ah, it feel so good to be able to power through a regular-sized book, one that doesn't have the density of a neutron star. i was questioning my english-major status for awhile on account of the mazes that pynchon has been dangling a carrot in front of me all the way through, but i set that one aside and picked up a few breathers, and now i feel like i can come back to it sometime soon. what a relief. this is what i love so much about life outside of the constructs of college....you get to make your own directions, and give up on things when you want to, and pick up different things when you catch sparks touching them. its a bit of a black hole at the same time though, and you really have to begin to get a grasp upon yourself and what your driving motivations are. i could easily see one small distraction spiraling into months and months of absent-minded debauchery without real direction. what's curious, though, is that even that sort of approach has its definite benefits....you never know what you will stumble into in a tempest, or what might stumble into you, and you might pinpoint something spasmodically instead of via the typical slow-n-steady routes...likely even a lot of interesting things that would have lain long away from your intended paths. there are ups and downs to that of course. but at a certain point perhaps you have to relinquish control to your body and spirit, and let them guide you unguarded. you have to know that you will still get somewhere, that you will still learn something, and you have to think that your ambitions will find their way towards what "you" would intend, even if the route is circuitous. it is kind of like surfing around on wikipedia for hours and hours....it seems in ways like a sinkhole, but you learn quite a bit....and you likely wouldn't have clicked onto that next progression unless you had at least a slight inkling towards it, consciously or unconsciously nudging you self-ward.
the world's a brilliantly complex state of affairs. it seems like one misstep in it can ruin or take a life; conversely, it can create an opportunity or conjure an idea. every moment of every day, we are confronted with choices we can make, that we usually don't even consider. perhaps you would call those blinders that we put on, 'personality'. it's interesting to hear that word in a negative context, isn't it? but how could we function without some semblance of ourselves? we would completely dissolve into the world and its vast machinery if nothing compelled us to some constancy. there are literally 360 degrees that we can travel in, from any set stance, and once we've taken a step, there our 360 options are again, but they have changed slightly. for ridiculousness' sake we'll leave out non-horizontal travel~ but we situate and we follow paths, wearing down the tracks of our own memory with repetition, like the stairs of hellems. it sort of digs little ditches for our feet, you see, but one supposes that it makes life more intelligible so it remains the standard. you really don't get a fair picture of it if you're already enmeshed...but travel a little, and you really begin to acknowledge what a difference time and place, and the tiniest choices that we make in our lives, have on the whole tapestry.
the sad part about acknowledging this is that you realize, at some point or another, that newness is really what makes the world inspiring, what makes existence creative. people complain as they get older; they complain about the acceleration of their years, and about how those throttling years are no longer 'golden' (a precious metal reference...i doubt that people would admit it, but they may literally feel that the later years are less valuable to them, overall, than those forged of gold). it's all in the paths that we run, or dig ourselves deeper into; it's all in the timing and the actual use of our time. you can say that newness fades because we collect experiences....that there is only so much to do and that it is inevitable that we pass beyond these vivacious times. i just think that, at this juncture, i would respectfully disagree. the choice to work an eight-hour day, a forty-hour week, is not a societal norm in many places. when we do this we are shackling ourselves, or willing it to be done to us by others~ workplaces are efficient; they are well-oiled machines and they tend to treat us like mathematical functions, like specific applications or gears in a project that is ongoing, never-ending and ever-growing in the ideal of the market. we work so that we can live, so that we can have money to explore or dig ourselves deeper if we choose...but we are under the impression that money is life and that we are being sold the means to life~ it's right at our fingertips, no work necessary, but our entire country, our entire world has been designed to make it seem like an absolute necessity, as though one cannot do without it. i have a lot of deep-seated issues with all this, but clearly i'm still in it playing the game. it definitely burns deep down in me sometimes.
