New Year, Old Angst

Or How to Make the Ghost of Alan Watts Laugh

Happy New Year.

I’m sitting upstairs in Issa’s downtown Inglewood coffee shop surrounded by the future of Black Hollywood. Young people typing on laptops around long tables. I feel old and alone. I’m not working on anything in particular except myself. What would it feel like to have ambition?

How are they so optimistic? Aren’t they reading the same things I’m reading about how Hollywood is in an tailspin? About how the techno elites are buying up the imagination and offering nothing but scraps to the creators? Surely they must know the odds. But what are the odds when you have no choice? You’re already born and time machines haven’t been invented yet. The tragedy of the world is that there really is only one and it can be anything.

What am I feeling about this? I’ve been thinking about it a lot and realizing my emotional vocabulary sucks. So many of my feelings are an enigma to me except for fear and anger. It’s as if those emotions have a better vocabulary and more confidence in themselves than the others. Fear and anger preach a strong word, are strident and conclusive, and the others murmur and defer. They are afraid to be seen or heard. They skitter in the darkness of my thoughts. Granted no audience, they wage terrorist campaigns on the towers of my integrity.

Behind the landscaping of my conscious mind there is a world of shadows. And just what is this conscious mind I give so much attention? Is it anything more than a soliptical dialogue between two parts of my brain? Is it just two generative algorithms comparing data until some pattern emerges? And does that pattern ever truly represent the Great Pattern it seeks to emulate? Do I ever know anything? Or am I just one of another set of algorithms? Am I ever really conceiving of the Universe which is All? How can I conceive of the All except to resort to synonyms? My experience of the All is endless iteration. Never-ending reruns.

The annoying thing about all that is it doesn’t matter. Occasionally I get the thrill of pushing my thoughts into new frontiers. Learning has its own reward system. But ultimately knowledge does not save me. Knowledge can comfort, but it does not console. Or maybe I only know the wrong things. I’m not sure. The Vulcan in me believes in salvific logic, but I have rarely seen it. More often logic is used to smother feelings, to bury truth in an anodyne casket of intellectual oblivion, and justify exploitation. Maybe in this sense the only truth that ever enlightens is the knowledge of death, which is, in another sense, the pattern of iteration. All individuals find final division in the All but the Universe is clearly filled with invidual consciousness. Is consciousness a relative of gravity, a force responsible for the constellation of experience? Because what are we except contellations of experience. What are we if not the individual molecules of the Holy Ghost of the All?

I haven’t been writing poetry.

If there’s anything that should worry me most, it’s probably that. Poetry used to be the lens through which I sharpened my vision. Poetry was the scaffolding I used to organize my experience. Poetry was the language I used to translate my feelings.

Nikki Giovani is gone. Amiri Baraka is gone. My revolutionary heroes died professors. But poetry is still my faith.

I’m making up my mind again whether to be. I’m always deciding. There is nothing for me to do and nothing for me not to do other than this. I choose to be or not to be. Perhaps this is the only meaningful definition of will, free or encumbered. Will doesn’t have to be absolutely free in order to mean something. Maybe you need the alchemy of both Will and Pattern to make a cosmos. A will that is entirely free is chaos and a pattern that is entirely bound is static. The “freedom to do” is different from “freedom from” almost to be separate concepts entirely. Freedom to do is potential. Freedom from is limitation.

‘To do’ in a meaningful living sense must mean to choose more than the Binary, but perhaps at the core of the Binary is also a freedom to. “I am that I am” and “I am that I am not” conspiring to become All.