ESSAYS E-BOOK CRA 4/27/10

Taking off the Mask

Essays Volume One

by Lethe Bashar
 2

Contents

A Short Introduction 3
What is Character? 4
The Imaginary Audience 9
Escape Artist 13
The City 16
The Paradox of Dreams 19
Loving Her 24
The Divided Self 28
My Response to a Reader’s Comments 31
Notes to Myself 34
Opening Pandora’s Box: Assisted Suicide 38
Mother of Pearl 41
Taking off the Mask 44
How I Escaped from Rehab 49
Fathers and Sons 54
The Pursuit of Happiness 56
The Line of Beauty 57
Am I too Pessimistic for my Age? 60
The Magic Pill, or Self-Destruction 63
How Does Pot affect your Mind Exactly? 67
With the Passage of Time 71
The Undiscovered Self 75
 3

A Short Introduction

The Blog of Innocence was started in 2008 with the motivating desire to write essays and
meditations on a broad spectrum of topics that intimately concerned me. The title of
“Innocence” is a partial response to Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Whereas
Pessoa’s writings center on an imaginative cynicism, I sought to create essays that would
appeal to just the opposite. The sense I wanted to convey about myself and the world was
a simple questioning and naivety toward material reality and experience. I don’t go in for
any postmodern tricks here, but rather I seek to return to a state where cleverness and
sophistication are alien and not very useful to understanding ourselves. I want to
experience not knowing, so I can further discover something.
You will see many references to The Blog of Innocence in these essays; this is
because the essays were originally posted on my blog. There will be four volumes of
essays available as eBooks, each covering a different subject area. This first volume,
entitled Taking off the Mask, concerns life and culture. The next volume will be
concerned with art. The volume after that will be concerned with technology and the web.
And the last volume will be concerned with literature and writing.
My sincerest wish is that you take something from these words of mine. Writing
is the closest thing to my heart. It is the way I commune with others, and myself.
 4

What is Character?

James Toback has just given us an incredible documentary on Mike Tyson, the youngest
Heavyweight Champion to ever win the World Title. My fascination with Toback's other
films, such as Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White, eventually grew into a
fascination with Tyson, because Toback himself was fascinated with Tyson.
In the movie, Black and White, Tyson appears briefly, strongly contrasted by
another one of Toback's favorite actors, Robert Downey Jr. It is an interesting scene
between the two. Robert Downey Jr. plays a closeted homosexual and actually comes on
to Tyson, who is playing himself. Tyson appears startled, afraid, and agitated by turns.
Then his characteristic rage comes out, and you know he is not acting.
There are some words in the English language that contain multitudes. And then
there are some words that want to contain multitudes, but they cannot hold the weight of
their meaning.
In the beginning of the documentary, Tyson is describing his relationship to
Constantine "Cus" D'Amato, his first manager and trainer . . .
Tyson spent much of his early adolescence in juvenile penitentiaries. His family
moved to Brownsville, NY from Brooklyn when he was ten years old, a neighborhood he
describes as "gruesome" and "promiscuous". His mother died when he was sixteen years
old, and Constantine D'Amato became Tyson's legal guardian.
D'Amato, in his late seventies, felt a deep affection for the young Tyson. In
footage from the documentary, the older man says that the boxing prodigy gives him
motivation to live. Tyson recalls his relationship with Cus:

I did everything he told me to, and I won. I won every championship at the
amateur level--and I started believing in this old man . . .

I turned my whole life over to boxing. He brainwashed me so much. I was

like his dog. If he told me to bite, I would bite.

It's like a father and son relationship even though he is my manager and
trainer.
 5

Cus trained me to be totally ferocious.

He spoke with me every night about discipline and character, and I knew
that nobody--physically--was going to fuck with me again.

Tyson lived with the D'Amato family in a fourteen bedroom Victorian mansion in
Catskill, NY. His entire focus was on becoming the youngest Heavyweight Champion of
the world. He studied boxing. He practiced. He trained. Every night from the ages of 14
to 21, he watched fight films that dated back to the early days of boxing. D'Amato had a
collection of them and the young Tyson would pore over the great fighters. He knew their
every punch by heart.
A poignant moment in the documentary comes when Tyson is recalling what
D'Amato used to tell him about the different fighters in history, and what made each of
them great in their own way.

I have a great deal of respect for Cus--I believe everything he said. His
word in boxing is Bible to me. When he described fighters, he talked
about their good points. He talked about Jack Dempsy's ferocity, he talked
about Rocky Marciano's will and dedication; when he discussed
Muhammad Ali, he talked about character. He said that's the only reason
why Ali is the best--because he had more character. I thought that was
funny--I was a young kid. As I grew older, I realized what he meant.
Most definitions of the word "character" emphasize moral strength. But "moral strength"
is only slightly less conceptually vague than the word "character". What does character
really mean?
Character embraces the whole person, emotionally, psychologically, and
spiritually. Character seeps into the physical person as well, blending fluidly with the
emotional, becoming habits, tics, and what we call "characteristics".
Character is the person's root in this earth, their essence day to day, and over a
lifetime.
There is nothing greater than character; only destiny. And a sage once pointed to
the connection between character and destiny.
Let me be concrete now. Writing this essay about character, the one you are
 6

reading right now, was not a choice for me. For days, I will go without a single igniting
flame in my mind, and then, I'll watch a movie or read a passage in a book or have a
conversation with a stranger, and suddenly, I must write. There are ideas wildly ringing
in my ears, connections and metaphors that were not there the day before.
Writing is my form of boxing. From my earliest memories of childhood, I was
writing. My father disciplined me to read classical literature and write on a regular basis.
I wrote ferociously through high school and college. There was this root of my
personhood that needed to be expressed in writing.
Now, I pick up electricity in the world, in the things I read, in my experiences and
relationships, I pick up the current of whatever happens to be rushing though my reality
in a given moment, and I express those ideas for people to read, for myself to understand.
This is what the Blog of Innocence is all about. It is about bending raw, open questions
into language.
But I want to try to answer this question, "What is character?" Because I believe
that some of us, like Mike Tyson, have enormous talent, skill, and intelligence.
Remember D'Amato's words, "Each great fighter has something different; something that
makes them great."
To answer this question, I hold up two icons of boxing, Mike Tyson and
Muhammad Ali as examples.
Mike Tyson reached the pinnacle of boxing fame before he was 21 years old. In
art-world terms, he was the Basquiat, who I write about in another essay . . .
After this enormous staggering success--a result of Tyson's many years of rigid
apprenticeship under Constantine D'Amato, a string of tragedies unfolded. The death of
his father-figure and trainer, a divorce, a rape conviction.
Under the new circumstances of his life, Tyson could not be the same man, the
same fighter. No reality is permanent; and Tyson's reality dramatically shifted into a
complex web. His character was tested on a grand scale.
A boxing match provides an illuminating metaphor for spiritual fitness.
Literally, you must be healthy to fight; you must train hard; and prepare yourself.
 7

Spiritually, the outcome of the fight depends on the strength of your character in a
single moment of your life.
You may win the World Title, as Tyson did. You may win it again, and if you are
lucky, another time too. People will venerate you and you will feel, as Tyson did, like
you are on top of the world--
But for success to happen once or twice, for victory to occur, does not imply
greater character. Character endures over time, and brings success and victory full-circle.
And your greatest successes are always your future ones; because your wins keep getting
bigger, more unfathomable.
But let's be honest, who can stay on top forever? Nobody can. Which is why those
with the most character stand out from the crowd--and this is not the usual crowd--this is
a crowd made up of Presidents, Olympic record breakers, and world champions of every
stripe from chess to literature.
Lincoln. Mahatma Gandhi. Muhammad Ali. Nelson Mandella. We know them by
heart, their stories are woven into our national histories.
In the world of boxing, Muhammad Ali was a three time World Heavyweight
Champion, and "suffered only five losses (four decisions and one TKO by retirement
from the bout) with no draws in his career, while amassing 56 wins (37 knockouts and 19
decisions).” (Wikipedia)
Character.
D'Amato: "The only reason why Ali is the best--he had more character."
Now I think about my life and how quickly things change. States of emotion, my
outlook, my thoughts. And, it seems, every day is different from the last one. Like Tyson,
there is turmoil in my life, and I wonder if I can still fight like I once did.
How can I continue to fight?
How can I continue? This existence?
I'm not even talking about suicide. I'm talking about being unable to fight, unable
to win anymore. You need character to win. You need character to fight every day, and
then to do it again the next day.
 8

We each have our struggles. We've all been on the razor's edge before . . .
But if I've learned anything from my past, it is that there is life after death. I may
sink into despair because of the choices I make. I may be unable to enjoy the most basic
things, sleeping, eating, loving . . .
All it takes is a series of unlucky events, like the events that destroyed Tyson's
career, to knock one of us out of the ring--
But character is what lives through all of that. If the self dies a hundred times in
one lifetime, if the self dies a thousand times, one's character grows with every death. It is
the thread that cannot be broken.
And we remember the person by that thing which cannot die--even long after they
are dead.
 9

The Imaginary Audience

Let me describe what I see in front of me:

the Sunday edition of the New York Times, Tricycle (a Buddhist magazine), a
book of poetry by Emily Dickinson, The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, The
Energy of Delusion by Viktor Shklovsky; and underneath the coffee table, War and
Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.
I am reading all of these books at the same (or sections of them)--in addition to
the newspaper and magazine.
Lin Yutang talks about the "histrionic instinct." He talks about our human drive
to perform for others. He talks about how we are hardwired for the approval of an
audience. Let me quote him once again:
"Consciously or unconsciously, we are all actors in this life playing to the
audience in a part and style approved by them."
There has been a recent explosion in blogging. The Internet is a suspended
audience. You know people are watching; you just don't know how many or who these
people are. The audience becomes more elusive. But it is only the promise of someone
watching that we need. A virtual audience will do just fine.
In Las Vegas, eight years ago, I had an experience.
I became an actor in my own life. Was I imagining things? I deeply believed that
my actions were central to the world. I adopted a persona based on these beliefs.
In adolescent psychology, this is called "imaginary audience." Another
characteristic of adolescent egocentricism is the "personal fable". Professor Boughner of
Rodgers State University writes: "adolescents imagine their own lives as mythical or
heroic" and "they see themselves destined for fame or fortune."
These ideas seem closely related to what Lin Yutang calls the "histrionic instinct."
Eight years after my experience in Las Vegas, I set out to write my history. You
can call this history my "personal fable". The novel is called Lethe Bashar's Novel of Life.
 10

Lethe Bashar is me eight years before, in Las Vegas. What defines Lethe's character is
the "histrionic instinct."
My adolescence was a dream. I was under the spell of my own play-acting. I
created a persona to feel important, to feel unique. (Could I be doing the same thing now?
Writing the novel?)
I am writing the novel to understand the character and the dream. And to know
the spell has truly ended.
Can the actor awaken from her performance at the end of the day?
The theater lights have turned off, the audience has gone home. The actor is still
up on stage.

