By what yardstick?

No matter what I do or who I become there will only be two great accomplishments in my life. The first is my birth, and the second is my death. With my birth I passed into the dream that is existence. There is no world but what I see and what I believe. Should I choose to disbelieve some part of existence I cannot. For, like Pandora's box, once I have seen the results of my dream they cannot be undone. The world is a turbulent place, full of strife and suffering, and for this I am sorry. But my mind is a storm and from a great distance it may seem organized, like a theory of chaos, in truth we are all on the ground. We cannot see anything from a great distance because we are here and we live in the passing of now. We can imagine what our lives might seem like from an objective viewpoint, but it is only that, the imagination of ourselves. A dream within a dream. Though we may all be here together on this planet, we are actually alone within the dream that each of us creates day by day, everyone simultaneuously a bit player in each others' play.

This is not real.

There is a box in a room, through a door, at the end of a hall.
In this room there is nothing but the box.
In the box are the secrets that I keep.
In the box are the things that I've done.
In the box are my memories.
I made the box.
I took a branch from every tree in the world.
A band of every metal.
A lock made of stone.
A hinge made of glass.
After a thousand years I was done.
Yesterday the box was full.
Today I woke up.
The box was gone.

Reading into things (a bit too much)

Lately I've been obsessed with this one song. It's by Neko Case and called 'Furnace Room Lullaby' from the album of the same name. I'll include the lyrics here:

All night… all I hear… all I hear is your heart
How come? How come…

I twisted you over and under to take you
The coals went so wild as they swallowed the rest
I twisted you under and under to break you
I just couldn't breathe with your throne on my chest

So far under the bed
Into the beams you've gone
I've gone… you've gone

I'm wrapped in the depths of these deeds that have made me
I can't bring a sound from my head though I try
I can't seem to find my way up from the basement
A demon holds my place on earth 'till I die

All night… all I hear… all I hear is your heart
How come? How come…

I can't help but think about redemption. I don't mean Judgement Day and holy hosts and such, that really isn't my cup of tea. I'm talking about personal redemption in this lifetime. You see, there isn't a lot of stuff I regret about my life, but the things I've done that I do regret are of a pretty heavy nature. Sometimes I think my obsession with sailboats is because there is a certain lightness of spirit associated with sailing. I often think I'd just like to pack a solo cruiser up with supplies and travel for a couple years. Out on the water civilization seems very distant, even with land in sight. My solitude no longer feels like penance. On a sailboat there is nothing that is not absolutely necessary (keep in mind I don't spend much time on luxury yachts) and each thing has a very specific purpose. Once you get used to boats, there is nothing that seems arcane in nature. I'm pretty handy, but I get confused by most engines made after 1990. The engine on a sailboat has a very simple purpose, and is used infrequently. I can take one apart and put it back together without even consulting a schematic or manual. Winches, blocks, rudders, and boom vangs seem almost holy in their simplicity and usefulness. Anything larger than a dinghy has color-coded halyards and sheets.
Wow I've gotten off track. I suppose that's a common blog occurrence. Well, back to the song. I've always been primarily interested in certain songs for the lyrics. I mean, the music is what catches me, but the lyrics hold me. (This could be part of the reason I never cared for jam bands.) The music feels funereal, like a country requiem. The mourning is for times past. You see, there was a girl. (There always is, it seems like.) I knew her for a while, but then I went away. I came back after a while and saw her. She hit me in the head without even moving. I couldn't even think straight. Things evolved for a while as fate does that thing that she does. It was shockingly perfect. Except I felt a nagging thing in the back of my head. I think part of it was my own blooming insanity, but part of it was her devotion. She was becoming the high priestess in the temple of me. It became an extreme version of what Plato called the mentor relationship. My insanity was progressing to the point that I felt almost holy. I always had a knack for talking, but now I could tell anybody anything. I felt like I could see right through a person's head. It was like a personal magnetism, an agressive charisma. I became self-destructive. I hurt this girl and some other people (emotionally) and ended up getting kicked out of school and hurting myself pretty badly with a knife. Not quite David Koresh, but in an emotional sense, very similar.
For a long time I thought, what did I do? What happened to make me deserve this? Gradually I came to realize that why isn't really important. I saw the path, I walked down it, I fell off the cliff. There is no cosmic reason for the path, and no one pushed me off the cliff. Every step I take is one I take myself. And now I'm trying to climb out of this hole and it isn't really working. I've withdrawn into myself to such a degree that people don't often recognize me. So where do I go from this point? I often think that somehow I will redeem myself and come back into the light of day, the girl will come back and somehow everything will be restored. However, I'm realized that, like there is no 'god' that sent me into the hole, there is also no 'god' to forgive and restore me either. That's the pesky problem with redemption. There's a quote, from Ecclesiastes no less, that illustrates that even in biblical times people didn't really believe either.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might; for there is no work, no device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest."

