Wednesday, May 25, 2005

AMONG THE "FABLED DAMNED"




I think we all know what late nights and no ladies can do to even your most stoic Sarchichan.
Although, you know, sometimes you get the pleasant ancillary byproduct of strange meditations and bursts of creativity.

For example:

I have for a long time been a little weird about the perception of the future, and the idea that the way a culture at a given time identifies its future is exceedingly more telling about that era itself than it is about the way it all ended up, the way the future played out.
Weird lonely forgotten images of the future really get me worked up. As you may or may not recall, I even wrote a little poem about it.
These days it seems like the future features lots of squares and rectangles. That's what I've been noticing lately.
I think they're supposed to represent displays. Like, multiple fields of vision. Antecedents with the old Microsoft OS and the idea that more information is necessarily good.

Oh and then this:

Right. So I'm reading this book, okay?
I know.
And then, of course, there's the old Fahsboro recquired reading with the bit especially about the fat lady and your shoes and whatnot. Which, you know, is essentially the notion that anything really worth doing is a spiritual endeavor. And that anything that is worth doing is best done with Detachment.
{ed. note: 1. Should've been a Hiebredonic preface in the Shamanzo "I know how we all hate God and everything" style. 2. We here at Fahsboro have been championing Detachment for centuries, and yet have only recently begun to convince ourselves that we are beginning to grasp its true nature.}
Right?
Okay.
I mean.
For the sake of argument.
Good.
So this Leland cat (link above) has this bit towards the front (and then a whole chapter later I haven't gotten to yet) about the Beats and the root word\concept being "beatific" and all. And how the Beats have this whole deal going on where they reject modern values and so on in favor a more, well, "beatific" sort of grace.
You might recall that I wrote a column a while back about me and me stopping with the pursuit of cool.
But, now, with this weird through-line I've shoddily grafted Family Circus footprint style between Seymour Glass and the Beat Movement in arts & literature I'm confronted with this other deal. Like, being cool (and I think, for some reason, I'm thinking of that walk-away-from-anything Nebraskan cool as much as whatever else) as a spiritual deal. You know. Best done with Detachment and Worth Doing in the first place.
Is a clearer headspace and increased productivity on the horizon? Or a Johan Santana off-speed sudden Kaballah life dedication?
Time will tell.

But in the meantime:

I'm still, chiefly, a writer, right?
I'm saying. That's why we're here, yeah?
So I've been thinking about books a lot lately. Seeing as how I read the shit out of them and am trying to write one.
And a book, right, on a fundamental level is a means by which to communicate. But it is not a means to communicate like a telephone is a means to communicate. It's - typically, or at least in my experience - a mode by which One Person (or a Small Group of People) shares ideas with Lots of Other People. When it's successful.
So me writing a book is me trying to put my thoughts, a distillation of my experiences, into the heads of others.
So why does the medium matter?
I mean, aside from all that I can write better than I can draw stuff.
The thing, the object itself that exists outside of your brain where I have put my thoughts, the commodification ... all that it important, no?
Especially with all that art existing in the marketplace and nowhere really else thing forever springing snaps and snares into treehouse dreamery.
I wonder what the memecist says about the object.

I've had enough for today.

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