On writing and other things, again

17/07/08

Cloudy and rainy again. On the verge of breaking the 160,000 word mark. I’ve added the sledge travelling part and went along with those characters of mine through blizzards and endless sheets of whitness where horizon and land merge into one infinity. I saw those huskey dogs run wild, dragging the sledge behind and I felt every bump on the way. Whether I actually managed to convey the experience in words is another matter, as always. My last big journey will be trekking through the dense tropical forest that leads to the Shores. It will only be a short trip but I’m looking forward to letting my mind travel in the far-flung regions of perfection. I cheated time and gravity all at once. Whilst my body is bound to this reality, being stuck- a prisoner- between grey walls, relentless noise and ugly landscapes that make up a city I can no longer stand, I have at the same time travelled so far away that it blows my own mind. It is as though I have really been to those unreachable realms of beauty and sheer wilderness. I went, saw, felt and remembered like a true explorer. What I do not know is whether I was able to translate everything I saw, felt, heard and experienced into something I could share. Yet I know now that what I have written is my most precious possession. It is my own escape, a world I created along the way that is entirely mine even though it now stands on its feet and has its own ‘spirit’. I may have thrown in the foundations but the rest that ensued was of its own accord. The world shaped itself into what it ought to be, not according to what I wished it to morphe into, in a way. Or perhaps the grey walls and relentless noise around me, the gloom and crying skies, were the very element that helped me build a world so far removed from my reality. I longued for sunny horizons and green landscapes, glimpses of purity boyond the ruthless materiality that is everywhere my eyes look.

So much so that in the end the perfect world was born- out of a mind that felt smothered alive and reaching out for air and freedom it can never truly obtain. I suspect I shall never win such freedom, for I know very little of what it ought to be. I only yearn for the ideal it instills in my mind. I’ll always be a prisoner of this reality and a pawn of materiality. It is inevitable. All I have is a yearning mind and itchy fingers eager to better themselves. These tools are my only defense, my only way out. Beyond that nothing much truly makes sense. Everything is veiled or concealed from its truth. Every object, every palpable thing is known without knowledge and taken for granted. Even the food we eat everyday isn’t known. It is so far removed from its original state and has gone through so many different processes that it is but a lie to think we know the finished product. 

If I picked a tomato and turned it myself into a puree I would know what ketshup is.

I look at that glass bottle and the only way I ‘know’ it is ketshup is thanks to a label telling me that it is. Social conditioning also instilled in me many templates of what certain things ought to look, feel or taste like but unless I haven’t discovered the thing myself, from its initial state to its finality then all that I know is really little more than an illusion. No wonder I feel trapped and confused in a world where everything that surrounds you is based on a tacit agreement that we ought to know things simply because a majority says what they ought to be.

 It seems especially true of food. How do I know what that beef steak really is, beyond the safe label stuck on it telling me that it is? It’s pretty much a game of trust and I should be trusting enough to take whoever’s word for it but in an age where only profit and money prevail, I find myself lost and frightened. Even if I decide not to trust what is deemed to be, even if I refuse to believe readily that the beef in front of me really is beef, everything has been so far removed from me for so long that I have no alternative but wonder forever. I have no option to go back to the source and learn- truly- what beef is, what that piece on my plate is. It seems that while we appear to live in a world of great material technology, we’ve never been so far removed from reality itself, living off understandings on what everything ought to be- living off one illusion to the next.

Anyway, I need to go to the bank pretty soon and that really pisses me off. The bank itself is a perfect allegory of illusion-based reality where the bank is a term that refers to an unknown agglomeration of people and powers. There is no real relation or exchange between the individual and the bank, only the illusion of one through numbers of people and machines. Hence the difficulties and headaches such encounters always seem to give us. In the spectrum of Reality such encounters are in fact at the lower end and could be deemed more likely to be an illusion than not. Fact.

substitute for perfection?

I never wondered what it is I like about art, what always seems to draw me in beyond the positive feeling I conclude it gives me. 

Why do people paint; why do we compose, play or listen to music; why do we write stories? It all comes down to the root of expression, what is conveyed through any form of art. Some paint to show a sublime moment in time (ie. Impressionism) or to capture a vague sense of perfected light, a body, a scene. Some paint to depict pain, misery, war and despair (think Picasso) as though they could do nothing but become witnesses of their times. Others write the most enchanting stories, the kind that will seem to set your mind free into the endless realm of imagination. Stories will be romance, science-fiction, even a thriller or a classic...But what is the aim? Beyond the prison of reality and a sense of helplessness -human limitation-stories offer an escape for the mind in the hope of finding a sense of peace or freedom, fulfillment. Some write to transcend the reality of having only one life and with the power of their imagination they can live so many and share them with others. All forms of art, it seems, derive primarily from a desire or need to escape what cannot physically be escaped, a desire or need to create a window that will reflect either the illusion of a voice or perfection. A voice, whose owner-the artist- is not able to use any other way for he finds himself prisoner of his individual condition; a perfection, for who has never dreamt of catching but a glimpse of what makes perfection or sublimity? In a perfect world made of perfect minds the need for art would be cancelled for once such a perfected world is achieved the perfection will be found within, therefore making all forms of art obsolete. Escapes and external substitutes would no longer be required.

Until then, though, there is art...