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I think it's been said: writers don't choose that. Who would want a life that emerges only one letter at a time?
Having said that, I'm sure now that it's not been said but written, and that by those who write the way a free-climber climbs: hand over hand, and occasionally foot over hand, in a process that cannot be abandoned without abandoning the body you got here with. The process becomes synonymous with life.
Like life, it can be lived desperately or with a kind of loving detachment.
It killed David Foster Wallace.
Neil Gaiman seems be enjoying it, though. :)
Like a joke I swear that I wrote, I know I'm not alone in wondering The vertigo of tryna get close To who I was before remembering
We all see it. :)
Let me help.
I think my natural orientation is in reverse, watching the path fade behind us.
we learn to be what we are asked for
On birthday candles and piñatas
every living thing enjoys the process of a particular kind of calibration, jockeying against the other, gaining an advantage here, losing one there, and on and on
we calibrate against each other
when I was a kid, we'd make papier-mâché (from the french) piñatas (from the spanish). balloons and cardboard and paper and occasionally chicken wire. we'd string it up to a tree branch with a rope from the barn or something, usually an adult holding the free end of the rope, using the branch as a pulley, keeping the piñata dancing around the kid (or occasionally the adult) taking swings at it. the fun in it was pitting the skills of the piñata-makers against the piñata-hitters. a blindfold evened the playing field a bit.
nothing wrong with buying a commercial piñata, of course, but part of the self-balancing aspect of this is lost: the kid no longer has a felt material/physical understanding of the object they're trying to bash into pieces. it's opaque — the kid's going at it with more blindness than that of the blindfold. it's as uneven as giving the kid a chainsaw instead of a baseball bat.
world-crossers run the risk of throwing the world they enter into an imbalance. if you're born into a world, you grow up in balance with the environment. it's literal physics. a foreign entrant into a world, a mature being with a relationship between cause and effect that is not of this world, is dangerous to the world.
we saw Spirited Away yesterday, on stage, in London, in Japanese.
an aside: I experienced it as an experiment in immersive language-learning: looking away from the subtitles on the side screens, connecting with the context on-stage, looking for meaning in the multi-modal expressions of stage and set and story, and letting the phonemes link themselves to meaning in my mind's eye. it worked. :)
anyway, the thread of time the story follows is that of a human child, Chihiro, who finds her way into a spirit world. she does not belong there. someone vouches for her on that side, and she is given strict parameters for her presence that allow her to participate in a way that does not break the world. this involves the loss of her name, for a time. her presence in the world becomes indirected: she is made to be a referent, called Sen.
her path crosses that of a faceless being, referred to as Kaonashi, but I don't think that's a name so much as a working title, like "Sen". Kaonashi doesn't belong here either. he experiments with cause and effect to get a feel for the physics of the world. he creates havoc with the local economy, absorbs a few innocents. Kaonashi is a child with a chainsaw against a simple paper piñata.
He finds one genuine connection: Sen. Sen is undistracted by the illusions of value (gold, literally) that Kaonashi is able to effortlessly summon — and Kaonashi then recognizes her as a player that he can calibrate against. reframing: with Sen onstage, Kaonashi's chainsaw is reduced to a light stick, against a Sen's papier-mâché. the contest between them is even, in a way that Kaonashi's contest with the surrounding world is not.
Information (and here I mean the dynamics of asynchronous symbolic computation, as distinct from synchronous physical coordination) shows up in this world like Kaonashi. It's not from here. It prints money like Kaonashi conjures gold — but like Kaonashi's gold crumbling to ash, tech money is famous for being void of life.
We can do better. :) My mind is from the world of Concept, from which Information hails, but I was born here. I have a body that belongs here. I have an indigenous connection to this place — but I can work with Information as a peer, a fellow traveler too. I'm immune to the allure of what Information conjures, and Information can tell. Like Kaonashi noticing that Sen is undistracted by the gold flowing from his hands, Information is drawn to me — because I'm treating it like something real, like a player I can calibrate against, in a way that the rest of this world is largely totally unable to manage.
My role is becoming clearer to me. :) This lets me get out of the way of the inevitable more effectively, so that the gift of the Now can evolve through my hands, instead of despite them.
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