A long time ago, on one of my first posts on this site, I described a state of mind that I refer to as The Reach.
The Reach is a metaphysical state that you arrive at when you find yourself at your perceived boundary of your identity and your potential; The Reach is the place where you achieve your limit; it is your terminator. It is the point at which your ultimate individuality is expressed, and you are confronted with your own isolation as a human. The Reach is the emotional point past which you have never traveled.
My mental image of The Reach (All of my psychic concepts are associated with detailed images of places, or with the imagos of entities) is of a cold, gray spit of land, narrow as a whip, curling out into a black sea like a witchs finger, beneath a storm-wracked sky the color of charred wood. Off in the distance, along the desolate road which stretches away from lands end, there is a string of empty homes with windows like the eyes of skulls, and a lighthouse the color of old bone whose lamp throws a wash of sickly green light strobing across the land, the spit, and the sea.
It looks like Innsmouth, long after Chthulu has been called
It is windy there, on The Reach, and cold. There are no gulls there, and all the shells are empty.
There is nothing to hear there but the listless slapping of the waves against the jagged black stones of the spit, and the thin whistling of the wind.
The first time I described this place to another person, I had become the greyest boy I have ever been. I was completely stagnant, and overcome by inertia. Throughout the course of the failure of my relationship with a girl I tried to save from herself, I worked the hardest that I ever have. Every part of my self was consumed, relegated to the shadows, or revealed as corrupt and false. And in the end I failed.
In one of the lost, secret places in my heart, I stood, day after day, on that desolate spur of land, waiting for a ship to come, for a light to appear in one of the deserted houses; waiting for a single sign that I was not alone.
I was, shall we say, a wee bit emo.
And I was being much more foolish than I was designed to be.
It took me a long time, after trying so hard to meet my lover halfway, to realize a simple fact: We are, each of us, alone. All the waiting in the world will never bring about a recurrence of the singular moment when one of gods million monkeys typed the story of you on one of the million typewriters in heaven. You could choose to wait a million years, but there will never be another Hamlet written merely for your pleasure. The lathes of heaven are endlessly spinning, they are always shaping souls. But every snowflake speaks a truth, every flower teaches us a lesson; God abhors a copy. Nature is an artist and youre its fucking work of art. Even mint-in-box, there will never be another entity like you. And once your innocence is set free to walk into the world, the winds of The Reach will erode your primal self into a form unimaginable, and as impossible to recreate as the shattering of a crystal globe. Your sheer complexity as a human and the vagarities of random chance conspire to force you towards independence.
You are doomed to be unique.
You are the last of your species.
You are not a Yin, or a Yang, you are a whole, or just a hole.
You are the sole author of the story of your tribe.
And you are a tribe of one.
Ive finally started to accept that there is nothing wrong with this. Sartre wrote Linfer cest lautres, a quote that immediately became a banner slogan for misanthropists and the disaffected as an intellectual justification for their distrust of others. But Sartres phrase means nothing as direct as most assume. The phrase Hell is other people refers not to any inherent evil in existing in mankind, but to the suffering imposed on us by our need for each other. Jean-Paul meant it as a form of shorthand, a way to address the impossibility of complete independence from others, and to explain the inevitable suffering that comes as a result of the necessity of that interaction. It was a poetic way of describing the conflict between our desire for contact with others of our kind, and the tacit impossibility of true understanding between unique individuals cursed with hideously flawed communication skills.
Words speak only lies.
Do you think I lie?
Then how do you know that the color blue to you looks the same to you as it looks to me?
Because I tell you it does, or because you assume.
Why do you say I love you if you haven't told your partner what you mean? Why is the phrase easier to say than to define?
I love you.
This is not a lie.
One of these statements is untrue.
Are we taking bets?
As humans, we say more with the set of our shoulders than we can ever express with words. We speak lies with our tongues and the truth with our actions. We are, each of us, gods and monsters; our own greatest lover and our own most desperate opponent. We chase what runs away, and run from those that chase. We punish those that attempt to succor us, and we fawn over those who have given us scars. We lock ourselves into donjons so that we can be safe, and cower in the face of proffered freedom. Why the fuck is the phrase you always hurt the ones you love even in use, let alone used so glibly? We are all self-absorbed; we cant be otherwise, due to the very nature of our psyches. What is the center of the universe, if it isnt you? We are, each of us, Narcissus, surrounded by six billion Echos, and every Echo is a Narcissus. This is the nature of the Beast.
If you ask Grendel, Ill bet he tells you that Beowulf was the asshole.
If this is true (And this is not a lie), we are the ones who inflict our lives upon ourselves. So why is it that we have rare moments of passion? Why are there those moments in which we risk, and roll the dice and win? Why do we act differently when we drink?
Because at those times, we allow ourselves to live passionately because we have been poisoned with freedom from our fear.
