Sunday 1/2/22
There is so much to get up on here and so much that will be happening and getting done, that I will have to settle into a rhythm, along with the rhythm of everything else.
This is the most important time of my life. With what I have, what I must do, what I've created, am working through, developing, finishing, the war I am in, the parts of myself I have unlocked, the stakes. I also can't get ahead of myself. I must be aggressive, but also let the game come to me. Even writing this journal can be an act of faith--that in-game faith. That if you play the game right, all will come right before the final horn.
I speak to someone who tells me how easily they get overwhelmed, and that they can't imagine doing as much as I do, and having to do so much at once. The thought of it overwhelms them. I am not overwhelmed, say, by having 100 stories going at once in my head, and being at work simultaneously on ten books. I try hard not to be overwhelmed by the historically unique levels of discrimination and bigotry applied against me right now. The idea that bad people, who offer the world nothing, attempt to suppress the greatest work there has been, while putting forward the worst. I cannot let that anger overrun me. As it would anyone else. That person would only be anger. They would probably have killed. I cannot allow anger to blind me, or to stop me in my fight. It's hard, though, to put it aside, because what these people are doing to me is more unjust than anything that has ever been done to anyone else. When you are discriminated against like this--owned, in a way--the reach and specter and shadow of that discrimination never goes away. You never have a single conversation with someone about, say, whether you liked the pizza at a given pizza place they favor, because you're always in the hold of that bigotry. It determines everything in your life. Where you live, who you know, how you're known, how much money you have, the quality of your life, who you're with. And it's all evil. Evil people doing evil things. The evil is made more horrible because of the context of that evil. It's like if you had a community of children who possessed no musical ability and they gathered rocks sometimes and banged on pianos, and they were nasty, vile children to boot, and you were Beethoven, and you made this music for the ages, and the evil people said, "no, these rock-bangers are where it's at, give them every opportunity, award, money, and you, because you're actually great, fuck you, we hate you, we're going to lock you the fuck out." But they were too cowardly to even say it. Because there have been no greater cowards than these people in the history of our world.
That example is not even absurd enough. No. Not with publishing. And the children would have to be that form of cretinous adult-child, but a pretentious cretinous adult-child, but not even the kind of interesting form of pretentious because someone has knowledge, because these people know absolutely nothing about anything. It's not just the injustice--it's the absurdity of the situation. And that situation is allowed to prevail, unchecked, also in part because in publishing, the key to keeping that going is making the world at large not care, which is to say, not read. That is how they get away with it. Reading is now completely irrelevant. Hardly anyone does it, and very few people can even do it if they wish to, because reading is a skill, there's a reading muscle. If you never use it, you can't so much as lift a feather, so to speak. What that means here is that the simple sentence becomes almost impossible for a person to "lift"--that is, understand. The muscle is all fat and flab. Society suffers, because there is such a palliative good to amazing writing laden with ideas, in which people can see themselves, their own experiences, and feel their own feelings--and new ones--with a power that is new and alive and fresh and super-charged. And if someone--hello--could write that way, and make it so that they took the reader along, as part of the flow, the downward flow of the prose, so that it's not this struggle to process and follow, then the world can be changed so much to the good. But there is no one in publishing who wants that. The broken subculture of freaks that is publishing merely wants to maintain the most pathetic forms of power. You know how that person on your building condo border is arrogant and officious? It's pathetic, right? Or the admin in the Facebook group? Because what power is that? Publishing people are this way. They've rendered the entire thing they're supposed to be about--writing and reading--as obsolete in society. But in rendering reading and writing as obsolete, they've essentially shut the light off so that they can do what they want in the darkened room. They can rape, molest, and get away with it, because they've taken away prying eyes and anyone who is not like them who might care. They can say a smear of shit is a stunning work of literature. And who will object? No one. Because no one cares. And no one is going to read it. These people don't even read it. They just know when to say what they say. And they only say it about people just like they are, because there has never been a country club, or a plantation, that was more about a class system than these people are about their class system and their kind of person.
And you add in that these evil people are idiots, who possess no talent, and that is why they hate you, why they are doing this to you, their opposite. How could you do anything in your life and have separation from that? The shadow is always there, in everything. Because even when you have that conversation about the pizza, this is what you are going back to, because this is what is always there--you are going back to the prison cell in the torture chamber. You're the Jew going back to the camp. And you're supposed to have a conversation, meanwhile, at some point, about how the Patriots are faring? You never have a conversation about how the Patriots are faring. The person you're speaking to might think that's what you're doing, but it's impossible when this is the evil that controls your everything. Except your inner life. Not fully, anyway. And what you can do in five seconds which none of them could do in five billion years. And that is my life right now. The whole of it. Every aspect of it is completely determined by what they are doing and where that puts me.
I was speaking about this journal, though, and how even here there must be faith, and faith in rhythm. One way to help that faith is simply to get started a little. There are hundreds of pages of notes for these pages, and there is always more to add, because I always go forward. I will take care of some basics shortly, because basics matter, too. In the telling of a story, and the accounting of a quest, basics can be a crucial part of the mix.
I had good discipline to start the year. Mental discipline is, in my view, one of the crucial factors in living a life of purpose. How many people live a life of purpose? I've never known anyone else. That will cause offense. Purpose is a transcendent quality that goes beyond the bounds of what one would ordinarily do, or be willing to do. That is, if you took the lives of people who think they live with purpose, and made them exceedingly difficult in what they do, and where they think they have purpose, would they continue on, no matter what? Purpose is never stopping. Purpose for what you do, what makes you you, is seeing the world such that you always add to that purpose. Everything is filtered through the purpose. It's not going to law school, or leaving one career to start another, and it's not having a family--or it's not merely these things. One has to do those things for various reasons, chief among them so that they think they can have purpose. It's not the same. Purpose never rests. It never takes a moment off. It is perpetual drive. There is no set of circumstances that could deter one from the purpose. No odds. The world could be against one, and all of one's fellows have left, abandoned, and one would not veer from the purpose. That is purpose. I've never even known anyone who knows what it means. Humans, especially now, don't have purpose in them. They have to fill up their lives, and that is why they make most of the choices they do. It's why most people marry, have families. It's why most people take very simple things and stretch them out in complicated things, because otherwise there would be nothing else to do. They days would be emptier still. People's children could be anyone. What matters is that they are their children. One would have been as good as any other for most of them. That, to me, is not purpose. That's just what people need to do. Because what will they do otherwise? Yes, there is companionship, and all of that. But it's not purpose.
And crucial to purpose is mental discipline, which also never lets off. Mental discipline is the gaze that does not cease, the voice that doesn't stop saying what must be done and done next. Mental discipline makes notes of all that must be accomplished, checked off. Most people need to be reminded or led to the water to drink from it. Mental discipline says, "remember, we need to find that water today, don't forget to do it." It never needs a reminder. There's no out-of-sight-out-of-mind with mental discipline. That which is from three years ago will still be attended to, and no one will have to cite what that is for it to get done. Nothing calls anything back to memory. There is, "That reminds me, we need to do this." Because when you are that way, and you are not reminded, the thing never gets done. Because you would not be a person of purpose. Nor mental discipline. You'd be like everyone else. And that is one of many reasons why I feel like I am an alien living among a species entirely separate from my own.
I will run stairs now, though, for that is what I must do, and what is most immediately "next," and those stairs will play their part in keeping me strong enough to keep going, with purpose, and get to the world, and impact and change it, which I will, no matter the hold these other people have on me right now. I will eventually slip from those hands and clutches, and then I will break every last fucking bone in them, too. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Purpose. Mental discipline.
