when they fail to respond to challenges they face. History has “rhythms”, and the whole of Toynbee’s Study has been an attempt to give names to these rhythms: “challenge-and-response”, “withdrawal-and-return”, “rout-and-rally”, and so on. History is only made where its rhythms persist, where challenge is met with response, where withdrawal is followed by return. If Western civilisation cannot respond to its challenges, or withdraws into itself never to return, is routed never to rally, then it will be replaced by some other power, and the march of History will continue without it.

For example, Toynbee points to the Enlightenment as an inadequate response to a challenge. From the 18th Century onwards there has been an accelerating decline of religion, the glue that – Toynbee believes – holds society together. The West’s big response to this crisis was the Enlightenment, which attempted to unify the disillusion already prevalent in society into a new world view that championed reason and science and left faith to one side. As a result, the decline of religion – decline of belief in faith, hope, and charity – was allowed to continue, reinforced by the new movement. The challenge of the decline of religion was never properly met, and as a result Western society has been in decline ever since.

Toynbee’s view is strange to me, since I’ve always been taught of the centrality of faith, hope, and charity in Enlightenment thinking. Immanuel Kant and many of his followers emphasise the importance of faith alongside scientific enquiry, they and other thinkers stress the hope that science and critical thinking brings for humanity, and the Enlightenment brings with it new humanisms and liberalisms that put the needs of the poor at the centre of political thinking. I can’t think how any more “religion” at the heart of the Enlightenment project could have made the response a better one.

But perhaps that is exactly the point. I cannot think of a better response than the Enlightenment because it has already done its work, and I already live in a (disintegrating) society largely devoid of religion. I can’t imagine what new religion might have arisen to replace the failing Christianities that emerged both from Rome and the Reformation, because to imagine such a new religion would have been a huge creative act, far beyond the powers of one like me who – on most days at least – blithely accepts the non-existence of God. Religion simply isn’t a problem for me, because I have no need for it, living as I do in the ruins of Western civilisation.

And this is what makes Toynbee intriguing to me: his suggestion that History has shaped the imagination of the individual, determined which possibilities are within our grasp, and, conversely, what possible worlds lie outside our field of vision. Having finished reading Toynbee’s Study, I’m left with an eerie doubt that we might not live in the best of all possible worlds, and that the solutions to our problems might forever elude us, for as long as our civilisation lives.

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Review: The Moon and Sixpence

Posted on December 5, 2017 by Lee

I picked up The Moon and Sixpence, having heard it was “inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin,” expecting to read a novelised biography of the artist, with an appropriate level of artistic licence. What you get with this book, in fact, is a fictional work that uses the real life of Gauguin only as a starting point for a gripping drama with a compelling anti-hero at its centre.

The Moon and Sixpence, by William Somerset Maugham, is the story of Charles Strickland, a painter and struggling genius. Strickland suddenly leaves his wife and his day job and flees to Paris, to commit himself to painting, to the shock of all those in the polite society around him. The story is narrated by a writer who moves in these polite circles, and becomes acquainted with Strickland when he’s given the task, by Strickland’s wife, of following the artist to Paris, to try to persuade him to return.

The narrator struggles to understand the struggling artist, and this lends a mystery to the portrait that I found appealing. Strickland is always calling the narrator a “damned fool” or the like, for failing to understand what drives the artist. The narrator simply cannot understand why a man would throw off all his duties, hurting others in the process, simply in order to paint. Though a writer, the narrator just is not an artist, and so can never understand. It puts us, as readers, at a distance from the artist himself, we seem only to see him side-on, literally a profile of the artist with only hints at the depths. It’s been suggested that Maugham’s inability to penetrate the depths of creative genius is a weakness of this book. I would say rather that it’s this that gives the book its distinctive and compelling quality, its realness in helping us to see what it would mean for an ordinary person to come into the presence of true genius.

Rich and enjoyable, The Moon and Sixpence is one of Maugham’s best works. Full of thoughtful and sometimes deep (if not strictly original) insights, it will keep you thinking as you turn the pages to see what happens next.

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Reading Toynbee

Posted on November 27, 2017 by Lee

Perhaps there’s nothing you have to do and nowhere you have to be. You’re on your own, so you’ve only yourself to worry about. But what is there to worry about when you’ve only yourself to worry about?

A quiet spot of reading. I’m usually a noisy reader. I cry out, I laugh, I write hasty notes in the margins. But what would it be to just read? Is it possible to sit and be still and just listen?

Would I even be aware of what I was reading? Reading is usually a conversation. I react. I chime in. What could it mean to read a book in silence?

Thinking, perhaps? But no, to think is to surprise yourself, to react and respond to what you discover. Thinking is a noisy process too. Thinking is not the same as being still and silent.

A time to stop. There is nowhere you need to be, nothing to think about. When I pick up the book and start reading, the words are already familiar to me. And whatever I don’t understand I already know is irrelevant, it’s not for me, and I can let it pass. “What we cannot speak about …” I am happy not to understand. It’s not my business, for now at least, in this moment.

Arnold J Toynbee has his own concerns and his own character. He says things I can’t agree with. And usually in my noisy reading I assume I’m supposed to agree, and I become obstinate, and I scribble exclamation marks and questions in the margins. But now I watch him speak and I smile, and I learn what sort of person he must have been to say these things. I enjoy him, as the narrator of his own story. I reserve judgement.

I still write in the margins, it’s an old habit. But I pause before I write. And what I write is appreciative, not combative. I note the story that Toynbee is telling, and I try to enjoy it. It’s a tale of a vast empire that brought peace and justice to the world, but is now in a time of trouble, and probably decline. It’s a fabrication like any other.

Slowly I’m building the picture piece by piece. I think back on my own past wrongheadedness, and wonder at the ways I must be wrongheaded still. I’ll look back and shake my head at what I’m writing now. And I forgive myself and I have no regrets, just as Toynbee now, in his grave, regrets nothing.

There’s nothing for me to do here. I know this well enough already. What I don’t understand is not for me. I listen as I would listen to a friend on a late evening, through a pleasant drunken haze.

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Sunday I Ching: On Throwing Things Away and Going to China

Posted on November 21, 2017 by Lee

Where have you been? There’s no getting rid of the clutter.

In this life now I am surrounded by old papers, magazines, short blunt pencils, piles of wrinkle-spined novels, a dusty-lidded and long-closed piano, and plastic containers for used up medicines.

They’re forging a new beginning for me, and I have to be ready for it. I need to make myself receptive, capable of listening, and this means less noise.

Get rid of old clutter! And throwing away what you don’t need you find out what’s left of you, the heart of your simple being.

In simple being you can be open and truthful – perhaps speaking out some difficult truths – and bring yourself forward into your new life.

Every piece of paper, old box of junk, speck of dust – I wonder if this is where I have my being. And I hang onto it just in case. I’m afraid to leave it. Leaving this fragment behind could mean death.

But living in fear is hardly living at all. So don’t fear life or death. Get rid of the clutter.

I’m confused now about my position. I’ve always preferred to have things defined clearly. Each scrap I uncover has different information written on it, sometimes a whole story about me, but I seem to be reading each story for the first time. And each story is set in an impossible time and place, in times before my body existed, or thousands of years after my predicted lifespan will be over. How long can a spirit live for? I can’t assemble a clear message out of this mess. So keep getting rid of the clutter, and risk everything, and see what’s next.

To consult the oracle I shook 3 five pence pieces like dice, rattling them in my hands each time before dropping them onto the mat. It was a firm, solid motion, and a very masculine result. The oracle told me it’s about pressing on and breaking through.

My sense of who I am and what I am to do is becoming clearly defined, and I’ll find a place to complete this transformation in China. In my anticipation of going to China. I’m forging a state of mind, a “China” like Henry Miller’s. A vessel for travel.

I need to clear out the old stuff that’s blocking me. Some of the things I have to do are difficult. The physical tidying up and throwing away of old things: I hate doing this. It means cutting old ties. In China there will be no ties. There will be only gravity: I see the fluid and majestic movement of bodies around and past each other, crowded streets where each person travels at their own predetermined speed. And I among them, moving around and through the slow flow, tickled and jolted by the unfamiliar rhythms in the speech sounds that surround me and pass through me like music.

Hear that! The new harmony you’ll find in China. What is to come will be stable and lasting. I’m approaching 40, and Confucius says it’s time to be free of doubt.

I’m carrying forward something of value. Some cargo. My learning, perhaps, what little there is of it. I’ll be able to use what I have and succeed in teaching or writing. I wonder which it will be. Or both?

Be truthful and confident and speak out about the direction you’re heading in. Focus on where you’re going, instead of reacting against the past. I’m a writer now. I’m a teacher. Work out in what sense you’re both of these things: do you have a job, and can you do it?

China is a breakthrough: asserting myself, and breaking through indecision.