So when we risk and win, why do we turn away from risk the next time? Having proven we can have whatever we want, why do we close the doors of our cells and wait for mealtime? When we wake up confronted by what we felt we would never have, why do we feel ashamed?
We wake up with regret because we have been confronted with, and for once earned what we desire; but the very fact of our success tells us that we betrayed our dreams in every preceding day of our lives; our comtempt of our prior failings rears up, and our fear whispers to us that one battle is not the war; it demands that we turn back from hope before we lose everything. And by rejecting what we have earned, we are left with nothing.
I have been standing on The Reach, where the land meets the sea, for far too long waiting for Annabel Lee. I have stood here waiting for the mermaids to start singing for longer than I can remember, and Ive realized that the journey doesn't end when you stop walking. The Reach has been a riddle to me, because I am not one to retrace my steps. But I made the mistake of thinking that the road seemed to end where the rocks began, and the sea always seemed like an wall.
Not so much.
I have learned a secret, little ones. The road never ends. Its only that our perception of it changes. A door is nothing more then a wall before it is opened, and the road continues on the other side. I have placed my feet on the waves, and I have found the other road.
When you find yourself beyond the reach of the laws you have been taught, and when you stand confronted by the fallacies and the failures of your own self-made rules, you will spend a time lost, crippled, confused. You will stand on the edge of the Deep Black sea thinking you have nowhere else to go. You may even date musicians. But the fact is that the road does not end; it changes. The moment that you accept that the laws you have lived by are simply the bars of a cage, you have managed to pick your cage's lock. All that remains is to find the courage to leave the safety of the familiar, and enter into a world whose laws are as absolute as stone.
Love is the law, love under will
-Crowley.
I go out to prepare my face. And I wonder about the faces I will meet; brothers and sisters, and lovers and killers; angels, and demons, and whores. There will be no cowards among us, and we will drink and war, telling lies with our tongues, and speaking truth with our actions. We will wear bones in our hair, and feathers, and shell casings. Our weapons will be our words and our wits and our will and our love. Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, there falls the Shadow, and the Shadow is the Sea.
We all must devour our shadows before they devour us.
And I believe Ill have mine with some fava beans, and a glass of Chianti.
I.N.R.I.
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulcher
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulcher there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
P.S. I would write the best suicide notes. I should charge a fee.
The Reach is a metaphysical state that you arrive at when you find yourself at your perceived boundary of your identity and your potential; The Reach is the place where you achieve your limit; it is your terminator. It is the point at which your ultimate individuality is expressed, and you are confronted with your own isolation as a human. The Reach is the emotional point past which you have never traveled.
My mental image of The Reach (All of my psychic concepts are associated with detailed images of places, or with the imagos of entities) is of a cold, gray spit of land, narrow as a whip, curling out into a black sea like a witchs finger, beneath a storm-wracked sky the color of charred wood. Off in the distance, along the desolate road which stretches away from lands end, there is a string of empty homes with windows like the eyes of skulls, and a lighthouse the color of old bone whose lamp throws a wash of sickly green light strobing across the land, the spit, and the sea.
It looks like Innsmouth, long after Chthulu has been called
It is windy there, on The Reach, and cold. There are no gulls there, and all the shells are empty.
There is nothing to hear there but the listless slapping of the waves against the jagged black stones of the spit, and the thin whistling of the wind.
The first time I described this place to another person, I had become the greyest boy I have ever been. I was completely stagnant, and overcome by inertia. Throughout the course of the failure of my relationship with a girl I tried to save from herself, I worked the hardest that I ever have. Every part of my self was consumed, relegated to the shadows, or revealed as corrupt and false. And in the end I failed.
In one of the lost, secret places in my heart, I stood, day after day, on that desolate spur of land, waiting for a ship to come, for a light to appear in one of the deserted houses; waiting for a single sign that I was not alone.
I was, shall we say, a wee bit emo.
And I was being much more foolish than I was designed to be.
It took me a long time, after trying so hard to meet my lover halfway, to realize a simple fact: We are, each of us, alone. All the waiting in the world will never bring about a recurrence of the singular moment when one of gods million monkeys typed the story of you on one of the million typewriters in heaven. You could choose to wait a million years, but there will never be another Hamlet written merely for your pleasure. The lathes of heaven are endlessly spinning, they are always shaping souls. But every snowflake speaks a truth, every flower teaches us a lesson; God abhors a copy. Nature is an artist and youre its fucking work of art. Even mint-in-box, there will never be another entity like you. And once your innocence is set free to walk into the world, the winds of The Reach will erode your primal self into a form unimaginable, and as impossible to recreate as the shattering of a crystal globe. Your sheer complexity as a human and the vagarities of random chance conspire to force you towards independence.
You are doomed to be unique.
You are the last of your species.
