Untitled ("Open the eye between your eyes")
Eden exists, remember, and it’s all around us. Do you wake every morning with it on your mind?
Open the eye between your eyes. Rise and shine. Today the Door opens a little more, a wide-open wall of windows showing the scraped-open sky laid out in gold waiting for me to grasp it. Night or day it doesn’t matter, everyone else is asleep and I’m restless, scrambling with my words, trying to communicate the inexpressible — but some concepts can’t be understood, only felt. Some ideas aren’t ideas at all, only sensations, like the heavy duvet weighing me down and making me sweat in my sleep, or the mist emanating from my new topaz around my pinky and my neck.
What do you want and how bad do you want it? Do you wake every morning with it on your mind? Over my 11 AM pinot grigio I see I’m self-obsessed and that’s why I’m different. I never had a choice but to wear all of this gold, we attracted each other, and it’s the same for everyone in my life. The heart has a gravitational pull, and sure enough like in space, most of what surrounds us is empty.
There’s no reward for living well beyond just being alive, having a full plate and full hands and fingers full of rings, a heart full of love, fullness. Laying back sluggish, belly full, closing your eyes in overdosing heavenly bliss. When I’m high I’m skating on the rings of Neptune, all my eyes wide open, mist covering me like armor. I know deeply how it feels to lose or gain a pound, to have the eyes of all the others on the plane following me down the aisle.
Before you can have an intimate relationship with another you must have some sort of connection with yourself, this I believe fully and wholeheartedly, and ideally the bodily connection is beautiful and bountiful. Wrap your hands around your own arms, move down to feel the bulge of your ribs, caress your own neck and squeeze a little bit. This season especially I’m going all-in: colognes, citrus in the morning, scented moisturizer, a new chemical deodorant, increasing skill at sharpening my own hairline. Though we need each other I refuse to rely. I’m infusing repetition, obliterating myself into my rituals, stripping the eczematic skin away, just to see what remains. Within the essence of me I find lessons, leisure, and a predisposition for pleasure. We are who we are, what we do, where we are.
It descends upon you mostly only in the night: that you are who you know. When I slip the group into the club because I know the bouncer, when I have a place to stay because I know someone in that city. Everyone can be a teacher and everything a lesson. Even an absence can gift you with a feeling, an idea, an understanding. Not being liked or in love yields a desire for what you miss. The sensation of “starving” is showing me the enormity of my need. I’m extravagantly devoted to beauty and connection, I wither without them, and so I —
— have promised to keep quiet about N, at least for now. It is because it is important that I want to keep it in the dark. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but us, not even us. What matters is that we see each other.
I’ve taken a week off work and fled to Chicago to be with M. again. It’s my first vacation since New Years. No one anywhere knows who I am, not even the buildings, and under new ones I can be my own transgressive idea of myself. If Identity is the prison we built for ourselves, the key to which we’ve let our shadows swallow, then like Sir Monte Cristo I’m going to break out and revenge myself against… my me. I.
I’ve been becoming another. I know I can do it. I’m already split and switch between my selves without seeing it. The world is constantly reinventing itself too, spring is here all of a sudden and cherry blossoms drift down along my weekend commute, and I consider: we could be cruel or we could be critical. We could brush off a stranger as surely as we can make one’s day with a smile and a compliment.
But what would become of us, the real us, if we were to really radically change? Do you understand the extent of the change I think about? A career pivot, sure, but also a deep reinvention of your cycle(s), a senseless shift in your setting, an open declaration of your desires, a chance taken which leaves you breathless to consider. If you do, what’s left? Who even is the real you? The actor or the character?
No, I’m tired of asking questions we already know the answer to: there is only annihilation and what remains after. For there always is an after.
When I give my name at coffee shops, very often I lie. At the afters with another S. I told them my name is James and no one knew otherwise, brilliant S. knew better than to question it. Because there is the idea we all understand: that “I” do not really exist. Trying to grab hold of a soul is as futile as trying to grasp a footstep; there is only a pattern we can observe in the real world, the desire lines through the sea of time, and connection to others. In other words there is no real me, not to you or me, just what you see and the inertia of who I’ve been so far.
Resistance is the source of suffering. When I resist a client that doesn’t want to change yet. When you resist your lover being out until the sunrise cracks open the dark. Time pushes you along and you can’t stay put in one spot. I’m telling you that you can’t with more fervor than anything I’ve ever said before. Look behind you at the shore and the umbrella you shoved in the sand is miles away and to the side, if it’s even standing still at all.
