As I drove home from work after class I thought about how if I were to slide between dimensions, possibly by dying, presumably my senses would be the first thing to go. If that’s true, though, it seems odd that I think of art as transcendent, as in, able to reach other planes of reality. Maybe art is the senses’ approach to finding truth, not truth itself. If that’s true, and even the best art disappears when our senses dissolve, the truth that it was pointing toward might remain, because truth is not contingent on your perception.

The other thing I thought before I turned onto my street was that that means you can’t hang onto pieces of art as you transition, like you can’t hang onto coins you earn from level to the next in a video game. When you ‘graduate’ or shift or slide to another level or dimension, while it would be wonderful to be able to carry something with you, like your favorite book or melody, in all likelihood you can’t. Art is transient, and because it is dependent on the senses, it cannot survive the transition. So you better hope that your understanding of it is strong enough to, because that might be all you get.

I turned this in to my philosophy professor as a response to the reading we were supposed to do on David Hume. I didn’t read it, so I don’t know how relevant my input was, but I was banking on him being sufficiently moved to give me an A anyway.

‘The paper was supposed to be ten pages long,’ he said, staring at my measly one page on his desk during office hours the next day. He frowned at it through it his enormous glasses. ‘And on the fallacies in Hume’s critique of the argument from design.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, truly remorseful.

‘However, I’m willing to make an exception,’ he went on, ‘If you can parse out what you handed in to me into a valid argument, by Monday, I’ll accept it.’ He steepled his fingers under his chin.

As I closed the door behind me I heard him mutter ‘And please read the critique.’

This was excellent news. I now had the choice between two papers to write, which meant one must be worth doing. Having only till Friday, I sat down that night with every intention to complete at least one.

The Five Burroughs

You know how when you remember part of your childhood, or something that happened a long time ago, the parts of that memory all seem to bleed together, as if they weren't discrete sections that you experienced separately, but one big mix of stuff? (Do other people feel that way?)

I love that feeling, and I think I try to dive into it when I write something.

Last night Johnny told us a good name for a band he'd thought of: The Five Burroughs. (As in, spelled like William S. Burroughs.) I said it sounded like a punk band, and he said he'd probably never change his band name from Secret Cove, so it didn't matter anyway, and I said he could use it in the book he's writing. That is another thing I love about writing: if you think of something awesome that you won't do, but might have done in another life, then you can imagine the world you'd want it to happen in, and create it.

Someday, looking back, my whole life will be a big amorphous flowing memory of all the things I did - maybe, far enough away, I won't remember whether I lived in NYC before South Bend, or if I went to Ghana or only imagined going to Ghana. And I think that in that mix will be all the things I wrote about. Maybe they'll even be as real as things that really happened. So for that reason, I owe it to myself to right great things, and to write a lot of them, and to write them well.