The Whole of It All

I was on a good path a little over a year ago. I was starting life anew on my own terms, I was working on what I am still hoping is an Academy Award nominated screenplay, and I was feeling free for the first time, probably in my entire life.

Things were going so well, and I was working so hard, I decided to give my brain a little break every night. It wasn't much. I just went outside just after dusk to watch the orange horizon to the west fade into a purple blanket of stars. I use to like looking to the stars for inner peace and understanding. I found insight and knowledge and even God at one point.

I stood in the back yard in the dead of night, gazing beyond the most distant stars, wondering what was out there.

After my second trip to Australia in December 2005, I had a pretty good handle on the world and all of its idiosyncratic insanities. I found out things about myself that I thought were long dead. For instance, I have enormous charisma for one so superficially unsound. I thought it was my American accent that brought me all the attention, but when I brought the new found attitude and confidence back home in January 2006, I discovered that the charisma came from the simple fact that I do not care anymore. It wasn't the cynical "the world needs to blow up before we discover how doomed we are" apathy that I have today. Rather, it was more that I had a carefree, pragmatic perspective on life.

No worries, mate.

So I would look at the stars and wonder why the answers weren't more obvious. Sometimes I sat in a faded red-painted outside rocking chair - the one made of metal of some kind that scraped against the concrete patio that, when wet from the rain or hose would sound like footsteps on a gravelly beach - and just casually rock myself into a trance of sorts. The universe made complete sense to me, but I still couldn't describe it. I thought of several ways to describe how to describe it, such as the Grand Orchid metaphor, but I never was able to encapsulate it into a simple set of symbols that I could express over the Internet.

I even came up with a method of reducing large concepts into small meaningful words or phrases in order to help me find a simple answer. I call it "the Paisley method" because it generally starts with a large explanation of the concept I am attempting to describe, followed by three or four breakdowns of related topics, including an analogy for each, ultimately culminating in a single word or phrase.

Such is the shape of a Paisley.

I enjoyed creating unique visual metaphors for my thinking processes and relating my view of the universe. We are a visual culture, and we respond well to imagery. Quick...what do you see when you think Nike, MacDonald's, or Coca Cola? That's why KFC doesn't have to be Kentucky Fried Chicken anymore. People respond well to concise visual cues. Entire corporate histories are contained in a swoosh, a yellow M, and a white wave.

One night of rocking and thinking, visualizing as much of an infinite universe as one mind could possibly contain, I saw a single, simple image flash before my eyes.

In my trance, I traveled beyond the solar system, the galaxy, the cluster, and the Quasars at the outer edge of the universe. I traveled beyond space in order to look back and see the entire universe as a whole. It takes a lot of imagination and internal memory to compress that much information, so I couldn't hold onto the vision for long.

A circle of light lay on a velvet black background, placing its imprint on the darkness. It wasn't a glowing light, though. It had more the effect of lightning flashing across the dusty blackness of an Oklahoma thunder storm. Only this light was smooth and the radiant tendrils were short and straight. A line of the same light dissected the circle at an angle from my perspective. I must have been looking at the universe from the lower left. And as quickly as I pulled away to see the line extending infinitely on both sides, the image was gone.

Amazingly enough, I was watching National Geographic Channel about six months later, after a lengthy trip to Australia in which my hope for humanity was lost, and there was a pseudo-documentarian fantasy program about the universe. Basically, the show talked about images of the universe from the Hubble telescope and various unmanned missions, as well as a microwave telescope in, I believe, upstate New York. Something about pigeons causing interference.

In the end, they showed an X-ray image of the entire universe, and it boiled down to a large circle in the middle indicating large amounts of X-radiation in the beginning, then slimming out into bands as the energy dissipated. It looked a hell of a lot like that flash of God I saw in my head that night I saw the universe.

I have seen everything, so what is left for me to do? What's the point?

