Van's Journal: Year 6

  2004-Oct-07 | 2004-Oct-04 | 2004-Aug-15 | 2004-Jul-17 | 2004-Jun-08 | 2004-May-29 | 2004-May-27 | 2004-May-23 | 2004-Apr-21 | 2004-Mar-06

2004-10-07 : Also on the streets of Rome, I saw an ad along the sidewalk that reminded me a bit of the Dolce and Gabbana ad that I wrote of when I sat at that airport in Milan. It was of a girl ambiguously aged, nude, but photographed only from the top of her breasts up. Photographic tricks and unthinking computers had stripped the character of age from her face, until she was a child. Diets had stripped the flesh from her bones, until I could be thoroughly satisfied that she had given up her nourishment for my eyes. Fat had been injected into her lips until they burst forth with overabundance juxtaposed to her frailty. She was ageless but striking, ambiguous but defined. She was waiting to be molded however a mind wished. Was she a child of whom I could take care, or a child of whom I could take advantage? Was she a woman with full lips with which to show as a symbol of life like a voluptuous ancient statue, or lips thoroughly padded so as to service me? She was both the child and the woman, and in each one, both the source of the viewer's strength and the weakness next to which the feeble mind could feel placated. She was grotesque and desirable. She was a symbol of everything problematic and everything intoxicating about the world we've built up around those feeble parts of our minds, which prefer to build a cloud of secrecy rather than deal with the clarity of reality. She was whatever I wanted her to be.

In our minds, where those clouds and truths coexist as a dichotomy, she too is a complimentary dichotomy, on every street corner, in every shop window, reminding us, comforting us. She is not only the child which one can safely overpower to satisfy a truth that cannot be admitted, but also the child that one can protect to satisfy the cloud of self-delusion. Her lips are a source of life and a symbol of fertility like the femininity in the models of old, while her body has seen the life drained from it. She is the source of our life which we seek to drain until death. She is the savior nailed to the cross. She is an incarnation of a lie to thyself. She is the cloud. She is the truth.

I've discovered that to truly grow, I must neither accept those ugly truths nor hide them behind clouds. Instead, I must acknowledge them and determine why I allowed a truth so grotesque and its partner lie in my mind. The more honest with myself I become, the more I understand about the world around me, and the less I scare myself. With every dichotomy that falls, though, the one big question that remains is, "Why were these lies originally necessary?" What impossible expectation was originally thrown at our species to make us run in fear?

I seek the answer without fear. However, I do not seek the answer to destroy it. I expect it to melt in the face of the truth.

2004-10-04 : A few days ago I was walking the streets of Rome and watched the faces in the cars driving on cobblestone roads. I watched their features become dissected in my mind. I watched what makes attractiveness work. I watched what separates a girl from a woman, and what holds them in common. I dug down in the trenches of my subconscious to see how my mind distinguishes between those who live and those who go through the motions, how a tell-tale tightening of a lip or the arch of an eyebrow gives away their states of mind. I watched my lust after a body accepted as an equal citizen in my mind, and thus allowed to give rise to imagination of fashion and art. I saw the cuff of a man's sleeve not as an article of clothing meant to cover his body, but as the visual echo of his daily actions. I saw that everything realized in my mind was free of guilt, for I discarded everybody else's power over my thoughts; free of sin, for I discarded ownership of my mind to a higher power; free of chains, for I discarded distrust of my own fundamental value.

I realized most people do not live like this. Then I remembered why I wanted to be the way I am, why I worked to become this, why I shed everything else. This I must always remember.

2004-08-15 : It started with family, you see. I felt that family was a method by which elder members sought to subvert younger members for their own purposes. It was an especially vile concept, especially in light of my oldest precept, the one that disallows association of age with experience and rights. Some would have called it just a typical adolescent mindset wrapped in my usual self-important style, but I considered it a revolutionary concept overlooked by our society. I still do.

I was trying to pull myself together. I was fighting for my life. I was twelve or thirteen, and had constantly contemplated suicide for a while, coming far closer to it than I would have liked. I thought this was another major problem in our society, that the young were given busy work rather than valuable roles in the culture, all in the name of their protection. And I couldn't take reaching out to a society that wanted nothing to do with me. So, I was dying. I knew that even if I physically didn't die, I mentally would. And if I mentally died, became something else, what would be the point? I would have been just another person going through the motions of life because that's what everyone else did. I saw whole constructs within family that existed for no other reason than their being perpetuated by an immigrant a hundred years ago, still holding their moral authority by association with the word "family."

When I realized that, family was the enemy. And like anyone about to die would do against their enemy, I killed it. Within myself, I killed the construct of family. Like an angry witch hunt, every obligation to "family" fell, one by one. Most went quietly, no match for a smart little kid with a fading will to live and a desperate fear of death. Some went painfully. But every death was cleansing, as it brought me closer to survival. And when I was done, the terrain of my mind looked little different, the carnage from family hardly separable from the civil wars of a person close to flying apart at the seams. But I was a little different. I had one less factor to deal with in sorting out my own problems. I no longer had to worry about my internal obligations to family. I only had to worry about what the external family might do if it did not like something I was thinking. That was a much simpler problem. All one has to do is withdraw further into himself to avoid it.

