"I'll Tell You a Secret: All the Best People Are"

I spent half the day today reading all of the writing I created on this web space since my journey began in India to when I was reading about presidents in Japan.

Having lived on memory lane, I can happily say that I am sane and in possession of a wide-eyed enthusiastic brain.

I also read over many photograph writings I have not published anywhere.  I mostly skimmed, as there are hundreds upon hundreds of thousand+ word pieces which I wrote in Japan.  I took a picture of the crescent moon in Hamamatsu when I was traveling from Osaka back to Tokyo, and found the following paragraphs:

All I can do is be alive, and everything on top of that is an extra prize.

 
I’ve had incomparable fun following the clues the past few years.  It hasn’t mattered if I was traveling from city to mountain to desert to village to city or staying stationary in the most boring place in the world.  I’ve found a way to notice poetry in the people, places and patterns around me.  The clues are always leading me forward to the next step, yet making me appreciate the value of the journey in the moment along the way.

All that really matters is to master imagination and creativity to manifest a romantic reality, which is top quality be, for her, whoever she is, and me.

Speaking of the word "quality," I wrote about a quality sign I photographed in New York City before I moved to San Francisco:

#16:  April 16, 2012 – New York, New York:  Top-Quality.  The Best Good Possible.  The Highest Level of Bliss Through Experience.  Maximum Value of Being.  Ultimate Essence.

I took this picture as I prepared to leave New York City after a week of visiting friends.  I used to live there for three years, and many people I knew happened to move there right after I left, so I had no shortage of people to see.  I did some writing, saw an awe-inspiring Hiromi concert, and spent a lot of time walking around New York and taking pictures of interesting messages and scenes as I went along, just like I had done all around the world.  As I passed the Empire State Building on my way to Penn Station, my ultimate destination essentially my relatives’ home out in East Islip, Long Island, I took a picture of this sign to remind me of the design of my journey, and why I bothered to go through all of the trouble.  I am seeking top quality experience.  I don’t know exactly what that is until I feel it, or what the alternatives are, and many physicists hypothesize that this is the best possible of all universes, which would make everything top quality.  Especially if you’re some some sort of pantheist mystic who claims everything is good.  If that's the case, then there can be no low quality, which doesn't make sense in this positive/negative world.  However, we live our reality as it comes, whether or not under the illusion of choice, and every choice is ultimately between levels of quality as they are deemed fit for the chooser’s experience within the greater experience, if ultimately that choice is made on the criterion of quality for the greater experience.   How do you define quality?  That’s like defining God or reality, right?

Robert Pirsig was a brilliant philosopher and English professor with a sky high IQ, which is good.  Unfortunately he drove himself completely insane trying to pin down quality and what it was, which is bad.  He lost all interest in life and eventually lost the will to even get up off the floor instead of wetting his pants, which is also bad.  He regained his sanity for the most part, took a motorcycle trip with his son across Montana and the rest of that part of the country, and wrote the highest selling American philosophy book of all time, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  And the root of his whole discussion is quality, and how we know whether or not something is good.  Ultimately, it’s just something we can tell and not define.  It sounds a lot like spiritual feelings described by mystics, or romantic love, or a million other things that require intuition.  When we’re working on something good, we do it by getting a feel for the work, and this isn’t an instinct, but it comes after a lot of “basic contact with reality” as he puts it.  He also says that the roots for quality and the Buddha, “Good" and "God,” are essentially the same in old English.

He also talks a lot about romantic reality and classical reality, and how one is about enjoying the surface of experience and the other is about understanding the machinery, but since quality is the Buddha and the Buddha is everywhere, these are all manifestations of quality.  However, he does distinguish romantic reality as being the ultimate value of existence, since that’s the cutting edge of experience and where all of the action is.  And when you’re up front, standing on the shoulders of all other understanding, you move forward with an intuitive feel for where you’re supposed to be going.

Why do I care about quality?  First of all, I care about quality of my life.  I want to live the best life I can while existing within universal experience.  One part of that is to create quality by doing God’s work: art.  Pirsig says that “Art is the Godhead as revealed through the works of man.”  Ultimately, when I create something, the universe is creating itself through me, who is also the universe, to unfold the world the way it’s supposed to.  Just like I derive inspiration from the pyramids in a way that countless bored tourists do not, someone else might derive inspiration in their imagination from one of my creations.  That's why I want my creation to be of the highest quality possible.

This circles back to the first point, as Pirsig also notes that someone who cares about quality in the aspects of what they do likely has a lot of quality in their character as well.  If you work hard to put quality into your creations, then you are likely to be living a quality life.  This isn’t a fool-proof maxim: you can work too hard and miss out on more important parts of life, like enjoying yourself and loving others, and you can be a perfectionist with no people skills and make a lot of people miserable, or even the world worse, in pursuit of your own ego’s perception of the correct definition and manifestation of quality.  Every person feels quality in their own way.

My attempt at quality through art is to write and tell a story that I enjoy working with and the reader enjoys.  If they become enlightened and are then inspired to live their life to the highest quality making the overall quality of the universe that much higher--if universal quality increase is possible through time--so much the better.  I am telling a story about a boy becoming a man.  The boy is scared of life, inspired by a dead friend to travel abroad, gains confidence, graduates and moves to New York City to pursue his writing dream, but first travels to the magical circus at Bonnaroo, enters a whole new reality, faces many young trials in New York while perceiving strange coincidences and metaphors, falls in love and loses three times, and decides to go on a journey around the world.  This decision leads to many journeys filled with real-as-your-feet-on-the-floating-earth poetry.  Throughout these journeys there is quality abound, despite the necessary learning mistakes.

My attempt at quality through life is to feel the good love as much as possible, and inherently spread it to others by doing so.  It’s not that crazy a recipe for bliss, and I only had to go a little insane to figure it out. (4/16/12)

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During that same visit to New York City I paid tribute to the statue of Alice in Wonderland on the Upper East Side.  I discovered it by surprise for the first time when I did my first voyage west, camping and hitchhiking in the snow.  

What is it they say in Alice in Wonderland?

Mad Hatter:  Have I gone mad?

Alice:  I'm afraid so.  You're entirely bonkers.  But I'll tell you a secret.  All the best people are.

Why is that?

Mad Hatter: There is a place.  Like no place on Earth.  A land full of wonder, mystery, and danger!  Some say to survive it: You need to be as mad as a hatter. [picks up his hat].  Which luckily I am.

I would agree, except for one huge difference.  This "place" is the Earth.

Now I can move forward within this fun crazy story on the earth.  I hope we flow to such high quality that the world lights up like fireworks.

What else do they say in the movie?

Why, sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast.