Writing is a lot like cake

Of course you can write. If you’re reasonably smart and you paid some attention in school.

But what and how should your write?

If you want, you can write like Disney or make up heroic wizards. You can sell soap or sappy notions of romance. But if you mean to express yourself, that might be quite another matter. Then, you must risk being underappreciated – and possibly not read at all. Your thoughts and emotions and ideas may simply not be that interesting to others. What other self than your own do you have to offer?

But you can always write.

Say what you will, some words are just more palatable than others. You should give people what they think that they want if you want to increase your chances of fame – or royalties.

Simply put, you can write for acceptance or you can write for yourself. Most likely you will aim for something in between. And sometimes it turns out that if you write for yourself, some readers will want to hear what you have to say.

So if you wish to write, you get to choose. Acceptance is not to be shunned, but pandering is to be avoided unless all you really want is applause.

It would be something to express your own self and to be appreciated, too.

Kyra's neurolinguistic question

Which comes first is the wrong question. What if mind and language evolve simultaneously?

What if what we call ‘mind’ is immaterial – merely some property that emerges from the organic brain – from divided reality: matter and energy? Clearly our minds have no living presence in space and time without our bodies and specifically our brains, but what if they are an imaginary reality - like the square root of negative one is an imaginary number?

What if my mind does not exist in the way than the material universe exists? What if my words don’t exist except in my relationship to some other mind(s) – sometimes imagined? There might be a difference between the nonsensical and the immaterial, perhaps. But forget about the religious notions of God.

The question is this: What am I? If I am a ‘who,’ (let us speculate: a mind) what do I mean when express myself in words? If there is a beginning to consciousness, I don’t think that the beginning is actually the ‘word’ (language) – I think that perhaps consciousness emerges out of the universe itself from imagination. I have only an intuition of what imagination is, not a definition, but I am almost sure that the explanation is not supernatural (religious) nor is it primarily natural (scientific). I wonder if consciousness emerges from some immaterial imagination. Maybe consciousness made itself up.

I’m not making this stuff up. Wait a second… Who am I? And except for a whole lot of stuff that is not me, I’ve been making everything up along with borrowing thoughts from minds who came along before I was born. From what and when did imagination spring?

Maybe it was shrooms.  Maybe it was extraordinary sex. Maybe it was just looking night after night at the moon. What if it was a complete and random accident?

Damn, I just blew my mind again. Anybody got a match or jumper cables?

If you decide to try to answer these thoughts, Kyra, use as many words for yourself as you need to. Of course, I would listen to whatever ideas and questions you have, but I only want to read one haiku. And if you don’t have time for any of this, I completely understand. Almost everything – just a walk in the park under the moon with someone you care about, for example – is more important than answering these kinds of questions. Though still my own mind wonders.

Here’s one haiku of my own:

Under the cold moon

derelict rock and dead seas,

why, there, do we kiss?

The brain evolves in response to the environment. Free will and awareness are emergent properties. These are ideas. An egg crème and bacon and you are as real as it gets. Nothing really new here – except I care.

Anywhere might be interesting

I heard Mary, a barista at the coffee shop, once say what I think that I have said myself, once or twice before. She thinks that travelling to almost anywhere in the world might be interesting for a while. Paris was mentioned. Scotland or Spain. But here is the puzzle I would like to pose.

I find that the alley between New Hampshire and Rhode Island Streets, walking from 14^th and not farther than 13^th,  to be interesting – though my mind often wanders well ahead of my feet as I pass through it. And I haven’t sat on every bench in South Park, either. But I have met a quaint older fellow in that very picturesque park who speaks English as well as me, but he reads Goethe and Balzac in the German and the French. He can quote from out of his memory old dead poets like Wordsworth with a glint in his eye.

Now I think that I understand wanting to see the Great Wall of China or the Mediterranean Sea off the seacoast of Greece. But why do we so seldom look for what is interesting in places where you could walk to so easily without a spending a dime? Where in the world, indeed?

