Writing Advice From A Liar

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have not been writing truthfully. There are things I have not allowed myself to admit. I must tell the truth because that is where the juice is. The good writing is in the truth. The real truth. And the truth about the real truth is that it is mostly about lies. Truth is deception. All of the ways we are deceiving and being deceived. Deceiving ourselves. If we write about things we can easily admit to those we love or to ourselves then we are not writing truthfully. Good writing is about writing truthfully about deception. And fear. 

Good writing is always the scariest to write. You are scared of hurting people, of isolating them, losing them. Scared of the places your mind goes to. Scared of your own proclivities. Scared of admitting what you really want. Scared of being weak. Scared of needing someone. Scared of realizing you do not really need anyone at all. The truth is scary and that is why we do not and why we should write about it. Write about the real truth, the deceitful truth.

Once you have done that you can lie again. Bury the truth in a web of deceit. Exaggerate flaws, consolidate personalities, change universes, centuries, genders. If, at the heart of it all, you have told the real truth, the scary truth, the secret, squirm in the gut at the thought of anyone knowing it truth, then people will know it as the truth, and those embellishments will only make it better. Sometimes lying about the details of the truth just makes the truth more honest. And more interesting. The opposite of truth is not deception, it’s silence. It’s fear.

Be true. Be scared. 

On The Significance and the Insignificance of Being Human

Human beings fascinate me. Being a human being fascinates me even more. In the billions of other possible species that I could have been, I was, by luck or pure chance, thrown out of a womb that belonged to a descendent of the most cerebral species on the planet. What did I do to deserve having a human brain, the most complex system/organ in the known universe? Nothing at all. My existence is contingent. It doesn’t have to be. It isn’t necessary. And it's totally meaningless and purposeless. 

But this is what makes it so amazing to be a living, breathing human being. The fact that I don’t have to, but nevertheless I exist, is indeed the purest element of “meaning” I can attach to my existence. If my existence was the decision of a higher intelligence, and if I was created and put into this world for a purpose, then it would be rendered less meaningful and less valuable because my life would then be the product of somebody else’s will and decision, and not the result of an accident. To me, something that is planned is somehow always less miraculous and exciting than something that just happened by pure chance. So miracles are in their essences, deeply paradoxical, and it’s why I unfold meaninglessness back upon itself until it becomes meaningful. 

I would scrutinize everyday objects and events with existential joy and astonishment, for even broken condoms, car wrecks, gum wrappers, cuss words, and the kind of fallen-from-grace sort of building display asethetics, brilliance and creativity unmatched by anything in the known universe. Just as the slowest and the oldest cheetahs should nevertheless deserve the praises for having great speed, the laziest and dimmest of all people, spending one shabby day after another, doing their work should all the same, be praised for their intelligence by a larger and wider standard. The difference between Einstein and a high school drop-out is non-existence under the perception of a monkey, dolphine, or a fish.

But on the other hand, I would feel pity towards myself and my fellow human beings when their lives are examined under a different lense. Sometimes I would watch TV in between sets during my workout, and there would be one monitor showing ESPN, with some black guy sweating his balls out with a pole just so he could out jump his opponents by a few inches. And on the monitor next to it, there would be some seemingly insignificant flea on Animal Planet, without even asserting energy, jump over objects that are 200 times over its height. If humans have the potentials to jump that high. Even the oldest and sickest of us all would have the ability to leap over the Times Tower with ease. And then I would feel obtuse, ridiculous, and hopeless for attempting to become stronger and faster, for even the most athletic human beings pale in comparison to the power and speed of many other creatures on the planet. What did I do to deserve being locked inside this bald, weak, and slow body? Nothing. 

