August

26 days since my last post. I haven’t been in the mood to write on here. Not that I haven’t had anything to say, more like my focus has been elsewhere. The internet bores me more and more. Once it held the promise of new ideas, community, creativity, and discovery, now it’s just irritating content and advertisements.

Living in the South has changed me. I’ve become less interested in moving fast, my focus on the local, the small, the present has increased. I look forward to a stroll with my dog at the end of the evening, the light of the setting sun in the Lowcountry is magnificent. When I look at my phone or open my browser I find myself not interested in what is going on with the world. I don’t care about politics and the culture war, I don’t care about new movies, I don’t much care about anything outside my immediate circle of friends and family.

August is upon me, in time and metaphorically. I’m entering the August of my life and I’m ready to enjoy the rest of this beautiful summer in my back yard with a nice cigar, cold beer, and some good steak cooking on the grill. Winter is still far away but the frenetic action of the early summer is over, now is the time to focus on the present and prepare for a more internal spiritual autumn. I no longer have the time or the energy to waste on trivial dead ends. I’m no longer interested in much beyond my artistic and spiritual development.

Art, I’ve been thinking a lot about art. When I say art I’m referring to writing, fiction and poetry, in my case, but the greater idea of art consumes my thoughts. I’m not interested in writing as a business, as a way to make money, to gain fame. I write because it’s the nearest thing to a spiritual connection with the greater sphere that I can manage.

I’ve changed the way I write. I no longer plot. I just write. I sit down and I type and enter a state of flow where I barely know what comes out, surprising myself when I go back and look at the pages of text on my screen. I don’t know if any of it is good, but I know that it comes from an honest place.

I’m tired of artificiality. I’m tired of genre, all genres, with ridiculous conventions that must be adhered to. I’m tired of it all. I crave authenticity, vitality, and truth. So much of what I come across is baren and valueless, poisoned by irony and stupidity. I reject it all.

I’ve been reading a lot. Putting myself through a torrent of self-education on the great writers of the past two hundred years. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Fitzgerald, Kafka, Borges, Pynchon, McCarthy, Mann, Waugh, O’Conner, Faulkner, Joyce, and many more. I want to live in their worlds and move my inner creative world forward with the inspiration I find in the great works from the past. It’s daunting. When a writer reads a novel like McCarthy’s Blood Meridian he can feel the crushing weight of a masterpiece, the pressure of knowing that the chance of being able to climb such a high mountain of achievement is next to impossible.

But you have to try because art doesn’t come from you, it comes from somewhere else, and you are just the medium.