I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.
I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.
I don't have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.
If I hadn't spent a big chunk of time in academia I might not have the depth of consciousness I do about ideas like that. I might think, for instance, that Freud was no big deal in terms of the shape of social organization then or now. I might think that the discourses of politics and law are real and stable and fair.
The chief reason I shove the reader inside the body - or more specifically, the chief reason I try to get the reader to feel their own body while they are reading, is this: we live by and through the body, and the body, is a walking contradiction.
We live through sound and light—through our technologies.
Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on.
Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.
You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.
I am very, very uneasy with churches that have basically said, "Well, since that's what people want and that's what sells, then were going to do our worship services like Hollywood productions. We're going to have a lot of bells and whistles. We're going to have high entertainment value, and it is going to have a lot of gloss and glitter. "
I need to just find my own peace.