Thursday, April 2, 2015

It could well be true that no one in a situation of material comfort can write well.  Conventional contentedness and writing are mutually exclusive.  What have I to do with you, Satan, nothing, away.


Viewed from the long lens of future generations, the religions, the writings, the art, the cave paintings will all merge, seen as fruits of the same impulse on different branches of the same tree, equal as human expression.


Well, I guess you can't always be apologizing for yourself.  Maybe you dodged a bullet.  True of many of the women you've dated with curiosity and attraction.  You want to learn something.  Affection, certainly.

But it's a larger issue, one of not blaming yourself, I guess.  Free yourself up.  Life's confusing enough for some of us.  Don't be down on you.  Guess what, we all make mistakes.  Even the best of us.  And if we do nothing but dwell on those mistakes, which cometh, these offenses, I'm afraid we don't get anywhere, do we.

I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do back then.  I wanted to be a writer.   I felt I had to focus on it.  I've never known the meaning of that effort, nor do I understand all the self-reflections or whatever it is that I tend to write, embarrassing and as pointless as they may be, but for some vague psychological purpose.  I got piles of notebooks, many writings I know not what to do with.


Pull them apart and put them in different categories.  Like goes with like, as in house-keeping.  You don't put kitchen stuff in the living room.  Take what you have, and then sort it out.  Throw old stuff away.


Writing for me is a facet of my blood type.  The old blood, type O.  A way of sorting out the distant DNA memory of life before agriculture and property and ego.  Before all the terms were placed on things, specialization.   The body doesn't label.  Thus its protean sexuality, its friendships.

When all the terms came, all the societal rules, all the uptightness, then the cooperative grew distant.

The modern world is thus profoundly confusing to some of us.  Can't we admit this?  We don't know what to do about a lot of things but innocently go along for the ride.  Wine, for instance, profoundly confusing, good and bad.  Like facing a transexual.  Huh?  What?

Maybe there's some of that in Conrad's short story about washing up on some shore of completely foreign tongue.

And all through that, you are still you.  You still have your basic tastes, you understand the things that agree with you, that don't give you gas.  It's not what goes in you that corrupts, it's what comes out of you.   It's not a matter of being intentionally clueless.  You're just made that way.  Gullible, I suppose, until you know better.

Is attraction a sin?  Is self-knowledge?

For an O, yes, it's all about cooperation.  A kind of automatic pitching in, playing your role.  You don't mess with people, you just get fired up, full of adrenaline.  That's just how you see things.  Maybe to another you're absolutely blind, you don't get it, don't understand the cultural cues...  Particularly when you're fed a foreign substance...

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