I have to turn to something else. Writing my new “book” is fatiguing me and the subject is intense so that I have transferred to the blog to calm down. I’ve noticed that over the past week or so that I write fewer blogs; the unconscious needs time to fill up before it decants itself. I have been writing about “emptiness” versus “awareness” and I have chosen in my parody to take the side of emptiness. And as I sink into my empty self I am struggling to define what it is to be fully empty, that is an oxymoron in a way. The annoying thing is that often i start something and all along the process I feel it will not work and I am feeling this is so in my new effort. Call it the old depressive in me.
I persevere. I slog through my own verbal shit, now and then coming upon some worthy phrase or insight, perhaps outsight; after all, I am writing about emptiness and I am beginnging to feel there is merit in that stance. What i want to do is go after all the Dyers, Dr. Phils and Chopras who hawk awareness as a commodity. I find all three galling, experts supposedly on their own internal states and then like Joseph Smith selling the snake oil to others, so vastly American. Like religion, these awareness peddlers are the “dragon at the gate.” Perversely, I make a case for emptiness as I throw the gauntlet down. To make it “fun” or digestible, I use humor, ha ha, quizzes, anecdotes, all the paraphernalia of the self-help book. And quite frankly I go after the holies of our culture –Mother Teresa, religion (easy target), hard work, et al. It is quite enervating but I like to snarl at what I feel are the apparitions of bullshit in this culture.
What I intend to do with this short pamphlet or slim book is to self-publish it and give it away as a throwaway. My business card, if you will. I have no doubt that this book has percolated away from consciousness for many years, for its sourness and misanthropy have long been with me. One of the great moments of literature is when at the the end of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver is on a raft, isolated, desolate. When by chance he is discovered by a boat, at first he refuses to come aboard. It is a great moment, for he has seen enough of human nature that the thought to be with others of his kind nauseates him. Bravo!
On this blog I feel free to blather and blather I do. When I began in September 2007 I introduced myself and my intent for this blog. I hold true to it. it is a Thoreauvian puddle, of a kind. I find it useful to write to myself each day as a way of emptying ballast. Very few people respond to bloggers, I have noticed, I have read. I find it interesting that on some sites thousands have visited and maybe 30 to 40 comments are left. Do you have a thought about that? I do. Whatever! I go on quite oblivious to you as you are to me. And so it is in this culture. I believe that a sincere and good writer, leave great writers to history, are writers — this is only a self-centered belief on my part — who are discontented. I know where my discontent lies. And that is for me to work out and work it out I do every time I sit down to express myself. As I said to someone who tried to pin me down like a Nabokovian butterfly with a pin through its thorax, that I am happily discontented — lovvve that oxymoron. Like Indian madras, she had trouble handling the running colors.
I tire and end on this note.
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