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Notes on The Soft Machine Chapter 10: “Last Hints”

Posted on November 13, 2017 by Lee

This chapter is about Carl continuing his travels through space and time by finding a new body. He’s back in the city of catwalks and ladders and cable-cars in the middle of a jungle. Presumably he’s already changed bodies at least once since he arrived, since at the end of chapter 8 he was turned into a pile of green slime. But we mustn’t take things too literally and any interpretation is possible.

“Carl descended a spiral iron smell of ozone.” With cut-up, Burroughs achieves a pared down prose that makes even the pulp writers he admired seem long-winded. He could have written “Carl descended a spiral iron staircase and there was a smell of ozone”, but we don’t need all this. With what we’re given we see (and smell) immediately what we’re supposed to. This is one of those cut up sentences read it aloud and you can hear the cut, two messages cut together to give the full picture:

“Carl descended a spiral iron …”

“… smell of ozone.”

Like we’re listening to two channels at once, switching attention between the two to get the full sight and smell picture.

Carl meets a boy and sees that “through his eyes the look out different”. He’s sizing up his victim, the one who will give him a new body and therefore a new mind and therefore a new perspective on life and therefore a new position in space time and therefore a new mode of being. He’ll be rejuvenated taking the body of this young man. “Woke up in other flesh …” is how the chapter ends, once Carl has seduced him and entered him and by this method taken his body.

We mustn’t take things too literally. On the one hand this is straightforward science fiction, where a group of individuals have learned how to travel through space and time by occupying other bodies and minds. It’s a horror story, where a race of psychopaths see human beings as so much flesh to be put to use for their own experiments. But however you interpret the story, the most important thing is the book itself, The Soft Machine, the artefact you hold in your hands that is the product of the real life application of the cut-up method. A new method, or “technology”. With cut-up you don’t only create books, but also transform and control minds, alter reality, and look into the future.

This much we must take literally: Burroughs believed in the real life application of the writing and recording methods he described and demonstrated in this book. Pay attention to the outer layer, the text itself. The futuristic world described there is a prophecy of what is possible if you take up this book and learn from it and apply these methods yourself.

The author, and the books he’s written, keep popping up in the book not just as a piece of post-modern cleverness, but as a reminder that the book you hold in your hands is itself part of the story, and that the story is real, and you as reader play a part in it.

Like all great science fiction, the Soft Machine describes a world both future and present, imaginary and real.

(P.S. I’ve written another essay about Burroughs, just published at Empty Mirror. You can read it there now.)

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Notes on The Soft Machine Chapter 8: “I Sekuin”

Posted on November 6, 2017 by Lee

“… the old hop smoking world I created …”

Who created it?

“I Sekuin …”

Who are you?

“I Sekuin Perfected These Arts Along The Streets Of Minraud.”

Sekuin has perfected the art of image-control. Word dust blows through the streets of his city, and settles on shop window frames.

Sekuin is a kind of deity, this landscape belongs to him because it is his creation. He made it through cut-up, reducing the words and images to dust and fragments.

“Darkness fell in heavy chunks blocking out sections of the city.”

I found this chapter hard to grasp. It describes the end point of the cut-up experiments, a nightmarish horror city-scape in which no kind of continuity can survive. Minraud is a city broken into fragments and filled with dust. When the word is destroyed, disjointed cities like Minraud will be all that remains of the world.

Bradly, the tragic hero of this chapter, crash lands here and is immediately seized by one of the local inhabitants, who wants to help him, or this is what he says.

“You crazy or something walk around alone?”

But who could live in this desolation? Is this a human being or just a spectre, a projection, an assemblage of images and words conjured up in a moment by the wind that carries the dust through the empty streets?

Bradly follows his guide, the spectre. What else can he do?

He’s taken to a restaurant, he’s in need of a meal. “Krishnus,” his guide says, as the waiter puts the strange food stuff down on the table. Bradly eats “in ravenous gulps.”

Later, Bradly is seduced by his guide. They undress and smear a bright green substance over each other’s bodies. This green slime burns their bodies away until all that is left of them is the slime. This is Bradly’s form now in this world, his human body dissolved away. Slime that will itself eventually break apart, disintegrate, and dissolve into the scenery.

Sekuin watches the scene, watches sadly his own world “… the old hop smoking world I created mutters between years saddest of all movies frosted on the glass wind and dust through empty streets and gutted buildings spectral janitors grey autumn chill in the ashes cold dusty halls …”

And through the emptiness his past self calls out to him. Who was Sekuin before he was Sekuin? What is this past identity calling out to him now?

“… a petition from the old me … the narcotics department … Colonel Smoky … Chinese waiters … Pantapon Rose … Bill Gains …”

These are names from Burroughs’s past work. Sekuin is Burroughs, it was Burroughs who created this desolate hellscape and became Sekuin, a captive in his own creation. This silence, where words must become dust to blow endlessly along desolate grey streets and human beings must be reduced to slime.

