LEVELS & LAYERS. Why write, why learn.
LEVELS & LAYERS. WHY WRITE, WHY LEARN.
I'm rattled. Rattled without reason. With no strong reason for writing.
I enjoy writing. Sometimes. I detest it others. I like having written. To have crafted a something. I like the release.
It feels mildly good to write something that helps another understand a topic. Some part of the world, some patterning. To organise it. To clarify, simplify, put it in context.
But that has always felt a little light. Not reason enough. Kind of like why it's good to do the groceries.
Well, we have to eat.
-- -- --
I get gently depressed thinking about the effort needed to write something bland.
The reading, the distilling, the ruminating. An edit or two.
The long slog, bleary. Whittle-craft crystallised in digital meh.
-- -- --
This stone-in-the-shoe distress isn't an isolated anxiety.
It's heaped. Lathered idly on the uncertainty of not knowing where I should best spend my time. Where I should direct my tiny energies and indulgences.
I have a few more weeks or months to find some level of sustainability to these fallow explorations. To arrive at something fruitful. Some action. A practice that will pay the bills.
I'd settle for clarity of purpose. Direction. A believable dream.
Or simply pure-enjoyable.
Writing is neither of those things.
And yet it's not not those things either.
-- -- --
There is a type of distilled writing that I'm drawn to. Poetry. The generative form.
A sentence that cannot be rewritten. A contained blazing portal-feast of imagery and ideas in an un-reconfigurable sparsity of words.
I am no poet.
-- -- --
There is a business writing equivalent. Bear with me.
Facsimile, a cheap knock-off of the real thing. Knock-offs aren't nothing. Not nearly. We are mirror-folk, meme-people.
I'm speaking of a fractal writing document. A Product 1-pager. Summarising a concept. In its purest form, a single sentence. You'll need to capture and condense. Buttress firm with a well-chosen metric. Or two opposed, leaning. Inwards.
It must be clinical. Firm. Final.
The eigenvector of the idea. The eigen-concept.
-- -- --
I tend away from this type of writing in public. I do some in private. I usually don't refine it sufficiently to publish.
And then, I wonder is it worth publishing.
-- -- --
My poetry lacks art and discipline. My business writing lacks research and rigour.
-- -- --
There is a third string to this harp. Explain it to me as a five-year-old. Simple sentences. Form the simplest building blocks of ideas. Dum-dum language. It is beautiful and powerful both. Because it immediately shines the blinding beam of a lighthouse on the gaping gaps of your understanding.
There's no-where to hide.
And so, it takes time to craft. To withstand the harsh-neon exposure of small sentences made for reading.
-- -- --
Each string of the harp enthrals me a little. But don't sit me down in deepest wonder either.
And I worry if I have anything at all worth saying.
Anything at all worth the effort.
-- -- --
A man is not supposed to know his Fatal Flaw. Or if he does, it doesn't matter much. He falls for it anyway.
I suspect my own is Epistemic Greed. I want to know everything. And believe I can and will.
I say this knowing comfortably that even if it were possible, I lack the intellect and memory. And more importantly, I lack the practice.
But I dabble.
And hold out false hope that I'm moving on that path.
Accumulating tabs, and Twitter bookmarks. Notes, highlights, sketches.
And books in piles of leaning towers I'll likely never read. And sure I'll never learn.
But I do it anyway.
It is a compulsion. And one I'm happy enough to indulge.
-- -- --
My father once consoled me by telling me I wanted to be God's Brother. I laughed a laugh of delighted recognition.
And that made me love the fatal flaw a little more.
Though the flaw is overwhelming. And tiring me out.
And standing in the way of doing something much, much smaller. Of much, much greater consequence.
Of any consequence really.