One might think I know enough about myself by now, considering I’m 59 years old and that most of my habits would be fixed; well, it turns out that I’m still learning. On our recent trip up the central coast of California, Caroline bought me a nice little notebook as she liked the motif of snail and flowers on the cover. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, on the rare occasion I did write, it was on paper. When I started blogging, I enjoyed having spell-checking at my fingertips, along with the added convenience of not having to transcribe my handwriting. In 2010, on a whitewater rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, I picked up a half-dozen Moleskine-ruled notebooks as there was no possibility of having a computer with us on that epic journey.

Over the course of 19 days, disconnected from the grid, I filled those notebooks, and when I got home, I bypassed transcribing them onto the computer and instead wrote what amounted to a first draft of what would become a book on yet more paper. While parked at a number of coffee shops, I tried to flesh out what I’d jotted down in the canyon as the impressions were still flowing through me. Only after that did I transfer those handwritten pages to the computer. I failed to see any connection between the original note taking with what I ended up with: a book instead of a series of blog posts. I attributed what came out of that exercise to the monumental scope of the truly overwhelming environment.

In the intervening years, I’ve turned to writing on paper during other whitewater adventures that took us up into the Yukon, into the Balkans, or just for the convenience of having a paper notebook stuffed in Caroline’s purse while we walked for miles through some corner of Europe. Each time I practiced this craft of using pen and paper, I was blinded by the magnitude of the environmental intrusion of the place we were visiting. Until this last long holiday weekend.

Heading out the next morning after Caroline’s gift, I gave in to the idea that I’d leave my computer in the hotel room and take my new notebook instead. Keep in mind, when I sling my computer over my shoulder, I’m doing so with consideration that we’ll sit down somewhere with wifi or at least a table so I can start writing to capture the events of the day. How was it not glaringly obvious that I was limiting when I’d be able to write? With a borrowed pen from the Red House Cafe, where we had breakfast, I started writing even before we were seated. Waiting in line, I got busy. Once the cafe opened and we placed our orders, I continued to write without having to clear space for my computer. When later we arrived at the aquarium, I didn’t care about going to find a place to set things up, I asked Caroline for the notebook and the “borrowed” pen, and I just started writing when and where inspiration struck.

Why have I allowed myself to lose countless opportunities to write when the thoughts strike me? Sure, I’ve sent myself plenty of dictated emails while driving or asked Caroline to text me a message as I spoke my ideas and thoughts to her but the notebook offers me a different experience. There, on paper, standing next to the sea at sunrise, looking at my wife, I can write to my heart’s content instead of hoping to remember the moment so at breakfast; I can break out the computer trying to remember what was in my heart and mind.

This brief post should act as a reminder to me to let go of the computer and always count on pen and paper. Due to taking so many photos, I’ve grown too comfortable having the computer nearby to make a backup, even though I’ve not had a memory card fail in more than a decade. The computer, in some ways, has become a boat anchor and a habit that needs some reworking. I need to remember the adage regarding the power of the pen. In any case, I do love the action of putting pen to paper and concentrating my thoughts and inspirations at the moment they are occurring. So remember to always have a notebook at the ready with a couple of extra pens.

As William Makepeace Thackeray once said, “There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.”

I think I am starting to understand Derrida’s idea of erasure. Could he mean that once we’ve seen a sign, image, or word, we’ve learned what it means? On subsequent encounters with the sign or the word, we erase the previous one in a sense, allowing it to be replaced by a new context.

The written word is a dangerous sign that pries open areas of the psyche that are a threat to external control structures. The spoken word is a distinctly different organ/tool from the written word: the emoting tonality of the speaker triggers a temporary euphoria or understanding that arrives with the perceived intentionality of the person talking. Compare this to writing/reading when we decipher on intimate terms, using traces of other writers that weave between ideas of signifier and signified.

This mechanism of attention/deconstruction is not available to the listener, which for controllers is a good thing as the spoken words flow in ways that don’t allow traces to enter the stream as long as the orator keeps their foot on the pedal of delivering a relative barrage.

This was the method employed by Hitler, Trump, Putin, Charles Manson, Shoko Asahara of the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo, and many religious zealots, simply keep drilling the message using an authoritative voice that takes the listener on a ride and overwhelms their analytical mind, rendering them unable to find their own internal voice using threads/traces of what they might have otherwise considered, had they been reading the written words.

For example, I’m currently reading Gayatri’s preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and if I’m comprehending it correctly, it is almost irrelevant as I find my own traces/threads through the meaning of things that produce thoughts and ideas I would consider my own, although I know that what I’m translating into my own discourse is a continuation of words and ideas harvested from everyone, including WSB, Nietzsche, Bukowski, Russel, Baudrillard, E.O. Wilson, and now Derrida via Freud, Heidegger, Foucault, and Lacan.

