Book Terrors...! VI: Continuum

It's funny to hear
DFW describe
entertainment as
filling a void like
an addiction, and
certainly how he
talks about his own
habits, because he
truly doesn't seem
to have any reason
or interest in his,
and so certainly
for him, his reasoning
is sound; for some
points of view, maybe
I could be seen as
similar, but I would
disagree.

I don't use it to substitute
social interaction, or
to glut on it (even when
I was at my "worst," I
never just watched
for the sake of
watching, but because
I was legitimately being
entertained, and this
is not even to count
all the hours I have
spent reading any
number of a thousand
things, in print and
online).

I am not inherently
someone who will
benefit a great deal
from extended
interactions with
other people, and
that has little to
do with "shyness"
or social anxiety,
so much as a lack
of basic common
demonitators that are
anything less than,
well, entertainment.

It just so happens
that I benefit more
from experiencing
what other creative
voices have to say,
and if I happen to
be entertained along
the way, then so much
is the better, and really,
why should I complain
about that? Where
would it improve my
circumstances to belittle
the results of what I
think is a perfect
culmination of mankind's
potential, when all the petty
differences are truly set aside
(like every two years
at the Olympics)?

Particularly as an American,
where it has become our
national drive to engage
in these activities?

Louis Hartz apparently
thought to note that
Americans tend to
avoid extremes, which
I would say is exactly
what helped forge
our country in the first
place, and no matter
how many examples
you can think of
that would contradict
this, just within
the counterculture
and the void it's left
us for the past forty years,
I would still argue that
we're still driven by it,
and the only way the
American Dream will
ever truly be broken,
when we trade
bread and circuses
for coliseums and empire,
is when we change that.

Yet I don't see that happening;
where would be the fun in that?

Natural Selection

Of all the rational ways
to express oneself,
I believe the majority
of us choose to do
so in irrational ways.

I think it's why nature
has a way of avoiding us,
not because we're
the top of the food chain
(because I hardly believe
anyone really wants
to boast about that,
whether or not it's
even true, so much as
easy to assume, because
we have so many more
ways to kill things
in abundance)
but because nature
is inherently rational,
even all the weather
we find so inconvenient.

Our greatest form of
expression is irrationality,
the ability to know what
the right thing is and decide
not to do it.

I wouldn't particularly call it
evolution, and in that way,
I've never subscribed
to "survival of the fittest,"
because any fool can survive,
and any fool can make
a considerable collection
of things (even trash, and
not just metaphorically,
counts, I might add, and that
shit is free), but it's how
we treat each other, how
we refuse to accept
that our lack of rationality
impedes us, and I say
this from the perspective
of a considerably irrational
mind, because that's
the only way I know to
confront the irrationality
around me.

Yeah, that really doesn't make
any sense, and yet, that's what
I do, out of sheer frustration,
because I keep hoping
and expecting that people
will learn to be less selfish,
and I'm not talking by way
of symptoms, of material things,
but in the way they approach
others, about knowing that
they can't just assume the world
will accept every ill-considered
thought they have.

That's what school ought to do,
if parents won't, instead of
cramming "knowledge" only
intended to act as an example
(and yet graded as though
life depended on it), try
and see what wisdom,
a little common sense,
can accomplish.

I'm not saying people
are stupid, but they
sure like to act like it.

Predictably
irrationally.

Book Terrors...! V: Deep Survival

As long as a thing is possible,
it lasts forever; there is no
such thing as extinction
for creativity, for what
the human mind
is capable of.

This is why I must scoff
at the traditional beliefs
that continue to suggest
that what we have can
be lost, because it's
not in what we have
but what we can do
where our greatest
treasures lie.

As hard as it is to believe,
all that we have now is
not even the beginning
of a pinnacle of
human civilization,
because that pinnacle
is in our minds.

I am not a pessimist.

I am a sorry realist,
an unfortunate dreamer
of impossible things,
forever restless,
unsatisfied with
what I see around me,
because all I see
is potential.

It makes me somewhat surly,
but I would rather be that
than to accept things
and settle for what's easy.

If I were a recent movie,
I would be The Imaginarium
of Doctor Parnassus, and I
am always fighting Mr. Nick.

