So until I figure all of this out, I guess my best option is to just try my best to experience this world I’m living in, and of course, its many different people. I believe the best way to learn about yourself is to immerse yourself into the different cultures that exist on this planet. There is so much to do and see, so if you’re not sure what your calling is, a good way to start searching for it is to just get out there. Live it up. Find what you enjoy doing, what makes you happy. Search for and discover satisfaction. You have to find what’s right for you and be who you are—who you want to be—who you were born to be. Whoever that may be. You won’t get any answers by just sitting around and doing nothing. This is your time, make it count. You have to take full responsibility for your life; who else should? Find your calling however you can, surround yourself with whatever makes you tick, and escape the things that bring you down and prevent you from making the best of what you’ve got to work with. You’ve got to find out where you fit, where you belong in an ever-diversifying society. You have to find your scene—as it is often referred to. What can you contribute that will be beneficial, if not inspirational, to others that are like you? If you’re unsure of your purpose—the meaning of your life—then do what you can do to help others find theirs, and maybe you’ll get lucky and figure it out along the way. As I have discovered, one of the best ways to solve your own problems is to help others with theirs. Or, perhaps you will discover that helping others is your purpose. That you were put here with others besides yourself in mind, which in many ways is perhaps one of the highest callings. Also, it may be one of the most rewarding, which is to say that someone who spends his life helping others may be much happier than someone who is extremely successful, but has never done anything with anyone else in mind. The pay for charity, although numerically very low, may in fact be much higher in the grand scheme of things. This, however, is only one path that can be followed, and it is definitely not right for everybody. But the only way to know for sure, that is, to figure you why you’re really here, is to get out there, to experience this world, and just see what happens. If all works out, you’ll probably get to the point where you just know, you just understand the reason for your existence.
In my wonderment, I consider many of the things that most people do, but it’s different I think. Very different. I guess I just want to understand, to know what it is that I want to know. But the difficulty is in that I don’t actually know what it is that I want to know. I mean, I guess that what I want to know is how to live and experience this world in a way that I’m not wasting my time. At most, I’ll get what, maybe a hundred years?—What is a hundred years?—But how do I use that time? It’s hard to say, I think. It’s a good start to be able to comprehend that time, but it’s also a curse. To know that your time to live is so short, but to not understand how to use that time. To want, as desperately as I do, to use my time here for both the good of myself and others. Although I believe my primary purpose is to do my best to enjoy myself, it’s also important that I do what I can to help others and contribute to this world in whatever ways I can. It’s just frustrating, to realize how quickly time winds down. I’m not sure what I should be doing, I just hope to find out soon enough so that this frustration doesn’t continue forever.
I sometimes wonder as to the future of humanity, but more importantly, I often wonder as to my own future, but not necessarily in the way that others wonder about their futures. All anyone seems to be doing anymore is preparing; which I guess you could say is just being smart in regards to guaranteeing yourself a comfortable—and perhaps socially acceptable—future. But the way I see it, this is not planning or looking out for your best interests, but rather speeding up the process of dying with little attention paid to the actual process of living. As it appears to me, there are very few people who are actually at all concerned with life itself. It seems that everyone is only concerned with the end, the conclusion, the final moment. And this leads me to the question that if nobody cares at all about any moment other than the last, what is the point in living all the rest? It would also seem that there are those who aren’t even concerned with the end at all, but only with what comes after. These are the people who confuse me the most, because frankly, we have nothing to rely on other than faith that there is anything after death. And although I have faith that there is something that follows death, I see no sense in wasting what time we know we have on that belief. We are born, we live, and then we die. Anything further than that is guesswork on our parts. I see no sense in not spending what time we know we have living. Because, I believe that a man who spends each day living it as though it were his last will be much better prepared when that day finally arrives than a man who spends his entire life preparing for that day.
I long to feel the grips of darkness, To understand the light. To hang on the edge of a nightmare, To comprehend the dream. To come face to face with death, To fully appreciate life.
Forever swirling in the endless confusion of a world long gone and a promise long forgotten, never coming, never going, nowhere in sight, the place we long to be, and the peak we soar to reach; no, nothing of that kind, and nowhere in this world, but this rock, standing on this rock, with nothing but our minds to guide our thoughts of places and dreams, searching out the goal, the answer, an even understanding of the reason for existence.
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You're a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
To believe in yourself, And the life that you're living. To love life and experience the world, With an open mind, heart, and soul. To be content with the good, As well as the bad. To know what it is, That makes everything run. To make peace, To be sure, To know, And understand.
We long for it all. How much we get, We must decide.
There is a soreness, A soreness that flows throughout my body, But not only my body, but my entire being, A soreness of mind and of soul as well. It invades my every thought and emotion, Only encouraged by the circumstance of existence, Further magnified by the enormity of perception. It is a soreness that will remain through completion, And follows through into fulfillment. It exists always, a constant persistence. No one knows all of the evil it has caused, Nobody wants to, But it is never forgotten, never lost or escaped. At times it surfaces as anger or sorrow, While for others it is an inspiration. It is the author of numerous works, The painter of many a scene, The singer of a number of songs. It is an artist and an intellectual, It is a zealot and a bum. But whatever it is, we all know it. It has made or broken us all. There is a soreness, A soreness to which we are all well acquainted.
The sky is a deep shade of gray, Greatly contrasting the hill which stands ablaze, With a bright hue of orange, Projected on leafless trees, By the setting sun. The hill shadowed in the foreground, By the dark green of pine trees.
As the sun continues to sink, The orange dims and the gray lightens, While the colors of the sky, hill, and pine trees blend.
It is early spring, But the trees remain lifeless. The absence of the sun's light, Provides a solemn preface to the night.
