Twin Stars of my Horizon:

You arrived at dinnertime, one minute after another, healthy and screaming at 5:24 and 5:25 PM respectively, August 9, 2007. You seemed to have your mother’s eyes, your father’s chin, grandfather’s brow, and a litany of yet-to-interpreted features from genealogies of custom and genetics. The radiance and love within, of how I feel when I behold you, in your natal glow, astounded and surprised me: aware now of a cynicism toward my own life yet love spilling out of me.

You sleep a babe’s sleep, unencumbered by worry and responsibility. You are each absolutely beautiful to behold. Your mother and I love you so much it feels almost unbearable, if it weren’t so wonderful.

I tell those who aren’t parents but someday would like to be that there is nothing else like it, and moreover, there is nothing else like the two of you. I feel tired all of the time these days, living on a fraction of the sleep I enjoyed before you were born, but somehow don’t mind and find energy around you at every turn.  

You are twin stars of my horizon, my future- and as I behold such beautiful children your mother made, as yourselves, I could not ask for better. Life is good.

 Love,

Papa

I remember writing the letter below: I coughed, sputtered, cried as I wrote.
I'm at a crossroads in my life right now, and somehow this letter, rereading it,
I feel better in a general way, about life and my aims, my goal right now:
To study law and make sense of the tools available to do so.  

I'm glad I still have this letter, even if hard to read at times because of the 
mourning involved.

Dear Jim,


A friend once had noticed and mentioned, as her gazed passed between you,
Jim, the talented lecturer, and a particularly dedicated student, a
bedazzlement and glow emanating from the eyes and brilliance she beheld.
This youthful joy and lightness in being, being what there was and
learning from it, she believed, you and I shared mutually. Since one of
several beginning, then, you have acted as a catalyst, a guide and
inspiration, a whole and real human being, cutting against the grain at
times, and following your own path with others. You map and lead as you
listen. And since even those days in autumn, when for a first time, I,
among many, encountered your visage, when you shared CHID 110 with all of
us, we all have known what you can do with maps! In the most rooted and
rhizomatic ways, you performed as a true educator to the CHID community,
to communities elsewhere and beyond, and always as a mentor and friend to
me. True guide: you have turned every map, globally, upside down and right
side up, so that some might walk this earth a little more connected, a
little more thoughtful, authentic, reflective, empathetic. Across and over
oceans you embarked on lines of flight, the fancy and effervescence
present in one who lives robustly, lives their virtues, daily. In the wake
of you, Jim Clowes, I have but to look around, to see, to know, I am not
alone. I am not without a community, and never without friends and
colleagues, comrades who truly care. Presently, Tolkien comes to mind: The
world is changed: I feel it in water, I feel it in the earth, all we have
to decide now is what to do with the time that is given to us. You are not
alone. It is a special honor for me to write you today, you student of the
hermeneutic circle, you, Schleiermacher and all things connecting our
community as a community.

	Honestly, I must confess to you, when first I heard you utter the
word "hermeneutic," I believed you had sneezed between the lines of
something you were reading. "Rhizomatic," also, at the time, sounded like
an obscure type of African Dung Beetle. And "Foucault" and "Derrida"
seemed like competing brands of breakfastfood.

Yet you ventured onward, in courses and seminars, with these seminal
concepts and more. Sentiments resonant with the glow expressed by the late
UW emeritus Professor Giovanni Costigan:

 "Remember your humanity and forget the rest."

There is no doubt, friend and mentor, this humanity to me I will never go
without, because of you, a part in which you will never be forgotten. Let
even time cease: if there be a weight in this, I would gladly shoulder it
with you, and everyone who has been touched and inspired in remarkable
ways during this life by you. Even an Atlas must shrug one day, on the
horizon, yet let us not go gentle in to that good night, even if in the
twilight, our words had forked no lightening. I am no overman, myself, but
this is all any of us can promise: to love our friends and comrades and
carry on with whatever time we have left. Cherish always the leaps from
plateau to plateau, on Table Mountain, rock to rock, sheet to sheet. These
pages are my testament. I dedicate my thesis to you.

	The pages of the journal, another one of several beginnings begun
during CHID 110, and the utopian project you assigned, then: that
assignment I took up as one might a the pen, an edged tool, and the
delight therein inspired me to explore and venture out, inwardly and
beyond, as it were. In the Kirstenbosche gardens and waterfalls I
discovered, there, and here, the veritable Tsikama Forest, to the depths
of the mountains, to the heights of the sea, and Hobbit Shire all my own,
for all this I send a living gratitude with these notes. For even if you
never claimed to hold tight to the particular helium inherent in every red
balloon, for Marx, as we might say, I hold out even now, yours along with
others, was also ever the struggle, for bread and roses, bread and roses.

Not even in the past, in passing, and in all the passages I've read and
laid down to date and since, sings an ode to the joys I experienced upon
my return to campus, when last you saw me. You saw a glimpse of this
yourself when we embraced in greeting and farewell, on a high and
brilliant February noon, serendipitously, as we passed one another in the
faculty lounge. Now, I return again, this time, here for you. Recovered
beyond the borderlines separating a multitude of memories in the life,
some fair, some harsh, some more beautiful, more profound, some
enlightening, some terrifying, and, finally, some bedazzling: you seem to
me to stand at the rainbow and a bridge, a gray sage, dispelling,
magically, attacks by that Balrog, that demonstrable state of ignorant
self-deception. There was a crazy period of life for me where I believed
there was a chance I might never be able write or read again, turning
myself into a literary pretzel. I wanted you to know those dark times have
passed over me, cast back to the shadow. Now, in this Age of Iron, when
mettles are truly tested, the embrace seems all the more resonant to me,
as Coetzee writes, perhaps while waiting for the barbarians, (perhaps a
Conan or two) "I begin to understand the true meaning of the embrace. We
embrace to be embraced. We embrace our children to be folded in the arms
of the future, to pass ourselves on beyond death, to be transported. That
is how it was when I embraced you, always."

