Not Inappropriate
A patchwork of ideas.
Give me a break. What an exhaustive constrictor!
Now a pebble can hit a bamboo and we can dwell amidst a landscape of strange rock formations and crystal springs, spending the rest of our lines in secluded repose. We shall not vainly pass by jewels a foot-wide in span and squander moments of time to no purpose. We shall eliminate rough edges, give up being picky and choosy and enjoy donkey work of day-to-day plodding through writing.
My indulgence in conceptualisation was tying me up without a rope. Every moment is beyond words or conceptual thought, free of entanglements. Sudden, unexpected shifts are attempts to bypass or short-circuit a purely intellectual comprehension. The text is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary. Readers are not the reason for its existence, but their self-awareness and reflection make them special within it.
How far will this process go? It’s impossible to say. But we have a reasonable guess, based on our progress thus far: it will go all the way. We will ultimately understand the text as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself. That’s a big deal.
Everything about the text suggests that it is intelligible: if we try hard enough we can come to understand it. There is so much we still don’t know about how it works, but at the same time there’s a great deal that we have figured out. Mysteries abound, but there’s no reason to worry (or hope) that any of them are unsolvable. It’s us against the puzzle; if we care about understanding, we’re on the same side.
Acquiescence bias: readers tend to agree with a statement when in doubt, regardless of the content. Barnum effect: readers seeks a correspondence between their perception of reality and the contents of the text. My errors are the portals of discovery. We all bear conflicting needs within us. We want both, simplicity and abundance.
Curiosity is a form of desire. The text’s whimsy is the product of wonder-worthy randomness, an unmerited grace of evolutionary caprice. Nothing is original. We make our thefts authentic and we don’t bother concealing them. There is nothing new except what has been missed.
In August it rained all the time — heavy, corrosive rain from which only nettles and rusty metal derived refreshment. I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the centre. I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time. The best way of talking about what you love is to speak of it lightly.
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind. Anyway, literature should not disappear up its own asshole. And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction. Everything is nothing, with a twist.