But then again, for most people, sense of desperation, depression, envy, jealousy and misunderstanding only comes when you compare yourself to people who are around you, and who are within your own league…people like your neighbors, classmates or coworkers. We are jealous of our friends and co-workers if they are just a little bit richer than us, but lose very little sleep over how rich Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is. I would rather live in a world where I make 10 bucks a day and everyone else makes 9 than in a world where I make 20 a day and everybody else makes 50. I see a lot of kids playing their hearts out on the dusty neighbor-hood football “pitches” . I used to wonder why they even bother to try, for it is obvious that people in the major football leagues, say Real Madrid? Yes, even the worse players from that team, could beat them to the ground with minimum efforts. 

And then I realized that the reason why they feel significant upon winning is because they are beating people within their own league from their own world, playing against people who are wearing the same torn uniform and shoe sizes as themselves. If I played Lionel Messi and he beat me(like it’s not that obvious), I probably wouldn’t feel half as bad if I was beaten by that teammate of mine who was always competing with me for playing time…

But sometimes it helps to widen your scope, and compare yourself to members of other leagues or of other species. But such act of comparison can also be a double edged sword, as you can easily be discouraged when you are looking at the situation from the opposite direction.

If I shaved the hallucinatory Harvard University degree off my tongue, I would have simply put all that this way, "Stop Becoming and instead Be"    

SHIVA

Idioms and idolatry 

Prophecies, apostrophes 
All mean absolutely nothing to me 
Honestly 
The Devil isn’t in the flesh, he’s in the filigree 
Revel in the reverie
Of in between breaths
Remarkably 
We should touch in degrees 
Don’t you agree? 
I have no idea where I should go
Yet, this mouthful of palpable 
Parables, mountains of gold 
Out beyond where infinite rivers flow
Bask in the ambiance, take in the afterglow
The pillar I was thrust upon, I wouldn’t know 
Mask me in the undertow 
And watch as these shivers slither through fingers 
Slivers of winter 
And a pound of snow 
A constantly ever changing internal dialogue could prove 
Whether or not I’m more alive than the other corpse in the room
Yet still somehow the pile of ashes continues to grow 
I’m too busy finding my third eye to notice the fumes 
Building up to take me home

Introduction

They say procrastination is like masturbation; well I guess if that was the case here, by now  my hands would be sour and I would have run out of lotion because It took me quite a while before I could decide what my first article would be, how it would look like and what it would sound like.  Despite the endless journeys the arms on my clock took, I still couldn’t settle on what to put out first. Then it hit me! This was not one of those David-Goliath states. It was me having a lot of thoughts I needed released; so fuck David! I opened the gates for an entire armada!

PROLOGUE

Conveying thoughts, ideas and  knowledge I feel is worth sharing which sometimes will simply be in the form of a sentence construct from words that had gone unsaid, will be my agenda on this blog. I will quote and feature minds/ characters/ teachings throughout the different phases of time that I consider “Prometheus Fire”. Fictional or not: Plato, Leonardo Davinci, Picasso, Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Jesus, Enoch, Albert Einstein, Buddha, Tao Channellings, motivational speakers, The Joker, Bane(from Batman), Dr. Manhattan  etc.

Most of my work will be considered uhhhm, ‘bizarre, hysterical and even heresy to the common folk but what essence is freedom when you cannot think outside the stipulated lines of reality? I hope you find it helpful, enlightening and sometimes a pat on the back. This work none-the-less will be rooted on known human knowledge (both existing and lost, throughout time) and have both as its point of reference and spine. It may be a trip down the rabbit hole but there can be only one

ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

So this right here is the ‘measuring point’ whether you’re tall enough to get on this ride or not. Religion, race, gender, wealth and all other measures in the third density will cease to exist in most of my thoughts I lay here; and so should yours. “Ubuntu! Undus Mundus”!        

After The First Black Eye

After the First Black Eye

1. She calls to say she still loves him, despite the fresh black eye turning ripe like a blackberry stain on the left side of her face.

On the phone people can usually hold themselves together but you’ve begun to notice in person she’s started to carry herself like an ancient map that already knows Pangaea will crack apart at the slightest wrong touch. She is Pangaea. And you know that if they have enough time together, he will break her.

