I've decided that approximately 28% of everything I say is probably pure bullshit. Maybe even 36%. Let's say between 28-36% of everything I say is bullshit. This goes for blogging too. Truth as I'm beginning to see it is that I do care about what I post out there and I do care about who might read it. Maybe I didn't initially in my early spontaneous expressions stage, but I've grown into this and I'm only now realizing it. It's probably behind my scarity of posts over the past year. I think it has to do with my actually developing relationships within my blogosphere and I no longer hide behind the relative comfort of anonymity. But I'd rather have the relationships than the freedom of stranger status. I think it helps me to take pause before I throw something out there, and in this pause I can question my thoughts and my motives and the sequencing of my ideas. I hope it will help me cut out the unnecessary, confabulatory, tangential verbosity that has been my m.o. What I hope will come of this, are thoughts that are a little more developed. I'll still have typos and sentence fragments I'm sure, but I believe they will be grammatical errors within a more delibrate thought train. Although I reserve the right to throw out half baked nonsense when the mood strikes me.
Half baked streams of consciousness like this...
I am developing a nasty case of pink eye. Odd because I've pulled out the "can't go, gotta cancel 'cause I have pink eye" excuse a few times and now I actually HAVE it! I don't think I've ever had pink eye until now. It's not fun. No wonder people happily allow me out of obligations.
or this...
Today I was working with a young man with high functioning autism. I seriously love this kid. He is funny and creative and full of energy and life. He told me today that he actually IS a superhero. "Oh yeah?" I asked, "what is your special power?" He replied that he is a superhero because he is "superheroish." Then he demonstrated his superheroness until I made him sit down and do some breathing exercises.
or this...
I find that when I pull out my laminator, kids who are demonstrating their superhero powers calm down really quick. 'Cause hey... who doesn't like to laminate?
Yeah. That's good fun. Meaningless and trivial information that no one really cares about but it feels so oddly satisfying to throw it out there anyway. Not well thought out...not even thought out at all. When you read it, I'm reading it for the first time too.
But then again I do have a post that I've been working on for the past week. It's all still in my head and I pull it out when I'm stuck at a traffic light. It has to do with the concepts of pleasure and restraint. But I need more traffic lights before I'm ready to talk about this yet.
Pink eye making it so I can't see the computer screen well, which is my signal to turn this off and get some shut eye. Let's hope I can open them in the morning with all the goopy adhesions that will develop as I'm sleeping tonight. The part of me that loves to peel my sunburn and pop my zits will love pulling the caked mucous out of my eye tomorrow. Admit it, I'm not alone in these fetishes am I?!
Thursday, April 16, 2009
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1 comment:
Wow. Nothing for months and then three posts just like that.
I wish my long comment hadn't disappeared into the cybersphere--I don't think I can recreate it--but oh well.... Here's a brief attempt to summarize: I said that I could relate to this instinct to destroy what you've written. When I wrote for the theater group, we had a running joke about my tendency to want to blow my plays up, often literally by having an explosion conclude the play. I also remember destroying my Junior High journal when I reread it in High School. The junior high poser behind the words made me want to vomit.
But I don't think that's a necessarily negative inclination. I'm thinking about Asian and Native American sand paintings, which are immediately destroyed after completion, living on only in the memory of the witnesses. What I'm suggesting is that the destructive urge might be necessary to feed our creativity. Maybe the instinct to preserve is what has to be guarded against.
Likewise, we might have to guard against being too deliberate. That can destroy creativity, too. I, for one, have always admired the "spontaneous" and "disregulated" quality of your writing and would hate to see you do more filtering. Just as involuntary memories often paint a more honest picture of our past selves than our consciously constructed memories do, so too writing that isn't self-conscious--that doesn't try too hard--usually creates a more vivid and telling portrait of the writer. That's maybe why works of fiction are so much more interesting--and honest--than memoirs. In my latest post I tried to show how "consciousness" can destroy the will to live, how it zaps us of our creative zeal.
That said, I don't think it's possible to write just for the "self". In "The Tales of the Arabian Nights" the heroine has to keep telling stories to keep the king from resuming his wife-killing spree. It's the king that drives her creativity. In a sense, I think we all have those two sides in us: the creative story teller who helps us go on and the destructive uncensored king who shatters our illusions and demands that we keep creating, who pushes us to keep growing. The key, maybe, is in maintaining the right balance, not turning life into an abstraction and not falling into the void.
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