and now we pass the time in this manner, and now our days become more and more clustered...our experiences more and more similar to one another, our days adrift and unchanging. i think this is the reason that people report life as 'accelerating'; i think that when you act as a single function, if that is what is expected of you, you spend long portions of time doing the exact. same. thing. every day, every week, year out. when we're youthful, when we're in college or high school or what have you, our moments are constantly fluctuating. new knowledge, new people, new places, new things to do, new music to listen to, new ambitions and hopes. jobs have a way of crushing ambitions, relegating us to the present, and cramming us into it in a way that it is surprising to me so many people put up with. we no longer have the *time* to do different things, to be new selves; if we were able to then it would compromise our current positions~ so our days become more selfsame, and we snowball along with them, rolling up layer upon layer of habit and similarity and convention to block us from experiencing the changes that are, in the end, so essential to the living spirit and to keeping life crisp and new.
i would like for people to put a more genuine effort into finding jobs which they will really enjoy and be rewarded by. i would like for myself to do this as well. i'm working on it, sort of, although not really in an amending-the-current-situation sort of way....i'm trying to explore, and find something which really inspires me to devote my energies to it. all this i'm doing on the side, and trying to stay active about it. in the meantime we do what we have to, i suppose; i'm just tired of seeing people work jobs that they have no affinity for, that they continue on it because it is the path of least resistance on account of their own digging into it. we can literally be worth whatever we put the effort into being worth; all of us.
mind is burnt. matches out~
February 3, 2009
January 30, 2009
25 things 'bout you
1) i still have a very vivid imagination and, when you're not looking or around me at all, i'm probably ninja-pressing against some wall in an effort to get all cloak-and-dagger with the next person to walk down the wrong hall at the wrong time. an alternative possibility is that there may be magical spells erupting from my fingertips.
2) my #1 favorite food is fruit. my #2 favorite food is sushi.
3) i wouldn't go so far as to call myself obsessive-compulsive, but i'm certainly compulsive-compulsive.
4) i believe that the world is speaking to us, telling us what to do and how to achieve balance, down to even very specific little things. i believe that it is possible to cultivate one's mind such that the whispers which we only catch hints of from time to time become more like a complete and articulate dialogue.
5) while it may not be fashionable to have an amazing, drama-free and well put-together family, i have one that i am so proud to be a part of and wouldn't trade for the world. they give me ground to walk on when everything else is missing.
6) i really like to quantify things, mostly because i think it is an exercise in absurdity. when it comes down to it, the second best coffee i've ever has was really only about 75% as good as the best coffee that i've had.
7) i've always been a sucker for green eyes. when i was little, i wished and wished and wished for green eyes; mine were brown. i wished hard. in high school, my eyes changed colors and now they are 70% green, 30% brown.
that's a funny follow-up to the last point, but these numbers are actually quite verifiable.
8) i aspire to be great at a lot of things, but most poignantly i will be disappointed in myself if i don't end up writing a handful of books that i can be proud of putting out into the world. if i sell out and write gobble-fiction, that might be even worse~
9) my favorite place that i've ever been to is garden of the gods in colorado springs.
10) my most valuable possessions are my old moleskin notebooks, although i rarely ever look back through them. i would be less devastated if my car got stolen.
11) my dreams tend to achieve a balance with my life. when my waking life is extraordinary and exciting, my dreams are mundane. when my life gets repetitive and droll, my dreams unfold thunderous and colorful.
12) i believe in a deeper order of connections between things than just what we can see, and i have one specific personal and surreal experience which i attribute as the anchor of this belief.
13) i've eaten well over 4000 peanut butter & jelly sandwiches in my lifetime.
14) one of the biggest turning points in my life was when i realized that it is okay to feel sad; that we shouldn't always feel the need to grapple for happiness in every moment. that is one of the most liberating perspectives that i have come across.
15) i have a very irregular filing system for my memory. i haven't quite figured it out yet. all i know is that i have an extreme recall of many details, but i need a solid trigger to really unleash them.
16) i tend to judge religions and philosophies on the personalities which they produce.
