Posted by I am waiting for the computer, the very old computer to fire up. It is a homunculus given a spark of energy like the me in my brain waiting to acknowledge it.
I am broadsided by tv interlocutory confrontationalists who pry my imagination with leverage of thesis/antithesis, washing and dredging belief and disbelief with the arrogant authority of consequential narration.
The computer chips have brought to order the mind awakening, and with dawn at my fingertips I am wellborn. I am lists of stigmas with sigmatas of my broad attention given; I am gamed for gaming.
Associations charging, fueling derivatives meandering and wandering, yet faithful to unseen signposts.
The moths that lined her lips tickled the tips of my own lips. The bottoms of our feet together seesawing in unison on the bed, our fingers grasping, clutching wrists. Her pupils were moons in ponds of onrushing days, speeding ahead for retrospection from an old age. And I am looking back at her as some behemoth against whom I once rubbed and wondering if she would be worth remembering. I cannot remember. I was imagining things, divining her face. I was shocked to hear she had private affairs. The whole time I was lost in her face instead of paying attention to her.
With all the things constantly teeming my brain I should always have something to write about, I tell myself. I say I want to share my stories with others but that doesn’t make others consumers of my brand of talkativeness.
Okay. My voices agree to come together for the sake of the family. We lick our wounds in our own corners. And come out swinging.
A: Ah, go ahead, kid, sell ’em su’um. If you don’t sell the things you have produced and just give them away-that stuff is called junk. Things have to have a value and that value is what we say it is. And you are selling something that represents an abstract value.
B: You know, there’s lotsa and lotsa abstract, intellectual presumptuousness in the value of art.
C: All art. Even Daniel Dennett.
B: That’s not art.
C: Imagine. The Absurdity in his writing is that he makes no distinction between behavior and mind. Since imagination is the act of the mind, which doesn’t exist, art cannot be created until the rules have been set forth for its creation. An absurdity. Artists conjure their forms from chaos. The faculty of mind is above the chaos and not part of it in order to establish order. Therefore one cannot be truly creative because imagination itself creates the rules with which it engages as consciousness. Mind can only sculpt the chaos into forms that can be understood, forms latent in every human regardless of language, according to Chomsky.* But we aren’t each just a simple comprehending yardstick adapting to environment. The irony of Daniel Dennett’s writing is that he is then his own creation even though his creativity doesn’t exist separate from function. His life is art. The artist posing as scientist.
B: I can’t agree with you or disagree.
C: There’s too much this side/that side without splitting the sides exponentially to configure the ramifications of word momentum. This is just poetry. It is not deduction.
OA**: (I try to move to the next line of thought but my creative brain is stuck in a loop of a this or that dichotomy; in this case the educated/uneducated, initiated/uninitiated, religious/anti-religious, etc. and in my mind I want a dialogue along the lines of Waiting for Godot. Btw, I have high regards for Dennett. I have read his work and John Searle’s. I read them both for their excellent prose and for their intellectual engagement. I don’t espouse any academics or school of thought really. Philosophy is simply a fertile area where I can grow my poetry. And as a student decades ago I got into the habit of writing papers that build knowledge rather than tear it down. As a fictionalist I enjoy reading various perspectives of philosophy because they provide archetypal forms which I can use to create persona and character in these psychological vignettes of Absurdity which I post)
B: Lotta things shouldn’t be worth anything but there’s too much money floating around, I guess. And nobody remembers where they threw a few bucks away last year. Hey, if someone wants to pay for some entertainer’s spent wad of chewing gum then it’s fair for you to put a value on that novel you wrote.C: Or chapbook of poems, or a music CD, a painting, drawing…
C: Or chapbook of poems, or a music CD, a painting, drawing…
A: Right. And if you don’t sell it you are the only one to whom it matters. You certainly aren’t selling it for financial gain. You spent hundreds of hours on that novel, on that painting, on that musical album. Putting it up for sale is like a memorialization. Give it it’s eulogy and move on. If it is taking up space throw it away. Work on something else. The life force feeds itself by creating. Old art hanging around to haunt you with failures…maybe, maybe not. You, yes, Mr. Neurosis of the thesis/antithesis, lover of modernism and postmodernism, disdainer of politicizing..
B: Somebody gave Rand Paul my email.
C: I know. Mine too. I thought he was a fictional person.
B: What?
C: I don’t know why.
B: Ok. I am pretty sure he is a real person.
A: Everyone has there place in history. And a lot of what we are made out to be isn’t real. We are all our own person enduring the minor sufferings of our environment, agonizing over our own cruelties of youth. I wonder what cruelties of youth Rand Paul had to endure. Did he like to show off?
B: Everyone likes to now and then. I hate that we don’t let each other do that more often. But that bores everyone. I mean, what is a reader supposed to get out of this? Reading this is like breathing smoke signals or something. It isn’t a story, does nothing to engage…
C: Wait. You see, their eyes have come this far and are wondering why they haven’t conveyed words to the brain with some sort of resolution, just a mind in process…
B: Yes. What is it doing?
C: Writing a story. You are watching a child play with a dog outside and are temporarily taken from the customer phone calls. You are working at a carnival and have to put a dog eared novel down to make change for a bunch of delinquents who spit on you. You are a human being who is writing about trying to write a novel. You are a dialectitian rehearsing argument while watching comedy movies with the sound muted.
B: But I want a story with a moral to it.
C: I have nothing to sell you. Sorry.
B: But why do you bother?
C: The question is for A.
A: It’s what I do. Please read the above paragraph that begins with, “Writing a story.”
B: Why? It tells me nothing.
A: Exactly.
B: Zen? Is that what this is?
A: No. It’s Mark Twain, “Anyone trying to discover a plot or a motive will be shot.” Or something like that.
B: Should be the other way around.
C: Low brow. Do you really want to destroy culture; the pastime of considering, digesting, adapting with reason?
B: I was born with a temper. I am a complete asshole if I have to reason. I have to see your love or I don’t believe you.
A: Okay. I understand. We had the same father. Let us meet in the middle of the chaos, where the music begins.*** I need my guitar.
*I am referring to Chomski’s hypothetical Language Acquisition Device.
**OA = omniscient author.
***A theme from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy From the Spirit of Music.
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