From Sept 20 2008

A journal entry compact as some Joseph Cornell box, each one with a lot of unorganized clutter inside it—stuffed birds, ping-pong balls, clocks and feather-dusters. The tail feathers of a golden pheasant. I missed the Tunbridge World’s Fair. Sickness befelled me. I would have gone on Sunday; perhaps the expulsion of drunks and girly shows has only done it good. As to philosophical meditation, nothing pricks me to a higher exponential level: I remain concretely minded. Of this week, what observation did I have? In this apartments, I have at least one den or inner sanctum without windows in which I can withdraw without awareness of what’s outside, whether the wind in the trees or the traffic out the window, whether of cars, pedestrians, or bicyclists. This inner sanctum can be made completely dark, without a crack of light, only the blinking LEDs of the computer like beacons into space, so that the inner space of this den or chamber mimics the vacuity surrounding the earth, vacuity through which the planets hurl without creating a wind so rapid it not only whips the leaves off the trees, but the trees from their roots, and the roofs from the houses with their inner sanctums like this one, until there’s no mediation, no protective barriers between the self and the heimarmoine (harmony)that created it in the first place, no barrier between the prime mover or law of motion and the eye that can perceive it. An inner sanctum that incubates conceits both insupportable and serving as fictions necessary for sustaining life outside, just as saline deprivation tanks nurse the patient to an inner strength. The blinking comes from the pulse of veins in the temple, the headache that seems to occur in the brain produced by the tightening of muscles around the scalp on both sides until the pain feels as if it came from the center of the brain, as if the pain were a holographic projection, not emanating from the place where it is felt. What blinks inside the sanctum comes from outside, the sign of an immaterial magnetic connection: Dr. Mesmer thought his magnetic bed encouraged physical alignments leading to better conjugal relations, that the alignment of the nervous and circulatory systems resulted in the alignment of the spirit.