2. On her bedroom wall there is a yellowed article about a boy who was dragged from the water of a harbor by the fisherman who saw him jump over the railing and below the ship. There is a reason for him jumping, and the reason is some sort of sadness. Everyone knows it is there, but no one wants to bring it up. The same is true with the bruise on her right hip, blooming like a cactus flower in all the wrong colors. Everyone else pretends it’s only a tattoo.

3. She calls to say she still loves him, and you try your best to tell her that love does not leave birthmarks born from a fist. The rain falls in whatever shape it wants to, always believing the ground will soak it up and never turn it away. She falls in love with him despite every hit, always believing one day his hands will form the right shape and cup her face instead of turning it away with a slap too.

4. Salmon spend most of their early years in rivers before swimming out to sea to live their adult years, and every time she phones, you will keep telling her to swim away too, to reach the calmer currents but she will always find her way back to him no matter how many times he batters her body against the rocks.

5. You have done your best, and she has too. Whatever happens next, whether she finally manages to swim out to the sea or he keeps her captive downstream, those bruises will always be entirely his fault. They came from his skin; she never wanted them on hers and neither she nor you will ever be to blame for the pain she was forced to endure.

Voicemail from the Ex- Poet to the Ex Girlfriend

This message will be too short to encapsulate how long you wish your relationship had lasted. You will think your life has ended like a poem ends as soon as the last line has escaped from the reader’s mouth the same way jet trails mark everything that has been left behind.

But there is still your own body language to learn, to become fluent in, instead of concentrating on all the syllables the soft underside of someone else’s thigh makes when it falls over yours- there are still so many words to decipher that only you alone can make.

He may have fled through your window or left directly from your bed, he may have left a thousand wounds inside your head, but you were never anything less than an entire poem.

You are not unfinished just because he has finished with you. There is something about the way owls call out in the middle of dusk

that reminds everyone on earth that “who” is not always a pronoun but sometimes a question. And yes, without him there will be twilights that feel like the perfect time for cops to arrive and file a missing person’s report for the one half of your heart that belonged to his, twilights in which, like the owls, you will call out to ask who you are without him.

We all feel like when one part of our lives has been lost, we are “something ex.” Ex-girlfriend, ex-poet, ex-ballerina. So please, before you erase this message, remember this: you are not his “ex marks the spot.”He is not on your map anymore, just as poetry is no longer on mine.

You will make beautiful geography alone. There is beauty in an Island.

SOULMATES

Once, my grandmother was convinced that soul mates only met in the afterlife, the kind of belief that sent her baking endless loaves of bread filled with rain and yeast in the days before her death as if each slice contained every thunderstorm she would encounter when she chanced upon her soul mate for the first time.

Today, I peel oranges in the morning light of the kitchen with my bare hands until the syrup stain the top of the counter, lick the knife used to carve out the wedges until all that’s left is salt.

There have been so many women between my sheets but every day I grow hungrier since none of them are actually “the one.”

They kiss me with tongue, bring bottle after bottle of red wine, but after all is said and done and they’ve walked the long stumbling walk back to their apartments under the gaze of a single street lamp,

I gorge on the bags of nectarines by myself. I wonder if when the time comes, my spine will fill itself with birds whose beating wings will carry me all the way through the afterlife and into the arms of the only person I’ll ever truly love.

In the meantime I settle on feeding my emptiness with the spines of men, bake loaves until my hands grow sore and almost forget how my grandmother died of indigestion.

GRIEF

As a child I was constantly sticking my fingers in sockets and trying to figure out if grief had its own color

So my mother sat me down on the sofa and took out the Pantone book, paged through it for an hour until we found the blues. There, I said, that one, and pointed to cerulean. Oh honey, my mother replied, That’s not grief. That’s just a paint swatch and it will never amount to all the pain in your heart.

Sometimes I feel the urge to go wade out into the lake after filling my pockets with stones, but then I remember my father and how he wore his grief like a too-tight sweater, something given to an awkward child by a grandmother who doesn’t even know the right size, so I take the stones back out of my pockets and I place them on his grave instead.

