thoughts

The Breathing Mountain has become a point of obsession for me. I work on it every day, and I'm finding a great deal of pleasure with both the sentences and the flow of the arguments. Something I don't typically do but am doing for this piece is hinting at my final argument through numerous vignettes. By the time the reader gets to my conclusion, they should be familiar enough with the idea of the breathing mountain that it won't be too much of a shock. This is uncharacteristically smooth, for me at least.

The scope of what I'm writing seem arrogantly large, though, and I regularly have to contend with doubts to that effect. I'm not sure that I have the authority to write about this. But, well, authority is a weird issue. Because this isn't a matter of qualifications. Or, if it is, the qualifications are not based on one's degree or career. It has a great deal more to do with the way I see the world and the practice of applying theory to perception.

My ideas are largely shaped by the people I surround myself with. Most of them are architects, and their conception of urban space and human interaction has made its way into my theories. Like them, I am also obsessed with the way people organize themselves and the types of hierarchies that develop amongst eachother. I just have an oddly spiritual take on all of it, and I wonder if that organization is itself a sort of organism. Anyway, I'm slightly drunk right now and unsure what else to write. The goal was simply to put a few words on paper.

Another important comment about these last days is my obsession with beauty. When I was in high school creative writing, I remember constantly struggling to write beautiful scenes. I wrote a great deal about autumn leaves tumbling across the ground, and about things falling, like sheets of paper drifting out of somebody's hand and floating down a cliff into the sea spray. I was obsessed with that sort of stuff. It was cinematic beauty. But I also thought a lot about sentences. I always wanted to polish the individual sentences to perfection. This often blocked me and kept from getting very far with my writing. I liked to say that I'd written thousands of opening sentences to my novel. Which, when I think about it, probably isn't that far from the truth.

I'm still obsessed with beauty, though now its more about the beauty of words than the beauty of images. I pride myself on prose that alliterate and lift the tongue. I love a line that leaves one light-headed. It has next to nothing to do with the content of the idea. It's about the way my tongue feels inside my mouth. Beauty is the way one speaks. Unfortunately, this too keeps me from progressing through paragraphs. I often spend inordinate amounts of time perfecting, pushing the "puu" sound into every word. And although many of these sentences still make sense, they don't always. And there are crisper ways I could write a sentence. So when I reread, I'm torn between keeping the beauty and revising for clarity. The beauty, anyway, just seems like a pretension. Few people will notice it anyway, unless they happen to read the piece aloud.

Still, it's something that helps me have faith in my sentence. If it sounds beautiful, I feel alright with it and can move on. I'm not sure if I'd be comfortable submitting a work that lacks this hint of poetry.

Stories

I feel fine when I'm writing an essay. It's the stories that give me trouble. How much detail should I add? Where should I start the narrative? I want to set a clear scene, but how clear does it need to be before I can move on? I spend hours staring at the computer screen trying to make these basic choices. It's frustrating beyond anything else I experience. I'm losing my will to write. But, of course, I'm not about to give up.

The Breathing Mountain, Take Two

The city is more than buildings, roads, and infrastructure. The city is also a society. It is a group of people networked into the physical structure of a space. It has an intelligence and character of its own. It is the body and mind of something greater than people.

Human beings are composed of cells. Each cell is an individual lifeform, with its own DNA, its own energy producing mitochondria, its own status as alive or dead. Yet we think of the collective of these cells as the living entity. Why, then, do we not extend this reasoning to the city itself? Cities are the collective of human interaction, just as humans are the collective of cellular interaction.

Yes, that's the trick. In order to understand the big picture, we must first zoom in. All the way down to the cell, then we understand how life networks with life to create a sort of uber-life. This lesson can be reapplied when we zoom out. Humans network with humans to create something more, an unfathomable collective entity. The Ancient Greeks didn't see themselves as individuals, but as part of a city-state. The cities themselves were the gods, embodied. Athens was Athena. New York City is a god today.

This is the spirituality of concrete and asphalt. And yet we ignore the big picture, just as we ignore the little one, too. We fail to see our part in the collective; we refuse to admit that there's something greater than us. We want to believe that we're the most important thing on this planet, and it wracks us to think that we may be just a part of something else.

And worse yet, we aren't part of a god. Our cities are not benevolent. They do not make the world a better place. Inside, they are riddled with the lines of segregation, class inequalities, and waste. Around them they consume the world. They devour forests, core the hearts of mountains, turn the skies grey with pollution.

We have created devils, and we are the devils' body.

The Breathing Mountain

I live in a city with approximately 650,000 people. I am networked into a grid of roads and can use my bike to get from almost any point A to almost any point B. Green spaces are strategically scattered throughout the grid, while most of it is predominated by buildings, ranging from a single story to over fifty. Most of the tall buildings are clustered in the heart of the city.

