Writing (any artform [antfarm]) can be a way of never knowing or arriving at the purpose of art, or life, but to continually attempt to find it over and over, and always differently because meaning is never the same, nor is the context in which one meaning exists. It’s maybe a way of avoiding meaning, preventing creative settlement.
So if we never arrive at or find what we think we're looking for in or through art or life we'll always have something to work toward, something to look forward to, something impossible to measure, but always something new to define or interpret as something which possibly could be defined, and therefore interpreted. Or some shit like that. I'm now going to use Wikipedia.
Tom Robbins, I read somewhere, writes his novels one sentence at a time, consecutively, until he gets each sentence perfect. This seems like a good way of tightening the work up as you go, focusing intensely on the selection and combination of words/signs, like stacking LEGOS until you've erected an entire city.
Thinking about this process, I get the image of an icicle forming drop by drop, dripping down itself and freezing on the end, slowly getting longer, heavier until, like a ripe fruit, it cracks off the branch of the house’s eaves and falls, stabbing the snow. I forget where I was going with this.
"Memory-based explanations" aside, déjà vu is maybe a connection with a parallel universe, when, for one split second, two dimensions are engaged in the same activity, a split second apart, occupying the same space, the same time (though representing different points in time), instantly aware of each other without immediately reacting to any hesitance of perception, and it feels strange to feel that, to acknowledge it as something that has already happened, which therefore is happening.
Or, it could just be a neurological disorder. The way the brain perceives time is no different from the way it perceives emotions. I’ve been thinking a lot about biological chemistry lately, and I think that’s all we are: Chemicals. Chemicals in our brains are the cause of everything we feel and perceive. They give us the illusion of individuality, of subjectivity and of emotion as being anything other than a minor variation in balance. That we all have different personalities is a matter of a different balance of chemicals.
Experience teaches us what chemicals we find appealing, so we embrace or avoid certain situations because of the chemicals our brains will produce and the feeling we get from them. Our brains are their own pharmacies and our bodies are just a transport system for our brains to go find more energy for those pharmacies to keep the lights on.
People who jump out of airplanes do so because they like the rush of adrenaline. Comedians tell jokes in front of people because they like the mixture of Cortisol from performance anxiety and Serotonin from the relief of producing laughter in others. We all use each other as drugs—we’re all fixes to one another. We hang out with people we like, get high off that. We talk shit about people/things we don't like, get high off that.
I write because it makes me feel better, and I like the feeling of having a work accepted—that rush of dropping a submission into a mailbox or hitting SEND, the Cortisol-induced anxiety of wondering why I just did that, what the point of it is, of waiting for a response, of getting one and the release of rejection or acceptance (I often enjoy rejection because I can (1) get another submission-fix [I must be sadomasochistic] by sending the work out again and (2) feel less pressure to conform whatever obligation acceptance may bring).
This is probably a very reductionist view, but it makes sense to me at this point in my life. I want to write a book of essays on my ideas about [g]od and how people's brains use the idea of [g]od as a drug. I'm going to call it MYTH-AMPHETAMINES. Wikipedia.
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