A slight deviation from the norm

I guess I need a quick break from the castle in my head series. I was reading this afternoon (big surprise) and my eyes kept being drawn to my wrist. I kept thinking about all the scars I have. Really, my arms look like I've been in a war. (Or really self-destructive, I hear that's a common thing these days.) One scar looks like I tried to commit suicide when actually I got it caught in a crack in the rockface while climbing. (Pretty scary for a moment.) Another scar is too ridiculous to be believed. I had a pet rabbit when I was little and it got heatstroke. When I went to pick it up it latched on to my arm like a damn badger. Pretty nasty scar and no one believes me. I get lines from Monty Python about it. (No, there was no holy hand grenade available at the time.) I also have a series of burns from various soldering and welding projects in my sculpture and metalsmithing hobbies. Even one of my tattoos has an inordinate amount of scar tissue. I must be prone to these kind of things.
This makes me wonder if someday we will have the technology to make all scars disappear. Where will the stories come from then? My skin contains memories, like etchings of events past. The scars are reminders of the person I have become and the events that made me. Like Paul McCartney once said, sometimes we like old music not because we simply like it, but because we like remembering who we were when we first listened to it. Each scar, like each song, is a signpost on the road of our existence. Something I would never want to erase.

Doctor, there's a castle in my head (Part Three)

One of the oddities of a personal mindscape is that there are no rules except for the ones you make. There can be mutable laws of phsyics, thermodynamics, space, and time. Once you've established just what you want for your interior world and created a landscape you can step back and look around. This is like a feedback loop within a feedback loop. What does your world say about you? Are you a God? A distant observer or an integral leader? Perhaps you're just a worker in a land run by someone else. Sometimes, as a meditational device I enter the town at the base of my mountain and become a boatbuilder with a small yard and a pier. Even when I am 'the man in the high castle' I have a separate governing body for the port city. I've tried to have it as an accelerated social evolution that is now plateaued around, say, 18th-century Spain. (Minus the ridiculously bad succession of kings and petty disputes that have plagued Spain.) I let everything flow naturally, though I have suppressed some epidemic diseases. I don't let the people worship me, though they try from time to time. I want to mostly be left alone, since I go to this inner world for peaceful meditation and examination of ideas. If I want social interaction, I shouldn't have to invent it, but seek it in the real world. One of the dangers of an intraverse is that it can become more interesting than the real world. I once skipped a class because I was examining the evolution of the ecosystems I had created. I knew then that I had better start getting a life. So, what does this information say about me as a person? Since it is entirely built out of my head, everything within it has something to say about the kind of man I am. Sometimes this introspection can uncover uncomfortable truths about oneself. For instance, I discovered just how completely arrogant a creature I am. This is something I have hidden from even myself. And it is good to know. Not that knowing has exactly changed me.

Doctor, there's a castle in my head (Part Two)

There are only two things in the room. The first is a chair positioned in the exact center facing the window. It took me a long time to sort out what kind of chair this was going to be. I started out with your basic Eames lounge chair, but decided I needed something more substantial. I cycled through a few different chairs until I finally chose to make my own. It's a solid white oak frame using double mortise and tenon construction. Instead of several large springs I use 45 small multi-stage springs. The chair is an oversized club chair style with a slight incline to the seat. It's covered with a dense and thick cotton fabric in a navy so dark it's pretty much black. I don't really like the feel of leather, so cotton it is. The other item in the room is a single reading lamp. It is positioned behind and just to the right of the chair with a long cord connected to an old-fashioned single outlet in the wall. I picked a Tolomeo floor lamp from Design Within Reach. It is a simple tension arm design that I find quite appealing.
I use the chair to contemplate the world I've created. In the beginning it was designed so it could show me anything I imagined. Since I moved the room up the cliff as an observatory for the town I created I've removed the magical capabilities of it. It is now just a window. Of course an 18x12 foot window is structurally unsound and I haven't found a way to support it without breaking it into sections yet. So it remains a slightly magical construct. I want this inner space to obey the laws of phsyics as much as possible. No floating cities with giant mushroom houses for me. It's just not my style. However, some rules can be bent until I have found a solution. Anyway, I have dry erase boards that fold out of the ceiling for working on concepts and equations. It is interesting how I can meditate on this concept, meticulously applying ideas to the boards and then remember them perfectly much later. This appears to be an effective mnemonic tool since I don't actually have a photographic memory. If the entire concept of the memory palace seems ridiculous to you, just remember that we naturally compartmentalize our memories and this is nothing more than adding a formal structure to a natural process. you may surprise yourself with how enjoyable this effort can be. I went from a single room to a castle and then to an evolving port city and harbour. I like to sit in the chair and watch people race small sailboats out in the bay. I have to expand the boundaries so the people can explore their world.