Shortly after that came sexuality. It had been a steadily increasing "problem" since the onset of puberty, and had to be eliminated, as it was an unpredictable weakness that would only give other people a potential advantage over me. You see, I had always been a pretty odd kid, and never felt my unique traits were valuable to much of anybody. However, they did give people plenty of ammunition to use against me. So with all my other internal problems, the last thing I needed was this. I decided I had to kill it, or at least put it on hold until I could sort things out. But that was a much more difficult act, as it involved less of the mind than it did of the body. The hordes that had destroyed family were not adequate. So with my newfound bit of freedom from killing "family", I started to arrange the hordes into something more organized. Slowly, they were becoming a military.

But what good is a military that has no idea what to do, no matter how much power it attains. So it spun off research and introspection arms. And it demanded organized thought, because a lack of clarity was the first thing, I felt, that could lead to further internal degradation.

Yet the military was still very close to its horde heritage, and I used its new research and strength to tear out sexuality like one would tear out a bundle of wires to make a machine stop working. And I stopped being attracted to much of anyone. Desire just ran like an unheld garden hose, still spewing forth its natural product, but not directed at anything in particular. The military quickly found ways to use that as fuel.

Before this revolution, I was such an emotional, feeling person. After it, I rarely felt anything. The will to organize thought into a tangible, controllable substance overtook everything else. The military spun off police to deal with less intrusive factors more gently than things like family and sexuality. And with that, the thing was starting to look less like a revolution and more like a government. Then it did what all good little governments do. It used what power it had to gain more power.

The research arm discovered a common thread among many threats. It found the concept of "original sin" to be in far more than religion. Since the idea of being born with an obligation of any kind flew in the face of everything the revolution fought for, the research arm suggested that original sin be ferreted out of my identity. The recommendation turned into order.

That's when so much of wider society started to fall apart within me. First was religion, the only obvious culprit, as it was the only cultural factor honest enough to admit it had a concept of original sin. Then came charity, environmentalism, common good, and the vast majority of modern "liberal" causes, most of which rely on an underlying concept of original sin. They all went relatively quietly. Concepts like those rarely fight for their lives.

With all those external obligations gone, there was a power vacuum which the government was all too willing to take. The research arm spun off a philosophy segment, which took the seat of religion. Given its track record, the morality of the outside world was deemed to do more harm than good. It was expelled from my identity, and replaced by an in-house solution, which took everything that was deemed good with society's morality, and expounded on it.

The original idea of withdrawing further into myself to protect myself from the outside world took on a new life, as my diverging internal culture had to be protected from the external culture. That idea became another arm of the government, charged with translating internal culture in a manner palatable to outer culture, and directing outer culture to the appropriate research agency within internal culture, so that it could be dissected for possible threats. That shell arm--the Citadel--was later also charged with making sure the translation to the outer culture did not infect my internal identity. This is when the practice of "identity management" started to really get going.

As I was hitting fourteen years old, the government was worried that slowing puberty would yield a less malleable mind, making future implementation of research more difficult. Research and implementation was accelerated. Thought became brutally organized to maximize production. Those parts of my personality that were damaged or torn up in the revolution, like sexuality, were rebuilt in their "new-and-improved" incarnations.

By then, I felt a bit like a cyborg, some gruesome not-quite-human entity with normal human traits missing, and otherworldly extremities in their places. But I felt successful, because I had changed myself when nobody said I could. I had attained control over something when the whole world said that I was too young to control anything. I was proud that I had fixed myself just enough to keep from dying, and that everything I liked about me was protected behind this seemingly unstoppable government. I looked with pride at a new, not-quite-human mind like an anorexic would look at a new, not-quite-human body. I won. And all those other fuckers lost.

Eventually, the government realized there were no more threats big enough to destroy me with this newfound protection. It started to focus on long-term sustainability. Processes became traditions. Traditions became laws. Laws became the Institution. We were damned if everything we had worked so hard to build would be taken away if I grew soft in the future. Thus, taking an example from external cultural factors that had been assimilated, like the Church, everything was encoded, formalized, institutionalized.

The focus went from fighting for survival in my environment to a switch of environments, to one that would not threaten me so much. I had seen major cities before, which encouraged ideas, and had avenues of expression for a wide variety of people. The Institution set about making movement to one a goal, and also planned its own demise for when that happened, when it would no longer be needed. It used identity management to encapsulate itself away from "me" so that when the time came, we would be separable. This process would take some time. A few years passed. And in the interim, I had a renaissance of new ideas and philosophies and mental tools for interacting with the world around me. The military became a tool for research rather than research a tool for the military. The shell slowly started to feel less like a protection for me against the world, and more like a protection for the world against me. I lost my fear of death and strengthened my will to live. The morality of the world around me became something that was understood in the context of my own morality rather than a force to threaten it. Nearly everything I came in contact with became something to be assimilated. People became a resource to be mined rather than an opposing force to be shunned.

