Tag: experience

Writing Practice – 6/20/2020

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Why do I write?

Just as well, why do I keep asking the question? I have thoughts in my head, surely I have ideas that, if I did not release them to the pages, would build up and build up and build up, until I had no other recourse but to explode my brain in a disorganized, jumbled mess of a release, and then I would have no way of controlling the output.

But that could be okay, wouldn’t it? But, no, it wouldn’t, because I would have no more organized state, no friendly status, no more attractor to future ideas.

Because ideas come to join other ideas. They herd together, they band together, they like to travel in packs like wolves (or, maybe better, elephants, who are less territorial and defensive and more collaborative and cooperative).

My ideas like to be around other ideas and if the destructive release happens (if the reservoir disappears, evaporating into the ether when the head blows up, then there’s really no thing to attract more ideas, and they’ll go off and implant themselves in someone else’s head. Somewhere else that has a more fertile repository, a better breeding ground for the spawn of those ideas in the future.

Would it be too strange to say that such ideas are alive? That they have intentionality, that they have goals, that they choose one thing or another based on a weighing of potential costs and benefits?

Perhaps they do not “move” like flagella, maybe they do not wriggle like the worm or pace like the lion, but I know that ideas do not simply pop into my head spontaneously ex nihilo. They come from their own breeding ground, out there in the non-physical realms, and they are searching for a place to land. They wander the sixth dimension, seeking, seeking, seeking that place that will be welcoming to them. That will invite them in, offer them warmth, comfort, succor, companionship, a place to rest, to remain, to flourish.

My brain offers that when it not only has enough ideas that the newcomer is not scared, but also not so many that it is too crowded to adequately take hold.

Thus my need for continual offloading of ideas into the page. I must make these ideas feel welcome, while, too, allowing for them to explore themselves, to be comfortable, to be real and to understand that they have a larger part to play in this world. They are part of something. We do not know just what that is. But we – my ideas and I and all my other ideas I have had – and will again have in the future – we join together in this symbiosis, this equal-but-not partnership, and we wait.

We wait for our time to shine. We wait for our purpose to be revealed. And while we wait, we enjoy one another, in a wonderfully trans-materialistic orgy of experience and ideation and substantiation and metaphor and causal chain and letting go and simply wondering in amazement at it all.

Writing Practice 1/12/2020 – Budget

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Prompt: “budget”

Good lord, don’t speak to me of budgets. How often must we talk of accounts, and income, and expenses, and allocations? Let us live our lives! Let us run free! Let us roam, let us expand let us explore! No more artificial, arbitrary constraints of a dollar here or a dollar there. No more abstract concepts of balancing from one ledger line to another. No more wondering whether we’ll be off and over by a penny, thus incurring the same warmth as if we had gone over by ten dollars or a thousand.

Why such absolutes? Be more fluid, more flexible, and see where life takes you. Fly! Fly free and enjoy the wind of life in your hair.

Ignore the boundaries of capitalism and embrace the freedom of poverty. Release yourself from the shackles of limitations and discover just how much you can accomplish with nothing, nothing at all.

Ignore the voices at the back of your head saying “worry” and “fear” and “save”. What do they know of life, anyway? What good is saving now for another day, when that other day, you are too feeble to use what you have saved?

No, tomorrow is not guaranteed. And, likewise, neither is a year from now not guaranteed. So, live your life. Love your life. Appreciate your boundaries, and run free within them.

When you find, as you absolutely will, eventually, that those boundaries no longer offer the stimulation you once received – when your cavorting within the confines of your budget no longer satisfy your curiosity for adventure, for exploration, and experience – then, then my friend, it is time.

You shall know it by the warning signs: when you are antsy with your routine – when you are bored of your friends – when your lover does not – when you see these, be aware, and be prepared, that the change is coming.

