update

September 21^st, 2010

My mind is exploding with so many thoughts that I don’t even know where to begin. My personal statement for Stanford just came to me today. It’s ironic that I spent last night reading Zarathustra and today I had an epiphany as I was scaling a mountain.

It’s hard to get going. The first paragraph is always the worst. I can think of so many similes for this struggle of mine, yet, I can’t describe exactly what it is – only what it is like. Maybe there is something sexual about this. “Setting the mood.” “Getting warmed up”. Supply your favorite euphemism and it probably fits. I always feel like I’m blindly grappling on my hands and knees for what comes next. I’m not even in search of a destination, really, I’m too preoccupied with the challenge of the journey.

Epiphanies here are like cups of coffee. They’ve basically become a part of my daily routine. They’re strong, potent, and definitely an acquired taste. When they wake you up first thing in the morning, they never fail to get your blood flowing. They occur at the most arbitrary moments. When I was walking home from the neighbors’ house today, I stopped at the highest point of the hike. I had just spent twenty minutes forcing my legs to keep striding up a straight and treacherously rocky incline. My muscles burned. My heart was racing. My breaths were deep,  methodical, and rhythmic. Hot sweat mingled with rain as it forged watery crevices through the crusted dirt on my brow. 

I’m not sure where this is going. The more I read, the more I surely become unsure.

I looked over the edge of the cliff and the green hills sprawled endlessly in front of me. I watched the river – meticulously carved out of the thick trees. I am reminded of being four. Or five. Or six. Sometime where I am safely cushioned by single digits stretching through the years before and after. I am sitting at thanksgiving, or maybe it was the Sabbath. It is clearly an occasion where am I expected give thanks in purely “adult” terms and worship a God whom I can’t understand. We are going around the table saying what we are thankful for. It is a hallmark moment, to be sure.  Just as festive. Just as picturesque. Just as empty. I hear the murmurs of thanks circle around our perfectly varnished table – but I’m not listening. I don’t  look up and my potatoes become mountains and the gravy is a great, murky river that violently tears its way down the mountain side. I garnish those hills like white elephants with fecund foliage. The flaccid spears of steamed broccoli become ancient oaks with deep roots and amber-colored bark.

“Jessica,” my father says, that edge of anger in his voice obvious only to me. Everyone else only hears paternal concern. “What are you thankful for?”

I blank. I don’t have an answer. Those following seconds stretch on for millennia and I think of everything. Nature, bedtime stories, my collection of porcelain dolls. Everything that makes me happy –everything that makes me simple. But I look up, my six-year-old eyes round like fishbowls – my awareness twinkling as I recognize his expectation. I know for what I am thankful, and I know better what he wants to hear. There they are, the dozens of adults around me. Staring. Breath in their chests. Looming over me – their forks and knives becoming gavels. Judge. Jury. Executioner.

My father doesn’t blink.

“Family,” I murmur quietly. “poppa, momma, my sisters.” I take a shallow breath and continue, my stress momentarily appeased by their sighs of relief. “Joseph Smith, the one true prophet. Jesus. Heavenly Father.”

I don’t know what these words mean, I just know that they will ensure me comfort for a few more hours. I had heard them repeated to me thousands of times in Sunday school, in the book of Mormon, in our family home evening lessons. I know they are important to these people, to my family, so I pretend that they are important to me too.

I say a silent prayer – begging the God I couldn’t understand – to make my father sleepy that night. The words are so simple, but they are so heavy. I still feel that weight. I somehow distinctly recall my train of thought. I didn’t understand my feelings. my fears. I didn’t understand why I was terrified of him and that my fear manifested itself as pure guilt. I knew only one thing: I knew I wouldn’t have nightmares if he fell asleep early – if he didn’t come to tuck me in. 

I was always his favorite.

September 23, 2010 – does it matter?

The air is cool today. It feels new.

I had a dream last night – well, a few dozen I think. They were all vivid and slightly terrifying. I can only recall pieces of them. There is one, however, that I remember completely. I was sitting in a shack similar to the one I live in now. Striped green wallpaper cracked on the walls. It was only me and a pallid, waifish brunette. She looked almost sickly and her hair was long and tangled. I vaguely remember us talking, and then I remember something began to grow on her face. It was bacteria-like, or maybe it looked like fungus. Perhaps a tumor seething beneath her skin. I’m not quite sure what it was. She asked me to operate on it, but she had a request. My dream consciousness was from a third person perspective – I couldn’t see what I was performing on her. Finally, I got a glimpse of it as the chair was spun around. Her lip had been stretched to at least a foot outward from her face and a sparkling mirror had been sewed in. She looked terrifyingly deformed and had trouble keeping her head up, but she couldn’t stop smiling. She explained to the dream-Jessica that she had just wanted to be able to see herself – all the time. To be able to always look in the mirror.

