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ellipsis being pulled in, an acknowledgement withdrawn, a closeness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.
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