Aporia Rhapsodia:
It’s Not A Bug, It’s A Feature

This is a book of riddles.

What are riddles? Riddles are portals to the unknown. Riddles are spectacles of perspective, conceptual illusions, traps along the roads of routine reasoning. Riddles are big concepts conveying themselves in small spaces. Riddles are behind the green glass door. Life is littered with riddles. Our lives are how we answer them.

Riddles bend the mind and defy expectations. Riddles are mental exercise, cognitive calisthenics promoting an agile intuition and supple imagination, stretching the edges of possibility, flexing faculties of flexibility. Each day poses mundane riddles, static mysteries relating to the economics of time, space, and our place in them.

These daily dilemmas reflect deeper enigmas, nested inside other mysteries, ad infinitum, which are framed by our own unique set of clues, providing texture to the collective quest. We are engaged in a mad treasure hunt, with myriad conflicting maps in circulation, pursuing the elusive gold, unsure if we are seeking a trove of literal or metaphorical metal, or a cache of iron pyrite, or something else beyond comprehension.

So successful has the human animal been in resolving the natural puzzles of survival, and unsuccessful at resolving problems amongst ourselves, that our species has devised whole classes of activity devoted to the more dynamic inquiries troubling our hearts and minds.

Artists puzzle over the possibilities of a particular medium, submitting solutions born from the soul. When we dance, we are answering the unspoken riddle of how to match our movement to the music. When we create, we are solving the implicit riddle posed by our culture and personal viewpoint: what does the world require, which I might uniquely be able to offer?

All these individual inquiries are fractal refractions of the Grand Riddle: what is the nature of existence itself, and self in relation to the Cosmos? What am I for, and what shall I do?

Riddles beguile with obviousness, exposing faulty patterns and prejudiced thinking. The urge to slay the conceptual dragon brings out the deeply real limitations inherent to the habit of short-cuts we often miscall our thought.

The notorious and mysterious mischief of Mercury in retrograde, that periodic hailstorm of glitches, rapidly emerged as the compelling question driving this volume of verse, trailing in his orbital wake expansive meditations: on mythology, the paradoxes of parallax perspective, the alchemical transmutation of abstraction into action, cosmic trickery, and most particularly, the meaning of error.

What I find most curious about this apparent retrograde motion is the way it amounts to, in essence, an optical illusion; nothing happens to Mercury itself. Rather, the perception that any given planet’s direction has reversed celestial course is produced by the relative position of the Earth. The whole effect is a trick of perspective.

There is no rational reason I can summon to explain why, in strictly physical terms, this astronomical anomaly should impact human affairs at all, let alone in the mildly disruptive fashion that is the hallmark of the Herald gone haywire.

If I were very inclined to a method of strict rationality, I should be forced to resort to dismissing the matter entirely, chalking any anecdotes off to “coincidence” or “confirmation bias” and filing the whole phenomenon in a mental trash bin marked, “superstitious nonsense,” along with other such hoodoo notions.

I am not, however, one for holding too much stock by rational thought, as those who know me will be quick to attest. Vastly over-rated, suffocating straightjacket of a mentality, sanity is. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing, it is that typing in a straightjacket is pure madness.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to vacuum the downstairs ceiling.”

Even hardened skeptics can be made to pale in terror under the barrage of cosmic error during Mercury retrograde. There were three such periods during 2013, a year which was rich in ironic reversals, and therefore fertile with material. The embryonic framework of this collection, based around the eponymous lyric, emerged during the first, in Pisces; was completely restructured during the middle phase, in Cancer, and once again, through Scorpio, in preparation for publication. This became intentional, but it didn’t start that way.

There really is a Haywire Hill, so dubbed, and at first, I deeply regretted visiting that vortex of confusion. Without trotting out a complete laundry list of mishaps which struck us there during a few hectic days in early July, I will say that the experience was more than enough, for my purposes anyway, to remove the retrograde riddle from the realm of academic speculation, and place the matter squarely in the category of immediate survival.

