Story is what we use to conjure order out of chaos.
We charm chaos into narratives that replicate and reflect established perceptions of reality.
Though it appears to be nothing but fragments, the world is in fact a unified field: of cities, thoughts, food, language, dreams, bodies, hopes, fears and passions. The unifying factor is story, the ongoing whisper we hear in our heads, the tale we tell ourselves, no more real than any other story, a play we imagine, a dream we dream.
Left-handed blows and roaring dreams
Left-handed blows are ideas that tear vents in the facade ofaccepted reality. They blow convention to smithereens. Theyknock the entire universe exactly one foot to the left or theright. Left-handed blows have nothing to do with politics, andyet politics is controlled ultimately and entirely by left-handedblows.
Left-handed blows come from Rimbaud, Basho, Benjamin,Apollinaire, Joyce, Kerouac, Lao Tzu, Beckett, Trungpa, Eliade,Whitman, Gautama, Molly Bloom, Li Po, Emma Bovary andmany others known and unknown. They come from crazypeople, enemies, allies, lovers. From the sun and moon, fromthe planets and stars, up from under the earth.
Left-handed blows come like lightning, like water, like dreams.Left-handed blows sometimes curve all the way around andappear to come from the right. In any case, left-handed blowsalways come from the void, from the far reaches of the dustynebulae, from inside the chest.
They are magnificent, astonishing, ultra-simple, silent andempty. Left-handed blows are beyond interpretation, even thisinterpretation.
Roaring dreams, meanwhile, are not separate from perfectlysilent mind. They are the purest indication that perfectly silentmind is prowling about, a leopard in the jungles of night.
Roaring dreams are continuous like a river, like breath, likechange. Roaring dreams thread in and out of time, double back,leap ahead.
When they disappear we remember them, before they comewe long for them. Roaring dreams roar loudest when thesilence is strong. When the silence grows weak, roaring dreamscannot be heard.
As soon as roaring dreams are noticed, they change, as if achameleon were wired to the foreground rather than thebackground.
Left-handed blows only hit you when you arent looking.
Roaring dreams only arise when mind rests in perfect silence.
Boredom
Is there anything we fear more than boredom?
Boredom, it turns out, is our only hope.
Wittgenstein said there were only the variables of reality, thedetails, with no unifying factor behind them. But, thegroundlessness that humans glimpse when they are bored, thenothing they fear, is indeed that unifying factor.
Boredom is our only hope because it is precisely the placewhere new things are illuminated and born. That emptiness,that space, is the locus of the creative, it allows all possibilities.Without it, nothing is possible. Wonderfully empty andterrifying, the leap into the abyss. The source of left-handedblows and roaring dreams.
The letter A
The alphabet is a profoundly adaptable and fecund system.What tales can be told from the assembling and orchestrationof twenty-six letters and a space!
The letter A was originally drawn as an ox-head (Proto-Sinaitic pictograph, 1500 B. C.). Turn the capital letter A overand one sees the prongs of the oxs horns. How it evolved(literally turned) from a pictograph of an ox-head to an A isa development that can be followed in the evolution of Proto-Canaanite script.
In its etymological sources, the word ox suggests fertility. Itderives from the Sanskrit uksati, he emits semen. The Indo-European root is ugw, to make wet.
Turn the ox horns upside down and one sees a rudimentaryplow. At the end of nomadic cultures in the Near East, with thefounding of cities and the beginnings of agriculture andwritten language, it is fitting that the alphabet had an oxleading the way.
(A further connection between language and bovines: theearliest Chinese writing is found on oracle bones, the shoulderblades of cattle. The bones were poked with hot branding ironsand the ensuing cracks read for prophecies which were thenengraved on the shoulder blades in the form of early Chinesepictographs.)
The connections between the ox and written language appearagain in the form of Greek writing called boustrophedon (bous= ox) in which the line moves left to right and then right to lefton the succeeding line, going down the page as a farmer wouldplough a field.
The etymological connections grow ever more intriguing whenone considers that one of the sources of the word verse is theMiddle Latin versus, a furrow. This conjures the image of aploughed field that resembles a poem on the page, and vice-versa.
Letters ubiquitous
We glimpse letters everywhere: the H in the ladder and thefence, the S-bend in river and road, the alphabet on thetelephone keypad, in the tangled garden, in the limbs of bodieswalking the crowded street. The taps pour out letters infoaming chaos, so too do letters fly from the banner whippingin the wind. The Tibetans believe prayer flags, when flutteringin the breeze, release over and over the prayers printed on them.Cars and buses release sounds that represent alphabeticnonsense. Every mouth has a balloon attached, a bubble filledwith words. Another balloon stretches and swells inside ourheads. The three electric wires passing over my back yard are alined page waiting to be filled in. The city is a kind of text,Borges infinite library broken free of restraint and gone mad,as if the letters and words have been liberated and comepouring out of the neo-classical building like inmates releasedfrom an asylum. The letters are a kind of god: ubiquitous andomnipresent. Like a primal foundational energy, theymagnetize themselves, gather, cluster, resonate, creating anongoing story of infinite complexity.