Writing
Transcribed thoughts from my journal. Stuff I put down on paper to guide me through the current project I’m working on. A sort of pseudo-manifesto, an expression of some of my ideas on the topic.
Writing has been on my mind a lot lately. Writing as an art form, the novel and poem as a work of art. The creative act and the spiritual mysticism surrounding it. I’m sickened by a current of mercantile behavior and the embrace of obscene metric-focused vulgarity. Typing isn’t writing, vomiting recycled television plots, and tracking word counts isn’t writing. I’m becoming ill with the inundation of boosterism and pablum, a hatred growing inside me towards genre repetition that is just shorthand for cowardice and lack of purpose beyond base entertainment.
Thoughts, an unorganized manifesto of ideas:
What am I writing for, what am I trying to say? What is the point of what I am doing? My work has to say something, it has to communicate a truth, otherwise, it’s just masturbation.
I want to look back at writing from the past, absorb it, and then move forward. Take a few steps back and correct course. Return to the crossroads of modernism and take a different path. Get rid of post-modernism because it failed to answer any pertinent questions. The late 20th century is far behind us and work from that era does not speak to my generation at all. In our modern world, all of the progress has done nothing for us and has left us empty, disenchanted.
Reject nihilism, materialism, and deconstruction, as spiritually bankrupt. Focus on art that creates. Body and Soul. Integrate the realist with the spiritual. Create art for truth. All truth. The good, the evil, the beautiful, and the grotesque.
The spiritual is not always nice, not always pleasant, but often terrible and filled with shadows. Art is a spiritual quest towards the divine, but approaching the numinous awe and terror should be expected.
1. Find a new spirituality in art.
2. Embrace the imperfect, the mystical, the amateurish. Art as business, as a factory product, is disgusting. Create from a deep pool of matter.
3. Write subjectively not objectively. Style Matters. Voice is key.
Reject nostalgia/move forward —>
Take inspiration from the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi, the beauty of imperfection, and Mono No Aware, the awareness of the transience of things and the bittersweet feelings that accompany that passing. These concepts illustrate truth in existence.
Embrace the shadow, everything has one.
Modern neo-lib art has two poles. On one end you have saccharine Bubble Gum, a fake improbable word. On the other, you have the bitter and dishonest. Reject it.