Well, I've still got the meds. I'll have the girl for a little while longer, but it's almost time to move on. The initial chemistry was caffeine and alcohol and loneliness-fueled, and now it's mostly gone.
I'm back for real this time. I'll be around to your journals as time permits.
Here's the first part of something I hope will turn into a novel (of which I have a very vague plan: one character and a plotline with nothing attached yet, just the movement really). Just written, fresh and steaming from my mental cave, ambiguous and nebulous and flabby and too much like Beckett but not enough like Beckett, by which I mean the tone is not completely unlike Beckett, though not enough to be any good yet, but the style is half-assed and not yet interesting, and it doesn't run along where it should or stop where it should. But I have all the time in the world, and it's moving again, after a long absence. I'll take it:
I keep getting the feeling that I'm not really here, in the desert. Not that I'm not in the desert, but that I'm not here because I don't belong, here where all the people who don't belong come, to belong to something, at last, after all that time alone. And I'm still alone.
But it's probably not just me. We're all so carefully placed in our own heads, not restrained or shackled but unable to escape all the same, where we've been for so long, that not a one of us is really here, here in the desert, beneath the hundred-foot high flames leaping from the head of a dark giant.
Where we actually are is wherever we expected, hoped to be when we came here, here prime if you will. A psychological construct, not a real place with real others where we might find a real self. We're just continuing to create a virtual self, just like we've always done, to present, to feign, to feint and have no followup but running away, hoping that the others are distracted by the puppet while we make our escape, like a
No. No metaphors. I'll say what it is, not what it's like, because that's what's got me where I am, not here, alone. It is what it is (whatever it may be), and an intentional metaphor would only obfuscate the fact, not objectify it.
Who am I kidding? It's all metaphor, all writing is, all language, all pointing at something and saying something else. I was about to say that I am sure there's a way through all this, a path. That's a metaphor, right there, as if life were just traveling down a confusion of roads, a simple matter of picking the right to get to wherever you want to end up, as if the end were the important part. Not that the journey's more important. A false dichotomy, it's all the same from this end, and no one's come back to tell us otherwise. What's for certain is that they never will. There's that, at least.
But the metaphor's so easy to slip into, though it takes a bit of work, and it always lies at least a little bit. And you'll say it's only a matter of degree, that the unadorned language itself is already a metaphor, since it's not the thing, just another thing that pretends to the be the thing it's describing, a lame impostor. So what's the difference if the metaphor lies more, or lies less? And if by lying more the metaphor's more memorable, more interesting, more beautiful even, who cares about objective truth, which you have no faith in anyway?
Ah, but I do. Have faith in an objective truth.
But no faith that it's perceptible.
A distinction. Not unimportant. Perhaps I can get close. That's my faith. Not much, but there it is. That's my defense against intentional metaphor, unnecessary metaphor. Why add to lies? There's enough of them to go around as it is. To make the world go around, world without end.
I'm back for real this time. I'll be around to your journals as time permits.
Here's the first part of something I hope will turn into a novel (of which I have a very vague plan: one character and a plotline with nothing attached yet, just the movement really). Just written, fresh and steaming from my mental cave, ambiguous and nebulous and flabby and too much like Beckett but not enough like Beckett, by which I mean the tone is not completely unlike Beckett, though not enough to be any good yet, but the style is half-assed and not yet interesting, and it doesn't run along where it should or stop where it should. But I have all the time in the world, and it's moving again, after a long absence. I'll take it:
I keep getting the feeling that I'm not really here, in the desert. Not that I'm not in the desert, but that I'm not here because I don't belong, here where all the people who don't belong come, to belong to something, at last, after all that time alone. And I'm still alone.
But it's probably not just me. We're all so carefully placed in our own heads, not restrained or shackled but unable to escape all the same, where we've been for so long, that not a one of us is really here, here in the desert, beneath the hundred-foot high flames leaping from the head of a dark giant.
Where we actually are is wherever we expected, hoped to be when we came here, here prime if you will. A psychological construct, not a real place with real others where we might find a real self. We're just continuing to create a virtual self, just like we've always done, to present, to feign, to feint and have no followup but running away, hoping that the others are distracted by the puppet while we make our escape, like a
No. No metaphors. I'll say what it is, not what it's like, because that's what's got me where I am, not here, alone. It is what it is (whatever it may be), and an intentional metaphor would only obfuscate the fact, not objectify it.
Who am I kidding? It's all metaphor, all writing is, all language, all pointing at something and saying something else. I was about to say that I am sure there's a way through all this, a path. That's a metaphor, right there, as if life were just traveling down a confusion of roads, a simple matter of picking the right to get to wherever you want to end up, as if the end were the important part. Not that the journey's more important. A false dichotomy, it's all the same from this end, and no one's come back to tell us otherwise. What's for certain is that they never will. There's that, at least.
But the metaphor's so easy to slip into, though it takes a bit of work, and it always lies at least a little bit. And you'll say it's only a matter of degree, that the unadorned language itself is already a metaphor, since it's not the thing, just another thing that pretends to the be the thing it's describing, a lame impostor. So what's the difference if the metaphor lies more, or lies less? And if by lying more the metaphor's more memorable, more interesting, more beautiful even, who cares about objective truth, which you have no faith in anyway?
Ah, but I do. Have faith in an objective truth.
But no faith that it's perceptible.
A distinction. Not unimportant. Perhaps I can get close. That's my faith. Not much, but there it is. That's my defense against intentional metaphor, unnecessary metaphor. Why add to lies? There's enough of them to go around as it is. To make the world go around, world without end.
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
your thoughts...are just the sort of things i think. i am very much on the same page--the inescapable internality, the approximating/shunting activity of language, the existent but indiscernible objective truth.
thanks for coming back