Syntax is meant to be a coming-of-age work that offers readers a path forward through what I feel is a modern malaise: how modernity has cratered our ability to make meaningful relationships. These structures do not provide solutions to spiritual problems and have necessitated inner solutions. I feel that the climax of the book, a doubling-down on creativity, is one of the most readily accessible forms of grace available to the every-day person. This perspective however, is from that of an outsider, making observations...someone on the fringes so to speak. The form reflects this impulse. Syntax is a guided dream.
The past, present, and future all have their own geography Demian; they interface with one another. Being with M- felt like a remembrance-with it came a spirit of gravity. Falling upward. This geography, it's a light that discloses everything. It's part-full moon part-abyss part-imminent but looking at it now and how I felt in that moment I see it was a real chance to carry joy forward. Don't you say: Being joyous is the thing...to be joyous is the thing…the supreme ideal.I've been around enough to know some things. Maybe not as much as my friends or even their friends or their friend's friends and so on...but just enough to know for me that joy and excitement are rare. We cannot allow ourselves to be destroyed by such moments. A part of the mission in life is to find those moments because they don't just materialize. You have to work on them; follow the secret thread right to the source. I'd like to think that's what we were doing at her apartment, following an invisible path that we both could feel our way around. The thread is totally unspooled now; Ariadne's jewelcovered curse, but that first night was a critical transition. Together through a bright portal with a shaky but intelligible future. I wanted to keep going. I think M- knew. Didn't she know where these things lead? They lead to difficulties, yes-strain, yes-frustration, yes-heartsickness, yes. Yet there is a destination, worth more than anything I could make with my devil's hand pushing ink into the paper. It's easy, it's love. It's knowing that out there, in the world, there is someone that sees me, that I can meet face to face and say: Here, this is me. I want to give it all to you, let me sing to you.