'Clearheaded rationality with a deep understanding of chaos'
Mar 20, 2009
Transcribed below:
Friday March 20th, 2009 | Brooklyn, NY
Out having coffee and reading Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries at Taza on Henry Street. My god my mind all comes back at once, thoughts and bold emotions in a torrent, all channeled through that book. A marvelous mind! I thrill at having found him from reading Henry Miller who revered him. He’s—
—mine and I get it thoroughly and fundamentally. The flights of fancy, the mysticism lying right there on the surface, the reverence, the conflict and confusion. Today I read the scene where Nigel is paid a visit from what appears to be an old spurned lover of his, tracking him down in his mad hideaway of a parochial town. The necessary reminder that to be a seeker, one must seek (I have not been, really, for awhile, and hence, am half-dead) and to be a seeker, one will find, which is the crucial social/emotional complication. That in my expansive state I am seeking, and in my small state, I settle with what I find and try to grow it. In that, I become tame myself and shrink continually until… until a final withered yet hopeful moment when I dash it all and strike out again to repeat the cycle. And still I seek to understand—to grasp and therefore truly appreciate my nature. The goal of understanding, really, I don’t think is to tame it, quell it. No, I want to blow it up larger, magnify it, embolden it, highlight, fling it around, proclaim it, and serve it up to anyone who will listen—and especially those who won’t. And in that compulsion, perhaps, lies a goal of finding kindred spirits, the unstable, those who live too loudly and are struck by the overwhelming monstrous nature of their inner world and thus can perceive the inherent flux of the outer world. Arguably, everyone gets this to some degree. But I want to worship at mine, I want to make it an altar and pray at it, I want to let it guide my every thought and action, I want to let it rule me. I want to be subjected to it. That is the uncommon trait. I see it in Lisa, though she is an insuff—
—insufferable person to be very close with. I had this in Marc, really he was my superior in this in many ways, and look what I eventually made of that. To combine the analytical and verbal nature of the talker with the penetrating insight and surefooted doubtfulness of the silent mystic that Marc was—all that in someone who shared the larger scope of my basic values—and my desire for action from thought—that would be my dream partner, whether in an all-consuming lover, or just a best friend. The clearheaded rationality of the verbose, with the deep understanding of chaos just behind it. And would I stop seeking upon finding this? No! Because a partner in crime is not the goal of what I seek. I seek, I think, for the pleasure of seeking. To come in close contact with the mysteries of attraction, with the godlike power of creation and dissolution of emotions and thoughts in others. To see and be seen. To feel and make felt. To be affectable, and to effect. To allow myself to be constantly changed, and to change or at least inspire change in others. The holiness of the expansive mood, of white hot talk, of inspired living, of reading, creating and following omens—this is my holy grail. And it appears in my hands from time to time, God only knows its source and where it returns to when it leaves. Bless Knut Hamsun and may all the rest revere him a hundred years after putting pen to paper, before going truly mad and offing himself. He got it, and he gave it to us.