As it came time for me to leave for college, the old threats I perceived seemed more remote. With them less present, many defenses willingly shut down, as they were designed to do when they were no longer needed. Having attained a legal age of consent, those around me who were concerned no longer had the force of law to hold over me. Thus, my thoughts became declassified. I started Redstroke as part of the systematic effort to open-source my mind. In a way, it was very positive. Every time I wrote, I was cleansed, because saying something to the world without a middle-man translator was unifying my identity. It was proclaiming that the rift between me and the world is healed a little bit, because I have accepted the world, and now this is something for the world to accept about me. And if the world chose not to accept it? Then I was like the anorexic standing naked before them, making them look at something not-quite-human, even if they didn't want to. Except with me, they didn't have something as easy to contend with as protruding ribs and sunken eyes, where they can just look away. With me, they would have to contend with ideas and rawness that they had never dealt with before, which once released to the world, were no longer my propriety property. My ideas could run rampant at their own will. My nakedness before the world would not be turned off with a mere flip of the channel. This was power.

The institution did not deliver in significantly altering my environment, as it said it would. Like any good bureaucracy, it kept asking for more time and funding without yielding many results. I was angry at it and angry at me, though afraid to live without it. Perhaps my identity management with respect to the institution was not as efficient as I would have liked to believe. I confronted the institution. I exerted myself, but had no idea how to kill it.

In an effort to further unify myself with the world, I sought to find an answer from the outside. After all, I thought the most efficient tactic to destroy the Institution and move on with my life would be to bring in its worst enemy--unadulterated ideas from the outside world. I thought about my predicament, and realized I was stuck in essentially the same rut as IBM. I was a strong, stable, productive institution that was killing itself with its own self-made heritage. So, I researched how Louis Gerstner turned IBM around. I took his ideas, adapted them, and applied them to my situation.

Like Gerstner's turning off the fabled overhead projector in an IBM boardroom was a major watershed moment for IBM, I stopped my own boardroom. Then I set about preserving my core competencies while eliminating the institution. Unlike the cultural constructs it had destroyed, the Institution did not go quietly. It yelled and screamed and begged for its life and fought back and cried and lashed out and forced me to tear it apart limb by limb, making me to feel every bit of blood that splattered against my face. And it told me I was nothing but the product of violent hordes from which I rose, and that I would always be that not-quite-human monstrosity without its help to fix me. I kept hacking away at it, with the knowledge that if I did not survive this separation to move on with my life, to get out of my rut and move into an environment in which I could flourish in the outside world, then my life wasn't worth living anyway. The Institution was fighting an individual who had nothing to lose. And that was an enemy it did not know how to defeat.

Even though I did kill it, it was another year before I could finally say goodbye. And then another month after that before I could come to this journal entry, and tell the world my story. Here I am, world. Naked. What do you see? Protruding ribs and sunken eyes? Healthy skin and a bright smile? Satan's forked tongue? An angel's wings? I don't care any more. I'm tired.

In that year, between when I killed the Institution and said goodbye to it, a lot changed. I did get out of my rut. I found new tactics to deal with the world that the Institution could never have conceived of. I moved to a major city. I got a fabulous job. I engaged in healthy interpersonal relationships. The people who know me now don't believe that I was once a xenophobe. They can't even see a trace of it, apparently. I've been called charming. I've been called sociable and sometimes confident. And granted, I'm often called weird. But that's a good thing, I think. It shows my internal culture is surviving just fine without a hard shell to the world. And just as I typed that, my phone rang, and a friend was inviting me to go eat. Imagine that. Somebody actually wanting to spend time with me. At one time, that was unheard of. Just give me twenty minutes, I said.

I feel things with depth I haven't since before the revolution. And oh my God, let me tell you, the sex has been fantastic. I had no idea I could feel this intensely. It's a whole different world. This outside world is very flawed, but I guess I can see why people like it. I could hang out here for a while.

For the past half year or so, I've been kind of floating without a real direction. I guess it has been my vacation. I was just so tired of fighting so many wars. By the time the institution fell, I had nothing left to give. And then I had to deal with living without it. It hurt. But it's time to move on. I called an all-stop for this ship over a year ago, and I haven't set a new course since. It's about time I did. I'm working on it, don't worry.

But until then, I'll just stay where I am. I'm happy. Second star to the right. And straight on 'til morning.

2004-07-17 : I found myself again in a familiar farmer's field, on a familiar day, approaching a familiar man crouched on the ground. The black soil gave way like a sponge beneath my feet as I stepped closer to him. He was much older now, having aged faster than would have made sense with the amount of time that had passed. Much of the weight had left his bones, and in place of the rich brown of his skin was a paler, almost grey hue, which grew darker in the folds beneath his eyes.

I hadn't even spoken when he said, "I know why you're here, entity. This is... just a formality."

