Special Announcement:
I'm proud to contribute my 2005 Evil Time Traveler story The Final Voyage of Carl Denning, 1609 to issue #2 of the ezine Death's Head Grin. Read, browse, and lend your support to any- and everyone who's made it their business to publish stories.
Showing posts with label The Work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Work. Show all posts
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Monday, April 02, 2007
Preface to Initial Conclusion after One Day of Experimentation in the Field of Modular Thinking
Today I mastered the ability to do my job without the need for directed, conscious thought.
Let me explain: though I am a thoughtful soul, and would never advocate the voluntary suspension of conscious activity. However, as my job does not demand even the slightest pretence of such activity, I would much prefer my cognitive energies be directed toward something else. Anything else.
So I began experimenting, knowing that while the Western tradition is quick to separate body and mind into distinct, oppositional objects, the Eastern tradition is in large part based upon the idea of mind and body affecting each other in a holistic unity. Trance states, hypnosis, self-induced feats of superpowered mental control...all these are, theoretically, possible, in so much as anything is possible. Proceeding thusly, I managed to spend the entire day plotting a scene from my current story, while at the same time working a full days work to my usual high degree of capacity. I know, because my work is so routinized, so autonomic, so absolutely unvarying, that any variance in the movement of my hands, the timbre of my voice, or the inflection in my callers response instantly dragged me from my self-induced, story-plotting state (what my bosses would no doubt label “daydreaming”) and into full attention.
I didn’t fuck up. And I didn’t get caught. Loose yourself in a story, especially one of your own, in any other public place…a school, say…and it wouldn’t be long before the local jumped up authority figure came down on you hard for having a spark of interest in your glassy-eyed stare. (Capital crime in my old school…you could drool all you wanted as long as you trained your eyes to follow the teacher…but all the gods help you if you stared out the window.) But at our jobs we are truly isolated…as apart as you can be in a room full of people, answering the phone all day. The walls of our “pods” (a cubicle by any other name still has three sides and no privacy and no view of anything other than my coworkers cubicles) separate us from each other. The phones separate us from our “customers”. Office doors separate our supervisors from us and miles of distance separate me from my home, this apartment, this chair, and the…absolutely…beautiful creature sleeping in my bed…
The point is, no one noticed me. Tonight I came home, wrote down what I’d thought about, and found enough inspiration in that to write more. It was (even though my superstitions make me loath to admit it) a good day, all told. I hope to repeat my experiment tomorrow. Whoever may read this: wish me well. I’d do the same for you.
Let me explain: though I am a thoughtful soul, and would never advocate the voluntary suspension of conscious activity. However, as my job does not demand even the slightest pretence of such activity, I would much prefer my cognitive energies be directed toward something else. Anything else.
So I began experimenting, knowing that while the Western tradition is quick to separate body and mind into distinct, oppositional objects, the Eastern tradition is in large part based upon the idea of mind and body affecting each other in a holistic unity. Trance states, hypnosis, self-induced feats of superpowered mental control...all these are, theoretically, possible, in so much as anything is possible. Proceeding thusly, I managed to spend the entire day plotting a scene from my current story, while at the same time working a full days work to my usual high degree of capacity. I know, because my work is so routinized, so autonomic, so absolutely unvarying, that any variance in the movement of my hands, the timbre of my voice, or the inflection in my callers response instantly dragged me from my self-induced, story-plotting state (what my bosses would no doubt label “daydreaming”) and into full attention.
I didn’t fuck up. And I didn’t get caught. Loose yourself in a story, especially one of your own, in any other public place…a school, say…and it wouldn’t be long before the local jumped up authority figure came down on you hard for having a spark of interest in your glassy-eyed stare. (Capital crime in my old school…you could drool all you wanted as long as you trained your eyes to follow the teacher…but all the gods help you if you stared out the window.) But at our jobs we are truly isolated…as apart as you can be in a room full of people, answering the phone all day. The walls of our “pods” (a cubicle by any other name still has three sides and no privacy and no view of anything other than my coworkers cubicles) separate us from each other. The phones separate us from our “customers”. Office doors separate our supervisors from us and miles of distance separate me from my home, this apartment, this chair, and the…absolutely…beautiful creature sleeping in my bed…
The point is, no one noticed me. Tonight I came home, wrote down what I’d thought about, and found enough inspiration in that to write more. It was (even though my superstitions make me loath to admit it) a good day, all told. I hope to repeat my experiment tomorrow. Whoever may read this: wish me well. I’d do the same for you.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Prefacial
It is possible, though highly improbable, to concoct a moral system based upon the actions of superheroes. But that’s not what I want to talk about.
