Or: Am I the Ghost in the Machine?

The Center Holds

Turning and turning in the widening gyre…

That is the backdrop. Things fly apart in the MACRO and the _micro, and the soul resonates with the old words because they ring true. There is a feeling that the center cannot hold. How long have I been slouching… I’m no slouch, though. Slouching was an act. I was slouching toward oblivion.

He slinks away under the radar and rages against his obscurity, numb to his complicity.

Time to stop slouching. Time to stand up. _{Interestingly, I just recently learned to walk. Hear me out. I’ve been doing it wrong. Something to do with heel strikes—another story for another day.}

Time to stop slouching because it’s time to stand and walk. Keep moving. You feel so much better when you’re moving because you’re always moving everything is _{that is life} when all molecular motion stops we reach absolute zero (kelvin) and all that jazz and reality just isn’t.

I’ve been waiting for the hand of God to emerge from the clouds to deliver me from evil. I didn’t realize that I am the machine inside the ghost, and where machinations flow, energy might go, and all that.

Dude’s ex, talktothehand.

Where is the center on the surface of a sphere? Where is the centre on the surface of a hypertorus?

No wonder things fall apart, amiright?

But the center must hold. I must be the center. I must hold it together.

Or perhaps I am not the center. Perhaps I am both inside looking out and outside looking in. When I am the artist, I am the creator. I am the center, the perimeter, the circumference, and all points in between. I can plunge into the form and be the dance, become a figure and act the part, be the calm within the storm, or be the director of it all. As above, so below. As within, so without.

Close to the edge of meltdown, sometimes just the knowledge that I can tuck myself away somewhere with a notebook and a pen is enough to remind me that this universe is worth… something.

The world has been a trial by fire. Life. It has been one test after another, and yet, the greatest truth is that each challenge has led to growth. My life. Your life. You’re Life. Life. I’m not special; ^{I’m just me}. The deeper I go into darkness, the more I see the light. My entire perception of self is shifting dramatically like a giant dreadnought taking a corner like an Italian sports car. ¹

All this personal change—professional growth, my father’s sickness, my brother-in-law’s aneurysm, my unmasking from years of unaddressed ADHD, holding my wife through her grief while accepting her support as I grieve a lifetime of masking²—all of it happens against the backdrop of a nation seemingly tearing itself apart. It is almost too much to take. Rejection sensitivity dysphoria, acute empathy, a strong internalization of the golden rule and a righteous loathing of bullies makes this a very difficult time for people like us. Evil is going unchecked and terrorizing those parts of my psyche that went into hiding at the first encounter with the human lordoftheflies tendency toward powerlust and cruelty.³

But through all this terror, where trauma once triggered me into fight or flight, I have found a new tool. Through it all, I have learned to handle adversity.

I have learned to create.

Create. Create. CreeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE 888888888888888888888888888888888888ATE!!!!!!!!!!!!

On August 20, 2024 I learned that my teaching situation that had been so fulfilling and comfortable for almost 10 years would change. I handled that news with the panicked grace of a tazmanian devil on fire. Yet in the darkness there was a light and that light was opportunity and that opportunity called for creativity because when you think it is pitch black you realize that you have electricity in you. ^{I mean we are stardust after all.} An imperceptible spark of biochemical electricity flickers in a synapse and an idea initiates a motor response and you find a way to stoke a spark and make something. You realize you were given a chance to see how much you have to give, and a pathway to give even more… because you are made to give, you know that like the sage said, “Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the single candle will not be shortened.”

MAKE SOMETHING

People I love suffering, fearing, grieving, hurting… myself hurting… such a desire to just shut it all out. But in the pitch of black that little spark _{(as long as you’re not at absolute zero there’s a spark)} lights a wick triggering chain reactions of butterflywings flapping into tornadoes, gyrations in the hips of my Anema urging me to

MAKE SOMETHING

Am I an artist? I am as much as anyone is or isn’t. I like the feel of the pen on the paper the way the lines work alone and in harmony and the multisensory splendour of embedding ink into fiber. I do this on a blank page and step back and look at the shapes. This can be something, that another thing, is there a connection? If something begins to emerge I help it help me help it out. We work together, the maestro and the message. I daren’t call myself a “maestro” in any sense of mastery… in fact the maestro here may be the art that teaches me to be an artist as I help it manifest from thin air onto white paper.

Meanwhile on my TV, in the atmosphere, down the hallowed halls of the holiest of holies all hell can be breaking loose. Madness.

And as long as I can create something in the face of madness, I feel that I am. After becoming what I’m being I am.

1. I’d call it a brilliant red Barchetta from a better vanished time and if you know you know and you’d know that my knowledge of Italian sportscars is intimately entwined with my knowledge of Canadian progressive rock. ↩︎
2. You grieve these things. I’m learning that. I never realized that we grieve the self we never allowed ourself to be. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s a reminder and an opportunity to become; and how can one be if one hasn’t become? ↩︎
3. So many writers have skillfully, painfully, graphically, heartbreakingly illustrated this point. Pick your favorite deep dive into the heart of darkness, from apocalypse then to a nihilist now. ↩︎