Where do we carry the true Earth? Is it in our heads, lurking there with unspoken gravity, coloring the frames that our eyes manufacture in concert with our memories, beliefs, and experience? Or is it outside of our hands, related to our voices, the way we manipulate symbolic objects with the metaphors of our physicality, the way our speech casts us as individuals among a caste?

It is one of the great secrets that people do not know what the world is. Truely and unadorned, how it exists. Science analyzes its parts, but from these parts no agreeable whole has been constructed that advances our understanding beyond scientific label jargon for processes witnessed most often in false environment. The arts attempt to teach us who we are, what our roles and lives mean, but these often go ignored due to the inherent subjectivity of the author or artist. One wonders, in terms of Creationist myth, if God himself is a subjectivist. It is entirely possible that He crafted the world from the ethos of matter the same way that Pollock splattered his expressionism across canvas, the way Monet colored his lillies; complete in style but nebulous in meaning.

One tries to gather an impression of meaning from the immediate environment. Los Angeles, perhaps the most unmagical city in America, sprawls in every direction, yet it remains impossible to escape the totality of the sky. Smog, high clouds, jet contrails, and the mad rush of helicoptors give one the feeling of giantism and the need to duck ones head, the necessity of ceiling room. But then, their are these umbilical connections to the astral, to the celestial spheres, that jar one subconciously with the impression that man has scorched even the sky, which is saying a lot, considering the Christian value placed on the upper atmosphere regarding heaven since the infant philosophies of the Gnostics. Looking down the filthy runnels of alley ways and runway-width highways gives the impression of false space; an open plain converted into a psychologist's experiment maze. Gleaning substance from people is impossible; they have given up the pain of meaning and its weight in favor of the rather depraved lightness and ease of social congress, in favor of the percieved opportunity to be worthy of material accumulation.

My searches for meaning take place not in the valley of roads and suburbs, but rather in the cobblestone-worked lanes of books. Though it is true that there are already enough people in the world, I cannot hold that same statement to be true concerning imaginary people, made up by authors for the sake of exploring various facets of real character. It is terrible, but sometimes I hold the goings on in a character's life to be of more value and intrest than the happenings in the lives of some millions of Los Angeleans. However, on second consideration, this may not be wholly terrible, seeing how fictional characters are ultimately the invention of one who possesses a rich inner life. It is that inner life I long to communicate with, that I desire to find expression for. The world of hybrid powered sedans and glam perfume is generally an annoyance, while the words from a Billy Pilgrim or Holden Caufield highlight the emotional memory of years that we could never live.

The true world for me, is it merely in my imaginings then, lying in mental pictures, langauge comprehension, and philosophical ruminations? Or is their a world stripped of the human element that passes below our notice, unobserved, cycling like the invisible wind of a hurricane in swaths of time and space?