Chapter 1: Building Houses, Hauling Wood, Managing Trash, and Lighting Fires
INTRO
Houellebecq calls the poet a "sacred parasite", and indeed he's not far off. At the moment I am neglecting my wordly obligations in order to indulge a forbidden, scary muse: writing. And writing about writing. One could hardly find a more self-indulgent pursuit. Writing about writing is bad enough, but blogging about writing about writing puts one firmly in the postmodern house of mirrors, where even those who normally eschew vanity are kissing and fondling their reflections at every turn.
Today I talked with a friend about Americorps. I have a lot of personal ties to Americorps people, but never got to experience it myself. This friend has fallen in love with a project involving inner city youth. Another one found his true calling in life building houses in Montana. Neither of them are blogging about writing about writing. Theirs are lives of service, selflessness, and giving, sheer kryptonite to we lunatic artists.
Yet why does this Muse call me forth? WHY am I going through the painful contortions of typing, squinting, and pumping my body full of sugar and caffiene at 1 in the morning? What light lies at the end of the typewritten tunnel? Is there any?
In the act of writing we find a bridging, an intermediary, a hermetic/promethean process, wherein pure fire is stolen from the volcano mouth of the Higher Mind (that mind which generates the infinite impossible worldspaces of one's dreamtime) and brought into the sensible, intelligible world. Words are hot molten metal, cooled and poured into forms. These forms are used much the way physical molten forms are used: as tools, weapons, things of use value.
For too long, writing has been about self-expression, self-indulgence, infantile emotionalism, obscurantism, and career-tracking. We have come to lop the head off of this notion, to restore writing to its proper role: building houses, hauling wood, managing trash, and lighting fires.
BUILDING HOUSES
The noospehere is a hostile environment, and humans understandably turn to ideas as a shelter from the storming predators of Thought Chaos. Idealogies represent one such form of shelter, but they are crude and utilitarian. See Christianity, or Hinduism, or Jediism, or Wilberism as variations on the underlying theme of post, lintil, floor, wall, and roof. Writing, on the other hand, in the sense we wish to explore in this piece, is not a home, but a system/form of sacred homelessness, where one casts oneself out of the comfort of fixed and cherished ideas, and heads out into the wandering unknown of Anything Can Happen, Anything Can Make Sense. Writing is not sedentary, but a roving inquiry of empowered geography-straddling, the means by which the wandering Mind-Hermit might engage the hostile planes of data-junk with an Open Heart and open, begging hands. His feet become the floor, his head becomes the ceiling, his body the post and lintil, and the whole wide terrible world his walls. Life spent wandering the one-room studio apartment of life, rent-controlled and with beautiful views.
HAULING WOOD
Hauling wood automatically implies its own dissolution and irrelevance, the fire which burns the wood away. The hauling is difficult effort, teeth-grinding labor, work in its crudest sense, and the writer quails at the idea of sacrificing this activity to the cheap nihilism of bonfires and ash. His will is to dig notches into each log to build a house, to have his efforts Count For Something, to Leave a Legacy, to Etch His Mark on the Ass Crack of History. We can forgive the writer for wishing the situation to be so. But alas, it is not, and wood hauled with broken fingers over ten miles of rolling hills and mountain lion tracks is wasted effort indeed, so much sweat poured to create so much heat to create so much light to create so much ash.
MANAGING TRASH
You have seen the Internet. You have seen library shelves. You have seen disordered piles of CDs on the floors of messy roommates, you've witnessed a year's worth of newspapers filling a dumpster, you've tasted bad fusion food with ingredient lists longer than the arms used to stir it. You know, more than even rapper Immortal Technique, that we are being burned in this melting pot of symbol systems and marketing pitches, announcements of desire and pragmatic/technical requirements. This, for the writer, is nothing to fear, in fact it is raw material. The writer is a garbage picker, surfing the piles of discarded/lost/underused ideas and putting them together into pieces of art worthy of "Family Ties" boyfriend Nick's own junk-sculpture shop floor. Yet unlike Nick's pseudo-Modernist masterworks, the refuse-wading writer is not surfing to create trad art objects, but GADGETS, gizmos, widgets, and doodads-- gimmicks and toys and wind-up robots which, in their collective self-propelled activities, approximate the noospheric equivalent of living being. Writings live beyond their writers, accrue new limbs and utilities, and mate and miscegenate with other gadgets from the wrong side of the tracks. Juxtaposing ideas is like BattleBots for horny droids, and are we no longer surprised when said forbidden couplings bear out new offspring of sparks, jagged metal, and swinging booms?
