The Doors

That photo is of Clarice Lispector. I have moved the paragraphs about her to near the end of this blog post.

Steve Roggenbuck and I are going to start emailing daily writing to each other (him a poem, me prose stuff). This way we can help each other stay productive.

Friday was "Beer Friday" at work. The theme this week was German beer. I tried a Belgium white expecting to not like it and did not like it. Some people invited me to go with them to a bar. I like when people invite me to things, especially if I would want to go to a place with those people.

I bought a round of shots. I did karaoke: "99 Problems" Jay-Z. I felt very white during my performance. A black woman, I think the hostess, touched my arm as I walked by and complimented my performance.

I am going to try to buy my family Christmas presents this year. I am less broke this year. I like when I think of a nice present to give someone. So far I have thought of one present to give, but it is not for a family member.

Saturday during the day I felt as if I were rotting inside. I think it was on account of having little on the stomach and drinking a lot of coffee and also various disappointments and sadnesses and general confusion and angst and a lack of certain things and general shittiness. I went to a "Friendsgiving" dinner and drank a lot of wine. Later I went to a place and then another place and then went home.

I finished reading The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector. I liked it a lot. It's very philosophical. This woman goes into her maid's room and closes a door on a cockroach and then sort of meditates on the cockroach as a symbol/metaphor for various things.

Here is some from it:

"If my life is transformed into it-itself, what I now call sensibility will not exist--it will be called indifference. But I am still unable to learn that way of being. It is as if hundreds of thousands of years from now we finally won't be what we feel and think anymore: we shall have something that more closely resembles an 'attitude' than an idea. We shall be living matter manifesting itself directly, unmindful of words, going beyond always-grotesque thinking.

And I won't travel 'from thought to thought' but from attitude to attitude. We shall be inhuman--as humanity's greatest conquest. To be is to be beyond the human. To be a human being doesn't do it, to be a human has been a constraint. The unknown awaits us, but I sense that that unknown is a totalization and will be the true humanization we long for. Am I speaking of death? no, of life. It isn't a state of felicity, it is a state of contact."

It is about 170 pages of that sort of thing. I thought some of the best bits were toward the end and so I concluded satisfied and feeling positive about the book overall.

I recommend her. I have also read Near to the Wild Heart and The Hour of the Star. Both of those have more characterization and action than The Passion.

Today I purchased The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley at Myopic, along with Almost Transparent Blue by Ryū Murakami.

I started The Doors of Perception. It is about Aldous Huxley taking mescaline; he describes the effects it has on his consciousness and understanding.

Here is a part:

"That which, in the language of religion, is called 'this world' is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various 'other worlds,' with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate 'spiritual exercises,' or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception 'of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe' (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large) but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality."