Small Post

Often I'm discouraged by my incapacity to say anything new, to elaborate and summarize current topics the way others can, to tease meaning from the tangle of events. Often I'm discouraged by the stories which occur to me to tell and am disappointed at the lowliness of my creativity when compared to my ambitions. I fear I'm a talentless hack. But, I believe, this is the time when perservering in the face of my pathetic output could earn me at least my own respect. Even badness, if it's dogged and self-aware, could be some minor virtue.

As I struggle over the next few weeks to finish my second book, I'll detach from the world. No tracking the news, knowing the issues and players, congratulating myself on having informed, if fatuous, opinions. I'll have to be all about producing and finishing the manifestation of the world I began writing a year ago. That's how these things get done by me so far. Dissociation and submersion.

I wish I knew in a lasting way how to concentrate only on the worlds that deal with my writing and art and music. I wish I knew how to care less about the trivia of the day and the particularities of unrelated people, places, and things. I want to spend less time caring about arenas where I don't directly participate, even though I'm afraid to be shamed by my increasing ignorance of the common culture. I want to leave the world where I've chosen to store my mind and create another one driven mostly by my own creations and the inspirations of similar others.

I'm a Terry Pratchett afficionado, my favorite books being Thief of Time and Hogfather. His fantastic invention, the Discworld, allows him a world's breadth to comment on human nature, institutions, and illusions. His creation is a disc supported by four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle that swims through the multiverse. I'm currently reading The Last Continent which contains the following observation on the first page:

People don't live on the Disc any more than, in less hand-crafted parts of the multiverse, they live on balls. Oh, planets may be the place where their body eats its tea, but they live elsewhere, in worlds of their own which orbit very handily around the center of their own heads.

I'm ready to move out of my old neighborhood.