...but I want to.
For the past four years, we've been bouncing around the eastern seaboard, and toward the end there, I just wanted to be home. Heather and I have had a recent tragedy that brought us back, and this time, we're staying. I love my home, I love DC, love Maryland. Hopefully we're here to stay.
It's been tough to keep working beyond my dayjob at times. This impermanence, I think, has fostered some interesting ideas for fiction, for telling stories about people, but hasn't given me the stability I had in college for studying, for absorbing more technical ideas and writing. It's something I've grown to miss.
There's a wonderful groundedness that comes from taking new research, pulling from old and spinning it into a clean essay. It's a sharp contrast to the tepid apathy of this age, where ideas have become a kind of currency, assigned a material weight, proposed for acceptance as something that can be measured and held. We want to pin them to our lapel with a flourish, a great red feather, this idea of self, identity defined by this concept or our perception of it. It is with the utmost importance that this idea - the defining idea - is handled with care; only apt fingers - knowing hands - can draw from it the will to stand in a courtroom and demand respect.
But a demand for respect is always inherently a request. The affirmation is sought from an established entity, which adds a fascinating undercurrent to these interactions: if we were truly defined by an idea, would we seek such an approval? A demand is not a request; we demand things by actions, not words. Demands are not things that are sanctioned by others, they are done. Art demands attention and acceptance by its existence. The greatest artists do not request approval to create, they do so with courage to cut deep into themselves and smear the inner beauty, love, anger, hatred, disgust, selfishness, despair over their canvas. The demand to see, to hear, is made by the boldness or subtlety of the piece itself, the skill of the artist to manipulate our senses. It's an argument that seeks no response.
To see ideas treated without such regard is puzzling. We continue to spiral deeper into splintered subculture, siphoning down into tiny minorities seemingly only compelled by the shared acknowledgement of contrast, a shade of a hue. By starting with a wide cultural category, one can trickle down into outlying areas where the subcategory defies its super-category and crosses over into another camp entirely. What a grand star chart you could create with the categorization of identity-defining ideas.
Willingly, we walk fields of post-modernist apathy in These Uncertain Times. I marvel at the depth of despair in some, the depth of ignorance in others and those tiny, peripheral flickers of hope. Blink and they're gone. We're headed somewhere, but I don't think anyone knows where it is. The internet is rife with accusations of intellectual dishonesty and calls for reason, rationality, but the reality is that even most fervently demonstrative of these virtuous human beings is as deeply hypocritical as those they demonize. There are some things in life that are only worth a smile and a shrug. The point is, you have to keep walking.
To find stability again, enough stability to delve into something tangible will be a relief from the ether of creativity. I never said it was a heavy ether, mind you, but enough to compel me to continue writing about people, about ideas, about feelings and irrationality and hands and slips of memory, of sense. To write creatively is a compulsion; to write about nature, about reality - that is work. My saving work.
