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Mortality

Prose Review: Mortality, By Christopher Hitchens In an effort to understand post-humous writing; writing written without pause for deliberation or the current world’s opinions, sensitivities, and other limiting factors, I am reading Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality, which was published in 2012, after his death. The book is primarily composed by Hitchens informing the world of his battle with esophageal cancer, which in 2011, took his life. The last chapter by Hitchens is fragmentary pieces of ideas for the end of the book, which are disjointed and incomplete, written in bouts of consciousness as he began to lose his war with cancer. The effect of this is completely unexpected and crushing. It is followed by words of Carol Blue, his wife. The effect of this contrast is two-fold: On one hand, her words, with a different tone than Hitchens’, seem to be the somber reverie to exit the work with the completion that Hitchens’ last chapter lacked with the sudden ending. This then becomes untrue, as her last words are completely crushing, echoing the profound end of one of our species’ greatest intellects, “At home in Washington, I pull books off the shelves, out of the book towers on the floor, off the stacks of volumes on tables. Inside the back covers are notes written in his hand that he took for reviews and for himself. Piles of his papers and notes lie on surfaces all around the apartment, some of which were taken from his suitcase that I brought back from Houston. At any time I can peruse our library or his notes and rediscover and recover him. When I do, I hear him, and he has the last word. Time after time, Christopher has the last word.” The ending of this work, which I think many Atheists, Antitheists, Secularists, Skeptics, and others disunited in Non-Belief can appreciate, is one that left me in tears. Christopher Hitchens’ works are powerful. His words are empowering. I find I own nothing of words in comparison to such an indefatigably literate and brilliant man. The omission of him radiates in me, screaming that life is not eternal; consciousness is limited and worth more than anything. Insentience awaits us all, silent in its waiting, silent in its own insentience. In this light of cosmic darkness and death, humanity is ever-more inspiring. Our whole species, vibrating, jostling, and hosting a tiny bubble of truly remarkable ideas, all composed of tiny atoms and molecules that have no sentience whilst alone. If he were alive, I would thank him. “I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies." C. Hitchens

#fictionwriting

Weaving with Carpal Tunnel

Today is the first time I’ve sat down and written anything in over half a month; not because I felt I needed the break, but because the nature of deadlines is less quietly crashing down. Time’s apparent seepage has pooled in a negative cache, revealing how apathetic and lazy I have been. This theme brought to mind words of Christopher Hitchens. “I’ve always known that I’m born into a losing struggle… don’t know anyone who’s come out of that a winner. One should try to write as if posthumously. Because then you’re free of all the inhibition that can cluster around even the most independent-minded writer. You don’t really care about public opinion now, you don’t mind about sales, you don’t care what the critics say. You don’t even care what your friends, your peers, your beloved think. You’re free. Death is a very liberating thought.” Upon googling his words, I soon found that his notion was not original, but lit on the voices of other authors, such as Hemingway in his 1954 Nobel Prize Acceptance speech. “ The core of the notion is to write for a post-humous audience. To create works, ideas, and concepts that are so profound, so worthy of humanity’s wavering attention, that they may live on and even contribute to future human endeavors. This is paradoxically quixotic and ironic; Pandering to a demographic is paramount to monetary success as a writer, as it allows writers to live, eat, and sleep in a room. The irony is that the most profound pieces are not able to be readily digested until years after the Author’s death, rendering society handicapped in creating works and ideas that are meaningful and worthy of maintaining after the death of the individual who created it. We remember Charles Darwin not as a milquetoast who fainted at the sight of blood, but as the crafter of one of humanity’s greatest ideas, Evolution by Natural Selection. His idea has generated such waves as to change the literal understanding of our own origins, of life itself, and of the cosmos which encapsulates us all. This of course realigns my opinions about my own work for this class, and what I must do to advance it. I’m not only facing the dwindling nature of time; eroding my neurons, my brain, my muscles, seeking to rearrange all the atoms of my body into the infinite canvass of existence, I’m also facing the end of a class, and what could be the last chance to learn valuable techniques. Working 40 hours a week is hardly an excuse; In a lifetime, the work will not matter. Tiny sums of money will be dust in the wind. My work will probably never be published. It is an exercise in creation. In expression. And in that, I find it particularly difficult. Crafting new thoughts and ideas is laborious. It’s taxing. This isn’t a class where I read a book, locate ideas, memorize the ideas, and regurgitate them; This is a much more difficult task of creating something of value, something that bleeds. Struck by no Muse, as such a notion is absurd, our minds must craft stories from bits and fragments of our own world. Weaving the words is incredibly difficult. I do not worry that I will not complete the work. I do not worry that the world will never see the work and give a fuck. I worry that I will fail to create something that matters to me. I worry that I will disgust myself, and produce rote, predictable, heavily flawed garbage. Death will always loom over those who ever lived.

