This week I finished a summer-long project of transcribing poems and journal entries that span back from July 2005 and reach July 2016. It was a wholly unique experience to psychically pass through the past 11 years of my life in such detail, to zoom into the intricate minutiae that remained and changed since then. Being and noting that I've changed, I decided to sit down for:
An Interview with Nick Segovia, pt. 1
DS: Hey man, how’s it going?
NS: Awesome! I can’t believe you have access to a time-machine! This is so crazy. Aren’t you worried about the space-time continuum or something?
DS: No, we’re Gemini’s, you're always alive and well in me. I’m actually just imagining that we’re sitting beside the Starbucks on SW 112th now.
NS: Oh, right. Well where are you, gonna blaze?
DS: We...I don't blaze, really. I was actually hoping that I’d limit myself to talking about the future and you’d just talk about our, your, past. What do you think?
NS: Whoa, okay. So what should I do?
DS: I'm gonna ask questions and you can ask them too.
NS: For what?
DS: To document change, generally. It's for a “social discovery platform” that I write for weekly.
NS: …
DS: It’s like a more professional blog, like LiveJournal for more relevant and edited ideas.
NS: Why don’t you just write a personal piece for it?
DS: Unlike you, I have difficulty with talking about myself in a transparent, direct or vulnerable way.
NS: Oh…how come?
DS: I’d have to talk about things that happened between these ten years to answer that and that’s against the rules. But I will say that you got it out of my system.
NS: Right…okay, well. What do you want to ask?
DS: Okay, so I’ve been reading over some of the things that you’ve written and am curious about your optimism and carefreeness. Could you talk about why you feel that way or what inspires you to feel so hopeful, so much so that it sometimes seems like naivety?
NS: Dude…are you like, an adult now? Oh my god. [Looks away and shakes his head]
DS: I’m not, I’m just saying…
NS: Like, just ‘cause there are really bad things that happen, or you’ve had your heart broken doesn’t mean that like, we just surrender to this feeling of “oh well, there’s no use in trying,” right?
DS: That’s fine. But do you agree or think it’s possible that there’s a limit to how much a person can stand?
NS: The ‘ol “every man has his breaking point”1 idea, right? I don’t know. The fact remains that there are beautiful and truthful things in the world. Like, capital “Beauty” and “Truth” in the world. It’s like, you can’t beat the boss unless you die a whole bunch of times to study and learn his techniques, you know? I think it’s like that with Truth and Beauty, we have to be willing to like, f*cking suffer…can I say that?
DS: Yeah, of course.
NS: okay…yeah, like, we have to be ready to f*cking die and be really hurt…because those things like, are in the tornado and like, we have to give ourselves up to get it, you know? Sacrifice our little circles of comfort to get to the treasure. Nothing that's worth a damn is cheap.
DS: Yeah, I remember that feeling. I just, don’t feel that way that much these days. I’m more just trying to explain now with words, what I’ve felt in my remaining days lately.
NS: Are you dying?
DS: In the Plath sense of the word, yeah.
[Both laugh]
DS: So, I’m putting together some poems from these years and I’m finding this common thread right? For the most part, it seems to be about, um, loss, I guess, and then finding something to hold onto in an unexpected or serendipitous way, you know? So I guess an even more common thread would be like, the tininess of an individual and the colossal movement that they’re just caught in the middle of by living. How I feel now, it’s like, that external force doesn't need to be a person right, but it’s like, almost the whole transformation or force has to occur within me for it to be real or sustainable. The question, I guess, is, hmmm…how can I phrase this? Well, why do you deify the people that you like, and like, make them tantamount or wholly responsible for your salvation?
NS: Hmmm…I guess, I dunno. I thought about that a lot last year…
DS: …Right, the journals from Red Rock…
NS: The easy answer is that I was raised in a Catholic family. Like, there's this idea that I take for granted that I'm at the whim of external forces always, you know. Adam f*cked up, Jesus fixes it, you know? It's very deterministic in that way. Like, if you explain it bluntly, our action doesn't matter as much as our belief, you know? And I think that's dangerous because it sets the paradigm up to "live lives of quiet desperation" hoping some conviction will be enough to feel good or important. Like, it doesn't matter what I do, it matters what I believe, but you know what they say about the road to hell.