At a certain point, the role the actor plays can become self-destructive. The imagination
fuels her sense of power as well as her sense of defeat. According to adolescent
psychology, the actor thinks that she is invincible. Imagination becomes dangerous, a
weapon. There are consequences for incessant dreaming. Sometimes this is called
"idealism."
I compare my alter ego, Lethe Bashar, to Don Quixote. Lethe Bashar takes drugs
and acts out an imaginary role as poet/writer. Don Quixote reads too many books and acts
out an imaginary role as knight errant. Both go on journeys. They leave their homes.
The novel by Cervantes is a violent novel. It is funny, but it is also violent.
Nabokov writes, "Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty.
From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned. And its
cruelty is artistic."
What I have described to you is adolescent psychology. But couldn't we say this is
adult psychology as well?
Lin Yutang writes, "The only objection is that the actor may replace the man and
take entire possession of him."
The actor degenerates into a fool, a nutcase, like Don Quixote. We have seen
many of these characters on reality television, on American Idol.
 11

The audience laughs instead of cries. And yet somewhere inside we can relate to
this foolishness. We empathize with Don Quixote.
There are many books at my house. Gazing at my library solidifies my sense of
self. I surround myself with books, extensions of myself.
If I am an actor, books are my props. At the beginning of this essay I described to
you "the set."
You are my audience right now. Your applause strengthens my purpose.
I cannot see the writer or the artist. I can only ruthlessly act out his needs and
desires. The role is my destiny and my pre-destiny.
Destiny gets created somewhere.
Lin Yutang says that beyond the fear of God and the fear of death is the fear of
one's neighbors.
In other words, society.
The audience is society. A child's first society is her mother and father.
I first started reading classical literature to my father when I was in middle school.
I hated it.
But he would make me go downstairs and sit with him on the couch. We would
read for one hour. He had a collection of leather bound books that arrived in the mail
each month.
The books literally cracked open they were so new. Each new edition had a
frontispiece portrait of the author. The manila pages had illustrations. Under a block of
letters that read, "PUBLISHED EXPRESSLY FOR THE PERSONAL LIBRARY OF,"
my father signed his name.
I couldn't understand what I was reading and that's why I despised reading with
my father. It felt like a cruel joke.
For five years I read with my father almost every night.
Lin Yutang says the actor is seeking approval of the audience. The audience is
society.
 12

I really believe in my role as a writer. I don't know who I would "act out" instead. It's not
easy to pick up another role.
We become who we are through sedimentation. Years of repetition. We work
with the old drafts constantly, rewriting the ego. The future seems to hang on the success
or failure of a single part.
I omitted the first line of this essay. I was making revisions. I will include that line
here: "I'm making discoveries about myself that are unsettling."
The unsettling part of a dream is not the dream itself, but discovering the dream is
unreal.
Can I escape my role as a writer? Do I even want to?
 13

Escape Artist

These last couple days I've found myself pondering the idea of "escape." I've been
thinking of the various ways in which I use the term "escape" and how I apply it to my
life.
An escape is a break from the usual routine. Often the word is used with travel,
vacation or adventure. It therefore connotes something outside the boundaries of daily
existence. We escape from life's duties, life's routines; we break from the mundane world
to take a vacation.
And yet have you noticed how many aspects of our culture are masquerading as
escapes? The shadow side to a hyper-capitalist culture with a Protestant work ethic is a
profusion of escapes. Our escapist culture seeks solace in virtual worlds, food and drug
addictions and sexual fantasies. I am a product of this culture and in many ways a poster
child.
An escape doesn't have to be mindless. I consider my books an escape, my
writing an escape. Perhaps there are healthy escapes and unhealthy ones, but they all
seem to follow the same logic: I wish to be somewhere else right now, take me there.
It's true that I fear boredom and listlessness and thrive on work and productivity.
It's true that I'm frequently restless and impatient with the slightest things, such as making
a meal or preparing the coffee in the morning.
The churn of daily stuff--jobs and activities that consume me--begins to feel like
an escape in itself. I ignore myself, how I feel, and my surroundings, the weather outside,
the air. My mind is focused on one thing, sadly; what I have to do. Beyond this, I am
aware of how time is passing. Recall Charles Van Doren's marvelous essay, "If We
Loved Time":

The fear of time -- of time lost, of time wasted -- is a mortal disease. It

shortens a life to an instant -- this instant -- which will be followed by
other instants that are equally fleeting. There can be no joy in moments
that are carefully measured and doled out.
 14

This creates a perpetually unsettled feeling inside of me. Always under the assault of fear
and haste, my first impulse is to seek out an escape. I've put myself into a prison and now
I'm craving release.

I retreat to Borders where I can grab a book off the shelves and buy a tall Vanilla
latte. This atmosphere immediately calms me down while at the same time I'm aware that
it too is not static. I will finish my latte, read a couple pages and have to return home
where I will give myself another job to do. Even my moments of rest begin to feel
rushed. But that's not the ironic part of this "mortal disease." I'll get to the irony in a
minute.
I also escape into fattening, easy-to-find or easy-to-make meals. My girlfriend and
I go out to Chipotle or Thai food instead of cooking at home. Instant gratification is a first
cousin of escapism.
I escape into the dizzying vortex of consumerism. There is always some item,
some product, some material thing bobbing on the horizon of my ever-expanding sea of
desire. Recently I bought a new Mac computer. Shame on me! One week later I wanted
to buy a video game to go with it. I haven't played video games in fifteen years. But the
thrill of my usual escapes seems to fade with time. I'm constantly on the look out for
fresh, new escapes, more immediate and easier to obtain. I seek to colonize new worlds
of pleasure.
My girlfriend and I watch the Daily Show almost every night. Another escape;
nothing wrong in itself; but compared to the vast amounts of escapes we partake in, our
lives seem to be strung together by numberless incidences of the same thing. I was
getting bored with watching the same show with her every night so I suggested video
games. We had played a car-racing game in a movie theater once and had a ball together,
so when I purchased the computer I thought it might be fun to try something new.
The new Mac computer provided an enormous escape. Twenty-four inch LCD
screen, superb graphics, lots of cool software, crystal-clear photos and video, you name
it. And then with the Internet, I was so buried in possible escapes that purchasing a video
game on top of it seemed deplorable.
 15

When I finally got the video game, it was more like an escape from my escape. I'd
waited two weeks to receive an extra controller for the car-racing game. When the
controller arrived I was ready to play.
That night my girlfriend and I sat in front of the computer, helplessly trying to
figure out how to make the game two-player mode. Nothing on the menu of options (or
the back of the box) suggested this was possible. We spent an hour clicking buttons until
I realized that the game only allowed one person to play at a time.
Computers are solo vehicles. I forgot that part.
But when I played the video game myself, I wondered why I had bought it in the
first place. I don't even enjoy video games. I'm a writer, an intellectual. Video games are
anti-intellectual, anti-creative. How far I had drifted from my original desires!
Escapes can become addictive as well. My addiction to the Internet is
unprecedented. I check my email on average eight times a day. I check my six blogs three
or four times a day. I loiter in cyberspace, I wander, I get lost on purpose.
Not that there's anything wrong with wasting time. But I'm so driven to
accomplish things that in an ironic reversal I find myself escaping more and more into a
cloud of petty aggravation. What I'm saying is after a certain point, the escape blurs.
You're no longer moving from routine to escape, from normal life to fantasy, from
mundane to dream. Soon the routine becomes the escape and vice versa.
That's what happened to me. With all my escapes, I trapped myself in the very
thing I was trying to break free from.
Just as a prison is mental, so is an escape. The two can easily switch on you when
you're not paying attention. The desire for escape intensifies the prison.

I guess this leaves me with the hope that I can distinguish things from now on. My escape
is supposed to be fun. My work might not always be. More importantly, I would like to
return to those original escapes that once gave me a sense of fulfillment. Reading and
writing are escapes that don't dull my mind. Reading and writing make me sharper. They
are difficult pleasures that also happen to be magnificent escapes.
 16

Or perhaps I don't need an escape at all. Maybe I just need to look around and
check into reality once in a while--rather than longing for someplace else.
 17

The City

Tim Barber

This photograph has been on my mind for several days now. I look at hundreds of images
a day for the art website, and often it's like living in a dream world, the images flow past
my eyes, some hold my attention for a moment, some longer; but then, there's that picture
like the one above which speaks to my reality.
Who is this man, holding his hat, dashing up the concrete stairs? He's a tiny figure
to the backdrop of an immense city structure. And a four-lane highway rolls underneath
like some giant asphalt river.
The lines of the photograph are also interesting to me. They signify movement,
with the bars angling up, and the thick flank of the concrete making a wide zigzag. The
fact that the (mostly straight) lines are crossing, the highway lines with the stairway lines,
lends the photograph to a sort of confusion.
The man is obviously in a hurry, rushing up the stairs. But to where? To what?
Great art is a false mirror that reflects the truth. When I look at this picture I see
 18

myself, I see myself in that little man. I am racing up a monolithic structure, which I can
hardly see, because don't have the view I have right now, looking at the picture. I have
the view of the little man.
I'm not really looking around, I'm running. Like the Mad Hatter, I'm late. Always
one thing and then the next. But I catch glimpses of this immensity I'm climbing, and it's
cold, it's stark, but bigger than me, much bigger than me. It's not me. It's a city compared
to me.
 19

The Paradox of Dreams

There is a puzzling quotation that opens Herman Hesse's early novel, Demian:

I wanted only to live in accord

with the promptings of my true self.
Why was that so very difficult?

This weekend I met with my mentor, Alane Rollings, in Chicago. Alane is a

Southern woman with kindness in her eyes. She has a baby doll face framed by dark
curly hair and she carries herself with extreme fragility; but inside is a powerhouse of
strength and love. She has been mentoring me in fiction and poetry for ten years now.
One summer after my second year of college I sat in Alane's creative writing
workshop surrounded by high school kids who admired me for my passion and intensity.
A couple years older than these students, I had already begun treating myself as if I were
destined to write fiction, as if nothing in the world could change this basic truth.
Alane also seemed to treat me differently. She enthusiastically pointed out the
attention I gave to detail in my short, fantastical pieces. There was a feeling of
specialness, a halo of uniqueness, hovering over me in her classroom, and although I
appeared confident in my abilities, I needed Alane to prove to myself that my quest to
become a writer was not an elusive dream.
At the end of the short summer term, Alane wrote on the back of my final
assignment--a ten-page short story--that she'd be willing to read another 50-100 pages of
the same story. I read those words and my heart sank. Before leaving the classroom, she
reassured me that she meant it. My dream could become a reality if I wanted it badly
enough.
What happened after that is a long story. I went back to college and became
addicted to drugs. I never wrote another page of the short story that Alane praised in front
of my classmates. The rest is told in my Novel of Life.
 20

I don't know what dreams look like to other people. I don't know if some people allow
themselves to dream as vividly I do. Maybe it's a matter of temperament. Some of us are
brought up to be more practical, more responsible. Others meticulously cultivate their
irrational side.
My mother never allowed me to have a full-time job when I was in high school.
She grew up in a poor neighborhood in Chicago and knew what it was like to work hard
and be poor. Without an education, she became a fashion consultant and then a clothing
designer for Sears in the 1970s. My mother never stopped working until she met my
father; and then she went back to school and became an oil painter.
My father was born in Baghdad, Iraq. At twenty years old he left home for
compulsory duty in the Iraqi National Army under president Saddam Hussein. Since
childhood he was following his mother's wishes to become a doctor. He worked as a
doctor in the army for two years and then was granted a rare, once-in-a-lifetime pass to
leave the country.
I believe my father never got to follow the "promptings of his true self." His
mother fiercely directed him into medical school in Iraq because it was a stable, higher-
paying profession and something my grandmother always wanted to become herself. But
my father loved literature and for the rest of his life he would recall the hours he spent
alone fervidly reading European novels and magazines from the United States.
A father's dreams are easily passed down to his son. Through this natural process,
I inherited my father's lost dreams. And here, it would be nice to say, "Just like my father
became a doctor, I became a writer and everyone lived happily ever after." But life is not
a fairy-tale.

Alane and her husband Richard Stern seemed happy last weekend when my girlfriend
and I visited them at their Hyde Park house. A small house with brown paint and blue
shutters, it was built during the World's Fair in Chicago, nearly 80 years ago.
Alane directed us into her living room that faced a large window. The overcast
clouds caused the living room to grow dim. Still I could see an infinite amount of
 21

interesting things on the walls, miniature pictures, framed sketches and small
illustrations; and on the side tables, lots of old books rising up everywhere. The wallpaper
had an antique quality to it, but it was well preserved and without a speck of dust. The
house reminded me, in fact, of just what it would look like going down the rabbit hole in
Alice in Wonderland:

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of
time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going
to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was
coming to, but it was too dark to see anything: then she looked at the sides
of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-
shelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung on pegs.

I was surprised to see Richard in such lively spirits. He overflowed with an

autumnal vigor, his eyes sparkling with interest. He remarked, "Fantastic!" after either
my girlfriend or myself told him a piece of news about ourselves. But I was more
interested in hearing about his life. He told us a story about Borges whose apartment they
visited in Argentina. It seemed like a dream to hear a personal story about a man
universally worshiped in the world of letters. Here was Richard Stern, exactly the same
age as Borges in 1979, telling me how Borges directed him to the shelves and "pointed
out the exact location of the book he wanted read to him even though he was blind." (As
a side note, I discovered a book about Borges on Amazon, in which Richard recounts this
exact same story in an essay entitled Borges on Borges.)
To believe your dreams is a daring, dangerous quest, very often plainly irrational.
Think of Don Quixote.
Before going to Alane's house, I had gotten into an argument with my father.
Rather, my father expressed his disagreement with my lifestyle (i.e. writing and not
having a full-time job). I'd heard the lecture before and so I buffered it with my own
peremptory defense, but most of the points I raised were useless.
Why was it so very difficult?
It was so very difficult because my parents unwittingly raised me this way. It was
 22

so very difficult because there are conflicting realities in this world. Herman Hesse, I'm
torn between what is true to me and what is true to those around me.
My father has never been an illogical or preposterous man. On the contrary, he
wants his son to be self-sufficient and financially stable. He wants me, more or less, to
embody what Emerson talks about in that great essay on man, "Self-Reliance."
And I want that for me too, but I also have this irrepressible drive to emulate
Richard Stern, Jorge Luis Borges, Alane Rollings, and Herman Hesse. My dream is to
accomplish what they have accomplished in their brief time on this earth.
But my father has a point that I always seem to forget, "Dreaming takes place in
the future; while living is the here and now."

Toward the end of our visit at Alane's house, I broke into a soliloquy about my past. I
shouldn't have said another word. As Richard remarked in his essay on meeting Borges,
"We talked non-stop for two hours, literature, history, politics, jokes." I too thought our
time had passed quickly and enjoyably. But something possessed me in those final
moments and I blurted out:
"My father always wanted me to succeed. My father is a surgeon, and I had this . .
. this need to perform, to outperform my peers. I took mental enhancements, drugs like
Ritalin, to become better than the rest of my classmates . . ."
I went on, unable to stop myself, "And the Novel of Life, this project that I'm
working on, it's a work of archeology, I'm digging into my past and finding a lost
civilization . . ."
I had nearly become delirious explaining myself to the room, and all I can
remember is Alane, and then Richard, repeating the word "civilization." They repeated it
as if it meant something, but to me it meant nothing and I didn't know why I had even
said it. It was ridiculous to declare in front of a celebrated author that I was digging up a
"civilization" with my "art". A civilization of what? Myself?
Alane led us to the front door and told us where to find the Coop Bookstore on the
University of Chicago campus. As I walked away from the brown house with blue
 23

shutters, I kept replaying the blunder in my mind, and I kept saying to my girlfriend,
"Didn't I sound stupid? Didn't I screw it all up in the end?"
"No, no," she said. "You sounded fine. You sounded intelligent. You were fine."
 24

Loving Her

Nearly three months after we had broken up, my ex-girlfriend and I continued to see each
other. Both of us were dating, but neither of us had found anyone we liked. You could
say we were happy, not as a couple, but as two people who enjoyed spending time
together. And the sex, well, you get the point . . .
Before we broke up, she lived with me in my house. In the beginning, it was
exhilarating and rife with possibilities. This was the stage of the relationship when you
picture living in Europe together, or on an island. But then, the novelty wore off and I
wanted more and more time to myself. I started to say things like, "I want to be left alone
tonight." By the end of the relationship, it seemed like we hated each other. That grim
statement by Sartre, "Hell is other people," echoed in my mind. It wasn't going to work . .
.
My difficulty was loving her. But love shouldn't be difficult at all. I've loved
before; love is the easiest thing in the world. Love is effortless, a joy.
Maybe if I would have fallen in love with her, then I could have effortlessly loved
her. You know, the romantic, feverish feeling, the tingling, anxiety, and butterflies--that
never happened to me. We even talked about this. "I'm not head over heels for you," I
told her bluntly on one of our morning walks, "But I do have feelings for you."
What were those feelings? I never really examined them. The feelings I did
examine were the ones I didn't have. I was obsessed with the void, the emptiness, the
missing piece, and I constantly brought it up, as if to safeguard myself from the tidal
wave of her affections.
Despite my weirdly anti-social behavior, we grew together as friends, as partners,
and I believe she accepted my shortcomings. We argued and disagreed on many things,
but in truth, we were hopelessly entangled, psychologically, emotionally, and physically.
Whether it was love or something else, stuff just happened, and Tess and I were bound in
some mysterious way.
Now that she has another boyfriend, I guess you could say I'm coming to terms
 25

with what I lost.

I remember one day in particular. We were spending the weekend in Chicago. At night
we had plans to go to dinner and then to the movies. During the day, I wanted to take her
to the Art Institute. It's the largest collection of art in the city, and my mother graduated
from the School of the Art Institute. So, I loved being there. It reminded me of my
mother.
Tess wanted to be close to me. She loved me . . . I can't deny her that! I kept
pulling back from her, though. I narrowed my focus, or I distracted myself with my
obsession . . .
Did I tell you about my obsession? I have many, but on this day, I felt as though I
did not love her. The entire day felt like a sort of pantomime, an act, and the mere
thought of faking it was beginning to disturb me. What was worse I gazed at the couples
who appeared all around us, radiantly attractive in their picture-perfect worlds.

We walked through the cold, granite park that day,

ice-skaters breezed by in merry furies, loops upon loops,
maddened by the wind,
with bright shining faces and bright shining eyes,
and everywhere I looked
couples burrowed in each others’ arms.
This was January, and our faces were red from cold air. That's when I noticed all of the
couples wearing knit hats and gloves. I stood by the ice rink and Tess took a picture of
me. It was too cold to smile.

I suggested the museum,

the first floor was empty
except for two high school kids who played hooky
and jested beside the glass of Renaissance art;
I stared at them meekly, as if I envied their sweet
adolescent rebellion. They were drenched in
whatever I wanted.
The high school kids. I was jealous of them for being so blithe and carefree. They were
oblivious. But I saw them, I peered into their self-contained world. The boy wore a jean's
 26

jacket with a chain hanging out of one of the pockets, and the girl had a seductively sweet
face. The slightest thing the boy said made the girl laugh. Sulking, I continued through
the museum with Tess.

You lingered in the early art periods;

I approached a Grecian bust, once perfect,
now broken,
scuffed forehead, damaged nose and some dust.
A security guard paced the length of a wall,
I asked what exhibit was showing,
“de Kooning just left,” said the Chicago accent.

We walked through the galleries, and I noticed more couples in love. But I must
have stopped noticing them because I was suddenly engrossed in art. It was Edvard
Munch's, The Girl by the Window, which commanded my attention. The colors, a mixture
of shades of blue, seemed to emanate from the canvas. Tess was standing right next to me
and we were both transfixed.

On the second floor, Munch’s bedroom girl,

we both agreed, “a mystery of emotion,
haunting, beautiful, a dream . . .”
That brief instant was gone forever, like the day,
and the next, dominated by a hunchbacked curator
who lectured to the floor about floating blocks and cubes,
“both subject and
object moving,” (a preacher
went to see his lover, a dancer in a midnight club)
amorous obsessions, I thought.
In the next gallery, a large crowd was gathered before a giant canvas spanning the entire
wall. A hunchbacked curator gave a short lecture mostly in anecdotes about the abstract
masterpiece. To me, the painting looked like so many random lines and squares with
splotches of color. But apparently, it was a painting of a nightclub, and the story involved
a preacher who came to the nightclub to see his mistress perform.
I strayed into the next room. Tess was gone. Maybe she was still listening to the
hunchbacked curator. Maybe she left the museum all together. It didn't matter; I found
 27

Van Gogh.

Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait:

I stood there in a trance
beneath the fixed stare of triumph or terror,
beneath the weary beard of jagged lines,
inchoate strokes . . .

Later in bed, you grieved.

I said what I loved
about the portrait
the sheer incompleteness—as if
the colors were still dripping, and the artist
somewhere near.
When we returned to my father's apartment, we fought, made love, and fought again. She
wanted to know if I loved her--
"Van Gogh, Van Gogh, Van--" All I could talk about was him. He was perfect,
and I was alone.
 28

The Divided Self

I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different
directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong. --Ovid, The
Metamorphosis (qtd. Jonathan Haidt)

About two months ago, my girlfriend and I broke up and I picked up smoking after five
years.
I must have forgotten how long life actually is. Because I believed I would never
pick up another cigarette again. During my five-year stint of no drugs, no alcohol, and no
cigarettes, I also practiced meditation daily and didn't eat meat. And I exercised six days
a week.
There was a beautiful discipline to my life. My body was trim, my mind was
clear, my goals were within reach.
I look back at the era of my rigid self-control and wonder. I wonder if I was
happier living in a healthy body. I wonder if I truly appreciated my health.
I remember the lifestyle demanded an inordinate amount of work and conscious
effort to maintain. But there was also an energy that helped me along, a natural stimulant
my body must have been producing to keep me so focused.
And now?
Now I'm chain-smoking, staying up late, and eating poorly. I'm also less
concerned about having the occasional drink or the occasional joint. What happened?
Where did I stumble and fall?
It seems I covered the territory of the sober, the nicotine-free, and salubrious, and
now I'm flirting with the other side. Maybe life is better--or easier--caffeine-addled,
ignorant, and undisciplined.
Things must have not been so wonderful before; otherwise I never would have
forsaken my wholesome lifestyle. There must have been some boredom or irritation with
that life to dissuade me . . .
 29

In my current wasteland of petty vices, I find no shortage of problems. But that

also seems to be the advantage. My physical concerns take up so much of my attention
that I have little time to ruminate on emotional setbacks.
This question of the divided self has been revolving in my mind. Only because the
division is so painfully obvious when you want to quit smoking.
Last night, I laid in bed, after having my last cigarette of the day.
"That's it. You're done. You-are-done. No more smoking!"
And it made perfect sense at the time because my lungs practically felt like I was
experiencing the onset of some mild form of emphysema; short, shallow breaths, the
body convulses with cold-like symptoms.
I got out of bed and put the Nicorette gum I'd bought two weeks ago on the
dresser drawer. This pantomime of quitting, these small, ineffectual acts--I'm familiar
with. I've thrown away a dozen ashtrays and several full packs of cigarettes before
pathetically searching the garbage to recover them.

Morning came, and of course I remembered last night's ordeal, wanting desperately to
quit. The gravitas! The suffering! I recalled it but I walked past it as one walks past a
store window on their way to work.
How could it be happening again? I'm lighting a cigarette, I'm inhaling, I'm even
enjoying the damn thing in a sick sort of way.
But my mind--changed. It must have. It changed over night. Because in the
morning, I didn't feel the same emotion, the same devotion to quitting, the same visceral
disgust.
Instead, in that languid mood of not caring, I drifted to the garage, the place where
I go every morning to smoke a cigarette.
It makes me curious that we have these unconscious desires that are essentially
controlling us. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt compares the self to a rider
on the back of an elephant. He writes:
The image that I came up with for myself, as I marveled at my weakness, was that
 30

I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by
pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct
things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant
really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.
But the power to change your life is real. I know it's real because I've changed my
life before. I used to be a drug addict.
But life is long and nothing stays forever. We may think we will never waver, that
we will stay married until death, that we'll never go back to smoking or overeating or
compulsive shopping.
But we do. To waver is only human. And these decisions to quit, to change, to
reform, to improve, I want to embrace them--and more than that--I want to seriously
carry them out and change my life.
But it is perhaps wiser to have the knowledge that someday, no matter what
changes I do happen to make, I'll have to start at the beginning again.
 31

My Response to a Reader’s Comments

On my essay, "The Divided Self," a reader left this comment:

Your story is eerily similar to mine. I was leading a completely stressful

life - a LOT of drinking, smoking, zero exercise, eating crap. And then, I
was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I instantly changed, did a complete
180 didn't touch a single beer or a cigarette or a slice of pizza. All I ate
were cupfuls of cheerios, protein etc. No more than one slice of bread per
day. I exercised 2 hours daily. In 3 months I dropped 55 lbs, and my
doctor said my blood sugar was back to normal and I wouldnt need
medication to control it anymore. He even wanted to do a case study on
how I did that.

And then - I graduated, got my PhD. A month later, it started with one
beer. and now a year later, I am pretty much an alcoholic and a heavy
smoker. No more exercise and lots of crappy food. I gained back all the
weight. I cough, freak out for a while, throw my cigarettes out. and then
go search for them in the garbage. I use my asthma inhaler and then go
and smoke. I don't even know why I do this. The entire duality of my
personality has me beat.

When I was taking care of myself - i was a LOT calmer, reading

philosophy, whatnot. BUT I was nowhere as creative as i am now. Iam a
musician (stereotypes woohoo), and I find myself writing more often
when I am drunk and disoriented and so on.

Now which life do I choose? I guess it all comes down to balance - but
HOW? balance seems forced. balance seems complacent. or is it? It seems
so to me - the other desperate life is much more interesting - but it just
might kill me.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts - a friend suggested your blog to me. If
you find balance, tell us how.

I was moved by the comment and wanted to answer the commenter's questions to the best
of my ability. Here is my response:
Please do not take this response to mean I have all the answers, I certainly do not.
But I'm living as you are, and trying to cope with many of the same things, i.e. quitting
unhealthy behaviors and adopting healthy ones.
 32

You say, "I guess it all comes down to balance."

