In 2022, there is one main thing that I think I discovered, but I don’t know how to describe it—at least it is hard to put into words.

Growing up, I was always bright, I excelled in school and learning. In high school, I performed to the standards set for me in the classroom and football field and overshadowed them. But the intense shame of it all was crippling, I lacked a sense of human connection, so I found faith in Jesus, and thereby found love. In college, I then followed that system to its core, and it was tremendously difficult. I was sensitive, and the dogmatic tendencies of Christianity sucked me into their ridiculously unnatural mould. I felt my life was at stake, something was deeply wrong, but I wasn’t sure if it was my individuality or the dogmatism that was wrong. I had to get to the bottom of it or I was eternally damned. I became incredibly dogmatic, and through that discovered deep pivot points of freedom inside the faith that most people don’t get to. Life precedes law. I became incredibly open, not as a rebellion, but as an inversion, a birth inside of the death, a expansive creation inside of the black hole. To experience and follow a faith is one thing, but to get underneath its shortcomings is another. Religious perfectionism is a hard teacher. So I worked out a spiritual healing for myself in tandem with applying that wisdom to aerospace engineering. I felt that the militaristic, unnatural fury that is in human devices comes to a head in aerospace, and if salvation lurks there, then there is a cascading effect that has on the rest of the system. The freedom I discovered beneath Christian dogmatism is also beneath technological avarice; they are two aspects of perfectionism, and a solution existed. I also began a poetry project that concerned the nature of apocalypse, the existential limits of being human, and the crisis of modern/postmodern consciousness.

I have been accused numerous times by people I felt were once close to me of flying too close to the sun. A Chinese proverb says, “The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the one doing it.” Nobody knows if a madman is a genius until we see what he has done, and even then he may still be crazy! The ecstatic rarefaction of interstellar voids is not for everyone. Unfortunately, I think those have accused me are simply unable to orient themselves, and my intensity overwhelms them. Despite being a spritely, friendly person, my radiative persona is somehow a challenge to the emptiness in people. This is not a condescension—it is a sad thing, for all parties involved. It is only natural to be rejected by people who don’t understand you, who do not feel able to relate to you, who do not inhabit your world. It is easier to project someone into the confines of a simple caricature than see you for the gray complexity you are. There is a mystical otherness, a divine unknown within all things, and it is frightening. So when someone aspires to that abyssal height, when they are engrossed in it and obsessed with it, their personality reveals a rift in other people’s reality. That individual becomes a chaotic element, a dangerous radical, a crazy person that should be rejected. This is human nature. To accept that person by showing respect requires an understanding of the mystical otherness within oneself, and such understanding is terribly inconvenient to going along with ordinary life.

If there is any defect in me, it is in my fear of my own isolation. The intense individuality is not so difficult when I have no choice. In deep solitude, I find no strong need for company, except in an emergency situation, and even then I accept myself to be my own guardian. I often long for company, but I am unable to find it, so I travel alone. When I am around others, the possibility of real intimacy becomes very alluring, and I can become transparent. If this is not reflected, I feel inverted, like trying to unfold a pair of wet blue jeans from inside-out. I resent myself for my individuality, for my struggle to find intimacy with others, for my inadequacy in sitting with myself without love from another, and I resent others for being unable to connect with me as a moral quandary within themselves—relating to my personality requires a certain attunement to oneself, and so I take personally the moral shortcomings of society. The existential liberty of the human spirit is the dwelling place of my personality. I accept my marshiness, the muddy slug and tidal swell and rescinsion. Meanwhile, I feel torn between my books and my mind, outdoors and indoors, my desire to generate and my desire to receive. Having intimacy is a fuel for me. I resent my mother and father for their inadequacy to actualize themselves in an intimate relationship, and I resent the forces behind their raison d’etre, behind my own. I resent the species, and I rejoice in the species, in the network of the world, in the history of transformation, in the biology of the stars.