17) i think of my brain as a tool for making living easier (or more difficult) and more interesting. i come up with strange thought exercises that bend my perception, and i think that they have helped somehow, doing something.
18) at some point in my childhood i founded an assumption that i was going to live for 100 years at minimum. i will probably be disappointed if i don't reach that number, illogical as it may seem to my adult self.
19) a lot of times i am frugal to a point of insanity, and it gets a little out of hand. usually i won't buy things at the supermarket unless they are on sale, and i will rarely get a single drink at a bar. if i'm going to pay for it, then i'm gonna go big or go home, as they say. usually i just get nothing, and am pleased with not paying twelve bucks for a minor buzz.
20) graveyards freak me out a little bit. no, seriously, more than they freak you out. srsly.
21) i love to paint (watercolor), but i have seen what the medium is capable of (wyeth) and i am usually disappointed with what i produce. i was supposed to be an artist at some point.
22) i don't think that i have ever really hated anyone for more than an hour, which has taught me what an immature emotion it is.
23) don't take excessive advantage but, if you're my friend and i can do you a favor at all, i almost always will. i try not to expect anything in return but i might call it in someday~
24) my childhood terror was the banshee from 'darby o'gill and the little people'. i saw the movie when i was 3 or 4 and it scared the bejesus out of me. for something like 10 years.
25) i know that i can fit everything i own inside of my nissan se-r. i bet that i could fit everything i need inside of the glove box.
2) my #1 favorite food is fruit. my #2 favorite food is sushi.
3) i wouldn't go so far as to call myself obsessive-compulsive, but i'm certainly compulsive-compulsive.
4) i believe that the world is speaking to us, telling us what to do and how to achieve balance, down to even very specific little things. i believe that it is possible to cultivate one's mind such that the whispers which we only catch hints of from time to time become more like a complete and articulate dialogue.
5) while it may not be fashionable to have an amazing, drama-free and well put-together family, i have one that i am so proud to be a part of and wouldn't trade for the world. they give me ground to walk on when everything else is missing.
6) i really like to quantify things, mostly because i think it is an exercise in absurdity. when it comes down to it, the second best coffee i've ever has was really only about 75% as good as the best coffee that i've had.
7) i've always been a sucker for green eyes. when i was little, i wished and wished and wished for green eyes; mine were brown. i wished hard. in high school, my eyes changed colors and now they are 70% green, 30% brown.
that's a funny follow-up to the last point, but these numbers are actually quite verifiable.
8) i aspire to be great at a lot of things, but most poignantly i will be disappointed in myself if i don't end up writing a handful of books that i can be proud of putting out into the world. if i sell out and write gobble-fiction, that might be even worse~
9) my favorite place that i've ever been to is garden of the gods in colorado springs.
10) my most valuable possessions are my old moleskin notebooks, although i rarely ever look back through them. i would be less devastated if my car got stolen.
11) my dreams tend to achieve a balance with my life. when my waking life is extraordinary and exciting, my dreams are mundane. when my life gets repetitive and droll, my dreams unfold thunderous and colorful.
12) i believe in a deeper order of connections between things than just what we can see, and i have one specific personal and surreal experience which i attribute as the anchor of this belief.
13) i've eaten well over 4000 peanut butter & jelly sandwiches in my lifetime.
14) one of the biggest turning points in my life was when i realized that it is okay to feel sad; that we shouldn't always feel the need to grapple for happiness in every moment. that is one of the most liberating perspectives that i have come across.
15) i have a very irregular filing system for my memory. i haven't quite figured it out yet. all i know is that i have an extreme recall of many details, but i need a solid trigger to really unleash them.
16) i tend to judge religions and philosophies on the personalities which they produce.
17) i think of my brain as a tool for making living easier (or more difficult) and more interesting. i come up with strange thought exercises that bend my perception, and i think that they have helped somehow, doing something.
