These Things: A Word, A Thought
“We are a bookshop. Bookshops are all about ideas and tolerating different opinions” - a bookstore owner who broke up a fight against Steve Bannon in his bookstore.
[SOUNTRACK for this edition (great for office environments too): Brian Eno - New Space Music]
I don’t believe that things happen for a reason. The idea that things happen for a reason seems overly deterministic. And, I’m pretty sure reason was invented by humans to explain the wonder of life and the universe in the most banal way possible. Doesn’t it seem that when we’re “most reasonable” what we’re really doing is trying to keep things as we understand them now. This obviously subverts evolution and therefore possibility.
I’m sorry, let me try this again. I believe that it is up to me to choose a perspective and that this, most of the time, determines my attitude. I don’t know if this is free will and I am intrigued by the idea of linguistic determinism (or relativity) and how, if the hypothesis is true, do we evolve. Well?
Did you know that the German poet Paul Celan stopped writing poems in German after World War II? He believed, like the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that the language we speak determines how we think and that if Adolph Hitler spoke German, and his thinking was influenced by the German language, that there must be something wrong with the German language. You can feel it in his poem, “Ars Poetica 62.”
It’s more difficult today than just a few years ago for me to choose a perspective that maintains a positive attitude. Sure, circumstance influences this but what about the English language? Is there something in the way I speak that keeps me from thinking differently, from choosing another perspective, as I am currently feeling very distanced from any community? Does the way I speak create division in my mind?
An idea that is helping me choose my perspectives is a simple question: “Will You Choose Alive Time or Dead Time?”
Of course there’s inspiration too like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Message from the Future” that is beautifully animated by Molly Crabapple for The Intercept. Even reading more about Molly, I don’t remember how I first ran across her name but I would say it’s serendipitous. Is that too close to a reason? Or hope? Or desperation?
Am I overthinking this? I’ll have to consider that possibility.
If you’re looking for inspiration, The Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) online film recommendation engine is super impressive with its ability to match films to what you need to watch next. One of which is “Never Look Away.”
Once in April, I was in a motorcycle wreck that left me with a broken collar bone which kept me still for a few days. I got bored so I took three online classes: web design with HTML, JavaScript, and Perl/CGI. I accidentally started a career because I couldn’t get to the office for a few days. This paragraph doesn’t fit the content of this letter as well as it did initially. Is it nostalgia that insists I leave it?
I read a story (“Good Things Happen in Bookstores”) about Zeno, one of my favorite philosophers, how he accidentally became a philosopher because he overheard something in a bookstore. Zeno is the philosopher who pointed out the nonlinearity of logic with his example that mathematically there is always a halfway between two points. There is always a midpoint between A and B. And yet in the real world, we can cross the street subverting this mathematical logic. Maybe this has to do with time and not space?
I’ve been growing mushrooms at home, intentionally, in our pantry for a few years now. Mushrooms do what they will and sometimes don’t bloom as expected. I say “bloom,” but mushrooms don’t really bloom as they are not really plants. Like fish scales and the scales on the wings of butterflies, the cell walls of mushrooms are made of chitin. This may be “Why You Can’t Overcook Mushrooms” and why precooking them in water is the way to go.
Routine is not accidental and is very important to me right now as I’m wrestling with several large writing projects. But as the seasons change so does the availability of time. There’s yard work, installing gutters, and building bicycles for Oliver Bicycle Works. I’m trying to keep my routine but, as I wrote before, it’s harder now to keep a particular perspective than ever so it’s become more important that I find “A Portable Routine.” This too helps.
Charles Wright’s words reverberate constantly in my imagination that poems, “neither hinder, nor help,” which is why it is so important to me to maintain my relationship to this wondrous strange artform. I’m beginning to see that cinema is more of an extension of poetry than of drama as many people write. I don’t think I’m right–but this is my experience of these artforms: an image through sound that evokes an emotional or intellectual stirring in the imagination. Poetry and cinema both offer this and neither has anything to do with the edifice of language. Maybe.
I’m writing this letter to you as if it might help. It has. Thank you.
I’m currently reading:
“How Music Works” by David Byrne. More than anything, this is a fantastic experience of an incredibly facil imagination. I’m learning to see more perspectives and how music determines (uh oh) so many things culturally.
“Louise in Love” by Mary Jo Bang. This collection of poems is also a lyrically threaded story, a novel in a way. I’m rereading these poems as inspiration for an augmented reality project that won’t leave me alone.
“Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World” by Paul Stamets. I’m simply exploring options.
“The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers” by Christopher Vogler. I’m learning how to thread story through my associative and lyric experiences. This book, and its discussions of Jungian archetypes, has taught me many things about myself and how I relate to other energies.