So that's one part, that this axiom or subroutine that I view the world in, I think it's really informed by that scheme.
Yeah...but also, and also like, more micro-cosmically, is that I guess I started noticing back in Red Rock that I was just…I don’t know, replacing(?) whoever I was meeting with the feelings that were already there. You know? like, projecting I guess. And, if I had to think hard about it, it seems like that comes this very deep and almost sub-consciously rooted unmet desire from a long time ago. I mean, you know ****e*, right? But I don’t think it’s really about that. I think that there’s just so many beautiful and amazing things to see that, without anyone to share it, or like, connect the circuit with, it would just trail off into a dimming spark, you know?
Like, I'm not looking for someone to help me live forever as much as looking for someone to share what little bit of life I've experienced.
DS: That’s a nice image, and yeah, in a way, I agree, but that implies some sort of incompleteness doesn’t it? The spark trailing off...It implies that life can’t be lived in solitude, or at least not in the fullest sense of what “living” could be with someone else.
NS: I think we’re halves of things. It’s like positive and negative, or light and day, sperm and egg. Like, would night be beautiful if it happened all the time? Would we enjoy life so much if we didn’t die?
DS: Probably not, but from a different perspective, that duality doesn’t even exist. Like, from here, in a few hours the sun will apparently set, but from space, you can float in an interminable night.
NS: What’s your point?
DS: I just meant to illustrate how those dualities aren’t absolute, they’re just based on a perspective. Like, if we saw in a different spectrum, x-ray, for example, I don’t think that our duality would be based on the vibrancy of color, but rather the thickness of matter, which admittedly would be another duality right…based on opacity, but you know what I mean.
NS: Right, so what, are you suggesting like, living as a celibate monk in some secluded place and just, meditating all day.
DS: …
NS: Life wouldn't go on if everyone did that. People would die off and maybe the bees would be okay with it, but suicide is a serious thing, and though some people opt for it, a whole species doing it would be weird. It'd be like a big mistake happened in evolution and everyone realized it or something.
DS: People wouldn't smoke cigarettes if they weren't addictive, just because something is desirable doesn't make it work the effort involved in procuring it.
NS: Well if you're asking me about why I'm optimistic or "carefree" is it correct to assume that you're skeptical or stressed? Like, maybe it's unfair to ask such a limiting question but how do you fare in that regard?
DS: Lately I've been interested in the idea of keeping myself as close to zero as possible. Like, if we imagine happiness and sadness corresponding to the peak and trough on a wave respectively and assume that there'll be oscillations until we die then it follows that it's folly to set our perspective at any number on the graph besides zero, or the origin, right?
NS: That's Buddhist of you.
DS: Well, it's common for spiritualists in general. There' a nice verse in the Gita that says that the appearance of happiness and distress is like the appearance of the seasons and that it's all due to sense perception, in other words, it's impermanent.
I wouldn't call it realism as much as that, just trying to stay as close to the origin or center of my sense perception as much as possible, call it the soul if numbers are too boring but that's the idea.
NS: So what is that wave function of happiness and sadness for, is it just useless?
DS: Well, it could be a non-harmonic perception of our reality. You've read The End of Time right?
NS: Yeah, actually. Just finished it.
DS: Right, well, remember what Krishnamurti said about super- symmetry?
NS: ...That the universe is so symmetrical that on a large enough scale it can incorporate chaos or mistakes and still remain altogether whole or perfect right?
DS: Yeah, existence on earth continues because it can prosper in both extremes. I think it's more important to be fluid and expect more of yourself than of other people.
- Shawshank Redemption quote. Spoken by Morgan Freeman playing “Red.”
- http://www.vedabase.com/en/bg/2/14
- https://www.amazon.com/Ending-Time-Dialogue-J-Kris...
