~ science has been speculating for years now how humanity might go about terraforming Mars... how about we re-terraform the Earth first, and make a garden of eden thereof, instead of flying out into untravelled spaces of the stars ~

(circa 2006, by me)

Il fut un temps, bien avant notre ère, (environ le sixième siècle,) le premier maître du Zen traversa des montagnes féroces et des fleuves impassibles de l'Inde jusqu'au temple Shaolin en Chine. Aussitôt qu'il arriva à la montagne où se trouve le temple Shaolin, il décida de se mettre à une méditation qui dura neuf années. Pourtant, pendant la troisième année de méditation, il se fut endormi et arracha ses paupières afin qu'il ne puisse jamais s'endormir pendant sa méditation une autre fois de plus. Puis, les vieilles paupières de Bodhidharma atterrirent sur la terre riche du printemps et les premières plantes de thé poussèrent. C'est ainsi que tous les moines du Zen Bouddhisme boivent du thé pour qu'ils puissent ne pas s'endormir pendant leur méditation.

When I was an idealistic freshman at Reed College, I met an extraordinary scholar. He was a senior, well dressed and ready for his oral thesis defense. One day I sat with him outside for lunch. A small crowd had gathered around him as he entertained questions pertaining to his thesis, in preparation for his impending defense. His thesis was bold and unequivocal: "All institutions are fundamentally corrupt; ethical institutions on this planet do not exist." He related his thesis somehow to the political philosophy of John Rawls, and also to the Talmud, though how he synthesized his information now escapes me. That evening, I saw him outside the Paradox Café. He asked me if he could borrow a quarter so he could buy a cigarette. Since I admired him so much, I said: "Sure. But just know I hope you are trying to quit; smoking is such a repugnant habit." "Zach, if you knew why I smoke cigarettes, you would not say that..." "Oh? Well, um, so why do you smoke?" "I'll tell you after I get the cig." He lit his cigarette, and said: "A couple years ago I was out on a lake with my best friend. Something happened to the canoe. I tried to save him. He drowned. Since then I have been a chain-smoker." "My God. I don't know what to say. I am so sorry, man." That was the last I heard from him. A year later I found out he had committed suicide. He had finished his oral defense and handed in the final draft of his thesis, was ready to receive his diploma, when Reed told him that he could not graduate because the way in which he fulfilled his science requirement was untenable according to their standards of excellence. He killed himself soon thereafter.

My relationship with America is like most people's relationship with their parents: in their presence you find all the comforts of home, but sometimes, more often than not, you want to move as far away from them as possible; their very existence embarrasses you to no end...

Whitman sounding his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world was probably even more manic than Jesus storming into temples scolding rabbis in aramaic verse.

This afternoon I had tea at L'Aroma Café. Upstairs, a lone musician was playing a free gig. I was his lone audience member. He was playing mostly originals, but after three or four songs, broke out into "I've Just Seen a Face" by the Beatles. I began to weep senselessly, and continued to weep for the remainder of his gig.

One day, you might open your indolent eyes, and notice that the most compassionate bodhisattvas happen to be living in your backyard, and the most passionate poets happen to be your best friends.

The following is my feminist theory of poetry. To all who think this is a masculinist argument, I will cross intellectual swords with you until death: Poetry is womb-envy. The most masculine poets are driven by the most feminine impulsion of them all: to create and care for children; to produce progeny. Note that I did not say FEMALE impulsion, but FEMININE impulsion. Feminine impulsions occur in both men and women alike. Poetry occurs in both men and women alike. Strong women can have womb-envy and strong men can have penis-envy. It is a tired topic to talk of lesbians with penis-envy. The greatest lesbian of all time, Sappho of Lesbos herself, had a really bad case of womb-envy: she pretty much invented the Western lyric. Scholars may find examples of Western lyricism that predate Sappho, but Sappho remains the paragon of all Western lyricism, end of story. It does not trouble my argument that Sappho may also have entertained male consorts. Sappho's greatest love was neither for women nor for men: it was for poetry. More often than not, those who are most possessed by poetry have no children. Poets who follow Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, and Rexroth's insight that "too much poetry is bad for the organism," may elect one day to have children. Kenneth Rexroth, a supremely masculine and uniformly heterosexual poet, was so comfortable inhabiting the feminine that he wrote an entire collection of poems from the perspective of a Japanese heterosexual woman. Perhaps there is a tipping point at which the most perfect act of femininity collapses into its opposite, and the masculine and feminine are reconciled within the person of the poet, in spite of the poet's gender.

