Thursday, June 16, 2016

Hymn of Binaries, Mantra for Equanimity

Hymn of Binaries, Mantra for Equanimity

If you seek something for your writing, allow yourself to be pulled in the opposite direction. Don’t resist tides.
            So if you seek completion, let yourself be pulled toward the fragmentary, the dissolving, pixels scattering on the horizon, like water receding from stones, like an ellipsis being pulled in, an acknowledgement withdrawn, a closeness evaporating.
            If you seek acclaim or acceptance for your writing, let yourself be tugged toward obscurity, let yourself be imprinted with the forks of absent sand pipers.
            If you want to write a lot and often, go toward writing nothing, away from the shore and toward that black & white horizon with the numbered cloud.
            If you want to write in X genre or on X project, let yourself be dragged toward Y.
            If you crave privacy from audience, let yourself be pulled toward full exposure, to immediate performance, and vice versa, if you sorely want to write for an audience, let yourself write for no one.
            If you seek to be fully conscious while writing, let yourself be dragged under by the unconscious.
            If you wish to forget everything that you have written, remember everything that you have written until the landscape is fifteen or fifty oceans thick.
            If you seek to be original, repeat everything twice, three times, for an entire page until the wide-ruled, double-laned sea is covered with the same shapes.
            If you want to continue your writing session, let yourself stop writing for the day.
            If you wish to understand push-pull, let yourself sail along on the hyphen between those two words.
            If you want to be without goals and ambitions, let yourself be loaded with the cargo of those items by the dozens, in car-sized crates, let your ship the size of three football fields be filled with trinkets and non-necessities.
            If you prefer to write prose, write poetry. If you prefer to write nonfiction, write fiction.
            If you want to spend not so much time at the writing desk, let yourself spend days at a time at the writing desk.
            If you seek to write free of disturbances, place yourself in a setting in which you will be constantly spoken to.
            If you hope to reach destinations of surprise and discovery through your writing, let yourself land on the plateau of nothing new, where the mohawked sun occasionally rests its chin.
            And vice versa, reversing the process.