Every so often I remember what it is to write. Such rare moments of understanding swiftly dissolve as if insight itself was the catalyst, making it particularly challenging for me to pinpoint what exactly is gleaned. There is something built into my self-imposed mythology which makes me believe the writing to be a consequence of stillness, a stillness the bulk of the world is seeking to disrupt, and that if only I was locked away in a hermitage then perhaps the writing would come more frequently, if only there was a straightjacket on my whims maybe the language would seep back into my brain. My innate style includes this piece of mythology, it has been with me since I was a teenager writing detective schlock and science fiction stories on my word processor. During those periods in my life when I was unable to write I felt largely without purpose. I suppose something spiritual at work when I am able to write well. Sadly, this rarely happens.
My innate style includes a strong sense of awareness, perhaps more than anything I think of myself as someone who understands human behavior better than most, and I wear this eccentricity like a badge of honor, at least to myself. I brim with a strange mix of confidence and humility, humility because part of the revelation of this sense of awareness is that we all know very little, and any attempt on my part to pontificate otherwise would be a transgression of this knowledge. I have probably behaved like a pompous ass in my life but those events are overshadowed in my memory by this continued sense of humility. My awareness is one and the same with my humility.
My innate style includes insufferable moderation. I am not sure how far this characteristic goes back or why but I have been inclined towards a moderate approach to most things, but it is there. I do take a certain taboo pleasure in transgressing this approach in the perhaps necessary release valve events I participate in, and by that I do not just mean sex but something I touched on in my slacker manifesto, the urgent need to escape the constrictions placed upon by my obligations. Obligation is perhaps the single worst word in my personal mythology. I will not sing, I will not dance, I will not make a speech, I will not even bother with small talk. When the sense of obligation is removed from a situation I am incredibly easy-going. Implicit in this moderation is a feverish desire for self-control.
My innate style includes a walking wounded projection of self. When I was nineteen I underwent a depression which has marked me ever since. I probably have not fully recovered from it, and perhaps my moderate lifestyle is in direct response to it, but this aspect of my life has forever imprinted on me an acute sense of empathy for humanity. My awareness prevents me from acting on this empathy in the way a Mother Theresa type may, but the direct sensation of empathy is still genuine. I lack conviction, that is part of the moderation, part of the awareness mythology, part of the deal of who I am. Occasionally I use this lack of conviction against myself, and wish I was some other model of humanity, the pious altruistic type. Hence my preoccupation with faith and religion in my philosophical musings.
My innate style includes a want of belonging. I suspect this is a human quality more so than an individual one. I fondly remember my teenage fantasies of nearing death after accomplishing something heroic, and having the people I loved circle around me in mourning. Despite my resistance, my sense of awareness, my moderation, and perhaps as a direct result of my empathy, I feel a strong connection with people, strangers mostly, the stranger the better. I rely almost entirely on instinct when meeting new people, and make decisions about people fairly quickly. I require innate goodness in people and if I cannot sniff that out from the first five minutes of meeting a person I become convinced there is nothing substantial to be earned from this person. The elitism of this activity, I feel, is only on the surface, in the abstract description, the writing it down for you to understand. Either that or it is pure elitism to the point that I am completely unaware of it. For me my resistance of companionship is about being selective, which is a good thing because selecting the right people ensures mutual benefits for both parties. I am attracted and repulsed by people with alarming frequency, it, along with my latent artist self-image, is another great part of the mythology. I really do not know why I have such a problem with people, there is a cyclical aspect to all this: I feel humility, which boosts my confidence in understanding human nature, which boosts my empathy, which draws emphasis to my inaction and incenses my repulsion, which makes me feel insecure and triggers my return to humility.
My innate style includes taking stock of all exits.
Every so often I remember what it is to write… Man’s my great tragedy is he I can remember being happy. contentment never lasts and it taints everything else. maybe all the poetry, all the literature, all the music, came out of this deficit. That’s the payoff for aesthetics.
This mythology feels bigger than myself and the choices I enforce. My entire philosophic exercise is an attempt to overcome this mythology, to self-configure as Nietzsche puts it, to supplant the superego with some new agenda. I want to love humanity and not feel so threatened by it. I want what comes effortless to most people. But I have this walking wounded complex, a mythology swiped from a comic book.
That ends this session.
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[...] The mistake is to write in imitation of someone else. And yet I am fully aware that influence seeps into me without my prior knowledge. There is something of a contradiction between my commonsense observations and my mythology, and this is the decisive point, for anyone keeping tabs, where who I really am comes into play. I bank right towards the convictions of the mythology over the seemingly obvious sensibility of reason. I genuinely believe that I write from a spontaneous font of my own design, and genuinely believe that the arrangements of these words are somehow a higher document of self than they are representative of say linguistics, or history, or psychology. This is perhaps a smug claim to make, particularly from someone who also prides himself in conducting logical thought experiments on occasion. But it is the case. [...]