It is possible to set out a systematic philosophy of ethical thought, observation, and behavior using nothing more than aphorisms composed of two-sentence thought-stems. Nor is that what I want to talk about. My roommate’s co-worker notice I’m reading Human, All Too Human and asks what it’s about. I tell him, “Philosophy,” and he tells me, “I didn’t know you were a philosophizer,” dragging the word through California sand like “Ted” Theodore Logan: “phil-os-o-phizer.”
“Dude,” I wondered, “you aren’t?” To me, it’s as if someone has announce they didn’t know I breathed oxygen/nitrogen/trace element mixture. At the same time, how could he have known? It’s not as if I’ve told him. Two years ago, when my ex-wife called me a philosopher I didn’t believe her. Philosophers have systems, books and fixed beliefs. I was a fool two years ago, and believe some foolish things. Now I’ve become quite acquainted with the fluidity of all things, shook hands with relativism and discovered that the universe is an uncertain chaos; that we really cannot know and what we know we can rarely tell given that we have slaved ourselves to the techno-fetishism of language. The Word Virus marches on, ever West…until it reaches East and bites its own tail like a jargon snake.
Was that what I wanted to talk about it? Not really, no. Really, all I wanted to do was get the juices flowing, get the ol’ synapse firing, and get ready for the real Work. I must find a way to finish a story and at last leave behind this inescapable feeling that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing.
Strange choice of words, that. “Supposed” to be. Strange. This is what happens when an impressionable writer reads William S. Burroughs. If I needed a defense, I would offer up the fact that we are both children of Missouri, and we both fled for the Big City as soon as we possibly could. Both of us found our pet addictions and enjoyed our unrequited romances…though if he weren’t dead I might feel sorry for old Bill. Alan Ginsberg sounds like a hard bastard to carry a torch for, like the kind of girl who’ll bring her new boyfriend over, the better to solicit your opinion, “as a friend.” What to do then, and remain “moral” (or, as Nietzsche might say, to remain in synch with one’s own will). My heart and love once again summed it up quite succinctly: “It’s a happy ending; just not for you.” And this is most definitely not what I wanted to talk about.
But I’ve spent the week reading Naked Lunch and last night attended my best friend’s birthday party. The month of February is falling away from itself and I’m not closer to where I believe I should be. No closer to working my will upon the universe. My mind is a fragmented haze and I must get to Work soon. No choice to be had. I must learn to finish things.
It is possible to set out a systematic philosophy of ethical thought, observation, and behavior using nothing more than aphorisms composed of two-sentence thought-stems. Nor is that what I want to talk about. My roommate’s co-worker notice I’m reading Human, All Too Human and asks what it’s about. I tell him, “Philosophy,” and he tells me, “I didn’t know you were a philosophizer,” dragging the word through California sand like “Ted” Theodore Logan: “phil-os-o-phizer.”
“Dude,” I wondered, “you aren’t?” To me, it’s as if someone has announce they didn’t know I breathed oxygen/nitrogen/trace element mixture. At the same time, how could he have known? It’s not as if I’ve told him. Two years ago, when my ex-wife called me a philosopher I didn’t believe her. Philosophers have systems, books and fixed beliefs. I was a fool two years ago, and believe some foolish things. Now I’ve become quite acquainted with the fluidity of all things, shook hands with relativism and discovered that the universe is an uncertain chaos; that we really cannot know and what we know we can rarely tell given that we have slaved ourselves to the techno-fetishism of language. The Word Virus marches on, ever West…until it reaches East and bites its own tail like a jargon snake.
Was that what I wanted to talk about it? Not really, no. Really, all I wanted to do was get the juices flowing, get the ol’ synapse firing, and get ready for the real Work. I must find a way to finish a story and at last leave behind this inescapable feeling that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing.
