streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 3:49 am on March 31, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 353 ), craving ( 13 ), Hardie Karges ( 155 ), language ( 103 ), life ( 33 ), meditation ( 112 ), memories, memory ( 2 ), philosophy ( 78 ), POETRY ( 11 ), religion ( 128 ), thoughts, WRITING   

  Buddhism 499: Thought as Language and Memory…  

  

  The things we’re most attached to are our memories. If you can let go of them, then you can let go of anything. But the attachment here is insidious, because it is not strictly voluntary, but more customary, even essential. Because, like computers, we are in many ways defined by speed and memory, the two measurements which simultaneously both limit us and liberate us. What is more basic to our ability to think than language? Memory, of course, even if it’s always the past. Language is optional in the proto-consciousness of our lingo-less ancestors. Memory is not. 

  That’s the strict definition of thought, or awareness, but the sentimental attachments are more problematic. That’s when we become attached to our memories for purely sentimental reasons, or even worse: craving. Craving has long been identified as the chief cause of suffering in the Buddhist worldview, and that isn’t likely to change any time soon. The memories themselves aren’t usually the source of craving, of course, but the objects they represent are, insomuch as all memories are memories OF something. 

  So, here we are, featherless bipeds with a difference: we think like crazy, literally, mostly through the medium of language. In fact, in some people’s eyes, thought is indeed identified with language, as if no thought existed prior to language. I’m not sure how to prove it one way or the other, but I take it as an act of faith that that is not the case. Surely the animal kingdom conducts activities that can only be regarded as thought-driven, given the logic and forethought inferable.  

  Certainly, they have memories, and just as certainly, they have no language. But can we say that they are happier because of their lingo-less existence? Maybe. As always, the sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle. Dogs won’t cure cancer, but they may have less of it to begin with. Still, they’ll likely never live to the ripe old ages that we now consider normal. So, the best bet is to stop the thought stream periodically with meditation, and use memory as a substitute sometimes, but not as a practice of sentimental craving. Bingo. Sounds like an enlightened practice to me.  
   

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  hardie karges 6:36 am on October 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: fame, WRITING   

  If you got a killer line, then use it once or twice. 

  You may never get another chance. When the fickle foot of fate chases you down and kicks your butt, you’ve got one chance to deliver, two if you’re lucky, or fame and fortune pass you by, and your fifteen minutes are up. Fame runs on fleet feet, if and when it runs at all. It’s a societal disease, not a social disease, a disease of the soul, the collective soul. I don’t believe in the collective soul, except in the minimal sense. It’s the floor you walk on, the carpet you clean. It does little to inspire you, even less to fire you up into a truly higher orbit. Only the individual can rise above the crowd.
   
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  hardie karges 10:56 am on July 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: novels ( 2 ), WRITING   

  The great American novel 

  is the great American travel book is the great American screenplay is the great American whatever, pretentious in concept, grandiose in scope. There’s no reason to write anything else, really. There’s no reason to do anything in life except contemplate the moment of your death. Everything else is just trivia, facts and figures, characters and plots. I can think of a few plots I’d like to put some of those characters in. They’re all fake, abstractions of abstractions, stories about stories. Not that I didn’t try the same thing myself. I did. I still do. I ran imaginary people through imaginary situations, sending them up trees, throwing rocks at them, then looking for ways to get them down. The only good parts were the digressions, the spontaneous emissions, slips of the tongue, slices of reality in an otherwise bland pound cake. I was just making it all up. There are no good novels anymore, just stories, fabrications coming out of thousands of tiny fantasy factories lining the back streets of New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin, all screaming for your loyalty and your pocketbooks’ attentions. If there has to be some objective measurement of ‘what’s good’, then let it be money. Otherwise we swim in our opinions with no hope of resolution.

   
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  hardie karges 8:16 am on June 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING   

  A CALL TO LITERARY ACTION 

  Where is the great literature of Century 21? What will it be like? As challenging as it might seem to create something that can be equally a sign of the times and a map to the future, especially in an era as highly impressive as ours is technologically, the path may lie imbedded in that very fact. I think it’s time for literature, poetry, science fiction, and ‘action’ fiction storytelling to merge into a new form. Literature is largely uninspired and uninspiring story-telling, less compelling than its poor cousin, pulp fiction. Science fiction has yet to produce a real literary stylist, probably more impressive for its oblique purview and translation of the world of science for non-scientists. . Poetry is totally divorced from the real world of politics and Pontiacs, farther still the cutting edges of subconscious and verbal innovation. Poetry has not had anything heroic since the Beats shook things up. Since then it has gone right back to where it was before, garden parties for the upper class and their mutual admiration society. Only ‘slam’ poetry has added some new force to the field, though it doesn’t hold up as well on paper as on stage with its bro’, rap music. Even popular music in general has stagnated, reduced to formulas and re-hash. The new literature should be a combination of new science, revived poetic cutting-edge language, action story telling, and broad vision.

  maximumfiction is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    maximumfiction 11:25 am on November 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply

    “Science fiction has yet to produce a real literary stylist, probably more impressive for its oblique purview and translation of the world of science for non-scientists.”

