loving leroux, the silbersteins and mugu…real quality writing, every line alive…and loving discovering new words, and new ways of putting things and ways of seeing and thinking that the language affords, brilliant, so playful. it’s a new adventure this, the discovery of Afrikaans and the people in the language…in terms of my career as a writer maybe not entirely responsible to begin with something new at my time of life, but i guess all has always been new, haven’t ever yet found the thing to stake my claim to, i mean the form with which i’m competently comfortable and confident etc…still searching for the mass approval that will hallmark my output, i mean stigmatize it, or stamp it or recognise what it is that i’ve been meant to be doing all these years etc…by now...
NIGHT HOWLING…wind around these ancient stones, fear of the chimney tumbling down from the welsh tiles through the ceiling, door banging…strange dreams…
loving leroux, the silbersteins and mugu…real quality writing, every line alive…and loving discovering new words, and new ways of putting things and ways of seeing and thinking that the language affords, brilliant, so playful. it’s a new adventure this, the discovery of Afrikaans and the people in the language…in terms of my career as a writer maybe not entirely responsible to begin with something new at my time of life, but i guess all has always been new, haven’t ever yet found the thing to stake my claim to, i mean the form with which i’m competently comfortable and confident etc…still searching for the mass approval that will hallmark my output, i mean stigmatize it, or stamp it or recognise what it is that i’ve been meant to be doing all these years etc…by now...
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okay, so sure, as an academic i may not do as many hours in on the shop floor,
but my god, i make up for that by putting in plenty of hours of worrying… what kind of writer will i have turned out to be?
this is totally different from what kind of writer i am. well, it’s the familiar subjectivity/objectivity situation – there are so many variations on the theme…so many minds splintering off the one mind…or so many one’s forged composite out of the many…useless to speak of it… i guess the rising conflict is how to relate to samsaric activity and “my writing”…in the Vedanta principle Salinger is on about the idea of doing one’s best with no thought of reward – i like it – it’s striking…i have had a sense or a glimpse of that, in between the scrabbling and administrative applications – the desperate attempts at recognition and accolades and so on…in amidst these there’s the true joy of being immersed egoless in the sea of words…words flowing from who knows where to who knows how….just the words and not the self preoccupations with whether i shld be a good person and bitterness at others who are not, and so on…or what my concerns should be and complete submergence in american culture and yet also an angry resistance against that national-pride-culture sucking me in or rather pushing me out – i mean 4th of july’s and superbowl sundays and those rituals i’ll never be part of or belong to – so convenient then to dismiss them as ridiculous… i mean, die mugu is just as great as catcher in the rye in many ways they can be compared…but the book will never sell more than thousands..coz it’s trapped in this tiny island of a language inaccessible to the americans (by which i also mean the english, scotch, welsh and australians, canadians, new zealanders irish and so on and so forth, maybe i should rather say the Anglos, with their mighty nuclear threat type rulers….) watching salinger…feeling phony…how often relying on the views of others? sometimes, yes, learning to dig in and go with what looks right, and yet still so much depending on the initial approval of the other eye…it’s like myself leaks out, or rather the ideas of the composition, or what is composed of many elements, and my continual search for the mutuality of all encounters, and language being foremost among them, i mean in that the nodes or meeting places are what constitute what we think of as actuality…and where mind ends and begins…and yet this thing about trying to be real and the resistance to phoniness has always been also (well, always, okay, let’s link it to ontwakking and coming alive...coming into consciousness adolescence type appeals) but that whole thing has always been real for me…
so where does this leave me? i feel like in these notebooks i’m forever hammering on about this without resolution…i.e. wanting to once and for all see whether or not i can actually produce something in its totality before showing it to someone else and deciding finally on an ultimate version without alteration…coz even now unsatisfied with anything published and still forever tweaking still on the published page,…continual dissatisfaction… i seem easy going into the collaborative process at first, sure yea, anything going, encouraging, offering spirit to any creative improvised direction…but then at the end of the process drive my friends to distraction by never being able to finish with the tampering process…on each of the books, in sal and anomalies and freedom each time the ppl saying for goodness sake you’ve got to stop now, and then ending up having to pay my own good money in extra for just one more editorial amendment…can’t seem to let go, tenacious….yes, stubborn, unrelenting…but can’t i be done with that before the manuscript is submitted? can’t i make those choices myself? maybe what salinger did, i.e. not publishing, is the key, coz then you get to keep all the drafts up to the end… how little really matters…these thoughts perpetually blowing through my brain…of passed injustice and fear of future blame…reading what these histories of revenge have wreaked what brave and fighting words the people thought they spoke…and how little any of it really matters now at all, to us here today, so far away…- no, not far away, coz that makes one think it still exists somewhere, and yet it doesn’t, it’s all always gone forever…
i’m daily assailed by so many thoughts – am i doing the right thing with my life? should i be focusing more on something specific? is my artistic production really all amateur? what form should i be exercising? and what did the voortrekkers use for toilet paper? how strange that some people arouse things in us – feelings, but more than that, a kind of knowledge..of ourselves, of things, attachment, belonging, or abandonment…is everybody else really as nervous as what i am? can it be? the feeling of wanting to run away and be alone but also of wanting to reach out and be held? surely, yes, there must be many like this. wonder what it is this business of me feeling i don’t deserve real acclaim, i mean so awkward when award winning and embarrassed and blushing when talk of the merit award to staff as if i’d be accused of being a fraud or not deserving enough, and when i do deserve it feel “when they were going to give it to somebody” downplaying it…maybe my true shadow side is not some dark orgiastic beast but a fabulously successful and easy energetic golden creature i’ve denied myself of being deserving of…yea – open the windows and doors man, open all of them , open the house…or better still, burn it down and i’ll see you in the marketplace, with hafiz and rumi and the other ecstatics…yo... if my mind is mine
then why can’t i control it? if it’s not mine …then whose mind is it? where does my mind end and another mind begin? walking to work i’ve started noticing a lot of rubbish about the place – empty coke bottles, so much plastic, and so on…and it’s been annoying me and i help to pick some of it up sometimes…but today when i was seeing the useable litter my eyes suddenly widened – i suddenly saw the whole street itself– this sign metal jammed into the earth – wasn’t that also litter, all this tar slapped over the ground? those buildings, and the intricate mechanisms of cars and cc cameras – litter everywhere, man…we are befouling the premises….
hollywood lives, insider jokes…why put me through yr rigmarole?
stop wasting my precious life’s time man… south african films – or even any feature…so blunt…such blatant manipulation…if it’s well engineered, then yea sure, it tugs at the emotions, it makes one feel this or the other, but it’s a cheat, you know, it’s trying to move…where’s the real stuff gets done? the stuff that gets under your sin, the real beauty, or am i being snobbish and jealous and doctoral and the rest of it? no, i think not, i think i can appreciate what the circus is without wanting to be part of it, without thinking i could make it a good fit…my horizons are murkier, more worrisome, less clear…by not making commerce my aim, not wanting to make that object (is this possible without rejecting it outright?) there’s more i’m searching for or grappling in the dark for…more accidental…more spirit filled, more spiritual…<is it really tho? or is that an excuse?> - i mean what do i really want to write? of great love, of great sacrifice, of whom i really would admire, of true wisdom and insight and compassion and whittling away at something to warm the heart’s chambers, the mind’s eyes…
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Anton kruegerAt the end of every year I collect all the notes I've taken during that year and number them and print out one hard copy. ArchivesCategories
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