full moon

"he had, had, this was of removing all excitement from things with a few words. not even well-chosen words: he's that way by instinct. when they would go to the movies he would fall asleep. he fell asleep during nibelungen. he missed atilla the hun roaring in from the east to wipe out the burgundians. franz loved films but this was how he watched them, nodding in and out of sleep. 'you're the cause-and-effect man,' she cried. how did he connect together the fragments he saw while his eyes were open?"
~ gravity's rainbow

granted, this is just a passage from a book of epic proportions. granted, there is a lot of context, a lot of precursing, weaved into these words. but one of the things that i enjoy most about literature is that, in general, sentences and paragraphs are sometimes almost works of art all their own, and have a tangible value set apart from the rest of the work. maybe even these things wouldn't have been possible, perhaps they never would have been imagined, created, unless the author had all the previous stepping-stones to skip around on. but in turn, sometimes i write entire pages of crap that turn out to be worthwhile (in my mind) just for a scrap....a sentence, a word in new light; maybe even just a feeling.

doesn't it see impossible, to piece together the fragments that we see only while our eyes are open? let's take this at its most literal, in its hardest granite form. you are asleep, and something significant is altered. a pet dies. a significant other cheats on you. anything. waking, your world has changed....but it is completely lost to you in a temporal gap, a sliver of thought between cognizance last and cognizance next, and it has affected so much that direct impacts you. now your time, your actualization of the event, becomes borrowed time - you attempt to catch up with the world, but can one ever really break stride with something that marches persistently on, never stopping for a breath? we are perpetually out of sync with the sequences of photographs flying in front of our faces. our lives, as we know them, cover some 70, some 80, some 90 years. how much of that can we call our own? can we own a war, in our lifetime, if we do nothing to influence it, nothing to disarm it? if it exists outside of our spheres?

let's tumble worldviews off of the table, however; what i would really enjoy digging into is how this structures a personality....or, more accurately, how a personality filters the utter bombardment of experience that the world is constantly pitching (now a fastball, now a change-up) directly in our faces. step outside your door; take a brisk autumn stroll in this full moonlight. grab a notepad to take along with you. come back and, what did you see? what did you think? were those things correlated to one another? if you mapped it out, somehow, would it be intelligible; could you dive headfirst into it and explain, logically and soundly, how you progressed from square one to whatever ecstasy or depression you were mired in when you returned? a mind, isolated, reveals its fundamentals.
but i doubt you could explain all those hops. rarely, it seems to me, do we check our thoughts.

but here i stand, supposedly, offering you a vibrant storyboard of all your brainwaves, all your free-flowing associations and tangential interruptions and fortitudes and anxieties. can you tweak them; can you turn a dial, slightly, in photoshop-blur fashion, and alter something - can you turn this dial in my storyboard as easily as you can turn your head during your moonlight stroll? does that accomplish the same thing? do you ever choose the low road, simply because you know the high road so well? and the point is: what has that changed?

"did you see the woman in the red dress, neo? look again."

it dawns upon me that this world is infinitely rich; far too much exists to keep track of. when i do something as simple as turning my head, i have abandoned a solid 240 or so degrees of sight, of sense, of potential influence upon my mind and its understanding of things. i know this example is absurdity because we have no other choice; i welcome this absurdity. push it forward. when i narrow my focus; when i hinge my mind upon the world such that i can apply myself fully, such as writing this or that word, here, now.....my perspective has dimmed almost to absolute darkness...i find myself looking at a 1" x 1" square, if that. i have a full sphere of rotation for my sight...standing on the surface of the earth, i choose to look at a single star. in photography, however, the smaller the amount of light you let in, the sharper your overall picture becomes. food for thought. but that is contradictory to the point so i will abandon it~

we all pretend to be these fully-aware, fully-composed beings. we absorb the world around us, but when it comes down to it, our selectiveness is absolutely, postitively absurd. the world eclipses our composition to such an extreme that it seems an impossibility to advance any further than childhood wonder~ the more i learn, the more naive it seems to me that any concept of "knowledge" is considered to be valid. i must reign my thoughts in; they flare wayward. how did he connect together the fragments he saw while his eyes were open? we develop habits, erratic pieces (peaces) upon which we choose to align our individual focus-sets and mental toolboxes. it is staggering to me, at this moment, that our concept of fludity, of a smoothly-flowing stream of constancy, can be applied to the world as we experience it today. the world is an unknown; a massive labyrinth with minotaurs roaming the grounds, and we hold tight our creature-comforts, steady the wheel towards them and try not to look back.

i'm exhausted and my mind has become somewhat muddled on the topic. i'm certain that this comes through to some degree already (le sigh). perhaps i can pick this up tomorrow...but by then a world of differences and two million possible muses will have crossed my path. one more sun.