Amana and I ventured to the small town of Felton in our bus, Mahayana, to help organize a giant vinyl record archive in advance of some upcoming storage transfers; it was a friendly favor. Or so we imagined.

The records belong to a fixture of the music scene, who we took to calling “the Walrus,” for his handlebar mustache and eccentric manner. Coo coo ca choo.

Mahayana is a Sanskrit word meaning “Great Vehicle,” and this particular bus has served us well, having housed the headquarters of our laterally mobile publishing enterprise since inception. A converted church shuttle, often propelled and maintained by the power of prayer, Mahayana is not much of a mountain climber.

Like many semi-rural properties in Northern California, our destination was perched about a hundred feet above the graded road, at the top of a narrow dirt driveway. The hill looked innocuous enough, on cursory inspection in the waning daylight, but we hadn’t reckoned on few factors: a steep grade just below the parking area, the mechanical limits of our old vehicle at such an angle bearing the weight load of a crash pad on wheels-or, naturally, Mercury being in retrograde.

Our bus began to roll helplessly backward, toward the vulnerable house and its screaming owner, mirroring Mercury in an all-too-material imitation of retrograde reversal. Forward progress abruptly ceased, just as we were about to maneuver into our berth, and the brakes blew out under the stress, abruptly powerless. Gravity had caught up to us in a big way.

The record collector fell, yelling helplessly under the rolling rear end of the immovable object. Wheels spun. We screamed, too. Multiple lives flashed before our collective eyes. What had we done?

The Walrus was fortunately unharmed, apart from a twisted ankle, but we now found ourselves perched in a precarious position, on several levels. The emergency brake prevented the bus from slipping out of control again, but the neighbors weren’t fans of our impromptu parking job, and didn’t seem to understand why we were hesitant to move again, no matter how we explained our alien value system and predicament.

We placed the survival of our vehicle and host’s carport above their ability to use their usual parking spot; they, naturally, had an opposite perspective. I could see their point, but our spaceship was grounded and no amount of harassment could change that unpleasant reality.

The culture clash cascaded into a chain of chaos. A neighborly scuffle broke out over our refusal to relocate, and everything but the bus went downhill from there. The muscular inhabitant of the next parcel assumed a threatening demeanor against our increasingly distraught Walrus, who was now on crutches and unfortunately prone to making wild, swinging gestures with them in hand. Police were called, and called away again, through deft crisis management. Not one stack of records was packed that night.

This rapid streak of degenerating conditions took place within the first few hours on Haywire Hill. Then began the long, arduous quest to return the bus to flat and legally unthreatened parking. This entailed three more days of negotiating with tow operators, untold hours on the phone with roadside assistance, more bristling incidents with the hostile and unsympathetic neighbors, all while managing the un-mangled ankle of the Walrus, who was now limping inadvisedly around, cursing frequently and wondering what darkness we sorcerous pagans had brought to his quiet, phonographic retreat. The ostensible mission was devoured in the drama that followed our fateful decision to take on that damn hill.

The sky itself seemed to sigh relief when the ordeal came to an anticlimactic conclusion, following a nearly catastrophic and life-threatening brake failure, two visits from law enforcement, and four from various tow truck companies all bafflingly unable to unhook the Catch-22 we had maneuvered into.

When the dust settled, we were free from the quagmire, no serious damage done. We even had a reasonably accurate diagnosis of our brake issue from the brave tow driver, who had solved the problem by bucking regulations, taking the bus by the wheel and slowly rolling backward, in drive gear, all the way to level ground.

We were finally extracted from Haywire Hill, and I had some writing to do. Reckoning my fortune in glitches, I suddenly felt quite rich.

When traveling in higher dimensions, linear thought and action lead perpetually into peril. The way seems littered with obstacles. This applies to psychological topology as well geological terrain, for similar reasons.

At the end of the road, having learned to look and leap, these apparent barriers are revealed as stepping stones to another level of adaptation; the obstacles were the path.
You could say it felt like a miracle when things finally stopped going wrong.

