Active Dreaming of Southeast Asia

It feels as if I just woke up from a dream in which the last empty page of my passport was filled with a Thai visa and the week that followed was filled with nothing less than ecstasy -- No language has yet the words to describe the feeling of night snorkeling with bioluminescent plankton under a starlit sky with an eclipsed moon only 7 degrees off the equator by the Ko-Poda Thai Island. The same can be said or unsaid about a spice garden near Kandy in Sri-Lanka where I was taught all about cooking, self-healing and alternative medicine. Needless to mention all the lovely people I met and connected with along the way, some even on esoteric levels, the incredible sunsets we witnessed pinching each other for reality checks, the temples we visited and meditated at with no notion of time or space. Some places were so sacred to me that I did not even dare photograph even before my camera broke. I made a vow to myself while I was hostage of such astounding beauty to travel more often and in more meaningful ways before I forget how to recognize faces, elephants and dragons in clouds rolling by in the sky and before the tan migrates from my skin to that of other wanderers without prior notice. I will be posting some stills at ALAgrApHY shall you wish to come along and travel with your friends.

I hope that this post inspires you to experience something even larger and then share it back and so on and so forth until we are all one in every sense of the word.

EDIT: On a similar note, I just realised that just before I left for that trip, I had a dream of bioluminiscent frogs and had no preconception of bioluminiscence in Thailand! Is that a coincidence?

Dedicated to the #girl that smiled to me but chose to remain anonymous while I was jumping to catch #bioluminescent #frogs to impress her in my subconsciousness from what I can recall from my fragmented #dream last #night . #uv lit #fluo #painting

A photo posted by ENTHEOGENIC VOLUPTUOUS POLYMAθ (@alagraphy) on Jan 15, 2015 at 12:53pm PST

À la Bi

Do you want comfort or happiness?

It might sound counterintuitive but you cannot have both. Once you are too comfy you loose the sense of risk and adventure, and you slowly vegetate into a lesser being, whatever that means. One of my favorite sayings "life begins at the end of your comfort zone" sums this up pretty neatly. On the other hand, "you have to eventually settle down" you whisper to yourself, and it becomes more of an ordeal with every trip and discovery until a week in one place becomes some kind of a phobia.

It is much easier to find comfort in happiness than happiness in comfort but I, along with other lazy and clairvoyant beings, have been more interested in the latter, be it for its assured long-term stability or for the challenges implied.

In parallel to my commitment to arts and sciences, I am trying to master, Greek, the 8th language as a challenge of neophiliac stability.

Languages are like people and countries that we revisit to remember and perpetuate great moments, especially those involving communication, putatively with other beings. When I am speaking a language I am nostalgic for the other ones I am not speaking (and ones I am not speaking to) just like being in a place and not in a myriad of other possible places. 

Volatile memory extension nostalgic excitement and freedom price inflation

Yesterday, I had a skype call with a good friend, who is reading this today. He mentioned me citing a quote in this blog, but having forgotten about it, I came back looking for it and checking the context in which it was placed. It is not surprising that I have forgotten all about it since I write to forget. In fact, writing is analogous to freeing your volatile memory since you can always refer to an extended memory to chase down your fleeting ideas and develop them at later stages. But it happens that the extended memory at hand is an ephemeral blog of volatile properties and decentralized servers in unknown locations. The only alternative of quasi-ancient pen-and-paper writing techniques require tremendous amounts of indexing and localization that are costly and can only be stored in our volatile biological memory which beats the purpose. One of the fleeting ideas I could vaguely remember from yesterday's volatile conversation can be exampled by the following observation:

I have very much enjoyed my skype conversation yesterday which makes me wonder why was it not something I desired or demanded? Why is it not something I have anticipated with huge joy and high expectations knowing it is with a good friend I have not chatted for a while? How much must I have been betrayed by my expectations and my fluctuating mood that I have given up on anticipation, looking forward and projection? Is the very awareness of these factors a curse or the absence of unknown factors a blessing? Have I reached a certain point of involuntarily suppressing excitement fearing it will be followed by disappointment? Similarly, I have a wonderful thanksgiving dinner last week which brought back great memories from my past 8 years in the USA. I even dared highering my expectations and anticipating that thanksgiving dinner even though I did not know the host or most of the invitees. I then wondered whether I should seek more expats to revive the good old days.


Another fleeting idea concerns freedom that often comes at a high price, not only the price for owning it but also for maintaining it. When free one is paradoxically more a slave of whatever fears he has of loosing this freedom. The price for freedom has been inflated such that all can access it even if for a flavour of freedom or a mere sense of fake freedom. The market is overwhelmed with a myriad of freedom products that are all demanded and consumed. Many live in the deception of freedom often symbolized by a big mansion, life insurance... but rarely are the conditions of mortgage or the quality of life questioned.   Is freedom of fear the ultimate of all freedoms? How can one master it? Is the fear of freedom the very opposite of freedom?

The reason behind my dis-contempt

I woke up early this morning feeling a certain emptiness that neither friends nor family can fill. I looked around my studio and thought of the mediocrity of its spaciousness. I thought I should either move into a bigger space which can accommodate and entertain a larger potential or trim down the space and in turn my expectations therefrom. On a similar note, I questioned the extramural city size and concluded similarly. I should either keep striving for a quixotic stability in Paris or accept to dull my life elsewhere. In a previous post, I had compared people to places, hence, analogously, I can keep striving for Mrs. Right++ quixotically or give in to a Mrs. Smith (or Madame Dupont) and settle accordingly. The dis-contempt arises neither from choice A nor from choice B but from the very indecision and tentative instability.