scruta

As I plow through every epoch of my life, I like to think that the awkward moments, the embarrassing, the shameful are nothing but weeds. I must pluck them out so the seeds I plant might grow to fruit.

But then I think to myself: I live in a world where all the blessings of life must be mastered, and bear energy for an endless desire. These weeds too are worthwhile, worth digesting. I know it.

I relate to foreign cultures the way I relate to women. I start superficially, judging them in ways I would only feel comfortable sharing with close friends. When I try to get to know them better, it is awkward, absurd even. Any third party to our actions would find our behavior childish and naive. If I get to know them better, there is a slow process of revealing. Every single action is another look into something I begin to realize is far more complicated than I imagined. What I have before me is flesh and blood – changing, moving, thinking. If it goes farther, I find that I have fallen in love. These affectations I found so distant live within me now, a part of who I am, something I cannot escape nor do I want to.

Moving house teaches you about ambition.

You find remnants of all the things you wanted to do, but didn’t, that just piled up dust in the pockets of your life.

You might despair, but there’s no need for it.

These old notebooks are chrysalises; these unread books are exoskeletons; these notes of old lovers are dormant buds.

Dust them off. Look at them closely, and you’ll find they bring new life.

My innocence, my freshness, my opening to the world is a vacant lot in the middle of a sprawling city of high-rises drowning the sky in concrete. Gnarled grasses worm their way around the cracked earth, cordoned off from the surroundings by high walls and chain link fences. A dirt path leads inside from the road, strewn with detritus collecting dust.

I walk by the lot often and see myself walking down into it, but never actually do. I always have some place to be. Still, the thought of being there never leaves my mind. It haunts me when I’m alone in elevators, deep in work at my desk or carousing over drinks in the dimly lit corners of the city. Though I never go there, I feel as if I visit the vacant lot every day.

I promise myself that it won’t be paved over, and no building will take its place.

I’ll chain myself to the bulldozers first.

You want to know why poets suffer? Why they perversely grasp the sword of Damocles and bring it down upon their heads?

The greatest poets strike at what is most universal, and there is nothing more universal than suffering.

The only sin I know is feeling sorry for yourself.

Do you want to know what loneliness is? It is an obsession. It is the thing that you know you should turn your eyes from, but you can’t look away. It is a naked woman prancing through the streets flooded with pedestrians, and you are the one driving a tractor trailer behind her, staring idly when you should be watching your mirrors and the road ahead.

Loneliness is that naked woman running through the streets too fast for you to catch her. The more you try the faster she goes, wearing you out, folding your concentration, diverting your attentions.

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Sometimes I think I’ve fallen in love with loneliness. I do not work to end the sight of her. The chase I make across the city late at night or in the brightness of the morning is the same. I love that amber sigh I feel when I meet her gaze, that shining promise in the distance.

This is the thing that you’d probably say if you were trying to unravel this Chinese mystery that you see before your foreign eyes, sitting in a land that heard the buddha speak long ago, that understood and forgot, but found his voice lined in its bones. Now you see China as this, a mystery that continually unravels. You think you’ll understand the core, a massive turban that you unravel in your hands, turning over and over, piling up before you that you find impossibly, perversely never diminishes in size. You tell yourself that there must be a core, or that even if there isn’t, that you must think there is.

I am of the opinion that hearts do not grow stronger; they thicken.

I laugh at anyone who says the age of kings is over.

What man doesn’t want to be a king? What woman doesn’t want to be a queen?

This is the basis of our age; the madness that binds us.

The vision that everyone should live like a king, that everyone can live like a king.