Losing the star without a sky.

There's a time for perfection, and it's never it. I've spent my life trying to be perfect. I thought perfection was the goal. I knew it wasn't reachable, but I thought trying to achieve the best you could possibly do in whatever you threw yourself at was the point, the noble way to live. I am now at the age of 33 finally abandoning that thought. Like Newton's clockwork universe was shown to be an exquisitely beautiful mistake, I feel like I've spent my years running in figure eights pounding the heads of gophers of irrationality and making sure my mansion of cards lined up, looked lovely from every angle, made others feel special and inferior, and that every single atom of my creation was both self- and cross-referential at the same time.

As days pile on one another, this goes from being an extraordinarily difficult feat to an impossible one. I've been reduced to writing poems and meta-commentary on the state of my writing, rather than doing original writing itself. I've forgotten how to just look. I've described the veins on leaves, the textures of pollen, but I've forgotten how to see a tree. In my quest for self-consistency I lost the artistry. I forgot what it meant to be alive and just feel.

No more. Starting now I am lurching back into the world full force, and if I make mistakes, it's ok. If I use a word wrong, I'll correct it if I catch it, otherwise I'll move on. Maybe the wrong meaning will even be the right one. I don't want to write like an English scholar anymore, I want to write like a person who breathes and sees and when he thinks, it's only to more efficiently return to those sensory delights. Senses are all anything is about, at root. Plato thought it was pure thought, as I once did. Plato may have found an end to his path, but all I have ever found is horrifying fractal hairsplitting and infinite regression leading to madness. And suicide. Always the specter of suicide.

I don't want to make this site a shrine to any single person, but I want to credit my beautiful friend Nicola for unwittingly bringing about this change in me. Her imagery and attitudes have taught me to see the world with uncynical eyes again. She writes with the broad strokes of an impressionist's brush, where I built up my constructs one scientifically-perfect pixel at a time. She once told me she didn't see the beauty in math, that it made what was simple seem complex. At first blush I disagreed with her; like Feynman, I felt I could both see beauty as a nonscientist AND at a deeper, still-beautiful level of left-brained determinism. But that is another kind of beauty which only borrows the same word. For people like Nicola there is no internal war here; the asymmetric rabble of purple flowers on a hill is beauty pure and simple, and machines, even natural ones whose detail has been explained and exposed, are not. For me I have straddled the fence my whole life. I could see both. Like a mediator who can see the validity in both sides of an argument which has polarized two people.

But I am done sitting on that fence. I have hopped off into the land of irrational beauty, never to return. I don't disbelieve science at all. But I don't care about it anymore, because it's another endless regression than leads to finer and finer explanations of nothing, and for no purpose. All it has done for humankind is to create a world of ugliness and anxiety. I want to return to the feeling I got from the fairy tales told to me as a child. There was magic back in that world, and science holds very little of that magic now at the level I understand it. But a mystifying tale, a riveting photograph, a painting whose colors touch a part of you where no one is allowed to go: this is still the unexplainable sorcery of joy at work. I want to dedicate my life to feeling the magic that I've ignored much of my life, and to creating it as best I can for others to enjoy.

I want to kill the cynic in me who has an explanation for everything and replace him with a child of big dreams who knows absolutely nothing.