Here I'm tempted to say, "No, it all comes down to timing."
In an ideal world, I think all of us would want to lead more balanced lives--eating
moderately, exercising moderately, working less, and so on.
But in the day-to-day business of living, I feel balance is not so much of a choice
we have. We just deal. As you said in your comment, any attempt to create balance, feels
forced.
I re-read "The Divided Self" after I read you comment. It is very similar to an
essay I just posted, called "The Undiscovered Self".
I'm looking at my life now from the perspective of these two essays, which
essentially try to grasp the same problem.
It's strange. I don't even think about smoking anymore. I quit. It's been three or
four weeks now. I just don't think about it. Which is very strange in light of the essay,
"The Divided Self". Because in that essay, I'm describing what appears to be my utter
inability to quit smoking.
The thought to have a cigarette will cross my mind, but for some reason, now, I
don't act on it. And before I was helpless. So what explains this phenomenon?
I'm reading John Dewey's seminal work, Art as Experience, and he talks a lot
about the ebb and flow of human experience, nature, and life. As humans, we really do
have to go through these revolutions, these cycles. Granted some people with have more
accentuated rhythms than others, higher peaks, lower valleys--all of us are familiar with
these cycles.
Listen to how Dewey describes it. He's wonderfully accurate:

Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with
the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—either
through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the
recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state
of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed.
And here:
 33

Nevertheless, if life continues and if in continuing it expands, there is an

overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation
of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more
significant life. The marvel of organic, of vital, adaptation through
expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation) actually
takes place. Here in germ are balance and harmony attained through
rhythm. Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of,
and because of, tension.
And so, from these passages, you can infer that there is meaning behind our "bad
periods"--that is, the periods where we pick up smoking again, have lots of casual sex,
drink too much, etc. This does not mean unhealthy, compulsive, addictive behavior is
acceptable. It just means that the human being can be understood as moving through
phases of order and disorder, but that each stage of disorder has the potential to lead to a
higher stage of order, a higher level of consciousness.
I think there is great sense in this philosophy.
You mention that since you returned to drinking, you're more creative. In this
post, I examine the effect of pot on my creativity.
Everyone is different, of course, in regards to creativity and intoxicants.
I too had the sense when I was taking drugs that I could at times tap into a well-
spring of creativity. But for me it was an illusion.
Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, etc., generally occurs during a person's phase of
"disorder". And yet, I had a tendency to see order in my disorder. This was part of my
distortion.
I began my response to your comments by saying I thought it all came down to
timing instead of balance. Reading the passages by Dewey, however, it does seem to
come down to balance.
From the point of view of nature, yes, balance is what makes the human being
whole. It is the complete cycle, from order to disorder and back to order.
But from the point of view of the human being, I still believe it's a matter of
timing. Where you are at in any given moment of your life will determine your "success"
at living. But fear not, because according to the philosophy of Dewey, we are all on a
self-balancing path, even in our darkest moments.
 34

Notes to Myself

I like to think of myself as someone who is drafting and re-drafting his life until it makes
sense. Life, being irrational, never fully makes sense and so I am continually making up
new stories about myself in a creative and naive way.
But this is how children think. Nothing is absolute. Everything is provisional for a
child. Tell the child one story, she will believe it, because any story to a child has the
possibility of being true.
Adults on the other hand conform to a rigid set of beliefs, true or untrue only
according to their own reality.
I write because it is a door I once opened and I continue to go back and forth
through that door. I explore the byways and the tunnels of myself.
Whatever I write always has the possibility of being true--at least to me--and to
write down my reality is satisfying.
The question of whether what I do is art or not. Sometimes I am intentionally
creating art and sometimes I am just writing. The best writing comes out when I am not
intentionally doing anything--in fact the best writing comes out when I don't know what
I'm doing or saying. But I think I like to write because it feels like someone is listening. It
feels like what I am saying is not only true to me but true to others as well.
In a way, I am a compulsive writer. I will write because it's a drive.
Maybe I should stop.
Sometimes I do. But when I stop writing, I read a lot and reading activates my
imagination and soon I am writing again.
Whatever I've been saying in the last few paragraphs, I'm not aiming at anything.
I'm circling around the mood and the moment of my experience, gladly touching the
borders and playing with the edges.

Everyone has their own secret life. We all have minds which are islands--between those
islands flow the rivers of our hearts, but the mind itself is lonely. Which is strange,
 35

because we retreat into our minds so often. We retreat into our thoughts, our ideas, our
beliefs, and we find solace in them even though they are ridiculous.
But there is safety in one's private mind, the thoughts of which no one can read.
Because they are private entertainments of the self.
If you have pets, then you know the comforts of having non-human company. The
human-animal connection is unique, and for obvious reasons, animals are incredibly
loved by humans.
Ultimately, I think what we are stuck with is habit. Whatever habits you cultivate
within your lifetime, those are the heavens and hells of your existence. Many habits fall
between these two extremes and that's why our lives are pretty mundane.
Most of our habits are mundane in the everyday sense. We go to work, we eat
meals, we tend to our homes and our families, we do chores. Perhaps that's why novelty
is so interesting and stimulating.
I seek novelty. If I am not seeking novelty in dramatic and bizarre ways, I am
seeking novelty in the miniature sense.
I do appreciate a well-ordered life, everything manageable and in its right place.
This stems from the pure gratification of a sense of control. But as far as I can tell,
control is something that most people try to exert over themselves and their
environments.
My habits are deeply fulfilling mundane rituals that I carry out, such as going to
Borders every morning to have my coffee and read the New York Times. To me, the
Times is my mainstay to a normal, functioning adulthood. I am not saying the specific
paper has the same magical effect on everyone. But for me reading the paper is very
soothing and it reaffirms my sense of self.
I admire the quality of the writing in the Times and I believe it improves my own
writing. But there is something else about the ritual that stabilizes me.
And yet, I seek novelty.

Women provide men with an immediate burst of novelty and distraction. If you are ever
 36

bored, start a romantic relationship and you will find how interesting your life gets.
But I believe that I ultimately retreat back into my own private mind, and that
shared space between me and another person gradually lessens or dries up and dies.
I believe in long-term relationships, I am cynical towards permanent ones.
Right now I don't know where I am in terms of the opposite sex. Do I want to get
married? Do I want to have children? Would I prefer to stay single?
The opposite sex is delightful. Loving can also be a doorway to a higher potential
for one's being, but in most cases, we are not mature in love for long enough. We stop
loving and I cannot explain or understand that.
Love gets degraded over time, diminished, and terribly distorted until it is not
even love but something representing its opposite: hate.
Now my cats are quiet. The heater has stopped humming and the only sound in
the room is of my keys clicking.
I think about my past life, my life in Spain and Las Vegas. I think of the
adventures I once had and now being here in this moment of early, untainted adulthood.
I'm making the right choices now. Thank God. I am rational about things. I am
aware of habit and how it has the power to lull me into a state of unconsciousness.

We grow ourselves. We grow our personalities and our behaviors. Like a garden, we
grow ourselves--and once we were sick gardens but now we are growing healthier. Once
we were patches of weeds over a dusty mound of dirt, but now we are seeking wholeness
and fruit.
We want to bear fruit. For ourselves, for others.
We learn in time to survive, and even better, we learn to thrive.
It is the unfortunate fact of being human that we are constantly working against
ourselves. We like to be our own enemies. And I think it is better that we just accept this
as a matter of fact, that we accept the demons inside of us which want to destroy us, even
if that destruction is a slow-going poison.
Because, ultimately, we must die and we know we must die. So the destructive
 37

force inside each one of us is familiar and close. We know the destructive side as much as
we know the creative side. We know when we do good to ourselves and our bodies, and
we know when we do bad.
Good and bad are only relative to our own individual experiences. Doing wrong
to others is doing wrong to oneself.
But it is almost impossible to escape the cloud of unconsciousness that hovers
over each one of us. And in an ironic display, we can see everyone else's flaws but not
our own.
It is like the inability to smell one's own scent. The smell is palpable to others, but
not to yourself.
I don't repress the mystery about myself; I form it.
I also celebrate it.
I have been called naive before, and after all, this blog is called The Blog of
Innocence.
We are all innocent in life. We are innocent to the radical mystery of it.
No matter what we do, what errors we make, what horrors befall us, we are all
human, we are all innocent.
 38

Opening Pandora’s Box: Assisted Suicide

Last night, very very late (I think it was around 4 o'clock in the morning), I was just
about to go to bed when I cracked open Pandora's box on Twitter.
I tweeted:
What is the current state of public opinion on assisted suicide for medical
reasons?
And then I tweeted:
B/c I feel as though if I become sick and have cancer I should have the right to
die.
Unprepared for the deluge of comments on this topic, I shut my computer and
went out to the garage to have a cigarette (yes, I'm still smoking). Why was I awake so
late? I got back from the bars around 2 am and found myself in a pensive mood. So I
began writing. What I wrote down is of no importance, but the realization I had afterward
is. I realized that I want the freedom to choose assisted suicide for medical reasons if I
ever become terribly sick. This was an entirely personal realization; meaning, the thought
was not inspired by anything but my own desire to have this right for myself.

I hadn't heard much of anything about assisted suicide in the news lately, and I began to
seriously wonder what the current state of public opinion on the issue was. I wanted to
know, "What do people believe?" Because in that moment, I knew deeply what I believed
and how I felt.
I'm still exploring the possibilities of Twitter. The ability to tap into a vast and
variegated live audience from different locations around the world, and at any hour of the
day or night, is a phenomenon that draws my curiosity.
So what did people have to say on this topic? Well, I received a flurry of mixed
opinions, but the majority of them leaned toward the individual's freedom to assisted
suicide for medical reasons.
I was only interested in one question: "What do you think about assisted suicide
 39

for medical reasons?" In my rudimentary approach to sampling public opinion, I seemed

to overlook the millions of other questions that went along with my original one; the
what-ifs . . .
What if the person is not terminally ill?
What if the person has Alzheimer's and can't decide for themselves?
What if the person is "pressured" into assisted suicide?
While I understood that an abundance of hypothetical situations are enmeshed in
the topic itself, I was still looking for some straight answers. These were some of the
responses I got:

@salwaansart I agree with assisted suicide for medical reasons.

@dijeratic Depends where you are - some states do allow for it, all states
should, in my opinion.
@JamesHancox Still mixed I think. Personally, I support a persons right to
choose. Needs to be VERY carefully monitored though.
@buffysquirrel i don't think any of us needs a right to die; dying is going
to happen whether we like it or not
@PaulMathers I am inclined to agree although I like to think I would not
take that path personally. But as a right I'm inclined to agree

@DavidMunn Yeah, I'm in favor of euthanasia as long as the individual is

making the decision without pressure.
@JackAwful You're knocking on an open door here. I was a nurse for 10
years. Kevorkian was a brave man and only the suffering know.
@crazygibbonsorry 140 characters. If someone is in a fit mental to decide
state that's fine. Becomes difficult if they aren't.
@desireekoh13 Your responsibility to make decision when in right state
of mind, so no one has to be responsible for making it for you.
@NightShiftNurse assisted suicide should be legal. I have seen too many
patients suffer.
@StirringTrouble How you can call yourself innocent and promote
assisted murder? I'm sorry, but you're off my list.

That last one really caught me off guard. I replied, "I promote the freedom; not murder."
Just as a side note, I call my blog The Blog of Innocence because I cultivate a
wonder, an innocence, about the world in my writings. Because, to me, each new
experience is a new reality. I feel as though I will always be innocent to life. This naïveté
 40

is actually something I practice as I attempt to learn more about myself and more about
others.
The interesting thing about assisted suicide for medical reasons is how diverse
laws are from country to country, and within countries as well. I would like the law in
Illinois to reflect my right to die for medical reasons.
I have Hepatitis C, which means there is a 50% chance I will develop liver cancer.
In addition, I smoke and smoking is proven to cause lung cancer. Compound these
possibilities with my already abused system from years of drug abuse.
And so, these are my concerns. What if I get sick? What if I develop cancer? Can
I choose to die?
What baffles me is that people feel they can tell me I don't have that right. But
this should be my decision.

My mother died of a degenerative disease. I watched her slowly lose all of her motor
abilities, all of her facial expression, her balance, her ability to walk, her ability to speak.
Around forty-five years old, my mother was diagnosed with multi-system
atrophy, a variant of Parkinson's. She went strong until everything was taken away from
her. Her last three years on earth, she couldn't talk, couldn't walk, couldn't use the
restroom by herself.
She never told me she wanted to die. But then again, she couldn't speak. How
would I know? It became increasingly difficult to know her thoughts about her situation.
She was completely lucid until her death. Only in the last month, when she was
unable to even eat enough food to stay alive, did she show signs of confusion.
The doctors never called my mother's illness "terminal". They called it
"degenerative".
I watched my mother suffer. I saw what she had to go through for five agonizing
years. And I wonder if such a thing were ever to happen to me, would I want to continue
to live?
 41

Mother of Pearl

If you're looking for love in a looking glass world, it's pretty hard to find. --Bryan Ferry

I've fallen in love with an older woman. I can't tell you much more than that.
There is a song by Roxy Music called "Mother of Pearl." This song has enthralled
me for many, many years . . . and every time I listen to Bryan Ferry's histrionic voice,
every time I hear the tempo changes and rollicking rifts, I illuminate from inside out.
I glow from this music and I cannot explain why.
Like a personal anthem, the song speaks directly to me, encompassing my reality.
The music is fantastic, but it's the near-perfect fusion of lyrical poetry and transcendent
Rock 'n Roll that gives me euphoria.
You know, I could never get to the bottom of "Mother of Pearl." It kept me
guessing into my late twenties.
The language, always enchanting, mystical . . . funneled through electric sound.
There were lines that eluded me.
I didn't have the experiences to match the words.
But I felt the meaning of the song in my bones.
Because of this mystique, I retained a heard-for-the-first-time experience every
time I pressed play.
We make meaning out of poems, and "Mother of Pearl" is a poem.
At first, you find the smaller pearls strung together on chords and in between
lines; only later--if you are lucky--do you find the mother pearl.
This song explains my trials in love, my delusions, and my late-blooming
revelations.