Going one place does not preclude the other, of course, but what – or where - do we so easily overlook and why? I could just stroll around and around my house where I live, but somehow I often end up two miles later at Aimee’s to chat with the locals and to try not to act like a tourist. And walking over the river and back sometimes surely suit’s me better than staying in my backyard. I have seen seagulls flying over the Kaw and herons and eagles. There’s a book store not unlike one in Manhattan, Kansas, where I can manage to pass a little pleasant time not finding very much in particular. They also sell postcards if you want to let your friends know what a fine time you are having. And of course I often watch unlikely people doing quite interesting things on the sidewalks. Not always that interesting, of course. But that might be true in Bangkok, too.

I really thought that Omaha was nice when I was there. I’ve actually been there twice. The bridge over the Missouri is something to see. But the wind-turned sculpture by City Hall in Lawrence still catches my eye. And, yes, I must still concede that that Golden Gate is something more than steel and orange paint.

I had enough of Ottawa for a half-day or so, but the afternoon really wasn’t a waste of my time. We picked up a souvenir in a quaint antique shop. And my point, if you can find one when you see me dipping my finger in the fountain in South Park, is that you can be sure that I think that Mary was generally right:  Almost anywhere in the world might be interesting to travel to for a while.

Good riddles often have no good answers; the obvious answer is usually wrong. This one gives me something to think about when I watch the sunset, sitting by a little garden pond next to the brick patio laid by this clever fellow a few years ago, or so he told me. He looked as if he was probably going nowhere. Or I can ponder the possibilities when I wake up from a nap in my own bed, the blue sky out my window and the cat lapping at a bowl not on Waikiki beach.

I think that I could show you something interesting, if you wanted to travel a very short distance just to see something you possibly never saw before. I can’t promise you’ll find the trash cans there as compelling as the ones in Iceland, but I’ll give you your money back if you’re not satisfied and I’ll buy you something to drink. There’s another fountain next to the Gazebo that they turn on in the spring. It’s not Autumn in New England, but the fountain is still a little quaint - the water comes from the river, though they clean it up somehow. It’s safe enough that  you can drink the water and not get Montezuma’s Revenge. You do have bend over and push a button by hand.

And you might not believe me if I tell you this coincidental fact both amazing and true: the Roosevelt fountain in South Park was first installed near this spot for horses and it’s mostly true what I say: you can lead world travelers to water, but you can’t make them think.

Tolkien said it better: All that glitters is not gold, all they that wander are not lost.

I think that I’ll go take a walk. I know this quaint, interesting, out of the way place and a woman named Mary that I would definitely cross the street for and with. But I won’t meet her in Timbuctoo. It’s not that she is not interesting enough, it’s just that it’s too damn far to walk. 

I am not the Creator of heaven and earth

I made a little pond some years ago. There are plants and tadpoles and goldfish and lots of other things in it. There’s water.

I am not the Creator of heaven and earth, but I think like one some times.

And I have made people in my own image. That is I have formed them from out of flesh and blood into the beings that live and breathe somehow within my being. I don’t have the omniscience to know when one falls as sparrows do from time to time, but so many people have become somebody for me. They are not as the drops of rain or the grains of sand. They have names and faces. I know them. They are like my children or my parents or my brothers and sisters. Well, I have idealized these words, in a way. I was not actually very close to my mother, for example, but yet we must have been very close in ways that I don’t remember very well. She made me.

But I think that there is now a world of people partly of my imagining who I feel close to as if we were family.

So many I could tell you about, yet they are also other, each their own person, not made by me, real in ways I do not know.

But here is my part. I have imagined them to be part of me. In some real ways I have created who they are in my mind.

This is a mystery for me and yet I know it as the bedrock truth of my existence.

I step outside in the middle of the night and look up at the stars – some brighter than others. So distant yet this one or that one enters into my mind – if only its glittering light.

My world is not about fairness. I play favorites with people. Some have become more important to me than others. Some people make my heart ache in a way that I crave.