If I weren’t reading, I couldn’t find the space between words to activate my own thoughts, and I’d have to wait until the speech was finished and an extended silence opened before I could insert my own words. This is a danger of being a listener only as much is lost when waiting for a break. While reading and writing, I have only the tension of my excitement to reach the next word, and should I take a pause, I know I can return to exactly the same point, highlight it if need be, and continue pursuing inspiration if that’s what I’m exploring.

But this is all a palimpsest as I write over the erased text of what I thought I read because my understanding is of no consequence. My interpretation is that of a poor critic afraid to admit deficiencies in comprehension.

I suppose one thing I have learned is that when I reach the actual words of Derrida, I will have to examine the spaces between the words, lines, margins, and the vast empty spaces left as voids in Derrida’s writing in order for me to erase the missing meaning so I might insert my own meaninglessness that should also require erasure.

My job is not to bring closure (answers) to knowledge but to make the abyss larger and more confounding so as to grow the mystery of what still lies ahead. We hope to inspire others to fill the gaps we left behind to peer into the darkness between stars. This is the metaphor for understanding the infinite horizon of potentiality and that we are lightyears away from grasping the limits of our mind and language so we can endure the exploration of all that we’ve never imagined.

We attempt to destroy ambiguity as that is the frontier of freedom where discovery is the propellant, and to that end, all thinkers that risk convention by opening cans of experimental thought taunt the powers that be that their luxuries wrought from control could be put at risk.

Life itself is encoded in written form and must be read using the evolving strings of DNA that are forever altering the story of life on Earth. When we write, we are crafting the future. When we wave in the wind, we are but trees on the surface of a complex structure that lacks meaning; we are the meaning. Should we devolve further and abdicate our responsibility to craft signs, we will become nothing, unable to perceive the abyss of joy.

The letter and the word are signs equivalent to those used in any of the sciences. They represent a formula unfolding like a string of mathematic equations that will find their answer or allusion to further investigation after the totality is consumed, though it’s possible that the problem will not prove solvable or fully intelligible.

The author of anything is not the creator; they are handing the trace of thoughts and ideas through their pages or speech using archaic elements that have greater meaning than can ever be conveyed by any writer trying to say something unique. We filter and allude to directions that paint unknowable pictures in others’ minds whose interpretation we don’t get to control nor how the thread will be continued. Everything is flowing through us, and the more of that everything we can grasp, the bigger the picture grows, while conversely, the less we know, the lesser a human we devolve into.

The creator joins the lineage of gods, shaping the image of history yet to happen as the contribution of interpretation and alteration dislodges convention and tears us from our moorings.

As Foetus once said, “I can do any goddamn thing I want, anything.” That was back in 1985 with the release of his album Nail, and today, it comes to mind once again. Thirty-seven years ago, I snatched that release up after wearing the groove out of Hole, his album from the prior year. Oh, Foetus was not the full name of the project should you be interested in looking it up, it was Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel.

So why is this being mentioned today? Well, that’s not complicated, but it’s complicated. You see, this guy I know is in a pickle of sorts and is lamenting the stupidity of the situation, all of it really, and I was thinking about his need to make a difficult decision and the fact that Caroline and I are traveling tomorrow. While he and I were at coffee this morning, we were talking about Susan Jacoby, and as one thing leads to another because that’s where those things lead, I was thinking of the lyric from that song I referenced that says, “There must be some kinda romance in bein’ dumb.” As for Susan, she’s the author of books dealing with American anti-intellectualism, see the connection?

From there, but later at home, I was in the bathroom scrubbing the toilet. The wife won’t touch that thing until I become a “Sitzpinkler” (look it up), and I find myself thinking about our trip tomorrow, hence why I’m even cleaning the toilet. To be clear, we DO NOT go on a trip without our place being spic and span, so upon our return, we are not confronted with the chaos we are accustomed to on a day-to-day basis.

I’m hovering over our piss-stained toilet, thinking how good it feels to have the majority of chores out of the way and how, during the past weeks, I posted 11 missives that were only possible because we skipped a trip that was supposed to happen over the weekend of the 24th of June, but we opted to not. This option to not then triggered another part of the lyric from Foetus’s Anything (Viva!) which is the first quote up at the top of this post.

You see, we could skip out on a weekend trip because we’d already indulged on 11 previous trips this year (hmmm, this is the second reference to 11 in one post; there might be some kind of magick arising out of the occult or maybe I shouldn’t be listening to Death in June’s Nada album?)