Mother Of Pearl (lyrics)

Turn the lights down Way down low

Turn up the music Hi as fi can go
All the gang's here Everyone you know
It's a crazy scene Hey there just look over your shoulder oo oo
 42

Get the picture? No no no no....Yes

Walk a tightrope Your life sign line

Such a bright hope Right place, right time
What's your number? Never you mind
Take a powder But hang on a minute what's coming round the corner,
ooh.. oo oo
Have you future? No no no no....Yes

Well I've been up all night.. Again?

Party time wasting
Is too much fun

Then I step back thinking

Of life's inner meaning
And my latest fling

It's the same old story

All love and glory
It's a pantomime

If you're looking for love

In a looking glass world
It's pretty hard to find

Oh Mother of Pearl, I wouldn't trade you for another girl

Divine intervention
Always my intention
So I take my time

I've been looking for something

I've always wanted
But was never mine

But now I've seen that something

Just out of reach, glowing
Very Holy Grail

Oh Mother of Pearl, lustrous lady of a sacred world

Thus, even Zarathustra

Another time loser
Could believe in you

With every goddess a let down

 43

Every idol a bring down

It gets you down

But the search for perfection

Your own predilection
Goes on and on and on and on

Canadian club love

A place in the country
Everyone's ideal

But you are my favorita

And a place in your heart dear
Makes me feel more real

Oh Mother of Pearl I wouldn't change you for the whole world

You're highbrow, holy

With lots of so
Melancholy shimmering

Serpentine sleekness
Was always my weakness
Like a simple tune

But no dilettante
Filigree fancy
Beats the plastic you

Career girl cover

Exposed and another
Slips right into view

Oh looking for love

In a looking glass world
Is pretty hard for you

Few throw away kisses

The boomerang misses
Spins round and round

Fall on feather bed quilted

Faced with silk
Softly stuffed eider down

Take refuge in pleasure

 44

Just give me your future

We'll forget your past

Oh Mother of Pearl
Submarine lover
In a shrinking world

Oh lonely dreamer
Your choker provokes
A picture of cameo

Oh Mother of Pearl
So, so semiprecious
In your detached world

Oh Mother of Pearl I wouldn't trade you for another girl (repeat)

 45

Taking off the Mask

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another. ~William Shakespeare

It seems I haven't written a personal essay in a very long time. My life has changed in
subtle ways since my year-long essay-writing binge on this blog. I am consumed more
than ever by my activities on the Internet, with less time to let my mind "go blank" or
empty itself.
Mostly, I am preoccupied with Escape into Life, the online arts journal I founded
about a year ago. Working with programmers and designers, attracting writers and
readers, and editing submissions on an almost daily basis wears me down. Some days I
would just like to disappear from the online world.
Being connected to a vast network of people online is both a blessing and a curse.
One day you realize there are hundreds, maybe thousands, expecting something from
you. And this is what I've always wanted, I've always wanted an audience. Because it is
my nature to write for an audience, and nothing appeals to me more than having those
readers.
My participation in the online world has given rise to a persona, a mask I wear. I
am constantly promoting Escape into Life on Twitter, and always hoping to gain more
readers and more followers. At the same time, I feel my energy is being drained as a
writer. The most important thing for me is to have a certain amount of silence, or
emptiness inside. Too often in the last several months that emptiness has been crowded
with fears and concerns.
When I first read the novel, The Obscene Bird of Night, I became fascinated with
Jose Donoso's philosophy of masks and disguises. At the time, I was using drugs and my
parents were getting a divorce. If you want to know the truth, I was actually in a
psychiatric ward when revelations about the novel were becoming a kind of fixation for
me. You have to understand that I had a very cynical view of things, I was being "locked
up" in some hospital, and my family life was broken. But I seemed to find a lot of
empowerment in the idea that we all wear masks, and beneath each of those masks is yet
 46

another mask.
This frightening premise ignited my adolescent imagination. Jose Donoso was
influenced by the works of Carl Jung, specifically his alchemical studies in psychology.
The meaning that Donoso ultimately came to, which his novel puts into dramatic form, is
that beneath all of those masks is nothing. The human identity is made up of layers of
masks, and underneath those layers is a vast emptiness.
The artist, the writer, deals intimately with both masks and emptiness. We feel
constrained as writers when we bind ourselves to what we feel we ought to write, rather
than responding to what arises naturally in our changing interests. The result of writing
what you feel like you should write is simply putting on another mask, and the
consequences can be disastrous, like pretending to be someone you aren't . . .
I admire writers, and all artists, for the courage they have to continually take off
the mask. You are not truly creating anything until you are revealing a layer of yourself
you didn't know was there. While the ideal of shedding the mask remains important,
along the unexpected course of life, I find myself strongly gravitating to its opposite. I
want to be someone. When I look at my small accomplishments thus far, and see I've not
earned myself a single title in anything, I despair. I am still unknown. I am still without
an identity.
This may be my greatest advantage, however. Because if the work of a writer is to
take off the mask, again and again, not being anyone is actually a better starting point for
creating art. Listen to this passage in The Obscene Bird of Night:

There are so many of us who go around collecting, here and there,

whatever castoff enables us to disguise ourselves and feel we're
somebody, be somebody--a well-known person, a picture in the papers
with your name underneath; we all know one another here, in fact we're
almost all blood relations . . . to be someone, Humberto, that's the
important thing, and the lamplight flickers and the table wobbles under my
sister's elbows as she holds her face in her hands like in Las Bertini's latest
postcard photograph . . . my sister's too is a mask, La Bertini's mask,
because her own face wasn't enough; as one goes along he learn the
advantages of the disguises being improvised, their mobility, how the last
one covered the one before it.
 47

I am a character in my Novel of Life, and I am also a character playing many roles in this
life. How is it then that I feel I am not aligned, and at other times, more aligned with my
true self?
I strive so hard to cement my reputation in everything I do; but ultimately, this
leads me to betray myself. I've lost touch with the current of my natural instinct. I
become fixated on a social role, playing up to the expectations of the audience. I've been
reduced to a puppet.
It seems we are driven by these social masks. First we seek to attain them, striving
for a distinguished role, a podium on which we can stand out; and then, somewhere in the
process, we begin to question who we really are, if this is really me, this role, this
persona, this mask.
The sociologist Erving Goffman studied human behavior from the
"dramaturgical" perspective. He saw each human's action as a performance, as a
theatrical effect, in order to preserve social survival. Goffman wrote that the self

is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate
is to be born, mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely
from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial
concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited (qtd. Glenn Ward).
Glenn Ward further explains that Goffman

writes of the self as a series of facades erected before different audiences.

These facades only appear to emanate from some intrinsic self inside the
social performer. In fact, the self is an effect, not a cause, of the facade. It
is also not something you individually own. It arises from interaction with
other actors on the social stage.
There seems to be a lot of truth to Goffman's discoveries. I can see how I would be
writing for my social survival. Perhaps long ago I deceived myself into thinking that I
was a writer by destiny, and instead I conditioned myself to become a writer because it
was a social role I knew I could act out. It was someone I knew I could be.
Our histrionic natures have long been documented in literature and art. Read
Shakespeare who says, "All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women merely
 48

players." We know we wear social masks, we know we play roles. In contemporary

times, an index of reality TV shows will give you the full evidence of our histrionic
natures.
Yet as writers and artists we are compelled to uncover the truth, not obscure it.
Life is confusing enough as it is. At least in art, we can effect some level of control,
create some kind of meaning in the world. And so, we learn to write by repeatedly taking
off the mask, by giving it up, and finding something deeper and more powerful beneath
the surface. It is by reaching into our innermost selves that we are able to constantly
transform and improvise.
I know I am performing when I write, but I also know that I am honestly
searching. And the search, the mystery, cannot be faked. I love what I do because it has
an unknown factor. Any project I take up in my writing is with a destination unknown.
This gives me faith that I am not only pretending to be someone, but also deeply trying to
find myself.
 49

How I Escaped from Rehab

I called my mother from the Backpacker's Inn, a gritty sort of place outside the Vegas
Strip. I'd been living there for approximately two weeks.
"Let me come home," I said. But she was too worried about what I might do in
Chicago.
"Go back to rehab," she said in her brittle voice. My father had recently divorced
her and she was living with a caretaker, who I could hear in the background.
I knew I couldn't stay in Vegas anymore. I was making too many enemies and I
didn't have any money. They allowed me to stay at the Backpacker's Inn each night
because I cleaned the rooms during the day.
My mother paid for my plane ticket and I flew out to Tucson, Arizona, where I
had already been to rehab but was kicked out the 28th day when I refused to do an after-
care program. I was going back there because I had nowhere else to go.
The thing about Cottonwood de Tucson is that it's filled with lots of rich people
and celebrities. It's in the middle of the desert and has a gigantic swimming pool, palm
trees, and ten or fifteen resort-style bungalows. The food is gourmet and healthy, and the
chef greets you as you enter the dining hall.
My roommate was the drummer from Aerosmith's son, who was there for a pot
addiction. He was fifteen years old. To me, however, it appeared like he had an addiction
to drawing penises. He would draw them everywhere with a black sharpie, benches,
sheets of paper, his arm.
There were others too. This one lanky man, about six feet tall, wore a cowboy hat
and yodeled at night. He strummed on his guitar and made up songs on the smoking
bench. He said he was a television writer in LA and wrote the first season for NYPD
Blue. He left the center a couple times in a cab, but was brought back by his wife.
But when I returned to Cottonwood after Vegas, it wasn't the same. I didn't
recognize anyone, other than some of the staff members. The first day I guess you could
say I got off to a bad start. We were only allowed to smoke at the smoking bench, and I
 50

was lighting up wherever I wanted. They yelled at me, told me to put out my cigarette.
I was already getting sick of the daily mantras and routines. I pretended to be
involved but my mind kept wandering back to the places I'd been on my own, without
any adults telling me what to do.
On the second night, the leaders called us to the rotunda for a medallion
ceremony. You always have new people coming in and out of these places. We were
expected to say goodbye to the ones who completed the program, and there was a circle
where you passed around the medallion and made a wish for them.
On my way to the rotunda, the thought crossed my mind, "What if I just ran
away?" It was an impulsive thought, but when an impulse takes hold of me, it's like I've
been abducted by an alien race. The voice of reason never comes through in these
moments. It's only the urge that speaks to me. A whole new reality can be made in that
moment, and I feel alive.
Everyone was far ahead of me, most of them had already entered the rotunda for
the medallion ceremony. I turned around and walked back to my room. I gathered my
things and threw what I could fit into my backpack. Then I started to creep along the
outskirts of the compound toward the highway.
There were no security guards, no high walls to scale. The rehab center proudly
called itself an "open" treatment facility, where you were "free to leave at any time."
And so I left.
I'm not going to lie here. It really thrilled me to do outrageous things when I was
younger. I'm not the type to go speeding in cars or jumping off cliffs, but a singular
rebellious act filled me with extreme self-gratification. And it still does sometimes,
although I've learned to choose my rebellious acts carefully.
But that doesn't mean that I wasn't nervous when this happened. I didn't want to
get caught, and my heart was beating violently in my chest. I really wanted to make it out
of there without anyone seeing me.
I followed a long driveway that begins at the admission office and extends about a
quarter of a mile to the highway. The driveway was pitch black and strewn with rocks. To
 51

