Bad taste is everywhere. It oozes from everything we touch and breathe. It must be integral part of all foundation, of any great thing that transcends the mediocre. All great works grow from the ground up like saplings in the new sunlight beside a fallen tree.
In the spectacle of our existence, we cannot avoid the museum we are born into. Rare are the wonders that can come of age in-vitro.
I spit on the sidewalk when my lungs put up a fight. I also put my money on the mundane, where my mouth is.
It’s been a while since my flurry of initial posts, which tumbled out together in the space of about a week and what I have I learned? Pace yourself.
Writing without the driving force of a sales pitch is a luxury many of us do not get to enjoy. Then, there are those who wallow so long in a lack of drive that the smallest carrot dangled just beyond arm’s reach gets the whole machinery going like nothing else and behold, the rebirth: Johnny is an advertising man.
There is a guy down the road who stands every night under a lamp post for no apparent reason. He just stands there for a few hours, usually around 1am when the city is quieter. You can see him from the bridge, breath coming out in puffs of moisture.
I plucked up courage to speak with him once, and asked, why is it that you stand out here in the cold? He looked at me slowly and answered. I did not understand a word he said, but I will tell you this: I did believe him.
like a dial modem up modem up dial modem 56kbps and the dial up (phone is off the hook in the kitchen and you, raging in the office) like a dial tone you could hear it telling you the problem if you could hear it telling you the problem up modem like
What it’s like to like delete the post you wanted to write.
Tonight I sat down to write and a poem came. Like waves lapping the shore in a gentle storm, or the idea of a woman in some near-eternal orgasm (every orgasm in the moment feels eternal) it just came and came and kept on coming. Sexism. I am. I wish that could be me. Perhaps no woman can even go there. But I would see my body turn its insides to the out if somehow a pump could even simulate the experience. True story. Long before I made it even one fifth of the way my body would be washed back to sea and extinguished. Let the female form stand tall as bastion of what the human can. Sing the praises of the strength that brings us alive and breathing into being. Pray. Towering above the peak of what it is for us to truly be. (That place our dreams and fantasy lead us, the tunnel where maybe most of all art goes to charge.) Let us hinge the switches we keep inside and swing the hinges around where we can, so we can squarely see and let the deep mind fathom that really in the end of it all when the cards are down its the woman in man that each man longs to see in himself.
Regarding that poem, I ctrl-x’d it into an offline word file and stashed it. Never to be seen. Unless someone publishes it. No one may have read it, but the trawlers would have found it here, and that would just be daft.
We have such an obsessive relation to things, objects, stuff, that it is almost impossible to conceptualise anything (the word itself is a giveaway) without thinking in reductionist terms that bring whatever the thing is into a framework of understanding that heavily relies on the objective, tangible presence of something we can touch, hold, draw a line around (if conceptual), and put in a (metaphorical) box. It is hard to conceptualise any thing, in other words, that is not a thing. It seems that grasping a thing’s thingness helps us be more comfortable with the world, and maybe sleep better at night too.
2.
Perhaps the thing is that we need other words. Is that a thing? Genuine question. I don’t want to turn this into a pun, but I have a feeling it is in the very way of the words that are at our disposal. Or perhaps it is in the way we use them?
3.
Of course: love, music, art, etc. But even there, we still manage to keep these phenomena curtailed for the comfort we feel in relation to being in the material world... Sigh. No, this is not going down the George Harrison route. What I mean is: we like that we can smoke a cigarette after sex (or whatever), Hollywood gets it right there, even if the cigarette is really a cup of chamomile tea or another game of whatever-it-is-you-do-on-your-smartphone.
4.
Forget sex. Take another example. How many times have you had someone listen to “a song”, and played only 10 to 30 seconds of a track? This is not listening to music. There is little essential difference between this and, say, showing off a new pair of shoes. Nothing per se, just saying. I like songs. And shoes.
5.
An inkling of where this is going is coming to me. I think what I am driving at has to do with writing. Most things do these days. Did I mention I am supposed to be writing a phd dissertation? Yes, well. // Does art have to be artifact? Does writing have to become text? In the finality-imbued, systematic, structurally-sound sense-of-self way we mean when we say text...