“Under Sign Of The Centipede. A Captive Head. In Minraud Time.”

Sekuin is Burroughs himself, at an extreme. Burroughs is showing us the extreme desolation that exists at the furthest limit of cut-up experimentation. He’ll return from this limit, from this point of self-destruction, to turn his technique around against a greater evil in the world …

(I’ve been reading The Soft Machine by William Burroughs. All the stuff in quotation marks is taken from there.)

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Hegel: Knowledge, Desire, and Freedom

Posted on October 25, 2017 by Lee

The first part of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, concerning “consciousness,” shows us how knowledge of objects is knowledge only of oneself. In other words, it describes how we reach the initial premise of “transcendental idealism” – a philosophy created by Kant and developed by Fichte – that says that all the objects we know in the world are constructed in our minds, and that whatever might exist outside our minds is totally unknowable and entirely un-object-like.

Knowledge of objects is knowledge “only” of oneself: but it is knowledge of objects nonetheless. Because on the one hand, objects are constructs in the mind; but on the other hand, the reality we’ve constructed is the only reality we have, and so these objects are “real” in every meaningful sense of the term.

And so, in the Phenomenology, consciousness (meaning consciousness of objects) and self-consciousness (meaning consciousness of consciousness) keep getting separated, they’re proven again and again to be distinct, because it’s just not enough to say that everything exists “only” in the mind. Objectivity is a thing that keeps coming up again and again, or we might say: we keep running into objects day by day, they are a stubborn part of our experience, and we have to explain them somehow. And saying they “only” exist in the mind just isn’t enough.

And so, later in the Phenomenology, we get the discussion of “stoicism,” where objects are known to us by our desire for them, all objects are desire-objects, and so they exercise control over us, and so the only way to be free is to find a way to flee the grasp of the object, by retreating into thought.

Subjective freedom versus objective determination: this war for the freedom of the individual, for triumph over material circumstances, rages on, long after objects have been proven to be “only” in the mind.

(I’ve been reading Jean Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman, published in 1974 by Northwestern University Press.)

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William Burroughs, Truth, and Storytelling

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Lee

The young Burroughs liked to read adventure stories. The older Burroughs did too.

Stories are about characters. What’s infuriating and gripping about a good character is that she’ll have blind spots, things the reader can see that she cannot. It puts you into the story, you’re screaming at her: for goodness sake! Open your eyes! Just like real people have blind spots but you often don’t get involved enough in real people’s lives to notice or care so much. You have your own blind spots in this way.

In Last Words Burroughs writes about the clever ways some writers have of putting the reader into the story. Like one author has a wasp buzzing about a glass as two characters talk. You notice a wasp, it gives you something to feel bothered about as you read the conversation. Like you’re there half-distracted, like you’re mostly half-distracted in real life when you’re supposed to be paying attention.

Blind spots, distraction, these things are so human. You’re in the story because you know this could just as well be you. Well, you haven’t made such huge mistakes in your life, surely. In real life you’ve rarely encountered real tragedy or comedy, in the poetic senses of those terms.

One of the clever things a writer can do is find something interesting in a situation most people would pass over blindly. If you’re a writer you’ll pass over many things, but stop the wheel anywhere and there should be something you can write about to great effect. “A smokestack or a button,” Henry Miller said. Everything is meat to the writer.

The mundane is just the starting point. What develops is something larger than life. The characters are heroic in their resistance to acknowledging their blind spots. There’s no voice of reason to mediate between the clash of great personalities. In W. Somerset Maugham’s “Neil MacAdam,” we have two main characters: Neil and Darya. Neil is a moralist, Darya is a nihilist. Darya, a married woman, falls in love with Neil, and when he finds out he feels only revulsion, no pity at all. And Darya can’t understand Neil’s moralism, she won’t let it alone. The well-rounded character is Munro, Darya’s husband, but of course he won’t find out what’s happening, and there’s no way he can mediate the disagreement.

Neither the nihilist not the moralist will budge an inch. Munro in the background, Neil and Darya have to battle it out so that one of them must perish in the struggle.

This is the way a story goes. It’s something otherworldly. Could it have gone this way in real life? Well possibly. But more often in real life something gets in the way of the struggle, so it doesn’t have to be fought to its bitter end. It’s too convenient that when Darya puts Neil into an impossible position by blackmailing him, when she has him in her grasp, the stage on which they stand is the heart of the jungle, and he can abandon her to her death. When in real life does Nature conspire with the human heart to produce such an evil result?