Do you see what’s going on here? I think about one record from 1985, and all of a sudden, the nostalgia of my edgelord years rears its gloomy dark head, and I’m catapulted off the trebuchet of cheesy 80s music. Not the shitty 80’s music the rest of you listened to like Simple Minds, Tears for Fears, or Duran Duran, I was knee-deep in Current 93, Psychic TV, Einstürzende Neubauten, Mark Stewart, and Cabaret Voltaire, and though I should not admit it, I was that guy jamming on Whitehouse. Yer thinking, NOBODY jammed on Whitehouse? Well, maybe you never listened to I’m Coming Up Your Ass, loudly!

I don’t know what you were doing nearly 40 years ago, but I was not standing still. Sure, I had to stand at parade rest because I was in the U.S. Army (how they had me, I’ll never really know), but in the moments where I was opting to not, I was eating döner kebab, canvassing the red light districts of whatever European city I was in looking for hot whores, reading transgressive shit that was poisoning my mind, spending nights in underground clubs, collecting videos from various artists that I couldn’t share with “normals,” and generally exploring my own narrative.

Countless lifetimes of experience later, I sit in a Starbucks sipping my $4 grande iced tea, looking at assholes who require that I pound my 34db of noise-canceling, in-ear-monitors into my left and right head holes, turning the volume up to block all hints of the insipid soundtrack and equally insipid conversation of those who opted to be those who are not. And while it’s true I’m listening to Douglas P. sing about Klaus Barbie from the C’est Un Rêve track (again on the aforementioned neo-folk Death in June album), I’m pretty chill, haven’t done me a prostitute in more years than I can recollect, don’t seek out those edgelord experiences anymore, and have to be in a seriously different kind of mood to tune in William Bennet and Peter Sotos go on about My Cock’s On Fire or wailing about A Cunt Like You.

Well, well, well, it turns out that Whitehouse has a place in the repertoire of afternoon easy listening, and for the first time ever, I looked up the lyrics to that last song I mentioned and find that the line, “Pull yourself together, you fucking stereotype,” still has resonance with me. I opt to not.

Delving into the perversity of abstract thought, I search for fetishes (writings) that will anchor me in greater isolation as I lose the context of living with others. The challenge of deciphering the obtuse and complex propels me into chasms of other’s thoughts into which I’m ill-equipped to descend. I hang on by fingernails and scratch for fragments but inevitably fall down.

I’m relegated to gathering impressions of textures as words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters plod by the slow mind of the aging man who can no longer objectively figure out if the density of the subject matter is, in reality, difficult or if my own ability to comprehend is being compromised by my advancing years.

This then asks the question, am I losing my humanity (discernment), and has the bulk of our species ever had much of that at all?

If the purpose of the amoeba is fulfilled by its limited stratagems ordained with its simple life, what is the scale of human failure as we ignore the bigger directives of our own existence? We possess the power of scrutiny and yet see little beyond a primitive desire to decorate ourselves under a cloak of superficiality.

Mind you, the invisible cloth of the masses torn from the king who’d been adorned with a similar wardrobe offers transparency to those able to see the truth but easily tricks others who are mostly unaware into believing that they, too, are humans. Alas, you cannot alter the perception of what you wear without first consuming the pigments that will paint the fabric used in making your garb.

It is at the intersection of words that the fetish of our individuality takes form, and real human transparency starts to be seen instead of standing naked and stupid upon the throne of ignorance. We are not two-legged amoeba, nor should we be subverted into acting as such, but that is where many who form the masses have been banished to.

The heavy-handedness of this judgment weighs upon me as I consider the level of arrogance one must attain when passing these kinds of ideas off as having legitimacy, but this is what my observations of a plurality of those around me suggest. To miss this obvious state of affairs and deny voicing them is an acceptance of banality that ratchets my inner world into turmoil. I do not, adamantly do not, desire conformity to a standard of intellectual equality that might indicate a sameness between people, but just as society is able to have some expectation that we share enough common language so we can communicate with one another. I desperately need the bar to be raised.

You see, I am nowhere I want to be, but I also have very few around me who elevate the conversation and cultural embrace that indicate we are ascending the ladder of progress. On the contrary, obviously, I feel we are descending into not only greater banality but into madness. And just maybe, the division has been materialized by our unhealthy fetishizing of the economy and not giving rightful value to words, ideas, and thoughts that challenge our understanding of knowledge.