the side, there was a thick barrier of trees and some houses with their lights on.
The highway curved around the head of the Cottonwood entrance, and a car
passed me at breakneck speed. I realized I had to clear from this area as soon as possible
or risk being dragged back into the Garden of Eden. So I ran along the shoulder under a
canopy of trees for a hundred paces and then sprinted across the highway.
The highway was an elevated pavement running between two large ditches on
either side. The shoulder was thin and I had to balance myself on the edge of it while
watching for oncoming cars. I figured I was better off in the ditch than making this tight-
rope walk in the dark. So I slid my body down into the trench, where some debris and
empty beer bottles were scattered at the base.
Unfortunately, I couldn't just walk straight through the ditch. In some places, the
ditch stopped completely at a wall of dirt and sand. I waited in the ditch for a couple
minutes and then tried to see what the desert looked like on the other side. If I could pull
myself up somehow, I would be at the foot of the desert.
I was born in Illinois and I'd never trekked across a desert before. What you don't
think about the desert at night is how different the landscape is, really severe, stark
territory. When I climbed onto the other side of the ditch, I felt watched by the
vegetation. There were vast open tracts of land and then clumps of knee-high prickly
bushes. You couldn't walk in a straight line. You had to zigzag around the plants and
cacti. I kept shielding my legs from the snags of bushes. Thorns everywhere. My shins
were bleeding.
In the distance, I heard a car coming and so I dropped down on my stomach next
to a prickly brush. Through the brush, I could see a white van, the same white van they
had at Cottonwood to haul the patients from one place to another, and I knew it was
Cowboy Bill driving that night because he was the only one on transportation duty. In
fact, before the medallion ceremony, he had just taken us to an AA meeting in Tucson.
He told jokes on the way and everyone laughed.
I waited in the desert for a long time, keeping myself hidden. The moon shed a
little light over the area where I was sitting, and I took out my journal to scrawl a couple
 52

sentences. Throughout my drug addiction, I carried a journal everywhere I went, and I

felt compelled to report on my state of mind during these climactic moments.
As some of you may know, I began writing these stories as a novel. One of the
reasons for this is it felt like a novel as I was going through it. The divorce between my
parents, my mother's illness, and the numerous psych wards, rehabilitation centers, and
halfway houses I encountered, made up a chain of surreal events. But the strangest thing
of all was my delusion, my magical thinking, that I could alter the course of events by
actions such as this one. I imagined myself as a heroic figure, rebelling against the
dictates of my father, and all authority by extension, in order to reclaim a sense of my
own free will, however twisted, and not give in to a ready-made script handed to me by
someone else.
After about forty-five minutes, I was becoming more aware of the sounds and
movements around me. A pack of coyotes howled somewhere in the distance. An owl
appeared in the crook of a cactus and turned its head 180 degrees. I imagined snakes
slithering across the desert floor when I heard the bushes shaking. So I threw my
backpack over my shoulder and in a hurry to get out of there, I climbed over several
dozen thorn bushes, which ripped the skin under my thighs.
Once I got to the edge of the desert, I gladly jumped into the ditch, which to me
was a far better place than the eerie desert. It was probably two or three in the morning
when I stepped onto the shoulder of the highway, with not a soul in sight.
A car passed along the highway every twenty minutes or so. I stuck out my thumb
each time, but nobody stopped. It was hard to believe that I was actually hitchhiking like
this. At first I exulted in the sheer fact that I was out there, on my own, giving myself up
to perfect chance. But as each car passed, I started to feel less and less hopeful that
someone would pick me up. The stretch of highway ran on to infinity, it seemed, with
only the ridge of the desert and some occasional towering cacti to provide me a sense of
direction.
Every time a car passed me, I thought it would be the last. Then I saw a pickup
truck slow down ahead. The red, rust-bitten pickup went in reverse until it was right
 53

where I was standing. A man in his late thirties leaned over and pushed open the door. He
had on a nice pair of jeans, which I noticed for some reason. I think I was looking for
clues as to whether I should get in his truck. I got in the vehicle anyways.
 54

Fathers and Sons

In three words I can sum up everything I know about life: it goes on. --Robert Frost

I planned a vacation for myself, but that vacation was cut short.
I was only going to Chicago, where my father lives. I had two meetings in
Chicago on Thursday, and so it wasn't a real vacation, only a chance for me to get away
for a couple days.
On the first night (Wednesday), my younger sister met me at my father's
apartment a couple hours before he arrived home from work. We sat on my father's couch
. . . at first she was distracted, playing with her iPhone, she'd look up at me while we
were talking and then look back down at her phone to text message or check her email.
When my father arrived, he came into his study where Mandy and I were sitting
in front of the computer. He quietly left the room.
They made dinner for me as I sat on the couch reading the newspaper. Secretly, I
marveled at how well they got along together, cooperating on making the dinner with the
fun of a happily married couple.
There was a time when I could have been a part of the Chicago picture; I could
have lived there, and maybe developed a closer relationship to the family.
People often tell me that my problem is I don't live closer to people I care about. I
don't have a robust social network in real life (online I do), mainly because I choose to
live in Central Illinois. But I've tried to tether myself to people before, and it doesn't work
for me. I prefer the simple rituals I have which don't rely on an abundance of friends.
That night my father and sister watched home movies while I sat on the couch,
continuing to read the newspaper. My father's latest project has been to transfer all of the
home movies he made between 1979 and 1998 onto DVD. It's an enormous archive, and
when I come to visit now, I'm tacitly expected to watch a video from the archive. But
Thursday night, I had no interest. He filmed nearly every major event, and a great number
of non-events, everything from Christmases to birthdays, recitals, vacations, parties,
sporting events.
 55

Last time I was at his apartment I watched an hour or so of the videos, and the
repetitive version of my family history bored me, even though I got to see my mother,
who passed away. The family, through my father's eyes, and perhaps my sister's, reflects
something of the "good old days," but I see a different picture in the slew of tapes . . .
It seems my father has changed dramatically in his attitude toward me. My
impression is that all of my issues over the years has led him to think of me as a burden.
He saw me through many bad times, and he used to be committed to me, despite what
happened.
Today he shows little commitment to me as a son. He's swung to the opposite
extreme, presenting a cool exterior, which I interpret as unloving. If my actions in
adolescence, and some continuing into adulthood, caused my father to detach himself
from me, then I can only respond with a detachment of my own.
On Friday morning, we broke into an argument. Certain things I say irritate him.
He doesn't like me talking about my job, or my financial situation. I understand why he
wouldn't want me to complain, but it's hard to hide my resentment.
I returned home that day. I stayed in his apartment for only one night. This is the
usual duration before either one of us becomes so angry we can't be around each other.
I never thought that my relationship to my father would go through so many
reversals.
 56

The Pursuit of Happiness

Tonight is July 3rd. In honor of our nation's birthday, I would like to share with you an
essay that has meant a lot to me over the years. Written by John Perry Barlow, the former
lyricist of the Grateful Dead, "The Pursuit of Emptiness" touches on our greatest strength
and our greatest weakness as a nation.
Turning the famous and elusive utterance in The Declaration of Independence,
"the pursuit of happiness" on its head, John Perry Barlow questions this unalienable right
penned by Thomas Jefferson. For in Barlow's eyes, it makes little sense to "pursue"
happiness in any form. He wisely quotes Chuang-Tzu, who says, "Happiness is the
absence of the striving for happiness."
And wholeheartedly I agree. In fact, right now I'm working on an article for this
blog on the American culture of self-medication. Our impulse to self-medicate--not only
with prescription drugs, but with food and exercise--seems closely related to the "pursuit
of happiness" mentality.
The American people are after something, whether it's fame, recognition, love,
wealth, sex, or satisfaction. What propels us is our insatiable demand for more. For
awhile, this drive even kept our economy running.
The irony of happiness is this. Barlow quotes Swami Satchidananda:

If you run after things, nothing will come to you. Let things run after you.
The sea never sends an invitation to the rivers. That's why they run to the
sea. The sea is content. It doesn't want anything. That's the secret in life.
A magical and lovely idea . . . "Let things run after you." Happiness is not something you
pursue; happiness is something that pursues you.
The fireworks go off in the neighborhoods surrounding my house and I'm glad to
be alive. I'm glad to be pursued by happiness . . . keep it coming . . .
 57

The Line of Beauty

I've returned to the Ames Library after many months, maybe even a half-year. Exploring
the shelves again gives me that pleasure which is so close to my heart, a pure delight,
wandering among bookshelves, aimlessly picking up books and turning pages . . .
I come across an anthology of Russian short stories from the 2oth century. I come
across a book of translated poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, whom I've never heard of
before. I pick up Alan Hollinghurst's novel, The Line of Beauty, and I am curious to read
it.
Perhaps I will check these books out.
While my mind plots out the future with relentless determination, my body craves
moments like these, moments of abandon, moments of self-forgetfulness . . .
I feel like a naughty or undisciplined child when I'm not following my mental
agenda--I "look the other way" and allow myself to just explore and be surprised by
ephemera.
Whatever catches my fancy in this moment is my agenda; but I am self-divided.
On the one hand, I long to embrace the moment. My love of reading is a testament to this
desire and this longing.
But my personality continually pulls me out of these moments. There is always
something on my mind, an endless monologue going on, and I rarely allow myself to
become engrossed, absorbed, in experience.
Reading The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, for example, I often thought about
what I would read next . . .
Our minds seem fixated on what's next . . .
I also have a cold right now, and I'm thinking about how much better things will
be after my cold is gone. This state of mind, in which I'm always anticipating the future,
contributes to my restlessness, to my ongoing ambitions in work, and more and more the
task of living becomes a passage from one set of circumstances to another.
I'm preoccupied with moving from point A to point B. Once I get to point B, I
 58

become preoccupied with point C, whatever that may be.

Consumer culture seems to feed on this mania. The acquisition of any material
object leads to the desire for another object. But in life, the object becomes our set of
circumstances, and we strive to alter them, to improve our lives until we are satisfied.
I am always in transit to where I would like to be, and never just where I am.
I shouldn't say "never". When I write these essays, I am fully present. I am at
home with my emotions and thoughts. My mind and body are strangely united. Writing is
closer to an act of prayer than anything I've ever done before. I commune with my
deepest thoughts and feelings, and try to give them speech. I try to let my body articulate
its trials.
There is something deeply troubling me right now--it seems I can't be happy. I
don't think one can be happy "in transit".
I refer to my age a lot. When I say "I'm thirty years old," it gives me a certain
vantage point to speak from. Perhaps you've been thirty before, or maybe you have ten
years to go, whatever the case, thirty is a defining age for me. It makes me think harder
than when I was twenty-nine. I'm beginning to ask myself questions like, "How do I
really want to live my life?"
I feel like a wanderer. Every project I take on leads me into a sort of Siberian
landscape--a blinding whiteness in which I can't see ahead or behind me--I go deeper into
this white territory, unsure if I'm committing too much to a certain route, if perhaps I
should abandon this route and find another, I don't know, but I keep walking into the
white emptiness, the giant plane--
You would think that my projects would take me home, but they don't. They lead
me out. They multiply me because I am caught in a desire to do more always.

So projects, while fulfilling on some level, ultimately just feed me more work to occupy
my hours, and then there is this thing, beauty, which I am obsessed with.
Beauty is but a general term for my fantasies--I chase after something like a
perfect world. It is beautiful to me, aesthetically, idealistically, but it also promises a sort
 59

of completion, like a spiritual completion, if only I could attain it.

My pursuit of the line of beauty has left me in a conflicted state. Beauty leads me
into another Siberia, a Siberia of fantasy, and I am no closer to home, I am farther.
And then there is the sense that I'm engaging in a grand self-deception. I will
never achieve my fantasy, the beauty I imagine is unattainable, so why do I contemplate
this ideal world during so many of my waking hours?
Having tried the different ways to self-completion, or self-fulfillment, I fail.
Imagined beauty fails me and so does my incessant activity. If it were possible that a
relationship with a woman could save me, then I would pursue it--God knows I have
tried--I am trying--I am in a relationship right now--her heart is more delicate and trusting
and charitable than any woman I've ever been with---but I am still--unsatisfied--it is not
her--I do not blame her.
In truth, there is no one to blame in life. I tried blaming my father. He seemed like
the perfect culprit for my problems. But alas, there is no one except ourselves. . .
We have ourselves. But to blame yourself for being unhappy is wrong too. To say
that I am unhappy is also wrong--
Unhappiness is a broad generalization for an often-changing state of mind. I'm not
confused either, as some readers have suggested--
I'm innocent. It's a state of conflict, of contradiction, it's being human. Being
unable to be here (with God or Nothingness), always seeking after that enigma on the
edge of your mind. For me, it is beauty, an ideal . . .
The ideal world is especially seductive. I have a powerful imagination, and I can
concoct convincing pictures in my mind, fantasies, alternative realities. The trouble is
bringing the present moment up to speed with the picture in my head, an impossible feat,
because fantasy and reality never cross streams.
And so I dwell in the uncomfortable middle--pulled forward by visions--and
thrown backward by reality. Remember: I choose to have it this way. Which is the
greatest conundrum of all.
 60

Am I too Pessimistic for my Age?

Tonight, while I was on the Yahoo! search page, a strange link appeared up in the News
section. "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" was the "news story" and it directed
me to Yahoo! Answers. Once I was there, I read the question, then the answers; and I
"friended" a couple of the people whose answers I liked.
Within seconds I received an email in my inbox stating someone had invited me
to answer their question. I went to the site and the question was this, written by a 15 yr
old:

Am I too pessimistic for my age?

