10 AM

At last one has work – as it’s called. What it is I am doing and want to attempt. But is this a kind of trap, away from what matters, what is real, what might be real? And yet, it too has to be done, I don’t know why, but it does.

My work – most of it perhaps – so far – is thinking about things and writing about thought things. The ordinary and bourgeois life of my own, (sometimes) interesting to myself, joyful, sad, tragic, dull, is not what I care to write about, and besides, I lose (in moving, in life it is called) the experience of the deep or inside, or experiences of the deep or inside are easily lost, difficult to experience other than in stillness with words, I find inspiration in stillness and thinking, in words of others who thought things, the right words giving an experience of the deep and inside, even if fantasy, not existing in air, invisible. I invent a character who thinks about things, even if that character has no real life. But perhaps one day what is lived will be interesting enough to write about. I fear that day. I hope not. In fact, that day will never come – it will never happen. Or what is lived is all I write about.

A qualitative difference: artists and philosophers: (1) who start with the assumption that humans have access to a world as it is (i.e., those who don’t consider the problem – or do, but inadvertently, and go on to phenomena, existence as if it exists (without a sideward glance), world, love, work, parents, children, family in general, death, etc. etc.) OR (2) who start with not knowing if humans have access to a world as it is, who (perhaps) have lost interest in exploring phenomena, when all manner of living it is called has been explored in words for hundreds of years – but what else is there to explore if one wants to leave the world of phenomena ‘out there,’ where go from there? There is a range of course from the far end of #1 to the farthest end of #2. At the farthest end, in the latter case, one might be this: I know the human does not have access to a world as it is, no positive knowledge, no knowledge worth knowing, can’t go on. This might be a guide to whether you care to read something, it’s in the first sentences: no for items #1. Maybe Items #2.

The problem with items in #1 is that there is nothing new, nothing surprising, nothing we modern humans have not read, seen, etc. No new evil great enough to shock or to leave a memory of thing the thing read. We are moved for an instant, and we go on and forget what we read. To deeply move one – that is the challenge, and it requires something profound and even new, something unexplored. Reading must be a life experience, like submitting body and soul to the adventure and challenge of climbing a mountain, it must take all of you, and, in such case, it will leave a memory, your body will be changed. Perhaps, it is true, there is nothing new to write. One can see truly truly that, especially if there are only items in #1, and that seems to account for 98% or 99% of the work out there, that fiction is dead, why it is dead. And it might be dead in any event. Well, not dead, but existing in full to explore as it is, in its culmination. And yet, I doubt, I doubt that. Words are never dead. I am still working on this, thinking about this.