Take it to the next level...

“I don’t know what I think until I read what I have to say.”
- James Thurber

Thanks, 43T quote machine!

Not such a good job this week. I haven’t been going to the gym much, but hardly eating, with the result that I have been hungry most of the time and still weigh/look about the same.

Plateau city! Not good.

:P

work out time…...

I know very well what this means in terms of writing. Something about what SG said about having “a poetic project.” There’s something I don’t like about the phrase…probably the mere word “project” just reminds me of grade school glue and construction paper and being bored before you’ve even started. More to do with what LB said about revising for the reader, about really, really caring and never forgetting that you’re writing for an audience. Being able to do that and still stay true to whatever it was in you, whatever it was you saw that was original and new and worth saying and completely other than what your audience itself would say and yet something which will resonate, that is the key. Haha, that’s the trick. Being just coherent enough but not to destroy the oracular. It’s either that or just being a natural genius, and it’s tragic but I’m not a natural genius, haha. Doing this one must be in several places at once: it’s a leap. Yet as obvious as never turning your back to the audience if you’re on stage (every rule can be broken). And face it: maybe this will help me find something, some pattern, I was looking for anyway. Maybe that’s why I was avoiding it.

There are 2 basic sides to me. Normally I try not to say there are 2 basic sides to anything. Viz., “There are 2 kinds of people in the world: those who think there are 2 kinds of people in the world, and all the rest,” viz. in generalibus latet errore, viz. the word “basically” has basically no meaning….

Still, in a significant sense, there are 2 basic sides to me: the self-interested side and the self-eradicating, self-abdicating side. Neither is completely functional without the cooperation of the other. In times of emotional duress I find myself ratcheting between the two as extremes, thinking, “If only I could be wholly BLAH (with BLAH being the state I’m currently not in), everything would be organized and under control and proceeding smoothly according to some divine natural law, instead of rocky and unpredictable and veering all over the metaphysical road and painful as hell.”

It outrages me when people try to control me. But who isn’t trying to control his or her own environment? And when I’m not in an empty room, I’m part of someone else’s environment. Maybe it’s as ridiculous to ask that anyone wholly recognize my autonomy as it would be to ask that everyone recognize my autonomy even in part; maybe no one can do anything all the time, even if it would be just. I am sure that I cannot do all the things I think I can, such as always treat others the way I want them to treat me. On some level, yes, but everyone speaking the various languages that we do. . . . Solitude is the only true autonomy, and then of course (rapidly drinking a glass of water) NATURE and GOD-OR-WHATEVER become readily apparent.

By self-abdication I mean LOVE of course, coursed, cursed love, and ARTISTRY, and PERCEPTION and perhaps even REVERENCE. I am sick to death of them all. I want to build a little house with Tinker Toys and sit in it and to hell with the rest. Here in my alchemical basement I am working on the cure for missing things.

Can my coat of many words stand up to the smallest breadth of wind? And what do I trust to bring me back, o tiny thread(s), o arms full of riches wandering the labyrinth, look here I was nothing more than graffiti! (if not less). I will be poet everywhere I go or nothing, I said, and Nothing laughed and split its paper skin and there I was naked. Where is my business suit? my coat of many swords? the sun has come out and I have business to attend to. One evil at a time, get in line! Necessity shall be determined after I’ve cleaned my sword on the green grass. All questions are asked and have been made part of the public record. So I’m a straight shooter, eh? You don’t know the half of it yet.

And maugre all my ranting a young hummingbird dances around drinking from the honeysuckle waving at the window, the wind is not too high, a leaf is not too little. (a little Charlie Chaplin “man”)

Thanks, 43T !

“A man becomes the creature of his uniform.”
Napoleon Bonaparte

I’ve had this gorgeous L-shaped desk for 9 months, see, and it’s only just occurred to me that I need to keep one half of it for only jobsearching, and only use the other half for my real true life of the soul (ie poetry-writing, fun reading, academic meanderings and friends-correspondence, natch).

I mean ideally the desk would have a third arm for academic stuffs but it’s often hard to keep track of the dividing line between that and the poetry and the fun reading and, to some extent, the friends, so…however the above is a quite obvious division I’ve been irresponsibly avoiding. Just piles of fun stuff everywhere you know, with piles of job stuff listing against poetry anthologies and cds…who am I fooling? only myself!!! Maybe I’ll be so lucky as to get a permanent job involving some fun stuff, but until then….

MUST

COMPARTMENTALIZE

Patrick’s Rune

_{I love this image. I have the poster on my wall at home. It’s Aaron Chang, Pipeline Hawaii}

“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
- George Bernard Shaw

I am going to take my professionalism to the next level. This will be evident from a superficial level (presentation, delivery) and an overall quality level.

I will continue to increase my professional marketability.