What This Writing Does For You
[With special thanks to M. for asking me last night why I bother doing this blog.]
Words like Gatorade: refueling, tanking up, flowing through your circulation system.
What the writer wants to do for his readers is give them a piece of furniture to aid their getting up in the morning. The writer provides a second form of oxyegn-rich blood for those who are crippled by the complexity and conflict of the world-as-it-seems. He writes what amounts to an article, an essay, a book, a play, a poem, a song, a sonnet, a jingle, a catch-phrase -- some sort of glistening jewel-pellet dropped into the tiny hole at the crown of the head and into the vast labyrinths of the human nervous system. Each sentence, empty in itself, is by virtue of its relationship to all the other sentences, a thing of holographic beauty, an illusory energon-blast for someone who, in the last analysis, doesn't really need one to begin with. Writers remind their readers there is light in the world, and for that the best thanks is the removal of sunglasses, blinders, sleep masks, and blast helmets. Writers are the thin rivulet shock troops of the whole mighty ocean aching to storm ashore, and to follow a writer, to buy his books and to concern yourself with his career, is to be a caught in a riptide and pulled out to sea, where the sharks and idea fragments commingle and dissolve the hulls of aircraft carriers and manmade islands built of steel.
Phrases like food: filling, stuffing, delighting, gathered around, shared.
To quote an old indie rock band: I've got a magnet in my head, and the world is made of metal. Or rather, the plastic world contains bits of metal, stuck in enjambments and corners and in the crawl spaces between dumpsters. These bits of metal crave assembly in my head, and the assemblies crave to be displayed on the written/typed/blogged page. This is not to reduce the act of writing to mere bricolage, or metal-detecting; I'm not wearing gym shorts on a beach with zinc on my nose, oh no, not for you motherfuckers ;) This is to transduce the every written act, provided it is suspended in a tense magnetic/polar orientation between various sources of metal, as an act of needed, necessary, divine assemblage. In the Kabbalic sense: the world is made of shards of broken pottery, bits of broken light strewn about the globe, and it is our task to (re)assemble and share these shards.
Sentences like alcohol: loosening, strengthening, emboldening, dizzying.
All artists, then, have magnets in their heads, and hand grenade hearts, and ice skate fingers, and lamprey feet, and VTOL light show sabre stomachs, bursting through the Black Iron Empire's endless fiberoptic nets, granules of coagulated lichethin and blobs of small mercury raining down as we high-knee it through the rain, looking for metal, looking for shards, dragging a wagon and looking for shards.
Paragraphs like coffee: hot, dangerous, black, electric.
If you hold your blink down for too long, you know what I mean, for you feel the magnet inside aching to see once again, to perceive and conceive of Metal, Heavy Metal to be exact, razorblade powerchords of worldly experience/suffering shining forth in a shimmering vacuum of slipper desire and shallow Ultimate Concerns.
And then you open your eyes once again, and the plastic fills the page, and the coffee spills on the floor, and the food spoils in the midday air, and humanity rewinds to 1569 before magnets were ever known. Again.
Words like Gatorade: refueling, tanking up, flowing through your circulation system.What the writer wants to do for his readers is give them a piece of furniture to aid their getting up in the morning. The writer provides a second form of oxyegn-rich blood for those who are crippled by the complexity and conflict of the world-as-it-seems. He writes what amounts to an article, an essay, a book, a play, a poem, a song, a sonnet, a jingle, a catch-phrase -- some sort of glistening jewel-pellet dropped into the tiny hole at the crown of the head and into the vast labyrinths of the human nervous system. Each sentence, empty in itself, is by virtue of its relationship to all the other sentences, a thing of holographic beauty, an illusory energon-blast for someone who, in the last analysis, doesn't really need one to begin with. Writers remind their readers there is light in the world, and for that the best thanks is the removal of sunglasses, blinders, sleep masks, and blast helmets. Writers are the thin rivulet shock troops of the whole mighty ocean aching to storm ashore, and to follow a writer, to buy his books and to concern yourself with his career, is to be a caught in a riptide and pulled out to sea, where the sharks and idea fragments commingle and dissolve the hulls of aircraft carriers and manmade islands built of steel.
Phrases like food: filling, stuffing, delighting, gathered around, shared.
To quote an old indie rock band: I've got a magnet in my head, and the world is made of metal. Or rather, the plastic world contains bits of metal, stuck in enjambments and corners and in the crawl spaces between dumpsters. These bits of metal crave assembly in my head, and the assemblies crave to be displayed on the written/typed/blogged page. This is not to reduce the act of writing to mere bricolage, or metal-detecting; I'm not wearing gym shorts on a beach with zinc on my nose, oh no, not for you motherfuckers ;) This is to transduce the every written act, provided it is suspended in a tense magnetic/polar orientation between various sources of metal, as an act of needed, necessary, divine assemblage. In the Kabbalic sense: the world is made of shards of broken pottery, bits of broken light strewn about the globe, and it is our task to (re)assemble and share these shards.
Sentences like alcohol: loosening, strengthening, emboldening, dizzying.
All artists, then, have magnets in their heads, and hand grenade hearts, and ice skate fingers, and lamprey feet, and VTOL light show sabre stomachs, bursting through the Black Iron Empire's endless fiberoptic nets, granules of coagulated lichethin and blobs of small mercury raining down as we high-knee it through the rain, looking for metal, looking for shards, dragging a wagon and looking for shards.
Paragraphs like coffee: hot, dangerous, black, electric.
If you hold your blink down for too long, you know what I mean, for you feel the magnet inside aching to see once again, to perceive and conceive of Metal, Heavy Metal to be exact, razorblade powerchords of worldly experience/suffering shining forth in a shimmering vacuum of slipper desire and shallow Ultimate Concerns.
And then you open your eyes once again, and the plastic fills the page, and the coffee spills on the floor, and the food spoils in the midday air, and humanity rewinds to 1569 before magnets were ever known. Again.
posted by Paul S. at
3:53 PM
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