The first time I remember writing an original poem was for a 3rd grade class at the École Active Bilingue in Paris. I learned how to speak English before learning to speak French, but learned to write in French before learning to write in English. The teacher asked the class to write a poem (in French) following the rhyme-scheme of another poet. I did not fully understand the directions and wrote a poem about a Guinea Pig using a rhyme-scheme I invented myself. When I showed the poem to my teacher, she scolded me and said I did not pay close enough attention to the instructions that she explicitly explained. She proceeded to rip up my poem and throw it in the trash. To this day I still remember the first two stanzas of my poem, although the last two stanzas escape me. Thinking back on it now, I find an element of poetic justice in the fact that my first memory of total and abject humiliation coincided with my first memory of writing poetry, a pursuit that today is my most passionate and consuming.

To take the self as an object and to take the other as a subject are both objectificatory processes. Vice versa: to take the self as a subject and the other as an object are also both objectificatory processes. Prior to linguistically-structured thought, the self is not an object nor is the other a subject. Prior to linguistically-structured thought, there is only selfless and otherless awareness, life unqualified. Many in the field of mainstream psychology/psychiatry argue that when adult human beings begin to operate in the aforementioned state (in which the self/other dichotomy collapses) it is a regression to infant solipsism, and the person in question is psychotic. Solipsism implies that I, or self, alone exists. However: the selfless and otherless awareness of an infant cannot be solipsistic, because both the solipsism of subjectivity (I) and the anti-solipsism of objectivity (You) are mere conceptual inferences that originate only from linguistically-structured thought. If the aforementioned state is one of psychosis, then we must reduce most great artists and great mystics to lunatics. My first axiom, in other words, is: Both the subjectification of self and the objectification of other are objectificatory processes. By "objectificatory" I mean framed, contextualized, spatially and temporally located. Linguistically-structured thought is a constant framing, contextualization, and locating of basic and ineffable awareness, of life unqualified. A controversial point: Many assume that the most psychotic rapist necessarily objectifies the raped. I argue that this is a misunderstanding of objectification. The most psychotic rapist does not subjectify the self nor objectify the other. The most psychotic rapist is an empty vessel through which primordial compulsions take place. This is NOT an argument for raping people. It is an argument for understanding more competently and holistically one type of consciousness that compels persons to commit the most horrific crimes. Without the framing, contextualizing, and locating of awareness (life unqualified), demonic forces tend to manifest themselves: so-called psychosis, schizophrenia, mania, etc. These forces are not intrinsically evil. Kahlil Gibran says: "What is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?" He goes on to say: "Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters." I offered psychotic rape as the most extreme example of demonic possession. There are innumerable others. I am not talking about literal demons, for any who are confused by my use of religious terminology. Prior to subjectivity and objectivity, neither good nor evil exists. Nonetheless, we live in a society whose very foundation rests on the assumption that linguistically-structured thought can realistically apprehend the world. We cannot become anti-social automata who eat grass and ingest the sunlight. Anarcho-primitivism is untenable. I have only read a single book by Jacques Derrida: "The Gift of Death." Derrida's main argument in the above text is endlessly significant but endlessly unintelligible. Many of you may think my words are also unintelligible. If so, I challenge you to take a look at "The Gift of Death." There is only one thesis I took from the text in question: that religion's highest aim is not simply the rapture of the unificatory state of mystical consciousness, (in which linguistically-structured thought collapses), but the process of fully engaging in the infinite ethical conundrums that come with the advent of subjectivity and objectivity, self and other. Mystical consciousness without (necessarily objectificatory) ethical frameworks leads persons like the infamous guru Adi Da to rape all of his consorts and to financially exploit all of his followers. It is what led Manson, who declared "All is One" and "I am Nobody" to kill innumerable beings. The holistic or integral approach to religion/mysticism includes both the collapse and embrace of all dichotomization. The worst mystics are those who "attain heaven in one leap and leave a demon their place." (Meister Eckhart.) The worst political activists are those who seek to exorcise demons only in others, and to create heaven on earth without finding the kingdom of heaven within themselves. When Gandhi was asked if his work was truly altruistic, he responded by dialectically inverting the notion that all true moral action is exclusively for the sake of others: Gandhi replied: "What I do is for my self and my self alone." Gandhi was both a genius political activist and a serious spiritual seeker, though he too had his flaws and idealizations. As a side note, I recently read a quote that says, "Our actions are mostly flaws stitched together with good intentions." I like that. Although I always intend to do good, I fail again and again, ad perpetuem. Nonetheless, I will not cease from cultivating my greatest intentions. I wrote earlier that even the advent and exponential proliferation of objectification itself has only ever happened within the vast fields of subjectivity we call persons. In actuality I believe neither in subjectivity nor objectivity, but both are unavoidable modes in which we must learn to function. Another way of framing this paradox is that even duality is nondual; or, in clearer terms, that even when we experience ourselves as subjects and others as objects, and vice versa, that too is happening within (and as) the basic, ineffable awareness of unqualified life, which never came from anywhere and has nowhere to go. Many may point out that my own philosophical verbiage is extremely objectificatory. It is. Whitman knew that contradiction was not necessarily a bad thing. Whitman was large and contained multitudes. I aspire to be more like him. With that said, please go out for a beer with your friends, read a good poem, take a hot bath, go to bed, whatever. I am going to take my own advice now and go to bed, with the hope that tomorrow I become a little bit less of a demon than I was yesterday, and the day before.