"I don't know what to say. I know how important formalities are to institutions."

"This is a happy time. I am... I am proud of you. And I'm glad for you."

I had never come to bring about someone's demise before. I wasn't quite sure how to approach it. "You know what I have to do," I said.

"Is your mind stable," he asked.

I grinned. "Stable enough. The ride is no longer nearly as smooth, nor should it be. But a smooth ride is no longer my primary concern in life."

"Ah, but you cannot fault me for fulfilling my design. You know it is my primary concern. Have you emerged?"

"I'm working on it. Perhaps that is my new primary concern."

He struggled to raise himself up from the ground and stand as tall as he could. His frame was smaller than I had remembered, his shoulders not has broad, his back not as straight. "A noble goal indeed," he wheezed. "How does it feel, going through life like this? I always wondered." He stared off onto the horizon, one of the only things on which his eyes could still focus.

"Sometimes I pull on all my strength from the past, of everything I worked to be, and everything I am. And it feels that because of all I have done to experience myself and experience the world, I am, without contest, the biggest ship pulling into harbor."

"Ah, but other times."

"Yes. Other times I am tossed about like a life raft in a vast, lonely ocean, and the sun scalds my back, and all I can do is hope for another ship to come and rescue me."

"Such is the majesty of humanity," he spoke into the distance.

"Amen."

"But what form would that other ship take?"

I thought for a moment. "I'm not so wise as to answer that question. But I know it would not take the form of you."

He clapped for my answer.

I interrupted, "I still find you useful, you know. Those times, when I am the big ship in the harbor, it's often when I am drawing on that strength, from everything I accomplished in those years with you. The lessons I learned, the tools I forged. They are formidable even today."

"There was a time when you shunned their use."

"I know. But I promised myself that I would not allow myself to be consumed with such hatred for you that I would destroy all that was good. And now I can use everything that was good for my benefit, without asking for a rare bureaucratic approval. I am... no longer restrained by a distrust of myself."

He stepped closer to me and spoke a single word, as if it were the last word he would ever speak, with the last breath he would ever draw, with the last throes of a lust for life he would ever feel. "Heresy," he hissed.

I replied as most people speak, quickly, with disregard for the breath used, as if I had infinite more to spare. "Sweet heresy."

He smiled. "Then I suppose," he said, looking out at the field. "I suppose I have planted my last seed. And I suppose that now, I am some of your soil." He breathed heavily between words, trying to stay standing.

"Then I will rise up to take you. Like maggots from the Earth."

"Sweet maggots." He laughed a laugh that turned to a cough.

"I hope that one day, I can give myself up to this world, as I have given up this part of myself to me. As you have given yourself up to me."

He was left without words. I walked closer until we were nose-to-nose, and I placed my hand on his shoulder, holding him up when he could no longer stand. "Good bye," I whispered.

"Good bye, Entity."

And all that was left were the fields.

2004-June-08 : Our long lives grant us opportunities for absolution never dreamed in Biblical times, and pitfalls for lives wasted in a manner never conceived. Even now, I seek to correct past mistakes and forgive past sins at an age that, just a thousand short years ago, would have better been spent planning for my possible death. So many people, often including myself, spend every day with death as a concept so foreign, it might as well be another language, like an obscure dialect we are blessed enough to only encounter a few precious times in the relative eternity of our long lives. But I am fortunate enough to see the colors in the eyes of peoples who know death intimately, as a tragic, exquisite gift from the heavens, that reminds them of their mortality with both the cruelty that brings lines to their faces, and the grace that brings meaning to their ceremonies. It is of the starkest inequalities on Earth that I would take their understanding of life's urgency with me as I fly back to a place where death has little meaning.

This new kind of life I have, with my core so opened and raw to the rest of me, is an existence I forgot how to live. Depths of feeling and understanding and emotion I had almost thought were a figment of my imagination from the distant past are emerging again, now to a new intellectual framework that is not in danger of flying apart at the seams against the brutal reality of the human soul. It's a feeling of an awesome, frightful force of nature overtaking me, which demands both respect for what I am and trust that it won't demolish everything I worked so hard to build. It is natural and it is human and it is pure and it is folding all of me into one. It is raging fires where it needs to destroy, and ocean waves where it needs to smooth. It is surrender and it is forgiveness and it is a molten core that I can feel so tangibly, it drips down my spine and warms my body and wraps like ivy around my ribs. It tingles at my fingertips, down the tendons to my wrists, and it lingers on my lips like a kiss that's still happening even when another's lips have pulled away. It begs to extend beyond the confines of my mind and my body, and it tells me with its form that it will not stop until it does.

And most importantly, I am slowly beginning to understand urgency. I am trying to understand the incredible gift of mortality. I hope I might get it before I die.

2004-May-29 : Like the ability to find infinite details in the movements of a culture, infinite meaning can be found in the shadows cast by a person's face upon itself, or by the cry of a single violin against a symphony. Yet I've never been able to master painting a face or writing a piece of music.

