ALIVE JOURNAL

The word is my fourth dimension.

I am interested in how the wild beast lives in the jungle, not in the zoo.

The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.

If I could sing or play an instrument for you, I would sing and play an instrument for you. If I could dance for you, I would dance for you. If I could paint for you, I would paint for you. But my thing is words. Words. But the problem about words is that you may listen to them, and that would be a mistake. For all I’m doing is painting with words, and the message that is being sent is non-verbal. Anything you write down in a notebook to take home to think about, forget it. For in fact I am not going to say anything that you don’t know already. But the perplexing problem is that you don’t know you know. Chuang Tzu says, 'The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning, once you’ve gotten the meaning you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words, so I can have a word with him?'

Love puts the wild heart in captivity. Burdens her with comforts and compromises. Leaves her no time to surrender herself to chaos. Or only very brief windows through to lean out and shriek impotently into the wind. I want it? I want it like we "want" an end to all questions: not really.

I hate being confined, especially when it's for my own good.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

Oh, how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine which made my youthful sufferings public property!