That's why I believe in war,
because only in destruction
can new things be made,
and it is in a million little
battles every day that
all things are achieved.

If we stopped
just for one second
to acknowledge that,

we might have the beginnings
of true wisdom among us.

Book Terrors...! IV

Here's where we get to
Deep Survival.

The Great American Novel
isn't about laboring over
your story, but rather about
simple inspiration,
whatever form that may take,
if it happens to be
immediately relevant,
or a grand spectacle
that can't be appreciated
until decades later.

I guess I simply don't understand
how DFW fretted so much
over writing, whether it
was some sense of obligation
he'd picked up (growing
into all sorts of apparent
privilege that allowed
him to be singled out
before he'd actually
accomplished anything)
or his own psychoses.

Because for me, ideas
just seem to float around.

I don't get how any writer
ever begs for material,
because I guess I assume
that writers write
because they can think
more creatively than others.

But that's not really the case,
because the arts are too
alluring to pass up as
a vanity, which is a comment
I direct not at DFW,
but for all the sycophants
in general, who take it
for granted, rather than
from inspiration, that
they can make a living
doing this stuff.

But I'm not bitter;
I'm with ED.

You don't need to be
acknowledged
in order to do this.

Book Terrors...! III

Here's the deal:

The Hungry Mind consumes all,
the Hungry Mind is like a sponge,
the Hungry Mind will never give up,
and quite frankly, I simply
don't understand
how the Hungry Mind can ever
be sated.

The Hungry Mind is what we think of
when we consider literary fiction,
the kind of storytelling that isn't
satisfied with anything less than
an expansive view of even
the most common things.

The Hungry Mind is what turned
the Trojan War, the legends
of great heroes like Beowulf,
King Arthur and Robin Hood,
the Three Musteteers,
Sherlock Holmes & Hercule Poirot,
Doc Savage & Superman,
Jason Bourne & Jack Bauer
into folklore and literature.

The Hungry Mind cannot be
turned off or lost;
it's Crime & Punishment
in the year 2666.

Even if everyone stops reading,
someone will still tell stories,
and all of it will come back.

The Hungry Mind is mankind's
indomitable legacy.

The Hungry Mind
is a state of mind,
the incurable mind,
the precocious
and pretentious
and that little voice
inside all of us,
goading us on,
the devil and the angel
sitting on our shoulders,
waiting to see which side
will win, the battle
of good & evil,
a game of backgammon.

The Hungry Mind
is constant as the Northern Star,
and makes all the world a stage.

I feel pretty good about it.

Book Terrors...! II

The problem that literature
faces is that its most popular
elements are duplicated
and improved upon
in film, television, and comics.

If you want to know the real
reason why Harry Potter became
so huge, it was because
it was so unusual for books
to create something new
and enticing, because for
so long, we've buried their
impact within mounds
and mounds of obscurity,
so that, sure, people will
read, but only because
they consider it
a cultural necessity.

It's the same thing
that happened to poetry,
which has become such
an isolated activity
(which, again, DFW observed),
it might as well not be
taking place at all,
or in secretive cults,
for anyone cares.

It's just not relevant,
and that's what we've
done to it ourselves.

That's the sort of thing
that really needs
to be addressed,
or I will continue
to be depressed...

Book Terrors...! I

More poetry inspired by DFW:

It's uncomfortable to suggest
that literate reading is somehow
in danger when I'm not sure
it's ever really been in fashion.

I believe that we've always been
far more interested in popular
material, and that's how it
all got started in the first place,
what the bards sang about.

The problem seems more,
to me, about the extreme
abundance of such material,
that everyone can get this
stuff published, and that
there's no room and hardly
any real attention outside
out ladies reading circles
to anything that might
actually challenge you.

We start it in school,
scaring students into
thinking there are right
and wrong ways
to read the serious kind,
sober minds that must
be suppressed in order
to forget how much
of a pain it was
the first time around.

The problem with literate
reading and writing is
that it's stuck in the same
traps as everything else,
exclusive, constricting circles
that don't know what they have
and therefore hurt more
than help what they're
fighting to save.

But as I said,
the situation is
not as dire
as it seems.

But we are all
alarmists.