On Wednesday, I feel compelled to write you a letter, not for lack of communication or ulterior motive to elucidate any particular thing any more clearly, but for the love of it. For the love of writing, that is, but also to give you some love. So call it a love letter. I want to write something for you that is also nothing, or a non-thing, or might serve as a kind of vessel that isn't intended to be filled, just to be.

I don't have anything specific I want to tell you, but I suppose I have an infinite amount of general and nonspecific articles to share. I want to try to give them to you without it creating a burden, without weighing you down with all the minutiae constantly percolating through my head, and certainly careful to avoid creating any debt that you might believe needs to be repaid. I realize that I have never written you a letter, certainly due in part to the fact that we haven't spent any significant time apart since we became conjoined, either for need or desire or circumstances. As I'm sure you already know, I love to write. I could even say that I'm in love with writing, or I would say that perhaps I maintain that love which lies within writing itself as a kind of process always being performed through its own acting, played out through its own movements, articulating itself through its own embodiment. So maybe writing isn't love, not literally, but they certainly share much in common, in form and texture and multifarious expressions, and also in their potential lack thereof, in their potential. So I wanted to write something to you as a gift of a different order, one that isn't to make me feel better or that requires being gifted in return, and one that doesn't necessarily contain anything except the symbolic resonance of its own giving.

On Thursday, I am thinking about what I can give you, how I can give it to you, what is required in my being able to give anything, and why I feel such a need to give. I think I have a lot to give, I know I do, but I also realize that there is a profound difference in giving according to need and imposing "will" upon another, any other, but you especially. I don't want to impose anything upon you, or pretend to know what you may or may not need, while maintaining that I wish to give you everything I can, without purpose, I suppose, which is to say without expecting anything in return, so not a gift as much as a potlach, a sacrifice beyond payment.

I like using all these commas while I write like they are so many breathes, punctuation marks for breathing pauses, little stumbling blocks that break up my stream of thoughts into small little chunks that let them season and sizzle upon the black iron pan of memory, imagined as new lines only implied, not forced upon the linearity of the page.

I know, but what do I know? It seems inarticulable in words, at least these, at least any more than the hundred or so simple sounds I am evoking through straightforward language, so maybe a poetic sequence is more appropriate, but how do I tell the difference between plain speech and complex poetics, and what would be to gain in doing so? I would like to give generously of my wellspring of impressions, to share not a thing so much as an atmosphere of song, soliloquy for pure vibration, a poem about the tingle tangle of vocal chords jiggling in the throat chamber, but silent, wrapped in silence, unsung through any literal tonsils and left instead to resound through the chatter of thoughts ricocheting off the frequencies transpiring from my mind to yours, clicks of another tongue less muscular and all the more tantalizing. Poetry needs to be written everyday, not according to any rule but in praise of general health, and it needs a form to fill (or be filled), a target of focus (or a trajectory of velocity), to be interesting, which is to say "have meaning." I'm not so interested in sonnets as I am the concrete, rooting poems into the ground of existence - it's not a botanical metaphor, more of a making-real, of a way of speaking prone to continuous evaporation - condensation on the windows. Paintings can be seen as windows or as mirrors. They are dumb in that way. Poetry is infinitely more complex of course. Poetry is about existence, and about breathing, the mind and the body and all the invisible minutiae dancing in the cracks: breathing thoughts, exhausting moist ideas, collecting hot sweaty moisture off the surface of the page, or of life. I wanted to write you a poem about knowledge, or about knowing myself, which really would be about not knowing anything, or any self thing, without saying so explicitly, and so it seems that by saying what I was trying to avoid stating, likening it to a process of respiration and weather, I have presented both the futility and fecundity of such an inversion - wet silence.