The skyscrapers are a latticework of iron, many encased in glass. By themselves, they are dead as stone. It's only when they merge with mankind that they come to life. It's only when people enter them, network within them, create ideas and organize information within them that breath and function. They become the electric fire of neurons, the blood engorged strain of muscle, the life sustaining digestion of the intestine, the waste release of sweat, urine, and feces. They are the iron skeletons of organisms whose flesh dissolves every evening and reintegrates each morning.

But this perspective focuses solely on the individual building. Step back, and a broader organism can be seen. It's circulation runs red with brake lights. Oxygen rich, idea rich, work ready humans are transported in cars from one important sector to another. Vital materials are also transported, allowing the urban organism to mine resources from from away and then circulate them within its own system. Steel, lumber, and cement are brought in from outside to develop the physical infrastructure, the skeleton of the city. Foodstuffs are distributed to feed the biological element. The city grows, a rising mountain made of steel. A mountain alive with movement, with circulation and breath. It is a breathing mountain. We are a breathing mountain.

let's think this through

This is one of those mornings when I have nothing in particular to write about, but I feel an obligation to try, anyway. Maybe something will be uncovered in the process. It's like an archaeological excavation. One moment, I'm just shoveling dirt and clay. My hands are grimy, sore, and blistered. Then the next I hear the chink of metal hitting something hard. I curse under my breath, thinking it's just another rock. But as I clear the dirt around it, I discover it's no rock at all, but the wall of an ancient building, or maybe even the petrified skull of one of my ancestors.

But the reality is, I'm not digging very deeply in any one spot. I'm more like a man with a rake than a man with a shovel. I'm scrapping at the surface, moving leaves from one side of the yard to the next. Every now and then I spot a coin shining under the debris and I take it, smiling. But for the most part, I'm just tidying the place up. This isn't a process of discovery; it's a process of ordering chaos. Now the leaves are all in one corner of the yard, and I can see the grass and the soil again. Maybe I'll mulch the leaves. They'll become a potent fertilizer for some future project. Really, that's what these journals are about.

But that metaphor has put me in a difficult position. Now that I've tidily finished it, I have nothing in particular to say. Where I do go from here? Or, a little more accurately, how do I go about finding the next subject to write about? I've just finished raking a section of the yard, and now I lift my head and lean on my rake. I survey the grass, looking for leaves I haven't yet touched. And then, ah! There they are! I head over and start raking.

But that's not how it really works. Actually, as I look around the yard I see that leaves are everywhere. My spirit sinks. My mind tries to grapple with the logistics of this. How long will it take? Where should I rake next to most efficiently handle the process? I seriously consider just throwing the rake to the ground and walking off, or short of that, taking the rake to the shed and locking it away. When I realize I'll regret that later—regret that deeply, in fact—I groan and approach a random section. It may not be the most efficient approach, but I just need to start somewhere. I need to work and not to think. My thoughts will just dishearten me.

This reminds me of something my roommate Matt once told me. He was listening to an episode of This American Life, and in it they had a telling statistic: the average toddler from a family with professional parents (lawyers, architects, doctors, and other high achievers) hears some 500,000 encouragements by their second birthday. Meanwhile, the average toddler from a family in poverty hears next to no encouragement, but rather 500,000 discouragements and criticisms by their second birthday. Supposedly, this simple and pervasive act is responsible for perpetuating class.

Even if this sounds like something out of a pop psychology magazine, it says something interesting about me. While a child who hears extensive encouragement may grow up to stare at a mess of leaves and think, “I can do this, let's figure out how to handle it best,” I think, “This is going to take forever. I shouldn't even bother.” So while the first child has the strength of heart to think things through before acting, I have to force myself to act immediately, or else I'll do nothing at all. Curiously, this is not a question of intelligence, willpower, or raw ability, it's a question of faith. The first child has the faith in themselves to explore the possibilities, while I have to shut down my intelligence to act at all.

long time. . . .

It's been a long time since I touched this journal, or--for that matter--a poem or short story. I've done extensive writing for The Yellow Bike Project, but nothing creative or even personal. This wasn't an act of laziness or neglect. It was a choice. I had chosen to leave words for the writers and to pursue a purer form of life, one without the vanities of art and the abstract thoughts that accompany it.

Looking back over this month, though, I intensely regret not writing. My memories are still there, but they're difficult to access. There's no simple cue to summon them. In a way, that's exactly what these journal entries are. They're a Rolodex of memories. I can flip through them and remind myself of the stories I've lived. Ah, that's the night I got stoned watching a guerrilla concert with Lauren. Oh, and there's the time I talked about anarchism with Hamer. I remember scenes from these nights with surprising crispness. But I'm forgetting that I can remember them.

So I'm going to rededicate myself to this task. I'm feeling like a writer again.