Icarus’ father Daedalus was an engineer who was focused on staying in the middle, not too high, not too low, which is really a social way of problem-solving. It is image-based, it is not getting at the essential value judgments. It feigns truthfulness behind serotonin-and-testosterone-fortified pragmatic justifications. Daedalus told everyone his son flew too high and died, but he probably resented his son for being a dreamer. He wished his son would be concrete like him. He did not see that his son was taking his legacy a step further. Daedalus invented wonderful contraptions—although we do not know what they were, nor if he was a representation of a literal figure or a recurring personality in the time period. He went beyond the technology of the day. Icarus went a step further, beyond mere function into the domain of possibility, the noetic realm of imagination responsible for his father’s inventions. He explored the realm of the mind. Of course Daedalus would say his son was a failure. His son flew “too high” and “melted.” Icarus was dead to him, even though he lived in a way that was more alive than his father. His father did not appreciate or accept his cares as real. To Daedalus, his son seemed effeminate, dreamy, impractical, lazy, self-absorbed. Icarus was attending to the essences, he was inquisitive into the heart of knowledge. Powered flight came from the mind, and if the mind is a richer, more complex world than what we can communicate, then the flight of the mind is a superior form of flight, that effectively sheds some of itself by descending into the world. And the hope is that human invention could be raised back up to the dreamy, glorious level of the psychosomatic atmosphere where is imagination. We do live in a psychosomatic spectrum. Truth is a body of sorts, a physical process. Icarus is shamed by his patriarchal father for being an eclectic, perhaps for not catching the attention of Ariadne, of being showed up by Theseus, the heroic young man of Athens. Maybe Daedalus tried to kill his son over open water because he was ashamed of his son, who coped with imprisonment by becoming an imaginative. Maybe he abandoned his son. What truly became of Icarus is an unanswered story. “Daedalus” has succeeded in supressing the true story of the spirit of “Icarus” in the world. We must understand the manipulative, fatherly, authoritarian force that hides behind an exterior of success and competence. He has no exposure to vulnerability. Icarus faces the heights and accepts his life may end by climbing the peak. He has no real attachment to the summit. It is not the enjoyment of the ascent. It is always a higher dimension he attributes real value to. His life is very important to himself, but he walks on the knife’s edge, preferring the ascent to himself. Who has the ego? The man who stays in control, or the young man who dares to live out a dream?

When I was in grad school, I found it incredibly difficult to find human connection. Most people just wanted to be on their phones, to feign loyalty and friendships as novel whims. It is simply a feature of my personality to be existentially reflective, to seek abstraction. My personality and values were effectively being stifled wherever I turned. At best, I felt like a shiny object people enjoyed looking at on their shelf, but would not be willing to love or interact with. Moreover, my sex drive was seriously repressed, and my instincts were silently screaming for physical intimacy with another person, for deep love. This, combined with an extremely existential thesis topic, was the cause of a deep depressive spiral I looped through for a few years. Since the depths are within my nature, I felt, therefore, that I was being rejected by the world as a whole, even though I was searching for the universal answers. I looked for a way out. This consumed the course of my time in grad school. There was a lot I had to learn. Falling in love with a narrow, morbid woman, losing myself, and then being in love with a kind, lifegiving woman eventually transformed me.

When I finished my thesis defense (over a Zoom call) in June of 2021, the first thing that came to mind was the Santa Lucia Wilderness. A stream in my imagination that was already there, gurgling beneath the noise, if only there were enough quiet for me to hear it. The next thing that bubbled up was the desire to leave my girlfriend, who had been quite unloving to me for almost the entire relationship. But I had lost myself.

When I was in school, I felt there were things beyond everything yet. Beyond the pinnacles of scholasticism, beyond the systems of performance, beyond the social networks, beyond the societal infrastructure I had learned to trust and locate myself. An artistic, spiritual calling was calling me further still. So I looked for a way to Big Sur. It felt like a place that I would be safe, a womb for a rebirth, an existential slice of California: ocean, steep mountains, diverse wilderness, and a maverick culture. There was a shadowy spirituality of the natural, incarnate existence that was attractive to me. Around that time, I met a girl who ended up being a resplendent source of positivity for me, a real love. I began to feel the wind in my sails again, for what felt like the first real time. I began exploring the trails upon my arrival in February, and by summertime I found my legs were strong enough to not be sore after a backpacking trip. I began tackling harder things. I climbed Whitney in a day on no sleep… a story for another time. I crossed the Santa Lucias in a day, summiting Cone Peak, and then hiking over to Indians down the Arroyo Seco. My sights stay high. Unfortunately, I am feeling some haste to publish this and resume the narrative arc when I am more eager to do so.


May 25-27, 2023
Gorda