short manifesto (i know nothing) (Patreon)

audio for this post is available here.

hello! welcome to the first in-the-swing-of-things post….firstly I think I’ve messaged you all personally by now but again and again and again let me say I’m really grateful to have you here and I’m excited to see what this place becomes. it was nice to hear your thoughts on the chapter I posted. wonderful, too, that this relationship we have has already pushed me to crystallize the thought-vapor I’ve been blowing around in my mind over the summer so, so lazily, as if keeping a feather afloat by the gentle force my honk-shoos and mi mi mi mis.

I worry I’ve been enjoying this Go Fish of thought more than I’ve been working to dissect and package the things I'm concerned with – which isn’t something, like, bad or unchangeable, but it's not a state I want to let myself relax into, and is also an indicator I’ve been enjoying too many delicious gummies.

for the good of our relationship I thought that you ought to know what I’ve been ruminating on for the past few months! here's a brief treatise

baby don't hurt methe video I’ve got on deck is about romantic love. this is the main train I’ve been riding. I'd rather show you these thoughts in their final realized form via video, but the gist of the script is that our attitude towards relationships and 'love' at the moment is so combative, so analytical, concerned with winners and losers and quantifiably equal amounts of give and take, so incensed by even the idea of being treated like therapists or mothers or banks – what is this? what are we talking about?

more than anything curiosity, I think, is the absolute soul of a relationship, the commitment to learning about another person’s internal world, to observation, to knowing – and curiosity simply can’t coexist alongside this petty aggression. and no, you’re not their therapist, but shouldn’t you be, though, a little? and their teacher, and their carer? – and then sometimes you are their patient, and their student – an always-changing (and untallied) uncompetitive exchange of power, with the ultimate aim to support one another in recreating the euphoria of childhood. this is what I think love is! knowledge and observation. frankly I think relationships that aren’t built on this proposition (besides the ones that play out under the watchful eye of a culturally sticky force like duty, or social responsibility, or religion – all valid motivators which are clearly very good at keeping people together, but they're not forces I’m personally interested in or indeed what I think most people are talking about today when they talk about love) are doomed.

language isn’t thought and thought isn’t language and it’s making me really tiredwhen people say I've articulated something they’d always thought but couldn’t come up with the words for, I'm like, oh, that's why I'm doing this. this to me is a totally noble and worthwhile pursuit and I could happily write forever based on that motivation alone. but my god have I found myself similarly penniless at the toll booth of that road!

I've been thinking a lot about the concessions that need to be made to even engage with language, what meaning or synaesthetic flair gets lost or left behind on a thought’s journey from the mind, and – most importantly, to me – how this affects the ability of others to understand us. it makes me sad. annoyingly it’s a bit of a dead end thought – what the hell am I gonna do about it? I can't change the flimsiness of fucking words – even if we conquer every pain or sensitivity that makes us defensive or unclear with our language, we still have to grapple with its incompleteness, its inability to touch the murky grey stuff our mind is actually made of, something else that we're not even close to understanding. boo! man is not even master of his own house.

but more and more it’s important to me to say exactly what I mean, with an intention to cut to the truth but also to avoid misconstrual (it's a good reflex I think but is also no doubt a symptom of the place we’re at regarding the state of communication online, where we cripple ourselves with uncertainty in an effort to please even the worst faith or most illiterate of reply guys). this intentionality seems to me a good thing to strive for in all things.

richard sikenlord please protect richard siken on his internet journey, this lauded poet, this deeply intelligent man, who is stumbling through the online social realm like a fat-kneed baby, he is replying to every tweet….every indirect….i love him….

pendulum ridingI literally don't know anything. when I feel I do know something, I'm immediately skeptical. I envy so much the ability of some others to believe completely in truths that are not truths. ultimately the ideological pendulum swings on and we all smash against it like bugs on a windshield! in-vogue physical traits and sexual politics, our attitudes towards organized religion, societal power and bad governments...I guess I’m wondering if there’s a way to remove yourself from this interminable ebb and flow entirely, or transcend it and go somewhere else. to write within its borders feels pointless, towards nothing – and I’m frightened of dedicating my life to an idea and then arriving at the end of my life and discovering it didn’t matter, or that the whole time I was slightly to the side of what mattered all along.

but I kind of know something about peoplewe all create our worldviews and make our decisions by referencing information that lives in the same dataset...it includes the horrors of our childhoods, the results of socialization, our deep deep fears and insecurities, all things that form completely outside of our control…to find the best truth about the world we would have to strip away all of these things from all of us and see what’s left…

the end of septemberthe cool morning air :) the wind in the trees :)