pioneering a new style of being a person on the internet and in the world
let’s see if I got this right ~ my new sensibility of this is “shit-post a lot on Twitter in public, read carefully, jam with people in the DMs, post and Retweet what you admire and what challenges you, articulate your sensibility, share true and beautiful things, read voices who are in the fight, see yourself as in the fight, fight against bureaucratic laziness and people playing games for safety and positions in hierarchies for personal financial security out of fear and really BOREDOM and EMPTINESS, yes I can rage against suburbia from suburbia living for free after five years in the city I miss but there are more cities and now the pandemic is over and we’re about to rage, sing, fuck, dance, make love and good policy and rewire the bars of civilization so things are fair, yes, we love taxes and public programs and high speed rail and kids in libraries and teachers happy, everyone happy like a poet has prophesied before
why can’t someone just be a person? why does everyone have to sell and ‘work’? I anticipate fights with men my age who didn’t go my route with whom I now disagree about the meaning of work; so I accept being a martyr for my cause
an inbox with no expectation of reply
open communication, no deadlines
deadlines are for those who need meaning from being superior over others; but artists know competition is a low-bandwidth frequency, the real war is against silence and incoherence and oneself for self-esteem; the artist is a whirlpool in the ocean, a storm
muses and father figures, the urges for chaos and order, pleasure and pride…a healthy mix, becoming the site where all rivers of desire for connection meet, becoming a human volcano ~ this is the goal, this is my fate, I will die extremely human, having improved the design I inherited, 1986 — Present
Copy/pasted from a letter I sent an important father figure 10 days ago, as I try to assemble a few links that accurately show what I’ve been thinking and writing lately. Now that 10 days have passed, I can say mostly what’s been concerning is anticlimax — the arrival at accepting and being myself and there being no fanfare, no job promotion, no marker from without for what I’ve achieved inwardly…and I know it’s so: this is prophesied clearly by the poet Rilke in Letters To a Young Poet, and I know nobody can give an artist anything but leisure, free time, a place to stand while time mixes in him and produces something, anything…so long as he stays open and listening: now, the question is what does it *do*? What does ‘what I do’ do for others? How is it service? Well, I think I’m shaping myself to be useful to assist in your or someone else’s wakeup — initiate a catharsis, an abruption from convention, a vital change and growth, a bursting forth away from being held tight in a bud. EXPLODE! Become what you’re supposed to be next: be the hatching of the revolution all humans need right now, which is a revolution in respect, empathy, help, understanding, humility…becoming polymaths, replacing our habits of resting our thinking and identities in the infinite scroll of social media feeds, living instead in our own writings, in books, in music. The resting place for the mind…is that not the final trial and test, the work for which all other work is preparation? I am also reckoning with a tamped enthusiasm and a disappeared eagerness to speak…which is quite fine, and though my worrying mind often thinks my financial situation a disaster needing urgent, massive action to solve, I rest assured that my natural inner voice bubbling up here like so, like natural hot springs, shall clear the space inside necessary for the next essential moment to bloom. So, before I lose you, onto the excerpt of the letter:
I think I am pioneering a new style. I’ve talked (to myself) for a long time about the future of the author and the reader, and how books are not necessarily my style — media mediates, and I’m not far away enough to be out of touch from you or any other reader. A vital relationship, a participatory catharsis and spelunking of our own inner world…this must be the purpose and the end of literature — to never stop exploring, and frequently reckon with the appalling strangeness that we are always at the start again.
I say this in a sense because I need money, but who doesn’t…I am, maybe in my dying breaths before I’ve pushed my luck to its logical endpoint (“get a real job” — ha! as if that’s possible for me anymore; as if I could obey anything but my powerful internal voice), fighting for the idea not of universal basic income per se, but of universal basic creative freedom. I don’t know who I’m fighting against. The voice of my father in my head? In general and overall, my “struggle” with “my father” is mostly overcome; he won’t understand what I am doing in this mortal lifetime. That’s OK, he can live on in the theater of my mind’s eye for the rest of my life.
We’re spiritual beings having a human experience, here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.
I’ve lost my sense of humor and my enthusiasm for “haha, I’m an artist! I’m a fun little genius! Now shower me with gifts and kisses for my pretty little musings!” No, it is hard labor in the salt mines of raw awareness, bright light, every day for 5+ hours from first emergence from the bedroom until mid-afternoon when I need sunshine and movement.
Oh, dear friend and reader, I can’t tell myself to enough people who get it! But I love my solitude and aloneness, and really only need the money to keep the apartment (only $1,100/month), health insurance (haggled down to $36/month per an expected annual income of $20,000 — amazing how low I can go, it’s like limbo for quality of life), groceries, phone bill…I like chocolatey things, a few weekend trips a year, I…am becoming something I never thought I’d be, a poet, an artist, but REALLY being one, which is a horrendous prospect; a continual extinction of personality (to quote T.S. Eliot’s 1919 popular essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” which I’ve been rereading) — I’ve been working on being no one, being an empty vessel where thoughts and awareness and feeling can mix in new, unexpected, important ways. I am on the wild frontier of noticing what a human being can be in this modern time. I am absolutely modern, at the cutting edge, and all I want to do is burn my body out elegantly and perfectly. It’s amazing to me how little I care about fortune and fame; I really have no interest in “Geoff Lewis” or “Geoffrey Lewis” or whatever else I’ve been; I am pure human, like the Roman poet Terence who said, “I am human, and nothing human is foreign to me.”
“digital” just means “the fingers”
am I not perennially interested in what humans can make and what can be looked at? Attention can be rested anywhere — perhaps what is needed is a wakeup and shakeup from “the news”—maybe “the olds” is what we should be looking at.