I'm 15 and I don't believe in

-God
-heaven
-hell
-true love
-fate
-destiny
-love at first site
-the perfect man/woman
-soul mates
-salvation
-miracles

honestly, there's no solid proof that any of these things exist and I just
can't find a way to let myself believe in them.

So I kinda feel...empty.
I had nothing to do, so I thought I would answer her question. Why not? At her age, I
could have used an answer to that question. Here is my reply:

You will feel this way your entire life. Some days you will forget, but you
will always return to this feeling.

Every human being feels this way. It is part of what it means to be human.

Don't get overly hung up on it.

 61

Use the feeling of emptiness as a positive motivation to make your life

mean something.

If you start out with nothing, then you always have the potential to be
something.

If on the other hand you start out with everything, you have everything,
feel everything wonderful, then what is there left to do?

So emptiness is good. Even if it feels lonely sometimes, it's good.

I look at this feeling of emptiness, loneliness, boredom, etc. as an

advantage.

When there is less water in the cup, there is more room. Beliefs are like
stones in a cup of water, the more stones, the less room. So not having set,
fixed, rigid beliefs actually turns out to be a good thing!

Feelings come and go. You'll always have time on your hands. How will
you spend it?

That's up to you.

Your optimism or pessimism will usually depend on something.

Sometimes we think of things in a positive light, sometimes in a negative
light. Some people are pessimistic by temperament; others optimistic.

There is nothing wrong with being pessimistic. And, on the other hand,
optimism is not always good.

You may not have a belief system now, but someday you will. You will
have a belief system if you're religious, secular, or not thinking about
"existence" at all. You will come to believe in certain things.

You just haven't lived long enough to believe that strongly one way or
another about these ideas.

Proof is always riddled with error. You will never have proof, but you will
come to believe in things.

You're telling a story about the world and your experience in the world.

It will always be a story.

"Every man believes he's in possession of the truth."

 62

One of my favorite writers said that. Robert Musil, in his opus, The Man
without Qualities.

If you want to exercise your mind, read that book.

You know the feeling of wanting desperately to know the answer to something. I enjoyed
writing this response to an anonymous 15 yr old. I don't think I'll spend the rest of my
days answering questions on Yahoo! Answers, but for a change of pace, it was a
worthwhile experience.
We enjoy helping each other out. Especially when we get to share our wisdom
and make a sincere connection.
 63

The Magic Pill, or Self-Destruction

Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you
come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself. --Philip Roth, qtd.
James Wood

A couple weeks ago, I watched a documentary called Bigger, Stronger, Faster. This
movie struck a nerve inside of me like no other movie has for the last six months. I
identified with the director's quest for answers about thorny and controversial issues
surrounding self-enhancement drugs. The synopsis for the movie states, "Metaphorically
we are a nation on steroids. Is it any wonder that so many of our heroes are on
performance enhancing drugs?"
Director Christopher Bell gives a portrait of America as a nation striving to be the
best in every sector, especially sports. And then he asks: at what point does our need to
be the best clash with doing the right thing? There is an underlying hypocrisy to being the
best in America. Oftentimes, winning means lying, cheating, or tweaking the rules.
Which makes one think that steroids are bad; end of story. But the movie
challenges our assumptions. In fact, I learned that anabolic steroids are neither as
dangerous nor as life-threatening as the government and the media will have us think. It
is only with excessive use that these drugs become detrimental, and even then the damage
to the body is reversible. However, anabolic steroids and street drugs have long been
grouped into the same category. Nobody is denying that there are undesirable side effects
to steroids, but the leading scientists confess to a genuine lack of evidence about long-
term dangers.
So then steroids and other self-enhancing drugs are okay? Right? The
documentary is adept at dismantling each new assumption. Midway through the movie I
began to see another side. There seemed to be some problems with using steroids that
went beyond the drug itself.
 64

The director interviews his own family to uncover these nuances. Mad Dog, his oldest
brother, refuses to grow up. He cannot handle working with his father in the office, and
we watch him prepare to leave for L.A. with his girlfriend, where he'll try to become a
professional wrestler. He swears by his use of steroids; without them he would be
nothing. There is a moment when the oldest brother talks about his dream to become a
professional wrestler. Sadness and desperation eke out of his voice, and his
monomaniacal conviction to follow his dream sounds slightly ridiculous. Strangely, Mad
Dog was the brother I identified with the most. He's chasing something called
"greatness".
The director's youngest brother, Smelly, coaches a high school wrestling team. He
thinks it's alright to use steroids as long as you are "old enough". But during the movie he
decides that he's going to stop taking steroids. His wife has recently had a child and the
family has become important to him. He promises his wife he'll quit but later in the
documentary he tells the camera he might go back.
I have a confession to make; I'm a recovering drug addict. I took Ritalin and
Adderall without a prescription for three years while I was in college. And . . . after
watching the documentary I began to justify self-enhancing drugs. The movie had some
salient points. What's wrong with taking a drug to perform better? We all do it. Some of
us have our coffee in the morning; others need a cigarette; others take their cholesterol
medicine. And if Ritalin or Adderall are used in moderation--just like anabolic steroids--
there are no real dangers.
Compound these rationalizations with the chance encounter I had with a short
article in the New York Times entitled "A Case for Pills to Boost your Brain."
"So then I'm not the only one who thinks it's okay to take Ritalin!"
It wasn't long before I was looking up prices for Ritalin and Adderall on the
Internet. Of course I didn't have a prescription, so I would have to order through some
shady Mexican pharmacy.

For those who are consumed by the need to be the best, a drug that promises an edge can
 65

mean the world. When your ability is your identity, the notion of a magic pill seduces. A
couple days ago my best friend told me about a drug called Provigil, which was originally
invented to treat narcolepsy. Since its inception in 1998, the drug has found countless
uses not only for narcoleptics but for anyone who wants to stay awake and pay attention.
Part of this drug's appeal is the surprising absence of side effects. Because it is stimulant-
like, and not an actual stimulant, the drug does not cause addiction.
Dr. Joyce Walsleben, director of the New York University Sleep Disorder Center,
writes, "Should people just use it because they'll feel better and stay awake? That's a
question for society to answer. Is Provigil better than drinking six cups of coffee and
getting an ulcer? Is it better to fall asleep and drive into a tree?" (Salon)
Ever since childhood I've dreamed of becoming someone different, someone
greater than myself. Even in adulthood I am swayed by a fantasy of sudden
transformation. I want to be the best at what I do--not a mediocre nobody. I want to be
someone. This urge is intrinsic in humans although we express it in different ways. All of
us want to be special, admired, loved, known.
I flirted with the idea of going back on cognitive-enhancing drugs. I sat in front of
the computer at 2 a.m. debating whether I should begin taking drugs again. What for?
Well, for one thing, I would like to be more productive. I'm not satisfied with my
level of output. To become a great writer, which is my goal, you have to write a lot. You
have to write every day, say, five to ten pages, or you'll never improve. I'm simply not
writing enough in order to meet this goal of mine. (I tell myself this over and over again.
I even feel guilty.) And I'm almost convinced that Ritalin or Adderall or Provigil is the
only thing that will transform me.
The next morning, I'm standing by the kitchen counter, preparing a bowl of cereal
for breakfast. I hear my girlfriend yell from upstairs, "Mad Dog is dead."
"Who?"
"Mad Dog. From the movie. He died in a rehab center this morning."
It has been nearly three weeks since I saw the documentary, but the characters
come back to me in an instant. The searching, conflicted director, the determined,
 66

monomaniacal brothers, the broken, defeated parents.

"What happened?" I ask my girlfriend.
"He took too many painkillers."
"Oh--"
Maybe I should reconsider my desire to be the best.
 67

How Does Pot Affect Your Mind Exactly?

Jamie Nadalin, a reader of the Blog of Innocence, recently posted this comment:

"During the day, I'm ceaselessly striving. I'm striving for a picture in my
mind. Every morning I wake up and try to attain this ideal. You can
imagine I'm regularly disappointed. But I brush off the disappointment--
I've learned to."

Your blog is a pleasure to visit, I'm very glad to have stumbled upon it. I
identify with the above quote very strongly. Not only am I regularly
disappointed but also disheartened by not achieving that mysterious goal.
Most often I do brush it off, but sometimes I can't help but feel like I've
failed. What's worse is the goal or picture in mind is so vague, I can't
rightly decide how it is I should improve myself or my approach.

I also want to ask you why you stopped smoking pot? You say your mind
is important to you, how does pot affect your mind exactly? you see, I
smoke on a regular basis, mostly because I think it's the only way to feel
any real motivation, there are other reasons of course but that's the main
one. Sometimes I want to quit though, I'm afraid it will turn me into some
kind of a blob, a slug. Is that what you felt as well?

My response:
So you too have had this experience . . .
From time to time, I feel as though I've failed in achieving my mysterious goal.
Especially when I consider my accomplishments from the point of view of my father; in
other words, how he sees me.
My whole life I've been striving for my father's validation. On the one hand, I've
done what I've wanted to do in life. I followed my dreams, my desires, my instincts. But
on the other, I look back over my shoulder, always thinking of him, and anticipating his
reaction.
I never feel recognized in my achievements by my father. Perhaps if I was leading
a more conventional life, with a high-paying career, a family and such, he would
recognize my success. As of now, I have done little to impress him. The last time I
impressed my father was when I graduated from college.
 68

It's a petty thing to need my father's approval, but this sort of thing dominates
many people's lives. For some it's the mother's approval. For me, it's my father. I'm living
the life my mother would have wanted for me. I run an arts and culture publication. I'm
creative; a writer. My life is in accord with her dreams as an artist.
So, when you say "failure", I think of myself through my father's eyes. Of course,
he would not say that I am a failure. Perhaps it's the reassurance that I'm not a failure
which I need from him. I know I'm not. But certain things that are important to him--my
ability to support myself, financial independence, etc.--demonstrate that I have fallen
short in his eyes.
Sure, he's pleased with my literary and creative accomplishments, but they mean
very little to him without a paycheck.
I love what you say here: “What's worse is the goal or picture in mind is so vague,
I can't rightly decide how it is I should improve myself or my approach.”
The mysterious goal we set for ourselves is meant to be vague. This is so that we
can never actually attain it! So that we must continue striving, and achieving all sorts of
things, but never anything that truly satisfies us.
The logic goes that if we were satisfied, then we would stop living. There would
be no reason to continue doing anything in life.

We make the goal of our lives, our "destiny" per say--elusive. It must remain elusive for
us, or we won't have a desire to keep going.
If your goal is to retire and move to Puerto Rico, like one of my uncles, then you
attain it eventually and you move to Puerto Rico. This is not a mysterious goal. This is a
concrete goal. And when you are there, you may do like my uncle did. He bought a house
that overlooks the ocean and he sits on his roof and admires the view, or he drinks
whiskey and watches the stock market ticker.
He has no elusive goal before him. He is done with life. Ask him, and he'll say
there is nothing more.
You say, "I can't rightly decide how it is I should improve myself or my
 69

approach."
If you have a desire to live, you will improve yourself. We live in a culture of
self-improvement and half the time this seems like the disease and not the cure. You are
always improving your approach toward achieving your mysterious goal in that you are
re-defining your goal and goals constantly.
As long as you are actively re-imagining your goals in life, you are coming closer
to what you really want to do.
You ask me why I stopped smoking pot. This is a big question. First of all, I'm a
recovering drug addict and I shouldn't have been smoking pot in the first place. I had
what you call a relapse.
So when I was smoking pot recently, I was not leisurely smoking it. I was
compulsively smoking it. I went out and bought a $150 glass bong. I took bong hits
nightly.
And I didn't really enjoy the experience. You can read my essay "How many of us
are self-medicating" to get an idea of the situation.
Yes, the mind is important to me. What I mean by this is I depend on my mind. I
depend on my mind as a creative person, as a writer and intellectual.
I've done the experiment. Meaning, I've tested it out whether I'm more or less
creative, more or less effective, while stoned.
Usually, while high, I have lots of interesting thoughts in my head. And I tend to
end up on Twitter. Smitten by my own thoughts, I want to share them. I'll tweet
something profound and wait for people to respond.
When I write high, however, only 1 in every 10 times does something articulate
and meaningful get manifested. A lot of time it is just manic thought patterns and I don't
have the wherewithal to compose a single coherent article, essay, or poem.
But I'm not going to lie, sometimes I tap into a profound stream of thoughts and
I'm able to get them down on paper. For example, the Preface to the Blog of Innocence
was written while I was stoned.
Every individual is different. You say you're more motivated while high. For me,
 70