18) at some point in my childhood i founded an assumption that i was going to live for 100 years at minimum. i will probably be disappointed if i don't reach that number, illogical as it may seem to my adult self.
19) a lot of times i am frugal to a point of insanity, and it gets a little out of hand. usually i won't buy things at the supermarket unless they are on sale, and i will rarely get a single drink at a bar. if i'm going to pay for it, then i'm gonna go big or go home, as they say. usually i just get nothing, and am pleased with not paying twelve bucks for a minor buzz.
20) graveyards freak me out a little bit. no, seriously, more than they freak you out. srsly.
21) i love to paint (watercolor), but i have seen what the medium is capable of (wyeth) and i am usually disappointed with what i produce. i was supposed to be an artist at some point.
22) i don't think that i have ever really hated anyone for more than an hour, which has taught me what an immature emotion it is.
23) don't take excessive advantage but, if you're my friend and i can do you a favor at all, i almost always will. i try not to expect anything in return but i might call it in someday~
24) my childhood terror was the banshee from 'darby o'gill and the little people'. i saw the movie when i was 3 or 4 and it scared the bejesus out of me. for something like 10 years.
25) i know that i can fit everything i own inside of my nissan se-r. i bet that i could fit everything i need inside of the glove box.
January 24, 2009
pocketful of spare change
we hear so much about how limitless the human is
the indomitable spirit
but indomitable is measured by degree of dominance
nothing more
it could extend only just barely past all history,
we slipping gradually towards that breaking wave
of intensity
which will bring us down
will best us
but can we springboard off of each other,
you and i
devise some infinite sonic-the-hedgehog gravity cheat
some method, overlooked,
whereby we can keep rising, *sproinnng!*
we can access the secret areas
and even places beyond them,
beyond borders, limits
beyond plans
if there is such a thing
beyond ourselves
perhaps what so many seek
in nobility, spirit, the like
is succeeding in surpassing limits.
but how we aim now, bumbling
it would be no great honor to make it beyond ourselves
by some oddity of chance
some shortcut; wormhole
we would probably shatter in the higher frequencies
the mind broken
cyclical, like a record.
if we really want to bring ourselves there
and achieve, and feel that achievement justified
irises flaring
it must be slow and steady
we have to know the pain of trying, failing;
the real motivator in learning.
the indomitable spirit
but indomitable is measured by degree of dominance
nothing more
it could extend only just barely past all history,
we slipping gradually towards that breaking wave
of intensity
which will bring us down
will best us
but can we springboard off of each other,
you and i
devise some infinite sonic-the-hedgehog gravity cheat
some method, overlooked,
whereby we can keep rising, *sproinnng!*
we can access the secret areas
and even places beyond them,
beyond borders, limits
beyond plans
if there is such a thing
beyond ourselves
perhaps what so many seek
in nobility, spirit, the like
is succeeding in surpassing limits.
but how we aim now, bumbling
it would be no great honor to make it beyond ourselves
by some oddity of chance
some shortcut; wormhole
we would probably shatter in the higher frequencies
the mind broken
cyclical, like a record.
if we really want to bring ourselves there
and achieve, and feel that achievement justified
irises flaring
it must be slow and steady
we have to know the pain of trying, failing;
the real motivator in learning.
January 13, 2009
oh dear me
dear future self,
do not be whittled, do not submit. be a channel, a conduit; do not be swept. focus, burn it into your memory, focus, use your memory as your bridge to yourself, rickety, earthen, swaying. breathe in colors, sounds, let your mechanisms dismantle them and amorphously absorb them, then breathe them out in positive geometries, vectors, transpositions; planes like photographs, which originally are sharded from a singular moment, now tidally wrapping the contours of everything that you experience, newness stemming from the old, mycelial, hieroglyphic. burst forth with being.
do not be whittled, do not submit. be a channel, a conduit; do not be swept. focus, burn it into your memory, focus, use your memory as your bridge to yourself, rickety, earthen, swaying. breathe in colors, sounds, let your mechanisms dismantle them and amorphously absorb them, then breathe them out in positive geometries, vectors, transpositions; planes like photographs, which originally are sharded from a singular moment, now tidally wrapping the contours of everything that you experience, newness stemming from the old, mycelial, hieroglyphic. burst forth with being.
