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.

Stream of consciousness

The trouble with too much imagination is that it is bound to take you further than reality and therefore there is always a painful crashing down period.

I went to see the new batman yesterday. It’s hard to believe that heath ledger who played an amazing Jocker, is dead. That such talent killed itself, just like that, and all the world has left is one last breathtaking performance immortalised on screen.

There is something about feeling too much or being so sensitive, somehow, that every simple beauty or glimpse of what is hardly ever noticed becomes an epiphany of some sort, yet pain is as much emplified for no logical reason. As feelings keep burning lungs and spirit the mind grows weary and a mental torpor slowly eases its way through the body itself until the light is so faint that you stagger down the well you knew was there all along, but you can no longer avoid it. 

There is so much beauty through the pain of living that it is bound to kill a spirit in its bud when one dares to gaze at such spendor for too long. Written words are a painter’s brush forming infinite combinations of colors to mirror the hues of rain and sunlight. Alone they are little more than shadows of what they ought to become. Together suddenly the world is set alight and there are no limits. These days words seem to flow out of my hands and I watch the threads of thought slide along those lines without even knowing whether it is really me writing or something beyond my own self already. When one achieves greatness of any kind, does it mean the soul must have gone to other shores where only splendor and perfection prevail?

 Like a vessel the body translates or convey what little can be from those unphasomable shores and withers slowly under the strain, much like the one who one day built wings so he could reach the sun.

But what do I know? What am I? If there is but one thing I am aware of it is how tiny my body is amidst the ocean of life. But my mind? How far does it stretch? How far can one venture and be certain that it is not in fact an illusion of infinity? What if what I saw for infinity was only a trick of the light too bright and I kept flying in circles? Who would warn me? Who would even notice?

Sorrow tires me yet my mind feeds off it. The contradiction is again sublime. If I was made of words I would want to be a poem.

Why do I keep writing even though the writing itself is far from perfect? Because the process is the closest one can get to their own sense of perfect, which is always subjective in its very nature. Yes, of course the notion of perfection is subjective... The process of creating new lives, no matter how fictional, awakens a new lease of hope and opens the mind’s window to let your inner eye wander as free as can ever be. And so it is that with every page of any story I feel more of a sense of being alive than reality could ever grant me. But then there are the eyes to see what is real before you and life as it is is rarely more than one long cliche after the next. 

That’s why I used to love watching movies or read fantasy stories. They would open my inner window, you see. Throughout my early years this was enough for me to revel in my own little worlds but then as I grew older I was forced to stare reality in the face and that tiny window was no longer enough. Hanging onto it as I grow old now would blur the fine line between reason and folly, I suppose. As long as I find the strength to question myself I cannot be so bad. The day I take my own word for anything I will know that reason is morphing into something much darker, a shade closer to nothingness, perhaps.

Interlude

It’s 6.53am on a misty sunday morning. The cat sits on the window ledge and watches the world go by. 

I went to the library yesterday and got an old book on ‘wonders of this world’. All I can ever do is look at pretty pictures, lose my gaze into immortilised glimpses of natural beauty. I see high mountains lost in a hazy mist, drifts of blue ice and snow whiter than any snow I’ve ever seen; streaks of the greenest grass and oceans of golden sand... The most striking of waterfalls that seem to break free from canyons in majestic curtains of bubbling water crashing down the most mesmerising of valleys... 

And all this I see through the pages of an old book and I will probably never get a chance to witness such beauty myself. Yet as I take a stroll in the park nearby I find small patches of what I choose to see as wilderness and as I forget the spoils around to focus on one tiny glimpse of beauty I am again overwhelmed. Peering through the dense foliage of a weeping willow by the mossy lake I find myself in the midst of a distant land and further down that lake turned river lie the neverending green valleys and their untamed waterfalls. I glance over my shoulder and I am back to reality at once. 