LIGHTING FIRES
As eluded to above, the writer concerns himself lastly with lighting fires, setting off blazes, seeding the dried-up kindling forests of bored and tired minds with controlled burns which, God willing, will touch-off whole Feel-Forests and, in two weeks' time, set the whole world ablaze. When writers are writing the right way, you will know it, for the solar system will have a second sun, this one visible at night, behind closed eyes, in dreams and in the margins of notebooks, the backbeats of rock songs, the spaces between beer bottles and in the inch of young flesh just beneath the waistband of a 20-something virgin. The writer is both arsonist and smoke jumper, the guy with the matches and the girl in the foil tent with the parachute and the ax, gasping to survive the conflagration s/he touched off, and blowing on it with the lungs of God to whip it up into higher and fuller furies.
Building houses, hauling wood, managing trash, and lighting fires: let us concern ourselves now with the actual, semi-secretive behaviors needed to carry these objectives forth.
Houellebecq calls the poet a "sacred parasite", and indeed he's not far off. At the moment I am neglecting my wordly obligations in order to indulge a forbidden, scary muse: writing. And writing about writing. One could hardly find a more self-indulgent pursuit. Writing about writing is bad enough, but blogging about writing about writing puts one firmly in the postmodern house of mirrors, where even those who normally eschew vanity are kissing and fondling their reflections at every turn.
Today I talked with a friend about Americorps. I have a lot of personal ties to Americorps people, but never got to experience it myself. This friend has fallen in love with a project involving inner city youth. Another one found his true calling in life building houses in Montana. Neither of them are blogging about writing about writing. Theirs are lives of service, selflessness, and giving, sheer kryptonite to we lunatic artists.
Yet why does this Muse call me forth? WHY am I going through the painful contortions of typing, squinting, and pumping my body full of sugar and caffiene at 1 in the morning? What light lies at the end of the typewritten tunnel? Is there any?
In the act of writing we find a bridging, an intermediary, a hermetic/promethean process, wherein pure fire is stolen from the volcano mouth of the Higher Mind (that mind which generates the infinite impossible worldspaces of one's dreamtime) and brought into the sensible, intelligible world. Words are hot molten metal, cooled and poured into forms. These forms are used much the way physical molten forms are used: as tools, weapons, things of use value.
For too long, writing has been about self-expression, self-indulgence, infantile emotionalism, obscurantism, and career-tracking. We have come to lop the head off of this notion, to restore writing to its proper role: building houses, hauling wood, managing trash, and lighting fires.
BUILDING HOUSES
The noospehere is a hostile environment, and humans understandably turn to ideas as a shelter from the storming predators of Thought Chaos. Idealogies represent one such form of shelter, but they are crude and utilitarian. See Christianity, or Hinduism, or Jediism, or Wilberism as variations on the underlying theme of post, lintil, floor, wall, and roof. Writing, on the other hand, in the sense we wish to explore in this piece, is not a home, but a system/form of sacred homelessness, where one casts oneself out of the comfort of fixed and cherished ideas, and heads out into the wandering unknown of Anything Can Happen, Anything Can Make Sense. Writing is not sedentary, but a roving inquiry of empowered geography-straddling, the means by which the wandering Mind-Hermit might engage the hostile planes of data-junk with an Open Heart and open, begging hands. His feet become the floor, his head becomes the ceiling, his body the post and lintil, and the whole wide terrible world his walls. Life spent wandering the one-room studio apartment of life, rent-controlled and with beautiful views.