January 11, 2009
maintenance
one of the most frustrating aspects of adult life, for me, has to be the incessant maintenance required of us in just about everything that we do. this is an inescapable facet, i believe, but i still feel the need to make note of it. it just took me two hours to swap out all the music on my ipod, and replace it with various tunes which i had hunted and gathered like a tribal warrior with a flash-drive spear. there is the endless question of what will and won't make the cut onto my portable music player, because there has to be a delicate balance there....a good amount of organic, fresh produce, which spurs the mind and body in quite a different way than the processed and already-digested music which we have incorporated and cycled into our personalities already. then too, there is the consideration of leveling and balancing the recipe overall, such that you don't end up genre-heavy because you didn't take the time to level off your spoons correctly. nothing worse than a playlist with too much nutmeg in it; it will throw off the whole flavor of your month. then of course one has selected 20 gigs instead of the required 16, and you must go back to pare down the whole thing.
but the point is that this maintenance, constant, is deadening, dulling; it robs us of such vital and diminishing time in our lives. i know some people who relish kneading their fingers into this, but personally i just can't understand it. i want to do, not prepare. probably an immature perspective for me to adopt, but what really is immaturity but an unwillingness to accept the way things are? a healthy idealism has its positive sides, as well. one should struggle to not become to sheepish in their allowances for the intrusion of life's harshness. we probably often put up with much more than we should.
this is only accentuated by the fact that i work at a medical device company, which requires the most stringent of all possible documentation regarding anything that happens in the process of developing and/or selling a product. you can perhaps imagine how frustrating it is to have to do something, anything, and then record it in a particular format.....also involved is knowledge of the format, the medium, the jargon, and keeping an eye out for how to describe something that you would normally just DO, and forget about afterwards.
maintenance creeps into my life from all fronts...there is the keeping up with cleaning, hygiene, paperwork (bank, phone, insurance, taxes, junk mail, real mail, the mail that is kind of real and kind of junk), exercise, diet. these are the realities which are not told to you when you are growing up; they are the chisels of operable society which eventually wear people down into little lumps of their original potential. i know people so involved that they could go for weeks, viably months, perhaps years, of nothing but such maintenance. maintenance and life become inextricable. friends get offended, consciously or subconsciously, if they are not kept up with every so often; i feel it in myself and can infer from that. having many friends becomes a whole system of its own, an solar system in which planets cannot swing too far from your star before they start to drain warmth, before the flora and fauna which grows between two people begin to die off and begin to be brushed away for different climates. a comfort: there are exceptions to this.
what is frustrating about the whole thing is that you can't really understand all the intricacies of something until you dig into it yourself. this makes these mundane preparations and adjustments necessary, to avoid being coddled into a general sense of luxurious ignorance. nobody likes someone who can't do any footwork for themselves, or won't. i recently heard about a service, a help-desk secretary sort of thing, and people are now contracting out this service who aren't busy professionals....some are just average people who don't want to deal with contesting a visa charge, or haggling over a doctor's bill, or going out to buy argyle socks. instead they pay a modest fee to have someone else take care of their busy-work. this sounds fantastic, but also ridiculous to a degree. like trying to buy back time wasted at a different market price. i suppose the real question is, does busy-work really constitute wasted time? so much that i write on here is a direct refuting of typical value systems, which so many people seem to have such an easy time with. i'm not sure what is different about myself, such that i was not able to adopt many of the same systems as the average person. many people would be completely content living on a ranch in a small town, doing work for the day, taking care of children until the night, sleeping in the liminal spaces between. or a law firm; pick your flavor. there's a good chance that i myself could be completely content with this storybook farmhand lifestyle. these are just things to be threshed out, combed for, well, really, whatever i can find of myself in them. what else could i be searching for? there does seem to be a genuine, good, productive feeling that emerges from accomplishing little tasks, or big tasks, which have nothing to do with some transcendental truth or existential realization. certainly those little tasks provide more concreteness, a more solid realization of something than that other, which is a constantly fluctuating field and wavers along with me from hour to hour. but am i conditioned to feel good, to feel justified after a day of errands? have i moved myself any closer to some goal; have i oiled some machinery which aids in that other?
