Post script of 5/29/10 - 2:20 pm- I wrote this post fast, in about 20-30 minutes without stopping. I've read it since and have realized how very quickly I produced it. I am shocked by many of the things I write when I read them later, and this post is particularly emotional and interesting to me. Then I was looking at W.G. Sebald's Vertigo and I read a line that I felt like I wanted to associate with this post. A character is seeing couples while reflecting on the death of his partner and he writes "How it is beautiful, he wrote, with an exclamation mark, in one of those somewhat awry formulations in which language for a moment gives free reign to the emotions. How it is beautiful and how we undervalue it!"- That is how I want this post to feel. Like my words are giving free reign to my emotions.
They are practically essays. They take a lot out of me. I read and I read and I read and I finish some book and suddenly I have great new ideas about things I have never thought of before. I feel flaming and outraged. I love the way I feel these days.
It is far beyond my ability to explain, however.
School is done and I am eating away at my own soul constantly. In a good way. I eat at myself. I pick at my beliefs. I pick at the things that I don't understand.
There is so much I don't understand.
I love walking and living and working and breathing and writing. I just feel so upset sometimes. In a good way.
This writing is so fast, so frantic, so scared. Because I want to vomit forth things. I want to bleed words. But I don't. Writing is not like bleeding. Writing is like surgery. Maybe.
But I don't think it is as effortless as bleeding. Absolutely not. I work so hard to think. I have to fight for words and sentences. I have to swing in the dark for sense.
The frontiers of my thought.
I try to find them and then I transgress them. I'm never sure if I really do. But I want them. I want them everywhere. I want to march all over my own mind. I want to turn it into my field.
But no. It's not a field. It isn't something manageable.
The mind is not some field and I am not some fucking farmer.
I am a legless individual sitting in the middle of an overgrown marsh. I sink into the muck and I watch things grow around me. I watch my mind gather experience and I watch that experience feed the weeds.
The more I think and feel and live the more I know my experience is overwhelming me with its incoherency.
Then I cut down the weeds. I try to make sense of it. I attack myself, my cluttered inner space. I swing wildly with words (which are like blades).
Experience as weeds, words as blades.
Your lawn, your mind, your grass, will be overrun with growth. You will never turn your mind into a farm.
You can only hope to harvest some things every now and then.
You feed it. You read. You write. You try to make sense. But then you have to let the experiences of life overwhelm your tools.
Then you try to prune back all the weeds. You use words to make sense of your experience.
David Shields' The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead is really exciting to me. He is such an interesting writer. I love how he blends memoir, narrative, and non-fiction.
Facts about bodies. Their death. Their breakdown. Their decay. Their sexual maturity. All of these facts intertwined with appropriate moments of memoir.
I find it incredibly compelling.
I am writing this post because I am bursting with flame that I can't articulate.
I feel something so strong and intense right now.
Had a really nice visit with my family today for mothers day and my birthday celebration. And I liked it a lot. We had a really good time, and I feel so fired up.
All my blog posts are so hard for me to write. I read and read and read. Then I write and write and write. I try to make sense of these things for myself because no one else reads them. And I don't care.
That isn't what I do this for.
Some people have read them. They are unwieldy I hear. Inaccessible? Call it whatever, I don't expect anyone else to get pleasure or interest from these things I write.
Though that won't defeat my fantasy that someday someone will read it and then they will have a lot to say and we will have a great conversation about a range of personal and philosophical topics.
I am incredibly open. To most things. Can't say everything.
But I was thinking about people more than anything else. I love people. I get so much satisfaction out of being with other people. Especially other people who like to be with me.
Unfortunately, my reading and writing is a solitary activity. And I spend time alone, because I like doing it.
But come on. Give me a break.
I could just feel and feel and feel all day every day. Then sometimes maybe I don't feel a lot.
What am I even trying to communicate in this writing? What do I feel? It is beyond me to explain precisely.
I am in a dynamic time in life. I started a new job and I like it a lot. I have plans to move in the relatively near future. My reading has been self-directed and I am extremely happy with the things I have been reading.
I feel a fury that I have never seen in anyone else. Not because other people don't have it. But because it is so goddamn hard to get close enough to someone that we can unleash everything we have.
How much fire do all these people have? Do these people love and hate as many things as I do? Do their emotions floor them? Does life feel so dynamic that it hurts in a good way? I feel all these things and I can't wait until I get close enough to people to really unleash this fire, and to feel their fire.
Life is so goddamn alone.
Who was it. What did I read? Was it Reality Hunger? Shields again? I forget. I think it was someone else that I can't remember.
But someone was talking about how many millions of people there are, and how many of them feel so alone. How it would be great if these millions of people could cure each others loneliness. But they can't. They don't want each other. They want one. Who do they want?
Why is it so hard to connect with other people?
Let me get a little bit more personal.
I find few things more satisfying than a genuine emotional or intellectual connection with another person. Nothing else has the ability to set me ablaze. To make me love myself and love the world. When I engage with a person who likes to engage with me, my mind enters a delightful space. I feel good. I feel okay. I feel okay.