#fictionwriting

Inside Beliefs. Depression. Metal. Devotion.

As a preface, this is going to be a long blog post. In examining the way I write, or, more typically, fail to write, over a course of time, I am struck first by they typical confusing multiverse behind my eyes, the typical Darren-negativity. (I attach “Darren” to it not because I find it descriptive of myself, I am usually able to overcome it, but rather because I have always felt that inside, this negativity has always existed, and influenced my actions, thoughts, beliefs, and even the way my brain is literally and actually composed. I’m not trying to say that I possess a special neural cluster which radiates negative thoughts, but I am saying that the negativity has always permeated within, flexing its braun and its insidious wit) After a firm hand combs the negativity into a slow, sitting, background observer, I am free to try and remember things that I do, things that I think. After I find something that seems relevant, I can then personally reflect on how pertinent to myself the object is, and whether or not it is more relevant to society, and less relevant to myself. Upon deeper devotion to finding the answers; which I constantly am concerned may not exist, or might just not exist for me, or exist for some people, but not others, or that if I’m positive enough-Can exist, or if the answers I find are complete bullshit only I believe....A unifying theme to my personal cognition is convolution. I feel like the things I think often are simply passing patterns and currents in a larger river of thought that as humans, we ultimately have no way of really remembering. I feel like the way our world has become, many people have no time to think, no time to reflect, and this is the ultimate reason why progress is so slow. In civil liberties, in artistic and cultural evolution, in the death of religion, in the passing of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, and other slowly-wilting, slowly less-favorable discriminations. In general, the world is majorly poor / middle class, struggling in futility in a classic class warfare situation, always seeming to get slightly more, (An inherent result of factory production, industrialization, science, etc) while always getting less in reality. (Here I reference the absurd disparity of wealth, both here in the USA and the entire Earth at large) As people gifted with the ability to write, and read, and critically think, and critically examine things, why is it so hard to feel motivated to try? On earth, many religious factions (Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), Balkans (Orthodox Serbs vs. Catholic Croats; Orthodox Serbs vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Christians vs. Muslims), Ethiopia & Eritrea (Christians vs. Muslims), Sri Lanka (Buddhists vs. Hindus), Pakistan (Muslims vs. Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Christians), Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians), and Egypt (Coptic Christians vs. Muslims) battle and wage war, trying to disseminate their, Truer answers. Emancipated of the gag, and the blindfold, and the financial starvation, and the educational destitution, how is it that some Atheists, as I, still dwell on Nihilism? So many other things to think about, so many things to evaluate, to criticize, to do, and yet so many are stuck on nothing-worship. Every thought, every action, every life, every death; a cosmic insignificance. This tone is prevalent in my beliefs, thoughts, opinions, manner of speaking and responding, my sarcasm, my joyless humor. Overcoming this Negativity that shares tea with Nihilism is a chore, but I do believe it can be done; That I can overcome it. First by embracing that it is a part of myself, that I will never see sight in rainbows, puppy dogs, or in a rose-tint. Certain endeavors, like lifting weights, can be neutral behaviors, by both embracing the drug-seeking Hedonism-side of my negativity, and also in improving me health, appearance, and ego; all of which our society generally views as positives. By finding these middle grounds, I can be free of lifting the burden that is overcoming my own Negativity. I am now 9 weeks sober, alone. Disgusted by the prattling, God-Centric, mind-numbingly