The Cipher.

The cipher is a circle.  The circle signifies continuity, motion and infinity.  A point on the borders of the  circle only makes sense in relation to the others that are in flow with each other.  A circle contains and frames something that is within.  In other words, a cipher creates another world.

The act of creation seems to be popularly viewed as something that arrives out of nothing.  Something that just drops down from heaven into the hands of a lowly recipient.  Perhaps this is true.  But if there’s anything that a picture can teach us, it’s that a photo merely places a frame around that which already is.  Thus creation is an act of bringing order to chaos.  However, when borders are loose enough to allow fluctuation and movement… when the form is dynamic enough to evolve along with that which is contained… you create a world within a world.  It’s almost as if you’re capturing air in a balloon, but the air keeps getting hotter, causing the balloon to expand.  It explodes.  More balloons must then be formed.

The cipher contains voice.  It enhances the poetic spewings of an ordinary subject.  The voice travels, bounces within the circle.  And the beautiful thing is… all are on rhythm.  The circle is constantly in movement.  Power is contained, bounced around and re-versed for the uplift of the whole.

The Familiar.

Some friends were in town for the weekend.  Did our whole going-out, drinking thing.  And unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for us, we were stuck outside the bar since all Boston joints must close at 2am.  Drunk people of all colors standing around.  Some are organizing folks for house parties, others waving down cabs, many spewing forth their dinner.  And us, mentally silent.

Defamiliarize.

Any stillness is an opportunity for explosion.  A friend drops a beat.  T-Vu spits a rhyme.  A circle forms.  Just like that, people are vibing, dancing, feeling.  Random folks are jumping in.  People coming and going.  The cipher disperses.

We walk down the street.  T-Vu feels like Moses, John like Aaron…  She parts the oncoming pedestrians like the red sea… the people heed her poetic rhymes.  The march down Harvard Ave stops for a moment.  The following forms another circle, half of which bleeds out onto the intersection.  New people join the flock.  Cars irritatingly curve around.  Cops drive by glaring.

The beauty of such a scene is not what is said, nor the visual.  It is what is felt.  For a moment, we were agents… grabbing the world we saw, rearranging it and displaying what it ought to be.  We created a world by means not of nationality, ethnicity, class, gender… but of community.  We were family for that moment.

The loving hugs.  The affirming words.  The grateful looks.

We were family.  We created home.

Home was whatever ground we stood upon.
The movement of poetic nomads, that is what we were for that moment.

Upright bass.
Two hostess cupcakes with 2 candles lit.
Cuban cigars on the rooftop.
Facebook explosion.
Mother nagging (lovingly) that i need a girlfriend at this age.
Father telling me not to drink too much.
Brother’s “hyung!!” text.
Running on the charles river.
Biggest bottle of grey goose that i’ve ever seen.
2 slices of mushroom pizza.
Black dude interrogating white dude for the crimes of white supremicism.
Drinks, thanks eddie.
Dancing.
White homeless dude cursing the world with a 40 in his hand.
Drinks, thanks q.
Dancing.
Throwing up (just kidding).
Special can of chinese tea from dave’s mom.
Salted fish, chicken fried rice.
Salt and pepper beef.
Garlic snow pea leaves.
Scallion pancake.
Seafood/mushroom fried tofu.
Ciphering up the avenue of the masses.
The epic ode to chuck, thanks dave.
The rooftop.
Sleep.
Dreams.
Why.
Is.
Life.
So.
Dope.
Sometimes?

A few days ago, archeologists announced that they have found a flute in a German cave.  This flute is approximately 35,000 years old.  The significance of such a find is that it is from the prehistoric era.  It blows my mind that in a time where basic survival was the daily goal, people found a reason to create things that would aid in expression.  Or in other words, people sought to create an aesthetic means in order to reach the sublime.  Now of course, art (as we understand and experience it today) and language weren’t as dichotomized back then.  Art was not seen as “art” but rather an expression of what is.  People drew in order to record their stories/histories, not because they wanted to hang it in some gallery.

The profundity, then, of this archeological find is that it hints at something I’ve been feeling for a while.  That art, or creative expression, is just as necessary as the basic necessities of survival: food, water, etc.  I can imagine the guy/girl who made that flute going off to gather some food, maybe hunt down a swine.  Then come back, roast it and eat with fellow tribesman.  After they’re all full and merry, I imagine some dancing to happen, some percussive instruments laying down a groove, and this guy to get up and just play.  Maybe he’ll express something happy, maybe something sad.  I mean, just take a listen to the clip of someone playing a reconstructed model of the flute.  It sounds beautiful and sophisticated.  I was nearly brought to tears just listening to it.

The point is: we humans aren’t just about survival, we are about creation.

To see this early in the archeological record suggests it might be a fundamental aspect of human nature… It does at least hint that music lies close to our foundation of common humanity.

