Once I was asked, what’s the thing about writing. Obviously, there are perks: I was raised near the Contagoras Mining Fields, my brother got into sorcery, that kind of stuff. Basically, I was the kid who had the big mouth when it came to avoiding work. But that’s not it at all. It’s far more shallow and sublime at the same time.
Imagine for a moment that it’s not the stuff I say that is of any importance. That you could really ignore any insights I might have to offer. Instead, think of my words as a code that’s there to be broken. As a syntactical hyperstructure of connections, verbal pathways, linguistic corridors! Imagine you are a bit of synaesthetically twisted, and you can actually SEE the semantical connections glueing arguments, thoughts, curses together with the wrath of a bloodthirsty, typing god! There are millions of ways how to describe what a sentence IS or DOES, imagine to actually SEE each one of those strings glimmering in some kind of goofy neon glow. If you can understand what it could feel like to move through this microspace of lingustructure, opening rhetorical doorways, following propositional corridors, but: Just while you are taking a high wave, you remember that it’s not a fixed structure at all, that rather you are creating it while thinking it while surfing it. The whole flower of argumentative fractals unfolding out of your brain is actually the inside of an universe with your head as the outside and you are riding the wave all the time! Imagine the cosmic lightning as a consequence of copypasting one whole paragraph from the beginning to the end! Beatboxes of planets shattering your dragbook that’s still in your hand because you are still writing. With every sentence added to the next you decide for one possibility, rejecting hundred alternative ones, and it’s not only the sentences: If you think about it, every word is a hyperlink to a rhetoric-spational universe, where you constantly have to decline all those paths, decide for that one only! Except for, maybe, in the few moments, after hours of struggling with keyboards, pens, after dozens of moderately excellent wordflowers, you unfold that one snowflake, or rather it unfolds around you: That one moment, when for a glimpse of time, you can see the whole of the text, all of it, and all the possible connections, what it really means or will mean or could ever mean. And maybe it’s not only your text, but rather THE TEXT! That’s the best, and it’s what we all are looking for, I think. Typing yourself out of it all! People around you won’t even notice what’s happening, cause to them you are just this guy with his dragbook, maybe a weird stare in his eyes. If it was a comic book, the camera would zoom close to his face so you could see a little snowflakeflower glimmering in his pupils. But it’s not, and they won’t know, only you: That in a few moments, when you close that computer and something comes to your attention, maybe some girl or something, it will start to fade: You’ll slow down, the colors come back, or disappear rather. Or something.
I am deadly serious here.
Certainly, I’m high as a hindhu while writing.
But if you think that makes it any less right, the joke’s on you!
Snowflowers.
I am not Fiction
Baruch Caan
Ah, the golden moment. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how many different people from different walks of life know that moment and call it by different names. Peak experience, the golden thread of the philosophers (as a certain rather wolfish unhuman acquaintance of mine would say), or just moment of ecstasy. Easy enough to say why you’d choose “some girl” as the distraction that kills it – how many people look for that perfect instant in the, shall we say, more physical “perfection” between that particular lock and key? And, of course, looking for it just pushes it away until you’re lost in the minutiae of the search.
And you, Baruuch, find your gold in synaesthaesia. Of course. In that strange little disorder (or so they call it) that is here characterised by seeing hidden colours in words. Why this particular form of synaesthaesia? Why, because you are a lover of words, Baruuch. We all know that by now, even if post #4 is still early days. And are not flowers the classical symbol of love? So, wordflowers then. And all those hidden colours in words, they give you a meaning that transcends them. But this is well-trodden ground, you’ve just been over it. Why should I repeat your words? Let me instead do what I always do – observe, and think, and interpret.
What you’ve very cleverly skirted and dismissed is the whole issue of content. And just as all flowers are not created equal, all words are not, either. I wonder what your perfect text might be – and whether you’re as divorced of its meaning as you claim. I must say, you’re getting better. Finding subversive subtext here would be a much greater challenge for anybody interested in looking than in your earlier stuff – but rest assured that they would still look, and look hard. You’re betrayed yourself already, so they’d only be looking for what they already know.
What is even more intriguing is what you’ve set yourself up as. You see yourself as a conduit, a gardener who has no influence over what flowers he grows and marvels at their beauty. How can it be you who’s determined your content? After all, you’re just an aesthete who has let his passion run away with him, right? Art mirrors life. You want to be just the mirror, not the image – a dicey prospect. But as the mirror, you can’t control who looks into you. And that is where doubt cracks your surface, Baruuch. The gardener still chooses what seeds he gets, the mirror is placed in a certain location, after all.
You’re somewhere out there (and I’m not going to say how close you are to me, that would be telling), and as all your wastelands flower and all your thickets bloom, you’re trying to step away from them, raising your hands and shouting you had nothing to do with it. I wonder whether you know what meaning flowers have to certain nonhuman subversives? This blog is your garden, Baruuch, and you are the one choosing what to sow. Nobody with open eyes believes you’re grasping seeds blindly and throwing them out. You’re peeking through your fingers.
But you’re a clever man, or you think you are. So you know this won’t hold water when they break down your door and start asking the hard questions. You might blubber about your golden moments when you’re face down on the floor of some dark room, and that might shield your mind from what’s going on even as you fail to shield your body from what those shadowy figures are doing to it. But that won’t keep the fear at bay forever. So why post this?
Why, dear Baruuch, it’s because you’d like to absolve yourself. If you are but the artist, and the artist dies the moment his work is created, then your eventual disintegration due to said work will not be your fault. Now I’m certainly not the one to deny anybody that kind of comfort. After all, I know what it’s like.
But do remember: that kind of thinking will only cause you to relax, and tension is what keeps you alive. Let that stinking cesspit you move around in push its tendrils into your head and tint those glasses of yours, and keep on spitting out what you see. But don’t ever relax, for your own sake and, more importantly, for the sake of keeping your writing sharp.
I am enjoying this. Can’t you tell? Have you guessed why, yet?
Well. Now THAT can confuse you to SERIOUS amounts!