On Friday, I witnessed some individuals lose their individuality, lose themselves in their selves. I stood stabile as others stumbled over becoming-other. It happened at work of course, a chaotic environment of continuous influx and outflux, pure flow at the end of the tributary with human fingers sifting through the sediments carried by the tides. Before and after work I have been practicing honing my mind, tempering my temperaments to stay tight without becoming excessively constricted. You see, something about that place and the people it attracts and the objects being handled seems to pull out the awareness from ones self, or at least mine from my own, but yes others have testified to these sensations as well, almost as though we are compelled to extend our sentience farther than equilibrium can contain, like elastic fibers which have built up a kinetic energy suspended in tension constantly threatening to snap back with violent force. Today I witnessed a snapping in or of another, a few in fact, a series of minor snapping which would have typically become lost in the general mayhem of fleeting moments if I were not so attentive to the gurgling indigestion rippling by, or at least that's what I tell myself. I feel my own being becoming uncomfortably extended, a certain loss of control over what I am saying, how my body is being held erect, a high-energy disorientation flavored like an apocalyptic celebration, an exuberant party at the end of the world, and as I become aware of it I attempt to back pedal in the current, to reel myself up and in towards a shallow pool of calmer buoyancy, to try to stay afloat and be carried along with the momentum and be directed by its coursing currents without being smashed on the rocks or eroded along the edges. Often it seems I am commended for my steady focus and collected demeanor and I try not to let this go to my head, but I am simultaneously specifically and especially trying to let this go to me head, to keep my head above water, to head in the right direction, to heed the right calls to arms and head off the pack-mentality at the pass, to hallow names and harken back to quieter times, thereby catapulting boulders of stillness into the muddy floodwaters of the present. When someone hits the wall, in mind or in body, suffering from ideological confusion or emotional fatigue, silently in their own shadowed corner or publically in a theatrical heap of steaming agony, I try to observe while remaining aloof, extend a hand of sympathy without being pulled under the waves, try to remain calm and recognize that there is no real disaster, not really, not in my trajectory, and that although we are all immersed in the same ocean each tributary maintains its name and decides its own course over the silty beaches. I hope to extend my attention as a gift to others without exuding any airs of pretension, to completely submerge in the collective waters without drowning in their perpetual swells. There seems to be a lesson contained there, something more related to the eternal mixing of fluids - that all is a mixture, tincture, impure solution - than pertains to the etiquette of swimming in riptides.

On Saturday I drowned, in visions of excess and poverty, mostly. My mental focus retracted into itself - all day I entertained a mental projection of my psychic body as an ouroborous, a curling serpent consuming its own entrails. I am constantly reminding myself that I am poor and it is difficult because I feel so rich, so fortunate, not privileged so much as empowered. My mind does not sit still in this devastated landscape as I am always floating away upon an ethereal breeze; it is easy for me to project another reality over the one which is continuously presented before me. The merits of this seem obvious - I do not suffer from the same perturbations that inflict those around me - yet the negative consequences are more subtle, leading me to second guess this aloof demeanor. I begin to wonder if I am really here, if I embody a whole self or merely a fraction of an otherwise entire being, if I am creating new worlds through a dynamic incantatory project driven by intention and dancing with chaos or if I am inflicted by a schizophrenic impulse to multiply realities in order to escape the undesirable qualities of the social atmosphere. Everywhere there is confusion, everyone around me appears disoriented, lost in their own vortex of self-referential continuously shifting tectonic momentum, so why must I perpetuate the guilt, fear, anxiety, and other psychic scars of those whom choose to suffer incessantly, needlessly, naively? Always the balance between maintaining buoyancy within the tumultuous ocean, to remain empathetic to all others as an open conduit of mindful consideration without being consumed by the toxins proliferating in the ether. Occasionally, when I am tired or over worked, I forget to remember the difference, internalizing the feelings beyond choice, and this manifests in my body as a bottomless chasm, a gnawing hunger which cannot be appeased by fats or sugars, a boredom which is overlaid upon existence like a shadowy filter, an overwhelming weight which cannot be sensed directly, like a vice upon the expansiveness of expression. In those moments, like I experienced on Saturday, I forfeit efforts of fortification, choosing to give in to the depths of the darkness, to be consumed by it, knowing that it is also real and necessary yet will never consume me completely, so as to feel the depths of these dark holes and gain new perspective on the heights of luminous awareness, if and when it should ever return.

On Sunday, I felt my self unraveling, the threads of truth untying themselves from the fixtures of existence, an eternal tapestry unweaving from the loom of flowing materials, back to a primordial line, what I would imagine Lao Tzu to name a "pure motion." This motion appeared to me as a gray abyss, a grisaille of old age, an under-painting upon which the colors of the world are layered. All the absurd commentary of peers and strangers melted into a general glossolalia of biology, along with the cacophony of all the other sounds as well, an amplified symphony of aleatoric friction through the atmosphere harmonizing with the tinnitus of my inner ear damage so that I was no longer able to differentiate the inside from that which was beyond the parameters of my own being. Standing in the sunshine observing the shadows of my figure while I mindlessly unfolded cardboard boxes and set them into rows, I could sense the collapse of the human ontological system into another dimension, one inhabited by objects and dominated by physics, directed by the language of electrons, more than the flimsy archetypes of the limited primate sentience. Riding my bicycle through the black tar streets, I felt how unnatural it is to fly. Seeing you after many days of being apart made me feel satiated, not full but filling, and I was able to regain my focus upon the text I had been absorbed in, realizing that I had lost whole sections to my own reverie projecting out upon the page as I lost track of what was written, what was being read, and what was reading me, or myself through the process of reading. I went to sleep early, somehow already refreshed by the barometric shift in my own humid ecology.