self-defeating Alcoholics Anonymous, maybe utilizing my own Negativity is a legitimate means of powerful, Maslowvian actualization. Still untangling currently-perceived, yet actually old weaves of memory and thought, I do see that I sporadically attempt to revolt and be negative. I think these revolts are a symptom of previous attempts to defeat, to vanquish, to cure my Negativity. Accepting I’m a Dick might be the only real way in rebuilding my ego up and reestablishing confidence. Writing, as something I do for recreation, or maybe even as a financial pursuit, should be an activity of personal development, reflection, and especially reification of abstract thoughts, beliefs and also of cognitive behaviors, and preoccupations. Crafting characters and environments that tangibly reflect our own personal thought patterns is something that often is relaxing, and deeply satisfying. Perhaps playing god, in imagination, in a form that is artistic, is one of the aspects of fiction writing that is most enjoyable. I lament that my peers fail to see the depressive elements of my work. The lack of color, or the inclusion of color only as a foil to future lackings of color, was my main attempt. Colorlessness is one of the things that I find is so characteristic of depression. Sadness without cause. Sadness for no reason. As soon as depression was named, it seems the word was instantly colloquially perverted. Almost everyone I’ve ever met (Except for 1 mental health professional) have failed to grasp the discerning difference between depression and generic sadness, and perhaps for good reason. They’re so similar. They can bleed into each other. They can cause one another. They can stack on each other and become difficult to untangle. Untangling them often doesn’t banish them. Solving one often leaves the other undealt with. In contrast, perceptions seems almost colored when happy, or using nicotine, cannabis, or caffeine. Things that are obtrusively negative are easy to let go of, and flaming desolate piles of previous thoughts, are able to finally be extinguished and left behind so that I may continue on the journey of life. Antidepressants make me skirt responsibilities, such as attending classes, doing assigned readings, or in general, attempting the less exciting activities of life. This class, however, is so far my most successful attempt at writing yet. In the past, I have tried to blog about Metal, my most favorite of arts. And Metal IS an art form, one that is profound, vast, undulating, exploding in new and provocative forms. When it was explicitly stated that writing about music was explicitly forbidden, I was a little broken-hearted, yet relieved. My past writing endeavor was to start a Metal blog where I would review albums, evaluate the Metal world, and generally write about things I probably couldn’t craft powerful enough words for. For how does one craft words to adequately explain the sound of a minor chord? Or a major? These are the most basic and definitely the most-explored musical concepts of the Western, and, by imperial consequence, of humanity. Even these basic concepts are only given reference words so that we can talk about them. The only way to understand a Major chord is to hear it. This naturally would give me an advantage. Avoiding technical and academic music theory knowledge, listening to Metal is something that the public honestly probably does better than the academia, as Metal fans listen to countless albums, countless times, and have erected contrasting, conflicting sub-cultures that no longer get along. The blog died after three days of one post per day. This sad failure was probably a result of my depression, yet this excuse does nothing to alleviate the fact that I did fail at a basic writing task which involved music that I listen to literally every day. Someday, I will readdress the failure, and move to correct my old blunder. With the weathering nature of time on memory, maybe I will paint it in a positive light, that it was a failure all itself a result of my depression, something outside of my control, and thus, free myself from the suffocating chains of personal guilt, shame, blame, and fear. I somehow doubt that I'll let myself forget that personal failure.