is there a point?
can i develop something, some logic pattern, a cerebral independence, such that it eliminates the need for this? can i exist in two places at the same time?
but the point is that this maintenance, constant, is deadening, dulling; it robs us of such vital and diminishing time in our lives. i know some people who relish kneading their fingers into this, but personally i just can't understand it. i want to do, not prepare. probably an immature perspective for me to adopt, but what really is immaturity but an unwillingness to accept the way things are? a healthy idealism has its positive sides, as well. one should struggle to not become to sheepish in their allowances for the intrusion of life's harshness. we probably often put up with much more than we should.
this is only accentuated by the fact that i work at a medical device company, which requires the most stringent of all possible documentation regarding anything that happens in the process of developing and/or selling a product. you can perhaps imagine how frustrating it is to have to do something, anything, and then record it in a particular format.....also involved is knowledge of the format, the medium, the jargon, and keeping an eye out for how to describe something that you would normally just DO, and forget about afterwards.
maintenance creeps into my life from all fronts...there is the keeping up with cleaning, hygiene, paperwork (bank, phone, insurance, taxes, junk mail, real mail, the mail that is kind of real and kind of junk), exercise, diet. these are the realities which are not told to you when you are growing up; they are the chisels of operable society which eventually wear people down into little lumps of their original potential. i know people so involved that they could go for weeks, viably months, perhaps years, of nothing but such maintenance. maintenance and life become inextricable. friends get offended, consciously or subconsciously, if they are not kept up with every so often; i feel it in myself and can infer from that. having many friends becomes a whole system of its own, an solar system in which planets cannot swing too far from your star before they start to drain warmth, before the flora and fauna which grows between two people begin to die off and begin to be brushed away for different climates. a comfort: there are exceptions to this.
what is frustrating about the whole thing is that you can't really understand all the intricacies of something until you dig into it yourself. this makes these mundane preparations and adjustments necessary, to avoid being coddled into a general sense of luxurious ignorance. nobody likes someone who can't do any footwork for themselves, or won't. i recently heard about a service, a help-desk secretary sort of thing, and people are now contracting out this service who aren't busy professionals....some are just average people who don't want to deal with contesting a visa charge, or haggling over a doctor's bill, or going out to buy argyle socks. instead they pay a modest fee to have someone else take care of their busy-work. this sounds fantastic, but also ridiculous to a degree. like trying to buy back time wasted at a different market price. i suppose the real question is, does busy-work really constitute wasted time? so much that i write on here is a direct refuting of typical value systems, which so many people seem to have such an easy time with. i'm not sure what is different about myself, such that i was not able to adopt many of the same systems as the average person. many people would be completely content living on a ranch in a small town, doing work for the day, taking care of children until the night, sleeping in the liminal spaces between. or a law firm; pick your flavor. there's a good chance that i myself could be completely content with this storybook farmhand lifestyle. these are just things to be threshed out, combed for, well, really, whatever i can find of myself in them. what else could i be searching for? there does seem to be a genuine, good, productive feeling that emerges from accomplishing little tasks, or big tasks, which have nothing to do with some transcendental truth or existential realization. certainly those little tasks provide more concreteness, a more solid realization of something than that other, which is a constantly fluctuating field and wavers along with me from hour to hour. but am i conditioned to feel good, to feel justified after a day of errands? have i moved myself any closer to some goal; have i oiled some machinery which aids in that other?
is there a point?
can i develop something, some logic pattern, a cerebral independence, such that it eliminates the need for this? can i exist in two places at the same time?