For all he read and enjoyed stories, Burroughs himself was never much of a storyteller. He’s like Henry Miller in this respect. Writing is a way to get at the human soul, which is necessarily fragmented. Stories are just too neat. Human experience, mediated through the human soul, is something non-linear, and with plenty of loose ends. So if you want to be truthful in your writing, you’d better make it messy.

And one thing Burroughs and Miller had in common was that they wanted to tell the truth. There’s truth in Maugham of course, and in other 20th century storytellers. But they’re writing stories, and not autobiography.

(“Autobiography of a Wolf”: Burroughs had the truth-habit from the beginning, always writing about himself.)

One conundrum I’ve found trying to write about Burroughs, is how much I should be excusing Burroughs’s uneven style. In other words, is this unevenness a necessary part of what he’s trying to do? Or just sloppiness on his part? In other words: could Burroughs have created such an effect and yet have been easier to read?

It’s reading someone like Maugham, who is able to deal with deep philosophical ideas and the finest and most mysterious elements of the human soul, while still being a popular writer, that makes me ask questions like this. A writer like Maugham, who has his stylistic points of interest too, and was a popular storyteller without being just a hack. Burroughs, who admired writers like Maugham, while aspiring to be a writer himself, never became popular in this way, instead becoming a cult figure, someone in the margins. Even today, when everyone has heard of him, few have read him, and Burroughs is known for being an impossibly difficult writer to read. “Burroughsian” can more or less be used to mean “incomprehensible.” Why? The evidence seems to suggest that it’s not because he consciously decided to rise above writing popular fiction like Maugham’s, but because he couldn’t do it.

I’m not trying to make a point against Burroughs here. There are plenty of great writers who found themselves utterly unable to produce certain kinds of writing, while excelling in others. Kurt Vonnegut, for example, failed as a sports journalist in his early years, finding himself unable to write an article about a horse race. Finally he typed “The horse jumped over the f***ing fence,” then gave up on sports journalism.

It’s necessity that creates artists. If Burroughs had been able to write adventure stories with a philosophical twist early on in life, then he would never have had to struggle and experiment in order to succeed, and he would never have produced the body of original work, from Naked Lunch onward, that transformed a generation. Or if, failing as a writer early in life, he’d had nowhere to turn to pursue his own course, he’d have maybe got no further than the limited success of works like Junky, in which the experimental elements have yet to ripen. By noting this, you can begin to see how “standardisation” of culture can be harmful: no-one could have foreseen Burroughs’s success, and it was vital that he be allowed to experiment to produce the work that only he could. Culture has to be something that is both transformative, and transforms itself continually. Don’t fall in love with culture, because it will change and you’ll be disappointed. Burroughs, influenced as he was by Oswald Spengler, knew this well, and wasn’t afraid to keep experimenting, to try to create something new. And he succeeded, even if he didn’t end up in anything like the place he’d imagined.

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A Walk in the Sun

Posted on October 2, 2017 by Lee

Summer heat wrinkles the air and dries the brain. I move slowly, under pressure, as if pondering a great thought. All I’m trying to do is remember why I got out of bed this morning.

The sun’s warmth swallowing me up. It’s under my skin I can feel its fever in my blood. An alien energy that enervates, working against me, leaving me tired and mindless. Soon skin bones blood boiled away I will be nothing but sunlight, shimmering into air. Pure energy.

“We’re just energy,” he said. But not all energy is alike. The sun is a great giant preparing to swell and swallow us, a dangerous distant negative force, and enemy we keep at arm’s length. I feel the hostility of a fierce universe in the rays of the sun. A reminder of how precariously we exist in our little spot in our little galaxy, and how soon everything will be burned away and left cold ashes.

William Burroughs wrote about the ancient Pharaohs and their mummies. Human energy depends on the cellular: it needs a body. So hold onto the body if you want eternal life. Destruction of the corpse means “second death.” Nowhere for that energy to go. It stays with “Sekhu” – the corpse, the remains – until it is annihilated.

You need courage to live in full knowledge of this human limitation: “Knowing you might not make it … in that knowledge courage is born.” If I were nothing but starlight, I would have no need for courage.

“Allen Ginsberg says you got no soul.” How much more courage is required if this is true? You have to find some way – some practice, some method – to get yourself through this short journey in the sun’s heat. And nerves of steel to steer you. Maybe even telling yourself you have a soul, if it makes you gentler and happier. (And of course you might be right.) “Enjoy your stay here! And God bless you!” We’re all just passing through here. Enjoy your walk in the sun.

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