I'm always thinking about some project, something I can create and something to commit to since commitment isn't my strong point. Loyalty and commitment are not the same thing. Loyalty is more of an obligation, but one done out of free will. I digress... I've been watching Conan. I am super behind in my episodes. On Friday I watched the episode where Rainn Wilson is a guest. Mr. Wilson was on the show to promote his book Soulpancake. I liked the discussion and thought I would check it out. I ended up buying the book yesterday. I've barely made it through the intro as I wanted to blog about the experience; as a project. One that is creative, spiritual and philosophical. Which are all "things" I highly value above all else. Though I lack any real commitment. Which I think is based solely on inspiration. I just happen to have inspiration that is short on fuel. This Soulpancake may be the motivation I need.
A quote from the book: I believe art and it's expression are the same as faith and it's expression. Science, too, for that matter. And quite frankly, everything that urges us to create, to love, to think deeply, to breathe in the moment, to be of service, to be human. They are all different expressions of some divine, creative energy that longs to radiate out and away from the trappings of close-hearted, selfish, animal materialism.
This is so well written, in an objective way. Something I sometimes lack in myself. But that's okay. All subjective experiences lose it's personal meaning in it's translation amongst others. It's hard to radiate something that which translation distorts. As an expression it becomes something other than what it originally was. Maybe that's what's my problem. I don't like the translation. The medium in which to express it is so deeply insufficient in capturing exactly how it feels and how I feel. How the thoughts become something beyond the thought itself. Beyond the body, yet coming from the only source from which it came. As much as I agree with the quote, so do I disagree. We are material beings. Animal beings. What we create and where it is created from comes from the physical. Creativity is organic. It is not from some separate source outside the physical, it is physical. It is a physical thing. Something tangible. Something graspable and at hand. Because it seems so rightly "divine" it must be from something outside of our animal bodies. This one quote has sparked hundreds of thoughts in just seconds. Neurons firing, multiple processes running at the exact same time. It blows my mind.
On Christmas Day, J played me a video of a classical composer whom she admires. The music was beautiful. In listening to the music I was engrossed by the entire process of this creation. One process of the music itself. The fundamental process of how we experience sound and how we hear it, and how what we hear is so fundamentally different to every other non-human. That beautiful sound we hear, richness of tone, inflection of notes, melodies, pauses and breaks and so on, are uniquely human. Without the physical, we would be unable to hear it. Without the mechanics of the ear, that catches vibrations in such a way that doesn't distort it, is simply incredible. These musical beings hear noise in their head that is completely internalized, and they externalize it. I wonder if what they "hear" in their head is what comes out if them, through their fingers, represented by a symbolic language of musical notes, that other people can read, and play that same sound. Even the brilliance of the engineering of a piano. The piano itself as an object. As physical thing. I can't even articulate all my thoughts into text. Text is 2D. These thoughts are of a different dimension. As I said about translation, it just can't quite capture my experience of it. Maybe someday in my life, it could be a possibility. Because what I think and experience isn't translatable in an objectionable way that is sufficient in capturing everything, what is the point of creating something that is no where near as complex as what I feel and see? I don't know how people work around this obstacle. Maybe they're not thinking about it, that's why they aren't hindered by all the noise because they only "hear" one thing at a time.
I never realized this was a problem for me until university. I read an Edgar Allen Poe short story about a cat being put into a wall. When I wrote the essay, I thought "this is amazing." I got the essay back and it was everything less than amazing. I got a "pass" on it but just barely. I cried. I bawled my eyes out. How I experienced the ideas and how they came out of me through my arm, and hand, pencil and paper was incoherent. But when I wrote it it made perfect sense to me. When I typed it out it made perfect sense to me. When I reread and edited it, it made perfect sense to me. When I got the paper back and saw the grade and spoke with my professor about the paper, the body of work made no sense to me. It was utterly incoherent. My lack of objectivity of my subjectivity was apparent. And was for a lot of my university experience. As I wrote more papers, my writing became more clear, but only out of my desire to get better grades. To write what I knew my professors would grade with a mark I could accept or be proud of. But because I wrote my thoughts with that objective in mind, that streaming subjective consciousness of mine was compromised. Discussion and the act of discussing requires being fluent in the art of dialect - in dialogue. All things I lack in expressing. Like a block. A block which I can't move. Technically because everything I create, produce, think, dream, "see" and "hear" are physical things, this block too is a physical thing. Maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to push past that block.
I've had enough of sharing. The philosophy will have to wait for another day. It is my intention to start Soulpancake tonight. To embark on a journey of Rainn Wilson's Soulpancake. In the first creative exercise, I created Selfsandwich. Which makes more sense to me than Soulpancake which is linguistically and syntax-wise an attractive thing to read and hear, but doesn't quite express the consumption of self and whatnot into a completely nonsensical word that somehow makes sense. Just like the "word" absentmindedness, which means only one thing, yet the two words by themselves mean a different thing. So I am going to tackle the sandwich of self.
Cheers.
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