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Entirely full of it. |
| It's a blog with entries. Blog entries. On days of the week but not all of them. Thoughts and ideas that occur to its author but not all of them. |
| What it is and what it isn't. A scene where the MC exits the misty cloud forest onto a crustal block that had slid down the crater wall. I've seen it so often play out in my mind's eye and yet I still don't know how I will write it. It's exhausting and of course the only way it's ever going to work is by writing it. By the time I do it, it will seem so stale I will have no clue about its quality. This is so veering into the banal but I don't know what else to do. I've written a few things in a certain style that seemed to work very well. It's almost poetic in a way, but I don't want to write a whole novel that way. Do I? Right, I don't know. This here is writing for the sake of writing. The worst kind. Empty. Hollow. Not even a facade. Is it good for anything? It may be. Words roll out onto the page no energy applied. They have nothing in them to nourish the reader. There will be no reader and perhaps that is why it is still a good idea. What are these empty words? What are these sentences? They are sentences but they signify so little that they barely register. They cannot sustain anything. They are a form of pollution, drifting, a plastic patch in the pacific ocean. Even less. They can provide no cover. These words drift along in a country sized plankton bloom of useless sentences. Used up sentences. One can hear them and they fit the required patterns, the absolute minimum for language. They follow the currents of the ocean, going around and around, slowly visiting the same geographic points every few months. Degradation under the tropical sun is almost imperceptible. A couple of letters at a time at the outer edges of an ill-conceived raft. Hardly a change in meaning, no recombination. These are not genetic materials, they are inert. Their dreadful uniqueness cannot save them from oblivion. They will disintegrate and the universe will be rid of them and nothing will have changed. It is better this way. What more can I send to that mass of unmeaning? Am I making progress? Yep, that one will definitely fit in. There will be no suspicions, and the guileless raft will float on unravelling, growing, dissipating, disappearing. No progress one way or the other. They will have to play golf elsewhere. I've been delving deeper, mining the metaphors of metaphysics, the vocabulary of it. The history of thinking about things, the cognitive landscape where every word has a very particular meaning. This meaning is often critical in understanding a concept, and the meaning drifts over time. Not only that but language itself drifts, and cultural understanding changes. Each term collects baggage, becomes a container. The container comes in the guise of a word used in a relatively straightforward way - let's say, common parlance. Using a dictionary, and let's only (!) look at English (oh god.. ), we start unfolding this container. We're unfolding and not unpacking because the container and its contents cannot be separated. Is it a map, perhaps? Hold on to your metaphors, hang on to them, don't lose them. We find several definitions because even in the common tongue words have manifold flavours. Select one that has some philosophical weight to it. These are often indicated if it is a good dictionary (for various flavours of good) with a label such as PHILOSOPHY. Handy, but not necessarily enough. The definition will be of limited use and each term in the definition is in itself a map (if you wish) pointing to lands further off. You may need a flotation device. You're going to need something. Pack the warmer socks. Further to the unfurling, and here I realize that there is a theme now, but do not get too taken in by it. It is a reflection of my lack of imagination and has scarcely any roots in reality. The plane of immanence is not yet on the horizon and we are still coasting along on the pacific ocean garbage patch of meaninglessness. First one unfurling -let's say a sail- then others as the recipe, (the map?!), demands. I hope that you brought with you the larger dictionary and at the same time I hope that it floats. And, for god's sake, rehydrate often. This is thirsty business. |
| I write because I am. I am before I write. Write, me. But before I go on, let's step back and take a good look at this word: Balk. It can also appear in the form: Baulk. Either way, I want to suggest caution and vigilance. When you encounter this word, mark your surroundings, recognize your companions. Take note of those who utter the word, and indeed also those who balk at it, at the uttering of it. Take measure of their balk. Look out for this word among your conversations. I tell you now there will come a reckoning. The word is uncanny in writing but more so in conversation. It is, I believe, a word of alien origins. Celestial alienness. It is not from around here. You will protest. You will tell me of its rural, south Bavarian heritage, the ploughs, the mules. But I will attend to your response most carefully. Your eyes as they shift uncomfortably, your hands. Do you suddenly need to scratch your nose, is that a sweat sheen on your ample forehead? Yes, and I will listen for tell-tale hesitations and careful pronunciations. The tone, the cadence. This word, balk, is not one of ours. I feel this, I know this. Humans don't do it. We don't balk. |
| Exuberant. Elated. Joy. It slips off, that joy. It finds rest on the floor from where it cannot fall further. We'll leave it there for now since we have other things that require our attention. What we may do is push it under the desk with the metal tipped toe of our boot. Later, when we sweep out the place, just before we depart into that good night, we'll scoop it up and dispose of it in the dustbin. We will exube and elate at its good riddance. I've been reviewing the written word lately on a website called, and it is aptly so called, I feel, writing.com. The customers of the site are dedicated writers, if not all that enthused by reading. This makes sense because otherwise it might have been called reading.com which I imagine is currently a site specific to a village in England. But to return to the reviewing part of the conversation before we get carried away again by these necessary vexations. I've been looking particularly at poetry on the site. Reviewing poems. And I've been overjoyed to discover that there are ways of reviewing and critiquing poems which can be fun. This can only mean that I am unwell, that I should *get that checked out* as my son would say. I should and I will but not for a little while yet. I had in mind a surgeon, the surgical tools, the excisions and rearrangements, the viscera. The mind of a surgeon. Precise, delicate, discrete. Then I must have thought of the emergency room where the finer sensibilities of our surgeon are overwhelmed. The technician becomes the brawler. The fight has to end and it has to do so right now. Our surgeon comes in, fists flying. No more left jabs, surgical straight rights, it’s all power now, left hooks, right hooks, upper cuts. Defense a distant thing of dead tired clenches in the corners to catch a breath before the next assault. It's blood in the ring and blood in the ER. The hiss and clunk of the crowd, the roar of the cutting machinery. The towel that hurdles the ropes flashes weakly before it collapses on the floor at the ref's still shiny black shoes, a wet rag once white now bruised pink and red. In that corner disheartened resignation, in this one weary victory. The mouthguard tastes like gristle. The patient is... The mixed metaphor and its invariable extensions become muddled. This is probably, and I've only figured it out at this minute, why writers are discouraged from using them. The tools of the surgeon, the fists of the pugilist. The poem is the patient, but that's as far as it goes. Reviewing a poem should probably not be a boxing match, and who are you fighting with, you over-ambitious, misguided little plastic surgeon? The fat lips, the irretrievable noses, the sweeps, the epicanthic folds, the malleable flesh. One would imagine a delicate touch is required. There is little need for violence. Surely? |
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