It's time for a breakdown.

For fairly obviously reasons, I'm thinking about time tonight. I've been looking at my clock, one of those standard LCD type deals where the digits are made up of a grid of bars. I realized that you could completely remove the bottom line of horizontal bars and still be able to read the clock. I put a piece of tape over the bottom line. I'm not entirely sure why this is comforting. I guess it seems that something made up of simple bars should be made as efficient as possible.
I keep thinking about how our minds have to change just so much to account for daylight saving time. It requires a certain unmeasurable leap in the way we think about things. Is it really 4am right now? Why does it feel like 3? How does 3 feel different from 4? Time is an artificial construct in society, yet the sun still sets, and a certain time after that it rises again. So time is both very real and artificial. And in fact, since the rotation of the earth around the sun is actually 365 days and one quarter (hence the 'leap year'), the time that we perceive right now is not technically correct. I went to the national time server tonight (nist.gov) to get an accurate read on the time since I am studying historical navigation and it requires that I use an extremely accurate time for observing star positions and I read about how the steel and iridium rod used as the official standard for one meter is actually decaying at a steady rate. Of course this is taking place at a microscopic level and can only be measured with unbelievably precise instruments it is not exactly a national crisis. But it made me think about how, if time changed, if it decayed, we wouldn't ever know, since we're linked irrevocably to our perceptions of time. What if an hour right now was only 15 minutes in, say, 1650. What if an hour took an hour and a half in 1979? We would never know since the dilation or contraction can't be measured by an outside device. What if, right now, we are trapped in an hour that is taking 3 million years? There is no such thing as an absolute hour, or a separate and perfect second. Which means that, all things measured by time are subject to its influence. The speed of light is not absolute, because that 186,262 miles per second may take a different length of second in this instant than in that instant. I believe this is the boundary of the unknowable. And now I have a headache. Whatever time it might be, I can certainly define now as bedtime.

Doctor, there's a castle in my head (Part One)

I don't sleep very well. I would guess that this happens to a lot of people, but for me it feels like a very personal affliction. I feel vaguely tired at night, but not the drifting associated with falling unconscious. However, I don't want to get out of bed and ruin the chance that I might fall asleep. So a couple years ago I started a mental exercise to pass the time while I was lying in bed. I remember reading "Hannibal" maybe eight years or so ago. While it wasn't a particularly interesting book,(This concept of the aristocratic serial killer, or the utterly evil and mad genius, are rather boring concepts. I'm more interested in why normal people hurt themselves than the unrealistic representation of the twisted ubermensch. As for 'Silence of the Lambs', semi-omniscient counterpoint characters are actually a shortcut for a writer.) Anyway, the one thing that was interesting was that Hannibal Lector spent a lot of time inside his own head and he created a 'memory palace' to store all his memories and ideas. It was also an escape for him.
I decided to create one of my own. Of course it would be considerably different, seeing as how I'm not a two-dimensional character, nor a psychopath. (Of course I've always thought of myself as occupying a position somewhere on the periphery of sanity. That is, if you think of sanity as a geographical space, with room for movement, instead of a single point.) I decided to build it from the inside out. I started with a single room 40 feet long, 18 feet wide, and 12 feet tall. I didn't move out of this room for more than a month as I refined the details, adding and subtracting. I took the floor from an old factory building I saw downtown. It had an extremely worn oak flooring made up of very long, foot-wide boards. Old growth wood that just isn't seen anymore. Years of grit and varnish in the cracks but the whole surface is worn soft and smooth. At one end of the room the entire wall was a window. The room started out on a hill and then moved up the side of a cliff, until it became the observatory above my castle, which was built at the base of the cliff, and somewhat up it, as well as being dug in the hill. More on that later. At the other end of the room is a sort of sculpture(I just realized I'm switched tenses, but it's a blog, roll with it.) built into the wall. It is a 10 by 10 grid of wrought-iron spikes that are 18 inches long. They stick out of the wall with a foot between each one. They aren't particularly sharp or perfectly straight. They've been pounded out by a blacksmith many many years ago. They're black and rusty with age. I think they were once the top of a fence, but I'm not sure. I don't know where they came from or why, they just showed up in my mind one night. Sometimes I have dreams about being impaled on them. For some reason the dreams aren't nightmares. This should be disturbing, but for some reason it isn't.

I sometimes find a blog to be a terrifying thing. I feel this need to pour out everything in my head honestly. Honestly isn't always the best policy. Anyway, I'll just live with it. I'm not really capable of being particularly embarassed. This is looking like a multi-part posting, so more on this later.

Adam
"Run for the hills."