writing v

if i choose to develop, nurture, contrive sorrow – and not just sorrow, but any emotion or state that interests me, that fulfills an orientation (and which emotion or state would not at various points?) – i am not some neowerther, a schopenhauerean pessimist, a christian, for i neither mourn nor leap, and laughter is as much part of the palette as any other colour of the heart. if i at times might seem to favour sorrow over laughter, or some sensation over another, might it be for no other reason than as a sociopsychic autocorrection. the world in its amusements, volitions, and absurdities can be wearisome and i at least must wonder, viscerally, if its diet is imbalanced. we are all tiny experiments in an infinite laboratory.

who would not, in this age of relentless will and forced happiness, desire to use sorrow and anonymity as materials, as simulations and play, as contentments and travels.

i have been to india 19 or 21 times, each visit a mockery of the previous ones. so i have stopped going and remain in the provincial land of my birth. for mockery led me to the end of my heart and there i found an absence i perhaps had been seeking. while i had been writing for decades, only then could i write.

by the time one realizes that one is on a path and what that path has been named and the dialogues about that path from those who have walked it and those who haven’t and those who have been found broken by its sides or those who take a tourist interest in it and travel over it in helicopters and that that path is – like all other paths – engaging in a dialogue with all these in their various manners and knowledges – and has any experience worth noting … one is not only nearly dead but in a very real sense has died and so the human dialogue of paths is a conversation among the dead. in this way writing is little different than any other road.

a confusion (but there are many) of writing in an age when writing has lost its meaning through an excess of meaning, through an excess of proliferation, through abuses of familiarity (these common violations) is that it is easy and common for those of all paths to write about their paths and thus consider themselves writers. and so, inevitably, they must be considered. but when these writers are encountered and they clearly have walked a path or more but have hardly set a foot on the path of writing – its terrain, struggles, deaths, false ecstasies, predators, roadside inns, flora, and so on (there is no need necessarily to demonstrate any ability to articulate these experiences conceptually, analytically, but they need to be demonstrated somehow, certainly minimally in the writing itself, however subtly) – what then, other than confusion?

writing is an art of having things fall apart in realms of the unscene.

it is easy to write. all you have to do is decide not to run. not to run, and to disbelieve in time.

when you become disillusioned with disillusionment what remains is illusion but through the lens of disillusionment, and this renewed illusion is a ground of writing.

one becomes what one writes; if one does not write (other than in the ubiquitous purposive or transactional sense in which everyone writes, to accomplish something outside of writing) one becomes what others write.