GET OUT OF THAT CHAIR, GO OUTSIDE

Well, you must stop sometimes so you can appreciate what the senses have given you as you go your way through the world. You must stop in order to write about the need to pursue the seductive logic of never stopping. But you must stop before you go forward, as the brain absorbs only so much; you stop, you breathe, you think, you connect what has happened recently with the narrative of a life already recorded. This engages you with the world, truly, this is where the poetry comes from, not gushing hot lava adjectives and verbs while writing that the world is made more real by moving forward, without apology, without pause or reflection, following the string where ever it leads. But this is not poetry and it is not lyricism. Self-acceptance is one thing, but it seems to me that changing oneself is required in order to maintain a level of sanity that can return you sanity after the battering, high and low and in-between, human existence brings us. We cannot remain stubbornly the same as a means of spiting those who attempt to add us to their particularized set of neurosis; learning how to change is an essential skill.

 Perhaps “change” is the wrong word, as its been co-opted and poisoned by every fad pop-psychology has heaped upon our mass-mediated culture. More appropriate, more useful, perhaps, would be “grow”. Screw trying to change yourself into an internet meme, our tasks is to remain teachable and to grow into new experience, to learn, to become wiser and more full of the love for the world as well as love for ourselves. Too many of us pay a sorry price for having an excess of one or the other. We can grow into ourselves into the world we find ourselves, as individuals, as citizens, as members of a community. I realize the phrase “To thine own self be true” is a cliché that makes many cringes, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a bad way to go. It’s a matter of how we do it. Besides gaining knowledge through experience, we should be able to gather wisdom as well. Or one would think. 

The writer in those times they stop agitating the gravel and take pause to reflect, meditate, consider the thingness of the world they’ve blazed through a little too quickly, there arises the sense that one forgets that they are a writer, the self-appointed priest of making things happen on the fly; the writing becomes about the world , the people, the places, the things that occupy the same space as you, the same patch of land your visiting. It becomes less about the writer, the seeker of knowledge attempting to gain knowledge through velocity, the impatient explorer more concerned with inflaming their senses rather than being genuinely curious about and teachable within the world. You have to stop, take a breath, create a language, a poetry, a prose style that convinces the reader that they’ve actually encountered something extraordinary in their travels through hill and dale, river and inlet, village and burg, that they’ve actually learned something they didn’t know before. 

Otherwise, I believe, nothing is revealed because nothing was learned and, despite all manner of ranting and such protests defending one’s unique view, that view is forgotten, and another opportunity is lost to move a reader in ways you might not have expected.