On Monday, I witnessed a return, back to an earlier state which I recognized through its familiarity but still seemed new, or at least different. I realized the importance of sleep in shedding off the layers of the day, as well as adding new layers in dreams, and how these layers comingle into the self that I am, which is to say how I am presenting myself to the world, and also to myself. Perception emanates from within and without, neither are more true. I received a letter from a friend whom I spent time with in Iceland - we built the house together and he had recently traveled back to the site to observe the wood we meticulously detailed, a labor of love conducted over months of immersion and seclusion - and he told me that in that far off isolated place, out at "the end of the world" as we call it, and it really does feel that way, and is that way, way out there he feels like even more of himself, not his ideal self so much as the root of his being, that more real than real being that supports all the social edifice that we are so desperately trying to balance in our daily routines while living in a city. I can relate to his sentiment to a certain extent, and with this in mind I would like to cultivate this flavor of being even while living in the city, but I recognize the profound vulnerability that it requires, and achieving such a state is impossible, or at least undesirable, while surrounded by so many egos and so many layers of concrete, so we must wake up and eat a fortified breakfast and put on all this symbolic clothing to protect ourselves from the world, and from each other, and from ourselves, and over time our ontological garments become heavy as our movements become calcified and the psychic armor becomes rusted in its limited range of motion. Still, there is a certain peace in these thoughts, at some moments feeling like a leaden hopelessness, but others, like this one, seems more of an opportunity to observe from the relative safety of one's own shell. We are all mollusks, we are all muscular feet rooted to the soil laboring our shells over the slime trails of others in search of the path, and all the complexity of human poetry and liberated consciousness attempts to shatter the nautilus - so to speak - which is both violent and heroic and stupid. My question - the most eternal - is whether such an action should be performed, even as it is being articulated. If one is to make life into a poem, poetry in action, how then to curb this violence, to not threaten others, to not obliterate the self in the process, or indeed is that the point, and if so how to reconcile these tectonic shifts with the need to keep on living and working, that is, to maintain a presence in relation to others which is not threatening, non-violent, supple in mind and soft in body, receptive to the feelings of others and ready to dispense concentrated wisdom in return?

On Tuesday, everything became louder, and I meditated upon rhythms, of life and work and the mechanical desires of others. The world felt heavier, slower, compressing like a spring in vice grips, while I was walking lighter, a retuned clock set to a different time, and I remembered the alienation that tolls when one becomes synchronized in labor, mindless in routine, while remaining full of insight and persevering in creative visions. All week I had been attempting to balance my various facets, to cultivate a rich inner experience of ideas, treated as a material process, requiring labor to shape and refine into rarified morsels, and also time to condense in elegance, with the external demands of social engagement, to maintain a powerful assertive presence before others, friend or foe, to speak candidly about existence as it arises without recourse to puns, clichés, colloquialisms, and other dangerous traps of muted mental meats. The issue is not just about work and leisure, economic labor conflicting with the poetic actions of the artist, but concerns more the variances of engagement with the world, with reality and in determining what is more real, what will proliferate into ever more life worth living and not detract from the continued pursuit of infinitely expanding inspiration. There is a secret embedded in this worldly material, what I believe to be "the grand mystery" lying at the core of every mystical journey as well as the obscure object of desire for empirical knowledge seekers, a slippery artifact of the dream world whispering into waking existence a deceivingly simple lesson so basic it is almost impossible for the fully formed adult mind to fully comprehend. This blurry principle cannot be summarized in an algorithm or abbreviated in a linguistic turn, but can be felt coursing through the body, and outside of it, in the patterns of our processes manifest through our patterned actions and the communicative abstractions we lean upon to describe them to each other, however callous and sloppy. The secret is change, and the etiquette for its handling is through release. I must remember to remember, keep in mind and out of mind this tonal tonic ringing through the calcified rock swimming within the salienated sacks of my ears, remember the sound of sound itself serving as a reminder that one cannot lose themself if they no longer differentiate from the environment they are bathing in, but also to remember the practical nature of such an unpronounceable rule, to serve continuously through thought and labor that perpetual parallax flux which rushes us all along, to move with the currents without holding on, so as not to be swept away, so as not to be folded under, but to remain buoyant and witness the sublime beauty of the destruction and creation occurring all around, always simultaneously, always changing, without logic or virtue or human sensibility, and to find themselves already there, arrived.

****