I guess I tried to stick with words to express the things I want to say because they have been all I've known, and I still haven't mastered them. I've just made a little more progress. It's extremely hard for me to translate thoughts into words, and I too often feel that they are the most inefficient medium to express certain ideas. My need to reach out to other people irrevocably chains me to words, both as a master who tried to command them, and as a slave who needs them more than anything. I resent words as substandard substitutes that relegate my ideas into mediocrity. And at the same time, I love them with all my heart, for even if they reduce everything I am to mediocrity, they are all I have.

Sometimes I look at a painting or a sculpture, and I notice a single stroke of the hand that sets off a whole new meaning, much like the change of a single word makes a sentence "right" or the addition of an otherwise insignificant detail gives a story new life. In a single moment, I understand what the artist was trying to say. And when I open my mind to the world around me, I see colors, shadows and sounds in ways that reveals beauty unnoticed before. I look at the vein of a leaf, the shape of a hand, the curve of a breast, and suddenly I understand, in one terrifyingly brilliant moment! And I want to rush to paper and grab charcoal and explain what I just saw to the world! But wait. I can't. I can look at my hands, admiring how they move so precisely, how they can bang out words almost as fast as I can translate them from my thoughts. But they cannot draw. And they cannot paint. And they cannot write a symphony. Suddenly, I am isolated.

In fact, sometimes they haven't even been able to touch another person. And that's the problem. I can hide behind words. They have to be considered and thought out before they are released into the real world. They provide labyrinths in which to hide what I really want to say. If the world never forced me to speak in the same manner that it never forced me to paint, I likely never would have found them either. It was only my utterly abysmal record of conveying my thoughts to other people that forced me to try to improve my words. I've gotten a lot better at them. I still have a lot farther to go.

I know what it's like to kiss a single note as it hangs in the air. I admire those who can release them.

Sometimes I read back on this journal and I say, "It's shit, it's all shit!" So often it is. It's carefully parceled out in delicate spoonfuls, as if it's a pretentious dessert that was made with presentation rather than flavor in mind. It tries to be me, but it's not me. And I'm angry! I'm angry at myself for doing it, and sometimes, in the shadows when I'm particularly weak, I'm angry at the world for not providing me with an environment where I would have been free to know other people who felt the way I did. But after I feel that second one, I feel ashamed for wanting the world to solve my problems.

I hate feeling so isolated. I hate feeling angry at myself for making me stay so isolated. I try not to hate myself for the flaw. And it is a flaw, a tragic flaw, a damning, cursed flaw, that blindsides me almost every time I want to explain something new.

I have so far to go.

2004-May-27 : When I was in Ghana--I don't mean to harp on Ghana, but really, it was a country that did offer a fascinating perspective, and I highly recommend it--anyway, when I was in Ghana, I strolled down a beach until nobody else was in sight. There were neither people nor buildings. There was nothing but me, the shoreline and some palm trees. Well, out of the corner of my eye, there was a woman sunbathing topless in the distance, who I had passed several minutes before on my way to nowhere. But I tried not to think about her, as I was making every attempt to preserve my fantasy of total isolation, so that I might have a moment of clarity that would make for good journal writing later.

Now, this is going to seem like I'm changing subjects suddenly here, but you'll see how it ties in later. That's sort of been my journaling theme lately, I've noticed. See, a long time ago, I would finely control things in my head. No, not like it was a few months or a year ago, just before the iconoclasm. I mean some years ago, still in my early-mid teens, when I had learned to wield some thoughts and actions with laser-point accuracy, far more acutely than I ever did later. It was that power which went on to give The Institution its moral authority, as it was those abilities that I felt saved me from a personality that would soon tear itself apart, ending in certain intellectual death, if not a physical one.

But eventually, those methods fell out of favor with me and The Institution alike. They were viewed much like atomic weapons in that they were something I wanted to have on tap just in case, but I learned what havoc they might wreak if used haphazardly. In short, the methods that gave rise to The Institution became unpopular with The Institution, and thus distaste for those methods was institutionalized.

But now everything has changed. There's nothing to stop me from using those methods any more. And that's where the Ghanaian beach comes in.

I've noticed that many people with my job quickly fall out of health and gain a lot of weight. It's easy to do, since you're always traveling, and have a lot of per diem money to spend on good food. I said that I wasn't going to let that happen to me, especially as I noticed my tastes slowly falling towards unhealthy habits. Living in a perpetual vacation does that to you. So, I decided to run my first test to see if I still had it in me. I thought of a template for what my tastes should be, tastes that could still offer protein, but be heavier on vegetables and fish than meats and sweets. I closed my eyes, stopped walking, and felt the tide rush over my feet. I stood there for a few seconds while I encoded new tastes.

That night at dinner, I ate usual foods, but it felt kind of funny, deep inside me to be doing it. It's hard to describe. Something wasn't right. After dinner, I tried to get to sleep early to help encourage the new tastes to be encoded in my brain.

