Jan 08, 2009 00:04
I used to write for a living. Now I only write when I feel like it accomplishes something. Most of the time, at least.
It's not that that I've become so apathetic as to have nothing to say. It's that I fall into the mode of second guessing everything I have to say, that it won't matter, that I'll want it retracted, that writing in itself isn't some personal vanity that we use as a method of personal thought control, a conversation alone, with someone who isn't there, ever.
Used to be it took some modicum of work to write. Had to etch lines and ovals into stone, into bamboo, lightly draw fat brushes against thick paper, it was artisanal, not like this factory of words laid out in front of me like a rosetta stone, with every single symbol I could possibly require ready for nothing more than my input. It's so easy, I don't even really have to think.
But the matter is in the thought behind the presentation and there just is nothing there at the moment. No cylinder for this. No cubic zirconium slide rule.
The thought is all physical, it's all open and bouncing and unwieldy and I don't trust anyone but myself and my ego is winning but I try to pretend it's not because it makes it easier to muse.
I think that it is fantastical to imagine a world where all these creatures great and small brush up on one another in a frenzy trying to see this world as the others around it, with a tempest friction, try to do exactly the same thing. I think words are magical keys that attempt to arrest this frenzy but only come so far as to let the others know that the friction is there and it is forever up and down up and down seething.
I think that's enough.