Mumei Yume

I will soon begin a series of vignettes to promote the excellent band, Special Dental Team, which will be releasing a 5-track EP at some point this year. They began six years ago, in 2002, and have since split into three separate parts of the world, but their upcoming EP will continue the music.

Concurrently, I have begun my fiction workshop class with Pinckney Benedict at SIUC. In addition to suggesting we begin crafting work which we will share with the class in a few weeks, he has assigned us a project of “ludic writing,” which seems to be an experience of intense play that is used to inform writing. While he did not say so explicitly, I gather this experience to be a return to the imaginative play I indulged in as a child: back then I completely lost myself in the characters and situations I put myself in. He had a couple suggestions to begin: he suggested running through the woods with a partner, alternating hunting and being hunted, but his primary suggestion was to enjoy games with specific rules. He suggested taking these games seriously, imagining them as if we were acting the roles we represented in the game. He had significantly more to say about the topic–more, in fact, than I could grasp quickly enough to note–but my immersion in his lecture did not make me an expert. Giving me this basic idea of the concept gave me inspiration to try it whole-heartedly, though, and use it towards this Special Dental Team project.

Before I start, I essayed with another technique he mentioned in class: ekphrasis. “Ekphrasis or ecphrasis is the graphic, often dramatic description of a visual work of art. In ancient times it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ek and phrasis, ‘out’ and ’speak’ respectively, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name” (Wikipedia, 8/21/2008). Inspired by these techniques but unsure of where to start, I sought random Special Dental Team music, and came up with the track “Mumei Yume.” I closed my eyes and indulged in the music, using it to craft a situation in my mind which I will soon put myself in:

Having risen, I arrive at and stroll through the woods, carrying great importance. Spirits of my people accompany me; I have left them for life. I have passed forever from them for a corporeal body. I cannot touch or feel them, but I know they feel me. I remember. I seek them through meditation in the day, when they are most active: for hours I quiet myself near a nurtured tree, feeling to feel them again.

I moved slowly in death. Life is fast and assaulting, and I cling to our careful processes: sprouting the trees and tickling them with our threat. They resist and grow. Death was before time’s distinctions: there was only selfless attention and its connected subjects.

Darkness flows gentle from light, but not now. Having closed eyes under bright sun, darkness slams urgency at my eyelids. I’ve lost myself in meditation and fruitless search; the night offers everything to me, but I must grasp it. I’ve forgotten everything, especially the way back. Life is everywhere, mocking me and the concentrated pace I’ve led, so I speed, frantically, in every direction.

I tried to imagine myself as some sort of creature, but the music points away from this. Its lyrics suggest “octopus eyes” and “octopus mouth,” but I see this as more metaphorical than anything else. The music does not play to a creature with these attributes: the music plays to a human. This human may be more in tune with his or her spiritual self than anyone previously or consequently, but he or she is not a monster. Perhaps in attempting this imaginary game and adopting this role, I will discover what these eyes and mouth indicate. Perhaps they will follow and salivate after me as I run. Perhaps they are the image of urgency I fear.

I hope that the keeper of The Eyeslit-Crypt will provide information relating to the words “mumei” and “yume,” as I could only find mumei: “unsigned, nameless, anonymous (a-no), anonymity” (EDICT, 8/21/2008), and I don’t entirely trust an online translation. I’d much rather trust someone who participated in naming the track, especially when that person speaks Japanese constantly throughout his day.

I Return

Before today, I’d never cooked a whole chicken. I’ve always purchased the breasts separately as some sort of obscure entity separate from the animal-chicken. I’ve bought them shrinkwrapped to those styrofoam trays in packs of two or four or five or whatever random number of breasts some factory-butcher decided to pack. They are slabs of meat: pink productblobs. Fairly recently I’ve also bought them as the whole full breast of one chicken, connected between the two breasts with its breastbone, which at least alludes to the chicken it was once connected to. I’d never experienced holding the cold, dead chicken before. Slipped from the bag, it has all the heft and fleshy meat of an animal. Other than the decapitated head and scooped innards, it resembles the living and potentially happy chicken it once was (probably not–as much as the bag tries to advertise the product as “all natural” and “without antibiotics,” it doesn’t mention anywhere that it’s free-range, so it probably isn’t.) or could have been. It was strange to hold the whole carcass. The animal gave everything it had to provide me with protein, vitamins, and general sustenance–that is: I indirectly took this everything away from the animal. I feel a little guilty, and while I’m not contemplating vegetarianism, there is an imbalance here. It’s true that those dollars I gave to the farm company went towards giving the chicken life, as certainly it wouldn’t have been bred if not for this end product of my purchase, but this itself seems problematic. Something is out of balance. This something is well beyond this small situation, though. The world in general is out of balance. My balancing act within it includes eating animals, but perhaps to steady myself, I should appreciate that a bit more. Dealing with the animal-resembling carcass is a start.

I didn’t realize I would deliberate chicken for so long, but it’s no surprise. Strengthening my depth of attention is important. Without that attention I feel like someone else I don’t like: a blob or brainless animal carrying out life minus purpose. All life has a tendency to grow, but without purpose, it either grows negative and destructive energy or bloats.

