Noah Cicero: Bipolar Cowboy

Noah Cicero is suffering from mental illness, he recently had a nervous breakdown. He reads into everything, he overthinks everything, he comes up with ten truths. Strangely one of the ten

truths he comes up with is actually true. But sadly, life never lets us know what the absolute truth ever is.

Life gives us many truths and we have to pick one.

The math of building a bridge is usually always true. We do the calculations and if the bridge holds cars and gets humans across rivers, the math is true. But should we build the bridge, where should we put the bridge, how often should we maintain the bridge, when will we no longer require the bridge? We never know for sure.

If we knew the absolute truth, would things change?

Are we looking for the absolute truth or the absolute feeling? Or the answer that best suits our personal needs?

When it comes to love, there is no Occam’s razor, love is ineffable.

Noah believed and often said, “You can’t choose who you love.”

Noah didn’t know if that was a religious or a scientific philosophy.

He rationalized it in two ways—

1. The Science Way

Love came from the inner darkness. Somewhere deep in the childhood of every person were these moments, these obsessions, the training of one’s parents on how to love, on what to love, and it was so deep, it was like a song.

Noah believed everyone was like a song. Everyone is playing a song all the time, and when we find someone who plays a song like our song, then we become friends, and if the song is close enough, then we become lovers, even if it is only for a night.

Noah believed it was like music, because there is no getting to the bottom of a song, millions of people can create opinions on a single song for a million years, but the beauty of a song can’t ever be reached, it always remains different for everyone—

People are like that, songs. Everyone has a slightly different reaction to every other person they meet.

Noah believed that the reasons people loved each other, if said out loud, were often scary, because the answers for love often included balance, and often in humans the worst and best of us go into balance. Often one is a little lazy and the other a little busy, one is a little selfish and the other a little selfless, one a little unstable and the other stable—

But there is no need to say what the dark things are, most never do, and the world goes on.

2. The Mystical Way

According to Aristophanes, before the beginning—

There were creatures with two heads. They walked around having two heads, sometimes the two heads fought, sometimes the two were friendly, but they had to work together to stay alive and be two-headed people.

The two were linked, something deep, from the beginning—

According to the Navajos, we all come from when Changing Woman had sex with the sun and gave birth to humankind.

We all have light in us.

The two-headed creatures had light.

According to Christians, “ 1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2. He was with God in the beginning. 3. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. ”

Noah considered this one of the most beautiful things he had ever read. His favorite part, the thing that made him weep, was “ and the darkness has not overcome it. ”

Noah believed that there were lights inside people. He even believed that there were lights inside animals, inside mountains, inside plants, inside trees, Noah went so far to believe that there was even light in interactions, that there was light everywhere. That it made sense that Changing Woman had sex with the sun, because there was so much light.

But how does all this relate back to Aristophanes and his two-headed creatures.

All of the two-headed creatures had a light inside them, and the light had a very specific color and crackle, because the light burned from the same wood, from the same incense.

And humans are reincarnated many times over, finding that other creature over and over again — but Noah also believed there were families of souls born over and over again, destined to meet in every life or at least in a high ratio of them. And we know somehow, as soon as we meet, that we are old friends, that there is some infinite song, always playing.

Sometimes Noah felt like screaming, “Do you hear my song? Does anyone hear my song?”

Noah believed he had found his other head. But he was on medication. Prior to a few years ago, Noah was a normal atheist, living his George Carlin/Richard Dawkins life. He read Sartre and was a sophisticated man.

But he watched a man die, and visited Angkor Wat, and the mandala of his mind had been destroyed.

Now he had rocks under his pillow to keep bad dreams away and a wooden Buddha he prayed to every morning.

Noah recently saw a movie called Buddha Avalokiteshvara, made in China. Noah has no idea how to say ‘Avalokiteshvara’ out loud.

In the movie a Japanese monk wants a mystic green statue of Buddha Avalokiteshvara to bring back to Japan, to make peace in Japan.

To get this statue, the monk sits for a week on his knees praying and reciting sutras, with no food, no water, nothing. Eventually the Chinese monk gives him the mystic green statue, because he shows his sincerity.

Noah didn’t know if he was a desperado who was sincerely in love with a woman, and because his love was so strong, so sincere, that he had to bumble about the west like a cowboy, waiting for the day when she said, “Come home.”

That work didn’t matter, money didn’t matter, how the world looked at him did not matter, if he was the richest man, or the poorest man, it did not matter. The only thing that mattered

was his sincerity of love.

But it might not be sincerity.

It might be total and awesome genetic mental illness!

All of it, every last idea he had concerning this woman, his reality, the world around him, was a construction of his agony to deal with a reality he found to be intolerable.

Then Noah Cicero stared out the window of Starbucks and thought, “But doesn’t Buddha want me to let go of all attachment? Shouldn’t I just let her go? Monks aren’t even allowed to touch women.”

But Noah wasn’t raised in a Buddhist country, he didn’t grow up in a culture that would cultivate the personality traits that would blossom in a monastery, he grew up in America, a white guy with blue eyes. Enlightenment for a white man was marriage, kids, and then finding peace and wisdom in living a hard-working responsible life. Shit, when Sartre, who was supposed to be beyond all conventions, picked a personality trait we should all focus on, it was responsibility, the white man’s favorite goal, responsibility.

Noah Cicero sat in a wooden chair holding a Starbucks cup, half-filled with coffee. He stared at his shoes. Everyone that loves him stood in front of him, everyone that truly cares about him, they said in chorus, “Addiction is selfish. You are addicted to this person, while we are all here, we love your jokes, we love your thoughts, we love to go to parks and hike and drink beer with you too. Are we not good enough? We are tired of hearing about her, we are tired of you being sad. She makes you sad she makes you sad she makes you sad she makes you sad she makes you sad. And we can’t watch it anymore.”

But what the people who loved Noah could not understand was that he thought his addiction was sincerity, that he loved the uncertainty of the whole event. The mixture of Buddhist/Taoist ideas and hiking 200 miles in the deserts and forests of the American west had created some old monk cowboy mental state, a monk in China, meditating on a stone floor, staring at a wall, lived in total discomfort, a cowboy sleeping on the ground with bugs crawling on him, shivering out in the open air, hoping an Apache doesn’t come in the night to kill him, also lived in total discomfort, and they could do that, because of their sincerity.