your desperation could be embraced
the metaverse of grown children longing, reaching, weaving, trying to make the world safe; creating safety, offering a look at the striving to cure…
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I am mostly keeping this for the timestamp, it’s the usual drivel, approaching “passion” and “mission” as if I associate with those words anymore, as if I am desperate and putting my foot on the pedal and trying to drive something forward; I feel out of step with humanity—this feeling could be analyzed by an analyst and it would just create more information which is free to interpret or walk away from; me on the computer has too much freedom and I am greedy for free time, floating in the menagerie of inner space, waiting again for the moment when having written will be interesting; when there is something to do or somewhere to go with what I have done and can’t stop doing; I don’t think my past is redeemable; it is sitting there; I haven’t finished any films and don’t think I have an eye, ear, mouth or nose for finished work anymore; my ambition has died, crawled back into its shell, there is no motivation to become somebody anymore, I think I am done and defeated and finally no one, post-identity, post-being-someone, yielding to this urge to be infinite and spiritual and the whole sky, like every girl becomes the sky (6/23/22)
this is probably going to become a poem about hope
but it’ll be another bad thought-painting I simply have to make
on the road to being a good-enough poet, artist ~but see, the thing about
that word, those titles, is it’s about commitment; coming back to the work
even when it seems hopeless, ridiculous, selfish, absurd, impossible, unreal —
as if just typing whatever comes to your head as you sit around your apartment for hours
is art, is divine, is a truth we need to hear
and dare I read this? Dare I take up space somewhere? Is it true “poetry” is just whatever I want to say? Is it true my “I” is the same as yours?
I doubt you’ll read this; I doubt it’s worth the time
reading this from a friend’s email…
can I really sketch out two voices in one work? Even if I hand over a picture of my mind, what if it’s not good? What if my mind is a mess and a high-definition picture of it doesn’t do anyone any good? Can anyone in my life actually read this thing and respond to the questions I pose? Or do they know better? They can text me instead; they know I use “work” as a place to channel whatever I’m still wrestling with…all those things I have to say but have no reason to tell any living person (of course, I hope everyone who talks to me sees themselves in my scheme…by which I mean, I wish to show you my controls, the seat I take at the helm of my day, and show you where you are in me ~ oh, maybe this is loving, the verb, the actual action of loving someone. I’ve maybe not done that in a while.
“the feeling of passion” is the line I started writing this post with. The title it ended up with is “your desperation could be embraced” which came to me an hour later, after I’d forgotten I’d started this post, when listening to a poet I remembered read the poem he got in The New Yorker that’s pinned to his Twitter profile.
a passion for the possible is really the enduring thing, whether science, music, writing, management or financing is your tool…it’s about unbridled enthusiasm meeting wise judgment in the clear glass container that is you.
it would take a long time to explain how to become someone with good judgment, patience, an openness to the voices in one’s head without jumping to act…someone who’s a critic and consumer of their own words and actions before they speak, imagining first and foremost what they will mean to the person listening.
i still don’t know what to do with the 20 things i say today. i don’t know what to do with the things i write. in a sense they can’t be read; it’s unfair to make someone read them, because i don’t think the words do anything for that reader — sure, i’m a shining example of someone who believes in himself and keeps going; but is that how I can serve? Maybe instead I should attend to their catharsis (being so well-versed in mine, I know how the form works)
it’s just very hard to find a reader
when what i really wish is to stay
alone, thinking, writing, looking
wherever I think to look
passion and jobs don’t always mix; passion is for safety
disobeying is my fundamental action…going off the rails, going only where I am thinking to point my thinking-mind (and of course my thinking-mind is a commodity like no other ~ but I don’t want my art to be about how special I am. I want it to be about YOU and what’s in YOU ~ unfortunately all we can do is inspire each other, we can’t stab the billionaire piñata and make the streets run with rivers of money, I wish I could push a button and free everyone from having to make money to live — I think this is my passion: freedom, and it’s up to me to keep pushing on and insist on doing what I have to do (commanded by the inner voice, fate, God, surrender, what have you)
it is always my job, I say, to churn up more paragraphs unbidden and unexpected — the more raw stuff I come up with, the better; whatever “new” I make is not wrong ~ it’s my job to make new unexpected, to leak, and put it in line with the others so when I reread later, I see the volume of…C R E A T I O N. of course the question remains what to do with what’s been done; maybe nothing can be done; maybe the thing isn’t to read what i’ve written but to listen to what i say today assuming i’m still around. (what good is all this thinking?)
the interesting thing about that “passion” article is the black holes example. They sound interesting at the beginning, when they’re simple and exciting. When it turns out they take a whole life to understand, then it’s boring, because then it’s work.
“My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.”
― Miles Davis
the question of all this is “where do you start over every morning?” You’re gonna have to start somewhere: a boss, a hierarchy, Slack, social media…or maybe it’s stretching, yoga, the body…or it’s journaling, painting, a breathing exercise…something to pour your newly hatched presence into. You can’t just throw it away.
“When you’re creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain’t the limit.”
― Miles Davis
I think it all depends on whose limit you’re going to settle for, whose umbrella you’re going to call the top…how you imagine it will be to go out in the rainy city night for dinner and drinks with people you dig, being there as you…where will the self-satisfaction come from?
“Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”
— John Wooden
“Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”
maybe that’s the thing that people don’t want to commit to living in ~ they want parties, achievements (am I here to destroy and diminish the meaning of words that aren’t serving our culture anymore? Am I climate change’s representative? Here again I am letting form be a place where I discover what might be being asked of me by the muse, and as usual, it can and needs to be edited…which presents the next stage of the challenge: find someone who cares, which is an invitation to care about and be interested in somebody else ~ where won’t this thinking go? Here’s where you must treat your groove as superior, the arbiter of your life. No one else’s ceiling is yours; we all invent what being human is alone, singularly, until we tire for the day of being separate and like puppies we collapse in a pile ~ in practice, I mean sleep and dream, a place where we go to be cosmically one again, where the distinction between discrete fleshes goes away and we are simply Us) ← and that’s what art ought to remind us of