It will be difficult, no doubt. It may be violent, how strongly your subconscious rebels against the freedom you are exposing it to. But push on, continue, fight this good fight, for in doing, you dissolve the last barriers to true experience – those limitations on mind, on body, and, truly, on happiness usually called a “budget”.

Writing Practice 11/29/2018 – The kami…

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The Songs of Trees, p. 100. The kami is both water and absence of water.

It is light and darkness. It is the way of love and the way of indifference. Not hate, or war, for those imply a passion for, or against, something. Thus the opposite of passion is impassion.

The kami comes upon one when he or she is sleeping. It is a breath of night wind, through an open window, even around the cracks in the door. it steals in and silently takes over the soul, infusing its receptor with an air of invincibility, a feeling of all-reachingness, a sussurration of serendipity, a unanimity of thought and action unrivaled in the mortal plane.

The kami is an idea, an ideal, more than anything physical, or even spiritual. For if it were physical it could be defined, measured, captured, tamed. If it were a spiritual, perhaps other-dimensional, it could weakly interact with the objects, the people, the places and things of this world, and we could see its effects. We could see how, like gravity, or electromagnetism, it impacts the world even though it is not of the world.

But the kami does not behave as such. It does not behave at all. It has no pattern to its action, inaction, or combination of the two. It tries not, it fails not. It simply is. And if one were to attempt to understand the kami, to hold its concepts in your mind, to believe that you are external enough, observant enough, independent enough to be able to take in and objectively evaluate the kami, then you are simply showing your ignorance of the reality of the kami and of you.

For even this little we see, or imagine, of the kami is as if through a darkly-veiled glass. We see, we feel, we know, only what it wants us to know. Perhaps the kami is only one miniscule, minute, remote tendril of some great, vast, interstellar consciousness. Perhaps it is magnanimous, perhaps malignant. There is no way for us to tell.

Perhaps the kami is an aggregation of miniature experiences, floating through the ether with no more intentionality than the Yellow River. Again, we have no way to measure, to conceive, to understand, apart from what it has deigned to reveal to us. And should we believe?

There is a camp which says the kami is all it says it is, and we should believe. That this is the first of many steps along humanity’s path to enlightenment: the absence of skepticism. And that from that starting point we shall be able, with the help from the kami and those who follow, to eventually reach that Nirvana so many long for, and so few seek.

But not me. I shall retain my pensiveness, my apprehension. I shall continue to wait. To ask. To wonder. To believe – not in the kami, but in the self, for that, as Descartes so elegantly put it, albeit in not so many words, is all I really can do.

Requiem for a Notebook

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My Writing Practice notebook is filled. This one is, at least. I will start a new one tonight when I sit down again. Yesterday I wrote to the end of the current one and, because I was curious, I decided to do a review. Here’s what I found:

There are 100 sheet / 200 pages in this notebook. A few of the pages are covered with other writings, so they don’t count. I filled 191 sheets with my scrawl. The first 4 sheets had 197, 190, 170, and 167 words on them. I’ll estimate all those 191 sheets have 175 words each, for a total of 33,425 words, which would be about 135 pages when printed. That’s a long novella. Not bad.

My longest streak was 13 days in a row, starting July 2 and going through July 14. The next longest was 11 days from 8/4 through 8/14. Hm, something about the 15th of the month that I don’t want to write?

I did a 5-day series early in July on “Describe sex…” The first few lines of each are as follows:

7-3-18 This is a strange one. Because most other phenomenon a will be described by their physical properties – the game of baseball will be about… ; sex, on the other hand is more likely to be described in emotional terms.

7-4-18 It’s a physical status and a physical act. Status – male or female. Act – penetration, intercourse interaction.

7-5-18 “Sex is natural, sex is fun. Sex is best when it’s one-on-one!” “Let’s talk about sex, baby, let’s talk about you and me. Let’s talk about all the good things, that may be.”

7-6-18 Sex is power. Sex is control. Sex is authority. Sex is “top” and “bottom”, sex is “giver” and “receiver”. Sex is “fucking” – an active verb, an authoritative act – and it is “getting fucked” – a receptive, passive, dominated, submissive state.

