I'm not a professional writer. The idea of being a professional poet seems absurd to me. Same with the idea of being a professional philosopher or even psychologist. Pursuing these modes of literary inquiry as a livelihood seems absurd to me not because I see the activities as pointless but because the systems through which poetic, philosophical and psychological labor are formalized into professions and financially compensated have the effect of neutralizing and domesticating the intended effects of these activities turning them into interior decorating when they want to open frontiers. I'm an amateur writer but writing is more than a hobby to me. My motives for writing are exploratory. Writing is a means of investigation, radical empiricism. For me, writing is a way to operationalize an emerging understanding of the nature and function of imagination in the formation and maintenance of self and experience. It's a way to participate in those operations with a degree of conscious awareness and intentionality. Writing is a way to evolve and maintain a relationship with the well springs of conscious being, becoming, and meaning making. ...... Notes toward a phenomenology of human oppressiveness. The gaze of the other, the panopticon, and the way words watch. Language as an instrument of surveillance and control. Drama triangle-- the politics and mechanics of immiseration. Rumor, with its many operations, acting as a form of surveillance, enforcing wasting simplicities, diseases and conveniences. Inscribing the shadow of death and its gods into the living, imponderable body. ...... Wallace Stevens and the primordial What the Fuck. That he ends the thing with "The the" "Where was it one first heard of the truth?" Inalienable, of the nature, iambic, no Nobodaddy required, like a river unspooling itself, with no one watching. To know the use of words and not endure their usage, pure duration, phantasm in unknown territory, immune to flattery, the ground, with no one keeping score, the invisible library of the born blind and their psalms, tiny green breast feather levitating on a mirror.
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https://youtu.be/zprRZ2wFQD4?si=kODWWsvvHUawrEbX
Beautiful. And true.