Reality and its tall, grey buildings, the screeching of cars, the unseen smokes and broken skies. The patches of grass lose their sheen and return to their puny-looking selves, dry and stumped on far too many times. The pebbly paths no longer lead to wilderness unspoilt but back to greyer walls and colder grounds made of concrete and asphalt. My eyes have grown weary and my mind is tired. I can no longer pretend to see what is not really there yet I have so little strength to follow what the eye within only can see.

It might well be that what I am writing is grossly superflux but as long as it seems to teach me something it was never for nothing. I just can’t take anything for granted anymore- my mind simply won’t stand for it and will make me question until it all makes sense. I cannot just accept that I think one thing without questioning why or what lies beneath the end result that is that thought. I need to understand for myself HOW I got to think or believe one particular thing. To me the big test isn’t so much these very pages but whether I am able to write something as long as a book, a story in itself, that can actually stand up to scrutiny. These pages are indulgence to me, a place where I can let my mind run loose to follow any line of thought it fancies. They represent some sort of recycling bin in which I can empty the huge amount of constant reasoning from the silliest idea to the most elaborate and somehow avoid sheer brain overload, if that makes sense.

 That need to write so much is, I suspect, a mere coping mechanism that allows me to not only sort my thoughts out but also prevent overwhelming my own brain as it would otherwise lead straight to a major breakdown at some point. Honestly, just like an overworked machine. It would make logical sense that those who came up with the computer model based themselves on that of the brain itself. All that’s really missing from those machines is the human touch- feelings. Now that’s something we haven’t been able to create, something that would emulate feelings just as we experience them every day and that seem to make us so very human...And because we still don’t understand those feelings, why we have them, why they feel so much like some third party akin to a soul added to the body it is easier to end up believing in religions. And yet by doing so we elude the issue altogether, hiding behind an explanation even more complex to understand rationally and logically than the original enigma. So if I’m to attempt at least to get to the bottom of what makes us human and everything that goes with the question surely I should keep away from any other notion that only serves to confuse me further. If I can first answer issues surrounding the person- the foundations- starting from the very roots then I can move up to the next hurdle and so one. This way I minimise the chances for error in reasoning and I am more likely to find something right. No one should ever start with the question of religion or any of those massive notions before everything else. That would be skipping fundamental stages of understanding and of course the likelihood of finding any answer is greatly reduced. Fact. Learning is the pauper’s path. Remain humble and accept that you know very little and your mind will open up to new horizons, things that you thought you knew until it finally slaps you in the face and you realise that you never really knew until now.--

On the other hand I keep having doubts about the direction my story is taking: am I being too patronising, too much of a moralist at times? Am I writing too much beside the point, around the bushes, taking my potential reader for a morron? Yes, I think I do sometimes. I struggle with subtility and seem to spell everything out in case the message wasn’t clear enough and by doing so I threaten the power of suggestion, what makes a mind want to understand, curious. How do you make sure you don’t do that? How do you know you’re giving away just the right amount?? I’m still trying to figure that out. It’s pretty much like making a cake when you’ve never cooked before: how much raising stuff do you put in it exactly, knowing that if there isn’t enough it will go flat and if you put too much it will make your stomach churn...Here’s my dilemma, really. I can only guess and hope I have a good eye for measure, that my critical side will pick up on the problems soon enough. You can write, write, write but the real test is the finished product: is it going to be some cheap brand pack of rubbish or an expensive, rich texture kind of cake? The proof, I guess, can only be in the pudding, ah.

On writing and other things

The story to tell comes first and is all about inspiration, imagination and ideas. You have to find something to write about first, don’t you? Once you get an idea that stage is over and it would almost seem as the most trivial part of writing a story. However the truth is that it is one of the most volatile stages and one can spend years waiting for that idea to dawn on them. I should know. Once you get past that stage comes the physical side of things: the process of actually writing the story. It’s the most enjoyable part as long as you don’t get stuck at some point for whatever reason.

