unintoxicated
Argh. It's early for a post (me being a creature of habit), but it's surely better to be writing something than writing nothing.
I can't seem to make myself work on my book. I've opened up the file, and have scanned down through the notes at the end, but I'm just not interested. There needs to be some kind of activation energy. Maybe like the intoxication that Nietzsche described as the necessary precondition for any act of artistic creation. For each day is a new creation. The intoxication can be of any kind: anything that takes the artist from his ordinary consciousness to a more excited state. It could be drug-induced, or it could be emotional: love or sexual arousal. Or it could be an idea, some passion that grips the creator. But something.
I think there is truth to that. Anyway, for me, today, it isn't there. I can feel myself rebelling against the structure of my life and my project. The rebel demands freedom. I think back to a filmmaking panel I attended. One of the panelists was a producer (of some kind) of the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. He described a production process in which the activity of every single day was known a full year in advance. On 14 September you knew exactly what you would be doing on 17 July the following year. That felt grim to me: like a prison stretch. I saw why it might be necessary for a complex, expensive production, but I can't stand having my time spoken for, committed in that way.
And yet my own complex and expensive (to me personally, anyway) project is making similar demands. I could make up a schedule, but I know I would violate it, just to experience the freedom of doing so. Routine is productive. But planned routine is deadening.
What to do, what to do. Be patient. That is one of the Buddhist paramitas or perfections of the Bodhisattva. A Buddhist teacher gave a traditional image of patience: when trying to grow a lotus from a rock, you have to hold the lotus against the rock until its roots wrap around the rock.
Maybe I'll go upstairs and listen to another talk from Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning, a series of taped lectures by David Zarefsky, professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, packaged and sold by The Teaching Company. I saw a full-page ad for this series in The Economist in July 2004, and felt a strong pull toward it, despite the hefty price of about US$80 or so (a steep discount on their usual several-hundred-dollar prices). I really liked the idea of learning how to analyze arguments and critique them, not least because I might be writing nonfiction books of my own, and would want to make them as persuasive as possible.
I bought the tapes (24 lectures), and eagerly started listening, following and highlighting in the bound transcripts that accompanied the tapes. The course is excellent and Zarefsky is a good lecturer. But I fell off the wagon sometime early this year, and I'm only 9 lectures in. I want to finish. So maybe I'll go do that.
I can't seem to make myself work on my book. I've opened up the file, and have scanned down through the notes at the end, but I'm just not interested. There needs to be some kind of activation energy. Maybe like the intoxication that Nietzsche described as the necessary precondition for any act of artistic creation. For each day is a new creation. The intoxication can be of any kind: anything that takes the artist from his ordinary consciousness to a more excited state. It could be drug-induced, or it could be emotional: love or sexual arousal. Or it could be an idea, some passion that grips the creator. But something.
I think there is truth to that. Anyway, for me, today, it isn't there. I can feel myself rebelling against the structure of my life and my project. The rebel demands freedom. I think back to a filmmaking panel I attended. One of the panelists was a producer (of some kind) of the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. He described a production process in which the activity of every single day was known a full year in advance. On 14 September you knew exactly what you would be doing on 17 July the following year. That felt grim to me: like a prison stretch. I saw why it might be necessary for a complex, expensive production, but I can't stand having my time spoken for, committed in that way.
And yet my own complex and expensive (to me personally, anyway) project is making similar demands. I could make up a schedule, but I know I would violate it, just to experience the freedom of doing so. Routine is productive. But planned routine is deadening.
What to do, what to do. Be patient. That is one of the Buddhist paramitas or perfections of the Bodhisattva. A Buddhist teacher gave a traditional image of patience: when trying to grow a lotus from a rock, you have to hold the lotus against the rock until its roots wrap around the rock.
Maybe I'll go upstairs and listen to another talk from Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning, a series of taped lectures by David Zarefsky, professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, packaged and sold by The Teaching Company. I saw a full-page ad for this series in The Economist in July 2004, and felt a strong pull toward it, despite the hefty price of about US$80 or so (a steep discount on their usual several-hundred-dollar prices). I really liked the idea of learning how to analyze arguments and critique them, not least because I might be writing nonfiction books of my own, and would want to make them as persuasive as possible.
I bought the tapes (24 lectures), and eagerly started listening, following and highlighting in the bound transcripts that accompanied the tapes. The course is excellent and Zarefsky is a good lecturer. But I fell off the wagon sometime early this year, and I'm only 9 lectures in. I want to finish. So maybe I'll go do that.
posted by paulv at
10:54 AM
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