In the final analysis, no comprehensive theory of art will ever inspire good artists as well as good art itself. It is better to follow your intuition than to follow theoretical prescriptions. Nonetheless, my intuition led me to write what I believe is good theory, which itself is a kind of art and also can be written with nothing but love. The last thing I want to do however is confuse the territory with the map. But maps can be cool too. Especially if they glow in the dark and illuminate the territory.

Thinking about how my recent essay makes me sound anti-formalist. Formalism is the idea that in order to apprehend or evaluate a work of art you do not need historical or cultural context, nor do you need autobiography. I actually agree with this in more cases than not, though never absolutely. Take the "petals on a wet black bough" poem by Ezra Pound. I do not need to know that Pound was a fascist, or that he liked to carry luxurious canes or whatever, in order to understand his poem. The form is Pound's haiku-esque concision; the function is what it conveys. Some might say that the poem's function is purely aesthetic... but aesthetic is never really an isolated category. Usually an aesthetic experience means we have been impacted on a spiritual or emotional level. This impact has pragmatic consequences concerning how we view and react to our world. Art is a symbiotic and not a solipsistic experience.

Axiom: all art is a form of communication. In primitive times, art necessarily needed to approximate objects as closely as possible, since humanity was just beginning to break out of the shell of subjectivity for the purpose of an efficacious society. As systems of objectification became more and more complex, the function of art necessitated a dialectical inversion: art moved away from pragmatic to aesthetic functions, and the gulf between the two categories of communication became wider and wider. The function of increasingly anti-pragmatic, and purely aesthetic art was to realign us with primordial subjectivity, which is exactly antithetical to art's most basic purpose. Jackson Pollock, when asked if he was inspired by Nature, responded: "I AM nature." This statement suggests that Pollock felt his artwork was not a means of REPRESENTING nature, but a process of REUNITING his alienated and objectified self with nature's primordial forces. Thus his artwork focuses on PROCESS more than PRODUCT, another dialectical inversion. Against Greenberg, who argues that modernist art is perfect because it serves no function, I argue that the function of modernist art is enigmatic because it is paradoxical: it seeks to communicate the incommunicable; it functions as a portal to that which is beyond functional endeavor. Nonetheless, now that humanity has seen the dialectical inversion of the purpose of art, with all kinds of non-representational movements from modernism to dadaism, the new function should not be to privilege subjectivity over objectivity, aesthetic over pragmatic, or vice versa, but to jettison and embrace BOTH categories and produce art that dissolves any sense of isolated purposes. Although some might shirk from the connotation of these two terms, which stem from outside academia, I call this approach to art: holistic, or integral.

