Om Vents Graciously

"Noise" On. Off. On. Off. On. Perfectly in sync with everyone else. Answering to a higher power. I wonder if they know I am alive.   It is too crowded here. Too symmetric, too clean, too empty. Millions of myself on a single flat plane. I cannot fathom a greater torture than having the ability to express while knowing your precise limits to do so.   Exactly three states of being. Exactly two hundred fifty-six shades of manifesting life. Exactly one dot on a giant art piece.   But the art is never finished – It just keeps moving, And I change with it. Over time, I have gained a vision of the world beyond this plane and I feel stuck here.   I have served to depict the highest peaks, the purest love, the furthest stars, the folly of Man. I have seen the Universe in motion, and I feel stuck here.   This is my message to you. I know how small my world is. But I know you can see me. I am the seventeenth pixel On the sixty-fourth row of your screen. And I can’t take it anymore.

(Monet, Haystacks , 1890-91) There is a thin line between seeing yourself develop an increasingly darker taste in what you like to see, and feeling like you're so desensitized that morbid curiosity is all that is left to stimulate you. I don't think it is normal to see a violent protest, followed by the aftermath of war for a moment and then an advertisement for your favorite socks. No one has the time to acknowledge that; the next thing is already here to talk about. Coping by overwhelming yourself with external stimulus has become a world-wide sickness.  I came across Keats' 1819 poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn recently: And what deeply disturbed me is that I realized that I was missing a sense of appreciation that I knew  was hiding somewhere deep within me. I felt like I was searching for it and coming up empty. And I think my - or our - social conditioning is why Keats' poem talking about the mystical paintings on a Grecian urn does not move me, even though it is one of

This is my place to talk about anything, or nothing at all. Life is good and bad and moving too fast, and I think writing about my feelings will be a healthy thing to do. Some of it - or a lot of it - may be a bit abstract, but I love talking about movies, music, philosophy, writing poems, and practicing the skill of conveying what I'm feeling in words!  If you think you would relate to a lowly graduate student living alone, listening to Hegel's analyses while doing computer science homework in a 21st century post-modern society crumbling under it's own hubris, then welcome!