January 8, 2009
boards of canada
i am getting my ideas in line and i feel more and more, with what i am learning about writing, that a large project is right on my horizon. my plan currently is to busy myself as much as possible....not only with scribbles, but with music, with language, with art, with exploration (just probably not of an outwardly social nature; had a lot of that already and need to recess a little into my own worlds). is it too much to expect yourself to be able to branch out over multiple projects? i hope not....someone once said to me that if you want to get something accomplished, give it to a busy person. the mind somehow just aligns itself with intention, and piggybacks onto so many other factors involved in motivation. have you ever been bowling, and stared down one of the marks on the lane while you were winding up for a toss? really zoomed your focus down onto it? somehow the ball just finds its way there, as though the ball understands. and it does, in a way; it follows your body which understands intention much better and more precisely than we do. if there is one distinct thing that i have learned from meditation, it is that there is a cleverness to silence, to the absence of thought in its streaming form...silence is a variation on the theme of nature, and its transmission does a lot more good in terms of communication, it seems, than screaming obscenities into the emerald sides of a forest.
silence and writing, though...these two things are seemingly poles of a spectrum. it's impossible to be a silent writer....or at least, if it is possible, i haven't yet been made aware of a method towards achieving it, and wouldn't be certain of wanting it in the first place. the silence is what a writes rallies against and battles, even though really he can be trying to do nothing more than describe it in a glorified manner, if the situation calls for it. thoughts are different for everybody. perhaps silences are one of the great unifiers. at any rate, things seems to be set up in such a way that writing is an immense complexity: it involves finding your center, your calm eye of the storm, and maintaining in it such that you can obtain the perspective that you need to really possess a story instead of being consumed by it, by all the possibilities; to play master instead of minion. jeff expressed it to me quite succinctly the other day...that artistic inclinations are a like a djinn flying free from a lamp. you have to be able to contain them, or they will trick you with their cleverness; they will spin you round and round until you are completely disoriented. they can destroy you as a functional person; look to history if you need any semblance of evidence. but, if you can reign them in, if you can chain them and train them, have them do your bidding without letting them get the upper hand (which their explosive nature is apt to do; dizzying, damaging), then you can accomplish great things and amaze with your originality, with the spells of an unencumbered mind loosed upon the world.
one must know their own limits. it seems that possibility has none, and that it will balloon and balloon, fuming fiery generative on the inside. letting these thoughts pass through consciousness is an amazing and enlightening experience, but training them, focusing them, controlling them, is where one must know themselves or risk more than would be assumed to be at risk in most human endeavors.
it would be easy to write something trite, something book laced with consumption. it would probably be relatively easy to bend towards a casablanca style, a plot-and-drama spurring hollywood locked in verbs. people would read, it wouldn't challenge them very much; this would probably please them, or trick them into thinking they were pleased. but to actually come up with something inspired, something which forays into privately or publicly unexplored territory...this would leave a scorch-mark, and should be treated as such (with caution). it takes great personal fury, and not the angry kind, to be able to spin such a dynamo off of the fingertips. it takes knowing your brain as one knows an instrument. feeling it in the hands, as though it is an extension of you and a clear palate for expression. knowing what keys and chords to hit, and what, in particular, those effects have upon you. how you would steer it, with the wheel endlessly in your hands alone, as it should be.
"life is a blast when you know what you're doing
best to know what you're doing
'fore your life get ruined
life is a thrill when your skill is developed
if you ain't got a skill or trade,
then shut the hell up."