If there were a Creator as the biblical story speaks of, I imagine that God would think of the beings that she had created and then had given the freedom to be themselves. She would think of them often.

My own power is more circumscribed. My world is peopled with beings who I have truly imagined into a form that exists only in my mind but who are much themselves – like that star at one point of the constellation Cassiopeia.

My heart and my mind break. My universe shatters into fragments. I cannot contain it all within my brain. Omniscience, omnipotence, exceeds my grasp.

And so I let my feet trod the earth. I see and touch people. I listen to our conversations. And let me tell you from out of my thoughts, one by one, of the people who I know so very incompletely. And yet they seem so very real in my mind. They exist – they live there – in a way that only I can know. We share hints with each other, you and I, to be sure. But your world and your people must seem different in your mind, perhaps.

That is part of what I have been trying to say.

You should not be surprised if I tell you that I truly know so little of what I speak. And yet my life is somehow filled beyond bursting with you and you and you.

But here it is: I know - as much as I can know anything - of the countless longings in my heart.

I am the creator of one world. Almost all of everything else – worlds without apparent end - was not made by me.

Old school door dance

If you say ‘old school’ as in I won’t let a woman hold the door for me, then I’m not. But if you mean that I believe in things like distinctions and etiquette and protocol and the like, then you have me pegged.

Culture is largely based on lots of little rules – some of which have been created and refined over a very long period of time. I’m very much in favor of cultural change. I even like a little willy-nilly now and then. But I generally prefer the kind of actual thinking that is both conscious and then becomes subconscious about human values to an over-abundance of anything goes.

Plenty of cultural habits are out of date – but it is neither culture nor habits which are the baby we want to throw out.

Take the opening the door thing. Life is both easier and more interesting if there’s a little rule that says that the person who gets to the door handle first, opens the door for the person they’re with. Call it a common courtesy. Maybe it’s just a little game we play together. Perhaps the almost insignificant gesture might build a sense that we’re in this life together. As the favor is repeated and exchanged, not only civility, but good will is enhanced. Who knows?

Of course, I am a little old school about the other distinction here. You’ll find that I manage to shuffle my feet and move my body to get to the door just ahead of most women I’m walking with. I like dancing with women. But if you want to lead, I’ll dance with you. But if we don’t always want to dance only to the music in our own head, I think that culture – thoughtful, sensitive, respectful culture – is the old school way to go.

And if my hand touches yours on the handle, look me in the eye and smile. I’ll do the same. It’s a dance, after all, not a rule. Maybe we could change our culture with a bit more panache.

Coincidences

Of course I believe in coincidences – they happen. I also believe that I mostly make up my own meanings.

The story – and it’s not dramatic and not really that interesting, except maybe to me – begins with me mowing the lawn yesterday morning. I saw a bit of aluminum at the edge of the grass and realized that it must be a piece from one of my windmobiles. I looked up and, sure enough, the mobile, with its rusty wires and aluminum vanes, was hanging out of balance from the top of its pole, in the flowers, this vane and a slender length of rusty wire had broken off and fallen.

Only a few yesterdays more ago, I had explained to someone about making these mobiles some many years ago and how, in the weather - with the rain and the constant moving at the joints from the wind - the wires on this mobile drifting in the breeze would wear through just like on the other mobile near the pond with elements hanging awkwardly.

And now that someone and her family are thousands of miles away in Russia, a piece of glinting aluminum at the edge of the grass merely a reminder of things that happen.

It means something to me that we met, these people becoming friends. It might not have happened that way, but it did. I will need to fix this windmobile – and the one by the pond – before they get back. Connecting to people is more than coincidence – if not much more, sometimes.

And now sometimes a dandelion will remind me of her two girls. But that’s another story I’ll tell myself sometimes. There’s a photo of them that crossed the ocean on a slender wire in which they sit in a field full of tall dandelion heads. Just a breath and the fluff will fly. Like vanes on a rusty mobile.

Of course I believe in coincidences.