The Bent Stick
essai #1
I woke up in my apartment on Ellendale Place, just north of USC’s campus. I had a gig late the night before. There was a heat wave in Los Angeles, and my studio apartment was stuffy from my hours spent setting up, playing, and tearing down at a dive bar in Long Beach. I opened my balcony doors, the best part of that tiny place. The balcony looked out at a beautiful jacaranda tree, blooming violet at the time.
I woke up the next morning, the birds playing and singing in the tree. I went to stand, and my knees buckled. My vision doubled. Odd. I turned to sleep it off.
Woke again an hour or so later. And again, couldn’t quite stand up. I called my friend Matias, who helped me down the long, steep flight of stairs and drove me to the USC Health clinic on campus. The doctor came in, a bit distracted. He looked at me, not writhing in pain or with any visible symptom, checked his chart reading “double vision,” and asked, “Have a lot to drink last night?”
No, not really. He asked if I had slept enough, how my stress levels were, and then began a routine checkup. My heart, ears, then reflexes.
He struck my knee with the medical hammer thing. Nothing.
“I usually get this first try…” he said to himself.
Again. No reflexes. Hmm. He moved to other reflex points on my body. (Didn’t know those existed.) Nothing.
“You need to get to the hospital right now. Do you have a ride or should I call an ambulance?”
Matias drove me to Good Samaritan Hospital, where they were waiting for me, whisked me right in, directly into a CAT scan.
It took a few days and some gnarly tests for those great doctors to figure it out. But they did! Guillain-Barré syndrome, Miller Fisher variant. I could tell the nurses were relieved. They wanted the win as much as I did.
Guillain-Barré is a disease where your own immune system turns on your wiring, attacking the protective lining of the nerves. That’s why my vision doubled, reflexes failed, and then my ability to walk and play guitar was fading fast.
But luckily, it can be curable. And after a full immune reset, I was on the long road to recovery. (Side note: please donate blood. I can no longer do so, but blood donations saved my life. Thousands and thousands of donors are the reason why I continue to exist. Thank you. I am indebted to so many people I will never know or meet.)
While sick, I couldn’t do all that much. I had a lot of time and couldn’t play guitar. So I started wondering about what makes you you.
Lying Eyes
My muscles recovered faster than my eyes. Yeah, I had to crawl up and down my stairs for a few months. It builds character, but the weirdest bit was wearing an eyepatch like a pirate for the better half of a year. (Yes, people wanted to pick fights with the pirate. I didn’t take the bait, ye scallywag.)
My eyes lied to me for a long time. (Still sometimes do!) And they always did. I was just made painfully aware of it.
There’s an old image for this. Probably as old as sentience itself. Put a stick in a river and watch it bend. But it isn’t bent. A caveman might even ask: why see bent when no bent?
The water bends the light, and eyes receive the light, so the stick looks broken right where it meets the surface.
Democritus had a name for the kind of knowing the senses give you. Bastard knowledge, he called it. As opposed to the real thing, legitimate knowledge, which came from reason, not the eyes. Trust the mind. The eyes are liars.
Well, idk about that, Democritus… My eyes were liars, sure. Doubled and wonky. But lying in bed, I wasn’t so sure the mind was a trustworthy one either.
Because I started learning Japanese. And Japanese taught me the second half of the lesson the stick started. Language is a stick in the water too. I tried to learn Japanese and port over English. Like a translator or a dictionary. But it’s damn hard to speak understandable Japanese while thinking in English. The meaning bends as it crosses the barrier, right at the surface where one mind meets another. I learned (and am still learning) that translation is an art, not a science. Languages are paired with culture. Meaning is not atomic.
Anyone who used Google Translate before AI showed up knows exactly how broken the stick can look.
So I had those bastard eyes, but my mind too was a rat bastard. The mind’s own instrument, the words it thinks in, bends at the waterline.
What’s left to stand on?
Not a Nihilist
Like all young men, I flirted with existentialism and nihilism and misread Nietzsche. It bummed me out.
But I got free of it, and not by way of an answer.
A thirteenth-century monk named Wumen Huikai gathered forty-eight koans into a book he called the Gateless Gate, 無門関, the Mumonkan. The whole conceit is in the title: the barrier you’re straining to think your way past has no gate. You don’t pick the lock; you realize there was never a wall. His very first gate is a dog. (We’ll get to the dog. I am the dog lol.)
What freed me was opening the clenched hand and recognizing: I don’t know. Not giving up. Not “there is no meaning.” Socrates (the wisest man, according to the Oracle at Delphi) claimed to know exactly one thing: that he knew nothing. But he didn’t say it from a place of darkness. It was a comedic freedom. Just because I don’t know doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
To stay in that lane: truth is like the sun. You know it’s there; you can feel it on your face. But you cannot stare at it without losing your eyes. And homie, I’ve come closer to losing mine than most, so I don’t say that lightly. Don’t give up your eyes for “truth.” But you can glance… and a glance is not a failure to see. It’s the only way to look at something that big without terrible consequences. (Anybody else watch Fullmetal Alchemist?)
But a glance is hard to check. You know it’s there. It’s part of what holds back the Big Sad. And standing behind that (something I can’t verify, when the ground underneath doesn’t compel it, and I might just be wrong) is the thing I hang my hat on. In other words, authoring a life.
A narrator who could verify everything would owe nothing. A man who loves a goddess does not love. A goddess is, by nature, flawless. To adore her is recognition, not love. Love requires flaws. Intellectual honesty requires risk. Both require authorship.
And I am flawed. I used to think I had to apologize for that. Or figure everything out before speaking. Before claiming. I don’t feel that way anymore. The flaw isn’t a disclaimer. It’s the part of me that can lose, and so the part of me that can owe, and so the part of me that can stand behind my glance and mean it.
So, the dog. I’ve been chewing on this koan for years: a monk asks Master Joshu whether a dog has Buddha-nature. Joshu answers with one word: Mu. Nothingness. Not yes, not no. A refusal of the question’s terms, an answer too big to stare at, both? What does it mean? Idk. Now it’s yours to idk about too.
But I’ve stopped treating it as a problem to be cleared. I don’t want to argue the river out of bending the light. Or argue whether “true knowledge” or the Forms exist. Learn the angle, and reach for the stick. That’s the practice of doing. Of making. Of authorship and answerability. So let’s glance at the sun, hold Mu, and stand behind what we can’t prove.
A dog-masked singer once told me that’s about as close to the meaning of life as a bent pair of eyes is ever going to get.
Moo.
Luke