Strange choice of words, that. “Supposed” to be. Strange. This is what happens when an impressionable writer reads William S. Burroughs. If I needed a defense, I would offer up the fact that we are both children of Missouri, and we both fled for the Big City as soon as we possibly could. Both of us found our pet addictions and enjoyed our unrequited romances…though if he weren’t dead I might feel sorry for old Bill. Alan Ginsberg sounds like a hard bastard to carry a torch for, like the kind of girl who’ll bring her new boyfriend over, the better to solicit your opinion, “as a friend.” What to do then, and remain “moral” (or, as Nietzsche might say, to remain in synch with one’s own will). My heart and love once again summed it up quite succinctly: “It’s a happy ending; just not for you.” And this is most definitely not what I wanted to talk about.
But I’ve spent the week reading Naked Lunch and last night attended my best friend’s birthday party. The month of February is falling away from itself and I’m not closer to where I believe I should be. No closer to working my will upon the universe. My mind is a fragmented haze and I must get to Work soon. No choice to be had. I must learn to finish things.
Monday, February 12, 2007
The Ghost of Dian Fossey
Yesterday I received a rejection letter from Asimov’s. A form generated, Xerox copied, standard issue reply. A McNotice; their editorial staff did not lower themselves to signing it with a sig-stamp or a robopin, depriving their letter of the personal touch I characteristic of, say, F&SF’s rejection letters.
Easy enough to make out why I did not rate the robosignature. As Harlan Ellison reportedly said to the creator of Babylon 5, “Stop writing crap and you’ll start selling.”
Raised on the Novel I, spent the longest time balking at the Short Story, both as a medium and as a form. Too short, I thought, too base-board. To forgettable, to clichéd. Too O. Henry, and how I hated O. Henry. Bastard. Now I must pay for all this time spent in spite with time spent perfecting my personal achievements of the form; going through the same, slow process of experiment and expectation that’s allowed my Novel In Progress to swell to 30,000 words, with its end only barely in site.
I recognize the necessity of this learning process. The bricks of Rome rest on a bone yard of centuries and Robert Heinlein I am not. No contest winners on my hard drive, and I also recognize the fact that, in the process of writing everything but the Good Short Story, I’ve written myself an indeterminate sentence: twenty-five to Life in the Big House of Service Industry Economics. By day I look through my bars and dream of life on the Outside, where the toils of my class of worker are swallowed by the same visual background radiation that allows us to pass orange jumpsuited work groups as they trim brush along our highways.
Thankfully, my coworkers suspect nothing of my plans to consign them to nonentity oblivion. If they did I’d promise to make it up to them as best I could: by immortalizing their struggle for the wider world, preserving it in its own prison of abstract, symbolic representation.
I doubt that would cool them. This is why writers must remain anonymous. To be affective students of the human animal, we must allow ourselves to be possessed by the spirit of Goodall and Fossey and disappear into its midst.
Easy enough to make out why I did not rate the robosignature. As Harlan Ellison reportedly said to the creator of Babylon 5, “Stop writing crap and you’ll start selling.”
Raised on the Novel I, spent the longest time balking at the Short Story, both as a medium and as a form. Too short, I thought, too base-board. To forgettable, to clichéd. Too O. Henry, and how I hated O. Henry. Bastard. Now I must pay for all this time spent in spite with time spent perfecting my personal achievements of the form; going through the same, slow process of experiment and expectation that’s allowed my Novel In Progress to swell to 30,000 words, with its end only barely in site.
I recognize the necessity of this learning process. The bricks of Rome rest on a bone yard of centuries and Robert Heinlein I am not. No contest winners on my hard drive, and I also recognize the fact that, in the process of writing everything but the Good Short Story, I’ve written myself an indeterminate sentence: twenty-five to Life in the Big House of Service Industry Economics. By day I look through my bars and dream of life on the Outside, where the toils of my class of worker are swallowed by the same visual background radiation that allows us to pass orange jumpsuited work groups as they trim brush along our highways.
Thankfully, my coworkers suspect nothing of my plans to consign them to nonentity oblivion. If they did I’d promise to make it up to them as best I could: by immortalizing their struggle for the wider world, preserving it in its own prison of abstract, symbolic representation.
I doubt that would cool them. This is why writers must remain anonymous. To be affective students of the human animal, we must allow ourselves to be possessed by the spirit of Goodall and Fossey and disappear into its midst.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)