Today it feels like my frustration is losing its ability to become words and stories. Only the feeling remains; it has no object or target. Usually it generates fantasies of wild success or revenge. Today it is itself, like a burning fire, altering the shape, color, and texture of my being.
I am in a mood.
...
I'm sitting in the living room with a cup of black coffee from Trader Joes. This can of coffee is one of the worst we have had in awhile. My feet are cold.
I skipped breakfast, and I will skip lunch. I'm getting fatter than I want to be.
Intermittent fasting is good. And it seems to match my mood by adding a dash of self-imposed austerity.
I keep thinking of moving to New Mexico and pacing around the house. But I should be cleaning my room—our room...
Our apartment is a metaphor for our relationship. Common area is clean, but the bedroom—where we're most intimate—is a mess. My side is messy; and she has boxes still packed from over one-and-a-half years ago, mostly her dead dog's things.
...
If I could focus on like one thing I could probably get good at it, but I am scattered across too many things. It's nice to see the similarities across all of those things (reading philosophy, riding motorcycles, wishing I were a writer, doodling/drawing back in the day, knife sharpening, video game playing, raw denim wearing...) Man, I'm pretty fucking useless.
Oh hey look, that fire-and-frustration turned into words again.
...
"I am nobody," a voice says. I almost confuse it for a thought of my own. It's not my voice, but it's in my voice.
"This again?" I ask.
The voice shrugs a pair of invisible shoulders, unsure of what it's trying to do. We've been through this before. This conversation devolves into a dialectic where the voice concedes that what it is trying to say is that I am socially insignificant and I should feel bad for being socially insignificant and that maybe I should do something to make myself better. But when I try to inquire about how exactly it is that I am supposed to make myself more socially significant, the voice becomes useless.
And now a spirit says, live the good life and know that it passes through shadows and through dark nights.
...Yeah okay. Very deep and equally vague. Thank you. Nice.
...
Watching Peaky Blinders (autocorrected to Pesky Blinkers on my phone earlier) with Caitlin happened to lead me across a phrase that has stuck in my mind—second sight. In the show, Polly has a near-death experience, and she comes back a broken person (who recovers). While she is broken, she caves into fringe Romani spiritualism—seances, visions, speaking with ghosts, etc. But when her family needs her, she pulls herself together and automagically recovers. As a normal, high-functioning gangster, her spiritualism becomes second sight which seems to function like really good intuition.
There is something to the idea of second sight. It's another lens to see the world through, one that primarily relies on intuition—the ability to perceive interrelated patterns that take place over longer periods of time and across wider causal-order-of-events than our senses and rationality can extrapolate and predict; it is more meaningful and less physical; it is empirical but unscientific.
I've been walking through Queen Anne in the mornings over the past few days, and I have felt like I can switch to second sight. It's my second sight. I might be better off calling it poetic sight. There isn't really anything esoteric about it.
There is a story about an apprentice magician who is trying to learn to open his third eye. He is told to sit in meditation until it opens. He continues to sit and sit. He is a diligent and promising apprentice, so his master reveals to him the secret: his third eye had been open this whole time, the fact of which must remain a secret, and that many apprentices have cruel masters who indefinitely hold power over their students by never telling them that they already have that which they seek.
The "spiritual world" is full of very real meaning, and it is right there out in the open for anyone to see. But, in my experience, you're not going to like it. In my experience, it has revealed a lot of poverty. When I open my poetic vision, I see an impoverished world, as if I were an urchin kid walking through filthy streets despite walking through an upper middle class neighborhood.
Actually it's more sophisticated than that. Some houses look like fake plastic shells, others warm, others overflowing with life. Churches have a surprising amount of energy. Schools beget an order.
(Third eye? More like TURD eye... hah)
Here's my quick how-to/what-it-is guide for second sight/poetic sight:
It's your own lens and paradigm; it is the world seen through the totality of your experiences, the books you've read, the actions you've taken, the feelings you feel; you must step up to it everytime, as if hiking to a viewpoint, and the way up changes each time; it is bigger than you realize; it is an extrapolation as far as things can get extrapolated; it also requires a degree of secrecy; it does not like to be made too public.
I think I'll call it poetic sight from now on.
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