At the very apogee of awareness, where magic and logic mingle, exist enigmas which tease the imagination, defy explanation, and add dimensions of perspective on our quick flight from womb to tomb.

Here is where dreams linger, epiphanies emerge, and vacuous visions find their way to paper and ink, becoming concrete for that brief interstice between the writing of words and reading of them.

This is where I prefer to bide, in the Magma mines along Pine Cone Ridge, contemplating by inner eye the ineffable strangeness of being, and doing my best to translate these hazy glimpses into streams of morphemes worthy of song.

Mmmm…morphemes…

I am, I must admit, thoroughly addicted to the stuff. I’ve had to enter the trade, just to keep my own supply flowing. The highest quality morpheme mixes, containing the greatest degree of verity, are what I call “Magma”. You know, the liquid gold. I hunt this Fool’s Gold in the caverns of consciousness, in search of an angry fix for the broken babble plaguing our collective conversation.

Magma is what dogma once was, before freezing on the windblown surface of the mind, ossifying through mindless repetition, becoming its own opposite. Magma is transformative and dynamic, underlying visible reality, and heedlessly incites insight when exposed to open air, until the flames cool and another Pompeii is erected upon it to await incineration.

Dogmas demand that subjective experience conform to some theoretical objective value system and framework, while Magma generates estimations, in constant revision, from the collective subjective. Dogma dictates a narrow path; Magma invents the need for new trails to be blazed in response to a shifting landscape.

Magma springs from rare and perilous peaks, founts of fiery inspiration and seer-ing wisdom. Magma is not carved in stone; the smoky signals can be read only from ephemeral wisps, spotted in the heat of the firewalk. Magma is eternally churning, burning old edifices to the ground, and forging the foundation of a new cultural landscape.

Culture is to minds what it is to microbes. Mentalities reared on the monocultures embodied by empirical modalities develop predictably, prosperous enough until confronted with contamination by Other. We have arrived at the limits of linearity; the world is awash in war predicated on very slight distinctions in cultural flavor.

The challenges of a global culture have added an edge of urgency to the age-old quest for understanding. Rigid religious and political ideologies violently bumping up against each other is increasingly intolerable in a nonlocal conceptual environment, where the despot’s nudity can be posted with minute-by-minute accuracy for all to mock.

Dogmas offer the illusion of certainty. But Magma offers something infinitely more useful: the means to cope with sustained uncertainty.

It’s a metaphor, of course. And what is the meta for? It became evident at one point on Haywire Hill that the languages of logic lacked the context for apprehending what was happening. Whatever the true cause of our frustrating chain of errors, what we needed was a poetic understanding of the phenomenon.

Mythical figures serve as a way to embody cosmic principles too complex for rational dissection. These archetypes arrange themselves into coherent pantheons through a transmigration of concept conveyed via the art of an age.

Mercury, known to Greeks as Hermes, is a fleet-footed mediator between states of being. Hermes is a busy deity, conducting messages from the gods and mortal souls to the underworld. He is the original author, having invented words, and progenitor of music, designing the first woodwinds and stringed instrument for Apollo.

Hermes, like most Olympian deities, is often portrayed as possessed of a questionable and mischievous character; he began his career with a prank, the theft of Apollo’s prize herds. As the legend of liquid silver goes, the prodigious thief presented the lyre to Apollo in reparations, and song was born.

The lyre, an ancestor of the guitar made from guts and tortoise shell, was a device for poets, adding a melodic dimension to the highly structured odes, epics, and hymns conveying the events of the mythical dimension.

The seedy roots of rock n’ roll are found in this tale; and wily Hermes is a central figure in my own personal mythos, a garrulous guide in the borderlands of consciousness, where scraps of resonance morph into semblances of messages across the rainbow bridge.

So the riddle remains; what is at the core of this mutating metaphor, held in your hands and holding your eyes? I must confess, the best either of us can do is guess, and the best you can do is set down the bread crumb trail of clues. For these pages have spun themselves from the ether, out of an endeavor I can only explain in terms of a fervent transmutation. They are songs, but I don’t know how, or where, they will come to go. That is for the future to reveal.

