8.22.2006

it's been a long time...i'm sorry but i don't write when i'm unhappy...

This is a slight attempt to get out of my educative complacency...a way to figure out how to get myself motivated and back into the swing of things. I am unsure how the next couple weeks are going to turn out, if in fact they will turn into the next few months. Part of me just wants to give up and say forget it all...in fact, it is turning out not to help my job search anyways, and part of me just wants to move on to bigger and better things. I find inspiration in other places & people these days and my heart and mind are much more rewarded than ever before. I feel for the first time, a cohesion between heart, home, future, ambitions...this makes me smile in contentment...I do not know if ever there was a time before that this strange coming together has ever happened.

"To write, I meditated, must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deap ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus os his disillusionement. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. His inspiration is deflected at the source. If it is a world of truth, beauty and magic that he desires to create, why does he put millions of words between himself and the reality of that world? Why does he defer action - unless it be that, like other men, what he really despires is power, fame, success. 'Books are human actions in death,' said Balzac. Yet, having perceived the truth, he deliberately surrendered the angel to the demon which possessed him.

A writer woos his public just as ignominously as a politician or any other mountebank; he loves to finger the great pulse, to prescribe like a physician, to win a place for himself, to be recognized as a force, to receive the full cup of adulation, even if it be deferred a thousand years. He doesn't want a new world which might be established immediately, because he knows it would never suit him. He wants an impossible world in which he is the uncrowned puppet-ruler dominated by forces utterly beyond his control. He is content to rule insiduously - in the fictive world of symbols - because the very thought of contact with rude and brutal realities frightens him. Tru, he has a greater grasp of reality than other men, but he makes no effort to impose that higher reality on the world by force of example. He is satisfied just to preach, to drag along in the wake of disasters and catastrophes, a death-croaking prophet always without honor, always stoned, always shunned by those who, however unsuited for their tasks, are ready and willing to assume responsibility for the affairs of the world. The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of his imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain. The process of putting down words is equivalent to giving oneself a narcotic. Observing the growth of a book under his hands, the author swells with delusions of grandeur. 'I too am a conqueror - perhaps the greatest conqueror of all! My day is coming. I will enslave the world - by the magic of words....' Et cetera ad nauseum." -Henry Miller, "The Rosy Crucifiction, part 1: Sexus", p.17-19