It doesn’t make sense unless you’ve also lived it. Trust me or don’t. You have to be devoted to yourself in order to critique and change, like a patriot to the state of the self.
Boundless wisdom I’ve learned from T., who has taught me that I can consider myself enough already. I’m embracing this lesson as an antithesis of my usual approach fixated on desire, ambitions, which emerge from a place of lack. (You only want when you do not have. Abundance follows from abundance as like attracts like.)
T. also showed me that devotion is a stronger attractor than discipline, and very much kinder. You haven’t heard from me as much as usual because I’ve been devoted to living. Writing when I feel inspired while balancing devotion to my projects and goals. Spending time with people I want to be around as often as I want, because I am devoted to my Venus in the 1st House and I know how important my relationships are to me. Eden exists, remember, and it’s all around us.
But as I said I’m tumbling into transformation. When you ask what I’ve been up to the answer is always the same: I’m evolving. Paradox: I push against the pressure to perform or produce by exhausting myself with pleasure. Leisure lies to you.
Here in another city I’ve been reborn again, the same soul in a new body. And a city is a conglomerate of bodies, too many to count, the mass of multitude forming new concrete shapes you can see from space. I’m not always where my body is. Often my body is in two places at once, like: my room and another’s heart, Purgatory and Paradise, or the past and the future. There is no real way of knowing.
The soul as a parasite, a leech you can’t excise.
For now I’m content being a mysterious influence to most of the world. Even if you don’t hear me consciously I am there under the surface of the sea, subterranean. When I’m out with J. I know where we’re going without knowing. We amble through FiDi and end up at a famous recording studio just because we were supposed to be there but who among us knew it? When I chose my career I thought it was a whim but it was a perfect path for what I’ve needed, I may as well have chosen in my dreams, in which I can see the future.
Do you trust your inner self to lead you where you’re supposed to be?
And I don’t want to admit it but some are stronger than others. Some who get to know me show sparkles in their eyes, they’re excited and inspired by my relentless living, but others are intimidated. “It’s just too hard for me,” one of my weekend clients said, “I’m just not the kind of person who can do this.” He didn’t even want to believe depression is real. I didn’t know what to say. He’s been depressed for years. Relatively his struggles are minuscule — go outside, make friends, go back to school — but a hill is a mountain to an ant. And some of our souls are smaller than others, they’re younger in the overall sense of lives compounding over lives. Brittle, too, because they’ve avoided the rapture of ruin, because they didn’t want to believe that they would always rebuild.
I don’t want to admit this because I don’t want to think I’m better than anyone else. I’m still accepting the parts of myself I despise, namely the nagging sense that, well, I just might be better than some people. Because I do work hard, and I do make it a point to treat people well, and acknowledge myself and work to improve myself, which is a kind of destruction — and my mother taught me that a destroyer is the worst kind of man.
Yet here I am. And here I stand, at the eye level of many and above others, certainly below others as well. Hierarchy feels beholden to Hell and maybe it already exists here on Earth.
A life is finite but we live it anyway. Everything is temporary and every form of suffering emerges from trying not to accept this. Nothing matters and so everything can. This is revolutionary because we’re bred and socialized to believe in fates, productivity, usefulness, but how free could you be if you went where your essence took you just because it’s somewhere new to go?
I’ve gone nowhere with this piece and I haven’t finished any stories today because I’m doing the work in real time, making myself into the kind of artist and human I want to be, someone intentional and real while also fantastic. Because our lives do not have digestible themes or easily understood endings, they simply are, and we make meaning and arcs out of what presents themselves. There is no narrative. We have no purpose. We just are, by cosmic coincidence. It is cosmic coincidence too that we are the way that we are — meaning we are cosmic artists with the ability to manipulate and manifest matter in ways no other living being can do.
So you see too now that we are the artist and the art. And we don’t know how long we have until we are locked out of the studio and what remains is what we leave behind. Every day is a residency, every act if inspired leads closer to the refinement of the voice, the individual niche, the unique eye for beauty we all share. Art is a language and we all have the capacity to speak it. Look in the mirror: open the eye between your eyes: stare and stare until you don’t recognize what’s in front of you.
Then become.
!! everyday is a residency !!
Reading this before starting a very new + exciting + terrifying chapter in my life felt like more than divine timing. Thank you, as always Anderson, for your words.