Saturday, June 09, 2007

dromedary caravan

upon occasionally realizing i have Writer's Choke (block's not enough'f a word, as there's a soggy bottom to the identity of any 'doer' vs. their formal intent) i wonder what it's got to do with me. all personal challenges aside, according to one of the principles of dialectic process, the unity of opposites, it would follow that The Choke is some sort of antinomy of behaviour...

to practice writing, perhaps i should practice reading, and by that i mean repattern how i engage with i) the written word and ii) the story/narrative of other mediums...

in my life of the past few years, i've noticed that i increasingly veer away from people who seem to have opted out of dialogue (or perhaps opted for prescriptive rhetoric). this is not to say that i am happier or that my approach is better or that i do not engage in rhetoric myself, but eventually, in conversation with such a prescriptivist, we'll drive each other batty... i'll feel solicited and they'll feel mocked... true story. and i think i might be a little lonelier for it. its given rise to a Zeno's paradox of intimacy... distance being relative, but exhaustion not...

the obvious problem, of course, is the fact that writing is a mode of inscribing the ribbon of time, of elegant decay, of quotational parasitism. the written word is governed by rhetoric, even though it's main efforts are to corrode it, or perhaps morph and leave it ampliate. it's a camel's conversation with the sand.

i believe i'll tie up these ungainly ruminations with a few quotes, for unity's sake (harhar)...

“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself." - Marcel Proust

"Laughter is the closest distance between two people." - Victor Borge

"Symbols are the seams of the redressed gestures of dreams." - Me

"Hypocrite reader - my fellow - my brother." - Charles Baudelaire

1 comment:

Indiana James said...

Victor was a good man. I use was becuase I haven't heard anything from or about him lately. That is kinda grim isn't it? Expansive minds generate memorable experiences or at least situations. We find our own and move past many things along the way. Enjoy that which stays close for everything else that you bring out of context just clings. - me.