Many modern culture consumers are prone to regard poetry as a child of the printed page, a quaint niche for the nostalgic, forgetting that verse forms are intended for the ear, containing implied cadences, emphasis, and other dramatic flourishes interpreted uniquely in each rendering. This invisible element, along with the melody of musical adaptations, is supplied by whatever voice has captured it in the air, dynamic and collaborative.

Imagine, if you will, the tunes underlying these unsung songs ahead, and if you happen to strike musical gold, drop me a line via my publisher. Unless, of course, Mercury happens to be in retrograde; in that case, have my publisher contact you.
-ASAOS Hx3

You have your priorities straight. The process comes first. You have strategized a plan by which you will periodically be free to sink, undistracted, into the blissful timeless space of craft and invention. You are focused on your project, fixated on your subject, and racing toward your object with all due electricity.

Unfortunately, it often appears that life does not share your exalted vision. Interruptions large and small invade your neat little process. Mundane emergencies intrude. Even pleasant distractions, such as a surprise visit from friends, or some unplanned but unavoidable gathering, can present a maddening wrinkle in your fine-lined plans.

Maintaining a sense of humor and flexibility will lighten these moments considerably. These glitches are part of the texture of the process, and inevitable as they seem to be for all but the most solitary creators, learning to make use of the emotion of frustration can be a most empowering triumph.

One reaction to the involuntary pauses which may be plaguing your process could be to reformulate the workstream. Are there ways you can adapt to reality, when it won’t adapt to you?

For example, perhaps you are writing a novel and every time you get your bearings, the phone rings. One solution might be to write at night, when most people are asleep and businesses closed. Or, you may not be able to go nocturnal, but you can let all your friends and family know that you prefer text messages while you are at your labors. Find a way to accommodate both process and life, bending each as much as is practicable.

Economics is a matter few artists really revel in, but understanding the personal economics of creation is key to a really productive flow. By this, I do not mean merely the costs of materials and living expenses, although these are also a factor.

Rather, the artistic economics I am referring to are reckoned in units of time and space, hours and sense, as opposed to dollars and cents. Hours in which one is able to devote to creative endeavors are finite. There will be ebbs and flows to the busy-ness of life, and optimizing the precious moments life leaves free lets the Muse have her way.

The space in which you can allow your work, also, is logically constrained by certain conventions of your form. You may stretch the boundaries in this regard, but at some point you will have to yield to an absolute minimum and maximum expenditure of space for a single piece. Managing this dynamic, the length (and breadth, as the case may be) of a particular project is a job for your critical faculty to plan.

For a novel, conventions dictate that it be somewhere between one hundred and one thousand pages, but tending toward these extremes will tend to disqualify the work from being regarded as a novel, pushing it toward a different structure. Thousand page-projects are best thought of in terms of trilogies, if not reconceptualized into a more punchy narrative which would fit into a more manageable length of three hundred pages or fewer.

In the generative phase, the tendency is expansive; a great deal of material is often allowed to pass into the process despite being shallow or flawed, out of anxiety that there will otherwise not be enough to fill the space, leading to a bloated construction that is difficult to hone into presentable shape. For the steadily rising percentage of those who intend to self-publish, another, more material economy can come into play, as the print-on-demand model leads to the absurd position of paying by the page to expound at length.

Another anxiety which bothers new artists more than it often should is a perceived paucity of ideas, which cause some to thriftily string a few promising notions together with long periods of reduced content density. With a little faith, perseverance and reflection, new ideas will present themselves, so it is probably better to invest in a deeper process so as to best utilize your designated palette.

Mature artists come to understand that concise, effective expression trumps often long, drawn-out affairs, and that utilizing the space available to maximum artistic advantage is a more pressing concern than running out of material.

Regardless of the medium or form, there are concrete constraints that have more to do with the delivery of art than the production of it. Every moment devoted to an expression is bounded by all the rest of existence competing for the attention of the audience, and must therefore be rich to command the flitting eyes and fickle ears hardwired into the minds you wish to reach.