Devoting sets of hours to the cause of this class, and to this exercise in writing, and sticking to those set work times, is going to pay off in teaching me how set my own boundaries for positive, self-building behaviors and for my future life and relationships.

#fictionwriting

misanthropicloremipsum

Science Fiction-Real, Perspective, and Ego.

Third-Person, Omniscient.

October 17, 2013 Omniscience is the power to know everything. To be able to retrieve any piece of data, any tiny factoid, any momentary glimmer of a wave. If humans had this ability, we wouldn’t need to generate patterns, group things, name things. We also wouldn’t need to talk, or tell stories, or communicate. After all, the only reason to communicate is to gain or share knowledge with other people. With infinite or total knowledge at one’s grasp, talking becomes irrelevant. For this reason, the Third-Person, Omniscent Narrative mode will be how I communicate my story. After figuring out what I wanted with my short story, I had only to decide between First-Person and Third-Person perspectives. The greatest temptation for choosing first person, at least in my (A Biopsychology major) perspective, was the ability for “Stream of Consciousness”, a technique which involves the careful illumination of a person’s internal cognitive functions. This is naturally a brilliant tool for imagination, since who wouldn’t want to be able to experience the events of another person’s inner consciousness? Who would turn down the offer to switch minds with another person, even for a moment? The deeper comical nature of the proposition lies in the fact that even the preposition itself is interpreted by the inner mind of oneself. In other words, upon, “Trading minds”, we wouldn’t maintain our own consciousness, we would substitute it for another minds’ consciousness. Or for what passes for consciousness. To be completely honest, the idea of having another person’s brain configuration is completely revolting, terrifying, and almost diabolical. I see with eyes relatively un-fogged by . I feel with feelings unafraid of societal constraints. I am relatively disconnected from society, constantly annoyed and reaffirmed in this distance. The distasteful reverberations I often experience in the shame of pop music........It all is dreadful in an honest way. It’s not pretending to be more. It doesn’t even care enough to try to progress. Evolution, one of mankind’s greatest, sterling achievements, truly discarded. At the core of this fear of loosing my mind is the possibility that I too will slip under, or even worse, am already dreadfully blinded, and live with depression and anxiety for no good reason.  To return to the proposition’s irrationality; Had we switched minds with another, we would only return to our minds having had no means to perceive or observe the other mind (A Mind = A Brain, in all science has to say), making the journey of switching brains ( Presumably by disconnecting and reconnecting neurons a few times) a waste of time and energy. I naturally have a science fiction idea where neural circuits are constructed via machine, to connect one person’s brain to another, so that as one, two people can BE. As I see things, (Not to mention a very famous philosopher) thinking is existing. A soul has nothing to do with this. (How disappointing that my tone feels so different once I replaced, “Mind”, with, “Brain”. Maybe in the future, when, “Mind” is more synonymous with, “Brain”, and the connotation and denotation have evolved, this difference would be imperceivable) As a diehard Atheist, Skeptic, Naturalist, and knower of common science; the science fiction beauty in experiencing another human’s thoughts, with absolute certainty, with absolute trust, with absolute belief, is almost too beautiful for words. Sharing thoughts with someone would be something of ultimate beauty. It would, presuming there were no way to lie, break all bounds of human disconnect. A real means of world peace. A real means of powerful, unapologetic human understanding. Human psychology as we’ve never seen it (Literally and figuratively) before! CONS The primary drawback for telling my story in Third-Person, Omniscient P.O.V. is in the removal of Stream of Consciousness. To be honest, I have a big ego. I do think the way I see the world is reasonable, fair, and completely evolved. I believe that taking new pieces of information, and incorporating them into ourselves is the best way to evolve and change, and even to form correct political and moral opinions. There is a reason why colleges and universities make people secular and liberal. It isn’t a conspiracy at all. The more we read, the more we learn, the more likely we are to reject absurd ideas. The notion that our planet is supported by a powerful Deity, or that we live on a flat Earth, or that gays are evil and immoral, are all proved stupid and dead-wrong by studying science, philosophy, and in learning in general. I think that Stream of Consciousness, as I could tell it, would be an interesting read from Ist’s mind. In 3.P.O, (Third-Person, Omniscient) I have no way of taking my audience into Ist’s head. Ist’s thoughts are poorly experienced without the nature of Stream of Consciousness. The mental instability that I see Ist having is proving incredibly difficult to express in 3.P.O, as simply stating facts about Ist is incredibly lackadaisical. PROS On the other claw, I do really enjoy the ability to perfectly describe the setting, environment, and other details that wouldn’t be supported with a First-Person P.O.V. Designing a tale dredged in misery, depression, loneliness, and exhausting survival would be tedious to read from Ist’s perspective. I also think that 1.P would be entirely impossible, given that Ist has chunks of memory missing. Inability to recall her mother is a serious inability, one that I would find it difficult to write through. Since this work is essentially recreational, I also find it an easier P.O.V to write in. And, since I’m unashamedly egocentric, this grants me the ability to virtually bleed my own opinions and feelings into my Narrator.