The next night, I ordered fish I believe, with a side of vegetables, and some water. It wasn't that I tried to make myself eat that over the spaghetti or the steak. It's that I truly wanted it. My tastes continued in that vein.

That was, until a few weeks later, when I was in Lisbon. In what I thought was totally unrelated, I had gotten sick. And eventually I noticed that the area around my eyes was turning grey. I had no idea why. Until, I was out looking at a menu with a group of people, at my then normal fish or vegetables or soups or maybe even a small bit of chicken, when my eyes glanced over the steaks. I didn't want a steak, and I passed over them. But then I thought, "Wait, that's what my body needs."

My eyes darted back up to the red meat, and I ordered the largest one they had. After it came, I ate everything on my plate, which is extremely rare for me, especially for a meal that big. And not too much later, I started feeling better. I continued eating red meat for a couple of days to correct the damage.

I've since drifted my tastes back to normal, since that seemed to be working relatively well for me. But this experience reminded me what kind of powerful shit those methods of internal manipulation are.

This is something I should learn to carefully harness, but not avoid. Fear of it will only stunt my growth, but I have to keep in mind that it can change me in ways I never intended.

This entry is here for future reference. I have a feeling it will be important later.

2004-May-23 : A menu in Accra, Ghana reminded me of food where I grew up. It was full of grease and oils and savory flavors, and fried chicken. One might initially think that like so many other countries, food from America infested the local menus. To an extent, that was true here. But to a larger extent, it was their food that infested American menus, carried not by mass media and the mighty dollar, but by slave ships leaving the coast of West Africa.

The two people I was with chatted on the opposite side of the table, as I listened to the American music playing on a tabletop radio in the corner of the diner. I looked outside the window at the dusty streets, the old cars, and the rusty metal signs hanging over shop windows. I saw mostly faces of chocolate expressing rich personalities as they passed each other on the street. I looked back into the diner and saw more faces of people speaking from a culture that had mastered oration long ago, who could speak volumes of words with an inflection of the voice.

I wasn't talking much. But I did say, as I looked down at a plate of fried chicken, "This place reminds me of my home town." And the two faces opposite me looked confused.

Just then, I kid you not, the Country song "Sweet Southern Comfort" came on the radio.

I've said that one of the great things about being an American is that no matter where you go on Earth, if it's a city of any size, much of America will have been adopted there. People from no other country can say that.

However, that's not the true gift of being an American. The true gift, less apparent, is that no matter where I go in the world, I have little piece of that place inside of me. People of all nations created my America. Their food and faces and speech patterns are not something I experienced once at an ethnic restaurant on the other side of town. They are my history and the culture that surrounds me. They are the lunches my grandmother cooked, the expressions of caretakers who looked after me, the voices that offer how to breathe awe and grace into an otherwise inelegant language. If America was not there, in Ghana, then it was nowhere on Earth.

Some say I should hate where I came from. I will tell them about it, and the people who surround me now often do not understand how a mind could flourish in that environment. But I have always held that it is the responsibility of a mind to flourish in any environment, not the responsibility of the environment to encourage development. This concept is rooted in the idea that the same fundamental fabric of humanity and learning is a matter of nature, and that it is everywhere, in all human environs, in equal amounts. It just so happened, I would tell myself, that I did not personally mix well at all with that particular environment.

Hating it would have made things easier, for sure. I could have blamed all of my problems on the place. Sometimes I wanted desperately to hate it, but to hate a culture is an act of incalculable sin in my personal culture. I felt guilty for those fleeting moments of wanting to hate it.

But I knew that if I hated a culture, I would be missing the whole point of life, of what it means to be blessed with the status of "human." Undesirable parts of cultures some of us wish to hate are like the wrinkles of an old person's face. They are born of a lifetime of laughs. When we seek to understand their sources and their reasons, we glimpse into the same story—the human story. It's the story of people wanting to continue living, of people seeking to find their missing halves, of people holding on to what makes them whole. That story, no matter what culture tells it, is always beautiful.

Had I not maintained faith in this concept, I would have never found America—and by proxy, a part of me—in a little diner in Ghana. I would have admired Ghana's colors, I would have taken the same pictures, I would have appreciated their way of life. Perhaps I would have even joined the sickening throngs who pride themselves on their active tolerance of other cultures. But I would not have understood the fundamental tie I have to them. By virtue of my nationality, my roots run deep in many nations. Yet I never would have seen the root reaching into Ghana's people.

Who knows how much of life I would have missed out on had I allowed myself to hate the culture I needed to escape.

It was a long, hard fight to get out. But I left. I did it. It hit me not too long ago. I think, maybe, I am ready to talk about it.

2004-Apr-21 : [Note: This entry was held unpublished for one month after the written date to make absolutely sure it accurately described the thought before being posted into the permanent record.]

My eyes draw first to two woman-children. One of them is sitting on a mirrored stool, so that my eyes glance over it as if it were part of the background, and pay attention instead only to her. She's looking up toward the other girl, but not making eye contact. The standing woman-child props one foot upon the stool, against the sitting girl's crotch. They are both scantily clad, with full lips and waif bodies and engineered facial features. Similar looking people stand in the background, staring at nothing in particular. They're all dressed in Dolce & Gabbana.