That’s when you escape into that other world and you get to know your characters as you shape them along the way. Sometimes they surprise you in the way they grow and they end up quite different than you intended. You just never know for sure. And then there’s the re-writing stage, filling the gaps, mending the holes, adding, editing... I don’t like it much, to be honest. It confuses me more than anything but the fact that you have to really think about every little thing means that what you change will be more thoughtful and hopefully better than before. So, really, writing is very much like painting. You can be rather liberal in the way you apply the paint on that canvas, using as much paint as you wish and splatter generous amounts of what will serve as a base, but once you’re done with the foundations the painting process becomes more and more intricate and precise until the final touch which requires a steady hand.

 I’m not that far from that last stage, although I’m aware of the style issue. I try to keep in mind the sound advise of showing rather than telling per se... I shouldn’t write that one is angry when I can avoid it, but use gesture or facial expressions or actions to show that one is angry...It is easier said than done, for me anyway. And then I need to stop taking my ‘reader’ for a dumbass...That is to say I keep explaning things in too much detail, as though whoever might ever read my story wouldn’t have the brains to understand... I think such difficulties stem from the fact that I’m my own editor and therefore I find it very hard to be objective enough to spot the errors. But then I don’t have the luxury of friends and I have noone I could ask to read the story... And it’s quite a brick to read, I can tell you. So... If I do ever manage to finish it completely whatever mistakes or clumsiness there are left should be judged with a hint of clemency since I would have had no second opinion whatsoever. That is also why I can never be sure that what I’m writing isn’t utter rubbish. But hey, I don’t seem able not to write so...

Mum said that once your mind is free, once you can truly think for yourself and analyse what is being said or shown then you find peace of mind no matter what happens. If she is able to see beyond the shams and illusions of our reality, especially through the medium of society, then it would explain why all the setbacks in her life have become a well of strength from which she draws even more stamina to keep going...

I’m not that courageous. I need to strike a balance between a free mind, one that has freed itself from comforting yet deluded beliefs and preconceptions, and my social self, the one that has been so brainwashed and conditioned that it seems intent to clash with my thoughts all the time. I’m a coward. I was going to say a mental coward but that would be the wrong choice of words here. It’s simply that one part of me longs for truth and understanding of myself and what is around that self, but the other half isn’t strong enough to deal with what such truth, the undiluted version of it, entails for the rest of your life when you can no longer ignore the harsh fact that there is only you, a biological entity born to die and what you do in-between is up to you- and the sudden understanding that the only true entities that can give you credit or adknowledge your work, even your basic existence, are the people around you, all the members of your species... I suppose it gives me a lesser pleasure to know that there is no higher meaning to what I write than the expression of a passion, perhaps a talent I have. The only ones who can give it a deeper sense or importance are mere mortals who may well choose to ignore it. I suppose what I’m trying to say, albeit clumsily, is that now I can see that there is no higher power, no mysteriously powerful God watching over me and that everything I do or do not do for that matter is up to me only. We are lucky in so far as we have the faculty to think logically and therefore we can give to existence the meaning or purpose we wish to give it and in that we should strive to find solace. I want my life to be more fruitful than it would be biologically. I don’t want to simply reproduce, find love, get a house in the suburbs etc... I want to write and understand as many things as I humanly can. 

The only strive one can rely on- and that is, to me, the most disapointing side of the affair- is that other people will aknowledge your work, for one single individual needs the input of others in order to instill meaning into whatever one does. If I were the only human being on Earth, for instance, what strive would there be for me to write anything at all? The need to write stems from the hope that you will be able to share your work or discovery with others, I should think. When I was still blind enough I used to ignore that fact and imagined that somehow I was at least writing for some higher entity or that the latter was tilting me in such direction. That was a deluded belief- a safe idea that kept me from confronting the basic truth of it all: everything has meaning in so far as there is another person to share it with. And then you look around and you realise that most people aren’t that bothered by what you have to say or want to show them. Who could blame them? I’d react the same way in their shoes unless what one has to show or say is in fact truly mind-blowing. The idea of religion was greatly appealing for it meant that you could overlook that harsh fact of life and remain in the comfort zone of conveniant beliefs. Now there’s only me and my choice of what I’ll do of that biological miracle that is my very existence. It is also at the core of human discord.