You are not a Yin, or a Yang, you are a whole, or just a hole.
You are the sole author of the story of your tribe.
And you are a tribe of one.
Ive finally started to accept that there is nothing wrong with this. Sartre wrote Linfer cest lautres, a quote that immediately became a banner slogan for misanthropists and the disaffected as an intellectual justification for their distrust of others. But Sartres phrase means nothing as direct as most assume. The phrase Hell is other people refers not to any inherent evil in existing in mankind, but to the suffering imposed on us by our need for each other. Jean-Paul meant it as a form of shorthand, a way to address the impossibility of complete independence from others, and to explain the inevitable suffering that comes as a result of the necessity of that interaction. It was a poetic way of describing the conflict between our desire for contact with others of our kind, and the tacit impossibility of true understanding between unique individuals cursed with hideously flawed communication skills.
Words speak only lies.
Do you think I lie?
Then how do you know that the color blue to you looks the same to you as it looks to me?
Because I tell you it does, or because you assume.
Why do you say I love you if you haven't told your partner what you mean? Why is the phrase easier to say than to define?
I love you.
This is not a lie.
One of these statements is untrue.
Are we taking bets?
As humans, we say more with the set of our shoulders than we can ever express with words. We speak lies with our tongues and the truth with our actions. We are, each of us, gods and monsters; our own greatest lover and our own most desperate opponent. We chase what runs away, and run from those that chase. We punish those that attempt to succor us, and we fawn over those who have given us scars. We lock ourselves into donjons so that we can be safe, and cower in the face of proffered freedom. Why the fuck is the phrase you always hurt the ones you love even in use, let alone used so glibly? We are all self-absorbed; we cant be otherwise, due to the very nature of our psyches. What is the center of the universe, if it isnt you? We are, each of us, Narcissus, surrounded by six billion Echos, and every Echo is a Narcissus. This is the nature of the Beast.
If you ask Grendel, Ill bet he tells you that Beowulf was the asshole.
If this is true (And this is not a lie), we are the ones who inflict our lives upon ourselves. So why is it that we have rare moments of passion? Why are there those moments in which we risk, and roll the dice and win? Why do we act differently when we drink?
Because at those times, we allow ourselves to live passionately because we have been poisoned with freedom from our fear.
So when we risk and win, why do we turn away from risk the next time? Having proven we can have whatever we want, why do we close the doors of our cells and wait for mealtime? When we wake up confronted by what we felt we would never have, why do we feel ashamed?
We wake up with regret because we have been confronted with, and for once earned what we desire; but the very fact of our success tells us that we betrayed our dreams in every preceding day of our lives; our comtempt of our prior failings rears up, and our fear whispers to us that one battle is not the war; it demands that we turn back from hope before we lose everything. And by rejecting what we have earned, we are left with nothing.
I have been standing on The Reach, where the land meets the sea, for far too long waiting for Annabel Lee. I have stood here waiting for the mermaids to start singing for longer than I can remember, and Ive realized that the journey doesn't end when you stop walking. The Reach has been a riddle to me, because I am not one to retrace my steps. But I made the mistake of thinking that the road seemed to end where the rocks began, and the sea always seemed like an wall.
Not so much.
I have learned a secret, little ones. The road never ends. Its only that our perception of it changes. A door is nothing more then a wall before it is opened, and the road continues on the other side. I have placed my feet on the waves, and I have found the other road.
When you find yourself beyond the reach of the laws you have been taught, and when you stand confronted by the fallacies and the failures of your own self-made rules, you will spend a time lost, crippled, confused. You will stand on the edge of the Deep Black sea thinking you have nowhere else to go. You may even date musicians. But the fact is that the road does not end; it changes. The moment that you accept that the laws you have lived by are simply the bars of a cage, you have managed to pick your cage's lock. All that remains is to find the courage to leave the safety of the familiar, and enter into a world whose laws are as absolute as stone.
Love is the law, love under will
-Crowley.
I go out to prepare my face. And I wonder about the faces I will meet; brothers and sisters, and lovers and killers; angels, and demons, and whores. There will be no cowards among us, and we will drink and war, telling lies with our tongues, and speaking truth with our actions. We will wear bones in our hair, and feathers, and shell casings. Our weapons will be our words and our wits and our will and our love. Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, there falls the Shadow, and the Shadow is the Sea.
We all must devour our shadows before they devour us.
And I believe Ill have mine with some fava beans, and a glass of Chianti.
I.N.R.I.
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulcher
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulcher there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
P.S. I would write the best suicide notes. I should charge a fee.
Now, I think you under estimate my mission. It is not the airport I am going to. This is a full-on ninja rescue, 1500 miles of highway to cover in a weekend. This is a kidnapping, almost consensual, but not quite.
Not that I'm disagreeing with you, just something to think about.
You write wonderfully BTW.