    Read the novel _Terrestrials_ by Paul West. Paul is an acclaimed stylist who, in _Terrestrials_, who bravely, if briefly, stepped into the genre. The result is stunning.

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  hardie karges 8:26 am on June 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING   

  TO EACH HER OWN 

  One American author whose name will go unmentioned, not because of my higher ethics but because I’ve never heard of her, has got the ironic balls to declare that a large number of award-winning authors are masters of what she calls, with no apparent self-consciousness, ‘suckitude’. She’s talking about literature, mind you, something that I doubt her tidy little plots could even pretend to. Okay, she’s been published, so one up on many others, but that’s what defines ‘hackitude’, right? It’s like the old saying “shit happens”; “shit gets published”. She even pretends on her web site (surprise, surprise) to advise other writers on the dangers of literary agents while steadily plugging her own agent and her own contrived stories of international intrigue. It’s a sad day when authors denigrate the best of their lot to exalt the most mundane, as if Shakespeare were really all about the lives and actions of a lot of distinct individuals in specific situations. Shakespeare was all about immortal individuals in universal situations. Modern literature has a chance to do one better by liberating the situations from the characters, in short: stories about nothing, writing about everything, literature without stories.

   
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  hardie karges 8:05 am on June 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: life ( 33 ), WRITING   

  Stories have convenient beginnings, middles, and endings; 

  life itself has nothing of the sort. Half thoughts and misfired synapses jockey for position in a bubble of consciousness defined only by memory and bordering on infinity. Stop re-normalizing equations; maybe mass is infinite at the speed of light. I sell my soul to sell my self, writing little stories to try to amuse the masses and still can’t get past the dead-letter file, so f%$# it. I’ll write what I want, maybe my unborn progeny will appreciate it some day, the ravings of a 21^st century lunatic, legend in his own mind, lover of women and brother of men. I try to create meaning in a world that doesn’t necessarily have any. I try to do for paper what Picasso did for canvas, make love to it, then spurt my juices on its surface as my supreme gift. The only question is: do nouns and verbs accurately describe human existence? Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What are words worth on the open market anyway?

   
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  hardie karges 7:15 am on June 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Add new tag ( 2 ), WRITING   

  The nice thing about ‘automatic writing’ 

  is that there’s never any writer’s block because there’s no structure anyway. It should be word-jazz like be-bop, open the gates and let out all the chickens and scaredy-cats that’ve been cooped up since consciousness sprouted from seed in the fertile soil at the crossroads where attraction meets imagination and the algebra of need meets the geometry of desire. I don’t even have my glasses on so won’t know most of my typographic errors until later. Forget centrality, theme, whatever, everything but meaning. The only worthwhile goal of writing, of anything for that matter, is to find meaning in a world that doesn’t necessarily have any.

   
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  hardie karges 6:35 am on June 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING   

  Nothing inspires like a deadline. 

  Just got to write it down while I still remember it; just got to write it down before the game ends. “Write what you know.” The only thing anyone really knows is his own life, the jumble of perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and memories that constitute the phenomena of a human existence, the internal half of one of the higher apes homo sapiens sapiens, walking this planet in the path of his ancestors, lost in self-reflection.

   
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  hardie karges 6:38 am on June 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING   

  Automatic writing, 

  mind on auto-pilot, contact improvisation; everything is related to the things that came before, and nothing is related to the center, because there is none. Character development is fun if it’s a real character. I hate making shit up. Why expend time creating and developing new characters when so little is done with the characters that already exist? The ‘abstraction’ gene gets its way, I guess. The need to universalize and ultimately, teach, is part of the human makeup. It’s better than mascara. If words could connect to each other above and below as well as before and after, then that would be interesting, certainly better than much of the artsy-fartsy manipulations extant in the current publications, the next best thing to another dimension.

   
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  hardie karges 9:33 am on June 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING   

  DANGLING PARTICIPLES 

  I don’t do flower arrangements, a word here and a comma there, a male noun dangling here and a female verb down under just waiting to swoop up to the rescue in an elaborate choreography of stoic feminism and poetic justice. If these are the nuts and the bolts of the trade, the arts and farts of culture, then maybe I’ll just have to content myself with the rhythms of natives, the beats of the past, and the music of the dispossessed, in order to maintain some integrity of purpose. Maybe art is a plaything of the rich and I’ll admit that I never wanted to be a starving artist. But language is at a disadvantage, because people use it for mundane purposes also. The average bloke doesn’t paint landscapes. Everybody writes. To rise above, pretense demands elaborate editorial gymnastics to maintain the inherited class system. Life itself is an art form, of course, and the essence of art is combination, bringing diverse elements into unique juxtaposition. Nothing is truly original. Balance is the hard part, as always, carefully crafting the finished product so that it is ‘just so’. ‘Stuff’ cannot be defined; you’ve either got it or you don’t. In other words, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”