A daughter only becomes a mother upon the birth of her child, suggesting that two births happen simultaneously. So, it could also be said that the infant is the mother of its mother. The lineage of my understanding if I was able to comprehend what I was trying to draw from Catherine Malabou and her writing of Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, in which she was referencing Claude Levi-Strauss’s writing about the poem titled Autumn Crocuses from Guillaume Apollinaire is that each interpretation of knowledge gives rise to a new thought, or as a metaphor, a new child. In this type of “child of the mind,” we might consider the idea of birth and growth of a non-linear intellectual play of things branching from an arbitrary point across the timeline of potentiality or knowledge.

What I’m taking from this is that every time I encounter a new bit of knowledge that resonates long enough with me that it has the chance to impregnate my curiosity and make me want to learn and understand more, I’m giving birth to a new “thought-child” that with enough nurturing will grow up to be something. I become the mother to this child who was the mother of an idea that could grow to maturity.

What, then, is the difference between seeing a compelling character in a movie that I might want to see again and reading a book about science, history, philosophy, or some other work of non-fiction that inspires me to go further? Why do I immediately jump to the idea that entertainment is a mindless bundle of fluff with little in the way of redeeming qualities that, while it might spark a kind of joy, cannot compete with factual narratives that arrive out of the past or with current developments that impact our tomorrows?

Putting that to the side for the moment, I’m just as curious about the idea that well-formed threads of learning where deep contextual information can weave a more immersive tapestry, I’m able to better visualize the branches of where discovery can take me. One thing that comes to mind is the story of Martin Luther. When I arrived in Germany with the U.S. Army back in 1985, I quickly learned about the role of nearby Mainz and Johannes Gutenberg’s work regarding the printing press. On the heels of that revolution in movable type, we see the Gutenberg Bibles. Over time, I was able to visit the Wartburg, where Martin Luther translated the first German bible from Latin, which would benefit from the recently invented printing press. At another time, I found myself in Erfurt, where Martin Luther studied theology at an Augustinian Monastery. With the rise of Protestantism (Lutheranism), history runs headward into World War Zero following the defenestration of Prague, when a return to Catholicism was rejected.

Bach then gets tied into this as he was from Eisenach, Germany, where the Wartburg is located. Bach’s devotional music arises from his Lutheranism, and it was that which brought me to Mühlhausen as I was continuing my journey of building out a construct of devotion, spirituality, revolution, war, and intellectual evolution that could be referred to as the child I hold aloft in my mind created in the image of the influences that share these ties I’ve brought together.

My interest in geology is a wholly other child, which birthed my curiosity to cultivate knowledge about the formation and history of the world I live in. Symbiotically tied to land seen and unseen is the life that emerged in the crevices and small spaces, and while this potential silo of vast history and evolution could stand as a thing of its own, I’ve not really been able to separate them. Yet, intelligent life that branched from those areas has its own vector in my mind, but if I give pause in my thinking, I probably believe there are two vectors in regard to humans: those that evolve and those that do not. Chronologically, I can give parental attribution to the processes of chemistry that not only happen on the cosmic scale but also that have been occurring on the planetary scale. This lineage is only known due to intellectual processes, not because of the order in which I grew my interest.

These, then, are some of the children of whom I’ve become a parent, and it was their incredible potential that allowed them to become parents of nascent thoughts that would need nurturing over time for me to grow with them.

Let’s return for a moment to entertainment and the relative frivolity I see on its stage. Granted, there is a valid domain of aesthetic value and narrative, while those who take inspiration to further their craft have the most to gain, but other than the capitalist artifact of the potential of commerce to validate and create demand for those that work around the field, I see more harm than good. I refer to the harm that arrives with the absolving of consumers from participating. Thus, entertainment takes on the role of temporarily warding off boredom, which in itself is not a bad thing; it is the lack of balance between being an observer and participant that concerns me. Why do I care about this imbalance? Because I think it is part and parcel of our collective madness.

Just as humans must create new humans, I sense that those in balance and finding happiness do so as they cultivate aspects of themselves that flirt with creativity, thought, contemplation, and exploring difficulty. Mind you, these need not only to orbit around purely intellectual processes. Woodworking, pottery, fiber arts, robotics, playing an instrument, gardening, and a host of other labor-intensive hobbies can allow someone to practice mastery of a subject as they work through iterations of success and failure.

Maybe introducing something new to your senses on a daily basis will lead you to a succession of subjects that fail to find resonance with you but what if one a month strikes a chord? What if this only occurs once per year? Over a 10-year period, you will either be overwhelmed with dozens of fascinating subjects, or you’ll be honing in on less than a dozen new areas of thought and hobbies, which, either way, would be a win-win situation.