Writing to Live, Not Living to Write

I can always go into a room and be alone — free from the web of mutual expectations that is the “me” and the “you.”

This is rare. Usually I go into a room, and I’m merely “by myself” – still spinning in the wake of the previous room’s social vortexes. But now and then a door opens leading to an empty space, one with no self-conscious observer interpreting the situation.

But I don’t think it’s healthy to look at this room as a sanctuary. When I do that I notice that the walls of the room become thicker; the distinction between solitude and social engagement becomes more pronounced; and the hypocrisies, or at least contradictions, between the moment of clarity and the rest of the everyday clutter become more annoyingly apparent.

I think it’s hard to be alone (as opposed to being “by myself”) because the insights implicit in that empty space have not been shared widely enough not only between “us”, but between all the other stubbornly held perspectives within this single brain.

Outside the empty room, self-consciousness is tied to a particular combination of assumptions. In a space that is empty of self-consciousness, every assumption is held aloft like a prism, admired for the refractions of meaning these assumptions and metaphors make possible. And here one doesn’t have vested interest in conclusions or particular versions of Truth (with a capital T). Here what holds interest are the ever-shifting portions of eternity that metaphors allow us to navigate.

What feels necessary is to break down the walls separating the various perspectives of the mind – to undertake a publicly demonstrated private dialogue between the various perspectives so that the implications evident in the empty room can circulate through the whole mind.

And where does this mind end? Where does one person actually differ from another if their personality is a differently combined and emphasized collection of social constructs? Constructs such as language, memes and assumptions? It seems to me that all writing is public writing, and looking at oneself ceases to be a personal inquiry and becomes a public enquiry.

I’m not even sure it matters if anyone reads this. The very act of addressing these matters of self publicly feels healthy – as if a window is being opened into rooms that all of us share.

Dialogue is opening windows. Dialogue is proprioception in a larger, livelier, more unpredictable social mind.

And there’s something a little comical about the ego’s relation to dialogue that I haven’t been able to put my finger on till now. Dialogue often begins in a slapstick encounter with one’s own rational limits. It’s a psychic version of the rake-handle/head collision.  I think we run into dialogue accidentally, by discovering the futility of thinking our way beyond our own glaucoma of opinion and wishful thinking.

The rational mind believes it causes these accidental collisions to happen, by its own initiative. This initiative, however, amounts to nothing more than allowing the conversation to unfold unimpeded by ego resistance — fear, shyness, self-doubt…. From a certain angle there is no initiative. Resistance is merely overwhelmed by a genuine interest in the possibilities raised.

It’s interesting that it’s not necessarily an “absence” of resistance that allows a good conversation to start. There may still be resistances, but somehow, now and then, they don’t impede the emergence of something meaningful.

You start to feel that merely by bumbling along in the wake of an unspecified tug of interest, something orderly emerges without us having to intrude intellectually.  It’s uncanny how often order emerges by simply surrendering to ignorance.

This is how dialogue seems to happen. There’s an initial recognition of one’s own absent-mindedness. If I’m in the context of a “normal” High Noon conversation, where I’m expected to draw my opinions faster than the next guy, drawing a blank feels like an ignominious defeat. Faced with my own blank mind, my usual reaction is to scurry for cover. Or to shoot reflex opinions from the hip, hoping the noise at least drowns out the other person’s stupid opinions.

Somehow dialogue emerges from a mind as stupid as that. It doesn’t emerge by resisting or trying to be better than the idiots we are, but by finding the whole keystone cop charade of scurrying from our own ignorance futile and funny.

Dialogue starts when at least one of the gunslingers admits that his mind is firing blanks and surrenders. This flatters some former enemies, confuses others. After all, one minute you’re shooting your mouth off with everyone else. Next thing you know, you’re surrendering to your own slack-jawed befuddlement.

Writing dialogue is the same. These streams of thinking flow through every mind. It’s a whole stream – certainly not a single stream! It includes varied and colliding currents.

In an empty room or in a crowded room, dialogue begins when we proprioceptively grope the contours of our shared ignorance, and notice patterns in this hitherto unfathomable world. Your own ignorance becomes more interesting than being right.

This bewildered engrossment in bewilderment (second sight) can’t differ much from the mind of a baby. The bemused, bewildered baby manages to construct an orderly vision of the world out of scraps of inexplicable sensory excitations, and apparently accomplishes this by leisurely flailing its arms and legs with no rhyme or reason. I think it manages this because it’s graced with the absence of a judgmental overlord criticizing its every move, intent on being right. In that freedom from shame, a baby learns very fast. And if the “gagas” and “googoos” indicate anything, seems to enjoy its bewilderment.

Writing to Live, not Living to Write

I assume it’s inevitable that an overlord forms. But maybe it’s possible for the Self to be implicitly understood as a contextual convenience, with no overbearing qualities. If that could happen, then the Self would be a lovely invention, rising as needed fish-like in its infinite but limited tank, and then going poof with a wink.

But sometimes I picture the self-metaphor more like an egg shell, protective and helpful up to a point, offering a manageable horizon until wider vistas can be dared.

Now I think this self has developed too thick a shell, poisoning the yoke of mind with the excretions of excess rationality and control. I think the mind is being challenged to bust past this shell into wider horizons. But it can’t do so prematurely, without first realizing the Siamese nature of the self. Otherwise this little ego will scramble itself accidentally into false visions of the whole, which can lead to horrors of grandiosity or solipsism.

I’m going to start by merely admitting that the self I have in mind is not me, not whatever this mystery of existence may be.

There are memes circulating that enchant us all into seeing closed worlds, infinities that appear to offer no other possibilities, no breathing space.

We may be resistant to some effects of these black charms circulating in the social context. But we’re never fully free from their poison until these enchanted memes are exposed on the ceremonial dance-floor of dialogue.

These communal ceremonies of healing involve the spontaneous eruption of shared metaphors of a wider empathic horizon. This is an action of profoundly real magic that can dissolve incantations of fragmentation and separation that drive us to madness and war.

I want this blog to be part of that communal ceremony of healing. Not because I want to be a “writer”. Because I need space to breathe.

This is a portion of the Negative Geography Manifesto. I made the thing too long and wanted to post smaller portions of it as stand-alone essays.