HAULING WOOD
Hauling wood automatically implies its own dissolution and irrelevance, the fire which burns the wood away. The hauling is difficult effort, teeth-grinding labor, work in its crudest sense, and the writer quails at the idea of sacrificing this activity to the cheap nihilism of bonfires and ash. His will is to dig notches into each log to build a house, to have his efforts Count For Something, to Leave a Legacy, to Etch His Mark on the Ass Crack of History. We can forgive the writer for wishing the situation to be so. But alas, it is not, and wood hauled with broken fingers over ten miles of rolling hills and mountain lion tracks is wasted effort indeed, so much sweat poured to create so much heat to create so much light to create so much ash.
MANAGING TRASH
You have seen the Internet. You have seen library shelves. You have seen disordered piles of CDs on the floors of messy roommates, you've witnessed a year's worth of newspapers filling a dumpster, you've tasted bad fusion food with ingredient lists longer than the arms used to stir it. You know, more than even rapper Immortal Technique, that we are being burned in this melting pot of symbol systems and marketing pitches, announcements of desire and pragmatic/technical requirements. This, for the writer, is nothing to fear, in fact it is raw material. The writer is a garbage picker, surfing the piles of discarded/lost/underused ideas and putting them together into pieces of art worthy of "Family Ties" boyfriend Nick's own junk-sculpture shop floor. Yet unlike Nick's pseudo-Modernist masterworks, the refuse-wading writer is not surfing to create trad art objects, but GADGETS, gizmos, widgets, and doodads-- gimmicks and toys and wind-up robots which, in their collective self-propelled activities, approximate the noospheric equivalent of living being. Writings live beyond their writers, accrue new limbs and utilities, and mate and miscegenate with other gadgets from the wrong side of the tracks. Juxtaposing ideas is like BattleBots for horny droids, and are we no longer surprised when said forbidden couplings bear out new offspring of sparks, jagged metal, and swinging booms?
LIGHTING FIRES
As eluded to above, the writer concerns himself lastly with lighting fires, setting off blazes, seeding the dried-up kindling forests of bored and tired minds with controlled burns which, God willing, will touch-off whole Feel-Forests and, in two weeks' time, set the whole world ablaze. When writers are writing the right way, you will know it, for the solar system will have a second sun, this one visible at night, behind closed eyes, in dreams and in the margins of notebooks, the backbeats of rock songs, the spaces between beer bottles and in the inch of young flesh just beneath the waistband of a 20-something virgin. The writer is both arsonist and smoke jumper, the guy with the matches and the girl in the foil tent with the parachute and the ax, gasping to survive the conflagration s/he touched off, and blowing on it with the lungs of God to whip it up into higher and fuller furies.
Building houses, hauling wood, managing trash, and lighting fires: let us concern ourselves now with the actual, semi-secretive behaviors needed to carry these objectives forth.
8 Comments:
"Writing, on the other hand, in the sense we wish to explore in this piece, is not a home, but a system/form of sacred homelessness, where one casts oneself out of the comfort of fixed and cherished ideas, and heads out into the wandering unknown of Anything Can Happen, Anything Can Make Sense. Writing is not sedentary, but a roving inquiry of empowered geography-straddling, the means by which the wandering Mind-Hermit might engage the hostile planes of data-junk with an Open Heart and open, begging hands."
Thanks for the molten swoon into your mystically marauding madness.
you
are
welcome!
Master P,
Not that good is particulary relevant here, but this is the Best writing, in my opinion, you've ever done.
How do we learn to support one another without a Rah-Rah, Sis-Boom Bah kinda feel? How do I communicate to you, to go on, even if it is madness of a sort...2,4,6,8, let's all anti-coagulate?
CJ:
dropping me a comment once a day might do the trick! ;)
including each other's blogs in our creative visualizations maybe? and you should add some mroe images to yours...
-p
Hey paul,
wow, there just too much writing, can only read a little at a time, but good so far.
devon
catch up, slacker!!
;)
you people with your fancy internet connections think your sooooo cool. Im at the library, I only get one hour a day. Consider it an honor to get some of my time. I should be looking for a place to live.
or even, gasp, a job.
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