always having suspected that i was one of those of the missing and having found myself solidly halfway through life and still not missing and not wanting to miss my fate – at least not absolutely – i began migrating down a path of simulating being one of the missing and i would like to write about this migration but haven’t yet found the right language and so all the writing i’ve done is a kind of attempt to write about wanting to write about it
we decreate our way to ungreatness – to paraphrase a fortune 100 executive who paraphrased a management guru who no doubt paraphrased someone else. in my case this means learning the obscure arts of babbling, acedia, hallucination, and a calm franticness (which is not as much a contradiction as you might think) … not as anything to fear or scorn but as a lifestyle as legitimate as the rich and famous, the common bourgeois, or the common activist
the discipline of this learning is i admit a peculiar study and practice. to learn to experience these typically shunned arts as normal, good, desirable, even progressive requires a complex rewiring of the brain that no therapeutic advocacy or pharmaceutical aid could accomplish, as these aids and advocacies are most frequently designed to happyize (how else do we describe our novel culture of Smile except to conjure a verb from an almost enforced obsession?) active willing participation in the production of names … which is the religious orthodoxy of the day : the requirement to be seen. that is, to not be missing
a side benefit of this discipline is that it introduces (or reintroduces for those who believe in some sort of original face, core identity or soul – the language is less important than the orientation) us to some externally-contextually unreachable timespace of our i (our plurality or pluralities of i) … those languages and mores our interiority would find naturally compelling were they to exist in externality … where we would find our true place, that spiritual-physical home of dream and desire where, as some greek philosopher prayed, the inner and outer would be one
unfortunately these sorts of practices can’t be taught – even speaking about them in the way i’m doing lends itself to interdisciplinary quackery. every instance we see of these principles and movements being systemized and communicated for emulation (regardless of how sophisticated or earnest any student or teacher might be) the enterprise quickly turns into a parody of itself and the rationalists are right to shamelessly mock. for the time being and perhaps always we strange pupils resort to actualizing only in aspects of desolation, incommunicability … those spaces between the interior and exterior realms that reach for both but never touch either
