What questions to ask... I don't know what kind of answers the audience would want. Who is the audience? Thinking to hard is dangerous. it is better to let it flow now and then. Seek a place where you can observe the balance between a Kiss and a ...
Knowing and working around a few writers, I enjoy their frustration, their pleading to read their stuff, to commnet, to muse them.
As with so much of life I don't know what questions to ask them and I don't know what kind of answers the audience would want - often not sure who the audience is or ought to be.
But it is interesting to see how many writers operate in a fluctuating style: they cajole or attack and then they console or coalesce. It seems hard to operate in between - how to maintain relevancy and respect withoput being a floosy rainbow or an edgy hard core... ?
Sometimes I think that many of these questions of life and motivation are similar: Where is the line between using someone and leaning on a friend - often we don't know until we (or they) fall over.
ANd so it is with these letters I write. I wnat to say so much but I know it will be scattered. Mt friends say that it doesn't matter: Just write! Editing can always wait...
So, I think or dream that we are all stuck into the earth or it is the hand of fear or evil cpaitalists (preying on our own greed) who clutch and hold us down. A menacing strange sky or fast flowing clouds zips by continuously. Is it a high cloud or pollution or a reflection of our thoughts?
Then it seems more like a backdrop to our life and random thoughts - the white noise static - or voice trying to reach us or one that does but we cannot hear clearly.
When I think about this streaming mass, now I know it must be the increasing power of the US, of Bushism, ofcapitalist invincibility combinjhed witrh technology and an almost infinite optimism (faith. This movement mesmerizes us while its constnatness ricks us into forgetting that it is there. Just as we forget it is there we feel the word or the sense: ":Progress." An d we have no time to question as new images and desires intrude deep into our existence. But the flow goes on marchalling its minions and its plans...
Just living life replaces thought. Too busy, too stressed and worried - always performing for the boss or the friend, wifee, kids...
wE KNOW THAT SOMETHING IS WRONG - THE STREAMING WARNING IS REALLY ALWAYS THERE - iT TELLS US SUBTLY THAT IT IS GOOD, IT IS THE FLOW, COME ON...
iT MUST BE THIS DISTRACTING AND NUMBING SUBCONSCIOUSNESS THAT MODERATES AND BLURS THE DEATH, DESTRUCTION AND LIES THAT ARE SO OBVIOUS ALL THE TIME THAT YOU HAVE TO TURN IT OFF, JUNK THE tv OR SKIP THE EMAILS - AT LEAST ONCE IN A WHILE OR IN YOUR HOPES.
And so we live, breathe, make love, eat, laugh and cry… something haunts us until eventually we do not want to know or be reminded. Ecological disaster, species going extinct, torture, these can’t be good, but we know that something must be – or also that sometimes things HAVE TO HAPPEN.
Some of us read for relaxation and – I suspect – to learn more about what we know we ought to know (the streaming cloud). Many an author must strive hoping to connect the fractured pieces of reality into a message the readers can digest. But the critics and the poets hit a solid blank wall – the streaming cloud. Partly cloudy with a chance of genocide – pass me some Tylenol/prozac or…
Maybe if I find the right hill, the perfect perch.. a better ideology… then it will all make sense.
Maybe.