AT 19

AT 19

“At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my mind: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made frommolecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again.

Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends.  Don’t you dare.”

WINTER

On the nights when the moon is more a word on the tip of the tongue than a saving grace positioned at such an angle in the sky that for a little while it almost seems believable that light is alive and well

and will once again enter my own life,

I learn to love the language that rises like a phoenix from the ashes of my burnt-up hope.

They say it gets better, but who they are and what it is are never clear. Still, I hold on to those syllables like each letter could suction cup itself to my windpipe and remind me to breathe even during torrential rain. I learn to love those three words like I learn to hold on to my own body the same way scared swimmers hold on to a life raft. I may be the scared swimmer metaphorically, but it will get better literally. That’s the beauty of language.

My heart has so many fossils full of dead feelings that an excavation would take centuries, so every time the darkness comes I try to remember to be my own paleontologist. I unearth the bad; I dig up the apologies and replace them with the fresh bones of love. I bookmark my own spine like a favorite reading page as a reminder for how many times it’s held me up and will continue to do so.

I remember that it gets better. I remember that all poems must end eventually, but that doesn’t mean I have to finish writing my life story before it’s even begun.

Therapy

The therapist told me my heartbeat was rewired to kill itself

instead of keeping me alive, that the light found in most peoples’ eyes

had shut off in my own from lack of electricity,

and my back was bent like the spine of a much-loved book

after years of putting myself down.

The day I sat in the therapist’s chair was the same day I realized

that I don’t need someone else to tell me what’s wrong with myself.

That no one knows me better than I do,

knows that underneath my skin there are ruby summer skies

just waiting for the storm clouds to pass,

knows that there are fault lines in my bones trying to break me open

but I will never let them tear me apart and shake me to the core.

That day I realized a licensed degree in therapy, combined with a couch and pen,

will never be a magnifying glass into my soul.

That I just need some time to work things out on my own

without the help of a person who doesn’t even know my middle name

and only wants to dig me up for inspection.

So when I went back to the therapist for my second session,

I left a note face-up on her chair.

“You don’t need to fix me.

I was never broken.”

Therapy

The therapist told me my heartbeat was rewired to kill itself

instead of keeping me alive, that the light found in most peoples’ eyes

had shut off in my own from lack of electricity,

and my back was bent like the spine of a much-loved book

after years of putting myself down.

The day I sat in the therapist’s chair was the same day I realized

that I don’t need someone else to tell me what’s wrong with myself.

That no one knows me better than I do,

knows that underneath my skin there are ruby summer skies

just waiting for the storm clouds to pass,

knows that there are fault lines in my bones trying to break me open

but I will never let them tear me apart and shake me to the core.

That day I realized a licensed degree in therapy, combined with a couch and pen,

will never be a magnifying glass into my soul.

That I just need some time to work things out on my own

without the help of a person who doesn’t even know my middle name

and only wants to dig me up for inspection.

So when I went back to the therapist for my second session,

I left a note face-up on her chair.

“You don’t need to fix me.

I was never broken.”

Therapy

The therapist told me my heartbeat was rewired to kill itself

instead of keeping me alive, that the light found in most peoples’ eyes

had shut off in my own from lack of electricity,

and my back was bent like the spine of a much-loved book

after years of putting myself down.

The day I sat in the therapist’s chair was the same day I realized

that I don’t need someone else to tell me what’s wrong with myself.

That no one knows me better than I do,

knows that underneath my skin there are ruby summer skies

just waiting for the storm clouds to pass,

knows that there are fault lines in my bones trying to break me open

but I will never let them tear me apart and shake me to the core.

That day I realized a licensed degree in therapy, combined with a couch and pen,

will never be a magnifying glass into my soul.

That I just need some time to work things out on my own

without the help of a person who doesn’t even know my middle name

and only wants to dig me up for inspection.

So when I went back to the therapist for my second session,

I left a note face-up on her chair.

“You don’t need to fix me.

I was never broken.”