6.
We love things, I love things, who am I kidding.
7.
And then there is the importance of process. These considerations are one-sided. Of course, we all inherently understand and connect with the concept of process. We all know, somehow, that nothing exists in a vacuum. That you do not become this, or become that instantaneously... Similarly, you cannot have this object, or that object, without that object coming from somewhere, from having been conceived, designed, built. We know this!
8.
What’s the problem then?
9.
We must know better. Not more, better. This means so much, I could continue expounding exegesis until kingdom come or not come. You never are the thing you say you are, you’re always in the process of becoming it. This is why musicians paint, artists ..art, and writers write, a lot. It’s also why you clean your house. Learning to know means knowing to learn. It involves a feel for the change that brings us in and out of being, and being able to. We inherently know that an athlete does better in good conditions, and some of us know these conditions are fragile. Competition gives an obvious edge, or a shiny gloss to this issue, but it is essentially the same for everyone, all the time, more most things.
10.
X marks the spot. Put on your math caps. X is the variable. Basic algebra. Could be this, could be that, could be fucking anything -within reason that is (here read: realm of definition). Assume there is an X hiding behind everything. Or, come to think of it, assume there is an unknown function f(x)=somethingsomethingsomethingsomething hiding behind everything, which is even better. You must assume the curve is on the move: your little arse is cruising coordinates all the way up and down the Y and Z axes. And if this is confusing, just ask a 17 year old.
11.
Axes is the shared plural form of nouns ax, axe, and axis, though it comes with different pronunciations. No one seems to care that much, however, if this /r/Showerthoughts/ is any indicator.
13.
When I write, I am able to get into the movement of things that are not things. This is interesting to me. This is where I seek, not what, just where.
14.
Goodnight is not an object, it is a village in Missouri, and an unincorporated community in Kentucky, Oklahoma and Texas.
No techniques on display, not particularly. No reason to begin in the middle, save that it all is already underway and to continue searching for the beginning is a lost cause really. You give up the right of starting at the beginning once you rise up from all fours and decide to leg it as a bipedal going forward.
2.
I do like a certain amount of order but it’s an internal struggle every time I start to accumulate bits and pieces of writing (or anything for that matter). Ideally, life happens and it gets lost. This has its drawbacks, but at least you don’t have to live through the subtle, creeping, and all of a sudden overwhelmingly invasive accumulation of what Philip K Dick called kipple, the Universe’s fatal entropy and ultimate laugh. Man is submerged by stuff. The end.
3.
And so, one adopts strategies. It occurs to me that numbers work pretty well, and may even have a soothing quality on the soul for some, a strange thermometer for our times that, so why not start to using them? I figure milestones keep the mind satisfied it is making tracks, and it gives a breezier cadence to the breathing. Plus, long, bulky, paragraphless pages are a burden on the eye and you’d be better off reading War and Peace or some David Foster Wallace novel if you have the stamina.
4.
A word of advice that I have filled the tank with on this one:
Never put yourself in a position of having to defend the work before it is done. -- C D Wright
This is an adventure, a stomping ground, a place that would not have existed, a place to throw down thoughts and scribble a few lines. It’s a place I can work on the stuff that doesn’t fit into the other places I work on, and so on, you get it. These are not definitions.
5.
Obviously, this is a blog. But I dislike that word, and may never use it again if I can help it. If I do, then it’s proof I am a liar, or just a writer with flippant tendencies. The point of all this may emerge somewhere deeper in the Res, but at heart there is a desire to keep sharpening the knife.
6.
The knife is useful for many things. I wash it after meals and use it to carve out words from the world. Another thing it can be good at if wielded right is put in verse pretty clearly by Wallace Stevens as a form of exhortation. In section XXXII of ‘The Man With The Blue Guitar’, the poet writes:
“Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.”
I may write of this more elsewhere, and perhaps even in context, but for now I will try to let this resonate locally and declare: hoist the banners, empty banners, ready your knives! I have readied mine, and put it to use now.
7.
Let the rotted names fall before they roll off your tongue. Speak, read and write as if every word were alive.
areudirty
stormborns
janainaart
yousharknotpass
vaporwave
dailybridgerton
2087