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I got myself a new tv for my birthday. It came with a big blank box and I just feel a compulsion to put something on it. Doing art. I kind of try to achieve a semiconscious state when I work on this stuff. My main medium is to write & that demands concentration. You feel yourself holding your breath as you finish out a strong sentence. Apply paint & ink on a big piece of corrugated cardboard it's like a dream or sleeping. You move your hands and are conscious of the movement & the sound they make scraping against the cardboard. Every tiny circle is a motion of the hand, the tension of the felt tip on the cardboard, the sound of that scrape. It's audible, tactile & unconscious. I get why it's a motivating idea for science fiction writers - it really does seem like how one would have to communicate with an alien intelligence. It's just as fun to play like that' what is happening.
When we were kids we made fun of Erinn for being (out of nowhere) a Tolkien fanboy. We're all D&D nerds & he wouldn't touch the stuff but out of nowhere, senior year? Junior? He was doing all these school projects on Tolkien. My main recollection was someone, maybe me, mentioning how JRR had gone crazy & believed the things he wrote, believed they were true. Mazes & Monsters was on the watchlist & we were all gamer nerds who had been made acutely aware that our hobby might drive us insane. So we gatekept madness I guess. Like it's so crazy to believe the things you make. Why wouldn't you? As a kid it seemed bad, to lose a sense of perspective & lose the real world. Older? I don't think the real world is all that compelling. What's under its mechanical operation is a lot of really unfortunate animating energy. "You mean this is all so some rich asshole can be richer?" It's that jarring realization that you're trapped in here with them - the people who like it this way - that I think drives the imagination. Maybe it's like PKD & you imagine your way into communion with Ophiuchii.
I'm still thinking about different futures driven by different engines than acquisitively powerful individuals. I did Mars & I'm content with it. I might touch it up a little more. It's a short little romance about the ancestral machine guiding family life. Next I'm doing Venus where there's this long stretch of tedium. Where it's initially, very boring. The idea I have is that the creative endeavor (in my future that's what happens on Venus, it's the content-creation planet) of one atelier is based around a big concept. They have all had their brain-lobes disconnected. The right brain & subconscious are all linked wirelessly together into a giant Id which the waking left-hemisphered people interpret like augurs, tirelessly laboring to see the fruition of their comingled dreams. I think it's a fun idea that I can use to transmit some other details of the setting - but the opening perspective is all dreary business places & longwinded meetings about highly specific technical details. It's boring to write so probably boring as hell to read. I want to work on it but I have to think about it some more.
The weather got seasonal, unfortunately. Daffodils in the snow. It got cold & windy so I fell off of walking around in the woods. Walking around in the woods is how I work out these ideas. Long walks in the woods. Can't say enough good things about it.
That life is so complicated that you have to seek peace & stillness all of the time as a deliberate choice is why I don't think it's bad to believe in your own creation more than the real. It's good to disbelieve the real & to understand that it's just the creation of other people's imagination & only that.