Upon waking, I was really disturbed by this dream. I relayed it to Liz, and in my remembrance of it, I realized that they both were me. The waif girl had large blue eyes and pale skin, but she was just bones. It seems to be a pretty obvious metaphor – now that I’m shedding that part of myself I’m becoming afraid. I have worked so many years to cultivate my intellect – to satisfy my endless curiosity about the world. I am still working for that. Am I going to become empty? Vapid? Narcissistic? Shallow? Worthless? These questions are rhetorical. I don’t think any of these things will actually happen. I’m happier with myself than I’ve ever been. I just need to remind myself that it’s okay to be afraid of the unknown.

Last night I read Camus. I haven’t read The Stranger in English since my sophomore year of high school. I brought my old copy with me. It’s a deep navy blue. It appears almost velvet in the light. The letters on the cover are fading, but the gold embossing still gleams. It has a silken ribbon sewed in as a bookmark. It’s one of my most treasured books, yet, I haven’t picked it up in years. Upon opening it, I was transported back to another era. I remembered my fears and concerns and preoccupations of the time. Most of them were irrelevant and silly, but they consumed my world. I read my margin notes – it was almost heartbreaking. There are so many little seeds of ideas there – ideas that could grow rich and strong with the proper cultivation. On one of the pages I had tried to define truth. I had written the statement: “Truth is merely defined by what it is not.” I had drawn a little diagram of a box labeled “truth,” and then drawn motion lines outside of the box that signified everything else. It was basically the philosophical equivalent of a poorly-drawn portrait by a child. Stick people and a stick house. Yet, the parents are still proud. I’d add this to my philosophical refrigerator art collection of childish ideas.  It is amazing to reminisce about the ideas this book catalyzed inside my head. Some of them were juvenile and silly, but others show an obvious potential for great thought. My next question would be this: have I fulfilled this potential? Am I really any smarter than I was? I can easily recall thousands of hours I’ve spent reading since then and hundreds of titles I’ve devoured post-Camus. Does this make me any wiser? Despite my improved reading comprehension, the increase of my vocabulary, and even a greater development of analytical thought, all I have learned is that I can never know enough for it to matter. It’s paradoxical: the more I learn, the more I realize I know nothing. After I read The Stranger (and the rest of his published works – especially “The Myth of Sisyphus”) I thought I knew everything there was to know the world. I was sure that Camus’ almost scientific clarity revealed the ultimate truth about existence. A deep seated and ironic faith developed within me. This was a faith in the human condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that Camus diagnosed so plainly in his works. I’m fairly certain that he was responsible for my Francophilia. Well, not just him. Baudelaire, Baudrillard, Malraux, Sartre, Proust, Zola. Then, I remember what came next. I read “Being and Nothingness” as a junior in high school and remember how impressed my teachers were. I liked the attention. I realize now that I didn’t even grasp the meaning nor the context of Sartre’s ideas. I stumbled through Kierkegaard but I think I only picked him up because of the “existentialist” moniker. Oh, and also because I wanted to be able to say that I had read him. It’s undeniable that I was somewhat intelligent, but my priorities were all wrong. I had exchanged membership to my church of Jesus Christ for refuge in a temple of reason. I worshipped mindlessly just as I always had, but instead of God I had some strangely underdeveloped form of nihilistic existentialism (and yes, I am aware of the innate contradiction). I moved from existentialism to absurdism. I breathed Beckett and Stoppard and other absurdist playwrights for months. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was my favorite, especially after my four year obsession with Hamlet. I even took painstaking measure to memorize all of Hamlet’s soliloquies (I still remember most of them – it’s a great party trick).

I guess all of this rambling needs a point. I don’t have one. That is my point. I don’t see the purpose in this, but I can’t stop. Despite their impracticality, I am fervently addicted to new ideas.

September 23^rd, 2010 – 6:11 pm

I can’t concentrate on reading anything. Maybe I’ll just write for awhile.

I want to get into the groove of my thoughts but I keep trying to distract myself. My chair is uncomfortable. I should change clothes. I’m thirsty. I need water. I need to take a shower.

My whole life, needs have mingled with wants until I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. I don’t know what reinforced this imagined importance – what erected desire into this artificial structure of necessity. In being here,  the ability to satisfy those “needs” is entirely stripped away. I’ve come to realize how simple of a creature I am. I don’t need television, extensive social interaction, expensive meals, dryer-fresh clothes, a cell phone, air conditioning, hot water, internet access,  a shower every day. My body wishes for many things; yet, it begs for few. It pleads for water, fresh air, meals complete with plenty of greens and protein,  a good night’s sleep, literature, and exercise. If I have all of these things, happiness just follows. I hope I can keep this mentality once I return back to civilization. Habits are difficult to break and probably easy to resume.

Non sequitur: I just killed a mosquito with my gold-embossed hard-bound edition of the stranger. It wasn’t an arab, I didn’t have a gun, and I wasn’t on a beach, but it will do.

I want to write more; in fact, I am aching to write more, but for some reason I can’t. Not now. Maybe I should just think for awhile.

Liz and I are going to the volcano for the weekend – Volcan Arenal. It’s one of the ten most active volcanoes in the world. I’ve never seen one in real life before. We’re staying at a “party hostel” near the center of the city – la fortuna de san carlos. Maybe I’ll get a break from all of this one-on-one time with the inside of my head. Highly unlikely.