There is another economy to consider here, too; what an artist considers to be the span of duration is, on another level, translated into time experienced by the audience. With this responsibility in mind, one best approaches the planning of the project with respect for the time your audience will entrust to your hands…or fail to, if they feel you are you too wasteful of it.

Managing your dynamics of space and time puts you in charge of your pace and rhythm. The most definite limitation on one’s creative output is set by the finite hours available in which to generate it. Your most valuable resource is not any tool or device. It is your scarce and ever-diminishing opportunity to engage in art at all, bounded by factors of a future few have the privilege to foresee.

An artist is an individual who uses one or more methods of stylized expression to create something which is meant to be pleasing, in some way, to the artist and some theoretical audience. A successful artist has conveyed that sense of pleasure to an audience, of whatever size and nature.

There is no reason which I have been able to discern why every person ought not be an artist in some fashion, but if you feel empowered to disqualify yourself, this exploration will be of little use. Expression takes many forms, and finding yours may be a journey, but hopefully we are coming together with a clear idea of your available avenues for creativity and skill in using one or more of them.

Consciously or otherwise, all our experience and perspective is poured into a successful work of art. Every thought we have had, encounter with another being, every experience of art we have enjoyed as part of the audience-all are brought to bear on the problem of creation.

At a core level, the process begins in a state of discontent. There is an idea, or a feeling, or a sound, or an image, that is inside of you and is not adequately conveyed to the world so far. You may or may not understand what, specifically, your current project intends to express, but by the time a successful transmutation is complete, the audience will catch at least part of it.

Art is a lifestyle; an artist is always in process. Daily routines, social interactions, incidental labor, even (or especially) making love are not a suspension of the artistic process. These are integral aspects of it.

Artistic expression might be thought of as a series of solutions to the problem of unshared perspective. Your perspective is part of the collective mind. It is a product of every life that proceeded it, and will affect all who follow. The degree and type of impact your personal consciousness has on the entirety of existence can be determined by many forms of behavior. You may choose to be a soldier, or a line worker, or any of a number of prefabricated roles which demand that you suppress your individual initiative. You may also, subsequently or simultaneously, entertain a secret identity as an aspiring artist.

This is perfectly standard. Many artistic ventures of note were begun by simple workers, moonlighting in their spare moments on improbable careers in literature, music, or drawing. We all gotta eat. So if you are stuck in a day job to make ends meet, there is no shame in that; you are in fine company there.

The toils of a daily grind can take all you have to give, however; and a voluntary expenditure of even more effort can become all too dispensable in the exhaustion of employment. All too many let the day job become the main movie, and creative ambitions become just another prop of immaturity fallen to the cold mechanical realities of economics.

A devoted artist will not fall prey to this trap. Instead, the hours of work are seen as an opportunity to develop creative ideas passively, turning them around between whatever tasks you are being made to perform for pay. Contemplation of the creative challenges can become a welcome diversion from the boring work (so long as you are not distracted and put your paycheck in jeopardy), put a bounce in your step, and give you a reason to approach your off-hours in a state of eager anticipation rather than an exercise in relief.

A worker performs duties to achieve compensation. An artist gives freely, from the soul, with renumeration an uncertain afterthought. This is an unfair game where many labor but few get paid, and to let this affect one’s artistic drive is pure folly.

It is perfectly natural to want to be paid for your time, effort, ingenuity and investment in skills and equipment. If you are sufficiently diligent, and there is a market for your work, this is possible and even likely, but putting that sort of pressure on an emergent endeavor is unwise. If you want to dream your art will earn your freedom out of your labors, please do; but realism cushions the fall of many reality checks. Expect nothing from your labors but artistic fulfillment, and you will never be disappointed.

The unlikelihood of attaining professional status in your field is not a reason to restrain your ambition. On the contrary, the most vibrant souls shine to the challenge. But with an integral perspective, the rewards are quite sufficient, whether it leads to liberation from the necessary evil of employment or not.