7-7-18 Sex is biting nipples. It is stroking shoulders and grabbing hair, but not by the ends, to pull and to hurt, but close, at the back of the head, right by the name of the neck, just to get a feeling of control

I had “lose control” experiences on 7/22, 7/29, 8/5, 8/16, and 8/18. These are times when I stop thinking, stop getting logical, and often my pen does not even make words any longer. It looks like this:

7/22, at the end when I’ve completely lost control

On 8/4 I ended with “I come in the whirlwind.” I liked that line so much that I started my writing practice on 8/5 with that same line.

On 8/20 I ran a pen dry. This is always a satisfying experience. My topic was “Write about background music – “. I started and as I noticed that the pen was close to exhaustion, I promised myself I would keep going until it gave out. 6.5 pages in, the ink finally finished and I quit.

On 8/22 my topic was “Write in incomplete sentences.” It looked like this:

This will be a challenging for ________.

I don’t often ________.

In the middle of my sentences I usually ________.

Somewhat _______, but there’s this cute girl at the ________ that wasn’t immediately rejecting me last time I ________.

On 9/9 I ran out of space. I had no more empty pages. But I wasn’t done writing for the day, so I turned the notebook 45 degrees and wrote over the last page a second time. If I try reaaaaaally hard, I could probably decipher what I wrote the first time and the second time. I don’t want to try that hard.

I wrote on 60 of 83 days available during this period. I had one long stretch at the beginning where I missed 7 days in a row (I must have been doing something else the 3rd week of June), but for all the rest I usually only missed a day before writing again. My next notebook I’ll aim for 60 days of 70 (skip one day a week, on average).

I’m pretty satisfied with this one. Now it goes on the shelf. Will it ever come back off? Not likely. But still, having that tangible reminder of what I’ve done is always valuable to me.

Writing Practice 12/6/2017

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Write about birthdays…

Birthdays are about time. About impermanence, in the face of remembrance. Birthdays are about celebration, yes, celebrating another year older, but, too, these are, in the words of the beloved dirge, “Another year older and closer to death!”

Birthdays have no significance other than what we attach to them. Summer and winter solstices mark patterns of being much greater than ourselves. Sunrise and sunset, full moon, new moon, eclipse. These events mark our experience in this world as transitory – temporary – fleeting, for they exist without our experience.

Birthdays, like any other anniversary, require a sentient mind for their existence, their remembrance, their celebration, and thus are dependent on our civilization for their very existence. We are their god. We are their creator, their destroyer, we are their rule-giver, their death-bringer, their resurrection. We are their memory-makers, their legacy takers, their purity definers.

We are their essence of being, so without us they do not exist. Shall a sheep remember that on the seventh full moon after the solstice his mother birthed him from her womb? Shall the shark take the time to recall that it was the fourth new moon and three days since the vernal equinox when she calved, three large, thrashing, vibrant pups into the suddenly blood-filled water?

Shall there be a historical celebration of the turtle at turning fifty, or of the ant to achieve the monumental feat of surviving a whole year? Does the redwood, having stood for three and a half centuries, scoff at the gentle oak reaching skyward for a mere decade?

Shall they all humble themselves in the face of the desert, who has been growing itself for three thousand million years? And what of even that can hold a candle to the Sun, or another Star, having burned twice or thrice as long?

So, what of birthdays? Why bother? Because we cannot comprehend the imaginalities outside of ourselves? Because we cannot imagine the comprehension required to wrap one’s head around the scope of the solar system, much less the galaxy or, Heaven forbid, the Universe? Because we cannot condescend to deign to think of the Planck scale or the Heisenberg atom or the miniscule of miniscules? Because we cannot reconcile the large with the small, the infinitely vast against the infinitely small?

Yes.

And no.

Because all of those things.

And because … cake.