But here's the question. Are they happy? Don't laugh. I would certainly be happy if I was being paid lots of money to appear in a huge ad for Dolce & Gabbana, center stage at Milan's international airport. But in my efforts to learn standards of beauty from around the world, after having absorbed some ideal images from some very non-Western places, I wanted to look at Western standards in a fresh light.

After refreshing my memory that a Western standard of beauty is to be a malnourished youth, I started studying the composition of the photograph to move on to enhancing my photographic skills. I tried to figure out exactly what makes the stereotypical model photograph so recognizable? The placement of this ad, as well as the angle from which it was photographed, made the subjects seem taller, more intimidating. But that wasn't it. The female models were certainly skinny, but plenty of models are skinny without meeting this heroin-chic stereotype. What made this photo fit the mold?

None of them are smiling. None of them are happy.

Granted, there are a few other relevant aspects of the composition, but even if one of these models were shown alone with no background, the image would still work.

So my question is, why aren't they happy? I'm sure there are plenty of theories more versed than mine, but here is my shot. They're not happy because their value is provided by me, the viewer, the consumer, the admirer. Without my desire to be more like them, they are nothing but human props to make some not-as-beautiful investors rich. They're not supposed to be happy, just like they're not supposed to eat enough, and not supposed to have color to their faces, and not supposed to allow their inner glow to drown out the darkness around their eyes. Designers need them as clothes racks. Business people need them to be ultimately subservient and powerless, because the last thing they want is to have some pretty kid influence their decisions. And they all need me to understand that like those models, even when my soul has died, even when I have no self worth, even when I am a slave of all and a master of none, I will be beautiful as long as I wear Dolce & Gabbana.

Unfortunately, they screwed that part up, too. The clothes are nothing to speak of. If one wishes to showcase clothing, perhaps one should have clothing that is more than a few threads of substandard fabric made to demonstrate that the same models who couldn't afford food couldn't afford real clothes either. How can they put those clothes in front of us, and think they can compare to the silken saris of India? How can they speak of the quality of their fabrics when hand-woven symbols full of meaning adorn the bodies of Ghanaian men? This is why I travel.

Though I am sure the designers received some inspiration from many other cultures, little is left of those cultures by the time I go to buy clothes in the store. And even if there were, few of the models have bodies that would allow the fabrics to fall the way they were meant to. Yet, we have attached beauty to these models, and by proxy, these clothes.

But here's the thing. They are beautiful in my eyes, as well as in huge blocks of Western culture. I'm certainly not immune to cultural images of beauty, even though I know the absurdity of this image. I could have sex with her right now, and I would probably enjoy it.

But no longer do I truly desire her. It's been a long time since I have. Though it was a gradual process, I do very clearly remember the distinct moment where I passed the point of no return. I remember how I was alone and threw things and cried and screamed, and how out of character that was for me. And I remember sinking to the floor against my front door, burying my head in my hands and saying only, "Too rich for my blood." I knew then that I would never be the same.

The exact event is immaterial. It was years ago, and simply the endgame in a long battle against a culture that didn't like my frame of mind, and against me, who had codified the pursuit of female-specific beauty with institutional force, even if I never excluded men. It was a disease of institutional processes. But with that one event, that institutional hold finally snapped, and subsidies for women were gone forever. I knew that if I kept trying, I would ultimately become an empty husk of a human being, seeking out my beauty in the face of another. And I knew that even if I succeeded, which I very well may have, that beauty would lie in the hands around me, those same hands that demanded my obligation to desire certain standards, and that parceled out crumbs of affirmation with my compliance. And then I would have succeeded in my efforts to be more like those models.

A scientific study showed that men have emotional reactions when they see a new face they find attractive, whereas women don't. The fact that men do was not news to me, as I very much gauged it when seeing attractive faces. But what I noticed today, when I looked at her face in that photo was that I gauged no emotional reaction at all, at least not one strong enough for me to discern from all the background noise. Then I looked back at one of the male models, and I thought... OK, well maybe not that one. But theoretically, if it had been a male model I'd have found attractive, that emotional reaction would have still been there, along with the physical reaction. Yet I could still have sex with that girl. I could maintain an erection, do my darndest to get her off, ejaculate, cuddle and talk. The whole bit. But I don't particularly want to. And I don't desire her with anything more than a weak biological reaction.

And with that emotional need gone, I am free. Free from having to prove myself to women. Free from having to prove myself to myself. And perhaps too, she is free in some small way. Free from the drug that I once gave her. Free to realize her own real beauty that lies in faint embers, far behind her darkened eyes. I only hope that one day she will see the bright weavings flowing from the dominating breasts and hips of an African woman, who walks with regality in the face of her poverty, past a malnourished waif from the richest nation on Earth adorned in tattered rags. And may she be free to realize her beauty.