An interesting phenomenon of our world as that people make meaning for their lives. To whatever end, it seems to help a lot of people cope with a chaotic and psychotic world. And that's my problem. I can't seem to find any meaning in all of this, nor am I interested in discovering the meaning of all of it. I have seen what it takes to learn that kind of information, and it is beyond all human comprehension. People who search for meaning or who have found it are working under the assumption that we can hope that one day it will all make sense. They actually believe that one day after they die, they will learn the meaning of it all. At least they hope. But hope does not exist.

That sucks, because it pretty much reduces our options to the bare minimum requisite for survival in today's "global community". Should we unplug from the matrix, even though it seems rather trivial to hang around? It's like going to a bad party. All your friends show up hoping that all the hot girls are going to show up, and I already know that they're all at home washing their cats or something. No one's getting laid, but it's still cool to hang out. Why leave when there's nowhere else to go?

So I hang out in a chaotic and psychotic world with the understanding that there is no escape, and I think up clever methods of metaphorical thinking like a mental patient in the yard picking daisies.

Finger painting with words during arts and crafts hour.

Reaching into childhood for comfortable memories, pockets of humanity and beauty in a clear blue void.

I spent the crucial years of young adolescence in the house from hell. It was there that all the pain resided in alcoholic induced divorce, infidelity, daily pummelings, and all sorts of Amityville horror type stuff. The house was built in 1942 out of adobe made from the land on which it stood. Four rooms square made the front of the house, thick adobe walls encased in chicken wire and heavy plaster. The back portion was an "add on", and it was a rotten wood frame loosely covered in dry wall posing as the kitchen, bathroom, and back bedroom.

The roof sagged, the back door fell off, and there was no heat or air conditioning.

It was in this house that I had the dream. My room was the back left quarter of the main part of the house, and it had no third wall. It used to be the dining room, so the room opens directly to the kitchen. I had a large firm bed with a metal yellow frame, half octagons at my feet and head. It sat along the wall common with the kitchen. It was the only place for the bed because in the middle of the outside wall stood the swamp cooler, blasting ice cold air directly through my room and the adjacent room. It was so cold that I had to use winter blankets in the summer when I slept.

I woke up in the middle of no particular night, got out of bed, and headed for the kitchen. Groggy to the point that I could barely see. Afraid, but not knowing why. I walked into the kitchen, now a barren grey waste land of hills and bone, like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Everything clear to the eye, but I was alone. All around, the grey went on forever. And I felt the presence of something very bad behind me. I turned to look, but nothing was there, although I heard voices, I'm sure. Something behind me again, and I turn expecting to see the devil himself. My only thought, with all the torment and all the fear, was that I was standing on the outskirts of hell. Terrified, defiant, suspicious. Only shadows in my periphery, the voices never showed their faces.

I don't remember anything after that. I could have started a normal dream, or I may have awakened. That dream sums up all the horrible things that house represents. At least it explains things, even if nothing else explains the dream itself. That's only if it was a dream, though. It's hard to tell with that house. I had some pretty horrific "nightmares" while I lived there, even before all the bad stuff happened. When we first moved in, I woke up in the middle of the night for a drink of water, and noticed that my brother in the bottom bunk did not have a head. Yeah...I screamed.

We had two trees in front of the house. The one next to the sidewalk was a forty foot ash that helped shade the dirt lawn in the summer time. Along the front porch on the left facing out, just a few feet from the front door, grew a tree that blossomed lavender flowers in the spring time.

I found out what kind of flowers they were one day when an older lady stopped by - she was just passing through the neighborhood and noticed our beautiful orchids, and she wanted to know if she could pick some.

Figure that. Here we are living the Romanian dream in a hellish dust pit, and we have an orchid tree growing out front. I guess that's indicative of the silliness of life. God's cruel jokes or moments of his pity, there are good and beautiful things in life, growing in horrible places where they don't belong, indifferent to all that is ugly. The tree does not judge, it only grows. It represents a possibility, and that is its meaning - not simply to be, but to be beautiful in an ugly place.

Even a tree has meaning when taken in context.

God. The universe. Time.

Everything.

And a tree.