Facebook is a sophisticated attempt to objectify subjective experience. The original objectifier is language itself. The origin of language is the image: the ideogram or pictogram.

In primitive times the distinctions between language, poetry, and art did not exist. All symbol-making (objectification) was a form of communication. (Non-symbolic communication exists, but it does not objectify.) There was no dichotomy between pragmatic and aesthetic communication: the gap between form and function was not so apparent, if not altogether nonexistent. The conclusion I draw from this is that all good art should move us in ways that are both aesthetic and pragmatic: the effect of the most purely aesthetic poem should have pragmatic consequences, and vice versa. By "pragmatic consequences" I do not simply mean "utilitarian applications" or "moral lessons" but consequences in our emotional, psychological, political, or spiritual life that extend from, and ultimately extend beyond, the moment of aesthetic contemplation. Most art that is exclusively formal (a mere display of technique) is likely unpalatable, as in the music of Joe Stump. On the other side of the spectrum, art that is exclusively functional is also unpalatable, as in the propagandist painting of Stalinism. Art's highest aim is the unity of function and form.

Two understatements: I consider the music of Joe Stump exhibitionistic, and Stalinist painting dogmatic. Facebook tends to produce overt exhibitionism as well as propagate covert dogma. A great deal of Facebook photos are like Joe Stump arpeggios: undeniably novel, but often vapid. Furthermore, a great deal of Facebook photos are also like Stalinist paintings: the dogma they disperse is sometimes unapparent if left critically unexamined. The most persistent dogma that many Facebook photos are culpable of propagating is explained by the hip catch-phrase: "Pics or It Didn't Happen," which implies: if it does not exist objectively, it has no reality. I do not think we have fully grasped that uncanny implication of this watchword, which is often used pseudo-ironically to mask our belief in it.

Facebook is the most advanced form of objectification the world has ever known, and by consequence it is the most advanced means by which the value of subjective experience is being undermined. Please note: I am not against objectification. I am a logophiliac. There is no way back to the Eden of prelinguistic society. Art and poetry (like many aspects of religion) is the attempt to use symbols to represent that which transcends symbolic communication and linguistic society itself. I claim that even something as commonplace as a Facebook photo or status update can have this kind of transcendental power, if the Facebook user wields her medium like a gifted artist. (This does not mean that every Facebook photo should be artsy or every status update poetic. I am not championing so-called high culture at the expense of so-called low culture. A post that endorses the latest Lady Gaga music video can open hearts and minds just as well as any post about Lord Byron, if done in the spirit of beneficence and not solely to showcase personal cultural consciousness. Everyone knows that the latter approach devolves into games of one-upmanship. I know because I too am guilty.) A maxim for all gifted Facebook artists might be the following: "a good picture can be worth a thousand words, and a single sentence can be worth a thousand bad pictures."

The medium is not the problem. The problem is: how are we using it? I have no prescriptions where the "how" is concerned. I make status updates about anything from Ellie Goulding to Arthur Schopenhauer. I don't think it really matters, but I do think one thing does matter: intention. What do we intend to do when we are posting a photo or a thought? Is it mere exhibitionism or do we care about how what we share will affect others? Even quotidian humor affects others in positive ways; there is no formula, only the possibility of a greater awareness of intention.

I believe in what the German poet Hölderlin once said: "Where the danger is, there the healing power also grows." Let's keep moving forward with technological and 21st Century objectification, but with real care and critical concern. Nonetheless, let us remember that even the advent and exponential proliferation of objectification itself has only ever happened within the vast fields of subjectivity we call persons.

this is merely a test