	Fellow, I tell you, I send every each empathy and fondness for you
and Erin and the littler ones. On this way, the journey being one of
several destinations, here and there, back again, and beyond: I dedicate
to you this hope that you returned to me in kind when on each occasion we
met. Prey for the dead and fight like hell for the living. Do not go
gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And finally, with Lou Andreas-Solome, review again what Shleiermacher,
though with no knowledge of art and women, surely knew, through and
through:

"Human life- indeed all life- is poetry. We live it unconsciously, day by
day, piece by piece, but in its inviolable wholeness it lives us."



A dedicated friend to you, always, yours,



Aaron Clefton

Little-ones-to-be:

 You are not even the size of two footballs, warm within your mama. Snug inside. She uncomfortably sits upon our bed, and by happenstance, still working, she nourishes you with the political suggestion that we all should have a say over the conditions of our labor. You are eves dropping on her work, her organization, her passion, her art, her love. Our conscious propaganda we impart to you from even this early age. I wonder whether the drive in her for justice is something you will appreciate someday the way I do. Could love ever be an expression of politics? No doubt we love you each with all our hearts and minds and above all, our common consciousness.

 Someday you each will question Maureen and me, and wonder at that time what is unimaginable to us now. Already you challenge us. You are the subjects of lengthy negotiations, hopes and compromises, smiles, laughter, furrowed brows, protections and vulnerabilities. Already we love you. You are of adoration.

 Everyday brings you closer to emerging, to beginning this life, each of you. What responsibilities you face! I want to say something more real than all this fluffy stuff, but again and again I find myself so happy, happier than ever before in my life. All the words spill onto the page and mostly I just want you to know how much I love your mother for bringing you closer to me, day by day. I never thought I would father a family, never thought it in the cards for someone like me, someone with a haunted past and a betraying brain. But your mother never treats me like an invalid, or worse, and object of her pity. For that recognition I love her so much, love her to the end of my days and into the last night.

It seems strange to write this, like some kind of time capsule. That’s something your grandfather Kim liked and appreciated: the science fiction imagination it involves. It’s a message in a bottle, or a dusty old note. I feel like it is cliché- but a cliché I chose is better than no effort at all. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for you.

 Papa.

[	mood	|	listless	]
[	music	|	Coldplay	]

A multitude of pages and writings and still listlessness and anxieties prevail whenever I write. Long since when, however, I have noticed vast displacement between my thinking in ink and the truths of flesh and bone. Happiness and joy are in you, yourself, in your body, in beginnings. I wonder how many people with read one of the beginnings of this journal and believe me sad, or worse yet misunderstand me altogether. That's always the risk when writing: being, or becoming, misunderstood. Hell, perhaps that's ever the risk when living. A multitude of pages and writings and still Marx comes to mind, "the philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways. The real task is to change it." For those of us damaged by forces beyond our borders, beyond our boundaries, the task of working on ourselves and healing might not differ so much from Marx' challenge to the philosophers of his time (and ours for that matter). In other words, I journal and merely interpret the world in various ways, and yet the real task is to change it. To me, the search for psychological health and well being is inextricably linked with becoming aware and connected to struggles for political and social justice. In this, you know, you are not alone. 

Here is an open letter I wrote the Icarus Project online community regarding "the political." I don't post very often there anymore, but I like parts of this letter and wanted to post it here too. If I could, I'd ask these questions to anyone, but especially people with bipolar disorder.

Dear Friends,

I am writing this post as invitation to TIP community to "check-in" with its
own, to get a feel for what it is many of us desire, and to act.

One of the most important and neglected activities in the Icarus Project is the activity of the political. What would it mean for the Icarus Project to be the
political project of bipolars and related madness? And who are we who are
deciding this project's fate?

There are those within and without this project who say bipolars are unable and unwilling to act, who say bipolars cannot become independently able to contest
for real victories in the arena of politics and strategy. TIP community, it is
said; you cannot but depend and stay silent, save for the collective clicking
of keys and mouse buttons. TIP community, is this correct?

The question we face as community, I believe, is this: what is the real victory
to us?

Is it attaining individual changes in our bodies, be it taking medication or
refusing it? Accepting diagnoses or refusing them? Sampling alternative
medications or denouncing them? Is it gathering a group of people to socialize,
flirt, get laid, or to make art and puppets? Design a website? What about a
radio show, or a protest? Does winning mean flaming someone offensive so they
will never post again? Is it “D” for all of the above? If we only had online
polling, would you elect to feel virtually elated, satisfied with the results?

I’m not saying the work that goes into all these aspects of the Icarus Project
is futile or irrelevant to people’s lives. I am saying, however, the above are
not all that political.

We struggle with our conditions, I believe. In the affective deadness of
depression, does struggling in virtual battles beat winning the real one? When
stimulating vividness in mania, do individual visions and shamanistic
aspirations matter more than TIP community to create “a new culture and
language that resonates with our actual experiences of ‘mental illness’ rather
than trying to fit our lives into a conventional framework.”

At the risk of belaboring the point, how is creating new culture and language
the same or different from organizing the political? What is real victory for
us? These are two open questions, I believe, ones I hope that help distinguish,
among others, where the Icarus Project community ought to direct its talents,
energies, and sensitivity. As Ralph Ellison wrote, “could politics ever be an
expression of love?”

Mad embrace to you,
Aaron