I’ve bloated for a long time. I’ve also swooned in destructive energy in spite of or perhaps exacerbated by attempts to quash it. I use the preposition ‘in’ here with ’swoon’ attempting to counteract its inherent passivity and turn the word into an active practice, which still fails to suggest an attentive dance with that negativity, but swoon may be the proper verb after all. By definition, one does not choose a swoon. The best definition I find is of its noun form: “a spontaneous loss of consciousness caused by insufficient blood to the brain” (Wordnet, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/swoon). My brain has been sad. I’ve been sad. This is redundant because the brain and the self are not mutually exclusive, but I repeat as reminder of that. “Insufficient blood to the brain” means much more than what it says.

My decision to temporarily live with my family was one cause of this. While I appreciate them allowing me to live there, it filled me with negativity and bloating. This is something I need to come to terms with, because they’re my family and because I love and care about them. They’re part of me, and vice-versa. I never managed to balance this, though: not while I lived there and not now as I reflect on it. I have no idea how to fit coexisting with them in any capacity into my life, and that’s frightening and difficult. It’s something I need to work on. That aside, living there was negative. There was a lot of sadness in that home brought by strife marching hand-in-hand with negativity. Even now I can’t escape that sadness, but living there focused it central within my life. When negativity sleeps there in the breast, in the center of one’s home, it begins to take over.

Prior to moving back, living at my apartment in downtown Grand Rapids allowed me to thrive, and this pipeline of energy sputtered once I left that place. It and I had filled it and me with many energies, and I turned my back on that. I decided this abandonment was necessary, but it also, to no surprise, brought negativity beyond what that succeeding living space would cast.

Amidst those symbiotic events taking shape, I departed on summer travels. I left Grand Rapids to circle the country, and it was amazing. It posed many difficulties, but these challenged and taught me. I want to discuss the trip more now, but doing so would spin this essay out of its focus. I’ll say that it was excellent and move on.

I returned thrilled to be home. As excellent as the trip was, driving those 12,000 miles exhausted and consumed me. The general limits of the trip kept me from caring for myself, and I felt these effects. In this return, the definition of swoon adopted its medical aspects: blood was not flowing properly to my brain, thus limiting my consciousness. The brain needs exercise and nourishment and care to function well–just as I, generally as a whole person need these things to function well–and I hadn’t given myself this. Driving allows some limited quality of thought, but my had brain tired of this, possibly because of the low-quality energy flowing through it from the low-quality food I had been eating. I hadn’t kept up with reading, something that takes practice to do well, and this added to my atrophy. As much as I’d missed my family and friends in Grand Rapids prior to my return, I was coming back to a homelife that would set me out of balance, and I did nothing to correct this. I remembered that, prior to my trip, there had been no solution, so I bloated and waited. I sat and watched as it flowed over me. I watched everyone through that soggy lens: many of my friends came to Grand Rapids from their lives far away, and I was thrilled to see them, but my mind couldn’t keep up. I felt like I’d reverted to my self six years ago, when I was exceedingly quiet because of much younger brainpower. I hated creating such an impression with these friends I see so rarely, but that’s how it was, and I enjoyed their brief visit as much as I could.

While I discussed things revolving around this general lethargy prior to my travels, since then I haven’t said a word: just as I waited to move, I waited for this. I would’ve felt pathetic discussing this in its midst because of my atrophy: as if I were making promises to or poking at hope for myself. I feel that these kinds of promises about the future are worthless, as the only important thing is keeping them. Action is important, not the promise of it. Announcing both to the “world” and to myself through this blog that once I moved, things would improve, would’ve been nothing but complaining drivel. My last post shows that: as much as I tried to sound intelligent in my discussion of a fairly random feeling of loneliness, at its heart it was a complaint about my situation. This annoyed me so I shut the blog down.

Now I’m back. I mean this, obviously, to suggest that I’m back writing in this blog, which I’ll hopefully continue with throughout my surely work-intensive schoolwork, but I also mean that I’m back in more holistic terms. I’m back to the self I like. I am who I was when I lived in that peaceful one-bedroom place in Grand Rapids: someone who knows and works towards what he wants out of life, who can use his brain to be conscious of the world he lives in, who can write with the clarity of that thought, who can analyze texts and learn from them, who can work, and who can step back from all that and completely relax. I love being able to at least seek that peaceful relaxation. Without all that, I’m not me.

Making my new home in Carbondale is making this happen again. Living alone allows me to step back to my basic self and move into the world from there; I don’t work well when thrust into the world. I need to thrust myself into it. I’ve done so by making a life for myself here that allows that. Things here aren’t exactly as I’d like, but I have that base of complete control of myself and my consciousness, and that fills everything with potential.

I will use part of that potential for work on here. Just as I’ve missed having an energized brain to carry on cohesive thought, I’ve missed expressing that thought here. I began this with Jeff Jefferson’s joking attitude in mind, and while I appreciate that mockery, degradation, one-tracked American success-based sensibility, and, to some extent, the cockiness, I see this as a much more intellectual outlet. I’d like to work towards combining those attitudes, because there’s something interesting and real there; maybe something that disgusts me, which is something I’d love to challenge myself with.

I’m thrilled to be writing in this again.