207/365 the writing game
Jul. 26th, 2011 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wordlingsThe Writer had visited a lot of places, culminating with the distant planet Farth and its many new places to visit. But his favorite place he carried with him no matter where he was, and it was a familiar place full of strange new things.
It was easy to find, and sometimes maddeningly obscure, for reasons he didn't quite understand. He thought its obscurity lay in the fact that sometimes he had an notion of what to find there, and expected he ought to be able to find it, and was frustrated. Other times he expected nothing and was rewarded with many twisting bright new visions. Humorous dialogue, Homerous dialogue, blurprints of new mythology, lost and forgotten writings from ancient times and timelines, fragments of future masterpieces, the murmurings of gods, angels, demons, channelings from impossible beings, luminous visions from the spiritus universii.
Or, perhaps it wasn't an intellectual process at all. Now and again the planet of genesis orbited far away, and was simply unreachable. Or was encircled by an iron haze, unbreachable clouds of mercury and baryons, ionized hydrogen and nitrogen. And the Writer without a space capsule!
He had to wait until the planet rotated back, returned to the usual calms, hung in the warm black blue of space, the brilliantine ultramarine of ocean evenings -- when the genesis planet shrunk and waited, hanging just beyond the palms, and he could leap on it, straddle its curving hull and be carried off on its inscrutable, fascinating navigations.
He was also frustrated by his seeming inability to commoditize these inspirations of his. He had his sights set on something new and unusual, a new kind of writing, a new kind of book, the next generation of the novel, poetry without poetry's o'erweening callow mechanisms. The poetry that was the language spoken by reality, by relativity, the syllables that made objects and living things. Those syllables also formed ingots and lozenges of writing, silvry gold writing, minty bright writing. Writing from a pre-formative place, writing from a zone of uninventable rules. Writing spoken by extinct bards around cold ancient watchfires, sung by long dumb minstrels to ears that had long since decomposed, on lyres and guitars long since dust, in some zone of universal ruins.
They had, the Writer believed, those songs & stories had, a vibration that remained imprinted on the warp of the universe, remained stored in the universe's many compartments. This vibration was what he felt for, listened for. The more definite the expectation, the more signal being broadcast outward by him, the less hope he had of finding what he was looking for. The more you're broadcastin, the less you're receivin, as they say. He might as well then give up and write merely from his accumulated knowledge and learning, write from the crusty topsoil of his topmost mind, if that was going to be the case.
Writing. Shit. "Writing" wasn't the point anyway -- writing was a mathematical formula for emotional products, bland predictable notes for psychic psymphonies. The name of the game wasn't writing, but creating. What was created wasn't writing, but the traces of a new universe, recorded on the psysmograph, a tantalizing signal, radar trace, a bit of map to lead someone else to the same new unknown territory. Writing, the act, had to be second nature, like glasses to the art of seeing. Sure, it was artifice, but underneath were genuine imagination journeys to genuine nonphysical places and encounters with genuine immaterial people, recorded imperfectly in the words.
Writing as discovery! Writing as exploration beyond the frontiers of the mind, at the margin of within. Squatting on the shore of the galactic ocean, peeling off your shirt in the warm breeze. Plowing an organizing module through the vaporous symbols of the universal, magnetizing symbolic bits in the process, dragging out chains of relativistic linkage. Pulling forth, returning with these dangling accretions of magnetic symbolix to the everyday courtyards, there to interpret what remained of the shifted, metamorphosed bits.
It was easy to find, and sometimes maddeningly obscure, for reasons he didn't quite understand. He thought its obscurity lay in the fact that sometimes he had an notion of what to find there, and expected he ought to be able to find it, and was frustrated. Other times he expected nothing and was rewarded with many twisting bright new visions. Humorous dialogue, Homerous dialogue, blurprints of new mythology, lost and forgotten writings from ancient times and timelines, fragments of future masterpieces, the murmurings of gods, angels, demons, channelings from impossible beings, luminous visions from the spiritus universii.
Or, perhaps it wasn't an intellectual process at all. Now and again the planet of genesis orbited far away, and was simply unreachable. Or was encircled by an iron haze, unbreachable clouds of mercury and baryons, ionized hydrogen and nitrogen. And the Writer without a space capsule!
He had to wait until the planet rotated back, returned to the usual calms, hung in the warm black blue of space, the brilliantine ultramarine of ocean evenings -- when the genesis planet shrunk and waited, hanging just beyond the palms, and he could leap on it, straddle its curving hull and be carried off on its inscrutable, fascinating navigations.
He was also frustrated by his seeming inability to commoditize these inspirations of his. He had his sights set on something new and unusual, a new kind of writing, a new kind of book, the next generation of the novel, poetry without poetry's o'erweening callow mechanisms. The poetry that was the language spoken by reality, by relativity, the syllables that made objects and living things. Those syllables also formed ingots and lozenges of writing, silvry gold writing, minty bright writing. Writing from a pre-formative place, writing from a zone of uninventable rules. Writing spoken by extinct bards around cold ancient watchfires, sung by long dumb minstrels to ears that had long since decomposed, on lyres and guitars long since dust, in some zone of universal ruins.
They had, the Writer believed, those songs & stories had, a vibration that remained imprinted on the warp of the universe, remained stored in the universe's many compartments. This vibration was what he felt for, listened for. The more definite the expectation, the more signal being broadcast outward by him, the less hope he had of finding what he was looking for. The more you're broadcastin, the less you're receivin, as they say. He might as well then give up and write merely from his accumulated knowledge and learning, write from the crusty topsoil of his topmost mind, if that was going to be the case.
Writing. Shit. "Writing" wasn't the point anyway -- writing was a mathematical formula for emotional products, bland predictable notes for psychic psymphonies. The name of the game wasn't writing, but creating. What was created wasn't writing, but the traces of a new universe, recorded on the psysmograph, a tantalizing signal, radar trace, a bit of map to lead someone else to the same new unknown territory. Writing, the act, had to be second nature, like glasses to the art of seeing. Sure, it was artifice, but underneath were genuine imagination journeys to genuine nonphysical places and encounters with genuine immaterial people, recorded imperfectly in the words.
Writing as discovery! Writing as exploration beyond the frontiers of the mind, at the margin of within. Squatting on the shore of the galactic ocean, peeling off your shirt in the warm breeze. Plowing an organizing module through the vaporous symbols of the universal, magnetizing symbolic bits in the process, dragging out chains of relativistic linkage. Pulling forth, returning with these dangling accretions of magnetic symbolix to the everyday courtyards, there to interpret what remained of the shifted, metamorphosed bits.
