| "I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something important to say and the power to say it - only I don't know what it is, and I can't make use of the power. I feel I could be doing something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there important to say?" - Brave New World
It's now 3:50 on a Wednesday morning, and I'm supposed to be up for work in two hours. I fell asleep watching TV after dinner, so now I'm not tired. Fuck that.
I wish I had some kind of method of directly recording my thoughts. Like, some kind of machine that plugged into the back of my brain all Matrix-style and preserved my thoughts as they happened. During the day at work, sitting on the train, walking around, doing whatever, I must have a hundred great ideas for things to write about everyday. Ideas for plays. Ideas for movies. Ideas for books. Philosophy. Religion. Some new catchphrase that’ll sound oh-so-perfect in the context of a brilliantly crafted scene. I never actually write any of these ideas down. I don’t even want to try usually, because when they’re still in my head, they’re so amorphous and vague in a way that only I can really understand it. I think that sitting down to write it out and having to translate it into a language that everyone else can understand will destroy the essence that made it seem so brilliant to me. I tell myself that I’ll be able to remember it, and once I’ve mulled it over some more and worked out how to line it up with that Rosetta Stone, I’ll transcribe it into something timeless and ingenious.
Like I’d ever be capable of something like that. I don’t think that doing that would really help anything at all, that refinement of my language and ideas so that others can appreciate them more. That’s why I keep them locked away in my brain, because then they’ll never have to be compromised down to the less than perfect standards of my own ability and others’ comprehension. If I were ever to release them, it could never be a process of outline, rough draft, final draft, shooting script, but just pour it out of the page, fingers going so fast over the keyboard that I don’t even notice half the spelling errors I make, but it doesn’t matter because I’m not stopping to look at the screen to correct them anyway, a real stream of consciousness type of thing, letting it all just fly out of me without taking the time to hold back or censor myself or edit anything. Maybe then I’ll be able to make something brilliant.
But I doubt it.
There’s something about that solidifying process, thoughts hardening into words that still makes everything too, I don’t know, final.* When the thoughts are in my head, they float and surface and disappear, but then they still have the ability to grow, forming connections with other thoughts, continuing on and getting better and moving. But, as soon as that thought hits the page, it’s dead. Finished. Sure, you can keep polishing it, adapting it as it develops in you mind, but, even then it’s crippled, on it’s last legs, because you’re trying to hold it down on that piece of paper, nail it right down to the floor. But sooner or later, if you’re writing any of this down to share with someone else, the thought it going to be taken away from you and handed out, and then one it’s in the hands of someone else, it’s done, and you can’t change it anymore. It’s cut off, an object, an amputated brainwave. And then when it is in it’s final form in it’s glass case, you’ll look at it and think, “how fucking stupid.” Because now your mind evolved past what you tried so carefully to preserve, thus, making it obsolete.
I wonder if any of this makes sense to anyone who happens across this page. Or if anyone reads this at all. Not that it makes a difference to me. I’m not writing this for any of you. I’m writing this for me. Right? |
