No exit (yet)

Still flailing about,
Hoping to strike my mind's gold,
And ending my days sore,
At desire's door.

Self-indulgent mediocrity is an infestation that is not without its comforts, and comfort is an alluring addiction. If it were illegal, perhaps I'd have a better chance of staying clear of it.

Staring down the blank page.

Said Thomas Mann:

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

When I quoted this to a friend, he retorted:

Lucky for us, he didn't have access to the internet.

So, I made do without connecting to the internet once, just for kicks, and was able to put words down finally. Scary. It was work, and not that easy, but it happened. Hopefully it'll happen again, and again, and again...with a healthy frequency.

Do organized people make good Marxists?

"A place for everything, and everything in its place."

That's like "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability."

The first assumes that there's a self-evident, definitive, universal place for everthing. The Marxist adage assumes the same about "need" and "ability." Both, however, are perfectly "rational," which is probably why they don't work for most humans.

[organize | Marxism]

If I blog, I will write...

well, that's the hope, anyway. My other blog, where one would expect this kind of stuff to go, feels like it requires my writing to be a little more grown up, as it were. So, I figured that this is where I can emulate a kid, and play with words and thoughts and insights and observations and any other toys that I can conjure up, without having my imagination skills judged too harshly (by me.)

I'm also trying to put my time where my instincts are. These instincts, however, fear the physical world that this time is a bridge to. When exposed to the physical world, they tend to lose their claim on reality, which the tangible realm wraps around itself like a flag, as if it were an American President waging a war on intangibilism: "You're either real, or you're intangible." The intangible, it would seem, has as much claim on reality as an American liberal does, these days, on patriotism.

Although mangled and consequently maligned in our times, they are essential to the condition of those of us who are human. Myths, products of that wondrous faculty - imagination - that separates us from our machines and without which we would have no machines. They often fly in the face of reason, the faculty that we so doggedly try to inculcate in computers, our newest machines. Logic, reason's colder, harder alter-ego may be the lifeblood of our computers but only our fantasies can take them the distance that they need to go before they can be worthy of us. Much of the reality that surrounds us is born outside its known borders, where reason doesn't always reign supreme. I suspect that much of reality itself lies beyond the borders that we know. I wonder if our myths are our sense of this reality or perhaps they are our collective fantasies that grew old and wise - or just old - waiting to be incorporated into our reality. Come, flow with me... methinks.