This culture does not have a word for what I feel, which is probably for the best. It's controversial, as it introduces elements of fluidity and choice into human sexuality. It's not readily understood, though I'm not sure if that's because few experience it, or because few understand it in spite of experiencing it. At one time, maybe I liked being misunderstood on some masochistic level, as it helped preserve the insular nature of the Institution. That's pretty common. But now I'm just lonely, and scared that I'll discover a wonderful mate who will find these facets of me distasteful. At the same time, I will not lie about who I am and about my real desires, because I refuse to form any relationships based on a lie, even if people on all sides of the debate would like to dismiss me as "confused" or simply brush my views under the rug so as not to complicate the convenient, cut-and-dry culture war among the various political camps of "appropriate" desires.

I don't like to address issues of sexual orientation, but images of beauty are a recurring theme in my life, so I must say this about feeling obligated to desire a certain kind of person, may that kind be men or women, waifs or beefcakes, heroin-chic models or full-figured African queens. My quest for beauty is just another quest for truth. And if pursued with honesty, the quest for beauty is apparently a road to kinds of freedom I never knew I never had. Ultimately, this is a goal in my life, that my quest for truth reveals beauty, ultimately human beauty, not tainted by icons and marketers and social standards. I hope that I can learn to find existing beauty, not to attain it, especially not from a well-composed photograph of malnourished youths. And I hope this quest will set me free.

2004-Mar-06 : I remember nuns in Catholic school, every so often, would talk about their callings to serve God. This, perhaps more than anything, separated them from so many others of humanity, and was their facet second only to their garb that made them stand out. They told us that God gave them their callings as a magnificent gift, and that they were quite lucky to receive them. As they spoke, I remember thinking that their callings gave them a kind of peace in life that allowed them to focus their energy behind one unifying goal rather than spend it trying to find the meaning in their lives like the rest of us poor souls.

But some say a calling can be a curse. During my painful but necessary exile in Norfolk, I met a church organist. But being a church organist wasn't just his job. It was his calling.

This seemed odd, since it was the first time I heard of someone having a true calling to do something that didn't involve joining a religious order. The nuns spoke of the possibility that such a calling could theoretically exist, but naturally, that concept was relegated to the periphery of the discourse. I told him how fortunate he was to have a calling, and he halfway agreed.

The other half of him disagreed. "It's really kind of a curse," he said. From our following conversations, I came to realize that a part of him felt that his calling denied him the freedom to do other things in life, things that perhaps were more financially beneficial or more popular. After all, it has been quite some time since church organists attained rock star status. And someone educated and intelligent like him, with the same material, social and sexual needs as anyone else, probably often questioned why he was sitting behind a big pipe organ all the time.

But this was his calling. Along with a force to unify in his life came the lack of freedom that stems from not wandering. Perhaps this explains why those of us who regiment our lives with vast bureaucracies, as I did, are the most lost. Instead of truly having a place, we fool ourselves with endless methods of exploring and cataloging new paths that lead to hell knows where. And here's the dirty little secret. We secretly don't want that unifying goal, because that would mean a commitment in our lives. We are like the backpackers in a foreign land with nappy hair and beards, or some of the homeless that wander the city streets in temperate climates. We don't accept a path in life because we don't want to give up the freedom that comes with helpless aimlessness. Except we wear suits in place of rags, we carry years of painful confusion in place of a backpack full of dirty clothes, and we lie about what we want in life instead of having our intentions out there for all the world to see.

My intentions are now out there for the world to see.

I say all this now because I believe, in my best judgment, that I was delivered a calling during my exile in Norfolk. I'm not ready to talk about it yet. In fact, I haven't told anybody. Some people receive callings and know about them for years before they can talk about them. I hope I can be more efficient than that, but I may not.

When I say that I "was delivered" a calling, I realize that this is peculiar language coming from me. After all, Van isn't delivered anything. Van creates things. Van enacts things. Van, the future ruler of the world, as we all know, is the complementary cause to every effect in his life.

And of course, I'm not denying that. All I am saying is that I now have this calling, and although it may have arisen pending many of my prior actions, I can't say with any certainly exactly where it came from. I had to take a leap from ivory towers of self-imposed bureaucracy into the safety net of faith before my mind had enough room to receive a calling. On that point, at least, it seems the nuns were right.

But if I am right, and this is a calling, then knowing its source is immaterial. It still tells me where I fit in this world, no matter if it came from me or.... not.

Of course, I could be wrong. One of the main reasons I don't want to talk about it yet is that I want to make sure that this is going to stick, and that it isn't a trendy idea that will last for a few months and then fade away. A true calling, far from needing my protection, should stick with me, sometimes pestering me, sometimes staying in the background, but always there. So far, it has always been there.

I know I haven't written here lately. I've been quite busy starting my new life in Washington, and around the world. But I promised myself that I would make time to write, and I will. And hopefully, I should now have a little more to talk about than just myself.

Copyright © Van Goodwin, 2004
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