David Shields said a good book makes him feel 'human and unalone.' Books offer a window into people, and I love books as a way to connecting with other people. Authors I really like, they are my friends. I know their styles, I know them as a mind.
But why is it so hard to find minds around me? I mean, they are all around me. What is it that I feel that I want when I'm alone? What is it that I want? Who is it that I want? I don't want anyone.
But I wan't everyone. I love people. I reject society. Meh. I don't really do either of those things all the way, I do both sorta.
Let me drop a little arrogance. I think I have a certain intensity in my thoughts and feelings. I think I have a pretty good command of the English language, and I think I am in touch with my feelings enough that I can clearly articulate them despite the difficulties.
I want to unleash the full power of my mind. I want to bring everything I have to the table.
Unfortunately, I don't know where to do that. I quite a number of people that I express some pretty heavy stuff to. But I don't know.
It is rare that I feel like I bear my soul to someone and they feel the gravity of what I am saying. Honestly, I guess the bottom line is that I don't know that many people who want me to bear my soul in front of them.
But I like bearing myself.
I am more fascinated by pain than anything else.
Life hurts. And I have spent a long time looking at that, and thinking about it. I want to talk about pain.
But I mean, I also want to talk about love and happiness and all that. But pain. Pain is the realness.
Seriously, I could explore. I feel such a fury. Not an anger. A passion. A fire. An explosion swirling in me that I can't help but contain because all I have is these goddamn words.
I imagine anyone who read all of this may not have felt my words. Fuck these words. Forget these words. Feel my flame. Feel my excitement for every dynamic day. Feel me rejecting the perceived monotony of life in America.
That is not where I am.
Feel me going absolutely insane because I can't express myself enough. And more importantly, no one is listening enough. How silly and dramatic that last sentence sounds, yeah?
Oh well.
Who is listening? My friends, my family.
Who do I want to talk to? I don't know yet.
I want to explode
I want to set myself on fire. Because I think I will produce gold.
My mind is a form of alchemy.
In the pond of minds I will be king amoeba.
I will eat the world.
I will throw it up.
I couldn't deal with any academic writing right now.
So instead I decided to write without stopping or thinking. And now I think I am at the end.
And I don't like it.
I think I feel alienated like I have for quite a while.
I think I am going to throw myself a party where I do everything I want all the time. The party of my life. Unlikely.
But anyways. Perhaps I'll conclude since I am clearly losing direction.
My blogs, my essays, seem a little bit dense and inaccessible to me. I don't think they speak to other people. I don't think that others take things from them. I don't think anyone has tried a ton and I don't think they should necessarily.
But these blogs. They are everything to me. I take so much pride in them. I think my reading has come so far. I think my writing is improving. I think I am working with ideas that I will import to graduate school. I think I am breaking ground for myself and ideally for others. Pipe dreams, ahoy.
Yet, I despise these essays because I don't think they do justice to how intense my emotions are. To how intense my life feels to me. To how much I love living every day. How much I love reading and writing and thinking. I don't think they do me justice.
I want people to feel me. I want to look people in the eye and tell them exactly how I feel. And I think that I am more than capable of doing it. I look people in the eye and I tell them how I feel.
So why do I have so many and so few confidants? I know all kinds of people I can talk to. And I do talk to them. Yet so often I want more. MORE MORE MORE. GIVE ME MORE OF YOUR MIND.
The National: 'I was afraid I'd eat your brains. Cause I'm evil.'
I really want to know other people. I want to eat brains. I want to know know know. I want to feel feel feel.
Let me inside your mind. I want to see what is happening in there. Because my mind eats me alive. It takes me everywhere and it tosses me back and forth.
It drowns me in itself.
I love my mind.
RAH!
Oh how this text fails to communicate what I am feeling.
But, anyways. Moving on. Two blog posts on the way once I finish my edits to my literary paper and send it off to Notre Dame.
First, 'Narrative as an Investigatory Tool: Science, History, and Fiction.' Based a lot on John Lewis Gaddis' The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Fascinating book. Science embraces narrative, not just experimentation. Think of evolutionary biology, astronomy. The scale goes beyond the lab, so the imagination has to pick up the slack.
Second, 'The Dance Between the Ego and the Quantum Self.' Based on ideas in quantum physics about transcending the perceived separateness between living things. Consciousness, some claim, is more fundamental than matter, and therefore, is the unifying substance. The ego, I, as a perceived separate individual, must prepare myself to attain the quantum self, and then I must actualize it. This will be heavy. Reiki and yoga were very influential for me in my late high school years. Now I don't know how to grapple with them. But quantum physics is very much shaking up the way I think about things.
When was the last time I cried? I forget. Perhaps a little bit ago. Maybe the last episode of Lost made me cry. I don't think so.
But I want this post to reek of tears and pain and ecstasy. I am so happy these days. I feel like I am boundless. I feel like I am moving in the exact direction I need to be.
But if you read this, do me one favor: try to feel for me. Know that my words are not words, they are a feeling that overwhelms me and has no precise form of articulation.
Read my words and feel my love for the pain of life.
To conclude: if I had it my way, I would be the baddest motherfucking intellectual of the 21st century.
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