A Small Pause to Explain Something...

I must take a pause to explain something.

The Astute Reader may have actually seen beyond the obvious, to... the obvious.

I like to write. It is one of my arts.

Arts are good, as are talents and skills.

It's very easy for people to judge one another based on their appearance, and indeed entire industries have arisen to allow people to spend money to affect some fashion, style, or mode which is meant to broadcast to others one's interests in the arts, in sports, in recreational pastimes.

Yet I've long seen the value of being just plain folks, hardly Amish but I try to not be overly pretentions. "Conform yourselves not to the ways of the World", as the Good Book tells us; and I see little point in bizarre affectations such as dressing for sports while pursuing a drink in a bar, or for that matter, wearing Dockers and Timberland while working on the car or cutting the lawn. I tend to dress in a way that is suitable for almost any situation, and appropriate to the weather.

I don't see much point in dressing like a rock star. If someone is to find out that I'm a musician, they should be able to tell by seeing the guitar or hearing the music. If they want to find out that I'm a writer, they can read something I have written. They aren't likely to see me writing; this my Muse is one that comes to visit me only when I am alone and need pay attention to none but to her. She is demanding, and damn can she nag... and when she wants me all to herself, she gets top billing, and that is that. And when I dress, I dress for the Muse, be she the one who calls me quietly to sit and type for her, or be she the one who puts a guitar in my hands and tells me to make the guitar speak, or cry, or rage.

And in either case, I'll probably be wearing a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers... because the sort of work I do requires as much comfort as possible as I endure the strain and joy that is channeling the Muse, any Muse, however great or small.

---

I have been writing several thousand words a day for about 20 years now. At the peak of my BBSing days and through my peak on UseNet, writing 100 kilobits was not unusual, and the UseNet performance was on top of building a few websites, and writing stories as well, that the world will probably never see.

Stories have a special place in my relationship with the Muse of text expression and her internal reflection, the Muse of understanding and perhaps even of Wisdom.

---

I know people who see something in the world, and they say, "Oh, that's just like what happened to (insert biblical character here)".

I know people who see some young man breaking his heart in search of commitment over some young sweetie who doesn't want anything but to be the flower for every last bee she can attract, and they don't say anything... they just whistle the tune that goes with the lyrics: "she was too young to fall in love, and I was too young to know".

I also know an unfortunately large number of people who cannot abstract a situation or event to an allegory. I know an unfortunately larger number of people whose allegories are only from limited sets of pop-culture, and who try to express their allegorical summations to others as a sort of conceptual shorthand, and expect understanding and a response in kind.

I myself am perhaps at risk of falling into the latter case; when I'm watching television, I'm not watching trendy sitcoms or popular reality TV or "America's Next Model" or whatever. I try to limit my allegorical communications to stories more classical in nature, and then I discover that they no longer teach the classics.

If I were to draw an allusion to Echo and Narcissus, probably nobody under the age of 50 would get it, and many more would fail to get it at all for the reason that it's totally outside of their culture. Muslims or Jews, for example, aren't likely to get allusions to the Book of Revelations, though most Christians couldn't possibly miss understanding my meaning if I said "and he rode a pale horse". Yet perhaps no Confucian or Budhist Chinese-American would understand if I made reference to the intended sacrifice of Abraham, and no devout Jew, Muslim, or Christain could fail to understand the name and story of Isaac.

But I strongly suspect that perhaps the majority of people reading this are asking themselves and perhaps the people around him, "what the fuck is this Muse he keeps talking about as if we should get the reference?"

I fear for the future of culture.

---

I fear for the future of culture for a variety of reasons.

One is the cellphone and texting and twitter and all of that; they divorce the individual from the surroundings. Maybe that's how their Muse comes to them, but let's just say that my own Muse isn't explaining to me exactly how that works.

Another worrisome thing is the "response on top" or "latest on top" mode seen in office e-mail and in blogging. I'm used to a top-down mode in the classic style of writing and literacy in the classic Western mode.

So I have a little project.

I am trying to create a posting style in which you can read the most-recent first, of a multi-post series, and still know what the whole thing is trying to say. Thus, a summary block at the top of all of the multi-parter postings. Yet you should be able to read "from the bottom up" (in linear temporal sequence) and still find something new the closer you get to the top, to the modern second. Yet there shouldn't be any need to go "back to the past" unless you are really in search of detail, links, or nuance.

But as this is all a little difficult, and gives my Muse conniption fits even though she's getting used to the idea, you may have to wait a bit between posts, as I struggle to let the past be in the future, and the future be in the past, without painting myself into a corner -- as it were -- by imposing structure from the beginning which may turn out to be unwarranted as the story evolves, as new information comes to light, or as situations change.

Bear with me, if you will, and I'll see if I can't produce something worthy, even if it turns out to be nothing more than the metaphorical equivalent of pigshit on marble pavings, or pearls before swine.

And of course, I'll have to try to supply a bit of allegory, metaphor, allusion, and even obscure references, and hopefully it won't all turn out to be a Shaggy Dog Story.

Then again, if I can manage to make people fall out of their seats laughing after I've been plunging them into mopery, outrage, or even existential angst, then perhaps you won't see me for a while, because I'll be too busy with my Muse, getting lucky and getting offline and writing some new stories for people to steal and get rich on, so you can watch something with a plot instead of crappy "reality TV" that's so boring you'd rather twitter.

---

Commercial break over, folks. Back onto the court.

---