When creative people, for some reason, aren’t creating art, they are usually creating excuses. It’s all too easy to become too busy. Too busy to devote days before the difficult drawing board, where conceptual card-houses and ivory-tower architectures are liable to collapse under the weight of reality’s eyes.

Say life has been made perfect and ready for the beauty to be brought forth. Yet, why, o tortured artist, does it hesitate? Why does the nectar not flow?

Because you are not hungry any longer. You have feasted on the fruits of the world, and have no appetite remaining for the dew of paradise. Because there is no great leap of faith for you to take, and no reason not to sit serenely in your pleasure-dome. All those obstacles to your path, you have removed them; and only now do you understand that the obstacles WERE the path.

Notes on The Process

There are two types of blocks. The first is a true void: you have nothing to express; your artistic endeavor is predicated on some artificial notion of activity without any impetus. All I can say is, if you find this to be your situation, that you are not ready to create. You must first go out and find your artistic purpose. Study from the perspective of a non-artist for now, practice being an attentive audience, and learn the techniques which you will be able to employ, once you have found a vision.

For everyone else, the problem is usually not a poverty of ideas, but a crippling panorama of them. In a universe of infinite possibilities, the artistic process generally gums up on selecting among them, being unable to value any one idea over another in a meaningful way.

For this, we employ conceptual clarity. What ideas are in play? Do they integrate or conflict? Is my problem the result of trying to do too much at once? Am I hung up on perfectionism and unwilling to settle for anything less than the epic, world-changing epiphany before I proceed?

Art is nothing more and nothing less than a set of willful choices. Every stroke is a choice, a statement of values. It is your choice. You make this choice with the confidence of knowing you are doing so in a context that places the current project into your work as a whole, and the canon of your art. You are a part of the Great Work. It is infinite.

The journey of a thousand songs begins with a single breath. Don’t judge your ideas on arrival. Let them come out! All the malformed, impractical, ridiculous notions…if you have nothing else, start there! Be unafraid to see awful art spew from your elite fingers, and watch what wonders wash in on the wake.

Detach from the misbegotten misadventure, knowing that it is nothing personal; you merely don’t like it. Study it. Why does it fall short for you? What was it trying to be? How can this unsatisfying piece be carried along to fulfill its potential?

Why am I doing this? If you are stuck, ask, simply, why am I working on this piece? What do I want it to say? What values am I trying to convey: emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and technically? What is the purest, shortest route to that result in my medium?

Art, literary or otherwise, involves the transmission of values from artist to audience. This is true whether the medium is literary, visual, or musical. The artist presents a set of choices in the arrangement of a fairly constrained set of coded values, which becomes a highly nuanced system conveying ideas of quality. When artist and audience agree, quality has been conveyed. Joy!

You can not know your potential audience, but they will know you…the part of you that they will see in your creation. You look like a very different person after a long, mangled night of partying than you do freshly bathed and groomed. You may be a lot more fun in the crazy wee hours, and you may find that you are dry as a desert when you try to create within conscious constraints.

The trick of the artist is to be both…to let your mind get drunk on ideas, caution thrown to the winds, knowing that you will be by again, in a more serene state of mind, to tidy things up. You are artist and audience both…but to express them simultaneously is what is known popularly as “self-consciousness”. It is death to many a talented artist.

Creating a critical faculty is important for every artist. Review the characteristics of those who have mastered your art; learn to evaluate the work of your influences, as well as those you distinctly dislike, without the taint of preference. A wise critic does not ask “is this good?” but, rather, “in what way is this work successful? What goals does it achieve, or fail to, in my estimation?” This is nuanced critique.

“The critic” is antithetical to “the artist”. If you are stuck on perfectionism, the “critic” is too involved in your generative process. On the other hand, studying your unsatisfying attempts with an internally critical eye is the path to achieving clarity.

Balancing your internal critic with your internal creator is the key to a flowing process. Let the mad artist experiment, review the findings with your trained analytical faculty, and in tandem the two opposing forces of will work to push and pull on the piece, refusing to let either control the floor until the wild-eyed artist and the sober critic agree that we have some good shit here.