What is it about this incessant need we have to express?  And what is it about our insatiable drive to constantly create new means that enable us to do so?

Now I’ll be honest with you… the fact that it’s a flute excites me.  I’m a musician, so the bias is obvious.  Personally, music profoundly embodies the human will more so than other art forms.  My reasoning you ask?  Sound most resembles spirit.  After all, sound is nothing more than compressed air.  When it is projected at you, it quite literally passes through you.  And perhaps the most amazing thing of all, it dissipates thereafter.  It comes and it goes.  It is felt, but also invisible.

So to realize that music was and still is that powerful, even to a prehistoric man, elates me.  Actually, it’s sublime.  Luckily enough, I read a beautiful passage from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy that helped contextualize this whole discovery for me.  Hope you enjoy:

Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality of concepts, much as these are related to the particular things.  Its universality, however, is by no means the empty universality of abstraction, but is of quite a different kind, and is united with thorough and distinct definiteness.  In this respect it resembles geometrical figures and numbers, which are the universal forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all a priori, and yet are not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly determinate.  All possible efforts, excitements and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in the wide, negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere form, without the material; always according to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon – of which melodies reproduce the very soul and essence as it were, without the body.

This deep relation which music bears to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any event or surrounding seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it; as also the fact that whoever gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony seems to see all the possible events of life and the world take place in himself.

. . . .

We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will: and this is the reason why music makes every picture, and indeed every scene of real life and the of the world, at once appear with higher significance; all the more so, to be sure, in proportion as its melody is analagous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon.  It rests upon this that we are able to set a poem to music as a song, or a perceptible representation as a pantomime, or both as an opera.

. . . .

Music . . . gives the inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Lift up your hearts, my fellows, higher and higher!
And the legs – you mustn’t forget those!
Lift up your legs too, accomplished dancers;
or, to top it all, stand on your heads!

This crown of the man who knows laughter,
this rose-chaplet crown: I have placed it on my head,
I have consecrated laughter.
But not a single soul have I found strong enough to join me.

Zarathustra the dancer, the fleet Zarathustra,
waving his wings, beckoning with his wings to all birds around him,
poised for flight, casual and cavalier-

Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the laughing truthsayer,
never out of sorts, never insisting, lover of leaps and tangents:
I myself have put on this crown!

This crown of the laughter-loving, this rose-chaplet crown:
to you, my fellows, do I fling this crown!  Laughter I declare to be blessed;
you who aspire to greatness, learn how to laugh!

Zarathustra
Part IV, “Of Greater Men”

*Click on any of the photos to browse the remainder of the pictures.

I’ve been reading this book by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, courtesy of Becky.  It’s titled, “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.”  Never have I smiled/laughed so much reading a philosophical text.  The book is a great reflection on why people laugh.  Superficially speaking, it seems a bit esoteric to philosophically reflect on such an ordinary and simple action (and perhaps it is).  But the way Bergson analyzed the role of the comic remains quite profound on how we might come to view the movement that is life.

Bergson writes, “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.”  A popular form of the comic is imitation.  Try getting on your hands and knees in front of a mirror and bark like a dog (not that I’ve done this before or anything)… it’s funny!  And it induces laughter from those around you as well.  This action is humorous because a living being is mechanically acting like something else.  The comic is essentially “something mechanical encrusted upon the living.”  Or even further, “We laugh everytime a person gives us the impression of a thing.”

Why is this funny?  Because we are living, breathing beings.  Life, by its very virtue, is fluid.  We change, we shape, we mold… in other words, life is not static.  “[Life] must be changing every moment, for to cease to change would be to cease to live,” he writes.  Laughter is thus the corrective to this mechanical arrangement.  We laugh to remind ourselves that we are living beings, that we are not machines.

As I read through his text, I cannot help but unravel the tragic thread woven into Bergson’s tapestry, which remains undeniably applicable to our present reality.  In our globalized world of neo-liberal capitalism, we are constantly being homogenized and commodified.  In short, we are becoming machines.  Furthermore, our own cultural values have made it ethically sound to fully participate in its mechanizing processes.  And the tragedy is: We don’t find it funny.  It’s a sad thing to realize that we are practicing the comic… yet not laughing.

To Bergson, the comic is a disguise, an illusion that one wears like a garment.  It is meant to be temporary.  Thus the call of all things living is to shed the garments that we have mistaken as our flesh.  We must learn to laugh again.  Laugh at the tragicomic clenching our world, our minds and our hearts.  Perhaps then we will learn how to live and breathe again… not just individually, but collectively.

I once heard someone say, “Laughter is carbonated holiness.”  To laugh is to be holy.  And to be holy is to be set apart.  Laughter is our very protest against a tragic world that is set on taking the comically mechanical and normalizing it.

So be holy… and lol.

*From my backporch.