I'm not more motivated, I'm more manic. And just because I'm manic, having racing
thoughts, doesn't necessarily translate into motivation to produce a solid result.
I didn't worry that smoking would turn me into a lazy, unmotivated slob. My
personality is Type A, so there's little fear of that. I do too much in life, which is why I
gravitate toward drugs. I seem to need them to help me relax, to unwind, and to stop
working.
So when I was smoking pot on a regular basis I would get all of my work done
first. Pot was my reward at the end of the day.
But this didn't work out for me because I would stay up all night when I smoked.
Smoking interfered with my cycle. I wouldn't wake up until the afternoon. And during
the day, I noticed a bit of cloudiness.
I wasn't lazy. I didn't stop working. I just began to feel as though my brain wasn't
at its peak performance. That's all.
And my brain is important to me. In fact, my life depends on the performance of
my brain. I'm a writer, a thinker and an intellectual. I want my mind in the best possible
condition for writing these essays, and running my website and business Escape into Life.
 71

With the Passage of Time

Throughout the course of a day, many battles are fought. The mere fact of having a
physical body creates stress--whether in the form of exhaustion, bouts of emotion,
anxiety. But the alternative, floating around in some amoeba-like wavy film, doesn't
sound any more appealing.
And so we have this body. I've been a bit unhappy with my body--now into my
thirties, I lack the motivation to lose the weight I've gained in the last year. This requires
discipline and for a long time, I've avoided the necessary restraint to curb my appetites.
I wonder if as we get older we lose certain motivations. I'm obsessive about
writing, reading, and my work--those things seem to motivate me to a fault--but the care
of the body, once a concern, no longer matters.
I'm sort of embarrassed to say that I don't care for my body as I once did. Because
the real reason for this is I don't have anyone to impress. There are no women I'm trying
to woo, or otherwise get their attention, have dinner with, etc.
Since my late twenties, I've socialized less and less, and my circle of intimates has
narrowed.
By choosing to marry, you can prevent the circumstances I've just described. You
may be lonely in another sense, but you'll never feel isolated. If anything (and I'm
speculating here because I'm not married), you'll feel crowded or as my mother used to
put it, "I feel like I'm drowning."
My mother was a fierce individualist, an artist, and not really suited to raising a
family or having children. But she did and I acquired many of her traits for
contemplation, creativity, solitude and private work.
She used to keep journals in her art studio, many of them handmade. She bound
her own sketchbooks and journals. I remember seeing the half-cut fabrics in the laundry
room beside reams of thread. But she stored her journals downstairs, in a chest of
drawers. My mother's art studio had immaculate white walls and was filled with
repurposed furniture and random objects cluttering the floor.
 72

She created scenes with the furniture, rugs, or whatever she found around the house. Her
models sat under giant floodlights, and for hours my mother would stand at a canvas and
translate this imaginary situation into a painting. The window of her studio regularly
appeared in her paintings, with a view of our suburban enclave, a privileged world
protected by a gate.
It was a beautifully landscaped, dead conglomerate of houses. The houses were so
big and set apart that it was an inconvenience to visit people. You would have to drive to
their house just to say hello.
As a teenager, the vastness of the subdivision inspired many adventures on my
bike. I charted the territory available to me. Originally a golf course, which had been
transformed into a gated community, there were several large ponds, always with a great
deal of Canadian geese squawking and shitting in the grass. I remember the exact color of
the grass on most days. It was dark green. Around the ponds were massive weeping
willow trees and I used to stand on the tops of the roots jutting out of the ground.
Sometimes there were nooks in the bottom branches, where you could sit and watch the
cars go by.
The grounds of the Midwest Club, where I lived, were expansive. Cul de sacs
snaking up hills, and new houses always being built, large, preposterous modern ones. I
used to to explore the construction sites with a friend, and we collected those bottle-cap
things. The little metal caps were scattered in the sawdust, and we filled our pockets with
them.
The basements, I recall. Most basements of the houses we couldn't go down into;
there wasn't a staircase built yet. But we peered into the gaping hole that extended into
shadows and frameworks for rooms. We marveled at this part of the house, I imagine,
because it was so inaccessible.
In time, every basement we peered into would become a finished one, with lush
carpets and modern cooling devices to keep the temperature just right. Some of the
basements would be equipped with small movie theaters or bowling alleys. The general
 73

rule of the place where I lived was that every year a newer, more elaborate house would
be built. The new house in the subdivision with a waterfall, indoor gardens, and running
streams, would inevitably provoke gossip and cause the other residents to look with envy
as they drove back to their humble, dated mansions.
This probably explains why I wanted to spend so much of my later adolescence
outside of the house, and the neighborhood, for that matter. Our environments
undoubtedly shape our personalities, and when I was younger, I remember being by
myself a lot. Whether it was amid the vastness of the gated community or sequestered
inside my own large house, it was a common experience that repeated itself.
It seems I had more friends when I was younger, but at every stage of my life I've
felt a disconnect between myself and others. I felt this even when I had made friends in
high school or college; my friendships were always private and never in large groups.
They were also tenuous. When a friend was accepted into a larger group, I was usually
left on my own. I'm not wallowing here--that's just how things turned out for me. And I
kind of liked being by myself.
Of course, a part of us desires what we don't have, and so, I did long for
acceptance and to be part of a larger group. But my personality never allowed for it.
Another way to put this is I didn't fit in.
And now that I'm thirty years old, soon to be thirty-one, I'm slowly recognizing
why things are the way they are for me.
We tend to forget the past, and how we developed into individuals. I feel stuck
when I forget my past, like a coma has obscured some vital reference points. And these
instances of my separation from others, where I lived, how I grew up, describe my
tendency toward contemplation and creativity, as opposed to other forms of immersion,
like social immersion, which has always made me slightly uncomfortable.
I understand why I'm on my own, and it doesn't bother me as much as it used to.
I've always wanted this, even though I may have pretended otherwise.
Every choice in life implies the loss of another. Since I was very young, I chose to
cultivate my interior world. And that's where my poems come from, and these essays.
 74

Strangely enough, when I write these essays, I'm consciously reaching out to the
world. The fact that my interiority changes to its opposite makes me think that while
we're always "on our own," we also have this place to meet others, through language and
art. It's a wonderful hidden doorway, and I'm passing through it a lot these days.
 75

The Undiscovered Self

Examine the spirits that speak in you. Become critical. --Carl Jung

For Christmas, my girlfriend bought me The Red Book by Carl Jung. It's a
gigantic book with spellbinding illustrations and exquisite German calligraphy--the
second part of the book is a lengthy introduction and translation of the work.
I used to read a lot of Jung. As an adolescent, I went through a Jung phase. I recall
reading the fat white psychoanalytic volumes, The Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious, Symbols of Transformation, Alchemical Studies . . .
What drew me to these scholarly works I could barely understand? It was the
prolonged stage of my life when I always had a book in front of me, my eyes fixed on the
pages, almost obsessively. And yet, if you were to ask me to explain what I was reading I
couldn't tell you--
Jung's scholarly work was elusive enough to capture my imagination. I could
project anything onto the pages--and I underlined and highlighted furiously. I communed
with these books I hardly understood.
Buddhism was something I experimented with for about five years. This was the
period of my sobriety--after years of drug abuse. Disciplined, vegetarian, clean and sober,
I exercised profound control over all areas of my life. I meditated, read spiritual books,
and only on occasion wanted my life to be otherwise.
Eventually I grew away from this rigid lifestyle. Somewhere I faltered. I stopped
going to Zen "sits". I went out to bars once in awhile. Picked up smoking.

New Age spiritualism turned me off. Not that Jung ever belonged to that movement. But
he practically heralded it, and whenever I would think of Jung, I would think of those
New Age bookstores sprouting up everywhere in the city. So I stopped thinking about
him.
At the tail end of another reckless period of my life, I've returned to Dr. Carl Jung.
 76

Over Christmas, I read The Undiscovered Self. My father has an entire shelf devoted to
Jung. My impulse was to read as much as I could before plunging into The Red Book, so
as to understand it better . . .
The story behind The Red Book is this. At the time of Jung's death, an unfinished
manuscript entitled "The Red Book" was discovered. It was stated in his will that all of
his published, scholarly work should be made available to the public, but Jung did not
take a position one way or the other on "The Red Book."
This may have been because "The Red Book" did not fit into an easy
categorization for one of the founders of psychoanalytic theory--it was a creative work.
Inspired by Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Carl Jung set out to write an account of
his "fantasies," or confrontations with his unconscious. The book began as a series of
notebooks, called "black books," which were then used to create the final version of "The
Red Book".
I am a lover of pictures. If you know anything about my online presence, you will
know that I post an enormous amount of images on the Escape into Life Tumblr. Turning
the pages of Jung's Red Book, I sense a similar visual tendency in him--an obsession with
design, color, typography . . . and then the tale itself, which has been described as both
archaic and modern, fascinates me. But I haven't begun reading it yet; I've only thumbed
through the German text, a visual treat, a cornucopia of symbols.
Let me return to my experience on Christmas night, reading The Undiscovered
Self. It's important, I feel, because it cemented my convictions about quitting drugs and
alcohol for the last time. I sensed from before that my obsession with drugs was a
chimera, but I had to go through the heavy use one more time. I had to re-learn what I
had forgotten.

I had been tempted by the promise of a carefree life. It started with a girl and proceeded
from there, to smoking cigarettes, to going out to the bars, to taking drugs. The
disciplined life seemed so austere, so dry, and unnecessary. I wanted something new. I
craved novelty.
 77

But this was not novelty. This was repetition. I had been here before--like a blind
rat turning the same corner, entering the same dead end. My conception of myself never
changes. It is a wonderful script because it is so utterly the same; I live it over and over
and over again.
The Undiscovered Self:

When the fantasies reach a certain level of intensity, they begin to break
through into consciousness and create a conflict situation that becomes
perceptible to the patient himself, splitting him into two personalities with
different characters.
Fantasy does this to me--it splits me into two different people, each in conflict with the
other. I fantasize about drugs or women, about getting high or having a romantic
encounter, and soon I'm at war with myself. I'm at war with the part of me that wants to
get high or have sex and the part of me that thinks it's not such a good idea.
And the fantasy grows. It grows until it tears me apart, and the next thing I know,
I'm acting out that other person--the cheater, the liar, the addict.
What does it take to keep the human passions in line? It seems I barely manage.
With advertisements everywhere telling me to eat this and buy that, I wonder how
modern man is able to have a mind of his own. We're pulled out of ourselves constantly.
But I don't need Hollywood pulling me out of myself when I have a built-in fantasy
world doing it for me.

The Undiscovered Self:

This task is so exacting, and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he

forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and
putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being. In this
way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the
products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality.

How these lines resonate with me! I've even chosen the name "Lethe" for my alter ego.
 78

Lethe comes from the River of Forgetfulness in Greek mythology. I've been using the
name in my fiction for years. When I read the words, "he forgets himself in the process,"
I smile. Because that's why I chose the name to represent me. I forget. And my
forgetfulness is my character, my original sin.
But let's talk about what Jung says here: "putting his own conception of himself in
place of his real being."
What does it mean? It means that our conscious self, or ego--constituted primarily
by its aspirations and inner problems, by its suffering--is merely an idea of the self, and
not the real self.
How do I know this is true? Because mostly who I parade in front of my friends is
who I think I am--it's the elaborate narrative I've subsumed into my personality. And if
you're a writer, like me, you're good at telling stories.
My "conception" is essentially a story I have about myself. It has a pattern-like
quality. No matter what happens to me in my life, what unusual events befall me,
experience is sublimated by my ego or conscious self. I absorb everything into my
conception of myself. And I live in the (fake) knowledge of myself. But this is only my
conscious self, and sadly, it is a fraction of my spiritual person.
When Jung says "the products of his conscious activity progressively replace
reality," he is talking about the negative potential of thoughts. Each thought that occurs,
sometimes with a strong force of emotion, perpetuates the illusion of the conscious self
and further separates us from reality. We lose touch with the immensity of human
experience when we live inside the repetitive script of our conscious, thinking selves.
The irony of being human is that we seek to escape our "selves." We are drawn to
novelty and new experiences, new lovers, new foods, new ideas . . . The irony is that
within the confines of limited ego-consciousness, we are determined to find a way out.
Our escapes, however, only leads us back to our known selves.
So then, what is true novelty? What is true unknowingness?
It is outside my conception of myself. Outside my conscious ego. Outside the
person who I think I am.
 79

I'm sick of repeating the same dramas in my life. Perhaps you too have some of
these. I just wonder if I can trust in something that is unknown. How do I learn to trust in
the unconscious, which by definition, I do not know what it is?
This is the world of Carl Jung. The collective unconscious. Accessed through
dreams. Or meditation. Or what Jung called "practicing active imagination."
What will we find on the other side of our conscious selves? Who will we
discover?
Life is depressing if you always know what to expect. The same mood of
dissatisfaction, the same loneliness, the same longings, the same annoyances. But when
you realize that there is this whole other way to view yourself, namely through not-
knowing who you are instead of through knowing, then life begins to feel like it might be
sufferable, or better yet, it might even be fun.

END OF VOLUME ONE