Subway Graffiti

My tiny green notebook is nearing capacity and I've begun to transcribe some of its tib-bits. I thought I'd share this one with You:

I wonder about the graffiti on the subway tracks, well not on the tracks, on the tunnels I guess, the metal posts that keep the streets above from falling on the streets below.Do the graffiti-ists do it just to know it's there? Or to some other end? Like harnessing the unconscious night-vision of straphangers reading off and therefore feeding their spray-painted sygil? Or is it just to have a piece of this city, to occupy it indefinitely publicly yet privately with a piece of their art, of their mind? Or is it simply to tell another person "I did this thing!" and to have that person think every time they pass on the subway line "The did this thing for me."?

Biologist's Gripe

So I posted this in response to what my awesome friend wrote here:

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/blog/how_scifi_scientist

And I am preserving it here, because I am a narcissistic nerd.

Me:

I agree completely!

But, why do You think it is that biologists always seem to get such a bad wrap in science fiction?

The advancements that physicists make in sci fi always inspire "wonder and excitement." Yet, advancements in biology, with a few exceptions for "practical medicine," seem confined forever to the horror and dystopian genres. We are unhesitant to explore new territory, manipulate our environments, and create new tools. Yet when we direct that same sense of adventure inward, instead of out, somehow we cross a line and become the stuff of monsters...But why should we not try to guide our evolution?

Kennelly:

I don't know. I wrote this when I was drunk.

But The Fantastic Voyage isn't like that, that's biologists doing good and going on adventures and stuff. It's mostly horror, not sci fi that badly characterises biologists. I've got more comments, but I've forgotten them.

Me:

I don't know. Sci fi seems to put biologists in a "dubious at best" category, unless they're doctors or ecologists, just maintaining and preserving the status quo, but physicists get to be saints of the stars for throwing together interstellar space travel. "Good biologists" in fiction just don't CHANGE anything. It seems unfair. Or maybe it's just because the humans in those sort of tales (with badass forward thinking biologists) would be too foreign for us to relate to.

Raw, raw, raw

Why is it that the things in my past which hurt, still hurt? Why don't they scab over and scar, like a normal person's (who can laugh at their follies)? Instead they flush me with pain anew upon remembrance. Have I simply lived too little? Remembered too often? (Sensitized myself like the subways' squeaks which cringe me deeper, deeper with each passing.) Am I simply always picking the wound? I try so hard lately to pick up and move on, to fill my time. Fill it, fill it, fill it! With new multi-sensory memories, and other lives lived through books and films, and such. And yet, still! An accidental visit to an unhappy place in my mental geography leaves me immobilized there. Seeped in the horror of the moment.

This is my primary tragedy: I want always to remember so I can always understand... the unthinkable things some people do...but I am raw, raw, raw...It was so hard being a child. (Nostalgia, what a truly stupid thing.)

The Present is a Rough Draft.

With all the problems our society has, with all the problems each one of us has, how can we view the way things are done now as anything but a rough draft for things to come? If we're not working to make things better, if we're just passing through tasting the tastes, then we're not really living. To live is to change.

Why do people holdfast to habit? Why do people invest so much in the status quo? Forming habits of beliefs to make the habits of life easier. Falsity upon falsity. One reinforces the other meaninglessly, spiraling further away from the real mysteries of life all around us...art in all its splendor, seeking to reflect an inner world, we all know, but is not this one we share directly in the corporeal plane.

Countless choirs screaming in words that fall short, "Yes, that thing/that thought/that dream/that feeling! Yes, I know it too!"

***

I refuse to believe that asking questions and rejecting insufficient answers is a new trick our species just learned to do. Or that it is a unique characteristic of only a "certain type of person."

The comforts of our current day, on the contrary, don't push for inquiry. It's the crisis which is philosophical.

Why are we not constantly revising the thoughts of the thinkers before us, instead of delusionally grasping onto their words as gospel (nostalgia, what a truly stupid thing), or trying to reinvent the wheel. Just read people, read! It's all there! All the questions You seek to ask. No answers. No answers. I'm sorry. This life just doesn't do that. This life is ups, downs, commiseration, celebration, contemplation...but answers? No.

This life: You can like it, lump it, or leave it.

Facsimile of Lightheartedness

I am the facsimile of lightheartedness. The gravity of life weighs me down so that I am teetering on the edge of the abyss of unknowing. And so I can let it push me over into insanity or laugh at the absurdity of it all, of it all, of it all. I see it all! In hysterics, not laughing, not joking, but also these things. But hysteria, that is where I live. Don't be fooled! I am not what I seem with my easy-smile and my playful dress. This is all just so pointless! And so it's all I can do to keep each knowing thought contained in my head, the size of the universe, the size of everything, still adds up to nothing. Nothing of inherent value.

For, if our reason for living was anything but chemical, anything but the firing of synapses in just the right way (a music of the mind!), we would have something concrete to tell depressed people and it would make them better. But there's nothing to say. Nothing to do. Just try, and try, to re-wire.

"What are the neurophysiological and neuroanantomical consequences of altered sensory and motor experience? Studies demonstrate the neural assemblies change their firing pattern as a consequence of experience. More importantly, the cortical organization of neural assemblies changed due to experience."

Well, there You have it. The crossroads of hope and nihilism. Yes, cynic! This could be better. Yes, lost soul! There doesn't seem to be any meaning in any of this. But there is the possibility for change...in the plasticity of the human brain! In other words, life is unfair but You can learn to enjoy it...living, dying, these are just other options You have.

From an earlier private journal entry: "It's just like, I could go kill myself, or I could go eat a salad and watch TV, because there's this thing I might want to go to later."

Sussurations

Wow, it's been a week? I am so lazy.

Extrapolations of quick jots from my fast-filling little green notebook:

Susurrations:

This is a word I learned about twelve hours before its application organically arose in the following rant. What does that say about semantics? Is there an incubation period for certain words? Do some words instantaneously fill a void in vocabulary? Or do we actively seek to find a use for our new tools?

I'm sitting in a car next to, in particular, a boy who should not be so nervous to be sitting next to me, because I'm very glad he's there. Semi-familiar music I'd like to hear more often is playing around semi-familiar people I'd like to see more often. It's not so early. But it's very very early. Night was not a thing that happened. Hardly even the sun-rise was. The grandfather clock chimed indeterminately every hour or half hour, but always so unbelievably soon after it's last chiming.

And so and then it was morning. We let it be, reduced and bonded by our weighty words to funny little noises. And he went out for a cigarette and I fell asleep and instantly afterward was woken with "Diner? New York City?." "I'm up!" And everyone was surprised to see me dressed.

(I came in alone fanning optimism and I left with people and high hopes I tried to stifle. A lovely asymmetry, if You ask me.

They are talking. I am silent. I close my inner ears trying to keep the phrases fresh. Eager to preserve the sanctity of the evening/night/dawn/morning's conversation, or maybe I am just still so full of words to digest. Mulling. Mulling. Mulling.)

As we drive, we pass many farms. A farmer sprays his crops.

I feel the sussurations of the earth call out to me. I try to rise out of myself and go down to that place inside the earth where it hurts and weep with it. My skin pinches up and my hair stands on end. The me that is me stays in my body and I know it would have done me no good to go down to that place and weep. The earth knows no difference. It fights the infection with no discretion, a fever here, a plague there. We duck into our air-conditioned buildings and take our medications.

We've found a way to deflect its curse and pass it off on those who deserve it least.

^

This thought is so incomplete from the panorama-sensation followed by the poly-sensory pictogram which presented itself on this occasion. But there You have it, for now.