~heiroglyphics - at the helm
silence and writing, though...these two things are seemingly poles of a spectrum. it's impossible to be a silent writer....or at least, if it is possible, i haven't yet been made aware of a method towards achieving it, and wouldn't be certain of wanting it in the first place. the silence is what a writes rallies against and battles, even though really he can be trying to do nothing more than describe it in a glorified manner, if the situation calls for it. thoughts are different for everybody. perhaps silences are one of the great unifiers. at any rate, things seems to be set up in such a way that writing is an immense complexity: it involves finding your center, your calm eye of the storm, and maintaining in it such that you can obtain the perspective that you need to really possess a story instead of being consumed by it, by all the possibilities; to play master instead of minion. jeff expressed it to me quite succinctly the other day...that artistic inclinations are a like a djinn flying free from a lamp. you have to be able to contain them, or they will trick you with their cleverness; they will spin you round and round until you are completely disoriented. they can destroy you as a functional person; look to history if you need any semblance of evidence. but, if you can reign them in, if you can chain them and train them, have them do your bidding without letting them get the upper hand (which their explosive nature is apt to do; dizzying, damaging), then you can accomplish great things and amaze with your originality, with the spells of an unencumbered mind loosed upon the world.
one must know their own limits. it seems that possibility has none, and that it will balloon and balloon, fuming fiery generative on the inside. letting these thoughts pass through consciousness is an amazing and enlightening experience, but training them, focusing them, controlling them, is where one must know themselves or risk more than would be assumed to be at risk in most human endeavors.
it would be easy to write something trite, something book laced with consumption. it would probably be relatively easy to bend towards a casablanca style, a plot-and-drama spurring hollywood locked in verbs. people would read, it wouldn't challenge them very much; this would probably please them, or trick them into thinking they were pleased. but to actually come up with something inspired, something which forays into privately or publicly unexplored territory...this would leave a scorch-mark, and should be treated as such (with caution). it takes great personal fury, and not the angry kind, to be able to spin such a dynamo off of the fingertips. it takes knowing your brain as one knows an instrument. feeling it in the hands, as though it is an extension of you and a clear palate for expression. knowing what keys and chords to hit, and what, in particular, those effects have upon you. how you would steer it, with the wheel endlessly in your hands alone, as it should be.
"life is a blast when you know what you're doing
best to know what you're doing
'fore your life get ruined
life is a thrill when your skill is developed
if you ain't got a skill or trade,
then shut the hell up."
~heiroglyphics - at the helm
January 1, 2009
colorado
consuming, my time.
well it has been quite an eventful trip out here, with many good peoples and conversations. it's the new year now and, frankly, i'm not sure i have been as excited for a year, ever, as i am currently for this one. and i'm not sure that there is anything specific holding it together, in expectation, or setting it distinctly apart from any other. for one, i have started playing more guitar, getting more confident about writing (and myself as a person, for that matter), exploring, and have just acquired the french version of rosetta stone and a multitude of potential avenues of explosion in the form of Reason 4. who could ask for more in terms of potential? my time is, as of now, spoken for. and i think it is likely that i shall emerge much improved (and finally have some things to show for it) after the next twelve months. which is kind of an arbitrary timeline, to be sure, but it seems to be a line that people mentally associate with crossings for obvious reasons, though perhaps it might be more appropriate sometimes if transposed a month or two in rewind or fast-forward~
ducks are in rows. targets are set up.
well it has been quite an eventful trip out here, with many good peoples and conversations. it's the new year now and, frankly, i'm not sure i have been as excited for a year, ever, as i am currently for this one. and i'm not sure that there is anything specific holding it together, in expectation, or setting it distinctly apart from any other. for one, i have started playing more guitar, getting more confident about writing (and myself as a person, for that matter), exploring, and have just acquired the french version of rosetta stone and a multitude of potential avenues of explosion in the form of Reason 4. who could ask for more in terms of potential? my time is, as of now, spoken for. and i think it is likely that i shall emerge much improved (and finally have some things to show for it) after the next twelve months. which is kind of an arbitrary timeline, to be sure, but it seems to be a line that people mentally associate with crossings for obvious reasons, though perhaps it might be more appropriate sometimes if transposed a month or two in rewind or fast-forward~
ducks are in rows. targets are set up.
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