#fictionwriting

Bleached Prose: Dealing with Criticism and Contemplating a Selfish Direction

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Bleached Prose: Dealing with Criticism and Contemplating a Selfish Direction

When writing is used as an art form, it seeks to generate some kind of response from the observer of the art itself. The entire point of art is sometimes said to be the art itself. I find that point to be oxymoronic in scope; completely absurd. Even absurdity is a more valid reason for existence and genesis than simply existing. After trying out various mediums of artistic expression, I continually find writing to be one of the easiest mediums of expression for myself, which is why I'm taking this class in the first place. I find descriptive modifiers to be paramount in usefulness; carving out lines in a piece of writing that is by itself both poorly defined and too open for interpretation. In the opening passage of my short work I attempted to concretely slam the observer with a sensory load of details, leaving a path for the observers to narrowly transcend the classroom and enter a world I created. I feel like a mark of good writing is when the work leads the reader, and doesn't make the reader lead themselves, at least so long as we're talking about a fictional work. I often find myself perturbed by how loosely things can be interpreted; as if authors left out details in a nihilistic attempt to appeal to a broader audiences (Which, as a side note, might be a conscious prudent decision). When imagining a fictional world, I don't want to have to fill in gaps left by an author, deciding whether x is blue, red, or gold, or colorless. I want the author to craft a world for me. I don't want my creation to be colorless, full of holes, and ultimately ambiguous. I want my fictional world to be distinct, articulated as far as possible towards a fully defined, matriculated work. I don't want a theoretical reader to have to play the part of a detective; Piecing together found scraps of sensory details in my work in order to create their own subjective interpretation of my fictional world. Our brains constantly generate reality. One of the reasons art is such a worthwhile endeavor is because it allows us to momentarily contemplate something within our minds, which could have everything or nothing to do with our current situation at all. (Obviously ironic, as we had to use sensation and perception to even get that content from the exterior art form into our brains from the first of things) I don't fail to realize that language is a flawed method of transportation of a mind's inner matters, but it remains, as far as I know, the most competent and successful means of sharing ideas.

I remain steadfast in the assertion of the foil I created in my work. I still am unsure why my peers failed to grasp the foil I meant to create in the vivid, defined world I created, and the attempt at "Ist", a suffix we attach to words to simply reference a person. "Ist", to me, feels perfectly nondescript. The point of the name, and the appearance of the name, is to highlight the relative meaningless of man in the face of overwhelming, powerful, enduring nature. Plants that keep living with barely any light, butterflies that live despite uneven wings, grasses pathetique..........I am torn between this modifier infinite regress problem (That no matter how detailed I get my writing could always be more detailed) and the attempt to create a defined work. Should I bleach my purple prose to please the palate of peers with emaciated vocabularies? Or was this section of my work a failure in an attempt to create a foil? Was the foil in and of itself too obscure for even English majors to find? Do I cater to my audience of peers? Or do I craft a work for myself, the work I want to see in the world? Obviously, continued revision will help my material manifest in a more enjoyable format. In summary, the goals I had for the introductory description of my work were:

- Establish a clarified, robust setting environment for my work.

- Make a foil with the setting and the character to emphasize the theme of man's overemphasized position relative to untainted, natural nature.

- Create a foreboding tone

All in All, not one of my goals was completed, at least in the eyes of my interpretation of my peers' criticism. I really should disregard much of what my peers said, and not take their laziness in learning learned vocabularies to heart. (UBIQUITOUS- YOO-BI-KWIT-US) This life is the only one I know I'll have. This opportunity for creating my own work should not be squandered pandering to popular opinions. This work is for me, and not for my classmates, or any other person. I think I will proceed with this individualistic paradigm in the background of my mind.

I'm not entirely certain what the overarching point of these blog entries is, except to get us to think about writing. In this post, I simply typed out my feelings and thoughts about the criticism that took place five days ago as those thoughts came to me. This was a useful exercise, if just to bolster my self-confidence in writing for the Autotheistic audience; ME.

#fictionwriting

paganroots

By Coyhand

pictureperfectforyou-deactivate

caramel-lattte

perfect

victoriousvocabulary

ECLOSION

[noun]

1. Entomology: the emergence of an adult insect from its pupal case.

2. the hatching of a larva from its egg.

Etymology: French éclosion, equivalent to éclos (past participle of éclore - to hatch < Vulgar Latin *exclaudēre, for Latin exclūdēre - to hatch, exclude.